In a grisly account, prosecutors said four of the defendants — Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, Sgt. Robert Gisevius, Officer Anthony Villavaso and former Officer Robert Faulcon — had raced to the bridge in a Budget rental truck that morning, responding to a distress call from another officer.Sometimes blind mother justice gets off her pile of manure, and this would be one of those times.
There they poured out of the truck and opened fire, without pausing or giving a warning, on members of the Bartholomew family, who were walking to a grocery in the largely abandoned city. James Brisette, 17, a friend of the family, was killed, and four others were gravely wounded by the police, who kept firing as the Bartholomews raced for safety.
Several of the officers then chased Ronald and Lance Madison, two brothers, to the other side of the bridge, where Mr. Faulcon shot Ronald, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, in the back. Sergeant Bowen was convicted of stomping him on the back as he lay dying.
No guns were recovered at the scene, and witnesses — both officers and citizens — testified that the victims were unarmed.
The cover-up began immediately, prosecutors said, and the jury found all of the officers, as well as retired Sgt. Arthur Kaufman, guilty on charges of obstructing justice, fabricating witnesses, lying to federal investigators or planting a firearm at the scene to bolster a made-up story.
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| Dunes, beach and breakers from the boardwalk. |
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| Then, turn around. Bandstand, free summer concerts offered nightly. |
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| Bike parking by a selfish tourist. Takes the whole rack and removed the seat. |
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| The walk to work. Hotel with beach towels drying on balconies. |
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| Gloom & mist. The walk to work. Restaurant is at far right. |
The rest is HERE.A piece of debris from NASA's space shuttle Columbia has been discovered in Texas, eight years after the 2003 disaster that destroyed the spacecraft and killed its seven-astronaut crew during re-entry, NASA officials confirmed on Aug. 2.The debris was discovered last week in eastern Texas. It is a round aluminum power reactant storage and distribution tank from Columbia, which disintegrated over Texas as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere near the end of a 16-day science mission.The tank was discovered in an exposed area of Lake Nacogdoches, in Nacogdoches, Texas, about 160 miles northeast of Houston.
"The only reason it's exposed is because there's a drought going on and the tank was under the lake," Lisa Malone, a NASA spokeswoman at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, told SPACE.com. "The tank itself is full of mud."Nacogdoches police informed NASA of the find and sent pictures for identification. NASA engineers who work on the shuttle's power reactant storage and distribution systems were able to confirm the piece belonged to Columbia. [NASA's Shuttle Program In Pictures: A Tribute]"One of the guys had been here more than 30 years and recognized it, and said, 'That’s one of the tanks,'" Malone said.The piece was one of 16 tanks on the shuttle that stored supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. The spherical tank, about 40 inches (1 meter) in diameter, will eventually be shipped back to Kennedy Space Center, where NASA stores all the collected debris from Columbia in a climate controlled area in the giant Vehicle Assembly Building.
There are two days in every week we should not worry about, two days that should be kept free from fear and apprehension.That said, I will only report (a tiny bit) about today because this day was an almost exact re-run of yesterday only without the screaming Blue Meanies.*
One is yesterday, with its mistakes and cares, its faults and blunders, its aches and pains. Yesterday has passed, forever beyond our control.
The other day we shouldn't worry about is tomorrow, with its possible adversities, Its burdens, its large promise and poor performance. Tomorrow is also beyond our control.
While reading a local news story on the web, I noticed a familiar yellow and green color scheme on the sidebar. Sure enough, it was a BP advertisement: “Gulf Coast Restoration,” the article teased, “Read the latest.” Intrigued, I clicked the link and was sent to the official BP America Twitter feed which presented lovely notices about Gulf Coast festivals, links to photos of birds and fish, and a healthy does of BP corporate news (2nd Quarter profits: $5.6 billion).Read the rest of this story HERE.
But I didn’t see any actual “Gulf Coast Restoration” news, as a typical concerned Louisianan would understand the term. On the Twitter page sidebar, there was a column of links titled “Gulf Coast Restoration info.” So I clicked one of those and went to this page, with stories on BP’s new drilling standards and research initiatives, plus updates about area fishing contests. The site had prominent categories for topics such as tourism, wildlife and seafood, claims information, and news updates. But it wasn’t easy to locate the actual “restoration” page on the BP site. And when you do find it you come to learn that BP has neutered the term:
BP is working with governments and communities toward the goal of restoring the Gulf to what it would be like today if the spill had not occurred. This is referred to as “baseline conditions” – the measure used to define restoration goals in the Gulf of Mexico.Throughout the past year Jeffrey at Library Chronicles has brought attention to the following distinction, but it deserves repeated emphasis: oil disaster recovery is not Gulf Coast restoration..
Before the oil gusher was even capped last summer, BP labeled their recovery efforts associated with the Deepwater Horizon “incident” as “Gulf Coast restoration.” Surely the term was carefully chosen to appeal to Louisianans who associate the word with rebuilding the coast. But that’s bogus, a warping of language right out of George Orwell’s 1984. BP’s efforts to help the region recover from an oil disaster fall well short of coastal restoration, a vastly larger project. Cleaning oiled vegetation isn’t tantamount to replacing wetlands sliced and diced with oil service canals and lost to salt water and petrochemical pollution. To rhetorically link oil disaster recovery to coastal restoration, as usually defined, imbues BP’s work with a significance it doesn’t deserve. And by abusing common parlance to inflate its work, BP obscures the greater coastal crisis Louisiana faced long before last year’s blowout. A crisis the oil and gas industry has greatly accelerated.
Louisiana has already lost 2000 square miles of coast. This includes ecosystems that have nourished our culture and economy for generations, while providing communities with vital protection from storm surge. No one concerned with true Gulf Coast restoration believes that returning the coast to the “baseline conditions” of March 2010 should be the goal, because that condition was already unacceptable. Restoration doesn’t mean just mopping up oil and throwing guilt money at victims. It requires financing and engineering complex re-sedimentation projects that will replace the marshes, wetlands and natural ridges that have been lost to the sea. It’s the most important issue facing Louisiana, a policy challenge that is only set back by BP fuzzing the sharp distinction that must be drawn between disaster clean-up and a dynamic revival of the coast.
We need to tell BP to stop using the term “Gulf Coast Restoration” unless they are referring to long-term projects that replace lost coastal mass. Conflating clean-up with restoration is not only intellectually offensive, it undercuts Louisiana’s ability to educate the nation about the status of America’s most important wetland and the need to save it. Pretty photos of wildlife and seafood festival updates may have a soothing effect, but in no sense do they amount to evidence of restoration. Rinsing out the salt you threw into a gaping wound doesn’t make you a healer.
I suspect BP’s abuse of language is no accident. They know “Gulf Coast Restoration” is a loaded term in these parts. Associating their effort with the larger mission is a way of obscuring how superficial their clean-up has been to date. BP should immediately cease using “Gulf Coast Restoration” in their ads and websites, and replace it with a more descriptive term like “Oil Disaster Recovery.”
Ten Black & White Movies For People Who Won't Watch Black & White MoviesGo to the website to view his reasons and reviews. And go watch a good movie.
Several weeks ago, I was sitting at lunch opposite my twenty-eight year old second cousin once removed, with a host of other family members. It being a reunion of sorts, the mood was jolly.
I have always liked my cousin- she is smart, brassy, funny- extremely well spoken and well educated. The kind of person that gives you hope for the future.
The she dropped the bomb. Looking at me in a direct but decidedly matter-of-fact way, she said: “I won’t watch black and white movies.”
“Never?” I responded, thunderstruck.
“Never. And most of my friends wouldn’t either.”
She went on to explain that from what she’d seen of these dusty old cinematic relics, they were too slow and too talky. And she noted, the acting seemed fake to her.
I responded that this was a shame- that she (and her pals) were depriving themselves of some of the greatest films ever made; that movies should be judged- at least somewhat- in the context of their time; that before the advent of the “Method”, acting styles were indeed closer to the broader stage tradition; that black and white cinematography could be uniquely stunning; that many of the best older films offered something that too many new movies lack: namely, quality scripts.
To which she just smiled at me indulgently. I was getting precisely nowhere.
It is a sobering thought though- that what I lovingly term “the new generation” might totally reject any film not made in color (excepting "Schindler's List"), and in fact might be willing to go back only to the early ‘70s, thinking of that fertile time period in movie-making as ancient history.
While I may hope that their curiosity to go back further may increase with age, something tells me I shouldn’t count on it for the vast majority of twenty-somethings.
I think it’s a low-down dirty shame- only because if my pessimistic hunch gets borne out, they are really missing out.
On my own website of movie recommendations, black and white features comprise around 30 percent of the total.
But it’s the American Film Institute’s (AFI) ranking of greatest American movies that says it all…the top two picks (Citizen Kane and Casablanca) were shot in black and white. Four of the top ten titles, and by my count forty-one of the top hundred, were black and white movies.
That’s a lot of great movies to turn your backs on, kids!
So- to channel my sense of concern into something constructive, I gave myself a little exercise. If I could get all those black and white haters out there to watch just ten titles- movies that constituted absolutely essential viewing- which would they be?
I’ll just list my picks, in no particular order- and excluding those obvious top two AFI champs:
Duck Soup
Modern Times
The Grapes of Wrath
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
All About Eve
On The Waterfront
12 Angry Men
The Apartment
To Kill a Mockingbird
Crikey! Did you see this? From what I understand, a mondo iceberg four times the size of Manhattan broke into pieces off the coast of Greenland last year, and now nearly a year later they are seeing it appear off the 'iceberg alley' shores of Newfoundland!The top photo is a slice of ice that hit Newfoundland's Goose Cove temporarily blocking the harbor until it broke and melted a bit.
