Article:
Former WWE wrestler Brian Christopher, the son of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, died Sunday at the age of 46. (Photo courtesy WWE)

 Former World Wrestling Entertainment wrestler Brian Christopher (real name Brian Lawler), died Sunday after hanging himself during an attempted suicide in a Memphis, Tennessee, jail, according to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer. Christopher, the son of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, was 46 years old. Christopher was placed on life support and surrounded by his family at the time of his death, according to TMZ Sports.

 “Corrections officers administered CPR until paramedics arrived,” the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in a statement. “Lawler was transported to Regional One Medical Center in Memphis where he died Sunday afternoon.”

 “WWE is saddened to learn that Brian Christopher Lawler, who is best known in WWE as Too Cool’s Grandmaster Sexay, has passed away,” the WWE said in a statement. “Lawler, who is the son of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, competed during the height of the Attitude Era. WWE extends its condolences to Lawler’s family, friends and fans.”

 Why was Brian Christopher in jail?

 According to TMZ Sports, Christopher was arrested on July 7 for DUI and evading Tennessee police officers. A 12-ounce can of alcohol was reportedly found open in his car’s center console and his bail was set at $40,000. In June, Christopher was arrested for allegedly not having the funds to cover a hotel bill at the Hampton Inn in Memphis, Tennessee, according to TMZ Sports.

 Brian Christopher’s WWE run as part of Too Cool

 Christopher went by Grandmaster Sexay, one-half of the Too Cool tag team along with Scotty 2 Hotty. The duo would eventually add Rikishi into the mix as the now trio were best known for their hip-hop inspired choreographed dance routines after matches. In 2000, Too Cool would win the WWE Tag Team titles for the first and only time, defeating Edge and Christian.

 Story Continues

 Brian Christopher was one of three deaths in the wrestling world

 WWE Hall of Fame wrestler Nikolai Volkoff (real name Josip Nikolai Peruzović) died at the age of 70, the WWE announced on Sunday. Volkoff played a larger-than-life Russian villain and was one-half of a tag team with The Iron Sheik. Volkoff was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005 after a wrestling career of 40-plus years.

 Brickhouse Brown (real name Fredrick Seawright) died Sunday at the age of 57 from cancer, according to the Wrestling Observer. Brown was best known for his time in the USWA, AWA and CWA.

 Twitter reaction from the wrestling world on the deaths of Brian Christopher, Nikolai Volkoff and Brickhouse Brown

 1st time I worked with Brian Christopher was in Louisville I told him "Nobody wants to work with u. Let's have a great match and show them u can. Trust me, please. I'm not out to bury you" He did and we had many great matches. He was at times misunderstood. #RIPBrianChristopher — Tom Prichard (@drtomprichard) July 29, 2018

 Condolences to Brian Christopher family and the family of Nikolai Volkoff. — Honky Tonk Man® (@OfficialHTM) July 29, 2018

 Rest In Peace

 Nikolai Volkoff

 Brian Christopher

 Brickhouse Brown

 Each in their own way contributed to this world of wrestling that we inhabit, and have left memories that will last. — Christopher Daniels (@facdaniels) July 29, 2018

 Two men from different generations of wrestling industry both extremely successful careers have left us unfortunately. I knew Brian during my WWE years & shared lots of laughs with him. My deepest sympathies to the families & friends of #BrianChristopher & #NikolaiVolkoff – RIP — TAZ (@OfficialTAZ) July 29, 2018

 RIP Brian Christopher. I think I had every piece of Too Cool merch in 2000. — Zack Ryder (@ZackRyder) July 29, 2018

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  ||||| MY BEST FRIEND. MY PARTNER. MY BROTHER. WE GET MORE HEAT THAN ANYONE ON EARTH. I TRUST HIM WITH MY LIFE. HE TAKE CARE OF ME WHEN I WAS DOWN. I MISS YOU FOREVER pic.twitter.com/pp7ZgQRDnb ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

 World Wrestling Entertainment confirmed that two of its former stars died Sunday in separate incidents.

 Brian Christopher Lawler, known as Grandmaster Sexay, died at age 46, and former wrestler Josip Peruzovic, who played beloved Soviet heel Nikolai Volkoff, died at age 70, it said.

 Peruzovic was a member of a WWE tag team with the infamous Iron Sheik. Together, the two played villainous characters in battles against well-liked wrestling heroes like Hulk Hogan, Sgt. Slaughter and Bruno Sammartino.

 Josip Peruzovic, aka Nikolai Volkoff, at Wizard World's Philadelphia Comic Con in Philadelphia in June 2011. Gilbert Carrasquillo / FilmMagic - Getty Images file

 Peruzovic retired and joined the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005 after an in-ring career that spanned nearly 40 years. His wife said that Peruzovic had heart problems and that she found that he was not responsive when she tried to bring him medicine, according to The Associated Press.

 "As one of the greatest villains sports-entertainment had ever seen, Volkoff's infamous rendition of the Soviet National Anthem before his matches made him an instant icon in the eyes of the WWE Universe as a Superstar they truly loved to hate," WWE said in a statement.

 In 2006, Peruzovic made an unsuccessful run for a House seat in the Maryland General Assembly, the AP reported.

 Meanwhile, Lawler, the son of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry "The King" Lawler, gained popularity playing his Grandmaster Sexay character.

 As a wrestler for WWE, Lawler was a member of the "Too Cool" tag team and "competed during the height of the Attitude Era," according to the wrestling organization.

 After leaving wrestling, Lawler had fallen into some legal trouble.

 Corrections officers found Lawler attempting to hang himself in his jail cell, NBC affiliate WMC of Memphis, Tennessee, reported Sunday. Hardeman County jail records confirmed that Lawler was arrested July 7 on charges of DUI and evading arrest.

 According to WMC, officers administered CPR until emergency services arrived, but Lawler died at a hospital on Sunday afternoon. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating.

 WWE shared its sadness and extended their condolences to Lawler's his family, friends and fans. ||||| Brian Lawler, son of Jerry "The King" Lawler and former WWE wrestler, is in critical condition at a Tennessee hospital. (Photo: Submitted photo)

 Former WWE star Brian Lawler, the son of Jerry "The King" Lawler, died Sunday, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

 Brian C. Lawler, 46, had been held at the Hardeman County Jail on DUI-related charges and was found Saturday evening hanging in his cell.

 "Corrections officers administered CPR until paramedics arrived," the TBI said in a statement. "Lawler was transported to Regional One Medical Center in Memphis where he died Sunday afternoon."

 Reaction: Hulk Hogan, Triple H among many WWE stars mourning Brian Lawler's death on social media

 Mark Davidson, the 25th District Attorney General, requested that special agents with the TBI investigate, and the investigation remains ongoing.

 RIP Brian Christopher thank you for always stealing the show my brother only love HH — Hulk Hogan (@HulkHogan) July 29, 2018

 Lawler's death comes less than a month after he was arrested and charged on July 7 with DUI, evading arrest and driving on a revoked license in Hardeman County, which is about an hour east of Memphis.

 The Hardeman County Sheriff's Office confirmed Sunday that Lawler was being held on that case at the time of this incident.

 Lawler spent several years in the WWE from 1997-2001. He was known as “Grandmaster Sexay” and was part of the Too Cool tag team with “Scotty 2 Hotty” that won the tag team championship in 2000.

 Also Sunday, WWE announced that Josip Nikolai Peruzovic, a Hall of Famer who wrestled as Nikolai Volkoff for more than three decades, has died at 70.

 Lawler's pro wrestling career began in the United States Wrestling Association, where he performed as “Too Sexy” Brian Christopher.

 "RIP Brian Christopher," Hulk Hogan tweeted. "Thank you for always stealing the show my brother."

 Lawler spent two years on TNA’s roster before making appearances on the independent circuit for more than a decade. He returned to the WWE in 2014 for a brief Too Cool reunion appearance.

 He was arrested in June on a charge of failure to pay an $800 bill with a friend at the Hampton Inn in Downtown Memphis.

 More:Jerry Lawler's son arrested, failed to pay hotel, police say

 In February, he was hospitalized following a fight at an Indiana hotel room with former TNA wrestler Chase Stevens.

 "WWE is saddened to learn that Brian Christopher Lawler, who is best known in WWE as Too Cool’s Grandmaster Sexay, has passed away," WWE said in a statement Sunday. "Lawler, who is the son of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, competed during the height of the Attitude Era. WWE extends its condolences to Lawler’s family, friends and fans."

 On Monday, Hardeman County Sheriff John Doolen issued a statement saying Lawler was placed in a cell by himself because of how well-known he was. He also added Lawler was not on suicide watch because there was no indication the former WWE star was suicidal.

 Brandon J. Shields of the Jackson Sun and Patrick Graziosi contributed to this report.

 Read or Share this story: https://memne.ws/2LHR1U2 ||||| BALTIMORE (AP) — Josip Peruzovic, the former pro wrestler known for playing beloved villain Nikolai Volkoff, has died. He was 70.

 His wife Lynn Peruzovic confirmed his death Sunday. She says he has had heart problems, and that when she went to give him medicine he was not responsive.

 World Wrestling Entertainment says Peruzovic was "one of the greatest villains sports-entertainment had ever seen." He was known for singing the onetime Soviet Union's national anthem before matches and for his tag team alliance with another wrestler known as The Iron Sheik.

 WWE says his career spanned the better part of 40 years and featured showdowns with wrestlers such as Hulk Hogan.

 In 2006, Peruzovic made an unsuccessful run for a House seat in the Maryland General Assembly. ||||| WWE is saddened to learn that Brian Christopher Lawler, who is best known in WWE as Too Cool’s Grandmaster Sexay, has passed away. Lawler, who is the son of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, competed during the height of the Attitude Era.

 WWE extends its condolences to Lawler’s family, friends and fans. |||||Summary:

– The professional wrestling world lost two of its own over the weekend, including the son of WWE legend Jerry Lawler. Per Yahoo Sports and the Commercial Appeal, Brian Christopher Lawler, 46, was found hanging in his jail cell in Memphis, Tenn., Saturday evening and died the next day. "Corrections officers administered CPR until paramedics arrived," the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says in a statement. "Lawler was transported to Regional One Medical Center in Memphis, where he died Sunday afternoon." Lawler, who once performed for the WWE as Grandmaster Sexay on the Too Cool tag team, had been behind bars after being arrested on July 7 and charged with DUI, driving with a revoked license, and evading arrest. "WWE is saddened to learn that Brian Christopher Lawler … has passed away," the WWE said in a statement. "WWE extends its condolences to Lawler's family, friends, and fans." Big names in wrestling also paid their condolences, including Hulk Hogan, who tweeted, "RIP Brian Christopher thank you for always stealing the show my brother only love HH." The WWE also announced the death of "one of the greatest villains sports-entertainment had ever seen," per NBC News: that of Josip Peruzovic, known in the ring as Soviet heel Nikolai Volkoff. The AP reports that the wife of the 70-year-old Hall of Famer, who was once on a tag team with the Iron Sheik, found Peruzovic unresponsive when she went to give him medication he took for heart problems. The Iron Sheik paid an all-caps tribute to his former partner on Twitter, noting, "I MISS YOU FOREVER."


Article:

Saturn's biggest ring just broke its own record. Scientists have found that the planet's Phoebe ring is more than twice the thickness once thought – even though it can’t be seen with the human eye.

 The study, published in the journal Nature, also finds that this oversized ring is made mostly of tiny particles. The findings could shed fresh light on the evolution of the Saturnian ring system.

 “I was giving talks saying Saturn has a giant invisible ring, which makes you sound just perfectly crazy,” said lead author Douglas Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “It is 10 to 20 times larger than the second-biggest ring, so this thing is absolutely gargantuan.”

 Many of Saturn’s rings seem to hug the planet, forming the beautiful striped disc for which the gas giant is so well known. But in 2009, NASA’s infrared-sensing Spitzer Space Telescope picked up another ring so large that the entire planet and its main rings appear as a small dot in the middle.

 The ring is difficult to detect in visible light (NASA’s Cassini spacecraft did so a few years later), but it can be clearly seen as a ghostly halo at infrared wavelengths.

 Hamilton and colleagues first went looking for this "giant invisible ring" because of the strange two-tone coloring of Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons. One side is pale, but the other side of the moon is dark, as if covered with soot. The scientists theorized that unseen particles from farther out were hitting Iapetus and blackening one side. (Iapetus is tidally locked with Saturn and can't rotate fast enough to get an all-around coating.)

 “If that material was coming inward and coating the face of Iapetus, then maybe we could see the ring,” Hamilton said, and the team started searching. “Usually those things don’t pay off, but this one did.”

 At the time, they estimated that the ring stretched from 4.8 million to 7.76 million miles, though with Spitzer's relatively narrow field of view, they couldn't say how thick it really was.

 Now, with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope, they have found that it stretches from about 3.75 million to 10.1 million miles – a little beyond Phoebe, a far-out moon that is the same color as the stuff in the ring, and is probably the source for the dark material.

 While the Phoebe ring is enormous, the particles within are surprisingly tiny – the scientists estimate that the vast majority of them, roughly 90%, are smaller than the size of a soccer ball.

 Understanding why the particle size distribution is so skewed could offer researchers “a window into the history of the Saturn system,” Hamilton said.

 Follow @aminawrite for more science news. ||||| WISE Band 4 mosaic of the Phoebe ring. a, Individual WISE frames manually combined: scattered light from Saturn forms the large white overexposed blob with a black centre while four diagonal diffraction spikes radiate outward. Bright reflections of Saturn are visible as smaller white lumps with black centres at the six and twelve o’clock positions. Iapetus (black dot) and the more distant Phoebe (white dot) are visible at nine o’clock. The Phoebe ring is the white, horizontally oriented 550RS × 40RS rectangle. b, We subtract ±90° rotations of the top frame from itself, yielding clean and cluttered ring ansae (the apparent ends of edge-on rings); here we stitch the two clean ansae together to significantly reduce scattered light and reveal the ring’s inner regions. Distance scale applies to a and b. Credit: (c) Nature 522, 185–187 (11 June 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14476 (Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with members affiliated with the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia and Caltech, has found that the outermost ring of Saturn is much bigger than had been previously thought. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes how they studied the ring using an infrared telescope and what they believe caused its immense size to come about.

 Back in 2009, a team of researchers working with NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope discovered that there was an outer ring circling Saturn that had not been known to exist—made mostly of extremely tiny dark dust particles, the ring was difficult to see. They estimated at the time that the ring was likely over two hundred times the radius of its host planet. In this new effort, the researchers studied images taken from NASA's WISE probe, which has also been taking infrared pictures. Those pictures, the team reports, suggest the ring is actually over 270 times the radius of Saturn, which mean it stretches from almost four million miles from the planet to just over ten million miles, making it approximately ten times the size of the E ring, until this new discovery, Saturn's largest ring. Putting it into perspective, if Saturn were merely the size of a basketball, this new outer ring would extend nearly two thirds the length of a football field away from it.

 The ring has only been revealed by infrared cameras because the dust particles in it absorb heat from the sun—such particles the researchers report are extremely small, just microns in size. They also report that there are some other much larger, though far less in number particles, some as large as soccer balls. Because of the huge distance between the ring and planet, the researchers theorize that the material in the ring is probably very old, perhaps in the billions of years. They also suspect the tiny particles are material ejected from the distant moon Phoebe.

 Prior to the discovery of Saturn's largest ring, it was believed material ejected from moons at such a distance would coalesce into a new moon, rather than form a ring—now it appears such theories will have to be rethought. Also, because of similarities between Saturn's moons and Jupiter's moons, the researchers suspect Jupiter likely has a massive unseen ring around it as well.

 Explore further: Image: Groovy rings of Saturn

 More information: Small particles dominate Saturn's Phoebe ring to surprisingly large distances, Nature 522, 185–187 (11 June 2015) DOI: 10.1038/nature14476

 Abstract

 Saturn's faint outermost ring, discovered in 2009 (ref. 1), is probably formed by particles ejected from the distant moon Phoebe2, 3. The ring was detected1 between distances of 128 and 207 Saturn radii (RS = 60,330 kilometres) from the planet, with a full vertical extent of 40RS, making it well over ten times larger than Saturn's hitherto largest known ring, the E ring. The total radial extent of the Phoebe ring could not, however, be determined at that time, nor could particle sizes be significantly constrained. Here we report infrared imaging of the entire ring, which extends from 100RS out to a surprisingly distant 270RS. We model the orbital dynamics of ring particles launched from Phoebe, and construct theoretical power-law profiles of the particle size distribution. We find that very steep profiles fit the data best, and that elevated grain temperatures, arising because of the radiative inefficiency of the smallest grains, probably contribute to the steepness. By converting our constraint on particle sizes into a form that is independent of the uncertain size distribution, we determine that particles with radii greater than ten centimetres, whose orbits do not decay appreciably inward over 4.5 billion years, contribute at most about ten per cent to the cross-sectional area of the ring's dusty component.

  ||||| Rings around planets are supposed to stay close to home, as any Astro 101 textbook will tell you. Once they venture too far afield from their gravitational overlord, conventional astronomical wisdom dictates that they will collapse and form new satellites.

 “That does a really good job of explaining rings—except for this one,” says Douglas Hamilton, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland. Hamilton and colleagues describe Saturn’s biggest, strangest, most recently-discovered ring in a study published today in Nature. The so-called Phoebe ring is not only bigger than the researchers thought, it appears to be made of unusually fine particles—particles that continually collide with Saturn’s moon Iapetus as it circles the planet, turning the moon’s leading face black.

 Hamilton was part of the team that discovered the Phoebe ring in 2009, with help from the Spitzer Space Telescope. They wouldn’t have found it except for that weird pattern on Iapetus’ surface: one face an icy white, the other inky black. Like Earth’s own moon, Iapetus keeps one constant face toward its planet. So one side—the darkened one—is forever leading the charge through space. Phoebe, a dark-as-coal moon further away from Saturn than Iapetus, was the second piece of the puzzle.

 “You can imagine something big smashed into Phoebe a billion years ago, and all of this debris was flung out,” Hamilton says. When he calculated how long it would take for this debris to be cleaned up (either by collapsing into a new satellite or to fall to Saturn) he found that it would take a shockingly long time: about 10 billion years. That’s longer than the solar system has existed. “We realized that all of the debris coating the face of Iapetus, that didn’t happen long ago. It’s going on now,” he says. So his team started searching for the source of the material painting the moon black. “Finding it was really gratifying.”

 That was six years ago. Back then, when his team first wrote about their findings, the only available data on this vanishingly faint ring came in the form of a small cross-section. For Hamilton the picture felt “not much bigger than a postage stamp.” Now, using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft launched in 2009, they’ve gathered a complete view of Phoebe’s enormous ring. “It was immense beforehand, and we just made it even bigger,” Hamilton says.

 The Phoebe ring, they now know, is 30 percent larger than previous estimates, covering a section of sky equal to more than 500 times the size of Saturn. That makes it the largest ring—and possibly the slowest developing—ever discovered. “The thing that makes this unique is that, because it’s far from the planet, time scales are really slow,” Hamilton says. “Anything that comes off Phoebe just stays out there.”

 No other rings like this have been found, though theoretically they may exist. Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames, says that although the evidence is strong that much of the material in the ring comes from Phoebe, he’d like to see closer imaging: Perhaps some of Saturn’s more distant satellites (the planet has 53 moons in total) are contributing material as well.

 Phoebe’s ring is “fantastically faint,” in the words of Luke Dones, astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute. While its mere detection is impressive, it may also point the way toward understanding debris disks around other stars, which could contain unseen planets. Even in our own solar system, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune may have similar, albeit fainter and more spread out, rings. “There we expect much wider rings,” Hamilton says. “Maybe ring isn’t even the right word anymore. Maybe we should call them clouds. Those are much harder to detect and convince yourself that they’re real.”

 For Hamilton, the Phoebe ring’s quirks are is a reminder that the universe still holds a lot of surprises. “We see it over and over again with exoplanets where you find them doing something you’d never expect, just because planets in our solar system don’t do that,” he says. “This is another reminder that there are lots of mysteries out there—we don’t understand everything yet.” |||||
What is a summary?

– About six years ago, scientists discovered a huge ring around Saturn that also happened to be invisible to the naked eye. Now, they've learned that it's much bigger than they thought, and their theory on how it came to be might change some thinking about planetary rings and moons. Scientists previously estimated the ring to be about 200 times the radius of Saturn, but now they say it's 30% larger, or about 270 times the radius, they write in Nature. It stretches more than 10 million miles, which a post at Phys.org puts into perspective: "If Saturn were merely the size of a basketball, this new outer ring would extend nearly two thirds the length of a football field away from it." Or as lead author Douglas Hamilton puts it in the Los Angeles Times: “It is 10 to 20 times larger than the second-biggest ring, so this thing is absolutely gargantuan.” Researchers also found that the ring is made of up surprisingly small particles, with only about 10% of them larger than a soccer ball. They suspect the material, which is quite spread out within the ring, comes from the Saturn moon Phoebe, but it was previously believed that debris ejected at such a distance would form a moon rather than a ring. "Now it appears such theories will have to be rethought," says the Phys.org post. The ring can be detected only in infrared wavelengths. Based on all this, it's possible that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune have similar rings, reports Wired. “Maybe ring isn’t even the right word anymore," says Hamilton, "Maybe we should call them clouds. Those are much harder to detect and convince yourself that they’re real.” (Another of Saturn's moons might be able to support life.)


– The US gained two new citizens of note on Thursday: Viktor and Amalija Knavs, parents of first lady Melania Trump. The couple are natives of Slovenia, where they raised Melania, but have been in the US for more than a decade, says their immigration lawyer, per CNBC. Their path to citizenship "was no different than anybody else's," adds Michael Wildes. The couple reportedly live in the DC suburbs and are frequently seen out with their daughter and grandson, Barron. The couple's exact path to citizenship isn't clear, but one likely possibility is that their daughter's citizenship helped them get green cards first, reports CNBC. As CNN notes, critics have pointed out that President Trump wants to end that type of family-based migration.

Expand this summary.

The parents of first lady Melania Trump became naturalized U.S. citizens on Thursday, taking the oath in a private ceremony in New York, according to their attorney.

 Viktor and Amalija Knavs are originally from Slovenia but have lived in the United States for over a decade, during which time they gained permanent legal residency, said Michael Wildes, the couple's immigration lawyer.

 Wildes told reporters the couple "have travailed a wonderful journey like millions have, in getting citizenship and waiting the requisite period of time."

 He said that despite having the president of the United States for a son-in-law, the Knavses followed a process to gain their citizenship that "was no different than anybody else's."

 The White House declined to comment on the Knavses' newly acquired citizenship status, saying they were "not part of the administration and deserve privacy."

 After living between Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago for several years, Viktor and Amalija Knavs reportedly moved to the Washington suburbs following Trump's inauguration,and are frequently spotted traveling with the first lady and the Trumps' son, Barron Trump.

 The question of how the Knavses originally gained their green cards has become a controversial one since Trump won the presidency on an anti-immigration platform. Trump has frequently railed against the family visa system, or so-called chain migration, which permits U.S. citizens to sponsor their family members for visas.

 Even so, experts say chain migration is the most likely way the Knavses gained their permanent residency in the United States. ||||| (CNN) President Donald Trump's in-laws are officially United States citizens, obtaining their citizenship through the sponsorship of their adult daughter, one of the very categories of family visas that the administration has sought to end.

 "It went well and they are very grateful and appreciative of this wonderful day for their family," he said in a statement to CNN.

 The first lady's office declined to comment.

 Viktor and Amalija Knavs, who are from Slovenia, had been living in the United States with green cards and have been frequently spotted in Washington since their son-in-law assumed the presidency.

 A source with direct knowledge of Melania Trump's parents and their immigration status told CNN that Melania Trump sponsored her parents for their green cards, a status that allowed them to live and work in the US indefinitely and paved the way for citizenship. That type of family visa is exactly one of the categories that Trump and his allies have tried to repeal, saying they are harmful to the US.

 Wildes wouldn't comment on how the Knavs received their green cards or citizenship Thursday, but criticized the Trump administration's immigration policies to CNN.

 "I believe strongly in the principles of family reunification, which is a bedrock of immigration policy and law and has brought millions of people happily to our shores," Wildes said.

 Pressed on the fact that the President has harshly criticized family-based migration and regularly refers to it as "chain migration," Wildes responded: "I can't comment on the President's politics when it comes to my clients but I have stood up against the President's immigration policies personally."

 There are only a handful of ways that immigrants to the US can obtain green cards, and the largest share of them each year are given out based on familial connections. A smaller number go to immigrants based on their employment, and other categories include refugees and other special cases. Advocates for restricting legal immigration have pointed to the imbalance in favor of family connections as evidence of the need for reform, calling for a "merit-based" system that would choose immigrants based on need in the US.

 The US allows a number of ways for US citizens and legal permanent residents to sponsor family members to come to the US permanently, including categories for parents, adult siblings and adult children, married and unmarried.

 Trump and his congressional allies have fought to slash that dramatically, limiting sponsorship to spouses and minor children, including dropping the threshold for minor children from 21 to 18. Experts estimate that could cut overall immigration to the US by 40% to 50%, if those green cards are not reallocated to another category. Trump has advocated a "merit-based" system, but has not proposed any method of admitting immigrants to the US to replace those categories.

 Viktor and Amalija Knavs, 73 and 71 years old, respectively, are retired, and they maintain regular contact with the Trump family, often traveling with the first family on trips to Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, New Jersey. |||||


Article:

[Read our latest coverage of the fatal fire in Colts Neck, N.J.]

 Two adults and two children were found dead on Tuesday after a possible arson fire engulfed a large, stately home in central New Jersey — hours after another fire erupted at a house owned by a relative, officials said.

 Officials are investigating both blazes to determine if they are linked, the Monmouth County prosecutor, Christopher J. Gramiccioni, said at a news conference.

 “That remains to be seen,” he said, “but that is an option or an angle we continue to pursue.”

 The deadly fire that broke out in Colts Neck, N.J., around lunchtime and continued to burn into the evening was being investigated as a possible arson, Mr. Gramiccioni said.

 [What you need to know to start your day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

 Mr. Gramiccioni said three of the bodies were found inside the home in Colts Neck, roughly 50 miles southwest of New York City. The fourth, a man, was found dead outside the burning house. Officials have not released the names of the victims. ||||| UPDATE: Colts Neck fatal fire mystery deepens as brother is charged with setting his own house ablaze

 Keith Caneiro grew up in Brooklyn and was the best man in his brother's wedding.

 Caneiro, whom a source says was found dead outside his Colts Neck mansion on Tuesday, was the owner of a technology firm and a pest control company in Asbury Park, according to public records and social media. He also dabbled in real estate.

 Caneiro, 50, his wife Jennifer Caneiro, 45, and two of their children died in an apparent quadruple homicide at the family's sprawling estate on Willow Brook Road, discovered after a fire swept through the home, a law enforcement source told NJ Advance Media

 The source said that Keith Caneiro, who was found on the home's front lawn, had suffered a gunshot wound that did not appear to be self-inflicted.

 Keith Caneiro is listed as the owner of both the technology firm, Square One, and EcoStar Pest Management in Asbury Park, working both businesses with his brother.

 He had operated Square One, in Asbury Park since 1987, according to his LinkedIn profile.

 Records show Caneiro also has an active real estate license. A professional real estate website registered with his name as the web address advertises an affiliation with Keller Williams Realty.

 Jennifer Caneiro grew up on Staten Island as Jennifer Karidis, her maiden name, records show.

 Photos of the Caneiros on Facebook show a happy family playing in the kitchen, relaxing with loved ones and enjoying trips overseas.

 Caneiro's brother, Paul Caneiro, of Ocean Township, is involved in both the technology firm and the pest control operation, according to Jared DeVincenzo, who works in the building which houses both businesses. The pair grew up in Brooklyn before both marrying women from Staten Island and moving to New Jersey.

 Paul Caneiro's home on Tilton Drive was also the scene of a fire Tuesday morning, one that is now also under investigation by the prosecutor's office for possible links to the Colts Neck fire.

 Whether the two fires are related "remains to be seen," Gramiccioni told reporters.

 Neighbors told NJ Advance Media Paul Caneiro appeared visibly distressed, with "tears in his eyes," after the fire broke out before dawn at his house.

 Neighbors said he stayed at the scene until about noon. He and his wife had not returned home as of Tuesday evening.

 Neighbors described the Ocean Township couple, who have two older children, as friendly and helpful, and said Paul Caneiro had been injured in a car accident in Asbury Park a few years ago.

 When Paul Caneiro married his wife Susan in 1991, his brother Keith served as his best man, in a wedding officiated by the mayor of Shrewsbury, according to the couple's wedding announcement in the Staten Island Advance.

 Keith Caneiro's LinkedIn profile says he graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 2014, and was either enrolled or recently completed a master's program at the university.

 Both his LinkedIn profile and Facebook page also indicate he had taken courses at Harvard Business School.

 He graduated from John Dewey High School in Gravesend, Brooklyn.

 Caneiro purchased the family's home on Willow Brook Road in 1999, according to Monmouth County property records. He and his wife paid off the $1.8 million mortgage two years ago.

 Prosecutor's office officials indicate they expect to release more information Wednesday.

 Sophie Nieto-Munoz contributed to this report.

 Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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– A convoluted story out of New Jersey, where police have charged Paul Caneiro with aggravated arson in connection with a fire at his own home—one that the Asbury Park Press reports occurred seven hours before a fatal fire at his brother's mansion. Around 5am Tuesday, firefighters responded to Paul Caneiro's Ocean Township home and put out flames on the roof. Around 12:30pm, fire broke out at brother Keith Caneiro's home 12 miles away in Colts Neck, where police say a quadruple homicide occurred: Keith Caneiro, 50—found on the front lawn with a gunshot wound that didn't appear to be self-inflicted, per NJ.com—died along with his wife, 45-year-old Jennifer Caneiro, and their son and daughter, who were found inside, a law enforcement source tells the Asbury Park Press. The New York Times describes both children as under the age of 10. The brothers appear to have been close. Born in Brooklyn, they shared a Staten Island address for more than a decade before moving to New Jersey with their wives, per NJ.com. They would take up separate abodes: Paul in a single-family home on Tilton Drive in suburban Ocean Township, Keith in a $1.5 million mansion in upscale Colts Neck, home to celebrities like Bruce Springsteen. But Paul would still work for Keith— owner of EcoStar Pest Management and apparent web development company Square One—who also served as his best man. "They're wonderful people," says a neighbor of Paul, who saw family members Tuesday outside the house believed to have suffered damage to its back and attic, per the Times. "It's pretty shocking stuff." An earlier version of this story erroneously reported Paul Caneiro as being charged in the Colts Neck fire. (More on the case here.)


AP Photo Watchdog: Secret Service leaked information on Chaffetz

 The Secret Service leaked sensitive personal information to the press about Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz as the Utah Republican was investigating the beleaguered agency, an inspector general's report said Wednesday.

 The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General issued a report on Wednesday that accused Secret Service Assistant Director Edward Lowery and other agency officials of plotting to leak information about Chaffetz, including his unsuccessful attempt to join the organization.

 Story Continued Below

 The leaks were a highly unusual breach of decorum. Lawmakers often battle with agencies but the fights mostly stay above board and focus on policy, rather than descending into leaking private information.

 The report found that between March 24 and April 2, 2015, 45 Secret Service employees accessed “sensitive personal information” on Chaffetz nearly 60 times. Only 4 of the 45 employees had “an arguable legitimate need to access the information,” the report found.

 The IG also found that there was widespread dissemination of the personal information.

 Lowry, in one instance, emailed employees saying, “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out. Just to be fair.”

 Chaffetz blasted the agency for the alleged leaks.

 “Certain lines should never be crossed. The unauthorized access and distribution of my personal information crossed that line. It was a tactic designed to intimidate and embarrass me and frankly, it is intimidating,” the Utah Republican said in a statement. “It’s scary to think about all the possible dangers in having your personal information exposed.”

 The Oversight Committee launched an investigation into the Secret Service earlier this year after a series of embarrassing security incidents at the White House. Chaffetz helped uncover reports that a knife-wielding man got much further into the White House than initially reported and that an armed man was allowed into an elevator with President Barack Obama.

 The panel is also investigating reports that Secret Service agents paid for sex during a presidential visit to Colombia

 Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the panel, said the Secret Service should issue an “immediate apology.”

 “Although the Inspector General identified no evidence of political motivation or influence, I believe in fundamental fairness, and those who are unwilling or unable to meet the highest of ethical standards should not be a part of the Secret Service,” Cummings said in a statement.

 Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy said he takes “employee misconduct very seriously” and will ensure the involved parties are punished.

 “I again apologize to Representative Chaffetz for this wholly avoidable and embarrassing misconduct,” Clancy said. “Additionally, I will continue to review policies and practices to address employee misconduct and demand the highest level of integrity of all our employees.”

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 The Secret Service apologized Wednesday to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a prominent critic of the agency, for violating federal privacy law by improperly accessing sensitive personal information about him dozens of times in little more than a single week.

 Chaffetz, R-Utah — who has aggressively pursued allegations of Secret Service misconduct as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — called the unauthorized retrieval of his unsuccessful application to join the Secret Service in 2003 "a tactic designed to intimidate and embarrass me."

 "It's scary to think about all the possible dangers in having your personal information exposed," Chaffetz said in a statement late Wednesday afternoon. "The work of the committee, however, will continue. I remain undeterred in conducting proper and rigorous oversight."

 Later, in a short interview with NBC News, the congressman reiterated how chilling the report was.

 "It's a bit scary. If they would do this to me, I just, I shuddered to think what they might be doing to other people," he said. "I'd like to tell you how tough I am, but it's scary, and it's intimidating, and I will continue to investigate the Secret Service and others, but this should have never ever happened."

 The improper handling of Chaffetz's personal information was confirmed Wednesday in a 29-page report by the inspector general's office of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Secret Service.

 Related: Read the Entire Inspector General's Report (PDF)

 The report discloses an email in which Ed Lowery, the agency's assistant director for training, wrote that "some information that he might be find embarrassing needs to get out."

 The report says Roth told investigators he believed at the time that such disclosures would be "inappropriate" and explained that his email was a human reaction by someone frustrated by "stress and ... anger."

 The report specifically said Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy, whom President Barack Obama appointed in February to clean up a long series of scandals at the agency, was not aware of the improper behavior.

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 When these allegations first surfaced in April, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson referred them to the inspector general and apologized to Chaffetz. The report published Wednesday details the improper behavior and harshly criticizes the Secret Service for violating the Privacy Act of 1974.

 On Wednesday, the Secret Service issued a statement apologizing to Chaffetz for "this wholly avoidable and embarrassing misconduct" and promising that those responsible would be held accountable.

 The inspector general's report found that more than 40 Secret Service employees accessed Chaffetz's 2003 job application a total of more than 60 times, even though they had "no official need to query Chairman Chaffetz' name."

 The first inquiry was made March 24 — just 18 minutes after Chaffetz opened a committee hearing into alleged Secret Service misconduct, the report says.

 Related: Long List of Breaches and Scandals for Secret Service Under Obama

 Over the next nine days, the job application was accessed about 60 more times, the report says, by employees in the public relations office, the countersurveillance division, the division overseeing protection for former President Bill Clinton, the training division and at least 15 domestic and overseas field offices.

 Only four of the inquiries could reasonably be considered justified, it says.

 At least one employee acknowledged to inspector general investigators that he disclosed the protected information to a reporter for The Washington Post, according to the report, and in a further violation of the Privacy Act, some of the employees disseminated Chaffetz's data through the Secret Service email system, it says.

 "This episode reflects an obvious lack of care on the part of Secret Service personnel as to the sensitivity of the information entrusted to them," the report concluded. "It doesn't take a lawyer explaining the nuances of the Privacy Act to know that the conduct that occurred here — by dozens of agents in every part of the agency — was wrong."

 Johnson, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday that he had repeated his apology to Chaffetz and stressed that "activities like those described in the report must not, and will not, be tolerated."

 But the report angered Chaffetz and other members of his committee, Democratic and Republican alike.

 "It is intimidating," Chaffetz said. "Certain lines should never be crossed. The unauthorized access and distribution of my personal information crossed that line."

 Rep. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina, chairman of the committee's panel on government operations, said the report revealed "woeful abuse of power by a government agency tasked with one of the most important jobs in the country: protecting our nation's president."

 And Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the committee's top Democrat, said in a statement: "I believe in fundamental fairness, and those who are unwilling or unable to meet the highest of ethical standards should not be a part of the Secret Service." ||||| An assistant director of the Secret Service urged that unflattering information the agency had in its files about a congressman critical of the service should be made public, according to a government watchdog report released Wednesday.

 “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out,” Assistant Director Edward Lowery wrote in an e-mail to a fellow director on March 31, commenting on an internal file that was being widely circulated inside the service. “Just to be fair.”

 Two days later, a news Web site reported that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had applied to be a Secret Service agent in 2003 and been rejected.

 That information was part of a Chaffetz personnel file stored in a restricted Secret Service database and required by law to be kept private.

 [Secret Service officials allowed to participate in probe of leak by agency]

 The report by John Roth, inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, singled out Lowery, in part because of his senior position at the agency. The report also cited Lowery’s e-mail as the one piece of documentary evidence showing the degree of anger inside the agency at Chaffetz and the desire for the information to be public.

 Lowery had been promoted to the post of assistant director for training just a month earlier as part of an effort that Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy said would reform the agency after a series of high-profile security lapses. Clancy had tapped Lowery to join a slate of new leaders he installed after removing more than two-thirds of the previous senior management team.

 During the inspector general’s probe, Lowery denied to investigators that he directed anyone to leak the private information about Chaffetz to the press and said his e-mail was simply a vent for his stress and anger.

 The Chaffetz file, contained in the restricted database, had been peeked at by about 45 Secret Service agents, some of whom shared it with their colleagues in March and April, the report found. This prying began after a contentious March 24 House hearing at which Chaffetz scolded the director and the agency for its series of security gaffes and misconduct. The hearing sparked anger inside the agency.

 The inspector general’s inquiry found that the Chaffetz information was spread to nearly every layer of the service.

 [Secret Service chief questioned over handling of White House incident]

 Staff members in the most senior headquarters offices, the president’s protective detail, the public affairs office, the office of investigations, and field offices in Sacramento, Charlotte, Dallas and elsewhere accessed Chaffetz’s file — and many acknowledged sharing it widely, according to the report. The day after the March 24 hearing, one agent who had been sent to New York for the visit of the president of Afghanistan recalled that nearly all of the 70 agents at a briefing were discussing it.

 All told, 18 supervisors, including assistant directors, the deputy director and even Clancy’s chief of staff knew the information was being widely shared through agency offices, the report said.

 “These agents work for an agency whose motto — ‘Worthy of trust and confidence’ — is engraved in marble in the lobby of their headquarters building,” Roth wrote in his summary report. “Few could credibly argue that the agents involved in this episode lived up to this motto.”

 Chaffetz issued this response Wednesday night in a statement to The Washington Post: “Certain lines should never be crossed. The unauthorized access and distribution of my personal information crossed that line. It was a tactic designed to intimidate and embarrass me and frankly, it is intimidating. It’s scary to think about all the possible dangers in having your personal information exposed. The work of the committee, however, will continue. I remain undeterred in conducting proper and rigorous oversight.”

 Clancy said in an e-mailed statement earlier Wednesday: “I have reviewed the DHS OIG Report and have provided additional information to the DHS IG. The Secret Service takes employee misconduct very seriously, and as I have stated before, any employee, regardless of rank or seniority, who has committed misconduct will be held accountable. This incident will be no different and I will ensure the appropriate disciplinary actions are taken.

 “On behalf of the men and women of the United States Secret Service, I again apologize to Representative Chaffetz for this wholly avoidable and embarrassing misconduct. Additionally, I will continue to review policies and practices to address employee misconduct and demand the highest level of integrity of all our employees.”

 After reviewing the IG report, the oversight panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), said in a statement that he was “deeply troubled” by what Roth’s team uncovered and that staffers who have shown themselves to be “unwilling or unable to meet the highest ethical standards” should leave the agency.

 “Chairman Chaffetz and I have worked together to help restore the Secret Service to its standing as the most elite protective agency in the world,” Cummings said. “Today’s findings by the Inspector General go directly against this goal and are completely and utterly unacceptable and indefensible.”

 DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, whose department includes the Secret Service, urged in a statement that those personnel who had engaged in inappropriate conduct should be held responsible.

 Roth said in his report that it was “especially ironic and troubling” that the Chaffetz information circulated so widely inside the agency and yet Clancy did not know about it. Even Clancy chief of staff Michael Biermann and Deputy Director Craig Magaw had been privy to the information, the report said, but did not alert Clancy.

 Clancy had previously raised concerns about the failure of his staff to keep him properly informed. At the March 24 hearing, he said he was “infuriated” that he was not alerted by his senior management to an incident earlier that month in which two senior supervisors drove onto the White House complex after a night of drinking and crossed through an active bomb-investigation scene.

 “He testified that he was ‘working furiously to try to break down these barriers where people feel that they can’t talk up the chain,’ ” Roth wrote. “Yet the Director himself did not know.”

 Roth’s investigation examined not only who accessed Chaffetz’s personnel file inside the service but also who disclosed information about the file to the media. The Daily Beast first reported on April 2 that Chaffetz had once been rejected for a job at the service. The Post reported additional details later that evening.

 One official told The Post that the material included a parody poster that pictured Chaffetz leading a hearing on the Secret Service from his congressional dais, with the headline “Got BQA from the Service in 2003.” Within the Secret Service, “BQA” is an acronym meaning that a “better qualified applicant” was available.

 Roth’s report said investigators were unable to pin down how The Post and the Daily Beast obtained their information. “Because of the significant number of individuals who had knowledge of Chairman Chaffetz’s application history, we were unable to conclusively determine the universe of sources of the disclosure . . . to individuals outside of government,” the report said.

 Roth himself has faced criticism over his handling of the investigation because he allowed inspectors from the Secret Service’s internal affairs office to sit in on interviews and question some witnesses alongside his investigators. Legal experts and former government investigators have said the service’s involvement was a potential conflict of interest because top officials at the agency had an incentive to embarrass Chaffetz. Experts also expressed concerns that it could deter internal whistleblowers from coming forward with additional allegations of misconduct, for fear of retribution by their bosses. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Secret Service agents played dirty when a congressman criticized the agency, according to a government watchdog report. During Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz's investigation of the service, top agents dug into his files and decided to leak information about the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, including the fact that he had unsuccessfully applied to join the service in 2003, reports the Washington Post. "Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out," Assistant Director Edward Lowery wrote in an email on March 31 this year. "Just to be fair." Within days, a news website reported on Chaffetz's failed application, the Post reports. The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General found that in the space of a few days, 45 Secret Service agents accessed Chaffetz's confidential file, Politico reports. Only four of the agents could claim to have a legitimate need to see the information and the others violated federal privacy laws, according to the report, which stresses that Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy wasn't aware of the behavior, NBC News reports. The agency has apologized and Chaffetz has issued a statement slamming the agency for using "a tactic designed to intimidate and embarrass" him. "Certain lines should never be crossed," he said. "The unauthorized access and distribution of my personal information crossed that line."


Article:
Microsoft co-founder tells foundation meeting it was ‘kind of scary’ how much Trump knew about what Gates’ daughter looked like

 Bill Gates, the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, has claimed Donald Trump twice asked him the difference between HIV and HPV and knew a “scary” amount about Gates’s daughter’s looks.

 The remarks were recorded at a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation meeting, where Gates took questions from staff, according to MSNBC’s All in with Chris Hayes show, which broadcast the footage on Thursday.

 Bill and Melinda Gates urge Trump to respect people and to not cut foreign aid Read more

 Gates told the audience how Trump had encountered his daughter Jennifer, now 22, at a horse show in Florida. “And then about 20 minutes later he flew in on a helicopter to the same place,” the Microsoft co-founder said. “So clearly he had been driven away but he wanted to make a grand entrance in a helicopter.”

 Gates himself met Trump for the first time in New York in December 2016, he recalled: “So when I first talked to him it was actually kind of scary how much he knew about my daughter’s appearance. Melinda [Gates’s wife] didn’t like that too well.”

 All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) Exclusive footage obtained by All In... Bill Gates dishes on his meetings with Donald Trump. More tonight at 8PM ET. #inners pic.twitter.com/Zoehj1WTfk

 They met again in March last year at the White House. Gates continued: “In both of those two meetings, he asked me if vaccines weren’t a bad thing because he was considering a commission to look into ill-effects of vaccines and somebody – I think it was Robert Kennedy Jr – was advising him that vaccines were causing bad things. And I said no, that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that.

 “Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other.”

 Trump since appears to have abandoned plans to investigate debunked theories linking childhood immunisations and autism. Robert F Kennedy Jr told the Guardian earlier this year that parents and children’s health advocates felt “enormous betrayal and disappointment” at the decision.

 The UK’s National Health Service website lists “What’s the difference between HPV and HIV?” as one of its common health questions. It says: “Human papilloma virus (HPV) affects the skin and moist membranes. HPV can cause problems such as verrucas, genital warts and abnormal cell changes in the cervix.

 “Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks the immune system. HIV infection can lead to Aids; however, with early diagnosis and treatment, most people don’t go on to develop Aids.”

 Gates is hardly known for his comic timing but he frequently prompted laughter from the audience at the foundation event. In one anecdote he said: “When I walked in, his first sentence kind of threw me off. He said: ‘Trump hears that you don’t like what Trump is doing.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, but you’re Trump.’ I didn’t know the third-party form was always expected. ‘Gates says that Gates knows that you’re not doing things right.’”

 Trump has a now-familiar verbal tic of referring to himself in the third person.

 Hayes said his show had sought comment from the Gates Foundation but has not yet received a response. Tara Dowdell, Democratic strategist, told the MSNBC host: “We’re looking at a president that doesn’t know the difference between HIV and HPV but he has memorised Bill Gates’ daughter’s appearance.

 “So if he spent more time actually learning policy, if he devoted just a quarter of the time that he devotes to harassing women and gawking at women to actual policy, memorising and learning policy, I think the country would be a lot better off.” ||||| Tweet with a location

 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more |||||Summary:

– Bill Gates recently helmed a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation meeting with staff, and per the Guardian, he offered some anecdotes involving President Trump. In the footage aired Thursday night on MSNBC, Gates noted that when he first met Trump in late 2016, it was "kind of scary" how much Trump seemed to know about his adult daughter Jennifer's appearance. "Melinda didn't like that too well," he said. He also noted that in that 2016 meeting, as well as in a subsequent one in March 2017, Trump threw out a question that actually threw Gates during a discussion about vaccines. "Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV," Gates told his audience. "So I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other." Trump apparently isn't the only one who may have harbored uncertainty about the viruses: The Guardian points out the UK's National Health Service website features a dedicated page with the question "What's the difference between HPV and HIV?" Still, jokes flew online about the president possibly not having a handle on this. "Guys, we could probably get him to stop watching Fox and Friends by telling him it has HDTV," one Twitter user snarked. One other Gates anecdote that drew laughs: "When I walked in, his first sentence kind of threw me off. He said: 'Trump hears that you don't like what Trump is doing.' And I thought, 'Wow, but you're Trump.'" (Where the two men rank on Forbes' billionaire list.)


News article:

A tired Ben Friberg (L) rests after arriving in Key West, Florida, following an 111-mile paddleboarding voyage from Cuba across the Florida Straits to the Florida Keys August 2, 2013.

 KEY WEST, Florida A Tennessee musician on Friday became the first paddleboarder to cross the Florida Straits between Cuba and the United States, making the 110 mile journey in 28 hours as his father watched from a support boat.

 Ben Friberg, 35, arrived in Key West dehydrated and exhausted but otherwise in good shape.

 Before leaving Cuba on Thursday, Friberg said he was "doing this to promote peace and understanding between Cuba and the United States and to promote a healthy lifestyle."

 The guitarist and band leader from Chattanooga stood on his 14-foot-long board for most of the trip, sitting only for quick snacks. The crew of the support boat that accompanied him on the journey included a medic and a navigator.

 Friberg was decked out with a long-billed cap for protection from the sun, close-fitting long sleeve shirt, open fingered gloves and shorts cut off below the knee. Special socks shielded his feet.

 Last year, Friberg broke the record for the longest distance stand-up paddleboard journey in 24 hours, traveling 238 miles on Canada's Yukon River.

 Friberg is believed to be the first person to cross the entire Straits on a paddleboard.

 At least two Cubans have made the trip by surfboard. In 1992, Cuban-born doctor Ernesto Barral completed the journey on a wind surfing board in 19 hours, navigating by the stars at night.

 In 2011, Miami lifeguard Cynthia Aguilar made the crossing by paddleboard from 14 miles off Cuba's coast. She was unable to set off from dry land because she did not have a Cuban government visa. Unlike Friberg, Aguilar completed the crossing on her knees, using her hands to paddle.

 Several swimmers have attempted the journey but only Australian Susan Maroney has succeeded, making the crossing in 1997 with the help of a shark cage.

 (Writing by David Adams; Additional reporting by Tom Brown and Marc Frank; Editing by Toni Reinhold) ||||| The diver, who could only drink liquids during the six-day dive, lost 30 pounds

 Jerry Hall shows his shriveled hands and feet after he surfaced from South Holston Lake near Bristol, Tenn., Friday, Aug. 2, 2013. Hall set a new world record for the longest fresh water dive of six days, one hour and 42 minutes. (Photo: David Grace, AP) Story Highlights A diver in Tennessee has set a freshwater diving record

 Jerry Hall spent six days submerged in South Hoston Lake

 The previous record of five days was also set by Hall

 NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee scuba diver has set what is believed to be a record freshwater dive of more than six days.

 Jerry Hall emerged from South Holston Lake in Tennessee's northeast corner at 1:42 p.m. EDT on Friday after going under the surface at noon July 27. The dive lasted six days, one hour and 42 minutes.

 His trainer, Ella Helton, described Hall as emotional as he surfaced, especially as he hugged his son.

 "He's in great spirits, very, very weak, very emotional," Helton said by cellphone from the lakeshore.

 Hall, 49, set an earlier record of five days in 2008 that was certified by Guinness World Records, but a Florida diver later said he bested the mark.

 The record was broken at 12:25 p.m. on Thursday. Hall, who is 49, then stayed down another day to extend the mark.

 The dive was also used as a fundraiser for the children's charity of Bristol Motor Speedway.

 The diver had not yet weighed out, but handlers expected him to lose about 30 pounds from lack of food. He was on only liquids during the dive. Hall had intentionally gained about 15 pounds prior to the dive in anticipation of the weight loss.

 Asked to describe Hall as he emerged, the trainer replied, "He's very, very cold, very wrinkled and gray."

 From the dive platform, Hall had told his team he wanted "a hot dog, a beer and a hot shower" as soon as he got out of the lake.

 Other divers took turns staying with Hall on the dive platform around the clock, watching over him as he slept. He was never alone during the event. Medical personnel were nearby and his condition was constantly monitored.

 Hall, who works at Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, watched a lot of movies to pass the time while under the surface.

 Helton said Hall wanted the mark to stand for a long time.

 "This will be his last one," she said, noting his age.

 The time of the dive will be submitted to Guinness for certification.

 Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1cx6s81 |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Ben Friberg is far from the first person to paddle from Cuba to the US. He is, however, the first person to paddleboard from Cuba to the US, a feat he accomplished yesterday via a 28-hour, 110-mile journey. Friberg, a 35-year-old musician from Tennessee, stood up on his 14-foot-long paddleboard for almost the entire trip to Key West, though he sat down for quick snacks, Reuters reports. Friberg says he made the journey "to promote peace and understanding between Cuba and the United States and to promote a healthy lifestyle." Friberg is not the only Tennessean to set a watery record this week: a Gate City man spent more than six days underwater to set a world record for the longest freshwater scuba dive. Jerry Hall, 49, went under South Holston Lake last Saturday, and emerged yesterday afternoon, reports the AP. Hall gained 15 lbs before the dive and subsisted only on liquids while underwater. "He's very, very cold, very wrinkled and gray," says his trainer. Hall says he now wants a hotdog, beer, and a shower.


News article:

SAN DIEGO—Consuming alcohol is illegal on this city's famous beaches. But, thanks to a loophole authorities are now trying to close, drinking a few feet from shore is not.

 That's why, this past Saturday afternoon, Jon Kraemer sat atop an inflated air mattress, sipping a Bud Light he pulled from a floating cooler.

 The 26-year-old pharmaceutical salesman was tipsy and carefree and dangling his feet in the water, despite the dozen police officers standing on shore making sure no booze was consumed on land.

 Floatopia -- A Utopia? View Slideshow Sandy Huffaker for The Wall Street Journal Beachgoers on rafts clogged the water off of one San Diego beach July 17.

 "This is the best day ever, that's all I have to say," said Mr. Kraemer.

 San Diego's float parties are a case study in the law of unintended consequences. Fed up with litter and drunkenness on its beaches, San Diego's city council in 2007 passed a one-year ban on beach drinking. Voters made the ban permanent a year later. But there was an oversight: The ban defines "beach" as "the sand or land area bordering the water of an ocean or bay." The wording inadvertently created a drinkers' haven in the water.

 Dozens of large and small drinking-and-floating events have been held since mid-2008. Many of them, including last weekend's, are organized anonymously through Facebook, the social networking site.

 Police say that when the parties started, they checked with the city attorney's office about whether they were legal. It concluded that, indeed, drinking in the water isn't the same thing as drinking on the beach. "If you're floating, you're good," says Chris Ball, captain of the San Diego police department's northern division.

 But the days of boozy float parties—dubbed "Floatopia"—may soon be over. The council's public safety and neighborhood services committee recently passed a proposal to amend the drinking ban so it extends to "bathers," a category that includes almost anyone not in some sort of boat, including kayaks and canoes. On Monday, the full council is expected to vote on making it "unlawful for any bather to consume any alcoholic beverage within one marine league of any beach." A league is about three-and-a-half miles.

 "Now we have to take [the alcohol ban] a step further," says Tony Manolatos, a spokesman for city councilman Kevin Faulconer, who represents several of San Diego's beach communities, including Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach.

 San Diego isn't the first beach community to grapple with Floatopia, though the city's parties are unique in that they were created purely to dodge the law. Santa Barbara County, which had been dealing with float parties since 2005, last year banned alcohol on Isla Vista beach and 100 yards into the water.

 San Diego's parties are held in small bays that extend inland, rather than the city's miles of oceanfront. In the bays, calm waters and the absence of waves facilitate Floatopia drinking. Most floaters congregate right off land in water just a few feet deep.

 The largest Floatopias have attracted roughly 3,000 floaters, many of whom drink way too much. As the day wears on, beaches fill up with trash, beer cans and weary drinkers napping on slowly deflating rafts.

 Extra police and lifeguards cost the city tens of thousands of dollars.

 "If you slip off and the first deep breath you take is seawater, chances are you're not coming back up," says Capt. Ball. "That's what we're concerned about." Nobody has drowned so far.

 Most of San Diego's Floatopias happen in and around Pacific Beach—known as P.B.—a young, raucous neighborhood of bungalows and a two-mile-long strip of bars that ends at the Pacific Ocean. Back when beach drinking was still allowed, P.B.'s Fourth of July celebrations had so many alcohol-related arrests that police brought in a recreational vehicle outfitted with temporary jail cells.

 The alcohol ban has calmed things down. On July 4, the mobile jail got little use and won't be returning next year, Capt. Ball says. "The beaches are just tranquil now," says Jerry Hall, a Pacific Beach resident who favored the alcohol ban.

 The water, however, is a different story. Booze abounded at last weekend's Floatopia. Floats ranged from a barely buoyant blow-up doll to an inflatable deck that hosted a small dance party. Floating tables made possible games of "beer pong," a drinking game in which players toss ping-pong balls across a table hoping to dunk them in opposing cups.

 Kim Rampaul, 24, came with a two-seater float that has dual cup-holders and a built-in cooler. Mr. Rampaul, a college student and Floatopia veteran, was lathered in sunblock and brought along beer, snacks and Gatorade. Like most floaters, Mr. Rampaul uses rope to tie his float to friends' floats, creating a bobbing lounge.

 "It's just fun that we're allowed to do this," he says. "It's like you can't touch us, we're in the water."

 San Diego's Floatopias have murky origins. One of the first people to publicize the loophole was Bradford Boyle, then an information technology engineer, in mid-2008. Mr. Boyle, 28, had been told that drinking in the water was a way of dodging San Diego's now-defunct rules prohibiting drinking on the beach before noon. Later, when the broader alcohol ban was passed, Mr. Boyle figured the same logic could be used to legally drink near but not on the beach.

 After confirming the loophole with police and lifeguards, he shared the discovery on a personal website, and the idea spread. Mr. Boyle is now pursuing an M.B.A. degree and says he isn't organizing Floatopias any more. "It's just gotten out of control," he says.

 Perhaps surprisingly, that view is shared by a number of Floatopia participants. Mr. Rampaul, for instance, says that despite his love of drinking and floating, parties have gotten so big, the city council had to extend the alcohol ban into water.

 "Unfortunately, it makes sense," said Mr. Rampaul last weekend just before hopping on his float and enjoying a few beers. "Floating? Drinking? That's just not going to work out."

 Write to Conor Dougherty at conor.dougherty@wsj.com ||||| The San Diego City Council on Monday voted unanimously to ban drinking on Mission Bay in an effort to stop the "floatopia" booze parties that have exploited a loophole in the city's ban on drinking on beaches.

 Police and lifeguard officials told the council that the "floatopia" parties, at which hundreds of college-age people drink while floating on rafts, inner-tubes and other devices, are a menace and could lead to drownings because of drunkenness and injuries from broken bottles.

 But opponents of the ban said that further limitations on drinking could hurt tourism. The council was not swayed by that argument.

 "This is not the San Diego City Council saying no-no-no to things," said Councilwoman Marti Emerald. "This is the San Diego City Council trying to keep people alive at our beaches."

 After an alcohol-fueled riot on the beach at Pacific Beach during Labor Day weekend 2008, the council voted to impose a one-year ban on alcohol consumption on city beaches. In November of that year, city voters approved a measure to make the ban permanent.

 But the ban did not cover drinking in the water. Monday's ban on drinking in the water is set to become effective immediately. The ban does not include drinking on boats.

 -- Tony Perry in San Diego

 Photo: "Floatopia" party on Mission Bay. Credit: Nelvin Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– San Diego's city council has closed a loophole that allowed partygoers to dodge a ban on drinking on the beach by boozing just offshore instead. Wording in the original ban defined beach as land only, leading to "Floatopia" parties which saw thousands of people drinking on rafts and inner tubes just a few feet offshore, the Los Angeles Times reports. The updated law now says "bathers" need to be one marine league—around 3.5 miles—offshore before they can drink alcohol. City leaders say the floating parties were a disaster waiting to happen, and even partygoers say the law probably isn't such a bad idea. "Unfortunately, it makes sense," a college student taking to his air mattress for a final few beers told the Wall Street Journal. "Floating? Drinking? That's just not going to work out."


Write an article based on this summary:

– The reclusive Harper Lee reportedly wrote to friends a lot in her younger days, but few letters have "trickled out" because of her desire for privacy, as the New York Times puts it. That changed today when six she wrote to friend Harold Caufield between 1956 and 1961—before and after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird—went up for auction at Christie's. It turned out that the letters, now in the possession of a book collector, failed to sell, reports AP. (The expected price was $250,000; the bidding didn't hit the reserve price.) But we still get to read snippets, from AP, the Times, and the Los Angeles Times: 'Mockingbird success: "We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton review. The procurator of Judea is breathing heavily down my neck—all that lovely, lovely money is going straight to the Bureau of Internal Revenue tomorrow." On her dad, the model for Atticus Finch: "Daddy is sitting beside me at the kitchen table. ... I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead. It has been years since I have lived with him on a day-to-day basis." Small-town life: “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut if I feel moved to express myself, thereon it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP, which, God forbid. They already suspect this to be a fact anyway.” She also complains of the town's "ecclesiastical gloom." The lot included an inscribed 35th anniversary copy of the book: "Hal: Can you believe it?? You've lived to see this, and still have all your teeth and gumption. You will always be my beloved friend, hairless though you are." Lee's controversial second novel, Go Set a Watchmen, is out next month.

A collection of letters written by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee failed to sell at auction Friday at Christie's in New York. The six typewritten letters from Lee to her friend Harold Caufield, an architect, had been estimated to sell for as much as $250,000.

 The auction came about a month before the release of Harper Lee's much-anticipated second novel, "Go Set a Watchman." It's the first book from Lee, 89, since her classic "To Kill A Mockingbird" was published in 1960.

 The letters were written between 1956 and 1961, and some were signed with "comic pseudonyms" such as "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "R. Bouverie Pusey."

 The San Diego consignor, who wanted to remain anonymous until after the sale, said he paid considerably less than the $250,000 estimate, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

 The consignor collects rare books and manuscripts as a hobby, according to the Union-Tribune.

 The auction house described the lot as a "poignant and especially rare" collection written to "one of [Lee's] oldest and closest friends." Four of the letters were written before "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published in 1960, and one of those was written about her father, the inspiration for the character Atticus Finch.

 Another letter, written in December 1960, describes her reaction to the success of "To Kill a Mockingbird." "We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton review ... The procurator of Judea is breathing heavily down my neck -- all that lovely, lovely money is going straight to the Bureau of Internal Revenue tomorrow ... Must stop and take my rock-and-roll aunt Alice to the show. Elvis is on."

 The lot also includes an autographed copy of the 35th anniversary edition of "To Kill a Mockingbird," inscribed to Caufield with the note, "Hal: Can you believe it?? You've lived to see this, and still have all your teeth and gumption. You will always be my beloved friend, hairless though you are."

 In another letter, Lee complains of spending five months in small-town Monroeville, Ala., the Guardian reports, lamenting its "ecclesiastical gloom" as "really too much." In the end, Lee wound up back in Monroeville, where the 89-year-old now resides in an assisted living facility.

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 On Dec. 12, 1960, Harper Lee sat down at her typewriter and wrote an exuberant letter to her close friend, the New York architect Harold Caufield, expressing her shock and delight at a glowing review of her debut novel.

 “We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton Review,” she wrote. “I haven’t recovered my voice on the subject enough to say anything.”

 It was a striking contrast to another, more morose letter she had written to him, in which she complained of being unable to write.

 Despite her towering stature in the literary world for her blockbuster novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” little is known about Ms. Lee’s personal life, politics or writing habits. Few living authors are as shrouded in mystery. She gave her last formal interview in the 1960s, and though by all accounts she is a prolific letter writer, very little of her personal correspondence has trickled out, to the frustration of scholars.

 Now, as anticipation builds for Ms. Lee’s long-waited second book, “Go Set a Watchman,” a rare collection of six personal letters that Ms. Lee wrote to Mr. Caufield has surfaced, offering an oblique window into her creative struggles; her strained relationship with her hometown, Monroeville, Ala.; her views on religion and Southern politics; and her adoration for her father, A. C. Lee, a model for the crusading lawyer Atticus Finch.

 The letters, which will be auctioned off at Christie’s on Friday and are estimated to be worth as much as $250,000, were written between 1956 and 1961. (Some are undated.) During that period Ms. Lee wrote “Go Set a Watchman,” which she sold to J. B. Lippincott in October 1957. The novel, set in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb, takes place 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird”; features an adult Scout, who has returned to Alabama from New York to visit an aging Atticus. The plot setup seems to closely parallel Ms. Lee’s own life at the time she was writing, making her correspondence all the more intriguing. But Ms. Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, told her to recast the novel, setting it in Scout’s childhood. The resulting story was “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 40 million copies.

 In the aftermath, Ms. Lee shrank from the public eye, and struggled to finish another book. Her correspondence with Mr. Caufield, who belonged to her coterie of New York friends, shows a complex, mercurial person who is fiercely loyal to her family and closest allies and witheringly condescending to those she feels aren’t worth her time.

 She can be by turns prickly and flirtatious. (“Will you marry me this instant?” she demands in one letter.) She confides that a “preacher” wants to date her, and shares her bleak views on Presbyterian theology, “about the gloomiest Protestant dogma I know of,” and airs her suspicions that she is being gossiped about for her stance on civil rights: “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut if I feel moved to express myself, thereon it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP, which, God forbid. They already suspect this to be a fact anyway.”

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 In some letters she describes feeling alienated, creatively blocked and homesick for her Manhattan apartment, which she left to return to Monroeville to tend to her sick father: “I’ve been longing to get back for so many reasons, a major one being that as long as I have a roof over my head, a chair, a table and a typewriter, and no people, I can work. I simply can’t work here. Genius overcomes all obstacles, etc., and this is no excuse, but I think the record will show the extent of my output at 1539 York. Compare it with work I’ve done here — well, I feel like pulling a Mike and checking into a hotel. But it wouldn’t work in Monroeville. Monroeville would simply follow.”

 Though apparently Ms. Lee wrote to friends constantly, little of the correspondence has come up for auction, mainly because her friends are fiercely protective of her wish for privacy. The largest collection to sell was a cache of 13 letters that she wrote to a fan, Don Salter, who sold them through an online auction house in 2011. Few have been as intimate and revealing as the letters being auctioned at Christie’s.

 “What we have in this archive is a deep and unguarded correspondence,” said Tom Lecky, who heads Christie’s department of books and manuscripts. “She’s not putting on a persona.”

 Or if she is, it’s a teasing one — she occasionally uses silly pseudonyms like Francesca da Rimini and the Prisoner of Zenda.

 As more of her contemporaries die — Ms. Lee turned 89 in April — additional letters could surface. Her letters to Mr. Caufield were sold after his death by a member of Mr. Caufield’s family to Erik DuRon, a rare-books dealer, in 2011. The dealer contacted a California book collector, Paul Kennerson, a retired trial lawyer who had bought a first edition of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

 Mr. Kennerson, 74, snapped up the collection, and about four years later he is auctioning the letters at Christie’s. He said that in 2012 he wrote to Harper Lee to inform her that he had her letters, addressing it to the postmaster in Monroeville. He never heard back.

 The biographer Charles J. Shields, author of “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” said finding personal correspondence by Ms. Lee is “about as rare as a meteor hitting the earth.”

 “They’re precious, because she published so little,” Mr. Shields said. “The downside is that it may break the seal on a lot of questions she doesn’t want answered. It’s going to cheapen her legacy if personal letters keep popping up all the time.”

 Ms. Lee’s publisher, Michael Morrison, the president of HarperCollins, said that he expects she will be unhappy to hear that her private letters are being sold. Ms. Lee “is a deeply private person, and I’m sure she would be disappointed that letters she wrote to a friend are being sold as some sort of memorabilia,” Mr. Morrison said through a HarperCollins spokeswoman.

 In a month, the rest of the public will finally be able to read more of Ms. Lee’s writing. “Go Set a Watchman” comes out on July 14, with a first printing of two million copies. ||||| NEW YORK (AP) — Six letters by "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee to one of her close friends failed to sell at auction Friday.

 FILE - In this Aug. 20, 2007, file photo, author Harper Lee, who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird,” smiles during a ceremony honoring her at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Six letters by Lee, to one of... (Associated Press)

 The archive had been expected to bring as much as $250,000 at Christie's, which said the bidding did not reach the reserve price.

 Four of the letters date from before "Mockingbird" while Lee was caring for her ailing father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the model for her protagonist Atticus Finch.

 The signed and typed letters were written to Lee's friend, New York architect Harold Caufield, between 1956 and 1961, according to Christie's, which is selling them on Friday.

 In one, she writes about her "stunned" reaction to the huge success of the book, published in 1960 and made into a movie starring Gregory Peck two years later.

 "We were surprised, stunned & dazed by the Princeton review," she wrote. "The procurator of Judea is breathing heavily down my neck — all that lovely, lovely money is going straight to the Bureau of Internal Revenue tomorrow."

 In another letter she tells Caufield: "Daddy is sitting beside me at the kitchen table. ... I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead. It has been years since I have lived with him on a day-to-day basis."

 The sale comes as Lee's second book, "Go Set a Watchman," is set to be released in July. It was written before the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Mockingbird" but takes place 20 years later. Lee's agreement to release the book stunned the literary world. "Watchman" has been ranked No. 1 in new releases of classic literature and fiction on Amazon.com for weeks.

 "She's arguably one of the most important American novelists of the post-war period who has not published a great deal," said Tom Lecky, Christie's head of books and manuscripts. "She's remained a private figure so the appearance of an archive like this is a very important moment in the marketplace. Only three other letters of hers have come up at auction within the last 35 years."

 Christie's said the seller, who wished to remain anonymous, acquired the letters on the open market. The auctioneer intentionally has blurred the contents in its catalog and online to protect the author's privacy.

 The 89-year-old Lee, who is in declining health and lives in an assisted-living home in Monroeville, Alabama, could not be reached for comment about the sale. Her attorney, Tonja Brooks Carter, did not return an email and phone request for comment.

 In a 1961 letter Lee wrote that Esquire magazine turned down her "pastiche" about "some white people who were segregationists & at the same time loathed & hated the K.K.K. This is an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire!"

 The letters, totaling eight pages, are signed as "Nelle," ''N.H." or with comic pseudonyms including "The prisoner of Zenda," a reference to an 1894 novel about a king who is drugged and kidnapped on the eve of his coronation.

 The letters present "an interesting bracket of before and after of a monumental moment in American letters where you have the time leading up to while she's writing her book and then you get a glimpse into her reaction to the reaction," said Lecky. "You see how the book was received and how she received those reviews." |||||


Article:
Chicago Loop Synagogue vandalized with swastikas

 A hate crime investigation is underway after the front window of the Chicago Loop Synagogue was smashed by a vandal who affixed swastikas to its front entrance early Saturday.

 Officers responded at 12:20 a.m. to a call of “criminal damage in progress” at the temple at 16 S. Clark St., according to Chicago Police.

 Surveillance video shows someone getting out of a dark-colored SUV, possibly a Toyota Highlander, and placing two swastika stickers on the front doors, police said. Then he takes out a metal object and smashes a plate glass window.

 The suspect is described as a white male wearing dark clothing and a dark face mask, police said.

 Community activist Raul Montes Jr. on Sunday announced a reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the vandal.

 The American Jewish Committee’s Chicago office condemned the attack, saying the incident comes amid a rise in incidents of anti-Semitism across the country.

 “The Chicago Jewish community will not be intimidated by anti-Semitic attacks on a house of worship,” AJC Chicago Director Amy Stoken said. “The right of all religious groups to practice their faith without fear is a fundamental American value. Chicagoans must speak together clearly that the hatred behind this destructive behavior will never be accepted.”

 No one was in custody Saturday night as Area Central detectives investigated the vandalism as a hate crime. ||||| Story highlights Chicago Police say a synagogue was vandalized

 A Rice University statue was defaced, and New York subway riders encountered hateful graffiti

 (CNN) Police are investigating a flurry of swastika vandalism over the weekend in three major US cities.

 Chicago Police released a surveillance video Saturday that shows a man smashing the front window of a synagogue and placing swastikas on the front door.

 In the video, the suspect pulls up to the synagogue curb in a dark-colored SUV just after midnight, places the stickers on the front door and then breaks the glass with a metal object. He then gets back in the car and flees the scene.

 Chicago Police release pictures of smashed synagogue window and hate crime stickers

 The man is wearing dark clothing and a dark head mask, police said.

 The incident is being investigated as a hate crime.

 Read More ||||| Mr. Nied, 36, was returning home from his work as a sous-chef around 7 p.m. and boarded the train at 42nd Street. He said in a phone interview that his reaction to the graffiti, which he noticed immediately, must have been written on his face, and he soon attracted the attention of another commuter.

 “There was a lady sitting across from me under the map, and she said, ‘Oh that’s absolutely horrible,’” he said. “‘Do you think there’s any way we can erase it?’”

 Mr. Nied had many times used a Sharpie when he had meant to use a dry-erase marker, and he knew from experience that alcohol would work to erase the graffiti.

 “A light bulb went on, and I just asked, ‘Does anyone have hand sanitizer?’” he said.

 Mr. Nied and several other commuters began to wipe away the graffiti, their actions captured in photographs taken by Mr. Locke, who wrote on Facebook about his experience. By late Sunday afternoon, more than 518,000 people had reacted to the post on Facebook, and the post had been shared more than 354,000 times.

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 “I’ve never seen so many people simultaneously reach into their bags and pockets looking for tissues and Purell,” Mr. Locke wrote. “Within about two minutes, all the Nazi symbolism was gone.”

 Mr. Nied said that the episode had lasted less than five minutes and that the passengers were able to erase the graffiti before the train reached 96th Street. He returned a bottle of hand sanitizer to one of the riders, apologizing for having used most of it.

 “We sat down and glanced around at each other and settled back into the commute,” he said.

 Both men said they understood that there might be skepticism about their accounts.

 “I understand the criticism, but unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for it,” Mr. Locke said. “I would probably be suspicious, too, if I didn’t take the pictures.”

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 Detective Ahmed Nasser of the New York Police Department said that while the episode had not been reported on Saturday, other reports of anti-Semitic graffiti had been logged recently: A recycling container downtown was reportedly defaced with the words “Jews are a virus” in black ink in January, and swastikas were found etched on a northbound F train this month.

 A separate episode, in which a passenger on a B train saw that a swastika on an American flag had been transformed into a message of love, drew a comment from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday.

 On Saturday night, Mr. Nied sent a text to his wife, Jacquline, and to a friend with a photograph of the graffiti, but he did not consider the prospect that someone else might have taken photos. He said it had not even crossed his mind until more than an hour later, when his wife looked at her phone.

 “She said, ‘Dude, you’re going viral,’” he recalled.

 He added: “It was a very New York moment in that we all came together, we all teamed up, and then we settled back down. I don’t think any of those people really spoke, truth be told. Everyone kind of just did their jobs of being decent human beings.” |||||Summary:

– Houston made headlines first over the weekend, after a swastika was drawn in chalk on Rice University's statue of William Marsh Rice on Friday night. As CNN reports, it was the first of three such incidents to occur in different pockets of the country over a roughly 24-hour period. On Saturday Chicago police shared a video that depicts a man who drove up to the Chicago Loop Synagogue and put two swastika stickers on its door. The Sun-Times reports police were alerted to the incident just after midnight Saturday and found a window smashed. That evening, New York City subway riders came face-to-face with a slew of swastikas. Rider Gregory Locke describes getting on the No. 1 train and seeing swastikas written in Sharpie on the windows. "The train was silent as everyone stared at each other, uncomfortable and unsure what to do," he writes in a Facebook post that includes photos of the incident; it has gone viral with more than 500,000 reactions. The New York Times reports vile messages were also scrawled in the car, including "Jews belong in the oven." Upon one rider's suggestion that hand sanitizer would undo the hate, "I've never seen so many people simultaneously reach into their bags and pockets looking for tissues and Purel. Within about two minutes, all the Nazi symbolism was gone." The Times notes the NYPD and Metropolitan Transportation Authority received no reports of the vandalism, though the paper spoke with Locke and another rider who gave their accounts. (This man found swastikas in his boot prints.)