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 Please try the search box at the top right of this page or our sitemap below. ||||| Violinist Rachel Barton Pine-star attraction on this balmy night in Santa Fe--is stranded. She yearns to get up from the back-yard lawn chair where her husband has deposited her and stroll to a pool that's shimmering green-blue in the desert twilight. But she instantly realizes that finessing the stone walkways, craggy paths and uneven stairs nearby would be about as practical for her as traversing the face of the moon. So she sits, smiling, for the rest of the evening, her porcelain white skin set against a plume of red hair, feeling almost "like a prisoner," she says later. Meanwhile, Santa Fe socialites flutter around her, asking how she likes their picturesque town so far. Unfortunately, she hasn't seen much of it, and won't. Though she will have plenty free time on this tour, she will not be able to explore the city's lovely boutiques and spacious plazas. The open wound on what remains of her right foot--which was crushed in a notorious, 1995 Metra rail accident that also took her left leg above the knee--is stinging with pain. And walking, which she does only in spurts even when her injuries are in better repair, just will make matters worse. With an eight-hour surgery looming--she has endured more than 40 so far--she's simply hoping that she will be able to fulfill concert dates that were booked a year or more in advance. She's also praying that an incurable but now-dormant bone infection, which she contracted the day of the accident, doesn't reawaken, because it could cost her the already badly damaged right leg. So she tells her admirers outside this sprawling home of a Santa Fe Symphony benefactor that she's too busy to squeeze in any sightseeing, sustaining the illusion of a concert violinist in the pink of good health. The next evening, in fact, she will open the Santa Fe Symphony season brilliantly, reaffirming her gifts as one of the most accomplished violinists of her generation. But she pursues her art in the bittersweet frame of mind that has defined her life since Jan. 16, 1995, when that northbound Metra train shattered not only her legs but also an extraordinarily promising career and, inevitably, rearranged the rest of her life. Before the accident, she was a 20-year-old Chicago violin virtuoso who had surmounted poverty and a troubled family life to acquire a stack of international prizes, positioning herself for global artistic success. After, she suffered "indescribable pain" and struggled to balance glorious music with inglorious medical procedures; broke off contact with her parents for years; strove to regain career momentum that may be forever spent; and endured the myth that her accident made her a musical celebrity when, in fact, it grounded her at the very moment she was about to take flight. At 33, she finds herself performing as splendidly as her earliest fans had expected, but not with the legendary orchestras of Berlin and Paris and New York for which she once seemed destined. Instead, she appears with solid but decidedly less celebrated ensembles in places such as Santa Fe, Danville, Ill., and Youngstown, Ohio, with occasional, treasured engagements overseas. In a way, her predicament in the Santa Fe back yard mirrors the dilemma of her career, which she hasn't yet been able to move into high gear.Instead, she's still battling to become whole again, more than 13 years after the accident. Medically, "It's never over, just because of the complicated nature of the combination of my injuries," she says. Professionally, she still longs to perform with the world's greatest ensembles. "If I didn't get to play with those kinds of orchestras," she adds, "I would be heartbroken." As she contemplates her lawn-chair quandary, her husband, businessman Greg Pine, arrives to rescue her. A tall and rangy former minor-league baseball pitcher, he leads her up and out of the thing, then through the obstacle course of the back yard and onto the driveway, where he has parked their rental van.Tomorrow will be a busy day, and the violinist needs to go to their hotel room to practice and tend to her wounds. If you factor out the pain and anguish Rachel Barton Pine has endured since 1995, she's leading essentially the life she envisioned as a child thunderstruck one indelible Sunday afternoon by the power of music. Seated in a pew with her mother, father and baby sister, Sarah, at St. Pauls United Church of Christ, near Fullerton and Orchard Avenues, 3-year-old Rachel jumped when she heard three schoolgirls playing Bach on tiny violins. "Rachel stood up in the pew and said, 'Mom, I want to do that!' " recalls her father, Terry Barton. Her mother, Amy Barton, later made contact with the girls' music teacher, Christine Due, and signed Rachel up for lessons. "She was an amazing little kid," remembers Due, who watched Rachel devour the class repertoire. Within months, the precocious fiddler was playing Bach at church. Motivated beyond anyone's expectations, Rachel rushed home from kindergarten every afternoon and practiced for three hours, says her mother. When Rachel learned pizzicato-the technique of plucking the strings with the hand rather than stroking them with the bow-she practiced until "her fingers bled," says Due. At first, Amy Barton was wary of allowing her daughter to venture too deeply into this newfound obsession. Rachel's mother considered the violin "a rich child's thing," and money was in desperately short supply in this family. Educated in psychology at the University of Chicago, Amy stayed home to take care of the kids. Her husband, Terry Barton, who also studied psychology at the U. of C., gave up the profession to pursue various business interests, all of which failed. But Rachel's mother soon realized "This is not ordinary, this talent she has." Indeed, a rare, private recording of Rachel playing a Boccherini Minuet at age 5 reveals the graceful, exquisitely shaped phrases of a far more seasoned musician. By the time Rachel was 6, Due had taught her all she could and encouraged her to study with a more noted Chicago teacher. "She was more inquisitive than other children," says Betty Haag, who has been teaching young violinists in the Chicago area for decades. "Technically, she advanced very fast." That's putting it mildly. At 7, Rachel made her orchestral debut performing the Haydn Violin Concerto in G Major with the Chicago String Ensemble. "I was amazed that she had not just fingers but an intellect," remembers veteran conductor Frank Winkler, who led the performance.

 Before Rachel turned 8, she had learned concertos by Mozart and Bruch. The five to eight hours of practice she started logging daily prompted her mother to home-school Rachel and Sarah, beginning when Rachel was halfway through 3rd grade. "I knew she was a genius-as close as I've ever seen," says Almita Vamos, who became one of Rachel's two most important teachers, along with her husband, Roland Vamos. Rachel began studying with the Vamoses at the Music Center of the North Shore in Winnetka (later renamed the Music Institute of Chicago), when she was 10. Within months, she won the junior division of the first Illinois Young Performers Competition, in 1985, playing live on TV with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At 12, she became one of the youngest violinists in the history of the Civic Orchestra. And by 14, "I was working enough to be able to help pay for most of the mortgage and groceries and utilities," she says. The money was essential because the phone and electricity frequently were cut off, and another sister, Hannah, had arrived in 1986. "I wasn't always there and wasn't always completing my financial obligation," concedes Terry Barton. Rachel's patience with her father finally ran out in 1992. Realizing that international music prizes are the jet fuel of the modern solo career, she decided to spend much of the year in Europe pursuing them and the large cash prizes they carried. But that meant she couldn't be sure she would be able to pay the bills at home, so she urged her father to take some kind of salaried job. He refused, and she wrote him off. That June, she risked everything to travel to Leipzig, Germany, and promptly became the first American to win the coveted gold medal in the J.S. Bach International Competition, an extraordinary achievement for a 17-year-old playing some of the most austerely demanding string repertoire ever penned. Then she went on a tear, seizing awards at the Joseph Szigeti International Violin Competition in Budapest in September, and the Fritz Kreisler International Violin Competition in Vienna in October. The next year, she won both the Paganini Caprice Prize in the Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa and bronze medal at the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, remarkable feats for an American with zero connections to the personalities and politics of European culture. Her recording debut, in 1994, earned the kind of reviews emerging musicians fantasize about. "Fabulous fiddling" wrote the noted Washington Post critic Joseph McLellan of her CD "Homage to Sarasate." Though her parents had separated and the financial pressures persisted, Barton was blossoming. In February 1994, she performed with Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Daniel Barenboim at a benefit for the Music Center, the maestro kissing both her cheeks afterward and expressing interest in her future. With Barenboim apparently in her corner, the future seemed limitless. She reveled in her social life, dancing into the morning at clubs that played the heavy-metal music she had adored since age 13. When she wasn't subbing with the Chicago Symphony, she was teaching at the Music Center of the North Shore, another milestone achievement for a 20-year-old violinist. Henry Fogel, then president of the Chicago Symphony, asked for tapes of her performances so he could send them to New York managers. "I thought: 'This is a girl who plays with poise, maturity and a depth of expression that not every young violinist has,' " says Fogel, now president of the League of American Orchestras. So on Friday, Jan. 13, 1995, the violinist brought a stack of recordings to his office at Orchestra Hall. A spectacular career awaited. The following Monday, Jan. 16, was not only the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday but a special moment in the Barton family-Sarah was celebrating her 18th birthday, so she got first dibs on the family car. This meant the violinist would have to take the Metra train to Winnetka to teach her students at the Music Center of the North Shore. She had ridden the northbound commuter train about 15 times before this day-not nearly as often as she had taken the CTA, but enough to have established a kind of ritual. As the locomotive approached the Winnetka station, a few minutes after 11 a.m., she prepared to get up from her seat, loading her bags onto her left shoulder in the same order as always: purse, violin, bag of music and a sack containing food for lunch and dinner. The train pulled into Winnetka at around 11:10 a.m., and it would stand there for 27 to 29 seconds, according to court records. When the doors opened, she proceeded down the stairs. As she reached the station platform, she heard the train doors close behind her and started to turn left, to head south toward the Music Center, at 600 Green Bay Rd. But she couldn't move. Her left arm and shoulder were pinned to the train, and she didn't understand why: The largest of her parcels, a 1617 Amati violin on loan to her from a patron, was still inside the train, attached to her by its strap. Barton did not know, and could not know, that she had only 10 seconds until the train would begin to move. Yet she was not perturbed, presuming this was "not anything that's a big deal," she recalls. All she had to do, she believed, was get the doors to pop open, the way they did on the CTA trains she had ridden all her life. But when she tried, nothing happened. She began pounding on the door and shouting to the engineer. "I was just trying to yell to get his attention, but [there was] no fear, you know?" she says. The train started to move, and Barton, still attached to the northbound car but facing south, instantly was slammed to the ground and dragged alongside. A woman who had been jogging near the train, Theresa Croghan, caught a glimpse of Barton on the ground and began screaming for help.

 As Barton was being pulled, she "knew it was a distance to the next station, and I had seen old Westerns where they drag people," she remembers. "And I thought: 'Is it more likely that I will be dead by the time I reach the next station if I don't do anything?' I thought: 'First my coat will be scraped off. Then my jeans will be scraped off. Then my butt will be scraped off. Then my spinal cord will be severed.' " She also realized that "if I try to somehow release myself from whatever is holding me there . . . I know I will be thrown under the wheels." She decided that freeing herself was the better of two bleak options. So she "wormed" her fingers underneath the straps holding her left shoulder to the side of the train and gave them "one good shove." As the train pulled forward, the violinist spun away from it, her glasses flying through the air, her upper body buoyed to the right, her lower body swung to the left, placing her legs in the path of the train's remorseless metal wheels. "And that's somehow how my left leg got cut off and the other leg mangled," she said in the deposition for her subsequent trial. While she was blacking out, a "feeling of indescribable peace" came over her, she says today, speaking in her modest downtown apartment. "But the thing that was very personal about what I experienced is that in that moment, God offered me a choice. That, you know, it would be acceptable for me to just stay there, and not go back," she says, losing composure as she describes the event. "Ahh, it's hard to talk about this," she whispers, crying, "but, that, if I wanted to, I could go back. And it was totally my choice, no right or wrong. . . "Just knowing that I only had to go back if I really wanted to, or chose to, and I did choose to, because I felt like there were things I still wanted to do, things I hadn't yet accomplished," she continues, softly. When she returned to consciousness, moments later, she was in such physical agony that "I did not know so much pain could exist," she said at the trial. One of the passengers on the train, Brian McCarthy, heard Barton's screams, slammed a button to get the engineer to stop the locomotive, then ran out to help her. Another passenger, Jim Tuck, followed close behind. The two used their belts to fashion impromptu tourniquets on what remained of Barton's mangled legs. "We both looked at each other," remembers Tuck today, "and I said, 'I hope we're doing this right.' " Barton had been dragged more than 300 feet in a half-sitting position. When paramedics arrived, she felt chilled to her core, the result of exposure to temperatures that hovered between 32 and 33 degrees that morning, and her loss of approximately five pints of blood. Fearing that if she passed out again she might never reawaken, she struggled to keep talking in the ambulance until she arrived at the emergency room at Evanston Hospital. The violinist was in horrendous shape-worse than the public may have realized. In addition to the loss of her left leg, most of the skin and underlying tissue from the front of her right leg were gone as well. A large part of the bone just below her right knee was missing. The lower half of her right knee-the tibial plateau-was smashed; the upper part of the knee was cracked in two. Doctors spent eight hours operating on her. They took skin and bone from her destroyed left leg for future use on her right. They removed the five toes and the bottom half of her right foot because there was not enough skin to cover it or tissue to support it. They placed a "fixator," or metal bar, from the mid-thigh to the ankle of her devastated right leg, to try to stabilize what remained of it. In later surgeries, they would transplant bone from her hip and pelvis to the damaged right leg. When Terry Barton, the violinist's father, showed up in the intensive care unit, Barton refused to see him or to allow him to return. Every 24 to 48 hours for the next several days, she endured further surgeries. "The moment I thought I was alone in the room, I would start panicking and I would go into shock," Barton recalls. So she insisted her mother sleep on a cot next to her for months to come. Whenever orderlies rolled her into an elevator to the operating room, "As soon as I saw a door closing, I would just start to scream and freak out," says Barton, who was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. A child psychiatrist talked Barton down from her fears, but the violinist's belief that at least her hands had been spared in the accident proved incorrect. When she had arrived at the emergency room, technicians had plunged an IV into the wrist of her left arm, a disaster because that's the hand with the fine-motor skills that articulates notes on the fiddle (the other arm moves the bow). The nerve of the carpal tunnel in her left hand had been bruised, leaving three of the fingers numb. Worse, doctors were preparing to do a surgery that would have ruined her ability to play the violin once and for all. They planned to remove muscle from Barton's back to help rebuild her right leg, a potentially catastrophic move for a violinist, because the back musculature supports the entire range of motions required to play a fiddle. "My mom, of course, went hysterical when she heard that," recalls the violinist. An equally vehement protest from Dr. Alice Brandfonbrener, founder of the medical program for performing artists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, stopped that plan cold. Instead, doctors took the strip of muscle they needed from the violinist's abdomen. Unfortunately, when bone is exposed to air and dirt, the chance of an infection is high, and Barton developed osteomyelitis, an infection of the tibia, below her knee. Though she did not know it, she had become an enormous news story, the tale of a celebrated violin prodigy nearly killed because her instrument was trapped in a train flashed around the world. It soon morphed into the fiction of a violinist who sacrificed her life trying to save her violin. After many surgeries and several weeks at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Barton came home to a severely altered life. She would spend her first days suffering withdrawal from addiction to narcotics she had been given to dull her staggering pain and the next months battling a "black depression," she says.

 She wondered whether she would be able to walk again, whether she would be able to dance in the clubs she frequented just weeks before. "Will I be able to do my same moves?" she asked herself. "Will I be able to date? Why would anyone want to date me?" Like any other 20-year-old, she obsessed over how she looked, but in her case, the issues were profound. "Actually, the limb loss is not the yuckiest thing about my injuries," she says, noting that she wears long skirts and high boots to mask her legs. "It's all the bits of my flesh that have been transplanted to other bits of me. And I have weird scars and lumps. It just looks like I got chewed up and spit out under my skirt. Blah. "And I have a huge scar running the entire length of my abdomen from that flesh transplant. I've got big gouges in my back from where I was scraped as I was being dragged along. I've got permanent scarring on my chest from the central line [catheter] that was inserted for two years," pumping antibiotics to battle her bone infection. In 1995, she endured 15 operations, 14 prosthetic appointments, 80 rehab appointments and 101 medical appointments. Her mother still slept at her bedside, waking up in the middle of every night and donning gloves and mask to change her antibiotic IV, tend to her right knee and wrap her right leg in antibacterial soaked gauze to treat the bone infection. Her sisters pressed on with their lives, but the household stirred with tension. Rachel and her next younger sister, Sarah, often bickered, recalls their mother. And youngest sister Hannah, who was studying violin, "couldn't play with feeling" for years after the accident, says Amy Barton. If the music became too emotional, "she'd just break down and sob, because the whole thing affected her soul." But Rachel experienced hopeful moments in that first year of her new life too. By chance, in church, she met Greg Pine, a student home on spring break from Pomona College, in California. "There was something about the look on her face," says Pine, who immediately was intrigued. "Just the way she met me, there was a humanity there that really struck me." He asked her out that night; they went to see a movie and talked for hours, but he returned to school and she resumed her struggles. By fall, she was able to reclaim her technical acuity on the fiddle, performing occasional concert dates in 1995 and most of '96 in a wheelchair. Pine moved back to Chicago in the summer of '96 after a brief stint in the minor leagues with the Sierra Nevada Miners, to start a business, and he reconnected with Barton. Within months, he was traveling with her to concert dates, because she couldn't travel alone and didn't want to tour with her mother, as she had as a child. A platonic relationship between Barton and Pine soon became a romantic one. At the end of '96, when the violinist was liberated from the scaffolding on her right leg and the catheter that had been delivering antibiotics (her bone infection was pronounced in remission), she finally could get back on an airplane and try to re-launch a career that barely had gotten started. Signed by a New York talent agency in 1997, Barton decided to leave home and move in with Pine, a blow to her mother that began their schism. "It was very traumatic for her," says Barton. After the accident, "It was like, back to childhood, where my mom is with me every minute of every day. So for me to then leave, it was as if her 8-year-old had suddenly gone. "I think she felt like it was disloyal of me to have left the family. But who would say that a 22-year-old was being disloyal to no longer live with her mother? "I couldn't blame my mother for how she was feeling, but it certainly was not logical, and it did cause me to have to step back from having regular contact with her." Amy Barton, who had divorced her husband in 1995, grieved. "Everything was too intense," she says. "Psychologically, she was really kind of adolescent at that moment. . . . But until a couple months before Greg, I was sleeping on the floor by her bed. . . . She got an opportunity to live with Greg, so she jumped for it and left us kind of in the lurch." Mother and daughter would not speak for five years; the violinist also cut off from her sisters during that period. "That train," says Amy Barton, "hit all of us." Barton ran up $672,570.97 in un-paid medical bills at the time her suit against Metra and the Chicago and Northwestern Transportation Company went to trial, in February 1999. To deliver the services she needed, her medical providers had obtained liens against any future settlement. As the lawyers battled, staging re-enactments of the accident in court, Barton relived the worst day of her life for four weeks. Her post-traumatic stress disorder "got really bad again," she says. The jury decided in her favor, finding damages of $30 million and attributing 62.5 percent of the fault to Northwestern Transportation, 33 percent to Metra and 4.5 percent to Barton. After subtracting that 4.5 percent, the total verdict was $28,736,149.57, plus $859,500 in punitive damages. CNW and Metra appealed, launching a process that would last for years. In January of 2000, the violinist's father attended one of her concerts and approached her afterward, the two renewing their relationship. Barton came to realize, she says, that his lack of support during her childhood "was never motivated by malevolence." The railroad companies settled with Barton in 2002. By then, her medical expenses-including ongoing surgeries-topped $1 million. After her lawyers received their share of the judgment and expenses were deducted and medical liens paid off, Barton received about $15 million, which she has banked, she says. She pays for all of her accident-related medical costs out of these funds, living downtown in a three-bedroom apartment. "That money from the trial is my safety net," she says. "If I didn't have that money, and if Greg died and my bone infection came back, I would probably be in a nursing home for 50 years and [would be] unable to go and play the violin." With legal issues finally resolved, she and Pine married. Guests at the Fourth Presbyterian Church on June 5, 2004, wept when they saw her proceed gingerly down the aisle without crutches for the first time in public. Because mother and daughter had not yet come to terms, Amy Barton and the violinist's two sisters did not attend the wedding. But Amy and Rachel had begun speaking again around 2003 and were regularly talking on the phone and going out to lunch. Hannah studies violin at the Peabody Conservatory, in Baltimore, and maintains close contact with her sister. Sarah, who is married, does not speak with the violinist and declined to comment for this article.

 Even amid her extraordinary personal triumphs, Pine has not achieved a fraction of the acclaim that once seemed within her reach. The years she would have spent basking in her competition wins and playing international concerts in their wake were lost to years of recovery and rehab. Nevertheless, she suffered the myth that the accident had boosted her career rather than wounded it. "Would 22-year-old violinist Rachel Barton be booked solid for the next couple seasons had a tragic Metra accident not claimed one of her legs?" wrote a critic in the Chicago Reader. "Probably not." What's more, she struggles to be heard in a shrinking classical music world that's vastly overcrowded with talent. Earlier violinists such as Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman became household names, but today's pop-culture firmament-which lavishes fame and riches on rap performers and rock personalities-creates precious few classical superstars. "Rachel is a very fine violinist, no question in my mind," says Fogel, the former CSO president. "But there are more very fine violinists than there are opportunities for playing at the very top level." On her New Mexico tour, Pine pursues a schedule that might exhaust someone in Olympic condition. She and her husband wake at dawn to start promoting her concert. As always, her husband helps her in and out of the rented van, chauffeurs her to all of her appearances and aids her in finessing the often perilous backstage areas of concert halls. In those that are too difficult for her to navigate (the Americans with Disabilities Act does not require backstage areas to be handicapped-accessible), Greg Pine picks up his wife and carries her up and down stairs leading to and from the stage. On this morning, the couple arrive at a local rock station at 7:15, and she regales listeners with the slash-and-burn music of Metallica, which she plays on the multimillion-dollar, 1742 Guarneri del Gesu on loan to her. "Imagine all these violin licks with an orchestra behind it!" she exclaims on the air, hoping to lure young listeners to the weekend's Santa Fe Symphony season opener. Next she plays high-brow repertoire at a classical station, then on to a local violin shop, where she persuades the owner to contribute extra rosin, strings and other fiddle paraphernalia for her Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation, which distributes the goods to musicians in need from Chicago to Africa. For all her palpable energy and drive, however, she moves gingerly, constantly studying the ground beneath her, looking for potentially hazardous bumps, ridges, inclines, declines and other dangers that can send her tumbling onto her face. "I've seen that happen," says Greg Pine. "She'll fall in hotels, where the floor is slick and she doesn't realize it. . . . Any time she's standing, any time she's walking, she's on stilts," adds her husband, who often doubles back to extend an arm to her when he realizes there's tricky terrain ahead. As always, her husband carries the precious Guarneri del Gesu fiddle. She can't, because it's too heavy, and because of her PTSD. "As soon as something is sitting on my shoulder, even, say, a strap on my shoulder, [I feel] I'm going to die," she explains. When it's time for the big concert, she walks, smiling, onto the stage of the Lensic Performing Arts Center, in downtown Santa Fe, hobbling a bit to center stage, bowing, then leaning up against a custom-made stool she has brought with her from Chicago and drags along wherever she goes. She half-sits on it while playing, almost giving the impression that she's standing, as any other concert violinist would do. Though she's one of just three soloists on the program, only she receives a standing ovation, and only she plays an encore-her own Paganini-meets-the-blues version of "Sweet Home Chicago." But throughout this performance, it's obvious that she far outshines the orchestra. And she realizes that ensembles such as Santa Fe's, while impressive for such a small town, do nothing to promote the kind of top-rank, international career she once was close to achieving. "I find it really good to play with an orchestra like this, and play for all these wonderful people," she says on the way to the airport. "But when I play with an orchestra on the next level, it's such a deeper experience, and I have this longing for that." As soon as she returns to Chicago, she is swept up in the next round of medical appointments, as she prepares for another round of surgeries. If they succeed, she should develop fewer sores, endure less pain and spend less time at home, recovering from the physical rigors of life on the road. Yet being a perpetual work-in-progress strains the psyche."I spent the whole morning at the doctor's office," she says, near tears, back in her Chicago apartment, two days after Santa Fe. "And it just takes up so much time, you know? And I think about all the things I could do if I wasn't running around to all these stupid appointments." Though she takes pride in rarely canceling a concert date, though she thrives on squeezing so much teaching, chamber music and lecturing into her work life, she laments the sacrifices she's still forced to make. "I can't even consider starting a family until I've had [more] surgeries," she says, pointing out that the painkillers and other drugs she requires are unhealthy for a baby in gestation. "It really makes me mad." At home at night, she tools around her apartment in a motorized wheelchair to take weight and pressure off of her legs. Though for years she had preferred to tough it out with a manual wheelchair, violinist Perlman, who suffers the effects of childhood polio, "gave me this huge lecture," she recalls. "He was like: 'You have to stop using that now!' " When she did, she noticed that she gained new stamina. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– A renowned Chicago musician is going public with her airline spat over a piece of carry-on luggage—because that piece of luggage happens to be a 1742 violin insured for almost $20 million. Rachel Barton Pine says an American Airlines captain refused to let her bring the Joseph Guarneri "del Gesu" violin aboard a Wednesday flight from O'Hare to New Mexico, where she was scheduled to perform, because he deemed it too big, reports the Chicago Tribune. When Pine, a frequent traveler, pointed out that the FAA—and American Airlines itself—allows instruments such as hers on a first-come basis as long as they fit in the overhead bin or under a seat, he still wouldn't budge. "It is not going on because I say so," she quotes him as saying. Instead of checking it as the crew suggested, she opted not to board at all. "These are so delicate and breakable that if you check your violin, it will get broken," Pine tells KOB 4. "There's no maybe it will get broken. It definitely will get broken." American ticket agents got her on another flight, violin and all, and the airline says in a statement that it "has reached out to Ms. Barton directly to apologize for the inconvenience." She has the violin courtesy of a lifetime loan from an anonymous patron. Last year, Pine spent the night in a Phoenix airport terminal after a similar disagreement with US Airways, notes a post at Violinist.com. In a far more serious incident, back in 1995, the 1617 Amati violin Pine was carrying got trapped in a Metra train door; she was secured to it by its strap and dragged more than 300 feet. She was able to free herself, but the train's wheels took her left leg and mangled her right. (Read the story of how a stolen Stradivarius surfaced after 35 years.)


Article:
It is illegal to take conch shells with living organisms from Florida beaches. (Photo: breckeni, Getty Images/iStockphoto)

 A Texas tourist who collected 40 queen conchs seashells from Key West, Florida, is going to jail for 15 days.

 A Florida judge also sentenced Diana Fiscal-Gonzalez of Dallas to serve six months of probation and pay a $500 fine, plus $268 for court costs, for taking 40 queen conchs from the waters that surround Key West, the Miami Herald reports.

 Fiscal-Gonzalez, who pleaded guilty, said she didn't know taking the shells from the beach was illegal. She was planning to give the state-protected mollusks away as gifts.

 Recreational collection of empty seashells is allowed in Florida, but the conch shells Fiscal-Gonzalez collected contained organisms inside. Taking a living queen conch is illegal. Also, killing, mutilating or removing a living queen conch from a shell is prohibited, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission notes.

 More: Florida bucket list: 20 things you have to do in the Sunshine State

 Fiscal-Gonzalez was arrested by an officer from the commission on July 13, 2017, after an anonymous tipster called the agency. Officer John Martino reported seeing three containers full of queen conches soaking in bleach and water when he met with Fiscal-Gonzalez.

 Conch shells are an important part of Florida Keys culture. Native-born islanders are called Conchs, and the Keys are nicknamed the Conch Republic. Empty conch shells, which produce a unique sound when blown, have also been used as signaling devices in the Florida Keys for centuries.

 Follow Ashley May on Twitter: @AshleyMayTweets

 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2uwcuFE ||||| She said she didn’t know it was illegal to take conchs. She’s heading to jail anyway. |||||Summary:

– A tourist in Florida has been sentenced to 15 days jail time after she says she thought she was simply collecting sea shells. Per the Miami Herald, Diana Fiscal-Gonzalez was caught after harvesting dozens of queen conchs from the coast of Key West. Fiscal-Gonzalez, who was visiting from Texas, was reportedly arrested July 13 by a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer following a tip. Fiscal-Gonzalez had a reported 40 conch shells in a plastic container. She told authorities she didn't know it was illegal to collect the live creatures in the state of Florida. A judge sentenced her to jail, anyway, as well as to six months probation. Fiscal-Gonzalez will have to pay a $500 fine as well as $268 in court costs, according to USA Today. The conch has been a protected species in Florida since the 1970s, when over-harvesting led to a steep decline in their population in the region. In the Florida Keys, the conch is especially beloved. Floridians native to the stretch of islands refer to themselves as conchs and Key West High School's mascot is the endearingly named Fighting Conch. An FWC officer said most of the conchs Fiscal-Gonzalez took were still alive and returned to the water following her arrest.


– Greece blinked today: In a showdown with creditors, the crisis-wracked country agreed to find the final $1.85 billion needed to reach the $14.2 billion in cuts required to get desperately needed aid money in September, reports Reuters. Greece had been asking for more time, but fed-up German and EU donors in turn threatened to pull the plug on the whole bailout. Instead, Greece will further cut pensions and wages. Germany's finance minister reiterated today that Greece was out of wriggle room, reports the AP. "The aid program is already very accommodating. I cannot see that there is still scope for further concessions," he said. But Greek unions and labor groups continue to buck hard against the austerity program. "We agreed on one thing—that we disagree on everything," said the head of Greece's leading union umbrella organization, calling the newly elected government "charlatans."

Expand this summary.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Political leaders in Greece have agreed on most of the austerity measures demanded by its creditors and are now eyeing pension and wage cuts to find the final 1.5 billion euros of savings still needed, a source close to the talks said on Sunday.

 Greece must find savings worth 11.5 billion euros for 2013 and 2014 to satisfy its increasingly impatient lenders, who are currently visiting Athens to evaluate the country's progress in complying with the terms of its latest bailout.

 A finance ministry source said the lenders, who were due to leave Athens at the end of July, would now stay until the savings plan was nailed down.

 "We want to help and we will stay as long as it takes and until the plan is finalized," IMF mission chief Poul Thomsen has told the Greek finance minister, according to a Greek official.

 Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's government last week managed to draw up a list of measures to achieve those savings, but the three parties in his conservative-led administration failed to agree on them, and are due to resume talks on Monday.

 "The political leaders don't disagree on anything, there are just alternative proposals being discussed to protect those with low pensions or incomes in the public sector," said the source, who is involved in the talks. "We need measures worth 1.5 billion euros to finalize the 11.5 billion euro package."

 Near-bankrupt Greece is fighting an increasingly desperate battle to convince skeptical European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders it has turned over a new leaf and is ready to push through long-delayed reforms to overhaul its recession-hit economy.

 But the lenders have so far appeared far from convinced, and officials have told Reuters Greece is likely to require a new debt restructuring that the euro zone - faced with market turmoil in Italy and Spain as well - can ill afford.

 Greek media have reported that the country's leaders are discussing possible layoffs of contractors in the public sector, a cap on pensions, cuts in welfare benefits, reductions in tax exemptions, and lower salaries for public employees as well as raising the retirement age by a year to make up the shortfall in savings.

 PRESSURE ON CASH RESERVES

 A decision on a new tranche of aid for Greece is not expected until September, and the country's already dire financial position appears to be getting increasingly precarious.

 "The fact that we have not received the agreed aid installments has put pressure on our cash reserves. Until then, we are taking extra care in managing our cash," Deputy Finance Minister Christos Staikouras told Real News weekly.

 The troika of EU, European Central Bank and IMF lenders, whose departure date is now uncertain, is due to return in September to complete its assessment of whether Greece deserves more aid.

 A fifth year of recession, record unemployment, and repeated waves of austerity cuts have fuelled growing anger towards the troika and the austerity medicine it has insisted on.

 Summing up the dark public mood, the GSEE union lambasted the troika after talks with it on Friday for heaping misery on Greeks.

 "We agreed on one thing - that we disagree on everything," GSEE leader Yannis Panagopoulos said in a statement. "The troika men came to Greece as doctors and prescribed the medicine that would save the Greek economy and people, but in the end they proved to be charlatans."

 (Writing by Deepa Babington; Editing by Tim Pearce) ||||| Germany's finance minister says he can't see room for further concessions to Greece and is insisting anew that the country must implement far-reaching reforms and cut its budget deficit.

 International debt inspectors are scrutinizing Greece's finances and its progress in implementing budget cuts and reforms demanded in exchange for its rescue loan program. Greek officials have called for more time to implement the measures, but patience among creditors is running extremely short.

 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was quoted Sunday as telling the Welt am Sonntag newspaper: "The aid program is already very accommodating. I cannot see that there is still scope for further concessions."

 If the inspectors' report, expected in September, is damning, Athens could stop receiving rescue loans and face a disorderly bankruptcy and exit from the euro. |||||


Here is a news article: In an announcement likely to rewrite the book on early colonization of the New World, two researchers today said they have discovered the oldest fortified settlement ever found in North America.

 Speaking at an international conference on France at Florida State University, the pair announced that they have located Fort Caroline, a long-sought fort built by the French in 1564.

 “This is the oldest fortified settlement in the present United States,” said historian and Florida State University alumnus Fletcher Crowe. “This fort is older than St. Augustine, considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in America. It’s older than the Lost Colony of Virginia by 21 years; older than the 1607 fort of Jamestown by 45 years; and predates the landing of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620 by 56 years.”

 Announcement of the discovery of Fort Caroline was made during “La Floride Française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World,” a conference hosted by FSU’s Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and its Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution. The conference commemorates the cultural relations between France and Florida since the 16th century.

 Researchers have been searching for actual remains of Fort Caroline for more than 150 years but had not found the actual site until now, Crowe said. The fort was long thought to be located east of downtown Jacksonville, Fla., on the south bank of the St. Johns River. The Fort Caroline National Memorial is located just east of Jacksonville’s Dames Point Bridge, which spans the river.

 However, Crowe and his co-author, Anita Spring, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Florida, say that the legendary fort is actually located on an island at the mouth of the Altamaha River, two miles southeast of the city of Darien, Ga. Darien is located near the Georgia coast between Brunswick and Savannah, approximately 70 miles from the Jacksonville site.

 “This really is a momentous finding, and what a great honor it is for it to be announced at a conference organized by the Winthrop-King Institute,” said Martin Munro, a professor in FSU’s Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics and director of the Winthrop-King Institute. “It demonstrates the pre-eminence of the institute and recognizes the work we do in promoting French and Francophone culture in Florida, the United States and internationally.”

 Darrin McMahon, the Ben Weider Professor of History and a faculty member with the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, observed that Crowe and Spring’s finding — like the conference itself — highlights France’s longstanding presence in Florida and the Southeast.

 “From the very beginning, down to the present day, French and Francophone peoples have played an important role in this part of the world,” McMahon said. “Our conference aims to draw attention to that fact.”

 To make the discovery, Crowe, who received his Ph.D. in history from Florida State in 1973, flew to Paris and conducted research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the French equivalent of the U.S. Library of Congress. There he found a number of 16th-century maps that pinpointed the location of Fort Caroline. Some of the maps were in 16th-century French, some in Latin, some in Spanish, and some were even in English.

 Francois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, a professor of Christianity in the FSU Department of Religion and for 20 years the curator of rare books in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, underlines the fraternal attitude of French Protestant settlers in Fort Caroline toward native Americans, a rare occurrence among Western colonists, and the new perspectives opened by the discovery on the relationship between Huguenots and Indian tribes.

 Crowe was able to match French maps from the 16th to 18th centuries of what is today the southeastern coast of the United States with coastal charts of the United States published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and with maps published by the U.S. Geological Survey.

 One reason scholars claimed that Fort Caroline was located near Jacksonville is because, they believed, the local Indian tribes surrounding the fort spoke the Timucuan language, the Native American language of Northeast Florida.

 “We proved that the Native Americans living near the fort spoke a language called Guale (pronounced “WAH-lay”),” Spring said. “The Guale speakers lived near Darien, Ga. They did not live in Northeast Florida, where Jacksonville is.”

 The two scholars believe that Fort Caroline lies on Rhetts Island, southeast of Darien.

 “The fort appears to be situated in an impoundment used for duck hunting in the fall,” said Crowe, “and thankfully, the site is protected by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.”

 “The frustrating and often acrimonious quest to find the fort has become a sort of American quest for the Holy Grail by archaeologists, historians and other scholars,” he noted. “The inability to find the fort has made some wonder if it ever existed.”

 In 1565, Spanish soldiers under Pedro Menéndez marched into Fort Caroline and slaughtered some 143 men and women who were living there at the time. After the massacre, Menéndez wrote the king of Spain that he had discovered the French fort at “31 degrees North latitude.” Using GoogleEarth, Crowe found the fort close to where the Spanish general had reported.

 “The actual latitude of what we believe is Fort Caroline is well within the margin of error of 16th-century navigational instruments, about 17 miles,” Crowe said.

 French colonists at Fort Caroline were astonished by the dazzling amounts of gold and silver worn by the Indians near the fort. These reports were dismissed as fiction by previous researchers, who argued that North Florida has no deposits of either precious metal.

 “We studied the trade routes of the Guale Indians and found that they led directly to the gold and silver deposits near Dahlonega, Ga.,” Spring said. In 1828, Dahlonega became the site of America’s first mint, and over the years about $600 million worth of gold, in 2013 dollars, has been recovered there.

 The site has not yet been excavated by archaeologists.

 For 150 years, scholars have thought that “French Florida” meant Northeast Florida, including Jacksonville, Lake City and Gainesville. The Crowe and Spring study is expected to fundamentally redefine the term.

 Crowe noted that “French Florida forms a great oval extending from the Santee River of South Carolina, down to the St. Marys River, which serves today as the border between Georgia and Florida. French Florida extends from Darien on the coast, up to Milledgeville, east of Macon.”

 Contributing Source : Florida State University ||||| The mystery of Fort Caroline, the doomed French outpost in the New World, has been solved, two researchers claimed at an international conference of scholars Friday.

 The fort vanished, seemingly forever, soon after the Spanish wiped it out 448 years ago. Its location has been the most enduring puzzle in Jacksonville, where for more than a century amateurs and professionals have searched for it in vain.

 They could keep looking for another century and still never find it, say scholars Fletcher Crowe and Anita Spring,

 That’s because the fort was not in Jacksonville. It wasn’t even in Florida.

 Instead, they claim, it is 70 miles north, on the Altamaha River, south of Darien, Ga.

 Crowe and Spring, who is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Florida, presented their findings at Florida State University. They spoke to academics from around the world, gathered for a conference called La Floride Francaise: Florida, France, and the Francophone World.

 Robert “Buzz” Thunen, a University of North Florida archaeologist who’s been searching for Fort Caroline in Jacksonville, was at the conference. He was skeptical of their findings.

 “It’s a provocative presentation,” he said. “I don’t think it’s enough of an argument for me to change my mind.”

 However, if they are right, that means that everything we know about the first recorded history in the area is dead wrong.

 If they are right, that means that everything named after Fort Caroline in Jacksonville is misnamed.

 That anything named Mayport — from the French River of May, what was thought to be the St. Johns river — shouldn’t be.

 That Ribault High School in Jacksonville is named after a French navigator who passed up this area in favor of Georgia.

 That Jacksonville can no longer claim the glory of being the site of the first European effort to establish a fortified settlement in what would become America.

 If they are right.

 “We don’t have archaeological proof of the fort at this time,” Crowe said. “That’s not to say we don’t have just reams and reams of material, but having reams of 8 1/2-inch paper filled with words is far different from having a French cannonball.”

 Added Spring: “We haven’t found [the fort], but we are pretty much closing in on the site. We have a pretty good idea where it is.”

 She said she would have liked to have kept their findings secret for a few more months. But they decided the conference in Tallahassee on France and Florida was the perfect place to present their idea, in an hourlong presentation with 100 PowerPoint slides.

 Crowe said their presentation Friday provoked many questions from the academics gathered there, as he expected with such an unconventional idea.

 The purpose, he said, was to be challenged, and have those challenges help guide their future research. He said they remain confident, however, that they are correct.

 Spring, the UF professor, has homes in Gainesville and St. Augustine.

 It gives her no joy, she said, to claim that Georgia is home to the ancient settlement, which was founded before St. Augustine, before the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Jamestown or Plymouth.

 “I wish it was in Florida,” she said. “This chagrins me, really.”

 She said she and Crowe have a special-use permit from the state of Georgia to search where they believe Fort Caroline is. That permit does not allow them to pinpoint the location of the dig, to prevent looters from getting there first.

 They’re getting additional funding and expect to begin digging within a few months, Spring said.

 Crowe has a doctorate in history from FSU and can read ancient French. He put that skill to use in libraries in France, reading old documents related to the expedition.

 There, he says, he found a poor translation from the French, a translation made more than 400 years ago. That led to confusion between the words “above” and “below” the line of 30 degrees of latitude, which is roughly where Jacksonville is.

 Crowe claims that bad translation became accepted as fact, and flourished for centuries.

 “We’re claiming that the whole myth that Fort Caroline is east of Jacksonville is based on poor translations,” he said.

 Crowe and Spring say they also re-examined ancient maps, some of which had labeled the Altamaha as the River May, which has long been thought to be the French name for the St. Johns.

 Various geographical puzzles in the early writings of the French suddenly make sense when one looks at the maps knowing that Fort Caroline was on the Altamaha, Spring said.

 And linguistic evidence, looking at Indian words described by the French, shows that the language the natives were speaking was from Georgia, not Florida, Spring added.

 Their theory that Fort Caroline is on the Altamaha is not new. A writer named Richard Thornton also made that claim in various postings on the Internet.

 Crowe and Spring, though, say the evidence they’ve amassed will prove overwhelming.

 “I predict this will be just as controversial as saying that gravity doesn’t exist,” Crowe said. “It’ll be just totally contradictory to what the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce says, to what historians say.”

 Spring said the confusion is understandable, given the conventional wisdom that Fort Caroline was on the St. Johns.

 “You’ve got the best people looking for it,” she said. “Some of those people are my colleagues, and others I know. And they are terrific archaeologists and they have worked on it for a long time.”

 Thunen, the UNF archaeologist, presented a paper to the same conference, arguing that Fort Caroline is on the St. Johns — it just hasn’t been found yet. Thunen and his UNF colleague Keith Ashley have been searching for years.

 He noted that this year is the 450th anniversary of the founding of the fort.

 “That fuels the fascination of the general public. There are a lot of people who are interested in finding the fort. It is, for Floridians, a sort of anchor into the recorded past and, for Jacksonvillians, it is a source of civic pride.”

 Thunen said that, without any physical evidence to prove otherwise, there’s not enough in Crowe and Springs’ report to change his mind on the fort’s location.

 He believes they rely too heavily on maps that can be interpreted in different ways, and says their findings don’t seem to jibe with the “historical context” of European contact with the native people.

 “It never hurts to question our assumptions,” he said. “And what it does for me is to help sharpen my resolve and focus, helps me to re-look at the documents.”

 There is one key fact of history that indeed suggests Fort Caroline was in Jacksonville: the bloody end of the French fort in 1565.

 That’s when Spanish troops marched overland to the fort from their newly founded camp at St. Augustine, slogging through a hurricane for several days.

 If the fort were indeed in Georgia, how could that march have been made in that time? How could the Spanish have crossed the St. Johns?

 Crowe acknowledged those questions. “Anyone who makes [our] claim has to establish how the Spanish were able to march overland to the fort,” he said.

 Crowe and Spring say they believe they have an answer: The Spanish actually marched from a camp on the St. Marys River in Georgia, following Indian trails that led them to the fort on the Altamaha.

 Once there, the slaughter began.

 Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082 |||||
A summary of this is?

– No wonder historians haven't been able to find a historic but long-lost French fort in America: They were looking in the wrong state. Researchers from Florida State University say Fort Caroline—which one calls "the oldest fortified settlement in the present United States"—isn't near Jacksonville as long thought, reports Heritage Daily. The 1564 fort was actually on Rhetts Island near the mouth of the Altamaha River. That's about 70 miles away. In Georgia. The discovery would upend some long-held notions about the colonization of the New World and likely disappoint the Fort Caroline National Memorial—in Jacksonville. But there's a big caveat: "We don’t have archaeological proof of the fort at this time,” says FSU's Fletcher Crowe. Instead, the announcement at a conference is based in part on a detailed analysis of old French maps and coastal charts of the US. “We haven’t found [the fort], but we are pretty much closing in on the site," adds co-researcher Anita Spring." The pair also say they've amassed loads of circumstantial evidence. For instance, they say Native Americans near the fort spoke a language known as Guale, and those speakers lived around what is now Darien, Ga., near the newly proposed site. It's definitely "provocative," a University of North Florida archeologist in the Jacksonville camp tells the Florida Times-Union. But “I don’t think it’s enough of an argument for me to change my mind.” It's not clear when actual digging might start to resolve things. (Click to read about how historians are closer to learning why colonists on North Carolina's Roanoke Island disappeared.)


Article:

Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the Mall Saturday has occasioned handwringing from some devoted fans who worry that he’s losing his outsider credibility, and celebration from some Democrats who hope to channel his energy to advance their electoral prospects.

 But Stewart is an entertainer and, just as when Glenn Beck led a rally on the mall, this rally will be all about him and his Comedy Central partner Stephen Colbert.

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 reset VIDEO: Obama on Stewart VIDEO: Stewart rally announced POLITICO 44

 Their flirtation with political activism carries risks — just as some believe Oprah Winfrey did real damage to her image with a heartfelt endorsement of Barack Obama. But it also carries massive opportunities for Stewart, a man positioning himself as a cultural figure as central to his generation as Johnny Carson was to an earlier, less distracted one.

 “It’s fantastic for the brand,” said MSNBC analyst Lawrence O’Donnell, marveling at Stewart’s ability to escape the TV section of the newspaper and generate what’s known as off-the-page publicity. “He’s a great comedian extending his work to another stage.”

 “He knows what he does for a living,” O’Donnell said. “He will stand up there as a comedian and leave as a comedian.”

 Stewart’s gambit had already proved itself out, perhaps, Wednesday night, when he scored an interview with the president of the United States, whose presence was enough to quiet grumbles from some on the left that an election-eve snark-fest made light of the real dangers of Republican control.

 But if he's on trial for sycophancy, Stewart appeared set on proving his independence from Obama and the White House, choosing to advance the critique from the left that Obama — who appeared, at times, chastened — had been too cautious and moderate in advancing and selling his presidency.

 “You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, ‘Please baby, one more chance,’ ’’ Stewart quipped to Obama, chiding him for – if anything – a presidency too “timid” as Obama used the interview to plead with his supporters to vote.

 Stewart repeatedly baited Obama with his own words and his 2008 campaign message.

 It's " 'yes we can,' given certain conditions," Stewart said.

 " 'Yes we can,' ’’ Obama replied almost resignedly, “but it's not going to happen overnight."

 Stewart will navigate two sets of risks Saturday: He will, a handwringing legion of journalists and bloggers worry, cross the once-bright line from commentary to political participation, and find himself stranded, unable to return.

 And he could — television industry analysts say — alienate portions of an audience for his show that isn’t as polarized as that of the real cable news shows, with viewers divided starkly left and right.

 The first risk has been the subject of a great deal of prose, much of it in The Washington Post, as TBD.com’s Ryan Kearney catalogued Wednesday. Writers suggest either that Stewart is taking politics too seriously or that his supporters aren’t taking it seriously enough, and those fears are shared by some of Stewart’s most devoted aficionados.

 “He’s moving to a very new position — and very much runs the risk of alienating some people who liked him because he didn’t seem to be positioning himself as in the mainstream of political life,” said Geoffrey Baym, who actually studies “The Daily Show” at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Stewart, he said, is transforming himself from an “outside figure” to a “mainstream political player. ||||| In search of the surest way to reach and encourage his core constituency during the midterm elections, President Obama visited "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" Wednesday night -- a show that prides itself on never taking anything seriously but still treated him with sympathetic awe.

 That's how things are done now in the postmodern politiscape: Two men -- Jon Stewart and Barack Obama -- brimming with mutual regard, each of them funny in his own way, but managing to not be very funny together for the show's entire 22 minutes (plus a minute or two). Like any smart "Daily Show" guest, Obama knew the best bet was to play it straight.

 "This is a nice set," Obama said, looking around at the garish marble columns and other federalesque touches on the set at the Shakespeare Theatre's Sidney Harman Hall, where the show has been taping all week as a way to hype "The Daily Show's" much-buzzed-about Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which is scheduled for Saturday afternoon on the Mall. "It reminds me of the [Democratic] convention."

 "We actually bought it," Stewart said. "It was in a warehouse."

 (MORE on 44: Watch the full Stewart-Obama interview)

 The laughs belonged mainly to Stewart. Poking gently at the president, Stewart wondered what we all wonder: Can the economy truly recover? Has the White House capitulated to Wall Street and other powerful interests? "Are we the people we were waiting for, or does it turn out those people are still out there?" the ever-meta Stewart joked.

 "I am feeling great about where the American people are, considering what we have gone through," the president answered, sticking to a list of accomplishments. When he said that Lawrence Summers, who stepped down last month as chair of the National Economic Council, has done a "heckuva" job, Stewart pounced on an obvious opportunity for comic relief.

 "You don't want to use that phrase, dude," Stewart said.

 Obama seemed resiliently cool as ever, ready-made for just about anything one can do on television, on any channel, including Stewart's fake news show. But that anything -- a surprise moment, or a difficult question, or a failed attempt at humor -- never quite arrived.

 It's not much fun to write reviews of "The Daily Show." Woe unto him (and a special, dismissive woe unto old-fashioned critics and op-edders) who attempts to make too much or too little out of the cultural juggernaut it has become.

 Nothing makes a person look more out of sync with the times than when he or she sits at a keyboard and tries, unwisely, to interpret the layers of irony, meta-irony and complicated satire that form the "The Daily Show's" basis and explain its impact and meaning. You might make a point, but you will be mocked. Serious thoughts about Saturday's gathering (which Stewart is co-hosting with his colleague Stephen Colbert of "The Colbert Report") only invite more quasi-intellectual disaster.

 In simplest terms, the rally will be a publicity stunt meant to promote two TV shows while harnessing the voices of disenchanted and ultra-bright moderates out there. If I read it right (and that's a big "if") Stewart and company merely wish to lampoon the bitter political divides and noxious mediasphere gases that prevent America from . . . from doing better? ||||| WASHINGTON — If you are president of the United States and you take your campaign get-out-the-vote blitz to a fake news program, do you get tweaked, or do you get a pass?

 You get tweaked, as President Obama discovered Wednesday, when he made his first appearance as president on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. As the host, Jon Stewart, needled him, the president declared that he never promised transformational change overnight.

 “You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, ‘Please baby, one more chance,’ ” Mr. Stewart said at one point. At another, he wondered aloud whether Mr. Obama had traded the audacity of 2008 for pragmatism in 2010, offering a platform of “Yes we can, given certain conditions.”

 Mr. Obama paused for a moment. “I think I would say, ‘Yes we can, but —— ”

 Mr. Stewart, laughing, cut him off. The president pushed ahead, finishing his sentence: “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”

 The gentle ribbing was perhaps a price the White House was willing to pay for the opportunity to reach Mr. Stewart’s valuable audience — young people who turned out in droves for the president, but who are deeply dissatisfied with him. Mr. Obama is spending the waning days of the election season trying to motivate that crowd to get to the polls, and he closed the interview by urging them to do just that, telling Mr. Stewart he wanted to make “a plug just to vote.”

 Mr. Stewart, for his part, pressed the president with the standard liberal critique, accusing him of pursuing a legislative agenda that “felt timid at times” — a characterization Mr. Obama fiercely disputed.

 The president wound up defending his health bill, members of Congress and even members of his administration. When Mr. Stewart asked why Mr. Obama, after promising to shake things up, had brought in old Democratic hands like Lawrence H. Summers, the Clinton Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama offered what, for Mr. Summers, was perhaps an unfortunate reply.

 “In fairness,” he said, “Larry Summers did a heck of a job.”

 Late-night television has come a long way since Bill Clinton, then a presidential candidate, played his saxophone for Arsenio Hall in 1992. The lines between entertainment and news are increasingly blurred — in part because Mr. Obama has been willing to take his presidential platform to settings his predecessors might have viewed as unconventional.

 Mr. Obama has appeared as president on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Show with David Letterman”; over the summer, he dished with the doyennes of daytime television on ABC’s “The View.” (“I wanted to pick a show that Michelle actually watches,” he told them.)

 “The Daily Show” interview was taped in the run-up to a rally Mr. Stewart and his fellow Comedy Central host, Stephen Colbert, are hosting Saturday on the National Mall. It went longer than anticipated — so long, in fact, that the show’s producers decided to cut the original introduction Mr. Stewart taped, which featured a riff of the host fiddling with a pen and tapping his fingers as he pretended to make the president wait in the wings, and his introduction of Mr. Obama as “White House chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee’s boss.”

 In the interview, Mr. Obama conceded that he understands the feeling among his supporters that he has not fundamentally changed the way Washington does business.

 “When we promised during the campaign ‘change you can believe in,’ it wasn’t ‘change you can believe in in 18 months,’ ” he said. “It was ‘change you can believe in — but we’re going to have to work for it.’ ” |||||
What is a summary?

– Critics are predictably split on President Obama's much-hyped Daily Show appearance last night, but no one seems to think he single-handedly saved—or doomed—Democrats: Though Jon Stewart and Obama are both funny in their own ways, they managed "to not be very funny together for the show's entire 22 minutes," writes Hank Stuever in the Washington Post. "Obama seemed resiliently cool as ever, ready-made for just about anything one can do on television ... But that anything—a surprise moment, or a difficult question, or a failed attempt at humor—never quite arrived." Also in the Post, Dana Milbank weighs in: "As in his MTV appearance a couple of weeks ago, Obama didn't try to connect with his youthful audience. He was serious and defensive," and even had "a Brownie moment" when he insisted that "Larry Summers did a heckuva job." But at least "Obama has been willing to bring his presidential platform to settings his predecessors might have regarded as unconventional, to say the least," writes Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the New York Times, noting that "the gentle ribbing was perhaps a price the White House was willing to pay for the opportunity to reach Mr. Stewart’s valuable audience." As far as Stewart is concerned, the president's "presence was enough to quiet grumbles from some on the left that an election-eve snark-fest [Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity] made light of the real dangers of Republican control," write Ben Smith and Byron Tau on Politico. "Stewart played a comic, not a courtier, to Obama on his set, but he also let the president appear to be in on the joke." To watch the interview, click here.


Article:
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 New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is expected to announce within days whether he will join the presidential race, amid concerns within his inner circle over the increasingly tight political calendar and the formidable challenges of launching an 11th-hour campaign.

 The governor spent much of the weekend deliberating the logistics of a late bid, in discussions with his aides but also his wife and family, said people who have talked to Mr. Christie's inner circle. Mr. Christie attended an event honoring the New Jersey National Guard Sunday afternoon but didn't respond to shouted questions from reporters about his intentions.

 Operatives familiar ... ||||| Contains periodically archived News Web sites, the web sites of electronic journals and newspapers, radio and television stations, as well as blogs, and other formats published by entities that create, gather and disseminate to the public news, research, opinion and other content that reflects a left / progressive viewpoint. The content of these sites are primarily general interest or multi-issue; similar single issue sites are usually found in the other topically based web archives created by the Tamiment Library. For technical, privacy and other reasons, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. |||||Summary:

– Despite the many, many, many times he has said he's not running, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spent the weekend considering whether he should. He discussed the logistics of a late entrance to the race with his aides as well as his family, sources tell the Wall Street Journal, and he is expected to make an announcement within days. Filing deadlines for New Hampshire, Florida, and South Carolina all loom less than a month away, and Christie would have just three months to launch his campaign, since Florida's primary is now set for Jan. 31 and other primaries could also be pushed to early January—or even late this year. Because of the tight timeline, sources say Christie's aides have become more daunted in recent days. "The afterglow of Nancy Reagan's flattery" at an event last week "has been replaced with the reality of building a state-by-state organization and the abdication of his day job to do this," says one operative. And unlike Bill Clinton, who launched his campaign at a similarly late date but who had already put out feelers and formed an exploratory committee, Christie has apparently not reached out to Republican leaders in the key early states. Says one prominent New Hampshire GOP strategist, "All that I can deduce is he's not running."


– Dining out anytime soon? True/Slant blogger (and former waitress) Susannah Breslin has a little advice on how to treat your server. Check out the full list here. A sampling: Eye contact: Too many people treat servers like they’re invisible. Don't be one of them. “Look your server in the eye. The goal of dining out is great service. Treating your server like a human being is one way to get it.” Tip: At nice spots, it’s 20%, so deal with it. “If I just spent several hours running around … and basically acting like your personal slave for the evening, I’d like to be reimbursed for it.” Speak up: If you don't like something, say so. Competent servers will deal with it because it's in their interests to keep you happy. Don’t make a mess: You may think you’re helping by piling up your scraps and dishes. "You are not helping. You are sabotaging. ... Leave it. Let us get it.” Stay out of the kitchen: Self-explanatory. Don’t be like this guy, who Breslin thinks is both "self-indulgent" and "arrogant."

Expand this summary.

On Saturday night, for the first time in my life, I was kicked out of a restaurant — Restaurant Marc Forgione in TriBeCa.

 It’s a good restaurant, with a great cocktail and a clever bread operation.

 But that’s as far as I got into the meal. About ten minutes after my party of four sat down, we heard yelling — loud, sustained, top-of-lungs yelling — coming from the kitchen. Mr. Forgione was dressing down a member of the staff, in full view of many of the customers. The dining room quieted as patrons exchanged uncomfortable glances.

 No one said a thing though. Soon the target of the chef’s harsh words delivered our amuse-bouche, and the poor guy was so rattled he could barely speak above a mumble.

 A few minutes later, the chef was at it again. Fifteen seconds. Another fifteen. And without much forethought, I pushed back my chair and walked through the open doorway of the kitchen.

 I don’t remember exactly what I said, though I did not raise my voice to the point beyond where people in the kitchen could hear it. I told the chef that his behavior was making me and others uncomfortable. I let him know that I thought it was mean. And I asked him to cut it out. I don’t remember exactly what he said in response, but whatever it was, I found it irritating enough that I reminded him that I was paying to eat there and told him again to stop berating his staff at that volume.

 Maybe 20 seconds after I had returned to my seat, he approached the table. He apologized, barely, and then let me know that he thought it was incredibly rude of me to come into his kitchen and tell him how to do his job. I repeated the fact that he had been ruining my dinner. But his yelling was all in the interest of maintaining quality, he said.

 “I think it’s time for you to go,” he said.

 “Are you kicking me out?” I asked.

 “Yes,” he replied.

 I’m not naive about restaurants. People who work there sometimes yell, though usually out of earshot. And when I eat in a higher-end establishment like this, I try to respect the artistry of the proprietor. I ask to have the food cooked the way the chef thinks it’s best. I don’t ask for salt. I don’t ask for skim. (I do ask to have different gelato flavors in separate bowls, knowing full well that “They don’t do it that way in Italy!” They have it wrong in Italy, too, but I digress.)

 In this particular instance, however, something didn’t feel right. I don’t know if Mr. Forgione had been watching too much Gordon Ramsay on television or had learned the wrong lessons from his mentors. Listening to him in action, however, conjured up the particular type of nausea that results from watching people yank their misbehaving kids around on the subway or seeing my own kid smash a defenseless insect.

 When I called him on Monday to tell him I was writing this post about the evening, Mr. Forgione, in fact, said that I had scolded him like a child on Saturday night. “First and foremost, you came into my kitchen and spoke to me very disrespectfully in front of my cooks,” he said. “The kitchen is a sacred space.” He told me that my reply to his attempts to explain why he was yelling, while I was in the kitchen was, “We’re not interested.” That sounds about right, since we hadn’t come to the restaurant to listen to him yell repeatedly at his staff about whatever it was that he thought they were doing wrong.

 That wasn’t what got us kicked out though, according to Mr. Forgione. He claimed that he didn’t decide to ask us to leave until he explained to us tableside that his yelling was all in the interest of making everything perfect. “Well you aren’t,” he remembers me saying. “And then,” he continued, “you waved a hand in my direction as if I was an annoying bug. Someone who acts like that in my restaurant, I would never serve.”

 As with any confrontation, you always think of ways you could have handled it better in retrospect. It would have been more polite to ask for our friends’ endorsement before marching into the kitchen (Sorry Luke! Sorry Jen!). And as my better half noted later, my comments might have had more moral force had they not been a request at all. I could have simply told him that we weren’t going to sit there and listen to him abuse his employees and that we were leaving. Once I dressed him down in front of his staff, I imagine his manhood suffered enough that he had no choice but to kick us all out, lest he lose face. Perhaps a woman should have gone to talk with him instead, one on one.

 So I could have handled myself better. But my comments hardly rose to the level of disturbance or nastiness that Mr. Forgione displayed. He now says that he was aware of the problem and was planning on making it up later to everyone within earshot by comping dessert and whatnot, even before I invaded his space.

 Still, I’m not sorry I spoke up, and Mr. Forgione wasn’t interested in apologizing to me either.

 Is either one of us right or wrong? What would you have done if you were me, or if you were Mr. Forgione? ||||| I was a waitress for two years. I’ve worked a variety of jobs over the years, from pasta-maker to college teacher, but waitressing was far and away the hardest job I ever had. The hours are grueling, the physical labor is brutal, and suffice to say you learn something of human nature when required to wait on people: People will treat you like crap because they can.

 This is why I was so disgusted when I read New York Times‘ “Your Money” columnist Ron Lieber’s self-indulgent, arrogant “Diner’s Journal” post on getting kicked out of Restaurant Marc Forgione in Tribeca, “Why I got Kicked Out of a Restaurant on Saturday Night.”

 The short version of the story is that Forgione was yelling at a staff member in the kitchen. Apparently, this disturbed Lieber’s dining experience. So, Lieber walked into the kitchen and reprimanded the chef. Either you’ve worked in the restaurant business and get this, or you don’t. No one but the most self-entitled jerk of a customer walks into the kitchen. After some back and forth, Forgione asked Lieber to leave the restaurant. In other words, he kicked him out.

 One problem with working in the restaurant business is that the customer seems particularly inclined to believe he is running the show, when, in fact, he is not. For some reason, that eating, the most intimate of activities, second only to sex, is involved leads people to engage in this type of boorish behavior.

 Lieber’s whiny, unapologetic response, “I’m not sorry I spoke up,” only underscores his role as the classic jerk diner that servers hate. This is the same guy who whips out a pen and paper to calculate the tip, the same idiot who wants to know if he can take the rest of his wine home in a bag, the same fool who asks one too many questions about obscure ingredients on the menu to show off to his obviously bored-to-death date.

 If you don’t want to be the next Lieber, loathed by your server and despised by the kitchen staff, here are a few easy steps to not being the idiot at table 5.

 1. Eye contact. One of the most challenging things about being a waitress is how many people treat you as if you are invisible. They go the entire meal without looking at you once. The incidence of this was so widespread I began to wonder if there was some type of social meaning behind it. I could only guess that eating was intimate enough, it prompted people to feign an intimacy that wasn’t there, to shut out any intruder, especially one who’s hands were uncomfortably close to your food. Look your server in the eye. The goal of dining out is great service. Treating your server like a human being is one way to get it.

 2. Respect the choreography. Assuming you are dining at something other than the International House of Pancakes, say, at a high-end restaurant where you’ll be served a series of courses, you may want to keep in mind that you are engaged in a certain type of dance here. Play your part. Order within a reasonable amount of time if you want to eat before midnight. Depending on how the house works, we often are guessing how long it’s going to take you to eat which course, and if you decide to wait until the last minute to finally order your main course, except to wait a long time for it.

 3. Don’t make a mess. Don’t stick a napkin in a glass. Don’t create a teetering tower of dishes. Don’t pile a bunch of random weird scraps and papers and other gunk on your plate. You are not helping. You are sabotaging. If the server knows what he/she is doing, they are working to keep your table as cleared as possible and your weird rearrangements of random stuff on it is only making their job more difficult. Leave it. Let us get it.

 4. If you don’t like something, say something. Servers want you to enjoy your meal for one reason and one reason only. It increases the likelihood you will leave a bigger tip. If you don’t like it, speak up! As soon as possible. Unless we’re a complete dumbass, we should get on that and give you something that you do like in as timely a fashion as possible. Waiting until you’re done to bellyache about how you really didn’t like this, that, or the other, or, worse yet, dinging the server, tip-wise, because you didn’t like something and never said anything about it, is a dining lose-lose.

 5. The check. Here’s how to pay the check. When it comes, pick up the book, put your credit card or cash in it, and then slide it to the edge of the table, so we know it’s ready. Don’t pick it up, stare at it, and set it back down next to your plate. Don’t leave it sitting there for half an hour. When the book is returned to you, handle it. Sign the right slip. Retrieve your change. Then slide it back out again, so we now it’s done. Otherwise, we will hover, look at you inquisitively, pick it up, see it’s not ready, and put it back down again.

 6. Tip 20 percent or GTFO. The majority of time I spent as a server was at a high-end restaurant. As was the case with fail diner Lieber. Seriously? If you dine at a nice spot, leave a 20-percent minimum tip or dine somewhere else. You’re getting a certain level of food, a certain quality of service, and you’re going to need to pay for that. We both know you know I’m making a few dollars an hour, and if I just spent several hours running around, making you happy, picking up your chewed up food-filled plates, and basically acting like your personal slave for the evening, I’d like to be reimbursed for it.

 7. Stay out of the kitchen. That means you, Lieber. And the rest of you, too. That’s our domain. The chef is yelling at a member of the staff? Welcome to our world. Back here, you’re nothing but in our way. We’re working. If that’s not cool with you, let me come and sit on your desk while you’re writing your money column, randomly poking at your keyboard keys, and waving my hands in your face. In that case, I’m sure your column will come out great.

 Update: Grub Street has more on the matter from Forgione’s point of view: “I wouldn’t take his money.” |||||


Write an article based on this summary:

– Wha? Scotland Yard is sure to set the conspiracy theories in motion with an unusual statement today that it is taking a look at new information about the death of Princess Diana. It wouldn't divulge details, except to say that it was "assessing its relevance and credibility," reports the BBC. Scotland Yard stressed that this doesn't mean the investigation into the 1997 car crash is being reopened, and it added that the new assessment doesn't come under the umbrella of "Operation Paget," a previous police investigation into foul play. But those distinctions probably won't do much to tamp speculation. Enter Sky News, swinging for the fences: "The information, thought to include the allegation that the Princess of Wales, Dodi al Fayed and their driver were killed by a member of the British military, will be assessed by officers from the Specialist Crime and Operations Command." A British jury in 2008 blamed recklessness on the part of Diana and Fayed's driver and on the paparazzi chasing them, notes AP.

Image caption Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed died after leaving the Ritz Hotel in Paris on 31 August 1997

 The Metropolitan Police is assessing new information it has recently received about the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed in 1997.

 Scotland Yard said it was "scoping" the information and "assessing its relevance and credibility".

 It said it was "not a re-investigation" into the deaths of the couple in a Paris car crash on 31 August 1997.

 An inquest in 2008 found they had been unlawfully killed, partly due to the "gross negligence" of their driver.

 In a statement on Saturday evening, the Metropolitan Police said the assessment would be carried out by officers from the specialist crime and operations command.

 It added that the deaths had been "thoroughly investigated and examined" by the inquest held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

 Reports in several British Sunday newspapers suggest there are allegations the military was involved and that information had been passed to the police by an Army source.

 A Met Police spokesman said that the force would "not discuss the source of the information" it was assessing.

 A royal spokeswoman also said there would be no comment on the matter from Prince William or Prince Harry, or from Clarence House.

 A spokesman for Dodi's father Mohamed Al Fayed said he had no comment to make, but said he would be "interested in seeing the outcome", adding that he trusted the Met to investigate the information "with vigour".

 Paparazzi on motorbikes

 Scotland Yard said its assessment did not come under Operation Paget - the police investigation into allegations that the princess and Mr Al Fayed, her boyfriend, were murdered.

 Image caption The car carrying Princess Diana crashed in a tunnel

 It was a theory endorsed at the time by Mohamed Al Fayed, the then owner of London store Harrods.

 But in December 2006, the report into Operation Paget said it had found no evidence of murder and dismissed all conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths.

 Operation Paget concluded, just like the French investigation in 1999, that driver Henri Paul had been drunk and driving at excessive speed.

 Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection, told ITV news the deaths were "an accident by any definition, and three separate inquiries... have come to the same independent conclusion".

 He added: "I am absolutely convinced this was an accident so I'm mystified, after 13 years, how any new information can possibly allege anything other than that this was a tragic accident."

 Unlawful killing

 Princess Diana, the former wife of the Prince of Wales and the mother of Princes William and Harry, was 36 when she died alongside Mr Al-Fayed, 42.

 Mr Paul was driving when their hired Mercedes crashed into a pillar in Paris's Pont de l'Alma tunnel.

 The crash happened after the couple had left the Ritz Hotel and were pursued by paparazzi on motorbikes. Mr Al-Fayed's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only survivor.

 At the inquest into their deaths, the jury found the couple had been unlawfully killed and the deaths were the result of "gross negligence" on the part of Mr Paul and the paparazzi.

 The paparazzi pursuit, Mr Paul's drink-driving and a lack of seatbelts contributed to the deaths, the jury said.

 The inquest lasted more than three months and heard from 250 witnesses.

 After the hearing it was announced that its cost had reached £4.5m, with a further £8m spent on the Metropolitan Police investigation. ||||| British police say they are examining newly received information relating to the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, and that officers are assessing the information's "relevance and credibility."

 Scotland Yard declined to provide details about the information, only saying Saturday in a statement that the assessment will be carried out by officers from its specialist crime and operations unit.

 The force stressed that it was not reopening the investigation into the 1997 deaths of Diana and Fayed, who were killed in a car crash in Paris.

 In 2008, a British jury ruled that Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her companion, Fayed, were unlawfully killed due to reckless speed and drinking by their driver, and by the reckless pursuit of paparazzi chasing them. |||||