text:
The weapons were housed in Long Island City, in a low-slung, prefabricated building on Northern Boulevard. I could hear them growling and yammering in the dark. I'd arrived well before dawn on a wet, chilly October morning, and still wasn't sure how to proceed. A police officer had told me to meet him there at five-forty-five, but there was no bell to ring, no intercom to buzz. The building was surrounded by a ragged chain-link fence edged with spools of razor wire and posted with warnings. When I tested the gate, it was unlocked, but the entrance lay across an empty parking lot and up a wooden ramp. I wasn't sure that I could make it to the door in time.
I've never been much good around dogs. In the town where I grew up, about an hour north of Oklahoma City, every other house seemed to be patrolled by some bawling bluetick or excitable Irish setter, and the locals liked to leave them unchained. When I'd fill in for my brother on his paper route, or ride my one-speed bike to a friend's house, I could usually count on a chase along the way, some homicidal canine at my heels. The dogs didn't seem to give my friends as much trouble. And my father had a way of puffing himself up and waving his arms that would send them scampering. But I never figured out how to show them who's boss.
One of the satisfactions of city life has been turning that relationship around. A pet here is always on probation, its instincts curbed or swiftly incarcerated. A hound that chases children around would be considered a public menace, and even the little yappers have to be kept on a leash. In the past ten years, though, that balance of power has shifted. Since the attacks on September 11th, New York's subways and train stations, parks and tourist destinations have been prowled by police dogs—large, pointy-eared, unnervingly observant beasts deeply unconvinced of our innocence. They sniff at backpacks and train their eyes on passersby, daring us to make a move. It's a little unsettling but also, under the circumstances, reassuring. There are worse things to fear than getting bitten.
The New York City subway has more than four hundred stations, eight hundred miles of track, six thousand cars, and, on any given weekday, five million passengers. It's an anti-terrorism unit's nightmare. To sweep this teeming labyrinth for bombs would take an army of explosives experts equipped with chemical detectors. Instead, the city has gone to the dogs. Since 2001, the number of uniformed police has dropped by seventeen per cent. In that same period, the canine force has nearly doubled. It now has around a hundred dogs, divided among the narcotics, bomb, emergency-response, and transit squads.
A good dog is a natural super-soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet obedient. It can leap higher than most men, and run twice as fast. Its eyes are equipped for night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the most fractious prey. But its true glory is its nose. In the nineteen-seventies, researchers found that dogs could detect even a few particles per million of a substance; in the nineties, more subtle instruments lowered the threshold to particles per billion; the most recent tests have brought it down to particles per trillion. "It's a little disheartening, really," Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist at the Canine Detection Research Institute, at Auburn University, in Alabama, told me. "I spent a good six years of my life chasing this idea, only to find that it was all about the limitations of my equipment."
Just as astonishing, to Waggoner, is a dog's acuity—the way it can isolate and identify compounds within a scent, like the spices in a soup. Drug smugglers often try to mask the smell of their shipments by packaging them with coffee beans, air fresheners, or sheets of fabric softener. To see if this can fool a dog, Waggoner has flooded his laboratory with different scents, then added minute quantities of heroin or cocaine to the mix. In one case, "the whole damn lab smelled like a Starbucks," he told me, but the dogs had no trouble homing in on the drug. "They're just incredible at finding the needle in the haystack."
The New York police have two kinds of canines: detection dogs and patrol dogs. The former spend most of their time chasing down imaginary threats: terrorist attacks are so rare that the police have to stage simulations, with real explosives, to keep the dogs on their toes. Patrol dogs, on the other hand, have one of the most dangerous jobs in public life. Canine police are often called when a criminal is on the loose, and they're far more likely than others to have a lethal encounter. "The crimes I get called out on are always in progress," one officer told me. "The suspects are armed. They're known to be violent. So, by the mere nature of that call, it's going to be more dangerous." He shrugged. "I guess I'm an adrenaline junkie. I got into canine to hunt men."
The dogs in Long Island City were heirs to an ancient and bloodthirsty line. Their ancestors, descended from the great mastiffs and sight hounds of Mesopotamia, were used as shock troops by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, and the Greeks. (Alexander the Great's dog, Peritas, is said to have saved his life at Gaugamela by leaping in front of a Persian elephant and biting its lip.) They wrought havoc in the Roman Colosseum, ran with Attila's hordes, and wore battle armor beside the knights of the Middle Ages. In 1495, when Columbus sailed to what is now the Dominican Republic, he brought Spanish mastiffs almost three feet high at the withers and greyhounds that could run down an enemy and disembowel him. At the battle of Vega Real, each hound killed a hundred natives in less than an hour, according to the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. "They carry these dogs with them as companions wherever they go," he later wrote. "And kill the fettered Indians in multitudes like Hogs for their Food."
It took a while to break them of the habit. The colonists used dogs against Indians and slaves—"They should be large, strong and fierce," Benjamin Franklin recommended, "and will confound the enemy a good deal"—and the Confederates sent them after escaping Union prisoners at Andersonville. And though the U.S. Army opted for more modern weaponry abroad, attack dogs were still used at home, for crowd control. "Up until the nineteen-seventies, the police just wanted dogs that would bite everyone," Jim Matarese, the treasurer of the United States Police Canine Association, told me. "They'd go to the pound and get dogs that were fear biters—just scared to death of people. Or someone would call in and say, 'I've got a real aggressive dog. He'll bite!' Well, we saw what happened at the marches from Selma: those dogs just ate people up."
In Europe, police dogs were a more refined lot, though not always to their benefit. The German shepherd, first registered as a breed in 1889 by a former cavalry captain, Max von Stephanitz, was selected for intelligence and steadiness as well as power. The Germans fielded thirty thousand dogs in the First World War, and used them for everything from transporting medicine and wounded soldiers to shuttling messages between trenches. When the war was over, the animals were mostly killed, discarded, or consumed by the starving populace. "Dog meat has been eaten in every major German crisis at least since the time of Frederick the Great, and is commonly referred to as 'blockade mutton,' " Time noted, in 1940. "Dachshund is considered the most succulent."
The survivors went on to second careers in law enforcement or as guide dogs for the blind, and their breeding and training grew ever more sophisticated. In Germany, registered shepherds have to pass rigorous physical and behavioral tests, and their puppies are trained by nationwide networks of volunteers. Schutzhund competitions, in which dogs are tested for their ability to track, obey orders, and protect their owners, are a national passion, and the largest ones fill stadiums. "They just have a different dog culture over there," Steve White, a dog trainer and former canine officer in the Seattle area, told me. "If you look at North America, there are maybe five thousand German shepherd breeders. If you go to Germany, it's probably got fifty-five thousand."
It took the Lockerbie bombing, followed by the attacks at Columbine and Oklahoma City, to galvanize interest in police and military dogs in America. Auburn's canine program began as an attempt to build a better bomb detector. "In the eighties, we thought, Let's build a machine that can mimic the dog!" Robert Gillette, the director of the university's animal-health and performance program, told me. "But you can't mimic a dog. It's just a superior mechanical working system. So in the nineties we began to think, Hmm, let's put some of that research into the animals." The Department of Defense has apparently come to the same conclusion. Since 2006, it has spent close to twenty billion dollars searching for explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The detection rate has hung stubbornly at around fifty per cent," Lieutenant General Michael Oates told the magazine National Defense two years ago. When the same patrols use dogs, he added, the success rate leaps to eighty per cent: "Dogs are the best detectors."
The American military now has some three thousand active-duty dogs in its ranks, but good animals are hard to find. The American Kennel Club requires no proof of health or intelligence to register an animal—just a pure bloodline—and breeders are often more concerned with looks than with ability. "We breed for the almighty dollar here," one trainer told me. Programs like the ones at Auburn and at Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, are trying to reverse that trend. But their graduates are still the exceptions. "Some of these dogs, they couldn't find a pork chop if it was hanging around their neck," a dog broker in Minnesota told me.
The upshot is that many, if not most, American police dogs now come from Europe. Those in the New York subway were mostly born in Hungary, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic—descendants of the powerful border-patrol dogs bred during the Cold War. Other police dogs come from brokers in Holland and Germany, and still respond to Dutch and German commands: Sitz! Bleib! Los! Apport! "Europeans have more dogs than they can use, so they sell the excess to us," White told me. "We subsidize their hobbies."
When I'd finally summoned the nerve to sprint across the parking lot and up the ramp, that morning in Long Island City, I stumbled in on six patrolmen strapping on their gear. They were all with the transit squad, which safeguards the subway: four recruits and two trainers. A dry-erase board hung on the wall, scrawled with notes. One side listed explosives that the dogs could detect, including C-4, TNT, ammonium nitrate, and several others. The other side listed fines for canine misbehavior: five dollars for urinating in the subway, twenty-five for biting someone ("must draw blood").
Wayne Rothschild, one of the trainers, had just finished adding his weight to another list on the board—part of a contest to see who could lose the most pounds by the end of the week. (Canine police tend to be more active than others, but their dogs do most of the running.) The men in his squad averaged more than two hundred pounds, topping out at two hundred and thirty-six, for the sergeant, Randy Brenner.
"One pound?" a recruit was asked. "You've lost one pound?"
"I swallowed a lot of aggression."
"And pizzas."
Rothschild laughed. At one eighty-one, he was among the fittest men in the group. He and Brenner had first met in junior high and later played football together for the Hicksville Comets—Rothschild at quarterback and Brenner at center. Twenty years later, they still looked their parts: Rothschild square-jawed and decisive, with jet-black hair close-cropped on the sides; Brenner stolid, round, and reliable—the immovable object. Technically, Brenner was now Rothschild's boss, but their relationship hadn't changed much. "I was blocking for him then and I'm still blocking for him," Brenner said.
Like many of the men in the squad, Rothschild and Brenner had been around police dogs most of their lives. Rothschild's father, uncle, brothers, and cousins were in law enforcement, as were Brenner's father and grandfather. After high school, Rothschild spent two years at a community college and another two working construction, before joining the force. Brenner took his police-academy entrance exam at sixteen. When the transit canine unit was formed, six years ago, they each put in for it unbeknownst to the other, and found themselves back on the same team. "I'd rather be a cop in canine than a sergeant somewhere else," Brenner said. "It's all I ever wanted."
He and Rothschild led the recruits to the kennel behind the offices, to get their new partners. A week earlier, each recruit had been paired with an equally green police dog, a little over a year old. "We want the dog to make up for where the handler is weak and vice versa," Brenner said. "But I'll tell you, after a while the person's personality becomes similar to the dog's." Matthew Poletto, a rangy recruit with the jutting cheekbones and cut biceps of a bodybuilder, had been matched with Ranger, a skinny, high-strung Belgian Malinois—"like a German shepherd on steroids," as one handler put it. Horacio Maldonado, a small, soft-spoken Hispanic, had a sweet female Labrador named Ray. The others had big-boned, lordly shepherds with the contained power peculiar to the breed. The Labrador was a detection dog; the shepherds and the Malinois were patrol dogs—though some, like Rothschild's German shepherd, Danz, did both.
For the next month and a half, the dogs and men would learn to work together, to read each other's cues and idiosyncrasies, as if in an arranged marriage: police dogs and their handlers are usually partnered for life. "He's a great dog. It's just . . . sometimes I'd like to relax a little," Poletto said, sounding like the honeymoon was already over. "You know, watch TV and not have him put the chew toy in my lap."
Inside the kennel, the dogs were in an uproar. They lunged at their cages when they saw their owners, foam flying from their muzzles. They stayed here only when not on patrol or at home with their partners, but even this much confinement was hard to bear. "A lot of them are cage chewers," the unit's other trainer, Richard Geraci, told me. He showed me a photograph on his phone of a ventilation cover that his dog, Chief, had reduced to twisted scrap. "That's quarter-inch steel," he said. A German shepherd's jaw can exert upward of seven hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. "They just chew it up, tear it up. Chief's got broken teeth, but I'm surprised he doesn't have more."
And yet the moment the cages were opened the noises stopped. The dogs trotted silently to their partners' side, then sat back on their haunches—ears erect, eyes focussed forward—and waited. "It's like you've turned on a switch," Brenner said.
Canine police tend to talk about their dogs as if they were mechanical devices. They describe them as tools or technology and say that they're "building dogs" through proper training. They say that their animals need "maintenance" to be "fully operational," and that a "dual-purpose dog"—one that has been taught to both chase down criminals and detect drugs or explosives—has "superior functionality." At home, a police dog may be like a member of the family. But once in the field it's just another piece of gear.
This is more than a manner of speaking. It's a way of thinking about dogs that goes back to the psychologist B. F. Skinner and his work on behaviorism, in the nineteen-forties. Skinner argued that it's pointless to imagine what's going on in an animal's head. Better to treat its mind as a black box, closed and unknowable, with inputs that lead to predictable outputs. Skinner identified four ways to manipulate behavior: four buttons to push—positive reinforcement ("Good dog! Have a biscuit"), positive punishment ("Bad dog! Whack"), negative reinforcement ("Good dog! Now I'll stop whacking you"), and negative punishment ("Bad dog! Give me back that biscuit"). Connect an action to an outcome and almost any behavior can be trained. Skinner called this "operant conditioning," and considered it as effective for people as for their pets. "Give me a child," he once said, "and I'll shape him into anything."
By treating animals as clever machines, behaviorists managed some impressive feats: rats navigated mazes, chickens played tic-tac-toe, pigeons played Ping-Pong. During the Second World War, Skinner went so far as to design a pigeon-guided missile. The birds sat in the nose cone, each one pecking at a target on a translucent plate. The setup worked surprisingly well, but the pigeons were never enlisted—no one in the military would take them seriously, Skinner complained. Behaviorism, as a means of animal training, had a long, slow fuse.
The revolution, when it came, began with creatures beyond the reach of regular compulsion. An orca or a dolphin can't be tugged on a leash or stung with a whip. It can't hear what you're shouting most of the time. To make it do what you want, you have to break down the behavior into discrete components—swim over here, pick up that hoop, leap through the air—then offer a reward for each step. At marine parks and aquariums, in the nineteen-sixties, an orca that did something right would hear a whistle blast and get a fish. After a while, each behavior would be associated with a different hand signal, and become so rewarding, in and of itself, that the orca wouldn't always need to get a fish. One of the pioneers in this field, Karen Pryor, once taught a goldfish to swim through a tiny hoop just for the flicker of a flashlight. "It's easy," she told me. "You just have to have a healthy goldfish. And it has to be hungry."
As operant conditioning has spread from aquariums to zoos, what once would have been circus acts have come to seem like ordinary good behavior. Thirty years ago, if a lion needed a flu shot, it had to be tranquillized. These days, it will walk up to its trainer and proffer its paw. "I could give you examples all day," Ken Ramirez, the vice-president of animal training at the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago, told me. "We have sharks that will swim from tank to tank, and a beluga whale that will present its belly for an ultrasound. Our sea otters hold their eyes open to get drops, and I've had a diabetic baboon submit to regular insulin injections." Not long ago, when a camel broke its jaw at the nearby Brookfield Zoo, it walked up to a table and laid its head on a lead plate for an X-ray. "It makes managing animals so much easier," Ramirez said. "They do things as part of a game that you've taught them."
Dogs were made for this sort of thing. No other animal so loves a game or so diligently aims to please. No other has been shaped so specifically to our needs. Selective breeding has turned Canis lupus familiaris into the most physically varied animal on earth. Its genome is the Microsoft Windows of biological programming: layer upon layer of complex function and code, often accreted at cross-purposes. It can produce Great Danes big enough to kill wild boars and Chihuahuas small enough to go down rat holes, beagles that track pythons and collies that catch Frisbees. "When you get to a detection dog that wants to find ammonium nitrate just so that it can play with a rubber ball, that is a very, very complex end point," Auburn's Robert Gillette told me.
The patrol dogs in the transit squad could bark on command (Speak!) and urinate at their handler's discretion (Empty!). They could climb ladders, crawl through drainage pipes, and leap through the open window of a moving car. They were smart, disciplined, extremely capable animals. But the blood of the old war hounds still ran in them, and their most effective ability was intimidation.
"One canine team can do the work of ten or fifteen guys in a gang situation," Lieutenant John Pappas, the head of the squad, told me. "It's 'Fuck you! I'm not going anywhere.' But when you throw in some jaws and paws—holy shit! It changes the landscape." In 2010, one station on the Lexington Avenue line was hit by twenty felonies in a matter of months. Once a canine unit was sent in, the number dropped to zero. "It's like pulling up in an M1 Abrams battle tank," Pappas said.
The commuters at Union Square seemed a peaceable crowd one Wednesday morning. Yet the dogs made even the innocent nervous. When the squad filed into a subway car, I could see backs stiffen all around, eyes focussed on the floor. Each dog and its handler took position at a set of doors, overseen by Rothschild and Brenner. Between stations, the dogs watched the riders. When the doors opened, they pivoted around to study the crowd on the platform. The German shepherds soon settled into the routine, but the Malinois kept twisting about on its leash, registering each face like a laser scanner.
"Malinois just really love bite work," a canine cop from Middletown, New York, had told me. "They have this giant prey drive. Some people call them Maligators." After a while, one of the riders—a tall, spindly man in a yarn prayer cap—began to get uncomfortable. He scooted down the seat, hunching his shoulders, and glared back at the Malinois. "If you tense up, if you're feeling threatened, the dog picks that up and perceives a threat," Brenner told me. Or as my friends used to say when I was a kid, at the worst possible moments, "They can smell your fear."
Times Square is the busiest station in the city, and the main concourse was at its most cacophonous. A band of black bluegrass musicians, called the Ebony Hillbillies, was sprawled in lawn chairs playing an old fiddle tune called "Martha Campbell." The bass and banjo lines skittered from run to run while the washboard chattered underneath, mimicking the commuters around us. "New York is just different," Brenner said, looking around with satisfaction. "Our version of a crowd is different from anywhere else in the world. And these dogs are tuning in to everything. They're trained for handler protection, and they don't know when that threat is going to be upon them."
The squad had been there only a few minutes when one of the German shepherds—a huge black male named Thunder—began to bark at something nearby. I could see a man in a hoodie crouched beside a pillar. An officer was shouting at him to show his hands, but he wouldn't do it. One second, the two were frozen in a standoff, Thunder straining at the leash. Then the suspect lunged, the cop let go, and the dog leaped through the air. "Get this dog off of me!" the man screamed, as Thunder's jaw clamped around his arm. The handler called Thunder back, but then the suspect broke away and the dog was on him again within a few steps, jerking him to the ground.
As it turned out, the suspect was a decoy—another transit cop, posing as a troublemaker. The second attack, though, had been unscripted: the decoy hadn't meant to act as if he were running away. "The dog wasn't wrong," Rothschild said. It's a police dog's job to perceive threats, and the handler's job to keep the dog in check. This is the hardest part of canine work. "You have to put emergency brakes on these creatures," one handler told me. A single loss of control could cause wrongful injury, lawsuits, or even death, but the dog doesn't know that. As Stewart Hilliard, a specialist in animal learning who works with the canine program at Lackland Air Force Base, put it, "You can't think of a reward more desirable to a dog than the opportunity to keep biting that person."
A few weeks earlier, at the National Police Dog Field Trials, in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, I'd watched several dozen dogs wrestle with their conscience. The field trials are a kind of canine decathlon, modelled on Schutzhund competitions. They bring together the best-trained police dogs in the country to test their agility, obedience, and ability to track criminals and catch them. Rothschild and his German shepherd were there to represent New York, along with four other dogs and handlers from their region.
Detroit Lakes sits on a flat, glacier-scoured plain about an hour east of Fargo. Some officers had driven as far as fifteen hundred miles to get there, but were unprepared for the freezing rain and the local fare. ("It's September—I brought all shorts!" Rothschild told me the first night, at a local buffet, while his teammates eyed the bratwurst; "I'm not eatin' those things," one of them said.) The night before, on the drive in from North Dakota, I'd received a speeding ticket on a desolate stretch of road. I later heard that the same thing had happened to two of the police officers—and they were driving their cruisers at the time.
"A lot of people are under the misapprehension that this is a dog show," one of the judges, Gary Pietropaolo, a mustachioed ex-cop from Yonkers, told me the next day. We were sitting in folding chairs on a baseball field, watching the criminal-apprehension trial. By then, I'd seen dogs search for guns in tall grass, and dogs sniff out a suspect hidden in rows of identical wooden boxes. In this case, they had to chase down a gunman, bite his arm, and waylay him until the handler caught up to make the arrest. It was a stylized routine, scored on niceties of execution—sitting slightly askew at a handler's side was enough to earn a deduction—but the dogs seemed deadly serious. At least four dogs had been killed or severely injured in the line of duty in the past year. One was thrown into traffic by an armed robber; another bit into a brick of cocaine; another was stabbed repeatedly; the last barely survived an attempted drowning. "If it's not a violent felon, you typically don't send in the dog," Pietropaolo said. "In the use-of-force scale, it's almost equal to using a nightstick."
Earlier that morning, as I was running across the field to join the judges, I'd suddenly realized that I was being watched. At the other end of the field, a half dozen German shepherds were lined up along a fence, their eyes locked on my every move. To them, I must have seemed like just another target—a man in a turkey suit, dashing through the forest on opening day of hunting season. "You got lucky," Rothschild told me later. Even with a protective sleeve on, an officer he knew was bitten so hard that his arm broke in two places, and Rothschild bore a dozen scars from trials gone awry. "It's just something you have to overcome," he said. "Most of us never got bit before going into canine. But you kind of get the feel of it. It's normal wear and tear."
Danz, Rothschild's dog, was a big, bristling male with something of his handler's swagger. When his turn came in the trial, he sat without a twitch while the decoy shot off a round and ran down the field. Then, at a murmured word from Rothschild, the dog took off—body low to the ground, feet a blur, like a shaggy brown missile. He was halfway across the field, in mid-flight, when Rothschild yelled "Stop!" The effect was immediate: Danz peeled away, circled back to his handler, and sat squarely at his side—a near-perfect routine.
Others weren't so successful. When David Causey, a patrolman from Lake County, Florida, called his animal off, you could almost see the dog weighing his options. He glanced back at Causey, slowed down for a moment, then hunched his shoulders and accelerated toward the target. "That's called 'He fucked you,' " Causey's friend David Williams told me. "Fifty points off. He's out of the competition."
For Causey, the result was made even worse by a sense of déjà vu. The year before, on the last day of the field trials, the same dog had bitten a decoy's hand and then, for good measure, his crotch. It was a case of accidental reinforcement, Causey said. A few weeks earlier, in Florida, his dog had chased a felon into a closet. A rough struggle ensued until the dog, in desperation, bit the man between the legs. Immediate surrender. The next time the dog chased down a suspect, he tried the same trick. Success again! By the time the field trials rolled around, the behavior was locked in.
When Causey and Williams told me this story, we were having breakfast at a coffee shop with Kurt Dumond, the officer who had received the unfortunate bite. Williams, a garrulous Cajun with a life-size revolver tattooed on his hip ("I'm always packing"), pulled out his cell phone and called up some pictures he'd taken at the emergency room: Dumond in a pale-blue hospital gown, followed by several distressing closeups of his scrotum. "That's a mess right there," Dumond said. Williams nodded. "The nurse, when she sees it, she goes, 'Woo woooooo!' Then the doctor comes out and goes, 'That is going to hurt!' Kurt, he'd just told me he had a little laceration. I didn't realize it was thirteen stitches' worth." This year, Williams added, Dumond wore a cup.
How do you keep a dog in line? The answer used to be simple: you smacked it or yelled at it or yanked on its chain. It wasn't pretty, but it could get the job done. Punishment and compulsion are still common in dog training, though usually in more subtle forms—a tug on a leash, for instance, or a mild shock from an electric collar. Traditional trainers, from the monks of New Skete to Schutzhund champions like Friedrich Biehler, can produce very accomplished dogs. But, as behaviorism has worked its way from aquariums to kennels, more and more dogs are being taught with positive reinforcement, often using a handheld clicker. "You used to wait until the dog did something wrong, then corrected it," Michele Pouliot, the director of research and development at Guide Dogs for the Blind in Oregon, told me. "Now you're rewarding a behavior you like before it goes wrong."
Like so much else in the dog world, the change mirrors a trend in child rearing—and provokes the same heated debate. ("The only thing two dog trainers can agree about is what the third dog trainer is doing wrong," Steve White told me.) The tough love of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, and the tender manipulations of Victoria Stilwell, the host of "It's Me or the Dog," have their exact analogues in parenting styles. Hearing Pouliot talk about headstrong, distractible puppies—the kind that usually make good police dogs—is a lot like hearing an elementary-school teacher talk about attention-deficit disorder and the trouble with boys. "If a dog loves squirrels, you have to find something that excites him so much it overpowers the squirrel instinct," Pouliot told me. "If you're constantly on top of him—punishing, punishing, punishing—that behavior is not going away. You have to get that dog to try to figure out what you want."
Canine police are conservative by nature. They have little margin for error or experiment, so they tend to play the Tiger Moms in this debate. "It goes like this," Gary Pietropaolo, the judge from Yonkers, told me. "You always want to use positive motivation first. But, if that was the only thing we used with these animals, we wouldn't have enough shelters in this country. What do you do with the dog that, if you show him the clicker, he shows you his teeth? Do you just kill him?"
It was the third day of the field trials, and Pietropaolo and the other judges were gathered in a conference room at the Holiday Inn, pooling their scores. Kurt Dumond's dog, Erek, held a thin lead over the rest of the field, with Rothschild's Danz in fifth place. (Erek would eventually drop to third, Danz to eleventh, and the championship would go to a dog from Austin, Minnesota, named Ghost—one of only a few Belgian Malinois in a sea of German shepherds.) The best handlers never abuse their dogs, Pietropaolo said, but, like good parents, they make their authority clear. "If you tell your kid to sit down and be quiet at the table, and he doesn't do it, it's over. You have to make it happen. But you don't necessarily have to grab him by the hair and drag him around." The judge beside him grinned. "I still use a choke chain on the kid," he said.
Guide-dog trainers were a lot like the police once, Michele Pouliot told me. Their methods were rooted in military dog training, brought over from Europe after the two world wars. "Everything was steeped in this tradition of very harsh treatment," she said. "Everything was 'You're wrong.' " Then, six years ago, Guide Dogs for the Blind switched over to positive reinforcement. "It was a huge undertaking," Pouliot told me. "We have sixty-five instructors who took years to get good at what they're doing. You're asking them to flip-flop a whole set of technical skills. It's like starting all over."
The benefits are already clear, Pouliot said. Less than half the dogs in her program used to complete their training successfully; now the number is close to three-quarters. "And the dogs are doing things they could never do before, unbelievable things," she said. One of Pouliot's specialties is canine musical freestyle—essentially, dancing with your dog. On YouTube, you can see her Australian shepherd, Listo, doing its best Ginger Rogers: waltzing backward, spinning pirouettes, doing double-takes, handstands, and cancan kicks, all to a medley of TV theme songs. "If you break down that routine and ask a traditional trainer, 'How do you train that?' he'd say, 'Hmm,' " Pouliot told me. "It would be impossible. If I jerk a dog on a leash, I can make him sit. I can make him cringe. But I can't make him show his natural joy."
Police dogs, though, aren't like other animals. Their work is inherently harsh and contradictory. Joy is often beside the point. "We have to have an animal that's willing to consummate its aggression on a living, breathing human, then contain it enough to come back to you," one trainer told me. "That's a lot to ask of any being, much less a dog." Positive reinforcement may be better at coaxing dogs into dancing figure eights and giving high fives, as Pouliot's partners do. But a certain amount of stress could inure an animal to the rigors of the street or the battlefield. "Dogs that are trained in a completely positive way, you deploy them in Afghanistan with the bombs going off—I think they'll crumble," a trainer at Auburn told me.
The program at Auburn is like boot camp for dogs. The Canine Detection Research Institute occupies part of an old military base in Anniston, Alabama, in the foothills of the southern Appalachians. When I visited, two weeks after the national field trials, I was taken to a low metal building across the road from the main offices. Inside, a narrow corridor was flanked by rows of steel cages, each with a small door that led to a dog run, outside. The air was edged with traces of ammonia and feces and reverberated with near-constant barking. Overhead, a loudspeaker system piped in still more noise: equipment clanking, boots stomping, engines roaring, bombs exploding.
"That's a Spook Less soundtrack," my guide explained. The system was first developed for stables, he said, and was used by police to get their horses ready for riot squads and other unsettling duties. The recordings could be swapped out to simulate thunderstorms, fireworks, screaming crowds, or construction sites. At one point, after a bombing raid—"I think that's 'Saving Private Ryan' "—I heard some bagpipes playing. When I asked what they were for, I was told that police have to attend a lot of funerals.
Auburn specializes in detection dogs. It has twenty-five trainers, who supply about a hundred animals a year to Amtrak, Federal Protective Services, and police departments around the country, including the N.Y.P.D. (Rothschild and his German shepherd, Danz, both trained there.) The average canine graduate costs twenty-one thousand dollars, including ten weeks of lessons for the handler. An élite Vapor Wake dog—"They're like the Michael Jordans of dogs," one of the trainers told me. "They can pick fragments out of the air"—costs thirty-two thousand, with an extra six weeks of training.
Detection dogs tend to vary by country and by national temperament. The French like standard poodles, the English springer spaniels. The Russians, in the Moscow airport, use a strange little breed called a Sulimov dog—a mixture of wild jackal, Lapland herding dog, and other breeds—which is said to be the world's best bomb sniffer. Bloodhounds have long been used as trackers in the South. But at Auburn, as at most canine-detection programs in the country, the cages were filled with Labrador retrievers. They were good-natured, highly driven animals, and less liable to bite than pointy-eared dogs. They were in such demand, in fact, that Auburn was also experimenting with other breeds, including springer spaniels and German pointers. "The country is almost out of Labs for detection work," one broker told me. "They're gone. And they don't have any Labs in Europe, either. I had a department wait ten months for one before I found it."
Dogs have such good noses that almost any breed can detect explosives. "If there are differences among them, they're probably well within the margin of error for our ability to measure them," Paul Waggoner, the behavioral scientist at the institute, told me. "The big key is trainability." Waggoner, who is forty-five, is a bearded, bearish figure with an unnerving habit of rolling his eyes back in his head as he talks, like a psychic. Bloodhounds are usually too single-minded for detection work, he said. Once they've hit a trail, they can seem "brutally stupid" when asked to change gears. Border collies can be too smart for their own good: they follow their handlers' cues rather than their own noses. Coonhounds like to go off crittering; dachshunds are too small and stumbly underfoot; and Doberman pinschers scare the bejesus out of people. What's left are friendly working breeds like retrievers and pointers: animals both social and independent, whose bloodlines have been better maintained than those of most show dogs.
If patrol dogs are the Swiss Army knives of the canine world, detection dogs are the shivs. They don't have to chase down felons, disarm robbers, or respond to the slightest cue. They just have to find bombs. Even so, until recently, only one in four dogs made it through the program. Like Schutzhund and guide-dog schools, Auburn sent its puppies to families for basic training, then brought them back for detection work after a year. But the dogs had to contend with so many environments—when I visited, they ran drills in a school, a shopping mall, along a highway, and in a mega-church—that any phobia was eventually found out. Rothschild's dog, for instance, was afraid of slippery floors as a puppy, and he needed weeks of practice to get used to jumping fences.
Four years ago, Auburn decided to try a more rigorous approach. The puppies now go to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they're trained and cared for by convicts in their cells. The companionship seems to have done the men good: some have been able to reduce their medications, and a few have gone on to become professional trainers. But the effect on the dogs has been even more dramatic. "You have startling noises and startling sights 24/7," one of the trainers told me. "You have crowds, stairs, slick floors, grated floors. If a dog can get used to those, you know he's not going to be fearful." Eighty per cent of Auburn's puppies now go on to become detection dogs.
I went to see the Vapor Wakes the next morning. They were being trained in an abandoned building near the woods, where the Army once taught officers to interrogate prisoners. Its dingy halls were lined with doors marked "Do Not Disturb: Interview in Progress," each one with an identical office behind it. To find a person carrying a bomb in here, an ordinary dog would have had to search the building systematically, sniffing its way from room to room. The Vapor Wakes didn't bother. They'd been taught to track explosives like living prey, following the trail of scent particles left suspended in the air.
"I'll hide in one of these rooms, then you bring her in," Tim Baird, the head trainer, told his assistant. He took a vest filled with TNT and wrapped it around his waist. Then he walked down the hall, turned the corner, and ducked into an office along the next corridor. The assistant brought in a small black Lab named Faye, her tail wagging furiously. She'd had thirty-nine days of detection training and twenty of Vapor Wake, and she knew that every drill was another chance at a reward. She scampered in a circle for a while, flaring the air, then took off in the wrong direction. Nothing there. She doubled back, sniffed at my pants—I'd stood next to Baird while he was stuffing the vest with dynamite—then shook me off and ran down the hall, catching a scent.
A dog sniffs the air like a wine taster, Waggoner had told me. It takes short, sharp breaths—as many as ten per second—drawing the scent deep into the nasal cavity to the olfactory epithelium. The receptors there are a hundred times denser than in a human, and can detect a wide array of molecules. When I followed Faye down the hall, I found her in the office, sitting on her haunches—the signal for "the bomb is here"—watching Baird with barely contained excitement. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a well-chewed tennis ball, then threw it down the hall with a whoop. Faye caught it on the first bounce.
The whole sequence had taken about thirty seconds. In one study, in Michigan in 2000, police dogs managed to track down suspects ninety-three per cent of the time, compared with fifty-nine per cent for teams of two to four police officers. And the dogs did it five to ten times faster. Vapor Wakes focus on explosives—in an adjacent room, Baird taught the dogs to find more than a dozen kinds of chemical by hiding them in a wall fitted with small compartments—but other dogs have been taught to find everything from bedbugs to termites, lung cancer, diabetes, and the lithium in cell phones. At Auburn, a dog that can't cut it as a bomb detector could find work as a fungus hound, sniffing out growths that attack and kill the roots of pine trees in the Southeast.
Its esteem for dogs notwithstanding, the university hasn't given up on mechanizing them. When I was in Waggoner's office, later that day, he played me a video from a project called Autonomous Canine Navigation. It showed a yellow Labrador moving through a bomb site wearing an elaborate headset and a harness. The harness contained a computer, a video camera, a G.P.S., and an accelerometer, all remotely controlled. As we watched, a man on a rooftop transmitted some coördinates to the computer below, which directed the dog to the target by playing tones for "Left," "Right," and "Stop" over the headset. "The computer can get within three metres," Waggoner said. "That's more accurate than under human control." When the dog came to a doorway, it sniffed at the threshold and lay down. By then, a sensor had detected its rapid-fire breathing, which meant an explosive had been found. Lying down set off a switch on its belly, confirming the discovery.
The video ended with a tennis ball flying down from the roof and the dog jumping up to snatch it. Even cyborgs, it seems, can use a little positive reinforcement.
New York City is now experimenting with a simpler version of canine navigation. In October, it acquired an infrared video camera that mounts on a dog's back and can be remotely monitored by police. "We can see what the dog is seeing," John Pappas, the head of the transit squad, told me. "So we can use it in a building search. If there's a suspicious box, instead of sending a human being down there, I'll send in the dog, then call him back if things look suspicious." The purchase was approved after the raid on Osama bin Laden, in which a Belgian Malinois named Cairo played an important role. "The real technology here is the dog," Pappas said, "and a lot of it is centered on the nose. That's the most useful tool we have."
On my last day with the squad, Rothschild and Brenner took the dogs for a sweep of Grand Central Terminal. It was nine o'clock on a Friday morning and a final wave of commuters was rushing from the trains. Police in riot gear stood guard by the tunnels to the tracks, machine guns at the ready, while voices blared overhead. When two of the squad's Vapor Wakes ambled in from the street, they stopped at the entrance and stared. The mess hall in a Georgia prison had nothing on this scene: a thousand New Yorkers late for their appointments. "It's an extreme situation," Rothschild said. "But we try to put the dogs in the hardest scenarios possible. We don't know how the next explosive is going to go through." The dogs didn't seem to mind. They just lifted their noses and sniffed the air.
Earlier that morning, Rothschild had arranged for two decoys to make runs through the subway and the train terminal. One would be carrying seven pounds of ammonium nitrate, wrapped in black panty hose and stuffed in a backpack; the other would have twenty pounds of dynamite in a baby stroller. Vapor Wakes can track a scent in the air for up to half an hour, I was told, but the trail wouldn't last long in Grand Central. "You have the trains pulling in air over here," Rothschild said. "You've got the mass of people pulling the air down under these arches. You've got vents bringing it around, and the smells from all the restaurants." He shook his head. "It's like when a boat passes. You can see the wave right afterward, but eventually it dissipates."
Horacio Maldonado, one of the new recruits, positioned himself under an arched entrance on the west side of the station. His black Lab, Ray, could smell most of the passersby from there—she had a range of about thirty feet—but a crowd like this was full of false leads. The chemicals found in explosives can also be found in drugs, cosmetics, fertilizer, construction supplies, and other mundanities. I'd heard of a police dog driven wild by a table patched with plastic wood filler, and a dog tearing down a wall with nail-gun cartridges hidden inside it. "I remember one time, we stopped a guy in Columbus Circle, he had two hundred nitrogen pills in his pocket," Maldonado told me. "Turned out he was going to Europe and had just come from his doctor. So you've got to use your common sense. The guy's sixty, seventy years old. He isn't sweating. Does he look like a suicide bomber?"
False positives are the bugbears of canine detection, but the bigger problem is miscommunication. A leash can be like a faulty phone line. The handler thinks the dog is telling him something; the dog thinks it's the handler's idea. ("Dogs are pretty easy," one trainer told me. "The problem is usually at the other end of the leash.") At Auburn one afternoon, I'd watched Waggoner put a Labrador into an fMRI scanner, to see which part of its brain lit up when detecting a scent. Some day, he said, detection dogs may carry EEGs that set off an alarm when a bomb is found. For now, though, cops and dogs have no choice but to try to talk to one another.
When the explosives went by, they were about twenty feet from Maldonado. The decoy, a young man in a blue sweatshirt with a Mets cap underneath the hood, was buried so deep in the crowd that I almost missed him. The Vapor Wake didn't. She lunged forward on her leash, Maldonado stumbling behind. The decoy walked beneath the arch and down the corridor, heading toward a set of stairs that led to the subway. Ray cut zigzags across his trail, zeroing in on the scent. Soon, she was only about ten feet away, pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a lizard's, claws scrabbling on the tile. She was about to catch up when a middle-aged woman sauntered by with three toy dogs on a leash beside her. Ray stopped and glanced at them—a little hungrily, I thought—then shook her head and continued. But by then the trail had drifted, and the decoy was down the stairs.
It was a rare mistake. I'd seen the Vapor Wakes catch half a dozen decoys that week, and even Ray found her man eventually, when he doubled back through the subway. But would she have caught him in real life? "Yeah, she was in odor," Rothschild said. "She was just eliminating the possibilities. She would have gotten him."
Afterward, when Ray was chasing her tennis ball around, some commuters stopped to watch. They were standing in one of the world's prime targets for terrorism, surrounded by a bomb squad with a suspect in custody, but that didn't seem to concern them. They smiled and watched the nice dog play with its ball, then hurried on their way.
Detection-dog stories almost always have happy endings. If they don't, they aren't about dogs anymore. When the training session was over, Rothschild went to get Danz, who was waiting in a mobile kennel, nearby. His cage was brand new and luxurious by most standards—custom-built and climate-controlled, with sensors that would sound an alarm and open the windows if the air got too hot—but Danz was glad to be free of it. He leaped to the ground when the gate opened, and shook his fur as if casting off a rope. Then he ran to Rothschild's side and waited, as always, for a signal.
It was a cold, clear morning, with sunlight streaming through the treetops, and the last patches of green were aglow in Bryant Park. Rothschild waited a beat, just to remind the dog who was in charge, then quietly said "Empty." Danz jumped into the ivy and lifted his leg to a lamppost, glancing back to make sure this was O.K. A police dog's life is all about delayed gratification. You know that ball? You can't have it. Not right now. That treat? Maybe later, if you do exactly what I say. Danz had an alpha male's domineering drive—it wasn't hard to imagine him howling at the head of a pack—but he'd long since learned to tamp it down. And who was to say he wasn't happier this way: always cared for, always needed, always knowing exactly what was expected of him?
Some police keep their dogs in a crate at night, when the family is around. "My husband doesn't put his gun on the kitchen table," Kurt Dumond's wife, Helen, told me. "And he doesn't let his police dog loose in the house." But Rothschild, who had two young children, let his dog roam free at home. Danz was named for Vincent Danz, a New York cop and family friend, who died in the attacks on September 11th, and Rothschild never forgot that the dog was also looking after him. He let Danz wander through the park a while longer. "This is his time," he said. "His time to play. When he empties, I just let him be a dog." ♦


text:
How do I remove the SIM or USIM card on my Galaxy Note 8?
• If you insert the tray into your device while the tray is wet, your device may be damaged. Always make sure the tray is dry.
• Fully insert the tray into the tray slot to prevent liquid from entering your device.
Thank you for your feedback!
Need more help? Contact Us.
24 hours a day/ 7days a week
(Including Public Holidays)
We'll respond within 24 hours of your request.
Contact the dedicated CEO's Office.
We'll respond within 24 hours of your request.
Take advantages of Remote Support for TVs, Mobile phones &Tablets
24 hours a day/ 7 days a week
24 hours a day/ 7 days a week
24 hours a day / 7 days a week
24 hours a day/ 7 days a week
Mon - Fri 9am - 6pm (Excluding Sat, Sun & Public Holidays)
* For any printer related enquiries, please visit HP website .
Service & Repairs
Search the nearest Samsung Service Centres in your area.
Experience Samsung Smart Service in Shop
Product Registration, Service Request for Callback, Schedule an Appointment
Get updates on your Samsung Service

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Whiskey Wednesday: Balblair Comes to LA
Last Thursday, the good people from the Balblair distillery sponsored a party at the Edison, downtown, to kick off the introduction of Balblair to the US market. Balblair is an Eastern Highlands distillery. Unlike most Scotches, which release whiskies with general age statements (e.g. aged 12 years), the Balblair has opted for vintages. As with wines, their whiskies are identified by the year of production. While a few other distilleries are doing this (most notably The Glenrothes), it is still fairly unusual in the world of distillery bottled Scotch. The first two expressions coming to the US market are the 1991 and the 1997 vintages. Both were bottled in 2009 so the 1991 is 18 years old and the 1997 is 12 years old.
Balblair is owned by Inver House distillers, which is in turn owned by Thai Beverage (ThaiBev). Inver House owns the excellent Old Pulteney, but until recently, many of their whiskies were not available in the US market. Within the past few months though, they have released Balblair, Speyburn and anCnoc (distilled at Knockdhu). I'm always glad to see new releases on the US market, so kudos to Inver House for opening up the market.
The Edison party was very nice; it's hard to beat sipping whisky and munching hors d'oeuvres among the turbines and other strange electronics that make up the Edison's renowned steampunk aesthetic. There was also a bowl of dark chocolate bars, and as it turns out, Balblair pairs very well with high cacao chocolate.
Balblair was offering tastes of both malts. It's hard to do formal tasting notes in this type of setting, but I did get a good impression of both of the expressions being offered, which have very different characters. The 1997 is a floral, perfumy malt; lighter and younger tasting. The 1991, in contrast, has big malt flavors; it's very straightforward, very drinkable and should appeal to those who like the pure taste of malt, uninfluenced by sherry or peat. Both of the Balblairs clock in at 43% alcohol and are aged in ex-Bourbon casks. The 1997 will retail for $64.99, and the 1991 will retail for $129.99. They are available at specialty spirits shops.
FTC Disclaimer: The Balblair event offered whisky samples and a bottle to each attendee free of charge.
1 comment:
- Greg said...
I have the '97 and like it very much. I want to get my hands on an '89 but of course, elusive.
- July 30, 2010 at 11:54 AM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
There's nothing like praise from Oprah Winfrey to send DVD sales through the roof.
Robert Kenner's critically-acclaimed documentary "Food, Inc." might have received an Academy Award nomination Tuesday for Best Documentary, but for DVD sales, nothing will help more than after the boost from the Oprah Winfrey Show.
As a result of the last Wednesday's "Oprah" program dedicated to the muckraking documentary on the food industry, "Food, Inc." DVD sales climbed to the top-selling position on Amazon. Hanging tough with the likes of MIchael Jackson's "This Is It" DVD release was a "major achievement," according to a release by the film's PR company.
The show featured clips from the documentary and featured one of the film's stars Michael Pollan urging viewers to spend more time thinking about what they put on their family's plates. Oprah suggested that viewers make up their own minds on the film's controversial take on the food business: "For me, it boils down to making more conscious food decisions," Oprah said on the show. "That is my opinion. I saw the movie. That's how I felt. But you need to see it for yourself and make your own decisions because I believe you have a right to know where your food is coming from."
Clearly, her loyal viewers have followed suit. After opening theatrically on June 12, "Food, Inc." went on to play nationwide for 24 weeks, grossing more than $4.4 million.


text:
Our replacement toner cartridges for the Canon i-SENSYS 4150 deliver brilliant image quality and excellent reliability at a low cost. Compared to the original toner cartridges, you'll get equal or higher page yield, pay 25% less and receive 100% lifetime warranty.
Toner Cartridges for Canon Printers from Xerox
Black toner cartridge. Equivalent to Canon 0263B002. Compatible with Canon Fax L100, L120, L140, i-SENSYS 4120, 4140, 4150, MF4010, MF4100, MF4110, MF4120, MF4140, MF4150, MF4270, MF4320, MF4330, MF4340, MF4350, MF4370, MF4380, MF4660, MF4690
Capacity: 2700
Compare prices
Compare prices
Price: £30.36
Compare prices
Price inc VAT: £36.43
Pricing Details
*Prices do not include any supplies, additional print charges or applicable taxes and are subject to change without notice. Products are available to business customers; subject to applicable terms and conditions. Xerox equipment and accessories have been produced in a factory from new parts and from reprocessed parts which meet the performance standards of new parts.


text:
Indian police shoot dead at least 8 after election riots
Indian police shot at hundreds of tribesmen and women in the northeastern state of Assam today, killing eight people.
The shootings took place after violence broke out during village council elections, the state's chief minister said.
Police were called to deal with protests by Rabha tribesmen and women who opposed the elections saying they infringed on tribal law, another senior government official said.
"Eight people have been killed in police firing in Rabha areas of Assam today," Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi told reporters in the state capital Guwahati.
A leader of the Rabha tribe said he held the government responsible for the deaths.
Angry tribesmen armed with swords, hatchets, spears and axes marched to polling stations from villages of the western Goalpara district, police officials said.
At least two people were killed by the mobs in the early hours of the day, said Bhupen Bora, a senior official of the state's home department.


text:
Fully responsive search engine optimised Joomla website
Built on the latest version of Joomla CMS featuring a custom Joostrap template. The brief was to work to a set budget and design and create a clean, elegant looking responsive website that functioned superbly on all devices and browsers creating an easy user experience for all. Aside key functionality, gaining a firm place in Google and Bing search engines was also high on the list of priority's.
- Search Engine Optimised
- Fully Responsive
- Fast Loading
- Products offered pages
- Custom Contact
- Google maps
Winchester Web Design 2016


text:
Texas county 'on alert' over deaths of prosecutor, wife
The district attorney's office in Kaufman, Texas, was closed Monday morning and the courthouse was under tight security following the weekend shooting deaths of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife in their home.
The shootings on Saturday came two months after McLelland's assistant district attorney, Mark Hasse, was fatally shot in a parking lot a block from the courthouse on Jan. 31.
Authorities appear to be stymied in their investigations of both incidents.
"We're still in shock," Kaufman County Judge Bruce Wood told reporters Monday. "I guess that's the best way to describe our feelings about this latest incident. I've searched all weekend to think of the right word to describe and I can't come up with a single word. 'Unbelievable, this really didn't happen,' but it did. This whole thing is shocking to all of us."
Wood said security protection had been ordered for several county officials.
"We're very much on alert," he said. "We obviously have some folks that are out to do harm to elected officials."
Gov. Rick Perry offered prayers for the McLelland family, friends and people of Kaufman County, and urged Texas residents to show extra caution "whether they're public officials or otherwise."
"There is a clear concern to individuals who are in public life, particularly those who deal with some very mean and vicious individuals, whether they're white supremacy groups or the drug cartels that we have," Perry said.
Authorities have been investigating the possibility of a connection of both prosecutor killings with the brutal Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a prison gang of about 2,000 inmates. Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center that tracks extremist groups, says the ABT has been linked to at least 100 murders and about 10 kidnappings.
In December, the Texas Department of Public Safety warned in a statewide bulletin that authorities had received "credible information" that the group was "actively planning retaliation against law enforcement officials" who helped return indictments in Houston against a number of gang members, including its leadership, The Dallas Morning Newsreported.
"High ranking members ... are involved in issuing orders to inflict 'mass casualties or death' to law enforcement officials who were involved in cases where Aryan Brotherhood of Texas are facing life sentences or the death penalty," the bulletin stated.
PROBE:White supremacists under scrutiny in DA slaying
READ:34 Aryan Brotherhood of Texas members indicted
READ:The full indictment
Earlier this month, the Kaufman police chief said the FBI was looking for any connection between the attack on Hasse and the shooting death March 19 of Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements in his home.
Colorado authorities have noted that the suspect in that shooting, Evan Spencer Ebel, 28, was a member of a white supremacist prison gang called the 211 Crew when he served time in a Colorado prison.
Ebel later died in a shootout with Texas law enforcement officers northwest of Dallas.
McLelland himself, in an Associated Press interview shortly after the Colorado slaying, raised the possibility that Hasse was gunned down by a white supremacist gang.
McLelland, elected district attorney in 2010, said his office had prosecuted several cases against racist gangs, who have a strong presence around Kaufman County, a mostly rural area dotted with subdivisions, with a population of about 104,000.
Kaufman prosecutors were among scores in Texas who were strongly pursuing cases against the prison gangs.
However, there has been no evidence so far of a link to the white supremacist gangs in either of the Kaufman shootings, except for that fact that they appear to be a professional "hit."
Judge Wood has also said that Kaufman County investigators have found no link between the Clements shooting and the killing of Hasse.
Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson said on Sunday that he had accepted the Houston sheriff's offer of 24-hour security for him and his family after learning about the slayings, mostly over concerns for his family's safety.
Anderson said he also would take precautions at his office, the largest one in Texas, which has more than 270 prosecutors.
"I think district attorneys across Texas are still in a state of shock," Anderson said Sunday.
Contributing: Associated Press


text:
Archive for the 'Classic Kennels' Category
All Dogs Deserve a Vacation
at Classic Kennels!!
Together, Pam Oney and Robert Myers are operating Classic Kennels in Hartford, OH. The kennel is now back in the hands of its original family–the Oney family. Marvin Oney, Sr. started Classic Kennels back in 1985, and we plan to continue his legacy of providing a safe, clean, loving environment for your pet while you're away.


text:
ACA could increase food stamp rolls
Republicans have another reason to hate Obamacare: It could grow the number of people on food stamps.
The Obama administration has ordered a study to determine whether the Affordable Care Act, by increasing the number of people eligible for Medicaid, will also increase the number of people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program based on how states enroll people.
Story Continued Below
The outcome of the study could show an increase of 3 percent to 5 percent in food stamp recipients in some states from people who were already eligible for SNAP benefits but had not enrolled in the program — which could translate to millions or even billions more in federal spending, Greg Mills, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who is conducting the study, told POLITICO.
"So in percentage terms, it's not going to be very large, but we're talking about a very large program," said Mills, who is investigating the effects of the health care law on SNAP on behalf of the Department of Agriculture's Food Nutrition Service, the agency that monitors food stamps.
( See POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage)
"It would have a substantial financial effect."
The likely increase would come from a greater overlap in eligibility between Medicaid under Obamacare and SNAP.
Nearly all uninsured people now covered by the Medicaid expansion are also eligible for food stamps, but they are not all enrolled. Depending on how states put residents in these programs — many have integrated the process for SNAP and Medicaid — eligible food stamp recipients could be more easily targeted and encouraged to apply.
Talk of a potential increase in food stamp recipients comes as House Republicans targeting SNAP insist it has become too bloated. House GOP members on the farm bill conference committee, already eager to make SNAP cuts, are ready to seize on the latest development during the negotiations that look to resume soon after last week's opening meeting.
"It's troubling that three years after passage, we're still learning about new unexpected consequences from Obamacare." wrote Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), who sponsored a bill to reform SNAP in the House, in an email to POLITICO.
"I'd be very interested to see a report on the interaction between SNAP and Obamacare," Neugebauer wrote. "As a member of the ag committee, we've been dealing with the interaction between SNAP and other federal programs for years and I've been a strong advocate for reforming the categorical eligibility provisions that allow individuals to receive benefits when they don't otherwise qualify for SNAP."
During the negotiations, Neugebauer and other House Republicans will be defending the $40 billion in cuts over 10 years that are now contained in the House version of the farm bill, significantly more than the $4 billion the Senate's farm bill would cut over the same period, during the negotiations.
Making the issue more complicated is the $5 billion reduction in the program this fiscal year that went into effect last week when the additional SNAP dollars provided temporarily through the 2009 stimulus package expired.
( Also on POLITICO: Issa releases Obamacare 'war room' notes)
Eligibility for both — the new standard for Medicaid under Obamacare and SNAP — is based on what percentage of the poverty line the individual or household falls under. For Medicaid, that's individuals or families with incomes at or below 133 percent of the poverty level.
SNAP data has typically been used by states to enroll residents in other programs, but with an influx of uninsured people now covered by the federal Medicaid expansion in 25 states — nearly all of whom are also eligible for SNAP — states can also proactively seek out eligible food stamp recipients through the Medicaid enrollment process.


text:
TV.com | IMDb (Movie) | IMDb (Series)
Synopsis: In this adaptation of the Top Cow comic book, Witchblade is the story of a New York detective, Sara "Pez" Pezzini, whose search for justice brings her into contact with the Witchblade, an ancient, intelligent, living weapon so powerful it can battle Earth's darkest evil forces. Week in and week out, "Pez" employs her skills as a police detective to fight crime. She finds she must employ the Witchblade to combat a much greater and frighteningly organized conspiracy of evil that threatens the very soul of humanity. As Sara tries to keep the secret of the Witchblade, do her job and have a personal life, she finds that her most formidable adversary may be the Witchblade itself.
Reviews: DVDTalk.com | TerrorHook.com | Horror.com | Mania
Directed by: Ralph Hemecker
Yancy Butler .... Det. Sara "Pez" Pezzini
Anthony Cistaro .... Kenneth Irons
Conrad Dunn .... Gallo
David Chokachi .... Jake McCartey
Kenneth Welsh .... Joe Siri
Will Yun Lee .... Danny Woo
Eric Etebari .... Ian Nottingham
- Code: Select all
Title: Witchblade (2000-2001)
S01E01 - Witchblade
Source: DVD / R1, NTSC / Untouched
Size: 1.172.986.924 bytes (1/4 DVDR)
Runtime: 01:34:27
Format: MKV
Video Codec: H264 (x264 rev.1153)
Video Bitrate: 1462 kbps
Resolution: 720x480 (Anamorphic, displayed at 1.78 AR)
Aspect Ratio: 1.78 (SAR: 32/27)
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Audio Codec: AC3 (2 channels)
Audio Bitrate: 192 kbps
Sampling Rate: 48 KHz
Language: English
Subtitles (muxed in): SRT: English HI
SA: HP @ Level 4.1
Encode (top) vs. Source (bottom):


text:
NAIA Wrestler of the Week ? No. 6
KANSAS CITY, Mo - Prescott Garner of Southern Oregon has been named the NAIA National Wrestler of the Week, announced Wednesday by the national office. Garner was selected based on his performances from Feb. 4 - 10.
Garner, a native of West Linn, Ore., moved to 22-5 on the season with victories in Southern Oregon's duals against Simpson (Calif.) on Feb. 8 and NCAA Division III Pacific (Ore.) on Feb. 9. The sophomore, who is currently ranked No. 1 in the NAIA at 133 pounds, opened the week with a pin of Simpson's Chan Chao in 1:48 - his second fastest pin of the year. Against Pacific, Garner tallied his second pin of the week - sixth of the season - in 5:23 against Ryan Baxter despite wrestling out-of-class at 141 pounds.
Garner is 11-0 against NAIA competition this season and has won by fall in six of his last eight matches. He is the second Southern Oregon wrestling to claim weekly honors this season, joining 125-pounder Mitchell Lofstedt, who previously won the award on Jan. 23 and Feb. 6.
The final Wrestler of the Week announcement will be on Feb. 20. For the complete Player of the Week calendar, click here.
Nominees: Nathan Ryan, Morningside (Iowa); Blake Fruchtl, Hastings (Neb.); Wismit Moinius, Lindsey Wilson (Ky.).
2013 Wrestlers of the Week
Week 1 (Jan. 9): Tyler Kacmarynski, Morningside (Iowa)
Week 2 (Jan. 16): Jarid Price, Baker (Kan.)
Week 3 (Jan. 23): Mitchell Lofstedt, Southern Oregon
Week 4 (Jan. 30): Eric Thompson, Grand View (Iowa)
Week 5 (Feb. 6): Mitchell Lofstedt, Southern Oregon
Week 6 (Feb. 13): Prescott Garner, Southern Oregon


text: The Sisters of Mercy were founded in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, by Catherine McAuley, a woman who sought, through her service to the poor, the sick and the uneducated, to reveal the mercy of God in our world. Catherine's particular concern for women manifested itself in her efforts to help women to recognize their inherent dignity, to become self-directing and self-sustaining. Education was at the heart of this effort as was a desire to meet needs not being addressed by others.When the Sisters of Mercy arrived in Pittsburgh in 1843, their first ministries arose from the needs presented by this burgeoning city – education and health care. Saint Mary's Academy and the Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh (now UPMC Mercy) were established within two years of their arrival.In the late 1920s, another need presented itself – the lack of baccalaureate level education for the Catholic women of the city. After consultation with the bishop and the heads of the already existing institutions of higher learning, the Sisters of Mercy founded Mount Mercy College (now Carlow University) on September 24, 1929. These Mercy traditions of a particular focus on the concerns of women and of response to unmet needs have become hallmarks of the University. Carlow University is now sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas through the Conference for Mercy Higher Education. The conference, comprised of 16 Mercy-sponsored colleges and universities, was created for "the preservation and development of the core Catholic identity and mission of Mercy higher education in accord with the spirit, mission and heritage of the Sisters of Mercy."


text:
Diamond of California
Shelled Brazil Nuts
Produced by Diamond Foods
last checked Jan 16, 2013
"All Diamond-branded nut products are gluten free."
ContactOnline: www.diamondfoods.com/contact/
Store Locator:
Important: We try to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information available. However, please keep in mind that manufacturer policies and formulations can change at any time, and that some information listed on this site could be out-of-date or contain unintentional errors.
Remember to always read product labels and check with the manufacturer directly if you have any concerns.


text:
A winter storm whipped by high winds is expected to hit the Chicago area just in time for the evening rush hour Thursday, dumping up to 4 inches here but maybe a foot or more in Wisconsin where a blizzard warning has been issued.
But on the bright side (for some, at least), the National Weather Service is giving us a 30 percent chance of a white Christmas next week.
Thursday will begin with rain but that will change to snow around 6 p.m. as temperatures plunge. Winds will gust at 50 mph and wind chills will drop into the single digits, according to the weather service. There could even be thunder snow, it said.
The snow will continue past midnight and there could still be flurries for the morning commute Friday.
Chicago and most of the collar counties could see 2 to 4 inches of snow, with 1 to 2 inches south of Joliet and 4 to 6 inches near Rockford and Dixon, the weather service said. This would be the first measurable snowfall for Chicago this season -- and the latest it has ever occurred.
The worst of the storm will be north and west of Chicago: Both the Davenport and Milwaukee offices of the weather service have issued blizzard warnings.
"Winter's held off so long, it's going to come here with a bang," weather service meteorologist Jamie Enderlen said.
In Wisconsin, the heaviest snow is expected to arrive after midnight and continue throughout the day on Thursday. Wind gusts of up to 45 mph by Thursday afternoon should make travel treacherous.
The weather service posted blizzard warnings for at least eight south central counties for Thursday afternoon. Forecasters say it could be the biggest snowstorm to hit the state since the Groundhog Day blizzard last year. That storm dumped 1 to 2 feet of snow in southeastern Wisconsin.
WGN-Channel 9 meteorologist Tom Skilling warns that the lack of snow to date over a wide swath of the Midwest, including Chicago, means there's no residual ice-deterring chemicals on the road which "could lead to especially icy road surfaces, producing hazardous travel conditions."
Skilling also reports that Chicago's first measurable snow of the season is usually a minor event, totaling just a few tenths of an inch and not causing any problems. But a check of the city's snow archives dating back to 1884 found that Chicago has logged 12 first measurable snowfalls of 3 inches or more.
The largest was 4.8 inches on Nov. 15, 1940 that helped boost that month to the city's snowiest November on record. The month ended with 14.8 inches of snow. The 1940-41 snow season went on to produce a robust 52.5 inches, well above the city's current 36.7 inch normal.
The forecast for next week is a little cheerier. For Christmas Day, the weather service says it will be in the middle 30s with a 30 percent chance of light snow.
firstname.lastname@example.com: @chicagobreaking


text:
Hartford police arrested a city firefighter after finding dozens of unsecured guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition in a child's bedroom, police said.
Police arrested Lt. Michael Patterson, a 16-year-veteran of the department, on Tuesday morning after responding to a domestic dispute at his Canaan Street home.
Investigators said they found 29 unsecured guns out in the open, as well as the ammunition and most of the weapons were piled on top of a child's bed.
A 7-year-old and a teenager were inside the home when the guns were found out in the open, officials said.
"All city employees have a sense of responsibility for the city and a sense of safety for the city," said Hartford City Councilman Kyle Anderson. "I think it's a double black eye for the city."
Police said Patterson has additional firearms and was registering them in different states to get around Connecticut's gun laws.
Investigators are trying to locate those weapons. Police said they found some in a house in Bloomfield and there are some in South Carolina.
Patterson, who was charged with 29 counts of risk of injury to a minor as well as additional charges, is cooperating with investigators, police said.
He has been placed on administrative leave and is due in court today.


text:
Apple Dropping Price of iTunes Plus Tracks
ArsTechnica reported yesterday that Apple was planning to announce a price drop on its non-DRM tunes today. While we haven't seen the announcement just yet, a quick check of the iTunes Plus page in the iTunes store showed that many though not all iTunesPlus tracks are indeed reduced to from $1.29 to 99 cents. iTunes Plus offerings should be increasing very soon, as well. CNET has a quote from Tom Neumayr,senior manager for iPod, Apple TV & iTunes, regarding the new lower iTunes Plus pricing: "We're adding over two million tracks from key independent labels in addition to EMI's digital catalog and look forward to even more labels and artists making their music available on iTunes Plus."
Considering that AmazonMP3 has been undercutting iTunes's per-track prices, the price drop makes sense. What would make even more sense would be for Apple to drop the price of all tracks, and remove DRM while they're at it... A girl can dream.


text:
Hey I'm Cristian Grañó. A (slightly obsessed) Developer & Code Dev enthusiast from Barcelona, I'm passionate about crafting beautifully simple, user centric digital experiences and an advocate for clean, semantic and reusable code.
By day, you'll find me collaborating with a great team developing lya2 app, great scheduler calendar for a medical teams.
By night, you can find me crafting freebies for joomla community, or releasing exclusive code for fieldsattach, my contribution to joomla community. In between all of that, I'm father and sailor.
Feel free to email us


text:
Harpsichord Photo Home
This is a site for sharing photographs and specifications of harpsichords and clavichords.
Owners/contributors are listed on the left side of every web page on this site.
Owners/contributors are listed on the left side of every web page on this site.
The rules are simple: This is a non-commercial site. There will be no direct selling on this site. Any known violators of this policy will be removed from this site without prior notice, and the contributor will be barred from making further contributions.
- No prices will be listed, and no commercial messages will be included.
- Featured instruments that are not the personal property or product of he who submits the photo/specs, or are not the property of an instutution (school or church) and under the supervision of he who submits the photo/specs, will not be included. Beyond a forum of indicating an owners pride in what he plucks daily, the emphasis is on design, technique, and execution.
- Photographs of public performances will be accepted for publication. To make sure we don't violate anyone's privacy, the performers will be identified only if the contributor assures the site host that the performance was advertised to the public, along with the names of the performers. Program information, publically available information on the performers, and information on the instruments will be published as available. The name and EMail address of the contributor will also be published.
- The site is maintained by a volunteer when time is available.
- When your specifications and photo(s) are posted on the Internet, anyone can copy them using the popular web browsers and well documented procedures. Accordingly, if you don't want someone to make a copy of your stuff, don't send it.
- Each contributor will get a subdirectory on the site host's file server, and that subdirectory will include one or more web pages and one or more picture files. The site host will determine the page layout and if additional pages are required.
- One or two MP3 files may be included with samples of sound for each instrument: this is strictly optional!
- Photos should be of excellent quality and must be scanned or shot via digicam by the owner/contributor. Digital files should be presented as "high quality" JPEG files (the site owner will optimize these for web display using PhotoShop) that should be at least 800 pixels in width. Generally, there is a maximum of four photos per instrument and a maximum of two instruments per owner/contributor.
- The site host is that final authority of what gets published. The intent is to maintain high quality of the presentations. Time premitting, the site host may make minor color and/or composition adjustments; however, owners and contributors are encouraged to use PhotoShop or similar tools if available to assure good color balance, proper croping, etc. All photos will be reduced to a standard width of 580 pixels if possible.
- Because this site is done on a time-available basis, speedy turnaround can not be assured. Contributors can never expect "near real time" response. Those desiring to use this facility should think strategically, not tactically. "How to" pictures with supporting narrative are encouraged.
- Owners and contributors hold the site host harmless for any perceved or actual commissions or omissions with regard for the operation of this site.
- Any claim for damages made against the site host will be limited to the amount of funds actually paid by the owner or contributor to the site host. Please refer to next rule.
- This is a free site. Please refer to previous rule.


text:
John Wick is sick. Go on, you can take the literal one here. The movie's target audience is gore action lovers. It has an absurd plot that is laughable per se. The magic however works owing to some extraordinary point blank shots that take you on a joyride. And it just doesn't stop. There are bullets flying galore and they always hit the target. Headshots! If it weren't for the close-up non-stop action, John Wick would have disappeared as yet another cliched hero. But somehow it manages to shake off the dust.
Theme and Plot of John Wick (Spoilers)
First things first, you don't kill the cutest beagle on the planet, that too a pup, in a movie! We are not yet ready for that! But if you do, which as a matter of fact, Theon Greyjoy did, just make sure it is avenged right. Ramsay Bolton are you listening?
Okay, so we already knew the plot thanks to the trailer that spoke louder than Keanu Reeves. With thousands of clichéd stories of agents, mercenaries and hit men that are out there, Wick has nothing much to offer. Except one thing – rad action. Headshots, exquisite finishes, gore and Mustang engine revving are sheer orgasmic.
To constitute its plot we have John Wick a badass assassin trying to spend a retired life. He encounters a prick named Iosef Tarasov played by Alfie Allen who takes his car and kills his dog. The pup was the last remembrance of his wife who had died of a disease. The whole movie circles around him trying to avenge the pup, his token of love for his wife with whom he had a lot of sentimentality attached.
Viggo Tarasov played by Michael Nyqvist is the head of the Russian crime syndicate and is the father of Iosef. That's why nabbing him becomes such a pain in the ass.
People don't change. Times do.
Thus the movie is overflowing with hooligans and it's up to John Wick to headshot past them to reach the Iosef, and then finally exonerate himself of the main threat.
You can order John Wick movie here:
Movie Shortcomings
What John Wick flick lacks big time is a proper story-line. Also, the direction doesn't impress you much either. We often see building shots of the city for like 5-7 times that are downright dispensable. Fight sequences were pretty cool though. Who are the directors again? Stuntmen? Okay. That explains it.
There is literally no drama present in the movie, and the entire movie carries a background beat that goes boom boom, which makes it an effort to concentrate on the dialogues dispersed. The score is well, trance, basically.
It is as if the directors thought – "let's just build up a huge crowd of hooligans and let Keanu shoot them one by one from different angles, nay make him headshot each one of them, and there will be lots of blood spluttering, and let him drive something kewwwwwl too. While we are at it, let us give him a badass name. John Wick! Has a nice ring to it!"
The Final Verdict
The movie works out great for action lovers. It will keep that adrenaline rush going. It doesn't score well in the story department. The direction too falters at a lot of occasion. You can watch it if you are an action fanatic and a big Keanu Reeves fan.
You can check out the trailer of John Wick here:


text:
Large, scalable prefabricated IT infrastructure comprised of multiple SmartShelter Modules ganged together to create a configurable design and complete d optimized for service providers and large enterprises
SmartShelter Data Hall offers a scalable, data center infrastructure solution for large service providers and enterprise customer deploying in 50-100 rack increments with the ability to easily add future capacity. The solution consists of factory-built IT modules with 14-15 racks, ganged together on-site, with minimal construction, to form a large, functional IT room. Locate data center outside or into a simple building shell as a stand-alone system that has physical security, power and cooling redundancy, and can be remotely monitored and managed with a full suite of DCIM software. - Decrease risk with a pre-engineered, fully managed system - Preserve CapEx by growing infrastructure with demand - Adjust plans for future expansions with repeatable and flexible designs SmartShelter Data Hall contains complete data center physical infrastructure, assembled and tested in a multiple-module configuration to provide a fully functional data center.
|Part Number
|Part Number
|Product Prefabricated Reference Design Tier III 500kW 400V/50Hz
|Part Number PFRDTIII500K400V
How to buy
|Cost Savings
|Simple and Fast Deployment
|Prefabricated Data Center Modules arrive on site ready to deploy which significantly reduces installation time and cost.
|Predictable Cost and Performance
|Pre-engineered designs and factory assembled and tested infrastructure dramatically reduce total the total project timeline and complexity. This minimizes construction cost overruns and changes to the original engineering design. The result is the cost you expected the performance you planned for.
|Pre-engineered and Factory Assembled
|Prefabricated Modules are designed and built to precise specifications in a controlled factory environment and utilize DCIM software which results in improved reliability and a more predictably performing data center.
|Simple and Fast Deployment
|Prefabricated Data Center Modules arrive on site ready to deploy which significantly reduces installation time and cost.


text:
The ancient or classical dances of Hawaii that are accompanied by chanting is called Hula Kahiko. These classes are more vigorous and also emphasize the cultural aspect of Hawaii. Many hulas are part of a hula lineage that goes back centuries through teachers such as Mary Kawena Pukui, Pat Bacon, Lokalia Montgomery, Iolani Luahine, Hoakalei Kamau'u, and Maiki Aiu Lake. The class will learn the chants and dances accompanied by chanting.
Open to women and men age 16 and older with at least 2 months of Adult Hula I, Adult Hula II, or dance experience, and permission of Kumu June.
Cost: $20/class or 4 classes for $70. Bring payment of cash or checks payable to "Zen Life & Meditation Center" to class.