Inside Breezy Point: An inferno in a flood

REPORTERS' NOTEBOOK

By Keturah Gray and Jim Dubreuil

When we were sent out on Monday afternoon to report on the "holdouts" of Hurricane Sandy - those who refused to leave their homes despite New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's mandatory evacuation orders - we expected winds and rain, but thought it was nothing that we couldn't handle.

We had our bottled water, our rain gear, our chips and were ready to tough out the storm with the citizens of Breezy Point, a beach town in Queens on the far end of New York City, and a place where Jim has family.

We were two of the last to arrive over the Marine Parkway Bridge before it closed to the public at 2 p.m. ET, and we joined up pretty quickly with 30-year-old Mary Lepera. She gave us a tour of the neighborhood and explained why she, like so many others, planned to stick out Hurricane Sandy at home: She'd spent her whole life there and wasn't about to abandon her home.

"We're sticking it out," she said. "Even if we have to go up on our roof, we'll do it."

A lot of people kind of felt that they had jumped through hoops for Irene, and this time, they weren't going to do it. And there was just this feeling that the storm was going to be like any other storm that hits the East Coast. It wasn't going to be the Super Storm that had been portrayed - but that's not what happened.

Over the course of the next few hours, though, Breezy Point became a literal lightning rod in the storm, battered by winds, rain and fire. At least 80 homes were destroyed in the beachfront neighborhood and we got caught in the chaos.

The last thing anyone imagines is a fire breaking out. But that's exactly what happened.

Jim DuBreuil: I remember looking out the window around 8:30 at night, and all of a sudden, we just saw this ? it seemed like we were in a national forest where you see all those fires with timbers flying around. It was off in the distance and at 8:20 at night, I wasn't thinking this is going to affect us. But as each hour progressed, the storm, the fire was just coming closer and closer and God, you [Keturah Gray] looked at me and said, "We're getting the hell out of here," and I was like, "Yeah, let's go." I got a trash can and we threw in garbage bags and all of our camera equipment in it. The family we were with did the same and we were out the door.

Keturah Gray: I just remember when I first saw that fire thinking we have water on one side of the house, we have a TON of water on the back side of the house, and we have a fire that is inevitably going to get closer because of all of the winds. I was just like, "What do we do? Where do we even begin? Do we take this route or this route?" I was so worried about the people that I knew, because we had been down that beach earlier that afternoon. There were a lot of people in that line of fire, and I just didn't know how they were going to get out.

Jim DuBreuil: I kind of think where we got lucky was the tide started going down. The water was much higher at 8 o'clock and then by 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock it was just easier to get around. Where the water would've been up to our chins, the water was finally at our waist. We put on our backpacks and got our trashcan and headed out of there.

Keturah Gray: I think I was the first one that was like, we need an escape plan, but I also didn't know if I was going to be strong enough to walk through the water.

Jim DuBreuil: Timbers are flying and there's 80 mph winds coming at you as you're going through the waves. You're trying to get through the flood and the fire's behind you and I just remember looking at you and going "don't look back, don't look back."

Keturah Gray: The water was receding, but the fire was becoming stronger. We were walking against the current, which was really hard, and we're carrying a trash can and a lot of other people had babies they were carrying and bags.

Jim DuBreuil: I think it could've been absolutely chaotic and hell on earth at one point, but everyone got together. People were helping each other and going "OK, we're going to get you out." We were moving from one spot to the next. When we got to our first evacuation spot, which was maybe 100 meters away from the first house we were at, I could smell kerosene. They told us there's a gas pump nearby. At that point, the fire has moved and the embers are now coming in to the fire and Keturah looked at me again and was like, "Let's get the out of here." It just seemed the fire was following us. We finally got to a Roman Catholic Church and, for me, that was the moment when I was like, "We're going to be all right. These people are going to be all right and we're going to get out of here."

Keturah Gray: That's when they said nobody can stay. You are leaving this time. And everybody that we were with, for the most part, were happy to hear those words.

Jim DuBreuil: I think it's easy to look at people like this and say, "Gosh, why didn't they heed the warning," but I think these people just love their community so much and they take care of each other, that they just didn't want to leave and they didn't think it was going to be bad and I think they realized that they made a mistake. But again, they could've never predicted a huge fire. The people of Breezy Point will come back and rebuild.

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/inside-breezy-point-inferno-flood-002046120--abc-news-topstories.html

andrew brietbart branson mo monkees songs danica patrick top chef texas rail gun harrisburg

News about Online Marketing issue #1 - RapiChat.com Blog

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://blog.rapichat.com/2012/10/31/news-about-online-marketing-issue-1-16188/

kentucky derby beltane ryan o neal dark knight rises trailer dark knight rises trailer vince young vince young

MPAA Puts The 'R' In 'Riddick'

By Ryan Gowland From the very beginning, Vin Diesel has said that "Riddick," the upcoming sequel to 2004's "The Chronicles of Riddick," would have an R rating, like 2000's "Pitch Black," the character's original outing. "Though Hollywood likes their PG Ratings, the next chapter in the 'COR' series was always envisioned as an R rating, [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2012/10/31/riddick-r-rated-vin-diesel/

dont trust the b in apartment 23 johnny damon kirk cameron news 10 hillary rosen j.k. rowling j.k. rowling

News sites knocked out as data center floods

1 day

Wilson Rothman , NBC News

At 4:21 p.m. ET Monday, the tech blog Gizmodo tweeted that its downed?site would "be back soon!?There was a data center battery failure after the power went down in Lower Manhattan. Generators powering up." But almost a day later, the site ? and its sister?sites in the Gawker network ? were still limping.

Gawker was not alone. The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed experienced outages and trouble publishing. CNET reported that Livestream, host of the live "Sandycam" video?feed, had a "major outage." And?MarketWatch, a property of the Wall Street Journal, was "?severely disrupted by Hurricane Sandy," according to a?post on its?Tumblr site.

When you see a website go down,?the blame usually falls on hackers or, more often, software bugs.?We don't often think of?the Web as having a physical existence, but sure enough, Sandy has shown that nature can impact websites with greater force than any team of malicious code wizards can summon up.

The problem was explained by BuzzFeed ? not in a post on its own site, but on a BuzzFeed channel on the Tumblr blogging network:

Datagram, the ISP whose Manhattan servers host BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, and other sites, has lost power, an official there told us via text this evening.

"Basement flooded, fuel pump off line ? we got people working on it now. 5 feet of water now," the official wrote.

Even Tuesday, Datagram was still struggling to recover. At 11:20 a.m. ET, the company's website reported: "We are still flooded, as soon as the basement is cleared we will be allowed to operate the generator and restore power." Then at 11:53 a.m. came the update: "The building has slowly begun to pump water out of the basement. They are unable to provide an ETA however."

Nationally, the picture was not so grim. Most of the country's?top websites "appear to have weathered the storm remarkably well," wrote Aaron Rudger, senior?marketing manager of Web performance for Keynote, a mobile and website monitoring and testing service, in an email to NBC News. "Overall performance slowed by about 7 percent, with average availability of 98 percent."

Rudger said that only one of 40 biggest websites tracked by Keynote had an outage in the timeframe?of?Sandy's impact, job site Monster.com. "That site experienced major failures at around 8?p.m. Pacific Time last night, persisting throughout the evening and into the morning. The site appears to have recovered now."

Gawker founder and publisher Nick Denton "was among Internet honchos who engages a data center in downtown Manhattan, which, unshockingly to anyone who's read a weather report in the last five days, didn't make it," wrote The Awl's Choire Sicha, who added, "The rest of us made data center preparations; even then, some of us went down after midnight."

But given the scope of the outage, it's not clear what quick preparations could have been made to avoid the problems, especially for sites that are hosted in a single physical?location.?

"We had plans for a second data center in 2013 which we will now be moving up," Scott Kidder, Gawker's?executive director of operations, told NBC News in an email. "We ? as other publishers ? had counted on Datagram's ability to withstand anticipated natural disasters, which seems to have been misplaced."

Like other sites facing data failures in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Gawker turned to alternative publishing. (You can now?find Gawker sites at updates.gawker.com,?updates.gizmodo.com, updates.kotaku.com, updates.jalopnik.com, and so on). Denton urged his staff to turn to Facebook and Twitter as well.

"While we're obviously disappointed with Datagram," said Kidder, "our priority has been getting back online for our readers with an alternate publishing platform, which we've now done with all sites thanks to Tumblr."

"Elements of BuzzFeed?s site and many story pages are back online, thanks to a Content Delivery Network, Akamai, which hosts the content at servers distributed around the world," said BuzzFeed's Tumblr page. "We aren?t able to update the site right now, however," so the site provided its Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook info for readers.

During its outage, The Huffington Post was able to redirect traffic to an alternate server at status.huffingtonpost.com, but appeared to have recovered sooner than the?others.?

Re-directing readers to social channels and new Web addresses is a messy proposition, but in today's twitterfied news world, it's not as crazy as it sounds. At least not for BuzzFeed, according the site's tech editor, Matt Buchanan.

"I think BuzzFeed is in a unique position because it's a social publisher at its core ? so it's totally natural for us to move to these other media," Buchanan told NBC News. "I think a lot of our readers are totally comfortable following us as natives of the social Web. Also, it helps that we had strong presences on Twitter and Tumblr to begin with."

Despite intermittent Tumblr outages, Buchanan said traffic was "picking up" on BuzzFeed's alternatives, particularly buzzfeedpolitics.tumblr.com.

But?getting BuzzFeed's main?site back on track has taken more Herculean efforts: It is rebuilding the whole operation on a cloud-based server run by Amazon.?"The team have been working non-stop since we went down yesterday," said BuzzFeed's Ben Smith.?One of BuzzFeed's New York-based?developers who coded through the night for the emergency site?transplant did so with a tree smashed through the roof of his home.

Wilson Rothman is the Technology & Science?editor at NBC News Digital. Catch up with him on Twitter at @wjrothman, and join our conversation on Facebook.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/news-sites-knocked-out-nyc-data-center-floods-1C6759330

ricky rubio day light savings time peter paul and mary edgar rice burroughs dallas clark litter marinol

Mother's little helpers let her relax

Monday, October 29, 2012

Published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, the research shows that mother chestnut-crowned babblers bring food to their chicks much less often when they have family members doing the same.

'We were expecting that mothers would work hardest at feeding their chicks because, on average, they have the greatest genetic stake in their young. But this was not the case,' says Dr Lucy Browning, now of the University of New South Wales, who led the research.

Yet by slacking off on the communal task of feeding, it may be that the mother avoids spending energy and risking predator attack while looking for suitable food. Instead, she can save her energy for her next attempt to breed.

This isn't just relevant to birds; ultimately it could help shed light on how we reproduce and raise children ourselves.

'The breeding female produces all the group's offspring, and the more the others can support her, the higher quality offspring she will produce, which is better for everyone,' says Dr Andy Russell of the University of Exeter, another of the paper's authors. 'So in a small group the breeding female does as much as anyone else, but we found that as the group gets larger she reduces her feeding activity by about two thirds.'

The researchers monitored numerous groups of babblers at the University of New South Wales Arid Zone Research Station throughout the process of rearing young. They tracked the size of prey that each adult brought the chicks, what kind of food it was and how often they did it.

Chestnut-crowned babblers are what ecologists call 'obligate cooperative breeders' - they breed in family groups, in which only the dominant pair ever get to produce the offspring, and breeding without help is rare and generally unsuccessful. The other birds have to content themselves with helping their relations raise their chicks, and hoping to improve the chances of their genes getting passed on to the next generation that way. Bringing prey for the youngsters to eat is a big part of this.

This means breeding female babblers don't just have their mate to help take care of their chicks, but also numerous grown-up offspring and other relations. So they can put less effort in without significantly adding to the risk their offspring will starve. Flying about looking for food is tiring, and exposes mothers to the risk of attack by hawks and falcons. And the whole process of breeding is hard work for females; they have to lay eggs and stay sitting on them until they hatch.

So in theory it makes sense that mothers should put less effort into feeding chicks when there are others to do that. But this is one of the first times scientists have shown such a clear pattern for the breeding female alone.

Males may scale back their feeding contributions a little, but there's less reason for them to slack off as they invest much less in each attempt at breeding. They don't have to lay eggs or spend weeks incubating them, so there's less incentive to try to conserve as much energy as possible for the next breeding attempt. Meanwhile the females generally brought large items of prey, but much less often. This increased prey size didn't come close to counterbalancing the drop in how often they brought food.

Russell says that similar group cooperation could have played an important role in the development of human reproduction as we know it. People have an unusually short birth interval compared to with primates of a similar size - women can have another child only another year or so after their last one, compared to about five years in chimpanzees. 'In humans, grannies, siblings and older children provide mothers with a huge amount of support,' he says. 'It's likely that our short birth interval evolved as a consequence of this kind of helping behaviour, which allowed mothers to reduce their investment of energy in their current child in order to prepare for the next one.'

The behaviour is subtly different from that of other obligate cooperative breeders like meerkats; there, both parents significantly reduce their investment in feeding young, not just the mother. Another recent paper by the same team showed that the chestnut-crowned babblers don't just share the burden of child-rearing; they are honest about always feeding the food they bring to the young, even when they're hidden inside the domed nest and could easily just eat it themselves.

###

Browning, L.E., Young C.M., Savage J.L., Griffith S.C. & Russell A.F. (2012) Carer provisioning rules in an obligate cooperative breeder: prey type, size and delivery rate. Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology.

Natural Environment Research Council: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/

Thanks to Natural Environment Research Council for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 41 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124888/Mother_s_little_helpers_let_her_relax

ryan madson louisiana primary syracuse basketball chipper jones chipper jones dancing with the stars cast mickael pietrus

Nevada town named state's 'most bearded community'

{ttle}

{cptn}","template_name":"ss_thmb_play_ttle","i18n":{"end_of_gallery_header":"End of Gallery","end_of_gallery_next":"View Again"},"metadata":{"pagination":"{firstVisible} - {lastVisible} of {numItems}","ult":{"spaceid":"7664811","sec":""}}},{"id": "hcm-carousel-1452490511", "dataManager": C.dmgr, "mediator": C.mdtr, "group_name":"hcm-carousel-1452490511", "track_item_selected":1,"tracking":{ "spaceid" : "7664811", "events" : { "click" : { "any" : { "yui-carousel-prev" : { "node" : "a", "data" : {"sec":"HCMOL on article right rail","slk":"prev","itc":"1" }, "bubbles" : true, "test": function(params){ var carousel = params.obj.getCarousel(); var pages = carousel._pages; // if same page, don't beacon if(("_ult_current_page" in carousel) && carousel._ult_current_page==pages.cur) return false; // keep track of current position within this closure carousel._ult_current_page = pages.cur; return true; } }, "yui-carousel-next" : { "node" : "a", "data" : {"sec":"HCMOL on article right rail","slk":"next","itc":"1" }, "bubbles" : true, "test": function(params){ var carousel = params.obj.getCarousel(); var pages = carousel._pages; // no more pages, don't beacon again // if same page, don't beacon if(("_ult_current_page" in carousel) && carousel._ult_current_page==pages.cur) return false; // keep track of current position within this closure carousel._ult_current_page = pages.cur; return true; } } } } } } })); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {(function() { try{ if (Math.floor(Math.random()*10) == 1) { var loc = window.location, decoded = decodeURI(loc.pathname), encoded = encodeURI(decoded), uri = loc.protocol + "//" + loc.host + encoded + ((loc.search.length > 0) ? loc.search + '&' : '?') + "_cacheable=1", xmlhttp; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); else xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); xmlhttp.open("GET",uri,true); xmlhttp.send(); } }catch(e){} })(); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {Y.namespace("Media").ywaSettings = '"projectId": "10001256862979", "documentName": "", "documentGroup": "", "ywaColo" : "vscale3", "spaceId" : "7664811" ,"customFields" : { "12" : "classic", "13" : "story" }'; Y.Media.YWA.init(Y.namespace("Media").ywaSettings); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {if(document.onclick===YAHOO.Media.PreventDefaultHandler.newClick){document.onclick=YAHOO.Media.PreventDefaultHandler.oldClick;} }); }); });

Ti West's "The Sacrament" adds Joe Swanberg, Gene Jones to cast

{ttle}

{cptn}","template_name":"ss_thmb_play_ttle","i18n":{"end_of_gallery_header":"End of Gallery","end_of_gallery_next":"View Again"},"metadata":{"pagination":"{firstVisible} - {lastVisible} of {numItems}","ult":{"spaceid":"7664811","sec":""}}},{"id": "hcm-carousel-401807622", "dataManager": C.dmgr, "mediator": C.mdtr, "group_name":"hcm-carousel-401807622", "track_item_selected":1,"tracking":{ "spaceid" : "7664811", "events" : { "click" : { "any" : { "yui-carousel-prev" : { "node" : "a", "data" : {"sec":"HCMOL on article right rail","slk":"prev","itc":"1" }, "bubbles" : true, "test": function(params){ var carousel = params.obj.getCarousel(); var pages = carousel._pages; // if same page, don't beacon if(("_ult_current_page" in carousel) && carousel._ult_current_page==pages.cur) return false; // keep track of current position within this closure carousel._ult_current_page = pages.cur; return true; } }, "yui-carousel-next" : { "node" : "a", "data" : {"sec":"HCMOL on article right rail","slk":"next","itc":"1" }, "bubbles" : true, "test": function(params){ var carousel = params.obj.getCarousel(); var pages = carousel._pages; // no more pages, don't beacon again // if same page, don't beacon if(("_ult_current_page" in carousel) && carousel._ult_current_page==pages.cur) return false; // keep track of current position within this closure carousel._ult_current_page = pages.cur; return true; } } } } } } })); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {(function() { try{ if (Math.floor(Math.random()*10) == 1) { var loc = window.location, decoded = decodeURI(loc.pathname), encoded = encodeURI(decoded), uri = loc.protocol + "//" + loc.host + encoded + ((loc.search.length > 0) ? loc.search + '&' : '?') + "_cacheable=1", xmlhttp; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); else xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); xmlhttp.open("GET",uri,true); xmlhttp.send(); } }catch(e){} })(); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {Y.namespace("Media").ywaSettings = '"projectId": "10001256862979", "documentName": "", "documentGroup": "", "ywaColo" : "vscale3", "spaceId" : "7664811" ,"customFields" : { "12" : "classic", "13" : "story" }'; Y.Media.YWA.init(Y.namespace("Media").ywaSettings); }); Y.later(10, this, function() {if(document.onclick===YAHOO.Media.PreventDefaultHandler.newClick){document.onclick=YAHOO.Media.PreventDefaultHandler.oldClick;} }); }); });

Green Blog: Learning to Live With Urban Coyotes

Only a few decades ago, Wile E. Coyote in hapless pursuit of Road Runner may have been the most readily conjured image of Canis latrans, the coyote, for most city dwellers. But increasingly, residents of urban and suburban areas are having firsthand experience with coyotes in their own yards, parks and neighborhoods.

Coyotes now inhabit every state in the country except Hawaii, eating mostly rodents, rabbits, and fruit while making their homes between apartment buildings and in industrial parks and popular recreation areas in metropolitan areas from New York City to Chicago to San Francisco. Recent research suggests that coyotes could prove to be just the first of a wave of larger carnivores ? bears, cougars, and wolves ? moving into residential areas.

?There?s a number of things that coyotes really find to their liking in suburban communities, more than adjacent wild areas,? said Robert Timm, a wildlife specialist and the director of the University of California?s Hopland Research and Extension Center. Food set out continually for a pet or stray cat, fallen fruit left in the yard, a small dog running off-leash or a cat allowed to wander the neighborhood, a bird feeder stocked year-round ? all of these things can attract coyotes.

?It may only take one person feeding coyotes to develop a really aggressive one,? Mr. Timm said in a phone interview. ?If some people are just ignoring them and coyotes are finding a lot of resources, they can start to think, ?Oh, this is a really good place to be. I own this neighborhood now.??

A bold coyote that lacks a natural wariness of humans can be a problematic one. But according to Camilla Fox, founder and executive director of Project Coyote, an organization based in Larkspur, Calif., that seeks to promote appreciation of coyotes and minimize lethal control, the animals? behavior is often misinterpreted. ?I may see a coyote in my neighborhood, and recognize that coyote is moving through, looking for a mate,? she said. ?A neighbor might say that coyote is a danger.?

Founded in 2008, Project Coyote works with communities to develop ?coexistence plans? that focus on strategic hazing, or training residents, animal control officers and parks staff to use consistent and persistent deterrents like loud noises, water spraying, bright lights, throwing objects, shouting and chasing coyotes.

Denver adopted a hazing-based management plan three years ago, sending out teams, for example, to scare off coyotes that had taken to trotting after joggers in a public park. And according to a case study prepared by wildlife specialists with the Humane Society of the United States and Denver?s Parks and Recreation Department, officials report that hazing has successfully reversed ?aggressive and undesirable behaviors in coyote family groups and solitary coyotes, reduching pet attacks in neighborhoods and reducing the overall number of complaints from residents.?

In Denver, the killing of coyotes was reserved as a last resort ? an action to be taken only in response to human attacks ? but no lethal control has been used since the hazing program began in 2009. According to the case study, ?one of the novel and cost-savings aspects of the program is its hands-on and empowering nature ? it gives local residents the ability and confidence to address coyote conflicts in their own backyards, without outside help.? Similar programs are being developed or put into effect around the country.

Ms. Fox said that education was crucial. ?Whether it?s coyotes, mountain lions, or bears, in urban areas ? particularly when law enforcement are the first responders ? they may dispatch an animal, kill an animal that didn?t necessarily need to be killed, wasn?t necessarily a public safety threat and simply needed to be hazed away.?

When coyotes come to town, attitudes are often polarized. ?People have very strong opinions on coyotes and carnivores in general ? very strong support, and very strong negative attitudes, some of which may be unjustified,? said Paul Curtis, a wildlife biologist at Cornell University who co-led a five-year-long study of coyote behavior in Westchester County in New York.

But while the long-running battle over how best to protect and manage another, larger carnivore ? the wolf ? has often pitted environmentalists and animal welfare groups against sportsmen and ranchers, much of the debate over urban coyote management is now playing out at a local level. ?Coyotes are more opportunistic and harder to deal with than wolves are,? Mr. Timm said. ?They are much more clever, in come cases able to adapt to new situations and able to outsmart control efforts.?

Through hunting, trapping, and poisoning, people were able to nearly wipe out wolves in the continental United States, he added. Coyotes survived.

Research in the 1970?s registered generally negative attitudes toward both coyotes and wolves among the American public. Later, a 1985 study out of Yale University found that survey respondents ranked coyotes and wolves as the least-liked animals ? below skunks, vultures, rats, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, and cockroaches (dogs ranked as the most liked).

Although attitudes vary among different segments of the population residents in at least some regions, including Minnesota, New England, Colorado, and Michigan developed generally positive attitudes toward wolves and coyotes in the 1980?s and 1990?s.

?Although there?s been a general trend toward greater tolerance for wildlife and large carnivores in particular in U.S. society, that?s not a one-way street,? said Adrian Treves, founder and director of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?That tolerance can reverse.?

Mr. Treves, who studies conflicts between humans and carnivores and also serves on the advisory board for Project Coyote, has tracked such a reversal in Wisconsin. Recent surveys, he said, suggest that attitudes toward wolves over an eight-year period turned more negative in a variety of measures.

The data show increased fear of the wolves, a greater sense of competitiveness with them in hunting or trapping for deer, and an increased inclination to kill them illegally, as well as greater approval for the state to kill wolves for purposes of depredation and for a public hunting season.

Not surprisingly, coyote incidents reported close to home, if not experienced firsthand, can have a strong influence on attitudes toward the animals. ?People are initially really excited, or at least intrigued: ?I want to see what their behavior is, and where they live, and what they eat, what their pups are like,?? Mr. Timm said.

?But if your pet gets bitten, or your cat gets killed and you find parts of it on your front lawn in the morning, then you have a whole different conception of whether it?s good to have coyotes in the community,? he said.

Mr. Treves said he had witnessed that kind of shift in sentiment very close to home. In Madison, Wis., he lives with his family beside a 90-acre park where coyotes have made their home for at least 15 years. ?We hear coyotes and their pups every year, and it?s a noise we love,? he said.

But in 2009, coyotes attacked two dogs on the west side of town. ?It caused quite a bit of alarm among neighbors, and I was right there in the audience, listening to the experts, trying to get a handle on what was going on in my own community,? Mr. Treves said. For nearly a year afterward, the family golden retriever was kept inside at night. His family was vigilant about leaving more lights on in the yard after dark and making sure no food was left outside to attract coyotes.

?People are coming into contact with coyotes in a setting that?s novel,? he said. ?And novelty often creates fear and uncertainty.?

?Go an hour outside Madison, they?re used to seeing coyotes and there wouldn?t be an outcry? on the level Madison experienced after those two dog attacks, Mr. Treves said.

According to a paper by Cornell researchers who surveyed residents of four Westchester towns before and after two coyote attacks on children in July 2010 in that New York county, ?residents were aware that coyotes could harm pets? at the time of the first survey in the autumn of 2006. ?But the possibility of harm to people was a hypothetical risk until the events during summer 2010.?

The fall after the attacks, nearly half of respondents in each of two study areas (Somers and Yorktown, two rural-suburban towns along the county?s northern border, and Mount Pleasant and Greenburgh, two more densely populated towns along the southwestern edge) expressed ?great concern? about the threat to small children. Four years earlier, only about 37 percent had expressed that sentiment.

More than a year after the attacks, the worries had not subsided. The community?s concern about coyotes and perception of risk, the study?s authors wrote, appeared to have been elevated to ?a new norm.?

?The reality is coyotes are incredibly adaptable, intelligent, resilient animals, and they have learned how to coexist with us,? Ms. Fox said. ?But we?re still trying to figure out how to coexist with them.?

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/learning-to-live-with-urban-coyotes/?partner=rss&emc=rss

bcs championship game beyonce baby detroit auto show tebow broncos ben roethlisberger downton abbey season 2 2013 dodge dart

McIlroy beats Woods in China exhibition

ZHENGZHOU, China (AP) ? Rory McIlroy outdueled Tiger Woods in the first one-on-one exhibition match between golf's two biggest names.

Woods thinks he'll have plenty of chances to get revenge.

McIlroy shot a 5-under 67 to beat Woods by one stroke in an 18-hole match between the two top-ranked golfers at the Jinsha Lake Golf Club in central China on Monday.

"This is certainly not like most Mondays. To have this many people come out and watch us play golf in an exhibition was something special. This doesn't happen," Woods said. "As far as doing something like this down the road, it would be fun."

The event, dubbed "Duel at Jinsha Lake," marked the first time the two golfers had played head-to-head without other competitors. It probably won't be the last.

Woods said he'd relish the chance to take on McIlroy more often to create a rivalry at the top of the game similar to the one between Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray that have made men's tennis so exciting in recent years.

"If you look at the history of the game, it's not like other sports where the guys play against each other all the time. Jack (Nicklaus) and Arnold (Palmer) didn't go at it that often," Woods said. "But you know what, if we can do this for the next 10, 15 years, then certainly we can have that type of rivalry.

"I think having matches like this to promote the game of golf is what it's all about. We're trying to promote the game of golf in this region and it's come a long way since my first time here 11 years ago."

McIlroy took an early lead with two birdies on the first three holes and held on to beat Woods, who had two bogeys to go along with his six birdies for the day. The 14-time major winner finished with a 68.

Both players competed elsewhere Sunday and had to make long journeys to Zhengzhou, an industrial city in China's Henan province. McIlroy finished second to Peter Hanson in the European Tour's BMW Masters at Shanghai, while Woods tied for fourth in the PGA Tour's CIMB Classic in Malaysia.

McIlroy, who captured the PGA Championship in August for his second major, said the win over Woods offered some consolation for his defeat Sunday when he surged back from four shots down against Hanson only to lose by one stroke in the end.

"It's been a nice distraction to not dwell on what happened yesterday. I let a great chance to win a golf tournament slip through my fingers," McIlroy said. "Coming to do something like this today has definitely made it a little easier to deal with."

After falling two strokes behind on the front nine, Woods hit a perfect chip shot from the fairway on the par-3 12th hole that hit the pin and dropped in for birdie, bringing him within one shot of the Northern Irishman.

However, he then missed a long putt for par on the next hole, settling for bogey, while McIlroy sank a 7-footer for par.

Woods made birdie on the 14th hole to pull within a stroke again, but he missed his final chance to level the score on the 18th when he misplayed his approach shot and landed in a bunker, muttering "where did that go?"

The first head-to-head matchup between Woods and McIlroy ? at the eight-player World Golf Final in Turkey this month ? was far more one-sided. Woods shot a 7-under 64 to defeat the Northern Irishman by six strokes in a group match at the exhibition event.

China has lured a number of the world's top players with lucrative exhibitions in the past few years as part of an effort to grow the sport's popularity and market a bevy of new celebrity-designed courses.

No expense ? or extravagance ? was spared in welcoming Woods and McIlroy to the Jinsha Lake Golf Club.

As stunt planes buzzed overhead, a fleet of Rolls Royces whisked the players to the course, passing helicopters for sale and Aston Martins and Maseratis with showgirls draped over them. After the two struck a gong to open the event, fireworks exploded behind them and confetti cannons rained gold flakes over the jostling crowd.

Some spectators, however, were skeptical whether an event like this would actually attract new fans to the sport in China.

"The bosses here maybe want to sell the villas so they introduce two big stars to come here," said Michael Wong, vice editor-in-chief of China's Golfweek magazine in Beijing. "It's a show more than a game."

Nonetheless, fans on the course were excited to see golf's biggest names.

Ji Tianxin, a 14-year-old student and occasional golfer, came with her father from Nanjing to watch McIlroy, her favorite player.

"I don't usually get this chance to watch the best players," she said, watching the players putt on the fourth hole. "I think the two are both stars so I really wanted to see them."

The duel even led to some sibling rivalry between a brother and sister from Beijing. Li Weiyang is a longtime fan of Woods because he appreciates his skills and finds him "charming," but his older sister Jing Sun was rooting for McIlroy.

Jing said they didn't have a wager on the match, but she thought it was a good idea.

"The bet can be who will drive back home," she said. "It's a long drive."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mcilroy-beats-woods-china-exhibition-083319352--spt.html

transtar 316 william daley truffles truffles alabama vs lsu alabama vs lsu

Access at 21 ? We're Finally Legal

Turning 21 and reaching the legal drinking age is a milestone in the U.S. (by the way, this is the highest drinking age in the world). For Access Communications this represents a different and even more significant milestone: 21 years ago our agency had its humble beginnings in a loft in Potrero Hill, San Francisco with a handful of people and big dreams.

Access was conceived as one of the first public relations firms to focus on the nexus point between technology, consumer and business markets. 21 years later we employ 100 people and represent some of the best known technology brands in the market including Intuit, PayPal, Toshiba, Polycom, 2K Games and Experian. We also partner with vibrant start-ups who are using technology to redefine how we work and live, including TwitchTV, Jive Software, Cool Planet sustainable biofuels, Rearden Commerce, Turn and AddThis. And over the last 21 years we have also expanded our client portfolio to include well-known consumer brands such as Leapfrog, Safeway, Luna, Beefeater Gin, Kahlua and Silver Oak.

There are many colorful chapters to our biography thus far: we quickly expanded during the go-go days of the 90?s dot.com era we survived two massive economic down turns. Through it all we nurtured a dynamic employee-centric culture and unparalleled level of client service that has resulted in strong staff retention and long-term client engagements, including ten year-plus relationships with Intuit, Trend Micro and 2K Games. Our focus creative thinking and execution has been recognized with shelves of industry awards including three Silver Anvils.

Recognizing the emergent importance of globalization, we became a part of Ketchum, one of the largest global public relations agencies, so that we can offer our clients not only expanded resources in the U.S, but support in almost any market that is important to our clients today and in the future.

So much has happened in the last 21 years that it is impossible to capture it all in a brief blog, so we are very grateful to the talented Rob Flaherty, Ketchum CEO, for recreating a visual highlights timeline. Please take a moment to watch the video and celebrate with us Access? first 21 years.

Susan Butenhoff

Tagged as: Access Communications, Ketchum, Rob Flaherty

Source: http://blog.accesspr.com/2012/10/access-at-21-were-finally-legal/

karen handel hangout todd haley kareem abdul jabbar karl rove miramonte elementary school mark jenkins

Additional Kepler data now available to all planet hunters

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2012) ? The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is releasing 12 additional months worth of planet-searching data meticulously collected by one of the most prolific planet-hunting endeavors ever conceived, NASA's Kepler Mission.

As of Oct. 28, 2012, every observation from the extrasolar planet survey made by Kepler since its launch in 2009 through June 27, 2012, is available to scientists and the public. This treasure-trove contains more than 16 terabytes of data and is housed at the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, at the Space Telescope Science Institute. MAST is a huge data archive containing astronomical observations from 16 NASA space astronomy missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope. It is named in honor of Maryland U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski.

Over the past three years the Kepler science team has discovered 77 confirmed planets and 2,321 planet candidates. All of Kepler's upcoming observations will be no longer exclusive to the Kepler science team, its guest observers, and its asteroseismology consortium members and will be available immediately to the public.

The objects already discovered may only be the tip of the iceberg. The data store contains clues to the existence of as yet undiscovered planets and a record of stellar behavior of stars near the Sun.

Since its launch, the Kepler spacecraft has stared almost nonstop at more than 150,000 stars in the direction of the summer constellations Cygnus and Lyra. The Kepler mission is operated by NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The spacecraft simultaneously measures the variations in brightness of the stars every 30 minutes, searching for periodic dips in a star's brightness that occur when an orbiting planet crosses in front of it and partially blocks the light from its parent star.

These fluctuations are tiny compared with the brightness of the star. For an Earth-size planet transiting a solar-type star, the change in brightness is less than 1/100 of 1 percent. This event is similar to the amount of dimming if a flea were to crawl across a car's headlight viewed from several miles away.

These brightness variations are available in the Kepler inventory. Finding planets requires stellar detective work by repeatedly measuring variations in the brightness of target stars.

In addition to yielding evidence for planets circling some of the target stars, the Kepler data also reveal information about the behavior of many of the other stars being monitored. Kepler astronomers have discovered star spots, flaring stars, double-star systems, and "heartbeat" stars, a class of eccentric binary systems undergoing dynamic tidal distortions and tidally induced pulsations.

There is far more data in the Kepler archives than astronomers have time to analyze quickly. Avid volunteer astronomers are invited to make Kepler discoveries by perusing the archive through a website called "Planet Hunters," (http://www.planethunters.org/). A tutorial informs citizen scientists how to analyze the Kepler data, so they may assist with the research. Visitors to the website cannot actually see individual planets. Instead, they look for the effects of planets as they sweep across the face of their parent stars. Volunteer scientists have analyzed over 14 million observations so far. Just last week citizen scientists announced the discovery of the first planet to be found in a quadruple-star system.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/astronomy/~3/drcpArAzTqU/121029133542.htm

Mother Jones cars Bacon Number Kate Middleton photos Chi Magazine Kate Middleton Nude Photos glee

Regal Beloit's 3Q Below Estimate - Zacks.com

Regal Beloit Corporation (RBC - Snapshot Report) reported adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.32 in the third quarter of 2012 compared to $1.31 per share in the year-ago quarter and $1.50 in the second quarter of 2012. The annual rise in the earnings was driven by the company?s improved operational performance during the quarter.

The results surpassed the company?s previously provided guidance range of $1.22 to $1.30 per share but failed to meet the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.37 per share.

Revenue

Net sales spiked 5.8% year over year but down 9.8% sequentially to $779.5 million, although the sales missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $840 million. The company has witnessed sequential decline in its sales due to a clouded fiscal scenario. Although the company?s residential HVAC business grew slightly during the quarter, Regal Beloit witnessed low demand in its other businesses. The foreign currency translation reduced the net sales by 1.7% from the year-ago quarter.

Segment Analysis

Revenues from the Electrical segment climbed 6.1% year over year $708.3 million mostly driven by its business acquisition activity, but was down 9.6% sequentially. Excluding the company?s business acquisitions, the Electrical segment?s sales dropped 9.2% year over year due to the fall in the revenues accrued from Regal Beloit?s Commercial, Industrial and Asian businesses. The North American residential HVAC motor sales surged 0.4% year over year. The North American commercial and industrial motor sales declined 6.4% year over year in the quarter.

Net sales in the mechanical segment hiked 2.6% year over year but declined 11.3% sequentially to $71.2 million. Sales from the North America Mechanical segment (the company?s acquired and divested businesses excluded) declined 0.9% from the year-ago quarter. The sales outside the United States decreased 9.4% year over year.

Margins

Gross profit in the quarter was $192.6 million, up 7.2% year over year while gross margin increased to 24.7% in the third quarter of 2012 from 24.4% a year ago. Operating margin in the quarter was 10.7% compared to 10.6% in the year-ago quarter and 12.0% in the prior quarter.

On a segmental basis, the gross margin of the Electrical Segment was 24.5% in the quarter versus 24.0% in the year-ago quarter. The Mechanical Segment?s gross margin declined 100 basis points year over year to 27.2%.

Operating margin of the Electrical Segment in the quarter was 10.3%, declining from 10.4% in the prior year quarter. Mechanical Segment reported a 14.2% operating margin in the quarter versus 12.7% in the year-ago quarter.

Balance Sheet and Cash flows

Exiting the third quarter, Regal Beloit?s cash and cash equivalents were $185.8 million?versus $190.9 million in the previous quarter. Inventories were $594.9 million compared with $583.9 million in the second quarter of 2012. Long-term debt at the end of 3Q12 was $781.7 million versus $899.8 million at the end of the previous quarter.?

Net cash provided by operating activities in the quarter was $71.8 million compared with $66.7 million in the prior-year quarter. The effective tax rate in the quarter was 24.5% versus 30.3% in the prior year quarter.

Guidance

Management expects that the clouded fiscal scenario and weak demand in the market would continue to affect the company?s financial as well as operating performance. However, the company?s HVAC business is expected to improve in the fourth quarter of 2012. Additionally, the company would focus more on its restructuring actions to improve its profitability.

Regal Beloit expects that the earnings per share (including the restructuring charges of 9 cents per share) will be within the range of 58 cents to 66 cents per share for the fourth quarter of 2012.

Our Recommendation

Regal Beloit currently has a Zacks #4 Rank, which implies a short-term (1-3 months) ?Sell? rating on the stock.

Read the full analyst report on RBC

Source: http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/85819/regal-beloits-3q-below-estimate

apple announcement indianapolis colts joseph kony joseph kony ipad 3 release date apple store down apple live blog

Last-Minute Halloween Hints - Childhood Obesity News

As we head into the season that encompasses the traditional American Big Four ? Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year ? and a number of other ethnic, religious, and cultural holiday festivals, let us reflect on the words of psychotherapist Stefanie Barthmare, as quoted in ScienceDaily:

If you use food as a crutch, this time of year could be troublesome.

Barthmare says a holiday-season gain of 7 to 10 pounds is not unusual. Like Dr. Pretlow and many others, she advocates getting to the root of personal problems and learning to cope with stress in more productive ways than comfort eating. Barthmare is further quoted as saying:

If it was just a matter of knowing the calorie difference between a piece of cake and broccoli, we would all be all be our ideal weight. Maintaining a healthy weight requires a disciplined approach mentally and physically? Unfortunately, it?s complicated and there is not a one-size fits all solution.

Barthmare, in other words, affirms and validates the very same lesson Dr. Pretlow has learned from the voices of children and youth, via his Weigh2Rock website: information is not enough. And while there is no one-size-fits-all solution, a useful approach to a solution is to look at the childhood obesity epidemic through the ?psychological food dependence-addiction lens.?

Dr. Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine takes the occasion of Halloween as an opportunity to voice his year-long concerns, such as children as young as five whose physical exams show signs of preventable disease and early demise. He says:

What really scares me are the meat and dairy products lurking in children?s diets every day and everywhere ? from fast food to school lunches. Unfortunately, some parents don?t share this fear? Meat and dairy products are loaded with fat and cholesterol that lead to childhood obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

It?s probably too late to do anything about this Halloween. Most likely, the candy is purchased and ready to distribute. Maybe the kids have already gone to some parties. If a family has not set boundaries and introduced limiting rules by this time, it?s probably too late to make any changes this year.

Just in case you still have hope, plug the word ?Halloween? into the Childhood Obesity News search box, and pick up a few quick ideas. Here?s another suggestion: Even if this year?s celebration isn?t everything you would like it to be, observe carefully and make mental notes in a file called ?What to do differently next year.?

Of course, it goes without saying, that you should limit the actual consumption of candy on October 31. An agreement should be made beforehand, that only a certain amount is allowed, once the kids are back home. But what about while they?re out in the neighborhood, going from house to house? A mask that obscures vision is bad, but here?s an in idea to consider for future Halloweens: a mask that covers the mouth.

Post trick-or-treating, let the child sort, fondle, categorize, gloat over, and otherwise enjoy the swag. It?s the only time of year when it?s okay to play with the food! Give the child a chance to realize that a lot of the contributions are not even close to being favorites.

Meanwhile you, the parent, estimate the caloric value of the haul, then pack it up and stow it away out of sight. Next day, when the supermarket puts all the candy on sale, offer a trade: Will the child give up the Halloween collection, never to see it again, in return for a much smaller amount of a favorite brand? Some kids will go for this bargain. It?s worth a try.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: ?Using Food for Comfort and Coping Leads to Unwanted Holiday Pounds,? ScienceDaily, 10/15/12
Source: ?It?s Not Just Candy Causing Childhood Obesity this Halloween,? PCRM.org, 10/17/12
Image by ninahale (Nina Hale).

Source: http://childhoodobesitynews.com/2012/10/30/last-minute-halloween-hints/

fox news debate martin luther king jr mlk mlk school closures being human being human

Romney for President

"Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people ? a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence."

So wrote John Jay in Federalist No. 2, wherein he describes Americans as a "band of brethren united to each other by the strongest ties."

That "band of brethren united" no longer exists.

No longer are we "descended from the same ancestors."

Indeed, as we are daily instructed, it is our "diversity" ? our citizens can trace their ancestors to every member state of the United Nations ? that "is our strength." And this diversity makes us a stronger, better country than the America of Eisenhower and JFK.

No longer do we speak the same language. To tens of millions, Spanish is their language. Millions more do not use English in their homes. Nor are their children taught in English in the schools.

As for "professing the same religion," the Christianity of Jay and the Founding Fathers has been purged from all public institutions. One in 5 Americans profess no religious faith. The mainline Protestant churches ? the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian ? have been losing congregants for a half-century. Secularism is the religion of the elites. It alone is promulgated in public schools.

Are we attached to "the same principles of government"?

Half the nation believes it is the duty of government to feed, house, educate and medicate the population and endlessly extract from the well-to-do whatever is required to make everybody more equal.

Egalitarianism has triumphed over freedom. Hierarchy, the natural concomitant of freedom, is seen as undemocratic.

Are we similar "in our manners and customs"? Are we agreed upon what is good or even tolerable in music, literature, art?

Do we all seek to live by the same moral code? Abortion, a felony in the 1950s, is now a constitutional right. Homosexual marriage, an absurdity not long ago, is the civil rights cause du jour.

Dissent from the intolerant new orthodoxy and you are a bigot, a hater, a homophobe, an enemy of women's rights.

Recent wars ? Vietnam, Iraq ? have seen us not "fighting side by side" but fighting side against side.

Racially, morally, politically, culturally, socially, the America of Jay and the Federalist Papers is ancient history. Less and less do we have in common. And to listen to cable TV is to realize that Americans do not even like one another. If America did not exist as a nation, would these 50 disparate states surrender their sovereignty and independence to enter such a union as the United States of 2012?

Nor are we unique in sensing that we are no longer one. Scotland, Catalonia and Flanders maneuver to break free of the nations that contain their peoples. All over the world, peoples are disaggregating along the lines of creed, culture, tribe and faith.

What has this to do with the election of 2012? Everything.

For if America is to endure as a nation, her peoples are going to need the freedom to live differently and the space to live apart, according to their irreconcilable beliefs. Yet should Barack Obama win, the centralization of power and control will continue beyond the point of no return.

His replacement of any retiring Supreme Court justice with another judicial activist ? a Sonia Sotomayor, an Elena Kagan ? would negate a half-century of conservative labors and mean that abortion on demand ? like slavery, a moral abomination to scores of millions ? is forever law in all 50 states.

President Obama speaks now of a budget deal in which Democrats agree to $2.50 in spending cuts if the Republicans agree to $1 in tax increases. But given the character of his party ? for whom Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, food stamps, Head Start, earned income tax credits and Pell Grants are holy icons ? any deal Obama cuts with Republicans in return for higher taxes will be like the deal Ronald Reagan eternally regretted.

The tax hikes become permanent; the budget cuts are never made.

In the first debate, Mitt Romney said that in crafting a budget that consumes a fourth of the economy, he would ask one question: "Is the program so critical that it's worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?"

If a President Romney held to that rule, it would spell an end to any new wars of choice and all foreign aid and grants to global redistributionsts ? such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It would entail a review of all U.S. alliances dating back to the Cold War, which have U.S. troops on every continent and in a hundred countries.

Obama offers more of the stalemate America has gone through for the past two years.

Romney alone offers a possibility of hope and change.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/romney-president-070000923.html

lawrence o donnell magic johnson jetblue pilot solicitor general neighborhood watch dennis rodman dodgers sale

Music Lessons Teach Valuable Life Lessons | arts and entertainment

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://rewty32.blogspot.com/2012/10/music-lessons-teach-valuable-life.html

franklin graham jambalaya taylor swift and zac efron basketball wives manny ramirez easter 2012 bachelor

Mitt Romney in 2011: 'We Cannot Afford' Federal Disaster Relief (Atlantic Politics Channel)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/258970005?client_source=feed&format=rss

department of justice doj dept of justice weather chicago swizz beatz mpaa south carolina debate

Libyans disillusioned with government amid chaos

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) ? The protesters converged on the conference center housing Libya's newly elected congress, trying to force their way in past startled guards. Mostly young and half of them women in headscarves, they demanded an end to the siege of the town of Bani Walid, where the government was in the midst of an attack to uproot holdouts from Moammar Gadhafi's former regime.

Police rushed to the scene. But in Libya, the police are actually militias, in this case from the Tripoli neighborhood of Souq al-Jumaa that last year lost several men in a battle with Bani Walid residents. Instead trying to control the crowd, the "police" dressed in t-shirts and pants of a military uniform exchanged threats with protesters and then mounted a rival demonstration of their own. Soon they were firing their assault rifles in the air to intimidate the protesters.

As tensions soared, a dozen pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns and carrying soldiers in newly pressed camouflage uniforms pulled up to parliament, swiveled their guns forward and fired in the air as an apparent crowd-control method. The deafening noise of a dozen heavy-caliber machine guns sent demonstrators running and filled the upscale neighborhood with the sounds of battle. Blocks away, shocked bystanders wondered if one year after the civil war ended, Libya had gone back to war.

After a year of turmoil since Gadhafi's ouster and last month's killing of the American ambassador, Libyans are disappointed, disillusioned and increasingly angry at their government. They complain that their leaders have not acted forcefully to address the most pressing problems ? particularly the free rein of the country's many militias.

"It's not going very well partly because we have a minister of defense and minister of interior who were very incompetent and weak ? they gave into the militias," said Guma Gamaty, a politician and outspoken critic of the militias. "The whole process of rebuilding the army and the police has not progressed much at all in the last 10 months. We lost a lot of vital time."

Last year's fight that ended in Gadhafi's ouster and death after 42 years in power was largely carried out by regional militias that amassed weapons. But long after the civil war ended, the militias continue to serve under their own leaders and wield significant power even though they have nominally come under the control of the state's military and police forces.

The lack of control of the government over the militias it relies on was brought home in the starkest terms on Sept. 11, the day of attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, the eastern city where last year's uprising against Gadhafi began. The Islamist group Ansar al-Shariah, one of the biggest militias in Benghazi, is suspected in the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Before the attack, Ansar al-Shariah had been working with the municipal government to manage security in Benghazi, and it had been charged among other things with guarding the hospital.

The killings in Benghazi fueled popular anger against the militias. Just a week after the assault, tens of thousands of Benghazis attacked the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah and another militia in Benghazi and drove them out.

The government took advantage of the public anger. In the days after the attack, authorities carried out high-profile weapon hand-ins in Tripoli and Benghazi and issued ultimatums for all militias to submit entirely to government control.

"We know people are angry with the militias," said Taher Khalifa, a former computer engineer who is now the head of investigations for the 8th Special Protection Force, a police unit based in the Tripoli district of Souq al-Jumaa that was once a militia. "They don't want to see weapons everywhere and they want the police to be symbols of the state and wear uniforms," acknowledged Khalifa, though few of his men wore anything resembling a police uniform.

Gamaty, the politician, was himself kidnapped the night of Oct. 6 by a militia from the western mountain city of Zintan and held for several hours before he was dumped in a field and warned to mute his criticism. He said the government must build up a well-equipped security force that could then be used to subdue the militias if they refused to be disbanded or integrated, much like the army's quick-reaction force that dispersed the demonstration outside parliament last week.

There are government committees that are supposed to integrate the militias with the regular uniformed police and army. But in actuality, Gamaty said, there has been little progress on that front.

"It's not easy to inherit a country with no state institutions, with no constitution, no army, no functioning security apparatus," said Gamaty. "It's almost like a vacuum."

Still he and other critics say Libya's new government hasn't yet shown the resolve or decisiveness to really tackle the problem. The congress elected in July has yet to even produce a government, much to people's disappointment and dashing high expectations after Gadhafi was toppled.

"No one in Libya is happy," complained Jihadeddin al-Salam, a young man sipping espresso with friends outside a cafe in downtown Tripoli. "Everyone has to be in a militia ? if you aren't in a militia you can't protect your home."

One year on, the oil-rich country with a population of only about six million is still struggling to overcome the legacy of one of the most erratic leaders of modern times as well as the brutal, eight-month civil war that left the country awash in weapons, militias and very few viable institutions of the state.

Despite widely hailed elections in summer, the new General National Congress has been widely condemned as dysfunctional, engaging in shifting alliances and unable to form a new government.

Many Libyans complain that little has changed in the past year and amid the instability, everyone is holding on to their guns.

"We can't really discuss differences of opinions when we have weapons because in the end everyone here has a gun, and when they get mad, they might go for their weapons," said Saleh Sanoussi, a political analyst at Benghazi University. "Freedom with weapons results in chaos," he added.

"It is a Catch-22," he said of the militias dilemma. "Without them, there is a danger to security. With them, it is impossible to build an army."

For the most part, though, the weapons have disappeared from the streets of the capital Tripoli at least and it is now rare to see militias on street corners flaunting their arsenals, like they did before. Instead they are confined to their bases, from where they patrol and keep the peace.

Khalifa, a heavy set man with close-cropped hair dressed in a neat green camouflage uniform, fiddled with his white iPhone in his office as he explained his police investigation unit's new duties.

He said his unit is essentially the same battalion of close friends and relatives that began the fight in Tripoli against Gadhafi, with a few new additions, and he maintained that they are safeguarding the revolution.

"There is a power stronger than the government and that is the power of the revolutionaries and it is keeping matters on the right track," he said. "The forces of Zintan, Misrata and Souq al-Jumaa are stronger than the government," he said referring to the cities and districts with the most powerful militias.

He acknowledged that while nominally his group is under the control of the central government, when the Misrata militias said they needed help in their fight against Bani Walid, Khalifa dispatched units long before the government ordered an attack on the city.

"In cases of national security, we don't need permission."

For some Libyans, despite all the obvious problems, there is still a glimmer of optimism.

"We inherited many bad things, but the worst that affects our lives is the corruption, "said Mustafa al-Refai, a 56-year-old running a consultancy company in Tripoli.

Yet lacking some of the impatience of younger Libyans, al-Refai said he believes things are slowly moving in the right direction.

"I am glad I lived to see the change," he said with a broad smile.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/libyans-disillusioned-government-amid-chaos-183602130.html

maundy thursday fab melo google glasses kim kardashian and kanye west henrik stenson jobs act greg mortenson

Volunteers in Medicine Turns 5 Thanks to a 'Kind' Community

(l-r) Shelley Sallee, volunteer coordinator; Dr. Rajih Haddawi, board member; and Nancy Richman, executive director of Volunteers in Medicine of Monroe County. Photo by Lynae Sowinski

BY JANET MANDELSTAM

They walk into the clinic on West 2nd Street?113 of them on an average day?to see a doctor or dentist, stop at the pharmacy, or receive mental health services. Monday is women?s health night; the Friday focus is on spines. And if they meet the eligibility requirements, the care is delivered at no cost.

Since 2007, Volunteers in Medicine of Monroe County (VIM) has been providing health care at the clinic to low-income, uninsured residents of Monroe and Owen counties.

VIM is a national program with clinics in some 90 locations. But a few years ago Dr. Rajih Haddawi noticed that ?we didn?t have anything in our county to serve these people.? Haddawi, now a retired orthopedic hand surgeon, visited other sites and held more than 50 meetings with ?people who all supported the idea? of establishing a clinic in Bloomington.

?Dr. Haddawi?s passion brought people to the table,? says VIM Executive Director Nancy Richman. ?He said the community has to provide services to those who cannot access care.? With strong support from The Cook Group, Bloomington Hospital (now IU Health), and hundreds of medical and lay volunteers, VIM opened as a family-practice clinic.

Today more than 450 volunteers and a paid staff of 9 offer primary and preventive care, health education, medications (with only a low-cost handling fee), psychological counseling, diagnostic laboratory and radiology tests (at the hospital), and dental care. Any uninsured resident of Monroe or Owen county whose income does not exceed 200 percent of the federal poverty level is eligible to be treated at the clinic. For an individual, 200 percent of the poverty level is $22,340; for a family of four, it is $46,100.

Richman says the clinic has seen ?a steady increase? in the number of clients it serves. ?And there have been demographic changes, too,? she says. ?It?s not just the homeless. Many of the clients are employed or under-employed but have no health insurance.? It would not be possible to serve them, she says, ?without the phenomenal support of the community.?

Volunteer coordinator Shelley Sallee says the volunteers ?are a reflection of Bloomington, of how kind and compassionate this community is. They want to help people who need medical care in any way they can.? Many of the medical volunteers are retired doctors and dentists. The duties of the lay volunteers, who range from college students to an 87-year-old receptionist, include greeting clients, working the phones, scheduling appointments, and updating medical records.

The relationship between the clinic and IU Health Bloomington Hospital benefits both. The hospital provides three full-time staffers for the clinic?a registered nurse, a nurse practitioner, and a pharmacist?and performs laboratory and radiology tests for clinic clients. ?The hospital is very proud to support the Volunteers in Medicine clinic,? says Ruth Ann Morris, vice president of patient-care services at IU Health and a member of the clinic board. Because the clinic has become a source of primary care, preventive services, and continuity for its clients, ?there are fewer emergency room visits? at the hospital, Morris says. ?It?s quality care at less cost.?

Source: http://www.magbloom.com/2012/10/volunteers-in-medicine-turns-5-thanks-to-a-kind-community/

news 12 world series james harden morgan freeman Natina Reed giants Sandy Hurricane