The Daily Drift

And that my friends is the truth...!

 

Carolina Naturally is read in 192 countries around the world daily.

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Today is Labor Day  
 

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Today in History

1666		The Great Fire of London, which devastates the city, begins.
1789		The Treasury Department, headed by Alexander Hamilton, is created in New York City.
1792		Verdun, France, surrenders to the Prussian Army.
1798		The Maltese people revolt against the French occupation, forcing the French troops to take refuge in the citadel of Valetta in Malta.
1870		Napoleon III capitulates to the Prussians at Sedan, France.
1885		In Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, 28 Chinese laborers are killed and hundreds more chased out of town by striking coal miners.
1898		Sir Herbert Kitchner leads the British to victory over the Mahdists at Omdurman and takes Khartoum.
1910		Alice Stebbins Wells is admitted to the Los Angeles Police Force as the first woman police officer to receive an appointment based on a civil service exam.
1915		Austro-German armies take Grodno, Poland.
1944		Troops of the U.S. First Army enter Belgium.
1945		Japan signs the document of surrender aboard the USS Missouri, ending World War II
1945		Vietnam declares its independence and Nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaims himself its first president.
1956		Tennessee National Guardsmen halt rioters protesting the admission of 12 African-Americans to schools in Clinton.
1963		Alabama Governor George Wallace calls state troopers to Tuskegee High School to prevent integration.
1963		The US gets its first half-hour TV weeknight national news broadcast when CBS Evening News expands from 15 to 30 minutes.
1970		NASA cancels two planned missions to the moon.
1975		Joseph W. Hatcher of Tallahassee, Florida, becomes the state's first African-American supreme court justice since Reconstruction.
1992		The US and Russia agree to a joint venture to build a space station.
1996		The Philippine government and Muslim rebels sign a pact, formally ending a 26-year long insurgency.
1998		Jean Paul Akayesu, former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, found guilty of nine counts of genocide by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Non Sequitur

Defining a "burger"

It depends on which side of the Atlantic you live on, according to separated by a common language:

The British focus on the bread: a burger is a cooked thing served in a round bun... So, order a chicken burger at Nando's or Gourmet Burger Kitchen, and you'll get what Americans would call a chicken breast sandwich. For Americans, a burger is a (chiefly AmE) patty made of (AmE) ground/(BrE) minced meat, so we can be heard to express surprise when the chicken burgers we order in the UK are chicken breasts. (Not necessarily disappointed, but surprised. One doesn't hear chicken burger that much in the US, but turkey burger is fairly common--and always ground/minced.)...

In fact the 'burger' is so much associated with the meat that (orig. AmE) hamburger can also be used in AmE to refer to ground/minced beef even before it's cooked. Hence Hamburger Helper, and its 'Add hamburger' in the top right corner of the package.

An American Burger

One example of many sandwiches that the British call 'Burgers'

Feasting and Fighting ...

The long-lost secrets of Beowulf 

Archaeologists in Denmark have excavated the sixth-century great dining hall at the center of the epic work

The dark secrets of the legend of Beowulf, England’s oldest work of epic literature, are gradually emerging from under a field in eastern Denmark.

Archaeologists in the country’s  earliest royal ‘capital’ – Lejre, 23 miles  west of modern Copenhagen – are investigating the joys of  elite Dark Age life in and around what was probably the great royal feasting hall at the violent epicentre of the Beowulf story.
The archaeologists – led by Tom Christensen, director of the Lejre investigation – have so far managed not only to find, excavate and date the late 5 or early 6 century building most likely to have been Lejre’s first royal hall (described in Beowulf as `the greatest hall under heaven’), but have also succeeded in reconstructing what was on the menu at the great feasts held there.
Scientific study this year of the bones of literally hundreds of animals found near the hall, shows that they feasted on suckling pig, beef, mutton, goat meat, venison, goose, duck, chicken and fish.
Other finds from around the hall have included fragments of glass drinking vessels, 40 pieces of bronze, gold and silver jewellery, pottery imported from England and the Rhineland – and the wing of a sea-eagle, whose feathers may well have been used for fletching arrows. Twenty other gold items were found just a few hundred metres away.
The discoveries, reported in the current issue of BBC History Magazine, are of international importance.
“For the first time, archaeology has given us a glimpse of life in the key royal Danish site associated with the Beowulf legend’’, said project director Dr. Christensen,  curator of Denmark’s Roskilde Museum, four miles from Lejre.
The Danes plan to put the finds on permanent display next year at Roskilde and Lejre Museums.
In the Beowulf legend – which is believed to have influenced some aspects of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and was turned into a 150 million dollar Hollywood film six years ago – a young nobleman from southern Sweden goes to neighbouring Denmark to save its ruling elite from the depredations of a monstrous man-eating giant called Grendel. The monster had entered the Danish king’s great feasting hall at Lejre, while the king and his warriors had been sleeping off an evening of feasting and drinking, and had succeeded in devouring a number of them.
On meeting the king, Beowulf offers to rid the land of the monster. The king accepts – and Beowulf waits alone in the great hall for the giant to attack again. In the epic battle between the two that then ensues, the giant is defeated and retreats to a cave beneath a nearby lake where he is finally killed by Beowulf.
As well as investigating the hall most likely to have been the one associated with the Beowulf legend, the archaeologists have found, excavated and dated six other royal feasting halls in Lejre.
They have discovered that the early Danish monarchy used each hall for only a few generations, before dismantling them and building a new one – usually on  or very near the same site as its predecessor. Detailed examination of the buried remains of successive feasting halls has shown that they were used between around 500 and 1000 AD.  All were roughly  on the same site – except for the one associated with the Beowulf legend which was 500 metres to the north.
It may be that the change in location was somehow connected with events described in the legend, part of which actually states that the early royal hall, was in fact abandoned – because of the depredations of Grendel.  Whether Grendel (meaning quite literarily ‘the destroyer’) originally existed in some less legendary form – perhaps symbolizing a malevolent spirit responsible for disease and death, or a particularly fierce-looking human enemy – is as yet unknown.
The quasi-legendary high status individual that Beowulf is based on probably lived in the 6 century AD. The story of his exploits was most likely brought to England by Scandinavian (potentially southern Sweden originating) settlers in the 6 or early 7 century AD.  The poem was then written by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, probably sometime in the 7th or  8 centuries.

Did you know ...

About dismantling the empire

That digital activists are building alternate Internets

That Indian farmers grows record yields with no GMO crops or pesticides

That Oregon stands up to corporations

About the 5 most absurd, self-pitying gripes by the christian wingnuts

Here are some pictures from the fast-food strike this week

That millions of pounds of meat are shipped without being inspected

How to stand still and get free beer

The Rise And Fall Of Slackers

As we pause this Labor Day weekend to celebrate the Great American Worker, we can't help but wonder: Whatever happened to the Great American Slacker?

It wasn't that long ago that slackers ruled the earth. OK, maybe ruled is a bit over the top because slackers, by definition, didn't really rule — or try very hard or take full responsibility. Whatever. But they sure were omnipresent there for a while.
"Slackers really didn't want to do anything much," says Elayne Rapping, professor emerita of American studies at the University at Buffalo. "They celebrated not having to work at much."
They slouched around on couches and quoted the tag line "Work sucks" from the 1999 film . They sang along with the Ben Folds Five slacker anthem : "I know it's cool to be so bored."
For more than a decade, the do-nothing attitude of slackers slaked a national thirst, an apathetic antidote to American drive and determination.

Slackers: A Media History
1990 – credits the University of Texas, Austin, with coining the term "slackers" for neo-beatniks on campus.
1991 — , a low-budget film by Richard Linklater, chronicles the lives of Austin's offbeat denizens.
1994 — The Official Slacker Handbook by Sarah Dunn. Contains advice such as "How to maintain a surface industry in one's artistic endeavors and yet never have to produce a single page, canvas or stanza."
2002 — , the Hollywood version, starring two generational Jasons: Schwartzman and Segel.
2006 — Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, a book by Tom Lutz, puts slackers in historical context.
2007 — , a film by Michael Moore, is free to all slackers — and to everyone else.

Type the word "slacker" into Google Trends and you will see that in the term peaked in the United States in December 2008. Since then interest has steadily declined.
Maybe the demise began with the 2011 story in The New York Times titled — signaling that Madison Avenue had co-opted the posture. Or maybe it coincided with the corporate emergence of music — an Internet-based service that is anything but lazy.
Now — like pay phones and video parlors — slackers seem to be disappearing.
Rapping says the world has moved on. "I think slacker is pretty much out now," she says.
So to paraphrase Peter, Paul and Mary: "Where have all the slackers gone?"
Rapping's theory: The slacker has been "replaced by the hipster, which is very different."
Hipsters today, she says, "also live cheaply and on the fringes, but they are much more sophisticated and self-consciously ironic and, well, hip. They have attitude, and attitude is important these days as we search for identities in a changing world."
Whatever.

Leaked documents show NSA spied on Al Jazeera

The US National Security Agency spied on Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to documents "seen by SPIEGEL," the German news agency today reports. "The US intelligence agency hacked into protected communication, a feat that was considered a particular success."

In addition to cracking the airline reservation services for Russian airline Aeroflot, accessing "Al Jazeera broadcasting internal communication" was listed as a "notable success," the document shows. The NSA said these selected targets had "high potential as sources of intelligence."

More

When Google and Microsoft "Stand Together" against US spying, you know stuff just got real

 "To followers of technology issues, there are many days when Microsoft and Google stand apart." Quite an understatement, but so begins a recent blog post by Microsoft's General Counsel and Legal/Corporate Affairs EVP Brad Smith. Why are the two tech arch-enemies joining forces? "The Government’s continued unwillingness to permit us to publish sufficient data relating to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders."

Each of our companies filed suit in June to address this issue.  We believe we have a clear right under the U.S. Constitution to share more information with the public.  The purpose of our litigation is to uphold this right so that we can disclose additional data. On six occasions in recent weeks we agreed with the Department of Justice to extend the Government’s deadline to reply to these lawsuits.  We hoped that these discussions would lead to an agreement acceptable to all.  While we appreciate the good faith and earnest efforts by the capable Government lawyers with whom we negotiated, we are disappointed that these negotiations ended in failure.

Read: Standing Together for Greater Transparency - Microsoft on the Issues.

House repugicans Refuse to Come Back Early from Vacation to Discuss Syria

Nothing gets in the way of the repugican House avoiding work. Not even voting on military action in Syria. House leaders issued a statement saying that “serious, substantive” questions were being raised regarding Syria and they are so glad that the President is asking them to vote because this is so important, constitution, blah blah – oh, and they are going to take the measure up on September 9th, which is another way of saying they are not coming back early from vacaction for this “serious, substantive” matter.
House Speaker John Boehner (r-OH), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (r-VA), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (r-CA) and Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (r-WA) today issued the following joint statement.
“Under the Constitution, the responsibility to declare war lies with Congress. We are glad the president is seeking authorization for any military action in Syria in response to serious, substantive questions being raised. In consultation with the president, we expect the House to consider a measure the week of September 9th. This provides the president time to make his case to Congress and the American people.”
Can you imagine if Democrats had told the shrub they’d get back to him on Iraq when they were done with vacation?
This was to be expected by this House, after all, they are only planning on working 9 days in September.
And it’s not as if there’s anything major to deal with, like that debt ceiling threat they’ve been lording over us or anything. It’s not as if they should plan more days instead of less, based on their inability to even decide what the repugican position will be on any given issue. Nope, they’re just going to add Syria to the list and hope for the best.
Frankly, since they have already set historical records with their laziness and failure to pass legislation — only passing 4 out of 12 appropriations bills before they took off on yet another vacation, and when they are there they do nothing but try to harm America, we should be grateful that they are on “vacation” again.
I can hardly wait to see how they handle this “serious” matter. If it’s with the same gravitas as they approach our economy, we’re in deep Cheney doo-doo.
Bets on how long it will take them to try to use Syria as leverage for defunding Affordable Healthcare?

The repugican Hunger Mongers Are Starving People To Give Corporations Welfare

The repugicans certainly find revenue to fund billions of dollars for oil subsidies and agricultural corporations but they claim they do not have the money to stop cuts to…

Nearly all Americans have experienced that physical sensation of desiring food at some point in their life, but since they live in the richest nation on Earth, there is really no reason any American should be hungry for any length of time. When social scientists talk about people suffering from hunger, they usually refer to those who are unable to eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs all human beings require to support their bodies. It is difficult to imagine that any American condones depriving another person from having adequate food, especially when over 70% of them follow christ who said “feed the poor,” but 40% of Americans affiliated with christian wingnuts support repugicans who deny poor Americans adequate food. One can only conclude that even so-called christians embrace the idea of keeping Americans hungry.
Last week in Pennsylvania congressman Tom Marino (r) said he supports the Meals on Wheels program that provides food for seniors who are shut in, but he supports reducing the nation’s long-term debt more. At the headquarters for Meals on Wheels, Marino told senior citizens that “I can’t stand here and tell you your agency won’t be cut,” because “we do not have the money. The revenue is not there.” Marino is a liar pure and simple. The repugicans certainly find revenue to fund billions of dollars for oil subsidies, agricultural corporations, and religious organizations through faith-based initiatives and tax-exemptions, but they claim they do not have the money ($41 million) to stop cuts to Meals on Wheels for seniors and the disabled who will have 19 million fewer meals delivered to their homes. The repugicans have the revenue, but they are loath to spend it on assisting Americans with basic nutrition because they long to keep the poorest Americans hungry; especially children.
When the House decided not to fund food stamps recently, they guaranteed that 22 million children in poverty would experience that physical sensation of desiring food on a regular basis. Add to that the sequester cuts to Head Start, and it is evident that repugicans want to keep children hungry if they claim “we do not have the money, the revenue is not there.” These are the same so-called followers of christ who adhere to the “sanctity of life” mantra, but it is a life of hunger and despair for millions of the poor that their religion’s namesake commanded his followers feed.
One libertarian hunger-monger, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul explained that “as christians, we have an obligation, I really believe that, and it’s a deep-held belief. As humans, we do have an obligation to give to give people food.” Paul goes on to argue that giving people food puts them in servitude to the government and it is about as valid an argument for cutting food assistance to the poor as telling seniors “we do not have the money.” It is unclear why, or when, it became repulsive to help the poor and provide them with food, especially when they would rather have a living wage job, but this is 2013 and heartlessness is in vogue. As it is, 72% of food stamp recipients are working Americans and likely the other 28% are children and senior citizens repugicans felt were “extraneous” when they failed to fund food stamps in the House’s version of the farm bill. However, there is a callous disregard for hungry Americans that is rampant across America and not reserved to Congressional repugicans.
In over 50 major American cities it is illegal for good Samaritans to provide food to the poor and indigent officials admit is a ploy to drive hungry and homeless people out of the cities. Whatever their reasons, it reveals a blatant disregard for human beings who are hungry and a growing trend to deprive the poor from getting any kind of nourishment; even if it is food discarded in dumpsters. In many cities it is a violation of the law for the homeless to eat food out of garbage dumpsters, and at a Seattle Starbucks recently one of their baristas who supplemented his meager income with food stamps was terminated for eating out of the dumpster. The employee grabbed a meal out of the trash after a co-worker threw out a stack of breakfast sandwiches that were marked past their sell-by date. The hungry barista said, “I hadn’t eaten all day, and I was on a seven-hour shift.” Several days later the manager called the hungry worker into the office and fired him for enjoying his “dumpster dinner” because Starbucks regards being hungry and eating out of the trash stealing from the company.
It is a sad commentary that in the richest nation on Earth there are nearly 47 million Americans, most of them with low-paying part-time jobs and children, who are dependent on food assistance to keep from going hungry. It is particularly offensive when between 73-76% of Americans self-identify as christians and likely the percentage is much higher for repugicans in Congress. The repugicans claim the nation cannot afford to feed hungry Americans, and it is a poor excuse when they find billions for subsidies to the oil, agriculture, and religion industry.
There are millions of parents who are mortified when schools are in recess or on weekends because those free and reduced-priced lunches may be the only nutritious meal children get each day, but they are becoming scarcer with sequester cuts for Head Start and repugican cabal cuts to food stamps. The problem of mass hunger in the richest nation on Earth is not for lack of revenue or resources, it is a lack compassion for hungry Americans the   hunger mongers know affects children and senior citizens. There is a saying that “a nation is judged on the basis of how it treats its most vulnerable citizens,” and America should be judged as cold-hearted the way it treats its hungriest citizens.

Kentuckians hate Obamacare but love it by another name

There's a black man in the White House and it's driving them insane.

Click HERE to read all of the story posted below.

***

This is the biggest fear of every repugican that should not have been if they had simply been party to the solution. Instead they lied, misinformed, and ultimately made what would be a great law, a law that will need improvement.

Kentucky is geared up with their health exchanges. They are now informing residents of how to get access to health insurance. They market their Obamacare state exchange under the Kynect name. The following reported encounter with a Kentuckian shows the dangers of being misinformed.

A middle-aged man in a red golf shirt shuffles up to a small folding table with gold trim, in a booth adorned with a flotilla of helium balloons, where government workers at the Kentucky State Fair are hawking the virtues of Kynect, the state's health benefit exchange established by Obamacare.

The man is impressed. "This beats Obamacare I hope," he mutters to one of the workers.

"Do I burst his bubble?" wonders Reina Diaz-Dempsey, overseeing the operation. She doesn't. If he signs up, it's a win-win, whether he knows he's been ensnared by Obamacare or not.

North Dakota Town's Residents Weigh Options to Prevent White Supremacy

The residents of a tiny North Dakota town fear that a newcomer is trying to transform it in to a white supremacist community.

Sixty-one-year-old self-proclaimed supremacist Craig Cobb moved into the town about a year ago and began buying property with hopes of making Leith the "White Nationalist intentional community in North Dakota."

"People's comfort level is best when they're amongst their own," Cobb, who, according to The Bismarck Tribune, currently owns one home and 12 other lots, said. The number of lots is significant, considering that the town only has about 19 people.

But his neighbor, Sherril Harper, doesn't agree with Cobb's vision for the town. She's in an interracial marriage.

"Don't bring hatred and don't bring your harmful ideas," she said.

Town officials are considering their options to prevent Leith from becoming a haven for white supremacists. One option includes dissolving the local government in order for the county to assume control to prevent a takeover.

Bones unearthed in search at former Florida reform school

 

by Bill Cotterell 

Teams of searchers recovered human bones from the sands of Florida Panhandle woodlands on Saturday in a "boot hill" graveyard where juveniles who disappeared from a notorious Old South reform school more than a half-century ago are believed to have been secretly buried.

"We have found evidence of burial hardware - hinges on coffins," said Dr. Christian Wells, an anthropologist from the University of South Florida, in a briefing about a mile from the closed excavation site near the former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.

"There appear to be a few pieces associated with burial shrouds, and there are pins consistent with the 1920s and 1930s, - based on the style of the pins - and they appear to be brass," he said.
Some "large bone fragments" were found on the first day of digging, Wells said. They were human bones, he added, but it was impossible to know if they came from any of the teenaged boys who were housed at Dozier during its infamous 111-year existence. The school was closed in mid-2011.

The bones will be examined in laboratories at the University of Southern Florida and the University of North Texas, as part of a program funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and state of Florida.

After forensic investigators, using ground-piercing radar and old public records, detected 31 spots showing possible human remains, researchers planted crude white crosses on a nearby hillside to commemorate the unaccounted-for boys.
Some former residents of Dozier, now in their 60s and 70s, have told of brutal beatings and boys - mostly black juveniles - disappearing without explanation more than 50 years ago. Blood relatives of some of the boys have given DNA samples, to be matched against evidence taken from the skeletal remains.
Earlier on Saturday, Dr. Erin Kimmerly, a forensic anthropologist from USF, met with some family members and survivors.
"We're approaching it much like you would an archeological excavation," Kimmerle said. "It's all done carefully and by hand."
'NEVER HAD A CHANCE'
Tananarive Due, who came to the dig with some family members, said her great-uncle, Robert Stephens, died at the school in 1937.
"The story was ... he tried to run away at one point," she said. "The official cause of death was a stabbing by another inmate, that's what it was listed as. But with so many of these boys, who knows how they died? Their families never had a chance to say 'good-bye' to their loved ones."

Johnny Lee Gaddy, 67, said he was locked up from 1957 to 1961 for truancy. He said he was severely beaten, but in his teens became a good farm worker, hoping to get released.

Gaddy said he had heard of teens disappearing without explanation.
"I know some they said went home, but they hadn't been here long enough to go home," said Gaddy. "They said some others ran away or were transferred to other places. We never saw any bodies or funerals."
John Due, father of Tananarive, said descendants and civil-rights activists who pressed the state for disclosure of what happened to the young men ran into rigid resistance from authorities for decades.
"People didn't want to talk about it, and we found that particularly among black families," he said. "That's what racism does. It beats you down and you think you don't matter, so you won't speak up."
The forensic teams will work through Tuesday. Remains that can be identified will be re-interred at family plots and any unidentified remains will be numbered and buried - with records kept for later return to families, if any come forward.

Would-be thief beaten up by women at cash machine told victims to ‘get some manners’

A would-be thief got upset after he didn’t reckon on his victims fighting back as he tried to steal cash from two women withdrawing money from an ATM in south London. One of the women pushed him off his bike after the man attempted to grab the notes from the Barclays cash machine in Worcester Park.

He spat at them and told them to ‘get some manners’, said police, who are appealing for witnesses to the incident on Sunday, June 9 at around 7.15pm.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Service said: “The women, aged 25 and 27, were taking money out of the cash machine watched by a man on a bicycle immediately behind them. As the notes appeared from the machine, the cyclist lunged forward to grab the cash.

YouTube link.

“But he hadn’t reckoned on the girls fighting him off and pushing him away. He then spat at one of the girls, who reacted by pulling him off his bike.” Police have released CCTV of the suspect, who is described as a white man, approximately 5ft 8ins tall, in a bid to track him down.

Severed human head and hands sent to Kenyan police commissioner interpreted as death threat

A freshly chopped head of a man has been found in a box that was left outside the National Police Service Commission offices in Nairobi. The carton had the writing – Kavuludi you are next – which detectives have interpreted as a death threat to the Commission’s chairman Johnston Kavuludi.

A pair of hands chopped from the wrist were also found in the box, together with the head which was covered with blood. The box that was wrapped in a yellow polythene bag was abandoned for about two hours before police were alerted. it was dropped on a flower bed, just outside Luther Plaza, where the Mr Kavuludi’s office is situated, near the University of Nairobi.

Nairobi police chief Benson Kibui linked the incident to an earlier one where a torso, was found in a farm in Ruai. The Torso had the head and hands missing. “Judging by the decapitation of the head and hands, we can be able to connect. We shall start by seeking the identity of the victim, then we find the killers and establish their motive,” said Mr Kibui.

Workers at the Commission told police that the carton was dropped there at around 4pm, and the police chief said his officers were alerted two hours later. Officers from the nearby Central Police station who were the first to arrive at the scene sealed it off and called in their colleagues from the Bomb Disposal Unit. “The experts did not detect any explosives and so scene of crime analysts took over and found the head,” Mr Kibui added. He estimated the deceased was 30 years old.

Ziggy

Ten Real-Life Hidden Treasures You Could Still Find

Everyone wants to find a hidden treasure. Just imagine walking around in the woods and stumbling across a treasure chest of money. Pirates hid them all the time, sunken ships hold endless amounts of wealth under the sea, and some people are giving away their life savings just for the fun of it. Treasures are hidden all around us, and all we have to do is search for them.

New England expects ample apples after dismal 2012

Apple pickers are descending on New England's orchards for the early varieties as growers around the region predict a strong rebound from a dismal 2012.
Weather conditions have been favorable to apple production this year, with minimal late frosts, a wet early summer and recent dry conditions. The weather contrasts with conditions a year ago when a warm late April coaxed out the apple blossoms but was followed by a killing frost in many areas.
Bill Suhr, owner of the Champlain Orchards in Shoreham, Vt., said the moisture early on helped increase the size of the fruit and the dry conditions now are probably contributing to sugar content, making many of the apples sweeter.
"We already have people doing pick your own," said Alison Dayton of the Happy Valley Orchard in Middlebury, Vt. "Last year, we didn't have any."
For the region, orchardists expect a good crop this fall — about 3.5 million 42-pound boxes, just under the 3.6 million-box average over the last five years, the New England Apple Association says.
Likewise, the forecast for apple production nationwide calls for an upswing. Industry group USApple says apple production for the U.S. is expected to be 13 percent higher than last year. The 2013 forecast calls for 243.3 million boxes — each box containing 42 apples — about 9 percent above the five-year average.
Although the nation's leading apple producer, Washington state, is expected to see its 2013 crop fall below the five-year average by about 10 percent, both No. 2 New York and No. 3 Michigan should see big increases over a poor 2012.
New York apple production could be 87 percent greater than in 2012, while Michigan's forecast calls for a nearly 1,000 percent jump from a record low last year.
In New England, Paula Red, Ginger Gold and other early varieties are already being picked, and some orchards said the MacIntosh apples were coming in just in time for Labor Day weekend.
"People are very excited that they are so plentiful this year," Dayton said. "We will start selling cider Sept. 1."
At Gould Hill Farm in Contoocook, N.H., owner Tim Bassett said he and his wife, Amy, were thrilled about the prospects.
"For us, it's a very good year," he said. "We have no complaints — very heavy Macs, Macouns, Honey Crisp."
Bassett also touted the farm's heritage varieties, including Roxbury Russetts, which he described as "the oldest apple in America."

Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/2013/08/31/4915140/new-england-expects-ample-apples.html#storylink=cpy

Whole Fruit - Juice - Type 2 Diabetes

Skip the juice, go for whole fruit

 

Eating more whole fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes, and apples, was significantly associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study led by Harvard School of

Read more...

Why your juicing regimen might increase diabetes risk 

People who ate at least two servings each week of certain whole fruits, especially blueberries, grapes and apples, reduced their risk of Type 2 diabetes by as much as 23 percent compared to those who ate less than one serving per month.

Man gets 6 years for stealing nearly $3M in wine

A Newport Beach man was convicted and sentenced to six years in state prison for stealing $2.7 million worth of wine from his clients' storage lockers and under-reporting over $3.5 million in payroll to his workers' compensation insurance carrier, prosecutors said on Friday.
George Osumi, 65, a construction business owner, pleaded guilty to charges including: failing to file a tax return to avoid paying taxes, identity theft, perjury, grand theft, and aggravated white collar crime, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
Osumi is accused of breaking into private wine storage lockers at Legend Cellars, Inc. in Irvine, stealing other people's wine, auctioning it off, depositing the money into his bank account, and replacing the wine he took with a cheaper brand, prosecutors said.
The wine he's accused of stealing had an estimated value of $2.7 million, officials said.
At least once he hired a friend to auction off some of the stolen wine in exchange for a portion of the proceeds, prosecutors said, adding the man did not know the wine was stolen.
He also deposited about $280,000 into his business account and used the money to pay for personal expenses and legal fees, officials alleged.
Osumi is accused of auctioning some of the stolen wine himself for nearly $311,000 at least twice and having the money deposited into his business account, the District Attorney's Office said.
A family member of one of the clients reported the theft to the Irvine Police Department, which launched an investigation.

A 73-year-old man plants mystery seeds, gets pot ticket

A 73-year-old man who was given the first civil marijuana ticket in a Vermont town says he had planted some seeds he found in a box and "got spanked" by police after it grew into a pot plant.

William Reynolds was issued a $200 civil ticket by St. Johnsbury police after authorities seized a potted 2 ½-foot-tall marijuana plant from his Main Street apartment.

Police say they saw no indication Reynolds was a pot smoker or had other marijuana plants.

Reynolds tells the Caledonian Record he doesn't smoke marijuana and was "playing around" with the seeds he found.

He says he "did wrong" and won't contest the ticket.

Vermont decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana on July 1.

Pirate-Themed CT Scanner in a Children's Hospital

(Photo: Macey J. Foronda/Buzzfeed)

It might almost make a kid want to go to the hospital! The New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital redesigned its CT scanning room, adding pirates:

“There aren’t scary pirates — there’s a pussycat pirate and one that looks like Curious George,” says Dr. Carrie Ruzal-Shapiro, chief of Pediatric Radiology. “The parents have been really positive too. It makes it less scarier for the kids.”
On average, New York-Presbyterian has about 200 inpatients per day, treating about 150 kids each day in the pediatric emergency room. And every day kids ranging from newborn to age 21 come in for CT scan for ailments from neonatal abnormalities to abdominal pain to head trauma. “Our more adult patients ages 17 to 21 ask for the pirate scanner, too,” Ruzal-Shapiro says.

You can see several more photos at the link.

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Stalin's Rope Roads

The mining town of Chiatura, Georgia, surrounded by steep cliffs, is criss-crossed by a network of aging Soviet-era aerial tramways that are still in use today. In the early 20th century, after the U.S.S.R. annexed Georgia, Soviet authorities were intent on extracting the vast manganese deposits beneath Chiatura.

In the 1950s, planners began work on what locals call the 'rope road,' that still connects almost every corner of the town. Today, while some of the cars have rusted away, 17 of the aging tramways remain in service.

Why our black hole is a finicky eater

Why our black hole is a finicky eater: Material ejects itself before black hole can devour it

For years, scientists have observed that the black hole at the center of our galaxy has a surprisingly small appetite. While the black hole, named Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star),

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The Duplex

Earliest evidence of Gondwana land animals found in Eastern Cape

 The earliest evidence of land animals on the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana has been found in the Eastern Cape.

The earliest evidence of land animals on the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana has been found in the Eastern Cape. It includes a fossilised pincer as well as part of the tail and sting from a species of 360 million-year-old scorpions. The tiny fossils were found compressed between layers of shale taken from a road cutting near Grahamstown [Credut: Dr Robert Gess]

It includes a fossilised pincer as well as part of the tail and sting from a species of 360 million-year-old scorpions.

They lived during a geological period known as the Devonian.

The small, predatory creatures, which would have snacked on the world's first primitive insects and millipedes, were almost the length of a modern-day pencil.

Dubbed Gondwanascorpio emsantsiensis by its discoverer Dr Robert Gess, a researcher at the time with the Bernard Price Institute of Palaeontological Research, details of the new species have been published in the latest volume of the scientific journal, African Invertebrates.

The tiny fossils were found compressed between layers of shale taken from a road cutting near Grahamstown.

"They are very delicate, and silvery-white in colour against the dark background of the rock," Gess told Sapa.

He said the pincers and the tail segment and sting were found separately, and were not from the same individual.

He had found both fossils while carefully splitting apart small slabs of shale from the site, and was "totally thrilled" by the discovery.

"One knows one's found something very significant," he said.

Back in the Devonian, between 420 and 360 million years ago, the world consisted of two supercontinents: Laurasia, comprising North America, Europe and Asia; and the southerly Gondwana, including Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India.

The two were separated by a deep ocean.

Gess said that although it was known that Laurasia was inhabited by diverse invertebrates before and during the Devonian, "until now, we had no evidence that the early plant life of Gondwana was similarly inhabited".

For the first time, it was now known that not just scorpions, but whatever they were preying on were already present in the Devonian.

"We know now that Gondwana, like Laurasia, had a complex terrestrial ecosystem, comprised of invertebrates and plants, by the end of the Devonian.

"It too, therefore, had all the elements to sustain terrestrial vertebrate life that emerged around this time, or slightly later," he said.

Among other fossils found by Gess in rocks from the Eastern Cape site are 20 types of fish and a range of different land plants.

At the time these existed, the area was on the edge of a high latitude coastal lagoon.

Pionus menstruus

Blue headed Parrots 

In South America, the Blue-headed Parrot is mainly an Amazonian species, including in the southeast the neighboring Araguaia-Tocantins River system as its eastern limit; a disjunct population lives southeastwards on Brazil's South Atlantic coast, a coastal strip from Pernambuco in the north to Espírito Santo state in the south, about 1500 km long. In northwest South America the range continues into Central American Panama to Costa Rica. It avoids the northern Andes cordillera spine, and a smaller contiguous area of central Venezuela and northern Colombia. A Pacific Ocean coastal strip continues the range, from southern Ecuador, north to Caribbean areas of northwestern Colombia and western Venezuela.

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European Wildcat

The European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) is a subspecies of the wildcat that inhabits forests of Western, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as Scotland, Turkey and the Caucasus Mountains; it has been extirpated from Scandinavia, England, and Wales. Some authorities restrict F. s. silvestris to populations of the European mainland, in which case populations of Scotland, Mediterranean islands, Turkey and Caucasus are regarded as separate subspecies.

The physical appearance of the European wildcat is much bulkier than that of the African wildcat and the domestic cat, although its weight is similar to the average housecat, as males of the species weigh an average of 5 kg (11 lb) and females 3.5 kg (7.7 lb), with strong seasonal weight fluctuations of up to 2.5 kg. The wildcat's thick fur, size and non-tapered tail are its distinguishing traits; it normally would not be mistaken for the domestic cat, although in practice, it is less clear whether the two are frequently correctly distinguished, as one study showed an error rate of 39%. Predominantly nocturnal, the wildcat is active in the daytime in the absence of human disturbance.

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Animal Pictures