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Munster 23-21 Northampton, Heineken Cup, November 12
McGahan lauds 'special' O'Gara
ESPNscrum Staff
November 12, 2011
Munster fly-half Ronan O'Gara lands the game-winning drop goal © Getty Images
Munster head coach Tony McGahan hailed match-winner Ronan O'Gara as a "special" talent after the fly-half landed a dramatic last-gasp drop goal to deny Northampton a much-prized Heineken Cup win at Thomond Park.
O'Gara kicked a nerveless drop goal to help Ireland claim the Grand Slam at the Millennium Stadium in 2009 and his match-winning heroics against Northampton deep in added time rivalled it for drama. Munster maintained possession for some 41 phases before the fly-half dropped back in the pocket to strike his winning kick.
It undid the good work of Saints, last season's beaten finalists, who maintained their discipline in defence and scored tries in each half from Chris Ashton and James Downey. A delighted McGahan, whose side had touchdowns from Damien Varley and Doug Howlett, said: "It was something special. The belief in the group, the way they stuck at it for 80 minutes, a lesser side would maybe not even have been in the contest.
"Ronan O'Gara's kick at the end, he's a special person to do that, to show the bottle to put his hand up and make the kick. This felt like a Round Six encounter during the week when it actually was an opening-round game. There is a great sense of achievement for the group at this early stage. This competition is like six Test matches and we are approaching it in that fashion. The win gives us a great buzz."
Northampton boss Jim Mallinder admitted his side was frustrated by the result and also by a number of decisions from referee Nigel Owens. "The mood in the dressing room is low. The feel is one of frustration. That is the best term to use, frustration in terms of how that went," he said. "We will look at ourselves. We did have a chance to at least score one other try, a good clear-cut opportunity when we knocked on.
"But I think the game did hinge on some crucial refereeing decisions. I felt the referee got quite a long wrong. I think it is as simple as that. It is difficult. It is an intimidating place to play with a cracking atmosphere. Sometimes you don't always get the rub of the green and I think we will look back and probably say we did not quite get it."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
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Towards the last two months of my last visit to India in the spring of 2012, I encountered the Tibetan community in exile in India experiencing painful news of their people self-immolating in fire one after another in China-occupied Tibet. My experiences in the past visits in India (drawing a cremation site in Varanasi, documenting fire pits, cremation alters, and contemplating on life and death around fire) synchronized with this particular movement, an extreme way of 'offering' their bodies to 'fire' for asking freedom and peace.I could not help drawing large and small drawings as emotional response and with a sense of mourning.
After coming back to Vancouver, the self-immolation kept happening and I felt that my personal and professional task is not finished.
I have come back to India to continue to document and draw under the same theme. email@example.com
11 March 2013
For Drupchen Tsering ( Druptse) March 11 2013
Yet his body is not returned
Return his body to his family and community
Return Tibetans you arrested
Return all the innocent and faithful people whom you put in prisons

subset: commoncrawl


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NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A 19-yard touchdown by Telvin Hooks with 1:28 remaining proved to be the difference, as Tennessee State defeated Murray State on Senior Day, 17-10, on Saturday.
Hooks finished the game with 129 yards and tied his career high with 25 carries for an average of 5.2 yards.
The TSU (9-3, 6-2 OVC) defense held the Racers to 25 yards of total offense and -23 on the ground in the second half.
Daniel Fitzpatrick anchored the defense with eight stops (seven solo) and one tackle for loss.
The teams traded three-and-outs to begin the game, and TSU picked up its only first down of the first quarter when Ronald Butler hit Wesley Samuels with a 10-yard completion on a third down on its second possession. The gain couldn't produce any Big Blue points, but punter Leon Holderhead pinned the Racers at their own six-yard line to start their next drive.
The long field did not intimidate Murray State (5-6, 3-4 OVC), as the squad marched 94 yards down the field in 11 plays and 3:39 for a touchdown. Racer quarterback Parks Frazier was 10-of-10 on the series for 88 yards including a two-yard touchdown to Pokey Harris at the 7:48 mark to take a, 7-0, lead.
After three more punts, Murray State got the ball back and a 30 yard strike from Frazier to Janwski Davis set up a 24-yard field goal by Murray's Marc Wynstra to open up the second quarter.
Down by 10 points, TSU received the ball at its own 18-yard line on the ensuing drive. A 15-yard penalty on MSU gave the Big Blue offense better field possession but Butler was 0-for-3 on the drive and TSU had to punt again.
Murray State picked up a pair of first downs after the Tiger kick, but the offense eventually sputtered, giving TSU the ball with under 10 minutes to go before halftime.
Adam Davenport checked in at running back for the Tigers on their next series and the freshman picked up 12 yards on his first two carries. A TSU penalty gave the team a fourth and three even after Davenport's touches. Head Coach Rod Reed faked the punt and Davenport scampered three yards for a TSU first down. The gamble did not pay off, as TSU punted for the fifth time of the half.
De'Ante Saunders picked off a Frazier pass to give TSU the ball in MSU territory, and the Tigers were finally able to get on the scoreboard. Four Davenport carries for 25 yards set up a 33-yard field goal by Jamin Godfrey to pull TSU within seven with 22 seconds before halftime.
The kick ended a half in which TSU was outgained 246 to 87.
Like the first half, the sides traded punts to open the second. On TSU's second series, the offense picked up four first downs and 67 yards, the bulk of which came on a 14-yard completion to Joe Bowens. Godfrey came in to attempt a 34-yard field goal, but his attempt was blocked to leave the score 10-3 with 4:20 left in the period.
Neither side scored in the third stanza, but the Tigers finally found the end zone at the 9:49 mark of the fourth. A two-yard touchdown from Butler to Samuels in the back of the end zone off of play-action pass capped off a nine play, 67-yard drive. A 22-yard run by Telvin Hooks got the Tigers within striking distance.
Murray State failed to score on its next two possessions and gave the ball to TSU with 5:36 left in the game. The Tigers kept pounding the ball on the ground with plenty of success. Darion Hall had an 18-yard rush to force the Racers to start worrying about the clock. Four plays later, Hooks found the corner and ran 19 yards for the go-ahead touchdown with 1:28 left.
MSU had one more chance to score, but TSU's defense held strong. Antonio Harper and Marquaveus Jackson sacked Frazier on fourth down and TSU sent its seniors off with a victory, 17-10.
The Tigers outrushed the Racers 241 to 24 and had the ball for over 17 minutes longer than MSU.
TSU's victory over Murray State is its first since the 2007 season.
The Tigers will take a week off and await their fate. TSU will find out if it makes the playoffs on Sunday, Nov. 24.


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Wind Advisory 5pm Today
Strong cold front still well west sweeps through later this afternoon and early tonight. Very windy conditions develop near the cold front and a Wind Advisory has been issued for tonight from 5pm through 3am Sunday morning. Winds in the vicinity of the front will be sustained 25-35mph with gusts to 40mph+. Use care while driving high profile vehicles and secure outdoor objects.
Ahead of the front, we'll squeeze out one more day in the low 40s. A mix of sun and clouds with southwest winds 15-25mph. Some chance for light drizzle this morning in our northern counties. The cold front approaches later this afternoon and winds will increase quickly after 5pm and come from the west-northwest. Much colder air for tonight as temps fall steadily all night. Lows dip to about 9 and highs tomorrow are in the mid teens. Wind chills all day Sunday will stay in the range of -10 to 0. The coldest air will be Sunday night and again Monday night with lows near 0 and wind chills near -20. Highs for Monday and Tuesday will be about 10.


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The New York Police Department would get a new watchdog under a deal city lawmakers reached Tuesday, propelling a plan galvanized by outrage over its extensive use of the tactic known as stop and frisk and its widespread spying on Muslims.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced the pact on installing an inspector general for the nation's biggest police department. She said talks were progressing on three companion proposals to set new rules surrounding stop and frisk, including expanding protections against racial profiling.
The developments come amid a federal trial over the department's use of stop and frisk, and they follow a series of stories by The Associated Press that revealed how city police systematically listened in on sermons, hung out at cafes and other public places, infiltrated colleges and photographed people as part of a broad effort to prevent terrorist attacks.
"We came to a very important agreement" on the plan for an inspector general, Quinn said by phone Tuesday evening. The monitor would be able to issue subpoenas and look broadly at police procedures and policies.
Civil rights and police reform advocates said they were pleased with the pact but continuing to press for the other measures. Police unions condemned the inspector general idea as squandering resources on red tape, and the police department said it gets plenty of oversight already.
The issue could set up a showdown between the council and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose administration has opposed the idea as unnecessary. Quinn said she believed the council had the votes to pass the plan and override a mayoral veto, if necessary.
Proposed last year, the inspector general and stop-and-frisk measures have gotten entrained in the politics of a competitive mayoral campaign. Quinn, a leading Democratic candidate, has faced pressure from civil rights and minority advocates and from some of her rivals to get the measures passed. One of them, Democratic Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, held a news conference on the inspector general issue Tuesday morning.
The ongoing stop-and-frisk trial — featuring testimony from people who said they were accosted by police while simply running out for milk or walking home from the bus — has only ratcheted up attention and raised the question of whether the court might decide to impose its own monitor. Adding to the charged backdrop, days of sometimes-violent protests erupted in Brooklyn last week after a stop ended with police shooting and killing a teen they said pulled out a gun.
"The events of last week were deeply disturbing to everyone in the city," and the trial has helped sharpen focus on stop and frisk, but intense negotiations among lawmakers and advocates were under way for weeks beforehand, Quinn said.
Not all lawmakers were in on the talks, including the Council's Public Safety Committee chairman, Peter Vallone Jr. He said Tuesday he had yet to see details of the changed proposal, which would be expected to get a vote in his committee before going to the full council. Vallone doesn't oppose the idea of an inspector general, though he's vehemently against the other three companion proposals.
They would require officers to explain why they are stopping people, to tell people when they have a right to refuse a search and to hand out business cards identifying themselves. The measures also would give people more latitude to sue over stops they considered biased.
In a key change, the inspector general would be housed within the city's existing Department of Investigation, which acts as an inspector general for many other arms of the city government, Quinn said.
The proposal originally set up a separate inspector general's office just for the NYPD, and Bloomberg's administration argued that it was both unnecessary and beyond the council's powers. Quinn said she and other lawmakers were comfortable the new plan would survive legal scrutiny.
Bloomberg's office referred calls Tuesday to the NYPD, which said it already gets plenty of oversight from its 700-person Internal Affairs Bureau, a civilian complaint board, a police corruption commission, prosecutors, judges and a 1985 federal court settlement that set guidelines for its intelligence-gathering.
"No police department in America has more oversight than the NYPD," chief police spokesman Paul Browne said in a statement.
But Quinn countered at a mayoral candidate forum: "You can have a lot of entities, but if they're not getting the job done, then more is needed."
The NYPD has said that its surveillance of Muslims is legal and that stop and frisk — a technique of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people who are seen as acting suspiciously but who don't necessarily meet the probable-cause standard for arrest — has helped drive crime down to record lows and save lives by taking weapons off the street.
Police have made about 5 million stops during the past decade, mostly of black and Hispanic men; critics say the practice unfairly targets minorities. The Supreme Court has said such stops are legal; the current trial concerns whether the NYPD's use of the tactic needs to change.
City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch called it a "politically driven" and "unconscionable" waste to spend city money on an inspector general instead of on more police officers. Captains Endowment Association President Roy Richter termed it an added layer of bureaucracy that "would retard the (NYPD's) ability to adapt to the ever changing public safety needs of the city."
Inspectors general — officials with investigative powers — are a common feature of government agencies, including in law enforcement and intelligence. The FBI and the CIA have such inspectors, as do police forces including the Los Angeles Police Department.
Civil rights advocates say it's time for the same in the NYPD. New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said her group was gratified that the council appeared poised "to create meaningful oversight and mechanisms to investigate police practices," but advocates wanted action on the other proposals, too.
Councilmen Brad Lander and Jumaane Williams, who sponsored all the proposals, said they appreciated the "productive negotiations," but lawmakers needed to go further than the inspector general proposal.
"Any legislative response by the City Council should, at a minimum, prohibit discriminatory policing, based on racial or other profiling," they said in a statement. "New York will only be truly safe when communities trust the police."


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Running for Shelter
Help our relay runners go the distance! They're running nearly 200 miles to create more safe and affordable housing.
The Enterprise-sponsored Running for Shelter relay team is a group of 12 recreational runners participating in the annual Hood to Coast relay race in Oregon August 26-27, 2011.
There's a reason they call Hood to Coast the "Mother of All Relays." The world's largest relay race will have our runners starting on the evening of Friday, August 26 and crossing the finish line approximately 25 hours later. The race starts at Oregon's famed Mt. Hood and will end in the town of Seaside.
Running for Shelter will collectively run the 197 mile Hood to Coast course in support of Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, a nonprofit community organization in Bronx, New York, providing safe, affordable housing to more than 3,000 families.
Enterprise formed the Running for Shelter team 15 years ago and has raised nearly $600,000 for nonprofit developers across the country.


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Consider the following
testadj = RandomVariate[BernoulliDistribution[0.15], {50, 50}];
AdjacencyGraph[testadj, VertexSize -> Large]
The nodes are almost completely hidden in the mess of edges. They can be made easier to see by making the edges fade into the background a little.
AdjacencyGraph[testadj, EdgeStyle -> Directive[Opacity[0.4], Gray],
VertexSize -> Large]
But we still have the problem that the lines draw over the top of the nodes. Is there a way to force the nodes to draw on top of the lines?


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(Photo used by permission of BlueStar Forensic)
Extra-marital affairs are accepted in France. Wives and husband who indulge in them are even admired. It means that a woman, though married and probably a mother, is still attractive and desirable to the male of the species, and that despite marriage and fatherhood a man remains virile. Yet, occasionally, a spouse will cry "Stop!" and when the philandering continues, the result can be foul murder.
On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, early in the morning, Florence Bourgade dialed the telephone number of her sister.
|Yves and Florence
The sun was shining but it was bitterly cold – just 42° F – in Moigny-sur-École in the Department of Essonne, 36 miles south of Paris, and the 42-year-old's news was as chilling. Her husband, Yves, 44, had only got back home in the early hours of that morning after a night of drinking and he's being very abusive verbally and she did not want their children to witness such behavior. Could she therefore send them over for a couple of days? The next-door neighbor would be dropping them off on her way to work. It was the February school vacation.
That call was not the first that Florence made that morning.
Her first call had been at 6:45 a.m. She had called her husband's employee to say that he would not be in that day. Her husband was a self-employed mason. "Yves has blown a fuse. He has left," she told the man. What she had said in French was Yves a pétée les plombs for which "blowing a fuse" is a polite translation.
At 7 a.m. she had made a second call. She had called her neighbor to ask if she could bring over the children for her to look after for that day. "She wanted me to take the children, but I had to go to work which I told her," the neighbor would later testify to the police.
Fifteen minutes later Florence had made yet again another call. She had again called her neighbor to ask if she could, on her way to work, drop the children off at her sister's house. The neighbor had replied that she could do that, yes.
Florence's sister lived 10 miles away in the town of Barbizon, so, as the neighbor had to go in that direction, dropping the children off would not make her late for work, but, all the same, within 15 minutes she was at the Bourgade house. The three children, two boys and a girl, aged respectively 12, 10 and 5, were still in bed and were told to get dressed immediately and quickly.
"I understood that Yves was not well," the neighbor would also later say in her testimony. "I thought of the alcohol."
She knew that Yves Bourgade drank. In 2004 there were only about 500 houses in Moigny-sur-École and not even 1,500 people lived there, so it was not easy to hide that a spouse habitually returned home in the early hours of the morning and in an inebriated state.
Florence's family and friends, although they did not live in the village, were also aware of the drinking. They also knew that Yves was a womanizer. And it had not been necessary to stick their noses into the couple's life to have known about the women because Yves bragged about his exploits. He even made it his dinner conversation. He did not appear to care that his wife was at the table tending to their guests for whom she had prepared a splendid meal.
The two had been married since 1997 but they had been partners for more than 14 years and Yves had not ever been faithful.
Turning a blind eye to adultery
In France, wives – spouses for that matter because women cheat on their husbands too – are open-minded when it comes to adultery. It is a tradition that goes back to when France was still a monarchy and the king's favorite – his mistress – enjoyed a high regard in the country and had her own "court" in the royal household.
In more recent times there have been many cases of well-publicized adultery.
The former socialist President François Mitterrand (1916-1996) had a long-standing adulterous relationship with a French woman who bore him a daughter. His wife, Danielle (1924-2011) whom he had married in 1944 and who had brought three sons into the world for him, knew of the mistress and daughter and, as far as we know, accepted it. She even allowed the mistress and daughter to attend his funeral and sit with her and her two sons. (The couple's eldest son died in infancy.)
Mitterrand did keep the mistress and the daughter a secret from the French but in 1995 when the weekly magazine Paris Match informed the nation with a cover story that their president has a mistress and love child, he told a journalist: "Yes, it's true. And so what? It's none of the public's business." The French then proved as tolerant as his wife, because they did not bat an eyelid on learning that they, as tax payers, had financially supported the mistress and the love child because the state had provided them with a Paris apartment and police protection.
Mitterrand's predecessor, Giscard d'Estaing, who was head of state from 1974-1981, was also often in the news over his extramarital affairs. As the daily Le Monde reported in 1974 when Giscard (he was generally known by his first name) was going to spend the night with a woman, he would leave a sealed envelope at the presidential Élysée Palace so that his aides would know where to find him in case of an emergency. One morning at six, driving from a woman's apartment in Paris's Latin Quarter, he collided with a truck collecting the garbage bins the French put out on the sidewalks during the night. He was not injured and the police were not summoned to the scene.
In 2009 he, then 83 years old, wrote a novel La Princess et le President (The Princess and the President) published by Fallois-Xo which told the story of the secret and passionate love affair of a French president and a Welsh princess who was very unhappy in her marriage. The daily rightwing Le Figaro, in reviewing the novel, wrote that the book rose above the level of a romantic work because of the wealth of detail about the palaces where the two met to make love.
Naturally, there was much speculation at the time of publication that the two protagonists in the novel were Giscard and Diana Princess of Wales and that he had finally decided to reveal that he had been the Princess's lover while he was head of state. Asked on television chat shows whether this had been so, he would neither admit nor deny it. His grin was wide. The British media dismissed the book as "an old man's fantasy."
A French president – the married Félix Faure – had even suffered a fatal stroke in the arms of his mistress in 1899, the fourth year of his seven-year mandate. Aides rushed to his private drawing room in the Élysée Palace on hearing a woman's screams. They found the 58-year-old Faure unconscious on a sofa, his hands gripping the hair of the 30-year-old Parisian socialite Marguerite Steinheil. He had suffered a stroke while Steinheil was performing oral sex on him. (Steinheil would later be charged with the murder of her husband and mother-in-law but was found not guilty. She died in England, the wife of an English nobleman.)
The latest case of a Frenchman's adultery is that of former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known as DSK. Despite that there had been many rumors and many media hints that DSK was a womanizer, the French were still ready to elect him as their president in next May's (2012) presidential election.
Therefore, Florence, sitting calmly at the dinner table while Yves recounted his sexual exploits to their guests, was not all that extraordinary.
Charming and attractive couple
Yves and Florence Bourgade were both attractive.
In 2004, Yves, his hair still black, looked like a man in his early thirties.
Florence, having had three pregnancies, was a little broad around the waist and had a shadow of a double chin, but she had lost none of the vivaciousness of her youth when as Miss Florence Féderlé, she had caught Yves's eye. She still often combed her long dark hair into a chignon as she did at that time, and also as then, she kept her eyebrows perfectly curved. And despite her husband's nocturnal activities, she was never dour.
The couple loved to have fun. They had vacations at the seaside and they often entertained. Florence made sure that there was an abundance of food and drink at their parties. There would be much laughter and everyone had something to say, and being French, several would even speak at the same time.
Then Yves would start off about his newest conquest, and Florence would listen but not comment. Often Yves's stories were embarrassing the guests, but they knew him as a fêtard – a reveler. And, he was charming, and one forgives a charming man for a lot of wrongdoings. He, cheating on his wife, did not therefore make him an unlikeable man.
The guests, or some of them, also knew that Yves and Florence were experiencing serious financial problems. The house they were living in they rented. It was a fairly large two-story house of grey brick and a grey tiled roof and there was a swimming pool in the garden. Yet, the house they had moved from two years previously was much larger and smarter. And they were the proprietors of that one. They had to sell the house though because of debt which Florence believed they had run up because of Yves's drinking and womanizing. As someone who loved elegant clothes and to spoil their children with gifts, she made no secret of the fact that she hated their shortage of money, and as family and friends noticed she had become very quiet. It was not the morose silence of depression, but rather as if she no longer cared about life – her life. Whereas she used to be talkative, she would sit in a corner and take no part in the conversation.
What the family and friends might not have known was that she had asked the family physician for something to help her sleep. He had prescribed the non-benzodiazepine Zopiclone. (The drug which can be obtained only with a prescription was first marketed in 1986 by Rhône-Poulenc S.A. In 2005 the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration listed it under Schedule IV as there was evidence that it had addictive properties similar to benzodiazepines. Its brand name in the UK is Zimovane and Imovane in Canada.)
She consulted the physician on the day before she sent the children to her sister's house. Once she had the prescription she immediately called in at the pharmacy for the drug.
Florence's story
Towards the end of the day, Florence again called her sister. Her news was that Yves has gone. He left her and the children for a 25-year-old woman. She did not know anything about the woman – Yves did not fill her in – but at four o'clock a grey Renault Scenic pulled up outside the house, and Yves, having thrown some clothes into a black plastic bin liner, rushed over to the car which then immediately drove off. She was not able to see into the car so she did not know who was behind the wheel. She spoke calmly as if she could not care less.
By then the children had told their aunt that they were awakened "during the night" because their mom and dad were arguing very loudly. Their dad had again been out drinking which had made their mom angry.
The following day Florence also told Yves's sister that her brother has gone off with a 25-year-old woman. Her voice again portrayed no emotion which was in stark contrast to how her sister-in-law felt; she wanted her to start looking for Yves and to get him to return home.
Late in the afternoon of the next day, Thursday, February 26, there having been no news or calls from Yves, and his family worried that he might be in some kind of trouble, they urged Florence to go to the gendarmes. That she did. She reported that he had abandoned the marital home. Under Article 227-3 of the French Penal Code, a man, abandoning a spouse or a woman with whom he has been living in concubinage (the legal term in France when a man and woman are living together as spouses) and fathered children by her who were still minors (under the age of 16) is committing a punishable crime with a two-year imprisonment and a €15,000 ($20,000) fine. (In France a love child has the same rights as a child born in wedlock.)
After she'd been to the gendarmes, Florence collected her children from her sister's house and drove them home.
In France, when the disappearance of a child is reported to the police they instantly launch a missing child alert – the Alerte Enlevement. Television networks, radio stations, cell phone operators, newspaper and news agency websites immediately flash a photo of the child and details of the disappearance over the airwaves. Simultaneously, alerts are flashed on highway signs. (Alerte Enlevement is based on the United State's AMBER Alert Program.) In some cases, INTERPOL's 24-hour Command and Co-ordination Center at its General Secretariat headquarters in the French city of Lyons would even issue an international Yellow Notice Missing Persons Alert.
When an adult disappears and there is no evidence of foul play – for example blood is found in the missing person's home, car or workplace – the police only launch an investigation if that person has given no sign of life for two months. Therefore, the police registered Yves as having abandoned his wife and children in order to prosecute him in two months' time, if necessary, under Article 227-3.
They asked Florence to let them know if he should return home or contact her.
A nauseating smell
It was not the kind of weather to be out on a bicycle. And what was more, to be cycling through a forest.
It was Friday, February 27 – 48 hours since Yves had left home – and a heavy fog hung over the Grands Avaux Forest. It was also cold, the temperature having dropped to 21° F in the previous 48 hours.
The 450-acre Grands Avaux Forest is six miles north of Moigny-sur-École and the comfortable home of the Bourgade couple and their three children.
The cyclist, accustomed to the forest's aromatic chestnut, oak, acacias and flame trees, suddenly became aware of a foul smell. He allowed his nose to lead him to a canvas-covered bundle in a clearing for vehicles. Controlling his curiosity, he did not lift the canvas but called the gendarmerie. (In France the gendarmerie which falls under the Ministry of Defense police the countryside and communities of fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.) Several gendarmes arrived on the scene and quickly established that the canvas concealed a badly-burned body which lay on another canvas. The body was headless and without hands and feet. The feet had been severed at about two inches above the ankle joint.
The national police moved in to assist the gendarmerie which is the norm in major crime cases. They closed off the area, took photographs and collected whatever lay about which included a cigarette butt which they found underneath the body. They sealed all in security pouches to prevent contamination and to ensure that no one could tamper with the items as all would be used as evidence in an eventual murder trial.
The pouches were taken to a police laboratory and in the coming days a DNA profile would be looked for on every object. The body too, which was taken to the police mortuary, would undergo DNA tests. The tests, the cops hoped, would put an identity to it.
An autopsy would also be carried out to determine the cause of death.
The gruesome discovery merited just a couple of paragraphs in the next day's papers and television did not mention it at all. Corpses, some of them headless, did have the habit of turning up in France's woods, rivers or canals.
Getting on with her life
Yves's family urged Florence to launch a search for him herself. She refused. She told them that she would deal with his abandonment of the marital home in her own way.
She telephoned Yves's employee and told him that she has closed the business. She sold the clothes Yves had left behind. She sold whatever was in the house which he had bought, and which she did not particularly like. He loved automobiles and had several and she sold those too. She sold the pickup he used in his business. She sold some of the furniture. She sold the mattress of their double bed. Or, she said she had sold those things when the family noticed that they were no longer at the house.
She also cancelled Yves's cell phone subscription. His sister thought that while he had a cell phone subscription they had a way of contacting him. He had not replied to the messages they had left on his cell though.
Yves's family again asked her to try to find him. She again refused. They decided to do so themselves; they placed missing person messages on the Internet. Florence, hearing of this, was furious, and the bad feeling between her and Yves's family intensified. She would have, she told them, phrased the message differently. She also told them that she had sold Yves's belongings because she needed the money; she had three children to feed and she also had to pay the debts Yves had left behind.
Meanwhile, the police were still none the wiser as to the identity of the headless, handless and footless body. The autopsy did reveal that he had a fractured vertebrae and a ruptured liver which had been caused by a violent blow or blows to the body. He also had consumed a massive amount of a non-benzodiazepine hypnotic sleeping pill. It was Zopiclone. (The standard prescribed dosage of the drug is 5-7.5mg at bedtime and the taker will usually fall asleep within 20 minutes. The drug's fatal dosage has not been made public, but according to the World Health Organization the lowest recorded fatal dose in a suicide was 90mg.)
There was no alcohol in the remains. The stomach however contained a cereal.
The damage caused by the burning of the body made it impossible to determine the cause or date of death.
The investigation
In May – almost three months having passed since the body was found – the police received the DNA results. It did not match DNA profiles they had on record. DNA had also been found on the cigarette butt; it was that of a woman. Checking missing person reports for the region, they decided to have a word with Florence. They went around to the house and after having asked her a few questions, they asked her to accompany them to their station house for further questioning.
"Did you murder your husband?" they asked her outright.
"No," she replied. "I have neither the physical or emotional strength to murder."
The police needed her DNA profile and got it by taking a buccal swab from inside her mouth. With no legal reason to keep her, they allowed her to go home.
Yves's DNA profile was also needed and his family stepped in to assist and allowed the police to take buccal swabs from them. In replying to questions from the police they did not hide their displeasure at how Florence had been getting rid of Yves's possessions. What if he returned home, they wanted to know, what will he wear? She had even closed his business, and, they told the police, she was going to move from the house and from the region. She had already removed the floor-to-floor carpeting in the bedroom. Her reason, as she had explained to them, was that the house's proprietor was going to put down a new carpet for when new tenants moved in. And she had washed down the floors and the walls, and the kitchen, bathroom and the toilet.
The DNA profile of the Grands Avaux body matched the DNA profiles of Yves's family. The results for the DNA which was found on the cigarette matched that of Florence.
The police, wanting to get to Florence before she moved, arrested her on Tuesday, June 1. They informed her that they were holding her on suspicion of having murdered her husband and after having informed her of her right to remain silent and that anything that she might say could be used as evidence against her in an eventual trial, they incarcerated her in the women's section of Fresnes Prison, half-way between Moigny-sur-École and Paris. She hired a lawyer: Maître Joseph Cohen-Sabban from Paris. (In France a lawyer is addressed as maître.)
In the interrogations that followed, always in the presence of her lawyer, as French law requires, Florence admitted to the police that she was going to move. She planned, she said, to settle some 150 miles south from Moigny-sur-École. She had cleaned the house, yes: She did not want to leave a dirty house so that the proprietor had the expense of having to have it cleaned. She had removed the bedroom carpet, yes. The carpet was dirty and the proprietor was going to redecorate the house anyway. Questioned about the time that Yves had left on Wednesday, February 25, she said that it was at ten in the morning. The police already knew that she had told her sister and parents that he had left at two in the afternoon, but that she had told Yves's sister that it was at four in the afternoon.
The police wanted to know what she had done with the carpet she had removed from the bedroom. She had disposed of it, she replied. Where did she dump it? Where one should leave large objects one no longer needed – the municipal rubbish dump. The police went to the rubbish dump but there was no carpet there. They also went through the rubbish hoping to find the mattress from the couple's double bed because Florence had changed her story saying that she had also disposed of the mattress at the dump, but there was also no mattress there. Municipalities regularly clear out such rubbish dumps and what can not be recycled are incinerated.
Who did she sell Yves's belongings to? She could not remember, she said. She could also not remember what exactly she had sold, and she pointed out that he had taken some things with him. She had also given things to beggars. She could not provide invoices or receipts, but this did not surprise the police because in France black market trading is an every day occurrence: transactions are in cash which makes it financially attractive to both the seller and the buyer because it eliminates Value Added Tax (VAT) charges. Even cars are sold on the black market to be shipped to the former East European countries or to North Africa.
Did she smoke? Yes, she said, she smoked.
Was she taking any kind of medication? Occasionally, like everybody else, she did, yes, she said. By then the police knew that Zopiclone had been prescribed for her, and that she had collected the drug from the pharmacy on the day before Yves had left.
A police officer trained in dealing with children meanwhile questioned the three Bourgade children who had gone to live with their mother's sister. The girl spoke of how her father had once smashed a door during an argument with her mom. The eldest child, a boy, told the police that his father's masonry tools were not at the house on their return from their aunt's place. What were those tools? He said that they were a handheld drill, an electric chain saw and a buff wheel. He had not seen the tools since.
Florence, questioned about the tools, said that she did not know what had happened to them. Yes, they were not at the house, but "Yves must have taken the tools with him."
Asked to explain the discrepancy about the time that Yves had left the house, she said with the same calm as during all of the previous interrogations, "I was under shock. He had just told me that he was leaving me for a 25-year-old woman."
The police had looked for the 25-year-old but found no evidence that Yves was having an affair at the time of his murder. His cell phone was missing but from the list of calls, text messages and voice mails the number had made or received according to a record supplied by the cell provider, not one pointed to him having been in an affair and planning to go off with the lover.
Looking for evidence of murder in the house
The police, not having found evidence of a lover, and unable to link Yves with a crime gang or with an enemy or enemies who would have wanted him dead, had no other suspect than Florence. They believed that she had killed him in the family home on that February morning, the children out of the way.
Their scenario of the murder was that Florence had drugged Yves by putting the Zopiclone prescribed for her in a bowl of cereal she gave him to eat, and when he was asleep, perhaps even unconscious from an overdose of the drug, she beat him to death and then cut him up with his own electric chain saw. She had obviously severed the head and hands to make identification impossible; without teeth to compare with his dental record and without hands to provide fingerprints which could be matched with prints at the family home, identification of the torso would have been impossible. She had severed the feet, cutting the ankles away too, because Yves had had a minor accident with one of his working tools and had a wound covered with a plaster on his right ankle. As the two families and the couple's friends knew about the wound, it would have identified the body in the wood as that of Yves. She had then driven the body to the forest and set it alight to destroy it further or perhaps hoping that it would burn to ashes. No doubt nervous, she must have been smoking while working on the body and did not notice that a butt had fallen from an ashtray and stuck to the canvas she was wrapping around the body. They had no idea about what she had done with Yves's head, hands and feet.
However, the police had to prove their theory and, Florence having thrown away the bedroom carpet and having, as she said, sold the mattress that was on their bed, and having cleaned the house so thoroughly that not a speck of dust, not to mention a drop of blood, was in sight, they needed assistance.
A team from the police's forensic department arrived at the house. Dressed in white protective clothing which included gloves and mouth masks, they erected tents in the garden to work from and set out an assortment of equipment – from cotton swabs, tweezers, lifting tape, notebooks, colored pens and pencils, torches and megaphones to sophisticated infra-red and ultra-violet cameras – which they would be using.
They were also to dust for fingerprints, and to search for blood. For the latter they were to use a reagent.
Legend has it that around one thousand years BC a Chinese emperor had a painting on which a glowing bluish-green ox mysteriously appeared each nightfall. The emperor had not revealed how he was able to perform such a miracle, but through the ages men had tried to discover his secret, but it was only in the middle of the 19th century that German scientists succeeded to synthesize a fluorescent chemical by mixing the inorganic compound of hydragine and hydrogen peroxide together. The chemical, which was given the name of luminol – it means "that which emits light" – and the scientific formula of C8H7N3O2,was then synthesized into a yellow-white powder. But no one had any use for it. Not even when, in 1928, the German scientist H.O. Albrecht discovered by accident that by adding an oxidizing agent to the powder the liquid that formed gave blood luminescence – the blood gave off a bluish-green glow in the dark just like the Chinese emperor's ox.
Albrecht's discovery would remain unused until 1937 when another German, the forensic scientist Walter Specht, discovered that when he sprayed a mixture of luminol and hydrogen peroxide onto blood, the iron atom present in blood's hemoglobin initiated a chemi-luminescent reaction; the blood emitted a blue-green glow. He tested it on different surfaces and everywhere the presence of blood, even old blood no longer visible to the naked eye, was revealed.
Specht's mixture was improved on by two American forensic scientists – M. Grodsky and K. Weber – and in 1966 the latter's formula which was made up of luminol, sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide diluted in distilled water was being used by police departments in the United States. The formula or reagent was however not perfect as its lifespan was brief and its luminous reaction had to be photographed in total darkness and with a night-vision camera. The reagent also initiated a chemi-luminescent reaction when applied to surfaces which had been washed with a cleaning product that contained bleach. Luminol could therefore not be used as evidence in a murder case; it could only establish that blood or bleach had been spilled at the murder scene.
|Reagent BlueStar shows blood on broom used for cleaning up blood at a murder scene
In 2000, the Monaco-based company BLUESTAR FORENSIC began to market a new improved reagent also based on luminol. Their product, BLUESTAR™, devised by Prof Loic Blum of the University of Lyon, did not require total darkness to be visible and could be photographed with an ordinary camera, yet it was more sensitive than other reagents on the market in that it could detect blood in a quantity smaller than the minimum required for a DNA profile. It could also detect very old blood as it did the blood spilled by two Confederate soldiers in 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg. (The house in which the two soldiers died is today a museum – the Shriver House Museum.)
Furthermore, the sensitivity of BLUESTAR™ made it react differently to blood than to bleach which eliminated any confusion between blood and the bleach component of a cleaning product. For example, the luminescence of blood sprayed with this reagent was blue-green, whereas the luminescence of bleach sprayed with it was grayish-brown, and the reaction was of a much shorter duration on bleach than on blood. The difference between blood and bleach under this particular reagent was, in fact, so marked that the technician spraying with the reagent could tell just by looking at the luminescence what he had in front of him. However, as one hundred percent confirmation would be needed in a murder case that the blood was indeed from a human, the company also began to market a test – Hexagon OBTI – to establish that the blood's hemoglobin was that of a human and not of another vertebrate. The test was to be done in a laboratory when a DNA profile would also be sought.
|Reagent BlueStar shows up blood in a bath
If Yves had spilled blood in the family home, then despite Florence's cleaning, BLUESTAR FORENSIC's tests would illuminate and identify even the tiniest drop of it.
Police sprayed the product across the house and it revealed blood on the walls of the couple's bedroom, on the frame of their double bed, in the tub in the couple's bathroom as well as on the tiled wall behind the tub, on a fire extinguisher and on the floor of the house's entrance. The luminescent areas were then scraped for residue and the residue was tested in a laboratory and despite that Florence had used Javelle Water (Eau de Javel) containing sodium hypochlorite and sodium chloride which made it a bleach and disinfectant, the tests showed that a large quantity of human blood had been spilled in the house. The Javelle Water however made it impossible to establish the blood's DNA profile.
The police also matched the canvas in which Yves's body was wrapped with canvas found in the house's garage and which Yves used for his work and with which the couple also covered their swimming pool in the winter.
Based on this accumulation of circumstantial and forensic evidence, the police charged Florence with the assassination of Yves. (In France first degree murder is called an assassination, whereas voluntary manslaughter is called murder.)
She did not react.
|Florence in court
On Monday, January 15, 2007, after 31 months of incarceration in Fleury-Merogis jail the trial of Florence Féderlé (in France a woman retains her maiden name for official purposes) opened at the Court of Justice in Évry, the judicial capital of the Department of Essonne.
Thin and pale, but composed as always, Florence listened to the reading of the indictment. Asked by the judge whether she had anything to say she said: "I loved my husband deeply. I did not kill him."
She would remain composed even when her eldest son, called as a defense witness, desperately tried not to condemn his mother with his replies.
Even when a statement was read which her late father had made when he knew he was dying, Florence did not show any emotion. "I think that my daughter has blown a fuse. She became obnoxious, aggressive. He pushed her to the edge with his multitude of women. She became mad, like my mother. In the first three months after Yves's departure, my wife and I already suspected Florence of having killed her husband. She must have panicked, wanted to hide what she had done to protect the children. She would never have confessed. She became impervious to what was going on around her. But she is my favorite daughter. She knows that I know what's going on in her mind."
On cross-examination by the prosecutor, Florence did not always reply, or rather her reply was, "I have no answer to give."
When the prosecutor referred to the DNA on the cigarette butt which the police had found under Yves's body, she called out, "Frame-up!" (In France the accused is allowed to intervene at any time during the hearing.)
About the blood in the house, she said that the inebriated Yves had often been in fights and had come home bleeding.
Looking her distraught mother-in-law in the eye, she said, "I'm accused of a horrible crime, but I did not kill my husband. It's barbarians, sadists, who did that."
Four days later, on Thursday, January 18, all the witnesses having been on the stand, the prosecutor asked the jury to give a verdict of guilty of assassination. He said that the many coincidences – the blood in the house, the canvas, the missing tools, the missing carpet, the presence of Zopiclone in the victim's remains – and the many inconsistencies in Florence's version of her husband's disappearance, condemned her. He asked the judge that should the jury find her guilty that he should sentence her to 16 years incarceration.
Florence's lawyer all the same emphasized in his plea for a not-guilty verdict that the prosecution had no proof against his client. He pointed out that as she had explained in her evidence, Yves had often got into drunken fights in bars and his injuries had bled. She had not manifested any emotion at her husband's death, yes, but that was "by education" he said.
The jury left the courtroom to deliberate in the presence of the judge and two magistrates who had been present throughout the trial but, in accordance with French law, had taken no part in the procedure.
Three hours later the jurors returned to the court room. Florence was guilty of assassination. The judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison – four years more than the period the prosecutor requested.
Florence's lawyer lodged an appeal and it was heard in May 2008.
For a week, Florence, as composed as in the past, repeated that she had not killed her husband, and her lawyer in his plea emphasized the doubt that existed in the case. He said that a "specter of judicial error" hung over the case.
After four hours of deliberation the jury upheld the previous guilty verdict, but the judge downgraded the crime from assassination to "voluntary violence which had unintentionally caused death." He reduced the previous sentence of 20 years to 15. The four years she'd already spent in prison would be deducted.
Today, Florence's family and children stand by her. They visit her each week. Yves's family remains heartbroken and sure of their sister-in-law's guilt.


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Ok, I understand and am convinced by the standard solution of the Monte Hall Problem, i.e. it is better to switch doors after Monte opens one, and improve one's probability of winning from 1/3 to 2/3. If I had remaining doubts, they were removed by the many computer simulations,
e.g. see http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/MontyHallParadox/.
But then I came up with what I call the "three card monte problem".
Assume you are playing a variant of 3 card monte against a blindingly fast but honest dealer, who will also turn over a losing card, before your once and final guess.
Do you have a strategy that improves your probability to better than 1/2? Well, here's one. You choose a card, mentally, but do not reveal it. The dealer then turns over one of the other cards, which he knows is always not the "special winning card". There is prob = 1/3 that the turned over card is the card that you previously secretly mentally chose. If that happens, you still can choose again, and therefore have prob = 1/2 of choosing the winner. If the card turned over by the dealer is not the card you secretly chose mentally, then you are apparently playing the classic Monte Hall game, i.e. you should secretly mentally switch card positions to increase your prob of winning from 1/3 to 2/3. Your overall prob. of winning is (1/3)(1/2) + (2/3)(2/3) = 1/6 + 4/9 = 33/54 = 11/18 > 1/2
The paradox arises from the fact that another player, who chose the other hidden card which was not turned over also has the same 11/18 probability of winning. So you both switch?
The difference between this and the classical Monte Hall paradox is that because no player has to declare any card position, you both can switch. Is this right?
If this gets too argumentative, I'll put it somewhere else.


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The root of flavor
Morena Leite, one of the leading gourmet chefs in the mega metropolis of São Paulo, grew up in a small town on the northern coast of Brazil. Her cooking has always remained faithful to Brazil and its unique ingredients. She gives us a glimpse of her world of flavor in a video
The Capim Santo restaurant has one thing that sets it apart from the cool chic of so many big-city restaurants: a warm, inviting atmosphere. This is the realm of Morena Leite, one of the best chefs in the country. Using local, organic ingredients and produce, the gifted young cook creates truly outstanding and authentically Brazilian dishes. When she's not in the kitchen, she's usually giving viewers a glimpse of Brazil's unique culinary landscape on television and her own YouTube channel.
Morena Leite has a clear idea just what it is that makes Brazilian food so special: Unlike France or China, she explains, Brazil does not have its own "pure" cuisine. Instead, the dishes here are as colorful and varied as the vast country and the people who live in it. As well as influences brought in by immigrants from Europe and Asia, it is the wealth of indigenous ingredients which makes the food here so special. Take, for example, the unassuming manioc root, an ingredient which is the basis for an astonishing number of dishes. Discover some of these in our video and find out why Morena Leite never cooks only for herself.


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On the Internet, Google+ Knows You're A TOS-Violating 10-Year-Old Dog
from the unintended-consequences depttheodp writes
"In its tear-jerker 'Dear Sophie' Google Chrome ad, a father creates a Gmail account (firstname.lastname@example.com) for his just-born daughter to preserve memories of her childhood. So, how does that work out in real life? Not so good, at least in the case of 10-year-old Alex Sutherland, who the WSJ reports was reduced to tears after being notified that the Gmail account his father created on his behalf two years earlier would be deleted because the Google+ Profile Alex created triggered a Google Terms of Service age violation. 'You made my son cry, Google,' wrote blogger Martin Sutherland. 'I'm not inclined to forgive that.' Not to pile on, but Alex may also be persona non grata at Khan Academy, where learning under the age of 13 can also constitute a TOS violation."
Of course, even bringing up how silly this is can lead to backlash. When Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that perhaps the law needed some rethinking to make it more reasonable for those under 13 to use useful parts of the internet, it was dubbed "controversial", and he had to clarify his remarks to make clear that he wasn't trying to get under 13 kids on the site any time soon.
Either way, it does seem silly for Google to put out a commercial in which a father creates an email address for someone under 13... when it's taking away accounts from others who do the same thing...
Filed Under: coppa, terms of service, under 13
Companies: google, khan academy


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Rent2buyrealestate necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 70 diseños de 23 diseñadores freelance.
Silverback Realty
We just received $10M in funding for a market-changing disruptive real estate investment vehicle. The website will be focused initially on the California market, but our immediate growth plans include the rest of the Western US.
Founders are from the top-rated Wharton MBA school and have an extensive network.
Real estate buyers/sellers who are looking to pay smaller real estate commissions, but expect full-service and professional treatment.
The logo should be simple, classical and appropriate for both the website and business cards and signage. Attached are two examples of other "Silverback" entities that reflect what I would like to have.
Silverback Equity has a professional logo that is accentuated by the black background with grayscales and white for the logo and type. I would also prefer a black background.
Silverback Strategies has a simpler logo. I would also like something that is quite simple, but still recognizable as being associated with a "Silverback Gorilla".
The key is that the logo should help in establishing our brand as professional.
Cartoons, clip art, stock images are not acceptable.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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Not long in the past a lot of individuals started out getting involved in raising their own chickens the main reason being that they would like to produce their own food and feed their families. But as the demand for chicken produce grew a lot of individuals found an opportunity in the market to rear chickens for profit.
When beginning in raising chickens at home in La Mirada California you must figure out you are allowed to farm chickens in your area. Some states or cities might not allow the keeping of chickens. Nevertheless if you are allowed to keep chickens in your area then its time so that you can get started.
>> Click Here For A Recommended Guide To Raising Chickens…
Chickens require a lot of attention plus management. You should ensure you feed your chickens the right feed to keep them healthy plus illness free. Feeding chickens is not a complicated process. Chicken can eat all kinds of food like garden pests, weeds and even your leftover foods. With this being said hens can be ideal for your garden as well reason being as they eat up the insects and also fertilize your garden with their poo.
Building a chicken house is very vital. The chicken coop must be safe and protect the chickens from predators such as hawks, cats and even dogs. Some people can even try to steal your chickens. Your chicken coop should be well covered as well to protect your birds from too much sunlight, cold and rainfall.
You should try by all means to keep your hen house clean as possible. The coop must be large enough to accommodate all of your chickens, young and old. They must be enough space for your birds to lay their eggs and eat. Refreshing water may also be given to your chickens in their coop.
You should surround your chicken coop with a fence to give your birds some space to move and search for insects to consume. The fence should be high enough for the chickens not to fly over and predators such as dogs to jump in. When you have this right you sure will be a happy poultry farmer.
>> Click Here For A Recommended Guide To Raising Chickens…


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Product Summary
Deckorators® composite decking offers a wide array of options in style and color options to fit your taste. Each composite deck board is offered in slotted and solid-edge profiles and in 12', 16' and 20' lengths. Our Stowaway Hidden Fastener makes it easier than ever to complete an outdoor project. Additionally, all Deckorators decking is backed by our industry-leading 25-year warranty, so you (or your customers) will have peace of mind for many years to come.
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Dialight of Farmingdale, N.J.recently announced that it has partnered with Veolia Environmental Services to offer high-intensity discharge (HID) and street light fixture and lamp recycling for commercial facilities and municipalities that make the switch to the company's more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly LED lighting solutions.
As business and municipalities change out traditional fixtures in buildings, warehouses, streetlights and parking lots to take advantage of the cost and energy savings offered by LED technology, the discarded fixtures and lamps must be recycled or disposed of properly. Most contain hazardous materials—like mercury—that not only make them an environmental liability, but also expose the company or municipality to the risk of penalty for improper handling and disposal.
"LEDs are a much greener option than traditional HID and fluorescent fixtures," said Roy Burton, Dialight's Group chief executive. "By adding this recycling option, we're able to enhance the environmental benefits changing over to LEDs and relieve our customers of the burden in figuring out how they're going to deal with the discarded fixtures."
As one of the largest commercial recyclers of lamps and ballasts in the world, Veolia works with a broad range of customers to offer environmentally compliant recycling services nationwide. Its state-of-the-art processing system ensures that customers who change to Dialight's LED indoor and outdoor fixtures will be able to minimize cost and maximize efficiency to meet their sustainability, regulatory compliance and budgetary requirements.


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Coastal South Carolina is set to be evacuated, anxious Florida residents raided grocery store shelves and North Carolina called for the evacuation of three barrier islands as Hurricane Matthew — the most powerful Atlantic storm in about a decade — threatened to rake a large swath of the East Coast in the coming days.
The storm roared across the Caribbean on Tuesday, slamming into the western part of Haiti. While it's too soon to know if it will make a direct hit on Florida or somewhere else along the U.S. coast, Matthew is expected to create dangerous conditions.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Tuesday she plans to issue an evacuation order Wednesday so that 1 million people can safely and comfortably leave the coast, barring a major shift in the storm's track. People will need to be 100 miles inland from the coast, and Haley said she expects the evacuation to begin at 3 p.m. EDT Wednesday.
U.S. & World
Asked at a news conference if the evacuation is voluntary, Haley said, "we don't do voluntary or mandatory, it is an evacuation."
A hurricane watch was in place for parts of Florida, which was already seeing rain bands from the storm.
Simone Corrado and her husband tried to buy water at a Publix in their hometown of Davie, about 20 minutes from Miami Beach, and mostly found empty shelves. They were worried the roof of their garden-style apartment would leak during heavy rain.
"I got scared because all that was left at Publix was just the pricey water," Corrado said. "They really put the fear into you here. On the television screen every few minutes is the 'beep, beep, beep' storm alert."
Florida Gov. Rick Scott met with emergency officials along the coast, starting out in the Keys and traveling north. At a news conference in Daytona Beach, he noted that the storm's predicted path can change quickly.
"We can rebuild your home, we can rebuild your business. We can't rebuild your life," Scott said.
The dangerous Category 4 storm blew ashore around dawn in a corner of Haiti where many people live along the coast in shacks of wood or simple concrete blocks. At least seven people have died from Matthew's march through the Caribbean. The storm was headed north over the Bahamas and expected to brush the Florida coast.
A tropical storm watch was issued from Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys to Deerfield Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale. A hurricane watch is in place further north.
"We are preparing for the worst, hoping for the best and not taking any chances," Scott said as he visited with emergency management officials in the Florida Keys.
The governor urged residents along the Interstate 95 corridor to start making preparations, which include having at least a three-day supply of water, food and medicine. He also asked residents to comply with any evacuation orders from local officials as the week progresses.
"Make sure you have a fully charged cellphone," Scott said. "If we lose power, you cannot charge your cellphones."
Scott noted that many people have moved to South Florida since Hurricane Wilma hit as a Category 3 storm in 2005. Matthew briefly reached the top classification, Category 5, becoming the strongest hurricane in the region since Felix in 2007.
President Barack Obama was updated on the path of Hurricane Matthew and its potential impact in the Caribbean and the United States, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
Obama had been scheduled to travel to Florida on Wednesday for campaign events and a health care event. But the White House said Tuesday the trip is being postponed because of the hurricane.
Instead, Obama will travel to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Washington headquarters to meet with officials coordinating the response. FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate will brief Obama on the latest developments if scheduling allows.
Federal officials have been deployed to state emergency operations centers in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina and relief supplies have been prepositioned in the region.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency, in part to immediately help farmers clear their fields of crops already affected by heavy rain over the last two weeks. He said he doesn't want other crops ruined, so restrictions on truck weights and hours of service would be lifted under the emergency declaration to allow farmers to take their harvest to market.
At Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina, superintendent Patrick Kenney said more than 100 trucks were being taken off the island and about 45 cabins were being cleared.
Ferry operators told Kenney it will take two days to evacuate everyone, meaning the islands should be empty sometime Wednesday.


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...and then the cops show up and everybody stands around for a few minutes before the person taping confirms that he recorded the whole thing.
Note: We're not sure what is so funny about Beyonce blaring over the stadium PA while this fight is dying down, but we are sure that it is funny.
H/T Jovan J.


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Have a look at Wayne Preece's Open Country TV productions and se how you can order them
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US high court protects N. Ireland 'Troubles' archive – for now
By Ross Kerber
Oct 17 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked a bid by authorities for access to interviews with a fighter from Northern Ireland's "Troubles," a temporary win for a pair of academic researchers.
At issue is whether authorities in Northern Ireland can obtain records from an archive at Boston College. The case has been closely followed on both sides of the Atlantic as it could show in uncomfortable detail the possible roles played by current political figures during the sectarian conflict, including Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams.
Adams, a member of the Irish Republic's parliament, has said he has nothing to fear from the college's materials.
In a brief order, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer stayed an appeals court decision that would have turned over material from the archive to police in Northern Ireland.
Breyer's order will last until Nov. 16, or until the resolution of an appeal of the lower court ruling that the researchers plan to bring to the Supreme Court soon.
The researchers – including journalist Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre, once a member of the Irish Republican Army – were part of a project that interviewed dozens of fighters from both sides of the conflict, which ended with a U.S.-brokered peace treaty in 1998.
Interviewees were told their words would remain sealed until their deaths. But after a series of news articles several years ago, the Police Service of Northern Ireland sought Boston College's records to help solve one of the most notorious killings of the sectarian conflict – the 1972 death of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10.
McConville was killed by the IRA on suspicion of being an informer, an accusation her family has denied. Her body was recovered in 2003.
The U.S. Justice Department had demanded the records on behalf of the Northern Ireland police, citing legal-assistance treaties, despite opposition from U.S. politicians worried the case could damage the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Since the legal battle began, the Northern Ireland police have gained access to archived interviews by Brendan Hughes, an IRA figure who died in 2010. But access to interviews with eight other IRA figures remains in dispute.
Technically, the matter before the Supreme Court concerns only interviews with Dolours Price, an IRA member who was jailed for her part in the 1973 bombing of London's Old Bailey courthouse that injured more than 200 people. The court's decision in her case will likely determine the fate of the other interview material, said Eamonn Dornan, an attorney for the researchers.
(Reporting By Ross Kerber; Editing by Peter Cooney)


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How many bloody times has he stood up under pressure for India in the last couple of years.
Whether it be test ,ODI or T20 ,He does it everytime .
Ridiculously good at crucial junctures.
He may not have got a MOTM or a 100 but his knock today was for me more crucial in setting the base than Dhoni.
Calm under pressure man .Surely has silenced all his doubters now.


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Old Asia Photography is London based and was established in 1982. It was previously known as Old Japan, originally set up to focus on early Japanese photography. This new site has been expanded to cover East and Southeast Asian 19th and early 20th century photography. We now cover China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar/Burma, Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia. Our customers are national and local museums all over the world, as well as photographic dealers and private collectors. We are always interested in buying collections, albums, or single images from the nineteenth century.
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Singles Anonymous
Hi, my name is Steve, and I'm single. And for those of you like me, this column is for you.
I feel like I have to say I'm single in the way a meeting of alcohol anonymous starts. I do enjoy being single most days. Of course on most days, drunks enjoy the bottle.
I've been single since June of 2003. That's the longest streak I've had sans girlfriend since I was 15. I've been dating the whole time, but nothing has ever materialized into promoting me to boyfriend status. Twice I was called in for an evaluation interview, but turns out they decided to hire another applicant.
My pattern is simple: I meet a girl, we like each other, I leave town, she likes someone else. I've gotten the "I'm seeing someone" call so often I can tell before she even says anything. And most of the time, I don't even get that call - I'm left to figure it out on my own. Once was able to call a girl and say "the least you could do is tell me you have a boyfriend," before she said anything. I'm kidding. I was able to do that twice.
I know I'm in a unique situation in that I travel often, but there are many commonalities of being single we can all relate to, and we have all experienced being single. When you are single, you alternate between loving your freedom and wishing you had less of it. And no one is immune. Even the girls that seem born with boyfriends have had a few days of "will I ever find someone?" syndrome.
There are good days - days when we're positive about our prospects. Days when we clean up our apartment in case anyone comes over. Days when our hair falls perfectly where it's supposed to, and the style happens to go with what we're wearing. Days when we wear the nice underwear. (Yes, guys do that, too). Those usually turn out to be terrible nights, but the anticipation is awesome. Ironically, the nights that work out are typically those when you're apartment is a mess, your hair has that one patch that keeps sticking up, and you desperately need to do laundry. That Murphy guy makes fun laws.
There are also bad days - days when it looks like you have no prospects at all. Days when your date cancels inexplicably five minutes after you finished getting ready. Days when you get three wedding announcements and every song you hear is about someone being happier than you. Days when your roommate brings home a moaner. Those are the tough days - the days that make you wish you hadn't taken your ex's number out of your phone.
Some of you are reading this and are glad it doesn't currently apply to you. But it might. Roughly half of all marriages end in divorce. And the VAST majority of all relationships end with a group of friends splitting a carton of Rocky Road or a six pack of Coors. But this one is THE one, you say. You might be right, and congratulations if you are. But you're probably wrong. And if you are wrong, when you look back at this column after the one turns out to be the wrong one, this paragraph will be particularly hysterical.
Living in LA, I have met a cadre of terrible women. Women who like me for my car or my job or who don't like me because my car isn't nice enough or they wished I had a better job. In the same respect, I live amongst a cadre of terrible men who use their cars and jobs to get these terrible women.
But I have a feeling if I lived anywhere, I'd run into something similar. My problems are not unique to southern California. Life is a quest to pair off with someone as equally wonderful and terrible as you are. And that's why dating is so difficult. Very few people know where they stand on those two supply and demand curves, let alone the status of anyone else.
While I spend my twenty-something years trying to find myself, I might accidentally find someone else at the same time. But for now, I'll continue to periodically clean my apartment, hope my hair comes out right, and wear the good underwear (which, for guys, is much less complicated to do than for girls). And when my dates cancel, my friends get married, and my roommate brings home a moaner, it might be a rough night. But I'll laugh about it the next morning. And hope that the next girl I end up with is even louder.


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There is a point within my back. It is on the left side, I think the T-1 to T-4 spots on the spine cover the specific points of pain i'm experiencing.. and then also specific spots elsewhere are on the scapula near the the shoulder, the muscles making up my rotator cuff? This shoulder is interesting as it has always been easy to dislocate and I feel almost like there are muscles missing from it.. or severely undeveloped.. maybe even ligaments that didn't form?
The pain most noticeable is in the spinal points as they go out into my rib and I can feel the tension and pain flowing into the front of my chest along the same rib coming out of the T-1 to T-4 regions.
Here are photos of the back and of the muscles in the scapula i'm talking about:
Spine: https://usercontent2.hubstatic.com/3780633_f496.jpg
Scapula/Rotator Cuff Muscles: https://www.shoulderdoc.co.uk/images/up ... tator2.jpg
The muscles in the rotator cuff that hurt specifically are Supraspinatus AND Infraspinatus.
The Spot that is most noticeable on the spine muscles and rib would be T2 or T3 I think..
I read that the Shoulders represent Survival Skills, and the Left side is Internal and Feminine... but I don't know what to do with that information.


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Part 2 of the Global Macro Op Ed pieces from the BoomBustBlog readers:
Our banks have grown out of control. They have every incentive in normal times to expand lending to grow profits. They were given the ability to gorge on this lending way beyond normalcy through the ability to create debt independent of deposits or anything else, through the removal of all watchdogs, and through fractional reserve lending. They exist not only in the US, but in almost all countries in quite the "non-zero sum fashion". They are now bursting at the seams due to their enormous size.
We are not primarily a fiat economy driven by central bank actions. We are primarily a PRIVATE CREDIT economy, driven by the desire and the ability of banks to create debt, with a fiat economy on the side.
This is not right. We have become overly reliant on debt. Our politicians and our business leaders are trying to convince us that more debt is the solution. They have it completely backwards. Debt is the problem. It is why we are in this situation to begin with. There is nothing wrong with a reasonable amount of debt. Our debt load is completely unreasonable - it is simply not sustainable, even in a purely utilitarian sense. There is no economy like ours where debt originated purely for consumption is as prevalent, or as accepted. It's not right on many levels.
Aggressive Fractional Reserve Lending is Bad but we are Worse
Table of Contents
- Conclusions
- What are the empirical parameters of this system?
- What are the theoretical properties of a pure fractional reserve lending system?
- Why is plain vanilla Fractional Reserve Lending an unsustainable Ponzi scheme?
- What are the EMPIRICAL properties of a pure fractional reserve lending system?
- Debt, GDP, Monetary Base, Deposits
- Debt versus GDP
- Debt versus Deposits
- Monetary Base versus Deposits
- Debt by itself
- Monetary Base versus Debt
There are a few conclusions from all of the analysis on our system over the past week:
- The dynamics of our system imply that we are a *Private Credit System* first and foremost - that Private Credit Growth, freely originated by banks, has been the primary driver of the money supply and our economy. A fractional reserve system with very low reserve requirements is extremely unstable, but we are even worse. Debt growth seems to be its own beast.
- Our credit bubble is home-spun, not a zero sum game versus China. China has lent us $1T, while our debt is $52T. We created that leverage within our own banking system, and every banking system can do the same. It seems apparent that the US, Europe, the UK and Australia most definitely created their own credit bubbles. This is a worldwide phenomenon that cannot be "taken out on the foreigners".
- Private debt is orders of magnitude bigger, and a bigger factor than, both Government Debt (government stimulus) and the Monetary Base (Fed stimulus). Again, we are first and foremost a Private Credit System.
- Fractional reserve lending systems w/short term capitalism have the ability and incentive to create more debt than society could ever support, and we have clearly gone beyond that point. The fact that debt growth has steadily been creating ever smaller amounts of GDP growth strongly support the notion that we are now simply borrowing the interest on our unsustainable debt. Our society cannot support this much debt. When we can no longer borrow, this dynamic will work in reverse.
- The vestiges of any conservatism in our FRL system have been abused, goaded by de-regulation and short term capitalism. Most reserve requirements have been scrapped. And consumers have been tricked into thinking this is a good thing, b/c they can get a 2% interest rate (even though it has contributed to the bankruptcy of our society).
- Deposits in total are an accounting fiction, to the extent that they are a byproduct of a small amount of base money being lent and re-lent over and over again. To the extent the loans must be written off, deposits will get withdrawn as well. However this will expose the small cushion of actual cash in our society, supporting both deposits and loans.
- It is game over when market participants realize we simply cannot service a debt as large as ours. Reasonable estimates imply we would have to work off approximately $40T of debt. Our GDP without the positive effect of debt is around $11T - just imagine if we had to shrink that down to manage a debt contraction of $40T. It would cascade completely out of control. But again, this is a process that cannot be avoided.
Our economy has become overly reliant on consumption driven by unsustainably large volumes of debt.
What are the empirical parameters of this system?
In a prior analysis we referenced the following graph:
This elucidates the basic elements of the system:
- Cash
- Loans
- Deposits
I would add a fourth - Output.
Output is spending. It is what we call GDP. We think about GDP a lot here, and spending (and income) are what drive our economy. Important variable! In the table above, GDP goes up when money is spent, but not at any other time. (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5) would show cumulative GDP of $0, $900, $900, $1710, $1710. Note how an initial $1000 was able to create $9000 of GDP simply due to credit growth and a zero savings rate.
These are the parameters we should be thinking about.
What are the theoretical properties of a pure fractional reserve lending system?
These are some of the properties of a fractional reserve lending system, as they pertain to the 4 variables identified above. All are evident from that simple example.
- [Deposits] > [Loans], always.
- [Cash / Deposits] >= Reserve Requirement, always.
- [$ Loan Growth] = [$ GDP Growth], always.
- Cash injection comes 1st, Credit growth comes 2nd.
- Loan losses dramatically disrupt bank functioning w/ reasonably small reserve ratios.
These are simple enough to see, and are intuitively appealing.
Why is plain vanilla Fractional Reserve Lending with low reserve requirements an unsustainable Ponzi scheme?
In "Deposits are a fiction - but base money is not part of the Ponzi", I argued a few things:
- That deposits in total are an accounting fiction, to the extent that they are a byproduct of a small amount of base money being lent and re-lent over and over again (see "cash" in above schema, compared to "deposits"). By this I mean that while everyone believes their deposits represent wealth, it is only as real as everyone's desire to NOT monetize it in any large amount at any point in time. All that everyone, at any point of time, can monetize is the base money, which can be (and is now) a small fraction of total deposits. If even a fraction of depositors were to withdraw, the whole system would go down.
- That fractional reserve lending beyond a certain point is predicated on perpetual growth, which makes it in some ways a big Ponzi scheme. Mathematically, a Fractional Reserve Lending ('FRL') system can create more debt than the ability of output to support that debt. Once output is no longer sufficient to make good on the interest on loans that were created into existence by banks (as it is now), then the system can only borrow the difference as GDP gets squelched until people realize the insolvency of the system.
I would add a few other points:
- Even the vestiges of our FRL system have been abused, goaded by de-regulation and short term capitalism. The original reserve requirement associated with deposits was 10%. That is, banks needed to set aside 10% of the cash given to them as a buffer again loss. That is still true for "demand deposits". However savings accounts and money markets have ZERO reserve requirement, and are lent out in FULL. Checking accounts USED to have 10% reserves. However this was removed under Greenspan in 1994. Legislation allowed these accounts to be "swept" into accounts that require NO reserve requirement (source, source). The banking system has been trying to squeeze every last drop of profits out of their deposits (and give a trickle to depositors via higher interest rates), but this has had the effect of horribly under-reserving the banks vis a vis their loan books.
- Even small loan losses are enough to bankrupt the banking system, if lending is not able to grow.
When the economy is growing, this is not a problem. In fact, when things are going well all these loans reinforce the good times. The problem is that this structure leaves the system horribly vulnerable to defaults. We just finished a debt binge on an unproductive asset bubble and consumption.
What are the EMPIRICAL properties of a pure fractional reserve lending system?
There is no reason why we need to stop with the theory. We have all of this data for the US.
These are where we find the parameters, from 1st principles:
- Cash: "St Louis Base" (source, source)
- Loans: "Total Credit Market Debt", "Private Debt" (source, source)
- Deposits: "Total Deposits" (source)
- Output: "GDP" (source, source)
The theory behind the choice of these figures was explained in "Monetary base is "cash"".
These are the results.
Debt, GDP, Monetary Base, Deposits
Before showing what the actual results are, consider what the simulated result would be assuming $1000 of initial money and a required reserve of 10% with each iteration:
This is what the actual figures have been from 1918 to Q2 2008:
These are the results adjusting all figures to equalize the monetary base over the data series to its Q2 2008 value of $839B:
- GDP (green line) kept up with Private Debt (red line) until around 1960, when private debt began shooting well north of GDP. Then in 1980, GDP markedly diverged below debt (especially evident in the adjusted base graph).
- Deposits are always supposed to greater than debt, but as can be seen, Deposits were less than Private Debt in only 3 years - 1943, 1944 and 1945.
- Monetary Base (cash) is small compared to Deposits, but piddling compared to Private Debt.
These results heavily call into question the hypothesis that we are purely on a fractional reserve lending system on 2 fronts.
- Debt growth is way too fast relative to GDP growth recently (when their growth in $ terms is supposed to be equal).
- Debt is well in excess of deposits (which under the FRL model is supposed to be impossible)
Debt versus GDP
We can look at this in a few ways - (1) Ratio of Debt / GDP ; (2) Change in Debt / Change in GDP.
This is the now infamous graph of Private vs Public vs Total Debt / GDP:
GDP, as noted earlier, is a proxy for the income of our nation. This chart, then, shows that an ever increasing amount of debt is being supported by the income of our country. This should cause a drag on the ability of GDP to grow.
Below is a graph of Change in Debt / Change in GDP:
- Before we used to get full "bang for the buck" - Debt growth had almost a 1-for-1 effect on GDP.
- Over time, debt continued to grow, but its impact on GDP has shrunk. While the graph has variations over individual time periods due to the business cycle, we have basially gone from 100% in the last 1940's to 20% in the 2000's.
The original 1-for-1 relationship b/w debt and GDP growth is supportive of what we would theoretically expect. The lack of "high" in later periods is supportive of the notion that we are now buckling under the weight of our collective debt load.
As noted above and elsewhere, lending beyond a certain limit requires Ponzi-like perpetual growth. In the absence of miraculous output growth, we must be able to continually borrow the interest on the incremental debt. This graph strongly suggests we are borrowing ever increasing amounts of interest on a growing mountain of unsustainable incremental debt.
Debt versus Deposits
Debt in the theoretical model is always supposed to be less than total deposits. This has never been the case though, as can be seen in the graph below:
Private Debt / Deposits had been 250% or below from 1934 to 1980 or so. Then it spiked up to 580%. This supports the idea that we *truly* began our debt binge in 1980. In a pure fractional reserve lending system, how could such growth be possible? The same amount of deposits somehow translated into a heck of a lot more loans.
I believe this is due to 2 factors:
- Banks began lending before they actually received deposits or base money injections.
- Banks began selling their loans via the securitization market.
The securitization model is extremely perverse from a macro perspective. It has pumped a lot of loans into the system that could not be supported by the banks alone. It has allowed for a far greater accumulation of debt within our country than would have ever been possible in a traditional banking system. It removed due diligence and loan underwriting standards.
Debt's size vis a vis deposits strongly supports the notion that our system has primarily been driven by DEBT.
Monetary Base versus Deposits
This is a graph of Monetary Base as a % of Deposits. This is how much our society is holding aside in actual cash, supporting our deposits.
- We began stripping away "buffer" after WW2.
- We are at the bottom of the range, at 11% right now. As low as we've ever been.
Debt by itself
As another way of thinking about it, below is a graph of real private debt per capita, from 1918 until Q2 2008:
- From 1918 to 1948, real per capita Private Debt was below $10k per person.
- From 1948 to 1978 we went from ~$10k per person to $45k.
- From 1978 to 2008 we went from $45k to $150k. This is simply huge.
It is one thing to be on an FRL system and have total debt per person at a manageable level of say $30k even. Median household income is $43k, when there are around 120k households in this country. This implies a median debt per household of $380k. Does this sound normal to you?
This is the problem with an FRL system in a short term capitalist society, on a credit system with a fiat subsystem. It has every ability and every desire to create this much debt, and doesn't know when to stop.
Monetary Base versus Debt
This is how much cash is underlying the loans in this country. Cash, or monetary base, is the "input", and loans are the "output". The magnitude of the output vis a vis the input is a function of how aggressive the banks are.
- We are at best half of where this figure should be.
- Loans are simply orders of magnitude bigger than they have ever been, relative to the underlying monetary base of our society.
- We passed the pre-Great Depression debt level in around 1975. Sounds about right. Everything is triangulating to a similar range.