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Dragan Stevic of Serbia is the new Egyptian hero who killed a large shark which had previously terrorized numerous tourists (injured 4 and killed 1) at the famous Egyptian resort Sarm El Sheikh.
The Serbian hero was too drunk to remember what had happened, though one of his friends who witnessed the incident explained it all for the Belgrade based media.
Dragan Stevic was dubbed by the Egyptian media as "Shark El Sheikh" and thanked him for saving their tourist season.
Milovan Ubirapa, one of Stevic’s friend who witnessed the incident explained that Dragan had decided to go to the beach for a swim after a long night of drinking. As Dragan and his friends approached the beach, he saw a fairly high positioned jumping board utilized earlier in the day by divers.
“Dragan climbed on the jumping board, told me to hold his beer and simply ran to jump. There was no time for me to react or to try to stop him, he just went for it” says Milovan.
“Dragan jumped high and plunged down to the sea, but didn’t make as much splash as we thought he would”, explained Milovan.
The reason could be because Dragan Stevic ended up jumping straight on the shark which was lurking near the beach, probably looking for its next victim. Dragan had nailed it right in the head, killing it instantly. The Egyptian police found the shark washed out on the beach that morning.
Dragan was able to swim to the shore and told his friends he had twisted his ankle, telling them the water was not that soft.
The water is soft buddy, you just landed on a shark. At the moment, the fearless hero is in a hospital recovering from alcohol poisoning. After Dragan gets well, he will get a chance to have some more drinks as the resort had awarded the Serb tourist with a free vacation for his heroic deed. // Pero Stamatovski
||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| | – A Serbian man is being hailed as a hero after killing—accidentally—a shark that had been terrorizing an Egyptian resort town. Dragan Stevic was black-out drunk when he vanquished the predator that has killed one beachgoer and injured four. He went with friends to the beach after a long night of drinking, announced that he would take a jump off a diving board, and the rest is history, the Macedonian International News Agency reports. "Dragan climbed on the jumping board, told me to hold his beer, and simply ran to jump. There was no time for me to react or to try to stop him, he just went for it," a friend who was there explained. As luck would have it, Stevic landed right on the shark's head—it had likely been lurking in the shallow waters waiting for a new victim—killing it instantly. When he returned to his friends, he complained that he had twisted his ankle because the water "wasn't soft." The kicker: Stevic is currently in the hospital ... for alcohol poisoning. (Update: Apparently you can make up stories about drunken Serbs fatally whacking tourist-eating sharks: This story originated on a site described as the “Serbian Onion,” and it turns out the Macedonian International News Agency has had some factual issues in the past. But we wish it was true.) |
Image copyright Twitter
Billionaire Donald Trump has said he "may sue" a Twitter user who tricked him into retweeting an image of British serial killers Fred and Rose West.
Mr Trump shared the spoof message that claimed the pair looked at him as a "big inspiration" and asked him to "RT for their memory".
Later he tweeted: "I guess this teaches you not to be nice or trusting."
Fred West was charged with a dozen murders in Gloucester but killed himself before the trial in 1995.
Rose West was convicted of 10 murders - many at the couple's home in Gloucester - and jailed for life. She was told when she was sentenced in 1995 that she should never be released.
Mr Trump was contacted by the Twitter user early on Monday, urging him to retweet the image of the Wests.
The tycoon, who features on the US version of reality TV show The Apprentice, later deleted the message after it was widely shared on the social media site.
Image copyright Twitter
Addressing the incident, Mr Trump later tweeted: "Some jerk fraudulently tweeted that his parents said I was a big inspiration to them + pls RT-out of kindness I retweeted. Maybe I'll sue.
"I thought I was being nice to somebody re their parents. I guess this teaches you not to be nice or trusting. Sad!"
Mr Trump has yet to respond to requests for a comment from the BBC. ||||| But his latest mistake is perhaps his most laughable to date – in the very poorest of tastes.
The business magnate accidentally retweeted a message from a follower asking Trump to share an image purportedly of his recently deceased parents in loving tribute to their memory.
“My parents who passed away always said you were big inspiration,” the post from @Feckhead read.
“Can you pls RT for their memory?”
Unbeknownst to Trump, however, @Feckhead is “failed comedian” Phil Bradbury, and the image he posted was actually one of convicted serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.
The response from followers was thus:
@realDonaldTrump @feckhead They seem like lovely, kind caring parents, don't you think Donald? Dom Joly (@domjoly) September 29, 2014
.@realDonaldTrump Congratulations to @feckhead you win the internet today. Veridis Quo (@METAKNlGHT) September 29, 2014
And our personal favourite...
Please retweet for my brother who has a disfiguring skin condition @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/gBQPLARgqh Beaker Police (@OffencePolice) September 29, 2014
The notorious married murderers were found guilty of torturing and raping scores of young girls, and killing 11 of them, between the years 1973 and 1979. Their victims included Fred’s stepdaughter, who Rosemary murdered while Fred was in prison for theft.
The pair were finally charged in 1994. Fred took his own life before the case when to trial. Rosemary was found guilty of 10 counts of murder in November 1995 and is currently serving a life sentence.
The scene of many of their most heinous acts, their Gloucester residence 25 Cromwell Street, was demolished in 1996 and converted into a landscaped footpath.
Last month, Trump caused mild outrage by deliberately tweeting the following about ebola doctors.
Read More: Trump Walks Out Of BBC Interview After Qs About Mafia ||||| | – "I guess this teaches you not to be nice or trusting," Donald Trump complained yesterday after he was fooled into retweeting a picture of notorious British serial killers Fred and Rosemary West. The tycoon says he may sue the "jerk" who told him his "parents who passed away always said you were big inspiration" and asked him to retweet the photo in their memory, reports the BBC. Trump quickly deleted the picture of the Wests—who murdered at least 11 young women in the 1970s—but not before the mistake had been widely shared, reports the Independent, which rounds up some of its favorite responses, including a picture of Freddy Krueger with the caption "Please retweet for my brother who has a disfiguring skin condition." (Also getting Trump's goat: Critics who say putting his name in 20-foot-tall illuminated letters on a Chicago skyscraper is a little tacky.) |
Most people dislike sitting in a room with nothing to do but think for several minutes. Most men, and a quarter of women, even chose to shock themselves with a mild electric jolt than spend time alone doing nothing. (Courtesy of Science/AAAS)
People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they'd rather be in pain. In a study published in Science Thursday on the ability of people to let their minds “wander” — that is, for them to sit and do nothing but think — researchers found that about a quarter of women and two-thirds of men chose electric shocks over their own company.
“We went into this thinking that mind wandering wouldn’t be that hard,” said Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “People usually think of mind wandering as being a bad thing, because it interrupts when you’re trying to pay attention. But we wanted to see what happens when mind wandering is the goal.”
Wilson didn’t think his subjects would struggle with the task. “We have this big brain full of pleasant memories, and we’re able to tell ourselves stories and make up fantasies. But despite that, we kept finding that people didn’t like it much and found it hard.”
The researchers tried everything they could think of to make the task of being task-less easier. “We tried to give them time to prepare,” he said, “so they could think about what they were going to spend their time thinking about.”
But even going into the exercise with a plan — an upcoming vacation to plot, for example, or a particularly dreamy celebrity to daydream about — didn’t seem to help participants enjoy their time alone. Those who completed the study at home often admitted to cheating by picking up their phones or a book, and many reported that the six to 15 minutes spent thinking had been unpleasant.
When it became clear that people were desperate for distractions, the researchers decided to give them one. “It dawned on us: If people find this so difficult,” Wilson said, “would they prefer negative stimulations to boredom?” He gave them access to a device that would provide a small electrical shock by pressing a button. It wasn't a very strong shock, as the device was built around a 9 volt battery. “But we weren’t even sure it was worth doing,” he said. “I mean, no one was going to shock themselves by choice.”
But they did. The researchers removed the curiosity factor by giving subjects a sample shock beforehand. They even asked them how much they would pay, given a $5 allowance, to prevent another shock. Most offered up a hypothetical dollar or two. But when left alone in the room for a 15-minute thinking session, the participants exhibited some shocking behavior. One man (whose data was left out of the study) shocked himself 190 times. “I have no idea what was going on there,” Wilson said. “But for most people, it was more like seven times.”
And while only 6 of the 24 women shocked themselves, 12 of the 18 men did so. This, the authors wrote in the study, could be attributed to the fact that men tend to be more "sensation seeking" than women. In other words, most men are more interested in seeking variety and stimulation than women are, even if that means getting 190 electric shocks in 15 minutes.
Jonathan Smallwood, a professor of psychology at the University of York who wasn’t involved in the study said that being able to disengage mentally is an important attribute. “It allows us to think about information that is not in the environment,” Smallwood said. It's hypothesized that this allows us to act in ways that aren't directly influenced by our environmental stimuli. "So that is probably the way," he said, "that the human mind escapes from simple reflexive behavior.”
The ability to let the mind wander has been linked to greater working memory and increased creativity, he said. But the study’s findings don’t surprise him. In a world where we have a hundred distractions—social media and smartphones, for example—the subjects probably found being alone with their thoughts to be strange, Smallwood said. Although Wilson's studies were small, with a series of 11 experiments using between 40 and 100 people each, both researchers said that the field is ripe for further exploration.
Don’t disable your Facebook just yet: It’s possible that modern distractions aren’t totally to blame. In fact, study participants who used social media less frequently weren’t better daydreamers. “I suppose it’s kind of circular,” Wilson said. “We wouldn’t crave these things if we weren’t in need of distractions. But having so many available keeps us from learning how to disengage.” ||||| Photo: Photo: Darren Modricker/Corbis
Most people don’t think it’s fun to sit alone with nothing to do but think — it’s part of the reason for obsessive phone-checking during idle moments. A new study in Science highlights just how unenjoyable this experience is: in short, very. To the point that some people will choose to shock themselves rather than sit alone with nothing to do for a little while.
The researchers conducted 11 experiments in a variety of settings and among a variety of age groups. In most of them, subjects were asked to simply chill out and think for 6 to 15 minutes — no phone, no book, no nothing — and then rate the experience. The participants found it very hard to do so, with rather high percentages saying it was unenjoyable and that they found their minds wandering in a distracting way. And when one group in one experiment was offered entertainment like listening to music or surfing the web, they reported that that was much more enjoyable than being alone with their thoughts.
Maybe not too, too surprising. But one of the experiments really upped the ante in a — sorry — shocking way.
In that one, participants were asked to rate the pleasantness or unpleasantness of a number of stimuli, including an electric shock, and then asked how much of $5 they’d pay to experience or not experience each of them again. Then, they were asked to sit alone with their thoughts, but told that if they wanted to, they could shock themselves by pressing a button (because why not?).
Among the participants who said they’d pay to avoid being shocked again (meaning those who found it particularly unpleasant), 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women nonetheless shocked themselves rather than face, without distraction, what is apparently a terrifying hellscape inside their heads. The researchers suggest the gender difference could come down to men having greater sensation-seeking tendencies than women — that is, they get bored more easily.
These studies, the researchers write, can help explain why some people seek out mindfulness training — simply to make idle moments, which are inevitable, less difficult, and less likely to lead to unpleasant ruminating or self-criticism.
“Without such training,” they write, “people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.” Amen. ||||| | – For a surprising number of people, 15 minutes alone with their thoughts appears to be a psychological ordeal so grueling they would rather give themselves an electric shock. In one of a series of experiments involving leaving people with nothing to do but think, a quarter of women and two-thirds of men left alone for a 15-minute thinking session with no phones or other distractions ended up giving themselves a small shock with a device built around a 9-volt battery, the Washington Post finds. One man—whose data was left out of the study—shocked himself 190 times. "I have no idea what was going on there," the lead researcher says. "For most people, it was more like seven times." The researchers believe men could be more prone to shock themselves because they are more "sensation-seeking." People were given plenty of time to prepare for the thinking session, says the lead researcher, who included the shock device when he realized some people left alone without phones were desperate for distraction. "We weren’t even sure it was worth doing," he says. "I mean, no one was going to shock themselves by choice." The researchers say their work explains why many people seek out mindfulness training, New York notes. "Without such training people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it," they say. "The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself." |
BEIRUT (Reuters) - At least 65 people were found shot dead with their hands bound in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Tuesday in a "new massacre" in the near two-year revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, activists said.
Opposition campaigners blamed the government but it was impossible to confirm who was responsible. Assad's forces and rebels have been battling in Syria's commercial hub since July and both have been accused of carrying out summary executions.
U.N.-Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi told the U.N. Security Council "unprecedented levels of horror" had been reached in Syria, and that both the government and rebels had committed atrocious crimes, diplomats said.
He appealed to the 15-nation council to overcome its deadlock and take action to help end the civil war in which Syria is "breaking up before everyone's eyes".
More than 60,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the war, the longest and deadliest of the revolts that began throughout the Arab world two years ago.
The U.N. refugee agency said the fighting had forced more than 700,000 people to flee. World powers fear the conflict could envelop Syria's neighbors including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, further destabilizing an already explosive region.
Opposition activists posted a video of at least 51 muddied male bodies alongside what they said was the Queiq River in Aleppo's rebel-held Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood.
The bodies had what looked like bullet wounds in their heads and some of the victims appeared to be young, possibly teenagers, dressed in jeans, shirts and trainers.
Aleppo-based opposition activists who asked not to be named for security reasons blamed pro-Assad militia fighters.
They said the men had been executed and dumped in the river before floating downstream into the rebel area. State media did not mention the incident.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which says it provides objective information about casualties on both sides of Syria's war from a network of monitors, said the footage was evidence of a new massacre and the death toll could rise as high as 80.
"They were killed only because they are Muslims," said a bearded man in another video said to have been filmed in central Bustan al-Qasr after the bodies were removed from the river. A pickup truck with a pile of corpses was parked behind him.
STALEMATE
It is hard for Reuters to verify such reports from inside Syria because of restrictions on independent media.
Rebels are stuck in a stalemate with government forces in Aleppo - Syria's most populous city which is divided roughly in half between the two sides.
The revolt started as a peaceful protest movement against more than four decades of rule by Assad and his family, but turned into an armed rebellion after a government crackdown.
About 712,000 Syrian refugees have registered in other countries in the region or are awaiting processing as of Tuesday, the U.N. refugee agency said.
"We have seen an unrelenting flow of refugees across all borders. We are running double shifts to register people," Sybella Wilkes, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told Reuters in Geneva.
The United Nations said it had received aid promises ahead of a donor conference in Kuwait on Wednesday where it is seeking $1.5 billion for refugees and people inside Syria. Washington announced an additional $155 million that its said brought the total U.S. humanitarian aid to the crisis to some $365 million.
Aid group Médecins Sans Frontières said the bulk of the current aid was going to government-controlled areas in Syria and called on donors to make sure they were even-handed.
MISSILES
In the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, insurgents including al Qaeda-linked Islamists captured a security agency after days of heavy fighting, according to an activist.
Some of the fighters were shown carrying a black flag with the Islamic declaration of faith and the name of the al-Nusra Front, which has ties to al Qaeda in neighboring Iraq.
The war has become heavily sectarian, with rebels who mostly come from the Sunni Muslim majority fighting an army whose top generals are mostly from Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. Assad has framed the revolt as a foreign-backed conspiracy and blames the West and Sunni Gulf states.
Fighting also took place in the northern town of Ras al-Ain, on the border with Turkey, between rebels and Kurdish militants, the Observatory said.
In Turkey, a second pair of Patriot missile batteries being sent by NATO countries are now operational, a German security official said.
The United States, Germany and the Netherlands each committed to sending two batteries and up to 400 soldiers to operate them after Ankara asked for help to bolster its air defenses against possible missile attack from Syria.
(Additional reporting by Sylvia Westall in Kuwait, Sabine Siebold in Berlin and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Robin Pomeroy) ||||| Syrian rebels stormed a government intelligence complex in the oil-rich east of the country on Tuesday, freeing at least 11 people held in a prison at the facility, activists said.
In this image taken from video obtained from the Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, Smoke rises from heavy shelling in Deir el-Zour, Syria, on Monday,... (Associated Press)
In this image taken from video obtained from the Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, A Free Syrian Army soldier flashes the victory sign, as damages... (Associated Press)
After five days of heavy clashes around the intelligence compound in the city of Deir el-Zour, rebels finally overran the complex early Tuesday following intense fighting overnight, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Opposition figures were reportedly being held at the jail on the complex's grounds, but it was not immediately clear whether those freed Tuesday are fighters or activists.
Government forces responded to the rebel advance by unleashing a series of airstrikes on the compound, trying to push the opposition fighters from the facility.
Deir el-Zour has been the scene of heavy fighting since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad began in March 2011. The province, which goes by the same name as the city, is located along Syria's border with Iraq and includes several oil installations that the rebels have repeatedly targeted.
The aid group Doctors Without Borders said last month that government forces are shelling and bombing Deir el-Zour almost daily. It said tens of thousands of Syrians, many of them wounded, remain trapped in the city.
Also Tuesday, regime warplanes also carried several airstrikes on rebel positions in restive towns and villages around Damascus, including eastern Ghouta and Yalda, and hit other suburbs with artillery, the Observatory said. The group relies on the reports from activists on the ground.
After capturing several major army bases and government outposts, the rebels control large swathes of land in northeastern Syria. Assad's troops, however, continue to hold a tight grip on the capital after nearly two years of conflict.
The areas on the capital's doorstep have been rebel strongholds since early on in the revolt. In recent months, the rebels have used them as a base from which they have been trying to push into central Damascus, the seat of Assad's power. ||||| | – The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is reporting what it calls a "new massacre" near Aleppo. At least 65 people have been found dead, all apparently shot in the head, and all with their arms tied behind their backs, Reuters reports. The death toll could rise as high as 80, the rights group said. It's unclear which faction in the country's ongoing civil war killed them. The incident comes as Syrian rebels scored a major victory today, taking a government intelligence compound in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor after five days of fighting, and freeing at least 11 prisoners held within, the AP reports. The government responded with a series of airstrikes in an attempt to drive the rebels out. According to Reuters, the rebels included fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group with ties to al-Qaeda. |
William & Kate: New Dog in the Family?
Is there a new addition to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge 's household?That appears to be the case, as the couple take a romantic stroll in North Wales just a few days after Kate turned 30 At their countryside surroundings, the two snuggled as they walked along the edge of the sea with a new, four-legged friend trotting with them along the damp sand.There had been reports that William planned to give his bride a puppy for Christmas, and the couple welcomed the New Year playing with some dogs at Kate's family home in Bucklebury, Berkshire.Growing up, William had a black Labrador – named Widgeon – and the devoted pal was regularly seen by his side at shoots and polo matches.While the royals are always big fans – and owners – of black Labradors, the dog by William and Kate's side is most likely a black cocker spaniel."It'll be a spaniel," a friend suggests. "The Middletons have always had spaniels. Perhaps Mike and Carole have given them one or it could be one of the family's dogs."And as speculation rose about whether it was a birthday present for Kate, it emerged that the Duchess's first as a royal was a quiet affair, likely celebrated with William, 29, and her family.Beforehand, palace sources had said it would be "low-key and private" – and it certainly didn't involve a wide group of friends. "It sends a good signal that not everything has to be a party the whole time," a pal says.The palace will not comment on the couple's dog. ||||| Prince William is believed to have bought his wife a puppy for her 30th birthday last week.
The Duchess of Cambridge has been spotted out and about with a black Labrador near the Anglesey cottage she shares with the RAF rescue pilot.
“The dog is ever so cute,” said a source. “The Duke and Duchess have been seen with it several times and he runs along at their heels.
“They are constantly in fits of laughter as it tries to catch them up.”
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
It is thought that the puppy will travel with them between their homes in North Wales and London.
Both the Duke and Duchess are well known lovers of animals. Prince William had a black Labrador called Widgeon when he was a youngster.
A spokesman for the Duke and Duchess declined to comment yesterday.
Earlier this week. an official list of gifts given the royal couple on their first foreign trip to Canada and the US last summer was released.
A sleeping bag, snow goggles, a papier-mâché doll and a jar of Vegemite were just some of the unusual gifts given to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge last year.
The newlyweds also returned home with mosquito traps, cowboy hats, hockey jerseys, stuffed toys, wine coasters and bread board among the hoard of gifts.
Kate seemed to win in the popularity stakes, receiving more gifts from members of the public than her husband. ||||| | – The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge reportedly have a new bundle of joy, but it's a bit more furry than the one diehard royal watchers were hoping for. Prince William has given Kate Middleton a Labrador retriever puppy, reports the Mirror, likely for her 30th birthday. “The dog is ever so cute,” a "source" tells the tabloid. “The Duke and Duchess have been seen with it several times and he runs along at their heels. They are constantly in fits of laughter as it tries to catch them up.” The trio has been spotted walking along the beach near their home in Wales, and People has the photographic evidence here. But wait! People thinks the royal canine is no black Lab at all, despite William's having owned one, dubbed Widgeon, while he was growing up. "It'll be a spaniel," a friend says. "The Middletons have always had spaniels. Perhaps Mike and Carole have given them one or it could be one of the family's dogs." |
In case you haven't heard, there's a fairly large, fairly unexpected space object coming fairly close to Earth today. Now scientists say it's probably a comet — a dead one. Have you ever heard of anything so Halloween appropriate?
[Five last-minute Halloween costumes for lazy science nerds]
When object 2015 TB145 was spotted a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like it was probably an asteroid. Asteroids are made of rock and metal, and while they vary widely in size, shape and composition, you shouldn't expect to see any of them from Earth without at least a small telescope. If a comet the size of 2015 TB145 came so close to Earth, we'd expect quite a show: Comets are made of ice and dust, and when a close pass of the sun heats them up, that ice turns into gas that forms a big, visible tail.
[13 spooky science stories to get you in the Halloween spirit]
But a comet doesn't come with an endless supply of ice. It has a rocky core underneath, constantly losing the layers of ice that cover it. Every time it passes the sun, the cloud of gas around it -- called a coma -- is going to be a little bit smaller. Eventually, the coma will disappear, leaving something that looks a lot like an asteroid. It seems that's probably the case for our Halloween visitor.
"We found that the object reflects about six percent of the light it receives from the sun," Vishnu Reddy, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a statement. "That is similar to fresh asphalt, and while here on Earth we think that is pretty dark, it is brighter than a typical comet which reflects only 3 to 5 percent of the light. That suggests it could be cometary in origin -- but as there is no coma evident, the conclusion is it is a dead comet."
This zombie comet is about 2,000 feet across, and it rotates once every five hours. Scientists have playfully suggested that it looks like a skull, because apparently undead comets aren't Halloween-y enough to satisfy them.
The comet will come nearly as close to Earth as the moon (1.3 lunar distances, to be precise) at about 1 p.m. Eastern time. So when you're out trick or treating, just remember: There's a zombie in the sky. But it's almost certainly not coming to get us.
Read More:
Five last-minute Halloween costumes for lazy science nerds
Mysterious space junk is hurtling towards Earth (and scientists are super excited)
Asteroid redirect mission won’t really redirect a whole asteroid, NASA announces
Scientists suggest a new, earth-shaking twist on the demise of the dinosaurs
13 spooky science stories to get you in the Halloween spirit ||||| The large space rock that will zip past Earth this Halloween is most likely a dead comet that, fittingly, bears an eerie resemblance to a skull.
Scientists observing asteroid 2015 TB145 with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun.
The belated comet has also been observed by optical and radar observatories around the world, providing even more data, including our first close-up views of its surface. Asteroid 2015 TB145 will safely fly by our planet at just under 1.3 lunar distances, or about 302,000 miles (486,000 kilometers), on Halloween (Oct. 31) at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT, 17:00 UTC).
The first radar images of the dead comet were generated by the National Science Foundation's 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The radar images from Arecibo indicate the object is spherical in shape and approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter and completes a rotation about once every five hours.
"The IRTF data may indicate that the object might be a dead comet, but in the Arecibo images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby," said Kelly Fast, IRTF program scientist at NASA Headquarters and acting program manager for NASA's NEO Observations Program.
Managed by the University of Hawaii for NASA, the IRTF's 3-meter (10 foot) telescope collected infrared data on the object. The data may finally put to rest the debate over whether 2015 TB145, with its unusual orbit, is an asteroid or is of cometary origin.
"We found that the object reflects about six percent of the light it receives from the sun," said Vishnu Reddy, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona. "That is similar to fresh asphalt, and while here on Earth we think that is pretty dark, it is brighter than a typical comet which reflects only 3 to 5 percent of the light. That suggests it could be cometary in origin -- but as there is no coma evident, the conclusion is it is a dead comet."
Radar images generated by the Arecibo team are available at:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/national-astronomy-and-ionosphere-center-arecibo-observatory/near-earth-asteroid-2015-tb145-passes-by-without-a-fright/1082765941733673
Asteroid 2015 TB145 was discovered on Oct. 10, 2015, by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS-1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on Haleakala, Maui, part of the NASA-funded Near-Earth Object Observations (NEOO) Program. The next time the asteroid will be in Earth's neighborhood will be in September 2018, when it will make a distant pass at about 24 million miles (38 million kilometers), or about a quarter the distance between Earth and the sun.
Radar is a powerful technique for studying an asteroid's size, shape, rotation, surface features and surface roughness, and for improving the calculation of asteroid orbits. Radar measurements of asteroid distances and velocities often enable computation of asteroid orbits much further into the future than would be possible otherwise.
NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the U.S. has the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering near-Earth objects (NEOs). To date, U.S.-funded assets have discovered over 98 percent of the known NEOs.
In addition to the resources NASA puts into understanding asteroids, it also partners with other U.S. government agencies, university-based astronomers, and space science institutes across the country, often with grants, interagency transfers and other contracts from NASA, and also with international space agencies and institutions that are working to track and better understand these objects. In addition, NASA values the work of numerous highly skilled amateur astronomers, whose accurate observational data helps improve asteroid orbits after they are found.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, hosts the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies for NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program within the agency's Science Mission Directorate.
More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is at these websites:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch
News Media Contact
DC AgleJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, [email protected] ||||| | – The "Halloween asteroid" set to make its closest approach to Earth today has turned out to be something spookier: a dead comet. Scientist say object 2015 TB145 looked like an asteroid when it was first spotted a few weeks ago. but closer inspection suggests that it is a comet that has passed the sun so many times that it has lost the layers of ice that would produce a tail, reports the Washington Post, which calls the visitor a "zombie comet." Radar images from the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico are also a little unsettling: The data "may indicate that the object might be a dead comet, but in the Arecibo images it appears to have donned a skull costume for its Halloween flyby," a NASA scientist says. |
According to the Washington Post, the late Justice Antonin Scalia spent his final day on this earth surrounded by members of a secretive, centuries-old, all-male society of wealthy sportsmen called the International Order of St. Hubertus.
John Poindexter, the man who owns Cibolo Creek Ranch, and C. Allen Foster, the Washington attorney with whom Scalia traveled to the ranch, hold leadership positions within the Order, the Post reports. It remains unclear whether Scalia himself had any official affiliation with the group, however.
Named for the patron saint of hunters, the Order was founded in 1695, in the Kingdom of Bohemia, by Count Franz Anton von Sporck—it came to the United States in 1966, via San Francisco. Its motto is “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures.” (Honoring how? And which creatures?)
Poindexter told the sheriff that in the evening after Scalia and Foster’s arrival in Texas, they “had supper and talked for a while” before Scalia “said that he was tired and was going to his room for the night.” His body was found the next morning.
After the justice’s death, Poindexter told reporters that he met Scalia at a “sports group” gathering in Washington, where the Order’s U.S. chapter is ostensibly headquartered, and the Presidio County Sheriff’s report names Foster as Scalia’s close friend. At least two other men present are affiliated with the Order as well. From the Post:
Planes owned by Wallace “Happy” Rogers III and the company of A.J. Lewis III left from San Antonio and arrived at the ranch just after noon Feb. 12. The planes departed the ranch about 30 minutes apart Feb. 14, according to flight records provided to The Post by FlightAware. Rogers owns the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio. He has donated $65,000 dollars to Republican candidates since 2008. Lewis is the owner of a restaurant supplier company, also based in San Antonio. He has given $3,500 to GOP candidates since 2007. Rogers and Lewis have both served as prior officers in the Texas chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus, according to Texas business records. Rogers spoke to a Post reporter briefly on the phone and confirmed that he was at the ranch the weekend of Scalia’s death, He declined to comment further. Lewis did not respond to several attempts for comment.
Members of the Order have gathered at Poindexter’s ranch at least twice before, and in 2011 new members from Houston were inducted in a ceremony held in Washington, D.C.
“There is nothing I can add to your observation that among my many guests at Cibolo Creek Ranch over the years some members of the International Order of St. Hubertus have been numbered,” Poindexter told the Post in an email. “I am aware of no connection between that organization and Justice Scalia.” ||||| High-ranking members of the elite hunting society, St. Hubertus, were staying at Cibolo Creek Ranch at the same time as Justice Scalia in the days leading up to his death. Here's what you need to know about the group. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
High-ranking members of the elite hunting society, St. Hubertus, were staying at Cibolo Creek Ranch at the same time as Justice Scalia in the days leading up to his death. Here's what you need to know about the group. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.
After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.
Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.
[Texas sheriff’s report reveals more details on Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s death]
Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John Poindexter and C. Allen Foster, a prominent Washington lawyer who traveled to the ranch with Scalia by private plane, hold leadership positions within the Order. It is unclear what, if any, official association Scalia had with the group.
1 of 8 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Inside the ranch where Justice Scalia died View Photos The Texas resort ranch spanned 30,000 acres. Caption The Texas resort spans 30,000 acres. Feb. 14, 2016 One of the ponds outside the suite where Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at Cibolo Creek Ranch, the West Texas resort that stretches over 30,000 acres. Matthew Busch/Getty Images Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
“There is nothing I can add to your observation that among my many guests at Cibolo Creek Ranch over the years some members of the International Order of St. Hubertus have been numbered,” Poindexter said in an email. “I am aware of no connection between that organization and Justice Scalia.”
An attorney for the Scalia family did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Two other private planes that landed at the ranch for the weekend are linked to two men who have held leadership positions with the Texas chapter of the Order, according to a review of state business filings and flight records from the airport.
After Scalia’s death, Poindexter told reporters that he met Scalia at a “sports group” gathering in Washington. The U.S. chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus lists a suite on M Street NW in the District as its headquarters, although the address is only a mailbox in a United Parcel Service store.
[How St. Hubert’s encounter with a deer inspired the society]
The International Order of St. Hubertus, according to its website, is a “true knightly order in the historical tradition.” In 1695, Count Franz Anton von Sporck founded the society in Bohemia, which is in modern-day Czech Republic.
The group’s Grand Master is “His Imperial Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria,” according to the Order’s website. The next gathering for “Ordensbrothers” and guests is an “investiture” March 10 in Charleston, S.C.
1 of 20 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The life of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia View Photos Antonin Scalia, the influential and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, has died. He was 79. Caption Antonin Scalia, the influential and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, has died. He was 79. Oct. 8, 2010 Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court. Larry Downing/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.
In 2010, Poindexter hosted a group of 53 members of the Houston chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, according to a Houston society publication. A number of members from Mexico were also part of the ranch festivities that included “three days of organized shoots and ‘gala’ lunches and dinners.”
Poindexter told CultureMap Houston that some of the guests dressed in “traditional European shooting attire for the boxed bird shoot competition” and for the shooting of pheasants and chukar, a type of partridge.
For the hunting weekend earlier this month, Poindexter told The Washington Post that Scalia traveled to Houston with his friend and U.S. marshals, who provide security for Supreme Court justices. The Post obtained a Presidio County Sheriff’s Office report that named Foster as Scalia’s close friend on the trip.
Sheriff Danny Dominguez confirmed that a photograph of Washington lawyer C. Allen Foster is the same man he interviewed at the ranch the day of Scalia’s death.
[Did sleep apnea contribute to Scalia’s death? A breathing machine was near his bed.]
From Houston, Scalia and Foster chartered a plane without the marshals to the Cibolo Creek Ranch airstrip. In a statement after Scalia died, the U.S. Marshals Service said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch.
The friend, Louisiana-born Foster, is a lawyer with the Washington firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. He is also known for his passion for hunting and is a former spokesman for the hunting group Safari Club.
In 2006, Foster was featured in The Post when he celebrated his 65th birthday with a six-day celebration in the Czech Republic. He flew his family and 40 Washington friends there to stay in Moravia’s Zidlochovice, a baroque castle and hunting park. The birthday bash included “tours of the Czech countryside, wine tasting, wild boar and mouflon (wild sheep) hunts, classic dance instruction and a masked costume ball.”
A secretary at Foster’s law firm said he is traveling in Argentina. The firm’s director of marketing, Mindee L. Mosher, said Foster was traveling and she would try to contact him. A woman answering a phone associated with Foster hung up when asked for comment.
Planes owned by Wallace “Happy” Rogers III and the company of A.J. Lewis III left from San Antonio and arrived at the ranch just after noon Feb. 12. The planes departed the ranch about 30 minutes apart Feb. 14, according to flight records provided to The Post by FlightAware.
Rogers owns the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio. He has donated $65,000 to Republican candidates since 2008. Lewis is the owner of a restaurant supplier company, also based in San Antonio. He has given $3,500 to GOP candidates since 2007.
Rogers and Lewis have both served as prior officers in the Texas chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus, according to Texas business records. Rogers spoke to a Post reporter briefly on the phone and confirmed that he was at the ranch the weekend of Scalia’s death. He declined to comment further.
Lewis did not respond to several attempts for comment.
The Presidio County Sheriff’s Office released an incident report to The Post on Tuesday that revealed Foster’s name as Scalia’s traveling companion and provided details about the discovery of his body.
Poindexter and Foster told the sheriff that Scalia had traveled to Texas the day before to go hunting. Poindexter told the sheriff that they “had supper and talked for a while” that evening.
Scalia “said that he was tired and was going to his room for the night,” the sheriff wrote in his report.
When Scalia didn’t show up for breakfast that morning, Poindexter knocked on his door and eventually went in and found the Justice dead in his bed, Poindexter said.
Law enforcement officials told The Post that they had no knowledge of the International Order of St. Hubertus or its connection to Poindexter and ranch guests. The officials said the FBI had declined to investigate Scalia’s death when they were told by the marshals that he died from natural causes.
Alice Crites in Washington and Eva Ruth Moravec in San Antonio contributed to this report. ||||| When Austrian Count Anton von Spork founded the International Order of St. Hubertus in 1695, he could never have imagined the St. Hubertus hunt that took place recently at Cibolo Creek Ranch in west Texas.
For starters, most of the participants arrived by private jet.
More than 400 years after the society for noble hunters was established, members of the Houston chapter and a number from Mexico gathered at the 30,000-acre ranch on the edge of Big Bend. On their agenda — three days of organized shoots and "gala" lunches and dinners. Cibolo Creek ranch owner and businessman John Poindexter, one of the original Houston members, hosted the group that numbered 53 in all. This is the second time that Poindexter has welcomed the Houston and Mexico contingent to his ranch, open year-round for hunting, outdoor and riding vacations.
So the chichi crowd jetted in including Jana and Scotty Arnoldy, Debbie and John Daugherty, Debbie and Vidal Martinez and Patty and Bill Porter. None was more important than the order's Great Master (and if you are into titles, you'll love this) Archduke Andreas Salvatore Hapsburg-Lothrengin, the Prince of Tuscany and Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, who came in from Spain for the festivities.
Poindexter reports that some of the players went so far as to dress in traditional European shooting attire for the boxed bird shoot competition and for the driven pheasant and chukar shoot, highlight of the sporting events.
When they weren't in the field, participants were lavishly wined and dined in Cibolo Creek Ranch style. Rounding out the Houston contingent sitting down to the feasts were Dennis Murphree John Kelsey, John Brent, Jerry Finger, Bill Price and Sandy Vaughan. Joining the weekend was Cristina Girard, who has hunted frequently in Spain with Hapsburg-Lothrengin and who entertained him in Houston before the ranch weekend.
Look who's cooking
That would be Jennifer LeGrand, who recently kicked off the new guest chef series at VOICE Restaurant in Hotel Icon. The attorney shared several of her fave recipes with VOICE chef Michael Kramer, who selected a few and made them specials for the night. Kudos to LeGrand, who maneuvered with grace through the kitchen in high heels. Among her fans that came in to sample her asian short ribs and Gruyere Overnight Mac 'n Cheese were Jodie Eisenhardt, Cathy Echols, Sarah Bray, Josh Espinedo, Carlos Meltzer, Nick Espinosa, Marcy DeLuna and Adam Gibson.
Keeping an eye on the fun was Hotel Icon's new general manager Charlie Skipsey, fresh from Barcelona where he has spent the past seven years. Fans of Mexico's Carlos 'n Charlie's watering holes will find it interesting that Skipsey's dad - and Charlie himself as well - made up half of that rollicking restaurant group.
Dining out
Houston Zoo's young professionals group Flock hit it lucky Sunday with perfect weather for its annual al fresco Beastly Brunch during which 150 dined on fare from Amazon Grill. Once their lunch was over, the zoo friends moved on to watch the piranhas and orangutans eat their lunch in special presentations. Eeeeek.
Flock members Kent Oliver and Jesse Bounds were the lucky ones chosen to help feed a Malayan tiger — meat on a stick and goat milk squirted from a bottle.
In the mix were zoo director Rick Barongi, Valarie Palmquist, David Cordua and Ashley Allen, Ted Bowen, Katherine Craig Chambers, Denise Furlough, Katherine Orellana and Kelly Guthrie with Drew Thornton.
Sight 'ems
A heavy-hitter crowd dining at Danton's Gulf Coast Seafood Friday night including former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby, Andrews Kurth executive director Bill Livesay and wife Lynn, Dr. Red Duke with Laura Moore, City Councilwoman Anne Clutterbuck and husband John Clutterbuck, Houston Interim Police Chief Charles McClelland and Maurine Ford dining with Dawn and Dr. Richard Gervais. ||||| Welcome to the website of
the International Order of St. Hubertus
The International Order of St. Hubertus is a true knightly order in the historical tradition. The Order is under the Royal Protection of His Majesty King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Grand Master Emeritus is His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Andreas Salvator von Habsburg-Lothringen of Austria, and our current Grand Master is His Imperial and Royal Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary.
The International Order of St. Hubertus is comprised of an international group of individuals, Ordensbrothers, who are passionate about the sports of hunting and fishing, and who are vitally interested and actively involved in the preservation of wildlife, its habitat, and the tradition of ethical hunting and fishing. Ordensbrothers include dedicated upland bird hunters, duck hunters, and hunters of larger and big game. A number of Ordensbrothers are also avid freshwater and fly fishermen, as well as big game fishermen. One constant among all Ordensbrothers, however, is that these hunting and fishing pursuits and the preservation of wildlife, habitat, and our hunting and fishing heritage and traditions is a real and personal interest. Ordensbrothers are individuals who have distinguished themselves as leaders in their careers and personal lives, and who have been recognized as ethical hunters or fishermen, and in their communities, professions, or in other organizations as having made a significant contribution. Members are not solicited. Membership is by invitation only, and upon sponsorship by existing Ordensbrothers. ||||| | – A new detail has emerged in the death of Antonin Scalia: The US Supreme Court justice spent his last hours with members of the International Order of St. Hubertus, a "secretive society of elite hunters," the Washington Post reports. Public records reviewed by the Post revealed that some of the men staying at the Cibolo Creek Ranch when Scalia died there on Feb. 13 are members of the order founded some three centuries ago. Ranch owner John Poindexter, along with Scalia's traveling partner, C. Allen Foster, both hold leadership positions within the order. Scalia's association with the group is unclear. In an email, Poindexter acknowledged that group members have been guests of the ranch, adding, "I am aware of no connection between that organization and Justice Scalia." Private planes connected to two other men who have held leadership positions in the order's Texas chapter landed at the ranch for Valentine's Day weekend, records show. As for Scalia's death, Poindexter told the sheriff that after dinner and a chat, the justice retired for the evening. Poindexter knocked on his door when he didn't show for breakfast; it was then they found Scalia dead in bed. Founded in 1695 in the modern Czech Republic, the International Order of Saint Hubertus (the patron saint of hunters) was a "knightly order," according to its website. Among the group's tenets is promoting "the concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity." And its motto is "Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes" or "Honoring God by Honoring His Creatures." (Honoring how? And which creatures? Gawker inquires.) Members drape themselves in green robes and have titles like "grand master" and "protector of the order." Read the whole story here. |
Kremlin.ru Following Putin's announcement, Russian political and spiritual leaders expressed support for a potential name change of the city of Volgograd.
If the people of Volgograd want to change their city's name to Stalingrad, Russia will respect their choice, President Vladimir Putin said when a war veteran asked about the issue during a D-Day memorial in Normandy.
"We will do as the residents [of Volgograd] say," Putin told a crowd of veterans on Friday, Itar-Tass reported.
Volgograd authorities announced on Saturday that the city council had not yet received any proposals for a name change referendum. Last year, municipal authorities voted for the city to adopt its former name for six days each year for commemorative purposes.
Volgograd was the site of the momentous Battle of Stalingrad, which took place between 1942 and 1943, and is widely viewed as one of World War II's most decisive battles.
The city adopted the name of Stalingrad in 1925 to honor Soviet leader Josef Stalin. In 1961, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushschev, changed the city's name to Volgograd in connection with the de-Stalinization process.
Following Putin's announcement, Russian political and spiritual leaders expressed support for a potential name change.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted on Friday that he "never doubted the necessity of a return to great Stalingrad's name" but insisted it would be done "not for the sake of Stalin but for that of Stalingraders."
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin of the Moscow Patriarchate said on Sunday he would not object to a referendum on the city's name change, although he noted a preference for the name "Tsaryn," the city's appellation prior to 1925.
"The word 'Stalingrad' already lives independently of the word 'Stalin.' It is associated with a victory in a famous battle, with a part of our history," Chaplin said, Interfax reported.
Stalin's legacy, which encompasses both mass political repression and the defeat of Nazi Germany, remains a contentious issue in Russia to this day. ||||| Russian Human Rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova is suggesting the renaming of Volgograd to Stalingrad, which is favored by veterans who met President Putin in Normandy, should be decided by the whole Russian people.
The issue was brought up by a group of Russian WWII veterans who met with President Vladimir Putin in Deauville, France, as part of the international D-Day celebrations. One of the elderly veterans asked if it was possible to rename the city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad.
Putin replied that the law says such questions need to be decided at the regional and municipal level. “In this case the city residents must hold a referendum and make a joint decision. We will do what the people say,” the Russian leader said.
The veterans are eager to go to Volgograd and as part of the campaign. The president also said that a square in Paris is named after Stalingrad.
On Monday Russian Human Rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova commented that because of the nationwide importance of the Battle of Stalingrad, the issue of Volgograd's renaming should also be put to a nationwide referendum. She said it could be held on the all-Russia election day in September. In late 2012 a nationwide poll on the subject showed that about 60 percent of Russians oppose the return of Stalin’s name on maps.
Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov also commented on Monday saying that Putin’s words should not be interpreted as supporting the renaming. “When he was answering the veterans’ question in Normandy Putin said that changing names of cities it was not within his powers. As he continued to answer the insistent veteran’s question, the President answered that he could not make such a decision himself and that there was a procedure – the question can be solved through a referendum.” The ITAR-TASS news agency quoted the Kremlin official as saying.
The head of the Russian Communists, Gennady Zyuganov, told reporters that he supported the idea of a referendum and immediately suggested to move further and hold a referendum on returning the name Leningrad to St. Petersburg.
The Issue of Volgograd returning to the name of Stalingrad is raised in Russian society on a regular basis – mostly by fringe left-wing politicians, veterans’ organizations and military history clubs. The discussion has become especially strong as the country readies to mark the 70th anniversary of victory in WWII.
In 2013 the Volgograd city legislature decided to use the name Stalingrad during the ceremonies dedicated to the anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad – the event that is believed to have turned the course of the war and led to the defeat of the Nazis.
However, most leading government officials and political party leaders have been cautious, saying the decision must be made by Volgograd residents in the course of a referendum. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in 2013 that the Kremlin administration was not supporting the renaming as it caused additional unnecessary expense and could start a chain of similar events that were not needed.
Founded in 1589 and originally named Tsaritsyn, Volgograd was renamed after Joseph Stalin in 1925. Its name was changed back in 1961 as part of the campaign against Stalin’s personality cult. ||||| Vladimir Putin has promised to help the city's residents vote on a name change after being asked by second world war veteran
For more than 300 years, the Russian city of Volgograd was known as Tsaritsyn. It was dubbed Stalingrad in honour of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for a mere 26 years, but then his successor Nikita Khrushchev dropped that name as part of his campaign to dismantle the personality cult of the former dictator.
Now the city may become Stalingrad once again after president Vladimir Putin proposed holding a referendum to change the name amid a wave of second world war patriotism over eastern Ukraine. When asked by a Soviet veteran during D-day commemorations in Normandy on Friday, Putin promised to help the city's residents vote on bringing back the Stalingrad name. "It wasn't me who canceled that," Putin told the veterans.
On Sunday, Russian Orthodox church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin also spoke out in favour of a referendum. "The word Stalingrad already has a life of its own, independent of the name Stalin. It's associated with the victory in a famous battle, with a certain part of our history," Chaplin said, news agency Interfax reported.
Several other prominent politicians, including deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin and Communist party leader and MP Gennady Zyuganov, were quick to put their weight behind the possible name change. But Putin's support is what is likely to move the initiative forward in Volgograd, which is one of Russia's largest cities with more than 1 million people.
Last year, several politicians called for a referendum on the name Stalingrad on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the battle there, which stopped the Nazi advance into the Soviet Union and stands as one of the bloodiest battles of all time, with an estimated 2 million total casualties. The Russian Citizens' Union turned in more than 50,000 signatures in favour of renaming the city, but local politicians and Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov both turned down the idea.
However, the Volgograd city council voted to use the name Stalingrad on nine annual holidays connected with the second world war.
But outside veterans and pensioners, few seem to support bringing back the war-era name. A poll by the independent Levada Centre in 2012 found that 18% of respondents were for renaming the city Stalingrad, but 60% were against the switch. Volgograd city council deputy Alexei Volotskov said three out of four residents asked in a local poll were against returning the name.
Over 20 million Soviet citizens are said to have died in the second world war, and the conflict has played a huge role in the national consciousness. But patriotism and reverence for the great victory has risen to new heights in recent years with the support of Putin and other politicians. Earlier this year, the liberal television station Dozhd was dropped by most major carriers under political pressure after it conducted a controversial on-air poll asking if the Soviets should have surrendered the besieged city of Leningrad to save lives.
Russian state television coverage of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels have been fighting for control with Kiev's forces, has portrayed the conflict as a struggle against fascism, dubiously comparing the new government in Kiev and Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazi invasion. Several rebel leaders have also portrayed their campaign as a continuation of the second world war. ||||| | – The city today called Volgograd, which with 1 million people is one of Russia's largest, has gone through several name changes in its recent past. For more than 300 years it carried on with the name Tsaritsyn, but after it became home to one of history's deadliest battles—2 million lives were lost when the Nazis tried to advance into the Soviet Union during World War II—then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided to name it after himself. That lasted 26 years, at which point Stalin's successor, Nikita Khruschev, renamed the city Volgograd in an attempt to diminish the former dictator's posthumous reach. As if the saga wasn't confusing enough, as of last year the city began changing its name to Stalingrad some six times a year, the Moscow Times points out. Now, a 365-day change could be in reach. In response to an inquiry from a WWII vet on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested a referendum be held over the question of the city's name. The Guardian reports he promised to help the city see such a referendum take place, but RT notes that his press secretary today insisted that Putin wasn't coming out in support of the former name, but establishing that there's a "procedure" for arriving at such a decision. Only problem is, the locals don't appear to want the name change, at least according to a poll cited by the Guardian that found roughly 75% against it. (A town in Spain recently voted to change its offensive name.) |
As so many great entrepreneurial success stories do, the tale of Mike Lindell begins in a crack house. It was the fall of 2008, and the then 47-year-old divorced father of four from the Minneapolis suburbs had run out of crack, again. He had been up for either 14 or 19 days—he swears it was 19 but says 14 because “19 just sounds like I’ve embellished”—trying to save his struggling startup and making regular trips into the city to visit his dealer, Ty. This time, Lindell arrived at Ty’s apartment expecting the typical A-plus service and received a shock instead: The dealer refused his business. Ty wasn’t going to sell him any more crack until he ended his binge. He’d also called the two other dealers Lindell used and ordered them to do the same. “I don’t want any of your people selling him anything until he goes to bed,” Ty told the dealers. When Lindell protested, he cut him off: “Go to bed, Mike.”
Many people would be ashamed by this story. Lindell tells it all the time. “I was like, ‘Wow, drug dealers care!’ ” he says. “That’s what it felt like, this incredible intervention.” The moment wasn’t the end of his drug abuse, which started in his 20s when he owned bars and stretched through the early years of MyPillow, the Chaska, Minn., company he founded in 2005 to fulfill his dream of making “the world’s best pillow.” It was, however, his low point. It was when he realized that abusing crack and running a business weren’t compatible in the long term and vowed to get better.
He smiles wide, white teeth emerging from under the push-broom mustache familiar to anyone who watches cable TV, and takes out his phone to show me a picture: It’s him, looking wired and wan, like a man who’d been bingeing on drugs for days. Ty took it that night, he says.
The story is impossible to confirm; Ty isn’t reachable for comment. But it’s become part of Lindell’s legend, and it will be a pivotal moment in the autobiography he’ll self-publish later this year. He and a friend, actor Stephen Baldwin, plan to turn the book into a movie as part of their new venture, producing inspirational Christian films “that aren’t cheesy,” Lindell says.
He says Ty took the photo not just to show him what he looked like—a crazy person spiraling toward death—but also as a memento. “Because he knew my big plans for the future,” he says. “I would always tell these guys that someday I was going to quit crack.”
“I was like, ‘Wow, drug dealers care!’ ”
Eight-plus years later, Lindell is sober and phenomenally successful. He quit everything—alcohol, powdered cocaine, and crack—after one final party on Jan. 16, 2009, and presides over an empire that’s still growing precipitously. Last year he opened a second factory, saw sales rise from $115 million to $280 million, and almost tripled his workforce, to 1,500. To date he’s sold more than 26 million pillows at $45 and up, a huge number of them directly to consumers who call and order by phone after seeing or hearing one of his inescapable TV and radio ads.
On this day in early November, he’s just back from a week in New York, spent celebrating the election of Donald Trump, whom he met at a Minneapolis campaign stop and decided to support, whole hog. He’s spent the morning catching up on business with various employees who cycle in and out.
People don’t seem to make appointments. They just know the boss is around and stop by the conference room he uses as an office, hoping to get his attention.
“This is my head of IT, Jennifer Pauly,” Lindell says, as a young woman pops in. “She’s a good example of me taking my employees and knowing their skills. I have a house painter in charge of all my maintenance at the factory. Jennifer is self-taught. Did you ever go to school for IT?”
“I took some Microsoft classes, but that’s basically it,” she says. “I knew how to run a spreadsheet, and that’s why he trusted me with data.”
Lindell laughs loudly. He wears two discreet hearing aids, but everyone says he’s been boisterous forever. “God’s given me a gift to be able to put people in the right position, where their strengths are!” he says.
Next, Bob Sohns, his purchasing manager, arrives to ask if Lindell will meet a guy who flew in from Italy to sell him an automated pillow filler.
“I’ve known Bob since 1990, but he came on in 2012,” Lindell says. “He was working for NBC Shopping Network, and then he goes, ‘Mike, I think I should come work for The Pillow.’ I said, ‘Sure, what do you want to be?’ ”
“That’s very close to the truth,” Sohns says.
“What do you do again? Buy stuff? OK. Keep on buying.” (Lindell later met the Italian and ordered his $162,000 pillow stuffer on the spot.)
Next, Heather Lueth, Lindell’s oldest daughter, the company’s graphic designer, comes in to talk about the latest e-mail campaigns. MyPillow is, someone at the company told me, more a family forest than a family tree. Lindell’s brother Corey, who invested at one of MyPillow’s lowest points, is now the second-largest shareholder. His job: doing essentially whatever. Today he’s fixing a grandfather clock. Earlier, he hung a flatscreen TV in the lobby shop. Lindell’s niece, Sarah Cronin, is his executive assistant. His brother-in-law, Brian Schmieg, has no title, but is responsible for gathering “concerns” from the factories to present to the boss in regular meetings.
Larry Kating, director of manufacturing, calls from the new factory in nearby Shakopee to discuss whether or not to make 30,000 pillows for Costco that the store hasn’t asked for yet.
Lindell’s vote: Go for it! “You’re always juggling stuff like that,” he says. He’s an unusual manager, governing largely on instinct and by making seemingly wild gambles that he swears are divinely inspired. “We don’t use PowerPoints,” he says. “I end up getting stuff in prayer.”
A worker tags pillows in the new factory in Shakopee. Photographer: Matthew Hintz for Bloomberg Businessweek
Lindell radiates energy, as if he did cocaine for so long that his body is forever trapped in a manic state. He’s friendly, animated, and unselfconscious, with the kind of laugh you’d assign to a cartoon woodsman from Minnesota. He’ll fiddle with whatever’s in front of him, which right now is a framed picture of himself with Mike Pence and Trump at the election night victory party. Pence is stone-faced—he could be his own wax dummy. Trump is being Trump, flashing a thumbs-up and smiling like a guy who practices in the mirror. And Lindell—he looks like someone who can’t believe his luck.
The autobiography was supposed to be finished last spring, but Lindell can’t decide where to end it, so he’s extending the narrative at least up through the election. “When you read it, you’re going to go, ‘OK, this isn’t real,’ and then you find out it is real,” he says. “This was before even the Trump thing. All my life it’s been like that. The last thing I expected in the world was to end up being involved in a presidential campaign. I’m an ex-crack addict, come on! My book writer just had a pretty great line: ‘From the crack house to the White House!’ ”
The pillow came to him in a dream. This was 2003. Lindell owned a pair of successful bars in Carver County, outside Minneapolis, and enjoyed the lifestyle a bit too much. He was, he says, a “very functional drug user” with four kids and a nice house. He helped with homework, took the family on vacation, and was a decent father and husband, other than the fact that he used cocaine.
Throughout his life he’d sought the perfect pillow. He never slept well, and things kept happening to worsen the problem. He got sciatica. He was in a bad car accident. He nearly died while skydiving, after nearly dying while motorcycling on his way to skydiving. (He quit both activities the next day.) He got addicted to cocaine.
When he did sleep, it was fitful. “That’s one of the problems with cocaine,” he says, seemingly without irony. One morning, after he woke—or maybe he was still up, he can’t recall—he sat at the kitchen table and wrote “MyPillow” over and over until he’d sketched the rough logo for a product that didn’t exist. When his daughter Lizzie came through to get some water and saw him maniacally scribbling the same words over and over like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, she asked what he was doing.
“I’m going to invent the best pillow the world has ever seen!” he exclaimed. “It’s going to be called MyPillow!”
“Dad, that’s really random,” she said, and went to her room.
The only way Lindell was ever happy with a pillow was when he found a way to, in his words, “micro-adjust” an existing one. It would typically be foam; he’d yank and pull the filling apart to break up the inside, then arrange and pile up the torn foam like a mouse building a nest, until it was the right height for his neck. Then he’d sleep. By morning, it would be all messed up again.
When Lindell imagined his perfect pillow, it was micro-adjustable but would keep its shape all night. He bought every variety of foam and then asked his two sons to sit on the deck of the house with him and tear the foam into different-size pieces that they’d stuff into prototypes for testing. Day after day they did this, until Lindell settled on a mix of three sizes of foam—a pebble, a dime, and a quarter, roughly. When he stuffed just the right amount of that mixture into a case and shmushed it around to the shape he wanted, it held that shape. It was perfect.
Sitting on the deck with his sons and ripping the foam by hand wasn’t a scalable model. He needed a machine to do the tearing. He tried everything, including a wood chipper.
Workers sewing up pillows at the factory. Photographer: Matthew Hintz for Bloomberg Businessweek
A friend who grew up on a farm suggested a hammermill, an old-timey machine that’s used to grind corn into feed. Lindell couldn’t find one anywhere. Word got around, and an old cribbage buddy called to say he’d spotted a rusty hammermill sitting in a field about a mile from Lindell’s house. Lindell picked it up, rebuilt it as best he could, and sure enough, it worked.
Lindell believed this pillow “would change lives.” He made 300 and went in search of buyers, stopping at every big-box retailer in the area. “I said, ‘I have the best pillow ever made. How many would you like?’ ” You can imagine how that went.
When someone suggested he try a mall kiosk, Lindell borrowed $12,000 to rent one at Eden Prairie Center for six weeks, starting in the middle of November 2004. He sold his first pillow the first day and it was, he says, “the most amazing feeling.” But he’d priced the product too low. His cost was more than the retail price. Plus, his pillow was too big for standard pillowcases.
The kiosk failed. He borrowed more money against the house, and also from friends who weren’t sick of him yet. When desperate, he counted cards at the blackjack table to pay for materials. He was good at it. Eventually, all the casinos within a day’s drive banned him.
His focus on the pillow project was the one thing that could override his drug cravings, but only for short periods. And every time something went wrong, he lapsed.
Today, Lindell is a devout Christian and prays constantly. He wears a large silver cross around his neck, and his office is filled with Christian iconography, as well as Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band tour posters. Back then he was an opportunist, praying to God only when things were dire: “I said, ‘God, what do I do here?’ ” The day after he closed the kiosk, he got a call from one of the few customers, who declared, “This pillow changed my life!”
This enthusiastic buyer ran the Minneapolis Home + Garden Show, one of the largest for home products in the country. He wanted Lindell to have a booth.
Lindell took 300 pillows (this time they were a standard size) and sold them all. He also got himself invited to take a spot at the Minnesota State Fair and sold well. This was a revelation. There were dozens of home and garden shows around the country and countless more fairs. “Those are your testing grounds,” he says. A product that works at the fair works, period.
For the next few years, this is basically how the company operated. Lindell and a few key salespeople drove around in trucks stuffed full of pillows to sell at fairs. They were all effective, but no one’s pitch—sermon was more like it—moved the merch like Lindell’s.
He didn’t give up the drugs. His habit continued, his 20-year marriage broke up, and he lost his house, because he was constantly borrowing money to pay his suppliers. He was barreling toward that moment with Ty, the dealer. Finally, he had one last blowout and quit cold turkey. “I knew if I waited one more day, it would be over,” he says. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to make the best comeback in the history of the U.S.”
Days after getting clean, Lindell borrowed $30,000 from the owners of a mulching company and used that to repair relationships with his foam supplier and sewing company. Then he set out to reestablish his primacy on the show circuit, where competitors had been selling MyPillow knockoffs.
The big break was an interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that ran in the business section in early January 2011. The morning the story hit, MyPillow’s web traffic went crazy. In a single day, the company made more sales than it had in the previous six months. The surge lasted three months.
He’d never considered that a newspaper could have such impact. He began designing and placing ads that looked like shorter versions of that original story, right down to the goofy picture of him hugging a pillow. They worked. His story of insomnia, of being unable to find a pillow that fit him specifically, seemed to resonate.
Lindell had another hunch: He knew the best way to sell his pillow was to present his story live, as he’d been doing at shows since 2005. He decided to make an infomercial. His friends thought he was nuts.
In August 2011 he booked a space in downtown St. Paul with a studio audience. His producer wrote a script, and at the read-through they all agreed it was bad. He sounded stiff. Instead, the producer suggested, he should just talk to the hired host as if they were having a conversation—sell her the pillow the way he sold it at fairs.
The spot opened with Lindell, in a satiny blue button-down that’s now his trademark garment, saying, “Don’t change that channel, because the next half-hour is going to change your life.” He just ad-libbed, saying, for instance, that down pillows were “the worst thing that ever happened to America” and that MyPillow was so malleable that “you can fold it up into little balloon animals.”
It was unconventional and a little unpolished, but everyone loved it. Lindell was sure it would be a hit, and he flew to New York to persuade his fabric supplier to front him millions of dollars’ worth to prepare for the deluge. “I said, ‘I’m going to go to $100 million!’ ”
“He had no credit and wanted $1 million in goods,” recalls the supplier, Leon Brocas. He’s still not sure why, but Lindell was so passionate that “we decided to give him a shot,” Brocas says.
Lindell walks through the factory. Photographer: Matthew Hintz for Bloomberg Businessweek
Lindell worked similar magic at Federal Foam Technologies, his longtime supplier. He asked two friends to put on suits and travel with him to the Wisconsin headquarters to take his first-ever meeting with Wyman Smith, the company’s president. Prior to that point, Smith says, Lindell was just “a small-potato account.” This time he wanted a lot of foam, on credit. “He made this pitch to me about how he was going to be the biggest pillow maker in the world,” Smith recalls. “He had quite a story, and the other guys never said a word. I found out later he brought them as a prop.”
The half-hour infomercial aired for the first time on Oct. 7, 2011, at 3 a.m. on the East Coast. The business “went straight up,” Lindell says. He hired everyone he could find—literally off bar stools sometimes—and put them to work answering phones or sewing on machines that he stuffed into every corner of a local bus garage lent to him by a friend. And he kept spending. He bought every long-form infomercial spot he could find and actually ran out of available slots before running out of money to pay for them. In six months, he grew from 50 to 500 employees and sold almost $100 million in pillows.
But Lindell never bothered to figure out his indirect costs. He didn’t really even know what those were. Checks were flying off his desk, more and more of them to pay for the infomercial spots, with no way to know which ones were working and which were just wasted money. But at this point he wasn’t sure who his customers were, so it was hard to know which spots to cut.
Federal Foam was concerned enough that Smith dispatched his chief financial officer to see what was going on at Lindell’s bus garage. It took him almost no time to see that, despite propulsive growth, MyPillow’s costs were out of control. Lindell was losing $250,000 a week.
What saved the entrepreneur was FedEx. It hadn’t occurred to him to negotiate shipping rates; he just paid retail with a bunch of different shippers. A company rep came in, asked about his costs, and offered him a rate so low he couldn’t believe it. “Wow,” Lindell said. “You can do this?” Overnight, a red number turned black. Around the same time, Telebrands, largest of the “as seen on TV” product distributors, offered to sell MyPillow after meeting Lindell when he threatened to sue the company over its sale of a knockoff. When he lamented to Bala Iyer, Telebrands’ executive vice president and chief operating officer, about how much money he’d wasted on media, Iyer stopped him. “That wasn’t wasted,” he said. “You branded yourself faster than probably any brand in history.”
Iyer told Lindell that 80 percent of consumers want to touch and feel a product, even if they’re intrigued by a commercial. “That segment will look for the product at retail,” he said, and he told Lindell he could get MyPillow into Bed Bath & Beyond and Walmart. But Lindell didn’t want to go into Walmart. He had loyal salespeople out working shows. The minute Walmart sells a cheaper version, he said, the original business dies. Not, said Iyer, if you go into Walmart at $59.99. Consider what that would mean to the people selling your pillows for $50 at the county fair. Now they can say, “This costs $60 at Walmart!”
Iyer was right: MyPillows sold well from the minute they hit Walmart. In short order, Home Shopping Channel, QVC, and Bed Bath bought into it, too. Today, MyPillow is one of the top five products in the vast Telebrands portfolio and can even be bought at Home Depot and farm and feed stores. (There are also 17 MyPillow retail stores.) “Because of the power of the infomercial,” Lindell says, “all that money was not spent on nothing.”
He’d had another dream: MyPillow would be a $1 billion company
On a day in November 2014, right before the midterm elections, Lindell was shivering on a tree stand while deer hunting. He was a little down—he’d just gone through a second divorce, and, because he’d taken his eye off the ball, the company was in a sales slump. Suddenly, the phone app that provides real-time sales graphs spiked. He phoned his call center to see what happened. It was a short ad that had just begun to air on Fox News.
He shot a deer, then ran to his car and called his media buyer to ask how much Fox he could buy through the end of the year. The answer was $2.1 million. Buy it all, Lindell said. The ads coincided perfectly with the Republican takeover of Congress, branded as a retaking of America. And here was Mike Lindell, a humble American success story, making pillows in American factories. By 2015, MyPillow was growing faster than ever.
In January 2016, Lindell announced to his board that he’d had another dream: MyPillow was going to become a billion-dollar company. “I didn’t know the date then,” he says, stepping out of his blue Dodge Ram pickup with green accent stripes outside the loading dock of his new 100,000-square-foot factory. After his nocturnal vision, he’d instructed his manufacturing team to find this location and begin building it out in anticipation of tripling sales. It opened in May.
Workers stuff pillows by hand. Photographer: Matthew Hintz for Bloomberg Businessweek
Inside, two lines make pillows at a rate of 12 per minute (37,000 per day). They start with a modern version of that original hacked-together hammermill and end with several brand-new machines to automate functions that were, just a few months ago, done by hand. For instance, one assembles boxes; another stuffs two pillows into a plastic bag and seals it (two-for-one being MyPillow’s typical sale). “These are all machines Darren ordered,” Lindell says, striding through the factory. Darren is his son—he helped his dad tear up foam out on the deck. Now he runs this facility.
Walking through the factory, Lindell shows off his newest products: a dog bed and a mattress topper. Then he points out a section of the building where returns are handled. Fewer than 3 percent of MyPillow buyers return products, he says, and “less than 1/20th of 1 percent of those return a product twice.” Lindell obsesses over customer satisfaction. If a customer is on hold for more than a few minutes, he gets an alert on his phone. He expects customer e-mails to be answered within minutes, and if a queue builds up, he gets an alert about that, too. He often handles hundreds of minutes of calls per month himself.
For years, MyPillow was advertised as the cure for almost every sleep problem as well as many health ailments. Ads boasted that using one could alleviate fibromyalgia, joint pain, and restless leg syndrome, as well as promote delta sleep, the most restorative phase of the sleep cycle. Early last fall, Lindell settled with 10 California district attorneys who sued MyPillow for false advertising, arguing that these claims had no scientific backing. The company denied any wrongdoing but agreed to pay $1 million to settle and to remove those claims from any advertising in California. Lindell actually pulled the claims from all advertising to avoid future suits.
The California suit was briefly embarrassing but seems to have had no lingering effects. It certainly hasn’t hurt sales or Lindell’s enthusiasm. He just taped a series of commercial spots to replace one that, he says, “totally flopped” because “I just didn’t have it”—it being the passion necessary to persuade watchers to pay 90-some dollars for two pillows. (There’s a class-action suit pending about MyPillow’s Buy One Get One Free sales tactic—basically, people would like to be able to buy a single pillow for half the price. Lindell has kept the promotion going for so long that earlier this month MyPillow got downgraded overnight from an A to an F by the Better Business Bureau.)
The new factory could run faster and soon will, Lindell says. MyPillow could push production up to more than 85,000 pillows a day. To get there, he says, all he needs to do is buy more media. He says that what he calls the “tsunami”—the next boom in sales, the one that will lead to $1 billion—started last fall. The election was just another harbinger.
Two women who did merchandising for the Trump campaign have stopped by for a tour and have been tailing our group. They seem in awe of the scale and efficiency here, from an essentially flat and somewhat chaotic-seeming organization ruled by a single outlandish man.
What’s the largest sales month you’ve ever had? one asks.
“MyPillow is always the biggest we’ve ever been on the day you’re standing here,” Lindell replies. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| | – You may have seen one of the ubiquitous ads: Mike Lindell makes his personal appeal for you to buy the pillow he literally dreamed up because he could never find one he liked. As Bloomberg reports, plenty of people have done just that, making his MyPillow company wildly successful. Consider that he opened a second factory last year and saw sales jump from $115 million to $280 million. He now employs 1,500 people and has sold more than 26 million pillows, which he insists, to anyone who will listen, are the best ever made. But what makes Lindell's success story so compelling is what the Bloomberg piece calls the "preposterous" nature of it: Lindell, for instance, is a former drug addict who loves to tell the story of how his crack dealer probably saved his life in 2008 by cutting him off after a 19-day binge and ordering him to go to bed. For years, Lindell owned bars and maintained a steady cocaine habit, and the idea to begin making pillows came to him as a kind of vision that found him sketching the company logo over and over before the company even existed. He experimented with various types of foam and ways to manipulate it, and saw his first success hawking pillows at a home and garden show in Minneapolis. Since then, it's been nothing but strong growth over the last decade or so, despite, or because of, a management style that involves "governing largely on instinct and by making seemingly wild gambles that he swears are divinely inspired," writes Josh Dean. “We don’t use PowerPoints,” says Lindell. “I end up getting stuff in prayer.” Click for the full story, which notes that he and pal Stephen Baldwin plan to turn his story into a movie. |
Image copyright PA Image caption Theresa May signs the letter to the EU confirming the UK's departure
Theresa May has signed the letter that will formally begin the UK's departure from the European Union.
Giving official notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, it will be delivered to European Council president Donald Tusk later.
In a statement in the Commons, the prime minister will then tell MPs this marks "the moment for the country to come together".
It follows June's referendum which resulted in a vote to leave the EU.
Mrs May's letter will be delivered at 12:20 BST on Wednesday by the British ambassador to the EU, Sir Tim Barrow.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Sir Tim arrived in Brussels earlier clutching a briefcase containing the Article 50 letter
The prime minister, who chaired an hour long cabinet meeting earlier, has left Downing Street to make a statement to MPs confirming the countdown to the UK's departure from the EU is under way.
She will promise to "represent every person in the whole United Kingdom" during the negotiations - including EU nationals, whose status after Brexit has yet to be settled.
"It is my fierce determination to get the right deal for every single person in this country," she will say.
"For, as we face the opportunities ahead of us on this momentous journey, our shared values, interests and ambitions can - and must - bring us together."
Attempting to move on from the divisions of June's referendum, Mrs May will add: "We are one great union of people and nations with a proud history and a bright future.
"And, now that the decision has been made to leave the EU, it is time to come together."
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party respected the decision to leave the EU and would hold the government to account "every step of the way".
He said: "Britain is going to change as a result. The question is how."
Mr Corbyn warned it would be "a national failure of historic proportions" if Mrs May does not secure protection for workers' rights.
Chancellor Philip Hammond said the triggering of Article 50 was "a pivotal moment for Britain" and insisted the government "will get a deal".
But he suggested on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that ministers would be prepared to compromise during the process, adding: "Everybody in the EU and the UK is going to go into this negotiation looking to protect their own interests...
"We understand that we can't cherry-pick, we can't have our cake and eat it - that by deciding to leave the EU and negotiate a future relationship with the EU as an independent nation, there will be certain consequences of that and we accept those."
He said EU citizens could still move to the UK and have their full rights while the UK remains "full members of the EU for the next two years".
But crossbench peer Lord Gus O'Donnell, formerly Britain's top civil servant, likened the triggering of Article 50 to being "in a plane being flown by members of the EU and we're about to jump out and we have got a parachute designed by the people flying the plane - and they have designed it in a way to deter anyone else jumping out".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Brexit divorce: 'Conscious uncoupling' or bitter breakup?
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Seven decades of the UK in Europe
The PM will be outlining the next steps during a special half hour BBC One interview on Wednesday with Andrew Neil at 19:00 BST on "Britain after Brexit", to mark the triggering of Article 50.
On Tuesday night, Mrs May spoke by telephone to Mr Tusk, EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Article 50 gives both sides two years to reach agreement, so unless both sides agree to extend the deadline for talks, the UK will leave on 29 March 2019.
Negotiations are expected to begin in mid-May. The UK government says it wants to carry out both separation and trade talks at the same time, but EU chiefs say the two issues must be handled separately.
The UK has said it wants an "early agreement" to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and those of British nationals living abroad.
Other issues which are likely to be discussed are things like cross-border security arrangements, the European Arrest Warrant, moving EU agencies which have their headquarters in the UK and the UK's contribution to pensions of EU civil servants - part of a wider "divorce bill" which some reports have suggested could run to £50bn.
Up for discussion
Trade: The UK will withdraw from the single market and seek a new customs arrangement and a free trade agreement with the EU
The UK will withdraw from the single market and seek a new customs arrangement and a free trade agreement with the EU Expats: The government wants to secure an agreement with European countries "at the earliest opportunity" on the rights of EU nationals in the UK and Britons living in Europe
The government wants to secure an agreement with European countries "at the earliest opportunity" on the rights of EU nationals in the UK and Britons living in Europe Brexit bill: The UK government has promised to honour its obligations as it leaves, but has brushed off claims these could run to £50bn
The UK government has promised to honour its obligations as it leaves, but has brushed off claims these could run to £50bn Northern Ireland border: Aiming for "as seamless and frictionless a border as possible between Northern Ireland and Ireland"
Aiming for "as seamless and frictionless a border as possible between Northern Ireland and Ireland" Sovereignty: Britain will leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice but seek to set up separate resolution mechanisms for things like trade disputes
Britain will leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice but seek to set up separate resolution mechanisms for things like trade disputes Security: The UK government has said it wants to continue to cooperate on security and intelligence-sharing
The UK government has said it wants to continue to cooperate on security and intelligence-sharing Transitional deal: An interim arrangement may be needed before the final arrangements come into force
The Lib Dems claimed Mrs May was "pulling the trigger that will set in motion a chain of events which will change this country forever, and doing so without a proper plan", but the Leave Means Leave campaign congratulated her on sticking to her timetable of invoking Article 50 before the end of March.
"Unpatriotic, pro-EU fanatics will continue to try to derail or, at the very least, delay Brexit," the group's co-chairman, Richard Tice, warned.
The PM was forced to consult Parliament before invoking Article 50 after it lost a legal challenge in the Supreme Court, but it secured the backing of most MPs earlier this month.
On Thursday the government is expected to publish details of its "Great Repeal Bill", which aims to convert EU law into domestic legislation and repeal the European Communities Act, which says EU law is supreme to the UK's.
Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning ||||| Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, sitting below a painting of Britain's first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, in 10 Downing Street,... (Associated Press)
Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, sitting below a painting of Britain's first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, in 10 Downing Street, London, Tuesday March 28, 2017, invoking Article 50 of the bloc's key treaty, the formal start of... (Associated Press)
LONDON (AP) — Britain is set to formally file for divorce from the European Union Wednesday, walking out on a 44-year relationship, enacting the decision made by U.K. voters in a referendum nine months ago and launching both Britain and the bloc into uncharted territory.
Prime Minister Theresa May is due to tell House of Commons at lunchtime that she has invoked Article 50 of the EU's key treaty, the trigger for a two-year countdown to Britain's exit.
Just before May's statement, scheduled for 1130 GMT (7:30 a.m. EDT), Britain's EU envoy, Tim Barrow, will hand-deliver a letter from May to EU Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels.
Photos were released of May signing the letter late Tuesday in the Cabinet room at 10 Downing St., under a portrait of Britain's first prime minister, Robert Walpole.
The letter, which is several pages long, was whisked to Brussels aboard a Eurostar train, British media reported. Barrow arrived at European Council headquarters carrying a briefcase Wednesday morning, before his appointment with Tusk.
May's office said she will tell lawmakers that the U.K. is embarking on a "momentous journey" and should unite to forge a "global Britain."
"It is my fierce determination to get the right deal for every single person in this country," she will say.
Britain's Treasury chief, Philip Hammond, said that triggering Brexit was "a pivotal moment for Britain," but denied the country was taking a leap in the dark.
"We all have the same agenda. We are all seeking to get the best possible deal for Britain," he told the BBC.
Hammond said he was optimistic of forging "a relationship that will strengthen the U.K. and will strengthen the European Union as well."
Gus O'Donnell, the U.K.'s former top civil servant, was less certain.
"We are in a plane being flown by members of the EU and we're about to jump out and we've got a parachute that was designed by the people flying the plane and they designed it in a way to deter anybody else jumping out," he said.
Britain and the EU have two years to unpick a tapestry of rules, regulations and agreements stitched over more than four decades since Britain joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973.
EU officials are due to circulate draft negotiating guidelines within days, and bloc leaders — minus May — will meet April 29 to adopt a common position.
Britain says it's not turning its back on its neighbors and wants to remain friends. May has said that the U.K. will become "stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking" and will seek "a new, deep and special partnership with the European Union."
But many British businesses fear the impact of leaving the EU's vast single market of some 500 million people. Senior British officials say they are confident of striking a close new free-trade relationship with the bloc — but a successful outcome to the complex and emotionally fraught negotiations is far from certain.
Brexit has profound implications for Britain's economy, society and even unity. The divisive decision to leave the EU has given new impetus to the drive for Scottish independence, and undermined the foundations of Northern Ireland's peace settlement.
It's also a major blow to the EU, after decades of expansion, to lose one of its largest members. Anti-EU populists including French far-right leader Marine Le Pen hope the impulses that drove Britain to turn its back on the EU will be repeated across the continent.
___
Associated Press writer Danica Kirka contributed to this story. ||||| | – The UK is preparing to say adios, au revoir, and auf wiedersehen to the European Union after 44 years of membership. Prime Minister Theresa May signed a letter Tuesday night invoking Article 50, and the EU received it Wednesday, formally triggering two years of negotiations leading up to Britain's departure from the bloc, the BBC reports. May was expected to address British lawmakers, calling the historic moment a "time for the country to come together" and promising to fight for "the right deal for every person in this country." Pro-Brexit British newspapers including the Sun, which beamed the message "Dover and Out" onto the famous white cliffs, are rejoicing, though others have sounded notes of caution, the AP reports. "We are in a plane being flown by members of the EU and we're about to jump out and we've got a parachute that was designed by the people flying the plane and they designed it in a way to deter anybody else jumping out," says former top civil servant Gus O'Donnell. EU budget commissioner Guenther Oettinger described the letter as "a negative message for Europe as a whole, for the UK especially" and predicted months of difficult negotiations ahead. |
WASHINGTON (AP) — On the eve of a critical Senate vote and under court order, the Obama administration signaled it will publicly reveal a secret memo describing its legal justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism overseas.
Two administration officials told The Associated Press that the Justice Department has decided not to appeal a Court of Appeals ruling requiring disclosure of a redacted version of the memo under the Freedom of Information Act. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
The decision to release the documents comes as the Senate is to vote Wednesday on advancing President Barack Obama's nomination of the memo's author, Harvard professor and former Justice Department official David Barron, to sit on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had vowed to fight Barron's confirmation, and some Democratic senators were calling for the memo's public release before a final vote.
Wednesday's expected procedural vote would allow the Senate to move ahead with a final vote on Barron on Thursday. "I think we'll be OK," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said earlier Tuesday.
Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader born in the United States, was killed after being targeted by a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Some legal scholars and human rights activists complained that it was illegal for the U.S. to kill American citizens away from the battlefield without a trial.
Some senators, including those in Obama's own party, have called for the public release of the memo before the final confirmation vote. The White House agreed under the pressure to show senators unredacted copies of all written legal advice written by Barron regarding the potential use of lethal force against U.S. citizens in counterterrorism operations.
Until now, the administration has fought in court to keep the writings from public view. But administration officials said that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. decided this week not appeal an April 21 ruling requiring disclosure by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York and that Attorney General Eric Holder concurred with his opinion.
The release could take some time, since the redactions are subject to court approval. And the administration also is insisting that a classified ruling on the case also be redacted to protect information classified for national security, but not the legal reasoning, one of the officials said.
The drone strike that killed al-Awlaki also killed another U.S. citizen, Samir Khan, an al-Qaida propagandist. Al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed the following month in another drone attack.
The American Civil Liberties Union and two reporters for The New York Times, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, filed a FOIA suit. In January 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that she had no authority to order the documents disclosed, although she chided the Obama administration for refusing to release them.
But a three-judge appeals court panel noted that after McMahon ruled, senior government officials spoke about the subject. The panel rejected the government's claim that the court could not consider official disclosures made after McMahon's ruling, including a 16-page Justice Department white paper on the subject and public comments by Obama in May in which he acknowledged his role in the al-Awlaki killing, saying he had "authorized the strike that took him out."
The ACLU urged senators in a letter Tuesday not to move forward on the confirmation vote until they have a chance to see any Barron memos on the administration's drone program, not just those involving U.S. citizens.
Paul issued a statement Tuesday saying he still opposes Barron's nomination. "I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a president is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court," Paul said in remarks prepared for delivery on the Senate floor Wednesday provided by his office.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has been pushing for public disclosure of Barron's writings and was one of several Democrats who had been refusing to say whether he'd vote for confirmation without it. "That's certainly very constructive," Wyden said when told of the decision not to appeal.
The administration's decision won over at least one senator, Mark Udall, D-Colo., who had been opposed to Barron because of the memo's secrecy. "This is a welcome development for government transparency and affirms that although the government does have the right to keep national security secrets, it does not get to have secret law," Udall said.
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Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler
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Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report. ||||| Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) signaled Tuesday that a controversial judicial nominee from the Obama administration is likely to win eventual confirmation from the Senate.
The nominee, David Barron, has drawn some criticism and scrutiny for his role in drafting a legal memo as a Justice Department official on the 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al Awlaki. But Reid said Tuesday that “I think we’ll be OK” on the vote to break a filibuster on the Barron nomination, slated for Wednesday.
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“There were just some misunderstandings,” Reid said Tuesday. “Once everything was explained, I think — I don’t know if everybody — but certainly most everyone on our caucus is satisfied.”
Senate Democrats concerned about the Barron nomination were briefed by White House officials during a classified session last week at the Capitol. But the most vocal criticism has come from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who announced last week that he would filibuster the nomination after reading the classified memos written by Barron.
Those documents, Paul argued, gave no legal rationale for the strikes that killed al Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, without trial or legal representation. The potential 2016 Republican presidential contender added: “There is no valid legal precedent to justify the killing of an American citizen not engaged in combat.”
With the Senate rules changes last year, however, a filibuster threat such as Paul’s has significantly less impact. Democrats need just a simple majority — rather than 60 votes — to break a filibuster, and they control 55 votes.
It is unclear whether Paul will mount a talking filibuster or force the Senate to use all of the debate time on Barron’s nomination. Paul, who spoke for 12 hours during a debate on CIA Director John Brennan’s nomination in 2013, plans to take to the floor Wednesday to speak against Barron’s nomination.
In excerpts of his prepared floor remarks released Tuesday, Paul plans to say the legal memos written by Barron “disrespect the Bill of Rights” and he could not support the nomination of any official who “argues that the president has the power to kill Americans not involved in combat.”
“I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a president is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court,” Paul will say on Wednesday.
Barron, now a Harvard Law School professor, is nominated for a seat on the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals.
On another controversial judicial nominee — Michael Boggs in Georgia — Reid reiterated Tuesday that he is still opposed to the pick.
“My position hasn’t changed; I do not support him,” Reid said. ||||| Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says he has the votes to confirm David Barron, the author of memos justifying drone strikes against American citizens, to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
Reid said most of the members of the Senate Democratic Caucus were satisfied with the defense of Barron provided by White House lawyers at a private briefing last week.
“We’ll vote on the Barron filibuster, stopping that tomorrow. I think we’ll be OK,” Reid said at a Tuesday press conference.
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Reid needs a simple majority to quash a GOP filibuster of Barron that threatened to attract Democratic support.
Some Democrats had balked at Barron’s nomination because the Justice Department had refused to make public memos he had authored justifying the lethal drone strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen who was suspected of terrorist ties.
The drone strike against al-Awlaki also killed Samir Khan, another American citizen, who published an online magazine promoting jihad.
The American Civil Liberties Union has weighed in strongly against Barron’s nomination and urged senators not to vote on him until it has researched his writings.
The White House has allowed senators to privately view his legal rationale for drone strikes against American citizens, but critics question whether lawmakers have been privy to all his relevant work.
Reid downplayed opposition to Barron within his own caucus as a “misunderstanding.”
“It was just some misunderstanding. Once everything was explained ... most everyone in our caucus was satisfied,” Reid told reporters.
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), two critics of President Obama’s drone program, declined to say Tuesday whether they would vote for Barron.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an outspoken critic of the nation’s drone policy, has led Senate opposition to the judicial nominee.
Democratic senators discussed Barron with White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler and Neil Eggleston, her successor, Thursday afternoon in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility located in the Capitol Visitor Center. ||||| | – The Obama administration has decided to release a secret memo explaining its justification for killing American citizens in drone strikes overseas, sources tell the AP. The decision comes as the Senate prepares to vote on the nomination of the memo's author, David Barron, to the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals. GOP Sen. Rand Paul has vowed to filibuster the nomination of the Harvard professor and former Justice Department official, and some Democratic senators have also called for the public release of the document. Paul plans to argue that Barron's memos "disrespect the Bill of Rights" and any official that "argues that the president has the power to kill Americans not involved in combat" is "not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court," according to prepared remarks released yesterday, Politico reports. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he definitely has enough votes to confirm Barron, reports the Hill, which notes that Reid only needs a simple majority to quash Paul's filibuster. Democratic opposition to Barron "was just some misunderstanding," Reid told reporters. "Once everything was explained ... most everyone in our caucus was satisfied." |
Jessica Alba at today's Microsoft event (Credit: CNET)
She's been a presence at tech conferences of late, and today Microsoft brought out actor-turned-entrepreneur Jessica Alba to talk up the virtues of Windows Phone 8, which the company is launching at an event in San Francisco.
Alba was on stage to tout Kid's Corner, Microsoft's new user account of sorts for kids. Kid's Corner, which acts as a second lock screen for kids, lets an adult choose which apps the kids see, which music they can listen to, and which games they can play. Kids can choose their own theme colors, but they can't pin apps to Kid's Corner themselves. If your phone is locked, you just swipe right from the Start screens to get into the Kid's Corner.
"I think it's awesome," Alba gushed about Kid's Corner. "I love that I can curate the space. It's a very clutch feature. Also I don't need to worry about my kid going into my social-media networks, or e-mailing my partners or anything like that."
So there you have it: A celebrity mom endorsement for Windows Phone. Alba also spent some time talking about switching to a Windows Phone from the iPhone. Naturally, she then plugged her startup, The Honest Company, which sells baby products such as diapers and wipes, before making her way off stage.
"This is the best tech crowd I've ever been in front of," she said on her way out. ||||| Joe Belfiore, Steve Ballmer and Jessica Alba at the Windows Phone 8 launch in San Francisco (Credit: James Martin/CNET)
SAN FRANCISCO -- Windows Phone 8, the second pillar in Microsoft's rebirthing of Windows, finally reached escape velocity. A wide variety of Windows smartphones will be shipping soon, entering a market totally dominated by Apple (iOS) and Google (Android).
Steve Ballmer gave assurances at the launch event at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, named after rock music impresario Bill Graham, that after four years the company finally got Windows Phone right. "People all over the world are about to fall in love with Windows Phone," the Microsoft CEO said. "If you're one of the hundreds of millions of people who will use Windows 8, there is no better phone for you." Actress and entrepreneur Jessica Alba was on stage to endorse Windows Phone 8 and its new Kids Corner feature. It was like watching a few minutes of the QVC shopping channel.
Hands on: Windows Phone 8 comes of age at last
Read: Microsoft dishes more Windows Phone 8 goods
Full coverage: Meet Windows 8
It was left to Joe Belfiore, manager of Microsoft's Windows Phone team, to articulate how Windows Phone 8 could leapfrog the well-endowed competition. His answer: "Windows Phone 8 "reinvents the smartphone around 'you,' and makes it the most "personal" phone available.
Live Tiles vs. Icons
The "you" and "personal' in Windows Phone 8 are most visibly expressed in how Live Tiles, which live on the phone's start screen and can contain real-time information. Users can "pin" Live Tiles of people (their tweets, photos, etc.), song, websites, photos, email, notifications, Facebook and other items to the screen. "You can actually maintain a better relationship with people, because you get a sense of what they're up to at that moment," Belfiore said.
Windows 8 phones with Live Tiles ready to sell in November (Credit: James Martin/CNET)
Belfiore also took a few shots at the competition in explaining Microsoft's design differentiation:
"It's the only phone that has live tiles, for the people you care about and the apps that you use all the time. It's a different story than iOS and Android.," he said. "The iOS 6 home screen is really just a sea of static icons. It's not people; it's not live data.
"Of course, after five years, they have added one more row of icons. Android home screens typically present a complex maze of icons, widgets, and settings. But, they look a lot like iPhones, too. If you put a bunch of them on a table, it'd be hard to tell your own from the crowd. We felt there was a better way. Windows Phone 8 -- it looks different because we didn't make it for all of us, we made it for each of us."
But Microsoft is swimming against the tide in requiring users to learn a new way of interacting with their devices. The iPhone and Android devices are icon-driven, but they also have notification services that can provide real-time snapshots. And, it wouldn't be surprising to see "live icons" emanating soon from the Apple and Android camps.
Belfiore's response: Icon-based interfaces are a "tired, old metaphor," and unable to give users an at-a-glance view of what is happening via their smartphone. "We do it more readily, conveniently and richly," he said.
With Windows Phone 8 devices getting into customers hands, Microsoft will see how well its Live Tiles fare against the smartphone icons. ||||| Article Excerpt
Microsoft Corp. officially released an overhaul for its nascent Windows Phone software, in its latest attempt to catch up to Apple Inc. and devices running software from Google Inc.
The new software, dubbed Windows Phone 8, will include a bevy of new features, including the ability for apps, such as those from Facebook Inc. or Groupon Inc., to display recently posted photos or the latest daily deal on the device's home screen.
But Microsoft said some of the new Windows 8 phones won't launch until mid-November or later. The timing means that Microsoft could lose out on some sales in ... ||||| | – Microsoft officially unveiled Windows Phone 8 yesterday, and it did so with a special celebrity guest: Jessica Alba. Microsoft invited the actress to tout the phone's "Kid's Corner" feature, which allows parents to control what apps kids have access to, touting her as a "great example of the kind of people who we think Windows Phone will appeal to," as a mom and entrepreneur. "This is the best tech crowd I've ever been in front of," Alba said, according to CNET. Alba's presence went along with the overall feel Microsoft was going for, Janet Tu at the Seattle Times observes, namely "fun and cool." "Clearly Microsoft—long associated with work, productivity, and your company's IT department—was trying to reach younger, hip consumers." To that end, here are some of the features the company touted: Steve Ballmer touted it as "the most personal smartphone out there," saying that it "reinvents the smartphone around you." The most notable way it does this: The live tiles that cover the display. Live tiles that don't just open apps, they display realtime data. You can "pin" a live tile of a friend, for instance and see their Facebook or Twitter activity, CNET reports. "The iOS6 home screen is really just a sea of static icons," Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore said. "It's not people; it's not live data." Microsoft also boasted about its growing apps catalog, which it says now contains 120,000 programs, the Wall Street Journal reports—while noting that it's a far cry from the 700,000 or so Android and iOS apps. They also touted the tight integration between Windows Phone and Microsoft's other products. "If you're one of the hundreds of millions of people who will use Windows 8, there is no better phone for you," Steve Ballmer said. Initial phones will include the HTC Windows Phone 8X, and the Nokia Lumia. Versions of both will be available from Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, for prices ranging from $99.99 to $199.99. |
Volvo has made a shocking pledge: By 2020, no one will be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car or SUV.
Seriously.
"If you meet Swedish engineers, they're pretty genuine," said Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo Cars North America. "They don't say things when they don't believe in it."
There is one big caveat. If someone really wants to hurt themselves, or is just really, really stupid... well, Volvo can't do anything about that. But, assuming you're not a suicidal maniac or a total idiot, in four years, you'll be safer driving a new Volvo than you are climbing a ladder to screw in a light bulb.
Fatality-free vehicles are not unprecedented. In fact, there already are some, and they're not just Volvos. According to data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, there are nine vehicle models -- including the Volvo XC90 -- in which no one in the United States died in the four years from 2009 to 2012, the most recent period for which data is available.
Volvo, still based in Sweden but now owned by China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (GELYY), wants to make this the case for its entire vehicle line up throughout the world. The automaker already tracks how many people die in its vehicles in order to monitor safety. That way, engineers can tell how much safer their vehicles become each time they roll out a new crash-prevention technology. That also helps Volvo predict how much safer its vehicles will be with each new advancement.
Ultimately, all these new technologies will be tied to together to create a car that can, literally, drive itself. In fact, a number of automakers, not not just Volvo, have promised to sell autonomous cars by 2020.
"With the development of full autonomy we are going to push the limits of automotive safety," said Volvo safety engineer Erik Coelingh, "because if you make a fully autonomous vehicle you have to think through everything that potentially can happen with a car."
That doesn't mean that drivers will necessarily have to use the car's autonomous driving mode in order to be safe, though. Even when the driver is in full control of the car, these systems will still run in the background, ready to take over the instant there's danger.
Most of the technology that's required for autonomous driving is already available from Volvo and other carmakers. Here's a look at the features that, when combined all together in one vehicle, will essentially make it crashproof.
Adaptive Cruise Control: Adaptive cruise control, which is already available on many new cars, uses radar and sometimes other sensors to detect vehicles on the road ahead. You set a maximum speed and then your car maintains a safe following distance on its own, operating the gas and the brakes for you. Some systems like this only work at highway cruising speeds, but many can work even in stop-and-go traffic.
Auto lane keeping assist: Cameras detect lane lines and road edges, and the car steers itself to stay in its lane.
Collision avoidance: Radar, cameras or other sensors detect obstacles ahead and warn the driver. If the driver still doesn't react, the car can apply the brakes automatically to avoid, or at least reduce, the impact of a crash. In the United States, auto safety regulators have found this technology particularly effective in reducing crashes.
Pedestrian detection: Cameras, including ones that can see in the dark, are programmed to detect human forms that might wander into the path of the car. Drivers can be alerted and again, the car can brake automatically.
Large animal detection: Hitting a moose, deer or elk is definitely bad for the animal but it's also very bad for a car's passengers. Volvo has created a system that can detect when a big animal is walking in front of your car, saving both you and the absent-minded animal.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the time period during which nine vehicles, including the Volvo XC90, had no crash-related fatalities. ||||| Swedish automaker Volvo has long kept track of how many people are seriously injured or killed while driving its vehicles. It uses this data to see how much safer it can make its vehicles in the event of a crash. Now, the company has made a bold promise — by 2020 there will be no serious injuries or fatalities in a Volvo car or SUV.
Cars are getting smarter with the addition of autonomous technologies, and this is how Volvo hopes to reach its goal of zero deaths in its cars. This does not, of course, preclude someone from driving recklessly and getting themselves killed. However, conventional driving should be made much safer with the inclusion of a number of technologies. It starts with making the interior of the car safer with improved airbags and restraints. Then things get more futuristic.
Volvo already has various smart features in its cars, but by combining them all, it becomes much harder to end up in a serious accident. Adaptive cruise control for example, is already available on many cars. It allows you to set a maximum speed, but uses radar to maintain a safe distance from the car in front of you. It can even apply the brakes if need be. This can be taken a step further with full collision avoidance. When a crash is likely, the driver will be warned. If action isn’t taken, the car can begin braking to avoid, or at least minimize the impact.
A relatively new technology that Volvo plans to make extensive use of is lane assistance. Cars will use cameras to detect lanes and alert the driver if they begin to drift. This has been found to dramatically reduce crashes from dozing off at the wheel and distracted driving. Road signs can be identified by cameras as well to help alert drivers to posted speed limits and upcoming hazards.
Cameras will also be used to watch for pedestrians in the vicinity of the vehicle. This is similar to the technology that is used in self-driving cars to identify potential obstacles on the road. The driver can be alerted if a person is in the car’s path and the brake can be automatically applied. In addition to people, cameras can be used to spot large animals in the roadway. For example, moose are common in Volvo’s home territory, and they’ll really mess your car up. Volvo has created a system that can act to avoid colliding with such a critter, saving both you and it.
Automakers like Ford and Tesla are moving quickly toward fully autonomous vehicles. Then there’s Google’s self-driving car program. Volvo too is in the early stages of driverless tech, and handing control over to a computer when it’s clear something is wrong could be a step in that direction. Proving that vehicles can prevent deaths with automated technologies could go a long way toward convincing the public and regulators that self-driving cars are the best option. Volvo thinks these self-driving cars will be the safest of all.
Still, claiming something to be death-proof seems risky. They said the Titanic was unsinkable, after all. ||||| I don’t often get the chance to drive large-capacity sport-utility vehicles as they’re meant to be, but this last holiday was (sort of) an exception. I drove a 2016 Volvo XC90 AWD Inscription to metro Milwaukee and back and brought along my family. Here’s where the “sort of” comes into play; my wife and I have no kids, but our three collies rode along behind the front seats. A borrowed rooftop carrier handled most of our luggage. (Note to Volvo Car USA: The Green Bay Packers “sticker” is a magnet.)
all-new Volvo XC90 in more than a dozen years as the future of luxury transportation. Even loaded to the gills and topped with that rooftop carrier, it managed about 20 mostly freeway mpg, enough to match its city EPA number. I had already come to regard the firstin more than a dozen years as the future of luxury transportation. Even loaded to the gills and topped with that rooftop carrier, it managed about 20 mostly freeway mpg, enough to match its city EPA number.
the S90 sedan, will ever have. The only upgrade will be the plug-in hybrid T8 powertrain that bumps the T6 turbo-/supercharged four from 316 horsepower to a cool 400. Actually, my first impression from a shorter drive earlier last year was that the XC90 is the future of high-capacity transportation. It’s a seven-passenger, three-row model that gets plenty of power from a turbocharged and supercharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder gas, direct-injection engine powering all four wheels. It’s the largest engine that any new Volvo coming in the future, including, will ever have. The only upgrade will bethat bumps the T6 turbo-/supercharged four from 316 horsepower to a cool 400.
Big as the XC90 is, it feels light on its feet. It’s 194.8 inches long, on a 117.5-inch wheelbase. At 69.9 inches high, it doesn’t feel that tall when stepping in and out. Volvo has not joined the ranks of BMW competitors that are trying to beat BMW dynamics -- at least, what BMW’s dynamics used to be. This is an SUV you’re supposed to forget you are driving (while still paying close attention to traffic around you). Nothing about the steering, handling, or acceleration makes you want to find a twisty mountain road. Nothing about all that makes you wish you were driving a Bimmer either; the handling is sufficiently crisp, and the steering provides decent feedback.
Volvo XC90 has adjustable dynamics. I have a tough time caring about, and trying out, these systems. (BMW used to be able to find the right chassis balance without making its drivers do the fine-tuning.) The Dynamic mode lowers the XC90 by 0.8 inch when above 84 mph. It also adapts four-corner active dampers on the air suspension (which was an $1,800 option on my $66,855 loaner) and shifts the eight-speed automatic at higher revs. I tried it just long enough to learn that I didn’t need this mode for this drive. You -- and Volvo -- don’t want to see what happens when collies get carsick. Like BMW and all the competitors that want to be BMW, thehas adjustable dynamics. I have a tough time caring about, and trying out, these systems. (BMW used to be able to find the right chassis balance without making its drivers do the fine-tuning.) The Dynamic mode lowers the XC90 by 0.8 inch when above 84 mph. It also adapts four-corner active dampers on the air suspension (which was an $1,800 option on my $66,855 loaner) and shifts the eight-speed automatic at higher revs. I tried it just long enough to learn that I didn’t need this mode for this drive. You -- and Volvo -- don’t want to see what happens when collies get carsick.
I did click on the Eco mode somewhere near Ann Arbor during the return drive, to avoid having to stop for gas within 10 miles from home. In this mode, it goes into "Eco-coast" when you lift off the throttle above 40 mph, thus cutting power and saving gas. I made it. Guess Eco works.
The new Pilot Assist II, to launch on the 2017 Volvo S90, does not require following another car, and it allows autonomous steering up to 80 mph. This would make the agonizing, stop-and-go drive through Chicago perhaps as easy as the rest of the trip … especially when the express lanes are open in my direction. I also tried the adaptive cruise control with Pilot Assist, but only briefly. Fact is, there isn’t much to do with this system because it works only up to 30 mph, and you rely on the car in front of you, which almost always will accelerate past 30 on most any street or road., does not require following another car, and it allows autonomous steering up to 80 mph. This would make the agonizing, stop-and-go drive through Chicago perhaps as easy as the rest of the trip … especially when the express lanes are open in my direction.
Super Cruise highway semi-autonomy until next year, Mercedes-Benz introduced its next step in the new E-Class that made its debut at the North American International Auto Show last week. Mercedes, which is Volvo’s chief rival in such advances, says if you signal for it, the new E-Class will change lanes autonomously while on a highway or freeway. The future of autonomous driving has come into focus just in the first few weeks of this new year. While Cadillac has delayed introduction of itsuntil next year, Mercedes-Benz introduced its next step inlast week. Mercedes, which is Volvo’s chief rival in such advances, says if you signal for it, the new E-Class will change lanes autonomously while on a highway or freeway.
operator rules for autonomous vehicles that require human drivers to always be in control. But then last week, ahead of the president’s appearance at the Detroit show, the Obama administration announced a $4 billion pilot program to study the technology, thus taking the leadership away from California. Volvo plans its test of Level 4 autonomy on about 31 miles of highway in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2017 and wants to next test somewhere in the U.S. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles put the kibosh on that late last year when it issuedthat require human drivers to always be in control. But then last week, ahead of the president’s appearance at the Detroit show, the Obama administration announced a $4 billion pilot program to study the technology, thus taking the leadership away from California.
Though I will be among the last drivers to give up a manual-equipped car -- which can’t be made autonomous -- I’m growing more comfortable with the fiercely growing trajectory of autonomous driving. For a seven-hour drive on tedious interstate in a big, luxurious SUV with your family, a bit of extra comfort (and, therefore, safety) is a welcomed thing. ||||| The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has proposed a 10 year, nearly $4 billion investment into the development and adoption of safe self-driving vehicles through real-world pilot projects.
The proposal is part of President Obama’s latest State of the Union address where he expressed the need to invest in a 21st century transportation system. U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx made the announcement at the recent North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit saying transformational automotive technology can significantly improve vehicle safety, mobility and sustainability.
“We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and transform mobility for the American people,” Foxx says. “Today’s actions and those we will pursue in the coming months will provide the foundation and the path forward for manufacturers, state officials, and consumers to use new technologies and achieve their full safety potential.”
Under the proposal, pilot programs would be used to test connected vehicle systems in designated regions throughout the country and work with automotive leaders to create a common multistate framework for connected and autonomous vehicles.
In addition, DOT has unveiled policy guidance that updates the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) 2013 preliminary policy statement on autonomous vehicles. The new guidance allows for the widespread deployment of fully autonomous vehicles. The NHTSA says that by using the deployment of new technologies it is possible to eliminate 94% of fatal crashes that involve human error.
Under the proposal, DOT hopes to accomplish in 2016:
In six months, the NHTSA will work with the automotive industry to develop guidance on the safe deployment and operation of autonomous vehicles with a common understanding of the performance characteristics necessary for fully autonomous vehicles and the testing and analysis needed to assess them.
In six months, the NHTSA will work with state partners to develop model state policy on automated vehicles that offers a path to consistent national policy.
Encourage manufacturers to submit rule interpretation requests to help enable technology innovation.
When the interpretation authority is not sufficient, encourage manufacturers to submit requests for use of the agency’s exemption authority to allow the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles.
Develop new tools necessary for this new era of vehicle safety and mobility and for the deployment of vehicles without a human driver in mind still conform to an equivalent or higher level of safety than there is now.
So far, automakers and industry organizations have come out in favor of the proposal. General Motors says in a statement that it welcomed the opportunity to work with the government and industry on a “collaborative approach with automakers to further enhance vehicle safety.”
The Association of Global Automakers, an industry organization representing international motor vehicle OEMs, equipment suppliers and other trade associations, applauded the DOT proposal saying the technology “promises to bring significant benefits for improving personal mobility, vehicle safety, fuel efficiency, emissions and highway congestion.”
The association went on to say automated vehicles will have a profound impact on the way the technology is tested and deployed not just at the state level but nationwide. “It is important that any policy is consistent and balanced so it not only reflects the current state of technology, but also is flexible enough to adapt as our industry continues to innovate,” the Association of Global Automakers says. ||||| | – Volvo has just come out with a gutsy move, making what CNN Money is calling a "shocking pledge"—that not a single person will be killed or even seriously injured in a new Volvo car or SUV by 2020. (Not including a driver who does something "really, really stupid," as CNN puts it.) Engineers already have some ground to stand on, given that not a single person has died in the Volvo XC90 over the past four years. And while it's in an elite squad, that model isn't alone—eight others claim the distinction. To reach its goal, Volvo (and other car makers working on similar safety features, including Ford and Tesla) is leaning heavily on autonomous technologies, reports Extreme Tech. Some of the features are run-of-the-mill—think better air bags and restraints—while others are more advanced, including adaptive cruise control, pedestrian and large animal detection, sign reading, and an assist to keep the vehicle between lane lines. "Still, claiming something to be death-proof seems risky," notes the Extreme Tech post. "They said the Titanic was unsinkable, after all." Meanwhile, a review in Automobile Magazine calls the XC90 the "future of luxury transportation" with "crisp" handling and steering that provides "decent feedback." It also notes that Volvo is planning to test its latest autonomy technology on 30 miles of highway in Sweden next year, while the Obama administration recently announced a $4 billion pilot program to study the tech further. (Check out why GM and Lyft are partnering up.) |
The hospital has threatened to perform cesarean surgery on Jennifer Goodall "with or without [her] consent." (Hospital via Shutterstock)
In an action that appears to be increasingly commonplace, a Florida hospital has threatened to force a pregnant patient to undergo cesarean surgery against her will, or to report her to child welfare authorities for attempting to exercise her right to make the medical decisions she deems best for herself and her family.
Jennifer Goodall of Coral Gables was informed in a July 10 letter from the chief financial officer of Bayfront Health Port Charlotte that because she decided to attempt vaginal delivery before agreeing to cesarean surgery in her fourth pregnancy, her prenatal care providers intended to report her to the Department of Children and Family Services, seek a court order to perform surgery, and perform cesarean surgery on her “with or without [her] consent” if she came to the hospital.
A complaint on behalf of Goodall was filed in federal court last week by National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) and Florida attorney Patricia E. Kahn, seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the hospital from carrying out its threats. Federal District Judge John E. Steele denied the request, stating in part that Goodall has no “right to compel a physician or medical facility to perform a medical procedure in the manner she wishes against their best medical judgment.”
Goodall is now 41 weeks pregnant and has told her lawyers she is terrified to enter a hospital. Given this and the weight of medical evidence in Goodall’s favor regarding the safety of the delivery she wanted to have, it is unclear whether the hospital or the courts are considering “best medical judgment” and in whose interest they are acting.
Goodall delivered her three other children via c-section and now desires to undergo what is commonly known as vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC). In decades past, VBAC was a common choice for women who had previously had c-sections, rising from roughly 5 percent of all deliveries after a cesarean in 1985 to roughly 28 percent by 1996. The rate of VBAC deliveries started to fall in the late ’90s, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, reaching 8.5 percent in 2006 due in part to “restrictions that some hospitals and insurers placed” on the procedure. In tandem with what some have noted as pressure on women to undergo cesareans, the rate of cesarean delivery overall in the United States simultaneously increased dramatically over the past four decades, from 5 percent to over 31 percent in 2007.
Medical and public health bodies have long criticized the high rate of cesarean sections in the United States. The World Health Organization points out that at the current rate of 30 percent of all deliveries, cesarean sections in the United States far exceed what should normally be between 5 to 10 percent of all deliveries. ACOG agrees. “The current cesarean rate is undeniably high and absolutely concerns us as ob-gyns,” ACOG President Richard N. Waldman said in a statement. “[ACOG’s] VBAC guidelines emphasize the need for thorough counseling of benefits and risks, shared patient-doctor decision making, and the importance of patient autonomy. Moving forward, we need to work collaboratively with our patients and our colleagues, hospitals, and insurers to swing the pendulum back to fewer cesareans and a more reasonable VBAC rate.”
“The risks associated with a vaginal delivery are lower than the risks associated with a C-section overall, as long as you can deliver the baby at a facility equipped to handle a C-section in case of emergency,” Roger W. Harms, an obstetrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and medical editor-in-chief of MayoClinic.com, said in a statement. And the recovery time is faster. Undergoing a cesarean surgery for the fourth time carries a 1 in 8 chance of major complications. In short, VBAC deliveries are safer for both the pregnant person and the fetus and lead to fewer complications.
These facts did not escape Goodall, who said in a statement released by NAPW:
My decision to allow labor to proceed before consenting to a surgical intervention is based on years of research, careful consideration of the risks to me and my baby, and my family’s needs. All I want is to be able to go to the hospital when I’m in labor and have my medical decisions respected – and my decision is to proceed with a trial of labor and not have cesarean surgery unless some medical complication arises that makes cesarean surgery necessary for my or my baby’s health. Instead of respecting my wishes like they would for any other patient, my health care providers have made me fear for my safety and custody of my children. The people who are supposed to be caring for me and my baby have put me into an even more dangerous situation. I know I’m not the only one to go through this; I’m speaking out because pregnant women deserve better.
“I would definitely consent to surgery if there were any indication during labor that it is necessary,” Goodall added. “I am trying to make the decision that will be safest for both me and my baby, and give me the greatest chance at being able to heal quickly after my child is born so I can care for my newborn and my three other children.”
NAPW staff attorney Farah Diaz-Tello expressed disappointment in Judge Steele’s ruling. “The process of labor and delivery isn’t a procedure; our client is the one trying to avoid a compelled medical procedure. Deciding whether and when to consent to surgery is a constitutionally protected right,” she said in a statement. Diaz-Tello explained that every appellate court to rule on this issue on a full record has held that pregnant women retain their constitutional rights, including rights to medical decision-making and bodily integrity. “No woman should fear that because she’s pregnant, she can be threatened, coerced, or deprived of her constitutional rights,” she said.
But this is exactly what happened to Rinat Dray in Staten Island and to at least six other women in Florida, according to NAPW. “Florida is particularly bad for people giving birth,” Diaz-Tello told RH Reality Check in an email. “We know of at least a half dozen other women who have had court orders or threats of legal action this against them, but the certainty with which hospitals have made these threats makes us think there are more we don’t know of.”
According to declarations of medical experts filed with the lawsuit, the hospital’s actions violate medical ethics. In a statement to NAPW, Mary Faith Marshall, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics & Humanities at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, called the hospital’s actions “troubling.”
“Given the clear statements from ACOG’s Committee on Ethics and other professional groups that coerced or court-ordered medical procedures are not ethically justified, it is stunning that a hospital would threaten such an action,” she said.
Diaz-Tello acknowledged the hospital’s concerns about malpractice liability, but noted that there is no legal or ethical authority that supports managing liability concerns by forcibly performing unwanted surgery. “The Florida Supreme Court has said health care providers are protected from liability when they respect and follow the decisions of a competent and informed patient to delay or refuse a proposed treatment, even when there are risks involved,” she said in the NAPW statement. “Ms. Goodall has explicitly and carefully documented her informed decision to proceed with a trial of labor; there is no justification for forcing her, or any person, to have unwanted surgery to protect a hospital’s bottom line.” ||||| Answering a Facebook campaign to show support, dozens swarmed the sidewalks in front of a Port Charlotte Hospital Sunday picketing against the hospital's insistence for a Cape Coral's mother to have a birth by C-section.
"Jennifer is not alone, she's not the only one," said one of the supporters.
We first told you about Jennifer Goodall's family when the hospital threatened legal action against her if she didn't comply with birth by cesarean. Goodall gave birth Friday and did have C-section birth.
Shouts of "Enough is enough" and "Honk if you hate forced surgery" came from the protesters toward anyone who drove by the Bayfront Health Port Charlotte Hospital.
Joining the moms were many youngsters standing along side their peers.
"Vaginal birth is not a procedure it's a normal outcome of pregnancy," said a protester.
They argue the decision of which way to go isn't left up to them.
"Every woman deserves the right to make choices about their birth and every woman deserves the right to say no if she doesn't want to consent to surgery," said Shannon Mitchell who is a mother of four. "I know what it feels like to just be in that position."
Mitchell claims she faced the same threats the Goodalls did with her own pregnancies.
"Florida's patient bill of right says we can refuse any procedure we want. And refusing cesarean is a procedure," argued Mitchell.
The National Advocates for Pregnant Women admit there is a higher risk of complication during a natural birth if the mother has had a prior C-section.
Goodall had three C-sections before this latest birth.
"Forced surgery is not an appropriate response to physicians fears about liability," said a protester. "We're tired of forced surgeries."
"Women are just asking for the chance to try and do what their bodies are designed to do," said Megan Nickel-Martin with ICAN.
Despite their presence Sunday, Bayfront Health refused to respond to the protesters but instead preferred to stand by their statement issued Saturday:
"Patient privacy laws prevent us from discussing any individual’s care and treatment, but we’d like to share some insight into our general practices. Every year, women and families throughout Charlotte County and surrounding areas trust our hospital care team to welcome their new babies into the world. We provided care for more than 1200 new babies and their mothers last year. We are honored to play a role in the lives of these families and take our responsibility to new and expectant mothers very, very seriously. We have equal responsibility for the health and well being of the babies born at our hospital. Our hospital is very respectful of a patient’s right to informed consent and we eagerly encourage patient involvement in decisions regarding their care, particularly in respect to a mother’s birth plan. We also rely on physicians to use their clinical judgment based on their training and experience to deliver the standard of medical care that preserves human life and results in the best possible outcomes." ||||| | – Two weeks before she gave birth to her fourth child, a Florida hospital threatened to force a C-section on 29-year-old mom Jennifer Goodall "with or without [her] consent," Jezebel reports. Goodall wanted to try delivering vaginally before agreeing to what would be her fourth cesarean—if it was necessary. But Bayfront Health Port Charlotte also threatened to call the state Department of Children and Families because, the hospital said in a letter to Goodall, a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) could lead to “death or serious injury” to the baby, reports the News Press. "My health care providers have made me fear for my safety and custody of my children. I know I'm not the only one to go through this; I'm speaking out because pregnant women deserve better," Goodall says in a statement. She delivered Friday … by C-section, NBC News reports. The courts didn’t back her up. A federal judge earlier this month sided with the hospital, saying the mom-to-be had no "right to compel a physician or medical facility to perform a medical procedure in the manner she wishes against their best medical judgment.” Though VBACs carry some risk, as many as 80% of women go through them safely; the World Health Organization has criticized the US for its high rate of C-sections. And like any other surgery, opting in or out is a "constitutionally protected right" held up by other courts, a National Advocates for Pregnant Women attorney tells RH Reality Check. “No woman should fear that because she’s pregnant, she can be threatened, coerced, or deprived of her constitutional rights,” she says. (A happier pregnancy story: A woman missing part of her heart managed to defy the odds.) |
Lindsay Lohan Fine Dining Behind Bars
It may not be Katsuya , but Lindsay Lohan has a delicious dinner in store on her first night in jail.Our jailhouse mole tells TMZ Turkey Tetrazzini is on the menu tonight. Actually, it's the only option. For those who aren't familiar, it's a turkey casserole with noodles, mushrooms and cream sauce.And there are sides -- Applesauce, broccoli coleslaw and wheat bread. And there's also milk to wash it all down. ||||| Lindsay Lohan received her first visitor in jail but lost access to Papa, as in Ernest Hemingway.
Shawn Chapman Holley, Lindsay’s former, always-was, and still is attorney of record arrived at the Lynwood Correction Facility to check-in on Lilo.
Lindsay Lohan — See The New Mug Shot
She gets the distinction of being visitor Number 1, RadarOnline.com learned.
PHOTOS: See Lindsay’s Previous Two Mug Shots
Lindsay was reading Hemingway’s The Old Man & The Sea and wanted to take it behind bars but was denied.
PHOTOS: Celebs Who Have Done Jail Time
“Her family is working on getting her a copy so she can read it behind bars,” a source told us.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Shows Up For Court Tuesday
Apparently there are rules pertaining to these things. For example Lohan can get books sent to her if they are ordered directly from Amazon, or Barnes & Noble online, and sent directly to the jail. ||||| Lindsay Lohan Scores Rx In Jail
Lindsay Lohan Scores Rx In Jail
TMZ has learnedhas found a friendly pharmacist to fill her prescriptions in the pokey.Sources connected with the Lynwood Correctional Facility tell TMZ ... Lindsay's prescriptions were being processed yesterday and she will be allowed to take several drugs , including, a psychostimulant used to treat. She also has a prescription forIt's pretty ironic ... friends of Lindsay, and, tell TMZ it's the prescriptions that have gotten her into this mess in the first place. Nevertheless, doctors say the meds are justified and Lindsay will get her daily dose. ||||| Lohan may not be serving her whole sentence, but she won’t get off lightly. Writer Piper Kerman, who served 11 months, on what the actress can expect, from the strip search to prisoners’ secret lines of communication.
After weeks of high drama, self-destructive starlet Lindsay Lohan has self-surrendered at the Lynwood jail in Los Angeles, where she’ll experience markedly different treatment than celebrities are accustomed to—and markedly different treatment than most prisoners receive. Still, the basics apply: On arrival, she was likely divested of all her possessions, excepting legal paperwork and personal photos; subjected to a strip search (the “squat and cough”); and none too gently reminded by staff from her first moment in custody that for these few weeks she is “state property.” It’s in the jail’s interest to make sure her stay, which a sheriff said Tuesday will be 14 days of her 90-day sentence, is highly secure, and this will mean 23-hour solitary lockdown.
Lonely, she may choose to “talk on the vents” to the other prisoners by whispering into the air ducts, a common practice in many facilities.
Lindsay Lohan Arrives at Jail
• Avi Steinberg: Lindsay Lohan’s Jailhouse Reading List Jail time is actually quite different from prison time—moment by moment, I’d say it’s worse, though jail sentences tend to be much shorter. I spent 11 months in a women’s federal prison in Danbury Connecticut, but the conclusion of my 13-month sentence was in a federal jail in Chicago. (I was transported there in shackles on “Con Air,” which really does exist.) Jails are crowded, chaotic, dirty places, and people would always arrive at “real prison” from county or city jails disheveled, and with profound relief on their faces. City and county jails often house folks who live on the edge of homelessness, have been arrested for very low-level offenses, or are on their way to bigger prisons and longer bids. Tragically, the three largest mental health facilities in the country are Rikers Island, the Cook County Jail, and the Los Angeles County Jail, and I assure you that incarceration does not improve the condition of the mentally ill, who are endlessly recycled through the prison system.
• More Lindsay Lohan Coverage From The Daily Beast
For those of us lucky enough not to struggle daily with insanity, the worst part of jail time is the utter boredom. In a real prison, an ordinary inmate takes part in a highly structured and socially intricate machinery that focuses on keeping the institution running. Prisoners who are not security risks work, usually to maintain the facility—I was a construction worker. They follow the daily rhythms dictated by the prison and carve out their own friendships, rituals, and patterns that help mark their time and perhaps hasten their sentence. But in a jail, there is precious little opportunity to fill the time with any constructive activity; occasional visits to the library, severely limited “rec time” in a gym or a yard, religious observance, and the constant blare of televisions are about the only options. Many people try to sleep the time away with the aid of abundant psych meds; self-motivated prisoners write copious letters and read every book they can get their hands on. ||||| The seed for this crawl was a list of every host in the Wayback Machine
This crawl was run at a level 1 (URLs including their embeds, plus the URLs of all outbound links including their embeds)
The WARC files associated with this crawl are not currently available to the general public. ||||| Lindsay Lohan's First Tearful Hours in Jail
or leave a comment of your own See what other readers have to say about this story –
With a thick glass partition separating them, Lindsay Lohan received her first visitor in jail – her attorney."Understandably, Lindsay's having a difficult time adjusting as it would be for anyone," Shawn Chapman Holley told PEOPLE after the brief visit with her client Tuesday. "She's trying to make the necessary adjustments to an extremely stressful and difficult situation. There were some tears."Lohan, who'll be confined to her 12-by-8 cell alone for approximately 22 hours a day for about two weeks , is being kept in a special segregated unit away from the general population. E! reality star Alexis Neiers, 19, occupies the next-door cell once used by Paris Hilton. "Generally, the first two days in jail are the most difficult," Holley added. "I just kept reminding her of that. She's doing the best she can."Lohan, 24, apparently got a nod of sympathy from her guards. "Her spirits aren't high," says Holley, "but I spoke to some of the deputies and they said Lindsay's reaction is the same as anyone in her situation." ||||| Lindsay Lohan Back in the Habit for 'Machete,' Full Frontal for 'Inferno'?
Email This Lindsay Lohan may be behind bars, but let's take a glance into the future at what we can expect once the troubled star is a free woman again. First up, a new shot of Lohan in character from the upcoming Robert Rodriguez film, 'Machete,' has surfaced, continuing with the theme of 'deadly nun' first seen in the film's trailer and
In other movie news, what better way to follow up a gun-toting nun than playing famed porn star, Linda Lovelace? Lindsay Lohan may be behind bars, but let's take a glance into the future at what we can expect once the troubled star is a free woman again. First up, a new shot of Lohan in character from the upcoming Robert Rodriguez film, 'Machete,' has surfaced, continuing with the theme of 'deadly nun' first seen in the film's trailer and promo poster In other movie news, what better way to follow up a gun-toting nun than playing famed porn star, Linda Lovelace? Radar Online has exclusively learned that Lindsay's much buzzed about role in the biopic, 'Inferno,' will feature a full frontal nude scene described as "violent nudity".
http://xml.channel.aol.com/xmlpublisher/fetch.v2.xml?option=expand_relative_urls&dataUrlNodes=uiConfig,feedConfig,entry&id=699616&pid=699615&uts=1278688062 http://www.popeater.com/mm_track/popeater/movies/?s_channel=us.moviespop&s_account=aolnews,aolsvc&omni=1&ke=1 http://cdn.channel.aol.com/cs_feed_v1_6/csfeedwrapper.swf Lindsay Lohan Snapshots WWW.BAUER-GRIFFIN.COM Lindsay Lohan, her mom Dina and a rather large entourage followed by furious photographers spend time shopping at a frame shop! Job 100709F1 NON EXCLUSIVE, Los Angeles, July 08 2010 www.bauergriffin.com www.bauergriffinonline.com LOMELI/bauergriffinonline.com
Director Matthew Wilder assures Radar, "It's not a porn movie, it's an artistic movie about a porn star. We will not see Lindsay performing oral sex, but there could be some clever play with black boxes or other cinematic tricks that the viewer may see." 'Inferno' should begin production sometime this year, after Lohan completes her 90 day jail sentence. ||||| | – Lindsay Lohan, meet your prison neighbor: Alexis Neiers, a member of the “Bling Ring” jailed for burglarizing celebrity homes…including LiLo’s. If that’s not awkward enough, more details from LiLo’s new life behind bars: Despite her celebrity status, she was probably subjected to a strip search as soon as she arrived—former inmate Piper Kerman calls it "the squat and cough" in a Daily Beast column on what LiLo can expect. Upon entering the Lynwood jail, Lindsay would have received a baggie of “generic and cheap quality” toiletries, a former inmate tells People. But anything she had on her when she arrived was taken away—including her copy of The Old Man and the Sea. A source tells Radar her family will order her a replacement copy—inmates can receive books if they come directly from an online retailer. While she waits, she can watch TV shows like I Love Lucy and Wheel of Fortune through the window on her cell door, the former inmate says. She can also take her prescription drugs, including Adderoll and Ambien—sources tell TMZ her prescriptions were being processed yesterday. Her dinner last night was turkey tetrazzini, applesauce, broccoli coleslaw, wheat bread, and milk, TMZ reports. Her first visitor was attorney Shawn Chapman Holley, who tells People Lindsay is “having a difficult time adjusting” and “there were some tears.” Click here for more on what awaits her on the other side...in a mere two weeks. |
IDs of tweets that mention Ferguson, Missouri between August 10th and August 27th, 2014 subsequent to the death of Michael Brown . Tweets collected by Ed Summers. He subsequently extracted the URLs from these tweets, and they were crawled by the Internet Archive. Please read Summers's article at inkdroid.org , with an update here , for more information.Photo: " Memorial to Michael Brown " by Jamelle Bouie ||||| Sarah and Mark Hall* spent hours giving depositions in the elegant conference room of their obstetrician’s lawyers. Again and again, their doctor’s lawyers asked them the same question while court stenographer sat ready to record their responses. The Halls knew what they had to say—there was no other way their lawsuit could proceed. Yes, they each said, swallowing their repugnance. Had I known that our daughter had a genetic disorder, I would have chosen abortion.
In 2010, while Sarah was pregnant with their daughter Ellie*, the couple was in the midst of a tumultuous time. Mark’s mother died suddenly. Compounding the couple’s grief, Mark’s mother’s death left the couple financially and legally responsible for his older sister Jennifer, who, due to an extremely rare configuration of her genome, has special needs.
Jennifer lives independently. While she has held jobs for short amounts of time, she has performed unevenly and now collects disability benefits. According to Sarah and Mark, she is 40 and has a developmental age of about 14. Jennifer has intense emotional fluctuations and her behavior can be very challenging. In 2008, Mark, who is non-disabled, discovered through genetic testing that he is a carrier of Jennifer’s syndrome. This means that any children he has might have a typical genome, or they might, like him, be symptom-free carriers. They also, however, might have either Jennifer’s syndrome or Syndrome Z. (This latter syndrome is rare enough to be identifying, so its name has been changed).
Mark was told by his geneticist that, given her genomic configuration, Jennifer was unusually verbal, mobile, and independent. If his child were to have Jennifer’s syndrome or Syndrome Z, the child likely would be significantly more cognitively and/or physically disabled. The geneticist also told them there would be a risk to Sarah in carrying a child with either syndrome. (With the caveat that I am not a geneticist, I have searched for data to suggest that Sarah herself would have been at greater risk, and have been unable to find any.)
So when Sarah was 16 weeks pregnant, she got an amniocentesis. The geneticist’s report was sent to their obstetrician’s office. Someone from their obstetrician’s office informed the Halls of the results over the phone. Ellie was “just like you,” Mark was told. That is, Ellie was a carrier, but would not be symptomatic. At a time when the rest of their lives were in no small upheaval, this result was a reassurance.
After she was born, Ellie developed typically for about six months. She smiled adorably and rolled over on cue. Then her development seemed to slow. She did not sit up, crawl, or walk. Her pediatrician became concerned about the size of Ellie’s head, and told the Halls that it didn’t seem as if Ellie’s brain was growing. The couple brought Ellie to specialist after specialist. Since all her doctors believed the amniocentesis demonstrated Ellie had a typical genome, however, no one suggested the Halls consult a geneticist.
The Halls describe that time of doctors, tests, and uncertainty as absolutely harrowing. “I couldn’t think of anything else but what was going on with my daughter,” Mark said. When Ellie was 18 months old, their pediatrician, now at a loss for other explanation, suggested they return to a geneticist. They all received further testing, and the Halls asked the obstetrician’s office for the geneticist’s report on Ellie’s amniocentesis. When Sarah received it, she was floored.
“I am not an expert in this. This isn’t my job. But I had read enough about genetics to know what it said,” said Sarah. The results, one simple line in karyotype notation , were clear. Ellie had Syndrome Z. The person who had phoned the Halls had, quite simply, misread the results. Their obstetrician’s office admitted the mistake, and a settlement is being negotiated.
Suppose, in the course of caring for you, your doctor makes a mistake. This alone is not enough to sue her. If you sue a healthcare provider for negligence or malpractice, you are required to demonstrate that the mistake the provider made actually caused harm. This is the problem facing the Halls and anyone else who receives a falsely reassuring result on a prenatal test. It’s not like the person who misread the amnio results caused Ellie to have Syndrome Z, nor did she exacerbate Ellie’s symptoms. So, then, what harm is really done?
In such cases, it is an established legal precedent in the U.S. that the only harm that can come of a falsely reassuring prenatal test is if the mother would have gotten an abortion had she known. Cindy Shapiro, a medical malpractice defense attorney in California who has no connection to the Hall’s case, said that the only way parents can win a lawsuit for a falsely reassuring prenatal test is to say that they would have had an abortion had they known. “The plaintiffs have to prove the causation aspect,” Shapiro told The Daily Beast. In at least one case , parents had to present a Do Not Resuscitate order they had signed for their son to prove that they really would have terminated the pregnancy.
It is a cruel quandary for parents and children alike—even crueler if their child’s disabilities are such that the child can understand what her parents have said about her when she’s older.
In the case of a falsely reassuring prenatal test, there are two possibilities for a lawsuit against a health practitioner. The first is what’s known as “wrongful birth” lawsuit. The parents are the plaintiffs in a wrongful birth suit, and they sue for the harm that their child’s existence with disability has caused them. Another kind of suit is called “wrongful life.” That is a suit brought on the behalf of the child, rather than the parents. These suits assert, basically, that the child herself was harmed by the very fact of her own birth.
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In one of the first cases to assert wrongful life, 1967’s Gleitman v. Cosgrove in New Jersey, the child plaintiff was intellectually disabled. The mother had had rubella during pregnancy, and was falsely reassured by her doctor that the virus could not result in disability to her fetus. The judge dismissed the child’s suit due to the difficulty, if not incoherence, in determining “the difference between his life with defects against the utter void of nonexistence.” Due to this difficulty, wrongful life suits are only permitted in three states. About half the states in the U.S. permit wrongful birth suits.
Opposition to both wrongful birth suits and wrongful life suits comes from an unusually wide array of the political spectrum. Pro-lifers unite with disability advocates in rejecting what wrongful birth and wrongful life suits communicate about people with disabilities: that their lives are not worth living. And worse, that their very existence is actually harmful to themselves or someone else.
Parents who bring such suits are routinely vilified. Shapiro told The Daily Beast that wrongful birth and wrongful life cases are incredibly difficult to win for precisely this reason. Her law firm represents health care providers, and has never lost either a wrongful birth or wrongful life suit when a provider has given a falsely reassuring result on a prenatal test. (California is one of the three states that permit wrongful life suits.) Shapiro has discussed cases with juries after trials, and they routinely express their disapproval of the parents for saying such a thing about their own child.
What the vilifiers may not realize is just how much the parents do not want to bring such a suit. The Halls sued for wrongful birth, which in their state is the only suit they could bring. They could not sue for emotional distress, damages for which can only be won in a wrongful life suit. It is indeed the case that they would have terminated the pregnancy. Now, however, they adore their daughter. Ellie is a captivating, laughing child with twinkling eyes. She looks uncannily like Mark, with a crop of soft dark curls. She is now three-and-a-half. She walks, albeit a little uneasily, and speaks in two-word sentences. By the standards of Syndrome Z, her developmental progress is remarkable.
I too have a child with a genetic syndrome and am all too familiar with the feelings that the Halls have, and that so many of us who are parents of kids with disabilities have. I wouldn’t have asked for this, and goodness knows it’s really rough sometimes. But now that my child is here, I wouldn’t give her up for anything. Isn’t this true not only about children with disabilities, but so many aspects of our lives? Some of what we value the most arises from moments of pain. A Wrongful birth suit is far too blunt a tool to acknowledge such complexities of life.
The Halls hate that they said what they did about their daughter. “That’s a shitty thing to say about a person—basically that you don’t deserve to live and breathe on this earth,” Mark explained. Sarah added, “Who wants to say ‘I wish this child wasn’t here’? What kind of mother is going to feel okay saying that?”
Of course, many will argue that they had a choice not to sue at all. However, telling them they could have shut up and put up is patently unfair. They are “not litigious people,” as Sarah said, but they felt they had a right to sue. The office should not be able to treat a matter of such importance with such negligence without any redress.
Parents who bring wrongful birth suits seem to face a burden faced by no other plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases. Shapiro agreed that, at least in California, if a healthcare provider misses a tumor in an MRI, then the plaintiff does not have to prove that he would have followed a given course of treatment. We are always, of course, free to refuse medical advice, and people regularly refuse treatment for various reasons. But the brain tumor plaintiff does not have to say what he would have done. Shapiro told The Daily Beast that most other cases do not determine what the actual plaintiff would have done, but rather what a “reasonable person” would have done. The burden on plaintiffs in wrongful birth cases “is unique, and is inconsistent with other types of malpractice cases,” she said. The plaintiff in the brain tumor case just has to prove that he would have had a greater than 50 percent chance of survival had the doctor diagnosed it at that MRI, and as a result now has a less than 50 percent chance of survival.
The Halls would far rather have sued for emotional distress. The original reasoning behind the inability for parents to sue for emotional distress seems to be that parents of children with disabilities often end up loving their kids anyhow. Of course this is true, but it hardly changes the fact that it can be extremely emotionally distressing to have a child diagnosed with severe disabilities, as those of us who adore our kids with disabilities will recognize all too well.
Sarah and Mark certainly have experienced emotional distress. Both of the Halls were working on their dissertations, but neither has finished. Therapies for Ellie take up far too much of their day. They stated repeatedly how lucky they are, and that things are not nearly as bad for them as for so many other people. The intensity of caregiving for Ellie, however, has put a strain on their friendships, professional lives, and marriage. Sarah said with a rueful wittiness, “I now say that I’m broken. Mark comes home and I say, ‘I’m broken right now, and Ellie broke earlier this afternoon. How are you?”
Parents of children with disabilities should not face a unique burden to redress their wrongs. Of course, negligence always requires proof of harm caused. Shapiro suggested that the “reasonable person” standard be used in such cases, although then the problem remains that the law still seems to state that someone’s very existence is harmful.
The harm should not be the child’s existence, but the parents’ emotional distress or lack of informed consent. No matter which way is chosen, it seems clear that not only do wrongful life and wrongful birth suits communicate a horrible and grossly false message about people with disabilities, they also put a patently unfair burden on parents.
*Names have been changed. ||||| | – Sarah and Mark Hall (names changed) love their 3-year-old daughter, Ellie. Yet they recently sued for "wrongful birth," testifying that they would have aborted the pregnancy had they known Ellie would be born with a rare genetic disorder. People who file such lawsuits are often vilified, Elizabeth Picciuto explains in the Daily Beast, but they may have no other choice. In the Halls' case, they knew their daughter was at risk for one of two rare disorders, so Sarah had an amniocentesis at 16 weeks. Someone from the obstetrician's office misread the results, and told the Halls that Ellie would be a carrier, but not symptomatic. Instead, she was born with a rare disorder Picciuto will only refer to as "Syndrome Z." In cases like this, couples are left with few options—and in the Halls' case, their only option was to sue for wrongful birth. The healthcare worker didn't cause Ellie's disorder, so in order to win a lawsuit against the provider, the Halls had to prove the error caused harm—that is, they would not have proceeded with the pregnancy had they known the truth, and their lives have been adversely affected since they did proceed. As one expert notes, plaintiffs in other medical malpractice cases don't face quite the same burden; in most cases, all that matters is what a "reasonable person" would have done had they received the correct diagnosis, not what the specific plaintiff would have done. Because of the controversy surrounding wrongful birth lawsuits, they're difficult to win, one medical malpractice defense attorney says, adding that juries frequently say they disapproved of the parents in such cases—perhaps not understanding that the parents had no other path to compensation. "Who wants to say 'I wish this child wasn’t here'?" muses Sarah. In their case, the obstetrician's office admitted the mistake and will settle. Another couple recently filed a wrongful birth lawsuit in Chicago, the Sun-Times reports, claiming they were told their son's ultrasound showed no "fetal abnormalities," but he was born with dwarfism. (Click to read about another couple who was awarded $2.9 million in a wrongful birth suit.) |
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The winners are in from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's "Weather in Focus" photo contest, picked from more than 2,000 entries taken between Jan. 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015. "From rainbows and sunsets to lightning and tornadoes, the winning photos aren’t just captivating to look at, but inspire us to look at the world in different ways," said Douglas Hilderbrand, NOAA's contest judge and Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador Lead. "It was difficult to pick winners from so many good entries." In first place, from the category "Science in Action," is "Green Bank Telescope in WV" by Mike Zorger, Falls Church, Va. Photos: It's the Crazy-Extreme Weather Season
NOAA ||||| The Queen’s neighbour at Balmoral had to flee his home as the raging River Dee swept away trees and a huge chunk of land at the rear of his ancient Abergeldie Castle.
When John Gordon looked out of his back door he saw just 5ft of dry land between him and the fearsome flood – where before there has been 60ft of ground stretching out to the to the river bank.
And like hundreds in nearby Ballater, devastated by last week’s flood, the 76-year-old Laird of Abergeldie had to leave in a hurry.
Mr Gordon, who is a friend of the Queen and rents out a portion of his sporting estate to the royal family for shooting and fishing, took refuge with a neighbour Gordon Fraser.
The 21st laird, Baron of Abergeldie, has now moved into a house on his estate.
But one neighbour said: “When the waters came up he had to get out quickly. The castle is teetering on the brink. God knows what will happen if the Dee rises any further.
“The castle is in imminent danger and John is at his wits’ end. It’s not only a home. It’s the heritage, the history.
“It’s an A-listed building so losing it would be a national tragedy.
“Nothing can be done while the river is in spate like it is. It’s just thundering down.
“It swept away and smashed the mature trees at the back of the house like match sticks. It also took 250ft of the bank away and all the ground at the back.
“The river is right at the back door. I’m sure the Queen will be in touch with her condolences. Prince Charles, who is at nearby Birkhall, will also pass on his sympathy no doubt.”
John Gordon’s family have had a close relationship with the royal family and the royals rented the four-floor tower house from 1848 until 1970.
Abergeldie Castle dates from the mid-16th century and was built by Sir Alexander Gordon of Midmar.
Meanwhile, the River Muick, which flows close to Prince Charles’s Birkhall Highland home before joining the Dee at Ballater, was in full spate.
It burst its banks close to the 18th century manor and the waters flooded a field beside the house, rising right up to the beech hedges which surround the property. ||||| | – After more than 450 years overlooking Scotland's River Dee, Abergeldie Castle is on the verge of being washed away by it. Floodwaters have eaten away the riverbank in recent days and the 16th-century castle is now teetering on the edge, Discovery reports. John Gordon, the Baron of Abergeldie, was forced to flee his ancestral home over the weekend after the river burst its banks and took with it nearly 60 feet of land, leaving the castle just a few feet from the new riverbank, reports the Telegraph. The castle was built around 1550 in Aberdeenshire (per local lore, its dungeon was once occupied by an accused witch) and neighbors the Queen's Balmoral residence. Floods caused by severe weather took many people in the region—including the 76-year-old baron—by surprise. "When the waters came up he had to get out quickly," a neighbor tells the Press and Journal. "The castle is teetering on the brink. God knows what will happen if the Dee rises any further," the neighbor says. "The castle is in imminent danger and John is at his wits' end. It’s not only a home. It’s the heritage, the history." The baron has moved to another house on his estate while he waits to see what happens to the castle, which was left "overhanging a 12-foot drop" as the riverbank continued to erode on Monday, reports the Telegraph. (This potato billionaire's hilltop mansion will soon be gone.) |
(CNN) Jennifer Aniston is headed to the White House in an upcoming Netflix comedy film, and she's bringing her wife with her.
The streaming network on Friday announced Aniston and comedian Tig Notaro will team up for a comedy called "First Ladies." Aniston will play the first female President of the United States and Notaro will play the First Lady.
The description provided by Netflix says their characters, named Beverly and Kasey Nicholson, will "prove that behind every great woman... is another great woman."
Notaro and Stephanie Allynne ("One Mississippi") will write the script and produce.
Aniston is also a producer on the project, as is Will Ferrell.
Read More ||||| Jennifer Aniston and Tig Notaro will play the first same-sex couple to occupy the White House in the Netflix TV movie 'First Ladies.' (Photo: Getty Image)
Goodbye, House of Cards. Hello, First Ladies.
Netflix's first White House series is getting ready to retire its first couple (the sixth and final season premieres later this year, without Kevin Spacey). But the streaming network will inaugurate a new power political couple in First Ladies, an original movie to star Jennifer Aniston as the first female president and comedian Tig Notaro (One Mississippi) as her wife.
Notaro will also write the series along with Stephanie Allyne, her co-star and writing partner from One Mississippi, which was canceled by Amazon earlier this year. Aniston is a producer, as are Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.
No premiere date has been announced.
First Ladies is Aniston's second new TV project: She and Reese Witherspoon, who played her sister on Friends, are teaming for an Apple TV comedy that takes place behind the scenes of a morning news show. It's due later this year.
Notaro's latest stand-up comedy special debuts on Netflix May 22.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2GvW2Zf ||||| | – Jennifer Aniston and Tig Notaro are both headed for the White House in First Ladies, a new Netflix comedy film, reports USA Today. Aniston will play the president and Notaro will play the first lady. The characters, Beverly and Kasey Nicholson, will "prove that behind every great woman... is another great woman," says Netflix. Aniston, Will Ferrell, and Adam McKay have been attached to the project as producers. Notaro will co-write the script with Stephanie Allynne, from One Mississippi, reports CNN. Both stars are busy. Aniston is also working on a TV project with Reese Witherspoon that’s set behind the scenes of a morning news show. Notaro is appearing in a Netflix comedy special that airs May 22. |
The National Park System Advisory Board was first authorized in 1935 under the Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act. The Board advises the Director of the National Park Service and the Secretary of the Interior on matters relating to the National Park Service, the National Park System, and programs administered by the National Park Service, including the administration of the Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act; the designation of national historic landmarks and national natural landmarks; and the national historic significance of proposed national historic trails. The Board may advise on matters submitted to the Board by the Director, as well as any other issues identified by the Board.
The Board's membership consists of no more than 12 individuals selected from among citizens of the United States having a demonstrated commitment to the mission of the National Park Service, and representing various geographic regions, including each of the administrative regions of the National Park Service. ||||| Former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles led a mass resignation this week from the advisory board of the National Park System. He’s served on the board since 2010.
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As first reported by The Washington Post, Knowles submitted a resignation letter Monday to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. It’s also signed by eight others on the 12-member board. Knowles says he’s concerned the Department of Interior is undoing much of the progress made in recent years, without even listening to the merits.
“The department showed no interest in learning about or continuing to use the forward-thinking agenda of science, the effect of climate change, protections of the ecosystems, education,” Knowles said in a phone interview. “And it has rescinded NPS regulations of resource stewardship concerning those very things: biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change.”
Zinke issued an order last year freezing work on all advisory committees so the administration would review what they were doing. Knowles says the National Parks System Advisory Board is different because it was chartered by Congress. His term was due to end in May, along with most of the board members. Knowles says they requested meetings with the new team at Interior but were ignored for a year.
“If they don’t want to meet with us, fine. That’s their prerogative,” he said. “But we wanted to make a statement as a board as we left what our concerns are, because we don’t think they (the new policies) reflect the vast number of public that support the national park system.”
The press office of the Interior Department did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. ||||| | – "I wish the National Park System and Service well." It's a goodbye, but not just any goodbye: They're parting words from the chair of the National Park System Advisory Board, who was one of nine members to suddenly resign in protest on Monday. The federally chartered board, which had numbered 12, is tasked with advising the secretary of the interior—Ryan Zinke, currently—on matters such as the designation of national historic and natural landmarks. But the Washington Post reports Zinke has declined to meet with them following a May decision to put committees on ice as his team reviews their function. "We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored," says chair Tony Knowles. Alaska Public Radio reports Knowles saw his board as somewhat singular, however, as it was chartered by Congress in 1935. The Post details other advisory bodies that remain at a standstill, among them two tied to the Bureau of Land Management. A member of one of those bodies, which focuses on the Rocky Mountain region, details some of the topics that are languishing: how to enact a fee bump in the area, and what to do about homelessness on federal lands. The terms of many of the exiting NPS board members were up in May, and Knowles says the desire was to "make a statement as a board as we left what our concerns are." Knowles outlines those concerns to the New York Times: that Zinke "appears to have no interest in continuing the agenda of science, the effect of climate change, pursuing the protection of the ecosystem.”" |
Meghan Markle may be the Duchess of Sussex, but she’s hardly a typical princess.
While arriving at the Royal Academy of Art in London to view the art exhibit “Oceania” on Tuesday in her first-ever solo outing, Meghan broke protocol in a subtle way.
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After shaking hands with one of her hosts for the evening, Meghan casually shut the car door and headed inside.
“First time I’ve seen an on-duty princess shut her own car door…” wrote one Twitter user.
The Sun‘s royal correspondent Emily Andrews added, “A princess who still takes the time to shut her car door. Well done Meghan!”
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Watch: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has arrived @royalacademy for her first solo royal outing — the opening of the Oceania exhibition #royal #meghanmarkle pic.twitter.com/HWSVbuy7RJ — Simon Perry (@SPerryPeoplemag) September 25, 2018
Meghan Markle Samir Hussein/WireImage
The move isn’t new for Meghan. In fact, she closed her own car door as a man held the door open for her mother, Doria Ragland, while arriving at Kensington Palace just last week for her first official palace luncheon in celebration of Together: Our Community Cookbook.
Watch: Meghan arriving at her lunch to launch the ‘Together’ cookbook — with mother Doria Ragland and Prince Harry 🎥 @Hannah_Furness pic.twitter.com/tdqk7sta8i — Simon Perry (@SPerryPeoplemag) September 20, 2018
Meghan, 37, proved she doesn’t mind helping out on her wedding day, when she pulled a romantic gesture as she and Prince Harry hopped in a Jaguar convertible to head to their evening reception. After Harry, 33, opened the door and helped his bride into the passenger seat, Meghan reached over to make sure his door was unlocked.
Markle, who identifies herself as a feminist on the Kensington Palace website, has long been a proponent of gender equality. The Suits actress worked with UN Women and advocated for girls around the world through her contributions to World Vision Canada.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle STEVE PARSONS/AFP/Getty Images
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry STEVE PARSONS/AFP/Getty
RELATED: The Special Meaning Behind Meghan Markle’s Black Dress for Her First Solo Appearance as a Royal
During the evening visit to the Royal Academy, Meghan toured artwork from New Zealand, Fiji, the Kingdom of Tonga and Australia — all of which she and Harry will visit next month — and met the exhibition’s curators and artists, as well as descendants linked to the works displayed. ||||| Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain. ||||| | – All eyes have been on Meghan Markle since her much-hyped nuptials to Prince Harry, with people commenting on what she wears, how they think she feels, and now—how she exits a car. The BBC and People report that the newest member of the royal family arrived Tuesday at London's Royal Academy of Arts to attend an art exhibit and, as is standard, someone opened the car door for her. What's not standard, apparently: that Markle then pushed the door shut behind herself. And the internet reacted, with responses ranging from laudatory—"Well done Meghan!" tweeted Sun columnist Emily Andrews—to sarcastic. "Because I was so inspired by Meghan Markle, as I left the house this morning I shut my own front door," one commenter snarked. An etiquette ace tells the BBC the royals typically have doors opened and shut for them not for "airs and graces," but for security reasons; it seems the person who opened the door in this case then stepped out of Markle's way so she could greet her host, and the duchess decided to just shut the door herself. It seems to not be the first time Markle's auto egress has raised eyebrows: She's believed to have also shut her own car door last week at the launch for a charity cookbook. |
UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea said on Saturday targeting the U.S. mainland with its rockets was inevitable after “Mr. Evil President” Donald Trump called Pyongyang’s leader “rocket man”, further escalating rhetoric over the North’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho’s remarks to the United Nations General Assembly came hours after U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers escorted by fighters flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea in a show of force the Pentagon said showed the range of military options available to Trump.
Ri’s speech capped a week of rising tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, with Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un trading insults. Trump called Kim a “madman” on Friday, a day after Kim dubbed him a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”
On Saturday, the mudslinging continued with Ri calling Trump “a mentally deranged person full of megalomania and complacency” who is trying to turn the United Nations into a “gangsters’ nest”. Ri said Trump himself was on a “suicide mission” after the U.S. president had said Kim was on such a mission.
“‘President Evil’ is holding the seat of the U.S.
President,” Ri said, warning that Pyongyang was ready to defend itself if the United States showed any sign of conducting a “decapitating operation on our headquarters or military attack against our country”.
“Now we are finally only a few steps away from the final gate of completion of the state nuclear force,” Ri told the annual gathering of world leaders.
He said sanctions would have no effect on Pyongyang’s resolve to develop its nuclear weapons, with the ultimate goal being “balance of power with the U.S.”
Trump announced new U.S. sanctions on Thursday that he said allow targeting of companies and institutions that finance and facilitate trade with North Korea.
Earlier this month the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted its ninth round of sanctions on Pyongyang to counter its nuclear and ballistic missiles programs.
The U.S. bombers’ flight was the farthest north of the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea that any U.S. fighter jet or bomber has flown in the 21st century, the Pentagon said.
“This mission is a demonstration of U.S. resolve and a clear message that the President has many military options to defeat any threat,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White.
“We are prepared to use the full range of military capabilities to defend the U.S. homeland and our allies.”
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho addresses the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 23, 2017. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
North Korea has launched dozens of missiles this year, several flying over Japan, as it accelerates its program aimed at enabling it to target the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile.
Pyongyang conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test on Sept. 3 and has threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific.
Ri met with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres after delivering his speech. Guterres expressed concern to Ri over the escalating tensions and appealed for de-escalation, the United Nations said in a statement.
The Pentagon said the B-1B bombers came from Guam and their U.S. Air Force F-15C Eagle fighter escorts came from Okinawa, Japan. Previous shows of force with bombers have stayed south of the demilitarized zone.
The patrols came after officials and experts said a small earthquake near North Korea’s nuclear test site on Saturday was probably not man-made, easing fears Pyongyang had exploded another nuclear bomb just weeks after its last one.
China’s Earthquake Administration said the quake was not a nuclear explosion and had the characteristics of a natural tremor.
The CTBTO, or Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty Organization, which monitors nuclear tests, and officials of the South Korean meteorological agency also said they believed it was a natural quake.
The earthquake, which South Korea’s Meteorological Agency put at magnitude 3.0, was detected 49 km from Kilju in North Hamgyong Province, where North Korea’s known Punggye-ri nuclear site is located, the official said.
All North Korea’s nuclear tests registered as earthquakes of magnitude 4.3 or above. The last registered as a magnitude 6.3.
Tensions have continued to rise around the Korean Peninsula since Pyongyang carried out its sixth test, prompting a new round of U.N. sanctions.
Trump told the United Nations on Tuesday the United States would “totally destroy” North Korea if it threatened the United States or its allies.
North Korea’s nuclear tests to date have all been underground, and experts say an atmospheric test, which would be the first since one by China in 1980, would be proof of the success of its weapons program.
The United States and South Korea are technically still at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended with a truce and not a peace treaty.
Slideshow (4 Images)
The North accuses the United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, of planning to invade and regularly threatens to destroy it and its Asian allies.
(For graphic on Nuclear North Korea, click tmsnrt.rs/2lE5yjF)
(For graphic on a tally of nuclear tests, click tmsnrt.rs/2xWf6jA) ||||| North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said President Trump is the only person "on a suicide mission," one that is making "our rocket's visit to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all the more."
In a fiery speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Saturday, Ri responded to a string of threats from Mr. Trump throughout the week -- particularly Mr. Trump's threat to "totally destroy" North Korea if the U.S. is "forced to defend itself or its allies." Mr. Trump has said "rocket man" Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, is on a "suicide mission," but Ri said "none other than Trump himself is on a suicide mission."
"Due to his lacking of basic common knowledge and proper sentiment, he tried to insult the supreme dignity of my country by referring it to a rocket," Ri said. "By doing so however, he committed an irreversible mistake of making our rocket's visit to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all the more."
Will North Korea test a hydrogen bomb?
Ri also called the president a "mentally deranged person full of megalomania," reflecting comments from Kim earlier this week, when Kim called Mr. Trump a "mentally deranged U.S. dotard."
The North Korean diplomat claimed the North Korean regime possesses a hydrogen bomb that can be coupled with an intercontinental ballistic missile, and is prepared to use its latest technology if needed. Ri on Friday threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.
"Trump might not have been aware what is uttered from his mouth, but we will make sure that he bears consequences far beyond his words, far beyond the scope of what he can handle even if he is ready to do so," Ri said.
Ri insisted it is the U.S., not North Korea, that poses an international threat.
"The U.S. claims that the DPRK's possession of H-bomb and ICBM constitutes a global threat, even at the U.N. arena," Ri said, using the acronym for the country. "But such claim is a big lie which is just tantamount to the notorious big lie faked up by the U.S. in 2003 about the existence of weapons in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction in order to invade that country."
Ri tried to argue that nuclear muscle power isn't the DPRK's first option. North Korea, he said, also only intends to target countries that join forces with the U.S.
"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a responsible nuclear weapons state," Ri said. "We will take preventative measures by merciless preemptive action unless the U.S. and its vessel forces show any sign of operating a decapitating operation on our headquarters or military attack against our country. However, we do not have any intention at all to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against the countries that do not join in the U.S.military actions against the DPRK."
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres met with Ri after his speech, and expressed concern over tensions in the North Korean Peninsula, CBS News' Pamela Falk reports, citing a readout of their conversation. Guterres asked for deescalation, and for the DPRK to implement all of the U.N. Security Council's resolutions. Guterres emphasized the need for a political solution, and for continued humanitarian aid to North Korea.
Moments before Ri was set to speak, U.S. Air Force bombers flew in international airspace east of North Korea. The Pentagon said it's the furthest north any U.S. fighters have flown in the 21st Century.
Mr. Trump has only escalated his comments about North Korea this week.
On Friday, Mr. Trump issued an executive order targeting countries that trade with North Korea. At a Friday night rally for Republican U.S. Senate contender Luther Strange in Alabama, Mr. Trump derided "little rocket man" -- his new favorite term for Kim -- and emphasized that North Korea would be dealt with. Earlier in the day, the president tweeted that he Kim is a "madman" who will be "tested like never before."
Follow below for live updates from the speech earlier.
2:46 p.m. Ri ends his speech, to applause from the North Korean delegation
The handful of members of the North Korea delegation offered their applause as Ri walked off stage, uneventfully.
2:44 p.m.: It's foolish to think "barbaric" sanctions will deter North Korea, Ri says
Although the U.N. and U.S. have imposed tougher sanctions on North Korea and its trading partners, Ri said that won't matter. North Korea is close to completing its nuclear weapons program, he said.
2:41 p.m.: Ri says North Korea doesn't intend to threaten countries that don't join U.S.
Ri said countries that don't join the U.S. in its nuclear attempts have no reason to worry.
2:40 p.m.: Ri says North Korea is a "responsible" weapons state
Ri said North Korea isn't eager to use its nuclear weapons capabilities, comparing the current situation to the "weapons of mass destruction" claims former President George W. Bush made to justify engaging in the Middle East.
2:34 p.m.: Ri says U.S. should "think twice" before threatening DPRK
Ri said "hopefully" nuclear power won't be necessary, and that's not their "first option." But Ri said U.S. and its allies should "think twice" before threatening North Korea.
2:33 p.m.: Ri says DPRK has entered a phase of completing its nuclear force
Ri says North Korea has nearly completed its nuclear weapons goals, including a hydrogen bomb. Ri said the weapons are intended to be a "war deterrent"
2:31 p.m.: Ri says the U.S. is the real threat
"The very reason the DPRK had to possess nuclear weapons is because of the U.S.," Ri said.
2:27 p.m.: Ri: "None other than Trump is on a suicide mission"
Ri said Trump will pay "dearly" for his speech.
"Trump might not be aware what is uttered from his mouth," Ri said, adding North Korea will be "sure" he pays.
2:25 p.m.: Ri says Trump "tainted" U.N. with his comments
Ri said he feels compelled to respond to comments from Mr. Trump, saying he poses a threat to international security.
"Due to his lacking of basic common knowledge and proper sentiment, he tried to insult the supreme dignity of my country by referring it to a rocket," Ri said.
Ri said Trump is, "mentally deranged and full of megalomania." ||||| | – In a move unprecedented in recent years, US Air Force bombers and fighter jets flew into international airspace east of North Korea on Saturday, Reuters reports. The Pentagon says it was the farthest north of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea the US has flown in the 21st century. “This mission is a demonstration of US resolve and a clear message that the president has many military options to defeat any threat,” Pentagon spokesperson Dana White says. The mission was revealed just before North Korea's Ri Yong Ho addressed the UN. The foreign minister told the UN that North Korea has successfully tested nuclear bombs that can be mounted to ICBMs and that Trump, who he called "president evil," is making a North Korean attack on the US "inevitable," CBS News reports. |
New Dietary Guidelines Crack Down On Sugar. But Red Meat Gets A Pass
Enlarge this image toggle caption Morgan McCloy/NPR Morgan McCloy/NPR
With January comes lots of diet advice.
And today comes the official advice from the U.S. government: The Obama administration has released its much-anticipated update to the Dietary Guidelines.
The guidelines, which are revised every five years, are based on evolving nutrition science and serve as the government's official advice on what to eat.
One concrete change: Americans are being told to limit sugar to no more than 10 percent of daily calories.
As we've reported, lots of Americans consume up to 22 teaspoons a day. To meet the new 10 percent target, they'd need to cut their sugar intake by nearly half — to no more than 12 teaspoons a day on a 2,000-calorie daily diet.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Morgan McCloy/NPR Morgan McCloy/NPR
Over the past five years, a growing body of evidence has linked high levels of sugar consumption to an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, even among Americans who are not overweight or obese.
Much of the dietary advice included in the new guidelines will sound very familiar and remains unchanged from 2010. For instance, there's a focus on consuming more fruits and vegetables, more fiber and whole grains, and less salt.
Top administration officials within the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, who were tasked with writing the guidelines, decided not to include some of the recommendations made by a Dietary Guidelines advisory panel that reviewed the latest nutrition science.
For instance, the advisory committee had recommended including sustainability as a factor in making food choices. But administration officials nixed that idea.
The committee had also advised telling Americans to cut back on red and processed meats. But that recommendation sparked a vigorous challenge from the meat industry, and the final dietary guidelines do not include any specific advice to cut back on these sources of protein.
The recommendation "was certainly controversial," says Tom Brenna, a nutrition professor at Cornell University and member of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.
"The red and processed meat recommendation, I think, has morphed a bit into a different kind of message," Brenna tells us. "A little bit like turning a coin over, in a sense, where if you eat less red meat, one is eating more of other protein foods."
Instead, the guidelines emphasize a "shift towards other protein foods" — including more nuts and seeds and about 8 ounces of seafood per week, based on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.
Teen Boys And Adult Men Are Eating Too Much Meat Consumption of meats, poultry and eggs in the United States, by gender and age
The suggestion to limit meat intake comes in more subtle form. For instance, the guidelines point out that many teen boys and adult men consume more than the recommended 26 ounces a week of protein from animal sources, so they should "reduce overall intake of protein foods by decreasing intakes of meat, poultry, and eggs."
There's also an overall recommendation — unchanged from 2010 — to reduce saturated fat intake to less than 10 percent of daily diet, a shift that could, in practice, require limiting intake of red meat.
"The message to eat more seafood, legumes and other protein foods really does mean substitute those for red meat," Brenna says. "So I think the message is more or less there, it's just not as clear."
That message to cut the red meat should have been stated more directly, says Barry Popkin, a nutrition researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "I am disappointed that the USDA once again is cutting out recommendations to truly limit red meat intake," he tells us in an email.
The other major change to the government's nutrition advice: dietary cholesterol. The new guidelines drop a longstanding recommendation to limit cholesterol from foods to 300 milligrams a day.
As Alice Lichtenstein, vice chairwoman of the the expert panel that advised the government on the guidelines, told us last February, there isn't strong evidence that limiting cholesterol-rich foods lowers the amount of artery-clogging LDL cholesterol that ends up in the blood.
The guidelines also call on Americans to cut sodium to no more than 2,300 milligrams per day. Most of us consume far more — about 3,440 milligrams daily on average — much of it in the form of foods like pizzas, soups, breads and cured meats.
The Dietary Guidelines have clear implications for federal nutrition policy, influencing everything from the national school lunch program to the advice you get at the doctor's office. But they are written for nutrition professionals, not the general public.
Indeed, one has to wonder whether most Americans are even listening. As the Dietary Guidelines report points out, three-fourths of Americans don't eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. In some age groups (think teens), the percentage of people following the guidelines is in the single digits. ||||| New recommendations for sugar, coffee and cholesterol consumption have been made in dietary guidelines released today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with good news for coffee drinkers.
It's the first government update to the dietary guidelines in five years and has new guidelines for people who enjoy a daily cup of coffee, added sugar and cholesterol-laden foods.
"Protecting the health of the American public includes empowering them with the tools they need to make healthy choices in their daily lives," Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said in a statement today. "By focusing on small shifts in what we eat and drink, eating healthy becomes more manageable. The Dietary Guidelines provide science-based recommendations on food and nutrition so people can make decisions that may help keep their weight under control, and prevent chronic conditions, like Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease."
For the first time, the government gives a limit to the amount of added sugar that people should consume on a daily basis. The new guidelines recommend people make sure added sugars make up less than 10 percent of their daily calories. Previously, the government just recommended people "reduce the intake" of added sugars.
Coffee-lovers rejoice! The new guidelines mention coffee for the first time and advise that "moderate coffee consumption" can be part of a healthy diet.
But the guidelines say those who consume both caffeine and alcohol should avoid the substances at the same time. The caffeine may lead people to consume "more alcohol and become more intoxicated than they realize, increasing the risk of alcohol-related adverse events."
One of the biggest changes is the removal of a daily recommended limit for cholesterol. Previously, people were advised to consume less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol in their diet per day.
But the removal of a daily limit does not mean to go nuts with a cholesterol-heavy foods. The guidelines recommend people "eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible" while building a healthy diet.
While there was speculation that recommendations for maximum-advised sodium consumption would change, the dietary guidelines on that remain the same, with the recommendation that people 14 and older eat no more than 2,300 milligrams per day.
The five overarching guidelines will not be a surprise, with a focus on eating healthy by avoiding saturated fats, sodium and added sugars in favor of nutrient-dense foods. ||||| Today, we are delighted to announce the release of the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
We know that a lifetime of healthy eating helps to prevent chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and Type 2 diabetes. The Dietary Guidelines provides a clear path for the general public, as well as policy makers and health professionals and others who reach the public, to help Americans make healthy choices, informed by a thoughtful, critical, and transparent review of the scientific evidence on nutrition.
Obesity and other chronic diseases come not only with increased health risks, but also at a high cost. Healthy eating is one of the most powerful tools we have to reduce the onset of disease.
The latest edition of the Dietary Guidelines focuses on three main takeaways to help Americans make decisions about healthy eating.
Eat for Health and for the Long Run
The path to improving health through nutrition is to follow a healthy eating pattern that is right for you. The science behind healthy eating patterns tells us that they can help prevent chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
A healthy eating pattern can be maintained over a person’s lifetime and, at appropriate calorie levels, promotes health and supports a healthy body weight. You can include many of the foods that you enjoy in a healthy eating pattern.
“What exactly is a healthy eating pattern?” A healthy eating pattern:
consists of all foods and drinks that a person consumes over time;
is adaptable to a person’s taste preferences, culture, traditions, and budget;
includes a variety of nutritious foods like vegetables, fruits, grains, low-fat and fat-free dairy, lean meats and other protein foods, and oils; and
limits saturated fats, trans fats, added sugars, and sodium.
There is more than one type of healthy eating pattern — the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines includes various examples of healthy eating patterns.
Learn more about healthy eating patterns and read the top 10 things you need to know about the Dietary Guidelines to learn more.
Start with Small Changes
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the idea of changing what we eat. By focusing on small improvements, eating healthy becomes more manageable. With so many choices to make every single day about what to eat and drink, each choice is an opportunity to make a small, healthy change — like replacing refined- flour bread with whole-grain bread.
Here’s more food for thought — almost 9 in 10 Americans get less than the recommended amount of vegetables. Instead of a whole new way of eating, find new ways to incorporate more veggies to dishes you’re already making. Further, Americans adults consume about 50 percent more sodium than the Dietary Guidelines recommends. Use the Nutrition Facts label to check for sodium, especially in processed foods like pizza, pasta dishes, sauces and soups.
See more examples for making small shifts to food choices to help ensure that meals are nutritious, healthy, and delicious.
Support Healthy Choices for Everyone
Many Americans may need to make changes to their food choices and get more physical activity to stay healthy, but they shouldn’t have to do it alone. Everyone has a role to play in encouraging easy, accessible, and affordable ways to support healthy choices at home, school, work, and in the community. The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans includes examples of strategies that support healthy choices.
Learn more about how you can help support healthy choices.
HHS and USDA share a responsibility to the American public to ensure that advancements in scientific understanding about the role of nutrition in health are incorporated into the Dietary Guidelines on a regular basis. To reflect the most recent science, HHS and USDA release a new edition of the Dietary Guidelines every five years. We’re grateful to our federal partners who worked with us to develop the Dietary Guidelines. For additional information, be sure to check out ChooseMyPlate.gov from USDA and new resources on Health.gov from HHS that will help health professionals support their clients and patients in making healthy choices. Please visit the website and explore the latest edition of the Dietary Guidelines and learn more about better health through nutrition.
For more information for consumers, visit ChooseMyPlate.gov. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Jan. 7, 2016, 11:58 AM GMT / Updated Jan. 7, 2016, 1:56 PM GMT By Maggie Fox
The federal government’s new dietary guidelines come out Thursday, after a year of arguments, lobbying and directives from Congress.
For the first time, the guidelines recommend limiting added sugar to 10 percent or less of calories.
They also recommend that people eat more fruit, vegetables and whole wheat and point out most Americans do not eat a healthy diet, are overweight and risk getting heart disease and other illnesses as a result.
The guidelines suggest cutting salt and saturated fat but stop short of telling people to eat less red or processed meat despite the strong evidence that both can cause cancer.
Not everyone will be happy with the final guidelines, which get rewritten every five years, but they are based on sound science, said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell.
“We want to make things easier and simpler for consumers,” Burwell told NBC News. “One of the things we are steering people to is small changes.”
Congress directed HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stick to recommendations that are strongly supported by science. There’s overwhelming evidence that too much sugar causes diabetes, heart disease and weight gain, Burwell said.
“There’s a lot of added sugars in beverages,” Burwell said.
“The things that you need to be careful about are sodium, that added sugar and saturated fat”
Despite heavy lobbying by the food industry, the guidelines — which set the standard for federal food programs such as school lunches and food stamps — also recommend that most people get 2,300 mg of salt a day or less. The average American gets 3,400 mg a day, Burwell said — and that can lead to high blood pressure.
More than 90 percent of children and 89 percent of adults aged 19 and older eat too much sodium, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released coincide with the new guidelines.
“More than three quarters of sodium in the American diet is estimated to come from processed and restaurant food, which gives consumers little choice when it comes to lowering daily intake,” the CDC said. “A key strategy for lowering population-wide sodium intake is gradually reducing sodium in the food supply.”
Most people are not going to even be able to get down to consuming just 10 percent of calories from sugar or fat, the report says — not if they are going to fit in enough fruits, vegetables and whole grains, too.
In a 2,000 calorie-a-day diet, that means 200 calories from sugar. But a 12-ounce canned soft drink alone has 120-150 calories, all of them from sugar — and most food labels even don't tell people how many calories come from sugar.
"How do you convert grams of sugar to teaspoons?" asked NBC News Health and Nutrition editor Madelyn Fernstrom. "It’s not user-friendly at all."
Most Americans get enough protein now, the report says, and males usually get more than they need. What people need more of are vegetables, fruits and whole grains.
“The things that you need to be careful about are sodium, that added sugar and saturated fat," Burwell said.
And the report says consumers, policymakers, the food industry and others need to work together to help Americans eat healthier diets.
Burwell says new food labels coming out this year will help. The Food and Drug Administration plans to require sugar details on labels.
Congress delayed rules to force restaurants to list calorie counts on menus. Some local governments have their own rules; New York city now makes many restaurants list salt content on menus.
HHS and USDA walked a fine line in issuing the guidelines. They considered advice from nutrition and public health experts, food industry experts, farmers and politicians. HHS also considered 29,000 comments submitted by the public.
There are some changes from the recommendations made by a panel of experts almost a year ago. While the new guidelines mention that cholesterol in food isn’t necessarily harmful – it doesn’t directly raise blood cholesterol – they say people should eat as little cholesterol as possible.
“Often saturated fat and cholesterol do come together,” Burwell said. So if people cut saturated fat and sugar, their cholesterol should go down, studies have shown.
The new guidelines also say that caffeine and alcohol appear to be safe in limited amounts, but say no one should start drinking either if they do not do so already.
The report makes clear that Americans will have to change the way they eat to meet the guidelines.
“Today, about half of all American adults—117 million people—have one or more preventable, chronic diseases, many of which are related to poor quality eating patterns and physical inactivity,” Burwell and Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack say in an introduction to the report.
“Rates of these chronic, diet-related diseases continue to rise, and they come not only with increased health risks, but also at high cost.”
The guidelines also give three diet types to choose from: a typical American diet, a Mediterranean-style diet and a vegetarian diet.
They say a healthy eating pattern includes: ||||| | – You can relax your grip on that cup of java: "Moderate coffee consumption" can be part of a healthy diet, according to new federal dietary guidelines released Thursday. In fact, three to five cups is apparently just fine, notes the Los Angeles Times. The guidelines emphasize veggies, fruits, and whole grains, include the first daily limit for added sugars, and remove a daily limit on cholesterol, reports ABC News. Some highlights: To cut your risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, limit added sugars to less than 10% of your daily calories. That's no more than 12 teaspoons with a 2,000-calorie diet, per NPR. Previous guidelines recommended people consume less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol per day. That recommendation is now gone, with researchers less worried about the effects of eggs and other cholesterol-rich foods. Still, the guidelines suggest we "eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible." The recommendation on sodium stays the same. Those 14 and older should eat no more than 2,300 milligrams per day. Most people consume far more. Don't mix caffeine and alcohol. The combination may make people drink "more alcohol and become more intoxicated than they realize, increasing the risk of alcohol-related adverse events." Though an advisory panel suggested Americans should limit red and processed meats, the guidelines don't go that far. But they do say people should eat more lean meats, eggs, nuts, seeds, and seafood for protein, per NBC News. "Essentially, the new guidelines nudge US nutritional policy toward a traditional Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes consumption of fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes drenched in such fat sources as olive, nut, canola and soybean oils," writes Melissa Healy of the Times. |
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau était à Donnacona, lundi, aux côtés de 4600 adolescentes pour le lancement d'une activité de Filleactive, un organisme qui fait la promotion d'un mode de vie sain et actif. Elle en est devenue la porte-parole.
Mais la conjointe du premier ministre, qui s'est impliquée dans plusieurs causes au cours des dernières années, est inondée de demandes. «C'est difficile de choisir parce que c'est touchant, les gens qui veulent ton aide. C'est épouvantable les lettres que je reçois, les personnes qui souffrent. Tu te dis : je vais essayer de transmettre un message qui va rejoindre le plus de gens possible.»
En attendant, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau n'a pas de local à sa disposition à l'édifice Langevin qui abrite le bureau du premier ministre. «J'ai un bureau chez nous sur ma table à dîner. On veut dépoussiérer un peu les vieilles méthodes patriarcales et on veut moderniser l'appareil qui nous permet de servir les gens, parce que les gens veulent qu'on le modernise. Ça, c'est clair dans notre tête. J'ai une personne qui m'aide à recevoir les demandes, à leur répondre, et on en a plus qu'on peut en traiter.»
Pourquoi avoir choisi Filleactive? Elle ne connaissait même pas la fondatrice, Claudine Labelle, une ancienne athlète d'élite qui a créé l'organisme en 2007 pour stimuler les adolescentes de 12 à 17 ans à prendre leur santé en main.
Mais elle a lu son histoire qui l'a touchée : «Je prends souvent mes décisions non seulement sur l'ouverture du coeur, mais aussi sur les faits. Or c'est un fait que les jeunes Canadiennes ne bougent pas assez. C'est un fait que les jeunes Canadiennes ont de la misère à construire une estime d'elles-mêmes sur des valeurs profondes et non pas sur ce qu'on nous présente dans notre culture de compétition, d'individualisme et de comparaison.»
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau a connu des problèmes de désordre alimentaire pendant son adolescence. Elle en a contre certains messages des médias sociaux : «Tu dois avoir l'air de ça, tu dois te comporter comme ça pour être femme ou pour être un gars. Tout ce qui nous restreint dans notre liberté, dans l'expression de ce qu'on est, c'est au détriment de l'être humain.»
Elle en a également contre la normalisation de la violence par rapport à la femme dans les cours d'école. «Il y a une culture non seulement de haine envers soi-même, de comparaison et de compétition, mais aussi de violence envers la femme qui est reliée à la pornographie, aux images d'hypersexualisation dans les médias. Les jeunes filles se retrouvent dans un endroit où elles ne savent pas où grandir, entre étant appelées une prude ou une fille facile.»
Selon elle, les jeunes hommes ont besoin de modèles masculins et féminins pour être interpellés vers les changements qui s'imposent. Comment compte-t-elle faire pour passer ses messages? Elle répond que même si elle allait dans 200 écoles, ce qui «n'est vraiment pas possible», cela ne suffirait pas. «Il y a moyen de transmettre une connexion sincère et une conversation sincère, et là les nouvelles technologies nous aident. Alors j'espère pouvoir les utiliser au maximum.» ||||| © Joshua Roberts/REUTERS Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, wife of Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, sits during a State Dinner at the White House in Washington March 10, 2016.
The wife of Canada’s prime minister has sparked a fierce national debate after saying she needs more help to expand her official role and take on more public duties.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau last week told a French-language newspaper that she wanted to do more, but struggled with just one staff member.
Grégoire Trudeau, a former TV presenter married to Justin Trudeau, has no office and reportedly answers official correspondence from her dining table.
“I’d love to be everywhere but I can’t,” she told Le Soleil. “I have three children and a husband who is prime minister. I need help. I need a team to help me serve the people.”
Grégoire Trudeau said she received regular requests from charities to promote their causes, but she could not respond to them all without an extra hand.
“It’s hard to choose, because it’s touching when people ask for your help. People really lay out their suffering in some of the letters I receive.”
The statement prompted howls of outrage from opposition politicians, who accused her of being out of touch and noted that the previous first lady coped with just one aide.
“Hearing statements like that certainly does not speak to the reality that Canadian women face and the kind of struggles that, you know, that they’re undertaking day in, day out,” opposition MP Niki Ashton said.
“Certainly the kind of statements we heard from the prime minister’s wife, you know, speak to that disconnect with the reality that Canadian women face.”
The prime minister’s office said it was looking in to hiring a second staffer for the first lady.
Meanwhile, Twitter users likened Grégoire Trudeau to Kim Kardashian and started the hashtag #prayforSophie.
Yes, you've reached the office of Sophie Gregoire Trudeau. To which assistant may I direct your call? #PrayForSophie pic.twitter.com/bi5xPWkyQt — Cat Cdn Poli (@CatCDNPoli) May 14, 2016
I don't have enough hired help to get through my day either. I sympathize with you, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau. #JeSuisSophie — Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) May 12, 2016
We should have a telethon to raise money to get Sophie Trudeau the help she needs. #PrayForSophie #SophieStrong pic.twitter.com/IyUJDDwUs9 — Stephen Taylor (@stephen_taylor) May 12, 2016
The role of “first lady” has no real formal status in the Canadian system, but the prime minister’s wife traditionally gets support in performing official activities, a point that was made by supporters of Gregoire Trudeau.
The Toronto Star newspaper ran an editorial on Sunday titled: Sophie Grégoire Trudeau should have all the help she needs to fulfill her role.
“The instant, often spiteful reaction from both social media and other politicians who should know better smacks of ignorance about the requirements of the role the prime minister’s wife has taken on,” it said.
CBC News suggested the first lady was targeted because she was a “tall poppy”, something Canadians abhor.
Grégoire Trudeau herself has not commented on the furore.
But some on Twitter suggested the hounding of Gregoire Trudeau was not just about politics, but sexism, while an open letter to the first lady of Facebook noted “society seems to have a problem when women ask for help”. ||||| This is The Globe’s daily politics newsletter. Sign up to get it by e-mail each morning.
POLITICS BRIEFING
By Chris Hannay (@channay)
Few political issues in recent weeks seem to have resonated in non-political circles as much as the issue of Sophie Grégoire Trudeau’s assistants. Ms. Grégoire Trudeau said last week that the mountain of correspondence she receives and her work promoting various causes and speaking to charitable organizations is becoming too demanding for her and her assistant, and so the Prime Minister’s Office was looking at ways to get her additional help. Opposition MPs, of course, said this was evidence of a “disconnect” between the Trudeaus and average Canadians (a theme espoused by the National Post’s Robyn Urback, who said it was “off-message” for a party concerning itself with the middle class.) Others have said, because Canada hasn’t historically had a “first lady,” it doesn’t need one now.
The Toronto Star’s Heather Mallick made the case that this is debate is really about what people think about Ms. Grégoire Trudeau, and not about the staffing itself.
But for an outside perspective – and one that many Canadian parents may be sympathetic to – it’s worth considering the view of Chatelaine editor Christina Vardanis. “By speaking openly about the challenges she faces as a working mother of three, she spurs a necessary conversation about the enormous strain on working families, lets other women know it’s okay to speak up when they need help and could even inspire demand for better resources and infrastructure. Just because she has financial resources doesn’t mean she’s immune to the intense stress a job or family circumstances can bring.”
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW IN OTTAWA
> The Liberals will introduce legislation this week to extend protections to transgender Canadians. Justin Trudeau is set to make the announcement later today.
> Finance Minister Bill Morneau meets with his team of economic advisers in Chelsea, Que., today.
> The Liberals are also looking at giving new powers to the information commissioner – and giving cabinet the power to block release of those documents if it wishes.
> Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose spent the weekend in the Maritimes to try to “earn back” the trust of Atlantic Canadians, after the Liberals swept the region last October.
> Maxime Bernier and Michael Chong became the second and third candidates, respectively, for the leadership of the Conservative party, after Kellie Leitch. Mr. Chong says he is putting a strong emphasis on reforming our democratic institutions, while Mr. Bernier says he’s learned his lessons from his short time as foreign affairs minister. “What I learned is very simple,” he said. “Being more cautious with confidential documents.”
> In other leadership news, the New Democrats will elect a replacement for Tom Mulcair in the fall of 2017.
> Senator Patrick Brazeau opened up to the Ottawa Citizen about his darkest hour, when he tried to take his own life earlier this year.
> Lifeline Syria, one of the most prominent groups resettling Syrian refugees in Toronto, has had its executive director and half of its board quit.
> And from pieces of mannequins to Harry Potter gear, all the odd items for sale on the Canadian government’s version of eBay.
REGIONAL ROUNDUP
> Ontario: The province will spend $7-billion over four years on a massive climate plan that will touch on all aspects of residents’ lives. The plan is so sweeping, some sources say it’s causing tensions between Environment Minister Glen Murray and his cabinet colleagues.
> Manitoba: The legislature kicks off its first session since the election with a Speech from the Throne this afternoon.
> Nova Scotia: The four Atlantic premiers are set to meet in Annapolis Royal today to talk about how to get more funding from the federal government for health care in the region.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
Campbell Clark (Globe and Mail): “You have to think there’s a better way [to craft the assisted-dying legislation]. This is literally a matter of life and death, a change to criminal law to deal with the difficult issues of grievous suffering and end of life. But collectively, parliamentarians have shown they tend to dodge these uncomfortable, divisive issues.” (for subscribers)
David McLaughlin (Globe and Mail): “Considering how to change voting systems isn’t new in Canada. But five provinces that did this each took about two years to do it, not six months. Each proposed a two – or three-step process involving the legislature, independent commissions or citizen assemblies and in four cases, a referendum. The Liberal majoritarian plan is a marked departure.”
Barrie McKenna (Globe and Mail): “The Liberals are absolutely right to stop tilting the balance even further in favour of [small business]. It’s bad tax policy that’s expensive and sends all the wrong signals to business owners. The government would be wise to go a step further and end the preference altogether.” (for subscribers)
Toronto Star editorial board: “After six months as Canada’s top diplomat, [Stéphane] Dion is starting to give the impression that his pragmatism knows no bounds. There’s reason to worry he’s erring in the opposite direction: too much responsible, not enough conviction.”
Dan Leger (Halifax Chronicle Herald): “Referendum or no referendum, the Liberals should not be able to set the rules and then capitalize on their current popularity to dominate the process to their own narrow partisan advantage.”
Welcome to the Globe Politics newsletter! Let us know what you think.
Report Typo/Error ||||| Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau walk to Rideau Hall for swearing-in last Nov. 4. ( Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
It may well have been politically unwise for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau to publicly raise her need for more staff to help organize her public engagements in an interview with a Quebec City newspaper this past week. A high-profile woman seen to be asking for more help clearly leaves herself open to criticism. But the instant, often spiteful reaction from both social media and other politicians who should know better smacks of ignorance about the requirements of the role the prime minister’s wife has taken on. This should not be a debate about Grégoire Trudeau’s privileged position. Comparing her problems to those of day-to-day working women amounts to a kind of faux populism that ducks the real questions. Instead, the focus should be on what we expect of the spouse of our prime minister, and the opportunities her role affords to represent Canada and promote important causes. Seen like that, the answer is clear: she should have the help she needs to carry out the work that Canadians want her to do. If that means an extra staff member to organize her appearances and correspondence, then she should have it.
Article Continued Below
It should come as no surprise that the demands on her are greater than those on previous PMs’ wives. Justin Trudeau is riding a wave of popularity that extends to his entire family, especially his wife. The Prime Minister’s Office says she’s been deluged with requests to appear at events and lend her support to all kinds of causes. That’s why she made the plea for extra help, in addition to the single assistant the PMO now employs on her behalf. “I’d like to be everywhere but I can’t,” she told Le Soleil. “I have three children and a husband who is Prime Minister. I need help.” The Conservatives say she should just suck it up, and asking for help amounts to wanting to do more “self-promotion” at taxpayers’ expense. That kind of rhetoric may play well with people who just don’t like the Trudeaus, but the opposition parties are taking the low road when they make the role of the prime minister’s wife a partisan issue.
It should be noted that Grégoire Trudeau is not asking for another employee to lessen her workload, but to increase it. She lamented that because she doesn’t have enough staff she is forced to make difficult choices about who she can help. In other words, she wants to do more in a role that is, after all, unpaid. There are many precedents for this. PM’s wives have taken on various roles, depending on their personalities and popularity. All had at least one assistant to help with public duties. Mila Mulroney had three staffers and an office in the Langevin Block across from Parliament Hill. Is it any surprise that someone in as much demand as Grégoire Trudeau should find that one aide is not enough? She has taken on a high-profile role, partly because she wants to and partly because Canadians want her to. She draws attention and donations when she speaks on behalf of aboriginal and girls education, and to raise awareness about bulimia and anorexia. Her work raises the profile of Canadian arts and fashion around the world. Nor is Grégoire Trudeau taking on all this simply to polish her husband’s reputation. Even in 2005, when she joined the entertainment program eTalk as a Quebec correspondent, she said she was looking forward to “reporting on Canada’s French and English stars who support social causes and bring about positive change.” Now that she’s in a high-profile position herself, she’s making it her work to bring about change. It’s quite true that the prime minister’s wife does not have a formal role, as the First Lady does in the United States. But the reality is that Canadians increasingly expect the PM’s spouse to play a significant public role. Ignoring that would be disrespectful to those seeking her help, and would squander an opportunity to do good work. Opposition politicians should watch to make sure all this doesn’t get out of control. But they should stop playing politics with this issue and support Grégoire Trudeau’s modest request for more help to do a job on behalf of all Canadians.
Read more about: ||||| Aversion to the success of one's peers
The tall poppy syndrome describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, strung up or criticised because they have been classified as superior to their peers. The term has been used in cultures of the English-speaking world.[1][2][3][4][5]
Etymology [ edit ]
Tarquinius Superbus by by Lawrence Alma-Tadema , depicting the king receiving a laurel wreath ; the poppies in the foreground refer to the "tall poppy" allegory
The concept originates from accounts in Herodotus' Histories (Book 5, 92f), Aristotle's Politics (1284a), and Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri, Book I.
[Periander] had sent a herald to Thrasybulus and inquired in what way he would best and most safely govern his city. Thrasybulus led the man who had come from Periander outside the town, and entered into a sown field. As he walked through the wheat, continually asking why the messenger had come to him from Cypselus, he kept cutting off all the tallest ears of wheat which he could see, and throwing them away, until he had destroyed the best and richest part of the crop. Then, after passing through the place and speaking no word of counsel, he sent the herald away. When the herald returned to Cypselus, Periander desired to hear what counsel he brought, but the man said that Thrasybulus had given him none. The herald added that it was a strange man to whom he had been sent, a madman and a destroyer of his own possessions, telling Periander what he had seen Thrasybulus do. Periander, however, understood what had been done, and perceived that Thrasybulus had counselled him to slay those of his townsmen who were outstanding in influence or ability; with that he began to deal with his citizens in an evil manner. — Herodotus, The Histories, Book 5, 92-f
Aristotle uses Herodotus' story in his Politics (1284a)[6] with reversed roles, referring to Periander's advice to Thrasybulus via a herald.
The story is that Periander made no reply to the herald sent to ask his advice, but levelled the corn-field by plucking off the ears that stood out above the rest; and consequently, although the herald did not know the reason for what was going on, when he carried back news of what had occurred, Thrasybulus understood that he was to destroy the outstanding citizens. — Aristotle, Politics, Book 3, 1284a
The specific reference to poppies occurs in Livy's account of the tyrannical Roman king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. He is said to have received a messenger from his son Sextus Tarquinius asking what he should do next in Gabii, since he had become all-powerful there. Rather than answering the messenger verbally, Tarquin went into his garden, took a stick, and symbolically swept it across his garden, thus cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies that were growing there. The messenger, tired of waiting for an answer, returned to Gabii and told Sextus what he had seen. Sextus realised that his father wished him to put to death all of the most eminent people of Gabii, which he then did.[7]
The earliest English-language example of Tall Poppies being used as a metaphor for notables may be found in Roger L'Estrange's newspaper, The Observator, in 1710. One party to a dialogue relates the tale of Tarquin, and later observes approvingly of his Royalist allies, "If you'll have but a little Patience, you may see them make very noble Efforts towards striking off the Heads of the tall Poppies."[8]
By 1835, the metaphor had crossed the Atlantic to the United States,[clarification needed (see talk)] where the Torch Light of Hagerstown, Maryland, observed of then-Congressman Francis Thomas, "Politically, Mr. Thomas and his friends are imitating the example of Tarquin and Sextius – indeed it is said some of the tall poppies of our county are in danger of decapitation."[9]
There is a similar legend about the king Ramiro II of Aragon, who asked for some advice to his old master to deal with some nobles who questioned his power. His master did not say anything but just cut the heads of the tallest roses in the garden. This legend is known as the "Bell of Huesca".
Usage in Australia [ edit ]
The phrase can be found as early as 1864 in a controversy over the awarding of a knighthood:
It is more difficult to find a similar recommendation for such a dignity as the Order of the Garter. But then it derives a collateral value from the fact that it is always given either to people of singular distinction, or else to men whose social position is sufficient to make them formidable to the Minister of the day. It is a kind of public proclamation that you are a tall poppy and that, as in these days your head cannot be struck off, it is worth while to buy you.[10]
Again in 1904 in a report of a debate in the Federal Parliament:
Senator. O'Keefe– He regarded the appointment of a High Commissioner as necessary. Sir William Zeal– Another tall poppy. Senator. O'Keefe– Some tall poppies were necessary."[11]
In 1930 one may read:
Unquestionably one of the evils of Government in Australia and Britain is the appalling cost of administration, from the tall poppy at £3,000 per annum to the toiler at £260.[12]
The phrase has been in more common use since Jack Lang, Premier of New South Wales, described his egalitarian policies as "cutting the heads off tall poppies" in 1931. "Mr. Lang made some of the tall poppies suffer who could be made to suffer."[13] "The tall poppies of the party had dragged Mr. Lang's name into the debate to cloud the issue."[14]
The phrase experienced a revival with the publication of Susan Mitchell's best-selling book Tall Poppies in 1984 in which Mitchell interviewed nine successful Australian women.[15]
Of the Australian definition, Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald writes, "(Australian) citizens know that some among them will have more power and money than others... But according to the unspoken national ethos, no Australian is permitted to assume that he or she is better than any other Australian. How is this enforced? By the prompt corrective of levelling derision. It has a name—The "Tall Poppy Syndrome". The tallest flowers in the field will be cut down to the same size as all the others. This is sometimes misunderstood... It isn't success that offends Australians. It's the affront committed by anyone who starts to put on superior airs."[citation needed]
Usage in Britain [ edit ]
Prior to becoming British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher explained her philosophy to an American audience as "let your poppies grow tall." [16][clarification needed]
The quote was made in the United States for political purposes and any assertion that the United Kingdom itself has a culture of tall poppy syndrome in the crab mentality sense like Australia and New Zealand[17] has been disputed.[18]
Explanation [ edit ]
Belief in the strength of this cultural phenomenon, and the degree to which it represents a negative trait, is to some extent influenced by politics. Tall poppy syndrome is related to what some call "the politics of envy".[citation needed]
Some commentators[who?] have argued that tall poppy syndrome is a universal phenomenon, that is more common in some cultures. The concepts of janteloven or "Law of Jante", in Scandinavia, and A kent yer faither (English: I knew your father) in Scotland, are very similar. Similar phenomena are said to exist in the Netherlands (where it is called maaiveldcultuur). In the United States, Benjamin Franklin Fairless, president of United States Steel Corporation (1950), criticised such behaviour when he stated: "You cannot strengthen one by weakening another; and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant".[19]
Zero-sum prestige [ edit ]
Some sociologists, notably Max Weber, believe that in certain social groups, the acquisition of prestige and power is a zero-sum game, and this situation may provide a rationalisation for the dislike of "tall poppies".[20] In such groups, there is only a limited amount of prestige for its members to share in and only a fixed quantity of attention, authority and material resources that its members can give to each other. Status is a relative value, so for someone to rise in status, another person must fall. A person who is more prestigious is an obstacle to another person's rise simply by being more prestigious, and a person who suddenly rises is an outright threat to the other's current status. Humiliating or sabotaging a popular member of the group will lower that person's status and thus make it possible for the aggressor to supplant him in the group hierarchy.
This zero-sum pattern can be found in small groups characterised by fixed hierarchies and where there is little movement in or out of the group. Examples include poor American communities and some street gangs.[21][22] A related concept is that of a crab mentality in which successful members of a disadvantaged community are seen as undermining the standing of other community members. The image is drawn from the observation that a crab clawing its way out of a bucket (or barrel in other versions) is pulled back down by its fellows.[citation needed]
Impact [ edit ]
Research performed at the University of Waikato in New Zealand in 2015 shows that a culture of tall poppy syndrome may result in a reduction in average performance of up to 20% for an organisation and explains how electronic cyberbullying can be considered a modern extension to the physical assassinations of King Tarquin's day.[17]
See also [ edit ]
Law of Jante, a similar concept in the Nordic countries
References [ edit ] ||||| A common theme in all the carping and snarking about Sophie Grégoire Trudeau is that she has NO official role, and NO official duties — that she's a "stay-at-home mom," and therefore she should pay for her help the way everybody else has to.
Well, first of all, she hasn't asked for any more help to take care of her kids.
As for her not having any official duties, yes, that's technically true; there is actually only one government spouse in Ottawa with official duties, and that's the Governor General's wife, who gets to call herself Her Excellency, and act as consort to the representative of Canada's head of state, cutting ribbons and greeting important guests and so forth.
Now, quick: Name the Governor General's wife.
The reason you probably can't is that Sharon Johnston, while no doubt a lovely, public-spirited woman, is not a tall poppy.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau is. And a lot of Canadians just can't stand a tall poppy.
Sophie Trudeau has NO official duties. She's a stay-at-home Mom with a driver, chef, two nannies and cleaning staff. https://t.co/ajwK749nQL — @Banks_Todd
If Sophie Trudeau wants a larger staff to help w/her responsibilities, kids & job, other working moms shouldn't have to pay for it. #cdnpoli — @paigemacp
Tall poppies stick out because they're really smart, or really rich, or talented and famous, or, as Derek Zoolander would put it, "really really really good looking."
In the United States, people love tall poppies. The average American looks at a tall poppy and says: "I want to be like that."
In Canada, we look at tall poppies and cluck and disapprove and fervently hope somebody takes them down a peg or two. Who do they think they are, anyway?
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau were featured in the January issue of Vogue. (Norman Jean Roy/Vogue)
After Grégoire Trudeau told a Quebec newspaper she needs more than the one staffer she has to cope with her new workload, Conservative MP Candice Bergen called it "hypocrisy," and managed to blame the prime minister.
The NDP called it a "troubling pattern" of using the public dime for support ordinary Canadians aren't provided.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, sniffed her critics, is just out of touch with the common Canadian.
Well, please.
I don't pay much attention to Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, but I know she's amazingly popular, and I understand why.
She puts her hand over her heart, and she empathizes, and she's very pretty, and open about her own shortcomings, and seems determined to help young girls navigate a fragile time of life and grow into mature, accomplished women.
Her cause is women's empowerment, with a corollary of bulimia and eating disorders, something she herself once overcame.
She talks about her personal problems, and she breaks into song in public, and appears in Vogue doing that forehead-touching thing with her husband.
This drives conservatives nuts, but it made her a sensation in America. First lady Michelle Obama pronounced her a "soulmate." (Being a sensation in America is also frowned on by a segment of Canadians.)
Michelle Obama called Sophie Grégoire Trudeau a 'soulmate.' (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
It's also made her a super-hot ticket for charities here at home.
The Prime Minister's Office says she gets 50 to 60 requests a week to appear at some worthy event or other: speak at our commencement, act as our patron, speak at our fundraiser, use your blazing fame to help us….please.
And she does. She tries to answer all the invitations with a yes or a no, because it is simply not possible to accept them all.
She tries to make speeches that don't mail it in, and if you've ever made a speech, you know the time and effort that takes.
Her work requires flying around, which can be exhausting, and staying in hotels, which gets old really fast.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau sings a song she wrote at a City of Ottawa event to mark Martin Luther King Day. (CBC)
But here's the thing: She does it for free. She could just as easily say, "Yeah, OK, listen, no. I'm off to teach a yoga class and play with my kids."
She could, as Aline Chrétien did and Olive Diefenbaker before that, remain quietly in the background. It'd sure be a lot less work.
But she doesn't, and all she's asking is for an extra staffer or two to cope with the sheer volume of supplicants – who, let's not forget, are Canadian taxpayers with expectations.
The last prime ministerial spouse as famous and as in-demand as Sophie Grégoire Trudeau was Mila Mulroney, who put her brains, beauty and glamour to much the same use. Her cause was cystic fibrosis, particularly in children.
Her husband gave her an office, and three staff, which also caused a big uproar (except from Conservatives, who seemed to think it was a good idea).
Mila Mulroney put her brains, beauty and glamour to much the same use as Sophie Grégoire Trudeau. Her cause was cystic fibrosis, particularly in children. (Ron Poling/Canadian Press)
"It was almost like being in a cabinet minister's office, in terms of workload and requests from the public," says Bonnie Brownlee, who for years was Mila Mulroney's majordomo and now works for the CBC.
"I can't think of an ethnic festival we didn't attend. Graduating classes, lots of medical stuff, 4-H clubs, women's associations, just everything you can imagine. The amount of correspondence alone was incredible."
And, like Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, Mila Mulroney never made a cent from it: "It's kind of a public mission," says Brownlee, who, incidentally, thinks Grégoire Trudeau is doing a crackerjack job and wishes her well.
Brownlee thinks Grégoire Trudeau has a remarkable opportunity to make a difference: "It's contribution to public service. It's volunteerism."
And she's doing it. Good for her. If she needs a few more staff, fine. It's at least as good a use for public money as, say, the business of the Senate. ||||| The Prime Minister’s Office is exploring various options – including hiring a second staffer – after Sophie Grégoire Trudeau publicly complained she is struggling to deal with the workload that comes with her duties, federal officials told The Globe and Mail.
Speaking in Quebec City earlier this week, Ms. Grégoire Trudeau bluntly said she and her current assistant can’t manage the number of demands that come from being a high-profile, bilingual and much sought-after speaker. Various groups and charitable organizations regularly invite Ms. Grégoire Trudeau to promote their causes, but the constant requests are proving impossible to address under current circumstances, she said.
“I’d like to be everywhere, but I can’t,” Ms. Grégoire Trudeau said in an interview with daily newspaper Le Soleil. “I have three children at home and a husband who is Prime Minister. I need help. I need a team to help me serve people.”
She added that with one staffer, she cannot respond to everyone who contacts her. “We want to modernize the system that allows us to serve the people, because people want us to modernize it.”
The PMO told The Globe and Mail that it is aware of the growing needs of Ms. Grégoire Trudeau and is looking at ways to assist her and her sole staffer, Natalie St-Denis.
To this point, PMO officials informally provide additional assistance, such as accompanying Ms. Grégoire Trudeau to events when Ms. St-Denis can’t attend.
However, there is a growing sense the current system cannot be sustained, given the personal popularity of Ms. Grégoire Trudeau, who has garnered international attention alongside Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Madame Grégoire Trudeau continues to receive an extraordinarily high volume of correspondence and invitations. We are continuing to look at new ways to make sure she is supported at official events she is attending and to make sure correspondence from Canadians across the country and invitations are triaged and answered in a timely manner,” said PMO spokesman Olivier Duchesneau.
Still, the Liberals are not looking at replicating the American model, where the White House includes a formal Office of the First Lady, Mr. Duchesneau said.
Mr. Trudeau’s office is treading carefully, given questions about the cost of the services offered to the Trudeau household, including two nannies who sometimes travel with the couple’s children.
The PMO has said Mr. Trudeau is using the same budget for household help as his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper. However, Liberal officials said Ms. Grégoire Trudeau receives much more correspondence than Laureen Harper, which explains the potential need for additional administrative help.
A precedent was set by Mila Mulroney, who had an office at the Langevin Block, in front of the Parliament Buildings, and at least three staff working with her at one point.
Ms. Grégoire Trudeau has promoted Canadian designers with her fashion choices at public events, but she is also the voice for a number of causes, including promoting the health and self-esteem of young women.
“It’s hard to choose, because it’s touching when people ask for your help. People really lay out their suffering in some of the letters that I receive. I tell myself: ‘I’ll try to send a message that will reach as many people as possible,’” Ms. Grégoire Trudeau told Le Soleil.
She said she is also fighting against the fact that people often tend to see her solely as Mr. Trudeau’s wife, arguing society needs to evolve and respect the decisions that professional women make for their families. Ms. Grégoire Trudeau is a former television journalist.
Ms. Grégoire Trudeau said her mother, who stopped working as a nurse after she was born, didn’t become less intelligent or interesting because she decided to stay at home.
“There is always a price to pay, but the price shouldn’t be as high,” Ms. Grégoire Trudeau said of finding a balance between work and family.
Ms. Grégoire Trudeau was not available to comment on staffing issues to The Globe on Wednesday.
Report Typo/Error ||||| Sophie Grégoire Trudeau is coming under fire for publicly requesting additional staff to fulfill her public duties as the Prime Minister’s wife, even as millions of Canadian women struggle to balance their professional and personal lives.
“Statements like that really speak to a disconnect,” said NDP MP Niki Ashton. “The focus should be on what Canadian women face on a daily basis and how the federal government can support Canadian women.”
Ms. Ashton added that the Trudeau family has access to taxpayer-funded help at home, including two nannies, while millions of Canadians struggle with daycare costs.
Ms. Grégoire Trudeau has one assistant who helps her with her public duties, including co-ordinating her public appearances and going through the correspondence that she receives. Still, she said earlier this week that she can’t cope with the current demands on her time.
“I’d like to be everywhere, but I can’t,” Ms. Grégoire Trudeau said in an interview with Quebec City daily newspaper Le Soleil. “I have three children at home and a husband who is Prime Minister. I need help. I need a team to help me serve people.”
The Conservatives said it’s up to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to explain any additional resources that would be provided to his wife, while adding that Laureen Harper fulfilled her duties with only one assistant.
“It is really the hypocrisy of Mr. Trudeau at this point, always wanting more to do self-promotion, to do vanity trips,” said Conservative MP Candice Bergen. “That is where a lot of Canadians would question more [staff].”
Ms. Bergen said Ms. Harper was well known for doing “more with less,” and said the Liberals should try to do the same.
The Prime Minister’s Office said it is aware of the growing needs of Ms. Grégoire Trudeau and is looking at ways to assist her and her sole staffer, Natalie St-Denis. PMO officials currently provide additional assistance, such as accompanying Ms. Grégoire Trudeau to events when Ms. St-Denis can’t attend.
However, there is a growing sense the current system cannot be sustained, given the personal popularity of Ms. Grégoire Trudeau, who has garnered international attention alongside Mr. Trudeau.
“Madame Grégoire Trudeau continues to receive an extraordinarily high volume of correspondence and invitations. We are continuing to look at new ways to make sure she is supported at official events she is attending and to make sure correspondence from Canadians across the country and invitations are triaged and answered in a timely manner,” said PMO spokesman Olivier Duchesneau.
A precedent was set by Mila Mulroney, who had an office at the Langevin Block, in front of the Parliament Buildings, and at least three staff working with her at one point.
Ms. Grégoire Trudeau has promoted Canadian designers with her fashion choices at public events, but she is also the voice for a number of causes, including promoting the health and self-esteem of young women.
“It’s hard to choose, because it’s touching when people ask for your help. People really lay out their suffering in some of the letters that I receive. I tell myself: ‘I’ll try to send a message that will reach as many people as possible,’” Ms. Grégoire Trudeau told Le Soleil.
The Conservatives rejected the assertion by Liberals that Ms. Grégoire Trudeau has to deal with more correspondence and public events than Ms. Harper.
Report Typo/Error ||||| | – Political gloves are off in Canada after the prime minister's wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, said she needs "a team" to help her "serve the people," reports MSN.com. In a French-language interview, the 41-year-old described her difficulty answering charity requests from her dining-room table while juggling family life with her husband, Justin Trudeau, and three children. "I’d love to be everywhere but I can't," she says. "I need help. ... People really lay out their suffering in some of the letters I receive." But in Canada, where there's no official "First Lady" position, some are accusing Grégoire Trudeau of abusing her role while others say critics are insensitive to working mothers or simply don't like the Trudeaus, the Globe & Mail reports. Among the reactions: "It is really the hypocrisy of Mr. Trudeau at this point, always wanting more to do self-promotion, to do vanity trips," a Conservative MP tells the Globe & Mail. "That is where a lot of Canadians would question more [staff]." A lawmaker with the left-wing NDP was no kinder, saying the interview "really speak[s] to a disconnect" about "what Canadian women face on a daily basis." But the Toronto Star notes that past PM's wives have had at least one assistant—as Grégoire Trudeau does—and one, Mila Mulroney, had three. Neil Macdonald argues at the CBC that Canadians just can't stand having a "tall poppy" around. "In Canada, we look at tall poppies and cluck and disapprove and fervently hope somebody takes them down a peg or two," he writes. "Who do they think they are, anyway?" An open letter on Facebook sees pure sexism: "We're supposed to be perfect mothers, wives, friends, employees and citizens, and we're not supposed to admit that we can't do it without a little help," writes Amanda Brennan. On a more practical note, the Prime Minister's office tells the Globe & Mail that it's considering giving Grégoire Trudeau a second assistant. |
So how did the 73-year-old insurance company CEO end up joining a sting operation this month that ended when he pulled out his handgun and killed suspect Eric Harris instead of stunning him with a Taser?
A lawyer representing the Harris family says the answer is simple.
Bates paid big money to play a cop in his spare time, attorney Daniel Smolen says, but he didn't have the training to handle the job.
It's a claim that Bates' attorney and the sheriff's office deny, arguing that he was experienced and qualified for the role. His donations of equipment to the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office and his friendship with Sheriff Stanley Glanz, they say, have nothing to do with the April 2 shooting.
But as Bates faces a second-degree manslaughter charge , analysts say the case raises serious questions about who's policing America's streets, how and why.
How much training did he have?
Investigators have said Bates meant to pull out his Taser but accidentally used his handgun during the undercover weapons sting.
In a video of the shooting, he's heard announcing that he's going to deploy his stun gun, and then apologizing, saying, "I shot him. I'm sorry."
Critics call it a clear case of police brutality and question whether Bates had the know-how to be a deputy.
"It's absolutely mind-boggling that you have a wealthy businessman who's been essentially deputized to go play like he's some outlaw, like he's just cleaning up the streets," Smolen said.
Scott Wood, an attorney who represents Bates, said his client -- who had donated cars and video equipment to the Sheriff's Office -- had undergone all the required training and had participated in more than 100 operations with the office's violent crimes task force.
He'd never been the main deputy in charge of arresting a suspect, Wood said, but was thrust into the situation because Harris ran from deputies, who were trying to arrest him after he sold a gun to an undercover investigator.
Bates worked for the Tulsa Police Department for a year in the 1960s. He'd been a reserve deputy since 2008, with 300 hours of training and 1,100 hours of community policing experience, according to the Sheriff's Office.
He was also a frequent contributor to the Sheriff's Office, including $2,500 to Glanz's re-election.
Tulsa County sheriff's Maj. Shannon Clark denied accusations that Bates had paid to play a cop, describing him as one of many volunteers in the community who have contributed to the agency.
"No matter how you cut it up, Deputy Bates met all the criteria on the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training to be in the role that he was in," Clark said.
Clark said the agency is now looking into its reserve program but notes that the 130 volunteer deputies have played a crucial role policing fairs, helping out after tornadoes and rescuing people from burning homes.
Allegations of falsified records
New evidence about the training Bates received was revealed this week, when a lawyer for the Harris family released a copy of an internal inquiry by the sheriff's office in 2009.
The memo did not explicitly say that Bates paid his way into the sheriff's ranks, but the investigation did conclude that he received special treatment
The document outlines interviews with several deputies who allege they were pressured by supervisors to falsify training records or provide exceptions to Bates regarding his duties.
According to the document, one deputy said she was told by the chief deputy to certify that Bates had completed the driving requirements, even though she believed Bates had not done the training.
Another deputy, who was charged with Bates' field training, said that he was pressured into certifying the reserve deputy even though he lacked the required training hours.
The memo also mentions instances where Bates was performing actions -- such as traffic stops on his own -- that he was not allowed to do given his status. When other deputies complained about Bates flouting the rules, the top brass at the department responded by asking that Bates be left alone to do what he wanted.
Deputy: I thought he had a gun
Bates' attorney describes the shooting as an "excusable homicide," arguing his client is not guilty of second-degree manslaughter.
"We believe the video itself proves that it was an accident of misfortune that occurred while Deputy Bates was fulfilling his duties as a reserve deputy," Wood said.
In a statement he made to investigators after the shooting, Bates said he'd attended "numerous schools and seminars related to drug investigations and the tactical operations associated with the apprehension of suspects involved in drug trafficking." He also said he'd attended a five-day homicide investigation school in Dallas and had training from Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office on responding to active shooters.
The gun he used was his personal weapon, he said, adding that he qualified at the range last fall.
In the report, he describes how, from his position on the perimeter, he saw Harris running from officers.
"I noticed that Harris was running in an unusual way because as he ran he repeatedly touched his right hand to his waistband," he wrote. "Based on my past experience, primarily with the task force, and my past training, I believed that Harris might be carrying a gun."
It was the fear that Harris could have a gun, he says later in the report, that made him rush to use his Taser as he saw Harris on the pavement, struggling with deputies as they tried to arrest him.
"My training on ground fighting, even going back to when I was on the Tulsa Police Department, has been that it is one of the most dangerous situations an officer can experience," he wrote.
'Recipe for disaster'
While many departments have volunteer police programs, such positions are generally used for crowd control or less volatile situations, experts said.
The Oklahoma case raises a troubling question, CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin said.
"Do we want really what are ordinary citizens, with enough money to play to be police officers, policing our streets? This is a very, very dangerous precedent," she said. "And I think it's now time for either the Justice Department, perhaps, or every single police department to review this, the deputy status, because we're going to see more and more of this kind of thing, if it isn't happening more than we even know."
Daniel Bongino, a former Secret Service Agent, said the New York Police Department's auxiliary department is a good example of a program that works.
"You go through a police academy, and you're primarily used in traffic situations, busy shopping areas. They're not armed, they're usually with an armed regular police officer. I think it's a far better model," he told CNN's "AC360." "I think you were almost setting yourself up for failure in this situation in Tulsa, having a 73-year-old man, however good or bad intentioned, in that kind of situation, with a potential gun crime. That was a recipe for disaster."
Look no further than the recent movie "Foxcatcher" for an example of how donations to law enforcement in order to play the role of a deputy are "very concerning," said Phil Stinson, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University.
John du Pont, the killer depicted in the film , made significant donations to police, Stinson told "AC360."
"He had given a great deal of money, he'd given cars, given use of a helicopter, actually set up a firing range for a township police department outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," he said.
"So we've actually seen this before, and if you think about the troubles police departments have had with budgets in recent years, it's rather tempting if you're the head of that type of agency to take someone up on this, and give them the action experiences that they're looking for. It's really pay for play." ||||| Tulsa, Oklahoma (CNN) Amid growing scrutiny over whether a 73-year-old volunteer deputy who killed a suspect during a sting operation was qualified to be policing the streets, a new report raises a troubling allegation.
Some supervisors at the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office were told to forge Reserve Deputy Robert Bates' training records, and three who refused were reassigned to less desirable duties, the Tulsa World newspaper reported.
Claims that the volunteer deputy's records had been falsified emerged "almost immediately" from multiple sources after Bates killed Eric Harris on April 2 , reporter Dylan Goforth said. Bates claims he meant to use his Taser but accidentally fired his handgun at Harris instead.
The newspaper's story does not say who allegedly asked the supervisors to falsify the training records or why. But the orders apparently started years ago, before Harris' death, "back when (Bates) was trying to get on as a deputy," reporter Ziva Branstetter told CNN's "New Day."
The Sheriff's Office denied the allegations in the Tulsa World's report. It also declined a CNN interview to respond to the claims.
In an email to CNN, the department's Maj. Shannon Clark said the lack of named sources in the newspaper's report leaves him dubious.
"Just keep in mind that the Tulsa World reporter cannot validate her sources and claims anonymity, which leaves us skeptical that her claims are unsubstantiated and deceptive," Clark wrote.
Clark Brewster, an attorney who represents Bates, said the accusations are based on an affidavit from a former Sheriff's Office employee who's now facing a first-degree murder charge.
"I don't put a lot of stock in that report or the credibility of who would further that report," Brewster said.
In a later interview with CNN affiliate KOKI , Clark cast further doubt on the document, which has the name of the accuser blacked out.
"If you're telling us we did something, then why can't you tell us who the person is on that affidavit so we can go back and confirm that information?" Clark said.
Department declines request for details
Sheriff Stanley Glanz and other sheriff's officials have repeatedly insisted Bates was properly trained.
The Tulsa County Sheriff's Office has released a summary of Bates' training courses only over the past seven years.
The office rejected CNN's request for the full training records because Bates' case is under investigation.
Branstetter said she's run into similar obstacles when asking for the names of supervisors who'd signed off on Bates' training records.
"You would think the Sheriff's Office, if in fact there has been no pressure applied, no falsification of records, that they would be forthcoming with these documents," she told CNN's "New Day."
"We've asked for them. They've said they don't believe they're public records."
JUST WATCHED Report: Bates donated cops cars to sheriff's office Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Report: Bates donated cops cars to sheriff's office 01:06
Missing gun certification records
Bates was classified as an advanced reserve deputy for the Sheriff's Office. That means he would have had to complete 480 hours of the field training officer program to maintain that classification, the paper said.
Bates would also have needed firearms certification training.
But the sheriff himself has acknowledged there is a problem with Bates' gun certification records -- his office can't find them.
"Bob went out and qualified with three different weapons with an instructor," Glanz told KFAQ radio this week.
He said Bates "qualified with a young lady that was a firearms instructor." But she is no longer there.
"She has left the Sheriff's Office and is now a Secret Service agent," Glanz told KFAQ. "And we're trying to get a hold of her and talk to her about ... we can't find the records that she supposedly turned in. So we're going to talk to her and find out if for sure he did qualify with those."
Inconsistent statements
Even before the Tulsa World story, inconsistencies were apparent in Bates' history with the Sheriff's Office.
In his statement to investigators, Bates said he "became an advanced TCSO Reserve Deputy in 2007."
But the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office has said Bates had been a reserve deputy since 2008
It also said Bates had undergone 300 hours of training. That would be less than the 480 hours of field training that the Tulsa World said is required to be an "advanced" reserve deputy, which Bates claimed to be.
In a statement he made to investigators after the shooting, Bates said the gun he used was his personal weapon, adding that he last qualified at the range in autumn.
He also said he'd attended "numerous schools and seminars related to drug investigations and the tactical operations associated with the apprehension of suspects involved in drug trafficking," a five-day homicide investigation school in Dallas and training from Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office on responding to active shooters.
But an Arizona official told CNN Bates never trained with the agency.
"He didn't come to Arizona," the official from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office said, "and he certainly didn't train with us."
Brewster said that line in Bates' statement was referring to a lecture given at a seminar in Washington by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The seminar was part of extensive training Bates received at classes across the country and through work in the field, he said.
"He met every training regimen," Brewster said. "He met every requirement, and all he did was give of himself."
Who's investigating?
Bates is now charged with second-degree manslaughter for Harris' death. He turned himself in to authorities Tuesday and immediately posted bail of $25,000. His attorney has said he's not guilty, calling the death an "excusable homicide."
The lawyer for Harris' family claims Bates wasn't qualified to be on the force, but received preferential treatment because he'd made donations to the agency and was a friend of the sheriff -- an accusation officials deny, saying they stand by his training record.
Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark, who has been brought in to review the case, has said Bates fell "victim" to something called "slip and capture," a term to describe a high-stress situation in which a person intends to do one thing and instead does something else.
It's a controversial claim that hasn't convinced critics of the department, and calls for an independent investigation into the Sheriff's Office and the case are growing. Earlier this week, the office spokesman rejected any idea of outside investigators into the shooting.
"We're not scared to prosecute our own. ... There's nobody in this culture that can be tougher on cops than their own," Clark said. "You know that analogy that you'll eat your young? You know, that's the same thing in law enforcement. If we have a dirty cop in our ranks, we will disclose them much quicker than the media."
A spokesman for Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said his office is concerned about allegations reported in the media about the case "and will continue to monitor and assess what appropriate measures, if any, are warranted."
Glanz has stated publicly that he's reached out to the regional office of the FBI to look into the shooting.
Special Agent Terry B. Weber told CNN there's no open FBI investigation into the case. ||||| | – Questions have arisen about how qualified reserve deputy Robert Bates was for the job after he shot and killed Eric Harris in Tulsa, Okla., on April 2, claiming he mistook his firearm for his Taser. Bates' attorney has said his client, charged with second-degree manslaughter in Harris' death, had undergone all required training, CNN reports. Now, however, "multiple" anonymous sources tell the Tulsa World that at least three supervisors were told to falsify the 73-year-old's field training and firearms certification records—and when they refused to do so, they were transferred to other departments. Other discrepancies have also popped up. Bates would have needed 480 hours of field training to qualify as the "advanced reserve" officer he was classified as, but the Tulsa sheriff's office has said he completed just 300 hours, per CNN. Then there's Bates' tenure as a reserve officer: The department says he started in 2008, but Bates has said he started in 2007, CNN notes. And although the Tulsa sheriff told local radio this week that Bates was certified for three weapons, that paperwork has vanished, as has the person who signed off on it, per the World. Regarding the falsification allegations, the department's undersheriff tells the World, "I have absolutely no knowledge of what you are talking about. There aren't any secrets in law enforcement. Zero." The department also sent an email to CNN stating, "Just keep in mind that the Tulsa World reporter cannot validate her sources and claims anonymity which leaves us skeptical that her claims are unsubstantiated and deceptive." Says a Harris family lawyer, per Business Insider: "An officer who is trained would never get these two weapons confused." |
In recent undercover tests of multiple airport security checkpoints by the Department of Homeland Security, inspectors said screeners, their equipment or their procedures failed more than half the time, according to a source familiar with the classified report.
Interested in TSA? Add TSA as an interest to stay up to date on the latest TSA news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest
When ABC News asked the source if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, "You are in the ballpark."
In a public hearing after a private classified briefing to the House Committee on Homeland Security, members of Congress called the failures by the Transportation Security Administration disturbing.
Rep. Mike Rogers went as far as to tell TSA Administrator David Pekoske, "This agency that you run is broken badly, and it needs your attention."
Pekoske was confirmed by the Senate this summer.
Inspectors "identified vulnerabilities with TSA's screener performance, screening equipment and associated procedures," according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security.
The statement added that the findings remain classified but that eight recommendations have been made to the TSA to improve checkpoint security. It is not clear what those recommendations are.
The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret teams from the DHS found that the TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop inspectors from smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.
That report led to major changes ordered at the TSA by then–Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. The agency opened a training academy for transportation security officers and changed procedures to reduce long lines.
Although lawmakers described the TSA's performance in this round of testing as poor, it was an improvement from two years ago, according to the source familiar with the report.
In the public hearing today on Capitol Hill, members pushed for the full implementation of a program using new scanning equipment that creates a 3-D image of bags, giving screeners better ability to spot possibly dangerous items.
The equipment is being tested in TSA checkpoints in at least two airports, but software and installation challenges have slowed wider implementation.
Rep. Bill Keating suggested that money is being diverted from the agency to build President Trump's promised border wall.
"We have the technology and resources to do it, but we're not doing it because ... we're paying for a wall," Keating said.
He also noted that Viper teams, specially trained Homeland Security units that use canines to secure transportation facilities, are being cut from 31 to eight.
It is not clear when the report will be released publicly.
The TSA said in a statement that it "concurs with the DHS OIG [Office of Inspector General] findings and is committed to aggressively implementing the recommendations."
"We take the OIG's findings very seriously and are implementing measures that will improve screening effectiveness at checkpoints," Pekoske said. "We are focused on staying ahead of a dynamic threat to aviation with continued investment in the workforce, enhanced procedures and new technologies." ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
/ Updated By Tom Costello and Phil Helsel
Undercover tests have found Transportation Security Administration screeners failed to detect test weapons at a high rate, according to sources, findings that one Congressional committee chairman called "disturbing."
Members of the House Committee on Homeland Security were given details about security vulnerabilities by Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the TSA administrator in a classified briefing on Wednesday.
"Quite frankly, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we found that briefing disturbing," Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said at a hearing following the briefing.
The rate of failure was not disclosed at the public meeting, but congressional and government sources with knowledge of the report said it was high.
"We take the OIG's findings very seriously and are implementing measures that will improve screening effectiveness at checkpoints," TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a statement.
"We are focused on staying ahead of a dynamic threat to aviation with continued investment in the workforce, enhanced procedures, and new technologies," Pekoske, who was just sworn in this August, said in the statement.
The TSA said in the statement that the classified briefing was “to discuss the results of the most recent OIG covert testing at airport security checkpoints."
In 2015, the then-acting head of the TSA, Melvin Carraway, was reassigned after an internal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security found sceening failures at dozens of the nation's busiest airports.
Screeners did not detect 95 percent of test items in that investigation. The breaches allowed undercover investigators to smuggle weapons, fake explosives and other contraband through numerous checkpoints.
The briefing and committee hearing on Wednesday came nine days after a terrorist attack in New York City involving a truck left eight people dead. The suspect allegedly told investigators he was motivated by videos from the terror group Islamic State.
McCaul called America’s aviation sector the "crown jewel of terrorist targets" and said, "America’s enemies only have to be right once, while we have to be right 100 percent."
Pekoske told Congressional members that the agency is prototyping two CT scan systems at checkpoints right now — the devices are already used for checked bags — that could give screeners greater ability to identify suspicious substances. He said the devices would be a "significant enhancement" over devices currently used at checkpoints.
Passengers load their items into bins to be scanned as they pass through security at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on December 18, 2015 in Fort Lauderdale. File Wilfredo Lee / AP
The devices have been used for checked bags but not checkpoints because they were too large and heavy for checkpoints until recently, Pekoske said. The prototype systems are in Phoenix and Boston, he said.
Pekoske said that "to invest in the CT technology requires funding above what TSA currently has," but the agency wasn't on the path to CT development at checkpoints when the budget was developed, so the program wasn't reviewed for investment.
Committee member Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., noted that $1.28 billion, being charged to the public through surcharges, is being taken away for deficit reduction.
"Certainly, additional investment would make travelers, whether they’re Americans or people visiting our country, safer," Pekoske said.
Pekoske also acknowledged that poor morale at the TSA continues to be a challenge. Ranking committee member Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said at the hearing that it "has consistently struggled with low morale across the workforce, ranking 303 out of 305 government agencies in 2016." ||||| An undercover operation has revealed that Transportation Security Administration screenings at airports fail for the most part.
Homeland Security investigators found that, more than 70 percent of the time, undercover officers were able to get through TSA checkpoints with mock knives, guns and explosives, the House Homeland Security Committee was told Wednesday. Just two years ago, testing found a 95 percent failure rate, reports CBS News correspondent Kris Van Cleave.
"We found that briefing disturbing," said Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
The DHS Office of Inspector General made eight classified recommendations based on the undercover operation. In a statement, the TSA said it took the "OIG findings very seriously and are implementing measures that will improve screening effectiveness at checkpoints."
Both members of Congress and the TSA support replacing old check point scanners with new CT scanners like the ones we were first to show you back in March.
"In this system, we use high power algorithms to detect explosives," said Mark Laustra of Analogic, a company developing the technology.
TSA administrator David Pekoske told Congress the CT technology is the most effective way to keep passengers safe, but the cost is a major hurdle.
"To invest in the CT technology requires funding above what TSA currently has," Pekoske said.
Frank Cilluffo, a former director of the Homeland Security advisory council, said as long as terrorists target airports, the TSA cannot be complacent.
"They're looking for vulnerabilities that can be exploited, and we need to make sure that we can push that as far as we can to minimize the risk," Cilluffo said.
The TSA launched a pilot program this summer with those CT scanners, a year behind schedule, announcing last week an additional $4 million investment in the technology. American Airlines even bought some of the machines to speed up their limited deployment. ||||| | – An alarming new report weeks before the busiest air travel days of the year finds that TSA agents at airport checkpoints miss test weapons, explosives, and other contraband items most of the time. During an undercover operation, Department of Homeland Security inspectors "identified vulnerabilities with TSA's screener performance, screening equipment, and associated procedures," DHS says in a statement. While the specific findings are classified, CBS News reports the failure rate is more than 70%, while a source tells ABC News that 80% is "in the ballpark." That means the TSA has only improved slightly from its 95% failure rate in 2015, which led to a host of changes at the agency, including a new training academy for agents. "America's enemies only have to be right once, while we have to be right 100%," said Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, after he was briefed on the "disturbing" report Wednesday, per NBC News. After vowing to adopt eight undisclosed recommendations laid out in the report, TSA administrator David Pekoske responded that CT scan systems used for checked bags would provide a "significant enhancement" at checkpoints. He added, however, that the funding isn't there. "We have the technology and resources to do it but we're not doing it because ... we're paying for a wall," countered Rep. William Keating, a Democrat, who says that $1.28 billion in ticket surcharges is being diverted away from the TSA to pay the national debt. |
Read the text here.
UPDATED: The 153-page bill makes a number of changes to the Senate bill. The highlights:
--Increases the tax credits for middle-income families who buy insurance.
--Reduces the penalty for not buying insurance from $750 to $695. But the bill also requires some people to pay a share of their income as a penalty and that number was raised from 2 percent to 2.5 percent.
--It closes the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage by 2011 and gives seniors who fall into the gap this year a $250 rebate.
--It eliminates the Cornhusker Kickback and covers 100 percent of the increased Medicaid costs of all states until 2016 and decreases each year thereafter.
--Requires that doctors that care for Medicaid patients be reimbursed at the full rate.
--Spends $250 million to fight waste, fraud and abuse.
--Delays and blunts the tax on high-end insurance plans in keeping with the deal Democrats struck with the labor unions. However, it does lower the index at which plans will be taxed, making it likely that more plans will be affected over time.
--Imposes a Medicare tax on unearned income for families making more than $250,000.
--Includes student loan reform.
Full summary after the jump.
Sec. 1001. Affordability. Improves the financing for premiums and cost sharing for individuals with incomes up to 400% of the federal poverty level. Subsection (a) improves tax credits to make premiums more affordable as a percent of income; and subsection (b) improves support for cost sharing, focusing on those with incomes below 250% of the federal poverty level. Starting in 2019, constrains the growth in tax credits if premiums are growing faster than the consumer price index, unless spending is more than 10% below current CBO projections.
Sec. 1002. Individual responsibility. Modifies the assessment that individuals who choose to remain uninsured pay in three ways: (a) exempts the income below the filing threshold, (b) lowers the flat payment from $495 to $325 in 2015 and from $750 to $695 in 2016 and (c) raises the percent of income that is an alternative payment amount from 0.5 to 1.0% in 2014, 1.0 to 2.0% in 2015, and 2.0 to 2.5% for 2016 and subsequent years to make the assessment more progressive.
Sec. 1003. Employer responsibility. Improves the transition to the employer responsibility policy for employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers (FTE) by subtracting the first 30 full time employees from the payment calculation (e.g., a firm with 51 workers that does not offer coverage will pay an amount equal to 51 minus 30, or 21 times the applicable per employee payment amount). The provision also changes the applicable payment amount for firms with more than 50 FTEs that do not offer coverage to $2,000 per full-time employee. It also eliminates the assessment for workers in a waiting period, while maintaining the 90-day limit on the length of any waiting period beginning in 2014.
Sec. 1004. Income definitions. Modifies the definition of income that is used for purposes of subsidy eligibility and the individual responsibility requirement. The modifications conform the income definition to information that is currently reported on the Form 1040 and to the present law income tax return filing thresholds. The provision also extends the exclusion from gross income for employer provided health coverage for adult children up to age 26.
Sec. 1005. Implementation funding. Provides $1 billion to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to finance the administrative costs of implementing health insurance reform.
Subtitle B – Medicare
Sec. 1101. Closing the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole”. Provides a $250 rebate for all Medicare Part D enrollees who enter the donut hole in 2010. Builds on pharmaceutical manufacturers' 50% discount on brand-name drugs beginning in 2011 to completely close the donut hole with 75% discounts on brand-name and generic drugs by 2020.
Sec. 1102. Medicare Advantage payments. Freezes Medicare Advantage payments in 2011. Beginning in 2012, the provision reduces Medicare Advantage benchmarks relative to current levels. Benchmarks will vary from 95% of Medicare spending in high-cost areas to 115% of Medicare spending in low-cost areas. The changes will be phased-in over 3, 5 or 7 years, depending on the level of payment reductions. The provision creates an incentive system to increase payments to high-quality plans by at least 5%. It also extends CMS authority to adjust risk scores in Medicare Advantage for observed differences in coding patterns relative to fee-for?service.
Sec. 1103. Savings from limits on MA plan administrative costs. Ensures Medicare Advantage plans spend at least 85% of revenue on medical costs or activities that improve quality of care, rather than profit and overhead.
Sec. 1104. Disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments. Advances Medicare disproportionate share hospital cuts to begin in fiscal year 2014 but lowers the ten-year reduction by $3 billion.
Sec. 1105. Market basket updates. Revises the hospital market basket reduction that is in addition to the productivity adjustment as follows: -0.3 in FY14 and -0.75 in FY17, FY18 and FY19. Removes Senate provision that eliminates the additional market basket for hospitals based on coverage levels. Providers affected are inpatient hospitals, long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, psychiatric hospitals and outpatient hospitals.
Sec. 1106. Physician ownership-referral. Changes to December 31, 2010 the date after which physician ownership of hospitals to which they self refer is prohibited and provides a limited exception to the growth restrictions for grandfathered physician owned hospitals that treat the highest percentage of Medicaid patients in their county (and are not the sole hospital in a county).
Sec. 1107. Payment for Imaging Services. Sets the assumed utilization rate at 75 percent for the practice expense portion of advanced diagnostic imaging services.
Subtitle C – Medicaid
Sec. 1201. Federal funding for States. Strikes the provision for a permanent 100% federal matching rate for Nebraska for the Medicaid costs of newly eligible individuals. Provides federal Medicaid matching payments for the costs of services to newly eligible individuals at the following rates in all states except expansion states: 100% in 2014, 2015, and 2016; 95% in 2017; 94% in 2018; 93% in 2019; and 90% thereafter. In the case of expansion states, reduces the state share of the costs of covering nonpregnant childless adults by 50% in 2014, 60% in 2015, 70% in 2016, 80% in 2017, 90% in 2018. In 2019 and thereafter, expansion states would bear the same state share of the costs of covering nonpregnant childless adults as non-expansion states (e.g., 7% in 2019, 10% thereafter).
Sec. 1202. Payments to primary care physicians. Requires that Medicaid payment rates to primary care physicians for furnishing primary care services be no less than 100% of Medicare payment rates in 2013 and 2014 (the first year of the Senate bill’s Medicaid coverage expansion to all individuals with incomes under 133% of poverty). Provides 100% federal funding for the incremental costs to States of meeting this requirement.
Sec. 1203. Disproportionate share hospital payments. Lowers the reduction in federal Medicaid DSH payments from $18.1 billion to $14.1 billion and advances the reductions to begin in fiscal year 2014. Directs the Secretary to develop a methodology for reducing federal DSH allotments to all states in order to achieve the mandated reductions. Extends through FY 2013 the federal DSH allotment for a state that has a $0 allotment after FY 2011.
Sec. 1204. Funding for the territories. Increases federal funding in the Senate bill for Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas Islands by $2 billion. Raises the caps on federal Medicaid funding for each of the territories. Allows each territory to elect to operate a Health Benefits Exchange.
Sec. 1205. Delay in Community First Choice Option. Postpones from October 1, 2010 until October 1, 2011 the effective date of the option established for State Medicaid programs to cover attendant care services and supports for individuals who require an institutional level of care
Sec. 1206. Drug rebates for new formulations of existing drugs. For purposes of applying the additional rebate, narrows the definition of a new formulation of a drug to a line extension of a single source or innovator multiple source drug that is an oral solid dosage form of the drug.
Subtitle D – Reducing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
Sec. 1301. Community Mental Health Centers. Establishes new requirements for community mental health centers that provide Medicare partial hospitalization services in order to prevent fraud and abuse.
Sec. 1302. Medicare prepayment medical review limitations. Streamlines procedures to conduct Medicare prepayment reviews to facilitate additional reviews designed to reduce fraud and abuse.
Sec. 1303. CMS-IRS data match to identify fraudulent providers. Allows the Secretary of Treasury to share IRS data with HHS employees to help screen and identify fraudulent providers or providers with tax debts, and to help recover such debts. Provides strict controls on the use of such information to protect taxpayer privacy.
Sec. 1304. Funding to fight fraud, waste and abuse. Increases funding for the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Fund by $250 million over the next decade. Indexes funds to fight Medicaid fraud based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index.
Sec. 1305. 90-day period of enhanced oversight for initial claims of DME suppliers. Requires a 90-day period to withhold payment and conduct enhanced oversight in cases where the HHS Secretary identifies a significant risk of fraud among DME suppliers.
Subtitle E – Revenues
Sec. 1401. High-cost plan excise tax. Reduces the revenue collected by the tax by 80 percent. This is achieved by: delaying the application of the tax until 2018, which gives the plans time to implement and realize the cost savings of reform; increasing the dollar thresholds to $10,200 for single coverage and $27,500 for family coverage ($11,850 and $30,950 for retirees and employees in high risk professions); excluding stand-alone dental and vision plans from the tax; and permitting an employer to reduce the cost of the coverage when applying the tax if the employer’s age and gender demographics are not representative of the age and gender demographics of a national risk pool. Under the modified provision, the dollar thresholds are indexed to inflation and the dollar thresholds are automatically increased in 2018 if CBO is wrong in its forecast of the premium inflation rate between now and 2018.
Sec. 1402. Medicare tax. Modifies the tax to include net investment income in the taxable base. Currently, the Medicare tax does not apply to net investment income. The Medicare tax on net investment income does not apply if modified adjusted gross income is less than $250,000 in the case of a joint return, or $200,000 in the case of a single return. Net investment income is interest, dividends, royalties, rents, gross income from a trade or business involving passive activities, and net gain from disposition of property (other than property held in a trade or business). Net investment income is reduced by properly allocable deductions to such income.
Sec. 1403. Delay of the annual limitation on contributions to a health FSA. Delays the provision by two years until 2013.
Sec. 1404. Brand name pharmaceuticals. Delays the industry fee on sales of brand name pharmaceuticals for use in government health programs by one year to 2011, and increases revenue raised by the fee by $4.8 billion.
Sec. 1405. Excise tax on medical device manufacturers. Delays the tax by two years to 2013 and converts the industry fee to an excise tax on the first sale for use of medical devices at a rate of 2.9 percent. Exempts from the tax Class I medical devices, eyeglasses, contact lenses, hearing aids, and any device of a type that is generally purchased by the public at retail for individual use.
Sec. 1406. Health insurance providers. Delays the industry fee by 3 years to 2014 and modifies the annual industry fee for revenue neutrality. In the case of tax-exempt insurance providers, provides that only 50 percent of their net premiums that relate to their tax-exempt status are taken into account in calculating the fee. Provides exemptions for voluntary employee benefit associations (VEBAs) and nonprofit providers more than 80 percent of whose revenues is received from Social Security Act programs that target low income, elderly, or disabled populations.
Sec. 1407. Delay of elimination of deduction for expenses allocable to Medicare part D subsidy. Delays the provision by two years to 2013.
Sec. 1408. Elimination of unintended application of cellulosic biofuel producer credit. Adds an additional revenue provision. In 2008, Congress enacted a $1.01 per gallon tax credit for the production of biofuel from cellulosic feedstocks in order to encourage the development of new production capacity for biofuels that are not derived from food source materials. Congress is aware that some taxpayers are seeking to claim the cellulosic biofuel tax credit for unprocessed fuels, such as black liquor. The provision would limit eligibility for the tax credit to processed fuels (i.e., fuels that could be used in a car engine or in a home heating application).
Sec. 1409. Codification of economic substance doctrine and penalties. Adds an additional revenue provision. The economic substance doctrine is a judicial doctrine that has been used by the courts to deny tax benefits when the transaction generating these tax benefits lacks economic substance. The courts have not applied the economic substance doctrine uniformly. The provision would clarify the manner in which the economic substance doctrine should be applied by the courts and would impose a penalty on understatements attributable to a transaction lacking economic substance.
Sec. 1410. Time for payment of corporate estimated taxes. Provides for a one-time adjustment to corporate estimated taxes for payments made during calendar year 2014.
Sec. 1411. No impact on Social Security trust funds. Provides that Title II of the Social Security Act (the old age, survivor, and disability benefits program (OASDI)) is not amended or modified by the bill.
Subtitle F – Other Provisions
Sec. 1501. TAA for communities. Appropriates $500 Million a year for fiscal years 2010 through 2014 in the Community College and Career Training Grant program for community colleges to develop and improve educational or career training programs. Ensures that each state receives at least 0.5 percent of the total funds appropriated.
Title II – Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Subtitle A – Education
Section 2001. Short Title; References. Provides that this subtitle may be cited as the “SAFRA Act,” and that, except as otherwise provided, whenever an amendment to, or repeal of, a section or other provision, the reference shall be considered to be made to a section or other provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
Part I—Investing in Students and Families
Section 2101. Federal Pell Grants. Amends the Higher Education Act to include mandatory funding for the Pell Grant. This provides additional mandatory funding to augment funds appropriated to increase the federal maximum Pell Grant award by the change in the Consumer Price Index. The mandatory component of the funding is determined by inflating the previous year’s total and subtracting the maximum award provided for in the appropriations act for the previous year or $4860, whichever is greater. Beginning in the 2018-2019 academic year, the maximum Pell award will be at the 2017-2018 level.
Section 2102. Student Financial Assistance. This section provides $13.5 billion in mandatory appropriations to the Federal Pell Grant program.
Section 2103. College Access Challenge Grant Program. This section amends section 786 of the Higher Education Act by authorizing and appropriating $150 million for fiscal years 2010 through 2014 for the College Access Challenge Grant program created under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007. Provides that the allotment for each State under this section for a fiscal year shall not be an amount that is less than 1.0 percent of the total amount appropriated for a fiscal year.
Section 2104. Investment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions. This section amends section 371(b) of the Higher Education Act by extending funding for programs under this section created under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 for programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and minority-serving institutions through 2019, including programs that help low-income students attain degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering or mathematics by the following annual amounts: $100 million to Hispanic Serving Institutions, $85 million to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, $15 million to Predominantly Black Institutions, $30 million to Tribal Colleges and Universities, $15 million to Alaska, Hawaiian Native Institutions, $5 million to Asian American and Pacific Islander Institutions, and $5 million to Native American non-tribal serving institutions.
Part II—Student Loan Reform
Section 2201. Termination of Federal Family Education Loan Appropriations. This section terminates the authority to make or insure any additional loans in the Federal Family Education Loan program after June 30, 2010.
Section 2202. Termination of Federal loan Insurance Program. This section is a conforming amendment with regard to the termination of the FFEL program, limiting Federal insurance to those loans in the Federal Family Education Loan program for loans first disbursed prior to July 1, 2010.
Section 2203. Termination of Applicable Interest Rates. This section makes a conforming amendment with regard to the termination of the FFEL program limiting interest rate applicability to Stafford, Consolidation, and PLUS loans to those loans made before July 1, 2010.
Section 2204. Termination of Federal payments to Reduce Student Interest Costs. This section makes a conforming amendment with regard to the termination of the FFEL program by limiting subsidy payments to lenders for those loans for which the first disbursement is made before July 1, 2010.
Section 2205. Termination of FFEL PLUS Loans. This section makes a conforming change with regard to the termination of the FFEL program for federal PLUS loans by prohibiting further FFEL origination of loans after July 1, 2010.
Section 2206. Federal Consolidation Loans. This section makes conforming changes with regard to the termination of the FFEL program for federal consolidation loans. This section also provides that, for a 1 year period, borrowers who have loans under both the Direct Lending program and the FFEL program, or who have loans under either program as well as loans that have been sold to the Secretary, may consolidate such loans under the Direct Lending program regardless of whether such borrowers have entered repayment on such loans.
Section 2207. Termination of Unsubsidized Stafford loans for Middle-Income Borrowers. This section makes conforming changes with regard to the termination of the FFEL program for Unsubsidized Stafford loans by prohibiting further FFEL origination of loans after July 1, 2010.
Section 2208. Termination of Special Allowances. This section makes conforming changes with regard to the termination of the FFEL program by limiting special allowance payments to lenders under the FFEL program to loans first disbursed before July 1, 2010.
Section 2209. Origination of Direct Loans at Institutions Outside the United States. This section provides for the origination of federal Direct Loans at institutions located outside of the United States, through a financial institution designated by the Secretary.
Section 2210. Conforming amendments. This section makes conforming technical changes with regard to the termination of the FFEL program for Department of Education agreements with Direct Lending institutions.
Section 2211. Terms and Conditions of Loans. This section makes conforming technical changes with regard to the termination of the FFEL program to clarify the terms and conditions of Direct Loans.
Section 2212. Contracts. This section directs the Secretary to award contracts for servicing federal Direct Loans to eligible non-profit servicers. In addition, this section provides that for the first 100,000 borrower loan accounts, the Secretary shall establish a separate pricing tier. Specifies that the Secretary is to allocate the loan accounts of 100,000 borrowers to each eligible non-profit servicer. The section also permits the Secretary to reallocate, increase, reduce or terminate an eligible non-profit servicer’s allocation based on the performance of such servicer. In addition, this section appropriates mandatory funds to the Secretary to be obligated for administrative costs of servicing contracts with eligible non-profit servicers. This section also requires the Secretary to provide technical assistance to institutions of higher education participating or seeking to participate in the Direct Lending program. This section appropriates $50 million for fiscal year 2010 to pay for this technical assistance. Additionally, this section authorizes the Secretary to provide payments to loan servicers for retaining jobs at location in the United States where such servicers were operating on January 1, 2010. This section appropriates $25,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2010 and 2011 for such purpose.
Section 2213. Agreements with State-Owned Banks. This section amends Part D of Title IV to direct the Secretary to enter into an agreement with an eligible lender for the purpose of providing Federal loan insurance on student loans made by state-owned banks.
Section 2214. Income-Based Repayment. The section amends the Income-Based Repayment program to cap student loan payments for new borrowers after July 1, 2014 to 10% of adjusted income, from 15% percent, and to forgive remaining balances after 20 years of repayment, from 25 years.
Subtitle B – Health
Sec. 2301. Insurance Reforms. Extends the prohibition of lifetime limits, prohibition on rescissions, limitations on excessive waiting periods, and a requirement to provide coverage for non-dependent children up to age 26 to all existing health insurance plans starting six months after enactment. For group health plans, prohibits pre-existing condition exclusions in 2014, restricts annual limits beginning six months after enactment, and prohibits them starting in 2014. For coverage of non-dependent children prior to 2014, the requirement on group health plans is limited to those adult children without an employer offer of coverage.
Sec. 2302. Drugs Purchased by Covered Entities. Repeals the underlying 340B expansion to inpatient drugs and exemptions to GPO exclusion. Exempts orphan drugs from required discounts for new 340B entities.
Sec. 2303. Community Health Centers. Increases mandatory funding for community health centers to $11 billion over five years (FY 2011 – FY 2015).
Prepared by Committees on Ways & Means, Energy & Commerce, and Education & Labor, March 18, 2010
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permalink ||||| Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible. Properties of this collection. It has been several years since the last time we did this. For this collection, several things were done: 1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random other collections, is a complex problem. 2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections. ||||| WASHINGTON — House Democrats initiated a 72-hour countdown Thursday on their yearlong effort to overhaul the health care system, unveiling a nearly final version of the legislation that promptly won additional support with a promise that the bill would more than pay for itself over the next decade.
Armed with detailed legislative language and a report on the bill’s costs from the Congressional Budget Office, Democratic leaders and White House officials kicked off a new round of arm-twisting to line up the votes they will need to pass the legislation when it comes to the House floor in the face of intense Republican opposition on Sunday.
House Democratic leaders were still struggling Thursday to lock in the 216 votes they need to pass the bill. They are believed to be at least a half-dozen votes short, but say they are confident they can secure the needed votes.
With the fate of his top domestic priority still up in the air, President Obama postponed a foreign trip that he had been scheduled to start Sunday to be on hand for the final House vote and a subsequent round of voting that would begin in the Senate next week to complete work on the bill.
The legislation’s chances seemed to be improved by the budget office report, which estimated that it would reduce projected federal budget deficits by $138 billion over the next decade, with additional tax revenue and Medicare savings. Many of the House Democrats who have continued to waver over the bill had been concerned about its long-term costs. The bill would provide insurance coverage to most of the uninsured, put new restrictions on insurers and seek to lower rising health care costs.
The version of the bill unveiled on Thursday is based on the bill passed by the Senate in December, but it incorporates a package of changes that would address concerns raised by House Democrats. Under the timetable outlined by Democratic leaders, the House on Sunday would pass the Senate bill and then immediately approve a package of changes. If signed by Mr. Obama, the first bill would become the law of the land, but the second one would go to the Senate, where it could be approved by a simple majority, using a procedure intended to avoid the threat of Republican filibuster.
Representative Bart Gordon, Democrat of Tennessee, cited the deficit-reduction figure in announcing Thursday that he would switch his vote and support the new bill. Mr. Gordon, a member of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, voted against the House bill in November.
Another Blue Dog Democrat who voted no in November, Representative Betsy Markey of Colorado, said she too would support the new measure.
But a few House Democrats, including Representatives Michael Arcuri of New York and Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, said they were moving in the opposite direction.
Mr. Arcuri, who supported the bill in November, said he would vote against the new package because it did not do enough to lower insurance costs.
Mr. Lynch issued a statement saying he was opposed to the Senate bill — and to a plan being considered by Democratic leaders to pass it without explicitly voting for it. The House should take “a straightforward up-or-down vote on a bill of this magnitude,” he said.
The No. 3 Democrat in the House, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, said, “We are absolutely giddy” over the report from the budget office.
Republicans minimized the significance of the latest cost estimate, deriding the 10-year budget savings as paltry compared with what they called the staggering scale of the government’s debt.
Democrats see no prospect of obtaining any Republican votes for the bill, a top priority for Mr. Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
“Passage of health care reform is of paramount importance, and the president is determined to see this battle through,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said in announcing that Mr. Obama had postponed until June his plan to travel to Indonesia and Australia.
Officials said that Senate leaders would spend Friday conferring with the Senate parliamentarian over the specific legislative language to determine if any provisions may be struck out for failing to meet the requirements of the complex process being used to alter the Senate bill, known as budget reconciliation.
Senior House Democratic aides said the decisions by the Senate parliamentarian could result in a final package of amendments, in the hope that the House could approve a bill on Sunday that would not require any further changes in the Senate.
Under the bill, the budget office said, the federal government would spend $940 billion over the next 10 years to provide coverage to 32 million people who would otherwise be uninsured.
The price tag, though higher than $875 billion cost of the Senate bill, is lower than the limit of $950 billion suggested by Mr. Obama.
The cost of the bill results from a significant expansion of Medicaid, to cover 16 million more low-income people, and the payment of federal subsidies to help moderate-income people buy health insurance on their own.
House Democrats said they had reduced the impact of a proposed tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans. White House officials have described the tax, included in the Senate bill, as a way to slow the growth of health spending.
Labor unions dislike the tax, but the A.F.L.-C.I.O. endorsed the overall legislation on Thursday.
Richard L. Trumka, the group’s president, said unions would “do everything we can” to lobby Congress on the bill.
Under the Senate bill, the tax on high-cost health plans would have raised $149 billion over 10 years. The new legislation delays and reduces the tax, slashing expected revenues to $32 billion.
Democrats would make up for some of the lost revenue by increasing the Medicare payroll tax and extending it to capital gains, dividends, interest and other “unearned income” of people with adjusted gross incomes over $250,000 for married couples and $200,000 for individuals.
The new Medicare tax would raise $210 billion over 10 years, more than twice as much as the $87 billion generated by the comparable provision of the Senate bill, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Fees and taxes under the new bill would total $438 billion over 10 years, up from $399 billion in the Senate bill.
Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, said he decided to vote for the health care bill on Thursday after receiving assurances from Mr. Obama that the White House would press forward with an immigration overhaul this year.
“I feel that what I have from the White House is a commitment to bring more enthusiasm, to make it a great priority to get immigration reform done this year,” said Mr. Gutierrez, who voted for the House bill in November but was noncommittal in recent days.
Ms. Pelosi said she was ready for a fierce fight. Insurance companies “will do anything to stop this legislation,” she said, asserting, “They have made a fortune off of the misfortune of the American people.”
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the new legislation was “worse than the Senate bill.” Republicans said the new numbers should not provide any comfort to people worried about the deficit. In the first decade, they said, the picture is too rosy because many of the taxes and fees would start immediately, while the major costs would not show up for several years. ||||| | – The last piece of the puzzle is in place for this weekend's vote on health care reform: The House Rules Committee has posted the reconciliation bill online. Politico has the pdf here. The House is on track for a final vote sometime Sunday afternoon, with Democrats "giddy" over today's CBO analysis saying it would cut budget deficits by $138 billion over 10 years, notes the New York Times. Politico rounds up some changes from the Senate bill: Raises tax credits for middle-income families who buy insurance. Cuts the penalty for not buying insurance from $750 to $695. "Closes the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage by 2011 and gives seniors who fall into the gap this year a $250 rebate." Covers increased Medicaid costs of all states until 2016. |
Watching a mama bear save her cub from a B.C. highway is one claws encounter Ricky Forbes won’t soon forget.
Forbes was driving through Kootenay National Park on Saturday afternoon when he saw a young black bear trapped on the road.
“We pulled over the car and we could see the cub on the side of the highway. It was screaming,” said Forbes, a driver for TornadoHunter.com.
Forbes started filming the cub, which was stuck behind an im-paws-ibly tall concerete barrier.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the mama bear to poke her head over and rescue her young – after taking the necessary precautions, of course.
“It looked like the bear looked both ways first,” said Forbes.
In the footage, the mama bear can be seen dipping down and grabbing the cub by its scruff then yanking it over the barrier as another cub pops its head up to peek at the action.
The incredible moment has already been picked up by media across North America and even in the U.K. ||||| Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain. ||||| | – A tornado hunter driving through British Columbia's Kootenay National Park stopped to film a bear cub by the side of a highway—and captured the moment its mother hauled it to safety. Ricky Forbes says the bear cub was trapped on the wrong side of a concrete barrier and was screaming as cars went by, CTV reports. The mother bear can be seen looking both ways before pulling the cub up by its neck as another curious cub looks on. "It was a very amazing sight to see," he tells the Telegraph. (In Alaska, another mother bear was apparently trying to protect her cubs when she mauled a jogger, who then walked two miles for help.) |
One by one, the infants and children slipped away on Thursday night, their parents watching helplessly as oxygen supplies at the government hospital ran dangerously low.
At least 30 children died on Thursday and into Friday at a hospital in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after its supply of liquid oxygen was disrupted over an unpaid bill, officials said. A home ministry spokesman told the Press Trust of India, citing police reports, that 21 of the deaths were directly linked to a shortage of oxygen.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene between 11pm and 2am as medical practitioners and relatives - the tanks running dry - handed out manual resuscitator bags to families in a desperate attempt to save the young patients.
"We saw children dying around us," said the father of one victim, who gave his name only as Vijay. "Obviously, it's the hospital's fault. So many children have died because of them. My son was fine until nighttime, then something wrong happened."
Two more children died Saturday at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College hospital in Gorakhpur, an impoverished area in the eastern part of the state, as authorities scrambled to firm up supplementary supplies and investigate the tragedy. The government suspended the medical college principal on Saturday.
The state's Health Minister and hospital officials have denied charges that the deaths were caused by the oxygen bill dispute. An estimated 60 children have died at the hospital since 7 August from a variety of causes, officials said.
In a news conference on Saturday, the state's Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, called the tragedy despicable and said the state had set up a committee to investigate the role of the oxygen vendor.
"The guilty will not be spared," Adityanath said.
Parents of the victims described feelings of anger and bewilderment over the incident, saying they were struggling with guilt over not being able to save their children.
"The idea is devastating - that she had to suffer while trying to breathe," said Manger Rajbhar, the father of a five-day-old girl who died in the chaos.
The deaths provoked widespread outrage and condemnation across the political spectrum and on social media, where a political cartoon spread that showed the babies as little angels hovering in the sky as an Indian government official tries to reach them.
"30 kids died in hospital without oxygen. This is not a tragedy. It's a massacre," Indian Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi, a child advocate, said in a tweet. "Is this what 70 years of freedom means for our children?" (The country is set to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its independence from Britain on Tuesday.)
30 kids died in hospital without oxygen. This is not a tragedy. It's a massacre. Is this what 70 years of freedom means for our children? — Kailash Satyarthi (@k_satyarthi) August 11, 2017
The hospital owed $89,750 to a Lucknow-based medical supply company called Pushpa Sales Private Limited, documents obtained by The Washington Post show, and the firm had written letters to the hospital and district magistrate for the past six months demanding payment. The company asserted that the hospital was violating the terms of its contract by running a balance of more than $15,625. The agreement expired on 31 July, and Pushpa discontinued the oxygen supply on 4 August.
On Thursday, employees who handled the storage plant that pipes the oxygen wrote to the hospital's chief medical officer to warn him that supplies were low and would last only until Thursday evening, according to a letter obtained by the news channel NDTV. The oxygen supply then dipped to a critical level, the channel said.
State officials claimed they had obtained sufficient backup supplies from nearby nursing homes.
The hospital is in Adityanath's parliamentary constituency. The controversial monk, who was tapped by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party to head Uttar Pradesh earlier this year, is the longtime head of a large temple there.
Adityanath had visited the hospital this week to inaugurate a new critical-care unit. Many of the young patients were suffering from encephalitis, a potentially deadly illness that causes acute swelling of the brain. The disease is often spread by mosquitoes, and infections rise during the monsoon season.
World news in pictures
50 show all World news in pictures
1/50 26 April 2018 Women hold portraits of their relatives, who are victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during a commemoration ceremony in Kiev, Ukraine. Reuters
2/50 25 April 2018 Rohingya refugees gather in the "no man's land" behind Myanmar's boder lined with barb wire fences in Maungdaw district, Rakhine state bounded by Bangladesh. Myanmar government said on April 15, it repatriated on April 14 the first family of Rohingya out of some 700,000 refugees who have fled a brutal military campaign, a move slammed by a rights group as a PR stunt ignoring UN warnings that a safe return is not yet possible. AFP/Getty
3/50 24 April 2018 President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, first lady Melania Trump and Brigitte Macron hold hands on the White House balcony during a State Arrival Ceremony in Washington. AP
4/50 23 April 2018 A boy walks on a pile of garbage covering a drain in New Delhi. Reuters
5/50 22 April 2018 Newly ordained priests lie on the floor as Pope Francis leads a mass in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. REUTERS
6/50 21 April 2018 South Koreans cheer during the welcoming event for the inter-Korean summit between South Korea and North Korea in Seoul. The inter-Korean summit is scheduled on April 27, 2018 at the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom, agreed by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un. Getty
7/50 20 April 2018 A Palestinian slings a shot by burning tires on the Israel-Gaza border, following a demonstration calling for the right to return. Palestinian refugees either fled or were expelled from what is now the state of Israel during the 1948 war. AFP/Getty
8/50 19 April 2018 Outgoing Cuban President Raul Castro raising the arm of Cuba's new President Miguel Diaz-Canel after he was formally named by the National Assembly, in Havana. A historic handover ending six decades of rule by the Castro brothers. The 57-year-old Diaz-Canel, who was the only candidate for the presidency, was elected to a five-year term with 603 out of 604 possible votes in the National Assembly. AFP/Getty/www.cubadebate.cu
9/50 18 April 2018 Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announces early presidential and parliamentary elections for June 24, 2018, at the Presidential Palace, in Ankara. Erdogan announced the snap elections, originally scheduled for November 2019, in a move that will usher in a new political system increasing the powers of the president. He said the new system needed to be implemented quickly in order to deal with a slew of challenges ahead, including Turkey's fight against Kurdish insurgents in Syria and Iraq. AP
10/50 17 April 2018 European lawmakers raise placards reading "Stop the War in Syria" in protest against airstrikes launched by the US, Britain and France in Syria last week criticizing the legitimacy of the operation, as French President Emmanuel Macron delivers his speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Macron is expected to outline his vision for the future of Europe to push for deep reforms of the 19-nation eurozone and will launch a drive to seek European citizens' opinions on the European Union's future. AP
11/50 16 April 2018 People participate in a protest against the rape of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua near Jammu, and a teenager in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh state, in Bangalore, India Reuters
12/50 15 April 2018 Fireworks are set off as the final performance takes place during the Closing Ceremony for the 2018 Commonwealth Games. PA
13/50 14 April 2018 The wreckage of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre compound in the Barzeh district, north of Damascus, after the United States, UK and France launched strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime early on April 14 in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack after mulling military action for nearly a week. Syrian state news agency SANA reported several missiles hit a research centre in Barzeh, north of Damascus, "destroying a building that included scientific labs and a training centre" AFP/Getty
14/50 13 April 2018 Indian activists gather to show support for the chairperson of the Delhi Commission for Women Swati Maliwal, who is on a hunger strike against the alleged rapes in Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, in New Delhi, India. According to news reports Maliwal is sitting on hunger strike demanding that authorities take strict actions against the alleged rapists. EPA
15/50 12 April 2018 Shi'ite pilgrims carry a symbolic casket outside Imam Moussa al-Kadhim's shrine to mark the anniversary of his death in Baghdad, Iraq Reuters
16/50 11 April 2018 Seasonal winds washed tons of debris ashore at Matahari Terbit beach, near Sanur, Bali, Indonesia. Reuters
17/50 10 April 2018 Syrian onlookers gather around rescue teams clearing the rubble at the site of an explosion of unknown origin which wrecked a multi-storey building the previous night in the war-battered country's northwestern city of Idlib. The cause of the explosion in the jihadist-held city, which killed more than a ten people and wounded 80, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, was not immediately clear. AFP/Getty
18/50 9 April 2018 Protesters try to block French gendarmes during an evacuation operation in the zoned ZAD (Deferred Development Zone) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, near Nantes, France. Reuters
19/50 8 April 2018 Competitors cross the start line at the annual Pyongyang Marathon. AFP/Getty
20/50 7 April 2018 The body of journalist Yasser Murtaja, 31, is carried during his funeral in Gaza city. He was shot by Israeli troops while reporting on Palestinian protests on the Gaza-Israel border. Reuters
21/50 6 April 2018 Supporters of the former South African president Jacob Zuma rally prior to his appearance in the KwaZulu-Natal High Court on corruption charges in Durban. Zuma, 75, arrived to face corruption charges linked to a multi-billion dollar 1990s arms deal. The graft case against him was postponed until June 8 after a brief 15-minute hearing. AFP/Getty
22/50 5 April 2018 Palestinian protesters run during clashes with Israeli troops at Israel-Gaza border. Reuters
23/50 4 April 2018 Presidents Hassan Rouhani of Iran, Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Vladimir Putin of Russia pose before their meeting in Ankara. Reuters
24/50 3 April 2018 South African school children pause next to a portrait of the late South African anti-apartheid campaigner Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, wife of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, at her house in Soweto. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa paid tribute to Winnie, who died on April 2, saying that Nelson Mandela's former wife was a "voice of defiance" against white-minority rule. AFP/Getty
25/50 2 April 2018 Jewish priests and civilians take part in the Cohanim prayer during the Passover holiday at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. AFP/Getty
26/50 1 April 2018 Pope Francis greets the crowd at St Peter's square after the Easter Sunday Mass in the Vatican. Christians around the world are marking the Holy Week, commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, leading up to his resurrection on Easter. AFP/Getty
27/50 31 March 2018 Mourners hold back a relative of Palestinian Hamdan Abu Amshah, who was killed along the Israel border with Gaza, during his funeral in Beit Hanoun town. Reuters
28/50 30 March 2018 Israeli soldiers shot tear gas grenades towards the Palestinian tent city protest commemorating Land Day. The day marks the killing of six Arab Israelis during 1976 demonstrations against Israeli confiscations of Arab land. AFP/Getty
29/50 29 March 2018 An emotional Steve Smith is comforted by his father Peter as he fronts the media at Sydney International Airport. Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were flown back to Australia following investigations into alleged ball tampering in South Africa. Getty
30/50 28 March 2018 French gendarmes escort the coffin of the late Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame transported by car during a funeral procession leaving the Pantheon as part of a national tribute in Paris. The French President will lead a national commemoration to hostage-swap policeman Arnaud Beltrame killed in jihadist attack. AFP/Getty
31/50 27 March 2018 Russian President Vladimir Putin visits a memorial made for the victims of a fire in a multi-story shopping center in the Siberian city of Kemerovo. Officials say that the fire escapes were blocked and a PA system was turned off during the fire that killed over 50 people. Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
32/50 26 March 2018 At least 64 shoppers have been killed in fire at a shopping centre in Russia. A further 16 people were still missing after flames broke out at the four-storey Winter Cherry mall in the city of Kemerovo in Siberia, according to Russian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov. The fire was extinguished in the morning after burning through the night. Parts of the building were still smouldering and the floors of the cinema hall had caved in in places, another emergency official said. Russian Emergencies Ministry via Reuters
33/50 25 March 2018 Syrian civilians gathering for their evacuation from the town of Arbin in the Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, following a deal with the regime. The deal is expected to see some 7,000 people bussed from Arbin and Zamalka towns and the district of Jobar to a rebel-dominated part of northern Syria. AFP/Getty
34/50 24 March 2018 Students attend the ‘March For Our Lives’ in Washington. In the wake of the Florida attack, there has been a widespread effort to ban assault rifle. Getty
35/50 23 March 2018 Police at the scene of a hostage situation in a supermarket in Trebes. An armed man took hostages in a supermarket in southern France, killing three and injuring about a dozen others, police said. A French minister confirmed the gunman had been shot dead by police. Reuters
36/50 22 March 2018 A boy rows his boat in the polluted waters of the Brahmaputra river on World Water Day in Guwahati, India. Reuters
37/50 21 March 2018 Kosovo's opposition lawmakers release a teargas canister inside the country's parliament in before a vote for an agreement to ratify or not a border demarcation deal signed in 2015 with Montenegro. AFP/Getty
38/50 20 March 2018 People carrying luggage leave the Russian Embassy in London and board a van bearing diplomatic plates. Dozens of people including adults with children arrived at the Russian embassy in the morning and then left carrying luggage in vehicles bearing diplomatic registration plates. Britain last week announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats over the spy poisoning row, prompting a tit-for-tat response from Moscow. AFP/Getty
39/50 19 March 2018 The Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft is mounted on the launch pad at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan AFP/Getty
40/50 18 March 2018 President Vladimir Putin walks out of a voting booth at a polling station during Russia's presidential election in Moscow. AFP/Getty
41/50 17 March 2018 People take part in a pensioners protest to demand decent pensions in Barcelona. Thousands of people across the country took part in mass demonstrations called by main Spanish workers unions demanding rises of state pensions in accordance with the consumer price index AFP/Getty
42/50 16 March 2018 Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the Almazov National Medical Research Centre in Saint Petersburg. AFP/Getty
43/50 15 March 2018 Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow. Reuters
44/50 14 March 2018 German Chancellor Angela Merkel is sworn in by the President of the German lower house during the government's swearing-in ceremony at the Bundestag in Berlin. Merkel, head of the Christian Democratic Party CDU, starts her fourth term as German chancellor, capping months of political uncertainty as she bartered with her rivals of the SPD to help govern Europe's top economy in a "grand coalition". AFP/Getty
45/50 13 March 2018 Nepali students of University of Dhaka light candles in memory of the victims of the US-Bangla aircraft crash in Nepal, Bangladesh. Reuters
46/50 12 March 2018 Rescuers work to save passengers from a plane crash at Kathmandu airport in Nepal. AP
47/50 11 March 2018 French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron pose for photographs as they visit the Taj Mahal. AFP/Getty
48/50 10 March 2018 France’s far-right party Front National (FN) president Marine Le Pen applauds former US President advisor Steve Bannon after his speech during the Front National party annual congress, in Lille, northern France. AFP/Getty
49/50 9 March 2018 A television screen showing pictures of US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un at a railway station in Seoul. AFP
50/50 8 March 2018 Protesters form triangles with their hands during a demonstration for women’s rights in Bilbao, Spain. Reuters
Zahid Ali, the father of a five-year-old girl suffering from encephalitis, said he and other family members were still in shock after the death of his daughter Khushi on Friday night.
Ali said Khushi, who was running a high fever, had been admitted to the hospital's encephalitis ward Thursday. She was responding to treatment while on oxygen, he said, but her condition deteriorated as the cylinders ran dry that night.
Hospital staff gave the parents a manual resuscitator and asked them to pump it themselves, he said, and he watched in horror as his daughter first became breathless, then turned "stiff and cold."
"At that time, I understood that my daughter was gone, but doctors kept on telling me that she is still alive," he said. She was pronounced dead several hours later.
(C) The Washington Post ||||| A hospital in India has been accused of failing to provide enough oxygen after 60 children died on its wards in five days.
Baba Raghav Das Medical College said 34 babies died at the hospital's neo-natal intensive care unit, 12 died because of encephalitis, and the rest died of other unspecified causes.
Local media have claimed that some of the deaths were due to a shortage of oxygen which occurred after a supplier withdrew equipment as a result of unpaid bills.
Parents of at least 35 of the youngsters said that the oxygen supply to the children's ward ran out on Thursday night.
They said patients' families were given self-inflating bags to help the children breathe.
Mritunjaya Singh, whose seven-month-old son was at the hospital but was not among the dead, said: "That's the time when the death of the children peaked."
Image: Medical staff tending to children at the hospital
Parmatma Gautam, whose one-month-old nephew, Roshan, died, said the hospital and authorities were trying to cover up their failure to pay their bills on time.
"We saw our baby struggling to breathe and we couldn't do anything," Mr Gautam said.
District Magistrate Rajiv Rautela said on Saturday that the deaths of the children in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh state, were due to natural causes.
He denied that insufficient oxygen led to their deaths.
Kafeel Khan, a hospital doctor, also said the cause of death was not lack of oxygen.
Uttar Pradesh's government has ordered an investigation and a team of federal health ministry specialists has been sent to the hospital to verify what caused the deaths.
Prashant Trivedi, the state's top health official, admitted there has been a problem in the pipeline which supplied oxygen.
Image: A hospital doctor said the cause of death was not lack of oxygen
But he said it did not cause the children's deaths as there was a sufficient number of oxygen cylinders to ensure all the youngsters could be treated.
A team of specialists from the federal health ministry was sent to the hospital on Saturday to verify what caused the deaths.
Opposition leaders blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the state, accusing it of neglect and indifference.
The opposition Congress Party's Rahul Gandhi said on Twitter: "Deeply pained. My thoughts are with the families of the victims. BJP govt. is responsible & should punish the negligent who caused this tragedy."
Encephalitis is common in India, especially during the monsoon season, and outbreaks often claim hundreds of lives.
India spends about 1% of GDP on public health, among the lowest in the world, and successive governments have faced criticism for not reforming the health system. ||||| NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The head of an Indian hospital where dozens of children died in recent days has been suspended, as officials traded blame over cash shortfalls that led to supplies of medical oxygen being cut.
The government of Uttar Pradesh state, run by India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), suspended the head of the state-run BRD Medical College, Rajeev Misra, late on Saturday and ordered an investigation.
Indian media have said the deaths of 60 children, 34 infants among them, were caused in part by oxygen shortages after a private supplier cut the supply over unpaid bills.
Hospital officials deny lack of oxygen caused the deaths, saying alternative supplies were found, and blamed many of the deaths instead on encephalitis and unspecified issues related to delivery of the infants.
On Sunday, J.P. Nadda, health minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet, visited the hospital in the town of Gorakhpur, 800 km (507 miles) east of New Delhi, accompanied by the state's chief minister, Yogi Adityanath.
After the visit, the chief minister urged patience until the investigation was complete.
"We will know - whether it was because of an oxygen shortage or due to a lack of proper treatment," Adityanath told reporters. "Those found guilty will not be spared."
Nadda said a team of doctors from New Delhi was working with the local authorities and the federal government was ready to send more assistance. He said Modi was also monitoring the developments.
The issue of the unpaid bills for oxygen supply has become a flashpoint in relations between the hospital and the state government, after the suspended hospital chief on Saturday accused state officials of not answering his requests for money.
"I wrote at least three letters," Misra told television reporters on Saturday, adding that he had flagged the issue in video conference discussions.
A child is seen in the Intensive care unit in the Baba Raghav Das hospital in Gorakhpur district, India August 13, 2017. Cathal McNaughton
Reuters was unable to immediately contact Misra for comment.
Adityanath, who had visited the hospital on Aug. 9, said no issue of unpaid bills was brought to his attention and all requests for funds were met promptly.
Pressure on Bjp
Slideshow (6 Images)
Opposition parties have stepped up the pressure on the state government, demanding the resignations of Adityanath and the state health minister.
"This government is a murderer," said Raj Babbar, head of the opposition Congress party in Uttar Pradesh.
Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous and politically-prized state, where the BJP's thumping victory has strengthened Modi's claim to a second term in 2019.
Gorakhpur, a down-at-heel town near the border with Nepal, is Adityanath's political base, which elected him to parliament five times before Modi asked him to lead Uttar Pradesh, after a landslide BJP election victory in March.
A study of government data by nonprofit body Brookings India showing the district has a 26 percent shortage of primary health centres.
Encephalitis outbreaks kill hundreds in India every year, especially during the monsoon season.
India's expenditure on public health is about one percent of GDP, among the world's lowest. In recent years, Modi's government has increased health spending and vowed to make healthcare more affordable. ||||| | – In a five-day span at a single hospital in India, 60 children have died, 34 of them infants. The rash of deaths, which the Independent reports began last Monday, has led to the suspension of the head of the hospital in Uttar Pradesh state, and it's also spurred a string of questions and finger-pointing. Reuters cites Indian media's take: that some of the deaths were due to a lack of liquid oxygen, with the hospital's supply having been cut off due to unpaid bills. Rajeev Misra oversaw the state-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College Hospital in Gorakhpur before his suspension, and he backs up that assertion, telling the media on Saturday that "I wrote at least three letters" to the government requesting money. A Home Ministry rep was quoted as saying 21 of the deaths were the result of the oxygen shortfall, reports the Washington Post. But other officials and a hospital doctor cited by Sky News say the oxygen supply wasn't a factor. They claim mosquito-borne encephalitis was the cause of 35% of the infant deaths, with the rest being due to unspecified causes. State officials say they were able to bolster the oxygen supply after reaching out to area nursing homes. But parents tell Sky the oxygen supply dried up Thursday night and that parents were offered manual resuscitator bags. The Post obtained documents showing the hospital had been receiving letters regarding unpaid bills for six months, and that nearly $90,000 was owed to a medical supply company. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh has pledged to get to the bottom of the situation: "We will know whether it was because of an oxygen shortage or due to a lack of proper treatment. Those found guilty will not be spared." |
Washington (CNN) Russian involvement in the 4½-year-old Syrian civil war seems to be escalating, with NATO's secretary general confirming Tuesday a second incursion by Russian planes into Turkish airspace and saying Russian ground troops were in Syria as well.
Damascus skies erupt with anti-aircraft fire as the US and its allies launch an attack on Syria's capital early on April 14, 2018. US President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in retaliation for Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons. Trump says the strikes are part of a sustained military response, in coordination with France and the United Kingdom.
Damascus skies erupt with anti-aircraft fire as the US and its allies launch an attack on Syria's capital early on April 14, 2018. US President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in retaliation for Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons. Trump says the strikes are part of a sustained military response, in coordination with France and the United Kingdom.
Bodies lie on the ground in the rebel-held city of Douma, Syria, on April 8, 2018. According to activist groups, helicopters dropped barrel bombs filled with toxic gas on Douma, which has been the focus of a renewed government offensive that launched in mid-February. The Syrian government and its key ally, Russia, vehemently denied involvement and accused rebel groups of fabricating the attack to hinder the army's advances and provoke international military intervention.
A child receives medical treatment after a village was attacked in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta region on February 25, 2018. Several people were treated for exposure to chlorine gas, opposition groups said, as airstrikes and artillery fire from the regime continued. CNN was unable to independently verify claims that chlorine was used as a weapon.
A child receives medical treatment after a village was attacked in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta region on February 25, 2018. Several people were treated for exposure to chlorine gas, opposition groups said, as airstrikes and artillery fire from the regime continued. CNN was unable to independently verify claims that chlorine was used as a weapon.
A member of the Syrian pro-regime forces fires a machine gun as a comrade holds his feeding ammunition belt on November 11, 2017. It was during an advance toward rebel-held positions west of Aleppo.
A member of the Syrian pro-regime forces fires a machine gun as a comrade holds his feeding ammunition belt on November 11, 2017. It was during an advance toward rebel-held positions west of Aleppo.
Residents of the war-torn city of Douma break their Ramadan fast on June 18, 2017.
Residents of the war-torn city of Douma break their Ramadan fast on June 18, 2017.
Members of the UN Security Council raise their hands on April 12, 2017, as they vote in favor of a draft resolution that condemned the reported use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Members of the UN Security Council raise their hands on April 12, 2017, as they vote in favor of a draft resolution that condemned the reported use of chemical weapons in Syria.
This photo, provided by the activist Idlib Media Center, shows dead children after a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017. Dozens of people were killed, according to multiple activist groups. The United States responded a few days later by launching between 50-60 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airbase. US officials said the base was home to warplanes that carried out the chemical attack. Syria has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack.
This photo, provided by the activist Idlib Media Center, shows dead children after a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017. Dozens of people were killed, according to multiple activist groups. The United States responded a few days later by launching between 50-60 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airbase. US officials said the base was home to warplanes that carried out the chemical attack. Syria has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack.
Arabic writing that reads "some day we will return" is seen on a bus window as civilians evacuate Aleppo on December 15, 2016. The evacuations began under a new ceasefire between rebels and pro-government forces.
Arabic writing that reads "some day we will return" is seen on a bus window as civilians evacuate Aleppo on December 15, 2016. The evacuations began under a new ceasefire between rebels and pro-government forces.
Smoke rises after an airstrike in Aleppo on October 4, 2016.
Smoke rises after an airstrike in Aleppo on October 4, 2016.
This still image, taken from a video posted by the Aleppo Media Center, shows a young boy in an ambulance after an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria, on August 17, 2016. It took nearly an hour to dig the boy, identified as Omran Daqneesh, out from the rubble, an activist told CNN. The airstrike destroyed his home, where he lived with his parents and two siblings. Director of the Aleppo Media Center Yousef Saddiq said Omran's 10-year-old brother, Ali, died from his injuries.
This still image, taken from a video posted by the Aleppo Media Center, shows a young boy in an ambulance after an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria, on August 17, 2016. It took nearly an hour to dig the boy, identified as Omran Daqneesh, out from the rubble, an activist told CNN. The airstrike destroyed his home, where he lived with his parents and two siblings. Director of the Aleppo Media Center Yousef Saddiq said Omran's 10-year-old brother, Ali, died from his injuries.
Members of a Syrian opposition group attack the headquarters of al-Assad regime forces in the Aleppo villages of Nubul and al-Zahraa on February 12, 2016.
Members of a Syrian opposition group attack the headquarters of al-Assad regime forces in the Aleppo villages of Nubul and al-Zahraa on February 12, 2016.
A sandstorm blows over damaged buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus, on September 7, 2015.
A sandstorm blows over damaged buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus, on September 7, 2015.
A refugee carries mattresses as he re-enters Syria from Turkey on June 22, 2015, after Kurdish People's Protection Units regained control of the area around Tal Abyad, Syria, from ISIS.
A refugee carries mattresses as he re-enters Syria from Turkey on June 22, 2015, after Kurdish People's Protection Units regained control of the area around Tal Abyad, Syria, from ISIS.
A Syrian child fleeing the war gets lifted over fences to enter Turkish territory illegally near a border crossing at Akcakale, Turkey, on June 14, 2015.
A Syrian child fleeing the war gets lifted over fences to enter Turkish territory illegally near a border crossing at Akcakale, Turkey, on June 14, 2015.
Nusra Front fighters inspect a helicopter belonging to pro-government forces after it crashed in the rebel-held Idlib countryside on March 22, 2015.
Nusra Front fighters inspect a helicopter belonging to pro-government forces after it crashed in the rebel-held Idlib countryside on March 22, 2015.
Rebel fighters dig caves in the mountains for bomb shelters in the northern countryside of Hama on March 9, 2015.
Rebel fighters dig caves in the mountains for bomb shelters in the northern countryside of Hama on March 9, 2015.
Medics tend to a man's injuries at a field hospital in Douma after airstrikes on September 20, 2014.
Medics tend to a man's injuries at a field hospital in Douma after airstrikes on September 20, 2014.
Volunteers remove a dead body from under debris after shelling in Aleppo on August 29, 2014. According to the Syrian Civil Defense, barrel bombs are now the greatest killer of civilians in many parts of Syria. The White Helmets are a humanitarian organization that tries to save lives and offer relief.
Volunteers remove a dead body from under debris after shelling in Aleppo on August 29, 2014. According to the Syrian Civil Defense, barrel bombs are now the greatest killer of civilians in many parts of Syria. The White Helmets are a humanitarian organization that tries to save lives and offer relief.
Photographs of victims of the Assad regime are displayed as a Syrian army defector known as "Caesar," center, appears in disguise to speak before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. The July 31, 2014, briefing was called "Assad's Killing Machine Exposed: Implications for U.S. Policy." Caesar, apparently a witness to the regime's brutality, smuggled more than 50,000 photographs depicting the torture and execution of more than 10,000 dissidents. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the photos, documents and testimony referenced in the report.
Photographs of victims of the Assad regime are displayed as a Syrian army defector known as "Caesar," center, appears in disguise to speak before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. The July 31, 2014, briefing was called "Assad's Killing Machine Exposed: Implications for U.S. Policy." Caesar, apparently a witness to the regime's brutality, smuggled more than 50,000 photographs depicting the torture and execution of more than 10,000 dissidents. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the photos, documents and testimony referenced in the report.
Rebel fighters execute two men on July 25, 2014, in Binnish, Syria. The men were reportedly charged by an Islamic religious court with detonating several car bombs.
Rebel fighters execute two men on July 25, 2014, in Binnish, Syria. The men were reportedly charged by an Islamic religious court with detonating several car bombs.
A giant poster of al-Assad is seen in Damascus on May 31, 2014, ahead of the country's presidential elections. He received 88.7% of the vote in the country's first election after the civil war broke out.
A giant poster of al-Assad is seen in Damascus on May 31, 2014, ahead of the country's presidential elections. He received 88.7% of the vote in the country's first election after the civil war broke out.
A US ship staff member wears personal protective equipment at a naval airbase in Rota, Spain, on April 10, 2014. A former container vessel was fitted out with at least $10 million of gear to let it take on about 560 metric tons of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents and sail them out to sea, officials said.
A US ship staff member wears personal protective equipment at a naval airbase in Rota, Spain, on April 10, 2014. A former container vessel was fitted out with at least $10 million of gear to let it take on about 560 metric tons of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents and sail them out to sea, officials said.
A man holds a baby who was rescued from rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo on February 14, 2014.
A man holds a baby who was rescued from rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo on February 14, 2014.
An injured man is helped following an airstrike in Aleppo's Maadi neighborhood on December 17, 2013.
An injured man is helped following an airstrike in Aleppo's Maadi neighborhood on December 17, 2013.
Syrian children wait as doctors perform medical checkups at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 26, 2013.
Syrian children wait as doctors perform medical checkups at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 26, 2013.
Residents run from a fire at a gasoline and oil shop in Aleppo's Bustan Al-Qasr neighborhood on October 20, 2013. Witnesses said the fire was caused by a bullet from a pro-government sniper.
Residents run from a fire at a gasoline and oil shop in Aleppo's Bustan Al-Qasr neighborhood on October 20, 2013. Witnesses said the fire was caused by a bullet from a pro-government sniper.
The UN Security Council passes a resolution September 27, 2013, requiring Syria to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Al-Assad said he would abide by the resolution.
The UN Security Council passes a resolution September 27, 2013, requiring Syria to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Al-Assad said he would abide by the resolution.
An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq on July 18, 2013.
An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq on July 18, 2013.
Rebels launch a missile near the Abu Baker brigade in Al-Bab, Syria, on January 16, 2013.
Rebels launch a missile near the Abu Baker brigade in Al-Bab, Syria, on January 16, 2013.
Syrians look for survivors amid the rubble of a building targeted by a missile in the al-Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo on January 7, 2013.
Syrians look for survivors amid the rubble of a building targeted by a missile in the al-Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo on January 7, 2013.
A father reacts after the deaths of two of his children in Aleppo on January 3, 2013.
A father reacts after the deaths of two of his children in Aleppo on January 3, 2013.
The bodies of three children are laid out for identification by family members at a makeshift hospital in Aleppo on December 2, 2012. The children were allegedly killed in a mortar shell attack that landed close to a bakery in the city.
The bodies of three children are laid out for identification by family members at a makeshift hospital in Aleppo on December 2, 2012. The children were allegedly killed in a mortar shell attack that landed close to a bakery in the city.
Smoke rises in the Hanano and Bustan al-Basha districts in Aleppo as fighting continues through the night on December 1, 2012.
Smoke rises in the Hanano and Bustan al-Basha districts in Aleppo as fighting continues through the night on December 1, 2012.
An Israeli tank crew sits on the Golan Heights overlooking the Syrian village of Breqa on November 6, 2012. Israel fired warning shots toward Syria after a mortar shell hit an Israeli military post. It was the first time Israel fired on Syria across the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
An Israeli tank crew sits on the Golan Heights overlooking the Syrian village of Breqa on November 6, 2012. Israel fired warning shots toward Syria after a mortar shell hit an Israeli military post. It was the first time Israel fired on Syria across the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
A Syrian rebel walks inside a burnt section of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo hours before the Syrian army retook control of the complex on October 14, 2012.
A Syrian rebel walks inside a burnt section of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo hours before the Syrian army retook control of the complex on October 14, 2012.
Smoke rises over the streets after a mortar bomb from Syria landed in the Turkish border village of Akcakale on October 3, 2012. Five people were killed. In response, Turkey fired on Syrian targets and its parliament authorized a resolution giving the government permission to deploy soldiers to foreign countries.
Smoke rises over the streets after a mortar bomb from Syria landed in the Turkish border village of Akcakale on October 3, 2012. Five people were killed. In response, Turkey fired on Syrian targets and its parliament authorized a resolution giving the government permission to deploy soldiers to foreign countries.
Free Syrian Army fighters are reflected in a mirror they use to see a Syrian Army post only 50 meters away in Aleppo on September 16, 2012.
Free Syrian Army fighters are reflected in a mirror they use to see a Syrian Army post only 50 meters away in Aleppo on September 16, 2012.
A Syrian man carrying grocery bags dodges sniper fire in Aleppo as he runs through an alley near a checkpoint manned by the Free Syrian Army on September 14, 2012.
A Syrian man carrying grocery bags dodges sniper fire in Aleppo as he runs through an alley near a checkpoint manned by the Free Syrian Army on September 14, 2012.
Family members mourn the deaths of their relatives in front of a field hospital in Aleppo on August 21, 2012.
Family members mourn the deaths of their relatives in front of a field hospital in Aleppo on August 21, 2012.
A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover as a Syrian Army tank shell hits a building across the street during clashes in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on August 17, 2012.
A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover as a Syrian Army tank shell hits a building across the street during clashes in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on August 17, 2012.
Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army capture a police officer in Aleppo, Syria, who they believed to be pro-regime militiaman on July 31, 2012. Dozens of officers were reportedly killed as rebels seized police stations in the city.
Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army capture a police officer in Aleppo, Syria, who they believed to be pro-regime militiaman on July 31, 2012. Dozens of officers were reportedly killed as rebels seized police stations in the city.
Syrian refugees walk across a field in Syria before crossing into Turkey on March 14, 2012.
Syrian refugees walk across a field in Syria before crossing into Turkey on March 14, 2012.
Supporters of al-Assad celebrate during a referendum vote in Damascus on February 26, 2012. Opposition activists reported at least 55 deaths across the country as Syrians headed to the polls. Analysts and protesters widely described the constitutional referendum as a farce. "Essentially, what (al-Assad's) done here is put a piece of paper that he controls to a vote that he controls so that he can try and maintain control," a US State Department spokeswoman said.
Supporters of al-Assad celebrate during a referendum vote in Damascus on February 26, 2012. Opposition activists reported at least 55 deaths across the country as Syrians headed to the polls. Analysts and protesters widely described the constitutional referendum as a farce. "Essentially, what (al-Assad's) done here is put a piece of paper that he controls to a vote that he controls so that he can try and maintain control," a US State Department spokeswoman said.
Delegates from Arab League member states and Turkey discuss a response to the government's crackdown in Syria on November 16, 2011.
Delegates from Arab League member states and Turkey discuss a response to the government's crackdown in Syria on November 16, 2011.
Jamal al-Wadi speaks in Istanbul on September 15, 2011, after an alignment of Syrian opposition leaders announced the creation of a Syrian National Council -- their bid to present a united front against Bashar al-Assad's regime and establish a democratic system.
Jamal al-Wadi speaks in Istanbul on September 15, 2011, after an alignment of Syrian opposition leaders announced the creation of a Syrian National Council -- their bid to present a united front against Bashar al-Assad's regime and establish a democratic system.
Syrian children walk over bricks stored for road repairs during a spontaneous protest June 15, 2011, at a refugee camp near the Syrian border in Yayladagi, Turkey.
Syrian children walk over bricks stored for road repairs during a spontaneous protest June 15, 2011, at a refugee camp near the Syrian border in Yayladagi, Turkey.
Anti-government protesters demonstrate in Daraa on March 23, 2011. In response to continuing protests, the Syrian government announced several plans to appease citizens.
Anti-government protesters demonstrate in Daraa on March 23, 2011. In response to continuing protests, the Syrian government announced several plans to appease citizens.
An injured man lying in the back of a vehicle is rushed to a hospital in Daraa, Syria, on March 23, 2011. Violence flared in Daraa after a group of teens and children were arrested for writing political graffiti. Dozens of people were killed when security forces cracked down on demonstrations.
An injured man lying in the back of a vehicle is rushed to a hospital in Daraa, Syria, on March 23, 2011. Violence flared in Daraa after a group of teens and children were arrested for writing political graffiti. Dozens of people were killed when security forces cracked down on demonstrations.
Displaced Syrian residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the UN Relief and Works Agency at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, Syria, on January 31, 2014. According to the UN Envoy for Syria, an estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed since an uprising in March 2011 spiraled into civil war. See how the conflict has unfolded.
Displaced Syrian residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the UN Relief and Works Agency at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, Syria, on January 31, 2014. According to the UN Envoy for Syria, an estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed since an uprising in March 2011 spiraled into civil war. See how the conflict has unfolded.
"It's unacceptable, it's dangerous, and it's reckless behavior and it adds to the tensions," Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN about the incursions into Turkish airspace.
"We see the violation of the Turkish airspace becomes more important, more dangerous, because it happens in a context where we see more fighting, more Russian military presence in Syria."
Stoltenberg expressed alarm over how the Russian military grows on several fronts in Syria.
"So we have seen a substantial military buildup by Russia in Syria, both in the air with the combat planes and air defense systems, but also an increasing number of ground troops," he said. "In addition to that, they have deployed naval assets, a large number of naval assets close to the Syrian shores. And they continue to do so."
Alleged airspace violations
The first violation of Turkey's airspace is reported to have happened Saturday. The second was Sunday, officials said.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a warning for Moscow, according to the nation's semiofficial news agency, Anadolu.
"If Russia loses a friend like Turkey, with which it has conducted many businesses, it will lose a lot," he said.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg condemns Russia's incursion into Turkish airspace.
In addition to the incursion reports, the Turkish air force said a MiG-29 fighter jet of an unidentified nationality had interfered Monday with eight Turkish F-16s on the Turkey-Syria border. The Turkish air force reported the jet put its planes under a radar lock for four minutes and 30 seconds.
Stoltenberg rebuked Russian combat aircraft for two alleged violations of Turkey's airspace.
"We also have seen two of them, two violations of Turkish airspace," he said at a news conference. "Intelligence that we have received provides me with reason to say it doesn't look like an accident."
Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, and alliance rules say that an attack on any of the 28 member states should be treated as an attack on all.
Stoltenberg said the "substantial buildup of Russian forces in Syria" includes "ground troops in connection with the air base they have."
Stoltenberg said he doubted that Russia, which has been conducting airstrikes in Syria, was interested primarily in fighting the terrorist group ISIS, also known as ISIL.
"I'm also concerned that Russia is not targeting ISIL but instead attacking the Syrian opposition and civilians," he said.
U.S.: Russia moved weapons, troops into Syria
The Pentagon also is worried about Russia's military activity in Syria.
The latest U.S. assessment indicates that Russia has moved ground combat weapons and troops to operate them into areas of western Syria where anti-regime forces are, according to two American defense officials. The United States sees the move as Russia "stepping up its ground activity" in Syria to attack those forces, rather than ISIS elements, according to one of the officials.
But Russian officials deny ramping up military activity. Officials quoted by state media said there would be no ground operation in Syria and -- in contrast to what officials had said earlier -- Russia would try to prevent any "volunteers" from going to Syria.
The tension between Russia and Turkey, however, appears to be escalating. The two countries are at odds over the civil war in Syria, with Russia backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"I discussed the situation in Syria with Foreign Minister Lavrov in New York last week," Stoltenberg said, referring to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. "I urge Russia to play a constructive and cooperative role in the fight against ISIL. And to strive for a negotiated political solution to the conflict in Syria."
Conflicting reports on strikes in Syria
As diplomats talked, the violence in Syria continued unabated.
Syrian state media reported that joint Russian and Syrian airstrikes had hit ISIS targets in the modern city of Palmyra, adjacent to its ancient ruins. The airstrikes hit "ISIS hideouts," destroying 20 armored vehicles, three ammunition dumps as well as rocket launch pads, the SANA news agency reported, citing unnamed military sources.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Russian strikes in and around Palmyra killed at least 15 ISIS militants and destroyed vehicles, posts and ammunition dumps there. Four more members of the terrorist group died in strikes in Raqqa, the Syrian city that has been referred to as ISIS' de facto capital.
But Russian state media denied the Palmyra strikes.
"All foreign media reports suggesting that Russian planes have allegedly launched airstrikes on the city of Palmyra are totally untrue," Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said, according to Tass
"We don't rule out that terrorists may be preparing provocations in this and other settlements — to blast mosques and then demonstrate fake photo and video materials with accusations against Russian aircraft on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic," the general said in the Tass report.
However, another Russian state news agency, RIA Novosti, reported that Russian jets hit ISIS targets 28 kilometers (about 17 miles) from Palmyra.
Obama authorizes resupply of opposition
On Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama authorized the resupply of Syrian Kurds and the Arab-Syrian opposition as part of a strategy to put pressure on ISIS from the north and strengthen the border, according to two senior administration officials.
The approval came at a National Security Council meeting Thursday.
CNN reported over the weekend that Obama emphasized to his team that the United States would continue to support the Syrian opposition as Russia enters the war-torn country.
"President Obama was clear that we intend to continue our efforts to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL in Syria and to keep supporting the moderate Syrian opposition," an official said.
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Russia's aims questioned
Russia has said it is conducting military operations to wipe out ISIS and other extremist groups. U.S. officials have seen the effort primarily as a move to bolster al-Assad, a close ally -- a goal Russian President Vladimir Putin does not deny.
It's believed the Russians are positioning weapons to support a Syrian ground offensive, officials said.
The equipment includes artillery as well as four BM-30 multiple-launch rocket systems -- all considered to be highly accurate. The latter is capable of rapid-fire rocket launches.
Officials: Russia brings electronic jamming equipment
Several weeks ago, Russia moved about half a dozen artillery pieces into the port of Latakia.
The United States originally thought the move might be for defense of the port, but the latest action is an indication of potential ground attacks in the coming days, an official said.
The weapons have been spotted between Homs and Idlib and west of Idlib.
It is not clear if they're now in final position for possible artillery strikes.
The officials also said Russia has moved electronic jamming equipment into Syria. Both a truck-mounted system and a number of pods that can go on aircraft have been observed. The equipment could potentially give the Russians the ability to jam electronics of U.S-backed coalition aircraft. ||||| BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian troops backed by Russian airstrikes battled insurgents in central Syria on Wednesday in the first major ground fighting since Moscow began launching air raids on militants last week, activists said.
In this Monday, Oct. 5, 2015 photo released by the Rased News Network, a Facebook account affiliated with Islamic State militants, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting,... (Associated Press)
In this Monday, Oct. 5, 2015 photo released by the Rased News Network, a Facebook account affiliated with Islamic State militants, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting,... (Associated Press)
The fighting comes as the Russian airstrikes appear to have emboldened Syrian troops to launch a ground offensive after suffering a string of setbacks in northwestern Syria over the past few months.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a government offensive began on four fronts early Wednesday in the northwestern provinces of Idlib and neighboring Hama. Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman said it is "the most intense fighting in months."
Activist Ahmad al-Ahmad, who is currently in Idlib, said government troops are "heavily" shelling central areas after rebels attacked an army post and destroyed a tank.
The Observatory and al-Ahmad said the main launching point for government forces is the town of Morek on the highway that links the capital Damascus with the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and former commercial center. Rebels have controlled areas on the highway since 2012.
The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group, said rebels were able to destroy two tanks and an armored personnel carrier in northern parts of Hama province near Idlib.
The Observatory said two helicopters believed to be Russian were seen flying at low altitude in Morek. It added that militants opened fire at the helicopters without striking them. It was not immediately clear if the pilots were Russian or Syrian.
The Islamic State group has no presence in the area that was attacked on Wednesday but al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front, is active in central and northern Syria, as are Western-backed rebels.
The latest developments come exactly a week after Russia began launching airstrikes in Syria.
Moscow has mainly targeted central and northwestern Syria, strategic regions that are the gateway to President Bashar Assad's strongholds in Damascus, and along the Mediterranean coast.
Meanwhile, Syrian state TV quoted an unnamed Syrian military official as saying that Russian warplanes attacked Islamic State positions in the town of Al-Bab and the nearby town of Deir Hafer in the northern province of Aleppo. ||||| BRUSSELS/BEIRUT NATO on Tuesday rejected Moscow's explanation that its warplanes had violated alliance member Turkey's air space by mistake and said Russia was sending more ground troops to Syria and building up its naval presence.
With Russia extending its air strikes to include the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he was losing patience with Russian violations of his country's air space.
"An attack on Turkey means an attack on NATO," Erdogan warned at a Brussels news conference.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance had reports of a substantial Russian military build-up in Syria, including ground troops and ships in the eastern Mediterranean.
"I will not speculate on the motives ... but this does not look like an accident and we have seen two of them," Stoltenberg said of the air incursions over Turkey's border with Syria at the weekend. He noted that they "lasted for a long time".
The incidents, which NATO has described as "extremely dangerous" and "unacceptable", underscore the risks of a further escalation of the Syrian civil war, as Russian and U.S. warplanes fly combat missions over the same country for the first time since World War Two.
The Russian Defence Ministry had said that an SU-30 warplane had entered Turkish air space along the border with Syria "for a few seconds" on Saturday, a mistake caused by bad weather. NATO says a plane also entered Turkish air space on Sunday, an incident Russia says it is looking into.
A U.S. official told Reuters the incursions had lasted more than a few seconds and described Moscow's assertion that they were an accident as "far-fetched".
The Turkish military said a further incident took place on Monday when a MIG-29 fighter and Syria-based missile systems "interfered" with eight Turkish F-16 jets patrolling along the Syrian border.
The MIG-29 locked its radar onto the Turkish patrol for 4 minutes 30 seconds, and a Syria-based missile system locked onto them for 4 minutes 15 seconds, the Turkish military said. Russia flies MIG-29s, as does Syria's own air force.
Stoltenberg said the U.S.-led alliance had not received "any real explanation" from Russia about the incursions.
AIR SPACE VIOLATIONS
Disagreement over the air space violations comes as Russia and the west dispute the aims of Moscow's air campaign. Moscow says it is attacking Islamic State, but most of its air strikes have hit territory held by other rebel groups fighting against its Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad.
Western countries, Arab states and Turkey, who are waging their own bombing campaign against Islamic State but also want Assad to leave power, say Moscow is using Islamic State as a pretext to target Assad's other foes. Russia says the Assad government should be the centerpiece of international efforts to combat extremism.
With Russian and NATO planes now flying combat missions in the same air space, a danger is that the Cold War enemies could fire on each other.
The skies in the area have seen incidents in the past. A Turkish jet was shot down by the Syrian air force in 2012 over the Mediterranean and earlier this year Turkey shot down a Syrian helicopter that Ankara said violated its airspace.
Russia's NATO envoy said the alliance was using the accidental incursion into Turkish air space for propaganda.
"The impression is that the incident in Turkish air space was used to plug NATO as an organization into the information campaign waged by the West to distort the aims of the operations carried out by the Russian air force in Syria," Alexander Grushko was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying in Brussels.
Russia's defense ministry said it agreed in principle with U.S. proposals on coordinating military flights in Syria. The ministry said it was ready to hold talks with Turkey to avoid "misunderstandings" and invited foreign military officers to Moscow for talks on how best to fight Islamic State.
President Vladimir Putin has said he will not put Russian ground forces in Syria, where the civil war has killed 250,000 people. However, Stoltenberg said there was a growing presence of Russian forces in Syria.
"I can confirm that we have seen a substantial build-up of Russian forces in Syria - air forces, air defenses, but also ground troops in connection with the air base they have, and we also see an increased naval presence," Stoltenberg said.
RUSSIAN TANKS
Several senior officials in the Middle East told Reuters the Russian air campaign was part of plan that will also involve a ground offensive by Iranian troops, Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas and Syrian government forces against Assad's foes.
The ground campaign is being led by Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, the elite extra-territorial special forces arm of the Revolutionary Guards who reports directly to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the officials said.
They said Soleimani traveled to Moscow in July to help plan the joint action after senior Russian officials met Khamenei and senior Iranians met Putin to agree it.
U.S. officials have previously said Russia has sent seven T-90 tanks, some artillery, and about 200 marines. It has also deployed temporary housing units, a portable air traffic control station and components for an air defense system.
Russian defense ministry sources have been quoted in Russian media as saying about 1,500 Russian servicemen are involved in supporting the air strikes and advising Syria's army.
The Russian Defence Ministry says it has more than 50 warplanes and helicopters in Syria. Russia's Tartous naval facility there is a logistics base and has been overhauled in recent years. It is being used to unload equipment, some of which is also being flown in.
In the latest strikes, Russian jets hit Islamic State targets in Palmyra and struck the northern province of Aleppo, Syrian state television said.
Islamic State forces captured Palmyra in May, an advance that brought them closer to the core of government-held territory in western Syria. It also put the city's Roman-era ruins under the militants' control.
Russia denied hitting civilian targets inside Palmyra or conducting strikes that might harm the ruins.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group tracking Syria's civil war, said the Palmyra strikes killed 15 Islamic State fighters.
"It was the heaviest Russian attack on Palmyra," Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said. Across Syria, Russian jets carried out at least 34 air strikes in the last 24 hours, the Observatory said.
(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart in Madrid, Andrew Osborn and Maria Kiselyova in Moscow; Writing by Giles Elgood and Peter Graff; Editing by Tom Heneghan) ||||| | – Russia is rapidly stepping up its involvement in Syria, and NATO is worried—especially by Russian violation of Turkish airspace. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Tuesday that he doesn't believe Moscow's claim that the incursions on a NATO member's airspace were a mistake, reports Reuters. "Intelligence that we have received provides me with reason to say it doesn't look like an accident," Stoltenberg said, per CNN, adding the violation is "more dangerous" in the context of a Russian buildup of forces in Syria involving planes, ground troops, and "a large number of naval assets." The Turkish military says that in addition to incursions over the weekend, an MiG-29 fighter jet that was either Russian or Syrian interfered with eight Turkish jets along the Turkey-Syria border on Monday, placing them under radar lock for several minutes, CNN reports. In Syria, American and Russian planes are now flying combat missions in the same country for the first time since World War II, raising fears that they could end up firing on each other, Reuters notes. On the ground, meanwhile, Syrian government forces backed by Russian planes have launched their first major offensive since Russian airstrikes began last week, the AP reports. Activists say that the "most intense fighting in months" is taking place in the northwestern provinces of Idlib and Hama, where the AP reports there is no ISIS presence, although the al-Qaeda-backed Nusra Front is active, along with US-backed rebel groups. (A top official in Moscow says Russian "volunteers" could appear in the Syrian army.) |
VATICAN CITY—It took Jorge Mario Bergoglio four minutes to convince fellow cardinals he was their leader.
Enlarge Image Close Associated Press Cardinal Bergoglio, right, with Canada's Cardinal Ouellet on March 6.
Speaking in the Paul VI grand hall of the Vatican, the Argentine cardinal warned the Catholic Church against focusing too much on matters close to home—advice that came against the backdrop of a papacy that had been consumed by infighting among Vatican officials, a dwindling flock in Europe and secular trends in the West.
The 76-year-old Father Jorge, as he is known back home, said Roman Catholicism needed to shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Rome—rather than being "self-referential," he said. Its core mission was humility, dignity and justice. It should help the poor.
It was a week before the secret conclave to elect the new pontiff would begin. But the speech sowed the seeds of one of Catholicism's boldest moves—the election of a pope from the New World, a man likely to steer the church's focus toward social justice and the problems of the world's periphery, rather than on the intrigue and controversy of its central administration.
What's News: The Vatican speaks out about allegations against Pope Francis. Inventors rushing to get patent applications filed before new changes go into effect. Carnival Corp announces plans to spend $800 million to get its fleet in ship shape. Photo: AP
This account, based on interviews with four cardinals, lifts the curtain on the dynamic that led the church's highest officials to shun the European basin from which Catholicism has drawn most of its leaders. Just before his speech, at a dinner of English-speaking cardinals, the future pope's name had come up over a meal of soup and wine but hadn't generated a buzz. "The speech was decisive," said one voting European cardinal.
"He spoke of the need for catechesis and the need to address the poor…the question of justice and the dignity of the human person," said a voting U.S. cardinal.
The call to project the church outward, not inward, propelled the Argentine prelate into contention in the first round of voting with two of Catholicism's most prominent cardinals.
Enlarge Image Close Reuters A puff of smoke announced the Argentinian's selection as pope.
The other two—Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Vatican's office for appointing bishops—were longtime acolytes of Benedict XVI, giving them what many cardinals thought was an inside track to the papacy. By the fifth and decisive round, Cardinal Bergoglio had surpassed both.
The election of Cardinal Bergoglio, known now as Pope Francis, doesn't mean the church will change its doctrine. Pope Francis is expected to uphold church teachings, ranging from its opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to its requirement of priestly celibacy. But he is likely to create a new narrative for the church, one less focused on the inner workings of the Vatican and more on social justice.
"Sometimes when you're dealing with a crisis, you kick the ball in a different direction. And that's what this pope has done. It's to say: What I stand for is a particular gospel way of life and witness," British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, archbishop emeritus of Westminster, said in an interview.
Benedict's resignation on Feb. 28 opened the door to a flurry of unusually frank discussions among cardinals in the week that followed. Unlike the conclave that followed Pope John Paul II's death in 2005, cardinals didn't spend time in mourning. Instead, their deliberations could turn immediately to the biggest challenges facing the church—the rise of secular trends, management of the scandal-plagued Vatican bank and the need to address a shift Catholicism's demographics toward the southern hemisphere.
After hours, the cardinals met in private to home in on candidates. On March 5, after they had spent the day in the talks known as the General Congregation, a group of them from around the English-speaking world gathered inside North American College, a school nestled on a hill above the Vatican, where U.S. bishops send seminarians to train for the priesthood. A banquet table was set up beneath a chandelier inside the Red Room, which is trimmed with red marble pilasters and oil canvases depicting cardinals.
Sitting down to saucers of soup, the cardinals discussed "five or six" names of papal candidates, said one U.S. cardinal. That roster included two of the names that were most frequently being mentioned by the media: Cardinal Ouellet, a former Archbishop of Quebec, and Cardinal Scola of Milan. The future pope's name was also dropped into the conversation, the U.S. cardinal said.
A spokesman for Cardinal Scola declined to comment. Reached by phone Friday evening, Cardinal Ouellet said, "I have nothing to say about the conclave. I have a very serious oath about what was going on inside." A Vatican spokesman declined to comment on conclave proceedings.
Cardinal O'Connor, who was among the invitees of the dinner, declined to say who first mentioned Cardinal Bergoglio as a papal candidate. But he added: "His name began to be thrown into the ring: Maybe this is the man?"
Many cardinals initially believed Cardinal Bergoglio, 76, was probably too old to become pope, especially coming in the wake of Benedict XVI, who cited his age and frailty as reasons for his resignation. "We came into this whole process thinking: The next pope has to be vigorous and therefore probably younger. So there you have a man who isn't young. He's 76 years old. The question is does he still have vigor?" said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.
American cardinals are heavily courted for support in papal elections. As a potential bloc of votes inside the conclave, the Americans are "very powerful" because they are outnumbered only by cardinals from Italy, Cardinal O'Connor said.
American cardinals also run archdioceses that are among the biggest donors to the Catholic church and to the papacy. Another asset that would have worked in the U.S. cardinals' favor is a lack of unity among Italians that has manifested itself in past conclaves, said the U.S. cardinal.
But as evening wore on, and glasses of red and white wine began to flow, it became clear that this time, the Americans, too, fostered diverging views. "I thought the American cardinals were quite divided about where to go," said Cardinal O'Connor, who didn't enter the conclave because he is above the voting-age limit of 80 years.
"Americans are particularly rugged individualists. We get along, but we all have our own point of view," the U.S. cardinal said.
Cardinal George of Chicago said he couldn't remember the evening but said it was "entirely possible" that Cardinal Bergoglio came up in conversations over a meal at the college. "Every night it's something different. So there are different conversations going on," the cardinal said in an interview in the Red Room on Friday. He declined to discuss the conclave.
Later that week, it was Cardinal Bergoglio's time to address his peers. Unlike the speeches before him, the Argentine kept his address short—less than four minutes, several cardinals said. That got him noticed.
It hadn't been the first time that Cardinal Bergoglio had mentioned the inward-looking nature of the church.
"We have to avoid the spiritual sickness of self-referential church," the cardinal said in an interview to an Italian journalist last year. "It's true that when you get out into the street, as happens to every man and woman, there can be accidents. However, if the church remains closed in on itself, self-referential, it gets old. Between a church that suffers accidents in the street, and a church that's sick because it's self-referential, I have no doubts about preferring the former."
"He speaks in a very straightforward way. And so perhaps—more than the content—it was simply a reminder that here is someone who has authenticity in such a way that he's a wonderful witness to the discipleship," said Cardinal George about the speech.
On March 12, the cardinals filed into the Sistine Chapel and cut themselves from outside communication. In the first ballot that night, the cardinals who garnered significant votes were Cardinals Bergoglio, Scola and Ouellet. Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston also drew votes. Black smoke rose from the chapel's smokestack, signifying no choice had been made, and the cardinals adjourned for the day.
On Wednesday, Cardinal Scola's support began to erode. Though Italian, the Milan cardinal was struggling to draw support from his countrymen, one European cardinal said. That left Italian cardinals divided among a range of candidates, with some starting to coalesce around Cardinal Bergoglio.
Members of another potential voting bloc—"Ratzingerian" cardinals who are close to Benedict XVI—were also divided between cardinals Scola and Ouellet, both of whom have deep ties with the former pope and are considered theological and intellectual admirers of his.
By the final round of voting, the opposition blocs had dissolved, with many of its voters joining into to push Cardinal Bergoglio past the 77-vote threshold needed to become pope.
Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as Cormack Murphy O'Connor.
Write to Stacy Meichtry at [email protected]
A version of this article appeared March 16, 2013, on page A6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: With a Speech, Cardinal Set Path to Papacy. ||||| Story highlights Pope Francis will deliver his first Angelus blessing on Sunday
Francis tells journalists he chose his name as pope to reflect a concern for the poor
He will meet with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in a week, the Vatican says
Since his election, he has faced questions over his past in Argentina
The new pope gave an insight into his choice of the name Francis in an audience with journalists Saturday -- and said how he wished for a church that was both poor and "for the poor."
His words came in his first meeting with the media since he became the only Jesuit and first Latin American to be chosen as leader of the Roman Catholic Church three days ago.
Francis, who before he became pope was known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio , said a fellow cardinal from Brazil had told him "don't forget the poor" as the votes stacked up in his favor.
This thought stuck in his mind, Francis said, as it became clear that he had won the two-thirds majority that meant he was the new pontiff.
"Right away, with regard to the poor, I thought of St. Francis of Assisi , then I thought of war," he told the assembled journalists. "Francis loved peace and that is how the name came to me."
He had also thought of St. Francis of Assisi's concern for the natural environment, he said, and how he was a "poor man, a simple man, as we would like a poor church, for the poor."
St. Francis of Assisi, who gave up his own wealth and prestige, is revered among Catholics for his work with the poor.
The journalists included Vatican communications staff and several Latin American reporters, mostly from Argentina.
Francis began by thanking them all for their efforts to share with the world the momentous events for the church in the days since Benedict announced his unexpected resignation.
Blessing for all
He drew a parallel between the work of the media and that of the church, saying both worked to communicate "truth, beauty and goodness."
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The media also had an important role to play in explaining the way the church works, he said, which is made more complicated by the role played by faith rather than more worldly or political concerns.
The new pope concluded the audience -- which did not include questions -- with a blessing for all the journalists present and their families.
He acknowledged that not all those present were Catholic, saying he gave them his blessing "knowing that you are of different religions, because all of you are children of God."
As a cardinal in Buenos Aires, Francis developed close relations with Argentina's Jewish community.
He wrote to the chief rabbi in Rome this week, saying he strongly hoped to "contribute to the progress of the relations that have existed between Jews and Catholics" since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which redrew the church's relations with the modern world, "in a spirit of renewed collaboration."
On Sunday, Francis will celebrate Mass in Vatican City and for the first time deliver the Angelus, or noon blessing, from his papal apartment window to the crowds gathered below in St. Peter's Square.
The official Mass to inaugurate Francis as the bishop of Rome -- and leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics -- takes place Tuesday.
Reforms to come?
Francis has already struck observers with his simple and humble style since being elected to the papacy -- and prompted speculation that he may bring in wider changes.
The Vatican said Saturday that he's decided that the heads of the various Vatican offices will keep their jobs for now, but he's not making any definitive appointments.
"It's customary for new popes to swiftly reconfirm the department heads who lose their positions when the previous pontificate ends, and then take his time about bringing in his team," said Allen.
"The fact that Francis has not followed that path may suggest that significant personnel moves will come sooner rather than later."
Francis wants "a certain period for reflection, prayer and dialogue before [making] any definitive nomination or confirmation," the Vatican statement said.
Military dictatorship
The pope's media audience came only a day after the Vatican sought to damp down reports over his conduct during Argentina's so-called Dirty War, amid accusations that he could have done more to protect two Jesuit priests who were kidnapped.
The Vatican rejected the allegations as defamatory and untrue in a news conference Friday.
"This was never a concrete or credible accusation in his regard. He was questioned by an Argentinian court as someone aware of the situation but never as a defendant. He has, in documented form, denied any accusations," said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman.
"Instead, there have been many declarations demonstrating how much Bergoglio did to protect many persons at the time of the military dictatorship," he said.
Francis will meet with his predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in a week, the Vatican said Saturday.
The March 23 meeting will take place at the papal summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, where Benedict has been staying since his historic resignation.
It comes amid concern in some quarters that the presence of a living former pope might lead to a conflict of interests or influence.
The Vatican has said that Benedict will not seek to interfere in the running of the church, but will focus on study and prayer. ||||| | – Pope Francis met with the international media today and shed more light on why he picked the name Francis. As the votes were being counted and it became clear that Jorge Bergoglio would be the next pope, a fellow cardinal from Brazil turned to him and said, "Don't forget the poor," he recalled. "Right away, with regard to the poor, I thought of St. Francis of Assisi, then I thought of war," he said, reports CNN. "Francis loved peace and that is how the name came to me." St. Francis, he added, was a "poor man, a simple man," and the new pope said he wanted a church "for the poor." The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, speaks to four cardinals who say a four-minute speech by Bergoglio in the runup to voting lifted him from a so-so candidate into front-runner status. "He spoke of the need for catechesis and the need to address the poor," says one, along with "the question of justice and the dignity of the human person." Bergoglio told his fellow cardinals that the church needed to stop navel-gazing at the Vatican and start focusing on social justice in the world outside Rome. Click for more on how his election came to be. |
Sarah Palin could soon be Sarah Palin®. The former Alaska governer and influential conservative leader has filed for a trademark on her name. So has her daughter Bristol. How come? Because they're worried someone might highjack the Palin brand.
UPDATED: Read the reply from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Sarah Palin at the bottom of the page.
What does that actually mean?
United States intellectual property law is a funny (and some would argue outdated) thing, and a trademark is one of many ways to enjoy protection under it. Orignally proposed by Thomas Jefferson to protect the marks of sailcloth makers, trademarks can now be applied to any product or service. And those two designations -- ™ for products and ℠ for services -- can be broadly defined to include ... pretty much anything. Products, images, slogans, designs and even names qualify for protection under the 1946 Lanham Act, and all it takes is a documented history of using that product, or "mark," uniquely for commercial purposes. There's even a designation for "non-conventional trademarks" that allow for smells, colors and sounds, like the Harley Davidson engine rumble. (Generic marks don't count unless they possess a distinctive character. Like Salon!)
Another key fact about trademark law is the difference between the ™ symbol and the ® symbol. The former requires no formal paperwork. You literally just add ™ to claim it. The latter requires an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office that should include proof of sustained and exclusive use of the mark.
The process to register a trademark is complicated and drawn out, but one important step is to determine into which category the registered trademark should be filed.
For the Palins, that first category -- "educational and entertainment services" -- makes some sense. Sarah and Bristol both earn buckets of cash their work on the speaking and television circuit. Sarah, of course, just starred in a TLC reality series, while Bristol has been featured on "Dancing with the Stars." Sarah also has her personal appearances, for which she reportedly requires $75,000 (at least), first class airfare, and bendy straws. Bristol's rate for speaking appearances is $14,000 per engagement. A registered trademark would prevent others from earning commercial gain by Palin-branding events or entertainment, and the two applications are apparently all but approved in this category.
The second category -- "information about political elections" -- is more complicated. This category is only mentioned in Sarah's application, and the politics bit seems like a no-brainer. Sending out mailers asking for money? Want to use Sarah Palin's name to catch someone's eye? If Sarah Palin® is approved, things like this would be illegal under trademark law.
But apparently Palin's people are having a hard time making a case that she's been using the brand for commercial purposes. (Trademark Law 101: You must show a sustained commercial use of the brand name and prove how others' use of the brand would hurt your business.)
Potential products where the Sarah Palin® name could be leveraged include "signs, photographs, brochures, website printouts or advertisements." In the registered trademark application, you must include a documented history of using this brand for commercial gains. So what did the Palin camp submit? A screenshot of her Facebook page, and also a screenshot of an article announcing her gig at Fox News. So far, this isn't cutting it with the United States Patent and Copyright Offices. According to the examining attorney, Karen K. Bush, Palin's application is insufficient for two main reasons. First, the Facebook page and Fox News article simply aren't enough evidence of sustained use of the brand. Second, Sarah Palin didn't even sign her application. Neither did Bristol.
UPDATE: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused Sarah Palin's application on account of the lack of signature. But that's easy enough to fix. All Sarah has to do is sign: ||||| In her television show tonight, Sarah Palin casts herself as a can-do superwoman of the natural world. She fishes, hikes across glaciers and preaches "respect for the elements" from a speedboat while clad in a yellow cagoule. But the programme has already plunged the Mama Grizzly-in-chief into controversy after a leading conservationist in her adopted home of Alaska accused her of flagrant irresponsibility by fishing too close to protected brown bears.
John Toppenberg, director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, said scenes in an online trailer for the programme appeared to show the former Republican vice-presidential candidate breaking the rules of Wolverine Creek, a famous spot where bears – and humans – come to fish. "It's clear from the video that she violated the guidelines," he said, calling her actions "a travesty".
In a preview of Sarah Palin's Alaska, a part nature documentary, part candid camera of the daily life of one of America's most controversial political families, the former state governor is seen fishing for salmon with husband Todd and family members. She can be seen apparently holding her rod towards brown bears on the river bank, while the party's boat appears to be closer to the bears than guidelines advise. The Alaska department of fish and game says people in a boat must not fish within 30ft of a bear. "It's clearly irresponsible," said Toppenberg. "She is encouraging the violation of important guidelines. Humans can get too close to the bears."
The irony of a right-wing conservative, who boasts of hunting moose and shooting wolves while campaigning for more oil drilling in Alaska, transforming herself into a nature fan for primetime has not been lost on environmentalists.
Large brown bears gather in Wolverine Creek because the fishing is so easy and the animals have, in the process, become a tourist spectacle. But Toppenberg warned that by behaving in an apparently irreverent manner, Palin was doing nothing to foster responsibility among visitors. "She is encouraging the violation of important guidelines that allows tourism to flourish in Alaska. She is inviting future problems with the tourism industry and, in particular, the bear-viewing industry," he said.
More than two years after she was plucked by Republican presidential candidate John McCain to be his running mate in the 2008 election, Palin, 46, claims she will run for president in 2012 if "there's no one else". Meanwhile she has decided to put her family and her home state on show for the nation in Sarah Palin's Alaska. But even a soft-focus programme becomes controversial when Palin is attached to it.
Joe Meehan, of the wildlife conservation division of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said that it appeared that the Palins' boat got within 30ft of the bears but not while they were actually feeding. "Some people may say you shouldn't even try to fish when a bear is in the area and I wouldn't argue with that," he added.
Meehan, who supervises Alaska's wildlife refuge programme, which includes Wolverine Creek, said that while he did not believe Palin had necessarily breached the guidelines, he had concerns over the signal she was sending. "Fishing in close proximity to bears may, in general, not send an appropriate message to large numbers of people that are not experienced at fishing in bear country," he said.
The preview clip also shows a bear jumping into the river near the Palins. Palin recalls dramatically to camera later: "So I'm thinking we are going to get stuck there, the anchor is dropped and there is a bear coming towards us."
But this enraged Toppenberg. "She implies that she is somehow in danger or being brave. That's complete nonsense," he said. "Wolverine Creek is the one place in Alaska where the bears are tolerant and completely habituated to the presence of people and boats. But the guidelines are there for a reason." ||||| | – A leading Alaska conservationist calls Sarah Palin's Alaska "a travesty"—and not because it's, well, a reality show starring Sarah Palin. He claims the former guv got too close to protected brown bears in last night's premiere, and says she was "clearly irresponsible." A clip from the premiere shows Palin and hubby Todd having an up-close-and-personal moment with some bears (including, yes, mama bears) while fishing. "It's clear from the video that she violated the guidelines" of Wolverine Creek, says the director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. The state's department of fish and game requires people in boats to stay at least 30 feet away from bears. He argues that the clip shows the Palins getting closer than that, thereby "encouraging the violation of important guidelines." A rep from the fish and game department, however, is not convinced they actually violated any guidelines, the Guardian reports, since they did not approach the bears as they were feeding. However, he notes, "Some people may say you shouldn't even try to fish when a bear is in the area and I wouldn't argue with that." Click here to find out how many people tuned in to her show's premiere. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Daniel Sandford described a scene of "serious devastation" in Kiev
Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych has agreed to negotiate with pro-EU protesters and opposition leaders after violent clashes in the capital Kiev.
He said a cross-party commission would be set up on Monday to try to resolve the deepening crisis. Opposition leaders confirmed this.
Earlier, a group of protesters - trying to reach parliament - clashed with police. Dozens of people were injured.
The US and EU called for an end to the violence and urgent political talks.
The violence broke out as many thousands of protesters held a rally in Kiev's Independence Square, outraged by new laws which they said restricted basic freedoms.
The ruling party of Mr Yanukovych denies this, saying the legislature is in line with European standards.
However, Western countries have expressed deep concern at the new laws.
The anti-government movement began in protest at Mr Yanukovych's decision in late November to pull out of a landmark treaty with the EU, but has expanded to demand his resignation.
'Civil war' warning
Late on Sunday, President Yanukovych's press office said a "working group" headed by National Security and Defence Secretary Andriy Kluyev would be set up.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Some in the crowd of protesters attacked a bus being used by the police as a cordon
Image copyright Reuters Image caption It was set alight after petrol bombs were thrown
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko (centre), who called for calm, was sprayed with a powder fire extinguisher
It said the group - made of members of government and the presidential administration - would meet opposition representatives on Monday to try resolve the crisis.
Opposition leader Vitali Klitschko confirmed this after meeting President Yanukovych at his residence outside Kiev.
"We must use every opportunity to resolve the crisis peacefully," the former world heavyweight boxing champion, who leads the Udar party, told Ukraine's Hromadske TV.
He warned against a "scenario of force", adding that he "didn't rule out the possibility of a civil war".
Arseniy Yatseniuk, another opposition leader, said Mr Yanukovych personally called him to say that he was ready for talks.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Daniel Sandford in Kiev said there were 'waves' of attacks
However, the opposition warned that the talks must produce real results and not be an opportunity for the president to play for time. The opposition is demanding the resignation of the government and snap presidential elections.
But opposition leaders are under huge pressure to come up with an action plan, amid criticism from many activists that their campaign has been too passive.
'Provocateurs and extremists'
Sunday's rally in Kiev, attended by many thousands, began with calls from opposition politicians to disregard the new laws curbing protests that pro-EU demonstrators have been staging for the past two months.
But clashes erupted as a group of demonstrators - reportedly far-right activists - headed away from the main square towards parliament to express their outrage.
They ran into police and interior troops cordons near the Dynamo football stadium, some 300 metres from Independence Square.
The demonstrators pelted police with flares, thunder flashes and petrol bombs, the BBC's Daniel Sandford in Kiev reports.
They overturned a bus used by police and set it alight. Other vehicles were also set on fire.
Police - who were sheltering behind buses under their riot shields - threw their own thunder flashes and gas canisters to try to force the crowd back.
Hours after darkness fell, the stand-off was continuing on Hrushevskyy Street, some 100 metres from Independence Square.
Police also used water cannon to try to disperse the demonstrators.
Interior ministry spokesman Serhiy Burlakov blamed "provocateurs and extremists" for the confrontations and urged people not to follow their lead.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Some protesters broke up paving stones to use as missiles
Police were filming everything and had opened criminal proceedings under Article 294 (organisation of mass riots), the interior ministry said.
The opposition leaders said they were committed to a peaceful resolution of the crisis, denouncing those activists who took part in clashes.
'Enslaving' laws
During the day, the rally on the main square heard a call from a former Ukrainian navy chief for members of the armed forces to defy "illegal" orders from those in power, Unian news agency reported.
"Tomorrow the regime will enslave you too. Therefore we are calling on you to fulfil your military oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian people and not to the authorities who have gone off the rails," said Rear Admiral Ihor Tenyukh, who was sacked by Mr Yanukovych in 2010.
The new curbs on protests, which have been signed into law by the president, include:
A ban on the unauthorised installation of tents, stages or amplifiers in public places
Provision to arrest protesters wearing masks or helmets
A ban on protests involving more than five vehicles in convoy
Hefty fines or jail for breaches of law
The protesters have been camping out behind extensive barricades on the Euromaidan, as Independence Square has been dubbed. ||||| KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Protesters erected barricades from charred vehicles in central Kiev as the sound of stun grenades pierce the freezing air, after a night of rioting sparked by passage of laws aims at curbing street protests.
Protesters throw stones during clashes with police, in central Kiev, Ukraine, early Monday, Jan. 20, 2014. Anti-government protests in Ukraine's capital escalated into fiery street battles with police... (Associated Press)
Protesters prepare to clash with riot police in central Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2014. Anti-government protests in Ukraine's capital escalated into fiery street battles with police Sunday as thousands... (Associated Press)
Opposition leader and former WBC heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, right, is attacked and sprayed with a fire extinguisher as he tries to stop clashes between police and protesters in central... (Associated Press)
A protester throws a molotov cocktail towards a burning police car, in front of him, during clashes with police, in central Kiev, Ukraine, early Monday, Jan. 20, 2014. Anti-government protests in Ukraine's... (Associated Press)
Protesters clash with riot police in central Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2014. Anti-government protests in Ukraine's capital escalated into fiery street battles with police Sunday as thousands of... (Associated Press)
Protesters clash with police in central Kiev, Ukraine, early Monday, Jan. 20, 2014. Anti-government protests in Ukraine's capital escalated into fiery street battles with police Sunday as thousands of... (Associated Press)
Dozens of protesters remain camped out on a central street in Kiev on Monday, as some vehicles torched by protesters overnight continue to blaze.
A large demonstration against anti-protest laws turned violent Sunday, when hundreds of radical protesters broke off from the main peaceful rally and marched toward the parliament building. They began attacking rows of police with sticks, stones and fire bombs, setting police vehicles on fire. Police responded with tear gas and water cannons. Dozens of protesters and police were injured.
The government is set to hold talks with leaders of the opposition Monday. ||||| MOSCOW — A large rally in Kiev, Ukraine, that was called in part to protest a new set of laws cracking down on public protests turned violent on Sunday when men in balaclavas attacked the police with sticks and threw firecrackers and cobblestones at them.
The police responded with tear gas. By early evening, at least one police van was burning on a central street in the city, and witnesses said people had been injured, though it was unclear how severely.
The violence appeared to be the worst in at least a month for the continuing protest movement in Ukraine, and it signified a deepening of the political crisis in the country, the most populous former Soviet state beside Russia.
Protests began in November, after the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovich declined to sign a sweeping free-trade agreement with the European Union. He later negotiated a financial aid package from Russia.
The fighting broke out on a side street leading to the Verkhovnaya Rada, or Parliament, and near Independence Square, which has been the center of the protests.
Photo
In speeches on the square, opposition leaders denounced the participants in the melee as provocateurs and said they did not represent the aspirations of the peaceful protesters. But the leaders were also powerless to stop the fighting.
By midnight, the streets were a scene of utter mayhem. Those fighting the police struck them with lengths of pipes and sticks, and hurled cobblestones the size of soccer balls into their midst. They sent fireworks whistling and sparking into their ranks, and threw what appeared to be firebombs, blossoming into flames when they struck. The police stumbled backward, patting at their clothes as fire burned their metal shields.
The riot police sprayed from a water cannon, in spite of the freezing temperatures. Gazeta.ru, a Russian news portal, reported that 70 police officers were wounded and 40 hospitalized.
The rally against the new laws enacted on Thursday drew tens of thousands of people, a smaller crowd than at the peak of the protest movement in December but larger than on recent weekends. Since November, protesters have occupied the square and several buildings, including City Hall.
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Protesters said they were angered by laws seen as circumscribing the rights of public assembly.
The laws stiffened the penalties for setting up tents and stages in public spaces. They banned wearing helmets and balaclavas, a tactic of the opposition activists to protect themselves against the police, identification or arrest.
In defiance, many demonstrators showed up wearing upside-down kitchen kettles on their heads.
The movement’s leaders have struggled to formulate a response to the laws.
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Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, one of the main protest organizers, announced a plan to form a shadow Parliament, government and Kiev city administration that would operate under the laws of a 2004 Constitution that Mr. Yanukovich had amended — illegally, the opposition says.
Late Sunday, Mr. Yatsenyuk, speaking from the stage on the square, said he had received a call from Mr. Yanukovich saying the government was ready for negotiations.
Vitali Klitschko, the leader of Punch, a political party, and a former heavyweight boxing champion, told the crowd that he was “announcing a snap presidential election,” though the parliamentary opposition has no legal grounds to force a vote if Mr. Yanukovich does not resign.
This inability of the leaders to force political change under the current Constitution or consolidate around a single leader in spite of clear popular support for their antigovernment agenda in the capital became a precipitating cause of the violence on Sunday.
A leader of a group of protesters who arrived in a column of cars, a movement called Auto Maidan, after the name of the square, took the stage and said the opposition should choose one leader, and if it could not, the crowd should march on Parliament.
Mr. Yatsenyuk called this speech a provocation to violence. But some in the crowd acted anyway, moving toward Parliament and clashing with riot police officers.
After the fighting began, Mr. Yatsenyuk, speaking from the stage on the square, called on protesters to refrain from violence and denounced those who were fighting the police, saying they did not represent the opposition. ||||| | – Dozens of protesters and police were injured in Kiev clashes yesterday that came on the heels of new anti-protest laws, the AP reports; a Russian news site puts the number of wounded police at 70. The fighting continued into the night. Protesters used sticks and pipes, hurling large rocks, fireworks, and apparently firebombs at police, the New York Times reports. Police fired back with tear gas and water cannon. Though opposition leaders condemned the violence, they couldn't stop it, the Times notes. Following the clashes, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich agreed to negotiations with opposition leaders and protesters, the BBC reports. Today, he said, a government "working group" would meet with opposition leaders and restore peace to the streets. Opposition head Vitali Klitschko, who met with the president, confirmed the plans. "We must use every opportunity to resolve the crisis peacefully," he said, noting the dangers of using force and saying he "didn't rule out the possibility of a civil war." Meanwhile, the unrest continues. Protesters have installed barricades against vehicles set alight, the AP reports, noting audible stun grenades. |
A 15-year-old boy remained in custody Sunday night as detectives tried to piece together what led to the shooting of his parents and three of their children who were found dead in a New Mexico home.
A Bernalillo County sheriff's deputy blocks the dirt road that leads to a home where detectives on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013, were investigating the deaths of five people who were shot to death south of Albuquerque,... (Associated Press)
A Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department crime lab is stationed outside a home south in Albuquerque, N.M., on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013, where two adults and three children were found shot to death. Authorities... (Associated Press)
Bernalillo County authorities are stationed outside a home south of Albuquerque, N.M., on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013, where two adults and three children were found shot to death. Authorities say a teenager... (Associated Press)
The teenager was arrested on murder and other charges in connection with the shootings, which happened Saturday night at the home in a rural area southwest of downtown Albuquerque, the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department said.
Authorities identified the victims late Sunday as Greg Griego, 51, his wife Sara Griego, 40, and three of their children: a 9-year-old boy, Zephania Griego, and daughters Jael Griego, 5, and Angelina Griego, 2. The suspect was identified as Nehemiah Griego.
Word of the shootings traveled quickly through the law enforcement community, and officials began offering their condolences for Greg Griego, a spiritual leader known for his work with firefighters and the 13 years he spent as a volunteer chaplain at the county jail.
"Chaplin Griego was a dedicated professional that passionately served his fellow man and the firefighters of this community," Fire Chief James Breen said in a statement. "His calming spirit and gentle nature will be greatly missed."
Jail Chief Ramon Rustin said Griego was instrumental in the creation of the Metropolitan Detention Center's chaplain program and worked to get inmates integrated back into the community.
Griego also was a former member of the pastoral staff at Calvary, a Christian church in Albuquerque. As part of his work there, he oversaw the Straight Street program for jail inmates.
Authorities said each victim suffered more than one gunshot wound, and several guns were found at the home, one of which was a semi-automatic military-style rifle. Investigators were trying to determine who owned the guns.
"Right now we're to the meticulous points of processing the scene and collecting physical evidence, and this is a vast scene with a lot of physical evidence," sheriff's department spokesman Lt. Sid Covington said.
Authorities declined to release details of any conversation that the 15-year-old had with investigators, but they said he was the Griegos' son. The sheriff's office said he is charged with two counts of murder and three counts of child abuse resulting in death.
The sheriff's office said it wouldn't release any further information about the case until Sheriff Dan Houston holds a news conference Tuesday morning.
On Sunday, a police roadblock cut off public access to the narrow dirt road that leads to the home, which is surrounded by trees and an agricultural field on one side.
Neighbors said they saw the first police cars and ambulances arrive at the home Saturday night. The road was blocked and word of the shootings began to make its way through the neighborhood.
Peter Gomez, a 54-year-old carpenter who lives about 200 yards from the home, said he had seen the family _ a husband and wife and their four children _ pass by many times but didn't know them personally.
"It's a horrible thing," Gomez said. "You see all this stuff that happens all over the country, the shootings in the schools and theaters, and then it happens right here. It's sad."
___
Associated Press writer Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix contributed to this report. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| | – The two adults and three children allegedly shot dead by a 15-year-old boy in New Mexico were the teenager's own family, police say. The victims have been identified as respected local pastor, Greg Griego, his wife Sarah, and their children Zephania, 9; Jael, 5; and Angelina, 2, KOB reports. The couple's son, Nehemiah, has been charged with two counts of murder and three counts of child abuse resulting in death. Police believe the teenager used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Griego was well known in the Albuquerque area for his work with firefighters and for his years as a chaplain at the county jail, the AP reports. "Chaplain Griego was a dedicated professional that passionately served his fellow man and the firefighters of this community," the local fire chief said in a statement. "His calming spirit and gentle nature will be greatly missed." |
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Twenty years ago this week, Friends premiered. The show about six pals who hang out all the time debuted to middling reviews and OK ratings before becoming a gargantuan hit and phenomenon. Friends was a top-10 series for its entire run, and a top-five series if you discount the first season. It always averaged more than 20 million viewers and had 25 million as late as its eighth season. It spawned a haircut fad and dozens of mostly mediocre copycats. Between TBS and Nick at Nite, it is currently rerun eight times a day. The anniversary of its premiere has been greeted with untempered enthusiasm, even for this era of rampant Internet-based nostalgia. (There’s been little celebration for ER, which premiered the same week, and was a bigger hit, if for a few years too long.) Jimmy Kimmel is staging mini-reunions, websites are dueling to create the definitive best-episode list, and residents of New York City can now head down to SoHo and get coffee—and Friends merch—at a Central Perk pop-up shop, where poor Gunther will be making appearances and maybe pouring out lattes, like some sitcom Sisyphus.
The almost entirely positive nostalgia trip surrounding Friends is a little curious— and I say that as a devoted Friends partisan. The show ended just a decade ago, and when it did it was a kind of shorthand for that which is popular, likeable, and unchallenging: pure TV pop. It was a show about white people living in oversized apartments they definitely couldn’t afford in a New York City populated by so few people of color that all the ones with speaking parts could be easily assembled in a single, rhyming YouTube video. Compared with punchier, sourer, more cynical sitcoms—from All in the Family to Seinfeld to The Office—that found humor in humanity’s bad behavior, Friends was smiley and conflict-averse to the point of being featherweight.
Willa Paskin Willa Paskin is Slate’s television critic.
The show’s Thursday night partner, Seinfeld, was famously about “nothing,” a claim that, especially in the context of Norman Lear’s morally instructive, socially aware series, was a kind of nihilist cri de coeur, a pledge with philosophical as well as comedic heft. Friends took Seinfeld’s nothing and its ancillary “no learning, no hugging” rule to heart—and then put the hugging back in. It did more than any show to excise the teachable moment from sitcoms for grown-ups: Friends occasionally ran up against “issues,” including lesbian mothers and weddings, but always treated such matters in a casual, offhand manner. It was a show without take-home lessons that was as cute and sweet as any show with them.
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When it ended, critics, even those who liked it, struggled to find the words to celebrate it. Heather Havrilesky, writing in Salon, channeled the sort of “yes, but” spirit of loving Friends: “Yes, Friends was silly and sentimental and self-important and fluffy at times. But isn’t that an indelible part of what we liked about it?” Time’s James Poniewozik wrote that unlike most other great sitcoms, Friends “is simply about being a pleasant sitcom.”
The pure pleasure-giving sitcom has never been a rarer thing.
But in the decade since Friends ended, it has become clear just how hard it is to make a straightforwardly pleasant sitcom, one that 20 million people want to watch and discuss. What Friends did so effortlessly has become, noticeably, very difficult. (Parks and Recreation, a sweet and funny show starring a very talented cast, can’t reliably attract 4 million viewers.) Nostalgia demands that we see the past through rose-colored glasses: The aggravating and the annoying, the painful and the piercing, these things fade away, leaving us with a soothing memory of a more carefree time. But Friends really did begin in a more carefree time. It was the quintessential Clinton-era comedy, existing in the historical period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11—even though the show went on for three more years, into 2004—and in a TV era when the networks could still reliably mint mass-appeal sitcoms. No concern—sandwiches, pet chickens, naked neighbors—was too small when times were so good.
The tug of nostalgia is strong, but Friends, which was “nothing more” than a very funny, anxiety-free sitcom starring a supremely talented cast, almost doesn’t require nostalgia to be glowingly appreciated from this particular vantage point: The pure pleasure-giving sitcom has never been a rarer thing. (Nostalgia, or memory loss, is required to forgive the dreaded Rachel-Joey romance.)
* * *
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The pilot of Friends was not particularly well-reviewed, but it plays well in hindsight. It begins with the gang, sans Rachel, hanging out at Central Perk, endlessly chatting, one conversation fading out and another fading in. The group talks about Chandler’s dreams and Ross’s divorce with a chatty, wannabe art-house cinema vibe. This discursiveness wouldn’t last, but most of the characterizations would: The sarcastic, neurotic Chandler, too-reasonable Monica, space-cadet Phoebe, and lovelorn Ross are all here, more or less fully formed. Only Joey, more of a meathead in the early going, would really transform, into someone more sweetly stupid.
And then into Central Perk walks Rachel, in a wedding dress, demanding and spoiled, incapable of making a cup of coffee or living without her father’s credit card. As the show went on, the characters leaned into their quirks, or grew new ones—Ross developed his paranoid-frantic physical-comedy side, Monica’s OCD got shrill—except Rachel, who grew out of hers. Aniston has spent the last decade being a celebrity and the star of mostly middling movies, but her Rachel is a towering comedic performance. She took a cliché—a ditzy JAP with a nose job and no sense of responsibility—and exploded it, keeping Rachel funny while turning her into an everywoman, the only character not reducible to a tagline.
Unlike with so much contemporary TV, there is no barrier to entry with Friends. Do you like to watch attractive people being funny while doing amusing and sometimes romantic things? Do you want to hang out with people who feel like your own friends? Think about the current comedy universe—which Friends, with its eight episodes a day and with Aniston, especially, still all over the tabloids, arguably inhabits. Some critically acclaimed comedies (Louie, Girls) are barely concerned with laughter, and can cut more painfully than the most poignant dramas. And series that center on a group of friends are often alienating in their generational exactitude. The characters on New Girl are older than those of Friends were, but they’re even more childlike. The best Friends copycat of all, ABC’s canceled Happy Endings, played like a feverish generational in-joke.
These shows have absolutely no truck with broad—specificity is what they are all about. This, especially in the case of Girls and Louie, is an artistic choice, but it also reflects the larger TV landscape: Regular viewers may not care very much about the general collapse in TV ratings, but the kind of shows that get made now—series aiming at ever smaller, hopefully passionate demographics—reflect the drying up of a large general-audience pool. This has given us lots of great, edgy comedies, but it has also given new network comedies a light sheen of anxiety—they have to do everything they can, right away, to find an audience—and a tough choice: Should they be unbearably broad, in the hopes of attracting everyone, or self-defeatingly narrow, in the hopes of inspiring the passion of the cool kids? In comparison, Friends is wonderfully relaxed, casually assuming it has a claim on your attention even when it has made an entire episode about Ross’s misguided leather pants or the time the gang was going to be late.
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Friends has an inviting, welcoming air. The only thing it is really specific about—the only thing it needs to be really specific about—is the friends themselves. The best episodes exist entirely within the fictitious world the show created—episodes set entirely in Monica and Rachel’s apartment, for instance, or with video flashbacks to their lives in the ’80s or trivia contests featuring questions only about each other. This is the reason it has aged so well: Not only is it relatively timeless for a sitcom, watching Friends turns you into a friend, initiated into the ins and outs of their relationships and personalities, their inside jokes, the PG way to flip somebody off. ||||| CTRL-C or CMD-C, then press Enter. Click/tap elsewhere to exit, or press ESC.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Party of Five, and as you can clearly see from the amazing behind-the-scenes video above: The roller-brush hair dryer has been around longer!
How else would you explain Scott Wolf and Matthew Fox's magnificently and perfectly curled-under bangs?
You guys. Why do I not remember this being a thing?! Hot guys with Dorothy Hamill hair? And we all SWOONED!
FOX
Anyway, to celebrate the 20th birthday of the beloved Salinger clan, we dug up our behind-the-scenes footage of E!'s very first set visit to Party of Five in 1994, and it is exquisite. For starters, everyone should know that Matthew Fox, Scott Wolf and Neve Campbell have not really aged in two decades, and clearly must have some sort of pact with the devil. And the hair. It's awesome.
For you who don't remember (and aren't ancient like moi), Party of Five aired on Fox from 1994 – 2000 and launched the careers of Matthew, Scott, Neve and also Jennifer Love Hewitt and Lacey Chabert.
But it was really all about: THE TEARS. Every single damn episode, we fans would cry our ever-living guts out because, not only were these five kids trying just trying to move on after the tragic passing of their parents in a car crash (they were the original Elena and Jeremy Gilbert—mmmkay?), but Charlie (Matthew Fox) batted cancer, Bailey (Scott Wolf) battled alcoholism, Julia (Neve Campbell) dealt with domestic violence and our hearts were never the same.
FOX
Party of Five was never a huge ratings hit, but it had a hardcore fan following, and was the surprise winner in 1996 for the Golden Globe for Best Drama, making it one of the lowest-rated shows ever to win the award.
So, a tip of the hat to the good ol' Salinger clan. And a tip of our curling iron to Scott and Matthew, who never looked more ridiculous/adorable.
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||||| | – As if news that Party of Five debuted 20 years ago this month doesn't make you feel old enough, Friends is this week hitting the same milestone. And as Willa Paskin writes for Slate, the anniversary is being "greeted with untempered enthusiasm, even for this era of rampant Internet-based nostalgia." That has Paskin asking—and answering—the question of why. As she writes, "it did more than any show to excise the teachable moment from sitcoms for grown-ups." It was sweet, it was fluffy, and it was ... a rare thing. In the 10 years since Rachel, Chandler, et al have left us, it's become apparent that making a "straightforwardly pleasant sitcom, one that 20 million people want to watch and discuss," is actually incredibly difficult. Today's comedies take one of two routes: They make specificity king (Paskin cites Girls and Louie) in the hope of reeling in a small but fervent audience or they go "unbearably broad" in a bid to reel in, well, everyone. But the attempts to do the latter are largely tainted by a "light sheen of anxiety," writes Paskin. "They have to do everything they can, right away, to find an audience." Friends, in contrast, "casually [assumes] it has a claim on your attention even when it has made an entire episode about Ross’s misguided leather pants." At the end of the day, we watch TV for pleasure, and 20 years on, Friends does that "reliably, effortlessly." Click for Paskin's full column. |
This page is a historical archive and is no longer maintained. For current information, please visit http://www.cdc.gov/media/
Press Release
Embargoed until: Thursday, December 5, 2013 at 12:00 noon ET
Contact: Media Relations
(404) 639-3286
Measles Still Threatens Health Security
On 50th Anniversary of Measles Vaccine, Spike in Imported Measles Cases
Fifty years after the approval of an extremely effective vaccine against measles, one of the world’s most contagious diseases, the virus still poses a threat to domestic and global health security.
On an average day, 430 children – 18 every hour – die of measles worldwide. In 2011, there were an estimated 158,000 measles deaths.
In an article published on December 5 by JAMA Pediatrics, CDC’s Mark J. Papania, M.D., M.P.H., and colleagues report that United States measles elimination, announced in 2000, has been sustained through 2011. Elimination is defined as absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months. Dr. Papania and colleagues warn, however, that international importation continues, and that American doctors should suspect measles in children with high fever and rash, “especially when associated with international travel or international visitors,” and should report suspected cases to the local health department. Before the U.S. vaccination program started in 1963, measles was a year-round threat in this country. Nearly every child became infected; each year 450 to 500 people died each year, 48,000 were hospitalized, 7,000 had seizures, and about 1,000 suffered permanent brain damage or deafness.
People infected abroad continue to spark outbreaks among pockets of unvaccinated people, including infants and young children. It is still a serious illness: 1 in 5 children with measles is hospitalized. Usually there are about 60 cases per year, but 2013 saw a spike in American communities – some 175 cases and counting – virtually all linked to people who brought the infection home after foreign travel.
“A measles outbreak anywhere is a risk everywhere,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “The steady arrival of measles in the United States is a constant reminder that deadly diseases are testing our health security every day. Someday, it won’t be only measles at the international arrival gate; so, detecting diseases before they arrive is a wise investment in U.S. health security.
Eliminating measles worldwide has benefits beyond the lives saved each year. Actions taken to stop measles can also help us stop other diseases in their tracks. CDC and its partners are building a global health security infrastructure that can be scaled up to deal with multiple emerging health threats.
Currently, only 1 in 5 countries can rapidly detect, respond to, or prevent global health threats caused by emerging infections. Improvements overseas, such as strengthening surveillance and lab systems, training disease detectives, and building facilities to investigate disease outbreaks make the world -- and the United States -- more secure.
“There may be a misconception that infectious diseases are over in the industrialized world. But in fact, infectious diseases continue to be, and will always be, with us. Global health and protecting our country go hand in hand,” Dr. Frieden said.
Today’s health security threats come from at least five sources:
The emergence and spread of new microbes
The globalization of travel and food supply
The rise of drug-resistant pathogens
The acceleration of biological science capabilities and the risk that these capabilities may cause the inadvertent or intentional release of pathogens
Continued concerns about terrorist acquisition, development, and use of biological agents.
“With patterns of global travel and trade, disease can spread nearly anywhere within 24 hours,” Dr. Frieden said. “That’s why the ability to detect, fight, and prevent these diseases must be developed and strengthened overseas, and not just here in the United States.”
The threat from measles would be far greater were it not for the vaccine and the man who played a major role in creating it, Samuel L. Katz, M.D., emeritus professor of medicine at Duke University. Today, CDC is honoring Dr. Katz 50 years after his historic achievement. During the ceremony, global leaders in public health are highlighting the domestic importance of global health security, how far we have come in reducing the burden of measles, and the prospects for eliminating the disease worldwide.
Measles, like smallpox, can be eliminated. However, measles is so contagious that the vast majority of a population must be vaccinated to prevent sustained outbreaks. Major strides already have been made. Since 2001, a global partnership that includes the CDC has vaccinated 1.1 billion children. Over the last decade, these vaccinations averted 10 million deaths – one fifth of all deaths prevented by modern medicine.
“The challenge is not whether we shall see a world without measles, but when,” Dr. Katz said.
“No vaccine is the work of a single person, but no single person had more to do with the creation of the measles vaccine than Dr. Katz,” said Alan Hinman, M.D., M.P.H., Director for Programs, Center for Vaccine Equity, Task Force for Global Health. “Although the measles virus had been isolated by others, it was Dr. Katz’s painstaking work passing the virus from one culture to another that finally resulted in a safe form of the virus that could be used as a vaccine.”
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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES ||||| The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning about a rise in the number of measles cases in the USA.
There have been 175 confirmed cases of measles this year, and 98% have been in unvaccinated patients. (Photo: Joe Raedle, Getty Images) Story Highlights More than 98% of measles patients unvaccinated, CDC says
Doctors recommend first measles shot at age 1, a second at 4 to 6
There were nearly 21,000 measles cases in Europe in the first six months of the year
The USA is experiencing a spike in measles, with 175 confirmed cases and 20 hospitalizations so far this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That's about three times the usual number of cases of measles, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said Thursday. The USA has seen nine outbreaks this year, with the largest in New York, North Carolina and Texas.
More than 98% of measles patients were unvaccinated, Frieden said.
"This isn't the failure of a vaccine; it's the failure to vaccinate," Frieden said.
The USA's overall measles vaccination rate remains high.
In fact, measles has been officially eliminated throughout the Western Hemisphere. That means that measles, unlike the flu, no longer circulates among the general population.
The USA has still had about 60 "imported" measles cases a year, however, largely diagnosed in travelers who come from abroad. Those cases mostly haven't spread beyond a couple of people, however, because nearly everyone those travelers encountered was vaccinated.
The country's safety net has become more porous in recent years, as like-minded parents who refuse vaccines have clustered in the same communities.
In August, for example, a visitor who had traveled abroad infected 15 people at a Texas megachurch. One of those infected was a 4-month-old baby, too young to have received a first measles shot.
Doctors recommend that children receive their first measles shot at age 1, followed by a second between 4 to 6 years old.
Babies traveling abroad, however, can receive a first measles shot at 6 months, Frieden said.
Many travelers are surprised to learn that some of the most popular destinations have the highest rates of measles, said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.
There were nearly 21,000 cases of measles in Europe in just the first six months of the year, according to the World Health Organization. Measles continues to circulate in Europe, Schaffner said, because countries there have much weaker school vaccination requirements than in the USA.
"This is an eminently controllable, eminently eliminatable childhood viral infection," said Schaffner, who notes that up to 500 Americans a year died of measles before a vaccine was introduced 50 years ago. The fact that measles continues to spread "is an ongoing tragedy."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1d1M1hX ||||| Measles may seem like a distant threat in the United States, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning the disease still poses a danger to U.S. residents.
The CDC fears that because measles is so prevalent overseas, people who travel are bringing the virus back to U.S. shores. Almost all of the 175 cases of measles reported thus far in 2013 were linked to people who had contracted the disease after traveling outside the country.
“A measles outbreak anywhere is a risk everywhere,” CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said in a press release. “The steady arrival of measles in the United States is a constant reminder that deadly diseases are testing our health security every day. Someday, it won’t be only measles at the international arrival gate; so, detecting diseases before they arrive is a wise investment in U.S. health security.”
Measles is a respiratory viral illness that grows in the cells that line the back of the throat or lungs. It can cause a fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. It can lead to ear infections in 10 percent of cases in kids, and 5 percent will develop pneumonia.
Other complications include encephalitis and death. About 18 children every hour around the world die due to measles, the CDC reported. There were 158,000 measles deaths across the globe in 2011 alone.
A new research paper published in JAMA Pediatrics on Dec. 5 shows that measles was "eliminated" in the U.S. from 2000 through at least through 2011. For a disease to be eliminated, there must be no continuous disease transmission for more than 12 months.
However, in 2013, there at least 175 cases and counting -- significantly more than the typical 60 who contract the disease each year.
The new report was released on the 50th anniversary of the measles vaccine. The CDC also published the latest figures on the global progress against measles in its journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, told USA Today that people might be surprised to learn that popular travel destinations in Europe are often where people contract measles.
The CDC added that doctors should consider a person has contracted measles if they are displaying high fever and rashes “especially when associated with international travel or international visitors,” and report the cases to their local health department.
Before the measles vaccination program was started in the U.S. in 1963, almost every child was infected by the disease, the CDC said. About 450 to 500 people died from it each year, 48,000 were hospitalized, 7,000 had seizures, and around 1,000 suffered permanent brain damage or deafness before the vaccine was distributed regularly.
About 2.6 million deaths worldwide were attributed to measles until vaccination was available around the globe in the 1980s, the report's authors noted.
The CDC has and continues to push for more vaccinations against measles, especially because the virus is so contagious that the majority of people have to receive protection to prevent an outbreak. The CDC has vaccinated 1.1. billion children globally since 2001 against the disease. They estimate they have prevented 10 million deaths, about one-fifth of all the deaths prevented by modern treatments.
"This is an eminently controllable, eminently eliminatable childhood viral infection," said Schaffner.
But, increasing anti-vaccination beliefs may also be behind growing measles rates in the States. A recent CDC study showed that 82 percent of people who had contracted measles as of September 2013 were not vaccinated, and 9 percent were not sure if they had been vaccinated.
Only one out of five countries have the ability to quickly detect, respond to or prevent global health threats started by infectious diseases, the CDC said. Because people are so mobile, a disease can spread globally in just 24 hours, Frieden pointed out.
“There may be a misconception that infectious diseases are over in the industrialized world. But in fact, infectious diseases continue to be, and will always be, with us. Global health and protecting our country go hand in hand,” he said. ||||| Importance To verify the elimination of endemic measles, rubella, and congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) from the Western hemisphere, the Pan American Health Organization requested each member country to compile a national elimination report. The United States documented the elimination of endemic measles in 2000 and of endemic rubella and CRS in 2004. In December 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened an external expert panel to review the evidence and determine whether elimination of endemic measles, rubella, and CRS had been sustained.
Objective To review the evidence for sustained elimination of endemic measles, rubella, and CRS from the United States through 2011.
Design, Setting, and Participants Review of data for measles from 2001 to 2011 and for rubella and CRS from 2004 to 2011 covering the US resident population and international visitors, including disease epidemiology, importation status of cases, molecular epidemiology, adequacy of surveillance, and population immunity as estimated by national vaccination coverage and serologic surveys.
Main Outcomes and Measures Annual numbers of measles, rubella, and CRS cases, by importation status, outbreak size, and distribution; proportions of US population seropositive for measles and rubella; and measles-mumps-rubella vaccination coverage levels.
Results Since 2001, US reported measles incidence has remained below 1 case per 1 000 000 population. Since 2004, rubella incidence has been below 1 case per 10 000 000 population, and CRS incidence has been below 1 case per 5 000 000 births. Eighty-eight percent of measles cases and 54% of rubella cases were internationally imported or epidemiologically or virologically linked to importation. The few cases not linked to importation were insufficient to represent endemic transmission. Molecular epidemiology indicated no endemic genotypes. The US surveillance system is adequate to detect endemic measles or rubella. Seroprevalence and vaccination coverage data indicate high levels of population immunity to measles and rubella.
Conclusions and Relevance The external expert panel concluded that the elimination of endemic measles, rubella, and CRS from the United States was sustained through 2011. However, international importation continues, and health care providers should suspect measles or rubella in patients with febrile rash illness, especially when associated with international travel or international visitors, and should report suspected cases to the local health department. ||||| | – Measles was indeed "eliminated" in the US from 2000 through 2011, per a review of data through that year published in JAMA Pediatrics yesterday. But there's a "but": As CBS News reports, America isn't actually measles-free. Elimination is defined as the "absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months" (USA Today translates: That means it's not circulating among the general population), but the US still sees about 60 cases a year. This year, however, we've logged at least 175, reports the CDC, and they're almost all tied to people who picked up the infection abroad and brought it home. And according to CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden, all but about 2% of the patients were unvaccinated, reports USA Today. "This isn't the failure of a vaccine; it's the failure to vaccinate," he says. This could end up being the worst year for measles since 1996. |
National Archives
Yes, it’s that time again, folks. It’s the first Friday of the month, when for one ever-so-brief moment the interests of Wall Street, Washington and Main Street are all aligned on one thing: Jobs.
A fresh update on the U.S. employment situation for June hits the wires at 8:30 a.m. New York time offering one of the most important snapshots on how the economy fared last month. Expectations are for 100,000 new jobs to be created — up from 69,000 jobs added in May — with the unemployment rate sticking at 8.2%.
Here at MarketBeat HQ, we’ll be offering color commentary and tracking the markets before and after the data crosses the wires. Feel free to weigh-in yourself, via the comments section. And while you’re here, why don’t you sign up to follow us on Twitter.
Enjoy the show.
For more MarketBeat and other streaming markets coverage from The Wall Street Journal, point your mobile browser to wsj.com/marketspulse. ||||| Dow Jones Reprints: This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit www.djreprints.com
Private businesses added more workers than expected in August, according to a report released Thursday, while unemployment claims fell for the first time in four weeks, positive signs for the labor market ahead of Friday's monthly jobs report.
Private-sector jobs in the U.S. increased by 201,000 last month, according to a national employment report calculated by payroll processor Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers.
The August number was well above the 145,000 expected by economists. The July estimate was revised to 173,000 from the 163,000 reported last month.
The ADP survey tallies only private-sector jobs. The Bureau of ... ||||| | – Teams Obama and Romney will likely be biting their nails come 8:29am tomorrow, as the first of the three remaining pre-election jobs reports are issued. With less than 24 hours to go, some hints of what may come: In what the AP calls an "encouraging sign," a private survey out today shows businesses ramped up hiring in August. Though private-sector jobs were predicted to jump 145,000 last month, the ADP survey noted an increase of 201,000 jobs. But don't get too excited. The Wall Street Journal offers a sobering reminder that ADP has had some huge swings-and-misses lately. It estimated a 176,000-job jump in June; the actual private-sector gain was just 84,000. As such, the Journal doubts projections will change. And what are those projections? An unemployment rate still stuck at 8.3%, and the addition of 125,000 new jobs, per economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires. (The AP puts the forecast at 135,000 jobs, same rate.) In other jobless numbers, 12,000 fewer Americans sought unemployment benefits last week, a possible indication of a job market on the upswing. The four-week average stands at 371,250; a number consistently below 375,000 suggests hiring is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate, explains the AP, though it predicts this most recent data won't affect the August report. Click for one take on why tomorrow's numbers have an unmatched political significance. |
Stock markets across the globe suffered fresh falls on Friday as global investors scrambled to understand the implications of Dubai World’s restructuring and unexpected debt standstill.
The lack of information about Dubai’s flagship government-owned holding company, made worse by a religious holiday in the Middle East, prompted indiscriminate selling of stocks linked to the region. The cost of insuring against default in emerging markets around the world also leapt.
In Japan, the Nikkei 225 lost 3.2 per cent to close at 9,081.52, its biggest one-day decline in almost eight months. In Seoul, the Kospi fell 4.7 per cent to 1,524.50, a four-month low. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 2.9 per cent to 4,572.10, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 4.8 per cent to 21,134..50.
The selling spread to Europe, where the FTSE 100 at one point slumped 1.8 per cent but regained ground to trade down 0.4 per cent at 5,175.3. The FTSE Eurofirst 300 fell 0.5 per cent to 983.2. US futures pared losses but still point to the S&P 500 opening down 2 per cent from the new high for the year it achieved ahead of Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday, when US markets remained closed.
Audio: Simeon Kerr on investor reactions ‘People are in the dark .... There’s been something of an information vacuum out of the government on the events’
Investors said that the lack of information about the debt standstill, announced on Wednesday, had been the key factor sparking the wider market turmoil. Investors generally moved into safer assets, pushing up prices of traditional havens such as government bonds.
“In the absence of definitive information it’s hard to see the market treating this as an isolated one-off,” said one trader.
After markets in Europe closed Dubai issued a statement on Thursday defending its move as a “sensible business decision”.
Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, chairman of the Supreme Fiscal Committee, said: “While the government understands the concerns of the market and the creditors, it had to intervene because of the need to take decisive action to address its particular debt burden.”
He said the government had acted in full knowledge of how markets would react. “We want to ensure resources are deployed ... to enhance the businesses of Dubai World Group, build on the restructuring ... and ensure long-term commercial success.” He said that further information would be given early next week.
A conference call on Thursday for bondholders of Nakheel, the Dubai-owned property company at the centre of the storm, collapsed after phone lines were swamped with callers.
Nakheel, wholly owned by Dubai World, is due to redeem a $3.5bn bond next month. The bonds were trading on Friday at 40 cents on the dollar, almost 70 below their 109 redemption price as investors lowered their expectations that payments would be made following Dubai World’s call for a six-month standstill.
The conference call was organised by QVT, a New York hedge fund. A fund executive confirmed that it was reorganising the call with a greater phone capacity but declined to comment further.
“People are panicking: This whole process counters everything that the rulers have been saying and the way it has been communicated before the holidays so no one can get any information is confusing,” said one hedge fund manager.
The cost of insuring Dubai’s debt against default jumped more than 100 basis points on Friday to 670, meaning that it now costs $670,000 annually for every $10m of debt covered for five years.
Other Gulf states and emerging markets with perceived problems were also under pressure. Hungary, which has had problems refinancing debt, and Greece, with one of the highest debt burdens in Europe, saw their insurance costs jump.
However, Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, said he and top regulator Mario Draghi were confident that the Dubai problem was containable and localised.
”I’ve talked to the chairman of the Financial Stability Board, Mario Draghi, in my capacity as president of the G20,” he said in Trinidad and Tobago, where he is attending a Commonwealth summit.
”I believe that we are satisfied that [with] the arrangements in place, the mechanisms that we’ve got in place to monitor what’s happening, we can be sure that this is something that is both containable and is localised.”
Additional reporting by Reuters ||||| Dow Jones Reprints: This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit www.djreprints.com
DUBAI—Investors sold banking stocks across Europe and Asia and jacked up the price of insuring against Dubai defaults, a day after the government said it would take charge of restructuring its corporate flagship, Dubai World, and asked creditors to accept delayed payments.
A Wednesday announcement of a six-month standstill in debt payments took investors and analysts by surprise. It followed months of positive moves and comments from government officials suggesting Dubai and the federal government of the United Arab Emirates were willing to step in to plug financing holes.
"The most negative effect of [the] announcement is a major shock ... ||||| | – A move today by the government of Dubai to take over its flagship company, Dubai World, caused ripples of panic throughout the region, and translated into a selloff in bank stocks in Europe and Asia. The government also aims to delay payments on $60 billion in debt, a request that caused the price of insuring debt in emerging economies to soar, the Wall Street Journal reports. The opaque nature of the both Dubai World and the emirate’s government itself didn’t help matters, traders tell the Financial Times—which could mean long-term trouble ahead. “In the absence of definitive information it’s hard to see the market treating this as an isolated one-off,” one notes. Nonetheless, a Dubai official called the move a “sensible business decision … (to) ensure long-term commercial success,” and promised more information next week. |
But in the past, he was much less low-key. Whether on his motorcycle or at the helm heel of the family sailboat – The Raymoni – he always went full throttle. When he fought, which was often, it was usually a one-sided affair.
“He was a terror,” said Leo, another former associate of Doug Ford.
Numerous sources identified Randy Ford as former drug dealer, including one who identified himself as former partner, but he and Doug maintained distinctly separate operations. “Doug, being savvy as he was and as business-minded as he was, knew his brother was just too volatile,” said “Justin,” the street-level dealer who said he was supplied by Doug Ford.
The eldest Ford sibling, Kathy, has been subjected to media scrutiny over the years, primarily because she has been linked to a number of bizarre, violent and sensational incidents.
Most recently, in January, 2012, her long-time boyfriend, a convicted cocaine and hash dealer named Scott MacIntyre, was charged with threatening to murder the mayor at his Etobicoke home. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser offence and was given credit for time served.
(In a brief interview with CBC after the alleged death threat, Doug Ford said: “To be honest with you, I really don’t know Scott MacIntyre.” Photographs and video taken on the night of the 2010 election show that Mr. MacIntyre was part of the small group of family members celebrating with the new mayor, his wife, Renata, and Doug.)
Ms. Ford’s relationship with Mr. MacIntyre is even more perplexing because of an earlier incident: In 2005, he and another man were accused of shooting her in the face during an altercation in her parents’ basement. She survived the blast and was rushed to hospital, while Mr. MacIntyre fled in her mother’s Jaguar. Crown prosecutors later dropped numerous charges against him, while his co-accused, Michael Patania, pleaded guilty to one count of possession of a handgun.
But even before that, there was gunplay – and it was fatal. Seven years earlier, Ms. Ford’s lover was fatally shot by her ex-husband, a drug addict named Ennio Stirpe. At his trial, Mr. Stirpe testified that his victim, Michael Kiklas, was a martial artist, which forced him to bring along the shotgun as “an equalizer.”
Not mentioned in the press at the time was the fact that Mr. Kiklas was a white supremacist – a group with which Ms. Ford associated in the 1980s.
Her friends included Gary MacFarlane, a founding member of the short-lived Canadian chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the late Wolfgang Droege, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist in Canadian history, a former Klansman told The Globe in an interview. Two other former associates of Ms. Ford confirmed her association with known white supremacists.
Among Mr. Droege’s numerous criminal endeavours, he also sold cocaine and marijuana, which led to his death in 2005 when he was killed by a customer. Mr. Droege was incarcerated for much of the 1980s in U.S. prisons – both for drug trafficking and for his role in a bizarre plot to overthrow the government of Dominica in the Caribbean.
The former Klansman, who agreed to answer questions by e-mail on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Kathy Ford was close to the movement, but he said he couldn’t recall meeting any of the Ford brothers. He described hanging out in the Fords’ basement and being snubbed by Doug Sr. when Ms. Ford invited him to a party on the family boat. Her father, the former Klansman said, clearly did not approve of his beliefs, while she was engaging and fun but hardly a committed soldier in the race war.
“Some people are real ‘believers’ and know all the history, dates, facts etc… Others just join to piss off their parents, or carry out some other act of personal rebellion,” he wrote. “Clearly [Kathy] was the latter camp.”
It remains unclear how much Mayor Ford was exposed to his siblings’ escapades and their issues with illegal drugs. He is considerably younger – Doug, the closest, is five years older. But at least one of Doug’s closest and oldest friends has become an official adviser to the mayor’s office. Several sources have identified David Price as a former participant in Doug Ford’s hashish enterprise.
Report Typo/Error ||||| This weekend, The Globe and Mail is publishing an extensive examination of the Toronto Ford family’s decades-old connection to illicit drugs. We are doing so with utmost caution, journalistic rigour and legal scrutiny – ultimately believing that Torontonians and, more broadly, Canadians need to understand the background of the most politically powerful family in the country’s biggest city.
An 18-month investigation by reporters Greg McArthur and Shannon Kari reveals that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s brother Doug sold hashish for several years in the 1980s, in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Another brother, Randy, was also involved in the drug trade, and charged in relation to a drug-related kidnapping. Their sister, Kathy, has been the victim of drug-related gun violence.
Mr. McArthur, one of the country’s most respected investigative reporters, began work on this project in late 2011, in an attempt to detail the history of the Fords. Although Rob Ford had been well-documented as a councillor and mayor, little existed on the public record about his older brother Doug, who has emerged as a force in the mayor’s office and across the city.
We have approached Rob and Doug Ford several times to speak to the allegations. A senior Globe editor visited Doug Ford, privately, to explain the purpose of our research. Doug Ford rebuffed our entreaties, and aggressively threatened legal action.
As we approached publication, we returned to three fundamental questions that readers should rightly ask of us:
How reliable is our information?
We located and interviewed 10 people who claimed to have contact with Doug Ford over illicit drugs. Each individual said they were afraid to attach their name to the story, citing the Ford family’s power in Toronto.
They did, however, speak at length, and in detail. Throughout we consulted with our legal counsel.
Is this information of public interest?
Rob and Doug Ford hold sway over much of the city’s business and have influence on a range of public affairs, including policing. They have campaigned on anti-drug platforms, as outlined in the story, and spoken in recent years of the need to do more to stop drug-related crime, without ever acknowledging the family’s own struggles. The rest of city council, and citizens at large, deserve to understand the moral record of their leaders. In most matters, public or private, character matters.
Why now?
Our investigation has been ongoing since late 2011. The reporters were sent back multiple times to find more witnesses, corroborate details and further authenticate information provided in previous interviews. We decided to publish their work this week, given the intense public interest around the Ford family and alleged substance abuse. After Rob Ford spoke to the media on Friday afternoon, carefully saying he does not use crack cocaine and is not addicted to crack cocaine, a group of senior editors met again, reviewed the story, and concluded again that it is in the public interest to publish. Indeed, we felt it would be irresponsible not to share this information with the public at this time.
Kofi Annan’s patience for peace
Kofi Annan has had a front-row seat to world events for nearly 20 years and has a simple message for anyone concerned about sectarian violence almost anywhere: be patient and keep talking.
I interviewed Mr. Annan in Ottawa Thursday night at an event hosted by the Global Centre for Pluralism, which is located in a stunningly designed structure on Sussex Drive built by the Aga Khan and the Canadian Ismaili community. Mr. Annan spoke about his challenges in defusing the Syrian crisis, his success averting a sectarian war in Kenya a few years ago, and his dealings with Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
You can watch video highlights of our discussion here:
Over dinner afterward, he spoke frankly about the need for patience. Egypt, he said, could take 15 years to stabilize. Syria is a decade-long project, with or without Bashar al-Assad in power. He encouraged even middle powers such as Canada to play a role in getting the many sides in a conflict to talk. Sometimes they need to talk for years. But he recounted his visit to Baghdad in 1998 to convince Saddam Hussein to open his palaces to inspections – and felt he was succeeding as long as Saddam was willing to talk.
It’s the sort of appeasement that many conservatives feel plays right into the hands of dictators and war-mongerers. Mr. Annan says a greater challenge is the big powers who “talk over one another.” Case in point: Russia and the United States, which he feels undermined a peace agreement for Syria last year because they weren’t listening to one another. He thinks John Kerry is changing that and winning confidence with Moscow.
Any further failure, he warns, will lead to an explosion of conflict in and around Syria. Message to Canada: help keep parties to the conflict talking.
Enjoy the weekend,
Report Typo/Error ||||| This investigative report reveals that:
Doug Ford, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s brother, sold hashish for several years in the 1980s.
Another brother, Randy, was also involved in the drug trade and was once charged in relation to a drug-related kidnapping.
Their sister, Kathy, has been the victim of drug-related gun violence.
In the 1980s, anyone wanting to buy hashish had to know where to go. And in central Etobicoke, the wealthy Toronto suburb where Mayor Rob Ford grew up, one of those places was James Gardens. In the evening, the sports cars often wound along Edenbridge Drive, past the gated homes and the lawn-bowling pitches, until they reached the U-shaped parking lot. By nightfall, the public park was a hash drive-thru. One former street dealer, whom we will call "Justin," described the scene as "an assembly line."
There were usually a number of dealers to choose from, some of them supplied by a mainstay at James Gardens – a young man with the hulk-like frame and mop of bright blond hair: Doug Ford. "Most people didn't approach Doug looking for product. You went to the guys that he supplied. Because if Doug didn't know you and trust you, he wouldn't even roll down his window," Justin said.
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Today, Mr. Ford is a member of Toronto's city council – and no ordinary councillor. First elected in 2010 as his brother was swept into the mayor's office, he has emerged as a truly powerful figure at City Hall –– trying to overhaul plans for Toronto's waterfront less than a year after arriving. He also has higher aspirations, and has said he wants to follow in the footsteps of his father, Doug Ford Sr., by running in the next provincial election as a Conservative.
Meanwhile, he serves as his brother's de facto spokesman. As Toronto is gripped by allegations that its mayor was captured on a homemade video smoking what appears to be crack cocaine and his office descends into disarray – his chief of staff was fired on Thursday – Doug Ford has been the only person to mount a spirited public defence of his largely silent sibling. On Friday, after the Mayor finally made a statement about the accusation, he was the one who fielded questions from the press.
Well before the events of the past week, The Globe and Mail began to research the Ford brothers in an effort to chronicle their lives before rising to prominence in Canada's largest city. Over the past 18 months, it has sought out and interviewed dozens of people who knew them in their formative years.
What has emerged is a portrait of a family once deeply immersed in the illegal drug scene. All three of the mayor's older siblings – brother Randy, 51, and sister Kathy, 52, as well as Doug, 48 – have had ties to drug traffickers.
Ten people who grew up with Doug Ford – a group that includes two former hashish suppliers, three street-level drug dealers and a number of casual users of hash – have described in a series of interviews how for several years Mr. Ford was a go-to dealer of hash. These sources had varying degrees of knowledge of his activities: Some said they purchased hash directly from him, some said they supplied him, while others said they observed him handling large quantities of the drug.
The events they described took place years ago, but as mayor, Rob Ford has surrounded himself with people from his past. Most recently he hired someone for his office whose long history with the Fords, the sources said, includes selling hashish with the mayor's brother.
The Globe wrote to Doug Ford outlining what the sources said about him, and received a response from Gavin Tighe, his lawyer, who said the allegations were false. "Your references to unnamed alleged sources of information represent the height of irresponsible and unprofessional journalism given the gravely serious and specious allegations of substantial criminal conduct."
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There's nothing on the public record that The Globe has accessed that shows Doug Ford has ever been criminally charged for illegal drug possession or trafficking. But some of the sources said that, in the affluent pocket of Etobicoke where the Fords grew up, he was someone who sold not only to users and street-level dealers, but to dealers one rung higher than those on the street. His tenure as a dealer, many of the sources say, lasted about seven years until 1986, the year he turned 22. "That was his heyday," said "Robert," one of the former drug dealers who agreed to an interview on the condition he not be identified by name.
Upon being approached, the sources declined to speak if identified, saying they feared the consequences of outing themselves as former users and sellers of illegal drugs.
The Globe also tried to contact retired police officers who investigated drugs in the area at the time. One said he had no recollection of encountering the Fords.
Another, whose name appeared on court documents in relation to allegations of assault and forcible confinement committed by Randy Ford, said he could not recall the incident. Several did not respond.
Since entering public life, both Fords have been ardent supporters of Toronto police and have campaigned, over the years, on increasing the police presence on Etobicoke's streets. In December, 2011, Doug Ford showed up, unannounced, at a police press conference to trumpet the force's crackdown on a network of drug dealers who were selling, among other things, marijuana.
Doug, like Rob, frequently promotes the Ford family as a type of brand – one that started with their late father's four-year tenure as an MPP in the government of former Ontario premier Mike Harris. Doug Ford is fond of invoking his family's contributions to the community. Through his involvement with the Rotary Club of Etobicoke, he has helped to organize events like the Etobicoke Fall Fair. He frequently mentions the many sports teams that the Ford family business, Deco Labels and Tags, has sponsored over the years. He also cites the many football teams his younger brother has coached, and the hordes of people – he puts the figure at 25,000 – the Fords have entertained at their annual backyard barbecue.
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But long before he took over the family business and pursued public office, Doug Ford's circle of friends was a group of young people who called themselves the RY Drifters, after the Royal York Plaza, a strip mall many of them frequented.
The Fords' neighbourhood was paradoxical in some respects. It teemed with wealth; families who settled there after the Second World War, such as the Fidanis and the Brattys, would become known as the biggest players in Toronto-area land development. As his sticker and label business flourished, Doug Ford Sr. was featured in the society pages of The Globe, rubbing elbows with cabinet ministers, senators and members of the Eaton family.
But the prosperity disguised a disturbing trend among many of the area's young adults – an attraction to crime that went beyond typical teenage rebellion. Former Ford associates interviewed for this story identified at least 10 RY Drifters who became heroin addicts, some of whom turned to break-ins and robberies to support their habits.
In recent years, the Ford family home has become known for the annual barbecue, attended by hundreds of neighbours and a Who's Who of Conservative luminaries – including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. But in the 1980s, the finished basement at 15 Weston Wood Rd. was one of the many places Doug Ford did business, the sources said.
"Justin" recalled descending to the basement on one occasion to buy hash from Mr. Ford, and on numerous other occasions watching as it was sold.
He said he couldn't recall exactly how much hash he purchased that day, but that it was enough to require a triple-beam balance scale – the kind used in most high-school science classes. Normally, street-level dealers in that era relied on Pesola scales, the compact tubes often used by fishermen to weigh their catch. "If you went over [a quarter-pound], you had to go up to the three beamers – because you could get up to a few pounds on it," he explained.
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As a dealer, Doug Ford was not highly visible. Another source, "Tom," who also supplied street-level dealers and has a long criminal record, said his girlfriend at the time would complain, whenever he was arrested, that he needed to be more calculating "like Doug." Mr. Ford's approach, sources said, was to supply a select group that in turn distributed smaller amounts across Etobicoke.
As well as James Gardens, a popular place to buy hash was the Royal York Plaza, also known as The Drift, because it offered a clear line of sight down Royal York Road and fair warning of any approaching police cruisers.
The mall is located steps from the Fords' childhood home. "If [Doug] wasn't going out, someone would go down to the house and pick it up and bring it down to the Royal York Plaza," said "Sheila," adding that she was an RY Drifter who bought small quantities of hash from Mr. Ford, and knew him to supply street-level dealers. "If Doug wasn't around, people … would sell it for him. It was an operation." The quantities that Mr. Ford handled were, at times, substantial. "Michael" said he remembered buying hash from Doug Ford at least half a dozen times – before he found a cheaper source – and that each time he bought between one-quarter and one-half of a pound. He said that a quarter-pound sold for between $400 and $425.
Like many of the street-level dealers interviewed, he said he sold hash in order to support his own smoking habits. When asked where Mr. Ford fit in the hierarchy of dealers in their neighbourhood, he replied: "He'd be at the top."
Turf wars were rare. Relations between dealers were so good, in fact, that in times of short supply, competitors turned to each other for help. "Robert," a former high-volume seller of hash, said he had an arrangement with Mr. Ford. "He would buy off me, sometimes I would buy off him."
"Tom," the high-volume hash dealer who admired Mr. Ford's ability to avoid scrutiny, also said he and Doug helped each other out during shortages. "We had all figured out that that kept the cops away. 'Let's keep things low-profile. Why start fights? There's enough money in it for everybody.' And most people agreed with that. Once the fights start and the guns come out, then the cops will be in and it will ruin it for everybody."
But the shunning of strong-arm tactics was not universal.
Marco Orlando had thick, curly black hair and round cheeks. He and his parents, Italian immigrants, lived in a bungalow on a quiet cul-de-sac a short walk from the Ford family home.
He was also supplied a lot of drugs on credit but was notoriously unreliable when it came to paying for them. Among his suppliers, the suspicion was that Marco was sharing his illicit proceeds with his parents and feigning poverty. So two weeks before Christmas, they hatched a plan, said "Tom," a drug dealer who said he was involved in the scheme.
On a Tuesday night, with the usual throng of young adults outside the Bank of Montreal at the Royal York Plaza, Marco was jumped, beaten and thrown into a car. He was driven more than 30 kilometres to a basement in Bolton, where someone called his parents, demanding they hand over the money. For 10 hours, Mr. Orlando was captive, but his parents didn't panic. Instead, they called the police. Within three days, all three men allegedly involved in the plot were under arrest. ("The powers-that-be blow things all out of proportion, and I guess technically it is kidnapping, but in our world, he owed us $5,000," said Tom.)
One of those arrested was Randy Ford, who was 24 at the time. Court records retrieved from the Archives of Ontario show that he was charged with assault causing bodily harm and the forcible confinement of Mr. Orlando. The records do not disclose how the case was resolved. Randy Ford's lawyer at the time, Dennis Morris – currently representing Rob Ford in the controversy over the alleged crack-cocaine video – said he did not recall the incident. He questioned the allegations surrounding the Ford family's past: "What's the point, other than a smear campaign?"
Since his brothers became leaders of Canada's largest city, Randy has largely remained in the background. Like them, he has blond hair and a wide frame; he also drives a Cadillac Escalade. One of the few times he has been photographed by the media was for a Toronto Star article during the 2010 election campaign. He posed with his brothers in front of a portrait of their father at the family business, where Randy oversees manufacturing. During the election-night speeches at the Toronto Congress Centre, he stood silently behind Doug, wearing a dark cowboy hat.
But in the past, he was much less low-key. Whether on his motorcycle or at the helm heel of the family sailboat – The Raymoni – he always went full throttle. When he fought, which was often, it was usually a one-sided affair.
"He was a terror," said Leo, another former associate of Doug Ford.
Numerous sources identified Randy Ford as former drug dealer, including one who identified himself as former partner, but he and Doug maintained distinctly separate operations. "Doug, being savvy as he was and as business-minded as he was, knew his brother was just too volatile," said "Justin," the street-level dealer who said he was supplied by Doug Ford.
The eldest Ford sibling, Kathy, has been subjected to media scrutiny over the years, primarily because she has been linked to a number of bizarre, violent and sensational incidents.
Most recently, in January, 2012, her long-time boyfriend, a convicted cocaine and hash dealer named Scott MacIntyre, was charged with threatening to murder the mayor at his Etobicoke home. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser offence and was given credit for time served.
(In a brief interview with CBC after the alleged death threat, Doug Ford said: "To be honest with you, I really don't know Scott MacIntyre." Photographs and video taken on the night of the 2010 election show that Mr. MacIntyre was part of the small group of family members celebrating with the new mayor, his wife, Renata, and Doug.)
Ms. Ford's relationship with Mr. MacIntyre is even more perplexing because of an earlier incident: In 2005, he and another man were accused of shooting her in the face during an altercation in her parents' basement. She survived the blast and was rushed to hospital, while Mr. MacIntyre fled in her mother's Jaguar. Crown prosecutors later dropped numerous charges against him, while his co-accused, Michael Patania, pleaded guilty to one count of possession of a handgun.
But even before that, there was gunplay – and it was fatal. Seven years earlier, Ms. Ford's lover was fatally shot by her ex-husband, a drug addict named Ennio Stirpe. At his trial, Mr. Stirpe testified that his victim, Michael Kiklas, was a martial artist, which forced him to bring along the shotgun as "an equalizer."
Not mentioned in the press at the time was the fact that Mr. Kiklas was a white supremacist – a group with which Ms. Ford associated in the 1980s.
Her friends included Gary MacFarlane, a founding member of the short-lived Canadian chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the late Wolfgang Droege, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist in Canadian history, a former Klansman told The Globe in an interview. Two other former associates of Ms. Ford confirmed her association with known white supremacists.
Among Mr. Droege's numerous criminal endeavours, he also sold cocaine and marijuana, which led to his death in 2005 when he was killed by a customer. Mr. Droege was incarcerated for much of the 1980s in U.S. prisons – both for drug trafficking and for his role in a bizarre plot to overthrow the government of Dominica in the Caribbean.
The former Klansman, who agreed to answer questions by e-mail on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Kathy Ford was close to the movement, but he said he couldn't recall meeting any of the Ford brothers. He described hanging out in the Fords' basement and being snubbed by Doug Sr. when Ms. Ford invited him to a party on the family boat. Her father, the former Klansman said, clearly did not approve of his beliefs, while she was engaging and fun but hardly a committed soldier in the race war.
"Some people are real 'believers' and know all the history, dates, facts etc… Others just join to piss off their parents, or carry out some other act of personal rebellion," he wrote. "Clearly [Kathy] was the latter camp."
It remains unclear how much Mayor Ford was exposed to his siblings' escapades and their issues with illegal drugs. He is considerably younger – Doug, the closest, is five years older. But at least one of Doug's closest and oldest friends has become an official adviser to the mayor's office. Several sources have identified David Price as a former participant in Doug Ford's hashish enterprise.
The morning after the Toronto Star and the U.S. gossip website Gawker alleged that journalists with both organizations had viewed a homemade video of the mayor smoking crack, a throng of reporters waited outside his home. Mr. Ford walked past them, uttered only four words – "these allegations are ridiculous" – and hopped into his SUV.
After driving only a few feet, he pulled to the side of the road and rolled down his window to chat with a man in a sunglasses and a blue shirt, Mr. Price. Moments later, Mr. Price appeared again, this time standing between videographers and Mr. Ford as they tried to film the mayor at the gas station at the end of his street.
Since he arrived at City Hall, the mayor's office has said almost nothing about what Mr. Price, called director of logistics and operations, is there to do. Concerning the hiring of Mr. Price, Doug Ford told Globe and Mail city hall reporter Elizabeth Church that "you can't teach loyalty."
Mr. Price first appeared in the office mere days after The Toronto Star revealed that the mayor had been asked to leave a military benefit gala by Councillor Paul Ainslie allegedly because he appeared intoxicated.
A few months before Mr. Price became a public official, he was approached by a Star reporter covering a football game being played by the high-school team coached by Mr. Ford. The reporter quoted Mr. Price as saying that he had coached the mayor in high school, and ever since he has been described in media reports as Rob Ford's former football coach turned aide.
However, four former dealers who spoke with The Globe described Mr. Price as a participant in Doug Ford's hash business in the 1980s.
Both men attended Scarlett Heights Collegiate Institute, where they played football and hockey. "Michael," a former street-level dealer, said he recalls being approached by a young David Price, who told him that Doug Ford had come into a large supply of hash. "I remember buying a quarter-pound," he said.
"Robert," once a large-scale supplier, called Mr. Price "Dougie's close ally" and described their hash business as "a partnership."
"Justin," a former street dealer, said: "They were two peas in a pod. They were both big, tough boys. It just became a natural thing."
He added: "Doug brought the supply, and Dave brought the demand."
According to Mr. Price's LinkedIn page, which has been taken down since he joined the mayor's office, he was Doug Ford's campaign manager in 2010, and graduated from York University in 1987 with a degree in economics and international relations.
Following that, he worked for decades at State Street Canada, a financial services company that provides investment management for institutional investors, such as pension and mutual funds. One former colleague described him as hard-working, very oriented toward customer service, and extremely opinionated when it came to politics. He left the company in 2011.
Mr. Price did not respond to several requests for comment.
Rob Ford was not a player in the Etobicoke drug trade. Several sources said they saw him around his brothers as they were doing business, but they said he didn't seem to be involved in a significant way.
It is difficult to determine what it was like for him growing up in this environment. His spokesman did not respond to requests for interviews. His closest friends from high school declined interview requests. Generally, it was only people who were on his periphery who agreed to speak.
As a teenager, the future mayor committed to football like it was a religion. He co-captained his junior team at Scarlett Heights Collegiate, which went a dismal 1-5 in the regular season one year, but shocked the league in the playoffs by making it to the championship and upsetting undefeated Etobicoke Collegiate. A yearbook photograph shows that "Robbie" – as he was known then – wore his leather championship jacket for at least three years after that victory.
He once played on Etobicoke's all-star team, a mixed bag of players from different high schools that was assembled in the summer to face off against all-star teams from Toronto's other boroughs.
It was a short and intense two weeks of back-to-back practices, which was necessary to inject cohesion into a mixed bag of young men who didn't know each other. Before each practice, they were told to run a mile. If they completed the run in under six minutes, they didn't have to complete it again for the rest of training camp. But if they failed, they had to keep running it at the start of every practice until they came in under the mark.
After a few days, there was only one person left chugging around the track.
"I remember Rob, who was about the same size as he is now, running this thing every day for like two weeks until he was the only guy running – but still giving it 100 per cent at the beginning of every practice until he finally made it," said Mike Lawler, a former Scarlett Heights coach.
"I just thought it took a lot for a kid to do that and not say 'to hell with it.' "
Another former Scarlett Heights football coach, Art Robinson, described young Rob as a leader, who was regularly the foreman in his shop class. There were even a few occasions, Mr. Robinson said, that Rob alerted him to students smoking pot on school grounds.
He went on to attend Carleton University. where he played football but never left the bench, one former teammate said. He dropped out in 1990, the end of his first year, he has told the online news service Openfile.
After that, he joined the family business, but unlike Doug, who ambitiously worked to grow the company, helping it expand to Chicago, his heart was not in it, several former employees said.
"Robbie just did not have the passion for labels," one long-time employee said. "He did what he had to do because it was the family business, but he did not show true passion until he got into politics."
His first run for public office came when he was 27, a council election that he lost. Undeterred, he became involved in several civic-minded campaigns – including one that targeted drug dealers and buyers.
In 1998, he teamed with his father and Toronto police for an unorthodox project, he later told The Etobicoke Guardian. In what would be the start of his unwavering tough-on-crime platform, he – at the time, 29 and unelected – and Doug Sr. – a backbencher at Queen's Park – travelled to Scarlettwood Courts, an Etobicoke public-housing complex, to rid it of illegal drugs.
"When people would drive through to buy drugs, we'd send the owner of the car a letter. It would tell them not come back to the area," Mr. Ford told the Guardian after he was elected to City Council in 2000. He said his crime-fighting campaign had helped him win the election and promised to take the battle to other low-income neighbourhoods.
But his personal war on drugs was short-lived. The year after their letter-writing campaign, he was arrested in Florida after being pulled over for impaired driving. Police also found a joint in his pocket – an offence not revealed until his 2010 mayoral campaign.
Throughout the reporting of this story, Doug Ford made several phone calls to Globe managers and reporters to complain about the questions being asked.
In November, 2011, he called a reporter in the evening to complain about the newspaper's "yellow" and "gutter" journalism.
"I'm getting calls from people I haven't talked to in 20 years," he said. When asked why he was so upset, he responded that he objected to "the type of questions" being asked.
"This is going to get ugly," he said, explaining that he was too "hot" at that moment to consider setting up a formal sit-down interview.
His call appeared to have been prompted by a brief interview The Globe had conducted that day, when a reporter asked a former associate about the RY Drifters – a group that he said never existed.
"It's like a folk tale," he said.
Greg McArthur is an investigative reporter with The Globe and Mail. Shannon Kari is a freelance journalist in Toronto. They were assisted by staff researcher Stephanie Chambers ||||| | – If yesterday's carefully worded I-am-not-a-crack-addict news conference made for a bleak day for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, today isn't much better. The respected Globe and Mail is out with an investigative piece on the mayor's family, including brother Doug, a city councilor. It includes paragraphs like this: "What has emerged is a portrait of a family once deeply immersed in the illegal drug scene. All three of the mayor’s older siblings—brother Randy, 51, and sister Kathy, 52, as well as Doug, 48—have had ties to drug traffickers." Doug, in particular, is portrayed as the go-to guy for hash in the city back in the 1980s. One of his associates reportedly was David Price, who now works in the mayor's office under the vague title of "director of logistics and operations." Kathy Ford, meanwhile, was associated with white supremacists in the 1980s and is linked to a slew of headline-making incidents of the wrong kind. In one, her longtime boyfriend, a convicted drug dealer, was charged with threatening to murder the mayor; he also was once accused, along with another man, of shooting Kathy Ford in the face. While many of the events took place years ago, "as mayor, Rob Ford has surrounded himself with people from his past," says the story. The Globe began working on the piece in 2011—well before the recent allegations emerged about the mayor smoking crack on video. In a letter to readers, the paper's editor writes that it would have been "irresponsible" not to publish the story, given the Ford family's huge sway over the city. "Character matters," writes John Stackhouse. Click for the full piece. |
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This will NOT appear anywhere on Newser ||||| (CNN) Former first lady Barbara Bush is in failing health, a source close to the Bush family tells CNN.
The source said she is being cared for at her home in Houston and has decided she does not want to go back into the hospital. She has been on oxygen for some time.
Her husband, former President George H. W. Bush is with her, as are daughter Doro and sons Marvin and Neil. Her other sons, former President George W. Bush and former Gov. Jeb Bush, have been in and out visiting her the past week.
Bush's office released a statement, confirming after a "recent series of hospitalizations," she has decided against seeking additional medical help and will instead focus on "comfort care."
"It will not surprise those who know her that Barbara Bush has been a rock in the face of her failing health, worrying not for herself — thanks to her abiding faith — but for others. She is surrounded by a family she adores, and appreciates the many kind messages and especially the prayers she is receiving," the statement continued.
Read More ||||| | – Barbara Bush is in failing health and won't be seeking further treatment for her illness, said a statement released Sunday. Per the AP, family spokesman Jim McGrath issued the news release saying that following a recent series of hospitalizations and after consulting with her family and doctors, the 92-year-old former first lady has decided not to seek additional medical treatment and will instead focus on comfort care. The release did not elaborate on the nature of Bush's health problems. However, CNN reports that Bush has been hospitalized multiple times in the last year in her battle with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and congestive heart failure. McGrath says Bush appreciates the many kind messages and prayers she's been receiving. "It will not surprise those who know her that Barbara Bush has been a rock in the face of her failing health, worrying not for herself—thanks to her abiding faith—but for others. She is surrounded by a family she adores, and appreciates the many kind messages and especially the prayers she is receiving," the statement read. Barbara Bush has been married to George HW Bush for 73 years. In recent years, it has been her husband's health, not hers, that has made headlines. The 93-year-old 41st president was hospitalized in 2015 following a fall in the family home. In 2017, Bush was hospitalized twice for a recurring case of pneumonia, the first of which kept him away from home over two weeks. |
In this Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016 photo, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier looks up from his desk in Mandan, N.D. Kirchmeier has led the police response to the Dakota Access oil pipeline protests, and... (Associated Press)
In this Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016 photo, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier looks up from his desk in Mandan, N.D. Kirchmeier has led the police response to the Dakota Access oil pipeline protests, and shrugs off criticism that that response has been heavy-handed at times, saying that he and his officers... (Associated Press)
MANDAN, N.D. (AP) — Don't look for apologies from the North Dakota sheriff leading the response to the Dakota Access oil pipeline protests, especially for the recent — and, in some circles, controversial — action against demonstrators who he believes have become increasingly aggressive.
"We are just not going to allow people to become unlawful," said Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, a veteran of the North Dakota Highway Patrol and National Guard who was elected to his first term as sheriff about two years ago. "It's just not going to happen."
More than 525 people from across the country have been arrested during months of protests over the four-state, $3.8 billion pipeline, all here in support of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe that's fighting the project because it believes it threatens drinking water and cultural sites on their nearby reservation.
His department's job of policing the protesters — the vast majority who've been camping on federal land that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it will close in December for safety concerns — has cost the county more than $8 million, even with help from the state Highway Patrol and officers from various states. Their tactics, however, have drawn criticism from Standing Rock's tribal leader as well as protest organizers and celebrities.
Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault said he and Kirchmeier have met many times and each meeting has been tense and unproductive. "I don't think aggressive force is necessary and he thinks it's necessary," Archambault said.
In the most recent clash between police and protesters, which was near the path of the pipeline and happened last week, officers used tear gas, rubber bullets and large water hoses in freezing weather. Organizers said at least 17 protesters were taken to the hospital, some for hypothermia and one for a serious arm injury, and one officer was injured.
Archambault called the confrontation an act of terror against unarmed protesters that was sanctioned by Kirchmeier.
"His job is to protect and serve, not to inflict harm and hurt," Archambault said.
But Kirchmeier, who has the backing of the state's Republican governor and attorney general, defended officers' actions. He and other authorities said officers were assaulted with rocks, bottles and burning logs.
Kirchmeier, a 53-year-old married father, grew up in this county, which has a population of fewer than 30,000 people — about 15 residents per square mile. He retired from the North Dakota Highway Patrol as a captain after 29 years, and had served in the National Guard for four years.
The protests are demanding: Kirchmeier hasn't had a day off since August, routinely working more than 12 hours a day. The 34 deputies in his department are pulling similar shifts, he said, even with help from more than 1,200 officers from North Dakota and nine other states.
Some officers have been targeted online by protesters, Kirchmeier included. He said someone recently posted the location of his father's grave, which he took as an effort to intimidate.
"Social media has been very bad and it has turned out like law enforcement is building the pipeline," he said. "I can't stop the pipeline. My job is to enforce the law."
President Barack Obama raised the possibility of rerouting the pipeline earlier this month, and construction on the last remaining large chunk, which is on federal land near the reservation, was halted by the Corps for the time being. But Kelcy Warren, CEO of pipeline developer Energy Transfer Partners, told The Associated Press the company won't do any rerouting.
Kirchmeier, like many other of the state's elected officials, blame the Obama administration for not stepping in.
"The issue of the pipeline is not going to get solved with protesters and cops looking at each other," Kirchmeier said. "This is bigger and takes way more political clout than what the county has to offer."
Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said Kirchmeier is in "an incredibly difficult position."
"He has the responsibility to allow people to lawfully exercise their First Amendment rights and he has the obligation to stop it when there is violence contrary to the law," Stenehjem said. "And now there are a significant number or lawless people and the citizens are worried."
Gov. Jack Dalrymple said Kirchmeier "has done a remarkable job dealing with all the issues brought about by these protests. He has been totally professional in what is not a typical law enforcement challenge in North Dakota."
With winter looming, the Corps has decided to close the land north of the Cannonball River where the Oceti Sakowin protest encampment have flourished on Dec. 5, also citing the confrontations between protesters and authorities, according to a letter Archambault said he received.
"To be clear, this means that no member of the general public, to include Dakota Access pipeline protesters, can be on these Corps lands," the letter provided by the tribe said.
The Corps said in a statement Sunday that has "no plans for forcible removal" of protesters and that it "is seeking a peaceful and orderly transition to a safer location." The agency says anyone on the property north of the Cannonball River after Dec. 5 will be trespassing and subject to prosecution.
Protest organizers said Saturday that they don't intend to leave or stop their acts of civil disobedience.
Kirchmeier said before the Corps' move that North Dakota residents who have grown tired — and increasingly afraid — of the protests are backing law enforcement.
"People don't want their livelihoods disrupted," he said. "They are not taking this lightly." ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| | – The US Army Corps of Engineers says it isn't going to force more than 5,000 pipeline protesters off land where they've been camping since August— despite having told them that they need to leave. "The Army Corps of Engineers is seeking a peaceful and orderly transition to a safer location," the agency said in a statement, per Reuters. "This will reduce the risk of harm to people in the encampments caused [by] the harsh North Dakota winter conditions." The agency says it has no plans for "forcible removal" of the protesters when it shuts off access to the area north of North Dakota's Cannonball River on Dec. 5, though Dakota Access Pipeline protesters who remain could be prosecuted for trespassing. Protesters, many of them from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, say they're going to stay put after the deadline expires. But local Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose officers used a water cannon on protesters amid freezing temperatures last week, tells the AP that he won't tolerate people breaking the law. "It's just not going to happen," he says. Gov. Jack Dalrymple says the federal government should take the lead in evicting protesters, though Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II tells the Bismarck Tribune that he believes the feds want to "reduce their liability" and will not act aggressively. (Donald Trump holds stock in the company building the $3.8 billion project.) |
Published on Apr 8, 2016
YouTube's newest superstar is a Finnish powerlifter who uses an industrial press to flatten household objects. If you're not already obsessed with him, you're about to be.
Watch more of Lauri's videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMD...
And read more about him here: http://qz.com/657279/ ||||| The first thing you see is a black and white montage accompanied by an infectious heavy metal soundtrack. A button is pushed, a lever pulled, a needle jumps within a pressure gauge. Then comes a male voice, thick with a Finnish accent: “Welcome to the Hydraulic Press Channel.”
Since the beginning of October 2015, Lauri Vuohensilta has been crushing random objects to smithereens, just for the sheer pleasure of it. He’s pulverized a rubber duck, a jawbreaker, various kinds of fruit, a hockey puck, a Barbie, Lego cars and a cable box, among other assorted and strange items. Crushing stuff is all that Vuohensilta does for his YouTube channel, which has gained almost 700,000 subscribers and nearly 51 million total views in just seven months.
“It’s been quite a surprise that it’s gotten so big so fast,” he said in a Skype interview with The Washington Post, through a gap-toothed grin. “I thought it would take three years or something like that to get this big.”
(Courtesy of Lauri Vuohensilta)
Curiously, the video that shot the Hydraulic Press Channel to viral status was not a spectacular crush like a bowling ball, or crushing a hydraulic press with a hydraulic press (appropriately titled “Pressception”). Instead, Vuohensilta’s first viral video proves an age-old myth in a rather startling fashion — paper really can’t be folded in half more than seven times.
After folding a normal piece of paper in half five times, Vuohensilta enlists the help of his 100 ton hydraulic press to make the creases a little sharper. He grunts as he bends the little white square a seventh time and pushes it under the press, applying 300 bars of pressure.
What happens next is unexpected — the piece of paper shatters.
Vuohensilta is just as surprised as we are, exclaiming “what the f–k?” before gently extracting the remnants of the printer paper from beneath the press. It crumbles in his hand, like limestone.
About a month ago, “Can you fold paper more than 7 times with hydraulic press,” made its way to the front page of Reddit. Within a day, the video got two million views, and Vuohensilta’s aptly named Hydraulic Press Channel took off.
Now, his videos typically gain over a million views within a matter of days, and that paper folding video? Nearly 10 million hits. In his most recent upload, “Crushing deep freezed stuff with hydraulic press,” Vuohensilta incorporates the use of liquid nitrogen to give his crushes a little extra flair and pizzazz. As a rubber-band ball and a remote control turn to dust, Vuohensilta and his wife laugh hysterically in the background.
So what is it about this hydraulic press and its crushing power that Vuohensilta and his viewers love so much?
Born and raised in Tampere, Finland, Vuohensilta was just like any normal kid — he loved to destroy things.
“We would crush smaller rocks with bigger ones and then we would crush toy cars with big rocks and stuff like that,” he said. “I think that most children love to break stuff. I think it’s built inside every person — the need to destroy something.”
Jennifer Walker, a psychotherapist and adjunct professor at University of Maine Graduate School of Social Work, had some thoughts on the matter.
“Perhaps there’s some sort of adrenaline rush or cathartic release that happens by watching something get destroyed. It makes me think of toddlers who discover they can both build things and knock them down. It’s a very powerful feeling.”
Despite the relatability of his videos, Vuohensilta doesn’t seem to have as much of a following in his home country as he does abroad.
“I have done 20 interviews for other countries, and just one small local newspaper, nothing at all besides that. So there is absolutely zero media interest right now in Finland for me, I’m not sure how it’s possible.”
For example, 17 year old Micaela Peltoniemi from Mäntsälä, Finland, had never heard of the Hydraulic Press Channel until recently.
“I asked my friends if they had heard about the channel or if I am just an uncultured swine. Seems like most of the channel’s popularity here in Finland is based on its Finnishness — yes, Finns love when foreigners know anything from their country. For some, including me, the way the guy speaks is the most interesting part. He has unusually strong accent and I find it very cute.”
Indeed, Vuohensilta also attributes much of his success to his Finnish brogue.
“We [he and his wife] also talked about my accent and how it was going to be very funny thing on top of the press thing,” he said. “There is this channel and they just shoot different guns, and the guy talks in a Russian accent and it’s a very popular gun channel.They have like 5 million subscribers, so I think that the accent is a good bonus for this channel.”
Vuohensilta owns a factory that produces building supplies, allowing him to experiment with heavy, destruction worthy machinery and dream about purchasing a brand new hydraulic press.
“I am planning to make a 1,000 ton press, where the cylinder diameter would be half a meter. So I am trying to find some sponsors to make it happen because there are quite expensive parts when you are building something like this.”
For the “hydraulic press guy,” along with other aspiring YouTube entrepreneurs, support and sponsorship is crucial, and has already yielded some great things. Recognizing his following on YouTube, he said a 3D printer company struck a deal with him and sent him his very own 3D printer. Right now, Vuohensilta wants to use the printer to make more sophisticated safety equipment, but in the future, he wants to use the printer to grow his channel in a unique way.
“I am also planning to let people send me earmarks of stuff that they want to be crushed, and then I can just print them out here and crush them and make the video.”
While he seems excited to develop an interactive relationship with his viewers, and cater to their crushing needs, Vuohensilta has dream crushes of his own.
“I think something really dangerous and explosive,” he said. “I am waiting to crush a very big lithium battery. I am planning to do this for as long as people want to watch these videos. I hope that is very long.”
Kate Sensenig, a student at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy, is a freelance writer. ||||| | – Lauri Vuohensilta is a competitive Finnish powerlifter and factory owner, but the world will probably remember him for something else entirely: His love of crushing things. That's because the 29-year-old has been filming himself crushing assorted everyday objects in a hydraulic press on his Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube since October 2015, and since one involving paper made it to the front page of Reddit, he's become a viral sensation with more than 660,000 followers, reports the Washington Post. "Perhaps there’s some sort of adrenaline rush or cathartic release that happens by watching something get destroyed," one psychotherapist muses. "It makes me think of toddlers who discover they can both build things and knock them down. It’s a very powerful feeling." Vuohensilta is a man of few words, and those he speaks are in a thick accent—something he says could well be part of his success. He's barely known in Finland, where his accent is, of course, not a novelty, but he's already done 20 interviews for media outlets in other countries. Quartz, which compiled its own best-hits video that includes the crushing of a cell phone, Barbie doll, pineapple, and more, notes that his proudest achievement so far is that he is the "eighth largest YouTube channel in Finland." He tells Vice that he takes requests for which objects to crush, and otherwise uses whatever is "laying around." But when asked why he likes to crush things, he replies it's "just for fun" and "I am also quite curious to see what happens to different things under the press." (If you want something more relaxing, Snoop Dogg has a nature show.) |
It makes sense to sell this old place now, but he can’t bring himself to leave her ashes.
Barry Gibbs lives alone in a single-story home among the loblollies of Hyde County in eastern North Carolina. The army veteran collects a small disability check after he tore tendons in his shoulder during a fall at his maintenance job at the local school. He winces every time he stands up. He’s 64 years old and the closest hospital is more than an hour away, a distance he came to understand too damn well on the day she needed help.
Their wedding portrait still hangs on the living room wall. It’s one of those 1980s shots with the laser beam backgrounds, her hair big and his mustache combed, his hand on her shoulder. The interior of the house is almost as she left it four years ago: white oak floors, paintings of black bears, family Christmas photos on end tables.
Outside along the driveway, a line of cypress trees shades a headstone that marks where Barry cut a ditch and spread Portia’s ashes, right where she asked to be.
Everybody called her Po. She was picking up sticks from the yard on 7 July 2014, five days shy of her 49th birthday, when she felt a sharp pain in her chest.
Six days earlier, their community hospital had closed. Pungo district hospital was 47 miles west of their house, in Belhaven, and had served the county since 1949, back when crab-picking plants and lumber mills kept these small waterfront communities working.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A picture of Barry Gibbs and his wife Portia. Photograph: Justin Cook for the Guardian
If you’re an accountant, hospitals are only as good as the number of paying patients. Belhaven’s population is about half what it was then. And Hyde county is now the fifth-sparsest county on the east coast, with nine people per square mile.
This spongy stretch of North Carolina’s inner banks represents the suffering side of a modern migration pattern in which southern cities are flourishing, but rural areas are shrinking and losing healthcare options. Since 2010, 53 rural hospitals have closed in 11 southern states, compared with 30 in the other 39 states. About half of those southern closures occurred in counties where non-whites make up a larger percentage of the population than they do the rest of the country. All but two happened in counties with poverty rates above the national average.
In Humphreys county, Mississippi, for instance, three-quarters of residents are black and nearly 40% live in poverty. The hospital there closed in 2012. In Barnwell county, South Carolina, which lost about 6% of its population from 2010 to 2017, residents learned on Facebook in January 2016 that their hospital would shutter the following day.
Many people in these areas piece together incomes with contract jobs that don’t offer insurance. Hospitals are often left to pay the bills for the poorest and sickest, and the math worsened as legislatures in the region rejected Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. The non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation acknowledged in March that Medicaid is having a “disproportionately positive impact in rural areas in expansion states”. The forces combine to create an unequal healthcare landscape, with urban hospitals producing an average 6% profit each year, while rural hospitals are at 2%.
In June, the hospital in Jacksonville, Alabama, will be the first rural hospital to close in 2018. While the deceleration of closures should be an encouraging development, rural health champions wonder if it will make lawmakers less likely to help the areas left behind.
For people in those areas, the questions are more personal: when does a financial decision outweigh a moral obligation? How far out is too far out for you to care about us?
Standing on the porch with Po that torpid July day, Barry had two options: he could go 60 miles east to a hospital in Nags Head and lurch along in the Outer Banks summer congestion, or drive 70 miles west, past Belhaven to a hospital in the town of Washington, where he knew the roads and their doctors had moved.
It wasn’t even a question.
Barry helped Po to their white Buick, backed out of the driveway, turned west toward Washington, and slammed the gas pedal.
‘I’d rather die en route to my doctors’
When Vidant Health, a $1.6bn non-profit medical consortium which owns all of the other hospitals in this region, purchased Pungo district hospital in 2011 and determined that it was losing money, few here were surprised. But when Vidant announced Pungo’s closure in 2013, it started a bitter four-year conflict that spurred protests, marches to the nation’s capital, NAACP intervention and lawsuit upon lawsuit.
“It’s worse than murder,” Adam O’Neal says, standing over his kitchen sink deveining shrimp. “Everybody who needs emergency care and is dying is being murdered by Vidant.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The former mayor of Belhaven, Adam O’Neal, stands at the empty lot where Pungo district hospital once stood. Photograph: Justin Cook for the Guardian
O’Neal served as Belhaven’s mayor for 12 years before deciding not to run in 2017.
Two weeks after the hospital closed in 2014 – one week after Po died – O’Neal staged a 273-mile walk from Belhaven to Washington. He did it again the next year, and was joined by medical professionals from rural hospitals across the south, as well as activists, including Freedom Rider Bob Zellner.
He’s a white Republican who won six terms as mayor in a town that’s nearly 60% black and stood alongside the Rev William Barber, a prominent civil rights activist who spoke at the 2016 Democratic national convention.
The protests created a small pool of enemies at home for O’Neal. Opponents worried his red-hot style would lead Vidant to back out of an agreement to build a modest multispecialty clinic in the hospital’s absence. (In my weeklong trip to the area in March, people called O’Neal a “bully”, a “dictator” and an op-ed in the local paper last year called derided him as “the town crier”.)
As he flops the shrimp around in a plate of flour, O’Neal fires off on those who didn’t support the campaign – everyone from the former Republican governor to small business owners in town. He refers to studies like one the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last year, which showed that rural white populations have better access to care than rural minority populations.
“By me treating the blacks just like I did the whites, that makes people furious,” he says. “When you treat everybody the same, you better get ready, because people will come at you.”
On Christmas Eve 2016, in a final effort to save the building, Barber wrote a column for the website Red Letter Christians titled, A Christmas Carol in Rural America. He prayed for an injunction and wrote: “No matter how long we’ve ignored our poor and sick neighbors, we can learn to do right.”
Five days later, Vidant demolished the hospital.
It’s been more than a year, and quiet fills spaces where conversations used to happen. Lifelong friendships are wrecked in a town where it’s hard to avoid each other. Neighbors who used to dance and bid on East Carolina University-themed crab pots together at hospital fundraisers now turn their backs toward each other at the downtown diner.
If you drive east, Belhaven is the last town of more than 1,500 people until you reach the coast. One-hundred and twenty-five miles of winding pavement separates the beach hospital in Dare county and the one in Washington. Eastern Hyde county, where Barry lives, is right in the middle. Paramedics there are directed to take patients to Dare county, because it’s technically a shorter trip. But Hyde county natives are programmed from birth to avoid beach traffic, so they keep most of their regular doctors in Washington or even farther west.
Barbara Gibbs, Barry’s third cousin, is a 73-year-old former social worker. When she learned that calls to 911 would result in her being sent to Dare county, she told her husband that if she has an emergency he shouldn’t pick up the phone – he should drive her to Washington.
“I’d rather die en route to my doctors than go to Dare county,” she says.
‘Everything is about distance’
Seven miles into the frantic drive with Po, Barry came to an intersection with NC Highway 94, the only road that crosses the 40,000-acre Lake Mattamuskeet.
Po rolled down the window and threw up. Barry knew she wouldn’t make it to Washington. He called the EMT station on the other side of the lake and said he was on his way.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lake Matamuskeet in Hyde county, North Carolina. Photograph: Justin Cook for the Guardian
It’s a straight shot across, six miles. As a teenager, Barry drag raced friends on the road at 140 miles per hour. Now he was in his 60s, flooring it again, zooming past people fishing for crappie and perch under the July sun. Only this time, his wife was next to him having a heart attack.
They’d met at the Sound Side Dance Hall in the early 1980s. He was in his late 20s and had served seven years as a US army infantryman, been married and divorced. She was just 18 but had her share of life experiences, too. She was born to parents in northern Virginia who named her Laura Sue Norris then gave her up for adoption. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Patricia Swindell, and her nickname evolved into Portia, then Po.
She tried to find her birth parents several times. She discovered her original birth certificate and paperwork that listed their likes and dislikes, but never uncovered a name or number. “She always wanted to know,” Barry recalls.
Barry and Po married on New Year’s Eve in 1987 and had a son three years later. Six years after that, a daughter. Po was never in great health. She was a diabetic from childhood. She had begun to show signs of multiple sclerosis. Sometimes Barry found her lying in the yard with no way of explaining how she got there.
They’d made it through each episode, though, so as he sped across the lake Barry never considered that she might not make it home.
They were 34 miles from where Pungo hospital had been open just a week earlier, and 60 from Washington, when he pulled into the parking lot of Mattamuskeet school, which housed an EMT station.
They put Po into an ambulance and shut the doors. Barry waited behind the vehicle for “over an hour, hour and a half” before an EMT popped out and said they were moving her across the lot to meet a helicopter from Greenville. Barry followed the ambulance and looked up.
Just as the chopper was landing, the EMTs told Barry that Po was gone.
‘We’re a real town because we have a hospital’
On a recent spring afternoon along a creek that leads to the Pamlico Sound, local shrimpers were readying their boats for the season. Terrell Mackey was helping friends on the Capt Dell.
Mackey is a 37-year-old black man who was born in Pungo district hospital. He served in the army after high school, and now raises two young sons on the northern edge of Belhaven. He’s an auto mechanic who delivers seafood on the side.
“Pretty bad,” he shot back when I asked him how things are after the hospital closed. “They took away something that was helping locals. Around here, everything is about distance.”
In June 2016, Vidant opened $5.9m multispecialty clinic with 19 exam rooms in Belhaven. It has eight full-time providers for primary care, physical therapy, lab tests and other appointment services. It’s open 24 hours a day but doesn’t have an emergency room. The overnight staff often consists of one physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner. There’s a helipad outside, and local EMS is directed to take people there in an emergency.
Vidant’s mission is “to become the national model for rural health and wellness”. Around the country, rural systems are trying to customize care for specific communities. One area may need just an emergency room, for instance, but another may need more outpatient services. You wouldn’t build a shopping mall for a town that can support only one department store, after all.
Ricky Credle, an independent who was elected Belhaven’s new mayor in November, says the clinic works for now. It had nearly 29,000 visits from patients last year, and a recent third-party survey showed that 85% rated their experience highly.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of rural areas in North Carolina and all across America that would be glad to have a clinic like that,” says Credle, a black man who runs an auto detail business. Credle says his goal is to bring in businesses and jobs to attract new residents. Maybe then, he says, Vidant will open an emergency room.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Entering Hyde county, North Carolina. Photograph: Justin Cook for the Guardian
Dan Drake, Vidant’s senior vice-president of operations, says the group is expanding the emergency department in Washington, but has no plans to reintroduce one in Belhaven. “We know that we are seeing an increase in patients that are using this clinic,” Drake says. “The people who live there and work there and serve those people are proud of what they’re doing.”
Still, the most consistent feelings I gathered in conversations with more than 40 people around the region were apprehension and skepticism. Several, such as Barbara Gibbs, said they were desperate for an emergency room.
Mackey, on the docks, lives less than a mile from the clinic and went there with pain in his knee recently. “Basically, they gave me an Ace bandage, but when that bill came, it was $900,” he says. “If you don’t have a fancy insurance policy or a crisp $100 bill in your pocket, you’re going to get treated different.”
On Father’s Day last year, a two-year-old boy with a mop of black hair was playing in his yard in Hyde county when a copperhead snake slithered out from under a toy car and bit him. His mom, Hannah Berry, sped 20 miles to the clinic. Staff there told her to drive to Washington, and staff there ordered an airlift to Greenville. Finally, after two car rides and a flight, the boy received anti-venom. It was at least two hours after he started screaming, Hannah recalls.
Last July, Latoya Chase took her elderly mother to the clinic with chest pains. When Chase went inside for help, “they told me that I needed to call 911,” she says. She called, and they waited in the parking lot for paramedics. Chase’s mother survived – doctors found blood clots, not a heart attack – but Chase remains furious. “Going there is a waste of time,” she says of the clinic.
Sally Holton, an 89-year-old retired schoolteacher, went to the clinic with breathing problems in 2016 and says doctors called hospitals in Washington and Greenville. Neither had room. They sent her farther west, to a Vidant-owned hospital about 75 miles west of Belhaven.
“I have been in a mess without the hospital,” Holton says. “I’ve just been handicapped.”
Dr Mark Holmes, a professor at UNC, is director of the North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center. A challenge with studying the effects of a rural hospital closure, he says, is that deaths are the only health statistic that’s easy to track.
His team can study economics – there’s a 4% drop in per-capita income and an increase in unemployment by 1.6% after one closes – but there’s no way to count the people who stay home sick when they should see a doctor, or how many visits a family would make if a patient was closer to home. The toll on relationships is impossible to quantify.
“Imagine Green Bay without the Packers,” Holmes says. “It’s a similar type of thing: We’re a real town because we have a hospital. We’re a real city because we have a professional athletic team. Those things give social fabric, which we know is important to a healthy community.”
‘Guess what? We’re still here’
Forty-seven miles west of Barry and Po’s yard, seagulls caw and circle the property that was once Pungo district hospital. Had Po complained of chest pains one week earlier, this would have been Barry’s destination. He doesn’t know if the hospital would have saved her but says: “There’s always that glimmer of hope.”
The building’s outline remains. The weather-worn asphalt in the parking lot cuts and juts around grass: a horseshoe where an entrance once welcomed visitors, a sidewalk to the emergency room, all paths to nowhere now.
The non-profit group that controls the property is selling it to a developer for $525,000. There’s potential. Belhaven’s waterfront sparkles. A block away are a couple of rows of big homes with front porches, and handful of restaurants that serve local seafood. Boaters passing through along the Intracoastal Waterway will stop in and eat this summer.
The newest business in town is an ice cream shop started by Credle and his daughter, Shaiana. Sweet Tooth opened on 30 March, and Shaiana smiled as she sold two scoops of salted caramel to the first customers.
“It’s not the end of the world,” the new mayor says of losing the hospital. “When the schools left, they said that’s the end of Belhaven. Guess what? We’re still here. When the crab industry left, people said Belhaven is dying. Guess what? We’re still here. Well, the hospital closed and guess what? We’re still here.”
That general status report is something most people can agree on, even Barry Gibbs, as he winces and picks up sticks around Po’s headstone, counting the reasons to move.
For better or worse, he’s still here.
Michael Graff is a writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
||||| WASHINGTON -- A financial crisis at rural hospitals driven by inadequate government funding is hurting millions of Americans' access to quality healthcare, experts told the Senate Committee on Finance on Thursday.
Because rural communities have more senior citizens and disproportionately high rates of chronic illness and obesity, many people in those areas rely on Medicare and Medicaid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But reimbursements from the two federal programs to rural healthcare providers don't always cover the cost of treatment, forcing hospitals and clinics to close, experts said.
"Given the financial pressure under their current ... reimbursement structure, rural hospitals are frequently unable to address the health of their communities," said Karen Murphy, chief innovation officer at Steele Institute for Healthcare Innovation, Geisinger.
Formerly the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health, she said she was "struck by the instability" of the rural hospitals in the state.
Murphy now advocates for a new financial model in which rural hospitals are paid monthly from a "global budget" based on the hospital's annual revenue. Under this plan, hospitals can tailor their services to community needs, she said, and would still treat patients with Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance.
"This approach is expected to provide hospitals with a predictable revenue stream," Murphy said.
Maryland first used the model and Pennsylvania is beginning to implement a global budgeting system as well.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the committee's top Democrat, said the bipartisan budget deal signed by President Donald Trump in February extended an "important" program that funds "Medicare-dependent hospitals" -- small hospitals in which more than 60 percent of the patients' insurance coverage is through Medicare.
"That at least gives us some measure of predictability for the next five years, but it seems to me we've really got some heavy lifting to do," the senator from Oregon said.
Since 2010, 83 rural hospitals have closed nationwide and hundreds more are at risk of closing, he added.
Wyden also warned of the Trump administration's attempts to "slash" Medicaid funding, which he said would "turn rural America into a sacrifice zone where hospitals shut down and people cannot get the care they need."
Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, rebuked Wyden, saying rural hospitals had financial problems long before Trump became president.
"We can't just spend more money on Medicaid and expect to solve every problem," Hatch said.
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Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, plugged a bill he introduced last May. It would create a new Medicare classification allowing small, rural hospitals to choose to provide only emergency services, lowering their overall costs. Those hospitals would get reimbursements for the cost of transferring patients needing inpatient care. The proposal has co-sponsors from both parties and support from the American Hospital Association.
Konnie Martin, the CEO of San Luis Valley Health in Colorado, which includes two small hospitals and five rural clinics, also supported Grassley's plan.
"Nearly 70 percent of our patients are covered by Medicare or Medicaid," she said. "We constantly struggle to remain financially viable."
Wyden, who said the hearing would inform town halls he plans to host in Oregon next week, spoke directly to Martin after her testimony.
"I'm going to remember what you said -- 'where you live should not determine if you live.' That really sums up the challenge." ||||| | – When Barry Gibbs' wife had a heart attack two years ago, the North Carolina man couldn't take her to the hospital in nearby Belhaven—because it had closed. Should he drive her 60 miles east to one town or 70 miles west to another? Neither seemed close enough. But his dilemma isn't unique in a country where 83 rural hospitals have shuttered since 2010 in an ongoing financial crisis, the Guardian reports. The problem: Many rural people have contract jobs without insurance, so hospitals often pay for the neediest, especially in states that rejected the Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare. Now urban hospitals are averaging 6% annual profit and rural hospitals only 2%. And as the former mayor of Belhaven learned, the politics of it can get ugly. Adam O'Neal, who served as mayor for 12 years, staged protest walks when the medical consortium Vidant Health prepared to close the hospital for losing money. "It’s worse than murder," says O’Neal. "Everybody who needs emergency care and is dying is being murdered by Vidant." The consortium did build a $5.9 million multispecialty clinic after closing the hospital, but that left Belmont without all-important emergency care. On the federal level, Sen. Chuck Grassley has introduced a bill to let small, rural hospitals save money by offering only emergency care and transferring other patients, so that's in the pipeline, per UPI. But it's too late for Barry Gibbs, whose wife Portia died on the way to the hospital. He sprinkled her ashes outside his home. |
Stephanie Fragoso was pulled over for illegal use of Chapstick. (Courtesy of KLAS)
Distracted driving is bad news — and really, no one should do it.
But did you know that applying lip balm while you’re behind the wheel can result in a $200 ticket and points on your driving record? We didn’t either.
One Las Vegas woman learned the hard way that when the Nevada Highway Patrol says it has zero tolerance for distracted driving, it really means ZERO.
Stephanie Fragoso, 37, thought it was just another day at the wheel. She was driving to take care of something at the Department of Motor Vehicles, of all places, when she pulled away from an intersection, and the officer who had stopped at the red light next to her pulled her over.
He told Fragoso that she was getting a ticket because she was putting on makeup.
“I said no, I was putting on Chapstick,” Fragoso told The Washington Post.
Plus, she was stopped at a red light. A red light!
“He was very sorry; he did not want to give it to me,” Fragoso said of the ticket, which was first reported by CBS affiliate KLAS.
But Fragoso had violated a little-known local ordinance that can land drivers with expensive tickets for doing a host of things that might distract them from the road.
[Those other idiots are the distracted drivers you fear]
The incident happened on April 1, and we don’t really blame Fragoso for thinking it was just an elaborate, terrible April Fools’ Day joke. After all, dealing with pesky chapped lips at a red light seems harmless enough.
Not so.
Laws banning texting or using a cellphone while driving have become ubiquitous. But the one that snared Fragoso goes even further. And this week, police in Las Vegas were cracking down: Fragaso said the officer told her that drivers caught with their hands anywhere but on the wheel were liable to be ticketed.
“[The ordinance] states that when a person is operating a vehicle they must provide full attention to the driving so that it won’t render that action to be unsafe,” Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Loy Hixson told KLAS.
Admittedly, some of the examples Hixson cited are pretty bizarre, if not terrifying.
“They may be eating,” he said. “We’ve seen women putting on makeup. I have seen men shaving with their electric razors. One time, when I was driving down U.S. 95, I saw a lady watching a movie on her iPad and the iPad was attached to her steering wheel with Velcro.”
Okay, so don’t do that.
But watch yourselves, Vegas; your seemingly innocent self-grooming habits have no place on the road.
“It’s really crazy, but the drivers in the city are so bad, I kind of feel better knowing that [police] are doing it,” Fragoso said. “I’m just kind of sad I was the example of that.”
MORE READING: Voice-controlled apps still distract drivers, report says
Distracted behind the wheel? These teens are developing an app for that
Finally, the life-sized Cumberbatch chocolate statue we have been waiting for ||||| LAS VEGAS -- The Nevada Highway Patrol has a campaign to crackdown on distracted drivers, but how far is too far when it comes to cracking the whip? 8 News NOW decided to examine that question after a Las Vegas woman said she received a ticket from a Boulder City police officer for putting on lip balm at a red light.
Stephanie Fragoso said she was cited Wednesday during the statewide crackdown. She said she was at a red light at I-15 and Blue Diamond when it happened.
Fragoso said when she asked the officer why he pulled her over, he told her it was for putting on makeup.
"I told him it was Chapstick,” Fragoso said.
Initially, Fragoso thought the entire thing was a joke, especially since it was April Fools Day, but when she received the citation, she quickly realized that wasn't the case.
“He said 'it could have been anything; you could have been drinking water, shaving your legs',” said Fragoso.
Law enforcement officers say drivers can be ticketed for any distraction that takes their focus away from the road and their hands off the wheel. Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Loy Hixson said this is a city and county ordinance most people don't know about.
“It states that when a person is operating a vehicle they must provide full attention to the driving so that it won't render that action to be unsafe,” Hixson said.
When it comes to distracted drivers, Hixson said he has seen it all.
“They may be eating; we've seen women putting on makeup. I have seen men shaving with their electric razors," Hixson said. "One time, when I was driving down U.S. 95, I saw a lady watching a movie on her iPad and the iPad was attached to her steering wheel with Velcro."
Hixson says each ticket is issued on a case by case basis. For example, some drivers that may be an exception to the rule are people with medical conditions. Take a person who may have an episode; those drivers most likely will not receive a citation, according to Hixson.
However, that wasn't the case for Fragoso. The valley woman said she learned a tough lesson that day. Fragoso says she plans to be more conscious.
Along, with the fine, Fragoso's ticket caused her to receive points against her driving record. Her primary offense was Full Time Attention, but she says after the officer pulled her over she was also cited for Expired Registration and No Proof of Insurance. ||||| | – Las Vegas resident Stephanie Fragoso swears she's happy that troopers in Nevada are getting tough on distracted drivers, she's just surprised to find herself at the wrong end of a ticket. The 37-year-old tells CBS affiliate KLAS that she got a $200 citation Wednesday for the high crime of applying lip balm at a red light. The trooper who pulled her over as she was leaving the intersection explained that he did so because she was putting on makeup. "I said it was Chapstick,” she recalls, but she still got the ticket. “He was very sorry; he did not want to give it to me,” Fragoso tells the Washington Post. Another trooper tells the TV station that the State Patrol is in the midst of a statewide crackdown: Drivers who don't keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel risk a ticket, period. He cites some extreme examples, including one driver seen watching a movie on an iPad strapped to the steering wheel. In comparison, "dealing with pesky chapped lips at a red light seems harmless enough," writes Abby Phillip at the Post. "Not so." (In Virginia, a fifth-grader made headlines for fighting for her right to use Chapstick at school.) |
Published July 08, 2008
GENERAL INFORMATION
The US Air Force Special Operations School (USAFSOS) is a primary support unit of the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), the Air Force component of the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The School is collocated with, and directly supports, USSOCOM's Joint Special Operations University.
Activated in April 1967 as the USAF Special Air Warfare School under the Special Air Warfare Center, the School was redesignated USAFSOS in July 1968. The School's initial course was The Special Air Warfare Indoctrination Course designed to prepare Air Force personnel for duty in Southeast Asia. Since then, the curriculum has changed continuously to meet emerging educational needs of special operations warriors as they respond to complex world situations.
USAFSOS provides indoctrination to turn skilled Airmen into special operators. The School provides specialized education to meet the unique requirements of AFSOC Airmen, SOF aviators, and joint/interagency partners. USAFSOS builds on the functional training conducted by other agencies like Air Education and Training Command and the USSOCOM training component schools: US Navy Special Operations Command's Special Warfare Center and US Army Special Operations Command's John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.
USAFSOS is a "defacto" joint school, due to heavy joint/civilian attendance and joint nature of subjects taught. The joint staff and faculty are comprised of 40 Air Force officer and enlisted personnel, 10 Air Force Reserve Individual Mobilization Augmentees, and Army and Navy special operators, civilians, and contractor personnel.
Nineteen commandants have guided USAFSOS in its 40-year history. The present Commandant is Colonel Paul R. Harmon, USAF. Telephone: DSN 579-6620/6222; commercial (850) 884-6620.
CURRICULUM
The USAFSOS curriculum is directed by USSOCOM and meets AFSOC validated educational requirements. USAFSOS follows the USAF Instructional Systems Development model for course design and delivery.
Currently, courses are focused in one of four areas: asymmetric warfare education, regional and cultural awareness, SOF professional development, and joint operations.
The purpose of asymmetric warfare is to educate SOF personnel on adversarial threats and operational and technological countermeasures available for consideration. Asymmetric warfare courses include crisis response, information operations, psychological warfare, force protection, unconventional warfare, international terrorism, and space operations.
The regional and cultural awareness courses are geared to SOF areas of responsibility and trace their roots to the very first course taught at USAFSOS. The purpose of these courses is to orient the SOF warrior to the cultural, historical, political, economic, and security issues of a particular region.
Career development and maturation of SOF officer and enlisted personnel is the primary focus of SOF professional development. Courses in professional development include introduction to special operations, staff orientation, professional military education, and command preparation.
Joint operations is comprised of six joint special operations courses that educate SOF personnel in the areas of SOF doctrine, SOF air command and control, contemporary insurgency warfare, and civil-military operations. The School also conducts a joint search and rescue course.
As USAFSOS expands to meet an increasing demand for the "thinking warrior," the number of off-station courses (both formal courses and courses tailored to unit needs) has increased. The use of distance-learning technologies is growing to expand course availability. Video tele-instruction and web-based courses are becoming increasingly important in reaching USAFSOS' students.
ATTENDANCE
Information on attending USAFOS courses can be found on the USAFSOS website at https://jsoupublic.socom.mil/welcome_commandant.php. Most courses are open on a first-come, first-serve basis. However, due to high demand and the unique nature of some courses, students must justify their attendance and be approved to attend specific courses.
Course security classifications range from unclassified to top secret. Students are responsible for ensuring security clearance requirements are met prior to attending courses.
Most courses use expert guest speakers to ensure the most timely and relevant information is provided to the students. Over 700 such guest speakers, including former ambassadors, distinguished academicians, and active duty and retired flag-rank officers, support USAFSOS.
There are no tuition charges for US personnel attending USAFSOS courses. Travel and per diem costs per student average approximately $850. The owning unit funds student attendance.
USAFSOS COURSES
- Dept of Asymetric Warfare
Commander's Responsibility Course (Level 3 Pre-Command AT Trng)
Dynamics of International Terrorism (Level 1 AT Awareness Trng)
Joint Operational Influence Seminar
Joint Senior Psychological Operations Course
Responsible Officers Course (Level 2 AT Officer Trng)
Space Applications for Special Operations Course
-Dept of Regional Affairs
Asia Pacific Orientation Course
Cross-Cultural Communications Course
Civil-Military Strategy for Internal Development
Latin America Orientation Course
Middle East Orientation Course
Russia/Eurasia Orientation Course
Sub-Saharan Africa Orientation Course
South/Central Asia Orientation Course
-Dept of Special Operations
Contemporary Insurgent Warfare Course
Insurgency and Foreign Internal Defense Course
Introduction to Special Operations Course
Joint Special Operations Air Component Course
Joint Special Operations Air Component Commander's Course
Joint Search and Rescue Coordinator's Course
Mission Commanders Course
Special Operations Liaison Element Course
Emblem Significance
The emblem is symbolic of the School and displays the Air Force colors, Air Force yellow and ultramarine blue. The laurel wreath cradling the world symbolizes a globe blessed by a peace with honor. Since the School is vitally concerned with counterinsurgency operations, the so called "Insurgency Belt", running from 35-degrees North to 35-degrees South is represented in red on the blue globe. The lamp and flame are traditional symbols of knowledge. It is this knowledge, provided in accordance with the training mission of the school, that tempers the use of airpower. That airpower is represented by the stylized aircraft facing the right of the emblem.
The motto "SCIENTIA VIRTUS PAX" is Latin for "Knowledge is Strength." ||||| HURLBURT FIELD — The former academic dean at the Air Force Special Operations School is appealing his recent dismissal for using prescribed cannabidiol, a non-pyschoactive marijuana derivative, to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
Henry Cobbs, a 22-year Air Force veteran who retired in 1982 and who holds a doctoral degree in educational technology, has been at the Special Operations School since 2009. Two years ago he was diagnosed with intraductal carcinoma of the prostate, a rare form of prostate cancer, and opted for wide-ranging treatment.
"I availed myself of everything I could find," Cobbs said.
One of the things he found through a Montgomery, Alabama, physician was CBD oil, another name for cannabidiol. After being prescribed the oil in October 2017, Cobbs applied the dosage on his tongue. But after reading that using the oil in an electronic cigarette and inhaling the vapor delivered the drug in a higher concentration, he opted for that method.
Cobbs subsequently told a couple of co-workers — one diagnosed with prostate cancer, and another with indications of the disease — about using CBD oil. And according to a termination letter from Special Operations School commander Lt. Col. Michael Lowe, Cobbs was also seen "vaping" the medication.
Cobbs' termination became effective the afternoon Aug. 15, but he retired on the morning of that day, a move designed to preserve his retirement benefits. Retirement doesn't jeopardize his appeal, Cobbs said.
At issue in Cobbs' termination is a 1986 executive order by President Ronald Reagan aimed to make federal workplaces drug-free. The order defines "illegal drugs" to include federal Schedule I drugs, which include CBD oil. But the order also notes "the term 'illegal drugs' does not mean the use of a controlled substance pursuant to a valid prescription or other uses authorized by law."
Cobbs has contacted with the office of U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz regarding his appeal.
Retired Air Force Capt. Nate Nelson, director of military affairs in Gaetz's office, said Thursday that federal law, which governs how the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) must handle Cobbs' situation, lists CBD oil as a Schedule I drug, with the exception of a particular type used for epilepsy.
Nelson said Gaetz's office is working with Cobbs in an advisory capacity, but added that "the military has to uphold the federal stance."
"We completely understand AFSOC's stance," Nelson said.
Nelson pointed out that, while they might not necessarily help Cobbs, a couple of pieces of legislation now in Congress could affect similar cases.
The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States Act would, among other things, exclude CBD oil from the definition of marijuana. Gaetz is a co-sponsor of the bill.
Also, Nelson said, House Resolution 6043, which would change how the Controlled Substances Act is applied to marijuana, has been introduced with Gaetz as a co-sponsor.
Cobbs' most recent examination showed his cancer had been contained. But as his appeal proceeds, Cobbs says he's left with one question.
"You're going to make me choose between a job and cancer?" he asked. ||||| Veteran Henry Cobbs promises to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court if needed.
A Vietnam veteran and career educator at an elite military training school now finds himself resorting to a Reagan-era executive order in hopes of clearing his name. Henry Cobbs’ crime? Vaping a non-psychoactive form of cannabis to treat his prostate cancer.
Cobbs, 77, was forced out of his job last month as dean of academics for the Air Force Special Operations School (AFSOS) at Hurlburt Field near Fort Walton Beach, a position he had retained since 2009.
A 22-year military veteran with two master's degrees and a doctorate in administration of higher education, the retired Air Force captain was issued a “Notice of Removal” in May for his “use of cannabidiol (CBD), a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance,” by Lt. Col. Michael S. Lowe, citing a witness who saw Cobbs “smoke your ‘medicine.’” On Aug. 13, Col. Robert A. Masaitis, commander of the 492nd Special Operations Training Group, rejected Cobb’s appeal, informing him: “This action will become a permanent part of your Official Personnel Folder.”
Hours before his scheduled termination, Cobbs filed for retirement in order to retain his benefits. But he says money isn’t the issue.
“My life has been sort of a storybook, to tell you the truth. I’ve been blessed,” said Cobbs, who also worked as executive assistant superintendent for computer technology services in the Atlanta public school system, as well as director for management information systems at Alabama State University. “But to end it on a note like this is reprehensible. What I’m trying to do is protect my legacy.”
Prescribed by a doctor
Although CBD lacks the tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC component that evokes euphoria, the federal government maintains that CBD has no medicinal value, despite numerous studies to the contrary, and is thus illegal. But Cobbs says he has a 32-year-old federal directive on his side, called the Drug-Free Workplace. “What they’re doing,” he said, “is conveniently cherry-picking their policies.”
In Executive Order 12564 Sec. 7(c), signed by President Reagan in 1986, the “definitions” section defines “illegal drugs” as controlled substances “included in Schedule I or II.” But it adds, “The term ‘illegal drugs’ does not mean the use of a controlled substance pursuant to a valid prescription or other uses authorized by law.”
By that standard, says Cobbs, he is guaranteed legal access to CBD, even as a federal employee. Although he says he doesn’t own a medical marijuana card, he submitted in his defense what he describes as a doctor’s prescription for CBD oil.
Noting Cobbs’ prostate cancer and inflammation, the physician, Dr. Ryan McWhorter of Montgomery, Alabama, indicated in a letter to Masaitis that his office “prescribed CBD oil” for Cobbs, who “purchases this medication from our office only.”
McWhorter did not respond to the Herald-Tribune’s request for additional information. A public information officer with AFSOC’s 492nd Special Operations Wing said she could not comment on individual personnel matters.
“The current state of federal law is that medicinal use of marijuana and marijuana derivatives is not legal,” spokeswoman Ciara Travis said. “We will continue to follow the law and expect our employees to do the same. We are committed to providing a drug-free workplace for our employees.”
Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says doctors are prohibited from writing prescriptions for marijuana — they can only make recommendations — because a Schedule 1 drug by definition has zero medicinal value.
The Food and Drug Administration is the arbiter of which products have legitimate medical uses. In June, the FDA ended its longstanding embargo on marijuana by giving its first-ever approval to a CBD product. The solution is called Epidiolex, and is recommended for two rare forms of childhood epilepsy. On Thursday, in an equally unprecedented move, the Drug Enforcement Agency assigned Epidiolex to its lowest-risk Schedule 5 category, alongside the likes of Lomotil, Lyrica and Robitussin.
But that probably won’t do Cobbs much good, says NORML’s Armentano.
“I do agree the language of the executive order doesn’t seem to make much sense; it seems to contradict itself,” he said. “I think it’s also interesting that it says at the end ‘does not mean the use of a controlled substance pursuant to a valid prescription or other uses authorized by law.’ I can’t for the life of me imagine what those ‘other uses authorized by law’ could possibly be.
“I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a judge, but certainly I could see how a layperson would look at that language and think there’s wiggle room here — it’s written as if to imply there is. Unfortunately, the issue here is, it doesn’t appear as if (Cobbs) has a valid prescription. And in most states, even if those states authorize medical marijuana, even the use of CBD, the entity that’s writing the prescription cannot be the entity that’s also filling it. That’s a total no-no.”
Among the many congressional bills being touted to mitigate marijuana’s erroneously imposed 48-year-old Schedule 1 quarantine, the “Fairness in Federal Drug Testing Under State Laws Act” — introduced in August by U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist — would most benefit Americans like Henry Cobbs.
As the Herald-Tribune reported last month in its “Warriors Rise Up” project, veteran suicide rates are soaring, claiming more than 75,000 lives from 2005-2015, and many survivors have pleaded in vain for access to medical marijuana. Passage of H.R. 6589 would allow more than 2 million U.S. civil servants and another 1.4 million military personnel to legally use marijuana for pain relief.
Linguist, intelligence officer
Cobbs, now paying the price for crossing the Schedule 1 line, enjoyed a distinguished career in the military. Trained as a Chinese Mandarin linguist eavesdropping on enemy chatter in Southeast Asia, he was also an air intelligence officer with the 18th Tactical Fighter Wing in Okinawa, as well an air targets intelligence officer and sensor operations detachment commander in Thailand.
After leaving the military in 1982, Cobbs pursued an educational track in the civilian sector. One of those jobs was a five-year stint in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he was an information and instructional systems adviser for the Saudi Royal Air Force.
Nine years ago, Cobbs was hired by AFSOS, which was formed in 1967 in response to unconventional warfare unfolding in Vietnam. “As USAFSOS expands to meet an increasing demand for the ‘thinking warrior,’ the number of off-station courses (both formal courses and courses tailored to unit needs) has increased,” states the school’s website. “The use of distance-learning technologies is growing to expand course availability. Video tele-instruction and web-based courses are becoming increasingly important in reaching USAFSOS’ students.” Supervising the conversion of those courses to digital formatting was Cobbs’ job.
In 2016, the Kentucky native was diagnosed for prostate cancer. Cobbs was preparing to endure radiation and chemotherapy when a doctor suggested alternative treatment. It involved dietary supplements incorporating citrus ingredients, non-psychoactive mushrooms and CBD. Cobbs’ cancer is now in remission.
This year, Cobbs, who brought a vape pen to work as part of his continuing daily regimen, tried reassuring a professional colleague who had received a prostate cancer verdict by sharing his own success with CBD therapy. A concerned coworker overheard the conversation and reported Cobbs’ use of marijuana to management. However, at least two other colleagues support Cobb’s position on CBD, but declined to go on record for fear of retaliation.
The next step for Cobbs is an appeal for a hearing before the Merit Systems Protection Board, which considers grievances lodged by federal employees for unfair termination. If they uphold AFSOS’ punishment, he vows to press his attack on Schedule 1.
“The simple plain and bottom line is, if the POTUS was unaware (as evidenced by the language in para(graph) C of the EO that you ‘cannot’ have a prescription for Schedule 1 drugs, how reasonable is it to expect me to know?” Cobbs states in an email. “The very presence of the language in the para says someone thought a prescription was possible. Otherwise, why add confusion to the policy?
“I’ll go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if I have to,” Cobbs adds. “I was only concerned with getting rid of my cancer, and the CBD worked. So to hell with the law.” ||||| | – Henry Cobbs, 77, is a 22-year military veteran who served in Vietnam and retired as an Air Force captain; he has two master's degrees and a doctorate; he's worked extensively in education and and had served as the dean of academics for the Air Force Special Operations School (AFSOS) at Hurlburt Field near Fort Walton Beach, Fla., since 2009. But he was forced out of his job at the elite military training school last month—because he vaped cannabis as part of his treatment for prostate cancer. Cobbs' doctor prescribed cannabidiol (CBD) oil, and Cobbs purchased it from his doctor's office. CBD oil does not contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis. In May, Cobbs received a "Notice of Removal" citing his use of a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance; it said that a witness saw Cobbs "smoke your 'medicine.'" He appealed, but the appeal was rejected in August, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports. Now Cobbs, whose cancer is in remission, says he will take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to. "You’re going to make me choose between a job and cancer?" he tells the Northwest Florida Daily News. Despite studies showing CBD has medicinal value, the federal government says it does not, and is therefore illegal. But President Reagan signed the Drug-Free Workplace executive order in 1986, and it states that "the term 'illegal drugs' does not mean the use of a controlled substance pursuant to a valid prescription or other uses authorized by law." But Cobbs does not have a medical marijuana card, and experts question whether doctors can legally prescribe something defined as a Schedule 1 drug. As for the Air Force, a public information officer would only say, "The current state of Federal law is that medicinal use of marijuana and marijuana derivatives is not legal. We will continue to follow the law and expect our employees to do the same. We are committed to providing a drug-free workplace for our employees." |
A journalist walks in front of a screen with olympics logos during the medal launching ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Sergio Moraes
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Rio de Janeiro's governor declared a state of financial emergency Friday and requested federal funds to help fulfill obligations for public services during the Olympics that start Aug. 5.
Emergency measures are needed to avoid "a total collapse in public security, health, education, transport and environmental management," a decree in the state's Official Gazette said.
The state's revenue, largely tied to the petroleum industry, slumped in the last two years as global oil prices collapsed.
The announcement followed this week's visit to Rio by Brazil's Interim President Michel Temer, who said the federal government would ensure all obligations are met for a successful Games.
Rio is expecting about 500,000 foreign visitors during the Olympics, which has coincided with Brazil's worst recession since the 1930s and a political crisis that last month led to the suspension of President Dilma Rousseff.
"The state's financial emergency in no way delays the delivery of Olympic projects and the promises assumed by the city of Rio," Mayor Eduardo Paes said on Twitter.
He also underscored that legacy construction projects, with the exception of an 8.79 billion-real expansion of Rio's metro that is expected to be finished just days before the Games open, are the responsibility of the city and that most have been completed.
The local organizing committee for the Games said the state's fiscal situation did not impact its actual running of the Olympics, which relies entirely on private funds.
While the majority of Olympic infrastructure costs have been spread across city, state and federal budgets, with some financing from private companies, the state is responsible for most day-to-day security and health services in Rio.
The financial pinch resulted in a 30-percent cut in the state's security budget - just as Rio has seen a jump in homicides and assaults in recent months, raising concerns about safety ahead of the Olympics.
The state of Rio expects a budget deficit of over 19 billion reais ($5.56 billion) this year as spending planned before oil prices fell outstrips revenue that is tumbling during Brazil's recession.
Rio state's debt has been downgraded several times.
On Wednesday, Fitch Ratings downgraded Rio's debt rating to 'B-' from 'B+', saying the state was suffering "a fast-deteriorating liquidity position."
Since late last year, the state has been forced to delay pension and salary payments and shutter some schools and hospitals, where crucial supplies, including medicines and syringes, are lacking.
Brazil is also facing an outbreak of the Zika virus, which has been linked to the birth defect microcephaly in which babies are born with abnormally small heads frequently associated with developmental issues.
(Reporting by Paulo Prada, Stephen Eisenhammer and Brad Brooks; editing by Richard Chang and Andrew Hay) ||||| Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Rio Olympics are starting to look like a picnic scheduled too far in advance. The picnic basket—in this case, the actual facilities of the games—looks like it might turn out OK, even if organizers are cutting costs left and right. (No TVs in the Olympic Village apartments, for instance. Boo-hoo. That's like leaving out the capers.)
Henry Grabar Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slate’s Moneybox.
But as the media hypes the minor faults of the games (fewer seats at some venues!), the broader context is that the picnic is happening in a thunderstorm. The state of Rio de Janeiro, which includes the city of Rio de Janeiro, is “nearing a social collapse,” state chief of staff Leonardo Espindola warned the country’s Supreme Court in April.
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Public workers have been working with delayed salaries since the start of the year; teachers and other workers have been striking for months. The Rio state security budget has been cut by 30 percent this year. Hospitals are in crisis and have been running out of essential supplies like syringes. Welfare programs like the Bolsa Familia, a Lula-era project that gives cash transfers to low-income families that send their kids to school, are being suspended.
On Wednesday, the credit rating agency Fitch dropped the state’s rating by two notches. Standard & Poor’s did the same in May. Both agencies say the downgrade reflects concern about underfunded pensions.
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The contrast between shoddy public services and frenzied World Cup and Olympics construction has rankled Cariocas for years. But the Olympics aren’t really to blame for Rio’s problems: The state has borne relatively little of the cost, according to the Brazil 2016 “Responsibility Matrix.” Brazil is experiencing a recession and a political crisis driven by a gargantuan corruption scandal involving the state oil company, Petrobras, and seemingly the entire federal legislature. The oil crash has hit Rio particularly hard. In 2012, more than half of the state’s investments were related to Petrobras. Today, oil royalties are half of what they were three years ago.
Obviously, the Olympic preparations have been impacted. The project to plant 500,000 mangrove trees in Barra de Tijuca, where a number of Olympic activities will occur, has been stalled due to the state's financial problems, Bloomberg reports. The half-dozen major construction firms building most of the Olympic infrastructure are all involved in the Petrobras corruption investigation, and several Olympic projects, including the port renovation and the metro expansion, are being investigated by federal prosecutors.
But as far as all things Olympics, Brasilia mostly has the Rio region’s back. The country’s government is responsible for any debts the local organizing committee incurs. Brasilia, frightened by the prospect of a failed state under the Olympic spotlight, is considering giving the state of Rio an emergency loan. The Brazilian justice and defense ministries will pay for most of the security preparations for the games. ||||| Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Olympics in Rio are due to start on 5 August
The Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro has declared a financial emergency less than 50 days before the Olympics.
Interim Governor Francisco Dornelles says the "serious economic crisis" threatens to stop the state from honouring commitments for the Games.
Most public funding for the Olympics has come from Rio's city government, but the state is responsible for areas such as transport and policing.
Interim President Michel Temer has promised significant financial help.
The governor has blamed the crisis on a tax shortfall, especially from the oil industry, while Brazil overall has faced a deep recession.
The measure could accelerate the release of federal emergency funds.
Rio state employees and pensioners are owed wages in arrears. Hospitals and police stations have been severely affected.
What has gone wrong in Brazil?
Image copyright AFP Image caption Rio state is responsible for the expansion of the metro for the Olympics
In a decree, Mr Dornelles said the state faced "public calamity" that could lead to a "total collapse" in public services, such as security, health and education.
He authorised "exceptional measures" to be taken ahead of the Games that could impact "all essential public services", but no details were given.
The state has projected a budget deficit of $5.5bn (£3.9bn) for this year.
Rio's mayor Eduardo Paes said on Twitter the state's decision "in no way delays the delivery of Olympic projects and the promises assumed by the city of Rio".
There are also concerns over an outbreak of the Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects, and the impact it could have on the city's tourism.
Rio expects about 500,000 foreign visitors during the Olympics. ||||| | – With less than 50 days before the Olympics, the state of Rio de Janeiro officially declared financial emergency while warning of a "serious economic crisis" and looming "public calamity," the BBC reports. According to Reuters, Gov. Francisco Dornelles declared the state of financial emergency Friday, requesting federal funds to keep public services going during the Olympics and to avoid a “total collapse in public security, health, education, transport, and environmental management." Rio is expecting half-a-million visitors when the Olympics start Aug. 5. During the games, the state, which is facing a $5.6 billion budget deficit this year, will be in charge of transportation, policing, and health. And things don't look good on that front. Homicides and assaults are increasing in Rio at the same time the state's security budget was cut by 30%. Rio is already delaying pension and salary payments while closing schools and hospitals. Slate reports teachers have been striking for months, and hospitals are running out of syringes. Plus there's the whole Zika thing. Brazil, as a whole, is in its worst recession in 80 years thanks to low oil prices. And the state chief of staff says Rio is "nearing a social collapse." But despite all that, the Olympics will likely go off without too many hitches. Much of the funding for the games is coming from the Rio de Janeiro city government. “Once the games are over? That’s when the real crisis will set in," according to Slate. |
Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is awake and responding sporadically in writing to questions, authorities said. Investigators are asking about other cell members and other unexploded bombs, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Previously officials said Tsarnaev was in no condition to be interrogated.
Tsarnaev, 19, is being treated at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he is listed in serious but stable condition, with wounds to the neck and throat area, according to sources.
The bombing killed three, including a young boy, and wounded about 170. An MIT officer was allegedly killed by Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan and a Boston transit cop was badly wounded in a subsequent shootout.
The FBI is still collecting evidence from the Monday's blast site, mainly from the sides of buildings and the bleachers.
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis in a news conference Sunday that the circuit board to at least one of the bombs had wires crudely soldered to it and is confident ATF agents will put that bomb back together piece by piece and tell us what it was made of.
Engineers are also checking the structural integrity of buildings near the scene before it fully reopens. Boston Police plan to start returning personal items to people who left behind their things on Monday.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said it is time for the city to move forward.
"I'm working hard over the last several days develop a plan to reopen Boylston Street now the most famous street in the world," Menino said at the Sunday news conference.
Possible Charges at State and Federal Levels
Tsarnaev could face charges at the state and federal levels, but Massachusetts has no death penalty.
Menino hopes federal authorities "throw the book at him," which would include the possibility of execution.
"I hope that the U.S. attorney takes him on the federal side and throws the book at him," Menino said on "This Week." "These two individuals held this city hostage for five whole days."
"They should not do that -- that's what these terrorist events want to do, hold the city hostage and stop the economy of the city."
RELATED: 'This Week' Transcript: Mayor Thomas Menino
Menino said he agreed with the decision to shut down the city Friday because of multiple events, including the discovery of a pipe bomb unrelated to the marathon attack.
"At that time we found a pipe bomb at another location in our city of Boston," he said. "Another individual was taken into custody."
Menino did not elaborate on the pipe bomb incident.
He said he believed the Tsarnaev brothers acted alone when they allegedly set off two bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line.
He also said he thought that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died after a gun battle with police, "brainwashed or manipulated" his 19-year-old brother, who was taken into custody Friday.
It's unclear when Dzokhar Tsarnaev will be able to talk, but a special interrogation team is at the ready, sources said.
He apparently knows that his brother died after a Thursday night gun battle with police, sources say.
Authorities had launched Friday a manhunt for Tsarnaev, who managed to escape one block outside a police perimeter. Residents of greater Boston were told to stay in doors, as police hoped to find and apprehend Tsarnaev alive.
Authorities zeroed in on a boat in a Watertown, Mass., backyard after they received a tip from homeowner George Henneberry, who saw something was amiss.
PHOTOS: Boston Bombing Suspect Manhunt
An infrared camera with a bird's-eye view of the moments before Tsarnaev's capture gave authorities an idea of what to expect as they methodically closed in on the Boston Marathon bombings suspect.
Police believe Tsarnaev was initially wounded Thursday night in the gun battle that ended in his brother's death. Police said they found blood in a car he abandoned and blood at a house.
RELATED: Boston Bomb Suspect Captured Alive in Backyard Boat
The thermal-imaging camera showed Tsarnaev was able to move around inside the boat, as the FBI SWAT team brought in a robotic device to approach the boat and peel back a tarp, giving authorities a clear view of the suspect.
At least two flash grenades were thrown into the boat, designed to disorient Tsarnaev, who authorities feared might have been wearing a suicide vest.
They were then able to move in, rushing Tsarnaev to Beth Israel medical center for treatment, where he has remained under heavy guard. He was not wearing a vest.
It was unclear whether he was hit by a final exchange of gunfire Friday.
Tsarnaev is in the same hospital where his brother, Tamerlan, 26, was brought early Friday after a shootout with police. Tamerlan died of his wounds.
The Investigation
Investigators, who are expected to include the country's elite counterterrorism unit, are hoping that Tsarnaev survives because they are intent on determining what triggered his and his brother's alleged involvement in the attack and whether they had any help.
One focus of the probe so far is a six-month trip Tamerlan Tsarnaev took to the semi autonomous Russian province of Dagestan in 2012. Dagestan has become a hotbed of militant Islamic activity.
The FBI acknowledged it interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev at the request of Russian authorities, but after looking at his phone records, websites he visited and associates, the FBI found he had no ties to terror.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the suspects' mother, said her sons couldn't be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because Tamerlan had been on the FBI's radar.
"My son would never do this. It is a set up," she said. "He was controlled by FBI like for five, three, five years. They knew what my son was doing."
RELATED: Bombing Suspects' Mom: 'My Family Is in the Dirt'
After Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been checked out, FBI officials said the monitoring had to stop by law because they found nothing incriminating.
"There are too many people in this country just like him that are touching extremist websites that are espousing things that aren't particularly kind to Americans. But that's not against the law here," ABC News consultant and former FBI special agent Brad Garrett said.
Boston Starts to Heal
After a week of tragedy, terror and living on edge, the greater Boston area is finally breathing a sigh of relief.
"We got our guy and very proud of it and we want Watertown to back to normal; we want Boston to go back to normal," Watertown Chief of Police Edward Deveau told ABC News.
On Sunday, Cardinal Sean O'Malley called on the people of Boston to return to the community.
"It has been refreshing to see the generous and at times heroic response to the Patriot's Day violence. Out challenge is to keep the spirit of community alive," he said.
Pictures of those killed were place on easels inside this cathedral and O'Malley said they live now in eternity.
At a Red Sox game on Saturday, fans filled Fenway Park with their voices, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in unison.
They applauded for law enforcement, they mourned the victims of the bombings and they showed their resilient spirit.
"We are one. We are strong. We are Boston. We are Boston strong," the announcer said to an eruption of cheers.
The Red Sox later pulled out a spirit-boosting win.
And America hasn't forgotten about David Henneberry, the man who tipped police off that Tsarnaev was hiding in his boat.
Bullets riddled the blood-stained vessel during a final volley of gunfire between Tsarnaev and law enforcement. Henneberry is being regarded as a hero, and people around the country are sending him checks to put toward a new boat.
Deborah Newberry, 62, of Orlando, Fla., told ABCNews.com she mailed a $25 check to Henneberry's home.
"Just listening to his coolness and how he handled the situation, it was like OK, that is a man who needs to have his boat restored," she said.
ABC News' Pierre Thomas, Anthony Castellano, Aaron Katersky and Christina Ng contributed to this report. ||||| The lone surviving suspect in the bombing attack on the Boston Marathon one week ago is communicating in writing, and could be ready to be questioned by an elite FBI team
As Boston prepared to mark with a moment of silence the passing of a week since the terror attack that killed three and wounded at least 176, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was believed to be unable to speak but awake and responding to questions, possibly from medical staff. Tsarnaev is under heavy guard at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and is in serious condition with several injuries, including a possible gunshot wound to the neck.
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USA Today reported that the suspect began answering "substantive" questions from authorities Sunday night, but that could not be independently confirmed. If the interrogation has indeed begun, prosecutors may have just 48 hours before he must be read his Miranda rights and granted the right to remain silent and to have an attorney. White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday that Tsarnaev, who is a U.S. citizen, will be tried in civilian courts and not held as an enemy combatant.
Investigators believe the throat wound that left the 19-year-old suspect unable to speak may have been self-inflicted in a failed suicide bid that may have come as police closed in on him, as he hid inside a boat trailered in a backyard in Watertown, Mass., late Friday.
U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee member Dan Coats, R-Ind., told ABC Sunday the injuries may leave the suspect permanently unable to speak.
“The information we have is that there was a shot to the throat," Coats said. "And it’s questionable whether — when and whether -- he’ll be able to talk again.”
Meanwhile, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has asked residents to observe a moment of silence at 2:50 p.m. Monday, the time the first of two bombs exploded near the finish line. Bells will ring across the city and state afterward.
The most serious charge available to federal prosecutors would be the use of a weapon of mass destruction to kill people, which carries a possible death sentence. Massachusetts does not have the death penalty.
Davis also said Sunday authorities believe the suspects also were likely planning other attacks based on the cache of weapons uncovered during the Thursday night shootout, calling the stockpile "as dangerous as it gets in urban policing."
"We have reason to believe, based upon the evidence that was found at that scene -- the explosions, the explosive ordnance that was unexploded and the firepower that they had -- that they were going to attack other individuals," Davis said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation." "That's my belief at this point."
Davis added on "Fox News Sunday" that authorities cannot be positive there aren't more explosives that haven't been found, but the people of Boston are safe.
Also Sunday, a lawyer for the wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev said federal authorities have asked to speak with his client as part of their investigation.
Authorities went to the suburban Rhode Island home of Tsarnaev's in-laws Sunday evening, where Katherine Russell Tsarnaev has been staying. Lawyer Amato DeLuca tells The Associated Press that she did not speak with them, and they are discussing how to proceed.
The twin bombings killed three people and wounded at least 176.
Patrick told NBC on Sunday that surveillance video clearly puts Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at the scene of the attack.
"It does seem to be pretty clear that this suspect took the backpack off, put it down, did not react when the first explosion went off and then moved away from the backpack in time for the second explosion," Patrick said. "It's pretty clear about his involvement and pretty chilling, frankly.
According to media accounts, Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, were Muslims who recently gravitated to a radical strain of Islam, going so far as to post Anti-American, jihadist videos on social-media sites. Both are thought to have as-yet-unprobed ties to a radical Muslim cleric hellbent on the destruction of the American way of life.
A day-long dragnet for Tsarnaev ended Friday, with police capturing the suspect covered in blood and hiding in a boat in the backyard of a man who called 911 after becoming suspicious of activity on his property.
"We got him," Boston Mayor Tom Menino tweeted moments later, as neighbors gathered to form a gauntlet of cheers while a phalanx of police cars departed the scene.
Police moved in on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Friday evening after a tip led them to the home on Franklin Street.
Neighbors said they heard more than 30 shots likened to "a roll of firecrackers shooting off." Police swarmed the scene, and several explosions, possibly police concussion grenades, were heard after a robot moved in on the boat. Less than two hours later, at about 9 p.m., the suspect, believed to have been injured in a wild shootout that spanned Thursday night to Friday morning, was being taken to Beth Israel Hospital.
No police were injured when shots were fired by the boat.
Sources told Fox News the shed and the boat had been searched earlier, but a local man noticed a door to it had been opened, saw blood on the tarp and called police.
"It was a call from a resident of Watertown," Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau said. "We got that call, and we got the guy."
Davis said Tsarnaev was in serious condition and was found "covered with blood." He did not come out from inside the boat willingly, despite the efforts of negotiators, Davis said.
"We assume that those injuries came from the gunfire the night before," Davis said.
He also said Tsarnaev did not have any explosives with him when he was taken into custody.
"I, and I think all of the law enforcement officials, are hoping for a host of reasons the suspect survives," Patrick said after a ceremony at Fenway Park to honor the victims and survivors of the attack Saturday. "We have a million questions, and those questions need to be answered."
The hiding place was found just moments after police said their hunt for Tsarnaev, one of two radical Muslim brothers suspected in Monday's attack, had gone cold and urged people to "go about your business."
Shortly after the capture was announced, Watertown residents poured out of their homes and lined the streets to cheer police vehicles as they rolled away from the scene.
Celebratory bells rang from a church tower. Teenagers waved American flags. Drivers honked. Every time an emergency vehicle went by, people cheered loudly.
"Tonight, our family applauds the entire law enforcement community for a job well done, and trust that our justice system will now do its job," said the family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who died in the bombing.
Early in the day, police told residents of several city neighborhoods, especially Watertown, to stay inside. School was canceled, bus and train service suspended and people were even told not to venture out for work. But those restrictions were lifted at the news briefing Friday night about 15 minutes before the gunshots were heard.
The boat Tsarnaev hid under was just outside the tight perimeter where Black Hawk helicopters patrolled the sky and police went door-to-door hunting for him, police said. Police say he and his older brother placed the deadly bombs, at least one of which was made from a pressure cooker packed with explosives and shrapnel, at the race, killing three and injuring more than 180. The sibling suspects are from Dagestan, a province in Russia that borders Chechnya, but have been in the U.S. for as much as a decade..
On Thursday night, hours after the radicalized Muslims were fingered by the FBI and their images circulated around the world, they killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and carjacked an SUV from a man who later escaped. The brothers led police on a chase through city streets that included a wild shootout that saw some 200 shots fired and the suspects hurling pipe bombs from the SUV. Bizarrely, police discounted earlier reports that the brothers had robbed a 7/11, saying although it had been robbed, and they had been caught on surveillance video, they were not the robbers.
The pursuit went into Watertown, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was shot several times in the gunfight. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev somehow slipped away, running over his already wounded brother as he fled by car, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was pronounced dead at Beth Israel Hospital Deaconess Medical Center Friday morning. But at some point following the shootout and car chase, the younger brother fled by foot, according to State Police, who said Friday night they don't believe he now has access to a car.
During the pursuit, a MBTA transit police officer was seriously injured and transported to the hospital, according to a news release. He was identified as Richard H. Donahue Jr., 33, and was at Mount Auburn Hospital in critical but stable condition.
The suspects' bloody rampage claimed the life of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, 26, who was found shot to death in his squad car at 10:20 p.m. Thursday in what Davis termed a "vicious assassination."
Moments after the shooting, the brothers carjacked the Mercedes SUV from Third Street in Cambridge and forced the driver to stop at several bank machines to withdraw money. The driver later told police that the brothers had bragged to him that they were the marathon bombers, law enforcement authorities said.
“The guy was very lucky that they let him go,” Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio said.
It was when police were working to activate the tracking device on the stolen SUV, that other patrol officers spotted it in nearby Watertown, touching off the dramatic chase.
FBI Special Agent Rick Deslauriers said Friday night the FBI pored though thousands of tips, and chased down countless leads in the intense probe following the terror attack on Monday.
"This was a truly intense investigation," Deslauriers said. "As a result of that, justice is being served for each of the victims of these crimes."
Click here for more from MyFoxBoston.com.
Fox News' Jennifer Griffin, Jana Winter, Mike Tobin, Mike Levine, Griff Jenkins and The Associated Press contributed to this report. ||||| Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was alive and struggling with Watertown police early Friday morning, when his younger brother and alleged co-conspirator drove over him in a stolen SUV, dragging him on the pavement and apparently inflicting the fatal injuries that killed him, said Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau in a Globe interview.
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Tsarnaev, 26, was pronounced dead early Friday morning at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, after engaging police in ferocious firefight in Watertown.
His brother, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, is in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in serious condition. He was captured Friday night, after hiding for hours in a boat stored in a Watertown backyard. Authorities believe the brothers planted bombs made from pressure cookers at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three and wounding more than 170.
The chief described the chain of events that led to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s death, beginning late Thursday, after the brothers allegedly carjacked a man in Cambridge. The two brothers let the driver out unharmed, but the driver’s cellphone was still in his car, said Deveau. Police “pinged” the phone to determine where it was, he said, which alerted police that the suspects were in Watertown.
A local officer spotted the brothers driving in two cars, a Honda sedan and the stolen Mercedes SUV, said Deveau. The brothers stopped, jumped out and started firing on the officer, while more police rushed to the scene, he said.
“Quickly we had six Watertown police officers and two bad guys in a gunfight,” said Deveau. At least 200 shots were fired; maybe as many as 300, he said.
The shots, around 12:50 a.m., woke resident Jennings Aske, at 66 Laurel Ave. When he looked out his window he saw a green Honda Civic sedan stopped in the street, with its lights on and the driver’s side windows blown out. A husky man – apparently Tamerlan Tsarnaev—stood nearby firing a gun.
“I saw him standing there shooting at police,” Aske said. “When he fired, there was a little flash of light. I could hear the gun firing. It was terrifying.”
A police SUV came down Laurel Street, hearing west toward Dexter Ave., crashing into some trash cans on the sidewalk and into a parked car. Aske said he then saw a black Mercedes SUV drive up, also heading west toward Dexter Avenue. Then he heard two or three loud explosions, one of them large enough to shake the house. In an instant, the street “was crawling with police,” he said.
Deveau said the Tsarnaev brothers hurled something at the officers – apparently a pressure cooker bomb—and there was a tremendous explosion. Police later found the lid to a pressure cooker. “We believe it was an exact duplicate of the Boston Marathon bombs,” he said. The suspects also threw five “crude grenades” at officers; three of which exploded, he said.
One of his officers put his cruiser into gear and jumped out of it, letting it roll at the suspects to draw fire, he said. The suspects peppered the car with bullets.
After several minutes, the elder brother, Tamerlan, walked toward the officers, firing his gun until he appeared to run out of bullets, Deveau said. Officers tackled him and were trying to get handcuffs on him, when the stolen SUV came roaring at them, the younger brother at the wheel. The officers scattered and the SUV plowed over Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was dragged briefly under the car, he said.
Dzhokar Tsarnaev abandoned the SUV almost immediately on a nearby street and fled on foot, triggering an all-day manhunt.
Meanwhile, officers at the scene treated MBTA Transit Police Officer Richard H. Donohue Jr., who had arrived on the scene and was wounded in the gunfight.
Aske continued to watch for several hours, while police searched the abandoned Civic with a robot, apparently looking for explosives.
The state medical examiner has not released an autopsy report detailing cause of death. ||||| BOSTON -- The suspected Boston Marathon bomber has begun responding to investigators in writing, a source familiar with the case said Sunday evening.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was in serious but stable condition at a Boston hospital, according to the FBI. He had been unable to speak due to a neck and throat injury, the source said. He was also intubated and breathing with the help of a respirator and earlier, officials had said he was not in any condition to be questioned.
It was not clear, however, whether what Tsarnaev was writing was of any value.
Authorities believe Tsarnaev may have tried to shoot himself before he was taken into custody Friday night because of the trajectory and location of the bullet wound in his neck, a source familiar with the investigation said Sunday.
The shot was fired at close range, the source said, suggesting the wound was self-inflicted. He was found hidden in a boat in a backyard in Watertown, Mass., bloody and injured. He was able to step out of the boat before being taken into custody after a brief exchange of gunfire with police and then negotiation with FBI agents, said Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis.
As he lay on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital, the suspect was mouthing curse words, either to himself or to the armed authorities standing watch in the ambulance as paramedics treated him, the source said.
Prosecutors in the case said Tsarnaev was not charged Sunday.
Asked by reporters whether charges would be filed against Tsarnaev Sunday, authorities released a statement saying, "There will be no press conference or further statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office this evening regarding the Boston Marathon attacks."
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Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said at the news conference that authorities are now convinced Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police Friday morning, acted on their own in the bombing.
Davis said investigators also have found a circuit board with a wire slotted through it at the bombing scene on Boylston Street and the area had been swept clean of explosives. Menino said that area is still under the control of the FBI, but will be released to the city soon and a five-phase restoration is planned.
A source involved in the investigation said late Sunday the motorist carjacked by the two brothers as their rampage began last week said the young men stated they planned to drive to New York. The source called such a trip "extremely unlikely" given the extent of the manhunt for the suspects. That assessment was proved correct by the events that followed Friday. However, that tip prompted authorities in Connecticut to be on the lookout for the brothers.
Hundreds of FBI agents and other investigators have interviewed more than 100 people who knew the brothers, the source said. They are looking for any possible links to foreign extremists and seeking to understand how the plot developed and if anyone helped them, the source said.
He confirmed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had video of a known jihadist on his YouTube channel, footage the source had viewed and characterized as "extremely inflammatory."
Menino had said earlier it has become clear that the older brother, Tamerlan, was the more influential, describing him as the "leader" and Dzhokhar as a "follower."
"His [older] brother read those magazines that are published on how to create bombs," Menino said.
Investigators are also tracking the brothers' online activities, phone calls and text messages, examining hundreds of pieces of evidence -- including bomb components, unexploded devices as well as the brothers' vehicles, guns, and financial records seized from various sites across Boston and surrounding suburbs, authorities said.
The blasts set off near the finish line of the marathon killed three people and injured more than 180.
Sunday morning, Davis said on the CBS News show, "Face the Nation" that the crime scene from the early Friday morning firefight in Watertown, Mass., that killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev was "littered" with unexploded improvised explosive devices.
Davis said it's his belief that the brothers were "going to attack other individuals" -- and Davis said that's based on the evidence at the scene and the firepower that the brothers had.
Two men with connections to the brothers were taken into custody Saturday in New Bedford, Mass., and eventually arrested and detained on immigration violations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that agency announced.
The source said those arrests were made in an abundance of caution because the men were friends and former roommates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and had regular contact with him. Officials want to question them at greater length about whether they knew anything about the brothers' plans or provided any help to them.
Sunday morning, Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley implored hundreds of parishioners at a Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross to forgive the suspected Boston Marathon bombers and seize on the goodwill born of the tragedy.
"We must be people of reconciliation -- not revenge," he told about 800 parishioners during a service that honored four killed in last week's marathon bombings and their aftermath. Candles lighted an altar with photos of the dead victims, including the three killed Monday in the bombing, and a police officer killed Friday in a shootout.
Speaking to reporters after the Mass, O'Malley reiterated the church's opposition to the death penalty. "Forgiveness does not mean that we do not realize the heinousness of the crime. But in our hearts, when we are unable to forgive, we make ourselves a victim of our hatred. Forgiveness is part of our obligation of disciples of the Lord."
Also Sunday, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that video footage clearly shows Dzhokhar Tsarnaev placing a backpack near the marathon finish line.
"It does seem to be pretty clear that this suspect took the backpack off, put it down, did not react when the first explosion went off and then moved away from the backpack in time for the second explosion," Patrick said. "It's pretty clear about his involvement and pretty chilling, frankly."
Patrick said it's hard to imagine why someone would deliberately harm "innocent men, women and children in the way that these two fellows did."
The FBI had disclosed this week that it had questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 regarding possible terrorist connections, but found nothing and took no action against him.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday he understood that the FBI didn't find any troubling evidence during its initial contact with the suspect in 2011 -- prompted by concerns passed along by Russian authorities -- but he noted that was before Tamerlan Tsarnaev made a suspicious overseas trip.
"Then he went to Russia and he came back and almost immediately put very radical things on his website," Schumer said of the elder Boston bombing suspect. "Why didn't the FBI, having known that he was someone a foreign government at least thought might be dangerous, go interview him again?"
Schumer, speaking during an unrelated news conference, said that the federal death penalty law he helped co-author in the 1990s would be "appropriate" in the case of surviving suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
On Saturday, Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) had also questioned the FBI's actions.
Meanwhile, rebels in Russia's North Caucasus region denied any link to the April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon in a statement posted on the vdagestan.com website.
"The Caucasian Mujahedeen are not fighting with the United States of America," according to the statement, which was attributed to unidentified Mujahedeen commanders in Dagestan. "We are at war with Russia, which is responsible not only for the occupation of the Caucasus, but also for heinous crimes against Muslims."
An FBI-led probe is looking into a six-month trip suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an immigrant of Chechen descent, took around two years ago to Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan, both regions of Russia that have been embroiled in Islamist separatist movements.
In Medford, Mass., relatives and friends were expected to attend a viewing Sunday for marathon bombing victim Krystle Campbell, 29, at the Dello Russo Funeral Home, 306 Main St. from 3 to 7 p.m. On Monday at 10 a.m., there will be a procession from the funeral home to St. Joseph Church for a Mass of Christian Burial at 11 a.m. Services will conclude with burial at Oak Grove Cemetery.
The Associated Press reported that doctors said the Boston transit police officer wounded in a shootout with the bombing suspects had lost nearly all his blood and his heart had stopped from a single gunshot wound that severed three major blood vessels in his right thigh.
Surgeons at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge say Richard Donohue, 33, is in stable but critical condition. He is sedated and on a breathing machine but opened his eyes, moved his hands and feet, and squeezed his wife's hand Sunday.
Emergency workers started CPR on the scene to restart his heart. Doctors say he is expected to make a full recovery and that nerves and muscles in his leg are intact.
Transit officials say Donohue had gotten out of his cruiser and was shooting at the suspects when he was hit late Thursday night in a gun battle in Cambridge.
"He went in there and engaged people who were shooting at his fellow officers," Donohue's brother, Edward, said at a news conference Sunday at the hospital. "I cannot describe the pride I have," said the younger Donohue, who is a patrolman for the Winchester Police Department.
The fellow officers included a friend, MIT police officer Sean Collier, who authorities say was shot to death at the beginning of the brothers' rampage earlier in the night.
Richard Donohue has been a transit officer for three years, said Paul MacMillan, chief of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
The University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a student, reopened Sunday at noon, university officials announced on the school's website.
With Nicole Fuller,
Paul LaRocco and
The Associated Press ||||| | – Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has regained consciousness and has been giving investigators written answers to questions, law enforcement sources tell ABC, though it's unclear if he's actually saying anything useful yet. Sources tell Fox News that he will not be formally charged today. The Boston bombing suspect is listed as in serious but stable condition at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, with neck and throat injuries that prevent him from talking. The shot that injured his throat was fired at close range, sources tell Newsday, and that, combined with the bullet's apparent trajectory, leads investigators to believe that the 19-year-old shot himself in a failed suicide attempt after police discovered his hiding place. The source says Tsarnaev was mouthing curse words as an ambulance rushed him to the hospital, though it's unclear if they were aimed at his doctors, his captors, or himself. Investigators now believe Dzhokhar may have dealt the killing blow to his brother, Tamerlan, the Boston Globe reports. The 26-year-old had apparently run out of bullets and was struggling with police officers trying to handcuff him when his younger brother sped toward them in a stolen SUV, causing officers to scatter and running over the elder brother, who was briefly dragged by the vehicle, Watertown's chief of police says. |
Kyodo
Two American men were arrested Saturday over the death of a female Irish exchange student in a Shinjuku Ward hotel, Tokyo police said.
The woman, identified as 21-year-old Nicola Furlong, was found unconscious in a hotel room early Thursday morning and was later confirmed dead at a hospital. An autopsy indicated she may have been strangled.
One of the two suspects, a 19-year-old who identified himself as a musician, was in the room with the woman when hotel staff went up to probe a complaint about loud noise.
The two men were charged with indecent assault on the student's 21-year-old female friend, who was in a separate room with the other man, but police suspect they were involved in the student's death, investigative sources said.
The woman was attending Takasaki City University of Economics in Gunma Prefecture.
She arrived with her friend in Tokyo on Wednesday afternoon, and after catching a concert at a club in Koto Ward the two men approached them and invited them to a meal, the sources said.
After deciding to take a cab to the hotel, where both men were staying, the two allegedly raped the Irish woman's drunk friend inside the taxi, they said.
Upon arriving at the hotel, the musician paired off with the Irish woman and the other two went to a different room.
A guest complained about a loud noise coming from one of the rooms around 3:20 a.m. Thursday, and a hotel employee who checked the room found the Irish woman lying unconscious on the floor with the man standing nearby, according to the sources.
There were no signs that anyone else had entered the room, they added. ||||| Tokyo police investigating the death of an Irish exchange student have arrested two American men, the Japan Times reported.
Nicola Furlong, 21, was found unconscious in an upscale Tokyo hotel room early Thursday morning after attending a Nicki Minaj concert with a 21-year-old female friend. Furlong was later pronounced dead, and an autopsy indicated she may have been strangled, according to the Japan Times.
Police said the women were invited out for drinks and then back to the Keio Plaza Hotel by two American men, a 23-year-old dancer and a 19-year-old musician. The 19-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was in the room when hotel staff found Furlong unconscious on the floor beside the bed after responding to noise complaints around 3:20 a.m., Japan's Mainichi reported.
Neither man has been charged in Furlong's death. Rather, both were charged with indecent assault on Furlong's friend, whose name has not been released, during the taxi ride to the hotel. Police said the friend, also an Irish exchange student, was unable to resist their advances because "she was in a comatose state from a highly alcoholic beverage," the Irish Independent reported.
Furlong's friend was in a separate room with the 23-year-old man, identified by the Associated Press as James Jamari Blackston, when Furlong was found unconscious. Blackston, a dancer, has reportedly performed with several high-profile acts, including the Black Eyed Peas and Jennifer Lopez, according to newspaper accounts.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State confirmed the arrests but said she could not provide further details, including the men's names, because of privacy considerations.
Furlong was studying at the Takasaki City University of Economics, about 60 miles northwest of Tokyo, as part of a one-year exchange program through Dublin City University. She had intended to return home this summer, the Independent reported.
Furlong's family described her as a "warm, generous, stunning person who always had time for her family and other people."
"We are devastated by the loss of our beautiful daughter [and] sister Nicola in such tragic circumstances," they said in a statement obtained by the Independent. "Nicola will always be at the center of our lives. She stood for everything that is good in life." ||||| | – One of two American men being held after the suspected homicide of an Irish exchange student in Tokyo has reportedly worked as a dancer for the Black Eyed Peas, Chris Brown, and Jennifer Lopez. James Jamari Blackston, 23, and a 19-year-old musician pal were busted after Nicola Furlong, 21, was found dying in a hotel room. She and a female friend had been invited by the men for drinks to the upscale Keio Plaza Hotel after attending a Nicki Minaj concert, reports ABC News. The men are currently charged with indecent assault on Furlong's friend, who was attacked in a taxi on the way to the hotel while she was in a near-comatose state, officials tell the Japan Times. Investigators believe Furlong was strangled, likely during a sexual assault, Japanese media is reporting. Investigators believe the men either plied the women with alcohol or spiked their drinks before taking them to the hotel, reports the Irish Independent. Furlong was a student at Takasaki City University on a year-long exchange program from Dublin, and was scheduled to return home in a matter of weeks. "We are devastated by the loss of our beautiful daughter," said a statement from her parents. “Nicola was a warm, generous, stunning person who always had time for her family and other people." |
Published: Friday, 6/26/2015 - Updated: 6 months ago
White lion, 14, on loan from Siegfried & Roy dies at Toledo Zoo
TOLEDO ZOO/ANDI NORMAN Enlarge Legend, a 14-year old white lion on loan from Siegfried & Roy, died today at the Toledo Zoo following a diagnostic procedure.
Legend, a 14-year old white lion on loan from Siegfried & Roy, died today at the Toledo Zoo following a diagnostic procedure.
Zoo keepers had recently noticed Legend showing signs of front left leg lameness, according to a statement from the Toledo Zoo. The lion was immobilized today to allow veterinary staff find the source of the discomfort.
Legend was put under anesthesia for about one hour. During that time, vets treated three over-grown toenails and an inflamed nail bed. The Toledo Zoo reports that the lion was stable throughout the procedure, including during an ultrasound of the heart which indicated no obvious issues.
The white lion was removed from anesthesia when the procedure was concluded. While still on oxygen, he went into cardiac and respiratory arrest. Veterinary staff worked to revive Legend, but were unsuccessful in their attempts.
“Animal deaths are always difficult, but Legend’s is even more so because of its sudden and unexpected nature,” said Dr. Ric Berlinski, Zoo chief veterinarian.
The Toledo Zoo cannot speculate on a cause of death, but will perform a gross necropsy, an autopsy for animals, and histopathology tests in order to investigate further.
“Because of the amount of time our dedicated animal care staff spends caring for the animals they become like family. This is a very sad loss for our entire Toledo Zoo family,” said Ron Fricke, deputy director of the Zoo.
Courage, Legend’s 14-year old brother, will continue to reside in the Toledo Zoo’s Tembo Trail.
Contact Christina Payne at: [email protected] or 419-724-6050. ||||| TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — A white lion on loan from the Siegfried & Roy animal and magic act has died after undergoing a medical procedure at the Toledo Zoo.
Zoo officials announced Friday that 14-year-old Legend died after being immobilized for an hour to allow veterinarians to treat problems with one of its paws. Legend went into cardiac and respiratory arrest after being removed from anesthesia.
A zoo veterinarian says in a statement that while there are risks whenever anesthesia is administered, the procedure was necessary for Legend's quality of life. A necropsy will be performed to determine a cause of death.
The zoo has one other white lion, Legend's 14-year-old brother Courage. The pair came to the zoo in 2003. A white lion named Wisdom died during surgery at the zoo in 2013. ||||| | – A mesmerizing male white lion belonging to Siegfried & Roy died yesterday while undergoing a minor procedure at the Toledo Zoo, where he was on loan, reports the Toledo Blade. Fourteen-year-old Legend was being operated on after displaying signs of lameness in his front left foot; he was stable as vets treated three toenails and an infected nailbed, but went into cardiac and respiratory arrest as he was taken off anesthesia. "Animal deaths are always difficult, but Legend’s is even more so because of its sudden and unexpected nature," says the zoo's chief vet. A necropsy is planned. It's not the first white lion death in recent memory: The AP notes that Wisdom, another male, also died during surgery in 2013. The zoo's remaining white lion is Legend's 14-year-old brother, Courage. |
Caroline Kennedy, the new U.S. ambassador to Japan and daughter of slain President John F. Kennedy, leaves for Japan on Thursday to begin her work to strengthen the critical bond between the U.S. and the Asian nation.
Japanese Ambassador to the United States Kenichiro Sasae, left, gestures while he and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy participate in during Japanese Ambassador's residence in Washington, Tuesday,... (Associated Press)
Japanese Ambassador to the United States His Excellency Kenichiro Sasae, left, watches as U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy drinks a cup of tea during a traditional tea ceremony at the Japanese... (Associated Press)
Japanese Ambassador to the United States Kenichiro Sasae, left, and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy talk during a tea during a traditional tea ceremony at the Japanese Ambassador's residence... (Associated Press)
Kennedy, who was confirmed by the Senate last month, was nominated for the ambassador's job by President Barack Obama after playing a role in his re-election campaign. Secretary of State John Kerry hosted a swearing-in ceremony for Kennedy on Tuesday afternoon at the State Department.
"We just had a tea ceremony which was a wonderful introduction to the Japanese culture," Kennedy said at a reception later at the Japanese ambassador's residence.
"My husband and I and my children are so excited to be going to Japan," she said in brief remarks to reporters. "We look forward to meeting as many people as we can, to making new friends, visiting and studying the history and culture of this beautiful country that is such a strong partner to the United States in so many important efforts."
At the reception, Kerry noted that Kennedy's father battled Japanese forces as a Navy officer in World War II.
"The daughter of a heroic lieutenant in World War II will be the first woman, in the next generation after the war, to represent our country in a relationship that symbolizes so much more than just a normal diplomatic relationship," Kerry said. "This is a symbol of reconciliation, symbol of possibilities, a symbol of people who know how to move past ... look to the future and build a future together."
He said he reminded Kennedy earlier in the day that the first time he met her was when she was a child in the 1960s, getting ready to ride her pony named Macaroni, and he backed into her and stepped on her foot. He said she broke into tears.
"So I am really excited, as the president is, that Caroline is going to be heading over there to represent this relationship at a critical time _ with the rebalance to Asia, global marketplace and competition therein, the efforts to deal with North Korea ... challenges of the South China Sea, challenges of climate change."
Kennedy, 55, an attorney and best-selling book editor, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a September confirmation hearing that she would work to strengthen the crucial bond between the United States and its Asian ally on trade, the military and student exchanges.
Japan is the United States' fourth-largest trading partner and home to the Navy's 7th Fleet and 50,000 American troops.
Her predecessors include the late Sen. Mike Mansfield, former Sens. Walter Mondale and Howard Baker and the late House Speaker Tom Foley. She replaced John Roos, a wealthy former Silicon Valley lawyer and top Obama campaign fundraiser.
Kennedy's confirmation to the post brought a third generation of her family into the U.S. diplomatic corps. Her grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain and her aunt Jean Kennedy Smith was ambassador to Ireland under President Bill Clinton.
Kennedy was five days shy of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated, and she lived most of the rest of her life in New York City. She earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, got a law degree from Columbia University, married exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg and had three children. ||||| The seed for Wide00014 was:
- Slash pages from every domain on the web:
-- a ranking of all URLs that have more than one incoming inter-domain link (rank was determined by number of incoming links using Wide00012 inter domain links)
-- up to a maximum of 100 most highly ranked URLs per domain
- Top ranked pages (up to a max of 100) from every linked-to domain using the Wide00012 inter-domain navigational link graph ||||| "I heard the words 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country' and those were the most inspiring words I've ever heard," said Suzuki, a 46-year-old office worker. "I have been a loyal Kennedy fan -- of JFK and his family -- ever since, for the last 26 years."
Suzuki is not alone. President Kennedy is still remembered fondly by many in Japan, which gives a built-in base of support to the new U.S. ambassador, Caroline Kennedy.
Kennedy, the late president's daughter, signed her appointment papers Tuesday during a private ceremony with Secretary of State John F. Kerry in Washington and is expected to take up her new post in Tokyo this month.
On a recent windy evening in Tokyo, 10 members of the JFK Club Japan gathered at a restaurant to discuss Caroline Kennedy's arrival and to share their Kennedy memorabilia, many wearing white T-shirts emblazoned with JFK's profile and name. Some had come from as far as Nagoya, more than 200 miles away.
Among them was Suzuki, who said he owns all of the roughly 300 books published in Japan related to President Kennedy and family members. He estimated that he had spent about $10,000 on his collection.
Suzuki and others, who have met twice a year since 2004, are flying from Japan to Dallas in the coming weeks to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. They have been making pilgrimages to Kennedy-related locations such as Dallas and Washington every five years since 2003, and this year's will be their third.
Kaname Matsumura, 48, a teacher who runs a test preparation school, heads another fan club called the Kennedy Society.
In addition to maintaining a blog, Matsumura has self-published 25 magazine issues on articles related to the Kennedy family. He said he had spent about $100,000 on Kennedy-related activities.
"I hope Caroline Kennedy, with her liberal views, brings good influence and balance to the nationalism movement in Japan happening right now under the ruling political party, but I'm simply happy a Kennedy family member is coming to Japan," Matsumura said.
Foreign policy experts in Japan are also upbeat about the impending arrival.
Caroline Kennedy's presence could be a huge plus for women in Japan, said Hiroshi Tsuchida, a professor of American government at Josai International University.
With very few women in politics in Japan, Kennedy could be a role model and inspire more women to enter politics and participate in society, Tsuchida said.
The World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2013, which was released last month, ranks Japan 105th out of 136 countries. The report ranks countries based on how successfully women are making gains in economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment.
Only one country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked lower than Japan: South Korea, at No. 111.
Takashi Inoguchi, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, said the most important job for a U.S. ambassador to Japan is maintaining a good communication pipeline with the American president. By that measure, he said, Kennedy will be a "perfect match."
Mikio Haruna, visiting professor of journalism at Waseda University, said Kennedy benefits from near-universal fondness in Japan for her father. "No one in Japan is opposed to her appointment," he said.
Fumio Matsuo, former Washington bureau chief for the Japanese wire service Kyodo News, said he hoped Kennedy would be able to persuade President Obama to visit the atomic bomb site in Hiroshima, making him the first American president to do so.
"I would like to see [Obama] visit the city of Hiroshima and make a floral offering," Matsuo said, adding that it would be "a historic move."
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Preah Vihear temple grounds belong to Cambodia, U.N. court rules ||||| | – Caroline Kennedy is the US ambassador to Japan following a swearing-in ceremony at the State department yesterday. After John Kerry administered the oath, the new ambassador, the secretary of state, and others headed to the Japanese ambassador's residence for a reception, the Washington Post reports. "My husband and I and my children are so excited to be going to Japan," Kennedy told reporters, per the AP. "We look forward to meeting as many people as we can, to making new friends, visiting, and studying the history and culture of this beautiful country that is such a strong partner to the United States," she said. Making new friends shouldn't be difficult, the Los Angeles Times points out: Kennedy's father remains popular in the country. The JFK Club Japan meets twice a year, and it's not the only Kennedy fan club. Caroline Kennedy heads to Japan tomorrow, the AP notes. |
Monday night marked the first ever The Daily Show with Trevor Noah with Jon Stewart.
It was what host Noah admitted as a monumental moment, but Stewart did not find himself back at the iconic desk for just any reason — he was there to show his support for the Zadroga Act, which provides compensation and medical funds to 9/11 first responders.
Though it has technically expired, Stewart and activist groups hope to get the bill renewed before Congress goes out of session later this week in order to secure funds. They are working against the clock.
It's a cause Stewart has been passionate about for years. In fact, back in 2010, Stewart gathered a panel of first responders to talk about their experiences in hopes of drumming up for support for the act.
President Obama signed the act into law in early 2011.
As part of his return, Stewart staged a reunion of that panel of four first responders. Only one man was present.
#DailyShow "reunion" of first responder panel that 1st appeared 5.5 years ago with #JonStewart. Powerful image. pic.twitter.com/sGDtBuzrNp — Sandra Gonzalez (@TheSandraG) December 8, 2015
Kenny Specht, the founder of the New York City Firefighter Brotherhood Foundation, who was on that original panel, explained that two of the empty chairs belonged to people with illnesses, whose conditions he could not legally comment on. The other belonged to John Devlin, who has since died.
"When we did the show five-and-a-half years ago, four men sat here. [Now] it's just you and I," Specht said to Stewart.
The stark moment came after a video package in which Stewart stepped into correspondent shoes and took his efforts straight to the Capitol, where he attempted to meet with senators whose support was needed. Or, in his words, "shame" them.
His attempt to get meetings resulted in mostly the receipt of press managers' business cards.
He did, however, get time with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). As reported last week, hours after their meeting Portman became the 67th senator to back the bill.
"What message does it send to our first responders if once we're done as a nation with them helping us that we forget about them? That's unacceptable," Stewart said.
Stewart asked viewers to mobilize and tweet with #WorstResponders to show their support for the bill. (His first suggestion was #endthefuckery, but on Noah's prompting for a hashtag "people can actually use," he changed it.)
Video of the segments will be posted when it becomes available. ||||| Jon Stewart is back on “The Daily Show” — for one night only.
Four months after his high profile retirement, the longtime host returned as a guest on what is now Trevor Noah’s Comedy Central show Monday to call for action on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.
Supporters hope Congress will vote to extend the program’s health component to help 9/11 first responders, which expired on Oct. 1.
Also Read: Jon Stewart, HBO Sign Production Deal
Despite the serious topic, Stewart began his welcome return on a funny note by creeping up behind new host Noah, who politely asked him: “I am sorry, Sir, are you lost?
“F–k, are you here to take the show back?” the South African comedian continued. “I heard about this in American TV.”
Stewart assured him “1,000 times no” and then went on to reveal his real motive. “I actually have this issue and I want to get some attention paid to it … and I realized that I don’t have a show, and nobody gives a f–k anymore.”
“My show is your show,” his replacement told him.
The political satirist went on to explain the issue for Noah, stating that from his experiences, “the only conclusions that I can draw is the people from Congress are not as good a people as the people who are first responders.”
Also Read: How Trevor Noah's 'Daily Show' Is Beating Jon Stewart's
Stewart joined a group of 9/11 responders last Thursday to tour the halls of the U.S. Capitol and visited the offices of senators in hopes of spurring them to pass a permanent Act.
Ailments stemming from the tragedy include respiratory and digestive disorders, cancer and mental health conditions. Stewart first took up the cause of the rescuers in 2010, by devoting an entire show to the issue and inviting survivors on to share their stories.
Also Read: Jon Stewart Warns 9/11 First Responders of 'Toxic Levels of Bulls-t' on Capitol Hill
While the bill seems like a no-brainer, Stewart said it was being held up because of “no brains” and welcomed back first responder Kenny Specht, who told him that 75 percent of the panel who appeared on the show five-and-a-half years ago are “no longer here.”
“With all this talk about terrorism, from the World Trade Center to San Bernardino, the one common link to all of this is the first people on the scene were first responders,” Stewart reminded viewers. “This is the legacy.”
Stewart retired as host of “The Daily Show” on Aug. 6 after 16 years.
Tonight! A young man returns to call for congressional action on a 9/11 bill. #SeniorJonStewartCorrespondent pic.twitter.com/GuEYnyrIf3 — The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 8, 2015 ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| | – Comedian Jon Stewart has returned to the Daily Show, where he made a push to renew a law that provides health benefits for first responders who became ill after the 9/11 attacks. On the Daily Show With Trevor Noah Monday night, Stewart, as a field correspondent for a segment, urged, badgered, and exhorted Congress, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to pass the Zadroga Act. The law expired Oct. 1 but has enough funding to last another year. Proponents of the law are seeking its permanent extension, but some Republicans have opposed that, saying they want a chance to periodically review it and make sure it's operating soundly. Stewart told Noah that he wasn't there to take his show back, but Stewart told him he was back because he had an issue he wanted people to pay attention to and that he "realized he didn't have a show anymore," the Wrap reports. Stewart, who devoted a show to the issue in 2010, said that from his experiences, "the only [conclusion] that I can draw is the people from Congress are not as good a people as the people who are first responders." He had a panel of four first responders on the 2010 show and welcomed one of them, firefighter Kenny Specht, back to the show Monday night, Mashable reports. Three chairs were left empty because two members of the 2010 panel are now too ill to appear and one has died. (Stewart will be returning to TV longer-term under a production deal with HBO.) |
Four baboons escaped their enclosure at a San Antonio biomedical research facility Saturday. A woman then spotted one leading researchers on a wild foot chase down a Texas highway. All of the baboons were safely returned according to a statement. https://abcn.ws/2qziJpt pic.twitter.com/pPBW4V5ZIu ||||| Though four baboons did escape, officials said everything is under control and nobody has anything to worry about. (Source: Dorian Reyna)
SAN ANTONIO, TX (KSAT/CNN) - Four baboons were on the run in Texas and the challenge of getting them back to a research facility they escaped from was caught on camera.
"I see four guys clapping at the bushes and I didn't really give it a second thought," said Jannelle Bouton, who witnessed the escape. "I just went about driving and then all of a sudden, this brown, big mass pops out of the bushes. I'm like 'okay, that's a big dog.’"
But it wasn’t a dog. It was a baboon.
"And he was furry and he was brown and he was pretty big," she explained.
But the baboon Bouton saw on her way to the store is only one of four that escaped the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, a facility that conducts research on chronic and infectious diseases.
"And the baboon stopped and one point and was just looking and then darted into the bushes. And these guys are frazzled. They are freaking out," Bouton recalled.
Though four baboons did escape, officials said everything is under control and nobody has anything to worry about.
Even though the public had nothing to worry about, Bouton said the workers charged with capturing the animals did.
"And you could tell that they were. They were panicking because they didn't want them to get hurt and they were trying their best to quarantine him. But being that kind of animal, he wasn't having it,” she said."
Bouton said she's not too worried about the monkeys getting out, but she is a little concerned.
"The fact that they had a medical mask on and it's a wild animal, it's a monkey, let alone. You just want to know what they're doing is safe," she stressed.
The institute said its primary focus was the safety of the animals, their staff and people in the community.
They said the baboons, critical in research for heart disease, diabetes and obesity, were seen by care staff and are doing well.
Copyright 2018 KSAT via CNN. All rights reserved. ||||| Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption There are about 1,100 baboons at the research facility
Officials at Texas research centre have made changes to the enclosures after four baboons leapt to freedom.
The primates propped up barrels against the walls of their yard at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and used them to jump over the fence.
Three baboons then escaped the centre perimeter, while the fourth returned to its pen on its own.
All three of the escapees were captured within half an hour. There are about 1,100 baboons in the facility.
The San Antonio institute issued a press release detailing the escape and the animals' recapture.
According to the statement, the baboons rolled a 55-gallon barrel up against the wall of their open-air yard to escape.
The enclosure at the Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) - part of the research institute - has been in use for 35 years.
Researchers gave the baboons the barrels as an "enrichment tool", to help them mimic foraging as they would in the wild.
Staff immediately removed the barrels once they realised the primates had used them to jump the walls.
Dr John Bernal, a vet at the SNPRC, said one of the baboons made it onto a road. The priority for the staff was "was ensuring the baboon was not hurt by traffic".
Lisa Cruz, assistant vice president for communications, called it a "truly unique incident".
"We have nearly 1,100 baboons on the property that date back eight generations. Baboons, as with all our animals, are critical to biomedical research."
The statement explains these baboons were not part of an active study or part of infectious disease research, and so were not infected.
You may also be interested in: ||||| | – Animal researchers saw the 55-pound barrel as an "enrichment tool." Baboons, to whom it was given, apparently saw only a means for escape. Indeed, four baboons briefly escaped the Texas Biomedical Research Institute Saturday after propping a barrel against a wall of their open-air enclosure and using it to hop to the other side, per the San Antonio Express-News. "One of the baboons said, 'I am going to try to make this leap,' and jumped on top of the wall and out," the Washington Post quotes an official as saying. In what he calls "typical monkey see, monkey do" behavior, three other baboons followed suit. The animals didn't have long to enjoy their freedom, though: One returned to the enclosure on its own, while the others were tracked down within 30 minutes. Two were captured near a tree line, but one reached a nearby road. A video shared by ABC News shows researchers chasing a baboon as cars whiz by. A passerby tells KSAT she saw "four guys clapping at the bushes. I just went about driving and then all of a sudden this brown big mass pops out." Luckily the escaped baboons are doing well, and they weren't involved in any infectious disease research at the institute, where new vaccines and medicines are developed. But the barrels, which were to help the baboons mimic foraging behavior, will be removed to prevent future escapes. Noting the facility has housed baboons for more than 50 years—it currently has 1,100—a rep says "this was truly a unique incident," per the BBC. |
James Knowles III, the mayor of Ferguson, said last week that he did not know what the Justice Department had found or would conclude. But he criticized Mr. Holder for saying recently that wholesale change was needed in Ferguson’s police department.
“How come they haven’t told us there is something that needs to be changed as they found it?” Mr. Knowles asked. “Why have they allowed whatever they think is happening to continue to happen for six months if that’s the case?”
Mr. Holder has stood by his remarks, saying they were based on his deep understanding of the case. “The reality is, I’ve been briefed all along on this matter,” he said at a news conference recently.
The Ferguson case will be the last in a long string of civil rights investigations into police departments that Mr. Holder has directed during his tenure. Since he became attorney general in 2009, the Justice Department has opened more than 20 such investigations and issued strong rebukes of departments in Cleveland and Albuquerque, accusing them of excessive force and unwarranted shootings.
The Ferguson report, however, is expected to more closely resemble last summer’s report into police activities in Newark. There, as in Ferguson, the police stopped black people at a significantly higher rate than whites. “This disparity is stark and unremitting,” the Justice Department wrote in that report, which concluded that African-Americans “bear the brunt” of the city’s unconstitutional police practices.
In some cities investigated by the Justice Department, such as Albuquerque and Portland, Ore., city officials have said they are open to making changes and quickly reaching an agreement with the department to fix problems. Others have taken a more confrontational approach, did not settle and faced a federal civil rights lawsuit. The Justice Department has four such lawsuits open, including one against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., and another against Sheriff Terry S. Johnson of Alamance County, N.C. ||||| Attorney General Eric Holder called the need for “wholesale change” in the Ferguson, Missouri, police department as being “pretty clear” and “appropriate.” His comments on Wednesday came in light of revelations from local and federal officials that a plan is in the works to shakeup the police department, including a possible resignation of Chief Thomas Jackson and potential dismantling the department.
“I think it’s pretty clear that the need for wholesale change in that department is appropriate. Exactly what the form of that change will be, I think, we’ll wait until we complete our inquiry,” Holder said in an interview with Jonathan Capehart during the Washington Ideas Forum on Wednesday.
RELATED: St. Louis police spend big money on riot gear, just in case
MSNBC reported early Wednesday morning that local, state and federal officials were working on plans for major change in the department. According to sources with knowledge of the plans, new developments could include the resignations of Chief Jackson and Officer Darren Wilson, whose shooting and killing of an unarmed black teenager in August sent the city spiraling in unrest.
Close video Eric Holder: 'Wholesale change' needed in Ferguson police department Eric Holder talks about the report of a deal being worked out that would remove the Ferguson police chief and Officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot Michael Brown. share tweet email save Embed
Another source with direct knowledge of the plans described them as “extremely delicate” and said the details are still being hashed out in closed-door meetings between Ferguson city and St. Louis County officials. Federal officials tell msnbc that the Justice Department is also being consulted.
Jackson’s resignation could come as early as next week, three sources said. As part of the plan, the resignation would be the first move ahead of a complete takeover of the department by the St. Louis County police. A source within the Obama administration confirmed with msnbc that plans for a shakeup of the Ferguson Police Department were in the works, but said that details have not been fully worked out.
When Holder was asked about the reports, the attorney general declined to comment, citing the Justice Department’s pattern and practice investigation of the police department. The Justice Department is conducting a civil rights investigation into the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown Jr., as well as the entire department for allegations of past discriminatory practices.
Jackson told NBC News late on Tuesday night that “I have not been asked to resign, I have not been fired, and I will not be resigning next week. If I do resign, it will be my choice.” Multiple sources told msnbc on Wednesday that it was unclear if Jackson had been aware of the back-channel conversations that included him being removed from his position.
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III denied plans for Jackson to resign, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch via text that “He’s stayed strong with us till this point. Don’t see that changing.” Knowles also said that the city had not been asked by federal officials to contemplate dismantling the police force. Close video Eric Holder: Sources of Ferguson leaks need to 'shut up' Attorney General Eric Holder talks about the recent “tsunami of leaks” from the Michael Brown investigation. share tweet email save Embed
Shortly before news of the plans were first published by media outlets, the Ferguson City Council passed resolutions calling for state reforms to the process of investigating deadly force by law enforcement. One resolution called for the general assembly to enact legislation that would “establish a clear process for investigation of an response to cases involving a law enforcement officers use of deadly force.” Another would require state police agencies to report annually their use of force data, including the number of incidents and the circumstances surrounding them.
The resolutions were passed without opposition, and are the latest moves by the city council to patch what many black residents describe as a criminal justice system that has been rigged against them.
RELATED: St. Louis police spend big money on riot gear, just in case
News of the behind the scene efforts to restructure the Ferguson police force comes as community leaders and residents anxiously await a grand jury’s decision as to indict or not to indict Officer Wilson in Brown’s death, and amid a string of recent leaks from the grand jury and investigation.
Holder on Wednesday called the leaks inappropriate and expressed his discontent with what he described as an attempt to shape public opinion in the case.
“I’ve said I’m exasperated. That’s a nice way of saying I’m mad, because that’s just not how things should be done,” he said. “Whoever the sources of the leaks are need to shut up.” ||||| | – Black drivers in Ferguson, Mo., are pulled over much more for traffic stops than white drivers—and this imbalance is the crux of a forthcoming and damning Justice Department report, the New York Times reports. The nearly finished findings, according to law enforcement officials who say they've been briefed on it, are expected to show how systematic discriminatory actions helped stoke tensions in the period before Michael Brown's shooting death last summer by officer Darren Wilson. The report is also said to suggest that ticket fines are used to keep the city's budget in line, the Times notes. If those issued a ticket can't pay it, they can keep going to jail for the unpaid fees, which has proven lucrative for the city: "Fines and public safety" are Ferguson's second-largest revenue source (sales tax is the first), per the Times. Although blacks in Ferguson only make up 63% of the population, they were involved in 86% of the city's 2013 traffic stops, per Missouri AG info cited by the Times. And the search rate for blacks after a stop was twice that of whites during that time period, though whites were significantly more likely to have "contraband." Mayor James Knowles III has already taken umbrage with the alleged findings and for recent statements by AG Eric Holder, who said in October that "wholesale change" was needed in the Ferguson PD. "How come they haven't told us there is something that needs to be changed as they found it?" Knowles told the Times last week. "Why have they allowed whatever they think is happening to continue to happen for six months if that's the case?" Also said to be included in the report: a racist joke believed to have been emailed among city officials, law enforcement officials tell the Times. |
It's all sequels, remakes and adaptations on Wikipedia's list of the decade's 50 top-grossing films.
So here we are - starting the second decade of the 21st century. Here at TheWrap, we're undercutting the anxiety of the age by curating the must-know and must-see for 2010. Mark those calendars: We've got the skinny on the most important stuff that's coming up this year.
Some enterprising Wikipedia contributor decided to pull together a list of the 50 films with the highest worldwide gross of this decade so far.
Here's the thing: One has to go all the way down to No. 15 on the list, Disney/Pixar's "Finding Nemo," before finding one created from original material -- in other words, not a sequel, remake or adaptation of existing material or characters (such as Batman or Harry Potter).
And then, to find another, you have to go all the way to No. 30, also animated: DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda."
It just goes to prove that familiarity breeds ... success.
See for yourself. Here's the list, including studio, year of release and worldwide gross. Original film titles are in bold:
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New Line; 2003) $1,119,110,941
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Disney; 2006) $1,066,179,725
3. The Dark Knight (Warner Bros.; 2008) $1,001,921,825
4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Warner Bros.; 2001) $974,733,550
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Disney; 2007) $960,996,492
6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros.; 2007) $938,212,738
7. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Warner Bros.; 2009) $929,022,922
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New Line; 2002) $925,282,504
9. Shrek 2 (DreamWorks; 2004) $919,838,758
10. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros.; 2005) $895,921,036
11. Spider-Man 3 (Columbia; 2007) $890,871,626
12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Warner Bros.; 2002) $878,643,482
13. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (20th Century Fox; 2009) $878,615,229
14. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line; 2001) $870,761,744
15. Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar; 2003) $864,625,978
16. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox; 2005) $848,754,768
17. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Paramount; 2009) $833,229,011
18. Spider-Man (Columbia; 2002) $821,708,551
19. Shrek the Third (DreamWorks; 2007) $798,958,162
20. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Warner Bros.; 2004) $795,634,069
21. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount; 2008) $786,636,033
22. Spider-Man 2 (Columbia; 2004) $783,766,341
23. The Da Vinci Code (Sony/Columbia; 2006) $758,239,851
24. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Disney; 2005) $745,011,272
25. The Matrix Reloaded (Warner Bros.; 2003) $742,128,461
26. Transformers *DreamWorks/Paramount; 2007) $709,709,780
27. Ice Age: The Meltdown (20th Century Fox; 2006) $655,388,158
28. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Disney; 2003) $654,264,015
29. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (20th Century Fox; 2002) $649,398,328
30. Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks; 2008) $631,736,484
31. The Incredibles (Disney/Pixar; 2004) $631,442,092
32. Hancock (Columbia; 2008) $624,386,746
33. Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar; 2007) $623,707,397
34. The Passion of the Christ (Newmarket; 2004) $611,899,420
35. Mamma Mia! (Universal; 2008) $609,841,637
36. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (DreamWorks; 2008) $603,900,344
37. Casino Royale (MGM/Columbia; 2006) $594,239,066
38. War of the Worlds (DreamWorks/Paramount; 2005) $591,745,540
39. Quantum of Solace (MGM/Columbia; 2008) $586,090,727
40. I Am Legend (Warner Bros.; 2007) $585,349,010
41. Iron Man (Paramount; 2008) $585,133,287
42. Night at the Museum (20th Century Fox; 2006) $574,480,450
43. ||||| A Wikipedia user put together a list of the 50 highest grossing movies of the decade; only nine of them are not sequels or adaptations, The Wrap points out. And, at a generous estimate, only five are not terrible.
Frankly there is nothing I can say here, no series of bon mots, that will illuminate the horrors of modern Hollywood more than just running the list:
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New Line; 2003) $1,119,110,941 2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Disney; 2006) $1,066,179,725 3. The Dark Knight (Warner Bros.; 2008) $1,001,921,825 4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Warner Bros.; 2001) $974,733,550 5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Disney; 2007) $960,996,492 6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros.; 2007) $938,212,738 7. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Warner Bros.; 2009) $929,022,922 8. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New Line; 2002) $925,282,504 9. Shrek 2 (DreamWorks; 2004) $919,838,758 10. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros.; 2005) $895,921,036 11. Spider-Man 3 (Columbia; 2007) $890,871,626 12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Warner Bros.; 2002) $878,643,482 13. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (20th Century Fox; 2009) $878,615,229 14. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line; 2001) $870,761,744 15. Finding Nemo (Disney/Pixar; 2003) $864,625,978 16. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox; 2005) $848,754,768 17. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Paramount; 2009) $833,229,011 18. Spider-Man (Columbia; 2002) $821,708,551 19. Shrek the Third (DreamWorks; 2007) $798,958,162 20. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Warner Bros.; 2004) $795,634,069 21. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount; 2008) $786,636,033 22. Spider-Man 2 (Columbia; 2004) $783,766,341 23. The Da Vinci Code (Sony/Columbia; 2006) $758,239,851 24. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Disney; 2005) $745,011,272 25. The Matrix Reloaded (Warner Bros.; 2003) $742,128,461 26. Transformers *DreamWorks/Paramount; 2007) $709,709,780 27. Ice Age: The Meltdown (20th Century Fox; 2006) $655,388,158 28. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Disney; 2003) $654,264,015 29. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (20th Century Fox; 2002) $649,398,328 30. Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks; 2008) $631,736,484 31. The Incredibles (Disney/Pixar; 2004) $631,442,092 32. Hancock (Columbia; 2008) $624,386,746 33. Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar; 2007) $623,707,397 34. The Passion of the Christ (Newmarket; 2004) $611,899,420 35. Mamma Mia! (Universal; 2008) $609,841,637 36. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (DreamWorks; 2008) $603,900,344 37. Casino Royale (MGM/Columbia; 2006) $594,239,066 38. War of the Worlds (DreamWorks/Paramount; 2005) $591,745,540 39. Quantum of Solace (MGM/Columbia; 2008) $586,090,727 40. I Am Legend (Warner Bros.; 2007) $585,349,010 41. Iron Man (Paramount; 2008) $585,133,287 42. Night at the Museum (20th Century Fox; 2006) $574,480,450 43. King Kong (Universal; 2005) $550,517,357 44. Mission: Impossible II (Paramount; 2000) $546,388,105 45. The Day After Tomorrow (20th Century Fox; 2004) $544,272,402 46. Madagascar (DreamWorks; 2005) $532,680,671 47. The Simpsons Movie (20th Century Fox; 2007) $527,071,022 48. Monsters, Inc. (Disney/Pixar; 2001) $525,366,597 49. WALL-E (Disney/Pixar; 2008) $521,268,237 50. Meet the Fockers (Universal; 2004) $516,642,939
(Also this. I appreciate the ludicrous vanity but it has some bearing on the above.) ||||| From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The decade of the 2000s in film involved many significant developments in the film industries around the world, especially in the technology used. Building on developments in the 1990s, computers are used to create effects that would have previously been more expensive, from the subtle erasing of surrounding islands in Cast Away (leaving Tom Hanks' character stranded with no other land in sight) to the vast battle scenes such as those in Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded and 300.
In addition, film genres not known for their popular appeal in North America became increasingly attractive to filmgoers: films in foreign languages like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Passion of the Christ and Letters from Iwo Jima; and documentary films like An Inconvenient Truth, March of the Penguins, Super Size Me, and Fahrenheit 9/11, became very successful.
Also gaining popularity was the use of Computer-generated imagery (CGI) to produce films. These types of films were originally seen in the 1990s with the likes of Toy Story and its sequel Toy Story 2, but CGI films became more popular in 2001 with the release of Shrek. Other popular CGI films include Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille. In addition, Up became the second animated feature ever to receive an Oscar nomination for The Best Picture.
The 2000s also saw a resurgence of several genres. For example, Gladiator, Moulin Rouge!, and X-Men increased the popularity of the Epic, Musical, and comic book genres, respectively.
Highest-grossing films [ edit ]
The list has more 2008 and 2007 films in the top 50 than any other year, each with eight. They are followed by 2009, 2005 and 2004, each with six. Figures are given in United States dollars (USD).
Highest-grossing film per year [ edit ]
Most acclaimed films of the decade [ edit ]
According to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, a site which numerically calculates reception among critics, the most acclaimed films of the 2000s are:
According to Metacritic, which analysed many of the notable 'best films of the decade' lists to compile the results, the top twenty films most often and most notably included in these lists are
As well as this, the ten films released in the 2000s which got the highest average critic scores according to Metacritic are
List of films [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ] ||||| | – Thanks to a Wikipedia contributor who put together a list of the 50 highest-grossing films of the decade, it’s easy to see Hollywood’s—and, apparently, America’s—obsession with rehashing old material. As The Wrap points out, only nine aren't sequels or adaptations, and you have to reach No. 15 before finding an original. Gawker says "only five are not terrible." The first 15: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: $1.12 billion Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: $1.07 billion The Dark Knight: $1 billion Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: $974.7 million Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: $960.9 million Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: $938.2 million Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: $929 million The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: $925.3 million Shrek 2: $919.9 million Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: $895.9 million Spider-Man 3: $890.9 million Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: $878.6 million Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: $878.6 million The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: $870.8 million Finding Nemo: $864.6 million For the complete list, click the link at right. |
AP Lebanese protesters attack American fast food restaurants after Friday prayers in the northeastern city of Tripoli, Lebanon, on Sept. 14.
AFP - Getty Images Lebanese men ransack American fast food chains Hardee's and KFC as they protest against the controversial film "Innocence of Muslims" in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Sept. 14.
NBC News staff and wire reports -- Protesters in a number of countries across the Muslim world vented anger against the West on Friday as the controversy over an anti-Islamic film raged, with a KFC restaurant torched in Lebanon, violent attacks on U.S. embassies in Sudan and Tunis and fierce protests in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.
U.S. embassies and consulates are braced for trouble on the Muslim day of prayer, when demonstrations are often held, following the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Continue reading.
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AFP - Getty Images Lebanese security forces fire shots to disperse men ransacking American fast food chains Hardee's and KFC as they protest against the controversial film "Innocence of Muslims" in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Sept. 14.
Reuters Hundreds of protesters set alight a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Hardee's restaurant in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Sept. 14, witnesses said, chanting against the pope's visit to Lebanon and shouting anti-American slogans.
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Sign up for the NBCNews.com Photos Newsletter ||||| The White House asked YouTube on Tuesday to review an anti-Muslim film posted to the site that has been blamed for igniting the violent protests this week in the Middle East.
Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, said the White House has "reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and ask them to review whether it violates their terms of use."
However, the video remained on the site as of Friday afternoon, and it is posted many other places on the Internet.
Messages to YouTube, and Google, which owns the site, were not immediately returned Friday. On Wednesday, a YouTube spokesperson said the video "is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube."
The spokesperson added, however, that the site restricted access in Libya and Egypt because of the unrest. "We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere," the spokesperson said.
The video, a trailer for what the promoters say is full-length film produced in the United States, has been cited as a cause for the some of the violent unrest in several Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt and Yemen. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Friday that investigators have no evidence that the protests were caused by anything other than the video.
"It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting," Carney said. "That in no way justifies any violent reaction to it, but this is not a case of protest directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy. This is in response to a video that is offensive and -- to Muslims. Again, this is not in any way justifying violence. And we've spoken very clearly out against that and condemned it. And the president is making sure in his conversations with leaders around the region that they are committed, as hosts to diplomatic facilities, that -- to protect both personnel and buildings and other facilities that are part of the U.S. representation in those countries." ||||| | – Violent protests continued across the Arab world today and claimed at least seven lives, three of them near the US embassy in Sudan's capital city, NBC News reports. Security officers in Khartoum fired tear gas at about 5,000 angry demonstrators, who were also protesting at nearby British and German embassies. In other developments: Two demonstrators were killed and at least 29 injured outside the US embassy in Tunisia, where angry crowds gathered after setting fire to the American School. At least one person died and 25 others were hurt in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, where protesters torched and ransacked a KFC and a Hardee's restaurant, NBC News reports. Demonstrations there were timed to concur with a 3-day visit by Pope Benedict XVI, according to Lebanese officials. A protester died of birdshot wounds during a battle with police near Cairo's US embassy. He was the first Egyptian fatality during the riots. A large demonstration is underway outside the BMCI bank in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, Huffington Post reports. The White House has asked YouTube to review—but not remove—the anti-Muslim video that apparently sparked the rioting, the Washington Post reports. Administration officials asked "them to review whether it violates their terms of use," said a National Security Council spokesman. (YouTube has already removed the video in protesting countries.) See our earlier roundups on the protests, including a no-fly zone in Benghazi and Marines arriving in Yemen. |
People with type 1 diabetes who used a bionic pancreas instead of manually monitoring glucose using fingerstick tests and delivering insulin using a pump were more likely to have blood glucose levels consistently within the normal range, with fewer dangerous lows or highs. The full report of the findings, funded by the National Institutes of Health, can be found online June 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers - at Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital - say the process of blood glucose control could improve dramatically with the bionic pancreas. Currently, people with type 1 diabetes walk an endless tightrope. Because their pancreas doesn't make the hormone insulin, their blood glucose levels can veer dangerously high and low. Several times a day they must use fingerstick tests to monitor their blood glucose levels and manually take insulin by injection or from a pump.
In two scenarios, the researchers tested a bihormonal bionic pancreas, which uses a removable tiny sensor located in a thin needle inserted under the skin that automatically monitors real time glucose levels in tissue fluid and provides insulin and its counteracting hormone, glucagon, via two automatic pumps. In one scenario, 20 adults wore this device combination and carried a cell phone-sized wireless monitor around Boston for five days, unrestricted in their activities. In the other, 32 youth wore the device combination for five days at a camp for children with type 1 diabetes. Both groups were also monitored for five days wearing their own conventional pumps that deliver insulin.
"The bionic pancreas system reduced the average blood glucose to levels that have been shown to dramatically reduce the risk of diabetic complications," said co-first author Steven Russell, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. "This is tremendously difficult with currently available technology, and so most people with diabetes are unable to achieve these levels."
The researchers found about 37 percent fewer interventions for low blood glucose (hypoglycemia) and a more than twofold reduction in the time in hypoglycemia in adults using the bionic pancreas than with the manual pump. For adolescents using the bionic pancreas, results showed more than a twofold reduction in the need for interventions for hypoglycemia. As well, both groups had significant improvements in glucose levels with the bionic pancreas, particularly during the night.
"The performance of our system in both adults and adolescents exceeded our expectations under very challenging real-world conditions," said Ed Damiano, Ph.D., the paper's senior author, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University and the parent of a son with type 1 diabetes.
"A cure is always the end goal," he said. "As that goal remains elusive, a truly automated technology, which can consistently and relentlessly keep people healthy and safe from harm of hypoglycemia, would lift an enormous emotional and practical burden from the shoulders of people with type 1 diabetes, including my child and so many others."
Just as a thermostat helps control a home's temperature, the normal pancreas senses blood glucose levels and adjusts the hormones that control it. People with type 1 diabetes, whose pancreas produces little or no insulin, have been using the equivalent of a manual thermostat, needing constant checking and adjustment. A bionic pancreas - like the one used in these studies - would function more like an automated thermostat, automatically monitoring blood glucose and delivering insulin or glucagon when needed to keep glucose within the normal range. As well, these bionic pancreas devices could be monitored remotely by the patient's medical provider or parent.
"With promising results such as these, we plan to support larger multicenter trials of the artificial pancreas in the near future," said Guillermo Arreaza-Rubín, M.D., the project officer for artificial pancreas studies funded by the NIH's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). "Within the next few years, we hope these technologies will go beyond experimental trials and be available to benefit more people with type 1 diabetes."
"The landmark Diabetes Control and Complications study - also funded by NIDDK - has long shown that maintaining as normal a blood glucose level as possible early on can stave off complications, including heart, kidney and eye diseases, decades later," said NIDDK Director Griffin P. Rodgers, M.D. "By funding research on the artificial pancreas, we aim to help people with type 1 diabetes maintain healthy blood glucose levels, prevent painful and costly complications, and lead freer, healthier lives."
###
Among other funding sources, this research was supported by NIDDK grants R01DK085633 and R01DK097657, and was made possible by the Special Statutory Funding Program for Type 1 Diabetes Research. The program was established by Congress for research to prevent and cure type 1 diabetes.
The NIDDK, part of the NIH, conducts and supports basic and clinical research and research training on some of the most common, severe and disabling conditions affecting Americans. The Institute's research interests include: diabetes and other endocrine and metabolic diseases; digestive diseases, nutrition, and obesity; and kidney, urologic and hematologic diseases. For more information, visit http://www. niddk. nih. gov/ .
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www. nih. gov .
NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health ||||| A portable artificial pancreas built with a modified iPhone successfully regulated blood sugar levels in a trial with people who have Type 1 diabetes, researchers reported Sunday.
Type 1 diabetes, which usually starts in childhood or young adulthood, is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin, the hormone that lowers blood sugar levels. Insulin works in conjunction with glucagon, a hormone that raises blood sugar. Together, they keep blood sugar in a healthy range.
Currently about one-third of people with Type 1 diabetes rely on insulin pumps to regulate blood sugar. They eliminate the need for injections and can be programmed to mimic the natural release of insulin by dispensing small doses regularly.
But these pumps do not automatically adjust to the patient’s variable insulin needs, and they do not dispense glucagon. The new device, described in a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, dispenses both hormones, and it does so with little intervention from the patient.
“The data address some of the most difficult problems in diabetes management,” said Dr. Kevan Herold, director of the Yale Diabetes Center, who was not involved in the study. “I’d say that the effects are quite significant and noteworthy.”
Dr. Fredric E. Wondisford, director of the diabetes institute at Johns Hopkins, also found the results encouraging. “To me, it’s a clear advance,” he said. But he cautioned that the effectiveness and practicality of the device had still not been tested in large numbers of patients over long periods of time. He also raised the issue of cost and insurance coverage.
Treatment of Type 1 diabetes is complicated. Patients not using pumps need two or more insulin injections a day, and all have to monitor blood sugar several times a day by pricking their skin and testing their blood.
Maintaining safe blood sugar levels requires precise adjustments, especially to prevent hypoglycemia, or extremely low blood sugar. Hypoglycemia can occur quickly, without the patient’s awareness, and can be a life-threatening emergency.
For patients with adequate treatment, elevated blood sugar is usually not an emergency, but can cause vascular damage over time that can lead to eye problems and amputations.
The artificial pancreas is the latest version of a device that researchers have been refining for several years. The system consists of an iPhone 4S with an attached glucose monitoring device, two pumps, and reservoirs for insulin and glucagon.
A sensor implanted under the skin on one side of the patient’s abdomen measures the glucose in the fluid between the cells, which corresponds closely to blood glucose levels. The sensor delivers the reading to the smartphone, and the phone’s software calculates a dose of insulin and glucagon every five minutes.
The medicine is then pumped through thin tubes to two tiny infusion points embedded just under the skin on the other side of the patient’s abdomen.
The phone also has an app with which a patient can enter information immediately before eating, indicating whether the meal is breakfast, lunch or dinner, and whether the carbohydrate content will be small, large or typical. The device then calculates and dispenses the proper dosages.
The device still requires a finger stick twice a day to get an accurate blood reading, which the patient enters into the phone.
The developers tested the device over five days in two groups of patients, 20 adults and 32 adolescents, comparing the results with readings obtained with conventional insulin pumps that the participants were using.
The adults in the trial each had the constant attention of a nurse, and they lived in a hotel for the five-day study. Most of the time they were free to travel around and pursue normal activities.
The adolescents, 16 boys and 16 girls, lived under supervision in a summer camp for youths with diabetes.
“We need to do a true home-use study, give people the device and send them home,” said the lead author, Dr. Steven J. Russell, an assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Let them do whatever it is they’re going to do without supervision.”
Several authors of the new report have received payments from medical device companies and hold patents on blood sugar monitoring technology.
The artificial pancreas performed better than the conventional pump on several measures. Among the adolescents, the average number of interventions for hypoglycemia was 0.8 a day with the experimental pump, compared with 1.6 a day with the insulin pumps. Among adults, the device significantly reduced the amount of time that glucose levels fell too low.
And the artificial pancreas worked well at calculating mealtime doses without the patient having to use (often inaccurate) estimates and correct a too high or too low reading after eating.
Much more work needs to be done before the device can be marketed, Dr. Russell said. The senior author, Edward R. Damiano, an associate professor of biomechanical engineering at Boston University, has a 15-year-old son with Type 1 diabetes. He said he was determined to get the new device working and approved in time for his son to go off to college carrying one. ||||| An artificial pancreas developed by Boston researchers shows considerable promise to dramatically change the treatment of type 1 diabetes, potentially enabling 2 million Americans to eat what they want without counting carbohydrates or calculating insulin injections, researchers announced Sunday.
Investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University developed the experimental device, which consists of an automated pump that releases the hormones insulin and glucagon and a glucose monitoring system controlled by an iPhone app.
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“We encouraged them to eat whatever they wanted while they wore the bionic pancreas,” said Dr. Steven Russell, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who led the study. “They went on a diabetes vacation, eating ice cream, candy bars, and other things they normally wouldn’t eat — like taking out a new sports car and seeing what it can do.”
In a new study published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers found that 52 adults and teens who used the mobile system for five days had healthier blood sugar levels compared to when they used standard treatments that required them to check their own blood sugar levels and determine how much insulin to inject via a pump device.
“This is not a cure,” said study coauthor Edward Damiano, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University who holds a patent on the software that makes the automatic dosing decisions. “It’s taking diabetes management to its ultimate potential and unburdens people with type 1 diabetes from thinking about all the things that go into managing diabetes every day of their lives.”
Damiano, whose 15-year-old son developed type 1 diabetes during his first year of life, said he wakes up two to three times a night to check his son’s blood sugar to prevent it from falling to a dangerously low level, called hypoglycemia, which can cause seizures, a coma, and sometimes even death. Having an automated device, which is expected to become available by 2017 after more testing and upgrades, would save Damiano and other parents from having to wake up in the middle of the night to avoid medical emergencies, he said.
Children with type 1 diabetes are eight times more likely to die from severe hypoglycemia at night — called dead in bed syndrome — than in a car accident.
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Diabetes experts who were not involved in the study cautioned that automated devices need far more rigorous testing to determine if they’ll be safe enough to become widespread.
“Quite a few things need to be addressed,” added Dr. David Harlan, chief of the diabetes division at the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. “The chances of the pump failing with two difference hormone infusions are great and it doesn’t remove constant diligence from lives of people with diabetes.”
The rate of type 1 diabetes — in which the body’s immune cells attack and destroy a healthy insulin-producing pancreas — has, for unknown reasons, been surging over the past few decades, with nearly 16,000 children under age 18 now diagnosed with the condition every year. (Type 2 diabetes, by comparison, is a more common condition, and tends to occur well into adulthood and has far more explainable causes, such as genetics, obesity, and a lack of exercise.)
In the new study, all of the study participants were closely monitored — adults were accompanied by nurses round-the-clock and the teens were in a summer camp for those with type 1 diabetes — to ensure that their blood sugar levels wouldn’t rise too high or fall too low, which could cause seizures or other complications.
The research found that adult patients with type 1 diabetes who used the experimental device had lower blood sugar levels overall than the control group while also spending 67 percent less time in a state of hypoglycemia.
Children who used the device experienced a 50 percent reduction in carbohydrate use to treat hypoglycemia, though they did not experience a significant difference in their blood sugar measurements. That’s likely because children who participated in the study were closely monitored even when they used their usual treatments, said Russell.
He and his colleagues presented their results Sunday evening at the American Diabetes Association meeting in San Francisco.
“The initial proof of concept is very strong,” said Dr. Guillermo Arreaza-Rubin, a director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases which funded the trial. “Parents of children with type 1 live in permanent fear and maybe this device can free them from that burden and increase the quality of life of those with this disease.”
A few other groups of researchers presented findings on similar automated devices at the diabetes conference, he said, which, like the device developed in Boston, are also about three or four years away from widespread use.
Christopher Herndon, 13, a study participant who tried the bionic pancreas last summer while at Camp Joslin in Charlton, said for the first time in his life he “felt steady the whole day” rather than shaky when his blood sugar levels dropped too low and “really talkative” when it was too high.
Despite using an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitoring device, which many diabetes experts consider to be gold standard therapies, the Newburyport teen said he has never been able to achieve the kind of blood sugar control that he had while using the bionic pancreas.
While his mother, Christina, often wakes him at 2 a.m. to have some juice if his blood sugar drops too low, he was never woken by his counselors at the camp during the five days he used the device.
Mark Lorenz for The Globe Christopher Herndon said he has never been able to achieve the kind of blood sugar control that he had while using the bionic pancreas.
Colby Clarizia, another study participant, said he consumed three blueberry muffins for breakfast while wearing the artificial pancreas and was surprised to see how well the device worked. The 21-year-old from Amesbury also found it easy to use.
“Instead of measuring every carb in a glass of milk or serving of rice, I just had to input whether I was going to eat a large meal or small one,” he said.
Such a device, he added, would make it far easier for him to eat in restaurants where carbohydrate counts aren’t posted on menus.
The bionic pancreas automatically monitors blood sugar using a wireless glucose monitoring system that sends a signal every five minutes to an iPhone adapted with software. The iPhone app determines how much insulin to dispense — to make high blood sugar levels decrease — and how much of the hormone glucagon to dispense to make blood sugar levels rise; it also learns over time how to adjust the release of the two hormones based on input from the monitoring system.
Harlan plans to test the device in conjunction with Russell’s team in a large multicenter study launching this week that will have less rigorous monitoring. Participants will need to stay within an hour’s drive of the study site but won’t need to be accompanied by a health professional wherever they go.
“I think it’s an important step forward, but it’s going to be quite challenging to see whether this device can function safely and effectively without close supervision,” said Dr. Howard Wolpert, director of the institute for technology translation at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who reviewed the paper before publication. “An analogy I would present is that they climbed a flight of stairs but now the next stage will be like climbing a hill or even a mountain.” ||||| | – While you were using your iPhone to browse Facebook and read Newser, a group of researchers was modifying an iPhone 4S to be used as a portable artificial pancreas—and in a recent trial, the device successfully regulated the blood sugar levels of people with Type 1 diabetes. About a third of people with Type 1 diabetes, which is typically diagnosed in childhood, use an insulin pump to regulate their blood sugar rather than giving themselves insulin injections. But unlike those pumps, the bionic pancreas adjusts both insulin and glucagon, a hormone that works with insulin to regulate blood sugar, automatically, the New York Times reports. It performed better than a regular pump for both adults and adolescents, according to the press release. The device is comprised of more than just the iPhone: The patient has a sensor implanted under the skin near the abdomen, which sends readings of blood glucose levels to the attached phone. The phone then calculates and sends the correct dosage of insulin and glucagon through attached pumps and tubes every five minutes. Patients can also enter information about meals before they eat, and the phone will calculate and deliver the correct dose. Twice-daily finger pricks are still required, with the blood sugar readings entered into the phone. Adult participants had about 37% fewer incidents during which low blood glucose levels required intervention—incidents that can be dangerous in the moment as well as cause health complications down the line—and the device could even allow patients to eat what they want, the Boston Globe notes. (During the trial, participants "went on a diabetes vacation, eating ice cream, candy bars, and other things they normally wouldn’t eat," explains the lead researcher.) It could be available by 2017, but larger trials are the next step. |
PARIS — A suspect linked to the Nov. 13 Paris attackers was found with surveillance footage of a high-ranking Belgian nuclear official, the Belgian authorities acknowledged on Thursday, raising fears that the Islamic State is trying to obtain radioactive material for a terrorist attack.
The existence of the footage, which the police in Belgium seized on Nov. 30, was confirmed by Thierry Werts, a spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutor, after being reported in the Belgian daily newspaper La Dernière Heure.
The news set off an immediate outcry among Belgian lawmakers, who charged that they and the country had been misled about the extent of the potential threats to the country’s nuclear facilities, as well as about the ambitions of the terrorist network linked to the Islamic State that used Belgium to plot the Paris attacks, which killed 130 people.
The International Atomic Energy Agency and the State Department also confirmed on Thursday a report by Reuters that radioactive material had disappeared since November in Iraq, where the Islamic State controls broad areas of territory, adding to fears that the group may be able to acquire material for an attack with newly disconcerting dimensions. ||||| Investigators probing the Paris attacks have found video footage of a senior Belgian nuclear official, a prosecutor has said.
The Belgian prosecutor confirmed the existence of “images mentioned by the press this morning regarding a person linked to the nuclear industry” in reference to a report in the daily La Derniere Heure.
The footage was discovered “as part of seizures made following the Paris attacks”, the prosecutor added, refusing to divulge the individual’s identity “for obvious security reasons”.
France has been under a state of emergency since jihadist gunmen attacked several sites in Paris on 13 November, killing 130 people and leaving 350 wounded.
Since mid-November 11 people have been arrested and charged in Belgium in connection with the killings. Key suspect Salah Abdeslam and his associate Mohamed Abrini, both from the Molenbeek area of Brussels, are still at large.
Belgian officials did not wish to give any details about how the video footage of the nuclear official had come to light.
According to the Derniere Heure, the 10 hours of footage showed the front door of a home in the Flanders region.
Belgium’s federal agency for nuclear control said it was aware of the interest in the story but stressed the importance of not revealing the name of the person or the property involved so as “not to endanger the enquiry or nuclear security” or the person involved and their family.
The images were captured by a camera hidden in nearby bushes and recovered by two suspects who left the area in a vehicle with the lights off, the newspaper report said.
It was discovered by investigators during one of the numerous searches carried out in Belgium since the Paris attacks.
The paper said it was not possible to date the seized video, and therefore to know whether it was taken before or after the November attacks.
Eight of the 11 suspects arrested in Belgium are still being held. ||||| | – Footage found in the possession of a man arrested after the Paris terror attacks may point to a plot involving radioactive material. Authorities say a 10-hour surveillance video seized from Mohamed Bakkali on Nov. 30 shows the home of a senior Belgian nuclear official who has access to secure areas of the Belgian Nuclear Research Center in Mol, report the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The purpose of the footage, whose existence was confirmed this week, isn't clear. A rep for Belgium's federal prosecutor says "there is no element that says that this was to perpetrate an attack." But some suggest it may have been groundwork for a plan to abduct the official to gain access to material needed to create a dirty bomb—basically a normal bomb but with "radiological material strapped to it," an expert tells the Times. Belgium's interior minister says government officials who watched the undated footage—apparently shot from a camera placed in nearby bushes, reports AFP—found there was a threat "to the person in question, but not the nuclear facilities." Sebastien Berg, a rep for Belgium's Federal Agency for Nuclear Control, however, says authorities had "concrete indications that showed that the terrorists involved in the Paris attacks had the intention to do something involving one of our four nuclear sites," the others being two power plants and a producer of medical isotopes. Berg says workers at the Mol facility had been advised to be extra watchful, but that no extra security staff was put in place. |
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UFOs and the Guy Hottel Memo An FBI memo in 1950 regarding an unconfirmed account of “flying saucers” still stirs interest.
A single-page March 22, 1950 memo by Guy Hottel, special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, regarding UFOs is the most viewed document in the FBI Vault , our online repository of public records.
UFOs or No?
The Guy Hottel Memo 03/25/13
It’s the most popular file in the FBI Vault—our high-tech electronic reading room housing various Bureau records released under the Freedom of Information Act. Over the past two years, this file has been viewed nearly a million times. Yet, it is only a single page, relaying an unconfirmed report that the FBI never even followed up on. The file in question is a memo dated March 22, 1950—63 years ago last week. It was authored by Guy Hottel, then head of our field office in Washington, D.C. (see sidebar below for a brief biography). Like all memos to FBI Headquarters at that time, it was addressed to Director J. Edgar Hoover and recorded and indexed in FBI records. The subject of the memo was anything but ordinary. It related a story told to one of our agents by a third party who said an Air Force investigator had reported that three “flying saucers” were recovered in New Mexico. The memo provided the following detail: “They [the saucers] were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”
After relaying an informant’s claim that the saucers had been found because the government’s “high-powered radar” in the area had interfered with “the controlling mechanism of the saucers,” the memo ends simply by saying that “[n]o further evaluation was attempted” concerning the matter by the FBI agent.
Guy Hottel Biography
Guy L. Hottel was born around 1902. He was a graduate of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he was a star football player. He was later inducted into the university’s athletic hall of fame. He entered the FBI as a special agent in 1934. In December 1936, he was named acting head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office; he was appointed special agent in charge the following May and served until March 1941. Hottel was re-appointed special agent in charge in February 1943 and served until 1951, when he took a position in the Identification Division. He retired in 1955. Hottel was married three times and had two sons. Following his FBI career, Hottel served as executive secretary of the Horseman’s Benevolent Association. He died in June 1990. That might have been the end of this particular story, just another informational dead end in the FBI files. But when we launched the Vault in April 2011, some media outlets noticed the Hottel memo and erroneously reported that the FBI had posted proof of a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and the recovery of wreckage and alien corpses. The resulting stories went viral, and traffic to the new Vault soared. So what’s the real story? A few facts to keep in mind: First, the Hottel memo isn’t new. It was first released publicly in the late 1970s and had been posted on the FBI website for several years prior to the launch of the Vault. Second, the Hottel memo is dated nearly three years after the infamous events in Roswell in July 1947. There is no reason to believe the two are connected. The FBI file on Roswell (another popular page) is posted elsewhere on the Vault. Third, as noted in an earlier story, the FBI has only occasionally been involved in investigating reports of UFOs and extraterrestrials. For a few years after the Roswell incident, Director Hoover did order his agents—at the request of the Air Force—to verify any UFO sightings. That practice ended in July 1950, four months after the Hottel memo, suggesting that our Washington Field Office didn’t think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it. Finally, the Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated. Some people believe the memo repeats a hoax that was circulating at that time, but the Bureau’s files have no information to verify that theory. Sorry, no smoking gun on UFOs. The mystery remains… Resources:
- The Guy Hottel memo
- Records on other unexplained phenomenon
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||||| A single-page March 22, 1950, memo by Guy Hottel, special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, regarding UFOs is the most viewed document in the FBI Vault, an online repository of public records.
Credit: FBI View full size image
The FBI says its most viewed public record is a memo from 1950 recounting a strange story someone told an agent about three "flying saucers" that were allegedly recovered in New Mexico.
The so-called Hottel memo was first released in the late 1970s under the Freedom of Information Act, but it's been viewed nearly a million times since 2011, when the FBI launched an online database of public records called the Vault.
Dated March 22, 1950, the memo was addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and written by Guy Hottel, then head of the Bureau's field office in Washington, D.C. Hottel was reporting what an Air Force investigator said that someone else told him about the crashed saucers.
The following details of the report have perhaps fueled the hopes of those who want to believe: "They [the saucers] were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots."
For the record, FBI officials said in a statement on Monday (March 25) that the Hottel memo "does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated."
Bureau officials also say there is no reason to believe that the story has anything to do with the infamous 1947 Roswell crash in New Mexico. Hoover did actually order his agents to verify any UFO sightings after the Roswell incident and until July 1950. That the Hottel report was never investigated suggests "our Washington Field Office didn't think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it," the FBI statement says.
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. ||||| Info The Vault
The Vault is our new FOIA Library, containing 6,700 documents and other media that have been scanned from paper into digital copies so you can read them in the comfort of your home or office. Included here are many new FBI files that have been released to the public but never added to this website; dozens of records previously posted on our site but removed as requests diminished; files from our previous FOIA Library, and new, previously unreleased files.
The Vault includes several new tools and resources for your convenience: Searching for Topics: You can browse or search for specific topics or persons (like Al Capone or Marilyn Monroe) by viewing our You can browse or search for specific topics or persons (like Al Capone or Marilyn Monroe) by viewing our alphabetical listing , by using the search tool in the upper right of this site, or by checking the different category lists that can be found in the menu on the right side of this page. In the search results, click on the folder to see all of the files for that particular topic.
Searching for Key Words: Thanks to new technology we have developed, you can now search for key words or phrases within some individual files. You can search across all of our electronic files by using the search tool in the upper right of this site, or you can search for key words within a specific document by typing in terms in the search box in the upper right hand of the file after it has been opened and loaded. Note: since many of the files include handwritten notes or are not always in optimal condition due to age, this search feature does not always work perfectly.
Viewing the Files: We are now using an open source web document viewer, so you no longer need your own file software to view our records. When you click on a file, it loads in a reader that enables you to view one or two pages at a time, search for key words, shrink or enlarge the size of the text, use different scroll features, and more. In many cases, the quality and clarity of the individual files has also been improved.
Requesting a Status Update: Use our new Use our new Check the Status of Your FOI/PA Request tool to determine where your request stands in our process. Status information is updated weekly. Note: You need your FOI/PA request number to use this feature.
Please note: the content of the files in the Vault encompasses all time periods of Bureau history and do not always reflect the current views, policies, and priorities of the FBI. New files will be added on a regular basis, so please check back often. ||||| | – Of the 6,700 documents that the FBI has posted publicly at its Vault since 2011, the most popular of them all is ... a 1950 memo on UFOs, reports Live Science. In the so-called Hottel memo, an agent recounts that someone reported seeing three "flying saucers" that crashed in New Mexico, with three apparent dead aliens in each. The agent didn't seem to take it very seriously, concluding that "no further evaluation was attempted." The memo has been publicly available since the 1970s, but with the launch of the Vault, the one-page memo went viral and has since then received nearly 1 million hits. The FBI again takes pains to point out "the Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs," in its own writeup on the popularity of the document. "It is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated," possibly the result of a tall tale floating around at the time. "Sorry, no smoking gun on UFOs." |
CLOSE Skip in Skip x Embed x Share Police believe William Boyette took his own life during a standoff at a Georgia motel. His alleged accomplice, Mary Craig Rice, surrendered to authorities. USA TODAY NETWORK
William Boyette (Photo: Special to the News Journal)
WEST POINT, Ga. — Authorities say one of two people wanted in the deaths of four women has killed himself, ending a Tuesday standoff at a west Georgia motel and a multi-state crime spree.
Escambia (Fla.) County Sheriff David Morgan said William Boyette died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and that another suspect, Mary Rice, surrendered and is in custody. The pair is charged with killings that sparked a manhunt throughout southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where the crimes occurred.
Deputies in Florida responded to a citizen tip Tuesday afternoon and found Boyette and Rice holed up at the West Point Motel in West Point, Ga., along with a car that was stolen Monday morning from Kayla Crocker's home in Pensacola, Fla. Crocker, 28, was shot and died Tuesday afternoon at an area hospital.
According to Sgt. Smith with Troup County Sheriff's Office, police made multiple attempts to contact Boyette and Rice inside the hotel with no luck.
Rice came out of the motel room where she was holed up with Boyette shortly after the Georgia SWAT team arrived. Within minutes of Rice being put in handcuffs and led away from the motel, police heard a single gunshot from inside the motel room, according to Troup County Georgia Sheriff James Woodruff.
Officers entered the room and found Boyette dead, Woodruff said.
The tip was received at about 2:30 p.m. today from a citizen who spotted the car that was being discussed in the media and on social media, Woodruff said. An officer was dispatched to the motel and confirmed it was the car stolen from Crocker.
A clerk at the motel told deputies that Rice checked into the motel Monday night under her own name. Deputies confirmed there were people inside the room because Boyette and Rice opened the curtains periodically and waved at law enforcement.
Deputies set up a perimeter around the hotel and just as SWAT was preparing to enter, Rice came outside, Woodruff said.
“We are always glad when something this seriously is resolved and no one is injured and no one is killed,” Woodruff told media gathered outside the motel. “We knew going in, them having killed several people already, that this could end very badly.”
Dominic Guadagnoli of the U.S. Marshals Service said federal, state and local law enforcement officials were on the scene.
Santa Rosa County Sheriff, Bob Johnson, right, and State Attorney, Bill Eddins, center, and Santa Rosa Deputy Sgt. Rich Aloy, left, holds a press conference Tuesday morning Feb. 7, 2017, to update members of the media on the latest in the William Boyette case. Local law enforcement agencies are seeking Boyette for the alleged murders of three people. (Photo: Tony Giberson/[email protected])
The shooting of Crocker Monday morning in her home was the most recent attack in the crime spree that began Jan. 31.
Two women, Alicia Greer and Jacqueline Moore, were killed at the Emerald Sands Inn in Milton, Fla., on Jan. 31. Boyette and Rice are are then thought to have killed Peggy Broz at her Lillian, Ala., home the morning of Feb. 3 in order to steal her vehicle.
Baldwin County (Ala.) Sheriff’s Office information officer Anthony Lowery confirmed that a warrant for capital murder had been issued for Boyette and Rice for the ambush and killing of Broz.
It’s alleged that Rice and Boyette followed Broz to her home early on the morning of Feb. 3, where they shot and killed Broz in her front yard. Lowery said BCSO has found no other connection between the suspects and the victim other than the fact she had a vehicle they wanted.
“We believe at this point that obviously they selected her to prey on, they don’t have any ties that tie them together at this point,” he said.
Mary Craig Rice (Photo: Special to the News Journal)
Broz worked at Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, but Lowery wasn’t able to confirm whether Boyette and Rice had followed Broz all the way from Pensacola to her home, or whether they were already located in Alabama when they found her.
In a press conference at the Santa Rosa county sheriff's office Tuesday morning, Sheriff Bob Johnson said a warrant for accessory after the fact to capital murder has been issued for Rice, who Johnson says is a "willing participant."
Records show that Boyette was a habitual violent offender, having been accused of beating and stabbing previous girlfriends in the years leading up to his killing spree and eventual death.
The prosecution was forced to drop a number of charges as the victims either couldn’t be located or recanted their statements on Boyette’s abuse, and as such he never served more than a year in jail for his domestic violence accusations.
Boyette had only been out of jail four months for a probation violation when he allegedly committed the Milton double homicide.
Aside from the known relationship between Boyette and Greer, police can’t point to any other connection between Boyette and Rice to the other three victims.
State Attorney Bill Eddins said Rice faces charges of accessory after the fact to capital murder in the Milton double homicide, and charges are still pending in the attack on Crocker.
Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office public information officer Anthony Lowery said Rice is facing charges of capital murder in the Alabama jurisdiction for her involvement with Broz’s killing.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2kKL8YA ||||| The Escambia County Sheriff's Office has reported that the stand off with William "Billy" Boyette, 41, and his accomplice Mary Barbara Craig Rice, 37, of Milton, Florida inside of the West Point Motel in Georgia has ended.
ECSO Public Information Officer Andrew Hobbs confirmed that Boyette is deceased and Rice has been captured by the Troup County Sheriff's Office in Georgia.
The TCSO said that Boyette died from what they believe to be a self-inflicted gun shot wound. Investigators are processing the scene at the West Point Motel at this time.
On Tuesday afternoon, the TCSO in Georgia reported that Boyette and Rice were inside of the West Point Motel in Georgia.
Troup County officials said that there was an active scene at the motel located at 7800 West Point Road in West Point, Georgia.
The Troup County Sheriff's Office along with multiple support agencies were attempting to make contact Boyette and Rice.
The TCSO said that while they tried to bring the situation to a peaceful resolution, they wanted people avoid the area of the motel.
Earlier, Baldwin County Schools reported that they would continue to have increased security measures in place until Boyette and Rice were apprehended by authorities.
During a press conference on Tuesday morning, Santa Rosa County, Florida District Attorney William "Bill" Eddins said charges for Rice, 37 had been upgraded to accessory after the fact to premeditated murder.
"We are asking her to turn herself in," said Eddins.
Eddins went on to say that the other suspect, Boyette, had pleaded guilty to aggravated assault charges in Santa Rosa County in 2003 and served a stint in jail.
Boyette was arrested and face state charges in Florida for possession of a firearm by a felon after being released from jail. Eddin also hinted at not being able to charge Boyette with domestic violence in Santa Rosa County on several occasions because his spouse would not cooperate.
A warrant for capital murder was also issued Tuesday morning in Baldwin County for the arrest Rice by investigators with the Baldwin County Major Crimes Unit.
Rice is charged with capital murder and first-degree robbery in the death of Peggy Phillips Broz of Lillian, Alabama.
BCSO investigators have determined that Rice was with William "Billy" Boyette, 41, when they shot and killed Broz during the early morning hours of Friday (Feb. 3).
After the murder, both suspects are believed to have stolen Broz' vehicle and fled to Florida.
That news came a few hours after the Escambia County Sheriff's Office reported that Crimestoppers has increased the reward to $21,000 for a tip that can lead to the arrest of Boyette and Rice.
The ECSO made the announcement on their Facebook page just after 8:00 p.m. Monday night.
The previous reward had reached $11,000 over the weekend when Boyette became the suspect in the deaths of Alicia Greer and Jacqueline Moore in Milton, Florida and Broz.
The ECSO also released a portrait-view photo of Boyette's suspected accomplice, Mary Rice.
The photo highlights the gap between her upper-middle teeth.
Authorities are still considering Boyette and Rice armed and dangerous. They are urging residents in Escambia County and Baldwin County to avoid approaching the pair if spotted and to call 911 immediately.
The duo are still believed to be traveling in a white 2006 Chevrolet Cobalt with Florida license plate number: 9613BJ.
The vehicle was stolen during a home invasion in the Beluah, Florida area on Monday morning when Kayla Crocker was shot and left in critical condition at a local hospital. Her 2-year-old son was unharmed during the home invasion.
A relative of the victim, Loretta Crocker, has set up a donations page to help Kayla's family while she recovers. ||||| Just One More Thing...
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The search for a gunman suspected of murdering four women in two different states ended Tuesday when he was found dead in a Georgia motel and his alleged female accomplice was taken into custody.
After several days of searching, police found William "Billy" Boyette, 44, and 37-year-old Mary Rice in the town of West Point, about 80 miles southwest of Atlanta, shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Peggy Broz. John Broz
While a SWAT team was preparing to storm the West Point Motel, Rice came out and surrendered, the Troup County Sheriff's Office said in a statement posted to Facebook.
Inside, the deputies found Boyette dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
Boyette was suspected of murdering Alicia Greer and Jacqueline Moore in Milton, Florida, and Peggy Broz, whose car Boyette is believed to have stolen, in Lillian, Alabama.
"There is nothing to make sense of this. He needed a car, and he did not care 'cause he's an evil person," Broz's father-in-law, John Broz, told NBC News. "He's a coward."
Mary Rice and William 'Billy' Boyette in sheriff's photos. Escambia County Sheriff's Office
The Escambia County, Florida, Sheriff's Office said Boyette was also suspected of shooting a woman, later identified as Kayla Crocker, during a home invasion in Pensacola. Crocker died Tuesday, the sheriff's office said.
Moore’s mother, Brenda Stockhill, said the victim's dad bought bus tickets so that the 39-year-old could relocate to Ohio days just before the shooting. She never showed up to the bus station.
"I didn't even find out that my daughter was murdered until Wednesday," Stockhill said.
She called the death of Boyette "some relief."
"He's off the streets," Stockhill said. "He's not going to hurt anybody else." ||||| | – A fugitive murder suspect who vowed he wouldn't be taken alive killed himself after being cornered at a Georgia motel Tuesday, police say. William "Billy" Boyette died of what police say was a self-inflicted gunshot wound moments after alleged accomplice Mary Rice surrendered at a motel in West Point, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Cops believe the pair murdered Alicia Greer and Jacqueline Moore at a motel in Milton, Fla., on Jan. 31 before killing Peggy Broz in Lillian, Ala., on Feb. 3 to steal her car. A fourth victim, Kayla Crocker, was shot in Pensacola, Fla., on Monday and died from her injuries on Tuesday, USA Today reports. Rice has been charged with robbery and first-degree murder. Police say they found the pair and that a standoff at the Motel West Point began after they received a tip from a citizen who spotted Crocker's car outside the motel at 2:30pm. The vehicle was stolen after a home invasion in which Crocker was fatally wounded but her 2-year-old son was left unharmed, AL.com reports. Boyette was confirmed dead and Rice was arrested at around 6:15pm. Boyette was in a relationship with Greer, but police say there was no known connection between him or Rice and any of the other three victims. "There is nothing to make sense of this. He needed a car, and he did not care 'cause he's an evil person," Broz's father-in-law tells NBC News. |
People vs. Dr. Conrad Murray MJ's Security Guard: Murray Had Me Remove Vials
People vs. Dr. Conrad Murray -- Michael Jackson's Security Guard Alberto Alvarez Testifies
Alberto Alvarez -- Michael Jackson's Security Guard Testifies
Updated 9/29/11 at 8:48 AM
's security guard-- the man who called 911 the morning MJ died -- just took the stand, claiming Murray asked him to remove several vials of Propofol before he called an ambulance.Alvarez claims he quickly arrived at the scene on June 25th, 2009 -- and saw Murray performing one-handed chest compressions on MJ, who was still in the bed. According to Alvarez, Murray immediately asked him to pack away several vials and an IV bag. Alvarez claims there were two saline bags on the IV stand, but Murray cared only about the one that contained a vial with a "milky white substance."Alvarez claims Murray THEN asked Alvarez to call 911 -- at which point the dispatcher ordered him to move Michael from the bed to the floor in order to perform CPR. According to Alvarez, paramedics arrived soon after.Defense attorneytried to get Alvarez to admit he may have been confused about the timing of the events -- but Alvarez insisted ... Murray ordered him to bag the vials BEFORE paramedics arrived.Alvarez says he has been offered enormous sums to provide interviews to media outlets -- as much as $500,000.The defense just showed footage inside a hospital room where MJ's body was relocated after the singer was pronounced dead -- and the place was crawling with cops. ||||| 1 of 31. Deputy District Attorney David Walgren (R) holds a bottle of propofol introduced as evidence as he questions Alberto Alvarez (L), one of Michael Jackson's security guards, during Dr. Conrad Murray's trial in the death of pop star Michael Jackson in Los Angeles September 29, 2011.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Michael Jackson's doctor asked a bodyguard to grab vials of medicine and a saline bag from the singer's bedroom on the morning he died, a Los Angeles court heard on Thursday in the manslaughter trial of Dr. Conrad Murray.
Bodyguard Alberto Alvarez also said he saw a "milky white substance" in the saline bag that Murray asked him to stash into a bag moments before an ambulance was called to attend to the lifeless singer.
"While I was standing at the foot of the bed he (Murray) reached over and grabbed a handful of vials and then he said 'here put them in a bag'," Alvarez testified on the third day of Murray's trial on a charge of involuntary manslaughter for being responsible for the "Thriller" singer's death.
Alvarez, testifying for the prosecution, said Murray then pointed toward an IV stand by Jackson's bed and told him to grab one of the saline bags hanging there and take it away.
The bag had "what appeared to me like a milky white substance. I recall seeing it at the bottom of the (saline) bag," Alvarez said.
Prosecutors say the milky substance was the surgical anesthetic propofol, which authorities have deemed to be the principal cause of Jackson's death on June 25, 2009.
Murray admits giving Jackson propofol as a sleep aid but denies involuntary manslaughter. He could face up to four years in prison if convicted.
PARIS SCREAMS FOR DADDY
Alvarez was one of the first members of Jackson's staff on the scene the day the 50-year-old pop star was discovered not breathing in his bedroom at his Los Angeles mansion.
"He was laying on his back, with his hands extended out ... his eyes were slightly open and his mouth was open," Alvarez said. As he followed Murray into the bedroom, two of the singer's children followed.
"Prince and Paris came behind me. Paris screamed out 'Daddy!'"
Alvarez said Murray told him Jackson had a "bad reaction" and that he saw the doctor giving the singer chest compressions on the bed with one hand.
Alvarez said he noticed an IV stand, oxygen tubing around Jackson's nose and a device attached to his penis that he later learned is used to collect urine while a person is sleeping. He saw no heart monitor, blood pressure monitor or other monitoring equipment.
It was only after the vials and the saline bag were placed in bags that Alvarez called for an ambulance, about one minute after first entering Jackson's bedroom.
Asked why he complied with Murray's request to remove the bag and vials of medicine, Alvarez told the court, "I believe that Dr. Murray had the best intentions for Mr. Jackson, so I didn't question his authority at the time. I thought we were packing to get him ready to go to the hospital."
Murray's defense team has argued that Jackson gave himself sedatives and extra propofol when the doctor was out of the room, and that additional dose was what killed him.
Prosecutors say Murray failed to monitor Jackson properly and tried to hide evidence before and after his death as he was in rehearsals for a series of London comeback concerts.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Xavier Briand) ||||| Michael Jackson’s doctor tried to revive him with a substandard version of CPR, performing chest compressions intermittently with one hand while the singer lay on a mattress, a security guard testified Thursday.
Alberto Alvarez, Jackson’s director of logistics, was the first staffer to enter the bedroom where Jackson lay lifeless on June 25, 2009.
He told jurors that Dr. Conrad Murray told him Jackson had “a bad reaction” and needed to get to a hospital, but then stopped CPR and directed him to gather up pill bottles.
Full coverage of Conrad Murray's trial
Alvarez said Murray grabbed a handful of vials and told him, “Here, put these in a bag.”
The doctor also asked him to remove an intravenous drip bag containing “a milky white substance” -- a description consistent with the surgical anesthetic propofol.
Only then did Murray request Alvarez call 911, the guard testified. ||||| | – Today's testimony in the Conrad Murray trial doesn't exactly speak to his skills as a doctor. One of Michael Jackson's security guards said that when he entered the singer's room, he saw Murray performing a shoddy version of CPR—using only one hand, intermittently, reports the Los Angeles Times. Murray told him that Jackson was in bad shape and needed to get to a hospital, even as he temporarily halted CPR, grabbed a "handful" of vials, and said, "Here, put these in a bag.” The guard, Alberto Alvarez, said he was also asked to grab a saline bag containing "a milky white substance." It was only after Alvarez helped put away vials and bags that Murray told him to call 911, notes TMZ. At one point, Jackson children Paris and Prince entered the room and Paris screamed. "Don't let them see their dad that way," Murray told Alvarez, who ushered them from the room. Yesterday, another security guard said he entered the room about the same time, notes Reuters. "Paris was on the ground balled-up crying and Prince, he was just standing there, he had a real shocked—just slowly crying—look on his face," said Faheem Muhammad. He quoted Murray as saying, "Does anybody know CPR?" |
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced new steps to reverse the decline of the Monarch butterfly, including efforts to restore more than 200,000 acres of habitat along the Interstate 35 corridor from Texas to Minnesota. (Reuters)
Threatened animals like elephants, porpoises and lions grab all the headlines, but what’s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summed it up in just one grim statistic on Monday: Since 1990, about 970 million have vanished.
It happened as farmers and homeowners sprayed herbicides on milkweed plants, which serve as the butterflies’ nursery, food source and home. In an attempt to counter two decades of destruction, the Fish and Wildlife Service launched a partnership with two private conservation groups, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, to basically grow milkweed like crazy in the hopes of saving the monarchs.
A monarch caterpillar rests on a leaf at the Northeast Regional Office in Massachusetts. (Maddie List/USFWS)
Monarch butterflies are a keystone species that once fluttered throughout the United States by the billions. They alighted from Mexico to Canada each spring on a trek that required six generations of the insect to complete. Afterward, young monarchs about the quarter of the weight of a dime, that know nothing about the flight pattern through the United States, not to mention Mexico, fly back, resting, birthing and dining on milkweed. Only about 30 million remain.
The extinction of certain butterfly species is not unheard of. The blueberry-colored Xerces blue disappeared from San Francisco years ago, and recently Fish and Wildlife announced that two subspecies — the rockland skipper and Zestos in South Florida — haven’t been seen since 2004 and are probably extinct. On top of that, pesticide use has also caused a collapse of other pollinators — wasps, beetles and especially honeybees.
Fish and Wildlife is reviewing a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity to list monarch butterflies as an endangered species that requires special protection to survive. The agency is studying whether that’s necessary and also trying to do more to help restore the population.
The agency is providing $2 million for on the ground conservation projects. As part of an agreement, the federation will help raise awareness about the need for milkweed, provide seeds to anyone willing to plant it and to plant the seeds in open space — roadsides, parks, forests and patio flower boxes, to name a few places. Another $1.2 million will go to the foundation as seed money to generate a larger fundraising match from private organizations.
Yosemite National Park offers protection to the milkweed plant, which is important to the survival of the "charismatic" monarch butterfly. (National Park Service/Yosemite Conservancy via YouTube)
Fish and Wildlife will chip in to plant milkweed seeds in refuges and other areas it controls to create 200,000 acres of habitat along the Interstate 35 corridor from Texas to Minnesota, where 50 percent of monarchs migrate. Fish and Wildlife will encourage other federal and state agencies to do the same on public lands and is working with the governments of Mexico and Canada to help restore the iconic butterfly.
The monarch butterfly’s round trip to and from Mexico takes it past a killing field of agriculture. But farmers aren’t entirely to blame for the insect’s decline, said Dan Ashe, director of Fish and Wildlife. “We’ve all been responsible. We are the consumers of agricultural products. I eat corn. American farmers are not the enemy. Can they be part of the solution? Yes,” Ashe said.
“It’s not about this wonderful, mystical creature,” Ashe said. “It’s about us.”
A monarch perches on a sunflower in Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. (Tom Koerner/USFWS)
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) underscored that point in her remarks during the announcement of the partnership at the National Press Club in Washington. Her mother, a second-grade teacher, was wild about monarch butterflies, Klobuchar said, so much so that she dressed as one each year to call attention to their return flight home. Her mother carried a sign, Klobuchar said, “Mexico or bust.”
“This is something that means a lot to my family,” the senator said. “My mother would want me to do this.” Klobuchar said her role is to help the foundation bring private partners to the effort and help the Fish and Wildlife Service however she can to persuade public entities to get involved. Minnesota, she said, has a monarch festival each year.
Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, said momentum is building. Charlotte and St. Louis, he said, are two cities that declared themselves as sanctuaries for monarchs.
A monarch drys its wings after hatching from its chrysalis. (Joanna Gilkeson/USFWS)
O’Mara said homeowners can do the same. The federation makes milkweed seeds available to people who want to plant them in gardens. O’Mara said there are milkweed plants at his home, and at his mother’s home, and they often see monarch butterflies climbing on them.
But if the new effort generates widespread interest, the federation might find it hard to keep up with demand. Not enough seeds are available, and not just any seed can survive anywhere. Milkweed seeds grow everywhere in the United States, but they grow better when adapted to local conditions, he said.
“I have a 3-year-old whose eyes pop wide open” when she sees monarchs crawling on leaves in their back yard, O’Mara said. “This is one of those keystone species. These are things that don’t make headlines, but they are indicators that something bigger is happening.”
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They thrived for millions of years. Now, there are only 1,100 ||||| We're Sorry! An error has occurred.
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||||| | – Just two decades ago, there were about a billion monarch butterflies; today, there are only some 30 million of the creatures that Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota calls "the most iconic butterfly in North America." The trouble starts when the butterflies are caterpillars whose only food is milkweed, which has been decimated as people try to wipe out weeds, National Geographic reports. The good news for the creatures is that the US government is on their side: yesterday, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to set aside $3.2 million to save them. Officials will work to bring back milkweed in breeding hotspots like Texas, Oklahoma, and the Midwest, including 200,000 acres stretching from Texas to Minnesota along Interstate 35; half of monarchs migrate through the area during an incredible trip from Mexico to Canada, the Washington Post reports. Another part of the effort requires kids' help: some 750 "schoolyard habitats and pollinator gardens" will be created, a press release reports. Meanwhile, FWS is considering a petition calling for the classification of the butterflies as endangered. "We can save the monarch butterfly in North America, but only if we act quickly and together," says Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe. (Scientists were recently amazed by the creatures' origins.) |
Halliburton in spotlight in gulf spill probe
Investigators look at the company’s role in cementing the deepwater drill hole in the Gulf of Mexico. Transocean and BP also face questioning.
In a statement Friday, Halliburton said: "It is premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues.… The cement slurry design was consistent with that utilized in other similar applications… [and] tests demonstrating the integrity of the production casing string were completed."
Halliburton Chief Executive David Lesar is scheduled to testify before Waxman's energy and commerce committee on May 12, along with top executives Lamar McKay of BP America Inc. and Steve Newman of Transocean Ltd., which leased the drilling rig to BP.
Two members of Congress, Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), called on Halliburton on Friday to provide all documents relating to "the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig and the status, adequacy, quality, monitoring, and inspection of the cementing work" by May 7.
Investigators delving into the causes of the massive gulf oil spill are examining the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company that was responsible for cementing the deepwater drill hole, as well as the possible failure of equipment leased to British Petroleum.
After an exploration well is drilled, cement slurry is pumped through a steel pipe or casing and out through a check valve at the bottom of the casing. It then travels up the outside of the pipe, sheathing the part of the pipe surrounded by the oil and gas zone. When the cement hardens, it is supposed to prevent oil or gas from leaking into adjacent zones along the pipe.
As the cement sets, the check valve at the end of the casing prevents any material from flowing back up the pipe. The zone is thus isolated until the company is ready to start production.
The process is tricky. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most-important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period.
Halliburton has been accused of performing a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.
In its statement, the company said: "Halliburton originated oilfield cementing and leads the world in effective, efficient delivery of zonal isolation and engineering for the life of the well, conducting thousands of successful well-cementing jobs each year."
The company had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the gulf accident, all of whom were rescued by the Coast Guard. It had completed the final cementing of the well and pipe 20 hours before the blowout April 20.
But at the time of the accident, "well operations had not yet reached the point requiring the placement of the final cement plug, which would enable the planned temporary abandonment of the well," the Halliburton statement said.
Experts were cautious about attributing blame, pending what are expected to be lengthy investigations by Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard.
"What we do know is that highly pressurized oil is coming out of the wellhead with no control possible at this time," said Richard Charter, a drilling expert with the Defenders of Wildlife. "For that to happen, at least three redundant fail-safe mechanisms on and below the rig had to either fail to operate or not have been properly installed."
Charter said a piece of equipment known as the blowout preventer is required to shut automatically, according to regulations by the Minerals Management Service. "And it obviously did not," he said. ||||| AP Photo/Ron Edmonds
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill could end up being the worst American man-made environmental catastrophe of this generation. With the oil still spilling and investigations into the causes yet to come, it's too early to neatly assign blame to any one person. But for now, let's hold Dick Cheney personally responsible for the whole thing.
Here's the evidence: The Wall Street Journal reports that the oil well didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch. The reason it didn't have a thing that it seems every single offshore drilling rig should have? According to environmental lawyer Mike Papantonio, it's because Dick Cheney's energy task force decided that the $500,000 switches were too expensive, and they didn't want to make BP buy any.
Is that not enough reason to blame the former Dark Lord of the Naval Observatory? Guess what: Halliburton is involved, too! The Los Angeles Times reports that BP contracted Dick Cheney's old company to cement the deepwater drill hole. Cementing the hole was, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, "the single most-important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period." And Hallburton is already under investigation for faulty cementing in an Australian well last year.
The spill will very likely destroy the fragile economies of at least five states and it could even plunge the nation back into a recession. So thanks, Dick. Nice work. ||||| (See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
Associated Press A worker looks over an oil boom as it collects oil from the leaking Deepwater Horizon pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster has been sending 1,000 barrels of oil a day gushing into the sea.
The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.
The lack of the device, called an acoustic switch, could amplify concerns over the environmental impact of offshore drilling after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last week.
The accident has led to one of the largest ever oil spills in U.S. water and the loss of 11 lives. On Wednesday federal investigators said the disaster is now releasing 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf, up from original estimates of 1,000 barrels a day.
U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated.
The efficacy of the devices is unclear. Major offshore oil-well blowouts are rare, and it remained unclear Wednesday evening whether acoustic switches have ever been put to the test in a real-world accident. When wells do surge out of control, the primary shut-off systems almost always work. Remote control systems such as the acoustic switch, which have been tested in simulations, are intended as a last resort.
Nevertheless, regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, in effect require them. Norway has had acoustic triggers on almost every offshore rig since 1993.
The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.
The U.K., where BP is headquartered, doesn't require the use of acoustic triggers.
On all offshore oil rigs, there is one main switch for cutting off the flow of oil by closing a valve located on the ocean floor. Many rigs also have automatic systems, such as a "dead man" switch as a backup that is supposed to close the valve if it senses a catastrophic failure aboard the rig.
As a third line of defense, some rigs have the acoustic trigger: It's a football-sized remote control that uses sound waves to communicate with the valve on the seabed floor and close it.
An acoustic trigger costs about $500,000, industry officials said. The Deepwater Horizon had a replacement cost of about $560 million, and BP says it is spending $6 million a day to battle the oil spill. On Wednesday, crews set fire to part of the oil spill in an attempt to limit environmental damage.
Some major oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell PLC and France's Total SA, sometimes use the device even where regulators don't call for it.
Transocean Ltd., which owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon and the shut-off valve, declined to comment on why a remote-control device wasn't installed on the rig or to speculate on whether such a device might have stopped the spill. A BP spokesman said the company wouldn't speculate on whether a remote control would have made a difference.
Much still isn't known about what caused the problems in Deepwater Horizon's well, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. It went out of control, sending oil surging through pipes to the surface and causing a fire that ultimately sank the rig.
Unmanned submarines that arrived hours after the explosion have been unable to activate the shut-off valve on the seabed, called a blowout preventer.
Enlarge Image Close Agence France-Presse/Getty Images A welder in Port Fourchon, La., worked Monday on part of a dome that might be used to contain oil spilling from a well in the Gulf.
BP says the Deepwater Horizon did have a "dead man" switch, which should have automatically closed the valve on the seabed in the event of a loss of power or communication from the rig. BP said it can't explain why it didn't shut off the well.
Transocean drillers aboard the rig at the time of the explosion, who should have been in a position to hit the main cutoff switch, are among the dead. It isn't known if they were able to reach the button, which would have been located in the area where the fire is likely to have started. Another possibility is that one of them did push the button, but it didn't work.
Tony Hayward, BP's CEO, said finding out why the blowout preventer didn't shut down the well is the key question in the investigation. "This is the failsafe mechanism that clearly has failed," Mr. Hayward said in an interview.
Lars Herbst, regional director of the Minerals Management Service in the Gulf of Mexico, said investigators are focusing on why the blowout preventer failed.
Crude oil released into the Gulf of Mexico after an oil rig explosion last week is now threatening the Louisiana shore. WSJ reporter Angel Gonzalez takes a look at the damage from the air, where oil sheen seems to extend to the horizon.
Industry consultants and petroleum engineers said that an acoustic remote-control may have been able to stop the well, but too much is still unknown about the accident to say that with certainty.
Rigs in Norway and Brazil are equipped with the remote-control devices, which can trigger the blowout preventers from a lifeboat in the event the electric cables connecting the valves to the drilling rig are damaged.
While U.S. regulators have called the acoustic switches unreliable and prone, in the past, to cause unnecessary shut-downs, Inger Anda, a spokeswoman for Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority, said the switches have a good track record in the North Sea. "It's been seen as the most successful and effective option," she said.
The manufacturers of the equipment, including Kongsberg Maritime AS, Sonardyne Ltd. and Nautronix PLC, say their equipment has improved significantly over the past decade.
The Brazilian government began urging the use of the remote-control equipment in 2007, after an extensive overhaul of its safety rules following a fire aboard an oil platform killed 11 people, said Raphael Moura, head of safety division at Brazil's National Petroleum Agency. "Our concern is both safety and the environment," he said.
Related Article Oil Spill Estimates Raised Fivefold
Industry critics cite the lack of the remote control as a sign U.S. drilling policy has been too lax. "What we see, going back two decades, is an oil industry that has had way too much sway with federal regulations," said Dan McLaughlin, a spokesman for Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson. "We are seeing our worst nightmare coming true."
U.S. regulators have considered mandating the use of remote-control acoustic switches or other back-up equipment at least since 2000. After a drilling ship accidentally released oil, the Minerals Management Service issued a safety notice that said a back-up system is "an essential component of a deepwater drilling system."
The industry argued against the acoustic systems. A 2001 report from the International Association of Drilling Contractors said "significant doubts remain in regard to the ability of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency back-up control system during an actual well flowing incident."
By 2003, U.S. regulators decided remote-controlled safeguards needed more study. A report commissioned by the Minerals Management Service said "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."
A spokesman for the agency, Nicholas Pardi, said the decision not to require the device came, in part, after the agency took a survey that found most rigs already had back-up systems of some kind. Those systems include the unmanned submarines BP has been using to try to close the seabed valve.
—Jeff Fick contributed to this article.
Write to Russell Gold at [email protected], Ben Casselman at [email protected] and Guy Chazan at [email protected]
Corrections & Amplifications:
The oil rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico was owned by Transocean Ltd. and leased by BP PLC. A previous version of this article incorrectly said that BP owned the rig. ||||| | – The scope of the Gulf oil spill is far from clear, but the finger-pointing is already under way, and a lot of fingers ought to be aiming at Dick Cheney, Alex Pareene blogs for Salon. Connecting the dots that begin with a Wall Street Journal exposé, we learn that Cheney's highly classified energy task force was responsible for the fact "that the oil well didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch," Pareene writes, "a thing that it seems every single offshore drilling rig should have." "The former Dark Lord of the Naval Observatory" is no rookie at covering his tracks, but the follow-up argument is a no-brainer: "Halliburton is involved, too! The Los Angeles Times reports that BP contracted Dick Cheney's old company to cement the deepwater drill hole." In short, Pareene writes, "Thanks, Dick. Nice work." |
BEIJING--North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seems to be leaning toward Russia for his first official visit abroad and not China, which would normally be the inaugural stop.
A number of sources familiar with the Russia-North Korea relationship said Moscow had extended an invitation to Kim Jong Un to visit next May, when ceremonies are planned to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
In November, Kim Jong Un dispatched special envoy Choe Ryong Hae to Russia.
Choe is secretary of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea and considered the de facto No. 2 leader in North Korea. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
During those meetings, Choe broached the possibility of a visit to Russia by Kim Jong Un, according to diplomatic sources in Beijing.
After his meeting with Choe on Nov. 20, Lavrov told reporters, "We are prepared for contact between the leaders of the two nations."
Russia will hold its commemorative ceremony on May 9, and is seeking to invite many foreign dignitaries.
If Kim Jong Un decides to make Russia his first foreign destination as North Korean leader, he will likely meet with Putin.
Russia has deepened ties with North Korea in recent months. Pyongyang fully supported Russia in its annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine. Russia also has plans to construct a gas pipeline to expand exports to South Korea. Pyongyang's cooperation would be indispensable for that project as the pipeline would go through North Korea.
Russia agreed this year to forgive about $11 billion (about 1.28 trillion yen) in loans to North Korea. The figure represents 90 percent of Russian loans to North Korea.
In November, Moscow opposed a resolution condemning the North Korean government for human rights abuses adopted at the U.N. General Assembly's Third Committee.
As yet, Kim Jong Un has not made a foreign trip since becoming North Korea's leader in 2011. Aside from its growing distance with China, North Korea remains a pariah in the international community over its missile and nuclear weapons programs, which resulted in an array of economic sanctions.
One obstacle to a visit to Russia in May is Kim Jong Un's apparent preference to undertake the journey when no other foreign leaders are present, sources said.
For Russia's part, having Kim Jong Un visit during a ceremony attended by other foreign dignitaries would allow Moscow to fend off the criticism that would surely arise from those nations which have poor relations with North Korea if it invited the North Korean leader for a separate trip.
(This article was written by Nanae Kurashige in Beijing and Akiyoshi Komaki in Moscow.) ||||| North Korea staged a ceremony on Wednesday to mark the third anniversary of the death of its former leader Kim Jong-Il.
Trains, ships and cars sounded their horns and masses of North Koreans fell silent for three minutes as they bowed toward the mausoleum in Pyongyang where Kim Jong Il and his father, "eternal president" Kim Il Sung, lie in state.
It is a Korean custom to observe three years of mourning after the death of a parent.
With that period now behind him, the younger Kim may be more likely to initiate new policies that underscore his own priorities and goals, though it is believed that major departures from his father's path are unlikely.
Crowds laid flowers below statues and portraits of Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, and his father Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994.
Kim Il Sung is still officially revered as the founder of the nation in North Korea. It is routine for North Koreans to lay flowers and pay their respects in front of images of their former leaders on all major anniversaries and holidays.
(APTN)
Since the death of his father, Kim Jong Un has indicated he wants to build the economy and improve the nation's standard of living, but he has also held firm to the North's longstanding - and extremely costly - focus on strengthening its military and developing its nuclear weapons capabilities.
North Koreans usually refer to Kim Jong Un as "our respected marshal", to Kim Jong Il as "our great general", and to Kim Il Sung as "our great leader". ||||| North Korea on Wednesday marked the third anniversary of the death of former leader Kim Jong Il, ending a traditional period of mourning and setting the stage for his son Kim Jong Un to further entrench himself as the country’s unchallenged leader.
A ceremony was held at Kumusan Palace of the Sun in the capital, Pyongyang, where Kim Jong Il’s body lies in state. Kim Jong Un was seen paying tribute along with his wife, Ri Sol Ju, in a broadcast by Korean Central Television, North Korea’s official TV network.
North Korean state media reported that all North Koreans observed three minutes of silence at noon, and that all car and trucks sounded their horns.
Though the commemorations were relatively low-key, the passing of the third year since Kim Jong Il’s death is significant in that it marked the end of the customary Korean three-year mourning period after the passing of a parent. Since Kim Jong Il's death, North Korea’s one-party system of governance has been kept almost unchanged, and in theory, Kim Jong Un could now seek to institute his own system.
“The end of the three-year mourning period can be used as a chance for Kim Jong Un to change the system and more thoroughly consolidate his power,” said Chang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies.
Kim Jong Un, believed to be in his early 30s, took over leadership of the isolated and impoverished country as a young and untested successor to his father. Early in his rule there were questions about whether he could win the allegiance of the older and more experienced men in the upper echelons of government. He appears to have been able to build a firm grip on power.
In recent days North Korea’s official media have run stories detailing Kim Jong Un’s accomplishments, including among them his purge of his uncle, Jang Song Thaek. Jang was the most prominent of officials from the Kim Jong Il era that Kim Jong Un has purged, in an apparent effort to put more people that are loyal to him in powerful positions.
Jon Chol Jin / Associated Press North Koreans gather Dec. 16 at Mansu Hill, where the statues of the late leaders Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Il tower over them North Koreans gather Dec. 16 at Mansu Hill, where the statues of the late leaders Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Il tower over them (Jon Chol Jin / Associated Press)
Kim Jong Il was well known in the West for his eccentricities, including his bouffant hairstyle, high-heeled shoes and huge film collection. He was generally reclusive and made few public appearances. As leader, Kim Jong Un has adopted a style more similar to that of his grandfather, North Korea founding leader Kim Il Sung, who carried himself in a more public, outgoing manner.
Like his grandfather, Kim Jong Un is often photographed at public events, grinning and hugging people, something his grandfather did often but his father avoided. Also unlike his father, Kim Jong Un regularly appears in public with his wife.
Kim Jong Il rarely traveled abroad, and his son has not ventured out of North Korea since taking over as leader. But on Wednesday, the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, reported that Kim Jong Un has been invited to Russia to attend a ceremony in May marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany.
The newspaper quoted unnamed sources who said that the invitation had been conveyed to Kim through Choe Ryong Hae, a senior North Korean official who last month met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. If Kim does make the trip, it would be his first known trip abroad as North Korean leader.
The South Korean government did not convey an official gesture of condolence for the anniversary of Kim Jong Il's death. On Tuesday, one South Korean politician traveled to the border city of Kaesong in North Korea to present flowers. Opposition lawmaker Park Jie-won made the trip on behalf of Lee Hui-ho, widow of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. Lee, 92, went to North Korea for Kim Jong Il’s funeral in 2011, but was unable to travel this year due to her frail health.
Kim Dae-jung was in office from 1998 to 2003, and was the architect of the “Sunshine Policy,” a strategy that saw South Korea provide the North with unconditional aid in the hope of improved relations and eventual reunification.
Borowiec is a Times special correspondent. ||||| | – It's Korean tradition to mourn a parent's death for three years, and today North Korea reached a similar milestone marking the passing of Kim Jong Il in 2011, the Los Angeles Times reports. The country completed its mourning period with three minutes of silence—though it was also noted with the honking of car, ship, and train horns, the Telegraph reports. Meanwhile, residents placed flowers under statues of the former leader and his father, Kim Il Sung. "The end of the three-year mourning period can be used as a chance for Kim Jong Un to change the (governing) system and more thoroughly consolidate his power," says an expert in South Korea. Recent days have seen stories in state media celebrating the younger Kim's achievements thus far. As a leader, he has behaved more like his grandfather than his father, the Times notes: He's often seen in public with his wife, marking a contrast to his father's reclusive nature. It's even possible that he could travel abroad for the first time since becoming leader. He was recently invited to Russia for a celebration of the defeat of the Nazis next year, insiders tell Japan's Asahi Shimbun. Kim, however, would seemingly rather visit at a time when no other foreign leaders were in Moscow, the paper notes. |
Officials investigating death at Naperville's Ribfest
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Naperville Police are investigating an apparent suicide that happened at Naperville's Ribfest celebration Thursday afternoon.
Ride operators and witnesses, including Paige Shipley of Naperville, said they saw someone dive under the moving Pharaoh's Fury, a boat-shaped ride.
Shipley said the man was struck three times as the ride swung back and forth before the operator was able to stop it. People on the ride said they heard a thumping sound.
The DuPage County coroner's office was called to the scene in Knoch Park near downtown, where the man was found about 3 p.m. unresponsive and not breathing, Naperville police Sgt. Bill Davis said.
Naperville Deputy Chief Brian Cunningham said the ride was functioning properly at the time.
"It was not a ride malfunction and it doesn't look like it was accidental," Cunningham said. "It's a sad situation."
Part of the carnival, located at the south end of the festival grounds south of Martin Avenue, was closed. But Don Emery, Ribfest marketing chairman, said nearly all of the carnival rides continued to operate and the area was "essentially open."
Cunningham said police are continuing to investigate.
Doug T. Graham contributed to this report ||||| A man was killed by a carnival ride at Naperville’s annual Ribfest in Knoch Park Thursday. NBC Chicago's Lauren Jiggetts reports. (Published Thursday, July 2, 2015)
A man died Thursday at Naperville’s annual Ribfest after deliberately diving under a moving carnival ride, authorities say.
Two festival-goers told NBC Chicago they saw the man throw himself under Pharaoh’s Fury, a large popular boat-shaped ride that was swings back and forth.
Naperville Police say the man was in his early 20s and had attended the festival by himself.
The ride was moving with approximately 25 people on board at the time. Witnesses said it looked as if he did it on purpose. The man was said to be struck while the boat swung back and forth multiple times before the operator could halt it.
Both witnesses said those in the area could see the man's body lying facedown after he was killed and the ride stopped, calling the scene "gruesome."
The incident happened less than three hours after the gates in Knoch Park opened at noon. Emergency crews and the DuPage County coroner's office were immediately called to the scene.
“I just saw everybody running over to the ride,” recalled festival attendee Rhonda Sandifer.
As of 6 p.m. a few rides were still closed, but the family event remained open.
His death was an intentional act, according to police, and there was no foul play or ride malfunction reported. ||||| | – Horror at Ribfest: A man was killed by a carnival ride at the Naperville, Ill., festival yesterday and police say it looks like suicide, the Daily Herald reports. Witnesses tell NBC they saw the man in his 20s jump in front of the Pharaoh's Fury—a boat-shaped ride that had around 25 people on board—and he was hit several times as it swung back and forth, leaving a "gruesome" scene. "It was not a ride malfunction and it doesn't look like it was accidental," a police spokesman tells the Herald. "It's a sad situation." Officials say most of the carnival, and the rest of Ribfest, remained open as normal. (A bullet train passenger in Japan picked a horrific suicide method earlier this week.) |
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| JUNEAU, Alaska A man with a soft white beard who prides himself on being an advocate for young children has been elected as a city councilman in North Pole, Alaska.
The rosy-cheeked 68-year-old candidate, who happens to be named Santa Claus, won a three-year term in the community of about 2,200 residents southeast of Fairbanks, according to election results released on Tuesday.
"My thanks to everyone who voted for me ... and all who supported my campaign," Claus wrote on Facebook. "I'll do my best for all!"
Claus, who legally changed his name from Thomas Patrick O'Connor about a decade ago while living in Nevada, said he has been an advocate for legislation and services that benefit at-risk children.
He could be seen in recent days wearing his trademark red velvet outfit and holding a campaign sign in North Pole, the namesake of the home of the legendary Christmas gift-giver.
Claus was one of two write-in candidates for two vacant seats in the Oct. 6 election. He will take office on Oct. 26, North Pole City Clerk Kathy Weber said.
In an interview with Reuters, Claus said that calling state lawmakers and saying: "This is Santa Claus from North Pole," either got their attention or a quick, though temporary, rejection. "It's been a valuable tool for developing legislation to protect children."
(Reporting by Steve Quinn in Juneau; Editing by Eric M. Johnson and Peter Cooney) ||||| | – Santa Claus has been chosen to represent the people of North Pole. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports that a man whose legal name is Santa Claus won a write-in campaign for an open City Council seat in the 2,200-person Alaska town. He began campaigning in his red velvet suit just two weeks before the election, in which he received 58 votes and a seat on the six-person council. No official candidates had filed for the two open council positions. Claus—who was living in Nevada when he changed his name from Thomas O'Connor a decade ago—tells Reuters that he's an advocate for programs that help at-risk children and that state lawmakers tend to pay attention when they get a call from "Santa Claus from North Pole." |
Despite an ever-expanding number of ways to put out news and information, a new report says the crackdown on media freedoms around the world has been unrelenting. 'Freedom of the Press 2014' says global press freedom has “fallen to its lowest level in over a decade,” with major setbacks in places that had been making progress only a few years ago. VOA’s Jeff Seldin has more on where the fight for a free media has fallen on hard times and on what it means for an information-hungry public.
Video Report: Media Freedoms Worldwide at a 10-Year Low Despite an ever-expanding number of ways to put out news and information, a new report says the crackdown on media freedoms around the world has been unrelenting. 'Freedom of the Press 2014' says global press freedom has “fallen to its lowest level in over a decade,” with major setbacks in places that had been making progress only a few years ago. VOA’s Jeff Seldin has more on where the fight for a free media has fallen on hard times and on what it means for an information-hungry public.
Video Fears Russia-NATO Tensions Could Disrupt Afghan Withdrawal International forces in Afghanistan are working through the mammoth task of shipping most of their vehicles and equipment out of the country, as the December 2014 withdrawal deadline approaches. One of the routes being used transits Russia, and there are fears that the growing confrontation between the West and Moscow over Ukraine could severely disrupt NATO's withdrawal plans. VOA's Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
Video Report: Drug-Resistant Bacteria Pose Major Threat to Global Public Health Doctors have long warned against prolonged use of antibiotics, saying that bacteria can build resistance to drugs, eventually rendering them ineffective. The World Health Organization reported Wednesday that antibiotic-resistant bacteria now exist in many parts of the world. Zlatica Hoke reports that some diseases that once could easily be cured by antibiotics have now become deadly.
Video Hillary Clinton Dominates 2016 Election Discussion The next U.S. presidential election is more than two years away, but any discussion of possible contenders among Democrats begins with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton has a huge lead in public opinion polls and is expected to decide on a White House run by the end of this year. Just the possibility of her candidacy is having an immense impact on the 2016 race. VOA national correspondent Jim Malone has more on what has come to be known as the "Clinton mystique."
Video 'Return to Homs' Puts Human Face on Syria Conflict As the Syrian civil war enters its fourth year, a new film focuses on one of the opposition fighters who leads a group of rebels against his government. The documentary, part of this year's Washington, DC International Film Festival, puts a human face on the ongoing violence in Syria. VOA’s Julie Taboh reports.
Video Iraq's Vote in First Poll Since US Withdrawal Violence marred election day in Iraq Wednesday, with at least two people killed as voters took part in parliamentary elections. VOA's Elizabeth Arrott has more from our Middle East Bureau in Cairo.
Video New Device May Help Remove Blood Clots from Brain U.S. researchers are developing a new type of robotic needle designed to remove blood clots in the brain. It hasn't yet been used in the operating room, but in simulated surgery, it's been able to remove 90 percent of the blood clots. As VOA's Carol Pearson reports, the device could potentially save many lives. ||||| A problem with the International Space Station's cooling system will require a series of spacewalks to fix, pushing the planned Thursday (Dec. 19) launch of a private cargo spacecraft into next month.
NASA has decided that three spacewalks — one each on Dec. 21, Dec. 23 and Dec. 25 — will be necessary to replace a faulty pump module on the orbiting lab. The holiday spacewalks will postpone the first contracted cargo mission of aerospace firm Orbital Sciences' unmanned Cygnus spacecraft until mid-January at the earliest, NASA officials announced today (Dec. 17).
Each of the three spacewalks is scheduled to begin at 7:10 a.m. EST (1210 GMT) and last 6 1/2 hours. You can watch coverage of the extravehicular activities here on SPACE.com beginning each day at 6:15 a.m. EST, courtesy of NASA TV. [How the Space Station's Cooling System Works (Infographic)]
"NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins will remove a pump module that has a failed valve. They will replace it with an existing spare that is stored on an external stowage platform," NASA officials wrote in a press release today. "The pump is associated with one of the station's two external cooling loops, which circulate ammonia outside the station to keep both internal and external equipment cool."
The valve malfunctioned on Dec. 11, requiring the shutdown of some of the space station's support systems. The issue — which NASA officials say does not endanger the lives of the six astronauts aboard the orbiting lab — initially pushed back the planned Cygnus launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia by 24 hours, to Thursday evening.
Orbital Sciences' Cygnus spacecraft is attached to its Antares rocket on Dec. 10, 2013 for a planned Dec. 19 launch to deliver cargo for the International Space Station. Credit: Orbital Sciences
But that delay now may be a month or more.
"The Antares rocket that is currently on the launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, will be returned to a horizontal position and transported back to the Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF)," Orbital Sciences officials wrote in a press release today.
"At the HIF, the Antares payload fairing will be removed to allow the Cygnus team to open the payload module hatch and remove time-critical payloads for safekeeping until the next launch attempt, which will occur no earlier than January 13, 2014," they added.
Virginia-based Orbital Sciences holds a $1.9 billion NASA contract to make eight supply runs to the space station using Cygnus and Antares. Cygnus has visited the orbiting lab once, on a successful demonstration mission that blasted off in September.
Another company, California-based SpaceX, signed a $1.6 billion deal with NASA to make 12 cargo flights to the station using its robotic Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX has completed two of these contracted supply runs already, and the third one is slated to lift off early next year.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com. ||||| | – Before they can tuck into their freeze-dried turkey dinners, two American astronauts are going to have to venture out on a spacewalk to fix a faulty pump that has shut down part of the International Space Station's cooling system. The Christmas Day spacewalk is one of three that NASA has scheduled over the next week to carry out the repairs, which have delayed the launch of a private cargo spacecraft, Space.com reports. The problem started last week, when the fault forced the station to close down one of its two ammonia cooling systems, reports Voice of America. The six-member station crew—the two Americans plus three Russians and a Japanese astronaut—is not in any danger; the shutdown has halted a lot of research and if a problem arises with the second cooling system before the first one is fixed, the crew could be forced to return to Earth early. |
BERLIN — A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI , as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.
The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he had no comment beyond the statement by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which he said showed the “nonresponsibility” of the pope in the matter.
The expanding abuse inquiry had come ever closer to Benedict as new accusations in Germany surfaced almost daily since the first reports in January. On Friday the pope met with the chief bishop of Germany, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the head of the German Bishops Conference, to discuss the church investigations and media reports.
Problems in the German church have already come close to the pope, whose brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, 86, directed a choir connected to a boarding school where two former students have come forward with abuse claims. In an interview this week, Monsignor Ratzinger, who directed the choir from 1964 to 1994, said the accusations dated from before his tenure. He also apologized for slapping students.
At a news conference following a one-on-one meeting with Benedict on Friday, Archbishop Zollitsch said the pope was “greatly upset” and “deeply moved” by the abuse allegations, and had urged the German church to seek the truth and help the victims.
The meeting and news conference occurred before the statement from the Munich archdiocese.
Archbishop Zollitsch said the German church had vowed to investigate all allegations of abuse, encouraging victims to identify themselves even if the abuse happened decades ago. In recent weeks, hundreds of people who say they were abuse victims have come forward.
“The cases are growing every day,” said Thomas Pfister, a lawyer appointed by the German church to investigate abuse cases in the Ettal monastery boarding school in Bavaria. He said more than 100 people had contacted him so far.
“Every day I receive e-mails from around the world from people who have been abused,” Mr. Pfister said, adding that the school had posted his e-mail address on its Web site to encourage this. “There has been a very big silence. Now they want to have a voice.”
Experts said the scandals could undermine Benedict’s moral authority, especially because they cut particularly close to the pope himself. As head of the Vatican’s main doctrinal arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he led Vatican investigations into abuse for four years before assuming the papacy in 2005.
“What is at stake, and at great risk, is Benedict’s central project for the ‘re-Christianization’ of Christendom, his desire to have Europe return to its Christian roots,” said David Gibson, the author of a biography of Benedict and a religion commentator for Politicsdaily.com. “But if the root itself is seen as rotten, then his influence will be badly compromised.”
When a sex abuse scandal broke in Boston church in 2002, Pope Benedict — then Cardinal Ratzinger — was among the Vatican officials who made statements that minimized the problem and accused the news media of blowing it out of proportion.
But as the abuse case files landed on his desk at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his colleagues said he was deeply disturbed by what he learned. On his first visit to the United States as pope, Benedict met with abuse victims from Boston and said he was “deeply ashamed” by priests who had harmed children.
But victims’ advocates accuse the pope of doing little to discipline the bishops who permitted abusers to continue serving in ministry. The case in Munich, which was brought to the attention of the diocese by the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, was a result of “serious mistakes,” the archdiocese said in its statement. ||||| The Vatican on Saturday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the spreading scandals of pedophile priests in his German homeland, and contended he has long confronted abuse cases with courage.
In separate interviews, both the Holy See's spokesman and its prosecutor for sex abuse of minors by clergy sought to defend the pope.
After decades of similar scandals in the United States, Ireland and elsewhere, the sex abuse scandal moved closer to Benedict in recent days.
After accusations of abuse connected to the Regensburg boys choir directed by the pope's elder brother for some 30 years, the Munich archdiocese acknowledged Friday that it had transferred a suspected pedophile priest to community work while Benedict was archbishop there.
Criticism has also mounted over a 2001 church directive Benedict wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.
"It's rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.
"For any objective observer, it's clear that these efforts have failed," Lombardi said, reiterating his statement a day earlier noting the Munich diocese has insisted that Benedict wasn't involved in the decision, while archbishop there, to transfer the suspected child abuser.
Lombardi cited an interview with the Italian bishops conference daily Avvenire Saturday, in which the Vatican's prosecutor for sex abuse cases, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, contended that the future pope dealt firmly with the abuse.
"To accuse the current pope of hiding (cases) is false and defamatory," Scicluna said.
As Vatican cardinal in charge of the policy on sex abuse, the future pope, "showed wisdom and firmness in handling these cases," said Scicluna, a Maltese prelate in an interview entitled "The Church is tough on pedophilia."
The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising announced late Friday it was setting up a new task force to focus on raising awareness about an preventing sexual abuse within the church and its institutions.
"There is no 100 percent protection against sexual abuse, because we can never rule out the failure or misdoing of individuals, but we want to apply ourselves 100 percent to prevent it from happening again," said the General Vicar of the archdiocese, Prelate Peter Beer.
The new task force will also collaborate with the workgroup tasked with working through allegations of past abuse. Beer said that group would be expanded to include an external, independent legal office. The archdiocese, where Pope Benedict XVI served as Archbishop from 1977 to 1982, set up the workgroup last month after allegations of abuse in a church-run school surfaced.
Thomas Mayer told Germany's Der Spiegel weekly that he had been sexually and physically abused while singing in the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir through 1992.
Mayer's abuse allegations, published Saturday, are the first that overlap with the tenure of the pontiff's brother Georg Ratzinger, who led group from 1964 to 1994. Previously reported cases of sexual abuse dates back to the late 1950s.
Mayer charged in Spiegel that he had been raped by older pupils. Spiegel quoted him as saying that pupils were forced to have anal sex with one another in the apartment of a prefect at the church-run boarding school attached to the choir. The Regensburg diocese has refused to comment on the report. ||||| | – A day after high-level Catholic officials admitted that "serious mistakes" were made in handling a sex abuse case in the German diocese where Pope Benedict XVI was then archbishop, the Vatican came out swinging in defense of the embattled pontiff. Benedict, as the Vatican's cardinal in charge of sex-abuse policy, "showed wisdom and firmness in handling these cases," a spokesman tells the AP. Some "have tried to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," said a Vatican spokesman. "For any objective observer, it's clear that these efforts have failed." But the New York Times notes that a storm is swirling: “The cases are growing every day,” says one German lawyer. And the outcome jeopardizes “Benedict’s central project for the ‘re-Christianization’ of Christendom,” says one biographer. “But if the root itself is seen as rotten, then his influence will be badly compromised.” |
UPDATE: Wahlberg has apologized for his 9/11 comment, releasing a statement that says: "To speculate about such a situation is ridiculous to begin with, and to suggest I would have done anything differently than the passengers on that plane was irresponsible. I deeply apologize to the families of the victims that my answer came off as insensitive, it was certainly not my intention."
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PREVIOUSLY: Mark Wahlberg is one of today's biggest action movie stars, but as he sees it, his heroism doesn't end at a film's credits. Instead, he fancies himself a real badass off screen, too.
In a new interview with Men's Journal, Wahlberg says that world history would have been different had he not made a fortuitous decision to fly to Toronto a week early and thus avoid boarding one of the planes out of Boston that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th.
"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did," he tells the magazine. "There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'"
Wahlberg has spoken before of the near-miss, and the action he would have taken had he been on the flight.
"We certainly would have tried to do something to fight," he said in 2006. "I've had probably over 50 dreams about it."
To his credit, Wahlberg is in impeccable shape. Part of what makes him stand out as an action star is his willingness to put himself on the line for a scene.
"[In 'Contraband'] I did all the stunts and then in 'The Fighter' obviously we did all the fighting and we fought and we made it real," he recently told GQ. "If it's necessary then we'll do it."
It worked out; "Contraband" won the box office with a $28.5 million take this past weekend.
Still, Wahlberg has a soft side. He recalls that he cried "about six or seven times" during "The Help," and, walked out of "Straw Dogs" because he did not like the rape scene.
Now a religious man, has markedly changed his sex life -- at least when it comes to his own personal intimacy.
"I don't get down with jerking off, dude. Look. I don't believe in everything that the church says. I try to do the right thing. I lead a clean and pure life. I'm a married guy. I have a beautiful wife. Sex is not the most important thing to me, being horny all the time, spanking the -- I mean, it's not against the law. You can do whatever you want. And it's not like, 'I shouldn't do it because of my faith. I'm just not really that into it that much anyway."
For more from Wahlberg, click over to Men's Journal. ||||| In our February issue, on sale now: Erik Hedegaard profiles two-time Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg, Paul Solotaroff revisits the golden era of Gold’s Gym, and Kevin Gray celebrates the fast life and fiery death of Dan Wheldon, racing’s brightest star.
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From Erik Hedegaard’s Mark Wahlberg Handles His Business:
On settling down
“Yeah, a lot of people I thought were my friends were disappointed that I decided to settle down and don’t take them on whirlwind tours of craziness anymore. When I was the life of the party, I definitely wanted to bring as many people along for the ride as possible. But sooner or later, you find out who your friends are. If they were my friends, they would have been happy for me changing my life and growing up. I mean, because of Entourage, people think that my life is just a big, wild party. And it is. But these days it’s a big, wild Halloween party or Easter egg party. I don’t go out at night anymore. I don’t hang around with the guys. I don’t really play golf. I stopped smoking cigarettes. I stopped smoking pot a lot of years ago, too. I’m focused on my family, my faith, and my work.”
On being ok with movies his wife chooses for date night
“As long as it isn’t a Sarah Jessica Parker movie.”
On crying during movies
“The last time I really cried a lot? During The Help. I cried about six or seven times. It was the wife’s choice, but it was a great movie.”
On being scheduled to be on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center
“If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’”
On how he feels about his older daughter going on her first date
“I’m not going to think about that right now. When the time comes, I will, but it’s not a good thought for me to have. Thinking about it really stresses me out, so don’t stress me out right now, because that’s a stressful thought, OK?”
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Plus:
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Follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter: @MensJournal and @MJGearGuy ||||| Widow of Flight 93 Hero: Wahlberg's 9/11 Comments Were VERY Disrespectful
Widow of Flight 93 Hero -- Wahlberg's 9/11 Comments Were ABSOLUTELY Disrespectful
's claim that he would've been able to single-handedly over-power theterrorists and prevent a plane from crashing is completely "disrespectful" ... so says the widow of one of the REAL heroic victims who RUSHED THE COCKPIT on that fateful day.TMZ spoke with-- whose husbandphoned her from that fateful flight saying, "I know we're going to die. There's three of us who are going to do something about it."Burnett-Bailey tells us, "Does Mark Wahlberg have a pilot's license? Then I think hindsight is 20/20 and it's insignificant to say what you would have done if you weren't there. "She adds, "The plan for Flight 93 was foiled by heroes. For him to speculate that his presence on board could have stopped everything is silly and disrespectful. Sounds like someone is grandstanding."We called Wahlberg for comment -- so far, no word back. ||||| | – Men's Journal has a profile of Mark Wahlberg in its February issue, and one quote in particular is generating some buzz: He says that if he were on one of the 9/11 planes that hit the World Trade Center, things would have been different: "If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'" TMZ ran the quote by the widow of Flight 93 victim Thomas Burnett, who isn't happy about what she sees as "grandstanding": "I think hindsight is 20/20 and it's insignificant to say what you would have done if you weren't there," says Deena Burnett-Bailey. (For the record, Wahlberg apparently wasn't talking about the Pennsylvania flight, but one of the two out of Boston that hit the WTC. He's given the matter a lot of thought because he had been scheduled to fly from Boston to LA that week but changed his plans late, notes the Huffington Post.) Update: Wahlberg offered a mea culpa via TMZ for his "irresponsible" comments: "I deeply apologize to the families of the victims that my answer came off as insensitive," he said. "It was certainly not my intention." |
Mel Gibson's Hot New 'Friend' Has 'F' Me Written All Over
EXCLUSIVE
has a brand new female companion -- she's hot ... she's foreign ... and she came thiiis close to showing her vagina in a modeling campaign for a company called "F Me" jeans.The pretty lady -- who accompanied Mel to The Grove in L.A. this past weekend -- is... an aspiring musician who moved to the U.S. from Italy back in 2007.Mel and Nadia have been spending a lot of time together recently ... they even went to a sushi dinner earlier this month.Of course, we all know Mel loves aspiring foreign musicians ... but we're told Mel and Nadia are NOT in a serious dating relationship.Too bad ... 'cause Nadia showed off the goods during a campaign for "F Me" jeans last year ... a company that makes clothing featuring a waistline that plunges dangerously close to the female reproductive organs. ||||| Mel Gibson has a new musical girlfriend.
Fairly fresh off of perhaps one of the most disturbing break-ups in celebrity history with the mther of his youngest daughter, Russian pianist Okasana Grigorieva, Gibson has been spotted squiring aspiring Italian singer-songwriter Nadia Lanfranconi about town.
Gibson, 56, has denied to the two are an item, but The Post reports the "Mad Max" star was spotted over the weekend seriously massaging her shoulders at a West Hollywood restaurant.
In addition to her musical pursuits, the attractive Lafranconi also models for magazines and the denim brand "F Me."
She also appeared on a 2008 cover of the magazine D.A.M. (we never heard of it either), and according to her MySpace page, plays regular gigs at various smaller venues.
Maybe Mel met he while sipping a decaf latte at his local Bohemian coffee house? (Advice to Lafranconi: keep Mel on the decaf.)
One other tidbit: Lanfranconi's website says she has an album coming out soon called "Bad Story."
Let's hope her new life does not imitate her art. ||||| | – Mel Gibson has been spotted around Hollywood with a young, attractive aspiring musician who's not from around here—no, not Oksana Grigorieva. New galpal Nadia Lanfranconi does resemble Oksana, though, the New York Post notes, but she's from Italy, not Russia. Gibson denies the two are romantically involved, but he was seen giving her a shoulder massage at a restaurant over the weekend. TMZ notes that Lanfranconi, who moved to the US in 2007, did a modeling campaign for "F Me" jeans last year. (The classily-named pants feature an extremely low waistline.) Fox News adds that Lanfranconi also models in magazines, plays small musical gigs, and is releasing an album. |
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News Corp. is contemplating the launch of a national cable sports network in the U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter, putting it head to head with Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.
The media company has been discussing the idea on and off for several months, though it hasn't made a decision. If it does go ahead, such a venture would not launch any time this year, the person said.
News Corp's Fox Sports unit is already a major player in television sports. Its 20 regional sports networks reach about 75% of homes in the U.S., while Fox also ... |||||
News Corp.'s Fox is again weighing starting a national cable sports channel to rival Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN juggernaut but there is no guarantee that such an effort will get off the ground.
Fox has toyed with the idea of creating a national sports network for more than a decade. It already owns 20 regional sports networks, including Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket in Los Angeles. Its Fox Broadcasting Company has long-term deals for professional and college football as well as baseball and NASCAR.
A Fox Sports spokesman declined to comment on the renewed speculation about a national sports channel, but people familiar with the matter said there are no immediate plans and dismissed a report in Bloomberg that said the new channel could be launched as soon as late 2012. Given how lucrative its regional channels are, Fox and News Corp. executives have for the most part viewed a national network as a luxury item, not a necessity.
Though Fox Sports is an established brand, going after ESPN would not be cheap. ESPN and its various spinoff channels have dominated the cable sports space and spend heavily to lock up rights. For example, ESPN is paying an average of almost $2 billion a season for "Monday Night Football."
NBC's new parent company Comcast Corp. is also looking to compete more aggressively against ESPN with its NBC Sports Network. NBC has the rights to the Summer Olympics in London and will use the games to boost awareness for its channel.
Sports teams and leagues would no doubt welcome another competitor to ESPN because it would mean one more bidder for rights, which could lead to even higher prices.
Consumers, however, may not have the same reaction. Cable sports channels are already among the most expensive sources of programming. ESPN, for example, costs cable and satellite operators more than $5 a month per subscriber, according to industry consulting firm SNL Kagan. (USA Network, for comparison, costs just over 60 cents per month per subscriber.) Much of that cost is passed on to the consumer. If another channel emerges and drives bills even higher, there could be renewed calls that high-priced sports channels should be sold as separate packages instead of being bundled into basic cable service.
"At some point there may be a real move for a la carte programming," warned David Carter, executive director of USC's Sports Business Institute.
-- Joe Flint
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Photo: The Bengals battle the Texans. NFL football is among the sports that Fox broadcasts nationally. Credit: Al Behrman/Associated Press ||||| Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWSA) is taking steps to start a national U.S. sports network on cable television aimed at challenging Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s ESPN, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
News Corp. is assembling the required rights from pay-TV carriers and sports organizations, said the people, who requested anonymity because talks are private. While a final decision to move forward hasn’t been made, the company is considering converting its Fuel action-sports network to the new channel, two of the people said.
With a national network, Fox would join Comcast Corp. (CMCSA)’s NBC Sports Network and CBS Corp. (CBS)’s CBS Sports Network in taking on the dominant ESPN. News Corp. last year secured rights to the Pac-12 Conference and Big-12 Conference games and owns 20 regional sports networks. The company in October won TV rights to soccer’s World Cup in 2018 and 2022.
“The success of all these networks will depend on the quality of their sports rights,” David Joyce, an analyst at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York, said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of competition for those rights and that’s driven up costs.”
ESPN is well-positioned to withstand competition because of its rights for Monday Night Football and national baseball and basketball games, Joyce said.
A national sports channel can capture higher affiliate fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV, according to research firm SNL Kagan. ESPN will command $5.06 per subscriber per month this year, the most of any cable channel, SNL Kagan estimates.
Dodgers Sale
That would help pay for sports rights that are growing ever more expensive. Fox, for example, holds rights to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games through next year, and exclusive negotiating rights to renew through late this year. The price is likely to go up with the team’s planned sale, for a record $2 billion, to a group led by basketball hall of fame player Magic Johnson and Guggenheim Partners Chief Executive Officer Mark Walter.
Fuel, a 24-hour action-sports network that carries mixed- martial arts fights, is available in 36 million U.S. homes, according to Fox.
In addition to Fox Sports Net regional channels and Fuel, News Corp. owns motor-sport network Speed, available in 78 million homes, the Fox Soccer Channel, the Big Ten Network, a partnership with the college sports conference, and Fox College Sports, consisting of Pacific, Central and Atlantic regional networks. News Corp. also shows games on broadcast television through Fox Sports.
Leverage the Channel
To compete with ESPN and NBC Sports, Fox will need to make an attractive offer to sports organizations and teams, said Neal Pilson, president of Pilson Communications and former head of CBS Sports.
“The way you do that is you give a new sports property exposure on the Fox broadcast network and then you put other games on the new channel,” Pilson said. “You leverage the broadcast channel to get product on the cable channel.”
The new channel could begin service by the end of this year, one person said. The effort is being led by David Hill, the chairman of Fox Sports, one person said.
News Corp., based in New York, has clearance from some carriers, including DirecTV, the biggest U.S. satellite television provider, two people said.
Lou D’Ermilio, a spokesman for Fox Sports, declined to comment, as did Darris Gringeri, a spokesman for El Segundo, California-based DirecTV. (DTV)
News Corp. fell 2.5 percent to $19.74 and Disney dropped 1.5 percent to $43.51 at the close in New York. DirecTV added 1.3 percent to $48.83.
To contact the reporters on this story: Andy Fixmer in Los Angeles at [email protected]; Alex Sherman in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at [email protected] ||||| | – Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is looking at launching a national sports channel to rival ESPN, reports Bloomberg. It quotes one insider as saying the owner of Fox News could pull the trigger late this year. The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Murdoch, quotes an anonymous source (maybe one with an Australian accent?) as saying the company has been seriously kicking around the idea for several months. One difference with the Bloomberg report: The Journal says it would not launch this year. Both reports say News Corp would probably take an existing channel, such as the action-sports network Fuel TV, and convert it into the national channel. The company already has a major player in the field in Fox Sports, but the new channel would be considerably bigger in scope. At the Los Angeles Times, a skeptical Joe Flint says News Corp has been making noises about such a channel for more than a decade, and "there is no guarantee that such an effort will get off the ground." |
A 28-year-old woman rescued from a chimney at a Thousand Oaks home was allegedly trying to break into the home of a man she had met online.Residents in the 1900 block of Woodside Drive reported hearing the sound of a woman crying in the area at about 5:45 a.m. Deputies found Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa trapped inside the chimney.Ventura County Fire Department and Urban Search and Rescue members had to dismantle the chimney in order to get Nunez-Figueroa out. She was lubricated with dish soap prior to being hoisted out, Ventura County Fire Capt. Mike Lindbery said via Twitter Nunez-Figueroa was conscious upon being extricated and was transported to a hospital for an evaluation, Lindbery said.The male resident of the home was not home during the incident. He said he had met Nunez-Figueroa online and went on a few dates with her, but had recently ended the relationship.This is the second time Nunez-Figueroa was found on his roof. Two weeks ago, he spotted her and called police, but she disappeared."I'm going to be a little more cautious of who I invite into my house now," said Lawrence, who did not want to reveal his last name.Nunez-Figueroa was later arrested for illegal entry and providing false information to a peace officer. ||||| THOUSAND OAKS (CBSLA.com) — Crews rescued a woman Sunday who was trapped in a chimney for several hours overnight.
According to the Ventury County Fire Department, firefighters had to slowly chip away at the bricks in order to remove the woman from a chimney located in the 1900 block of Woodside Drive.
Neighbors heard the woman screaming and called officials around 6:00 a.m.
She had reportedly been trapped since 3:00 a.m.
Firefighters told CBS2’s Laurie Perez they also used liquid dish soap to make it easier to remove the woman.
Family members of the trapped woman reported that she had dated the a man who owned the residence.
Crews pulled the woman out of the chimney around 8:13 a.m.
Perez reported that the woman has been arrested.
Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa, 30, has been identified as the woman.
The homeowner’s chimney is now gone. The homeowner’s name is Lawrence and didn’t want his last name used.
Robert Fisher, a neighbor, took still photos of the woman as she was being rescued. He was one of the residents who called 911 after hearing the early-morning screams.
“We couldn’t believe it,” Fisher said.
“This woman was definitely in distress,” Fisher added. “But no one knew where the voice was coming from.”
Lawrence wasn’t home last night and confirmed to Perez that he knew the woman.
“It wasn’t Santa Claus, for sure,” Lawrence said.
“Having someone in your chimney is like kind of a weird thing you wouldn’t expect to come home to,” Lawrence said.
The stuck woman’s family says she is a good woman and have offered to pay for Lawrence’s chimney repair.
Perez asked Lawrence how he was feeling now that the ordeal seemed to be over.
“‘I’m feeling better, not so weirded out anymore that that person isn’t in my chimney anymore,” he said. “Trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my chimney since it’s in pieces but better my chimney than probably me.”
Lawrence also told Perez it wasn’t the woman’s first attempt to break into his home.
“It’s actually the second attempt for her trying to access the inside of my house,” Lawrence said, “from the roof.”
He also confirmed to Perez they met online.
“Which just goes to show you,” he said, “You have to be careful who you meet online.”
Nunez-Figueroa faces charges of illegal entry into a residence. ||||| Please enable Javascript to watch this video
A woman accused of illegally entering the Thousand Oaks home of a man she went on multiple dates with was arrested Sunday after firefighters used jackhammers to partially dismantle a brick chimney she had become trapped inside.
Deputies responded to a home in the 1900 block of Woodside Drive (map) at 5:45 a.m. after a caller reported that the woman had been stuck in the chimney, about 8 feet from the top, for two hours, said Capt. Renee Ferguson of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department.
The county Fire Department's urban search and rescue team was called to the scene. Photos posted on Twitter by the department showed firefighters on the roof of the house as they worked to reach the woman, who was conscious during the rescue.
The flue was lubricated with dish soap before she was lifted out of the chimney, placed in a Stokes basket and hoisted from the roof by a ladder truck, according to VCFD Capt. Mike Lindbery.
The woman, whose "intent was unclear," was known by the homeowner, the Sheriff's Department said.
She was extricated by 8:22 a.m. and transported to Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center for evaluation, according to the Fire Department. Her condition was not immediately known.
She was later identified as Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa, a 30-year-old Thousand Oaks resident, and arrested for allegedly illegally entering a residence and providing false information to a peace officer, the VCSD stated in a news release.
The home's resident, who did not wish to be identified, said he had met Nunez-Figueroa online and they had gone on about six dates.
He cautioned other people about allowing acquaintances into their homes.
“Before you have somebody come in your house really check them out … really give it some time before you let somebody in, because they might want to stay,” he told KTLA.
More Video:
Please enable Javascript to watch this video ||||| | – Here's a tip for would-be home invaders: You might want to consider attempting to break in via a window or a door ... instead of, say, the chimney. Authorities say that's the route Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa decided to take early yesterday in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and things went very wrong, KTLA reports. Deputies responded to a 5:45am call reporting that the woman, variously reported as 28 or 30 years old, had been stuck in the chimney for two to three hours; neighbors called after hearing her screams, according to CBS LA. Firefighters used jackhammers to partially dismantle the chimney and lubricated the flue with dish soap before lifting Nunez-Figueroa out. What was she doing in there in the first place? Well, it's not clear, but she'd gone on six dates with the homeowner—who wasn't home at the time—after meeting him online, and he says he'd recently ended the relationship. The Sheriff's Department says her "intent was unclear." Whatever she was trying to do, this wasn't her first time: The homeowner also saw her on his roof two weeks ago and called the cops, but she fled, ABC30 reports. This time around, she was arrested after being removed from the chimney at 8:22am; she was also taken to a local hospital for evaluation. She had been stuck about 8 feet from the top and was conscious during the rescue. Her current condition isn't known, but she faces charges of illegally entering a residence and providing false information to a peace officer. The homeowner says he's learned a valuable lesson: "Before you have somebody come in your house, really check them out," he says. "Having someone in your chimney is like kind of a weird thing you wouldn't expect to come home to." (Another kind of weird thing you wouldn't expect to come home to: a box full of cocaine, heroin, and meth you didn't order.) |
In an uncharacteristic about-face, Apple Inc. loosened its control over software development for its iPhones and iPads as the company feels heat from a U.S. antitrust investigation and rising competition from mobile devices powered by Google Inc.'s Android software.
Apple said Thursday that it was relaxing restrictions on developers of applications for its iPhones and iPads. WSJ's Jen Valentino-DeVries and Lauren Goode discuss with Simon Constable what this means not only for app developers but how it impacts Apple's mobile iAd platform.
The move gives software developers more freedom to decide how to build their applications, or "apps." It will relax restrictions Apple introduced in the spring that had effectively blocked use of programming technology from Adobe Systems Inc. and potentially impeded Google's AdMob ad network from serving ads to Apple apps.
The concession comes after the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry around June to determine whether Apple had violated antitrust laws with the earlier policy. It isn't clear if Apple's move Thursday was in response to the FTC's investigation, but it will likely be carefully scrutinized by the regulatory agency, said people familiar with the situation.
An Apple spokeswoman didn't respond to requests for comment about the FTC probe. The FTC declined to comment.
The change comes in the wake of a vicious public relations battle between Apple and Adobe, creator of a widely used technology called Flash that manages video and animations on many websites. Apple's revised policy will now allow apps to be written using a Flash-based tool, and also removes restrictions on what other programming languages developers may use.
But the revised policy still won't allow iPhone and iPad users to access Flash-based content on the Web. Those websites rely on running Adobe software code that doesn't reside on a user's device, which Apple's revised guidelines still prohibit. Still, Adobe investors embraced the news, driving shares up 12% to $32.86.
"We are encouraged to see Apple lifting its restrictions on its licensing terms, giving developers the freedom to choose what tools they use to develop applications for Apple devices," Adobe said in a statement.
Google also welcomed the change. "Unlike the previous version, these new terms ensure that Apple's developers have the choice of a variety of advertising solutions (including Google and AdMob's) to earn money and fund their apps," Omar Hamoui, Google's vice president of product management, said in a statement.
For consumers, the implications may be less evident. Apple still plans to review every app submitted to its App Store, and Flash-based video still won't be viewable on its mobile devices. And some prior restrictions, such as the one that affected AdMob ads, weren't being enforced by Apple.
Yet the change means more apps—which range from videogames to news feeds to financial tools—may be available sooner on multiple devices. It may also bring in new developers to the iPhone and iPad, who have been reluctant to comply with Apple's restrictive policies in the past.
"They're opening up the platform to a much broader community of development," said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of mobile ad company Mobclix Inc., which works closely with iPhone app developers. Mr. Subramanian added that it could particularly energize the mobile advertising market because ad developers are most familiar with Adobe's Flash programming software.
Apple on Thursday also published its app-review guidelines for the first time, addressing a longstanding complaint by developers about the lack of clarity in the process. The guidelines suggest, for example, that an app could be rejected if it isn't useful or doesn't provide lasting entertainment or other value.
The language in the guidelines seems to emulate the direct style of Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive. "We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don't need any more Fart apps," the document reads.
Another section says apps that look like they were "cobbled together in a few days" could be rejected. "We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour," it says.
Enlarge Image Close Associated Press Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs.
Some analysts said the changes show how threatened Apple is by the increasing momentum of Google's Android Market. App development for Android could heat up with the introduction in coming months of several Android tablet computers that will rival the iPad.
"They're trying to make sure they stay the most interesting and most important development platform," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with technology firm Forrester Research.
Apple's App Store is still the biggest app marketplace with over 250,000 applications, but Google's Android Market—which doesn't vet apps—has increased its number to more than 80,000 from 30,000 just six months ago.
Smartphones that run on Google's Android operating system also are expected to outsell iPhones this year. IDC, another tech research firm, estimates that by 2014, Android devices will hold world-wide market share of 25% while the iPhone's share will drop to 11% from 15% this year.
A number of software developers still see Apple's App Store as the most important market and many are devoting the majority of their resources toward it, but they also have been unhappy with the company's seemingly arbitrary rejection of apps.
Joe Hewitt, a Facebook Inc. software engineer, caused a stir last November when he announced he would stop developing for the iPhone because of Apple's review process. He said in an email that Apple's policy change is "a wonderful improvement" that shows Apple has improved the tone of its relationship with app developers.
Mr. Hewitt, who developed Facebook's iPhone app, said he was working on other projects but would probably develop for Apple's App Store again "when I do have time someday."
Forrester's Mr. Hammond said some developers also are starting to develop apps for the Android Market first, so they can start making money immediately while they wait for the App Store version of the app to go through Apple's approval process.
"Customers are saying, 'You know what, I don't have to do the iPhone. I have a lot of other viable choices,'" said Dave Wolf, vice president of strategy at Cynergy Systems Inc., a Washington, D.C., software design firm that builds software using Flash and other programming languages. "I think Apple saw that writing on the wall."
The publication of the app review guidelines could also help get new apps into the marketplace sooner and minimize some of the clutter.The FTC is investigating complaints that Apple had unfairly blocked developers from using Adobe's tools, as well as whether Apple's restrictions on applications sending data to third parties unfairly disadvantaged AdMob and benefited Apple's own mobile ad network, according to people familiar with the matter.
Meantime, the Justice Department is looking at Apple's iTunes music store and new Bookstore to see if agreements Apple has reached with music and book publishers improperly limit competition, said people familiar with the matter.
Apple has attracted increasing scrutiny from antitrust enforcers in the U.S. and Europe as it expanded from its minority position in personal computers to a major force in markets for smartphones, music, movies, TV and publishing.
In the U.S. it controls around 70% of online music sales and has more of the overall music market than Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to market research firm NPD Group. It recently surpassed Microsoft Corp. in market value.
—Cari Tuna contributed to this article.
Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at [email protected] and Thomas Catan at [email protected] ||||| Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Apple, which keeps a tight lid on its products and inner workings, is loosening up a little.
The company said on Thursday that it would relax its rules on how software developers can build applications for its iPhone and iPad. And for the first time it published detailed guidelines explaining how it decides what programs can and cannot be sold through its App Store.
Apple has long faced criticism from developers who say its application review process is opaque and that it makes seemingly arbitrary decisions about what is acceptable for its customers.
This year, some were incensed when the company purged some sexually suggestive applications it deemed to be inappropriate — like a jigsaw puzzle featuring scantily dressed women — while a Sports Illustrated application with bikini-clad models remained.
Analysts said the moves on Thursday were a sign that Apple was growing increasingly aware of competition in the smartphone market, and was trying to be friendlier to the developers whose applications have helped drive the success of its products.
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In particular, Android, the mobile operating system by Google, has steadily increased market share in the United States and abroad. Shipments of smartphones using Android grew by 886 percent during the second quarter from a year earlier, according to the research firm Canalys. And a wave of Android tablet computers that will compete with the iPad are on the way.
“Apple is concerned enough about the shifting tide towards Android that it feels it has to loosen restrictions to keep developers on its side,” said Jeffrey S. Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Although Mr. Hammond said that Apple’s App Store was outpacing opponents in both the number of applications available for download and the amount of revenue generated for developers, he said Apple’s announcement was a “pre-emptive strike.”
“Google has done a better job at leveling the playing field for independent developers, and that matters,” he said. “I don’t think Apple can tolerate that, especially with the dozen or more pads that we’re going to see hit the market in eight to nine weeks.”
In the newly released guidelines, which are written in an unusually conversational style, Apple acknowledges that its App Store policies could give the impression that the company is made up of “control freaks,” but adds that “maybe it’s because we’re so committed to our users and making sure they have a quality experience with our products.”
Although the guidelines list many things that will lead to an app’s rejection, like the inclusion of pornography or violent images, or mimicking features that are already on the iPhone, they still leave much to interpretation. For example, Apple says that “apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected.”
Even so, software developers, many of whom have expressed frustration about the app review process, said the company’s newfound candor came as a relief.
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“This is gold. This is great,” said Dom Sagolla, chief executive of Dollar App, a mobile development company based in the Bay Area. “It feels like we’re finally getting a clue about what Apple wants.”
“This is a document I’ve been wanting to see for two years,” said Raven Zachary, president of Small Society, a software development firm. “It’s going to foster the creation of better apps because we know going in what to do and what to avoid.”
Apple also said it would begin to allow developers to use third-party tools to create applications for its iOS mobile operating system, which is used on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It had banned such tools in April.
The change means developers can more easily convert applications written for other types of mobile phones, including those that use Adobe’s Flash technology, which Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, has repeatedly said he will not support. The news bumped shares of Adobe up more than 12 percent to close at $32.86. Apple shares were little changed.
Apple’s new rules also specify that developers can put advertisements in their applications that come from outside companies. Its earlier rules had raised some questions about whether developers would be limited to using Apple’s iAd service, locking out companies like AdMob, which is owned by Google.
Omar Hamoui, the former chief executive of AdMob who is now the vice president for product management at Google, said in a blog post that the changes were “great news for everyone in the mobile community.”
“Apple’s new terms will keep in-app advertising on the iPhone open to many different mobile ad competitors and enable advertising solutions that operate across a wide range of platforms,” he added.
Good will aside, analysts said Apple may also be trying to keep federal regulators at bay. The ban on third-party tools and the uncertainty about outside ads had prompted the Federal Trade Commission to begin asking questions about Apple’s approach to competition.
“At some point, Apple asked themselves whether this is doing us more harm than good, between unhappy developers and the F.T.C. sniffing around,” Mr. Hammond said. “For once, Apple is being a little bit defensive in their strategy as opposed to being offensive. It just shows how the race is starting to tighten in this market.” ||||| | – Apple has done a U-turn and scrapped restrictions introduced earlier this year on what tools developers can use to build applications for the iPhone and iPad. Developers will now be allowed to use tools based on Adobe's Flash, and restrictions on other programming languages have been lifted, the Wall Street Journal reports. Shares in Adobe jumped after the news, though iPhone and iPad users still won't be able to access Flash-based content on the Internet. Apple also addressed concerns that the application approval process is too secretive by releasing, for the first time, a list of guidelines developers should follow to avoid rejection. Analysts say the company's new-found openness appears to be a move to avoid giving an edge to the competition. "Apple is concerned enough about the shifting tide toward Android that it feels it has to loosen restrictions to keep developers on its side,” an analyst at Forrester Research tells the New York Times. |
Megan Masters
TBS has pulled the plug on the ratings-challenged Lopez Tonight.
According to a network spokesman, the caber “has reached the difficult decision not to order a third season of Lopez Tonight. We are proud to have partnered with George Lopez, who is an immensely talented comedian and entertainer. TBS has valued its partnership with George and appreciates all of his work on behalf of the network, both on and off the air.”
This Thursday’s episode of Lopez Tonight will be its last.
Ready for more of today’s TV dish? Well…
• Bam! Top Chef is switching things up in Season 9: Food Network star Emeril Lagasse has joined Bravo’s reality staple as a new judge, along with lesser-known chef Hugh Acheson (who has been seen on Top Chef Masters). Padma Lakshmi, Tom Colicchio, and Gail Simmons will return as judges as well. Chef, which returns this fall, will no longer focus on just one location, opting instead to feature three cities in Texas.
• Sarah Paulson (Studio 60) will reprise her role as Lynette’s (onetime) loser sister during Desperate Housewives‘ final season, TV Guide Magazine reports.
• The Gilmore Girls brain trust is at it again: Amy Sherman-Palladino is teaming with Ryan Seacrest Productions and Weinstien Co. on a TV version of The Nanny Diaries for ABC, Deadline reports. Based on the 2002 novel, Diaries was previously developed into a 2007 feature film, starring Scarlett Johannson.
• The Young and the Restless‘ Michael Graziadei has landed a recurring role on Ryan Murphy’s upcoming FX drama, American Horror Story. Per Deadline, the daytime star will play the much younger boyfriend of Jessica Lange’s nosy neighbor character.
• A Bewitched reboot is in the works, courtesy of CBS and Sony TV. The project is still in the very early stages of development, but per Variety, Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher — the couple behind the 2005 film version — are set to executive-produce.
• A Frankenstein series is also in the making over on NBC, per The Hollywood Reporter. House exec producers Russel Friend and Garret Lerner will pen the script for the modern-day take on the classic.
• Zachary Abel will appear in the third episode of The CW’s new supernatural drama The Secret Circle (which premieres Thursday, Sept. 15), EW.com reports. The Make It or Break It alum will play a hot jock vying for the affections of Britt Robertson’s witchy teen, Cassie.
• Lifetime has given an eight-episode order to America’s Supernanny, a U.S. version of ABC’s former Brit hit. The cabler is currently holding a casting call for the latest childcare miracle worker.
Which TVLine Items have you talking today?
Want Scoop and Spoilers Sent Directly to Your In-Box? Sign Up for the TVLine Newsletter Now! ||||| TBS has announced that it is canceling George Lopez's talk show "Lopez Tonight."
"TBS has reached the difficult decision not to order a third season of Lopez Tonight," the company said in a statement. TBS called Lopez "an immensely talented comedian and entertainer." The last episode of his program will air on Thursday.
Lopez was the only Latino to host a late night talk show. The premiere of "Lopez Tonight" in November 2009 also marked TBS' first attempt to break into the late night scene. The show struggled to gain viewers in a competitive landscape, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In November, Lopez was bumped back an hour to a midnight slot to accommodate Conan O'Brien's "Conan" after the comedian's exit from NBC. ||||| | – George Lopez is out of the talk-show business as of this week. TBS has abruptly canceled his Lopez Tonight, and the final show will air tomorrow night, reports TV Line. The decision not to order a third season comes after TBS moved the show to midnight last November to follow Conan O'Brien. Lopez Tonight continued to struggle in the ratings, however. Click for more. |
A 5-year-old boy attacked by a mountain lion outside his home in Colorado on Friday night is in fair condition, officials said.
The boy's mother told police he had been playing in the front yard with his older brother when she heard screaming and ran outside to find a mountain lion on him, the Pitkin Sheriff's Department said in a news release.
The mother told police she was able to pull the boy away from the animal.
The boy's father called 911 to tell dispatchers he was driving his injured son to the hospital just before 8 p.m. local time, authorities said.
Mountain lion numbers have risen recently, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Colorado Parks & Wildlife
The boy, whose name has not been released, sustained injuries to his face, head and neck, police said. He has been transferred in fair condition to a hospital in Denver, according to officials with Aspen Valley Hospital.
Pitkin County Undersheriff Ron Ryan told the Aspen Times that the boy was" conscious and alert."
His mother, who sustained minor injuries to her hand and legs, was "treated and released in good condition," according to Aspen Valley Hospital spokeswoman Jenny Dyche.
The attack occurred approximately 10 miles northwest of Aspen on Lower River Road in unincorporated Pitkin County.
Sheriff's deputies and a U.S. Forest Service officer located a mountain lion in the same area where the mother said the attack took place and put the animal down, the sheriff's department said.
Officials with Colorado Parks and Wildlife will examine the deceased lion and attempt to locate a second lion that was reported to be in the area earlier in the day, officials said. ||||| Story highlights Colorado 5-year-old attacked by mountain lion
The boy is reported in fair condition
(CNN) A 5-year-old boy is recovering in a Denver hospital after being attacked by a mountain lion, officials said.
The attack happened Friday night about 10 miles northwest of Aspen, Colorado, according to the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office.
A man called 911 dispatchers to report that his son had been attacked by a mountain lion and he was driving to the Aspen Valley Hospital, police said in a statement.
The boy's mother told police that the boy was playing outside with his older brother when she heard screams. The mother ran out and "physically removed her son from the mountain lion," according to the statement.
After initial treatment in Aspen, the boy was transferred to Children's Hospital in Denver. He's in fair condition with injuries to his face, head and neck. His mother was treated and released for minor injuries to her hand and legs.
Read More ||||| A young boy was attacked Friday night by a mountain lion in the yard of his home below Woody Creek, a law enforcement official said.
The boy’s condition was unknown, though Pitkin County Undersheriff Ron Ryan said that as of about 9:15 p.m., he remained at Aspen Valley Hospital with injuries to his head and neck.
Emergency dispatchers received a call at about 8 p.m. from the boy’s father, who said he was driving his son to the hospital after the attack, Ryan said. Deputies met the father at the hospital and briefly saw the boy, who is between 3 and 5 years old, before he was taken into the emergency room, he said.
Ryan did not know the extent of the injuries, though he said the boy was conscious and alert at the hospital.
Deputies then drove to the family’s residence on Lower River Road downvalley of Woody Creek and located the mountain lion under some trees in the yard, he said.
“Since it was still there, it was either injured or very ill, so they dispatched it,” Ryan said.
The animal was shot by deputies or a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer who also was at the scene, he said. Numerous toys and bikes were near the area where the mountain lion was killed, he said.
Further details of the attack were not available Friday night. ||||| | – A Colorado mom whose 5-year-old son was being attacked by a mountain lion leapt into action Friday, fighting off the animal and potentially saving the boy's life, NBC News reports. The boy was playing with his older brother in their yard about 10 miles outside of Aspen when his mother heard screaming. She ran outside to see a mountain lion attacking her young son. According to a police statement quoted by CNN, the boy's mom "physically removed her son from the mountain lion." The boy was rushed to the hospital, where he is in fair condition with injuries to his head, face, and neck. His mom suffered minor injuries to her hands and legs. Pitkin County sheriff's deputies and a US Forest Service officer found the mountain lion under some trees in the family's yard and killed it, the Aspen Times reports. “Since it was still there, it was either injured or very ill, so they dispatched it,” Undersheriff Ron Ryan says. They were also looking for a second mountain lion spotted in the area on Friday. Experts say it's rare to even see a mountain lion in Colorado, let alone be attacked by one. Not even a dozen people have been killed by mountain lions over the past 100 years in North America. |
Momentum is building in the conservative movement for a third-party alternative to Donald Trump Donald John TrumpDHS requesting more troops at border: report House passes legislation to re-open government despite opposition from Trump Maxine Waters: Much of my work will be undoing Mulvaney's 'damage' to CFPB MORE and Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonDem introduces bills to eliminate electoral college, stop presidents from pardoning themselves Cracks beginning to show in GOP shutdown resolve Mitt Romney shows establishment still ignorant of wartime casualties MORE.
The effort got a big boost from Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanRomney writes new chapter in his like-hate relationship with Trump Romney warns Republicans about Trump Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna to oppose Pelosi-backed rules package MORE (R-Wis.) on Thursday when he said he wasn’t yet ready to back Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
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Ryan’s refusal to endorse Trump, at least for the time being, could provide tacit encouragement to the Republicans who are seeking to field another candidate.
Conservative activists led by Erick Erickson, a writer and radio host, and other well-connected strategists plan to hold at least two organizing conference calls before the weekend to figure out their strategy.
“A number of movement conservatives fiscal and social are actively now looking at third-party and independent options,” Erickson said Thursday. “We all find Trump unacceptable. We don’t think he can beat Hillary Clinton regardless of whether there’s a third party or not, so why not put an alternative out there.”
Time is of the essence.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse passes legislation to re-open government despite opposition from Trump Overnight Defense: Pompeo warns Iran against space launches | Top Army official makes surprise Afghanistan visit | Trump reportedly considering Jim Webb to replace Mattis Cracks beginning to show in GOP shutdown resolve MORE (R-Ky.) have both backed Trump as the nominee, touting him as the candidate who can keep Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, out of the White House. Other Republicans could soon follow suit.
But the coronation of Trump appears to have been halted by Ryan, who has a strong following among conservative lawmakers and activists and was Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012.
“To be perfectly candid with you … I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now,” Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper when asked about backing Trump.
“I hope to though, and I want to. But what is required is to unify this party. And the bulk of the burden on unifying the party will have to come from our presumptive nominee.”
The clock is fast ticking down for a third-party run, at least when it comes to getting on the ballot in many states. Independent candidates running for president must file applications and petitions of support in Texas, which has 38 electoral votes, the second-most of any state, by May 9, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office.
“It’s an uphill climb, everybody recognizes that, regardless of the route we go, but there are a lot of Republican donors sitting on the sidelines who would rather fund a third party than fund Donald Trump,” said Erickson, who said campaign finance experts within the movement estimate it will cost a minimum of $250 million to fund a third-party bid.
But even if a third-party candidate failed to make the ballot in many states, the mere presence of a prominent alternative in the race could be enough to deny Trump the White House.
Conservatives have floated several names as a potential Trump spoiler.
They include former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R), who is poised to become the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee; former Sen. Tom Coburn Thomas (Tom) Allen CoburnThe Hill's Morning Report — Presented by PhRMA — Worries grow about political violence as midterms approach President Trump’s war on federal waste American patients face too many hurdles in regard to health-care access MORE (R-Okla.), who was long an outspoken conservative voice in Congress; and freshman Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who early Thursday morning posted on Facebook an open letter calling for a third-party option to Trump and Clinton.
National Review, a leading conservative publication, published a piece Thursday afternoon making the case for Johnson, praising him as a self-made businessman and a fiscal conservative who favors free trade and gun rights.
“Everybody is looking at Gary Johnson right now to see where decides to settle on some of these issues,” Erickson said.
He added that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulThe Hill's Morning Report — Pelosi to reclaim Speakership amid shutdown Romney writes new chapter in his like-hate relationship with Trump Comey defends Romney for ‘calling out’ Trump MORE (R), who dropped his bid for the GOP nomination earlier this year, “would be viable” as well.
Erickson said the key issue is abortion. Any candidate who will at least leave it to the states instead of the federal government to set abortion laws could draw strong support, he said.
The biggest task ahead is finding a candidate conservatives can rally behind and who has the stature needed to become a national candidate and take on Trump.
So far Coburn and Sasse have not yet indicated publicly they want the job. Both declined requests for comment on Thursday.
The upcoming filing deadlines to get on the ballot in all 50 states give the dissident conservatives strong incentive to get behind someone like Johnson, who would be guaranteed ballot spots because of his affiliation with an established party.
Erickson, however, said there’s a compelling legal case for pushing back the state ballot deadlines until the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions in late July.
The situation gives conservatives plenty to talk about in the next 24 hours.
“There will be two others before close of business on Friday,” Erickson said of the conference calls he and allies have had to plot strategy. ||||| Rick Perry will support Trump
Rick Perry speaks to the crowd on Sept. 11, 2015, in St. Louis, as he announced he was dropping his presidential bid. (Photo: Michael B. Thomas, Getty Images)
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry went from being one of Donald Trump's most bitter opponents to a member of the presumptive GOP nominee's growing support base.
Perry, one of several former GOP presidential hopefuls, told CNN's Dana Bash that while Trump is not his ideal choice, he will nonetheless do whatever he can to support the presumptive Republican nominee.
"He is not a perfect man. But what I do believe is that he loves this country and he will surround himself with capable, experienced people and he will listen to them," Perry said.
This comes just hours after House Speaker Paul Ryan, a 2012 vice presidential candidate, said he was not yet ready to support Trump. Trump would need to unify the Republican Party to get his vote.
Bash asked if he’d be open to being his running mate and Perry responded: “"I am going to be open to any way I can help. I am not going to say no.”
"He is one of the most talented people who has ever run for the president I have ever seen," Perry added.
Perry didn’t always have such warm feelings for Trump. In July, when he was still in the presidential race, Perry gave an entire speech calling the billionaire "a cancer on conservatism."
Some have suggested to Perry that he run as a third-party candidate. He dismissed that notion as "quixotic," according to CNN.
"I believe in the process, and the process has said Donald Trump will be our nominee," Perry said, "and I'm going to support him and help him and do what I can."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/26Ylyzr ||||| | – If you're a conservative with political ambitions—and, ideally, with a few hundred million dollars burning a hole in your pocket—now is the time to get in touch with the #NeverTrump movement. Anti-Donald Trump conservative activists have stepped up their efforts to find a third-party alternative, but they'll have to file their paperwork in Texas by May 9 to get on the ballot, with deadlines in other states following soon, the Hill reports. Possibilities include former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's 2012 nominee, and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who called for an alternative to Trump and Clinton in a Facebook post Thursday. Rick Perry had also been mentioned, but he earned the scorn of Trump foes on Thursday when he dismissed the idea as "quixotic," endorsed Trump, and said he would be open to becoming his running mate, reports USA Today. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson has taken a leading role in the search for a Trump alternative and plans to hold talks with like-minded conservatives in the days to come, CNN reports. "It's an uphill climb, everybody recognizes that, regardless of the route we go, but there are a lot of Republican donors sitting on the sidelines who would rather fund a third party than fund Donald Trump," he tells the Hill. He says campaign finance experts believe a third-party bid would cost at least $250 million. Trump meanwhile, has a different suggestion for a third-party candidate. "Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats—both with delegates & otherwise," he tweeted Thursday. "He should show them, & run as an Independent." (Paul Ryan says he's "just not ready" to support Trump.) |
The U.S. president remains popular with much of Germany, but there's no question the Obama euphoria that swept the country five years ago has faded.
President Obama stands next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in front of Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 19. (Photo: Michael Kappeler, AP) Story Highlights President Obama called for a reduction in nuclear stockpiles
Obama addressed a crowd of 6,000 invited guests at Brandenburg Gate
European attitudes toward Obama have shifted
BERLIN — With the iconic Brandenburg Gate at his back, President Obama urged Berliners in a speech Wednesday to embrace the common values that bind America and Germany, and to carry forth the spirit of freedom that defines the once-divided city.
"It is citizens who choose whether to be defined by a wall or whether to tear it down," Obama told cheering crowds before the 18th-century city entrance. "We can say here in Berlin, here in Europe, our values won."
Fifty years after President Kennedy delivered his legendary "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner") speech in the former West Berlin, Obama said he was proud to stand on the eastern side of the wall.
Kennedy gave his famous speech when the Berlin Wall — erected by the Soviet Union to cut off communist East Germany from democratic West Germany — was still standing. With the wall gone since 1990 and Germany reunited, Obama urged Berliners to take an active role in helping to protect freedom and democracy around the world.
"We must acknowledge that there can at times be complacency among our Western democracies," he said, as many waved American and German flags and shouted in approval. "Complacency is not the character of great nations."
As he spoke, Obama's wife, Michelle, and daughters, Sasha and Malia, toured the famous front line of the Cold War at Checkpoint Charlie, the former guard station between East and West Germany, and visited the memorial of the Berlin Wall.
Joined by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, Obama addressed 6,000 invited guests and dignitaries on a hot day under a bright sky. When he talked specifics, Obama kept to issues on which the majority of the crowd appeared to agree.
Obama said he planned to slash America's nuclear weapons stockpile by up to a third and promised to seek negotiated cuts with Russia, too, saying "so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe."
The loudest cheers came when Obama vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison, a move that many Europeans have been waiting for since Obama took office.
Supporters held up signs with the words "Yes we can" and "Welcome" and chanted Obama's name. At one point during his speech, two women holding a "No NATO War" sign shouted briefly from the crowd at Obama before they were questioned by security personnel.
It was a much smaller crowd than the estimated 200,000 people who greeted Obama five years ago, when he visited Berlin as a candidate for president. Back then, he captured the enthusiasm of Germans and won broad support across Europe.
He remains popular with much of Germany, where local news outlets followed the first family's every move in the capital and published detailed features on their Ritz-Carlton presidential suite. A recent survey indicated that 85% of Germans believe Obama is a good president.
But while his pronouncements appealed to the pacifist sentiments of many Germans, they did not go down well with critics in the United States.
The Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon of California, lamented that Obama wanted to further reduce U.S. nuclear readiness against a Russian government that has failed to adhere to existing arms-reduction agreements.
"The president must make clear to (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin that the United States will not allow itself or its allies to be bullied by Russia or to allow that state to ignore its arms control obligations," McKeon said.
On Guantanamo, the president has declined to free the remaining prisoners at the facility and his Department of Justice has said the president has the authority to hold enemy terrorists without charge indefinitely.
There is no question that the Obama euphoria that swept the country five years ago has faded. The cover of the national newspaper Taz featured a full-page picture of Obama with the caption "Love Hurts," and the weekly magazine Der Spiegel featured a picture of Obama and Kennedy on its cover, with the title "The Lost Friend."
"His overall poll ratings in Germany are still for any American campaign manager dream-like, but at the same time, Germans have lowered their expectations," said Sudha David-Wilp, a senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund. "When he came here in 2008, he mentioned climate change, he mentioned a new way of doing business in the world, working with partners. Those things unfortunately haven't come to fruition."
Obama has been the subject of criticism in recent weeks over Washington's global surveillance program PRISM, which requests information legally from U.S.-based Internet companies on communications involving foreigners suspected of terrorist activity. Since Europeans communicate through such companies, it is possible German citizens have been spied on through the program.
Germany's history with fascism has planted a deep-rooted distrust of any sort of surveillance and the country has some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world.
"I think the spying is disgusting," said Richard Radtke, 52, a lawyer who navigated his way around police barricades on Wednesday to get to work. "If it's as nasty as it looks, then it will make a big difference in my opinion of the way Americans deal with the public interest and privacy."
Obama defended the program during a joint press conference with Chancellor Merkel earlier in the day, saying the initiative had saved lives.
"This is not a situation where we are rifling through ordinary e-mails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens," he asserted, adding that it was important to strike a balance between protecting citizens and intruding on their rights.
President Barack Obama is calling for a one-third reduction of the world's nuclear stockpiles. Speaking at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate, he says he intends to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond a Cold War nuclear posture. (June 19) AP
Before meeting with reporters, Obama and Merkel spoke at length about some of the progress made in Syria-related talks at the Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland earlier this week, and touched on Syria, Iran and the upcoming trans-Atlantic trade treaty as well.
"Europe is our partner in almost everything we do," Obama said. "Europe remains the cornerstone of our freedom and our security."
He also vowed to do more to change the climate, which he said is "the global threat of our time."
Though polls show may Europeans worry about global warming, some countries in Europe are scaling back government-subsidized renewable-energy plans in the face of rising electricity prices and cash-strapped government budgets.
While many in Europe believe measures to cut carbon emissions are crucial, skeptics point to recent scientific analyses that show that since 1998 global mean temperatures have remained unchanged.
Berliners said they are less excited about this visit and have been disappointed that Obama has not delivered on promises he made previously.
President Obama greets children at the Schloss Bellevue in Berlin on June 19. (Photo: Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty)
"It's easy to build up expectations of charismatic people but he's not a superhero," said Berliner Jannis Huelsen, 29.
Contributing: Ena Paponja and Catherine Featherston in Berlin
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/11YNjam ||||| President Barack Obama called Wednesday for “peace with justice” as he proposed reducing U.S. nuclear arsenals by as much as one-third in a wide-ranging call for action delivered on the eastern side of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.
“Our work is not yet done. For we are not only citizens of America or Germany, we are citizens of the world,” Obama said, drawing on John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech on the west side of the the city, in which he called on Berliners to look ahead to “the day of peace with justice” and to the rest of mankind. “We may not live in fear of nuclear annihilation — but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe.”
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He said the United States is now looking to do more to reduce that threat. “After a comprehensive review, I have determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies and maintain a strong and credibility strategic deterrent while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third,” he said. “I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures” and to work with NATO allies for “bold reductions in Europe.”
“We can forge a new international framework for peaceful nuclear power, reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking,” he added.
Obama has directed the Defense Department to strengthen its non-nuclear capabilities, to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks, and to reduce the role of nuclear launches in contingency planning.
New START calls for the United States and Russia to cut their arsenals to 1,550 nuclear warheads by 2018. Obama’s proposal, which would bring that number down to about 1,000, comes as tensions between the United States and Russia over Syria have been on stark display — most recently on Monday, as Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a cold joint statement at the G8 summit, and appeared to make little progress on the issue.
In another big speech in a major European city, in Prague during the spring of 2009, Obama set an even more ambitious long-term goal: “a world without nuclear weapons.” It’s a hope he’s reiterated since, including at last year’s Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, and one in which he’s said he still believes.
Obama spent much of his speech Wednesday leaning on Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech given 50 years ago next week, as he laid out a vision in which the United States and Germany “pursue peace and justice not only for our countries, but for all mankind.”
While remaining “vigilant” about terror threats, “we must move beyond the mindset of perpetual war,” Obama said, echoing the philosophy he laid out last month in his speech on counterterrorism in the post-post-9/11 era. In the United States, “that means redoubling our efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo,” he said to cheers. ||||| BERLIN (Reuters) - President Barack Obama defended U.S. anti-terrorism tactics on a visit to Berlin on Wednesday, telling wary Germans Washington was not spying on the emails of ordinary citizens and promising to step up efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
On the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, Obama made his first presidential visit to the German capital, a favored destination of U.S. leaders during the Cold War.
He held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he unveiled a proposal for new talks with Russia on slashing nuclear arms arsenals.
Obama, who attracted a crowd of 200,000 adoring fans when he last passed through in 2008 during his first campaign for the presidency, remains popular in Germany.
But revelations before the trip of a covert U.S. Internet surveillance program, code-named Prism, caused outrage in a country where memories of the eavesdropping East German Stasi secret police are still fresh.
Merkel said at a joint news conference that also touched on Afghanistan, Syria and the global economy, that the two leaders had held "long and intensive" talks on the spying issue, noting that some questions still needed to be cleared up.
Obama tried to reassure his host, who as a pastor's daughter growing up in the communist East experienced the Stasi first-hand.
"This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else," Obama said.
"This is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching any way we want. This is a circumscribed system directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done under the oversight of the courts."
In a message which seemed designed for her domestic audience, Merkel told Obama that balance was essential in government monitoring of Internet communications.
"I made clear that although we do see the need for gathering information, the topic of proportionality is always an important one and the free democratic order is based on people feeling safe," said the 58-year-old chancellor.
Obama countered that the U.S. had thwarted at least 50 threats because of its monitoring program, including planned attacks in Germany.
"So lives have been saved and the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited," he said.
A poll last week showed 82 percent of Germans approve of Obama, but the magic of 2008, when he was feted like a rock star, has faded amid concerns about his anti-terrorist tactics.
COMMON VALUES
In his speech to 4,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama harked back to Kennedy by stressing what he called common values of openness and tolerance.
"We can be a little more informal among friends," he joked as he took off his jacket in the sweltering sun on the Pariser Platz square, just east of the Gate that once stood alongside the Berlin Wall dividing the communist East from the capitalist West of the city.
Earlier, at the news conference, he touched on tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over U.S. plans to begin talks with the Taliban to try to seek a negotiated peace after 12 years of war, acknowledging "huge mistrust" between the Western-backed government in Kabul and its arch-foes.
"We do think that ultimately we're going to need to see Afghans talking to Afghans about how they can move forward and end the cycle of violence there so they can start actually building their country," Obama said.
On Syria, Obama said reports that the United States was ready to "go all in" to war in the country were exaggerated. He reiterated his view that President Bashar al-Assad's government had used chemical weapons, while acknowledging that Russia was skeptical on this point.
Obama declined to give specifics on new military aid Washington plans to provide to Syrian rebels.
Obama arrived in Germany after a two-day summit with Group of Eight leaders in Northern Ireland where he and other leaders clashed with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Syria.
Despite these divisions, he said he would engage with Moscow on reducing deployed nuclear weapons by up to a third from previously agreed levels.
"I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures," Obama said.
In 2008, Merkel refused to allow Obama, then a senator from Illinois, to speak at the Brandenburg Gate because he was not yet president.
Despite this awkward start, the Democrat has forged a pragmatic relationship with the conservative Merkel, who may be hoping for a political boost out of the visit months before a German election.
DRONES
In a nod to criticism, Obama defended his failure to close the Guantanamo Bay prison on Cuba that his predecessor George W. Bush opened after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
He also reassured Germans that the U.S. military was not using German bases to launch unmanned drone attacks.
For Obama, who grew up in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, Europe has sometimes seemed an after-thought. The signature foreign policy initiative of his first term was his "pivot" to Asia.
But analysts say plans to create a free-trade zone between the United States and European Union are a sign that he is focusing more on Europe.
"The Obama administration has found it harder than expected to work with emerging powers and has fallen back to a more traditional reliance on European allies," said Charles Kupchan, professor of international affairs at Georgetown University.
"Washington doesn't have better options. And when it comes to who to engage in Europe, Germany grows stronger and stronger."
(Additional reporting by Stephen Brown, Roberta Rampton, Annika Breidthardt, Alexandra Hudson, Michelle Martin; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Ralph Boulton) ||||| | – Five years after he addressed a huge crowd in Berlin as a presidential candidate—and 50 years after John F. Kennedy proclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner"—President Obama gave an address at the iconic Brandenburg Gate today, calling for a major reduction in nuclear warheads. "We may not live in fear of nuclear annihilation—but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe," Obama declared, according to Politico. He said the US could still defend itself with one third fewer nuclear weapons, and said he intended to negotiate a cut to that level with Russia. That would mean taking the arsenals down to about 1,000 warheads each. Officials tell the Wall Street Journal that the cuts may take place under a new treaty, to follow 2010's New START pact, but the White House will also consider reciprocal reductions without a treaty. Obama also spent plenty of time in the speech endearing himself to the crowd before him (which USA Today notes was limited to 6,000 invited guests), with frequent jokes and stirring references to the city's history. "I am proud to stand here and pay tribute to the past from the East side of the Brandenburg," he said. Of course, hanging over everything was the NSA spying issue. At a joint press conference earlier, Merkel said she and Obama had held "long and intensive" talks about it, while Obama offered assurances that the US wasn't "rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens ... or anybody else." |
Barrie Police ಮರುಟ್ವೀಟಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ BarrieToday
It may look "cool" and like something from out of the movies, but in reality the action of this driver put many lives at risk, including his own. He now faces Criminal Charges and will appear in court in October. https://bit.ly/2ojnlPH https://twitter.com/BarrieToday/status/1034793820246835201 … |||||
CTV Barrie
A Barrie man is facing criminal charges after crashing his car near a school parking lot.
Police say the 46-year-old man was driving at a high rate of speed on Little Avenue in Barrie just after 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
They said when the 2016 Telsa crossed the steep incline leading up to the railway tracks just north of Huronia Road it became airborne and crashed 100 feet away onto the street.
The impact caused the Tesla to skid across the road, shedding parts along the way, and landed on school grounds.
Police say the 4-door Tesla was "demolished".
The driver and passenger were taken to hospital with minor injuries.
The accused is scheduled to appear in a Barrie court in October. ||||| A man from Barrie has been charged after a single-vehicle collision in the city’s south end.
According to Barrie police, on Tuesday, just after 8 p.m., officers received a report of a single-vehicle collision in the Little Avenue and Garden Drive area of Barrie.
Police say a four-door Tesla was found demolished.
READ MORE: Toronto man charged in sexual assaults dating back 40 years: OPP
Officers say the vehicle had been driven quickly northbound on Little Avenue before the crash. When the car approached the incline before the railway tracks just north of Huronia Road, the vehicle became airborne and crashed over 100 feet into the oncoming lane.
Police say the impact of the crash forced the vehicle to skid across the roadway and hit a tree in a nearby school parking lot.
According to police, the driver and passenger were taken to a local hospital to be treated for minor injuries.
Police say the driver, a 46-year-old man from Barrie has been charged with dangerous driving. He is scheduled to appear in the Barrie Court of Justice on Oct. 1. ||||| | – A Canadian man discovered his Tesla could fly, the downside being that it's now "demolished." With a security camera observing, the scene unfolded shortly after 8:30pm Tuesday in Barrie, 70 miles north of Toronto, reports CTV News. Police say a 46-year-old man driving a 2016 four-door Tesla sped over an incline approaching railway tracks and went airborne before crashing 100 feet away in the opposite lane. Per Global News, the car then skidded into a school parking lot, where it hit a tree. The driver, charged with dangerous driving, was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, along with a passenger. "It may look 'cool' and like something from out of the movies, but in reality the action of this driver put many lives at risk, including his own," reads a tweet from Barrie Police. The video shared Wednesday has more than 650,000 views. |
Fifty-two percent say the death penalty is applied fairly
PRINCETON, NJ -- Sixty-one percent of Americans approve of using the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, down from 64% last year. This is the lowest level of support since 1972, the year the Supreme Court voided all existing state death penalty laws in Furman v. Georgia.
Gallup first asked about use of the death penalty in murder cases in 1936. At that time, 59% of Americans supported it and 38% opposed it. Americans' views on the death penalty have varied significantly over the 75 years since, including a period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when less than a majority of Americans favored it. Support climbed to its highest levels from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, including the all-time high of 80% who favored the death penalty in 1994. Since then, support has gradually declined; this year's measure of 61% marks a 19-percentage-point drop over the past 17 years, and a 3-point drop from last year's measure.
The Oct. 6-9 poll was conducted shortly after the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, which generated widespread protests and extensive news coverage. This could help explain the slight drop in support for the death penalty this year. However, there have been high-profile executions in the news in previous years without concomitant drops in death penalty support, making it less clear that such events have a direct impact on attitudes.
Less Than Half Say Death Penalty Not Imposed Often Enough
This year, 40% of Americans say the death penalty is not imposed often enough, the lowest such percentage since May 2001, when Gallup first asked this question. Twenty-five percent say the death penalty is used too often, the highest such percentage yet that Gallup has measured. The rest (27%) say the death penalty is imposed about the right amount.
Similarly, attitudes about how fairly the death penalty is applied in the U.S. have become less positive this year. Fifty-two percent of Americans say the death penalty is applied fairly in this country, down from 58% last year, but similar to the 51% who felt this way in June 2000.
Republicans, Those in Midwest and South Most Likely to Express Support for Death Penalty
Support for the death penalty is highly partisan in nature. Almost three-quarters of Republicans and independents who lean Republican approve, compared with 46% of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic. Additionally, men, whites, and those living in the South and Midwest are among those most likely to support the death penalty. Americans younger than age 30 are less likely to support the death penalty than are those who are 30 and older.
Bottom Line
Support for the death penalty in cases of murder has varied substantially over the past 75 years. A majority of Americans supported the death penalty when Gallup first asked about it in 1936, and less than a majority supported it in various Gallup polls between 1957 and 1971, but support has returned to a majority level since. Support peaked in the 1990s as concerns about crime rose, but since that point it has declined, although a clear majority of Americans still favor its use in cases of murder.
Recent years have seen renewed controversy over the death penalty's use, including the 2010 execution of Teresa Lewis in Virginia, the first woman to be executed in that state in almost 100 years, and the execution of Davis in September of this year. It is not clear whether the death penalty will be an issue in next year's presidential race, although Texas Gov. Rick Perry was asked in a recent Republican debate about his state's status as the most frequent in carrying out the death penalty.
A separate Gallup trend question, not asked this year, explicitly offers respondents the opportunity to choose between the death penalty and life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, and last year's update found about half of Americans preferring the latter option. On the other hand, Gallup has found support for the use of the death penalty rising when Americans are asked about specific cases involving high-profile mass killings, such as the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh. ||||| Support for the death penalty in the United States has fallen to a 39-year low, a Gallup poll shows.
The survey found that 61 percent of Americans back the death penalty, down from 64 percent last year, the lowest since 1972 when the Supreme Court ruled on Furman v. Georgia, which lead to a moratorium on capital punishment for several years.
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Of those polled, 40 percent said the death penalty is not imposed “often enough,” the lowest level since Gallup first asked the question in May 2001. Meanwhile, 25 percent said the death penalty is used “too often,” and 27 percent said it is used “about the right amount.”
The survey also indicates that Americans feel less confident that the death penalty is applied fairly than they have in recent years, with 52 percent saying they think the punishment is used fairly, down from 58 percent last year.
Republicans and independents who lean Republican are far more likely to approve of the death penalty — 73 percent of them said they approve, compared with 46 percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democrat. More men also expressed stronger support for capital punishment, with 64 percent of men saying they approve of the method while 57 of females said the same.
Support for the death penalty was highest in the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, with an all-time high of 80 percent expressing support for it in 1994.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 6-9 among 1,005 adults via telephone interviews. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points. ||||| | – A full 61% of Americans back the death penalty, but even so, support is at a 39-year low. A new Gallup poll finds that support is down from 64% last year, and is at its lowest level since a brief moratorium on capital punishment began in 1972 with the Supreme Court ruling on Furman v. Georgia. The news comes on the heels of an exoneration last night, when DNA evidence freed a Texas man. The poll also found that 52% think the death penalty is applied fairly, down from last year’s 58%. One-quarter of those polled said the death penalty is imposed “too often,” while 27% believe it is used “about the right amount” and 40% said it should be imposed more often. That 40% also represents the lowest level since Gallup began asking the question in 2001. Men, Republicans, and right-leaning independents were all more likely to support the death penalty. Support for capital punishment hit an all-time high of 80% in 1994, Politico notes. In other death penalty news, find out which state wants to bring back firing squads. |
Photo
At first the police in the southeastern city of Wenzhou suspected the two men were loading a human corpse into their S.U.V. The person-shaped object they were carrying was wrapped in a striped tarpaulin, of the kind commonly seen on construction sites across China, and bound in rope.
So Zheng Chuan and Li Kewu, Wenzhou city special police officers who were on their way to a training session Wednesday morning, stopped their vehicle to investigate, the news portal Wenzhou Online reported. Further arousing their suspicions, one of the men immediately fled the scene.
But when they unwrapped the tarpaulin, the two officers were stunned to find a dead tiger. The police apprehended the man who had remained by the S.U.V. and impounded the tiger and the vehicle, according to a notice posted on an official Sina Weibo account.
The police identified the man in custody as the owner of the S.U.V., a 31-year-old surnamed Wang from Fuzhou, in Jiangxi Province, and said they had detained him on suspicion of illegal trade in an endangered species. The police report said the authorities suspected the carcass to be of a Siberian, or Amur, tiger, one of the world’s most endangered animals, and had sent samples to be tested. As of Thursday, the police said the investigation was continuing. No information was released on the suspect who ran away.
Under Chinese criminal law, anyone convicted of illegally capturing, killing or trading in endangered species can face fines and 10 years in prison.
According to the conservation group W.W.F., there are now only around 450 Siberian tigers left in the wild, mostly in Russia. The Siberian tiger was once thought to be extinct in China because of environmental degradation and poaching, but government and nongovernmental organization efforts to protect the tigers’ natural habitat in the northeast have met with some success in recent years. Forestry officials estimated in 2013 that there were 18 to 22 wild Siberian tigers in China.
The captive tiger population is much larger. In a report last year, the London-based conservation group Environmental Investigation Agency estimated that China had 5,000 to 6,000 tigers in captivity, including Siberian tigers.
Visitors to the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang can take bus tours through a vast outdoor reserve that is home to more than 600 captive Siberian tigers, as well as lions and other large cats. Tigers, solitary animals by nature, can be see congregating in groups at the park, where their diet is fortified by the occasional chicken or sheep that tourists can pay to have released.
A significant threat to the tiger population, animal conservation groups say, comes from increasing demand for tiger skins and tiger bone wine, which is thought to have medicinal qualities. Although China has ratified the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which also calls for prohibitions on domestic trade, the Environmental Investigation Agency says that China continues to allow trade in tiger parts from captive tigers.
Rising demand from a growing middle class in China has also stimulated trade in other animal products in recent years, including elephant ivory. The government has taken steps to crack down on this illegal trade, most recently winning plaudits from conservationist organizations for destroying more than six tons of confiscated ivory. ||||| | 23
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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Physically and emotionally demanding. That’s how Philipp Henschel, Lion Program Survey Coordinator for the big-cat conservation organization Panthera, describes the six years he and other researchers spent combing the wilds of 17 nations looking for the elusive and rarely studied West African lion. The results of their quest were disheartening to say the least. Back in 2005, before the survey began, West African lions were believed to live in 21 different protected areas. But now a paper about the survey, published today in PLoS One, confirms that lions actually exist in just four of those sites. Worse still, the researchers estimate that the total population for West African lions is only about 400 animals, including fewer than 250 mature individuals of breeding age.
West African lions—historically referred to as the subspecies Panthera leo senegalensis, although that taxonomic designation is not currently in use—are smaller than and genetically distinct from their southern and eastern African relatives, which are also in decline and currently number about 35,000 big cats. Recent genetic tests link them more closely to the extinct Barbary lion of northern Africa and the critically endangered Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica) in India, which also has a population of about 450 animals.
Although shocking, the news of the lions’ near extinction should probably not come as a surprise given the context of the region. The populations of other large mammal species declined an average of 85 percent in West Africa between 1970 and 2005, mostly to feed the voracious demand of the bushmeat trade. The 11 nations of West Africa are among the poorest on earth and include six of the world’s least developed countries. The countries in the region have no money for conservation, and the study found that most of the protected areas that were expected to contain lions had little to no enforcement, security patrols or management. National parks are frequently overrun by tens of thousands of domesticated cattle. Henschel describes many of the so-called protected areas as “paper parks”—conservation sites in name only.
Devastating Realization
The research team conducted in-person surveys in 13 of the 21 protected areas—each of which was larger than 500 square kilometers—and relied on field reports from scientists studying other species in the eight smaller sites. Although some of the work could be done from vehicles, that wasn’t an option in many sites. “Due to the complete lack of roads in some protected areas, we had to conduct all survey work on foot in those areas, hiking up to 600 kilometers through rough terrain during individual surveys,” Henschel says. The research was also sometimes quite dangerous. “Encounters with aggressive poachers, and, in some countries, rebel groups, were frequent.”
The human encounters also illustrated some of the dangers the lions face (the cats are often killed as pests). “In many of the protected areas we surveyed, we also conducted interviews with various groups about the potential presence of lions,” Henschel says. “One group we targeted for interviews were herders of the Fulani ethnic group, which is the largest migratory pastoralist group in Africa, and extends across all of West Africa. We often encountered Fulani herders and their cattle deep inside protected areas, and individuals interviewed almost uniformly admitted to carrying poison to kill any lions that attacked their herds.”
Even harder than the travel was the fact that the researchers rarely saw evidence of any lions. “It was devastating to realize that despite all this physical effort, despite weeks spent searching for spoor, no lion sign could be found in so many areas,” he says.
But their work was not completely in vain. They did find spoors, tracks and other evidence of lions in the four sites and ever-so-rarely laid eyes on an actual lion. Henschel says the most rewarding encounter occurred in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park. They had been searching the area for more than a month under extreme heat—”over 95 degrees Fahrenheit even at night”— when they finally spotted a big cat. “What says it all, concerning the rarity of the lion in the park, is that not one of my four survey team members, all long-serving national park service staff, had ever seen a lion in their lives. It was extremely rewarding to see how excited they all were to finally have seen the animal that is also a symbol of national pride in Senegal.”
The Counts
The researchers found the most West African lions in W-Arly-Pendjari, a complex of parks that crosses the borders of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger, which they estimate to hold about 350 big cats. The three other sites in Senegal and Nigeria are each estimated to have fewer than 50 lions. None of the sites are anywhere near each other, as you can see in the map below:
(The map also shows the sites of two possible but unconfirmed lion sites in Guinea. No lions have been seen there in more than 10 years, but the authors write in their paper that “credible reports of vocalizations suggest they may still be present.”)
In addition to their low numbers, the lions also live at a very low density of about 1 lion per 100 square kilometers. Lions in East Africa live in populations fifteen times denser. Despite this stretched out distribution, Henschel reports the good news that cubs were observed, both in person and via their spoor, meaning the cats are finding each other well enough to mate. “Lions at all four sites where the species was confirmed present are still reproducing successfully,” he says.
What Comes Next?
“Now that this massive survey effort has been concluded,” Henschel says, “we finally know where lions remain and where we need to invest our efforts to save them. This was a vital first step, but the real work of saving them is only just beginning. Even the protected areas that retain lions are understaffed and underequipped. We intend to assist lion range countries in improving management effectiveness of the areas containing lions by helping them to increase the numbers, expertise, and operating budgets of enforcement personnel in protected areas with lions.” He says that will help to “curb the killing of lion prey and illegal incursions into protected areas by pastoralists.”
Beyond that, the genetic material collected from lion droppings during the surveys will be assessed to determine the animals’ genetic diversity and health. Along those same lines, the IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group, which determines the conservation status of wild cats around the world, is also tackling the thorny issue of lion taxonomy, which may result in new classification for the West African lion. The IUCN currently lists the West African lion as a population, not a separate subspecies, and considers it to be endangered. “If West African lions were indeed classified as a separate subspecies by IUCN/SSC, we would recommend listing them as Critically Endangered,” Henschel says.
Panthera president Luke Hunter, who co-authored the new study, also hopes that the world will take notice of these lions, which have been ignored until now. “Lions have undergone a catastrophic collapse in West Africa,” he said in a press release. “The countries that have managed to retain them are struggling with pervasive poverty and very little funding for conservation. To save the lion—and many other critically endangered mammals including unique populations of cheetahs, African wild dogs and elephants—will require a massive commitment of resources from the international community.” Whether that aid and assistance will materialize in one of the poorest and least supported regions on earth remains to be seen.
Previously in Extinction Countdown:
Photo: A male lion in photographed in 2012 in Pendjari National Park during Panthera’s survey of the W-Arly-Pendjari complex. © Philip Henschel/Panthera. Used with permission ||||| Surabaya. Only two days after a wildebeest was found dead in its cage, an African lion was also found dead at the Surabaya Zoo, which has been globally slammed on for its poor treatment for the animals in its care.
The 18-month-old male African Lion named Michael was found dead after its head got stuck between steel cables in his cage.
“Michael was found dead on Tuesday morning when the zoo keeper was checking his cage,” Surabaya Zoo spokesman Agus Supangkat said.
Each of the zoo’s lions spends its days in two different cages. Every morning the lions would be taken to a display cage where zoo visitors could watch them, then in the afternoon they would be moved to another cage where they slept, Agus explained.
He said the zoo used steel cables to secure the cage so zookeepers did not have to manually open or close the cage door with their hands — a safety precaution, which prevents them from being attacked by the animals.
“We are still investigating how the steel cables could entrap the African lion’s head,” Agus said.
He declined to confirm that Michael’s needless death was caused by zookeepers’ negligence.
“Michael was relatively young, he was only one-and-half-years old; it could be that he was playing around and somehow his head got stuck,” he said.
With Michael’s death there are only four African lions left at the zoo. The young lion had been rescued by East Java Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) before he was sent to the Surabaya zoo in March last year.
Surabaya Police have meanwhile started an investigation into the lion’s death.
Surabaya Police detectives chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Farman said a team has visited the zoo to gather evidence but the lion’s corpse had been removed.
Farhan would not say whether police believe the zoo was trying to hamper the investigation by getting rid of the lion’s remains.
“We are going to wait for the autopsy results, then we can further examine the case,” he said.
On Sunday evening a wildebeest was found dead in its cage.
Agus said signs of the wildebeest’s deteriorating health had been noticed several days prior to its death. The animal’s assigned keeper had reported its illness to the zoo’s medical team, which then moved it to conduct tests and a medical evaluation. Despite this, the wildebeest’s health worsened.
According to Agus, an autopsy showed an intestinal complication as the cause of death.
The issue raised speculation that poor maintenance and upkeep of the animals had contributed to Sunday’s death. But Agus denied allegations that officials had not been feeding the animal appropriately, citing the medical team’s autopsy results, which showed the wildebeest still had food in his stomach at the time of death.
He added that poor weather conditions may have been a contributing factor.
It was not the first time Surabaya Zoo officials blamed the weather as a cause of death of animals in its care. In October, an orangutan named Betty was found dead after suffering from pneumonia, an illness zoo officials blamed on the city’s heat.
Saturday’s death reduces the zoo’s wildebeest population to only one, a female.
The Taman Safari II zoo in Prigen, Pasuruan, East Java, donated the wildebeest to the Surabaya Zoo in April.
The death follows a string of animal deaths within the confines of the Surabaya Zoo, with 43 having died between July and September last year.
The zoo has been in the media spotlight since the mysterious deaths of a lion and a kangaroo a few years ago.
Surabaya Zoo has also been condemned for the death of a giraffe — found to have had 20 kilograms of plastic in its stomach — and for the death of a Sumatran tiger, which was found with a rotten digestive tract after being regularly fed meat laced with formaldehyde.
Many other animals at the zoo have also perished, allegedly from neglect, starvation, maltreatment and unnatural causes in recent years, while others are reportedly seen living in dirty, cramped cages suffering from illnesses.
This earned the zoo the nickname “zoo of death” in international media.
Animal rights activists have called for the zoo’s closure, but later reneged on the suggestion over concerns that the estimated 3,000 remaining animals would struggle to find new homes. ||||| Lion found hanging in cage at notorious Indonesian ‘death zoo’
By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, January 9, 2014 7:43 EST
A young African lion has died after getting its head caught in cables in its cage at an Indonesian zoo notorious for hundreds of animal deaths in recent years, it was announced Thursday.
The 18-month-old lion named Michael was found early Tuesday at the zoo in Surabaya, in the east of the main island of Java, said zoo spokesman Agus Supangkat.
“The lion was found hanging from the roof of his cage. He was very young and got his head stuck in cables that keepers use to open and close the cage,” Supangkat told AFP.
Supangkat insisted that the death was an accident and not due to negligence. Police were investigating its death, he added.
The incident came just two days after a wildebeest was found dead in its cage at the zoo, which has been dubbed the “death zoo” because so many animals have died there prematurely in recent years due to neglect.
Among them have been endangered orangutans, a tiger whose food was laced with formaldehyde and a giraffe found dead with a beachball-sized lump of plastic in its stomach, after eating food wrappers thrown into its pen over the years.
The wildebeest died on Sunday evening of intestinal complications.
Supangkat insisted the wildebeest had been properly fed and said it became sick after days of intense rain and humidity.
The management of the zoo — Indonesia’s biggest — has been taken over by the Surabaya city administration, but the deaths have not stopped and animal welfare groups continue to call for its closure.
African lions are found in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies them as vulnerable. ||||| | – Lions are on the verge of extinction in West Africa, a stunning new survey has concluded, after years of harrowing treks in search of them. When researchers started their search in 2005, the lions, a distinct species from their east and south African brethren, were believed to inhabit 21 protected areas. But as the team searched those areas, they encountered "aggressive poachers, and, in some countries, rebel groups"—but almost no signs of lions, Scientific American reports. In the end, they concluded that lions still live in just four of the protected zones, and that there were likely only around 400 of them left, including just 250 adults. These lions are desperately spread out as well, with roughly one per 1,000 square kilometers, but there is evidence of successful breeding in all four areas. "We finally know where lions remain," the program's coordinator said, "and where we need to invest our efforts to save them." In other depressing big cat news: An 18-month-old lion was found hanging dead from the roof of his cage at the Surabaya City Zoo in Indonesia, officials announced today. The lion, named Michael, had gotten his head stuck in the steel cables used to open and close the cage, the AFP reports via Raw Story. The Surabaya zoo is notorious for its frequent animal deaths; the lion is the second in the past three days, the Jakarta Globe reports. Police stopped two men loading what they assumed was a human corpse into an SUV in Wenzhou, China yesterday, only to discover that the tarp-wrapped corpse actually belonged to a Siberian tiger, one of the most endangered species on Earth, the New York Times reports. The two men fled, but another man who was still inside the SUV was apprehended. |
Liberal champion Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Sunday delivered a stirring defense of Black Lives Matter, characterizing it as a modern and necessary civil rights movement.
The full-throated defense of the movement contrasted with comments from other national politicians, whose remarks on Black Lives Matter have ranged from cautious to missing the point — like when Martin O'Malley said that "all lives matter."
One of the most powerful moments in the speech came when Warren criticized opponents of Black Lives Matter, who say the movement to end racial disparities in the criminal justice system is inciting violence. "Watch them when they march through the streets — 'hands up, don't shoot' — not to incite a riot, but to fight for their lives," she said at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. "To fight for their lives."
Warren: It goes even deeper than criminal justice disparities
Warren's remarks went further than the disparities in the criminal justice system, speaking to voting rights, economic inequality, housing discrimination, and predatory banking practices:
Fifty years after John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out, violence against African Americans has not disappeared. And what about voting rights? Two years ago, five conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates ever wider for measures designed to suppress minority voting. Today, the specific tools of oppression have changed — voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and mass disfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates black citizens. The tools have changed, but black voters are still deliberately cut out of the political process. … Today, 90 percent of Americans see no real wage growth. For African-Americans, who were so far behind earlier in the 20th century, this means that since the 1980s they have been hit particularly hard. In January of this year, African-American unemployment was 10.3 percent — more than twice the rate of white unemployment. And, after beginning to make progress during the civil rights era to close the wealth gap between black and white families, in the 1980s the wealth gap exploded, so that from 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between black and white families tripled.
Ultimately, Warren called for various policies to help bring down these disparities — from police-worn body cameras that would help hold officers accountable to steps that would make voting simpler and easier, such as automatic voter registration and making Election Day a holiday.
Warren on why "it is important to cause necessary trouble"
Warren finished her speech with a powerful anecdote, characterizing Black Lives Matter as a continuation of the civil rights struggles of more than 50 years ago:
Back in March, I met an elderly man at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. We were having coffee and doughnuts in the church basement before the service started. He told me that more than 50 years earlier — in May of 1961 — he had spent 11 hours in that same basement, along with hundreds of people, while a mob outside threatened to burn down the church because it was a sanctuary for civil rights workers. Dr. King called Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, desperately asking for help. The attorney general promised to send the Army, but the closest military base was several hours away. So the members of the church and the civil rights workers waited in the sweltering basement, crowded together, listening to the mob outside and hoping the US Army would arrive in time. After the church service, I asked Congressman John Lewis about that night. He had been right there in that church back in 1961 while the mob gathered outside. He had been in the room during the calls to the attorney general. I asked if he had been afraid that the Army wouldn't make it in time. He said that he was "never, ever afraid. You come to that point where you lose all sense of fear." And then he said something I'll never forget. He said that his parents didn't want him to get involved in civil rights. They didn't want him to "cause trouble." But he had done it anyway. He told me, "Sometimes it is important to cause necessary trouble."
Read the full speech
Thank you. I'm grateful to be here at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. This place is a fitting tribute to our champion, Ted Kennedy. A man of courage, compassion, and commitment, who taught us what public service is all about. Not a day goes by that we don't miss his passion, his enthusiasm, and — most of all — his dedication to all of our working families.
As the senior senator from Massachusetts, I have the great honor of sitting at Sen. Kennedy's desk — right over there. The original, back in Washington, is a little more dented and scratched, but it has something very special in the drawer. Ted Kennedy carved his name in it. When I sit at my desk, sometimes when I'm waiting to speak or to vote, I open the drawer and run my thumb across his name. It reminds me of the high expectations of the people of Massachusetts, and I try, every day, to live up to the legacy he left behind.
Sen. Kennedy took office just over 50 years ago, in the midst of one of the great moral and political debates in American history — the debate over the Civil Rights Act. In his first speech on the floor of the Senate, just four months after his brother's assassination, he stood up to support equal rights for all Americans. He ended that speech with a powerful personal message about what the civil rights struggle meant to the late President Kennedy:
His heart and soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.
"We should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace." That's what I'd like to talk about today.
A half-century ago, when Sen. Kennedy spoke of the Civil Rights Act, entrenched, racist power did everything it could to sustain oppression of African Americans, and violence was its first tool. Lynchings, terrorism, intimidation. The 16th Street Baptist Church. Medgar Evers. Emmett Till. When Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood before the nation and declared during his 1963 inaugural address that he would defend "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," he made clear that the state would stand with those who used violence.
But violence was not the only tool. African Americans were effectively stripped of citizenship when they were denied the right to vote. The tools varied — literacy tests, poll taxes, moral character tests, grandfather clauses — but the results were the same. They were denied basic rights of citizenship and the chance to participate in self-government.
The third tool of oppression was to deliberately deny millions of African Americans economic opportunities solely because of the color of their skin.
I have often spoken about how America built a great middle class. Coming out of the Great Depression, from the 1930s to the late 1970s, as GDP went up, wages went up for most Americans. But there's a dark underbelly to that story. While median family income in America was growing — for both white and African-American families — African-American incomes were only a fraction of white incomes. In the mid-1950s, the median income for African-American families was just a little more than half the income of white families.
And the problem went beyond just income. Look at housing: For most middle class families in America, buying a home is the number one way to build wealth. It's a retirement plan — pay off the house and live on Social Security. An investment option — mortgage the house to start a business. It's a way to help the kids get through college, a safety net if someone gets really sick, and, if all goes well and Grandma and Grandpa can hang on to the house until they die, it's a way to give the next generation a boost — extra money to move the family up the ladder.
For much of the 20th century, that's how it worked for generation after generation of white Americans — but not black Americans. Entire legal structures were created to prevent African Americans from building economic security through home ownership. Legally-enforced segregation. Restrictive deeds. Redlining. Land contracts. Coming out of the Great Depression, America built a middle class, but systematic discrimination kept most African-American families from being part of it.
State-sanctioned discrimination wasn't limited to home ownership. The government enforced discrimination in public accommodations, discrimination in schools, discrimination in credit — it was a long and spiteful list.
Economic justice is not — and has never been — sufficient to ensure racial justice. Owning a home won't stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn. Admission to a school won't prevent a beating on the sidewalk outside. But when Dr. King led hundreds of thousands of people to march on Washington, he talked about an end to violence, access to voting AND economic opportunity. As Dr. King once wrote, "the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice."
The tools of oppression were woven together, and the civil rights struggle was fought against that oppression wherever it was found — against violence, against the denial of voting rights, and against economic injustice.
The battles were bitter and sometimes deadly. Fire hoses turned on peaceful protestors. Police officers setting their dogs to attack black students. Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But the civil rights movement pushed this country in a new direction. The federal government cracked down on state-sponsored violence. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all called out the National Guard, and, in doing so, declared that everyone had a right to equal protection under the law, guaranteed by the Constitution. Congress protected the rights of all citizens to vote with the Voting Rights Act.
And economic opportunities opened up when Congress passed civil rights laws that protected equal access to employment, public accommodations, and housing.
In the same way that the tools of oppression were woven together, a package of civil rights laws came together to protect black people from violence, to ensure access to the ballot box, and to build economic opportunity. Or to say it another way, these laws made three powerful declarations: Black lives matter. Black citizens matter. Black families matter.
Fifty years later, we have made real progress toward creating the conditions of freedom — but we have not made enough progress.
Fifty years later, violence against African Americans has not disappeared. Consider law enforcement. The vast majority of police officers sign up so they can protect their communities. They are part of an honorable profession that takes risks every day to keep us safe. We know that. But we also know — and say — the names of those whose lives have been treated with callous indifference. Sandra Bland. Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. We've seen sickening videos of unarmed black Americans cut down by bullets, choked to death while gasping for air — their lives ended by those who are sworn to protect them. Peaceful, unarmed protestors have been beaten. Journalists have been jailed. And, in some cities, white vigilantes with weapons freely walk the streets. And it's not just about law enforcement either. Just look to the terrorism this summer at Emanuel AME Church. We must be honest: Fifty years after John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out, violence against African Americans has not disappeared. And what about voting rights? Two years ago, five conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates ever wider for measures designed to suppress minority voting. Today, the specific tools of oppression have changed — voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and mass disfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates black citizens. The tools have changed, but black voters are still deliberately cut out of the political process.
Violence. Voting. And what about economic injustice? Research shows that the legal changes in the civil rights era created new employment and housing opportunities. In the 1960s and the 1970s, African-American men and women began to close the wage gap with white workers, giving millions of black families hope that they might build real wealth. But then, Republicans' trickle-down economic theory arrived. Just as this country was taking the first steps toward economic justice, the Republicans pushed a theory that meant helping the richest people and the most powerful corporations get richer and more powerful. I'll just do one statistic on this: From 1980 to 2012, GDP continued to rise, but how much of the income growth went to the 90 percent of America — everyone outside the top 10 percent — black, white, Latino? None. Zero. Nothing. 100 percent of all the new income produced in this country over the past 30 years has gone to the top 10 percent.
Today, 90 percent of Americans see no real wage growth. For African-Americans, who were so far behind earlier in the 20th century, this means that since the 1980s they have been hit particularly hard. In January of this year, African-American unemployment was 10.3 percent — more than twice the rate of white unemployment. And after beginning to make progress during the civil rights era to close the wealth gap between black and white families, in the 1980s the wealth gap exploded, so that from 1984 to 2009 the wealth gap between black and white families tripled.
The 2008 housing collapse destroyed trillions in family wealth across the country, but the crash hit African Americans like a punch in the gut. Because middle-class black families' wealth was disproportionately tied up in home ownership and not other forms of savings, these families were hit harder by the housing collapse. But they also got hit harder because of discriminatory lending practices — yes, discriminatory lending practices in the 21st century. Recently several big banks and other mortgage lenders paid hundreds of millions in fines, admitting that they illegally steered black and Latino borrowers into more expensive mortgages than white borrowers who had similar credit. Tom Perez, who at the time was the assistant attorney general for civil rights, called it a "racial surtax." And it's still happening — earlier this month, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed a discrimination complaint against real estate agents in Mississippi after an investigation showed those agents consistently steering white buyers away from interracial neighborhoods and black buyers away from affluent ones. Another investigation showed similar results across our nation's cities. Housing discrimination alive and well in 2015. Violence, voting, economic justice.
We have made important strides forward. But we are not done yet. And now, it is our time. I speak today with the full knowledge that I have not personally experienced and can never truly understand the fear, the oppression, and the pain that confronts African Americans every day. But none of us can ignore what is happening in this country. Not when our black friends, family, neighbors literally fear dying in the streets.
Listen to the brave, powerful voices of today's new generation of civil rights leaders. Incredible voices. Listen to them say: "If I die in police custody, know that I did not commit suicide." Watch them when they march through the streets — "hands up, don't shoot" — not to incite a riot, but to fight for their lives. To fight for their lives.
This is the reality all of us must confront, as uncomfortable and ugly as that reality may be. It comes to us to once again affirm that black lives matter, that black citizens matter, that black families matter.
Once again, the task begins with safeguarding our communities from violence. We have made progress, but it is a tragedy when any American cannot trust those who have sworn to protect and serve. This pervasive and persistent distrust isn't based on myths. It is grounded in the reality of unjustified violence.
Policing must become a truly community endeavor — not in just a few cities, but everywhere. Police forces should look like, and come from, the neighborhoods they serve. They should reach out to support and defend the community — working with people in neighborhoods before problems arise. All police forces — not just some — must be trained to deescalate and to avoid the likelihood of violence. Body cameras can help us know what happens when someone is hurt. We honor the bravery and sacrifice that our law enforcement officers show every day on the job — and the noble intentions of the vast majority of those who take up the difficult job of keeping us safe. But police are not occupying armies. This is America, not a war zone — and policing practices in all cities — not just some — need to reflect that.
Next, voting.
It's time to call out the recent flurry of new state law restrictions for what they are: an all-out campaign by Republicans to take away the right to vote from poor and black and Latino American citizens who probably won't vote for them. The push to restrict voting is nothing more than a naked grab to win elections that they can't win if every citizen votes. Two years ago the Supreme Court eviscerated critical parts of the Voting Rights Act. Congress could easily fix this, and Democrats in the Senate have called for restoration of voting rights. Now it is time for Republicans to step up to support a restoration of the Voting Rights Act — or to stand before the American people and explain why they have abandoned America's most cherished liberty, the right to vote.
And while we're at it, we need to update the rules around voting. Voting should be simple. Voter registration should be automatic. Get a driver's license, get registered automatically. Nonviolent, law-abiding citizens should not lose the right to vote because of a prior conviction. Election Day should be a holiday, so no one has to choose between a paycheck and a vote. Early voting and vote by mail would give fast food and retail workers who don't get holidays day off a chance to proudly cast their votes. The hidden discrimination that comes with purging voter rolls and short-staffing polling places must stop. The right to vote remains essential to protect all other rights, and no candidate for president or for any other elected office — Republican or Democrat — should be elected if they will not pledge to support full, meaningful voting rights.
Finally, economic justice. Our task will not be complete until we ensure that every family — regardless of race — has a fighting chance to build an economic future for themselves and their families. We need less talk and more action about reducing unemployment, ending wage stagnation, and closing the income gap between white and nonwhite workers.
And one more issue, dear to my heart: It's time to come down hard on predatory practices that allow financial institutions to systematically strip wealth out of communities of color. One of the ugly consequences of bank deregulation was that there was no cop on the beat when too many financial institutions figured out that they could make great money by tricking, trapping, and defrauding targeted families. Now we have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we need to make sure it stays strong and independent so that it can do its job and make credit markets work for black families, Latino families, white families — all families.
Yes, there's work to do.
Back in March, I met an elderly man at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. We were having coffee and doughnuts in the church basement before the service started. He told me that more than 50 years earlier — in May of 1961 — he had spent 11 hours in that same basement, along with hundreds of people, while a mob outside threatened to burn down the church because it was a sanctuary for civil rights workers. Dr. King called Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, desperately asking for help. The attorney general promised to send the Army, but the closest military base was several hours away. So the members of the church and the civil rights workers waited in the sweltering basement, crowded together, listening to the mob outside and hoping the US Army would arrive in time.
After the church service, I asked Congressman John Lewis about that night. He had been right there in that church back in 1961 while the mob gathered outside. He had been in the room during the calls to the attorney general. I asked if he had been afraid that the Army wouldn't make it in time. He said that he was "never, ever afraid. You come to that point where you lose all sense of fear." And then he said something I'll never forget. He said that his parents didn't want him to get involved in civil rights. They didn't want him to "cause trouble." But he had done it anyway. He told me, "Sometimes it is important to cause necessary trouble."
The first civil rights battles were hard fought. But they established that black lives matter. That black citizens matter. That black families matter. Half a century later, we have made real progress, but we have not made enough progress. As Sen. Kennedy said in his first floor speech, "This is not a political issue. It is a moral issue, to be resolved through political means." So it comes to us to continue the fight, to make, as John Lewis said, the "necessary trouble" until we can truly say that in America, every citizen enjoys the conditions of freedom. Thank you. ||||| Senator Elizabeth Warren embraced the Black Lives Matter protest movement in a forceful speech in Boston on Sunday, calling on police departments to train their officers in the de-escalation of violence and to outfit them with body cameras.
Warren, speaking at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, emphasized that most police officers serve honorably. But she did not mince words in describing the police brutality that has become a national topic of conversation.
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“We have seen sickening videos of unarmed, black Americans cut down by bullets, choked to death while gasping for air — their lives ended by those who are sworn to protect them,” she said. “Peaceful, unarmed protesters have been beaten. Journalists have been jailed. And, in some cities, white vigilantes with weapons freely walk the streets.”
The speech, a high-profile endorsement of the anti-police-brutality movement by one of the nation’s most prominent politicians, combined Warren’s signature concern with economic inequality with a treatise on the damaging effects of racism.
The senator spoke of a history of subpar wages for black people and redlining in the housing market.
“Economic justice has not ever been sufficient to ensure racial justice,” she said. “Owning a home won’t stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn. Admission to school won’t prevent a beating on the sidewalk outside.” But Martin Luther King Jr., she noted, once wrote that he’d learned “the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.”
Warren spoke of a growing wealth gap between white and black families and a complaint filed by the National Fair Housing Alliance against real estate agents in Mississippi, alleging they consistently steered white families away from interracial neighborhoods and black families away from well-to-do areas.
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School who has written about Black Lives Matter, said he is not surprised Warren embraced the movement. But he said her rhetoric stands out. “Politicians have shied away from acknowledging the Black Lives Matter movement,” he said, noting that the same was true of the civil rights movement.
Warren, in her speech, positioned the protest as an heir to the civil rights movement.
Black Lives Matter, which grew out of protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the police shooting of Michael Brown, has become part of the presidential campaign, disrupting speeches by Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Hillary Clinton had a backstage encounter with activists that got national attention.
Warren said Sunday “pervasive and persistent distrust” of police in black communities “is not based on myths.” It is “grounded in the reality of unjustified violence,” she said.
“Listen to the brave, powerful voices of today’s new generation of civil rights leaders. Incredible voices,” she said. “Watch them when they march through the streets, ‘hands up don’t shoot’ — not to incite a riot, but to fight for their lives. To fight for their lives.
“This is the reality that all of us must confront, as uncomfortable and as ugly as that reality may be. It comes to us once again to affirm that black lives matter, that black citizens matter, that black families matter.” ||||| Speaking in Boston, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says black Americans still face violence, economic injustice and restrictions to voting rights. She highlights the efforts of activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. (Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate)
In a Sunday speech on racial inequality, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for broad policing reform — including de-escalation training and body cameras for all police officers — and likened the current Black Lives Matter movement to the civil rights movement that won black Americans the right to vote in the 1960s.
"None of us can ignore what is happening in this country. Not when our black friends, family, neighbors literally fear dying in the streets." Warren said. "This is the reality all of us must confront, as uncomfortable and ugly as that reality may be. It comes to us to once again affirm that black lives matter, that black citizens matter, that black families matter."
In the address, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post prior to her delivery, Warren draws direct parallels between the civil rights movement and the current anti-police-brutality movement, and it sought to link issues on economic inequality with systemic racism. She traces racial economic inequality, citing inequities in the housing system, as well as decrying restrictions to voting rights.
"Economic justice is not — and has never been — sufficient to ensure racial justice. Owning a home won’t stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn. Admission to a school won’t prevent a beating on the sidewalk outside," Warren declared. "The tools of oppression were woven together, and the civil rights struggle was fought against that oppression wherever it was found — against violence, against the denial of voting rights and against economic injustice."
[WATCH: Elizabeth Warren's full speech on racial inequality]
Warren's address, delivered at the Edward Kennedy Institute in Boston, was perhaps the most full-throated endorsement to date by a federal lawmaker for the ongoing protest movement, and it drew immediate praise from some of the most visible activists.
"Senator Warren's speech clearly and powerfully calls into question America's commitment to black lives by highlighting the role that structural racism has played and continues to play with regard to housing discrimination and voting rights," said DeRay Mckesson, a prominent activist who said he hopes to meet with Warren to further discuss racial injustice. "And Warren, better than any political leader I've yet heard, understands the protests as a matter of life or death — that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence and that the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma."
[Black Lives Matter movement finds influencing 2016 contest a challenge]
Born out of the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after the police shooting of Michael Brown last summer, the current protest movement has upended the efforts of Democratic presidential candidates to reach out to black voters. The three candidates have faced protests and interruptions at some of their campaign events. Both former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have met with some of the most visible activists, and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mckesson have agreed to meet soon.
The activists have called for a host of police reform measures, including body cameras, de-escalation training, special prosecutors in cases of police killings and a review of police union contracts.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) speaks about raising wages during the forum AFL-CIO National Summit (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
"It is a tragedy when any American cannot trust those who have sworn to protect and serve," Warren said. "This pervasive and persistent distrust isn’t based on myths. It is grounded in the reality of unjustified violence."
But the topics of police violence and reform have yet to gain significant traction in the Republican primary. In a three-hour debate held earlier this month, the topics weren't brought up once — by either the moderators or candidates.
[Why Hillary Clinton and her rivals are struggling to grasp Black Lives Matter]
At times, Warren's speech read as if it could have been authored by the activists themselves — unyielding in its criticism of police violence and even invoking the phrase "hands up, don't shoot," a Ferguson rallying cry that conservatives have attacked as a lie because the Justice Department concluded that Michael Brown's hands were most likely not up in the air when he was shot and killed by Darren Wilson.
"We’ve seen sickening videos of unarmed, black Americans cut down by bullets, choked to death while gasping for air — their lives ended by those who are sworn to protect them. Peaceful, unarmed protesters have been beaten. Journalists have been jailed. And, in some cities, white vigilantes with weapons freely walk the streets," Warren said. "And it’s not just about law enforcement either. Just look to the terrorism this summer at Emanuel AME Church [in Charleston, S.C.]. We must be honest: 50 years after John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out, violence against African Americans has not disappeared." ||||| | – On Sunday, Elizabeth Warren gave what the Washington Post is calling "the speech that Black Lives Matter activists have been waiting for." Speaking at the Edward Kennedy Institute in Boston, Warren compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the 1960s civil rights movement and called for all police officers to wear body cameras and be trained on how to de-escalate potentially violent situations, the Boston Globe reports. "It is a tragedy when any American cannot trust those who have sworn to protect and serve," she said. "This pervasive and persistent distrust isn’t based on myths. It is grounded in the reality of unjustified violence." Vox calls the speech a "full-throated defense of the movement," one that stands in contrast to how other candidates have handled the issue. "We’ve seen sickening videos of unarmed, black Americans cut down by bullets, choked to death while gasping for air—their lives ended by those who are sworn to protect them," said Warren. "Peaceful, unarmed protesters have been beaten. Journalists have been jailed. And, in some cities, white vigilantes with weapons freely walk the streets." She also discussed economic inequality as it relates to racism, pointing out the widening wealth gap between black and white families. Activists praised the speech: "Warren, better than any political leader I've yet heard, understands the protests as a matter of life or death—that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence and that the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma," says one. (Will this fire up those Biden-Warren rumors?) |
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder testifies about his FY2015 budget request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington April 3, 2014.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Justice Department will widen the criteria it uses to decide which drug offenders to recommend to the president for clemency, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday.
The department expects thousands of drug offenders currently serving time to be eligible for reduced sentences under the new clemency guidelines and it will prepare to review an influx of applications, Holder said in a video address.
Under U.S. law, the president can reduce sentences or pardon Americans serving sentences for federal crimes. The Justice Department will now recommend more candidates for the president's consideration.
Details of the new criteria will be announced later this week by Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
Holder hinted the guidelines may include applying a 2010 law that reduced sentences for crack cocaine offenders to those sentenced before the law was enacted.
"There are still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced under the old regime and who, as a result, will have to spend far more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly the same crime," Holder said in his address.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said at a press briefing on Monday that President Barack Obama asked the Department of Justice to widen the clemency guidelines.
"The president wants to make sure that everyone has a fair shot into the clemency system, and he has asked the Department of Justice to set up a process aimed at ensuring that anyone who has a good case for commutation has their application seen and evaluated thoroughly," Carney said.
Granting clemency to nonviolent drug offenders is part of the Obama administration's strategy to reduce spending on federal prisons by reducing the number of inmates serving time for nonviolent drug crimes.
Last year, Holder launched the "Smart on Crime" initiative to review the criminal justice system and look for ways to make spending on prisons more efficient by focusing on violent offenders.
Some Republicans in Congress say more lenient sentences would reverse a drop in crime seen in recent decades.
In 2010, nearly half of 216,000 federal inmates were serving time for drug-related crimes, according to Department of Justice data.
(Reporting By Julia Edwards, additional reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Paul Simao) ||||| Attorney General Eric Holder announced new clemency guidelines. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Thousands of federal offenders could become eligible for clemency consideration by President Obama under new guidelines set to be released later this week by the Justice Department.
Attorney General Eric Holder, in a video message posted Monday on the Justice website, said the expanded program will allow the president to consider clemency requests from "a larger field of eligible individuals.''
The Justice Department's action comes less than a week after the White House asked the department to revamp the rules for the solicitation of additional commutation and pardon requests.
"Once these reforms go into effect, we expect to receive thousands of additional applications for clemency,'' Holder said, adding that "potentially dozens of (department) lawyers'' would be assigned to review the anticipated wave of requests.
The effort is part of a larger strategy to reduce the bloated federal prison population and reverse past sentencing policies that doomed many offenders, including thousands of non-violent drug offenders, to disproportionately long terms.
In January, Deputy Attorney General James Cole appealed to state bar associations to help identify low-level, non-violent drug offenders who could be candidates for grants of clemency.
"As a society, we pay much too high a price whenever our system fails to deliver the just outcomes necessary to deter and punish crime, to keep us safe, and to ensure that those who have paid their debts have a chance to become productive citizens,'' Holder said.
Advocates for sentencing policy changes involving drug offenders expressed support for Holder's proposal.
"This would be a positive step toward righting the wrongs of our broken criminal justice system,'' Drug Policy Alliance spokesman Anthony Papa said. "With half a million people still behind bars on non-violent drug charges, clearly thousands are deserving of a second chance. Congress should act immediately to reduce the draconian federal mandatory minimum sentences that condemn thousands to decades behind bars for non-violent drug offenses.''
Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said he was "encouraged'' by the proposed expansion of clemency consideration.
"After years of advocating on behalf of Americans who are unfairly incarcerated, the policies that I've encouraged the president and the attorney general to adopt are now being implemented,'' Cohen said. "I am very encouraged by the prospect that these new clemency criteria will give deserving non-violent drug offenders a second chance at freedom, improve our justice system and save taxpayers money.''
The National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, which represents more than 5,000 federal prosecutors, has announced its opposition to scaling back mandatory minimum sentencing policy. But the group has not expressed opposition to the administration's clemency proposals.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the number of commutations granted "will depend entirely on the number of worthy candidates.''
"And in terms of how many deserving candidates are out there, I couldn't begin to speculate,'' he said. "But there's a process in place that reflects the president's belief that everyone should have a fair shot under the system for consideration.''
Contributing: David Jackson
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1iDjSTy ||||| | – Thousands of nonviolent drug offenders now serving long sentences in federal prisons could receive clemency from President Obama under a major Department of Justice overhaul. Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday that "a larger field of eligible individuals" will be eligible for clemency under new guidelines and the administration is preparing for a flood of requests, reports USA Today, which notes that the move is part of a broader effort to reduce the federal prison population and correct past sentencing disparities. Holder said the White House is seeking "justice, fairness, and proportionality for deserving individuals who do not pose a threat to public safety." Holder hinted that those eligible will include inmates sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before a 2010 law reduced what was called a racist disparity, reports Reuters. "There are still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced under the old regime and who, as a result, will have to spend far more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly the same crime," he said. White House spokesman Jay Carney said he didn't want to speculate on how many inmates will qualify for clemency, but there is a "process in place that reflects the president's belief that everyone should have a fair shot under the system for consideration.'' |
Aaron Hernandez was involved in a scrum with a fellow prison inmate at Tuesday, according to Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson.
Hodgson said that an investigation is underway at Bristol County House of Corrections to suss out what happened involving the Pro Bowler-turned-accused murderer, and if he or the other inmate involved should face charges in connection with it. Sheriff’s spokesman Bernie Sullivan said neither man was seriously hurt in the skirmish.
According to online reports, the other inmate had been relentlessly bullying Hernandez (who is usually kept in solitary confinement) since the football star arrived at the facility last June. When the mercurial pass-catcher caught his tormenter in a hallway, he let loose on him, and got the better end of the brawl.
PHOTOS: Inside The Aaron Hernandez Crime Scene
As we previously reported, the former New England Patriots tight end is charged with first degree murder in the Jun. 18, 2013 execution-style killing of Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player. Lloyd, who played semi-pro football for the Boston Bandits, was associated with Hernandez through his girlfriend, whose sister is Hernandez’s baby mama.
Hernandez, an All-American at the University of Florida, was inked to a $40 million, five-year deal by the Pats last year. He was unceremoniously cut by the New England Patriots two hours after his arrest earlier this summer.
GALLERY: Read Murder Suspect Aaron Hernandez’s Jailhouse Letter Here
If convicted of murder, the 24-year-old, who has pleaded not guilty to the accusations, could get life in prison with no chance of parole. ||||| Aaron Hernandez Attacks Inmate At Bristol County Jail
Aaron Hernandez -- ATTACKS INMATE at Bristol County Jail
EXCLUSIVE
ATTACKED another inmate at Bristol County Jail earlier today ... and we're told he beat the guy up pretty good ... sources tellSources tell us the former New England Patriots tight end -- who is usually segregated from the general population -- was allowed to take a walk in an isolated hallway ... but somehow came into contact with another inmate.We're told Hernandez recognized the other inmate and launched into an attack -- beating the other man up pretty badly.Sources tell us ... Hernandez and the other man had been beefing all day long. One source says the other guy had been harassing Aaron nonstop. Clearly, Hernandez was pissed.The 24-year-old has been locked up since June 26th -- he's facing murder charges stemming from the 2013 shooting death of semi-pro football playerOfficials had placed Hernandez in solitary confinement out of concern he would be a target behind bars due to his celebrity status.We reached out to the jail for comment -- so far, no word back. ||||| | – Apparently "behind bars" does not translate to "staying out of trouble" when one is Aaron Hernandez: Sources tell TMZ the former New England Patriot beat up a fellow inmate at Bristol County Jail yesterday. The sources say the two had been at odds all day (according to Radar, the other man had been "bullying" Hernandez since he was imprisoned on murder charges in June) and that Hernandez—who is typically kept separated out of concern that other inmates might target him—was for some reason allowed to walk down a hallway, where he caught sight of the other inmate and allegedly attacked him. The sheriff confirms there was a fight, but says neither inmate was seriously injured. The incident is under investigation. |
Emergency shelters will open Thursday while state offices across the Big Island will close as residents brace for a direct hit from Hurricane Iselle.
A Hawaii County official said the 11 shelters will open at noon.
Residents using the shelters should bring water, food and medication with them, he said.
Hawaii County offices, state offices and courthouses will close at noon Thursday and remain closed through Friday. Essential employees related to crucial operations will remain at work, the county said.
County and state parks are closed until further notice.
The state Department of Education closed all Big Island schools for Thursday and Friday, and University of Hawaii and Hawaii Community College campuses will also close through Friday.
Hawaii County Civil Defense Administrator Darryl Oliveira said the county contacted residents in low-lying areas to request they evacuate.
Mandatory evacuations were not planned.
Oliveira said residents across the isle should be prepared, and noted that strongest winds may occur toward the northeast side of the storm.
On Wednesday, a Hawaii County Fire Department helicopter made an emergency landing at Pololu Valley due to mechanical problems.
Battalion Chief Warren Sumida said it was making the flight as a “preventable measure” to urge people living or camping in high-risk areas to leave or see if they need to be evacuated. No one was injured, and a backup helicopter is available, he said.
Expecting the storm to have largely moved past the islands by Saturday, election officials were planning to go ahead with the primary.
“Every county, including the state, (is) at this time planning to hold a primary on Saturday,” said Rex Quidilla, state Office of Elections spokesman.
Pat Nakamoto, county elections administrator, said generators are on standby for polling places if power is not restored in time.
She said there are enough generators for each of the 41 polling places and the counting center.
“My understanding is, if all 41 need generators, we will be able to get them there,” Nakamoto said.
Walk-in voting sites will remain open from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday is the last day for walk-in voting.
Nakamoto said her office was receiving more phone calls than normal regarding early voting.
As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, the county received 14,540 mail ballots and 4,209 ballots from early walk-in voting.
The Coast Guard instructed all pleasure craft to seek sheltered waters, and announced that all oceangoing commercial vessels and barges over 200 tons are expected to leave Hilo by 4 a.m. and Kawaihae by 7 a.m.
American Airlines cancelled flights between Kahului, Maui, and Los Angeles for Thursday.
Hawaiian Airlines expects to make a decision Thursday afternoon whether to cancel flights, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park also closed its backcountry areas.
Hele-On buses were scheduled to operate as normal Thursday and Friday, though the mass transit agency was warning riders that cancellations or delays may occur with short notice.
The Democratic Party’s Grand Rally is also cancelled for Friday.
Senior nutrition and recreation programs are cancelled Thursday and Friday.
Assistant Police Chief Marshall Kanehailua said Wednesday there have been discussions at the Emergency Operations Center about notifying homeless people about the storm.
“We’ll be posting, of course, notifications about the shelter openings with officers on the beat,” he said. “When they do come across those individuals, we’ll be notifying them of the impending hurricane and what shelters are open.”
The Salvation Army released a written statement Wednesday that they’re “prepared to respond with community assistance as needed on the major Hawaiian Islands.”
“The public is encouraged to help in advance by supporting emergency disaster services efforts via monetary donations via our website …,” said Major Mark Gilden, Salvation Army’s Hawaiian & Pacific Island Division’s business secretary. “One-hundred percent of the donated funds will be used to support our emergency disaster services in Hawaii.”
Online donations may be made at www.salvationarmyhawaii.org.
Storm preparedness information can be found at http://www.scd.hawaii.gov.
Staff Writer John Burnett contributed to this story.
Email Tom Callis at [email protected].
Storm shelter locations
• Laupahoehoe School, 35-2065 Old Mamalahoa Highway, Laupahoehoe
• Kohala High & Elementary, 54-3611 Akoni Pule Highway, Kapaau
• Kealakehe High (pet friendly), 74-5000 Puohulihuli St., Kailua-Kona
• Konawaena High (pet friendly), 81-1043 Konawaena School Road, Kealakekua
• Hilo High (pet friendly), 556 Waianuenue Ave., Hilo
• Waiakea High (pet friendly), 155 W. Kawili St., Hilo
• Keaau High (pet friendly), 16-725 Keaau-Pahoa Road, Keaau
• Pahoa High & Intermediate (pet friendly), 15-3038 Pahoa Village Road, Pahoa
• Honokaa High & Intermediate (pet friendly), 45-527 Pakalana St., Honokaa
• Kau High (pet friendly), 96-3150 Pikake St., Pahala
• Waikoloa Elementary, 68-1730 Hooko St., Waikoloa Village
Source: Red Cross ||||| Tourists visiting Hawaii are anxious about what could be the first hurricane to hit the state in more than 20 years as weather officials say an approaching storm isn’t weakening as previously predicted. (AP)
Tourists visiting Hawaii are anxious about what could be the first hurricane to hit the state in more than 20 years as weather officials say an approaching storm isn’t weakening as previously predicted. (AP)
HONOLULU — The first hurricane expected to hit Hawaii in 22 years weakened slightly Thursday as its outer edges began to bring rain and wind to the Big Island, while residents and tourists prepared for a possible one-two punch as another major storm lined up behind it in the Pacific.
The eye of Hurricane Iselle was about 250 miles southeast of Hilo, moving at roughly 17 mph and expected to make landfall Thursday evening, according to the National Weather Service. Meanwhile, Hurricane Julio strengthened early Thursday into a Category 2 storm but was forecast to pass just north of the islands sometime Sunday morning.
Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie said the state is prepared for the back-to-back storms, noting the National Guard is at the ready and state and local governments were closing offices, schools and transit services across Hawaii. Emergency shelters also are being opened across the state.
Meanwhile, state Attorney General David Louie promised that Saturday’s primary elections will go forward as planned.
1 of 26 Full Screen Autoplay Close Aug. 7, 2014 Skip Ad Caption Residents of the islands boarded up windows and stocked up on water as the storm passed through. Aug. 8, 2014 Road crew workers clear a main thoroughfare of downed trees left in the wake of Tropical Storm Iselle in Pahoa, Hawaii. Bruce Omori/EPA Buy Photo
Earlier Thursday, a 4.5-magnitude earthquake struck the Big Island but didn’t cause major damage. There were no reports of injuries as residents made last-minute trips to grocery stores and boarded up their homes.
Kelsey Walker said the quake felt like a “little jolt” but didn’t knock things off shelves at the Waimea grocery store where he works. He was trying to keep a sense of humor about it.
“We have a hurricane. Now we have this on top of it. What else?” Walker mused.
Travelers got their first word of disrupted plans Thursday, when commuter airline Island Air said it was canceling some afternoon flights between the islands and shutting down all operations Friday.
Hurricane Iselle was expected to bring heavy rains, winds gusting up to 85 mph and flooding in some areas, but officials said the Big Island’s mountainous region and size should help break apart and weaken the storm as it passed on to Maui and Oahu late Thursday and early Friday.
“Not a major hurricane, but definitely enough to blow things around,” said meteorologist Mike Cantin of the National Weather Service.
Hawaii has been directly hit by hurricanes only three times since 1950, though the region has had 147 tropical storms over that time. The last time Hawaii was hit with a hurricane was in 1992, when Iniki killed six people and destroyed more than 1,400 homes in Kauai, meteorologist Eric Lau said.
The twin hurricanes have disrupted tourism, prompted flash flood warnings and led to school closures.
Hawaiian Airlines waived reservation change fees and fare differences for passengers who needed to alter their plans Thursday and Friday, while some travelers remained optimistic.
Boston resident Jonathan Yorke and his wife booked a Hawaii vacation with their two daughters last year. He has been watching the news to see how the storms could affect their two-week trip to Maui and the Big Island.
“We’re all optimists, so we’ll make the best of it,” Yorke said.
Washington state couple Tracy Black and Chris Kreifels made plans to get married in an outdoor ceremony on the Big Island on Saturday. They spent this week getting a marriage license, adjusting plans and communicating with worried guests on the mainland.
“We see the rain as a blessing,” Black said. “It will work out as it’s supposed to.”
Some residents, meanwhile, are voting early in the primary elections that include congressional and gubernatorial races.
“It’s quiet, nobody’s around right now. It’s kind of eerie” said Hilo resident Kimo Makuakane. “Everybody’s heeding the warnings — staying at home and staying indoors.”
Education officials said public schools on the Big Island, Maui, Molokai and Lanai will be closed Thursday.
Officials at Mauna Kea Observatories, a collection of 13 telescopes operated by astronomers from 11 countries located around 14,000 feet atop a dormant volcano on the Big Island, said the site was being secured and that visitor stargazing will be canceled Thursday night.
“It’s starting to get gusty on the summit of Mauna Kea,” said the observatory’s Gwen Biggert.
But the telescopes are in no danger, said Roy Gal, astronomer and outreach specialist for the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.
“Winds of 80 to 100 miles per hour are actually not uncommon on the summit,” Gal said. “We get tropical storms all the time which get comparable winds to a Category 1 hurricane.”
The storms are rare but not unexpected in years with a developing El Nino, a change in ocean temperature that affects weather around the world.
Ahead of this year’s hurricane season, weather officials warned that the wide swath of the Pacific Ocean that includes Hawaii could see four to seven tropical cyclones this year.
___
Associated Press writers Doug Esser in Seattle, Oskar Garcia in Honolulu, Karin Stanton in Kailua-Kona, and Dan Joling in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ||||| Hawaii braced for what could become the first hurricane to slam the state in nearly a quarter-century early Friday after islanders scrambled to stock up on supplies and take shelter. The outer edges of Hurricane Iselle, a Category 1 storm, brought rain and wind to the Big Island as it approached landfall. A second Category 3 storm, Julio, was close on Iselle's tail with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph. It was projected to barrel just north of the islands early Sunday morning.
8:30pm HT: Current infrared satellite imagery of #Iselle with #Hawaii sustained wind speeds and wind gusts. pic.twitter.com/6cNGaF7NfZ -Hurricane Central (@twc_hurricane) August 8, 2014
At a news conference Thursday, state officials told islanders to hunker down. Governor Neil Abercrombie said that emergency crews and response teams were “fully prepared” for heavy rains, fierce winds and flash floods. He said the National Guard was at the ready and shelters were open across the state. Transportation officials pleaded with drivers to stay off roads. Power was lost Thursday night in two communities on the Big Island: Waimea, a town of about 9,200 people near the island's north shore, and Puna, a district scattered with residents south of Hilo, Hawaii County Civil Defense officials said. American Airlines and US Airways canceled flights in and out of the Big Island and Maui after 6 p.m. Thursday through noon Friday. Iselle is poised to become the first hurricane to thump Hawaii since Hurricane Iniki made landfall in 1992. The state has been directly hit by hurricanes only three times since 1950.
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IN-DEPTH
— Daniel Arkin
The Associated Press contributed to this report. ||||| HONOLULU (AP) — Iselle was supposed to weaken as it slowly trudged west across the Pacific. It didn't — and now Hawaii is poised to take its first direct hurricane hit in 22 years.
Shoppers lift cases of bottled water in preparation for a hurricane and tropical storm heading toward Hawaii at the Iwilei Costco in Honolulu on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2014. Two big storms so close together... (Associated Press)
People lounge on Waikiki's beaches in Honolulu on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2014. Hawaii residents prepared for what could be the first hurricane to hit the state in more than 20 years as weather officials said... (Associated Press)
Shonna Snodgrass of Stafford, Va., left and Gwen Johnson of Sacramento, Calif. show the "shaka" or hang-loose sign while enjoying the sun on Waikiki beach in Honolulu on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2014. Hawaii... (Associated Press)
This image provided by NOAA taken Wednesday Aug. 6, 2014 shows Hurricane Iselle, center, and tropical storm Julio, right. Though it's not clear how damaging the storms could be, many in Hawaii aren't... (Associated Press)
This image provided by NOAA taken Thursday Aug. 7, 2014 at 2 a.m. EDT shows Hurricane Iselle, left and Hurricane Julio. Iselle was supposed to weaken as it slowly trudged west across the Pacific. It didn't... (Associated Press)
Shoppers stock up on cases of bottled water and other supplies in preparation for a hurricane and tropical storm heading toward Hawaii at the Iwilei Costco in Honolulu on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2014. Two big... (Associated Press)
Tracking close behind it was Hurricane Julio, which strengthened early Thursday into a Category 2 storm.
State officials are assuring the islands are ready and people should prepare but not panic. Tourists wonder whether their flights and activities would be disrupted and tried to get in some last-minute beach time before the surf's up, but ugly. And residents are making bottled water tougher to find than a cheap fruity cocktail.
"Everybody says this is the last day of good weather, so we came down to the beach," said Shonna Snodgrass, a tourist in Waikiki visiting from Stafford, Virginia.
Hurricane Iselle was expected to arrive on the Big Island on Thursday evening, bringing heavy rains, winds gusting up to 85 mph and flooding in some areas. Weather officials changed their outlook on the system Wednesday after seeing it get a little stronger, giving it enough oomph to stay a hurricane as it reaches landfall.
"What ended up happening is the storm has resurged just enough to keep its hurricane strength," said Mike Cantin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Cantin said that means stronger winds of 60 to 70 mph, though rainfall estimates of 5 inches to 8 inches in a short time frame remained unchanged.
"Not a major hurricane, but definitely enough to blow things around," he said.
Iselle loomed about 350 miles east of Hilo early Thursday, with sustained winds of 85 mph and traveling about 18 mph.
Cantin said the Big Island's size and terrain would help break up the hurricane, weakening it into a tropical storm as it passes Maui and Oahu late Thursday and early Friday.
"The volcanoes on the Big Island will do a number on the system," he said.
Hurricane Julio, meanwhile, swirled closely behind with maximum winds whipping at 100 mph. The National Hurricane Center said it expected the storm to strengthen even more Thursday before gradually weakening by Thursday night. That weakening is expected to continue into the weekend.
Hawaii has been directly hit by hurricanes only three times since 1950, though the region has had 147 tropical cyclones over that time. The last time Hawaii was hit with a tropical storm or hurricane was in 1992, when Hurricane Iniki killed six people and destroyed more than 1,400 homes in Kauai, said meteorologist Eric Lau.
The two hurricanes have disrupted tourism, prompted flash flood warnings and led to school closures. Gov. Neil Abercrombie, meanwhile, signed an emergency proclamation allowing officials to tap into a disaster fund set aside by the state Legislature.
"The sole purpose is to see to it the health and safety of the people of Hawaii is first and foremost," Abercrombie said at a news conference surrounded by his cabinet members.
For travelers, Hawaiian Airlines waived reservation change fees and fare differences for passengers who needed to alter travel plans Thursday and Friday because of the storms. Hawaiian Airlines spokeswoman Ann Botticelli said hundreds of inquires poured in from customers seeking to change their flights.
Some travelers remained hopeful.
Boston resident Jonathan Yorke and his wife booked a Hawaii vacation with their two daughters last year. He has been watching the news to see how the storms could affect the two-week trip to Maui and the Big Island.
"We're all optimists, so we'll make the best of it," Yorke said.
Washington state couple Tracy Black and Chris Kreifels made plans to get married in an outdoor ceremony on the Big Island Saturday. They spent Wednesday getting a marriage license, adjusting plans and communicating with worried guests on the mainland.
"We see the rain as a blessing," Black said. "It will work out as it's supposed to."
In Waikiki, Gwen Johnson wondered if she would make her flight home Thursday.
"We're leaving tomorrow and I'm a little concerned if we'll be able to get out with the turbulence and stuff," she said.
It wasn't immediately clear what financial impact the storms would have on the state's tourism industry, a key economic driver.
Hawaii residents also have had to adjust. Stores have seen long lines this week as people brace themselves.
Some are voting early in primary elections that close Saturday. The elections include several marquee races, including congressional and gubernatorial races. Abercrombie —who is running for re-election in a tight Democratic primary — said the election is expected to move forward as planned as of Wednesday afternoon.
Also, education officials said public schools on the Big Island, Maui, Molokai and Lanai will be closed Thursday.
The storms are rare but not unexpected in years with a developing El Nino, a change in ocean temperature that affects weather around the world.
Ahead of this year's hurricane season, weather officials warned that the wide swath of the Pacific Ocean that includes Hawaii could see four to seven tropical cyclones this year.
___
Associated Press Writers Doug Esser in Seattle and Oskar Garcia in Honolulu contributed to this report. ||||| | – Tag-team hurricanes Iselle and Julio will thrash Hawaii in a one-two punch that starts tonight—the first time in 22 years the islands have been directly hit. Category 1 Iselle is expected to maintain 85 mph winds when it makes landfall on the Big Island tonight. It’s "not a major hurricane, but definitely enough to blow things around," a meteorologist tells the AP; up to 8 inches of rain is expected. Iselle should weaken as it passes through the island's volcanic terrain into tomorrow morning. Just behind Iselle, Julio is a bit fiercer Category 2, with winds estimated at 100 mph; it'll pick up speed before weakening tonight and hit Sunday as a tropical storm, reports NBC News. The last hurricane to hit Hawaii was Iniki in 1992, which killed six people. Vacations are being disrupted by the storms. Island Air has canceled flights to Maui and Lanai, the Washington Post reports. Hawaiian Airlines will decide today whether to follow suit, adds the Hawaii Tribune-Herald; on the ground, state parks are closed and beachgoers are enjoying the last shreds of nice weather. One Boston resident booked his two-week Maui and Big Island vacation last year and has been eagerly watching weather reports. "We're all optimists, so we'll make the best of it," he tells the AP. Weather officials had warned this season would be an active one in the region, with up to seven tropical storms—probably due in no small part to El Nino. |
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians The Chicago Cubs celebrate after defeating the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the World Series on Thursday, November 3. The Cubs won 8-7 in 10 innings to win the series 4-3. The billy goat curse is dead. The Chicago Cubs are World Series champions at long last, winning their first Fall Classic in 108 years Hide Caption 1 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Aroldis Chapman of the Chicago Cubs reacts after Rajai Davis of the Cleveland Indians (not pictured) hit a two-run homer during the eighth inning to tie the game 6-6 in Game 7. Hide Caption 9 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jon Lester of the Chicago Cubs reacts after retiring the side during the seventh inning of Game 7. Hide Caption 12 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians David Ross of the Cubs reacts after hitting a solo home run during the sixth inning in Game 7. Hide Caption 13 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jason Kipnis and Carlos Santana of the Cleveland Indians celebrate after scoring runs on a wild pitch during the fifth inning in Game 7. Hide Caption 14 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians David Ross of the Cubs reacts after Jon Lester (not pictured) threw a wild pitch during the fifth inning, allowing 2 runs to score in Game 7. Hide Caption 15 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Javier Baez of the Cubs runs the bases after hitting a solo home run during the fifth inning in Game 7. Hide Caption 16 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Kris Bryant of the Cubs slides safely under Indians catcher Roberto Perez during the fourth inning of Game 7. Hide Caption 17 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Coco Crisp of the Indians hits a double during the third inning in Game 7. Hide Caption 18 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor of the Indians tags out Kyle Schwarber of the Cubs during the third inning of Game 7. Hide Caption 19 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Kyle Hendricks of the Cubs throws during the first inning of Game 7. Hide Caption 20 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Dexter Fowler of the Cubs celebrates after hitting a lead off home run in the first inning of Game 7. Hide Caption 21 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians The Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs stand for the national anthem prior to Game 7. Hide Caption 22 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians The Cubs celebrate after defeating the Indians 9-3 in Game 6 to even the World Series 3-3. Hide Caption 23 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs hits two-run homer during the ninth inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 24 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Aroldis Chapman of the Cubs races Francisco Lindor of the Indians to the bag during the seventh inning in Game 6. Hide Caption 25 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Addison Russell of the Cubs tosses the ball to Javier Baez (not pictured) for a force out in the sixth inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 26 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jason Kipnis of the Indians rounds the bases after a home run during the fifth inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 27 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jose Ramirez of the Indians makes a catch in the fifth inning in Game 6. Hide Caption 28 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jake Arrieta of the Cubs is in action on the mound during Game 6. Hide Caption 29 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Addison Russell of the Cubs celebrates after hitting a grand slam in the third inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 31 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Ben Zobrist of the Cubs collides with the Indians' Roberto Perez in the first inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 32 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Tyler Naquin and Lonnie Chisenhall of the Indians are unable to make a play in the first inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 33 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Kris Bryant of the Cubs hits a solo home run during the first inning of Game 6. Hide Caption 34 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians A general view during Game 6 of the 2016 World Series. Hide Caption 35 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Javier Baez, left, Jason Heyward, center, and Kris Bryant of the Cubs celebrate after Game 5. Hide Caption 38 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jason Heyward of the Chicago Cubs steals second base past Jason Kipnis of the Cleveland Indians in the eighth inning in Game 5. Hide Caption 39 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cubs right fielder Jason Heyward catches a fly ball hit by Indians' Trevor Bauer during the third inning of Game 5. Hide Caption 40 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians The Cubs' Kris Bryant, left, celebrates with Ben Zobrist after hitting a home run during the fourth inning of Game 5. Hide Caption 41 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Trevor Bauer throws during the first inning of Game 5. Hide Caption 42 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo (44) reaches for a ball bounced off from catcher David Ross who was trying to catch a foul ball hit by Cleveland's Carlos Santana during the second inning of Game 5. Hide Caption 43 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Chicago Cubs starting pitcher Jon Lester throws during the first inning of Game 5. Hide Caption 44 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor, left, and Brandon Guyer, right, of the Cleveland Indians celebrate after beating the Chicago Cubs 7-2 in Game 4 of the 2016 World Series at Wrigley Field on Saturday, October 29, in Chicago. Hide Caption 46 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Chicago Cubs center fielder Dexter Fowler can't make the catch on a double hit by Cleveland Indians' Coco Crisp during the seventh inning of Game 4. Hide Caption 47 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland Indians' Carlos Santana wears socks with the team logo before Game 4. Hide Caption 48 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor of the Cleveland Indians hits a single off of John Lackey of the Chicago Cubs in the third inning in Game 4. Hide Caption 49 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Indians second baseman Jason Kipnis collides with Cubs Jason Heyward as Kipnis turns a double play on a ball hit by the Cubs Javier Baez during the second inning of Game 4. Hide Caption 50 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland Indians' Carlos Santana hits a home run off Chicago Cubs starting pitcher John Lackey during the second inning of Game 4. Hide Caption 51 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland's Corey Kluber is safe at first as Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo can't make a play on a wild throw by third baseman Kris Bryant during the second inning of Game 4. Hide Caption 52 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Indians starting pitcher Corey Kluber throws during the first inning of Game 4. Hide Caption 54 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cubs' Anthony Rizzo hits an RBI single during the first inning of Game 4. Hide Caption 55 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor and Brandon Guyer of the Indians celebrate after beating the Cubs 1-0 in Game 3. Hide Caption 56 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Ben Zobrist of the Cubs reacts after striking out in the ninth inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 57 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Bryan Shaw of the Indians throws a pitch during the seventh inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 58 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Actor Bill Murray sings "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh inning stretch in Game 3. Hide Caption 59 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Michael Martinez of the Cleveland Indians scores a run during the seventh inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 60 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Coco Crisp of the Indians breaks his bat hitting an RBI single during the seventh inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 61 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Fans cheer in the stands after the fifth inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 62 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Justin Grimm of the Cubs reacts after a double play during the fifth inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 63 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Addison Russell of the Cubs turns an inning-ending double play in the fifth inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 64 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor of the Indians hits a single in the fourth inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 66 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Addison Russell of the Cubs makes a diving catch for an out during the third inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 67 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Josh Tomlim of the Indians pitches in the first inning in Game 3. Hide Caption 68 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians A Teddy Roosevelt impersonator stands outside Wrigley Field prior to Game 3. Hide Caption 69 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Dexter Fowler of the Cubs celebrates with Jason Heyward after defeating the Indians 5-1 in Game 2. Hide Caption 70 of 93
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Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Ben Zobrist of the Cubs in action at the plate in Game 2. Hide Caption 74 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Relief pitcher Zach McAllister and shortstop Francisco Lindor of the Indians react during fifth inning in Game 2. Hide Caption 75 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jake Arrieta of the Cubs throws a pitch during the fourth inning of Game 2. He had a no hitter through five innings. Hide Caption 76 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs celebrates scoring a run on an RBI single hit by Kyle Schwarber (not pictured) during the third inning in Game 2. Hide Caption 77 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Kyle Schwarber of the Cubs hits an RBI single during the third inning in Game 2. Hide Caption 78 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor of the Indians dives back to first on an attempted pick-off in Game 2. Hide Caption 79 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jake Arrieta of the Cubs throws a pitch during the first inning in Game 2. Hide Caption 80 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Kris Bryant of the Cubs hits a single during the first inning in Game 2. Hide Caption 81 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Francisco Lindor, left, and Rajai Davis of the Cleveland Indians celebrate after defeating the Chicago Cubs 6-0 in the Game 1. Hide Caption 82 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland's Roberto Perez hits a three-run homer in Game 1. Hide Caption 83 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Javier Baez of the Cubs tags out Cleveland's Francisco Lindor as he tries to steal second base in Game 1. Hide Caption 84 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cubs catcher David Ross falls after catching a pop fly by Cleveland's Lonnie Chisenhall in Game 1. Hide Caption 85 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland fans react to a strikeout in Game 1. Hide Caption 86 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland outfielder Rajai Davis catches a ball hit by the Cubs' Willson Contreras in Game 1. Hide Caption 87 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Jon Lester of the Cubs throws a pitch in Game 1. Hide Caption 88 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland Indians fans show their enthusiasm during the first game in Game 1. Hide Caption 89 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Addison Russell of the Cubs catches a ball hit by Cleveland's Jason Kipnis in Game 1. Hide Caption 90 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland's Jose Ramirez rounds a base after hitting a double in Game 1. Hide Caption 91 of 93
Photos: World Series 2016: Cubs vs. Indians Cleveland starting pitcher Corey Kluber throws a pitch. Kluber set a World Series record with eight strikeouts in the first three innings in Game 1. Hide Caption 92 of 93 ||||| Chicago Cubs players soaked each other with champagne as they celebrated their Nov. 2 World Series victory. (Reuters)
Chicago Cubs players soaked each other with champagne as they celebrated their Nov. 2 World Series victory. (Reuters)
Life changed in the early part of Thursday morning for so many of the good people of Chicago, for the North Side and all the way downstate, across huge swaths of the Midwest and even, judging by the din, from more than a few transplants and travelers right here. It took a rain delay, a stark reminder of just how disastrous baseball life has been there for so long, an impromptu and emotional meeting, and nothing short of one of the most thrilling baseball games ever played. But it changed.
Now, in the lives even of Chicago Cubs fans who are more than a century old, there is a clear and distinct dividing line. There are the days and years and decades before 12:47 a.m. Thursday. And there is the unfamiliar feeling — the absolutely delirious feeling — of whatever life is like now.
Take this in, Chicago. Read it twice if need be. Hold it, cradle it, caress it, cherish it. The Cubs won the World Series.
[Thomas Boswell: Finally, a time to rejoice for legions of sufferers]
They did it with a riveting, 8-7, 10-inning victory over the Cleveland Indians in the seventh and final game at Progressive Field, one that tore out the lining of Chicago’s roiling stomach before stitching it back together again. The simple part: Ben Zobrist’s double off Cleveland reliever Bryan Shaw pushed across the lead run, Miguel Montero followed with a run-scoring single, and Chicago . . . Chicago . . .
Hint: There were only 46 states. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
What to make of Chicago now?
“It’s 108 years, generations, some still here, some not,” said Theo Epstein, the Cubs president of baseball operations. “They were all here tonight.”
There is so much more to how the Cubs won their first World Series title since 1908, more than could be covered in the 17-minute rain delay that preceded just the 10th inning of — get this — just the fourth extra-inning Game 7 the World Series has ever known.
“This one about made me pass out,” Zobrist said.
How to distill it? Well, maybe with the most Cubs’ fact of all: They held a three-run lead in the bottom of the eighth, with four outs to go. They had their 100-mph closer on the mound to seal it up. And they couldn’t do it.
Suddenly, 2016 was going to fit right alongside 2003 and 1984 and all the rest. That backstory, and the fact that it was 68 years since the Indians’ last World Series title, colored this entire event.
“There’s been a burden placed,” Cubs Manager Joe Maddon said. “And I think, quite frankly, it’s misplaced. . . . I totally respect what’s happened in the past, and I totally respect our fan base. But if you just want to carry the burden with you all the time, tonight would never happen.”
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It did. So clear off the table. Spread out the evidence. Take a deep breath. Let’s sort this out.
The Cubs took what appeared to be control — a laughable notion in Wrigleyville, for sure — by going up 5-1 in the fifth, with all the runs coming off Cleveland ace Corey Kluber and impenetrable reliever Andrew Miller. And yet, when Maddon went to get starter Kyle Hendricks in the fifth, there were potential issues.
Asked before the game whether he would insert veteran left-handed starter Jon Lester into a situation with men on base, Maddon was clear. “I don’t think it would be appropriate,” he said. Lester has an awful time holding base runners on due to an absolute phobia of throwing a baseball — other than 60 feet, 6 inches. Yet he entered — along with David Ross, his personal catcher — with two outs and a man on first in the fifth.
For the first time, things went a bit haywire. Not in the Cubs’ history, of course. But for the first time Wednesday night. Jason Kipnis hit a spinner in front of the plate that Ross misfired to first for an error, and Lester uncorked a wild pitch that was so wild, it scored two runs. Progressive Field, filled with plenty of Cubs fans, shook with the glee from Cleveland’s own.
“You don’t think about storybooks and stuff like that,” Cleveland Manger Terry Francona said. “You’re trying to figure out a way to score one more run.”
When Lester departed with two outs in the eighth, he received and deserved congratulations. The last of his 55 pitches became an infield single to Jose Ramirez. But when Maddon turned to Aroldis Chapman, his closer, the situation was manageable: 6-3 lead, one on, one out to get in the eighth, then three more to get in the ninth.
“People are texting me congrats,” Epstein said. “I’m like, [expletive]. This is baseball. Anything can happen.”
So it did. Twice in this series, Chapman entered in the seventh. And as the Cubs crawled back from what had been a 3-1 deficit, he was asked to get the final eight outs of Game 5, then four more outs in Tuesday’s Game 6. The first hitter he faced was Brandon Guyer, and it was clear immediately that Chapman’s velocity — his defining quality — was down.
“I think if you’re being honest, I feel like the entirety of the playoffs probably did take its toll on him,” Cubs General Manager Jed Hoyer. “I think that he’s probably tired, as he should be.”
[ End of Cubs’ championship drought brings forth a mighty sound ]
Normally the hardest thrower in the game, with a fastball that averages more than 100 mph, Chapman settled in immediately at 97 mph. Hard to deal with, for sure. But not his overwhelming self. So Guyer cranked a double to right-center that scored a run. Cleveland all but shook as Rajai Davis came to the plate. Davis, in the lineup for his defense, had gained confidence against Chapman earlier in the series.
“I just felt like this was going to be a fight,” he said, “that I was going to win.”
Chapman fed Davis nothing but four-seam fastballs. He missed with two out of the zone, but there was a telling development: the four that were strikes, Davis didn’t swing and miss. He fouled them off.
“He was battling,” Montero said of Chapman.
With the count 2-2, Chapman came with his seventh straight fastball, this one at 97 mph. Davis jumped on it. It wasn’t majestic. Just historic. It went into the corner in left field, near the foul pole. When it cleared the wall, the Indians spilled out of their dugout like Little Leaguers. Tie game.
“Just ecstatic,” Shaw said.
And then at the end of the ninth, the skies opened up. The tarp came out.
“I really feel like in some ways that rain delay was kind of divine intervention,” Hoyer said. “The game was going really fast for us at that point.”
Epstein and Hoyer went under the stands to meet with officials from Major League Baseball about the plan and the weather. They then slipped into the Cubs clubhouse, where the hitters who were due up the next inning were meeting.
[‘Cubs had a great night. Bill Murray’s was better.]
“I got a little concerned,” Epstein said. He cracked open the door. Right fielder Jason Heyward — he of the $184 million contract and the .200 postseason batting average — had called the guys together.
“I’ve got something to say,” Zobrist recalled Heyward saying. And he talked about this epic game, and this epic team. He told them they would win.
“We just needed a brief moment to kind of collect ourselves and be reminded of who we are,” Heyward said.
And who they were about to become. In the 10th, Zobrist came up with two on and one out against Shaw. Maddon believes Zobrist consistently delivers the Cubs’ best at-bats. Here, he fouled off one 1-2 cutter from Shaw. He didn’t miss the next, sending it into left field, scoring Almora with the run that put them up 7-6. Turns out they needed Montero’s RBI single, too, because Davis somehow managed to push one across for the Indians in the bottom of the 10th.
“I died like six times,” Epstein said.
So start the conversation: Where does this Game 7 fit, all-time? Debate it Thursday, over the weekend, for 108 years. Epstein considered it after 2 a.m., standing on the mound at Progressive Field where he had just taken a picture with the front office he runs. Rain poured down, and he looked up into it.
“Everyone’s prone to hyperbole on nights like tonight,” he said. “But it is kind of epic, right?”
Routine, three-run victories don’t change life. There is now what we knew before 12:47 a.m. Thursday, and the unknown afterward. Welcome, Cubs fans, to the other side. ||||| CLOSE The Cubs pull off a thrilling win in 10 innings over the Indians to end their 108-year World Series title drought. USA TODAY Sports' Steve Gardner recaps how it all went down, and what Chicago and Cleveland can look forward to. USA TODAY Sports
Jason Heyward celebrates after the Cubs won the World Series, beating the Cleveland Indians in Game 7. (Photo: Ken Blaze, USA TODAY Sports)
CLEVELAND -- As the Chicago Cubs trudged out of the dugout and back toward the locker room to wait out the rain delay, Jason Heyward herded his teammates into a tiny weight room.
There were no coaches, no front-office types. Just the players, all 25 of them crammed into a tiny room with bright, white walls, low ceilings and row upon row of gleaming weights.
The Cubs had blown a three-run lead, and momentum would be squarely in the Cleveland Indians’ favor when they returned for the 10th inning tied at 6. The 103 games they’d won during the regular season, the 3-1 deficit they’d erased, the century of futility and despair they were about to put to rest – all of it was slipping away.
With his teammates surrounding him, Heyward began to speak. He’s a quiet man, Heyward, preferring to let the other veterans be the vocal leaders in the clubhouse. So when he does speak, his words have a gravity that commands full attention.
“I just wanted them to remember how good they were, how good we are,” Heyward said as his teammates sprayed champagne around him following Chicago’s historic 8-7 win Wednesday night. “Know how proud of them I was and that I loved them. That I mean it from the bottom of my heart.”
Looking around the room, Heyward said that every single one of them had played a part in bringing the Cubs to this point. Whether it was soon-to-be NL MVP Kris Bryant, rookie Albert Almora or veteran backup catcher Miguel Montero, Heyward reminded them, the Cubs had gotten this far as a team.
They had everything they needed to win, Heyward said, so long as they believed in each other and played for one another.
“He spoke up and said this is about your teammates,” David Ross said. “He just said, `We’re the best team in baseball for a reason. Continue to play our game, support one another. These are your brothers here, fight for your brothers, lift them up, continue to stay positive. We’ve been doing this all year so continue to be us.’
“It was a great message,” Ross said, “and well said.”
By the time Heyward was finished speaking, several of the Cubs were in tears. Addison Russell freely admitted he was one of them, feeling a weight lift as Heyward encouraged the Cubs to be the team they’ve been all season rather than trying too hard to something new in the last game of the season.
“We all vented. We all felt we had to say things that were on our mind, just get it off our chest,” Russell said. “We reached new levels. Grown men talking about that stuff, it doesn’t happen. The fact we did it here in the World Series, I really respect everyone for that.”
As Heyward looked around the room, he could see the mood shift and sense a new determination in his teammates.
They had won two games just to get to Game 7, Willson Contreras said. There had to have been a reason for that.
“Now we are here and we can do this,” Contreras said. “We’ve got this.”
The rain shower was brief, only causing a delay of 17 minutes. But it was long enough for the Cubs to get their minds right.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen but I knew we were ready to do what we did,” Heyward said.
Kyle Schwarber, who didn’t even know he’d be playing in the World Series two weeks ago after blowing out his knee in April, led off the 10th with a single. Almora was brought in to run, and he took second base on Kris Bryant's deep fly ball. Cleveland walked Anthony Rizzo, only to have Ben Zobrist make the Indians pay by doubling in the go-ahead run.
After Russell was walked intentionally, Montero gave the Cubs an insurance run with a single.
“It was,” Rizzo said, “the best rain delay of all time. It kind of settled us down, got us regrouped.”
The Cubs still had to close out the bottom of the 10th and Cleveland clawed back one of the runs. But this was Chicago’s game to win, and they knew it.
“We came back from 3-1 deficit against a really good pitching staff and a really good team,” ace Jon Lester said. “That’s a testament to these guys in this clubhouse.”
Players often say titles are won when no one is watching, through the work they put in off the field and in the weight room. Never has that been more true.
***
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour
GALLERY: Cubs celebrate World Series title ||||| | – It was, as Barry Svrluga of the Washington Post writes, "nothing short of one of the most thrilling baseball games ever played." And in the aftermath of the Cubs' World Series victory, players are talking about a late pep talk from quiet outfielder Jason Heyward. He called a players-only meeting during a rain delay after the ninth, when the Cubs were reeling after blowing a late three-run lead, reports CNN. "He spoke up and said, 'This is about your teammates,'" recalls catcher David Ross, per USA Today. "These are your brothers here, fight for your brothers, lift them up." Several players were moved to tears, including Game 6 star Addison Russell, notes a post at Knuckleball. Heyward himself explains that it was a "venting thing" for him. "I just had to let them know that I loved them. I had to let them know that we had 113 wins because we had overcome every bit of adversity that we've had thrown at us to this point. We needed 114 wins, and I told them everybody in this room could go out and get this 114th." They did, in the very next inning. Heyward has taken flak this year over the perception that he hasn't lived up to his $184 million contract on the field. In fact, he went just 3-for-15 during the World Series. But at a key moment, "Jason Heyward led the way," said teammate Kris Bryant. |
FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2017, file photo, Roger Stone arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2017, file photo, Roger Stone arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign appear to show Stone presenting himself as a WikiLeaks insider to Steve Bannon, who was at the heart... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2017, file photo, Roger Stone arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign appear to show Stone presenting himself as a WikiLeaks insider to Steve Bannon, who was at the heart... (Associated Press) FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2017, file photo, Roger Stone arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign... (Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign appear to show political operative Roger Stone presenting himself as a WikiLeaks insider to Steve Bannon, who was at the heart of then-candidate Donald Trump's run for president.
The emails, which were published Thursday by The New York Times, touch on a central question of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation: Did Stone have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' plans to release hacked material damaging to Democrat Hillary Clinton?
Stone says no, and the emails do not provide a definitive answer to that question. But the correspondence suggests that Stone wanted Bannon to see him as plugged in to WikiLeaks as it was planning to publish documents that would upend the campaign.
American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian agents were the source of information released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. And Mueller, who is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, has focused on Stone recently.
Mueller's team questioned Bannon last month about his exchanges with Stone, according to a person familiar with the interview. Bannon's interview was with prosecutors, though other people close to Stone have been called before a grand jury to discuss his ties to WikiLeaks.
The person familiar with Bannon's interview said Bannon and other top campaign officials were skeptical of Stone and his claims about having insight into WikiLeaks' efforts. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the confidential interview.
Stone, who confirmed the authenticity of the emails, denies being a conduit to WikiLeaks.
"What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype and punk Democrats on Twitter. This is called 'politics.' It's not illegal," he said in an opinion piece published Thursday by The Daily Caller website.
He said he had based his comments on Assange's public statements and conversations with a New York radio host, Randy Credico, a vocal supporter of Assange who has also been interviewed by Mueller's grand jury.
In a telephone interview with the AP, Stone said: "I had no advanced notice of the source or content or the exact timing of the release of the WikiLeaks disclosures."
In one email exchange from Oct. 4. 2016, Bannon asks Stone about an announcement that morning by Assange that puzzled some Trump supporters.
In the announcement, Assange said he would be posting a cache of documents weekly that would include some related to the 2016 election, among other topics, but he denied that WikiLeaks intended to harm Clinton, saying such suggestions were "false."
Many Trump supporters — egged on by Stone himself — had been expecting Assange to provide details on potentially damaging information about Clinton, possibly even posting it that day. Stone had built up suspense on Twitter, saying on Oct. 3, 2016, "I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon. #LockHerUp."
In the wake of the disappointing announcement, Bannon fires off an email asking Stone "What was that this morning???"
Stone writes back: "Fear. Serious security concern. He thinks they are going to kill him and the London police are standing done. However —a load every week going forward."
Days later, WikiLeaks released the first batch of material — emails stolen from the account of Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta. The Oct. 7, 2016, document dump came just hours after The Washington Post released audio from "Access Hollywood" in which Trump boasted of kissing and groping women without their permission.
WikiLeaks proceeded to dribble out the Podesta emails a thousand or so a day until Election Day.
___
Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report. ||||| Mr. Stone has repeatedly said that he had access only to Mr. Assange’s public statements and to secondhand information from journalists or other sources. If he implied that he had more direct sources, he has said, he was simply engaging in political hyperbole.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Stone insisted he did nothing more than “posture, bluff, hype,” based on WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed and miscellaneous tips.
“I didn’t need any inside knowledge to do that. They keep looking for some direct communication with WikiLeaks that doesn’t exist,” he said of journalists reporting on the Russia investigation. He added that he had paid for two polygraph tests that prove he is telling the truth.
But some of his previous statements have proved false. Mr. Stone told The Washington Post this week that he never discussed WikiLeaks with Trump campaign officials. “There are no such communications and if Bannon says there are he would be dissembling,” he said.
This article is based on interviews with people familiar with the Russia investigation and the inner workings of the Trump campaign, as well as a review of hundreds of text messages and emails that Mr. Stone exchanged over months with several associates, including Randy Credico, a New York comedian, former radio host and left-wing activist whom Mr. Stone has repeatedly identified as his source about WikiLeaks.
Besides the confusion caused by Mr. Stone’s penchant for innuendo and outright lies, investigators are hampered by the fact that Mr. Assange remains out of reach, holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for six years in fear of extradition to face possible criminal charges.
Still, Mr. Bannon’s October 2016 email correspondence shows that the perception that Mr. Stone knew what WikiLeaks had in store for Mrs. Clinton spread to the highest levels of the Trump campaign. No evidence has emerged that Mr. Trump or his advisers alerted the authorities. ||||| The Washington Post reported that former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon testified for the grand jury yesterday regarding his communications with me regarding the Wikileaks disclosures in October 2016.
The Special Counsel is reportedly probing whether I somehow directed or urged Wikileaks to release the allegedly hacked e-mails from the DNC in the wake of the Billy Bush accusations against Trump on Oct. 7. I did not — and there is no evidence to the contrary. In fact, Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange announced his release schedule on Oct. 2.
When Assange held a press event Oct. 2 (Oct. 3 U.S. time) and did not release any documents that day as had been widely expected, Bannon e-mailed me asking why.
I had long predicted an October release based on Assange’s June 2016 CNN interview with Anderson Cooper in which he said he had a trove of documents on Hillary and would release them. I had been told this would come in October for months by my source Randy Credico, whom I identified for the House Intelligence Committee.
Then Bannon (or his hatchet man Sam Nunberg) leaked this e-mail exchange to the various media outlets.
On Oct 4, 2016, at 9:25 AM, Steve Bannon < > wrote:
>
> What was that this morning??? ———- Forwarded message ———
From: Roger Stone <
Date: Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 9:47 AM
Subject: Re:
To: Steve Bannon < > Fear. Serious security concern. He thinks they are going to kill him and the London police are standing done. However –a load every week going forward. Roger stone
_________________________
The source of Assange’s Security Concerns came from Credico
On March 9, 2018, I wrote on Stone Cold Truth:
When Assange made no disclosures on October 1st, Alex Jones was among those publicly m*therfucking Assange for losing his nerve. Credico told me that Assange had demurred on October 1st because of the concerns of one of his lawyers, Daniel Ellsberg, about threats to Assange’s life if he went forward with the disclosures. Remember, Hillary Clinton actually advocated the use of a drone strike to kill Assange in London, in order to prevent the disclosure of what she knew he had. Credico told me that Secretary of State John Kerry had astonishingly gone to British Prime Minister Teresa May and asked that Britain rescind its diplomatic recognition of Ecuador for one day, stripping Assange of his asylum, so that United and British authorities could storm the Embassy and seize Assange … Credico predicted that Assange “would do the right thing” and in fact Assange announced the schedule of a serious of forthcoming disclosures in his October 2nd remarks, which was little noticed by the press. He would follow this schedule to devastating effect.
More importantly my prediction of “a load every week going forward” is based on Assange’s own public announcement hours before-that there would be weekly releases going through and beyond the election and not any communication with Wikileaks or Assange. Politico reported this.
When Bannon’s minion Matt Boyle asked me if what Assange had was “good” I replied it was, based on Credico’s insistence the material was “devastating,” “bombshell” and would “change the race.” This turned out to be right, although — as I have testified — I never knew the content or source of the Wikileaks disclosures in advance.
Bannon’s animus toward me stems from a column I wrote for the Daily Caller arguing that he had outlived his usefulness in the Trump White House and should be fired. The next day, he was.
Bannon also told Rhe Washington Post that the idea to bring the woman victims to the debate was his while the paper trail tells a very different story.
If the grand jury was told that either of my comments to Bannon were based on anything other than information I had already attributed to my source under oath or information reported publicly that day, they were misled.
What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype and punk Democrats on Twitter. This is called “politics.” It’s not illegal.
Roger Stone is a legendary Republican political consultant and a veteran of many national Republican presidential campaigns. He’s also the men’s fashion correspondent for The Daily Caller and editor of Stonezone.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller. ||||| | – Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign appear to show political operative Roger Stone presenting himself as a WikiLeaks insider to Steve Bannon, who was at the heart of then-candidate Donald Trump's run for president. The emails, published Thursday by the New York Times, touch on a central question of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation: Did Stone have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' plans to release hacked material damaging to Hillary Clinton? Stone says no, and the emails don't provide a definitive answer to that question. But the correspondence suggests Stone wanted Bannon to see him as plugged in to WikiLeaks as it was planning to publish documents that would upend the campaign. US intelligence agencies have concluded Russian agents were the source of info released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. Mueller's team questioned Bannon last month about his exchanges with Stone, a source says. Bannon's interview was with prosecutors, though other people close to Stone have been called before a grand jury to discuss his ties to WikiLeaks. The source said Bannon and other top campaign officials were skeptical of Stone and his claims about having insight into WikiLeaks' efforts. Stone, who confirmed the emails' authenticity, denies being a conduit to WikiLeaks. "What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype, and punk Democrats on Twitter. This is called 'politics.' It's not illegal," he said Thursday in a Daily Caller op-ed. Stone tells the AP: "I had no advanced notice of the source or content or the exact timing of the release of the WikiLeaks disclosures." (Stone thinks he knows who wrote the now infamous anonymous Times op-ed.) |
Story highlights Kenyan officials said Ikrima helped recruit Kenyans into Al-Shabaab
The raid was led by members of SEAL Team Six, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden
The SEALs withdrew because they came under fire, a U.S. official says
Al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for last month's Kenya mall attack
A pre-dawn raid by elite U.S. forces in southern Somalia, in the heart of territory controlled by the al Qaeda subsidiary Al-Shabaab, targeted an Al-Shabaab commander connected to one of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, a senior Obama administration official said Sunday.
The suspected foreign fighter commander is named Ikrima, a Kenyan of Somali origin about whom little is known. The official said Ikrima is associated with two now-deceased al Qaeda operatives who played roles in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and the 2002 attacks on a hotel and airline in Mombasa, also in Kenya.
A recent Kenyan intelligence report alleged that Ikrima was behind several foiled terror conspiracies against targets in Kenya between 2011 and 2013. The most recent was a plot to attack Mandera Airport in Kenya's North Eastern province in April.
Kenyan officials said last year that Ikrima had a significant role in recruiting and training Kenyans in Al-Shabaab. He is thought to have been a close associate of Saleh Ali Nabhan, a fellow Kenyan and senior al Qaeda operative in east Africa, who was killed by U.S. forces in 2009 in Somalia.
He is thought to have been a close associate of the Saleh Ali Nabhan, a fellow Kenyan and senior al Qaeda operative in east Africa, who was believed to have been connected to the embassy attacks. (Ali Nabhan was killed by U.S. forces in 2009 in Somalia.)
Ikrima also appears to be close to Al-Shabaab leader Mukhtar Abu Zubayr, who also goes by Ahmed Abdi Godane.
51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Relatives of Johnny Mutinda Musango, 48, weep after identifying his body at the city morgue in Nairobi, Kenya, on Tuesday, September 24. Musango was one of the victims of the Westgate Mall hostage siege. Kenyan security forces were still combing the mall on the fourth day of the siege by al Qaeda-linked terrorists. Hide Caption 1 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Ann Gakii reacts at the Nairobi City Mortuary after identifying the body of her father, who was killed in the mall attack on Saturday. Hide Caption 2 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A Kenyan soldier runs through a corridor on an upper floor at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, on September 24, shortly before an explosion was heard. Sounds of heavy gunfire erupted from the mall Tuesday, even as authorities said they had the building under their control. But four days after Al-Shabaab terrorists stormed the swanky mall, several gunmen -- including snipers -- were still inside, two senior officials said. Hide Caption 3 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Kenyan Defense Forces walk near the mall on Monday, September 23. Hide Caption 4 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Kenyan Defense Forces leave the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 5 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Stephen, center, is comforted by relatives as he waits for the post mortem exam of his father, who was killed in Saturday's attack at the mall. Hide Caption 6 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A Kenyan police officer guards the entrance of a building near the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 7 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A Kenyan security officer takes cover as gunfire and explosions are heard from the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 8 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Heavy smoke rises from the Westgate Shopping Mall on September 23. Hide Caption 9 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Medics take cover behind a tree as gunfire and explosions are heard from the Westgate Mall on September 23. Hide Caption 10 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A Kenyan police security officer runs for cover as heavy smoke rises from the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 11 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A paramedic runs for cover outside the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 12 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – People run for cover outside the mall after heavy shooting started on September 23. Hide Caption 13 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Kenyan security forces crouch behind a wall outside the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 14 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Soldiers take cover after gunfire near the mall on September 23. Hide Caption 15 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Kenyan paramilitary police officers patrol the area near the mall on Sunday, September 22. Hide Caption 16 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Soldiers from the Kenya Defense Forces arrive outside the Westgate Mall on September 22. Hide Caption 17 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A woman shields a baby as a soldier stands guard inside the Westgate Mall on Saturday, September 21. Hide Caption 18 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A rescue worker helps a child outside the mall. Hide Caption 19 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – People who had been hiding inside the mall during the gunfire flee the scene. Hide Caption 20 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – An armed official takes a shooting position inside the mall. Hide Caption 21 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – An armed official crouches on September 21. Hide Caption 22 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Hide Caption 23 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Bodies lie on the ground inside the mall. Hide Caption 24 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Men help a wounded woman outside the mall. Hide Caption 25 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Officials carry an injured man in the mall. Hide Caption 26 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Soldiers move up stairs inside the Westgate Mall. Hide Caption 27 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Armed police leave after entering the mall. At least one suspect has been killed, a government official said. Police have said another suspected gunman has been detained at a Nairobi hospital. Hide Caption 28 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Armed police take cover behind escalators as smoke fills the air. Witnesses say tear gas was thrown in the corridors. Hide Caption 29 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A woman who had been hiding during the attack runs for cover after armed police enter the mall. Hide Caption 30 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A body is seen on the floor inside the smoke-filled four-story mall. Hide Caption 31 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – An injured person is helped on arrival at the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi after the attack at the upscale mall. Hide Caption 32 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A soldier directs people up a stairway inside the Westgate on September 21. Hide Caption 33 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – An injured man is wheeled into the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi. Hide Caption 34 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – People run from the Westgate Mall. Hide Caption 35 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A Kenyan woman is helped to safety after the masked gunmen stormed the upscale mall and sprayed gunfire on shoppers and staff. Hide Caption 36 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Crowds gather outside the upscale shopping mall. The interior ministry urges Kenyans to keep off the roads near the mall so police can ensure everyone inside has been evacuated to safety. Hide Caption 37 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A policeman carries a baby to safety. Authorities said multiple shooters were at the scene. Hide Caption 38 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Bodies lie outside the shopping mall. Hide Caption 39 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A security officer helps a wounded woman outside. Hide Caption 40 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Elaine Dang of San Diego is helped to safety after the attack. The military asked local media not to televise anything live because the gunmen are watching the screens in the mall. Hide Caption 41 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Paramedics treat an injured man outside the mall. Hide Caption 42 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Medical personnel carry a body away. Hide Caption 43 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A body lies outside the mall. Gunmen shot people outside the mall as they entered it Hide Caption 44 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A woman is pulled by a shopping cart to an ambulance. Hide Caption 45 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A wounded man is escorted outside the mall. Hide Caption 46 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A police officer carries a baby as people keep low and run to safety. Crowds dashed down the streets as soldiers in military fatigues, guns cocked, crawled under cars to get closer to the mall. Hide Caption 47 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – People run away from the scene. Hide Caption 48 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – Armed Kenyan forces take position to secure the area around the shopping mall as ambulances move in to carry the injured. Hide Caption 49 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A woman reacts after she is rescued from the mall. Hide Caption 50 of 51 51 photos: Photos: Kenya mall attack Kenya mall attack – A couple flee the area. As night fell, authorities said they had cornered the gunmen in the mall. Hide Caption 51 of 51
JUST WATCHED Navy SEALs raid Somali town Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Navy SEALs raid Somali town 01:09
JUST WATCHED Video shows gunmen inside Kenya mall Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Video shows gunmen inside Kenya mall 00:42
How the raid happened
U.S. Navy SEAL members traveled by sea to reach the coastal villa frequented by top Al-Shabaab commanders, storming the house early Saturday. Until Sunday, no U.S. official disclosed the target of the raid.
The SEALs' mission didn't go as planned, however. The U.S. commandos encountered heavy fire and had to withdraw, not knowing whether their target was dead or alive.
Al-Shabaab is the U.S.-designated terrorist group that claimed responsibility for last month's siege on a Kenyan shopping mall that killed 67 people.
Residents of the port city of Barawe said the home belonged to Al-Shabaab leader Mukhtar Abu Zubayr, also known as Ahmed Abdi Godane. An Al-Shabaab spokesman had said Godane was the target of the attack.
The group said one of its fighters was killed in the attack. No SEAL members were killed or hurt, a U.S. official said.
It was one of two raids carried out by elite U.S. forces in Africa on Saturday against targets connected to the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi. The other was an operation in Tripoli, Libya, by the U.S. Army Delta Force against Abu Anas al Libi, indicted in the United States for helping to plan the Nairobi embassy attack.
Delta Force members captured al Libi, who will eventually be taken to New York to face federal charges.
In the 2002 attacks, three suicide bombers detonated a car bomb outside the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, killing the bombers as well as 12 Kenyans and three Israelis. The same morning, a missile attack unsuccessfully targeted an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa's airport.
Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for both Mombasa attacks.
U.S. forces strike in Libya, Somalia, capture al Qaeda operative
'Most wanted terrorist' al Libi nabbed in native Libya
Witness accounts
Residents of the port city of Barawe said about a dozen "foreign forces" went from a nearby warship to a smaller, faster boat before jumping onto the Somali mainland. Before long, the sounds of heavy gunfire and several large explosions echoed across the city, locals said.
After coming under fire, the U.S. forces -- members of the Navy special forces unit known as SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 -- made a "prudent decision" to pull back, a senior U.S. official said.
Barawe "is a main center, if not the center" for Al-Shabaab, said Matt Bryden, the former head of the U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea.
"It's a big source of revenue for them. It allows for trade," said Bryden, now the director of a Kenya-based think tank, Sahan Research. They "fully control the town" and hold large exercises on the beach, including target practice and even sack races.
Once a tourist destination, the city is now an important port for charcoal, a common fuel in Somalia, Bryden said. That makes it a revenue source for the jihadists, with the charcoal trade bringing in as much as $25 million a year to Al-Shabaab, the United Nations estimated in July.
Al-Shabaab's growing menace
Al-Shabaab, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has a relationship with al Qaeda that goes back several years. Last year, the two groups effectively merged, said CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.
Bergen: How Al-Shabaab picks its targets
Al-Shabaab hopes to turn Somalia into a fundamentalist Islamic state but has launched attacks in other countries as well.
In 2010, Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings carried out in Kampala, Uganda, amid crowds of soccer fans watching televised screenings of the World Cup final. The bombings left 74 people dead.
The group said at the time the attacks were retaliation for Ugandan participation in the African Union Mission in Somalia, known as AMISOM. One AMISOM goal is to support Somali government forces in cracking down on Al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab has also mounted many smaller attacks against targets in Kenya, hurling hand grenades into nightclubs, restaurants and schools. The group has also kidnapped tourists and aid workers.
Its attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya on September 21 killed at least 67 people.
Al-Shabaab said the attack was retaliation for Kenya's involvement in the African Union effort against the group.
In recent months, Al-Shabaab's haven in south-central Somalia has been been increasingly squeezed as Kenyan forces fight the group from the south and African Union forces come down from Mogadishu, the Somali capital. ||||| A United States official says the target of raid by Navy SEALs in Somalia over the weekend was a Kenyan man named Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir. A Kenyan government intelligence document names him as the coordinator of other planned attacks.
The man, also known as Ikrima, was a known operator for the Somali militant group al-Shabab.
The document says that foiled plots by Abdulkadir included plans to target Kenya's parliament building and the United Nations office in Nairobi, as well as an Ethiopian restaurant patronized by Somali government officials.
It does not appear that Saturday's raid resulted in the killing or capture of Abdulkadir. The U.S. official who confirmed the target of the SEAL raid insisted on anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter.
___
Burns reported from Washington. ||||| | – In this weekend's raid in Somalia, Navy SEALs were after an al-Shabab leader named Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, who had plotted foiled attacks targeting Kenya's parliament and the UN office in Nairobi, according to a Kenyan intelligence document obtained by the AP. Abdulkadir, who is also known as Ikrima, is a Kenyan of Somali origin, CNN reports. He is also reportedly linked to a pair of al-Qaeda figures involved in the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, as well as attacks four years later in the Kenyan city of Mombasa. Navy SEAL Team Six members arrived for Saturday's raid by sea, but when they ran into extensive gunfire, they made what one official calls a "prudent decision" to leave—though they didn't know whether Abdulkadir had survived. None of the SEALs were injured during the attack on the home of al-Shabab leader Mukhtar Abu Zubayr; al-Shabab says one of its fighters was killed in the raid, says a former UN official. |
Austrian mountain police officer Bernhard Magritzer said the man's father had alerted German police after his son had not returned from his climb last Saturday and he could not reach him on his mobile phone - which, the father said, was unusual.
The man has not been identified due to Austrian privacy laws.
Winter-like conditions and a danger of avalanches made the rescue attempt dangerous on the Dachstein, 90 kilometers (55 miles) south east of Salzburg. It is the second highest mountain in the Northern Limestone Alps.
Police found the alpinist's car near a lake below the mountain late on Wednesday night. The trapped man was able to make a call from his mobile phone but the signal broke off after a few seconds.
"My colleague heard someone breathing heavily and reacted in the right way," Magritzer said.
The rescue service switched communications to text messages and the man was able to explain his situation and give an exact location. "We would not have found him otherwise," Magritzer said. A three-hour search at 2,050 meters altitude in the middle of the night followed.
At about 4 a.m. the man was rescued from his 30-meter-deep hole and flown by emergency helicopter to the Wels clinic where he was reported to have only slight injuries to a shoulder and ankle.
The Dachstein's northern glaciers
Thirty years ago - same time, same place
Austrian television had on Wednesday evening shown a program about the 1985 rescue of a US soldier who was also found alive, also in November, but after 19 days on the Dachstein. He had broken his leg two days into his climb over a glacier.
Kenneth Cichowich from Buffalo NY, who was deputy chief of staff for logistics at the US Army European headquarters in Heidelberg, West Germany at the time, gave credit to his mountain survival training.
He spent six days eating snow before he was rescued by two men lowered from a helicopter who asked his name. "Then they said: 'You're the man we're looking for,'" Cichowich said at the time. "I was never so happy or so surprised."
jm/kms (AP, dpa) ||||| This will appear next to all of your comments
This will NOT appear anywhere on Newser ||||| | – Austrian emergency teams have rescued a German mountaineer who spent five days in a deep glacier crevice after slipping. Officials say the man was found in the 100-foot-deep gap Thursday after he succeeded in making an emergency call from his cellphone following numerous failed attempts because of poor reception, the AP reports. The man had been reported missing by his father Saturday on the rugged Dachstein range southeast of the city of Salzburg. State broadcaster ORF cites an alpine rescue official as saying the man is only "relatively lightly hurt" considering the drop, with shoulder and foot injuries. Deutsche Welle, which notes the poor weather and risk of avalanches made rescuers' efforts more difficult, documents how police first found the man's car near a lake at the foot of the mountain Wednesday night. He'd been trying to make calls from his phone, and finally one call went through, though only for a few seconds. A quick-thinking member of the rescue team switched communications over to texting, at which point the man was able to relay to them where he was. "We would not have found him otherwise," another rescuer says. The man was flown by helicopter to a nearby hospital after the early morning rescue. He's not being identified due to Austrian privacy laws. |
ELECTION DAY 2015!!!!!!!
PLEASE HELP/ PLEASE VOTE
The governor's race isn't the only action. There are some crucial state legislative races as well. As we all learned in 2014, the legislature makes a big, big difference.
Rep Stephen Ortego in Carencro is a very smart guy, young, the kind of person you hope gets involved in politics, and he has a huge target on his back because he believes the oil and gas industry should act responsibly and contribute to a solution. The industry very very much wants to get rid of him, in my view because they see Ortego as potentially very important in the future-- I think he's capable of being a serious candidate for much higher office and so do they-- and they want to get rid of him now. In St Bernard, Casey Hunnicutt, a parish councilman, is running against Rep Ray Garofalo. Garofalo on any environmental score card is a zero. If Hunnicutt-- whom I met long ago because of his support for alternative energy-- makes the run-off I think he'll win. Please help him make the run-off. Brenda Babin in Terrebone has a PhD in coastal science, running against Rep Lenar Whitney, a climate change denier who ran for Congress last year (Garret Graves won the seat). Cook Political Report's editor called her "frightening" and said she's the only 1 of hundreds of interviewees over a period of years who walked out. This is a 3-way race right now. Rep. Dorothy Sue Hill, from an agricultural district in Beauregard Parish-- on the Texas border, between Shreveport and Lake Charles-- voted right down the line not only on my issue but on other green ones, is a Green Army superstar, and she is coming under heavy attack. It's not the kind of district where you expect someone to take green positions. With help, she'll win reelection. Without it... In Plaquemines, Alexis Billiot, Democrat, a constable, is running against Rep Chris Leopold. Leopold is below zero on environmental issues and has a lot of money from industry, etc. Sen Conrad Appel, a Republican from Metairie. On most issues I disagree with him. On environmental (and education) issues he's excellent. And the guy running against him is John Labruzzo, a former state rep, is terrible not only on the environemnt but, in my view, on everything else. Also, in the Monroe area, pleas support Rep. Marcus Hunter. In the case of Ortego, Honnicutt, and Leopold, if we win it would have significant symbolic importance as well. Clearly the victories would be because of environmental issues. That sends a signal to every politician in the state that blindly protecting industry puts them at risk. All of a sudden it shifts the playing field. Thank you.
June update
Here is a new scientific review of what went wrong pre-Katrina. It places all the blame on the Corps of Engineers and completely exonerates the old levee board-- which ironically makes the case more than ever as to why the new board, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East, is necessary. The old board did nothing wrong yet 1800 people still died, because the old board lacked the expertise to challenge the Corps. The new board was designed to have that expertise. Until Jindal began his attempts to gut it in order to kill its lawsuit against oil companies, 4 of its 9 members routinely served on working groups associated with the National Academies of Science and the like, while other board members were engineers who built things. Here's the study:
http://www.iwaponline.com/wp/up/wp2015077.pdf
May, 2015 update
Thought everyone might be interested in this op ed, which ran May 17, 2015 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and at nola.com
If oil industry is serious, it will help protect St. Charles Parish from floods: John Barry
0 Reddit When the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East filed suit against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies , industry spokesmen condemned it, saying that the industry wanted to cooperate but couldn't and wouldn't with a gun to its head. Now the industry has an opportunity to mdake good on its pledge of cooperation in St. Charles Parish, which has not sued. St. Charles wants to build a $300 million levee to protect its west bank. The threat to this area has increased enormously because of the tremendous land loss in the Barataria Basin, land that once naturally protected the area against hurricane storm surge. And it is in the Barataria and Terrebonne basins where oil and gas industry activities have had more destructive impact than anywhere else in the state. According to a 1989 study by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, the trade association for such major oil companies as Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and BP, oil and gas operations were "the overwhelming cause" of land loss in these basins. A 2006 Louisiana Department of Natural Resources study concluded that the industry caused 76 percent of the land loss there. Other recent estimates put industry responsibility even higher, as high as 90 percent. Industry did this while ignoring laws requiring areas to be "restored to the pre-existing condition." Given industry responsibility for land-loss there, given that national taxpayers contributed to the cost of the metro area's levees, including St. Charles' east bank, given that parish taxpayers just voted to tax themselves for some west bank levee costs, given that the tax will raise only $4.8 million a year, far less than needed, the industry should now pay its share and demonstrate that its talk of cooperation isn't just talk. Chris John, the head of LMOGA, has argued the industry is already paying more than anyone else for coastal restoration, but he's counting its total tax burden, not any special contribution to restoration. True, some companies have made contributions to restoration or local levee districts worth millions of dollars, but that amount is trivial compared to the tens of billions of dollars of damage the industry inflicted. "Million" and "billion" sound alike, but a billion is one thousand times a million. Think of it this way: Suppose your car is worth $25,000 and some multimillionaire runs a red light and totals it, then gives you $10 and says, "Let's call it even." That's roughly how much the industry has paid so far compared to its liability. And if that multimillionaire hired people to get him out of paying more you'd get mad. That's exactly what the industry is doing. John recently told a reporter, "We'll spend more money this time than ever before." But he wants to spend money electing politicians who won't trouble the industry, not on coastal restoration. So far three public bodies, Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East and Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes have gone to court seeking industry help on restoration. The industry and its allies responded by exerting extraordinary political pressure to kill those lawsuits. And so far oil companies' talk of cooperation has been just another way of saying taxpayers should pay for everything. If industry truly wants to cooperate, it should contribute — on a scale commensurate with the damage it did — to building the St. Charles levee and restoring the land outside it. Then it should help Terrebonne Parish, whose citizens are now taxing themselves to build a levee that does not even meet the 100-year standard for flood protection, thus leaving them vulnerable to flood insurance increases that may be nearly as devastating as a hurricane. Industry could at least pay to bring Terrebonne levees up to the 100-year standard. Finally, the industry should engage in negotiations to create a fund to help rebuild the entire coast. Let's be clear. By no means did energy companies cause all the land loss, not even in the Terrebonne and Barataria basins. But they did cause much of it, and to the extent they are responsible they need to cooperate in forging a solution. That was always the goal of the flood protection authority's lawsuit: to precipitate a statewide solution. That would show real cooperation. If, however, industry promises prove empty, then politicians in St. Charles Parish and elsewhere have a responsibility to protect the lives and property of their citizens. They should do what the flood authority, Plaquemines and Jefferson did: demand satisfaction through the courts. Because it will take a very long time to pay off $300 million plus interest at $4.8 million a year. In fact, by the time that happens, there won't be much left of St. Charles Parish to protect.
April, 2015 update
Apologies to all for not keeping this page current. We have kept our Facebook page current, but we've let this one lapse. We haven't done more simply because Restore Louisiana Now has no staff and I have zero technical competence.
So it's past time to update you on the lawsuit filed by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authorit East against nearly 100 oil, gas, and pipeline companies over coastal land-loss. As you probably know, there were a few very small settlements last fall, trivial in the amount but important as precedents. Then we received very good news when a state judge threw out-- on four separate grounds-- the law which the legislature passed designed to kill the lawsuit. The attorneys are very confident the state supreme court will concur.
However, we also received a serious blow in February when a federal district court dismissed the case. The ruling was so flawed, however-- in fact, an attorney opposed to the suit told me laughed when he read the judge's opinion-- that we believe there is a very real chance the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will overturn the ruling. As one of the attorneys on the case put it, "This isn't a Hail Mary. It's more like going for a two-point conversion."
And there is a real positive that could come out of this: If the Fifth Circuit does rule in our favor, we'll be in a far stronger position than we were before.
Meanwhile, in other news, at this writing it does not look like there will be another attempt in the legislature to kill the lawsuit.
Finaly, below is an op ed I wrote for The Advocate a few weeks ago which, I hope, gives you a good sense of what's what and where things stand.
In 1989, the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association — the trade association for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and the other majors — conducted a study of areas most damaged by coastal land loss. By then, the threat presented by land loss was well-known, state laws required that areas damaged by the energy industry be “restored to the pre-existing conditions” and Governor David Treen had tried and failed to pay for fixing the problem with a new Coastal Wetlands Environmental Levy on the oil and gas industry.
Perhaps Mid-Continent launched its study hoping for scientific support to allow the industry to escape liability. If so, it was disappointed. The study concluded that “canal development tend[s] to be the overwhelming cause of wetlands losses.”
What has the oil and gas industry done since 1989 to address the problem that was “the overwhelming cause” of land loss in the hardest-hit areas? Can’t think of anything? Exactly.
In 2006, looking at the severe land loss in the Barataria and Terrebonne basins, a study by the state’s Department of Natural Resources attributed an astonishing 76 percent of land loss to “oil and gas exploration and drilling.”
What has the industry done since 2006, when the state blamed it for 76 percent of the problem in those basins? Can’t think of anything? Exactly.
Meanwhile, at least another 500 square miles of Louisiana melted into the sea.
The industry’s responsibility for land loss varies dramatically from region to region, and certainly other causes, including the levees themselves, also have destroyed land. But pretending oil and gas played no role is like pretending Drew Brees doesn’t matter to the Saints offense. For years, the state has declined to enforce existing laws and regulations that since 1980 have required areas be “restored to the pre-existing condition.” To force the industry to obey the law, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority filed its lawsuit against oil, gas and pipeline companies, basing its claim largely on federal law that prohibits doing anything to “impair the usefulness” of a levee and asking only that industry fix the part of the problem it created.
Ever since that lawsuit was filed, the industry has said the suit threatened industry’s cooperation with those trying to preserve the coast. What cooperation? Well, Chevron, which (through Texaco, which it now owns) probably caused more damage than anyone else, brags about supporting a project that will create 293 acres in South Lafourche. But there are 640 acres in a square mile, and the state has lost nearly 2,000 square miles.
And SLFPAE filed only after — eight months after — SLFPAE president Tim Doody and I told Garret Graves, then the governor’s coastal adviser, what our board was considering and suggested we all go to Mid-Continent head Chris John and try to work out a voluntary agreement. Graves replied, “I already tried that. They’re not there yet.” He also made it clear that for political reasons the state would not sue the industry.
Now Judge Nannette Jolivette-Brown has dismissed the flood authority’s case, not because the industry successfully argued it didn’t destroy land but because Brown — using rather bizarre logic — ruled that the right to call the industry to account for impairing a levee’s usefulness belonged only to the federal government and does not “extend to the protection of a levee owner or operator.” The dismissal will be appealed but it will take months before a decision comes down. Stewart Simonson, an attorney uninvolved in the case who was a senior member of the Bush administration, said, “The Fifth Circuit is conservative and pro-business, and they expect a certain level of legal craftsmanship. This isn’t it. The board has a good chance of winning the appeal.”
For the moment, the lawsuit is in abeyance, but it already has a legacy, changing politics and public awareness of the industry’s role. National realities also are settling in. The state’s elected officials have always said they’d get money for the coast from Washington, i.e., from taxpayers. That was always a fantasy. The most pro-environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt just proved it: far from calling for more federal dollars for Louisiana’s coast, Obama called for cutting those dollars to zero.
All this opens the door to three questions.
First, the industry said it was ready to work collaboratively to solve the problem, if only that nasty lawsuit wasn’t in the way. So, industry, when are you going to collaborate — not building 300 acres, but on a scale commensurate with the many billions of dollars of damage your own studies concede you’ve done?
Second, will some politician have the guts to demand that the industry step up? Will the attorney general protect the future of Louisiana? Will someone else? Or will our anti-tax governor stick Louisiana taxpayers with all the costs? In fact, last year, state Rep. Joel Robideaux, another anti-tax conservative and the manager of the bill to kill the lawsuit, conceded that taxpayers would pick up the tab for industry-caused damage.
Or, third, will the coast and so much that makes Louisiana Louisiana simply disappear?
The lawsuit was never the problem; it was filed to solve the problem. Let’s solve the problem. The land loss is the problem.
A Message from John
July 2, 2014
Colleagues and Friends,
No doubt many of you are wondering what's going on with the flood authority's lawsuit against numerous oil companies. I can assure you, It's alive!
That's the main message. Now for a little more detail:
As you no doubt know, the single bill (SB 469) which Jindal and the industry managed to get through the legislature was signed by the governor. Since it's now-- for the moment anyway-- a "law" it will henceforth be known as Act 544.
The attorneys will definitely challenge this bill on several grounds. Let me name just two:
First, Act 544 does prohibit "local government entities"-- except for parishes-- from suing over any oil-related damages in the coastal zone. However, a local government entity has a very precise legal definition, and that definition does not fit the flood authority. So the bill actually does not prohibit the flood authority from suing. That is a very strong argument that the attorneys will make. (Thank you Jimmy Faircloth, Jindal's favorite attorney, for this genius move in writing the bill; based on his track record in this and other cases apparently, Jimmy needs to go back to school.)
Second, a state court has already ruled that an unrelated law (about a hospital closure) just passed by the legislature is unconstitutional because its advocates violated procedural rules in passing it. They put the bill on the agenda for a committee hearing after 4:00 PM one evening and heard the bill at 9:00 AM the next morning. Exactly the same thing happened with SB 469/ Act 544-- only worse. Most of you will probably recall that SB 469 as originally written had nothing whatsoever to do with the lawsuit. The industry was attempting to move another bill, SB 531. But we had 531 killed in one committee, so they stripped everything out of 469 except the bill number and the title, shoehorned into it the core of 531, and got it heard in a different committee. So not only was proper notice not given, but 469 as it was heard was entirely different from how it was filed. And it gets even more egregious: forget the lack of notice-- even if you were physically in the room when the committee heard 469 you could not get a copy of the bill. This violates all sorts of notice and open meetings standards.
As I said, those are only two of the challenges the attorneys have. They're both pretty good ones. And they have others. Needless to say, the attorneys are happy to be fighting on the battlefield where the lawsuit belongs-- in a courtroom, and not in the legislature.
But that's not the only recent development.
On July 24 2013, the suit was filed in state court in Orleans Parish. The defendants-- the industry-- immediately removed it to federal court, and on December 18, 2013, attorneys for both sides argued before federal Judge Nannette Brown whether it should stay in federal court or return to state court. Judge Brown, incidentally, was appointed by Obama and has only served about two years on the bench. This past Friday, June 27, she ruled that the suit will stay in federal court.
What's that mean for the case?
The biggest positives: Judge Brown's 83 page opinion pretty much rejected all the technical arguments made by the defendants' attorneys, even though she kept the case. Also, by keeping it in federal court, the case is now entirely out of the political arena-- for those of you who don't know, in Louisiana judges are elected, so the industry can pressures state judges by choosing to fund either sitting judges or their opponents and so on. No such pressure works on the federal bench.
The biggest negative: No matter what happens in her court, the result will probably be appealed. And the 5th Circuit Court of Appeal is the most conservative appeals court in the country.
However, if the suit moves forward-- if Judge Brown finds that Act 544 does not apply-- then all those things I said in the past six months about settlements happening will come true. I firmly believe that will happen.
There's a separate issue on the horizon. Paul Kemp is a coastal scientist who sits on the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East, and he supports the lawsuit. His term may have expired July 1, 2014. I say "may" because his appointment letter says it expires July 1, 2015. I don't want to get too far into the weeds here as to why the difference, and the Attorney General has been asked to issue an opinion. He probably will soon. If it's determined his term has already expired, that triggers the next battle-- over his renomination. There is a complex nominating process for the board with a special nominating committee, and it's possible that if the committee chooses to do so, it could keep Paul on the board whether Jindal wants him or not. In the recent past, the committee cooperated with Jindal, but several things have changed since then.
That's all for now folks. When something happens, I will give you another update.
Thanks for your support. And remember who helped us-- who helped you, if you live in Louisiana-- and who betrayed you when the next election rolls around.
All the best,
John
A Message from John
Is there a single person in Louisiana who believes the governor is putting the state's interest ahead of his personal ambition?
At last count 106 legal scholars warned that signing the bill would put at risk claims against BP. The attorney general, the president of Jefferson Parish, the New Orleans City Council, and others all called upon the governor to veto the bill. I think he signed it today because they were just the beginning of a broad chorus from around the state and he wanted to cut that off before that chorus became deafening.
And while there may be doubt whether this bill does or does not limits existing BP claims, there is no doubt that it affects future claims- - if, for example, a pipeline ruptures in the coastal zone.
John Barry - June 6, 2014
Friends,
I want to thank you all for your help and support. This has obviously been a difficult and disappointing fight.
In terms of the legislature, let's not forget those who supported the idea of letting the courts decide-- and those who did not.
I find it astounding that legislators representing coastal areas-- and particularly legislators representing areas that were under water in 2005, such as Nick Lorusso from the New Orleans lakefront and Ray Garofalo from St. Bernard-- voted to kill the opportunity to gain billions of dollars for flood protection in their areas.
Considering that the next election coincides with the 10th anniversary of Katrina and Rita, their constituents might have flood protection on their minds. I look forward to reminding their voters of what Lorusso and Garofalo did.
I'm not sugar coating anything. It was a tough loss. But we do still have several rabbits and hats left, so although the legislative battle is over the war isn't. To quote the classic words of John Belushi in Animal House, "It ain't over until we say it's over."
A final request, find your legislator and thank him or her for their support and if they voted against us promise them that you'll remember next year. The vote is posted below:
Yay(59): Mr. Speaker(Kleckley) Adams Arnold Barras Berthelot Billiot Bishop, S. Broadwater Burford Burns, H. Burns, T. Burrell Carmody Carter Champagne Chaney Cromer Danahay Dove Fannin Garofalo Geymann Gisclair Guinn Harris Harrison Havard Henry Hensgens Hodges Hoffmann Honore Howard Ivey Jones Landry, N. Leopold Lorusso Mack Miller Morris, Jay Morris, Jim Ponti Pope Price Pugh Pylant Reynolds Richard Robideaux Schexnayder Schroder Seabaugh Simon Stokes Thibaut Thierry Thompson Whitney Nay(39): Anders Armes Badon Barrow Bishop, W. Brown Connick Cox Dixon Edwards Foil Franklin Greene Guillory Hazel Hill Hunter Jackson James Jefferson Johnson Lambert Landry, T. LeBas Leger Lopinto Montoucet Moreno Norton Ortego Pearson Pierre Ritchie Shadoin Smith Williams, A. Williams, P. Willmott Woodruff Absent(6): Abramson Gaines Hollis Huval St. Germain Talbot
As far as me personally, I've been spending full time on this since before SLFPAE filed the lawsuit July 24, 2013. Just about a year. No one has paid me anything for it, so I'll have to step back and earn a living. That means I'll write another book. Anyone got any ideas?
All the best,
John
The record of yesterday's vote is listed below. A "Yay" vote supported limiting the authority of local entities and retroactively killing the SLFPA-E lawsuit. The Louisiana Legislators were elected to represent YOU, did they?
Vote NO on SB 469
Call your Representatives today!
SB 469 is being voted on in the House of Representatives this week! SB 469 is the final big effort by this year's legislature to undermine the authority of local entities, retroactively kill the Southeast Louisiana Flood Authority- East(SLFPA-E) lawsuit, and prevent oil and gas companies from being held accountable for the damages they have caused to our coast.
Louisiana's Legislators were elected to represent YOU not industry lobbyists. Please urge your Representative to vote NO on SB 469.
Find your Legislators and contact them here.
As Louisiana’s coast shrinks, a political fight grows
As Louisiana’s coastline shrinks, a political fight over responsibility grows (09:20)
Restore Louisiana Now is taking our case to the airwaves of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin. If 469 fails there will be no money to shore up the land bridge along Highway 90. It's eroding and all that holds the Gulf back from the Lake. CALL HOUSE LEGISLATORS TODAY. VOTE NO ON 469!
The Final Push
May 27, 2014
Dear Colleagues,
Seventeen bills were filed to kill the flood authority's lawsuit demanding that the oil and gas industry obey the law and repair the damage they caused to the coast. It looks more and more like we-- you-- have stopped sixteen of them.
But SB 469 could still prove lethal. The Louisiana House of Representatives will vote on it Thursday or Friday. The bill takes away the flood authority's right to sue, and it would dismiss the suit "with prejudice"-- meaning even if a future legislature gave these important rights back to the flood authority it could not reinstitute a similar lawsuit.
This is about safety-- protecting lives and property. There is an op ed online now at nola.com which will be in the print edition of the Times-Picayune Wednesday which explains how the lawsuit directly affects the safety of everyone anywhere near Lake Pontchartrain.
http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/05/coastal_damages_lawsuit_is_abo.html
It also affects people all across the state. If you're getting this note, you probably already know that Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has publicly stated that because of the lawsuit oil companies have approached him about seeking a statewide settlement. That's what everyone wants. Get around a table and fix the problem, get some money flowing to help the entire coast. But if the legislature kills the lawsuit, the oil companies will walk away from the table and do what they've done for the last 50 years-- next to nothing.
We can win this fight, but it won't be easy. It's really up to you. If you contact your state representative, if you get your friends, your acquaintances, your neighbors, the barista in the coffee shop, the person who waits on you in the restaurant or rings up a sale in the hardware store, and even your enemies to contact their state representative, if everyone tells their representative to vote "No!" on SB 469, if everyone says they are watching this vote and will remember it come next election, then we will win.
As you've heard me say before, history doesn't just happen. People make history. You can make some history in the next few days.
Thanks,
John Barry
SB 469 passed the House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment late this morning by a vote of 13-6.
House floor vote on SB 469 will be on Thursday or Friday of this week.
We are urging everyone to please call their house representatives and urge them to vote NO on SB 469 next week. For information about the vote see Louisiana House panel votes to kill levee board lawsuit .
A MESSAGE FROM JOHN BARRY: MAY 20, 2014
Dear Colleagues,
Congratulations! The House Civil Law Committee is deferring action on SB 547 and SB 553. This is good news. If Jindal and the industry had the votes in that committee, there would be no deferral. This is a long way from a final victory, but right now I'd much rather be where we are on these two bills than where they are-- and it's because you spoke up.
The industry filed seventeen bills to kill the lawsuit. Other than those two bills, there's only one other one left.
SB 469 takes away the legal causes of action of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East. It says the flood authority can't sue to enforce coastal regulations, even though the legislation creating the flood authority explicitly authorized it to address coastal issues.
Let's see if we can kill this bill in the House Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday. It will be difficult, its chairman Gordon Dove is in the oil business, but it can be done. The following representatives are on the fence or leaning no, but if you contact them-- especially if you live in their districts-- and if you get your friends, neighbors, and people past you on the street to contact them, if their constituents swamp them, then we can win.
Rep. Billiot, (504) 436-8929, [email protected], Jefferson
Rep. Chaney, (318) 728-5875, [email protected], East Carroll, Ouachita
Rep. Foil, (225) 342-6777, [email protected], East Baton Rouge
Rep. Garofalo, (504) 278-6599, [email protected], Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard
Rep. Gisclair, (985) 798-7707, [email protected], Jefferson, Lafourche
Rep. Harrison, (800) 935-2081, [email protected], Assumption, Lafourche, St. Mary, Terrebone
Rep. Leopold, (504) 393-5649, [email protected], Belle Chasse
Rep. Ortego, (337) 886-4687, [email protected], Lafayette, St. Landry
If we lose in this committee, it's not over. We will make a push on the floor where right now we're only slightly behind-- but we have a good chance.
Let's do it.
John Barry
These are the members of the House Natural Resources Committee. Please call today and tomorrow. Tell them to vote against SB 469. Tell them that big oil must be above the law in Louisiana.
Name Hometown Office Phone Email Armes, James K. (D) Leesville (337) 238-7004 [email protected] Billiot, Robert E. (D) Westwego (504) 436-8929 [email protected] Bishop, Stuart J. (R) Lafayette (337) 981-7409 [email protected] Chaney, Charles R. (R) Rayville (318) 728-5875 [email protected] Connick, Patrick (R) Marrero (504) 371-0240 [email protected] Dove, Gordon (R) C Houma (985 ) 876-8823 [email protected] Foil, Franklin J. (R) Baton Rouge (225) 342-6777 [email protected] Garofalo, Raymond E. (R) St. Bernard Parish (504) 277-4729 [email protected] Gisclair, Jerry (D) Larose (985) 798-7707 [email protected] Guinn, John E. (R) Jennings (337) 824-0376 [email protected] Harrison, Joe (R) Gray (800) 935-2081 [email protected] James, Edward C. (D) Baton Rouge (225) 925-4859 [email protected] Jones, Sam (D) Franklin (337) 828-7778 [email protected] Lambert, Eddie J. (R) Gonzales (225) 673-5048 [email protected] Leopold, Christopher J. (R) Belle Chasse (504) 393-5649 [email protected] Morris, James (R) VC Oil City (318) 995-6852 [email protected] Montoucet, Jack (D) Crowley (337) 783-2999 [email protected] Ortego, Stephen J. (D) Carencro (337) 886-4687 [email protected] Schexnayder, Clay (R) Sorrento (225) 473-6016 [email protected]
The Almost Final Push
Dear Colleagues,
It may not seem like it if you read the stories of the last few weeks, but believe it-- we have a decent chance to kill all the bills that threaten the flood protection authority's lawsuit against the oil & gas industry.
Grassroots pressure-- your pressure-- has finally loosened up some of the votes against us. Now we need more pressure to break those votes free.
Jindal and the industry filed 17 bills against the lawsuit. Right now it looks like only three have a chance of passing. And to keep even that many bills alive, the industry and Jindal had to violate the rules of both the House and Senate.
I said before, history doesn't happen. People make history. You are making history.
We have a great chance to defeat two of the three remaining bills, SB 547 & SB 553, in the House Civil Law Committee, now scheduled to meet Tuesday. The industry and the governor are applying as much pressure as they can, but we look good in this committee. You are the only counterweight to their pressure. If you live in the districts of members of that committee please tell them to let the courts decide. Committee members are:
That leaves SB 469, which by twisting the rules the industry got assigned to House Natural Resources, which will hear the bill Wednesday. Nonetheless, we have a chance to win there. Again, if you live in the districts above let them hear from you. Especially if you live in Garofalo's or Schexnayder's district, let them hear from you. They're on both committees and both would vote against us right now. Chris Leopold in Plaquemines is also a key.
If 469 does get out of committee, we have a 50-50 chance of winning on the House floor. That battle will come the following week.
I've been to Baton Rouge almost every day. I'm tired. I'm sure you're tired, too, especially if you've already sent emails or letters or called. But if you want to win, you will exert more effort than ever. Contact your representative again. Get friends and neighbors and clerks in stores to do it. Get everyone on your email list to do it. It matters.
We`are so close we can taste it. Let's do it.
Thanks,
John
Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans urges defeat of SB 553. Lives depend on flood authority independence! When voters statewide approved the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authorities (SLFPAs) by an overwhelming 81 percent in the Sept. 30, 2006, constitutional election, they created two politically independent levee districts as political subdivisions and units of local government.
They voted to put public safety first, to create constitutional protection for two local-area flood protection authorities and to keep them out of politics (particularly, out of gubernatorial politics).
The political independence of these two regional flood protection authorities relies hugely on their status as political subdivisions. Under Louisiana’s Constitution, they are units of local (not state) government. They serve our metropolitan-area flood protection needs and are not controlled by the governor, as they were pre-Katrina.
Now, legislative assaults on their political independence seek to move them away from the protections of local government, treating them as state agencies subject to the governor’s control.
That’s not what Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans fought for in 2006. That’s not what Louisiana voters approved when they passed the 2006 constitutional amendment. Read more »
URGENT ACTION REQUESTED: PLEASE CALL MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT AND TELL THEM TO VOTE AGAINST SB 469. VOTE IS EXPECTED ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, BUT COULD CHANGE AT ANY TIME!
It is ambiguously worded and will erode the rights of parishes to file suit for violations of the Clean Water Act, the River and Harbors Act and the Coastal Zone Management Program. This bill was formerly Senator Brett Allain's SB 531, but became SB 469 through sleight-of-hand and transferred out of Senate Judiciary Committee A, where it would have been defeated, to the Senate Natural Resources Committee where it passed on a voice vote May 7.
Last week, April 28-May 1, the Green Army with the sponsorship of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, traveled across the coastal zone and south Louisiana visiting with communities where lives and properties have been compromised or destroyed by the callous disregard of the oil and gas industry. These communities included Bayou Corne, Lake Peigneur, Vermillion and Cameron parishes, Mossville, and Standard Heights in Baton Rouge. On Thursday evening, May 1, the tour rolled into Abita Springs to lend support to St. Tammany Parish residents who are fighting a permit that would allow Helios Energy the right to frack above the Southern Hills Aquifer. Moss Robeson, an 18-year old rider on the tour, prepared this documentary from the week's events.
LOST PARADISE: The Green Army's "No Big Oil Bailout" Louisiana Bus Tour from Moss Robeson on Vimeo.
OUR MISSION
It took nature 6,000 years to create the Louisiana coast, yet only 75 years for humans to destroy one-third of it. Already, 1,900 square miles of coastal lands have melted into the Gulf of Mexico, and that damage has put New Orleans and the entire region on the verge of collapse. The destruction of land is continuing, and if this area washes away, so will the economy and heart of the entire state -- and the nation will pay a price as well.
The oil industry is not the only party responsible for this destruction, but they are accountable for much of it. RLN will initially devote itself to preventing political interference in the lawsuit filed by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East against 97 oil, gas, and pipeline companies for the destruction of the coast -- the region’s first line of hurricane protection.
The message of these lawsuits is simple; obey the law, keep your word and fix what you broke. According to a recent poll, 93% of coastal Louisiana residents say that oil, gas and pipeline companies, not taxpayers, should pay to fix their share of the damage to the coastal wetlands. RLN proudly stands with those residents.
Watch John Barry's speech describing the necessity of the lawsuit:
John Barry Goes to the Rotary Club from Walter Williams on Vimeo. ||||| Deposed Southeast Flood Protection Authority East vice president John Barry on Tuesday announced the creation of Restore Louisiana Now, a nonprofit organization that will lobby on behalf of a controversial lawsuit filed by the authority in July against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies that seeks to get them to repair damage to wetlands or compensate the authority for damage that can’t be repaired, with the money to be used for levee improvements.
“What it really comes down to is the most basic conservative American values, what parents are supposed to teach their kids,” Barry said of the organization's support for the lawsuit. He spoke at a news conference at the Blue Crab Restaurant on Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans. “It’s keep your word, obey the law and take responsibility for your actions.
“The oil, gas and pipeline industries -- those companies haven’t done any of those things,” Barry said.
He said the organization also will support 28 lawsuits filed against energy companies by Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes last week that also ask for repair of wetlands damage.
The organization will eventually broaden its focus to include issues such as the Bayou Corne sinkhole, Barry said. But other issues will take a back seat to supporting the levee authority lawsuit, he said. “We intend to fulfill the task of preserving the lawsuit and preventing opponents from getting the Legislature to intervene in what should be a court process,” Barry said.
The suit argues that the loss of wetlands outside east bank levees caused by the energy companies has reduced the effectiveness of the levees to protect interior areas from hurricane storm surges. It argues that the firms violated federal and state permits and state laws that required them to maintain and restore areas they damaged.
Gov. Bobby Jindal and Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves, Jindal's coastal adviser, attacked the suit as soon as it was filed in July, contending that it would disrupt the state’s plans to sue the federal government for wetlands damages caused by the Army Corps of Engineers’ management of the Mississippi River, and that it also would conflict with projects proposed as part of the state’s $50 billion, 50-year coastal restoration and protection Master Plan.
They argue that such suits also make it more difficult to work with oil and gas companies in repairing wetlands.
Jindal and Graves also objected to the fees that might be earned by the attorneys filing the suit on behalf of the authority and to a “poison pill” provision in the contract that would saddle the authority – and possibly the state – with any costs incurred in pressing the suit if the authority was forced to drop it.
Barry’s name was not submitted to Jindal for reappointment to the levee authority in October after Jindal made clear he would not be chosen because of his role in proposing the suit. Jindal also replaced two other board members, including one who also voted for the suit.
Jindal is unable to remove members of the authority whose terms have not expired under a provision that is aimed at removing the board from politics by assuring that no governor can replace all its members.
New Orleans lawyer Joe Hassinger, appointed to Barry's seat, will ask the authority on Thursday to vote to suspend action on the suit for 90 days and to ask the legislative auditor to investigate the issue.
Barry’s new organization, while nonprofit, will not be tax-exempt, which will allow it to lobby on behalf of issues before the Legislature and Congress. Joining him as members of its inaugural board of directors are Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal and Walter Williams, a New Orleans native who created the “Mr. Bill” video spots for the “Saturday Night Live” television program.
Rosenthal and her organization have been critics of the Corps of Engineers after the failure of levees and floodwalls, resulting in the flooding of most of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and has led a nationwide effort to educate the public about the risks of similar failures for other federally designed and built levees.
Williams used the character Mr. Bill in a series of spots for the America’s Wetland Foundation in the 2000s, but refused to allow the organization to continue using them in 2008 after learning it received support from several oil companies. He has produced several documentaries about coastal loss issues in Louisiana since then.
Also on the board, but not appearing at Wednesday’s news conference are retired New Orleans Criminal District Court Judge Calvin Johnson and Al Sunseri, whose family owns P&J Oyster Co., which was hard-hit by the BP oil spill. Sunseri is a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection, Restoration and Conservation.
During the news conference, Barry also released the results of a poll of residents of Louisiana’s coastal parishes, stretching from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge to New Orleans, that he said supported the lawsuit.
The poll of 1,000 residents was conducted between Oct. 24 and Nov. 5. The margin of error for the poll was 3 percentage points.
The poll conducted by Silas Lee & Associates of New Orleans found that by a margin of more than 3 to 1, respondents didn’t want the Legislature to intervene to stop the levee authority lawsuit, that nearly two-thirds had little or no confidence that the oil and gas companies would voluntarily restore wetlands to their original condition, and that by more than 25 to 1, residents expect oil and gas companies who dredged and drilled in wetlands to pay for their restoration.
The poll found that the top three issues of concern for coastal residents were education, 76 percent; protecting wetlands from coastal erosion, 75 percent; and improving flood protection in their parish, 63 percent.
Barry is a historian holding a research appointment at Tulane University and is best known for writing “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.”
He said an irony of Jindal’s ousting him from the levee authority is that it provides him with the freedom to lobby on behalf of the lawsuit. Authority members are prohibited from lobbying on any issue. “On the flood protection authority board I was not allowed to be political,” he said. “I could not so much as ask a legislator for support. I assure you, I will be asking people for support now, both legislators and the public.”
Barry said he and others in the new organization are not opposed to the oil and gas industry operating in the state, but they want energy companies to pay for their damages. And he wants state legislators to recognize the industry’s liability.
“The industry has cooperated with parishes and levee districts to the tune of millions of dollars, (but) its liability statewide is in the tens of billions of dollars,” he said. “So what they have contributed so far is between 1/100th and 1/10th of a penny on the dollar for their liability.
“In return for that contribution, many politicians have been defending them,” Barry said. “I think that’s a pretty good deal for the industry. I think that’s a pretty terrible deal for the taxpayer. More importantly, I think it’s a pretty terrible deal for people living in the affected areas, people whose lives are threatened by land loss, whose risk increases every single day.”
||||| | – A Louisiana historian wants oil and gas companies to help restore state wetlands that are vanishing by the day—but politicians are fighting him tooth and nail, the New York Times Magazine reports. John Barry, a gritty ex-weightlifter who writes US history books, watches in horror as Louisiana wetlands recede (and the Gulf of Mexico advances) by about a football field per hour. Dams and levees are partly to blame, as are tens of thousands of wells carved by oil and gas companies. The industry even admits to causing 36% of southeastern Louisiana's wetlands loss. A plan supported by scientists and industry to repair the land would cost about $50 billion, $20 billion of which can be paid by BP Deepwater Horizon oil-spill lawsuits. Barry believes oil-and-gas should pay at least $18 billion of the rest—or 36% of the total. But oil-and-gas wants taxpayers to foot that bill, so Barry fought back. In an ambitious move, the regional levee board of which Barry was a member filed the biggest environmental lawsuit in US history against the oil and gas companies that affected the wetlands. "The reality is that our case is overwhelming," says Barry, adding that the companies "violated the terms of their contract. They broke the law!" Most of the companies had, in fact, used permits that demanded any environmental damage be repaired. But the state legislature—which critics say is deeply influenced by oil-and-gas—argued that no laws had been broken, and passed a bill that crippled or perhaps killed the lawsuit before it reached a courtroom. Gov. Bobby Jindal then signed the bill into law. Barry has started a nonprofit to keep the suit alive, and tells the Times-Picayune that "it really comes down to is the most basic conservative American values. It’s keep your word, obey the law, and take responsibility for your actions." |
'It’s hell. I can’t stand it!’ Carla Bruni reveals what Michelle Obama REALLY thinks of being First Lady
By Peter Allen
Last updated at 9:01 PM on 16th September 2010
New biography alleges rivalry between two women strained relations between the French and U.S. presidential couples
Michelle Obama thinks being America’s First Lady is ‘hell’, Carla Bruni reveals today in a wildly indiscreet book.
Miss Bruni divulges that Mrs Obama replied when asked about her position as the U.S. president’s wife: ‘Don’t ask! It’s hell. I can’t stand it!’
Details of the private conversation, which took place at the White House during an official visit by Nicolas Sarkozy last March, emerged in Carla And The Ambitious.
The book was written by journalists Michael Darmon and Yves Derai in what they claim is collaboration with Miss Bruni.
No secrets: Michelle Obama, left, and Carla Bruni last year. Miss Bruni made the revelations about the U.S. First Lady's feelings in a wildly indiscreet new book
Time for a little chat: Another biography about Carla refers to an alleged rivalry with Michelle and says it has strained relations between the French and U.S. presidential couples
Described by one of the French authors as 'Carla in her own words,' she portrays herself as demanding, spoilt, and selfish.
She also gives extraordinary insight into her life as the wife of a leader - and her relationship with some of the most prominent figures in the world, including the American president.
'On the advice of the Obamas,' she says, 'We don't read the papers in the morning any more.'
She does not speak to the American First Lady very often, she adds, but said that she likes her and 'could be her friend.'
Miss Bruni also tells how the U.S. President called her husband to congratulate him on becoming a grandfather after his son Jean had a baby boy Solal in January this year.
A wave for the cameras: The Obamas are greeted by the French president and his wife. Michelle is described in a biography of Carla as 'the only one in (Carla's) eyes able to challenge her for the title of the world's sexiest and most glamorous first lady'
Sarkozy pretended to be offended and said: 'You too, you will be a granddad one day'.
Mr Obama then teased him furhter by asking what Carla thought about being married to someone who was a grandfather.
In the book, Miss Bruni says one term as French president ‘will be enough’ for her husband and suggests he might take tips from his friend Tony Blair: ‘Why not start making money?’
According to a friend quoted in the book, the Sarkozys have been ‘impressed and inspired’ by Mr Blair’s fortune built up since he left Downing Street.
Miss Bruni also takes a thinly-veiled swipe at Princess Diana when talking about a visit to an African hospital full of Aids victims earlier this year.
She says she refused requests by French cameramen for a photograph of her carrying a baby in her arms ‘like Lady Di’, adding: ‘There’s something obscene in promoting yourself when you are giving of yourself.’
In the book, the Italian model, 42, accuses French government officials of trying to ‘kill’ her husband with too much work, and claims Mr Sarkozy lets himself be ‘bullied’ into complying.
Time limit: Carla with husband Nicolas Sarkozy. She claims one term as French president will be enough for him
Comparing herself to other leaders’ wives, Miss Bruni says: ‘I’m so different. I was a model. I sing, and I want to continue to sing. And on top of that you expect me to be subtle?’ And she admits: ‘I am a femme fatale, my dear.’
Tony Blair promoting his autobiography in New York. According to a friend quoted in Carla And The Ambitious, the Sarkozys have been 'impressed and inspired' by Mr Blair's fortune built up since he left Downing Street
She also recounts a telephone row with Mr Sarkozy’s ex-wife Cecilia, who warned her that Mr Sarkozy had ‘not yet turned a new page’ after their marriage.
Miss Bruni replied: ‘Not only has he turned a page but he’s changed books altogether. And you are the only person on earth not to have noticed it.’
The Elysee Palace has denied that the Miss Bruni co-operated with the biography.
Coincidentally, a second book - this one completely unauthorised - was published this week which also suggest a fractious relationship between Bruni and the First Lady.
Its author Besma Lahouri refers to an alleged rivalry with Michelle Obama and says it has strained relations between the French and U.S. presidential couples.
'[Michelle Obama] the only one in (Carla's) eyes able to challenge her for the title of the world's sexiest and most glamorous first lady'
Ms Lahouri says, Bruni-Sarkozy's obsessions have shifted away from rock stars to women she perceives as rivals.
One is Nicolas Sarkozy's second wife Cecilia, who was divorced from the French president months after he took office and the second is Michelle Obama.
She is described in the book as 'the only one in (Carla's) eyes able to challenge her for the title of the world's sexiest and most glamorous first lady'.
The book chronicles the minutia of the first ladies' various meetings, suggesting that Obama's alleged antipathy, or perhaps just indifference, to Bruni-Sarkozy has allegedly helped keep relations frosty between the French and U.S. presidential couples.
Ms Lahouri says Bruni-Sarkozy is 'a chameleon', someone who has 'trained herself to be a formidable actress'.
'She is a very foxy woman - I choose the word "foxy" over "clever". In fact, very foxy.'
The investigative reporter says Bruni's image of distant, well-heeled perfection has kept her at arm's length from the French people.
However, a spokesman at the French Embassy in Washington, Emmanuel Lenain, told CBS News that Bruni was not involved in writing the book.
||||| The White House is denying that first lady Michelle Obama ever described her White House life as "hell."
Mrs. Obama's spokeswoman, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, responded Thursday to a purported comment attributed to Mrs. Obama in a forthcoming book, "Carla and the Ambitious," about French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. The book says Bruni-Sarkozy recalled that during a recent White House visit with her husband, the French president, she asked Mrs. Obama about her new role. According to the book, Mrs. Obama replied: "It's hell. I can't stand it."
The French Embassy in Washington also released a statement denying that Mrs. Obama ever said those words. The Embassy says Bruni-Sarkozy "distances herself completely" from the book, which is due out Friday. ||||| | – Just in time for election season, a story Michelle Obama can't possibly be happy to see: In a new book, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy claims Obama told her that being first lady is "hell. I can't stand it!" (The White House and the French Embassy in Washington deny that Obama said any such thing, the AP reports.) Carla and the Ambitious, which was reportedly written in collaboration with the French first lady, is "wildly indiscreet," the Daily Mail reports; the French Embassy says Bruni-Sarkozy "distances herself completely" from the book, out tomorrow. Another book, an unauthorized biography of Bruni-Sarkozy, details the apparently chilly relationship between the first ladies, alleging Bruni-Sarkozy sees Obama as a rival. Michelle is "the only one in (Carla's) eyes able to challenge her for the title of the world's sexiest and most glamorous first lady," Besma Lahouri claims in Carla: A Secret Life. For more scandalous tell-all revelations about Bruni-Sarkozy, click here. |
The popularity of triathlons — races in which competitors run, bike and swim — has exploded over the past 15 years. According to USA Triathlon, the leading group that organizes races, the number of people with one-day memberships (indicating race participation) stood at more than 447,000 in 2014, compared with about 128,000 in 1999.
But a small yet persistent number of tragedies have marred the triathlon boom. Triathletes have a death rate of approximately 1.5 people per 100,000 participants, according to a 2010 article in the journal JAMA. That's not many, but it is two to three times higher than the rate seen in marathons.
Most of the deaths occur during the swim portion of the races, when participants are crowded together in the water. And when someone dies during a swim, it's tough to determine the cause. [The Odds of Dying: A Look At Your Chances of Death from Causes Both Common and Unusual]
Now, new research hints that a rush of fluid into the lungs may sometimes play a role.
In the new research, scientists looked at a condition called immersion pulmonary edema (IPO). When someone jumps into water — especially cold water — the body rapidly shunts blood away from the extremities and moves it toward the core. Sometimes, this can lead to a change in internal pressure that forces fluids from the blood into the lungs, leading to shortness of breath and blood-tinged mucus. If a swimmer can't get out of the water quickly, the fluid buildup (the edema) in their lungs may incapacitate them.
The researchers at Duke University Medical Center and the University of Iowa tracked triathlon deaths in the United States and Canada from October 2008 to November 2015. They found that 58 people died while training or during competitions, including 42 who died during the swim portion. Then, the researchers requested autopsy records from those swimming deaths. (They didn't compare the swimming deaths to the biking and running deaths because there were very few fatalities from those other portions of the race, and many of the deaths that did occur were the result of car collisions.)
Of the 23 records the researchers were able to secure, 19 belonged to men and four belonged to women. In some cases, there were obvious cardiac problems that could have contributed to the person's death. Four men had significant coronary artery disease, defined as blood vessels that were narrowed by more than 70 percent. Another man experienced a tear in his renal artery, causing him to hemorrhage; another died when his aortic artery tore open. A third man had heart stents, indicating existing cardiovascular disease. The researchers removed this group from their analysis, leaving 16 people without any obvious reason to have died in the water.
Of this remaining group, six people had excessively large hearts, the researchers found. In particular, the athletes showed evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy, meaning that the chamber of the heart that pumps blood to the body is larger than usual.
Elite athletes often have larger hearts than their sedentary counterparts because they work the muscle harder, but this so-called "athlete's heart" is usually not as pronounced as what was seen in the triathletes who died, the researchers reported Aug. 29 in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.
The researchers also compared the results of the autopsies to a cohort of 225 healthy triathletes and found vast differences in the proportion of people with thickening of their heart walls. The septum, or middle wall, of the ventricles was thickened in 1 percent of the healthy athletes, compared with 67 percent of the deceased athletes. Likewise, the posterior wall of the ventricles was overly thick in 0.5 percent of the healthy triathletes, compared with 50 percent of the deceased triathletes. [10 Amazing Facts About Your Heart]
Previous studies had found left ventricular hypertrophy to be a risk factor for immersion pulmonary edema. The new findings don't prove that the triathletes died of IPO, the researchers warned, but they do suggest a possible explanation for some deaths.
"The message is that if people have untreated hypertension or they're known to have ventricular hypertrophy, they need to get evaluated and treated before they embark on this sport," study researcher Dr. Richard Moon, a professor of anesthesiology and medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine, said in a statement.
Other explanations for triathlete deaths have been suggested as well. A 2015 commentary in the journal Current Sports Medicine Reports pointed to some possible explanations, such as panic attacks caused by crowded race conditions and cold-water races when athletes are used to training in warm pools. Some triathlon organizations are working to make changes to events that may decrease the risk. Ironman, for example, altered its swims in 2013 so that participants start in a staggered fashion rather than entering the water all at once.
Original article on Live Science. ||||| Conclusions LVH—a marker of SIPO susceptibility—was present in a greater than the expected proportion of triathletes who died during the swim portion. We propose that IPO may be a significant aetiology of death during the swimming phase in triathletes. The importance of testing for LVH in triathletes as a predictor of adverse outcomes should be explored further.
Results We identified 58 deaths during the time period of the review, 42 (72.4%) of which occurred during a swim. Of these, 23 postmortem reports were obtained. Five individuals had significant (≥70%) coronary artery narrowing; one each had coronary stents; retroperitoneal haemorrhage; or aortic dissection. 9 of 20 (45%) with reported heart mass exceeded 95th centile values. LV free wall and septal thickness were reported in 14 and 9 cases, respectively; of these, 6 (42.9%) and 4 (44.4%) cases exceeded normal values. 6 of 15 individuals (40%) without an obvious cause of death had excessive heart mass. The proportion of individuals with LVH exceeded the prevalence in the general triathlete population.
Methods Deaths while training for or during triathlon events in the USA and Canada from October 2008 to November 2015 were identified, and postmortem reports requested. We assessed obvious causes of death; the prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH); comparison with healthy triathletes.
In a series of deaths occurring during the swim portion of triathlon events, a high proportion of autopsies demonstrated cardiac anomalies, in particular left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). LVH is a marker of immersion pulmonary oedema (IPO) susceptibility, and the authors propose that many of these deaths were due to swimming-induced pulmonary oedema (SIPO).
The results suggest that screening examinations for triathletes should search for conditions that predispose to SIPO, such as hypertension, LVH and obstructive sleep apnoea. A risk reduction strategy that may prevent some of these deaths should include optimisation of blood pressure and body weight, and treatment of sleep apnoea.
The current investigation was performed to test the hypothesis that, when compared with healthy triathletes and the general population, individuals who died during a triathlon or in training have a higher prevalence of cardiac anomalies that could predispose to IPO.
Immersion pulmonary oedema (IPO, also known as swimming-induced pulmonary oedema, SIPO) is one such potential cause. IPO presents as rapid onset of dyspnoea, wheezing, hypoxaemia and expectoration of blood-tinged sputum, which can incapacitate a swimmer. A recent comprehensive review of swimming-related death identified IPO as a possible cause. 11 Although IPO usually occurs in healthy individuals without an obvious predisposing factor, many victims have left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), hypertension and other cardiovascular comorbidities—potential markers of susceptibility. 12–15
Drowning, the process of experiencing respiratory impairment from submersion/immersion in liquid, 4 is often the official reported cause of swimming death; 1 however, drowning seems unlikely in experienced swimmers. Predictors of cardiac death—the overwhelming primary cause of sudden death in most other sports 2 , 5–8 —remain elusive in triathletes. Arrhythmic causes, including prolonged QTc and autonomic conflict (simultaneous activation of sympathetic and parasympathetic), 4 , 9 have been proposed in triathlete cardiac death. Other suggested causes include exertional heat stroke, myocardial infarction, head trauma, panic attack and arrhythmia. 10 Cause of death uncommonly can be attributed to an anatomic cardiac anomaly; 1 thus, in most cases, physiological causes must be sought.
The triathlon is a sequence of consecutive races consisting of a sequence of swim (750–3800 m), bicycle (13–112 km) and foot (5–42 km) races. As in all competitive sports, there is a modest sudden death rate, which has been estimated at 1.5 per 100 000 participants, 1 in sanctioned triathlon events, two to three times greater than the marathon rate. 2 , 3 As most deaths occur during the swim when the victim's plight is not readily distinguishable among the large number of swimmers, the proximate cause of sudden death in the swim portion of the triathlon remains elusive.
Each medical examiner report was examined to determine whether there were any abnormalities of coronary arteries, cardiac muscle or valves, or obvious cause of death other than coronary disease. Heart mass and myocardial thickness were recorded. Heart mass was classified relative to normal reference ranges: for men 233–383 g; 16 for women 148–296 g. 17 Heart mass and ventricular wall thickness were also compared with the 95th centile values of normal heart mass scaled to height and sex. 18 Values also were compared with echocardiographic data obtained from a population of triathletes. 19 Also recorded were age, sex, height, body mass, body mass index, event date, death date, autopsy results and any other available pertinent information. Significant coronary artery disease (CAD) was enumerated as ≥70%; ≥50% coronary narrowing was also recorded. 20 LV mass was conservatively estimated as 75% of total heart weight. 21
The study was approved by the Duke Medicine Institutional Review Board. Using the search phrase ‘triathlon death’, deaths during triathlon events or while in training for triathlons in the USA and Canada from October 2008 to November 2015 were identified using manual internet searches and Google Alerts. The phase of the event when death occurred was obtained from news sources such as newspaper articles or internet postings. Medical examiner reports for those participants who died during a swim were requested, and the phase of the race in which each acute event occurred was confirmed from the report.
Excluding those with an obvious possible cause of death (coronary disease ≥70% narrowing (n=4), presumed coronary disease due to history of stent placement (n=1), retroperitoneal haemorrhage (n=1), aortic dissection (n=1)), 16 individuals remained. Of these, 6 (37.5%) had excessive heart mass, one of whom also had acute myocarditis. In this group, there was a higher proportion of individuals with thickened LV compared with the general triathlete population (p<0.001, table 6 ).
Four individuals had significant (≥70%) CAD. A man aged 58 years died of a massive retroperitoneal haemorrhage due to renal artery dissection. Death was attributed to acute dissection of the descending aorta in a man aged 66 years. A man aged 46 years had a history of atrial fibrillation, and flecainide was detected in his urine. A man aged 68 years was known to have coronary stents; his death was presumed to have been due to coronary disease and a full autopsy was not performed. Post-resuscitation ECG revealed prolonged QTc interval in a man aged 44 years whose initial cardiac rhythm was ventricular fibrillation. A woman aged 38 years had acute myocarditis. All individuals had pulmonary oedema.
We identified 58 deaths during the time period of the review, of which 42 (72.4%) occurred during the swim ( tables 1 and 2 ). A total of 23 medical examiner reports were obtained and reviewed. There were 19 men and 4 women ( table 3 ). The age distribution of the population of individuals for whom medical examiner report was available did not differ from the total population of swimming deaths ( table 4 , χ 2 =1.274, p=0.74). Further details are provided in table 5 and the online supplementary file .
Discussion
Albeit the probability of death during a triathlon is low, when occurring in a highly publicised event it inevitably raises a great deal of public concern about the sport's safety. This impelled the largest North American triathlon organisation to initiate an inquiry into triathlon deaths.22 ,23 Unfortunately, good data are difficult to obtain and hence specific screening or aftercare recommendations could not be made. The current investigation was performed to test the hypothesis that, when compared with triathletes and the general population, individuals who died swimming during a triathlon or in training have a higher prevalence of cardiac anomalies that predispose to IPO.
IPO and its causes Water immersion causes blood redistribution from the periphery to the heart and pulmonary vessels, causing an increase in central blood volume and pulmonary vascular pressures.24 This can be extreme and precipitate pulmonary oedema in IPO-susceptible individuals, even in those without any obvious comorbidities.25 The effect is augmented—especially during exercise—in cold versus warm water.26 Those triathletes susceptible to IPO are therefore believed to have abnormal myocardial diastolic compliance (lusitropy)—or stiff hearts. Abnormal LV diastolic compliance is partly responsible for elevated LV end-diastolic pressure during exercise in patients suffering from heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).27 IPO seems to be a form of HFpEF precipitated by increased preload due to immersion with heavy exertion. In the initial publication of IPO, a number of individuals exhibited a hypertensive response to cold exposure; thus, it is plausible that they had LVH.12 In a recent review of published cases, nearly 50% of published civilian IPO cases had identifiable predisposing factors, and most were cardiac.15 The association of IPO susceptibility with LVH and risk factors for LVH12–15 strongly implicates abnormal LV diastolic compliance. Since most sudden deaths occur during the swim portion of the triathlon, it is certainly plausible that IPO is a cause. IPO tends to occur in susceptible individuals most frequently in cold water, and often during heavy exertion.12 ,28–30 Typical IPO symptoms—cough productive of pink frothy or blood-tinged secretions occurring during a swim—have been reported by 1.4% of triathletes,31 and in 1.8–60% during 2.4–3.6 km open sea swimming trials in young, fit naval recruits.29 ,32 The prevalence of LVH in the general population is estimated to be 12–21%.33 ,34 In well-trained triathletes, LV dimensions are usually within the normal range for the general population.19 ,35 ,36 In a group of 235 triathletes (168 men, 67 women) participating in the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon from 1985 to 1995, the overall prevalence of LVH by echocardiography was 24% (LV mass >294 g in men, >198 g in women).19 Chronic, high-intensity exercise can also lead to LVH (athlete's heart); this was the most likely cause of the enlarged LV in most cases in the quoted series. Diastolic filling properties in athlete's heart under dry, resting conditions are normal;37 ,38 thus, it is unlikely that athlete's heart is a precipitating cause of IPO. LV thickness in athlete's heart very rarely exceeds 13 mm.39 ,40 In contrast, in the current series, a pathological cause of enlarged hearts was more prevalent, including extreme values of septal thickness and estimated LV mass (figure 1), significantly beyond the range expected from hypertrophy due to athlete's heart.36 ,39 ,41 Thus, diastolic filling properties were more likely to be abnormal. All autopsied cases in this series had pulmonary oedema, which is usually the end result from any attempt at cardiopulmonary resuscitation and water aspiration during terminal event. Thus, the existence of pulmonary oedema at autopsy provides little insight.
Possible causes of death in triathlons In some cases, cardiac anatomy at autopsy after a triathlon may occasionally provide clues to the cause of death.1 Of nine athletes autopsied after a triathlon-related death, only two had cardiac anomalies that could be construed as being a primary cause of death: one with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, the other with a congenital coronary artery anomaly. On the other hand, six had LVH.1 IPO is a plausible cause of triathlon death, particularly since it has been suggested as one possible mechanism in the pathophysiology of drowning.4 In contrast, due to the rarity of IPO-related deaths and lack of known history of IPO in any triathlon death, some have concluded that it is an unlikely cause of death in triathletes.10 ,22 ,23 Nevertheless, several IPO-related deaths have been reported in other settings.42–47 Fatal cases of IPO may be rare but probably under-recognised; unless an episode is witnessed and survival is sufficiently long enough to obtain adequate clinical information to make the diagnosis, attribution of an in-water death to IPO is exceedingly difficult.48 It is impossible to exclude primary arrhythmia as the cause of death in these individuals. Indeed, it has been proposed that cardiomegaly is an independent risk factor for cardiac arrhythmia.35 ,49–51 However, in a series of cardiac arrests during long-distance runs (where diagnostic facilities are more likely to be available and thus early detection of an arrhythmia more likely), primary arrhythmia was the purported cause in only a minority of instances. Non-ischaemic ventricular tachycardia was observed in only 7%, with ‘presumed arrhythmia’ the attributed cause in an additional 7%.3 One individual in our series had a history of atrial fibrillation and was taking an antiarrhythmic. It is not possible to know whether his propensity towards atrial arrhythmias contributed to his death; however, any rhythm other than sinus rhythm is likely to cause a rise in pulmonary artery and capillary pressures in the face of increased preload as occurs during immersion. In fact, atrial fibrillation has been proposed as a predisposing condition for IPO.52 In another case in the present series, prolonged QTc was noted after resuscitation. Swimming can be a trigger for arrhythmias in long QTc syndrome;53 however, prolonged QTc could also be secondary to antiarrhythmic drug administration after cardiopulmonary resuscitation or the cardiac injury itself. Information about genetic predisposition was unavailable. On the other hand, additional information from bystanders and others suggests that at least some of the deaths in the current series were not sudden and had features consistent with IPO (eg, cases 2, 10, 23 in the online supplementary material). It might also be argued that demand ischaemia might be more likely during swimming, even in those with minimal coronary narrowing, because of the central redistribution of blood and higher LV volume. For a given level of exercise, this might lead to greater myocardial wall tension and myocardial oxygen consumption compared to dry land. However, in patients with known CAD, a study of swimming in cold water versus cycling demonstrated that ST segment depression occurred at similar levels of exercise during both activities.54 The distribution of cardiac pathologies in this series is in marked contrast with other similar studies: in younger cohorts of sudden death cases, myocarditis, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and coronary artery abnormalities are more common.55 In case series with age distribution similar to the current series, atherosclerotic disease predominates.56 ,57 Of those in our cohort in whom coronary arteries were mentioned in the medical examiner's report, only four individuals had ≥70% coronary narrowing; six individuals had ≥50% narrowing. One additional person who did not have an autopsy but had coronary artery stents was presumed to have ≥50% narrowing. Whereas HCM is a common cause of sudden cardiac death in most series of land-based athletic events, no mention of it was made in any of the medical examiner reports in this series. While it can be difficult to distinguish HCM from undifferentiated LVH at autopsy,58 the apparent lack of HCM in this series is consistent with the physiology of swimming: blood redistribution during immersion dilates the LV and thus reduces the likelihood of LV outflow obstruction even when present.
Limitations There are several limitations to our study showing that markers of IPO susceptibility are common among victims of sudden death during triathlons. It cannot be definitively concluded that the cause of death in individuals with LVH was IPO. IPO has been considered by some to be an unlikely cause of triathlon death due to lack of prior history among victims. However, instances of IPO are most likely under-reported. Most triathletes train for the swim portion in pools, which are generally warmer than open bodies of water where events are held, and during a pool swim mild IPO symptoms can be relieved at an early stage by exiting the water. Primary arrhythmias cannot be excluded; indeed, it has been suggested that arrhythmias are more common among individuals with LVH.34 Among those classified as having no obvious cause of death, one (woman aged 38 years, see online supplementary case 3) had histologic evidence for acute myocarditis. Two others (man aged 57 years, see online supplementary case 6 and man aged 48 years, see online supplementary case 18) had 50–60% coronary stenosis. Although this degree of stenosis is not conventionally considered to be critical, the true degree of narrowing could have been underestimated at autopsy. Another (man aged 46 years, see online supplementary case 10) had no CAD but did have areas of myocardial fibrosis and chronic inflammation suggesting remote infarction. Finally, one case (man aged 43 years, see online supplementary case 12) had scattered intramural adipose and focal loose interstitial fibrous tissue. Although not identified as such by the examining pathologist, this could be consistent with arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia. We cannot exclude the possibility that these individuals might have died of an arrhythmia. While there could be inconsistencies in attempting to compare LVH using echocardiography with heart mass determined at autopsy (table 6), we feel that gross errors are unlikely as echo has been validated against postmortem measurements.59 Among 775 sports-related sudden death cases during moderate-to-vigorous exertion among men and women, fewer deaths occur during swimming than cycling or jogging.60 This could be a consequence, in individuals at risk for athletic sudden death, of fewer person-hours spent swimming. However, in triathlons, a specific swimming-related mechanism for death would be expected to predominate where swimming is the first of three events. Nevertheless, observations demonstrating that IPO is relatively common in competitive swimming such as military training and triathlons—and has been the cause of deaths42–47—implicate this condition as a likely cause of at least some deaths in triathlons. It would have been ideal to compare autopsies of triathletes dying during the bicycle or run portions; however, this was not possible due to fewer of those deaths, with a significant proportion due to motor vehicle trauma. Interestingly, scuba diving is another precipitating activity for IPO; indeed, LVH has been observed in a high percentage of scuba diving deaths.61 ||||| Heart abnormalities linked to immersion pulmonary edema were present in a greater-than-expected proportion of triathletes who died during the competition's swim portion, according to a study led by researchers at Duke Health.
The findings, published Aug. 29 in the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, are based on an analysis of autopsy reports of people who died in the United States and Canada between 2008 and 2015 while participating in triathlons. Triathlon competitions involve consecutive races of swimming, bicycling and running.
Study investigators identified 58 deaths during the time period, with 42 of those occurring during the swim. Researchers examined autopsy reports on 23 of the 42 deaths.
Richard Moon, M.D., the study's first author and a professor of anesthesiology and medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine, said he and co-investigators reviewed the autopsy reports to identify whether conditions were present that may have made the athletes susceptible to immersion pulmonary edema (IPE, in the study abbreviated as IPO based on the Greek spelling of oedema).
IPE, also known as swimming-induced pulmonary edema, occurs when the lungs suddenly fill with body fluids during activities in cold water, such as swimming and diving. IPE can lead to difficulty breathing, wheezing and confusion, which can be serious and even fatal.
While IPE can occur in healthy individuals, Moon said its onset is often seen in those with left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), a condition where the heart muscle becomes thickened or heart mass increases. LVH typically occurs in people with high blood pressure and is a marker for susceptibility to IPE. A mildly enlarged heart -- commonly referred to as athlete's heart -- can also develop among endurance athletes, although athlete's heart is not believed to predispose to swimming-induced pulmonary edema.
Moon and co-researchers compared figures from the autopsy reports in the current study to data from previous studies, including one published in 1997 led by Pamela Douglas, M.D., professor of medicine at Duke. Douglas' investigation looked at the prevalence of LVH in 225 athletes who completed a triathlon in Hawaii from 1985-95.
"Among the autopsy reports of the deceased triathletes, we found a much higher prevalence of LVH than the healthy athletes in Dr. Douglas' study," Moon said. "The degree of enlargement was also much greater in the triathletes who died."
Specifically, the 16 triathletes who died from unclear causes had higher measures of heart wall thickness. The autopsy reports showed abnormal cardiac septal thickness in 67 percent of the deceased athletes and abnormal posterior wall thickness in 50 percent. In the Douglas study, it was one percent and one-half percent, respectively.
While it cannot be definitively concluded that IPE was the cause of the triathlete deaths during swimming, Moon said the autopsy reports demonstrate a plausible link. He recommended that potential triathletes and their health-care providers be aware of the known connection between LVH and the potential risk of immersion pulmonary edema.
"The message is that if people have untreated hypertension or they're known to have ventricular hypertrophy, they need to get evaluated and treated before they embark on this sport," Moon said.
###
In addition to Moon, study authors include Stefanie D. Martina and Drs. Dionne F. Peacher and William E. Kraus of Duke.
The study was funded by the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command (N0463A-07-C-0002 and N61331-03-C-0015). The authors report no disclosures. ||||| | – Researchers believe they may know why so many people die during triathlons compared to other races, such as marathons. Approximately 1.5 people die out of every 100,000 who participate in a triathlon—which includes running, biking, and swimming portions, LiveScience reports. That's two to three times the death rate for marathon participants. According to a study published Monday in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, more than 72% of triathlon deaths looked at by researchers happened in the water during the swimming portion of the race. And researchers believe the culprit is something called immersion pulmonary edema, or IPE. IPE occurs when a person quickly gets into water, especially cold water. That causes the body to take blood from the arms, legs, and other extremities and move it toward the core. This changes the body's internal pressure and may force fluids from the blood into the lungs. This can cause people to experience confusion and difficulty breathing, sometimes to the point of death, according to a press release. A number of triathletes who died for no discernible reason had significantly enlarged hearts, even to a greater degree than other athletes. Researchers say this condition—left ventricular hypertrophy—is a risk factor for IPE. Researchers conclude future triathletes should be checked for the condition before participating in or training for a race. (A boy with cerebral palsy inspires in triathlon finish.) |
FILE - In this March 16, 2016, file photo, American student Otto Warmbier, center, is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea. Warmbier, whose parents say has been in a coma while serving... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this March 16, 2016, file photo, American student Otto Warmbier, center, is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea. Warmbier, whose parents say has been in a coma while serving... (Associated Press)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said Thursday it released an American university student over "humanitarian" reasons in its first official comment since he was returned to his home state of Ohio in a coma.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency said Otto Warmbier had been serving hard labor but didn't comment on his medical condition or how the country negotiated his release with the United States.
"Warmbier, who had been in hard labor, was sent back home on June 13, 2017, on humanitarian grounds according to the adjudication made on the same day by the Central Court of the DPRK," the agency said in the one-sentence report, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The 22-year-old Warmbier, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and sentenced in a one-hour trial in North Korea's Supreme Court in March 2016. He got 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion after he tearfully confessed that he had tried to steal a propaganda banner.
He was medically evacuated from North Korea and arrived in Cincinnati late Tuesday. His father, Fred Warmbier, told Fox News that his son was "terrorized and brutalized" and has been in a coma for more than a year.
The U.S., South Korea and others often accuse North Korea of using foreign detainees to wrest diplomatic concessions. Three Americans remain in custody in North Korea over accusations including alleged "hostile acts" and spying. ||||| Tucker Carlson sat down with the father of Otto Warmbier, an American student held captive by North Korea for more than a year.
The interview will air THURSDAY at 8 p.m. ET during Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News Channel.
Warmbier was released by the North Koreans last week, however he has reportedly been in a coma for several months.
Warmbier's father, Fred, told Carlson that the North Korean regime are "terrorists."
"They're brutal. There's no sense to anything here," he said. "They've crossed a line with my son, Otto."
Mr. Warmbier said the lessons from Otto's captivity will be for others to decide.
The Warmbier family held a news conference on Thursday morning, with Mr. Warmbier saying he doesn't believe anything that the "pariah regime" says about his son's time in captivity.
He also said former NBA player Dennis Rodman, who arrived in North Korea a day before Warmbier's release, had "nothing to do with" the matter of his son's detention.
LIVE BLOG: Parents of Otto Warmbier, student returned from North Korea, speak https://t.co/iIxxrpkJoT pic.twitter.com/Ssa4xuHziZ — Fox News (@FoxNews) June 15, 2017
As FoxNews.com reported.
The family of Otto Warmbier said Wednesday they are "adjusting to a different reality" following their son's return from North Korea, where he was "brutalized" by his captors and held for more than a year in a coma -- the cause of which is still unknown. "Otto is not in great shape right now," his father, Fred Warmbier, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in an exclusive interview Wednesday afternoon from his Cincinnati home. "Otto has been terrorized and brutalized for 18 months by a pariah regime in North Korea."
The 22-year-old college student was medically evacuated from North Korea and flown to a hospital in his hometown of Cincinnati late Tuesday following a brief flurry of diplomatic activity that involved the highest levels of U.S. government. The elder Warmbier singled out Joseph Yun, the U.S. special envoy on North Korea, as a key player in his son's release as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and President Trump.
Watch a preview clip from the exclusive interview above. ||||| WYOMING, Ohio (Reuters) - An American university student who was returned to the United States this week after being held in North Korea for 17 months has a severe brain injury and is in a state of “unresponsive wakefulness,” doctors said on Thursday.
Otto Warmbier, 22, who arrived in the United States on Tuesday, is stable but “shows no sign of understanding language, responding to verbal commands or awareness of his surrounding,” said Dr. Daniel Kanter, medical director of the neuroscience intensive care unit at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
“He has not spoken,” Kanter said at a news conference. “He has not engaged in any purposeful movements or behaviors.” He said Warmbier was breathing on his own.
Read the Reuters backstory
Warmbier, from Wyoming, Ohio, has been in a coma since March 2016, shortly after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea, his family said on Tuesday.
He was arrested for trying to steal an item bearing a propaganda slogan, North Korean media reported. He was visiting North Korea with a tour group.
On Thursday, North Korea said that it had released Warmbier “on humanitarian grounds.”
The University of Virginia student’s father, Fred Warmbier, said at an earlier news conference that his son had been “brutalized and terrorized” by the North Korean government.
Fred Warmbier said the family did not believe North Korea’s story that his son had fallen into a coma after contracting botulism and being given a sleeping pill.
Doctors said on Thursday that there was no sign of botulism in Otto Warmbier’s system.
Kanter said that Warmbier had suffered “extensive loss of brain tissue in all regions of the brain,” but he declined to discuss Warmbier’s prognosis at the request of his family.
FILE PHOTO - Otto Frederick Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who has been detained in North Korea since early January, attends a news conference in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this photo released by Kyodo February 29, 2016. Mandatory credit REUTERS/Kyodo
While doctors are uncertain as to what exactly caused the condition, cardiac arrest that stops the flow of blood to the brain is generally seen as resulting in the death of brain tissue.
Cardiac arrest in young, healthy people is rare and generally caused by either intoxication or traumatic injury, Dr. Jordan Bonomo, a specialist in neurosurgery and neurocritical care at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, said at the news conference.
Although doctors had no information about the type of medical treatment Warmbier received while in North Korea, they did receive MRI images from North Korea dated April 2016, Kanter said. Based on those images, doctors estimate the brain injury likely occurred in the preceding weeks, he said.
Doctors said there was no evidence that Warmbier suffered any broken bones.
On Thursday, the State Department said that its special envoy on North Korea, Joseph Yun, who negotiated Warmbier’s release during a visit to the country this week, had also met with three other U.S. citizens being held in North Korea.
Tensions between the United States and North Korea have been heightened by North Korean missile launches and two nuclear bomb tests. Pyongyang has vowed to develop a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. mainland.
Fred Warmbier said he was stunned when told of his son’s condition one week ago.
“I don’t know what being in shock is, but I’m pretty sure I was,” he said.
“There is no excuse for any civilized nation to have kept his condition secret and denied him top-notch medical care for so long.”
He said his wife, Cindy, had not left their son’s side since his return to the United States and that he had spoken with U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday night.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Thursday, “We’re glad he’s home.” He said officials would not comment on Warmbier’s health or how he came to be in his current condition.
Slideshow (5 Images)
Tillerson said on Wednesday that U.S. officials were considering some type of travel visa restriction to North Korea.
U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill last month that would ban U.S. citizens from traveling to North Korea as tourists and require them to obtain special permission for other types of visits, following the detention of at least 17 Americans there in the past decade.
In Wyoming, a northern Cincinnati suburb of about 8,000 people, Warmbier’s return to the United States was marked by blue and white ribbons, representing the colors of the local high school, tied around trees and telephone polls. ||||| | – North Korea has issued its first official comment since releasing Otto Warmbier, but it's not one that clears up the biggest questions. "Warmbier, who had been in hard labor, was sent back home on June 13, 2017, on humanitarian grounds according to the adjudication made on the same day by the Central Court" of North Korea, reads the entirety of the report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency, per the AP. Nothing further was said regarding how the release came to be negotiated or how Warmbier ended up in a coma. Pyongyang has claimed the 22-year-old contracted botulism and took a sleeping pill before falling into a coma immediately after his March 2016 trial, but at least one doctor disputes that. More: The Washington Post does have some further details regarding the release: It reports that after finally being informed of Warmbier's health, State Department Special Representative for North Korea Joseph Yun helped facilitate his removal from the country. The Post has more on the reaction to Warmbier's homecoming from those in his hometown of Wyoming, Ohio, population 8,400, and more about Warmbier himself: a salutatorian, homecoming king, and soccer team captain who was attending the University of Virginia on a "prestigious scholarship" awarded to "intellectually curious" students. As for what befell Warmbier, his parents may shine a light on that. Reuters reports Fred and Cindy Warmbier will "detail his mistreatment" during a Thursday morning press conference at their son's former high school. Fred Warmbier did speak with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, in an interview that will air Thursday at 8pm EDT on Fox News. We're "adjusting to a different reality," he says. "Otto is not in great shape right now ... [he] has been terrorized and brutalized for 18 months by a pariah regime in North Korea." As for what the brutality was, the New York Times cites an unnamed senior US official who says Warmbier was beaten. "The mystery is why," as the Times puts it. By its count, 16 Americans have been held by the country in the past 21 years, and they've typically been abused psychologically, not physically, though there have been exceptions (Robert Park, detained in 2009, says North Korean women used a club to beat his genitals). The feeling seems to be that North Korea is wary of further tarnishing the world's perception of its human rights record. |
The landmark spending bill approved by Congress on Thursday is a first step toward reversing years of steady growth in domestic appropriations and sets the stage for still more difficult budget fights this spring that will sorely test the same bipartisan coalition.
House passage—on a 260-167 vote—was secured only when Democrats crossed the aisle to rescue Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) from defeat after scores of defections on his right. Hours later, the Senate acted with far less suspense but again on a bipartisan 81-19 roll call.
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Repeating this level of cooperation will be the great challenge of the coming months.
The same Democrats who helped Boehner on Thursday won’t be back Friday to support the wholesale changes to Medicare and Medicaid envisioned in the Republican budget resolution. And it can’t be forgotten that Thursday’s votes came about only after lawmakers were chastened last week by walking to the precipice of an unprecedented wartime shutdown of the government.
That said, new crises abound. “We must build on this bipartisan compromise to tackle these issues,” a White House spokesman said after the bill’s passage. Indeed, the Treasury Department will soon exhaust its borrowing authority, requiring Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling or risk default. And if no agreement can be reached on the new budget resolution, the tortured saga of 2011 appropriations could very well be repeated.
As it is, six months into the fiscal year, the 451-page bill puts Cabinet departments and agencies on permanent footing, but at a spending level nearly $38 billion below what it was when the new Congress began in January. Nondefense spending is hardest hit, with a reduction closer to $42 billion, and the new appropriations target — just shy of $1.0498 trillion — is $78.5 billion less than President Barack Obama’s initial 2011 budget requests from a year ago.
State and local governments may feel the pinch most, and from Environmental Protection Agency sewer and water grants to community development block grants and Department of Homeland Security aid for local responders, billions of dollars will no longer flow from Washington.
“Never before have we cut our appropriated funding so drastically,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniele Inouye (D-Hawaii). “By far and away, this is the largest one-year cut from the president’s budget request in the nation’s history.”
Obama and Boehner — together with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — struck the deal last Friday. But down to the end, Boehner’s unique role as both speaker and party leader was pivotal as he seemed to swing between embracing Democratic votes and his more partisan goal of keeping a GOP-dominant fight with as few defections as possible.
“Listen, this bill is not perfect. It’s no cause for celebration. This is just one step,” Boehner told reporters Thursday at a morning press conference. Armed with charts, he went to the floor and bluntly told colleagues: “This is the best we could get out of divided government.” ||||| WASHINGTON — Congress voted Thursday to keep the government financed through September, putting an end to a raucous first skirmish in this year’s showdown between Democrats and Republicans over federal spending while presaging bigger ones to come.
Scores of House Republicans deserted their leadership to vote against the bill, which cut $38 billion in spending, saying it did not go far enough. As a result, Speaker John A. Boehner was forced to rely on large numbers of Democrats to pass the measure, which subsequently sailed through the Senate, 81 to 19. It went to President Obama for his signature.
Over the last several days, House Republican leaders repeatedly defended the bill, the product of a bipartisan compromise last week less than two hours before the government would have shut down. They said that while it fell short of their goal of cutting $61 billion from spending this year, it nonetheless established the principle that the budget would have to be substantially reined in.
“Is it perfect?” Mr. Boehner said, in his final appeal to members on the House floor. “No. I’d be the first to admit it’s flawed. But welcome to divided government.”
The House vote was 260 to 167, with 59 Republicans breaking ranks to vote against the deal. The large number of defections highlighted the challenge facing Mr. Boehner as he tiptoes between conservatives who ran on a shake-it-up agenda and the limitations of what the House can do when Democrats control the Senate and the White House.
The number of House Republicans who voted against the measure would have been 60 had Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas not arrived too late to vote. Afterward, Mr. Gohmert approached the podium and said sheepishly that the bill “didn’t live up to our promises,” before walking away. Among the 87 Republican freshmen, many of whom ran on a platform of “cut it now,” 60 voted in favor of the bill and 27 against.
Yet for all its last-minute drama and attendant partisan theatrics, the bill — made necessary after Democrats failed to pass a 2011 budget in the last Congress — was just an opening act for more consequential battles to come before this Congress.
Thursday’s vote was the precursor to an expected vote on Friday in the House on a budget blueprint for the next fiscal year that will call for a sea change in the structures of the giant Medicare and Medicaid entitlement programs, a measure almost certainly dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate. That fight, in turn, could be linked to the politically and economically explosive question of whether to approve an increase in the federal debt ceiling, a step many conservatives say they will resist unless Mr. Obama and his party agree to deep spending cuts for 2012 and beyond.
A mutual desire to avoid a crippling government shutdown led Democrats and Republicans to scratch their way toward a deal this time, but the far more difficult task of reducing government spending in a legislature divided not by political parties but by ideological factions will be far more difficult, especially as the 2012 election edges closer.
Almost immediately after the vote, the House moved right into a rowdy debate over the 2012 budget plan written by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Budget Committee chairman. Mr. Ryan said his plan would reduce projected annual deficits by a cumulative $4.4 trillion over the next decade through further cuts in discretionary spending programs and by turning Medicare into a “defined benefit,” replacing the current system with one in which older Americans would choose among private insurance plans. Those plans would be paid for by the government, up to preset limits. Mr. Ryan also wants to turn Medicaid into a block grant program, and to reduce the tax rates for corporations and individuals.
“This is a serious budget,” said Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona. “For all this talk about preserving Medicare, preserving Medicare as it currently is means that you are consigning it to history.”
The White House is seeking to keep the debate over the 2012 budget separate from the need to raise the debt ceiling in coming months. But many Republicans see the necessity of raising the debt limit as the best leverage they have to extract concessions from the administration and Senate Democrats, setting up months of brinkmanship this spring and summer.
“The president has asked us to raise the debt ceiling,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader. “Republicans, and I hope many Democrats as well, will say, ‘Mr. President, as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, you’ll need to agree to do something significant.’ And by significant, I mean something the markets view as significant, the American people view as significant, and foreign countries view as significant.”
House Republicans tried Thursday to suggest that the framework for the future negotiations, however hard fought, will come from their ranks. The party has “stopped spending our future and started saving our future,” Representative Ander Crenshaw, Republican of Florida, said on the House floor.
While opposing many aspects of the compromise budget bill for the remainder of this fiscal year, Democrats agreed to help lift it to passage. The minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, voted against the bill, while the Democratic whip, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, voted in favor. Quoting the 19th-century lawmaker Henry Clay, Mr. Hoyer said on the House floor, “If you cannot compromise, you cannot govern.” Mr. Hoyer added: “The priorities that we have agreed to in this resolution are not my priorities. But we have reached an agreement.”
Realizing that the majority was going to need Democratic votes to pass the measure and avoid a shutdown, aides said that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 Republican, reached out to Mr. Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat, for help on Thursday. Democrats initially did not have enough firm supporters of the measure, one official said, prompting Mr. Hoyer and his allies to reach out to lawmakers and round up what ultimately amounted to 81 Democrat votes, enough to provide a comfortable margin.
Those Republicans who voted against the measure — perhaps further egged on by Mr. Obama’s speech on Wednesday in which he laid out a long-term budget framework that differed in almost every substantive way from Mr. Ryan’s — said they simply wanted more cuts.
“I respect my leadership and applaud them for giving it their best,” Representative Joe Walsh, Republican of Illinois, said on his Facebook page. “But I did not come here to blink. I was sent here to run to the mountaintop and yell for all the world to hear.”
Congress also voted on two other measures, one to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood and another to roll back the 2010 health care overhaul. The first measure passed 241 to 185, with Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, voting present, while the measure seeking to repeal the health care act passed 240 to 185. Both measures, brought to the floor as part of the deal last Friday between Republicans and Democrats, failed in the Senate. ||||| | – The shutdown showdown is over, at least until the fall. The House and Senate today passed a measure to fund the government through September, the end of the 2011 fiscal year. The bill passed 260-167 in the House on a bipartisan vote, required because 59 Republicans broke ranks and voted against it, reports Politico. It then cleared the Senate, 81-19, and headed to President Obama's desk for his signature. As agreed upon in last week's down-to-the-wire negotiations, it calls for $38 billion in spending cuts, notes the New York Times. John Boehner: “Is it perfect? No. I’d be the first to admit it’s flawed. But welcome to divided government.” Democratic whip Steny Hoyer: “The priorities that we have agreed to in this resolution are not my priorities. But we have reached an agreement.” |
While much of the country was knocking back Bud Lights and licking Doritos cheese off their (or others' ) fingers in preparation for the Super Bowl, hundreds of churches across the country were celebrating Porn Sunday. Surely your eyeballs came to a screeching halt upon seeing church and porn mentioned in the same sentence, and that's the basic strategy behind XXXChurch.com, the self-declared "#1 Christian porn site" -- to shock you to attention with its young, fashionable leaders who preach irreverently about the sex industry. This latest stunt saw the premiere of a 45-minute video starring five NFL players speaking out against pornography.
With his disheveled hair and penchant for plaid, Craig Gross looks like a PBR-swilling commitment-phobic hipster, but the ministry's 35-year-old founder is in fact married with two children. This seeming dissonance is increasingly common among young Christian activists who are breaking away from and even criticizing the traditional religious establishment. (Consider Annie Lobert, founder of Hookers for Jesus, whom I profiled late last year.) These young, hip religious types are not only sermonizing about sex but also immersing themselves in the very environments that they are preaching against. Gross and his team man a booth every year at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, handing out T-shirts and Bibles that read, "Jesus Loves Porn Stars." He went on the road with the infamous adult film actor Ron Jeremy to do a series of debates on college campuses about the industry. Two and a half years ago he uprooted his family and moved from Michigan to Sin City.
I spoke to Gross shortly after he returned home from Dallas, where he rooted for the Green Bay Packers, about his beef with the traditional church, visiting brothels, the importance of sex education and being pals with a porn legend.
Tell me about Porn Sunday. Why peg it to the Super Bowl?
We felt doing it on Super Bowl Sunday gave us the best chance to reach the biggest audience. We also happen to have relationships with guys in the NFL. The problem is that churches don't want to talk about this issue. I was joking earlier this week, saying that if we were to talk about any subject other than pornography with the NFL players that we got (Jon Kitna, Josh McCown, Miles McPherson, Matt Hasselbeck and Eric Boles) we'd have thousands of churches participating. It's an issue that people want to run from.
What was the aim of the event, exactly?
Our goal ministry-wise is to raise awareness that [pornography addiction] is an issue in our society and to help stop people from going down this road and, for those who already have, to recover. When I got to [Dallas], a bunch of Steelers were at the strip club and that's expected, that's covered on TMZ, but here we've got some players that are actually saying, "Here's what I do on the road to have integrity, to remain accountable."
Why focus on pornography and the sex industry?
A lot of people want to give me other causes to promote, but when I created this website nine years ago it wasn't for any purpose other than to help people struggling with an issue that we saw no one talking about, and we really felt that the best way to address it would be online. I never thought, "I'm gonna quit my job and this is going to be the only thing I do," but I've stayed in this because I realized so many people are affected by this and hurt by this. Marriages are broken apart. This is a big issue.
You're part of the recent emergence of hip, young religious people -- like former prostitute Annie Lobert of Hookers for Jesus and ex-stripper Harmony Dust of Treasures Ministry -- who are irreverently talking about the sex industry. Why are we seeing this right now?
I think, in general, beyond the sex industry stuff there are a lot of nonprofits coming to the surface. The church is good at doing what is expected and not doing much else outside of the box. So when we created this website, the thought was, "We're gonna be in a space that nobody else has tried," and that's where we've had a lot of success. I don't see the church being as relevant on issues, and so there are a lot of younger people who are using the Internet, social media and other nontraditional methods, and we're having huge successes because we're doing things differently.
What has the reaction been like from the Christian establishment?
When we started we had more criticism than we do now. Churches are still our biggest critics, though. I think people don't like some of our methods or terminology or how we do things, but we've gotten more and more support from church leaders over the years. We're not gonna be everybody's best friend inside the church. Even though our events are getting huge exposure, [we don't get] a lot of accolades for what we're doing. No one wants to touch this topic.
Do you do any sort of sex education outreach, STD prevention?
We're actually rolling out a project next about everything from abstinence to safe sex. It's a comic book done by a guy I met in the sex industry, which is crazy, but we kind of figured out some things that we could agree on.
So you support comprehensive sex education?
Yeah, I think we've gotta talk about it. I think a lot of religious groups have a problem even when people give out condoms. I mean, I don't want people to have sex, but if they do, might as well be protected. I'm not gonna be that overly religious person who says, "Don't hand out condoms."
You moved to Las Vegas a couple of years ago -- how come?
We felt like we could develop more of an outreach to people inside the industry. We do the porn shows all over the world, but in Vegas we're targeting the sex industry specifically. We're doing a lot of stuff inside strip clubs and brothels.
You've really gone into the belly of the beast, surrounding yourself with porn stars, pornographers, strippers. Are you worried about temptation?
I think there's temptation everywhere. We're not dumb when we go about these things. Me personally, I don't go into strip clubs; we have a team of women who do that. I've been to brothels and I've been to porn shows, but there's nothing sexy at all about a brothel, in the back where these girls live. At a porn show, it's a convention, you're just talking to people. A strip club's a different story; I'm not gonna hang out there.
One of my biggest frustrations with the church is that so many people think, "Surely you can't go there. What good could you do at a strip club?" All the church is after, it seems, are results and attendance. It's, "When are people going to quit their lifestyle and come to Jesus?" I wish it was that simple, but it's not. What we've done is say, "Hey, we're gonna go to where people are at." That takes patience, it takes time, it takes trust.
So you're interested in targeting people on both sides of the industry, both the consumers and the sex workers.
The reason why we're interested in helping both is, I think, they're basically the same. The conflict runs between both sides. The [consumers] who are struggling are saying, "Hey, I don't want to do this, but I find myself doing it anyways." The people that are in the industry -- from Ron Jeremy down to some no-name porn star -- they don't want to do this, they'd rather do something else, but they're conflicted because this is what they know.
After your cross-country tour together, you consider Ron Jeremy a friend, right?
Yeah, we're good friends.
What have you learned from spending time with him?
I just kind of learned what I could do better in our relationship. Everyone I meet around Ron wants Ron for something -- an appearance, his name. They all just take. And I just see this guy, he's got nothing else to give you, and I never want to be that person in the relationship where you just take. We've continued to just show up in his world and ask nothing in return.
||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| | – When it comes to teen sex, "we need to be paying attention to the Netherlands," writes Tracy Clark-Flory on Salon. Unlike American parents who typically demonize pre-marital sex, Dutch parents commonly allow their teenagers—male and female alike—to have sleepovers with significant others, a new study finds. Even so, when it comes to birth rates, American teens had eight times as many births as their Dutch counterparts in 2007—"and the Netherlands generally whoops on the states in terms of STD rates, too," Clark-Flory writes. "It's no coincidence that the country has also secured easy access (for both teens and adults) to contraceptives and other sexual health care," she continues. If American parents could be more accepting of their children's budding sexuality, perhaps fewer teens would "sneak out of the house to have sex in the backseat of a car." And Clark-Flory's admittedly atypical experience as an American teen was filled with many such sleepovers, allowing her to engage "in playful exploration in my childhood bedroom with my first love—and my parents were right across the hall the whole time. I had no sense that sex was a naughty or shameful act. And you know what? I consistently used condoms, I was on birth control pills and I insisted that both of us were tested for STDs." |
This ABC show now in its 13th season is the bane of my existence (because I hate it so much) and returns on Monday, September 19th, with a fall season lineup of spandex-sporting contestants that’s as bewildering as ever. The full roster is:
– Nancy “J’accuse” Grace, TV blonde who rants about white trash murders.
– David Arquette, better known as a Howard Stern guest than an actor.
– LA Laker Ron Artest changing his name to “Metta World Peace”.
– Chaz Bono, who’s obviously there for random curiosity.
– George Clooney’s dumped girlfriend Elizabetta Canalis.
– Kristin “Drama Drama Drama” Cavallari, the unlikeable Reality TV bimbo.
– The least interesting Kardashian (which is saying a lot): Rob.
– Carson “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” Kressley, who needs a new agent.
– Ricki Lake coming out of the Witness Protection Program.
– J.R. Martinez, a soap opera actor who helps fulfill ABC’s diversity quota.
– Singer Chynna Phillips married to the least interesting Baldwin brother.
– Soccer player Hope Solo promoting her nude spread in ESPN The Magazine.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here. ||||| The seed for Wide00014 was:
- Slash pages from every domain on the web:
-- a ranking of all URLs that have more than one incoming inter-domain link (rank was determined by number of incoming links using Wide00012 inter domain links)
-- up to a maximum of 100 most highly ranked URLs per domain
- Top ranked pages (up to a max of 100) from every linked-to domain using the Wide00012 inter-domain navigational link graph ||||| | – Someone other than the devil may be dancing tonight, and Nancy Grace might have to play nice with judges for a change now that she's signed on to Dancing With the Stars. She met with her partner in Atlanta this week for the first time, causing TMZ to speculate that "this could be another Kate Gosselin situation" where Grace practices in Atlanta to host her show and dances once a week in LA. The rest of the cast, per Deadline: David Arquette Ron Artest, Los Angeles Laker Chaz Bono Elisabetta Canalis, George Clooney ex Kristin Cavallari of The Hills Rob Kardashian Carson Kressley of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Ricki Lake JR Martinez, soap opera actor Chynna Phillips, former member of Wilson Phillips and Baldwin brother wife Hope Solo, soccer player |
These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| This post was updated at 10:45 p.m. ET to include an updated statement from Uber.
Uber briefly charged its users in downtown Sydney a minimum $100 to escape an armed hostage crisis, a result of automatic surge pricing meant to get more drivers online.
An executive in the city's Central Business District (CBD) sent Mashable screenshots of the Uber app that showed the company was charging up to four-times the normal rate because "demand is off the charts."
Price surging was implemented in Sydney, Australia on Dec. 15th, 2014, during a hostage siege in the CBD. Image: Mashable
"I have never, ever seen it at four-times [the normal rate] and I'm a 1% top Uber user," said Matthew Leung, the user in contact with Mashable. "I understand the way the business works — higher the demand, higher the charge — but four-times at $100 minimum is ridiculous. Almost price gouging at its worst."
Another customer shared a screenshot of their "wack" fare estimate that showed a trip from an area just blocks from the siege to the airport would cost $145-185. That journey would normally cost less than $100, according to Uber's website. "This is price surging," he wrote in a comment to Mashable.
After Mashable published a story on the price hikes, the company reversed course and announced that all riders in the area would be free, and that anybody who had been charged the higher amount would be refunded.
"We are all concerned with the events happening in Sydney," Uber spokesperson Katie Curran told Mashable in a statement. "Uber Sydney will be providing free rides out of the CBD to help Sydneysiders get home safely."
Image: Uber
Any riders who were charged the higher amount may email [email protected] to get their refund, she said, adding that surge pricing only remains in place to encourage more drivers to come online and pick up passengers from the area.
Uber, the company said, will now pick up the tab.
Uber Sydney's Twitter account tweeted the info.
Uber rides out of the CBD today are free for all riders to help Sydneysiders get home safely. See http://t.co/UIwoom25Bm for more info. — Uber Sydney (@Uber_Sydney) December 15, 2014
The crisis involves at least one hostage taker and about 13 hostages, all being held in a cafe in downtown Sydney, Australia.
At present, little is known about the assailant, other than the fact that an Islamic flag was shown in the cafe window, leading some to suspect that the incident may be a terrorist attack. Police have evacuated most of the area.
Following the police evacuation, many locals have reported difficulty in finding transportation as they attempt to exit the area.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had previously said the company's pricing algorithms will be "capped" during situations like what's unfolding in downtown Sydney. "For each market, the state of emergency price will be set after excluding the 3 highest-priced, non-emergency days of the preceding 2 months," he said, adding that the policy "intends to strike the careful balance between the goal of transportation availability with community expectations of affordability during disasters."
Last July, New York's attorney general announced that Uber agreed to put a cap on prices during “abnormal disruptions of the market,” meaning natural disasters and emergencies, to comply with the state's price gouging regulations. It isn't clear if a similar agreement is in effect in Australia.
Uber launched in Australia in Oct. 2012.
Seth Fiegerman contributed to this report. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jon Donnison: Footage showed people fleeing the building
A gunman is holding staff and customers hostage at a cafe in Sydney, Australia.
The Lindt cafe in the city centre is surrounded by armed police. Officers have made contact with the gunman.
Five people have been seen running from the building. It is not clear how many remain inside. A black Islamic flag has been displayed at the window.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott said it was "profoundly shocking" that people were being "held hostage by an armed person claiming political motivation".
He was speaking after chairing a meeting of the national security committee in Canberra.
Earlier Mr Abbott said: "Australia is a peaceful, open and generous society - nothing should ever change that and that's why I would urge all Australians today to go about their business as usual."
Senior police officers say they are on a footing "consistent with a terrorist event".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The mother of one hostage said her son sent a text saying "I'm ok"
The incident began as people were arriving for work in Martin Place on Monday. Witnesses saw a man with a bag and gun walk into the Lindt chocolate shop and cafe.
Lindt said about 10 employees and 30 customers were thought to be inside at the time. Nearby offices were evacuated and police asked people to remain indoors and away from open windows.
The BBC's Jon Donnison in Sydney says an enormous police operation is in place, on a scale few Sydney residents will have seen.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption It is not clear whether the five who ran away from the cafe fled or were released
About six hours into the siege, three people were seen running from the building housing the cafe. Two more people followed about an hour later. It is not clear whether they escaped or were released.
New South Wales Police deputy commissioner Catherine Burn said: "Those people are now being assessed to make sure their health is okay and then police will talk to them."
"Our approach is to resolve this peacefully. It might take a bit of time but that is our priority," she added.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Eyewitness Andrea Proctor: "Many police officers started to come around us"
Police have identified the gunman and he is well known to them, Australian media report.
News organisations also say the suspect has contacted them to issue demands, which police have urged media not to report.
Channel 7, a broadcaster with offices facing the cafe, said lights inside the premises were turned out as night fell.
At the scene: Wendy Frew, BBC News, Sydney
The atmosphere in Martin Place itself was surreal. Office workers who had been evacuated from their buildings, construction workers from building sites and tourists packed the pedestrian plaza one block away from the Lindt coffee shop.
Rosemary D'Urso Healion had just come out of the Martin Place subway station and was walking to her office when she saw that it was blocked by police. Then she saw the police close down the subway station.
"I work in that building [where the siege is taking place] and I was just about to go in," she told the BBC, adding that she had been in contact with some of her colleagues who were in the building but not being held hostage.
She remained at Martin Place anxiously watching a police operation that appeared to be aimed at getting some of her colleagues out via a ladder erected on a window ledge on the first floor.
Uneasy crowds in Sydney
Eyewitnesses speak to the BBC
Image copyright AFP Image caption A man wearing a bandana and a backpack was seen inside the cafe
Image copyright AFP Image caption Hundreds of heavily armed police are surrounding the building
An armed man wearing a backpack and a bandana could be seeing walking around inside the cafe.
TV footage showed at least three people, thought to be employees and who were visibly distressed, holding up to the window a black flag bearing the declaration of Islamic faith, which reads: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger."
The flag is similar to those used by jihadist groups, but is different from the one used by Islamic State militants in the Middle East.
Martin Place is home to the state premier's office and the headquarters of major banks.
In September Australia - which has sent fighter jets to join the US-led coalition conducting air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq - carried out a big anti-terror raid.
One man was charged with plotting to behead a member of the public in Martin Place.
In October, new anti-terrorism laws, including a provision designed to stop Australians fighting in overseas conflicts, were approved by the Australian parliament.
The black flag
Image copyright Reuters
A black flag bearing the white Arabic text of the "shahada", the basic statement of the Islamic faith, is used by jihadist groups worldwide
The statement says: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger"
A black flag was the battle flag of the Prophet Muhammad and was carried into battle by many of his companions
Today, it is used as a symbol of engagement in jihad, in the sense of holy war, by militant groups including al-Qaeda and Islamic State
Islamic State's banner - unlike the flag raised in the window of the coffee shop - bears the first part of the shahada and the seal of the Prophet below it.
Timeline: Australia's terror threat ||||| | – An unknown number of hostages are being held at a chocolate shop and cafe in Sydney in what Prime Minister Tony Abbott says may be a politically motivated incident. Authorities say they're still working to find out how many people are being held in the Lindt Chocolat Cafe, where five hostages were seen running from the building after being captive for seven hours, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Three men who ran from a fire exit were followed by two women, apparently cafe employees, who ran into the arms of police. Earlier, hostages could be seen holding up what appears to be an Islamic flag. Police say they believe there are no more than 30 hostages in the cafe and as far as they know, nobody has been harmed. It's not clear whether there's more than one gunman involved. Hundreds of police officers have locked down part of the city's central business district and police presence has been massively boosted in other Australian cities. The police commissioner for New South Wales says the situation is tightly contained and officers are trying to resolve the situation peacefully, the Guardian reports. He did not confirm or deny reports that radio host Ray Hadley had spoken to a hostage acting under instructions from a gunman. Abbott said at a press conference that Australians should go about their lives as normal but stay alert, the BBC reports. "I can think of almost nothing more distressing, more terrifying than to be caught up in such a situation, and our hearts go out to these people," he said. Uber, meanwhile, now says it's offering free rides out of central Sydney. At the start of the hostage crisis, the company quadrupled its prices to a minimum $100 Australian, saying "demand is off the charts," Mashable reports. |
These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| CLOSE Our biggest fears can have our minds racing with scary images of bed bugs, but could you spot one? Angeli Kakade (@angelikakade) has the story. Buzz60
Two bedbugs (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A Brazilian model is suing Palm Desert Embassy Suites, a Hilton hotel, claiming she was "massacred" by bed bugs during a stay in one of their hotel rooms two years ago.
In a lawsuit filed in Riverside County Superior Court, Sabrina Jales St. Pierre says a severe reaction to the bites affected her ability to model and caused her pain, discomfort and emotional distress.
Jales St. Pierre, who has modeled for brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Versace and Victoria’s Secret, is seeking monetary and punitive damages against the defendants, which include Hilton Worldwide, Inc., Hilton Worldwide Holdings, Inc., Embassy Suites Management, LLC.
“Sabrina started noticing the bed bug bites after her first night in the hotel, and eventually she was massacred by bites covering pretty much her entire body,” said her attorney, Brian Virag, founder of the My Bed Bug Lawyer, Inc.
Virag said the model’s bites were among the worst he has seen in his eight years specializing in bed bug litigation.
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In a lawsuit filed in Riverside County Superior Court, Sabrina Jales St. Pierre says a severe reaction to the bites affected her ability to model and caused her pain, discomfort and emotional distress. (Photo: Sabrina Jales St. Pierre)
"Like most victims of bed bugs, Sabrina also had nightmares about the experience, and she still experiences psychological trauma and fear of bed bugs today," Virag said. "This was especially traumatic for Sabrina because her body is her work, so this severely affected her work and her career. She had to continue working during the hotel stay, but the bite marks all over her body made her feel embarrassed, ashamed and humiliated.”
Carlos Mendoza, Embassy Suites in Palm Desert general manager, disputes the claims, saying there was never any evidence of a bed bug infestation.
Mendoza said the hotel’s chief engineer and house-keeping manager investigated the room for bed bugs the day the incident allegedly occurred. None were found The hotel then called an outside pest control company to perform a second inspection and also found no evidence of bed bugs.
But, he said, the hotel agreed to dry clean Jales St. Pierre’s clothes in a gesture of good hospitality.
“The comfort and health and safety of our guests is most important,” Mendoza said. “Our experience with bed bugs though is that people travel with them and bring them to hotels. Once they are in our rooms, we take corrective actions.”
Mendoza said when hotel officials heard about the model's allegations two years ago they were very concerned and they investigated the allegations thoroughly.
In a lawsuit filed in Riverside County Superior Court, Sabrina Jales St. Pierre says a severe reaction to the bites affected her ability to model and caused her pain, discomfort and emotional distress. (Photo: Sabrina Jales St. Pierre)
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“We did all the proper protocols and found no evidence,” he said. “Now we have to go through the lawsuit to defend the reputation of the hotel.”
The lawsuit alleges that the hotel didn’t maintain proper pest control protocols, thus exposing their guests to bedbugs. Virag said hotels need to be proactive about pests, not reactive.
“This really is an epidemic problem with hotel rooms,” Virag said. “You have an expectation that you’re going to be safe at a hotel, so when bed bugs infiltrate that space, it’s like a betrayal of trust.”
Virag said Jales St. Pierre had to seek medical attention from the bites that lasted "for an extended period of time."
“I would say it definitely had an impact on her ability to do her job as a model,” Virag told the Desert Sun. “She still has trauma from the physical and emotional aspect of it to this day. Some people have permanent scarring from it, too.”
Virag had worked on lawsuits against Hilton hotels in the past. In October 2017, he represented an Arkansas family that was exposed to bed bugs during a one-night stay at the Hilton Garden Inn in Rancho Cucamonga. He obtained a $546,000 jury verdict against that property.
Virag said he ventured into the bed bug business because he “wanted to give a voice to those who don’t have one…because I really have a deep understanding of what people go through when exposed to bed bugs.”
Desert Sun reporter Nicole Hayden covers the cities of La Quinta, Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert. She can be reached at [email protected] or (760) 778-4623. Follow her on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.
Read or Share this story: https://desert.sn/2MYTWp7 ||||| | – A woman who's modeled for Valentino, Versace, and Victoria's Secret is suing a Hilton hotel in California, claiming she was "massacred" by bedbugs. Brazilian model Sabrina Jales St. Pierre says she had a severe reaction to bedbug bites that required medical attention and affected her ability to model while staying at Palm Desert Embassy Suites two years ago. Attorney Brian Virag, who secured in October a $546,000 jury verdict over bedbugs at a Hilton Garden Inn, says the bites "covering pretty much her entire body" were among the worst he's seen. Jales St. Pierre was "embarrassed, ashamed, and humiliated" but had to keep working, he says, per the Palm Springs Desert Sun, adding "she still experiences psychological trauma" and is seeking monetary and punitive damages. Photos shared as part of the lawsuit, at least one of which includes a dated newspaper, show large red welts covering the model's shoulder, back, and legs, per the Los Angeles Times. Describing the site of the 2016 incident as "an independently owned and managed franchise property," Hilton directed questions to Embassy Suites. The general manager of the Palm Desert location essentially accuses Jales St. Pierre of lying. The hotel agreed to dry-clean her clothes after she complained, but officials and an outside pest-control company investigated and found no evidence of a bedbug infestation, Carlos Mendoza tells the Desert Sun. "We did all the proper protocols," he says. "Now we have to go through the lawsuit to defend the reputation of the hotel." (This family won $1.6 million over bedbugs.) |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows disappeared while out playing
A convicted paedophile has been found guilty of murdering two schoolgirls who were found strangled and sexually assaulted near Brighton 32 years ago.
Russell Bishop, 52, had protested his innocence since the bodies of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway were found.
Cleared of their murders in 1987, Bishop went on to attack a seven-year-old girl within three years, leaving her for dead in 1990, but she survived.
He was convicted of the double murder in a second trial at the Old Bailey.
After Nicola and Karen were found dead, the case became known as the Babes in the Wood.
The guilty verdicts came exactly 31 years to the day of Bishop's original acquittal in 1987.
Families of the girls wept in court earlier as the jury delivered the verdicts after two-and-a-half hours.
Image copyright BBC News Image caption Bishop was found guilty exactly 31 years on from his first acquittal
Afterwards, Karen's mother Michelle Hadaway described Bishop as an "evil monster".
"We finally have justice for Karen and Nicola," she said.
"Time stood still for us in 1986. To us, them beautiful girls will always be nine years old. They will never grow up."
Speaking outside the Old Bailey, she said: "What people like Bishop inflict on the families of their victims is a living death.
"They take the lives of children but they also take the lives of the families left behind."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Barrie Fellows, who has epilepsy, says his daughter Nicola was always there for him
The Fellows family said in a statement that the two families had been "united in grief", and while the verdicts did not bring the girls back, other children were now safe from Bishop.
They added: "He is a monster. A predatory paedophile. Russell Bishop truly is evil personified.
"During the past eight weeks, we have endured reliving the horrific details of their murders and we have learned an awful lot about the true meaning of heartbreak all over again."
The two girls, aged nine, who were scared of the dark, went missing from their homes after they had gone out to play on 9 October 1986.
They were found in Wild Park the next day, lying together in a woodland den as if they were sleeping.
The trial heard former roofer Bishop had spotted the girls playing in the park near their home and attacked them.
On 10 October, he had joined the search for Nicola and Karen, claiming his dog was a trained tracker, and was nearby when two teenagers spotted the girls' bodies.
Image copyright PA Image caption A memorial tree stands in Wild Park, where the girls died
Afterwards, Bishop gave conflicting accounts to police and produced a series of fake alibis.
But he described details of the murder scene which only the killer could have known, jurors were told.
Judge Mr Justice Sweeney said Bishop would be sentenced on Tuesday, and must be present at the hearing.
Bishop chose to give evidence in his defence, but not to return during cross-examination, and then did not attend for the rest of the trial.
A DNA breakthrough led to the fresh trial taking place under double jeopardy laws. Bishop's 1987 acquittal was quashed and the second trial ordered.
The DNA came from a blue Pinto sweatshirt that was initially identified as belonging to Bishop by his former partner Jennifer Johnson, who then denied it in the first trial.
Senior investigating officer Det Supt Jeff Riley refused to rule out a perjury investigation.
Image copyright PA Image caption The Babes in the Wood case still affects people in the city
After Bishop's conviction, Nigel Pilkington, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said the verdicts marked the end of a long fight for justice by the families, praising their "remarkable resilience".
He described Bishop as an "extremely dangerous" man who had been convicted on "overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence".
Mr Pilkington also said Bishop had tried to blame Nicola's father to create the "most havoc" possible, adding: "There is not a shred of evidence against Barrie Fellows."
Calling Bishop a "wicked" paedophile, Det Supt Riley said the murder case was one of the most "high-profile and complex" in Sussex Police history and one that still affected people in the city.
"We have never forgotten or given up," he said.
"This is a moment to remember the two girls that died at the hands of a predatory and vicious killer that refused for 32 years to face up to what he did and still does."
Det Supt Riley added: "I sincerely hope the families can find some peace and look forward to the next chapter in their lives." ||||| A convicted paedophile has been found guilty of the “babes in the wood” murders at the end of a retrial that drew on scientific advances in forensics 32 years after two schoolgirls were killed.
Russell Bishop had been accused of sexually assaulting and strangling Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in October 1986 in woods about half a mile from Moulsecoomb, the area of Brighton where both girls lived.
The guilty verdicts were described as marking the end of a 32-year fight for justice for the girls’ families, who hugged each other and wept in court on Monday as the jury delivered its verdict.
“Time stood still for us in 1986. To us them beautiful girls will always be nine years old. They will never grow up,” said Michelle Hadaway, Karen’s mother, who described Bishop as an “evil monster”. “What people like Bishop inflict on the families of their victims is a living death,” she added.
Lee Hadaway, Karen’s father, died in 1998.
In a joint statement, the Fellows family said: “The guilty verdict doesn’t bring Nicola and Karen back, but we know that other children are now safe from the hands of Russell Bishop.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russell Bishop. Photograph: Sussex police/PA
After demonstrating that there was new and compelling evidence against Bishop in the form of scientific material, the prosecution had shown the jury how he attempted to conceal his crimes through lies, said the Crown Prosecution Service.
This included DNA evidence which provided what the CPS described as a “one-in-a-billion” DNA match linking Bishop to a sweatshirt which was at the scene of the murders.
The case had never been closed and had become the largest and longest-running inquiry in the history of Sussex police. A retrial was made possible after Bishop’s 1987 acquittal on the same charges was quashed at the court of appealin light of new evidence.
Bishop, who was not present to hear he was being convicted on the 31st anniversary of his original acquittal, will be required to appear when he is sentenced on Tuesday after the eight-week trial.
It also emerged on Monday that Bishop’s former partner could face a perjury investigation over her conduct at his murder trial at Lewes crown court in 1987. Jennifer Johnson had initially identified the sweatshirt which was found discarded along Bishop’s route home in Brighton as belonging to him, but then denied it in court.
She was not called by the prosecution in the second trial but another of Bishop’s former partners said he had been violent towards Johnson.
Nigel Pilkington, a CPS lawyer, suggested the result of the 1987 trial could have been “wholly different” if Johnson had not changed her story.
“Obviously if somebody has not told the truth in a case which has been a miscarriage of justice for 32 years, that’s a serious matter, if it turns out to be so. But we will wait to see if police make a decision to investigate,” he added.
Both Karen and Nicola had been afraid of the dark and the latter’s father had banned her from playing in an area known as Wild Park, even saying the “bogeyman” lived there, the court was told.
However, Bishop spotted the two nine-year-olds playing in the park near their home at around dusk on 9 October 1986 and seized his opportunity, the prosecution said.
During the attack, he punched Nicola in the face, to “subdue” or “punish” her for being disrespectful to his teenage girlfriend earlier that day, suggested Brian Altman QC.
The court heard that as well as the DNA evidence, fibre transfers linked the sweatshirt to the girls, the murder scene and Bishop’s home. Dried red paint on the sleeve was matched to a flake on Nicola’s neck and Karen’s T-shirt, providing “very strong support” they had recent contact with the garment.
There were also hundreds of ivy hairs on the sweatshirt like those at the scene of the murders. As well as the evidence from the sweatshirt, a DNA match to Bishop was found on Karen’s left forearm, jurors heard.
Bishop had returned to live in the Brighton area after his acquittal, but less than three years later, in February 1990, committed offences involving the attempted murder, kidnapping and indecent assault of a seven-year-old girl in the Whitehawk area of the city.
She survived and identified Bishop as her attacker, the jury was told. This, together with other evidence, led to his conviction for that crime in December 1990.
During the trial this year, Bishop tailored his defence to the new evidence and claimed he had touched the girls to feel for a pulse on the day after the killings, when he had joined the search for them and was nearby when they were found. However, two teenagers who had spotted the bodies insisted that he could not have come close.
Acting on instructions, Bishop’s defence team had also cast suspicion on Nicola’s father, Barrie Fellows, suggesting that police spent decades investigating the wrong man. The 69-year-old was reduced to tears during the trial by the claims against him.
The defence team also cast doubt on the new evidence, suggesting it could have been contaminated.
Det Supt Jeff Riley described Bishop as a “wicked” paedophile.
He said: “I still feel it’s a shadow over Brighton to this day. I’m very proud of the investigation we have put together. We have been meticulous. We have never given up on this investigation.” ||||| Paedophile Russell Bishop has been found guilty of the Babes in the Wood murders more than 30 years after a bungled police and forensic operation saw him walk free from court.
The 52 year-old was finally convicted of the sexually motivated murders of nine-year-olds Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows, who were strangled to death in October 1986.
The families of the two girls cheered members of the jury as the verdict was handed down at the Old Bailey on the anniversary of his original acquittal.
Bishop was not in court having refused to leave his cell and attend. He will be sentenced on Tuesday.
Bishop was initially charged with shocking crimes in 1987, but was cleared by a jury at Lewes Crown Court after a catalogue of forensic mistakes torpedoed the prosecution case.
Tragically, three years later, when Bishop should have been languishing in prison, he struck again, attacking a seven-year-old in almost identical circumstances. ||||| | – Nothing can bring back Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows, 9-year-old girls murdered in the UK in 1986. "But we know that other children are now safe from the hands of Russell Bishop," family members said Monday as the 52-year-old convicted pedophile was found guilty of sexually assaulting and strangling the schoolgirls in a wooded area half a mile from their Brighton neighborhood on Oct. 9, 1986. Based on what prosecutors described as a "one-in-a-billion" DNA match linking a discarded sweatshirt to Bishop, the girls, and the murder scene, the convictions came exactly 31 years after Bishop's acquittal on the same charges, reports the Guardian. An ex-girlfriend had initially said the sweatshirt found discarded along Bishop's route home in Brighton belonged to him, but she denied that claim in court in 1987. "Certainly, if she had not changed her story, it might have been a wholly different thing," a prosecutor tells the Telegraph, raising the possibility of a perjury investigation. Not only was Bishop's DNA found on Karen's left forearm, but dried paint on the sweatshirt matched flakes found on her shirt and Nicola's neck, according to prosecutors. They described Bishop attacking the girls at a park around dusk, though defense attorneys instead suggested the involvement of Nicola's father, who was brought to tears during the trial. Afterward, the family had harsh words for their daughter's killer, serving life for the 1990 attempted murder, kidnapping, and indecent assault of a 7-year-old girl, per the BBC: "He is a monster. A predatory pedophile. Russell Bishop truly is evil personified." He'll be sentenced Tuesday. (A podcast might've helped solve a 1982 murder.) |
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) —Upper Darby Police on Monday announced a break in a series of violent armed robberies that took place in the township over the last two weeks.
Police have charged 16-year-old Kemonie McKee of Philadelphia as an adult.
Police say McKee and 17-year-old Syniah Martinez robbed two cab drivers within hours of each other in a residential neighborhood near 69th Street.
“How do you get into the head of a 16-year-old?” Superintendent Michael Chitwood said. “I mean she’s a baby committing adult crimes.”
The crime spree began June 19.
Police: Teen Girls Rob 2 Cabbies, 2 Tourists In Upper Darby
In each crime, the cab drivers were held at gunpoint.
Days later, an 86-year-old woman and a 52-year-old woman, who were both visiting from Ecuador, reportedly lost almost $1,000 in a robbery on Kent Road.
When the 86-year-old tried to resist, she got a pistol forced into her chest.
Police say McKee and Martinez are responsible.
“They were terrorizing people – I mean how do you rob an 86 year old woman!” Chitwood said. “Give me a break.”
In one of the cases, the teens allegedly had assistance from a getaway driver.
It was somewhat of a lucky break for officers as they were led down a whole other path. The car was stolen in a carjacking in Philadelphia during the robbery of a pizza driver, several days prior. ||||| Police are searching for two armed teen girls who robbed cab drivers and tourists in Upper Darby. NBC10's Denise Nakano speaks to two of the victims as the investigation continues.
Police arrested two teen girls accused of robbing two cab drivers, a mother and daughter visiting their family from Ecuador, and a Domino's Pizza.
Kemonie McKee, 16, of Philadelphia and Synia Martinez, 15, were both arrested and charged with robbery, assault, conspiracy and other related offenses.
Police say the girls first targeted a cab driver on June 19 shortly before 9:30 p.m. The teens called the cab driver to the 100 block of Glendale Road in Upper Darby, according to investigators. When he arrived, one of the girls began talking to him to distract him while the second girl pulled out a gun and aimed it at his head, police said. They then allegedly stole the cab driver's phone and $100.
About two hours later the girls called another cab driver to the 200 block of Copley Road in Upper Darby and used the same method to rob him once he arrived, investigators said. The teens allegedly stole $80 in cash during the second incident. The cab drivers were not hurt in either incident.
"Cab driver arrives, starts a conversation, next thing you know he's got a gun to his head," Chitwood said.
On June 21, the girls robbed a Domino's Pizza on the 6400 block of Race Street in Southwest Philadelphia, police said. A surveillance photo of one of the suspects during that robbery was obtained by NBC10.
Photo credit: Philadelphia Police
On June 23, the two girls allegedly robbed a mother and daughter from Ecuador who were visiting their family in Upper Darby. Martha Chacon, 52, and her mother Maria Cardenas, 86, said they were both leaving their family members' home on Kent Road at 9:40 a.m. when they were approached by the two girls.
"She came up close to me, got really close and put the gun right here," Chacon said.
The girls allegedly shoved Chacon in the chest and took her purse which contained $200. They then struggled with Cardenas before hitting her in the arm with a gun and taking her purse which contained $700 and other items, according to police.
"I didn't want to let go," Cardenas said. "I grabbed my little purse with two hands. I had money, my watch, some other little things. They even took my denture that was inside."
After robbing the mother and daughter, the teen girls left the scene in a dark gray Hyundai Sonata which was captured on surveillance video, police said. Police say a third suspect was driving the getaway vehicle.
Surveillance photo of the suspects' getaway vehicle.
Photo credit: Surveillance
On Sunday, McKee surrendered to Upper Darby Police while Martinez was taken into custody by Philadelphia Police Tuesday. Both teen girls are being charged as adults.
(L to R), Kemonie McKee, 16, and Synia Martinez, 15.
Photo credit: Upper Darby Police
Police also say two anonymous people donated $1000 each to Chacon and Cardenas.
||||| Syniah Martinez, 17, of the 5100 block of Spruce Street, Philadelphia, remains at large. She has been identified as one of two teenage girls allegedly involved in a series of robberies.
UPPER DARBY >> Serial robbers preying on cabbies and women in late June have been identified as two teenage girls who will be charged as adults, police said.
Kemonie McKee, 16, of the 300 block of North 61st Street, Philadelphia, surrendered on Sunday and jailed in lieu of posting $500,000 cash bail after arraignment on Monday.
Her alleged accomplice, identified as Syniah Martinez, 17, of the 5100 block of Spruce Street, Philadelphia, remains at large.
“They are real scumbags,” township Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said. “When you hold a gun to someone’s head, that’s being a violent predator. They are both facing charges as adults because of the sheer terror of these two girls for terrorizing people with a gun. These were serial holdups, a two-person crime wave. They just wanted money.”
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Police continue to search for an unidentified man for his involvement as the driver of the getaway car in one of the robberies.
According to Chitwood, the string of robberies in Upper Darby began when two taxi drivers were dispatched to separate locations on June 19.
A 35-year-old cab driver, employed with Get A Cab, was dispatched to the 100 block of Glendale Road to pick up a fare at 9:30 p.m. June 19.
“One of the women approached and then a second woman came up to the driver’s side with a firearm,” Chitwood said. “She held the gun to the driver’s head and demanded money. He handed over about $100 and the two robbers ran away. Less than two hours later at 11:30 p.m. it was the same thing. The driver, 43, employed by County Cab, was dispatched to Copley Road and one of the women opened the door and put the gun to his head. He handed over $90.”
Police were searching for the bandits in the cab driver holdups when the duo allegedly attacked and robbed two women, ages 52 and 86, visiting from Ecuador on June 23 on Kent Road.
“An 86-year-old woman was hit with a gun on the arm when she refused to turn over her handbag,” Chitwood said. “It’s the same women committing these holdups. It’s the same M.O. and the same physical description except in the third one involving the two female victims they were seen getting into the back seat of a car.”
The vehicle was first identified as a Chevy Impala but later identified as a Hyundai Sonata, and was allegedly stolen in Philadelphia in a carjacking. A total of $900 and two cell phones were stolen in the robbery-purse snatches.
Nothing has been recovered.
“This is an ongoing investigation that exploded,” Chitwood said. “Both girls were identified by the cab drivers. Detectives Phil Lydon and Justin Clark with Philadelphia police officers did a great job. These detectives did not stop. They worked around the clock in Upper Darby and Philadelphia. They got locations and they got names of potential suspects. Philly police really helped us out. It was a great collaborative effort. We beat the bush pretty good to find the female robbers.
“We believe they are also involved in three pizza delivery jobs in Philadelphia.”
According to Chitwood, McKee gave a statement and admitted using a black BB gun in the robberies.
An innocent victim in the crime wave is the 11-year-old sister of Martinez, who was in the alleged stolen car with the girls after one heist.
She suffered a broken arm when the car they were driving crashed in Philadelphia, Chitwood said.
McKee was arraigned on two counts of robbery, theft and related offenses for the cabbie incidents and two counts of robbery, theft and assault for the attack on the two women on Kent Road. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| | – "You could write a book" about Kemonie McKee and Syniah Martinez, a Philly-area police official tells the Philadelphia Inquirer, but the story about the two teen girls wouldn't exactly be a fairy tale. Instead, McKee, 16, and Martinez, 17, pulled off "some very heinous, nasty crimes," Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood says, and they've now been charged as adults for the armed robberies of two taxi drivers, which took place just hours apart June 19 in Upper Darby, CBS Philly reports. In the cab crimes, which are said to have taken place at gunpoint (though Chitwood notes the teens say it was just a BB gun), police say the girls made off with a grand total of $100 from one taxi, $80 from the second. The girls are also accused of robbing two women from Ecuador, identified by NBC Philadelphia as a mother and daughter, at gunpoint on June 23 in Upper Darby. The teens have been charged with aggravated assault and related offenses in all three cases. In the Ecuador case, $900 and a cellphone were taken from the 86-year-old and 52-year-old tourists, who were also assaulted. The girls are also suspected of the carjacking robberies of two Philly pizza delivery drivers. Martinez's 11-year-old sister, meanwhile, suffered a broken arm when one of the getaway cars that she was riding in crashed, Chitwood tells the Delaware County Daily Times. While cops seek out a male adult they think was involved in planning the crimes and possibly serving as the getaway driver, they note a somewhat happy ending: Two anonymous locals came forward with $1,000 for each of the Ecuadorian women. "They felt bad ... people would come here from another country and be victims of a robbery," Chitwood tells CBS. (A teen pimped out other teens.) |
FILE – In this Dec. 22, 2016, file photo, Colo, the world's first gorilla born in a zoo, opens a present in her enclosure during her 60th birthday party at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Columbus, Ohio.... (Associated Press)
FILE – In this Dec. 22, 2016, file photo, Colo, the world's first gorilla born in a zoo, opens a present in her enclosure during her 60th birthday party at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium said Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, that Colo, the oldest known gorilla... (Associated Press)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The world's first gorilla born in a zoo, a female named Colo who became the oldest known living gorilla in the U.S., has died at age 60, the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium said Tuesday.
Colo died in her sleep overnight, less than a month after her birthday, the zoo announced. She surpassed the usual life expectancy of captive gorillas by two decades.
"Colo touched the hearts of generations of people who came to see her and those that cared for her over her long lifetime," zoo president Tom Stalf said in a statement. "She was an ambassador for gorillas and inspired people to learn more about the critically endangered species and motivated them to protect gorillas in their native habitat."
Colo had been on exhibit in view of visitors on Monday, when the zoo offered free admission for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Fond of baseball caps, the gorilla was seen in her enclosure toting around a yellow cap with a gorilla on it, given to her by the zoo team caring for her.
The zoo said the gorilla's body will be cremated and the ashes will be buried at an undisclosed location at the zoo.
Colo was born at the zoo on Dec. 22, 1956. She eventually became a mother of three, grandmother of 16, great-grandmother of 12 and great-great-grandmother of three.
Hundreds of people had gathered at the zoo last month to see Colo for her birthday, when the zoo decorated her enclosure with multicolored construction paper chains and cakes of squash and beet and cornbread with mashed potato parsley frosting.
Zoo officials said a post-mortem examination was planned to determine Colo's cause of death. The median life expectancy for female gorillas in human care is 37.5 years.
Veterinarians recently removed a malignant tumor from Colo, but the zoo had said she was doing well. The necropsy could help show whether the cancer contributed to her death, but the results aren't anticipated for several weeks.
Zoo officials said they also planned to take blood and tissue samples to assist with zoologists' efforts to learn more about western lowland gorillas.
Colo is the second zoo gorilla to die in Ohio this month. Cleveland Metroparks Zoo said one of its two male western lowland gorillas, a 32-year-old named Bebac, died Jan. 6.
Zoo experts say animals in human care are living longer than ever as early diagnosis and improvements in medical care extend their lives. The oldest known living male gorilla, Ozzie, is 55 years old and lives at the Atlanta Zoo, which has a geriatric gorilla specialty.
Packy, an Asian elephant at the Oregon Zoo, is now 54 and the oldest male of his species in North America.
Nikko, a 33-year-old snow monkey at the Minnesota Zoo, is the oldest male snow monkey in North America. Zulie, a 30-year-old Black Howler monkey at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is the oldest living female Howler monkey in captivity.
___
Find the reporters on Twitter at https://twitter.com/awhcolumbus and http://www.twitter.com/kantele10 . ||||| Story highlights Colo turned 60 on December 22, extending the oldest gorilla record
She was a great-great grandmother
(CNN) There's been another gorilla death at a zoo in Ohio. And while this one is of natural causes, it's no less heart-breaking.
Colo was the oldest gorilla ever on record and the first to be born in human care. She died in her sleep at the Columbus Zoo early Tuesday.
She was 60, and lived two decades longer than most gorillas.
She leaves behind an extended family, including three children, 16 grandchildren, 12 great grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren.
"Colo touched the hearts of generations of people," the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium said . "She was an ambassador for gorillas and inspired people to learn more about the critically endangered species and motivated them to protect gorillas in their native habitat."
Read More ||||| | – On Monday, Colo the gorilla was seen by visitors to Ohio's Columbus Zoo toting around a baseball cap—a favorite item of hers, the AP reports. On Tuesday, the oldest gorilla ever recorded died in her sleep, less than a month after her 60th birthday. According to CNN, Colo, the first gorilla born in human care, lived 20 years longer than an average gorilla. In a Facebook post, zoo CEO Tom Stalf says Colo "touched the hearts of generations of people." Colo had recently had a malignant tumor removed but was believed to be doing well. A cause of death is yet to be determined. The zoo plans to cremate her and bury her remains. Colo leaves behind three children, 16 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren. |
Asian American Populations
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines "Asians" as people having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
According to the US Census Bureau, on the 2010 Census, the Asian population category includes people who indicated their race(s) as “Asian” or reported entries such as “Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Filipino,” “Korean,” “Japanese,” and “Vietnamese” or provided other detailed Asian responses.
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Top of Page ||||| Brian Taylor is director of Ivy Coach, a Manhattan company that advises families on how to get their students into elite colleges. A number of his clients are Asian American, and Taylor is frank about his strategy for them.
“While it is controversial, this is what we do,’’ he says. “We will make them appear less Asian when they apply.”
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That a hard working, high achieving Asian-American student would want to appear less Asian on a college application may seem counterintuitive. But Asian-American students already make up a disproportionate percentage of the student body at many select schools, compared to their share of the general population.
And that’s the problem.
Some call it “the bamboo ceiling” of racial quotas, telling stories of Asian-American students with perfect SAT scores and GPAs turned down by elite colleges who limit the number of Asians they will admit, effectively forcing them to face a higher bar for admissions than other racial groups, including whites.
In response, groups of Asians have filed lawsuits against top schools, including one on May 15 by a coalition accusing Harvard and other Ivy League institutions of using racial quotas to admit lesser qualified candidates over Asians.
And some families are turning to consultants who offer services aimed at helping their students stand out from the competition and avoid what James Chen calls “the Asian penalty” in admissions.
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Chen founded Asian Advantage College Consulting 20 years ago in response to what he considers bias against top Asian students in elite college admissions. His firm, which is based in Alameda, Calif., also has clients on the East Coast, he says, including Boston.
“The admissions officers are seeing a bunch of people who all look alike: high test scores, high grades, many play musical instruments and tend not to engage in more physical sports like football,” Chen says.
If students come to him early in high school, Chen will direct them to “switch to another musical instrument” or “play a sport a little bit out of their element.”
And for the college essay, don’t write about your immigrant family, he tells them: “Don’t talk about your family coming from Vietnam with $2 in a rickety boat and swimming away from sharks.”
One of Chen’s New York clients is a girl who attended a top public examination high school in the city, where more than half the class is Asian. She got a perfect score on her SAT, was valedictorian, class president, and captain of the badminton team.
Her father, who asked that the family not be identified, told the Globe that he contacted Asian Advantage when his daughter was a sophomore. He and his wife emigrated from China, and their daughter was born here. “In general, we have the impression that it’s not easy for Asian Americans to apply to college,” he said.
Chen said that he worked with the teenager to “deemphasize the Asianness in her resume.” She played the piano, but he encouraged her to participate in musical theater. Badminton was a no-no on her college app: Too many Asian students play racquet sports. Ditto for Asian Club. And she was to avoid saying that she was interested in biology or wanted to be a doctor.
“She put down social sciences,” Chen says.
She was accepted early admission into Harvard.
At Ivy Coach, much of the advice Taylor offers his clients echoes that of Chen. Be careful, he tells them, to avoid appearing like a “grade grubber”: “Schools don’t want students who care too much about their grades. They want kids who love learning.”
Ivy Coach offers an “unlimited package” for students for $100,000, which includes helping them throughout high school with all aspects of their college applications: testing, essays, letters of recommendation.
The Asian controversy is another aspect in the complex and charged debate over diversity and privilege in higher education. Some schools and education advocates say affirmative action and diversity should be defined by socioeconomic class as much as race or ethnicity. And many also point out that, despite stereotypes, there is wide diversity within the Asian demographic: those from India, China, and southeast Asia differ greatly from one another.
It was a different story when the parents themselves were applying to college. Joe Chow didn’t feel hampered 40 years ago by the fact that he was Asian. In fact, it helped him.
“In the early 1970s, Asian-Americans were really an underrepresented minority,” he says. “So we benefited from the civil rights movement.” Chow graduated from Brandeis University and earned his MBA at MIT.
Chow and his wife Selina, who is board president of Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, encouraged their children to focus on English, speech, and performance.
“Our family is not totally traditional from an Asian perspective,” says Chow, a retired executive vice president at State Street who lives in Brookline. “Selina and I are much more comfortable with our children getting a good liberal arts education.”
Their oldest daughter went to Northwestern University, their son to Skidmore, and their youngest daughter is a junior at Colby College. Some of their Asian friends have questioned why they “wasted their time” on liberal arts over math and science.
At Ivy Coach, some of the toughest work is with the parents. “Asian-Americans are extremely competitive among each other,” Taylor says. “They want to impress.” Few such parents refer his firm to one another. “No one wants others to know they’re using us. But we always get the siblings and the cousins.”
That brand of hard-nosed ambition has paid dividends. The number of high-achieving Asian-American students applying to the top schools has soared in the past decade. According to the Pew Research Center, Asians are among the highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing groups in the nation.
At Princeton, 21 percent of the Class of 2018 is Asian American; Harvard’s is 20 percent. But the point raised by the lawsuits is that there are even more qualified Asian students who want to get into such selective schools. Asians make up about 5 percent of the US population.
“I think the successful Asian population has reached a tipping point,” says Elliot Place, who runs 1on1 Educational Consulting in Hingham. Just like high-achieving students of all ethnicities, Asians “have learned how to master the SAT, and they’ve mastered math and science. I think they’re frustrated that this doesn’t show up in their acceptance letters.”
The question now being asked by parents and students — and even attorneys: Is it discrimination or diversity that is bedeviling them?
The recent complaint by more than 60 Asian organizations against the Ivies called for an investigation and an end to racial quotas or balancing. The groups say that they are facing the kind of quotas that limited the number of Jews in the nation’s best schools through the middle of the 20th century.
In a 2014 lawsuit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nonprofit Students For Fair Admission allege that both schools discriminate against Asian applicants in favor of less qualified African-American and Latino students. The suit cited a 2009 Princeton University study of seven top colleges that concluded an Asian applicant needed an average 1460 SAT score to be admitted, while whites with similar academic qualifications needed 1320, Hispanics 1190, and blacks 1010.
Harvard’s general counsel, Robert Iuliano, defended the school’s admissions policy. “As the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions, including on race, transforms the educational experience of students from every background and prepares our graduates for an increasingly pluralistic world,” he said.
And not all Asian Americans support the legal actions. Some groups released statements supporting affirmative action. “Neither of us believes that any racial or ethnic group should be subjected to quotas,” said Karen Narasaki and Michael Yaki, who serve on the US Commission on Civil Rights. “Nor do we believe that test scores alone entitle anyone to admission at Harvard. Students are more than test scores and grades.”
Julie J. Park is an education professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book, “When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education.” Despite a 1520 SAT score and many extracurriculars, she was rejected by Harvard and ended up at Vanderbilt on a full-tuition, “affirmative-action-based scholarship.”
She says that she understood the rejection: “Harvard did not necessarily need more students like me. Vanderbilt did.”
While she understands parent and student frustrations over rejections, Park says she doesn’t believe that they understand the numbers. “I’m not sure that people really get that so many students of all races get rejected,” she says.
Last year, Harvard had 37,305 applicants for 1,990 seats for the Class of 2019; Stanford chose 2,144 out of 42,487 applicants.
At Newton North High School, whose student body is 12 percent Asian, college and career counselor Brad MacGowan says he hasn’t heard complaints from Asian-American students about being singled out. “I don’t see a victim mentality around that,” he says. “The students looking at colleges here are doing really well and they realize it’s competitive for everybody.”
At Milton Academy, Rod Skinner agrees that the pressure is not exclusive to Asian students. “It’s playing itself out across all kinds of high-achieving pools of kids,” says Skinner, director of college counseling. “It all comes down to, how do you make yourself distinctive? What else do you have, basically?”
Joey Kim of Chicago was one of those accepted at Harvard. His parents and sister came to his graduation last week. Kim, 23, had also been accepted into other elite schools, including Yale.
Yes, he had top SATs and a stellar GPA, was first violinist in his high school orchestra — and had come here from Korea at age 8 with not a word of English. What set him apart from other Asian-American applicants?
“I fell in love with theater in high school, and did a lot of drama productions, and speech,” he says.
Does he feel there’s an Asian disadvantage at select colleges? “It’s hard for me to say because I came in on the right side of that,” he says. “I’m personally caught in between the tension of having a diverse campus here, which I witnessed and is a good thing, but at the same time I feel for those kids who are caught in the nerve-wracking position of achieving but not getting in.”
His sister is one of them. Jessica, 18, applied to 10 top schools and got into 5. “I didn’t get into Yale and Harvard, and was wait-listed at Princeton,” she says. She’ll attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall.
While pleased with her acceptance, she notes classmates from other ethnic groups with qualifications similar to hers got into schools that rejected her. “For the most part, I think it [being Asian] hurt me,” she says.
More coverage:
• Harvard faces bias complaint from Asian-American groups
• What’s it like being poor at an Ivy League school?
• 12 ideas for making Boston more inclusive
• Google struggling to diversity beyond white, Asian men ||||| Housed within the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, the Princeton University Archives consists of over 15,000 linear feet of materials including both paper and electronic records, as well as photographs and other audiovisual materials that document the history of Princeton University. The University Archives is also the repository for Princeton senior theses and doctoral dissertations. To find more archival holdings within the Princeton University Archives and the Princeton University Library, consult our finding aids at http://findingaids.princeton.edu. ||||| University of Iowa LibrariesArchive-It Partner Since: May, 2006Organization Type: Colleges & UniversitiesOrganization URL: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu The University of Iowa Libraries is the largest library system in Iowa and 14th in materials expenditures among U.S. public research libraries. The University's Main Library, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, 5 branch libraries, and the Law Library contain more than 5 million volumes. ||||| | – Asian-American groups recently filed a federal complaint against Harvard, claiming the university holds Asian applicants to higher standards. But while that complaint is pending, the Boston Globe reports that breaking the "bamboo ceiling" is a thriving business, with coaches often advising applicants to appear, well … "less Asian," according to the director of NYC's Ivy Coach. Asians only make up about 5% of the US population, but, for example, 21% of Princeton's Class of 2018 is Asian-American, while Harvard's is 20%. But complaints focus on the many more qualified Asian-Americans who are being rejected because of what James Chen, founder of Asian Advantage College Consulting, calls "the Asian penalty." Coaches, therefore, focus on "deemphasiz[ing] the Asianness," as Chen says, to set them apart within their own demographic. Tips include trying different musical instruments (musical theater gets a thumbs-up over piano) and more physical sports like football. Chen also warns about immigrant tales in the application essay—"Don't talk about your family coming from Vietnam with $2 in a rickety boat," he tells the Globe—and says don't be a "grade grubber": "Schools don't want students who care too much about their grades. They want kids who love learning." Harvard's general counsel replies: "A class that is diverse on multiple dimensions, including on race, transforms the educational experience of students from every background." And an Asian-American professor adds, "I'm not sure that people really get that so many students of all races get rejected." (So why does that "Asian-American students are smarter" stereotype exist?) |
DONETSK, Ukraine — After Ukraine’s new president, Petro O. Poroshenko, told reporters in Kiev on Wednesday that he might soon order a temporary, unilateral cease-fire as part of a broader 14-point peace plan, it took all of several seconds for pro-Russian militants to rule it out.
“I am a condemned man,” said a stick-thin fighter who, like many others here, identified himself only by an alias, Tarik, for security reasons. Sipping tea in the gloom of the lobby of Donetsk’s rebel-occupied administration building on Wednesday afternoon, he patted the magazine of the automatic rifle slung across his chest.
Any cease-fire would certainly be violated by the Ukrainian Army, he said, adding that he and other pro-Russian separatists would be arrested the minute the government had the opportunity.
“What peace can they possibly offer me?” he asked. “If they want peace, then they can leave.”
Tarik and a dozen other rank-and-file fighters here reacted to Mr. Poroshenko’s proposal with a dark, belligerent skepticism. Most rejected the idea of disarming until a patchwork of amorphous conditions were met, suggesting that a truce would be awfully difficult to achieve.
Some demanded that the Ukrainian military leave the region, called Donbass, while others wanted a war tribunal for Ukraine’s newly elected leaders. Most said they wanted the restoration of “stability,” the precise definition of which remained elusive.
“Maybe there was a way back when this all just started, when the people were out here with the flags to make their point, and before the killing,” said Denis, a separatist fighter from Makeyevka, a depressed industrial town outside of Donetsk, when asked how and when the conflict might be resolved.
Another fighter jumped in helpfully. “The Third World War,” he said to nods of assent.
None said he was ready to lay down his arms.
The responses seemed to afford little hope that, as Mr. Poroshenko urged, a cease-fire “should receive support from all participants in the events in Donbass.” Toward that end, the president’s office announced that Mr. Poroshenko would meet on Thursday with what his office called the “legitimate” leaders from the east, including mayors and business representatives.
The Russian government has called repeatedly for Ukraine to stop its military crackdown on the separatists but has also insisted that it does not control, or speak for, the separatists.
But rebel leaders, some of whom were in Moscow on Wednesday, quickly dismissed Mr. Poroshenko’s proposal. Denis Pushilin, one of the leaders of the political wing of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said in television appearances in Moscow that he thought it was “pointless,” suggesting that it was the latest trick by Kiev to subdue the fighters.
Another rebel commander, Igor Strelkov, told Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper that regularly carries his statements, that Ukraine had already violated the cease-fire, though officially it had not yet even been declared.
In Kiev, Mr. Poroshenko told reporters that he planned to announce the cease-fire as part of a wider peace plan to end the more than two months of fighting in eastern Ukraine, where, the United Nations reported on Wednesday, at least 356 people are known to have died.
Mr. Poroshenko’s discussion of the peace plan followed a phone call late Tuesday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in which both sides said the cease-fire was a main topic.
Other elements of Mr. Poroshenko’s plan include sealing the border with Russia and amending the Ukrainian Constitution to allow for a “decentralization” plan that will give more authority to local governments.
The initial step, however, would be a halt to the Ukrainian military’s so-called antiterrorist operation against the pro-Russian militias, whose ranks include some Russian citizens who crossed the border to join the fight. Senior Russian officials have long insisted that any peace effort begin with such a step.
Also on Wednesday, Mr. Poroshenko nominated Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Pavlo Klimkin, as foreign minister, and asked Parliament to confirm him. Mr. Klimkin, a former deputy foreign minister, had an important role in negotiating the political and economic accords with the European Union that Viktor F. Yanukovych, then the president, refused to sign last November after long promising to do so, setting off months of civil unrest. Mr. Poroshenko has vowed to complete those agreements in the coming weeks.
Mr. Poroshenko also told reporters that he was awaiting a decision from lawmakers on holding early parliamentary elections, which he said were favored by 70 percent of Ukrainians.
Even on the eve of Mr. Poroshenko’s statements, heavy fighting in the Luhansk region on Tuesday left 27 injured and several dead, including two Russian state television journalists, according to a police spokeswoman for the region. ||||| Image copyright Reuters Image caption Petro Poroshenko spoke about his plans for a ceasefire at a military graduation ceremony
Ukraine's president has set out proposals for a peace plan for eastern Ukraine involving a unilateral ceasefire by government forces.
Petro Poroshenko said the temporary truce - expected "in hours or days" - would allow pro-Russian militants in the region to lay down their arms.
One separatist group has already rejected the proposal.
Mr Poroshenko's comments come after he held a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Media caption Petro Poroshenko is known in Ukraine as the "Chocolate King"
They discussed a solution to the crisis in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels are battling government forces.
More than 30 gunmen were killed and wounded in fighting near the town of Shchastya in the Luhansk region on Tuesday, a spokesman for the government's "anti-terrorism operation" said.
Kiev also said that 147 Ukrainian military personnel had been killed and 267 injured in fighting since March.
UN human rights investigators say the security situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions has deteriorated significantly over the past month.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Flames could be seen erupting from the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod Pipeline on Tuesday
Image copyright AFP Image caption Government forces have been fighting pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine since April
A report revealed a rising number of abductions and killings, with civilians increasingly caught in the crossfire and thousands forced to flee the violence.
Meanwhile, Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has said an explosion at a major pipeline in central Ukraine was caused by a bomb.
He said explosives had been placed under a concrete support at the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod Pipeline.
No-one was reported injured by the blast. European and Russian companies said gas exports were not affected by Tuesday's pipeline explosion.
'New warfare'
Speaking at a graduation ceremony at the National University of Defence in Kiev, Mr Poroshenko said a "brief" truce would be introduced to allow "Russian mercenaries" to leave Ukraine.
"The peace plan begins with my order for a unilateral ceasefire," Mr Poroshenko announced on Wednesday.
"We expect that disarmament of military groups and restoration of order will take place right after it."
The president added that his peace plan would have 14 points, including the closure of the Ukrainian-Russian border and changes to the constitution to give more power to the regions.
A presidential spokesman told the BBC the ceasefire could be announced in "hours or days" but gave no further details.
But Denis Pushilin, one of the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, a breakaway area which has asked to join Russia, rejected the proposal for the rebels to lay down their arms, Russia's TV channel Dozhd reports.
Mr Poroshenko also said Russia was waging "a new type of warfare" with the use of professional subversive groups and volunteers.
The Kremlin confirmed that Mr Poroshenko and Mr Putin "touched upon" the issue of a possible ceasefire during their talks on Tuesday, but gave no details.
Meanwhile Russia says it has launched a criminal investigation into Ukraine's interior minister and a local governor over the killings of civilians and journalists.
Mr Avakov and Igor Kolomoisky, governor of Dnipropetrovsk, are accused of organising military operations, including rocket strikes, in cities such as Donetsk, Sloviansk and Mariupol that left more than 100 dead, Russian state media said. ||||| An armed pro-Russian separatist with attached orange ribbon of St. George, a symbol widely associated with pro-Russian protests in Ukraine, stands guard at a road check point outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk June 8, 2014.
KIEV (Reuters) - After a late-night telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Wednesday set out proposals for a peace plan for eastern Ukraine involving a unilateral ceasefire by government forces.
Speaking to students at a military institute in Kiev, Poroshenko outlined a 14-step plan, including an amnesty for separatist fighters who lay down arms, and tighter controls over Ukraine's border with Russia. Acting Defence Minister Mykhailo Koval told journalists in Kiev the ceasefire "will happen in the next few days".
Ukraine accuses Russia of backing the rebels in the industrial Russian-speaking east who rose up after mass protests in Kiev toppled Viktor Yanukovich, a president sympathetic to Moscow. It says the rebels have been bringing in weapons across the long border with Russia.
"The plan will start with my order for a unilateral ceasefire," Poroshenko said. "Immediately after this, we need very quickly to get support for the peace plan ... from all participants."
Poroshenko had said on Monday that a ceasefire could start only if the border was secure, and that he had ordered troops to regain control of it to pave the way for a truce and peace talks.
The Kremlin said Putin's conversation with Poroshenko late on Tuesday night had "touched on the theme of a possible ceasefire in the area of military action in southeastern Ukraine".
Moscow has urged a swift end to what it calls a "punitive operation" by Ukrainian forces against pro-Russian separatists in the east.
Relations between the two neighbours are in tatters, three months after Russia labelled the uprising against Yanukovich a Western-backed coup, then annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine.
Moscow has grudgingly acknowledged Poroshenko as Ukraine’s new elected leader, but tensions are still high, exacerbated by Russia’s decision to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine after the two sides failed to agree a regime for pricing and the settlement of Ukraine’s debts.
On Wednesday, Russian investigators accused Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Ihor Kolomoisky, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region in the east, of criminal acts in the government's military push against the separatists.
A spokesman for the federal Investigative Committee said they were under investigation on charges including murder, kidnapping and using illegal methods of warfare - although it was not immediately clear under what jurisdiction.
"Kolomoisky and Avakov are literally drowning the country in the blood of its own people," spokesman Vladimir Markin said in a statement.
The Kremlin also said Putin had expressed his concern to Poroshenko over the deaths of two journalists for Russian state television, who were killed in shelling as Ukrainian forces fought pro-Russian separatists near the eastern city of Luhansk.
Poroshenko expressed his condolences and assured Putin there would be an investigation and that measures would be taken to protect journalists.
(writing by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Kevin Liffey) ||||| | – Ukraine's new president talked to Vladimir Putin last night, and today, Petro Poroshenko appears ready for a ceasefire, the New York Times reports. Poroshenko says he'll order the unilateral move once the border is secure; he believes "all illegal military units" will follow suit, per Russian and Ukrainian reports. During their call, "the presidents of Ukraine and Russia discussed a number of priority measures to be taken for a sustainable ceasefire, and the effective ways of monitoring it," Ukraine says in a statement. The ceasefire could come within "hours or days," a Ukrainian presidential rep tells the BBC. Poroshenko today told graduating students that a "brief" agreement would give "Russian mercenaries" a chance to leave the country. He discussed a 14-step plan involving amnesty for separatist fighters, Reuters reports. "The plan will start with my order for a unilateral ceasefire," he said. "Immediately after this, we need very quickly to get support for the peace plan ... from all participants." Russia's foreign minister has previously suggested that separatists would likely halt violence given an end to Ukraine's military action, the Times notes. |