Americana
Carolina Naturally is read in 191 countries around the world daily.
How about the warm weather stay around awhile ...
Today is National Chocolate Caramel Day
Don't forget to visit our sister blog!
1687 | The French explorer La Salle is murdered in by his own men while searching for the mouth of the Mississippi, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. | |
1702 | On the death of William III of Orange, Anne Stuart, sister of Mary, succeeds to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland. | |
1822 | Boston is incorporated as a city. | |
1879 | Jim Currie opens fire on the actors Maurice Barrymore and Ben Porter near Marshall, Texas. His shots wound Barrymore and kill Porter. | |
1903 | The U.S. Senate ratifies the Cuban treaty, gaining naval bases in Guantanamo and Bahia Honda. | |
1916 | The First Aero Squadron takes off from Columbus, NM to join Gen. John J. Pershing and his Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico. | |
1917 | The Adamson Act, eight hour day for railroad workers, is ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. | |
1918 | Congress authorizes Daylight Savings Time. | |
1920 | The U.S. Senate rejects the Versailles Treaty for the second time. | |
1924 | U.S. troops are rushed to Tegucigalpa as rebel forces take the Honduran capital. | |
1931 | The state of Nevada legalizes gambling. | |
1935 | The British fire on 20,000 Muslims in India, killing 23. | |
1936 | The Soviet Union signs a pact of assistance with Mongolia against Japan. | |
1944 | The German 352nd Infantry Division deploys along the coast of France. | |
1945 | Adolf Hitler orders a scorched-earth policy for his retreating German armies in the west and east. | |
1947 | Chiang Kai-Shek's government forces take control of Yenan, the former headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party. | |
1949 | The Soviet People's Council signs the constitution of the German Democratic Republic, and declares that the North Atlantic Treaty is merely a war weapon. | |
1963 | In Costa Rica, President John F. Kennedy and six Latin American presidents pledge to fight Communism. | |
1977 | Congo President Marien Ngouabi is killed by a suicide commando. | |
1981 | One technician is killed and two others are injured during a routine test on space shuttle Columbia. |
Women who report domestic violence are exposing themselves to arrest under a new NYPD directive that orders cops to run criminal checks on the accused and the accuser ... More
CROWLEY: Again, this case was played out in juvenile court, that is why there was a judge, no jury. He decided on the verdict, as well as, you heard there, talking about the sentence.Those poor, poor teenage boys who raped a 16 year old girl. According to CNN, we should feel sympathy for the rapists because their lives are ruined. Here’s a thought. Their lives wouldn’t have been ruined if they didn’t rape someone.
We want to go now to CNN’s Poppy Harlow. She is in Steubenville, and has been covering this trial.
I cannot imagine having just watched this on the feed coming in. How emotional that must have been sitting in the courtroom.
POPPY HARLOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I’ve never experienced anything like it, Candy. It was incredibly emotional — incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.
One of — one of the young men, Ma’lik Richmond, when that sentence came down, he collapsed. He collapsed in the arms of his attorney, Walter Madison. He said to me, “My life is over. No one is going to want me now.”
Very serious crime here. Both found guilty of raping this 16- year-old girl at a series of parties back in August, alcohol-fueled parties. Alcohol is a huge part in this.
But Trent Mays was also found guilty on a second count and that is of felony illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material because he took a photograph of the victim laying naked on the floor that night. Trent Mays will serve two years in a juvenile detention facility. Ma’lik Richmond will serve one year on that one count that he was found guilty for.
I want to let our viewers listen because for the first time in this entire trial we have now heard from the two young men. Trent Mays stood up, apologizing to the victim’s family in court. After him, Ma’lik Richmond.
Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRENT MAYS, FOUND GUILTY OF RAPINGIN JUVENILE COURT: I would really like to apologize to (INAUDIBLE), her family, my family and community. No pictures should have been sent out or should be taken. That’s all. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anything you’d like to say, Ma’lik?
MA’LIK RICHMOND, FOUND GUILTY OF RAPE IN JUVENILE COURT: I would like to apologize. I had no intention to do anything like that and I’m sorry to put you guys through this. (INAUDIBLE) I’m sorry.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: I was sitting about three feet from Ma’lik when he gave that statement. It was very difficult to watch.
You know, something that came up throughout this sentencing. Ma’lik’s father had gotten up and spoke. Ma’lik has been living with guardians. His father, a former alcoholic, gotten to a lot of trouble with the law, been in prison before.
And his father stood up and he told the court, “I feel responsible for this. I feel like I wasn’t there for my son.” And before that, he came over to the bench where his son was sitting. He approached him, he hugged him and whispered in his ear.
And Ma’lik’s attorney said to us in a courtroom, I have never heard Ma’lik’s father before say, I love you. He’s never told his son that. But he just did today.
This was an incredibly emotional day. These two juveniles being carried out and they will be committed today, Candy.
China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities.
Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409.The second method is more controversial. According to this article by Aleks Eror published in VICE, China is working on making its people more intelligent by genetic-engineering:
As recently as 1996, only one in six Chinese 17-year-olds graduated from high school. That was the same proportion as in the United States in 1919. Now, three in five young Chinese graduate from high school, matching the United States in the mid-1950s.
China is on track to match within seven years the United States’ current high school graduation rate for 18-year-olds of 75 percent — although a higher proportion of Americans than Chinese later go back and finish high school.
By quadrupling its output of college graduates in the past decade, China now produces eight million graduates a year from universities and community colleges. [...] By the end of the decade, China expects to have nearly 195 million community college and university graduates — compared with no more than 120 million in the United States then.
At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.Eror interviewed evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller who said that smart people were being recruited, through scientific conference and word of mouth, to contribute their genetic material to be sequenced so the genes for intelligence can be identified (and later on, used to determine the intelligence potential of embryos).
What does that mean in human language?
Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.
And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence.
Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.
As its name implies, this potato is not especially beautiful. It’s large, knobby, and, well, lumpy, with pale brown skin and yellow flesh. Still, it was widely grown in Ireland before the famine because it did well in poor soil and could feed a lot of mouths.Killop wants to bring back the Lumper for historic purposes, not to produce on a large scale. They don't taste as good as more modern potatoes. Irish potato farmers today generally grow newer varieties of potatoes for better quality and disease resistance. The news article includes a recipe for potato gratin, calling for russet potatoes. More
According to University College Dublin’s Cormac O’Grada, an expert on the history of famines, the blight (Phytophtora infestans) destroyed about one-third of Ireland’s potato crop in 1845 and almost all of it in 1846. Because so many people were poor and relied on potatoes for sustenance, the blight had catastrophic consequences, including food riots and mass death from starvation.
Spuds are faring much better today thanks to modern farming techniques and technology, although potato blight is still an ongoing concern for Irish farmers.
Modern birds generally work with two wings, using small, clawed hind legs for ground travel. A few, like the golden eagle, have fuzzy down on their back limbs, which is for insulating their appendages, not flying. Though researchers have unearthed evidence of downy limbs in feathered dinosaurs, little evidence existed that early birds were using those hind legs for flapping.That design didn't seem to work out too well for the birds, as those species eventually died out. The two-winged versions are more aerodynamic, and using your rear appendages for walking, perching, or catching prey is handy. Read more about the fossils at the Los Angeles Times.
But 11 specimens from Liaoning in northeastern China, from several species show evidence of long, stiff feathers with curved shafts jutting out nearly perpendicular to the leg -- a far cry from mere insulation.
The feathers were arranged in a relatively wide, flat plane, making it a potentially flight-worthy design, says a team of Chinese scientists studying feathered fossils.
Their first hint that the sea cucumber anus was doing triple duty came from a structure called the rete mirabile, a set of blood vessels that connect the sea cucumber’s respiratory trees with its gut.Carrie Arnold of National Geographic News has the story: Here.
Initially, Jaeckle, of Illinois Wesleyan University, and Strathmann, of the University of Washington, thought that the rete mirabile was used to transfer oxygen from the respiratory trees to the gut. But if P. californicus were obtaining food via its anus, it would likely use the rete mirabile to transfer the food to the gut.
To test their idea, the team fed several sea cucumbers radioactive algae, which also contained iron particles. [...]
Not surprisingly, the results showed that the sea cucumbers ate the algae through their actual mouths, which then traveled through their gut.
However, the researchers also found a high level of radioactivity when they looked at the rete mirabile. The only way that those blood vessels could have such a high concentration of radioactivity is if the animal was transferring food from the respiratory trees to the gut via the rete mirabile.