A mother of two died from sepsis after scratching the back of her hand while she was gardening, her family has revealed.

 Lucinda Smith, 43, went to see her GP after feeling pain in her shoulder following the minor scrape, in March last year.

 The doctor diagnosed a trapped nerve and prescribed anti-depressants to relax her and she was also told to see a physiotherapist. ||||| The mother of a woman who died from sepsis after she cut her hand gardening says she believes her daughter would still be alive if she had been given the correct medical treatment when she first complained of feeling unwell.

 Lucy with her partner Darren O'Neill

 Lucinda Smith started feeling unwell with a pain in her shoulder a few days after she scratched her hand while gardening at her home in Billericay in Essex. The 43-year-old mother of two went to see her GP but was sent away with a prescription to control the pain and was told to see a physiotherapist.

 Lucy with her children Megan (9) and George (6)

 Miss Smith 's condition continued to deteriorate and 3 days later she went to the accident and emergency department at Basildon Hospital. Her mother, Shirley believes by then her fate was already sealed.

 It was too late. By then her arm and hand were swollen and blotchy and she was vomiting. – Shirley, mother

 Lucy with her children Megan (9) and George (6)

 A blood test revealed Miss Smith had sepsis, which is a form of blood poisoning. She was immediately admitted for emergency treatment but died two days later from organ failure.

 If she'd been given the test and had her blood pressure taken when she first complained of feeling unwell I'm convinced she could have been saved. The saddest thing is her children have been left without their Mummy and it could have been avoided. – Shirley, mother

 The inquest ruled she died of toxic shock caused by sepsis. ||||| A scratch while gardening spiraled into a fatal bout of sepsis for a mother of two from the United Kingdom, her family says.

 Lucinda Smith’s family, reported The Telegraph, said the 43-year-old went to see her doctor earlier this year due to pain in her shoulder that occurred shortly after she suffered a minor hand scrape while gardening.

 The doctor diagnosed a trapped nerve and prescribed anti-depressants to relax her and she was also told to see a physiotherapist to help with rehabilitation of the so-called trapped nerve.

 Within three days, Smith’s fingers and arm became red and swollen, The Telegraph said. She also was vomitting and had increased pain. She saw a second doctor who thought she might have a blood clot and sent her to Basildon Hospital where a blood test revealed within 30 minutes that she had sepsis.

 Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection, according to Mayo Clinic experts. It happens when chemicals released into the bloodstream to fight the infection trigger inflammatory responses throughout the body. That process can lead to organ damage and failure.

 Septic shock occurs when the person’s blood pressure drops dramatically, which may lead to death.

 Smith, a lawyer from Billericay, Essex, immediately received intravenous antibiotics and was moved to a critical care unit, but she suffered organ failure and died.

 A CDC report released in August showed that in the U.S., for nearly 80 percent of patients, sepsis begins outside of the hospital. But it is also linked to exposure to medical environments -- 7 in 10 patients with sepsis had recently used health care services or had chronic diseases requiring frequent medical care.

 Anyone can develop sepsis but seniors and people with weaker immune systems are more vulnerable, say Mayo Clinic experts. Early treatment of sepsis, usually with antibiotics and large amounts of intravenous fluids, improves chances for survival.

 People should know the signs and immediately seek medical care if they notice these symptoms after developing an infection:

 · Shivering, fever, or very cold

 · Extreme pain or discomfort

 · Clammy or sweaty skin

 · Confusion or disorientation

 · Shortness of breath

 · High heart rate

 At the CDC press briefing in August, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden, said his own son survived sepsis more than two decades ago.

 “Helping patients to know to ask ‘Could this be sepsis?’ empowers them to potentially save their own or family members’ lives,” he said. “Recognition and treatment against sepsis is a race against time.”

 The most common infections that can lead to sepsis include lung infections, such as pneumonia, urinary tract infection, gut infection, and skin infection. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Lucinda Smith, a 43-year-old attorney and mother of two in the United Kingdom, was gardening in March of last year when she suffered a minor scrape on her hand. After feeling pain in her shoulder she visited her general practitioner, who diagnosed a pinched nerve and sent her home with anti-depressants to relax her and advice to visit a physiotherapist, reports the Telegraph. But three days later she was vomiting and in significantly more pain, and her fingers and arm were red and swollen, so she saw another doctor, who sent her to the emergency room. It was there, after a simple blood test, that Smith was diagnosed with sepsis, sent to critical care, and put on intravenous antibiotics. Days later, she died of toxic shock triggered by the sepsis, reports ITV. "If she'd been given the test and had her blood pressure taken when she first complained of feeling unwell I'm convinced she could have been saved," says her mother. Sepsis is a complication that can arise from an infection and, if untreated, quickly become life-threatening. With cases on the rise, the CDC recently launched a campaign to make the general public more aware of its symptoms—including fever or chills, elevated heart rate, confusion, and pain—and thus more likely to ask for a test when in doubt. At a press briefing, CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said he almost lost his infant son to sepsis 20 years ago and that "recognition and treatment against sepsis is a race against time," CBS News reports. (This UK student nearly died of sepsis after forgetting to remove a tampon.)


News article:

A memorial to Soundgarden vocalist and guitarist Chris Cornell is pictured at KEXP on May 18, 2017 in Seattle, Washington. Cornell was found dead in his hotel room in Detroit. (Photo: Stephen Brashear / Getty Images)

 Just minutes after Soundgarden’s concert at the Fox Theatre ended Wednesday night, frontman Chris Cornell was back in his hotel room at the MGM Grand, talking by phone with his wife.

 What Vicky Cornell heard alarmed her.

 Her husband was slurring his words, sounded groggy and kept repeating: “I’m just tired,” according to a family statement and a police report obtained by The Detroit News.

 She asked the band’s bodyguard to check on Cornell, who busted into the room and made a gruesome discovery: the alternative rocker was on the bathroom floor “with blood running from his mouth and a red exercise band around (his) neck,” according to the report.

 Within two hours, Cornell, 52, was pronounced dead. The police report, filed by officers from the Detroit Police Gaming Unit who responded to the scene, describes the final moments of the singer’s life and the start of the investigation into how he died.

 What happened in those two hours is already a matter of significant dispute between a family that doesn’t believe he would have intentionally taken his own life and the Wayne County medical Examiner’s Office, which declared his death a suicide by hanging.

 About an hour before he was found, Cornell had walked off stage with his bandmates about 11:15 p.m. to the raucous cheers of a sellout crowd of more than 5,000 fans.

 Within 15 minutes, Cornell was back in Room 1136 at the MGM, where bodyguard Martin Kirsten helped fix the star’s computer and gave him two doses of an anti-anxiety medicine, according to the police report.

 At 11:35 p.m., Cornell was on the phone with his wife.

 She called Kirsten at 12:15 a.m., and the bodyguard went to the room and found the door locked, the report said. Kirsten kicked the door open, only to find a second door leading to the bedroom suite also was latched — so, the report said, he kicked that door open, too, and found Cornell.

 In a statement issued by Vicky Cornell and attorney Kirk Pasich, the lawyer said the family needs the results of toxicology tests to be sure what happened to the alternative rocker.

 “The family believes that if Chris took his life, he did not know what he was doing, and that drugs or other substances may have affected his actions,” Pasich said.

 In the statement, Vicky Cornell said she spoke to her husband before and after the concert and noticed during the later conversation that he was slurring his words.

 “He was different,” she said. “When he told me he may have taken an extra Ativan or two, I contacted security and asked that they check on him.”

 According to the police report, Kirsten gave Cornell two Ativan pills, “which victim takes for anxiety,” the report said.

 A Soundgarden publicist said band members are not speaking publicly about Cornell’s death.

 Buy Photo Rachel Montgomery holds a photograph of Chris Cornell outside the Fox Theatre in tribute to Chris Cornell. (Photo: Max Ortiz / The Detroit News)

 Officials with Olympia Entertainment, which owns the Fox Theatre, did not respond to a request for comment.

 After hearing from Vicky Cornell, Kirsten walked two doors down to Cornell’s suite, to which he had a key, but found the door latched, the report said. “(Kirsten) called security from hotel phone in hallway ... stating he needs to get into (the) room to check on (the) victim,” the report said.

 “Security stated they can not let him into the room because he is not registered to that room,” the report said. “At this time (Kirsten) kicked in the door with his feet and ... went to the bedroom door and (the) latch had been engaged on this door also.

 “(Kirsten) again called for security but could not gain access to (the) room,” the report said. “At this time (Kirsten) kicked in (the) bedroom door and found victim laying on the bathroom floor.”

 Buy Photo Julie Webber holds flowers and candles in rememberance of Chris Cornell outside the Fox Theatre in tribute to Chris Cornell on Friday, May 19, 2017. (Photo: Max Ortiz / The Detroit News)

 MGM medic Dawn Jones arrived at the room at 12:56 a.m., the report said. “Jones untied the red exercise band from (the) victim’s neck and began CPR on (Cornell, who) was not breathing.”

 EMS Unit 42 was at the scene by 1 a.m. An emergency medical technician also unsuccessfully performed CPR on Cornell, according to the report.

 “At 1:30AM on 5/18/2017, victim was pronounced dead (by a doctor who came to the scene),” the report said.

 Homicide detectives arrived at the room and began their investigation, while another officer phoned Cornell’s wife to break the news he’d been found dead.

 “Victim’s wife ... stated victim is a recovered drug addict,” the report said.

 ghunter@detroitnews.com

 (313) 222-2134

 Twitter: @GeorgeHunter_DN

 Staff Writers Adam Graham and Stephanie Steinberg contributed.

 Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2rzArrF ||||| Chris Cornell Used Exercise Band and Sturdy Clip Device To Hang Himself

 Chris Cornell Used Exercise Band and Sturdy Clip Device to Hang Himself

 Exclusive Details

 Chris Cornell used a common piece of exercise equipment to take his own life.

 We've learned the Soundgarden frontman secured a red elastic exercise band attached to a carabiner to the top of his hotel bathroom door. A carabiner is a device commonly used by mountain climbers which they attach to a belt to keep them from falling. The device can withstand enormous weight.

 Cornell jammed the door shut with the carabiner at the top of the frame. The carabiner was jammed so tight it left an indentation in the door frame.

 As we reported, Chris' family believes he may have taken his life while under the influence of Ativan, and that he had no plan or desire to commit suicide just hours earlier.

 According to the police report, obtained by The Detroit News, Chris was on the phone with his wife, Vicky, shortly before committing suicide, who said he sounded "groggy" and repeatedly told her, "I am just tired," before hanging up.

 Vicky became alarmed, called the hotel and Chris' security guard kicked down 2 doors and found him in the bathroom with blood running from his mouth. ||||| On Thursday, Tom Morello paid tribute to his late friend and Audioslave bandmate Chris Cornell on Instagram. "Thank you for your friendship and your humor and your intellect and your singular and unmatched talent," the guitarist's post read.

 That same night, he wrote a poem in tribute to Cornell, which appears in full below.

 Related Tom Morello, Jimmy Page, Courtney Love Remember Chris Cornell Soundgarden, Audioslave singer found dead of apparent suicide at age 52 on early Thursday morning

 You're a prince, you're a snare, you're a shadow

 You're twilight and star burn and shade

 You're a sage, you're a wound shared, you're masked

 You're a pillar of smoke, you're a platinum heart

 You're a brush fire, you're caged, you're free

 Your vision pierces, you do not see

 You are pieces strewn on the hillside

 You're open armed, you're armed, you're true

 You're a revealer of visions, you're the passenger, you're a never fading scar

 You're twilight and star burn and shade

 You're the secret veiled, you're the secret revealed, you're surrounded no more

 You're not there, now you're always here

 You're a handsome groom, a loving father, a haunted stairwell

 You're the clear bell ringing, the mountains echo your song

 Maybe no one has ever known you

 You are twilight and star burn and shade ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Chris Cornell kept saying "I'm just tired" in his final phone conversation with his wife, according to a police report with more details on the final hour of the Soundgarden frontman's life. Vicky Cornell, alarmed by how different her husband sounded, called band bodyguard Martin Kirsten, who had to kick in two latched doors before he found the 52-year-old dead on the bathroom floor with "blood running from his mouth and a red exercise band" around his neck, according to a police report seen by the Detroit News. His death was ruled suicide by hanging, but Vicky Cornell says he told her he "had taken an extra Ativan" or two, and she believes the anti-anxiety medication or other substances may have clouded his judgment. According to TMZ, Cornell used a piece of climbing equipment to secure the exercise band to the bathroom door at his suite in the MGM Grand Hotel in Detroit. Less than an hour earlier, the band had played a sold-out show in front of 5,000 fans. Soundgarden had been scheduled to play the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio Friday night, Pitchfork reports. Instead, artists including Bush and Live paid tribute to Cornell by covering songs by his bands Soundgarden, Audioslave, and Temple of the Dog. Rolling Stone reports that Rage Against the Machine co-founder Tom Morello paid tribute to his former Audioslave bandmate with a moving poem, which can be seen in full here.


– Newser Note: For maximum impact, please listen to this song while reading the following story. KREM reports an argument about garbage escalated—as they are wont to do—until one neighbor was threatening another with a weapon straight out of Star Trek. Carlo Cerutti, 50, has been charged with assault after allegedly swinging a Klingon bat'leth—or "a large sword-like weapon with multiple blades" for our non-Trekkie readers—at the victim, according to the Spokesman-Review. Apparently Cerutti's wife had gotten tired of the victim putting his garbage in their garbage can and told him to knock it off, KREM reports. That's when she says the victim hit her with a bag of trash. Cerutti allegedly ran out of the house to defend his wife while swinging his bat'leth around. The victim was able to disarm Cerutti but fell off his porch in the process. Cerutti's wife claims he only unsheathed the bat'leth when the victim entered their house. There is one witness who can illuminate exactly what happened, unfortunately…

Expand this summary.

Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| Carlo M. Cerutti, 50, was arrested Saturday at his duplex near the NorthTown Mall after his neighbor called police, according to court documents.

 A Spokane man faces assault charges after allegedly attacking his neighbor with a sword following a dispute over garbage cans.

 A Spokane man faces assault charges after allegedly attacking his neighbor with a sword following a dispute over garbage cans.

 Carlo M. Cerutti, 50, was arrested Saturday at his duplex near the NorthTown Mall after his neighbor called police, according to court documents.

 According to court documents, Cerutti’s wife got into an argument with her neighbor after accusing him of throwing his garbage into her garbage can.

 The victim told police Cerutti came rushing out of his house after the argument wielding “a large sword-type weapon with multiple blades,” court documents say. He tried to swing the weapon like a hatchet, the neighbor told police.

 The victim put his hands up to block the blade and was able to pull the sword away from Cerutti, court documents say. Another neighbor witnessed the fight. |||||


Article:
La Porte County mail carrier accused of not delivering thousands of pieces of mail. // WSBT 22 photo

 Many of us depend on the postal service to deliver critical information, but what happens if your mail carrier doesn't deliver?

 In La Porte County, about 17,000 pieces of mail never made it to the intended destination.

 WSBT 22 reported Tuesday night that there's now a warrant out for a former mail carrier's arrest.

 Kristopher Block of LaPorte worked for the post office from 2015 to 2017.

 In that time, court records obtained by WSBT 22 allege he didn't deliver thousands of pieces of mail. He's now facing charges of felony Official Misconduct and misdemeanor Theft.

 Many days,the LaPorte Post Office is busy with mail coming in and out all day long.

 According to court records, for about six months in late 2016 to early 2017, a lot of mail never made it to its destination.

 Inclduing destinations like, longtime LaPorte resident, Wally Bass's home.

 “At least two to three times a week, we wouldn't get no mail and I knew that we had mail that was supposed to come, bills and different stuff,” said Bass.

 Court records show in February of 2017, tubs containing frozen mail were found in a ravine in New Buffalo.

 Those pieces were tracked back to the LaPorte Post Office and, at the time, mail carrier Kristopher Block's assigned routes.

 The documents say Block admitted to a detective with the post office that he paid a friend $50 to burn mail he didn't have time to deliver on a “regular basis.”

 Bass says he's had things like worker's comp checks go missing.

 “It's a crap-shoot whether you are going to get your mail or not," he said. "Finally, we just got tired of it and we got a P.O. box."

 Records show, postal service special agents found 11,000 pieces of mail in tubs in New Buffalo and when those agents went to Block's home, they found about 6,000 more.

 WSBT 22 also went to Block's home, but no one answered the door.

 Bass says he's happy the mail was found. He hopes something like this doesn't happen again.

 “I’d like to be able to have my mail delivered back to my house everyday where I don't have to pay for a P.O. box,” said Bass.

 WSBT 22 spoke to an official from the U.S. Postal Service, Office of Inspector General who provided the following statement:

 “The vast majority of U.S. Postal Service personnel are dedicated, hard-working public servants dedicated to moving mail to its proper destination who would never consider engaging in any form of criminal behavior. This type of alleged behavior within the Postal Service is not tolerated and when a postal employee betrays that trust of the American people, the special agents in the U.S. Postal Service, Office of Inspector General vigorously investigate these matters as we did in this instance and work with other law enforcement agencies and local, state and federal prosecutors to hold accountable those employees who violate that public trust. Anyone can contact the USPS OIG Hotline at 1-888-USPS-OIG (1-888-877-7644) or file a complaint online at www.uspsoig.gov to report alleged fraud, waste of funds or resources, mail theft and other postal crimes committed by postal employees or contractors.”

  ||||| CLOSE Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana allows Indianapolis residents to share anonymous tips with law enforcement. Here are a few things Crime Stoppers wants you to know before you call. Wochit

 U.S. Postal Service mail vehicles sit in a parking lot at a mail distribution center on February 18, 2015 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images)

 An Indiana mail carrier who is accused of paying a man to throw away 11,000 pieces of mail in another state and of hiding another 6,000 pieces at home is now facing criminal charges.

 Kristopher Block, 39, of LaPorte, was charged Tuesday in LaPorte Circuit Court with a felony for official misconduct and a misdemeanor for theft, according to online court documents.

 A warrant for his arrest has been issued, but online jail records indicate that Block has not yet been taken into custody.

 An investigation by the U.S. Postal Service began when a deputy with the Berrien County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan found multiple tubs of standard, undelivered mail in a ravine in February 2017. Authorities dug up the frozen mail bundles and transported them to the LaPorte Post Office.

 Court documents said that additional investigation revealed that the mail originated from the U.S Post Office branch in LaPorte, and that Block was the assigned carrier.

 When first speaking to police, Block said he was not involved in the destruction of the mail. When he was later shown 150 pieces of the recovered mail, court documents quote him as saying, "Looks like I’m going to jail."

 Get it while you can! Indianapolis weather: Enjoy patio seating. For now.

 Hamilton County court battle: With no chance to contest, Noblesville parking tickets unconstitutional, lawsuit claims

 Block told police that he took home mail he couldn’t deliver before the end of his shift and paid a friend of his $50 per bundle to burn it in Michigan, court documents said.

 Court documents say Block told investigators that the first time he gave up mail to be destroyed, he was far behind delivering his route in a timely manner.

 Block told police he would just give his roommate one bundle at a time to burn and admitted that he would unload the bundles on his lunch break.

 Block added that this went on for months dating back to summer 2016. Court documents said that after being questioned by police, he went to the post of office to turn in about 6,000 pieces of mail that he did not deliver and was keeping in his home.

 Block resigned from his job at the post office on Feb. 7, 2017.

 Police later determined that an estimated 11,000 pieces were recovered from the ravine in Michigan.

 According to court documents, police have not yet located Block's accomplice. The other man has also not been formally charged with a crime at this time, according to online court reocrds.

 Call IndyStar reporter Justin L. Mack at (317) 444-6138. Follow him on Twitter: @justinlmack.

 Read or Share this story: https://indy.st/2qqg6Gy ||||| A letter carrier based in La Porte, Indiana, has resigned after postal investigators interviewed him about thousands of pieces of mail found in Michigan.Kristopher Block, 40, of La Porte, was charged with felony official misconduct and misdemeanor theft, according to the La Porte County Prosecuting Attorney's Office. A warrant has been issued for his arrest.The investigation started after 11,000 pieces of mail were recovered in Berrien County, Michigan. Investigators with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General interviewed Block and then he decided to resign, said Jeff Arney, a USPS OIG spokesman.Arney said Block had a primary route in La Porte, but also would assist with at least four other routes, as well. It's unclear what areas of La Porte may have been impacted.A La Porte Postmaster spokeswoman said Wednesday that she is trying to clarify the route locations.Meantime, Arney emphasized that most employees do their jobs.It was unclear Wednesday afternoon whether Block was in police custody. |||||Summary:

– Neither snow nor rain can keep most mail carriers from their duties, but a too-taxing workload apparently derailed ex-Indiana mailman Kristopher Block. He's now charged with misdemeanor theft and felony "official misconduct" after allegedly not delivering 17,000 pieces of mail, the Indianapolis Star reports. What the former La Porte mail carrier is accused of doing with the backlogged mail: hoarding 6,000 pieces of it in his home, as well as paying an accomplice $50 per bundle to dispose of about 11,000 pieces of mail by burning it in Michigan. The still-unnamed helper, however, reportedly instead dumped the mail in a Michigan ravine, where it was found in February 2017. The USPS traced the mail back to Block, and he's said to have feigned ignorance when first approached about it. But court documents note that once some of the recovered mail was shown to him, Block said: "Looks like I'm going to jail." He then admitted he'd fallen behind on his shifts and started taking undelivered mail home. One La Porte resident tells WSBT 22 it was a "crapshoot" on whether he'd get his mail or not during the six-month period in question—late 2016 to the time of Block's resignation in February 2017—and that he finally just got a PO Box. A statement from a USPS Office of Inspector General spokesman notes that "the vast majority of US Postal Service personnel are ... hardworking public servants dedicated to moving mail to its proper destination who would never consider engaging in any form of criminal behavior." Meanwhile, a La Porte post office rep says they're trying to figure out which customers would have been affected, per WLS.


Here is a news article: What is love bombing?

 Love bombing is a process of grooming in which a predator uses flattery, praise and the promise of a supreme alliance to fulfill their own agendas. By love bombing their victims, abusers are able to persuade their targets to fulfill their requests and desires. Love bombing is not only a tool used by covert manipulators to exploit their victims, it is also used in cults to ensure loyalty to the cult leader. In fact, there is much overlap between the behavior of cults and the abuse cycle of an abuser and his or her victim.

 While anyone can be the victim of love bombing, it has an especially powerful effect on children of narcissistic parents, because they have already been subconsciously programmed to seek approval, engage in people-pleasing habits and look for external validation as a way to survive their psychologically turbulent childhoods.

 When children of narcissists meet emotional predators in adulthood, they are especially susceptible to becoming ensnared in the web of a malignant narcissist.

 Love Bombing and Intermittent Reinforcement Work Together to Create an Environment of Uncertainty, Coercion and Control

 In a relationship with a pathological predator, love bombing is combined with intermittent reinforcement to create a sense of instability and longing in the victim. Intermittent reinforcement (in the context of psychological abuse) is a pattern of cruel, callous treatment mixed in with periodic affection. The abuser hands out “rewards” such as affection, a compliment, or gifts sporadically and unpredictably throughout the abuse cycle. This causes the victim to perpetually seek their approval while settling for the crumbs of their occasional positive behavior.

 As author Adylen Birch writes, “Creating fear of losing the relationship – and then relieving it periodically with episodes of love and attention – is the perfect manipulation.” Much like the way a gambler at a slot machine becomes addicted to playing the game for a potential win despite the risk of major loss, a victim in the abuse cycle can become attached to the idea of getting a return on their “investment” in the relationship despite the toll it takes on their well-being.

 Intermittent reinforcement also affects our feelings towards our perpetrators, paradoxically bonding us more deeply to them and causing us to perceive their rare positive behaviors in an amplified way. Dr. Carver describes this as the “small kindness perception.” As he notes in his article, “Love and Stockholm Syndrome”:

 In threatening and survival situations, we look for evidence of hope – a small sign that the situation may improve. When an abuser/controller shows the victim some small kindness, even though it is to the abusers benefit as well, the victim interprets that small kindness as a positive trait of the captor…In relationships with abusers, a birthday card, a gift (usually provided after a period of abuse), or a special treat are interpreted as not only positive, but evidence that the abuser is not “all bad” and may at some time correct his/her behavior. Abusers and controllers are often given positive credit for not abusing their partner, when the partner would have normally been subjected to verbal or physical abuse in a certain situation.”

 Targets of emotional and psychological violence seek the love bombing that was so nourishing in the idealization phase, even as they are now being devalued and discarded by their abusers. This is not surprising, since love bombing, intermittent reinforcement and the effects of trauma work together to strengthen an intense trauma bond between target and abuser.

 There are three ways children of narcissists, who grow up scapegoated and diminished, are vulnerable to the tactics of love bombing. I discuss them below, as well as some “immunity methods” to resist these manipulation tactics.

 1. While hypercriticism puts us on the defensive, love-bombing disarms us initially. It mirrors our deepest desires to be wanted, desired, loved, cared for, heard and seen for who we truly are, down to every little nuance and quirk.

 When we are love bombed, there is an immediate sense of belonging and of kinship, something that is very attractive to children of narcissists, who feel very much like outcasts in their families as well as society.

 Narcissists and sociopaths are very good at “hooking” us by pointing out our desirable physical attributes, personality traits, and/or accomplishments that deep down we want admired and recognized. At the same time, they fixate on those traits to further their own agenda, not because they actually care to know us deeply. They dig deep when they have to in order to get what they want (praise in return, sex, money, a place to live, etc.), but their affection for us is often short-lived and transient, escalating to contempt and envy should we ever threaten their sense of control over us. As Dr. Floyd (2013) writes:

 “Love bombing is an extreme example of something that turns out to be relatively common—something I call “toxic affection.” If affection is the expression of love and fondness, then toxic affection is any such expression that has an ulterior motive. Perhaps I say I love you because I really do, and I want you to know that. Or, perhaps I say it only because I want to sleep with you, want to borrow money from you, or just want you to say it back to me. Using affection as a form of persuasion is often successful for the same reason that love bombing is: we want and need to be loved.”

 Immunity method: Seek internal validation for those traits that you’ve been love bombed with in the past. It’s not that you don’t embody what the predator has flattered you with, but that you no longer need to depend on them for your sole source of self-esteem. Surround yourself with healthy people who recognize, rather than exploit, those qualities in you. Genuine compliments are given freely, without a need for you to do something in return or be a certain way for a person. Be alert to over the top flattery merged with a request and unwarranted praise. Even if the praise does seem warranted, just be aware that some (but certainly not all) praise has a hidden purpose.

 2. Since children of narcissists are often triangulated by their parents, pitted against their own siblings, they fall for predators who make them feel special and unique.

 This is the type of attention that children of narcissists always craved to receive in childhood and they get plenty of validation from an emotional predator that grooms them. Yet they later become retraumatized by these same manipulators when they are “triangulated” with former or new harem members and lovers. This causes targets of malignant narcissists to feel even more diminished and lacking, never feeling quite “enough” and feeling as if they have to compete with others in order to be seen as important.

 Immunity method: Pinpoint what makes you irreplaceable and resist comparing yourself to others negatively. Remember that you may be seeing an abuser’s new shiny target or someone they triangulated you with fresh eyes, and you are unaware of what makes you truly beautiful and outstanding. Look at yourself with fresh eyes instead – if you were an outsider looking in, what amazing traits, talents and qualities would you notice about yourself? What makes you special and unique?

 Cultivate an authentic relationship with what makes you stand out and embrace visibility in areas where you may have previously hidden yourself to avoid the spotlight for fear of punishment or reprisal. Bring in healthier social feedback when needed to brainstorm what those areas could be. When you have a deep inner knowing that no one could ever replace you, you don’t find it necessary for someone else to make you feel that way.

 You can then become much more selective about who you let into your life. Manipulative, toxic people can no longer gain easy access by just being charming or sweet – they have to show up and be there for you in real ways in order for you to take them seriously.

 3. We mistake superficial alliances for deep, meaningful and once-in-a-lifetime connections.

 Children of narcissists are forced to navigate the world alone and become their own rugged heroes. We tend to our own wounds, our own scraped knees and emotional voids due to the necessity for survival. With no supportive caretakers to mend our aches in either childhood or adulthood, we find solace in even the most superficial of connections, holding onto them for indications that we have finally found a “home” for our tattered hearts and weary souls.

 As author Peg Streep writes in “Why Unloved Daughters Fall for Narcissists,” we often don’t notice the red flags as much as we do the potential for connection:

 “Because you’re so hungry for love and connection—and still trying to fill the hole in your heart left by an unloving mother—you’re likely not to notice how he amps the volume and drama. You stay focused on the make-up sex and the warm feelings of reassurance you feel when he tells you not to worry.”

 Unfortunately, the fast-forwarding nature of the type of relationship that has love-bombing, mixed with the intense chemistry of finally being noticed and seen, makes for a rather addictive biochemical and psychological cocktail. We become addicted to the attention because we mistake it for authentic connection.

 Immunity method: Differentiate between connection and flattery early on to avoid investing in people who may not have your best interests at heart. Assess which relationships and friendships in your life have the capacity to grow into deeper alliances and which ones fall short of authentic partnership and true compatibility. The former usually takes some time to build and is built over time with someone who is trustworthy, consistent, transparent and reliable. The latter is often a quick fix or sleight of hand, a magic show followed by a disappearing act.

 Flattery, even if it is based on truly amazing qualities you might have, rarely lasts long-term. Connection, on the other hand, is built on a solid foundation – not just on empty compliments, but on genuine rapport, support, and intimacy. It involves two individuals who both share parts of themselves with vulnerability, along with a respect for personal boundaries and reciprocity. Connection, not crumbs, is what nourishes you long-term. Remember that you are truly worthy and deserving of nothing less.

 References

 Birch, A. (2016, December 18). The Most Powerful Motivator on the Planet ~ Intermittent Reinforcement. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from http://psychopathsandlove.com/intermittent-reinforcement/

 Carver, J. M. (2011). Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The mystery of loving an abuser. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from http://drjoecarver.makeswebsites.com/clients/49355/File/love_and_stockholm_syndrome.html

 Floyd, K. (2013, October 14). Beware of toxic affection. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/affectionado/201310/beware-toxic-affection

 Streep, P. (2016, September). Why unloved daughters fall for narcissists. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from https://blogs.psychcentral.com/knotted/2016/09/why-unloved-daughters-fall-for-narcissists/

 Thompson, L. (2016, March). When family is a cult (Pt 1). Retrieved July 31, 2017, from https://blogs.psychcentral.com/narcissism/2016/03/when-family-is-a-cult-pt-1/ ||||| A bunch of flowers delivered to your office. A surprise romantic getaway to a secluded countryside cottage for the weekend. A thoughtful phone call when you least expect it. All the signs of the beginning a of loving, caring relationship, right?

 Well, perhaps not. In fact, they might be signposts for the opposite, or what is commonly known as 'love bombing'.

 According to Dale Archer, a psychiatrist and author, 'love bombing' occurs when people are showered with over-the-top displays of attention and affection. And, we're not just talking romantic gestures and the occasional home-cooked meal, but romantic conversations, talks of the 'future' together, and constant contact via social media, phone calls and messages. The difference between a solid loving relationship and one that is subject to 'love bombing' is what happens next...

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 More often than not, 'love bombing' is when these displays of 'affection' are grandiose and really over the top, leading people to quickly think they might have found their 'soul mate' or 'the one'. However, they soon find the loving, caring, affection, and understanding behaviour from their partner flips, resulting in unreasonable, controlling and manipulative traits.

 What is 'love bombing'?

 In essence, 'love bombing' is a form of conditioning tool (otherwise known as a form of abuse), whereby one person in the relationship drowns the other in displays of 'love' to maintain power and control.

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 'Healthy relationships build slowly, and are based on a series of actions, not a flood of words,' Archer writes for a blog post titled 'The Manipulative Partner's Most Devious Tactic' for Psychology Today.

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 The term is widely believed to have been first used by the Unification Church of the United States in the 1970s, whose cult leaders used love as a form of ammunition 'to con followers into committing mass suicide and murder', according to Archer.

 'Pimps and gang leaders use 'love bombing' to encourage loyalty and obedience as well,' he writes.

 How does it work?

 First things first, all relationships are different and just because a partner showers you with love and affection does not mean they're narcissistic or have psychopathic tendencies that might lead to 'love bombing'. Some people genuinely are very loving and thoughtful and these sorts of gestures continue long into the relationship with no catch.

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 However, those who use 'love bombing' as a form of control often reinforce their love for their victim by showering them with affection when they act in a certain way that pleases the abuser, and later they will punish that person for behaving in a way that the abuser doesn't like.

 For example, an abuser will post an adorable snap of the two of you at dinner to Facebook, for all to see, with an equally mushy caption about how much you mean to him and how happy he is to be spending the evening with a gorgeous creature like you. The same person, though, when you head out for a dinner without him or go to a club with your friends, will call you ten times and accuse you of cheating/abandoning/not caring enough about him.

 ''Love bombing' works because humans have a natural need to feel good about who we are, and often we can't fill this need on our own,' writes Archer.

 How do you spot 'love-bombing'?

 Getting butterflies, falling head-over-heels, and feeling like you're falling madly in love with a new boyfriend/girlfriend is very normal in the early months of a relationship.

 But, according to Archer, potential love bombing victims often find themselves trapped into having constant contact with a partner, which ultimately convinces them the intensity of the communication is a sign of success and love. |||||
A summary of this is?

– Love at first sight may actually be a warning sign. That's according to experts cautioning people in new relationships about so-called "love bombing." Not familiar with the term? Elle UK "delve[s] into the worrying behaviors of a 'love bomber,'" explaining that it takes time for people to truly get to know each other as their relationships deepen. When someone is over-the-top awesome in the beginning of a relationship—always sending flowers and offering up compliments and affection—it could actually be a "conditioning tool (otherwise known as a form of abuse)." PsychCentral calls it a "process of grooming." Constant flowers themselves aren't the worrisome sign—the shift is; ie, if the attention goes from positive and affectionate to controlling and cruel. If the person being "bombed" falls fast and hard it can be harder to see that shift. Love bombers, by the way, are narcissists, and they're usually men. In Psychology Today, psychiatrist Dale Archer dates the term "love bombing" to the 1970s, when Unification Church of the United States (aka the "Moonies") first used it. Cult leaders like David Koresh and Charles Manson would employ this tactic to woo followers and then con them into nefarious acts. Archer argues that idealization isn't necessarily harmful when it grows over time, but that the "common thread" in love bombing is intense courtship and idealization over just a matter of days or weeks. Soon, "love bombers exploit the natural human need for self worth, and turn it into shame, regret, and self-loathing." (One study finds that men tend to feel more entitled and be more narcissistic than women.)


Article:

Washington (CNN) The leaders of the Republican and Democratic national committees on Wednesday weighed in on the prospect of an independent presidential run by Michael Bloomberg.

 DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz suggested that the former New York City mayor's priorities are already "well cared-for" in the Democratic platform, while RNC leader Reince Priebus welcomed the idea, saying Bloomberg would siphon off votes from the Democratic candidate.

 The billionaire recently told the Financial Times he found "the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters," and that he was "looking at all the options."

 With two nominating contests gone and outsider candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump -- the two winners in New Hampshire -- looking like legitimate contenders, the likelihood of a Bloomberg bid could be growing.

 Asked about the prospect by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Wasserman Schultz sought to ease the wealthy media mogul's concerns, saying that Bloomberg's priorities are "well cared-for in the Democratic nominees' priorities and the Democratic Party 's agenda."

 "(They are) certainly not cared-for by any of the Republicans that are running right now," the Florida congresswoman continued. "On the contrary, they would roll back progress on issues like education and consumer protection and gun safety and protecting people from people who would do them harm."

 Wasserman Schultz's GOP counterpart Priebus, who spoke to Blitzer minutes later, took a different view of the question, saying he would welcome Bloomberg to the race, but only because he views the billionaire as a spoiler who would cull most of his support from the eventual Democratic nominee.

 "I don't really view it as a third party (candidacy). I just view it as another Democrat," he said. "So you'll have two Democrats running and splitting their vote."

 Priebus sought to pigeonhole Bloomberg as a "liberal Democrat" who "wants to take all the guns away" and "tax Slurpees and sodas," references to his calls for greater gun control and efforts to impose caps on soft drink sizes during his time running New York City.

 "He can't get to 270 electoral votes. It's not even possible," Priebus added. "Even if he did win a few electoral votes, then he would put the race in the hands of (House Speaker) Paul Ryan and I would imagine Paul's going to choose the Republican."

 If no candidate clinches a majority of electoral votes in the general election, the tiebreaker is put in the hands of the House of Representatives, which would likely put Ryan and his GOP colleagues in the position of picking the next president. ||||| Far from the New Hampshire primary, aides to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg eyed the solid victories Tuesday by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as potential boosts to a Bloomberg candidacy.

 The results, Bloomberg advisers said, were a fresh sign he may have an opening, as Democrats and Republicans embraced candidates the aides said were unlikely to resonate with voters in a general election.

 Steve... ||||| Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire media owner and former New York mayor, has stated for the first time that he is considering a run to become US president, a move that would dramatically reshape the 2016 race for the White House.

 Speaking to the Financial Times, the founder of the eponymous financial information group criticised the quality of the debate so far. He said he was “looking at all the options” when asked whether he was considering putting his name forward.

 “I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters,” Mr Bloomberg said in an interview, before adding that the US public deserved “a lot better”.

 His comments follow a New York Times report last month that said the billionaire had told advisers to draft a plan for a run as an independent candidate that could see him spending as much as $1bn of his estimated $39bn fortune.

 The first confirmation by Mr Bloomberg, who has considered running for the Oval Office in previous elections, comes as Donald Trump, the bombastic billionaire running a populist campaign, dominates the Republicans’ race. The property mogul has a significant lead in polls ahead of Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire. In the Democratic race, Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-declared socialist senator from Vermont, boasts a sizeable lead over Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state.

 Mr Bloomberg told the FT that he would need to start putting his name on ballots across the US at the beginning of March. “I’m listening to what candidates are saying and what the primary voters appear to be doing,” he said.

 His entry would radically affect the election, which has already been upended by the anti-establishment campaigns of Mr Trump and Mr Sanders. Many experts believe that Mr Bloomberg would help the Republican nominee by drawing more support from Democrats over Republicans because of his liberal stance on issues such as gun control and the environment.

 Highlighting the steep climb that Mr Bloomberg would probably face, a poll conducted by his own news organisation and the Des Moines Register ahead of the Iowa caucuses found that only 9 per cent of Republicans had a favourable view of him, while 17 per cent of likely Democratic voters in the state had a favourable opinion.

 Mr Trump has said he would be “very happy” if Mr Bloomberg entered the race, while Mr Sanders has criticised the prospect, saying it would confirm that the US was “moving away from democracy to oligarchy”.

 Mr Bloomberg reportedly also has reservations about the campaign of Mrs Clinton, who has dismissed the threat of his possible candidacy by arguing that he would only enter the race if she was not the Democratic nominee. But the strong challenge being posed by Mr Sanders raises the chances that the Democratic nominee will not be chosen by early March, the point at which Mr Bloomberg would need to make a decision about entering.

 While experts believe that an independent candidate would struggle in a system that is heavily skewed to favour those from the two main parties, the 2016 race has already proved the danger of accepting conventional wisdom.

 A year ago, most experts predicted that the election would see Mrs Clinton face Jeb Bush, the former Republican governor of Florida, or Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor. But Mr Walker dropped out early, and Mr Bush is struggling to save his campaign as he languishes in fifth place in the New Hampshire polls after doing badly in Iowa.

 The World Blog White House countdown: Bloomberg weighs his options Jumping into the 2016 race would radically alter an election that has already been completely upended by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

 Mr Bloomberg was speaking as he launched the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, which was created to improve how companies report their exposure to climate change. He chairs the group, which was announced by Mark Carney, Financial Stability Board chief, at the recent climate change summit in Paris.

 Mr Bloomberg has taken an increasingly hands-on role at his company since leaving the mayor’s office in 2014.

 He had been expected to pursue his philanthropic endeavours, such as his work fighting climate change and his push for tighter gun control legislation. But the former mayor grew restless and went back to work full time at the company he co-founded in 1981.

 His return was followed by upheaval in the upper echelons of the financial information company, with Dan Doctoroff, a long-time confidant, among the first to leave.

 I’m listening to what candidates are saying and what the primary voters appear to be doing - Michael Bloomberg

 Mr Doctoroff was Bloomberg’s chief executive, a role that Mr Bloomberg took himself. Several figures from the news and editorial side of the business have also left or stepped back, notably Matt Winkler, the bow tie-wearing father of the company’s news operation and Mr Bloomberg’s right-hand man for 25 years. He was replaced by John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist.

 The shake-up in editorial came as part of a greater focus on the company’s data terminals. Bloomberg is facing new competitors on multiple fronts, notably Symphony, a messaging service owned by some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, and low-cost operators, such as Money.net.

 The Cruz campaign welcomed the possible entry of Mr Bloomberg into the race. Rick Tyler, spokesman for Ted Cruz, said: “Please run!”

 Brian Fallon, spokesman for the Clinton campaign, declined to comment, as did the Rubio campaign.

 Michael Bloomberg urges companies to reveal climate change impact Companies must better explain to staff and investors how they are affected

 At a Sanders rally in Derry, New Hampshire, supporters said Mr Bloomberg’s entry into the race was unlikely to change their vote.

 Christopher Anderson, a 49-year-old art dealer who described himself an independent voter, said of Mr Bloomberg: “I don’t care for him. There’s not much difference between him and Hillary — they’re all in bed with Wall Street and big corporations.”

 James Coll, s 43-year-old teacher in US history from New York, added: “If he runs as an independent, how would he govern after getting support from Democrats and Republicans?”

 Additional reporting by Sebastian Payne in Derry, New Hampshire |||||
What is a summary?

– The New Hampshire primary may have boosted the prospects of a politician who wasn't even on the ballot: Michael Bloomberg. Stories about a possible run have been circulating for a while, and the victories by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have only ramped up speculation. Bloomberg is "itching to do it," an anonymous confidant tells the New York Post. The former New York City mayor is reportedly unlikely to run if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, but she got trounced by 21 points. "There's a big opening in the middle of the electorate, and Bloomberg is on point in that space," a former John McCain adviser who's not working with Bloomberg tells the Wall Street Journal. A Sanders-Trump race "would open a path for an independent candidate." On Monday, Bloomberg told the Financial Times he was "looking at all the options" and found "the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters." He added he'd probably announce by early March. Aides say the results of Super Tuesday on March 1 will help him make his decision. But even if Bloomberg does run, one professor says he'll have a tough go. "It still is difficult to come in from out of the blue and get the traction you need, even when things are really seemingly divisive and there's a great deal of disenchantment, even when you're a billionaire," he says. The Republican National Committee believes Bloomberg would steal votes from the Democratic candidate, notes CNN. The DNC's chair says Bloomberg's priorities are "well cared-for."


Here is a news article: The developing agreement on the DNA database would be part of a series of pacts that would resolve many of the key outstanding issues in the legislative session this year, including the state’s budget for the next year, new political districts for state legislators and a new pension plan that would reduce retirement benefits for future public employees.

 “We have the parameters of a deal,” Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Democrat from Brooklyn , said of the DNA bill that he is sponsoring.

 Negotiations are moving at an unusually brisk pace in the capital, as Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers face two sets of deadlines: a federal court has demanded an update on the Legislature’s redistricting progress by Thursday, and the governor and legislators are required by law to have a new budget in place by April 1.

 New York’s DNA database was created in the mid-1990s but applied only to those convicted of a limited number of crimes; the data collection has been expanded three times since then by the Legislature, most recently in 2006. Currently, DNA samples can be collected from people convicted of fewer than half of the crimes codified in state law, including all felonies and some misdemeanors. The measure would expand that to require that a DNA sample be submitted by all convicted criminals.

 The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. , an advocate for expanding the database, wrote in a recent opinion article that taking DNA samples from those convicted of low-level crimes had proved to be effective. He said that since the state allowed prosecutors to collect DNA from individuals convicted of petty larceny, investigators had been able to identify people linked to 48 murders and 220 sexual assaults statewide.

 In one case prosecuted by Mr. Vance’s office, DNA from the butt of a cigarette smoked by Lerio Guerrero while he was being questioned for trespassing in Brooklyn last year linked him to a 1998 rape. Mr. Guerrero had been arrested several times in the interim, but none of his convictions were for crimes serious enough to warrant that he give a DNA sample.

 Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.

 Prosecutors also argue that the database could be used to exonerate the wrongfully convicted by matching DNA in their cases to someone else. But the defense bar has argued that courts sometimes place onerous restrictions on gaining access to evidence after a conviction and has, therefore, urged the Legislature to make it easier for defense lawyers to get evidence and run tests against the database.

 “New York has a demonstrated problem with eyewitness misidentification and false confessions leading to wrongful convictions,” said Stephen Saloom, the policy director of the Innocence Project. “Any legislation that ignores the recommendations of those who’ve studied these issues is ignoring the heart of wrongful conviction reform needed in New York State .”

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 The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver , a Manhattan Democrat, has pushed to allow defendants access to the database. “We need to see fairness in terms of discovery, in terms of a defendant or a, quote-unquote, wrongfully convicted person,” he said.

 The Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos , a Long Island Republican, said he was not opposed to access provisions, as long as it was “done in a very tight and controlled way.” Senator Skelos did say he was against including broader so-called wrongful conviction protections in the bill, like videotaping interrogations.

 Some in the Assembly, led by Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, have been pushing to include as part of the DNA bill a measure that would make it a violation, rather than a crime, to possess very small amounts of marijuana in public view, but it was not clear whether that provision would make it into the final language.

 “There’s absolutely no justification for expanding the database and simultaneously including illegitimate misdemeanor marijuana arrest convictions that are racially biased and fatally flawed,” he said.

 The discussions over the DNA database are running alongside quickening budget negotiations. As part of his spending plan, the governor is proposing to give newly hired public workers across the state, including in New York City , the choice between a less generous pension plan than is available to current employees or a defined contribution plan, which is similar to a 401(k).

 But the senior administration official said the governor was now prepared to drop the 401(k) option, which has been a lightning rod for criticism from labor unions, so long as legislative leaders agreed to his proposal to create a new pension tier that would provide reduced retirement benefits for future workers. ||||| Bennett Barbour was convicted in 1978 of a rape he didn’t commit. At trial, he had an alibi supported by several witnesses. He didn’t match the victim’s description of her attacker. Barbour suffers from a severe bone disease that would have made it nearly impossible for him to be the assailant. Police found no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, beyond the eyewitness identification by his alleged victim. Barbour was handed an 18-year sentence and paroled after nearly five years.

 He tells me his time in prison was “a nightmare.” He has cancer now, “all over my body,” and travels regularly to Richmond for treatment. In prison, he says, “everything is taken away. Your pride ...” as his voice trails off. Jonathan Sheldon, a lawyer familiar with his case says, “People think, ‘Oh, he only got five years.’ But in that five years he lost his six-month-old marriage, and scarred his relationship with his daughter. That five years broke him.”

 The Commonwealth of Virginia learned that Bennett Barbour was innocent nearly two years ago, when DNA testing cleared him of the crime. Virginia authorities, however, never informed Barbour of his innocence. (State officials claim to have mailed a letter with the test results to Barbour’s last four known addresses, but none of those letters ever reached him.) Barbour learned of the DNA tests that proved his innocence only last month, on Feb. 5, when he received a phone call from Sheldon. “I was with my nephew playing cards, and Mr. Sheldon called my mother’s house looking for me,” says Barbour. “He said the authorities stopped looking for me because they couldn’t find me. But Sheldon found me in two days using the Internet.”

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 Actually, that’s not true. It only took Sheldon a few hours.

 Dahlia Lithwick Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus.

 Bennett Barbour is one of the fortunate ones. He, unlike what may ultimately amount to dozens of other men wrongly convicted and incarcerated by the state of Virginia, knows that his innocence can be conclusively proved. His lawyers at the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project filed paperwork last week to have the state formally declare him innocent. The trouble is that Barbour is one of only a handful who have enjoyed this vindication. Years ago, Virginia authorities realized they were likely convicting innocent men. The state’s officials know their criminal justice system is riddled with errors. As they investigated the depth of the problem, they have found that indeed many more men—at least dozens, maybe more—might be exonerated using DNA tests. But the state’s authorities did not move quickly to suspend these sentences or contact the individuals or families involved. They did not publicize their findings. Indeed, they denied Freedom of Information Act requests that would have shed light on the problem. Rather, Virginia state officials appears to have devised a system of notifying current and former convicts that is almost guaranteed to lead to the fewest number of exonerations.

 How was it that Bennett Barbour’s DNA came to be tested several decades after the alleged rape? In September 2004, Mark Warner, then Virginia’s governor, ordered a random audit of 31 old criminal cases after a vast trove of biological evidence was discovered lying around in old case files saved by state forensic serologists. The testing of those 31 samples led to the exonerations of two convicted rapists. Warner, embarrassed by the revelations, then ordered in late 2005 that every sample obtained between 1973 and 1988 be rechecked. It amounted to thousands of files.

 It was a project intended to take 18 months at a cost of $1.4 million dollars. Now in its seventh year, the cost of the project hovers at $5 million. Nobody has any idea exactly how the Virginia Department of Forensics has conducted its work. Indeed, no one knows much about the specifics of the crime lab’s work at all. According to the Richmond Times Dispatch, the state located approximately 800 biological samples of DNA that could be tested. Of those, only 214 were in sufficient condition to yield accurate results. Among these, more than 70 people—one commonly cited figure is 79—appear to have been excluded as the perpetrators of a crime.

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 University of Virginia law school professor Brandon Garrett (who has contributed to Slate) is an expert on wrongful convictions and DNA exoneration. His landmark study, Convicting the Innocent, scrutinized the cases of the first 250 people to be exonerated nation-wide by DNA testing. To hear him tell it, Virginia’s statewide audit is a mystery wrapped in obfuscation. “This DNA testing program began two Governors ago,” he says, “but its operation has remained shrouded in secrecy. We do not know how the authorities chose to test the cases that they have tested. We do not know how long the authorities have known about the many dozens of cases where DNA has excluded the individuals. We do not know what local prosecutors plan to do about the cases where DNA may prove innocence.”

 At the time Virginia’s audit began, Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to exonerate hundreds of prisoners across the country, noted in astonishment that “a random sample of convicted felons and we're getting a 7 percent exoneration rate" in Virginia. But it appears that a 7 percent exoneration rate may be grossly understating the problem. UVA’s Garrett suspects that the error rate may actually be as high as 17 percent. As he discovered in his own research, Barbour’s conviction, based on the testimony of a single eyewitness, reflects the reality that of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA testing, a whopping 76 percent were misidentified by eyewitnesses.

 Whatever the percentage of error on the part of Virginia’s criminal justice system, one thing is certain: Only a handful of the falsely convicted have received the exonerations they deserve. Since DNA retesting began in Virginia, two people have been formally exonerated and another, who is dead, was cleared of a rape he didn’t commit. When Barbour’s paperwork is processed, he will be only the fourth person to be exonerated, despite the fact that the state is aware of scores of others who may be innocent. Even now Barbour remains skeptical. “They can do anything now to trick it up like they did 34 years ago,” he says. “I’m not going to be excited ’til it all comes out. I’m innocent. I’m here. But I don’t trust the justice system. Period.”

 After all, Virginia authorities never did successfully contact Barbour to acknowledge his innocence. It was Jonathan Sheldon, a private-practice attorney in Fairfax, Va. who took it upon himself to contact Barbour and many of the other 70-some men who have been convicted of crimes, excluded by DNA testing, and never advised of that fact. As of today, the state has given him only 32 names and Sheldon says he has already located most of them. Some are dead. Some are dying. Some suffer from mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to even understand why he is calling. As the Richmond-Times Dispatch’s Frank Green, who first reported on Barbour’s exclusion by DNA testing, wrote last month: “The Virginia Department of Forensic Science has issued reports that exclude at least 76 felons as the source of biological evidence in their cases.” Yet as of last month, 29 of those felons had not been notified that the new DNA reports existed.

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 Sheldon launched this crusade to notify as many innocent men as possible because, in his view, neither Virginia’s crime lab nor its prosecutors’ office is taking that task seriously. How the Commonwealth of Virginia managed to put the crime lab and prosecutors’ office in charge of retesting DNA and notifying the prosecutors of the state’s own errors is one of the mysteries here. It would appear to be a program destined to end in confusion, obstruction, or worse. And it has.

 I spoke to Pete Marone, director of the Virginia Department of Forensic Science. Marone argues that the state’s crime lab should not be making legal determinations about the meaning of these DNA tests. “At what point does the lab’s responsibility end?” he asks. “We’re a lab. We do analysis. We don’t determine what the meaning is.” He says that the crime lab’s policy is to turn over their results to the police department and prosecutors, who are in a better position “to ascribe value to those numbers.”

 Initially, Virginia’s state authorities had no plans to notify the convicts that their DNA was being tested. Then, in 2008, the state legislature ordered them to notify those same convicts that their samples had been found and might be examined. If a convict failed to return the paperwork, the sample was tested nonetheless. Despite Marone’s claim that the Department of Forensic Science only conducts lab work, it alone is responsible for informing state prosecutors and police that former convicts have been cleared by DNA tests.

 The department put out a call to pro bono lawyers around the state, who were asked to hand-deliver notifications that the accused might now be subject to DNA retesting. But there was a condition: Those lawyers were required to sign confidentiality agreements indicating that they were barred from explaining the content of the letters to the accused or from representing them in court. Marone explains the rationale for constraining these volunteer lawyers: “The General Assembly said to send pro bono attorneys,” he says. “They can’t go blabbing all over the place. They can’t have the person they are notifying be their client.” He adds that this was done, in part, to protect the pro bono lawyers: “If you send a young, new attorney to a bad neighborhood, bad things could happen.”

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 The letters themselves were mainly legal jargon, and most of the recipients had no idea why the state was contacting them. Here is a copy of one of the state’s notification letters:

 According to Deirdre Enright of the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia Law School (and one of Barbour’s lawyers), most of the recipients were simply terrified that the commonwealth was re-examining their alleged crimes at all. The volunteer lawyers who delivered these letters were reduced, more or less, to being carrier pigeons, unable to explain the crucial significance of these letters’ content for the lives of these men and their families. The net effect was simply to frighten most of the convicts who received them, who knew only that the justice system was spontaneously taking another look at them decades later.

 Marone sees it differently. “This is the criminal justice system,” he says. “The answer is not to release all the criminal records to the newspapers. Lots of these folks hear about the testing and say ‘I did my time. I’ll tell you what to do with your report.’ We couldn’t go searching the streets for people.”

 The lawyers at the UVA Innocence Project believe that’s wrongheaded. Those who have been convicted of a crime they did not commit want to know that they could now be proven innocent. They also quickly realized that the worst possible agency to be notifying individuals—the prosecutors and state crime lab—had taken the sole authority to help them. Matthew Engle, legal director of the Innocence Project Clinic, tells me that those agencies are “not in the business of exonerating people, they’re in the business of convicting people.”

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 Enter Jonathan Sheldon. A successful Northern Virginia attorney, Sheldon has long been involved in death row cases and has worked for years to try to end the death penalty in the commonwealth. Indeed, he was one of the lawyers for John Allen Muhammad, the D.C. sniper. As he learned of the pro bono lawyers fanning out across the state, Sheldon grew infuriated that Virginia was unwilling to release the names of the more than 70 people who DNA testing suggested were innocent. “Why ask for volunteer lawyers to find people and tell them about DNA testing that might be meaningless?” he asks. “Why was the state trying to eliminate all these lawyers from representing all these people?”

 Sheldon submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and investigated further. He looked at the sample letter being mailed out. “These are not well-educated people,” he says, of most of the accused. “I thought, ‘If you send that letter to someone they are going to think the government is after them again.’ ” Sheldon also realized that despite all the testing going on, it appeared that not a single prosecutor had notified anyone that they had been found innocent. “At some point,” he says, “we were poking and prodding them and filing FOIA requests and they just broke and offered to winnow out the 70-something names that had been excluded.” As with the pro bono lawyers before him, state authorities made Sheldon promise not to help those who could be exonerated sue the Department of Forensic Science or take any action on their behalf. Instead, beginning in January, he began making what he calls “oblique” phone calls to men who couldn’t always understand what he was trying to tell them about the state, their DNA, and the justice system.

 And so, while the commonwealth was unable to track down Bennett Barbour for two years, Sheldon did it in a few hours. (Barbour’s lawyer Deirdre Enright says she was able to find Barbour’s correct address in an hour using WhitePages.com.) Nate Green, the Williamsburg Commonwealth's Attorney, told the Richmond Times Dispatch that when he received the 2010 report in Barbour’s case, he sent letters out to the four addresses Barbour had occupied over the last 15 years and received no response. Sheldon says Green “is a good guy and meant well,” but you can’t hand a lab report to the police and tell them to go find a guy. “It’s just not his job to go find old cases and it’s not the police’s job,” he says. Sheldon made it his job.

 In yet another case that recently emerged, the family of a deceased man seeking information on his DNA test results learned that their letter had been misplaced as well. When Sheldon asked the Virginia crime lab for those records, he was told that the department had “not, as part of the project's process, intentionally sent notification letters or certificates of analysis to family members of deceased suspects.” In other words, DNA tests that could potentially exclude deceased offenders may not be released at all. Marone claims the forensics department called the prosecutors immediately in this instance, but the “paperwork was put aside.” He cautions that critics of the system should “keep in mind that until last year, we weren’t allowed to give those reports to anyone but a law enforcement agency. That information is private and personal, and maybe that individual doesn’t want his family members to have a copy of the report. We have to protect the sensitivity and privacy of those individuals.”

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 Marone acknowledges that the system is “not perfect and it’s not timely.” But he rejects the idea that anyone is to blame. Marone claims the crime lab is doing its job, albeit slowly, and that it is the responsibility of the prosecutors and police to notify those who have been excluded by the testing. Sheldon, for his part, rejects the idea that the forensics lab is merely a passive, impartial observer. “[The Department of Forensic Science] thinks of themselves as this holy, unbiased, scientific branch of government,” he says. “But they are an organization with political sensibilities that are strongly pro-prosecution. That’s not surprising since prosecutors and the police are its main constituents.”

 It’s hard to tell whether all this represents mere incompetence on the part of the commonwealth, or some more pernicious effort to cover up past error, intimidate potential exonerees, and disqualify dozens of pro bono attorneys who likely could have represented them. The fact that vitally important information seems to fall into a black hole between the forensics lab, the prosecutors’ offices, and the convicts and their lawyers, suggests that intentional or not, the net effect is that injustices are not being brought to light.

 It remains to be seen whether there will be any repercussions for the state for its failure to notify what may be dozens of men that they were imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. The editorial board of the Richmond Times Dispatch recently advocated “making prosecutors and police chiefs personally liable for the failure to inform innocent men in a timely manner of evidence exonerating them.” Sheldon says that it may certainly be the case that someone will have a claim against the state as these convicts learn of Virginia’s errors and delays, particularly if someone is still in prison and has not been notified. At the very least, there is a strong push from Innocence Project branches and defense lawyers around the state to allow someone other than Department of Forensic Science and the prosecutors’ offices to take responsibility for notifications.

 Sheldon did learn recently that the forensics department may be taking action of a different sort. According to someone at the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, the crime lab initiated an inquiry into whether Sheldon breached his confidentiality agreement because of the press coverage of Barbour's story. Marone denies that this is so. |||||
A summary of this is?

– New York is poised to become the first state in the nation to require people convicted of any crime, no matter how minor, to provide DNA samples for a database. The state's lawmakers are putting the finishing touches on the measure, which would double the size of New York's DNA database, reports the New York Times. Supporters—including all 62 of the state's district attorneys—say the move will catch more violent offenders and exonerate more innocent people. "Every single time we’ve expanded the DNA database, we have shown how effective it is in convicting people who commit crimes, and we’ve also shown that it can be used to exonerate the innocent,” the chief of the Citizens Crime Commission says. The legislation would allow both prosecutors and defense lawyers to access the database. Some lawmakers are seeking to add a measure to the bill that would make it a violation, not a crime, to possess very small amounts of marijuana in public. Click for more on a state with a serious wrongful-conviction problem.


President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

 The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.

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 (Also on POLITICO: 8 takeaways from the DNC)

 “Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult.

 The Obama and Romney campaigns anticipate little movement in national polls before the first debate on Oct. 3, which both see as the most important day of this campaign. They also see eye to eye on their belief that the election will come down to whether Romney can persuade voters he understands the problems of ordinary people and that his solutions are at least marginally better for turning things around economically.

 Where the two camps differ — and differ starkly — is on their theories of the case for navigating the final nine weeks. Romney, armed with more dismal jobs numbers, will run a one-size-fits-all campaign, wrapped around the message that the economy is bad, Obama is to blame and that change of leadership is absolutely essential. The Republican plan rests heavily on Romney’s capacity to bury Obama with negative ads — and reap the benefits of his billionaire backers hitting the president even harder, and more relentlessly. This, more than anything else, alarms the high command in Chicago.

 A Democratic official said the other big worry for the Obama campaign is that when you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged.

 (PHOTOS: 39 great photos from Obama's presidency)

 “Many of them voted for Obama in 2008 and felt good about that vote, and still think Obama’s a good person who really tried hard, but the economy sucks for them,” said the Democratic official, who has access to reams of internal polls and focus groups.

 Despite that, Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates. “Romney is not going to win undecided voters 4-to-1,” a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “If you are losing in Ohio by 4 or 5 points and trailing in Colorado by 2 points, if you are trailing in Nevada by 2 or 3 points, you are not going to win in those states.

 “There is a small number of undecided voters so you are not going to see tremendous movement out of these conventions, even out of the debates. … [W]e have a small but important lead in battleground states that is a huge problem for the Romney camp. … Ohio needs to be tied, Florida needs to be tied at least.”

 Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, said the campaign will draw from “a cavalcade of devastating statistics that indicate where the country is,” including an increased use of food stamps, higher poverty rate, bleak jobs figures and the exploding debt. ||||| On Friday, we began to see reasonably clear signs that President Obama would receive some kind of bounce in the polls from the Democratic convention.

 Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.

 Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.

 On Saturday, Mr. Obama extended his advantage to three points from two points in the Gallup national tracking poll, and to four points from two in an online survey conducted by Ipsos. He pulled ahead of Mitt Romney by two points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, reversing a one-point deficit in the edition of the poll published on Friday.

 A fourth tracking poll, conducted online by the RAND Corporation’s American Life Panel, had Mr. Obama three percentage points ahead of Mr. Romney in the survey it published early Saturday morning; the candidates had been virtually tied in the poll on Friday. (The RAND survey has an interesting methodology — we’ll explore it more in a separate post.)

 The gains that Mr. Obama has made in these tracking polls over the past 48 hours already appear to match or exceed the ones that Mr. Romney made after his convention. The odds, however, are that Mr. Obama has some further room to grow.

 The reason is that the tracking polls are not turned around instantaneously. The Gallup poll, for instance, now consists of interviews conducted between Saturday, Sept. 1, and Friday, Sept. 7. That means that many of the interviews in the poll still predate the effective start of the Democratic convention on Tuesday night.

 That Mr. Obama has made these gains in polls that only partially reflect the Democratic convention suggests that his bounce could be more substantial once they fully do so. Mathematically, Mr. Obama has to have been running well ahead of Mr. Romney in the most recent interviews in these surveys to have made up for middling data earlier in the week.

 In fact, it is possible to reverse-engineer an estimate of what Mr. Obama’s numbers look like in the postconvention part of the tracking surveys. Specifically, I will be looking to infer Mr. Obama’s numbers from interviews conducted after Bill Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night, which in my view was the pivotal moment of the convention.

 Let’s use the Gallup tracking poll as an example. Mr. Obama now leads in that survey by four percentage points. Conversely, he led by one point in the version of the poll published on Wednesday afternoon, ahead of Mr. Clinton’s speech. What must Mr. Obama’s numbers have looked like in the interviews since the Clinton speech in order for him to make those gains?

 This can be determined with a little algebra if we know what percentage of the interviews in the Gallup survey reflect post-Clinton data. Fortunately, this calculation is fairly straightforward.

 Gallup’s tracking poll is reported over a seven-day window, and roughly the same number of people are polled each day. The interviews Gallup conducted on Saturday, Sept. 1, and then on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, predated the Clinton speech. The interviews it conducted on Thursday and Friday post-dated it. The only day about which there is any ambiguity is Wednesday itself. But, since Mr. Clinton’s speech was made late Wednesday night, only a small fraction of the respondents in the poll would have had the chance to watch it by the time that Gallup called them — probably just the last round or so of interviews that Gallup conducted on the West Coast. (We’ll assume that 20 percent of the Wednesday interviews did reflect Mr. Clinton’s speech, although the fraction was probably a little lower than that in practice.)

 Over all, that means that only about 30 percent of the data from the Gallup poll post-dated Mr. Clinton’s remarks.

 If you do the math, it implies that Mr. Obama must have been leading Mr. Romney by 10 or 11 points in the minority of the poll conducted since Mr. Clinton’s speech for him to have gained three points in the survey over all.

 In the table below, I’ve run through the same calculation for the other tracking polls. The results imply that Mr. Obama has run about nine points ahead of Mr. Romney in the portion of the Ipsos poll conducted since Mr. Clinton’s speech, about eight points ahead in the RAND poll, and about four points ahead in the Rasmussen poll.

 On average between the four polls, it appears that Mr. Obama must have held about an eight-point lead since Mr. Clinton’s speech in order to have gained so much ground so quickly.

 This method is not perfect — the only way we would know exactly how well Mr. Obama had been doing is if the polling firms published day-by-day results, which none of them do.

 But on Friday, I wrote that Mr. Obama might eventually hold about a five-point lead over Mr. Romney once the tracking polls fully rolled over to post-convention data. Now it looks like his advantage could potentially be a bit larger than that, depending on how long the bounce holds. Despite a mediocre jobs report on Friday, there were no signs in the polls that Mr. Obama’s bounce had immediately receded, as he gained further ground in the surveys that were released on Saturday.

 Earlier in the week of the convention, before there was any data on the magnitude of Mr. Obama’s bounce, I used a series of golf metaphors to serve as a guide to interpreting the postconvention numbers. By that nomenclature, it now appears that Mr. Obama is on track for a “birdie” convention, meaning that he would exit the conventions in a somewhat stronger position than where he entered them.

 The equivalent of a par score remains a possibility if Mr. Obama’s numbers cool off a bit, which they very well may, although that would be better than Mr. Romney’s bogey.

 But there is also the possibility of an eagle, with Mr. Obama holding as much as an eight- to nine-point lead over Mr. Romney in the polls once they fully reflect post-convention data. His polls seem to have been about that strong since Mr. Clinton’s speech, at least.

 Again, this is just the upside case for Mr. Obama — not the reality yet. But the fact that it seems plausible is a bit surprising to me. Very little has moved the polls much all this year — including Mr. Romney’s convention and his choice of Paul D. Ryan as his running mate, events that typically produce bounces. But Mr. Obama has already made clear gains in the polls in surveys that only partially reflect his convention.

 As surprising as it might be, however, I do not see how you can interpret it as anything other than a good sign for Mr. Obama. All elections have turning points. Perhaps Mr. Obama simply has the more persuasive pitch to voters, and the conventions were the first time when this became readily apparent.

 Polls conducted after the incumbent party’s convention typically inflate the standing of the incumbent by a couple of points, but not usually by more than that. Otherwise, they have predicted the eventual election outcome reasonably well.

 Since 1968, the largest post-convention polling deficit that a challenger overcame to win the race was in 2000, when George W. Bush trailed Al Gore by about four points after the Democratic convention but won the Electoral College — although Mr. Bush lost the popular vote.

 And unlike Mr. Bush, who at least led in the polls after his own convention that year, Mr. Romney did not, essentially only bringing the race to a tie in polls conducted early in the week of his convention.

 In fact, Mr. Romney has never held a lead over Mr. Obama by any substantive margin in the polls. The Real Clear Politics average of polls put Mr. Romney ahead by a fraction of a percentage point at one point in October 2011, and he pulled into an exact tie at one point late in the week of his convention, after it was over, but he has never done better than that.

 That makes this an extremely odd election. You would figure that at some point over the past year, Mr. Romney would have pulled into the lead in the polls, given how close it has usually been. John McCain held occasional leads in 2008; John Kerry led for much of the summer in 2004; and Michael Dukakis had moments where he was well ahead of George H.W. Bush in the spring and summer of 1988. But Mr. Romney, if there have been moments when his polls were ever-so-slightly stronger or weaker, has never really had his moment in the sun.

 Instead, the cases where one candidate led essentially from wire to wire have been associated with landslides: Bill Clinton in 1996, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

 There is almost no chance that Mr. Obama will win by those sort of margins. But this nevertheless seems like an inauspicious sign for Mr. Romney. If even at his high-water mark, he can only pull the race into a rough tie, what pitch can he come up with in October or November to suddenly put him over the top?

 Conservatives sometimes cite Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980 as a favorable precedent for Mr. Romney, because the polls showed him in a tight race with Jimmy Carter in October and early November, 1980. Nevertheless, Mr. Reagan had shown much clearer signs of upside potential earlier in the race — most conspicuously, in leading Mr. Carter by nearly 30 points after the Republican convention in Detroit.

 Because of demographic changes, the Republican base is probably just a bit too narrow to win the election for Mr. Romney on its own, even with a strong Republican turnout.

 Certainly, Mr. Romney will win his fair share of independent voters because of the economy — and if there are substantive signs of economic decline in October and November, probably enough to win him the election.

 But unless there is some change of course, it looks increasingly as though he lacks the appeal to the voting blocks that might allow him to win 51 percent of the vote rather than 49 percent.

 Mr. Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and his opposition to the auto bailouts may be a negative with the Reagan Democrats of the Midwest. His conservative stances on immigration will likely prevent him from having George W. Bush’s comparative appeal among Hispanic voters. He is mostly playing defense among the so-called security moms with whom Mr. Bush performed fairly well in 2004, having largely sidestepped discussions of national security.

 Highly educated voters who are moderate on social policy but conservative on fiscal policy might be a natural constituency for Mr. Romney, and they were critical to his election as governor in Massachusetts in 2002. But Mr. Romney has rarely broken from the Republican orthodoxy on social issues. By contrast, it was Democrats who were much more forthright about touting their support for abortion rights, gay rights, and less rigid immigration policy at their convention in Charlotte, N.C.

 I will acknowledge that there is the risk of jumping the gun with this analysis. Our forecast model began to see Mr. Romney’s subpar convention bounce as a bearish indicator for him early during his convention week. Now that Mr. Obama appears to be making gains when Mr. Romney did not, it has become more entrenched in seeing Mr. Obama as the favorite — enough so that it now gives him almost a 4-in-5 chance of victory. Taking the temperature of voters around the party conventions is tricky: it is a period when a lot of undecided voters start to tune in for the first time, but it is also associated with volatile polling. Every election is different, and no statistical method to analyze them is beyond reproach.

 But in the immediate term, it seems like the upside case for Mr. Romney is that Mr. Obama’s polls cool off quickly — and soon revert to where they were before the conventions, with Mr. Obama about two points ahead in the polling average. That’s certainly a very winnable election for Mr. Romney, but nevertheless one where he is the modest underdog.

 And Mr. Romney’s downside case is that Mr. Obama’s polling bounce will be a little stickier, and that Mr. Obama will already be fairly close to having achieved 50 percent of the vote with precious few undecided voters left in the race. That would make Mr. Romney a clear underdog — perhaps even one who needs some foreign policy or economic crisis to intervene to give him much of a chance at winning. |||||

Write a summary.

– President Obama's DNC acceptance speech may have inspired more yawns than fervor, but the latest polls are showing him a clear advantage, especially in several key swing states, reports Politico. Republican officials admit that their in-house tracking polls show Obama with a high-single-digits lead in crucial battleground state Ohio. While Mitt Romney can win the presidency without Ohio, it would be very tough. “Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a leading Republican official. The biggest worry for Democrats at this point is that the 6% to 8% of voters who are still undecided are overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, and economically stressed—bad demographics for Obama. But with polls showing a small but clear bounce for Obama, the president is now a "reasonably clear favorite," writes Nate Silver at the New York Times. Obama is now leading by four percentage points in Gallup's national tracking poll, two in Rasmussen's, four in Ipsos', and three in RAND's polling. Campaign officials say they don't expect many big changes over the next couple of weeks, as attention turns to Oct. 3 and the first presidential debate.