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May 5—not the end of the world!
May 4, 2000
Perhaps you have already heard some doomsayers predict that a worldwide catastrophe will befall our planet on May 5 when some of the planets will be in alignment. On that day the moon, the sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be clustered. Some prophets of doom are claiming that the resulting gravitational forces on Earth will be so powerful that large earthquakes and massive flooding will result. This is all nonsense.
Recommended resource |
Journeys to the Edge of Creation |
The planets are so far away from the Earth that even if they were to align perfectly, and even if each of their orbits were to be at their closest point to the Earth, their total gravitational pull would raise ocean tides by less than 1 millimeter! The strongest influence on Earth's tides is caused by its nearest object, the moon, which of course is far closer to Earth than the five planets that will be in alignment.
Over the centuries, planetary alignments have all passed harmlessly. They occur every 57 years on average. Back in 1524, when 5 planets were in close alignment, astrologers predicted floods, earthquakes, and other catastrophes, but, of course, nothing happened.
Some doomsayers might still argue that if massive flooding won't occur on May 5, earthquakes could result from the planetary alignment. An earthquake, however, could not result from such a meager gravitational pull (tidal action against a shoreline would exert more pressure, but even this will not cause any earthquakes because—as we have shown above—the effect on ocean tides will be negligible).
You can rest well on May 5! If you happen to be standing at a checkout line at your local grocery store and see a tabloid proclaim the end of the world—or hear radio broadcasters prophesying doom (you see, we also happen to be at the end of the millennium!)—just remember that these kinds of unfulfilled prophesies have been going on for centuries. A simple understanding of the effects of gravity shows that we have nothing to worry about come May 5.
If you are old enough to remember the planetary-alignment scare in 1982, you'll have already learned your lesson for May 5. Remember, too, that the God of the universe is in control, and He made the heavens and the Earth.


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© Robb Cohen ./Retna Ltd./Corbis
Jon Brookes has thanked fans for their support in the weeks following his onstage collapse. The Charlatans drummer stopped breathing at a US show last month and has since been diagnosed with a brain tumour.
In a blog post, Brookes describes his collapse during the Philadelphia gig, speaking of "strange lights" in the corner of his eyes and a feeling of disorientation and panic.
He continues: "The blessing is that I don't have enough recollection to be totally freaked out by the first seizure/event. And I can only feel sorry for my dear friends who had to witness such a painful display."
On the messages of support received since, the drummer says: "I will never be able to express my heartfelt thanks for all the love and light I received, from all of you who text me, sent me cards, made calls to me or passed on their support and best wishes that ultimately brought me back home, safe!
"I have the best chance of rebuilding my life now and will always have one eye on the lookout for those strange lights! But knowing that love is the key and I wouldn't be here without it… It is with the deepest thanks I can express that I will hopefully be back to my old self and be returned to full heath with the ongoing treatment I am to receive."
Former Verve drummer Pete Salisbury is currently sitting in for Brookes.

subset: commoncrawl


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MR. TIM RUSSERT: And on this Christmas morning, we have a very special program. We'll talk about the biggest news stories of the year, and perhaps the stories that didn't receive enough attention. And we'll reflect on the ethical and legal challenges confronting the media.
We are joined by two extraordinary reporters who have won every journalism award imaginable. He's been with NBC for 39 years. He anchored the "Nightly News" for 21 years: Tom Brokaw. And a 42- year veteran of ABC News, where he anchored "Nightline" for a quarter century, Ted Koppel.
Welcome both.
MR. TED KOPPEL: Thank you.
MR. TOM BROKAW: Thank you. Good to be here.
MR. RUSSERT: What a year for news, as reporters and American citizens. I'm going to go back to September, and it seems so long ago now, but Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi and New Orleans, as we well know. There was an NBC photojournalist, Tony Zumbado, who was in the Convention Center, who took pictures and came out and talked to the world, in effect. Let's watch and come back and talk about it.
(Videotape, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005):
MR. TONY ZUMBADO: You would never, never imagine what you saw in the Convention Center in New Orleans. The bathrooms--the way the bathrooms were--there's no food for these folks. The sanitation was unbelievable. I--the stench in there, it was unbelievable. Dead people around the walls of the Convention Center, laying in the middle of the street in their dying chairs where they'd died, right there in their lawn chair--they were just covered up, in their wheelchair, covered up, laying there for-- dead. Babies, two babies, dehydrated and died. I just tell you, I couldn't take it. It was unbelievable.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Raw emotion, Tom Brokaw.
MR. BROKAW: And Tony has been all over the world for us. You know, he's seen wars and he's been in the Third World for us. And what he was giving a portrait of was America as the Third World in that particular tragedy. I thought it stripped away in this country what we've all known but failed to acknowledge: that--this kind of permanent underclass that we have in this country, with so few resources available to them. To the rest of the world, it was shocking. Here's the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world, you know, portraying itself around the globe now as the patron of democracy and to show the way, and then we have this happening in our midst. And it's a question of, now, how we move forward and begin to deal with it.
But that was a stunning moment that will, I think, live for a long, long time about how the government failed to respond to Katrina from the ground up and from the top down--not just the federal government; how unprepared the city was, the state was, and how stunned the rest of the country was to find out that that could happen now in the 21st century.
MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, many people commented that the press seemed to find its voice in the Hurricane Katrina story.
MR. KOPPEL: Well, I think, just to follow up on what Tom said, that what so shocked people was the sense that we had just seen, 10 months earlier, what happened after the tsunami in Indonesia, and the capacity of the U.S. Air Force to mobilize, the U.S. military, to get supplies halfway around the world in less time, ultimately, than it took the U.S. government to get the federal government to get materiel, to get needed supplies, to get equipment down to New Orleans. And I think that's what so frightened people in this country, was the sense that, you know, the system broke down. We know the system can work. We know we're capable of doing that. We've done it a hundred times for other countries. And yet here, where it happened in our own country--and again, I think Tom hit on the point: We began to hear that on the first couple of days, and I think there were people around the country who were saying, "Come on, there are always people trying to bring racism into everything."
But the question had to be asked: if that had been a section of a city that was populated by middle-class white people, would the response have been the same? And the more we discovered about how it worked, it's not that racism was actively at work. It's not that anybody was sitting there saying, "Oh, we don't have to worry about New Orleans. It's mostly black anyway, 60, 70 percent black." I think there was just a feeling that you didn't have to be as engaged as I think the federal government would have been. And, of course, the president, remember, was at that time off at his ranch, and we was ill served by his advisers, who led him to say at his ranch. He was late getting off the mark. The federal government was late getting off the mark. And then there was this terrible competition between and among city government, municipal government, state government and federal government. It was just--it was a mess from start to finish.
MR. RUSSERT: On the issue of race, Tom Brokaw, the president's still very sensitive about that. A few weeks ago, Brian Williams sat down and talked to him. Let's listen to the president and come back and talk about it.
(Videotape, December 12, 2005):
PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: Somebody I heard--you know, a couple of people, you know, said, "Bush didn't respond because of race, because he's a racist," or alleged that. That is absolutely wrong, and I reject that. Frankly, that's the kind of thing that--you can call me anything you want, but do not call me a racist.
(End videotape)
MR. BROKAW: I think Ted is correct when he says it was not overt or active racism. But New Orleans had kind of been out of sight, out of mind. It was a city that had been struggling for 50 years with its own corruption, with a pattern of violence down there, and then this growing black underclass that people just turned their heads away from. And it was not just the federal government. I thought that the response of the city and the preparation of the city, with a black mayor, was outrageous and indefensible. I thought that the state didn't do a very good job of getting ready when they said two days after, "Well, no one anticipated there would be a force 5 hurricane." Play the tape back and look at Friday from the National Hurricane Center. They said, "This could be the most powerful storm ever to hit the Gulf Coast." And they just didn't respond to it that way.
I'm working on a documentary now about race and poverty in America and the unintended consequences of what has happened as a result of desegregation and opportunities for ambitious black Americans who got out of traditional black neighborhoods and what was left behind. And what was left behind is this permanent population that we don't have much of a clue about how we're going to deal with it. And it's not just a government response, but it's also a community response.
MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, you interviewed Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, on "Nightline," and it was so memorable, because he just basically sat there and could not explain exactly what he had done or not done. And it just, when contrasted to what the media were reporting, was breathtaking in his inability to explain why he had not stepped up to this challenge.
MR. KOPPEL: What was so breathtaking, Tim, was he truly didn't seem to be up to speed on what had happened, and even if--and we've all covered stories and been on the scene where there is a crisis under way. Theoretically, you should be best informed when you're closest to the eye of the hurricane, as it were. In point of fact, you're much better off being back a few miles and being able to look at it from a distance. So it didn't surprise me that in some respects we who were a thousand miles away might be better informed than he was. But what surprised me was that none of his staff, apparently, had been listening to the radio or watching television and passing the word on to him, so that he was still--was saw that very moving piece of video from your cameraman at the beginning, at the Convention Center. He clearly didn't know what was happening at the Convention Center, and yet that had been used as one of the refuges for all the people who were unable to get out of the city.
MR. BROKAW: There's no way he should have had that job, Tim. He just--he simply was not prepared to have that job. Jamie Lee Witt, setting the politics aside, was one of the best appointments that Bill Clinton ever made. He went through Hurricane Andrew and they went through the California earthquakes. And I thought when he first came to Washington that he was probably just an Arkansas crony of the president's. He was first-rate as a FEMA director. And "Good Job Brownie" will be, you know--President Bush will be living with that one for a long time. This guy wouldn't have been, you know, a store manager for Wal-Mart in east Wichita.
MR. RUSSERT: You mentioned, Ted Koppel, after the interview, that you got a lot of e-mails saying, "Well, gee, you were a little rough on that guy, weren't you?"
MR. KOPPEL: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: Where do you draw the line as a questioner in a crisis situation? You see the reality on the ground from your correspondents, your reporters, and this government official doesn't get it. Does that give us a license to say, "Hey, fella..."
MR. KOPPEL: Look, I mean, the fact is that three of us, I think, all have to operate with that same little hidden voice in the back of our heads. When we begin an interview--in this case, for example, the audience is sitting there, identifying and empathizing with you as the questioner, saying, "All right, Timmy, go after him. Nobody's really gone after these two bozos for a long time. You have a chance to do it today." If, as you're very carefully doing right now, you're setting us up slowly for some of those questions that you've got written down later, the audience will stay with you. And eventually, if Tom and I ramble on too long, they'll say, "Come on, Timmy, get in there. Rough them up a little bit." If you jump in too quickly, then you're going to lose the allegiance of the audience and they will transfer it then to your guest, and they will come to perceive, as Tom and I will shortly be, your victims.
MR. RUSSERT: Sympathetic figures.
MR. KOPPEL: Exactly.
MR. RUSSERT: Not quite. This is Christmas morning. But, Tom, there is a line where people suggested, "Well, during the Iraq War, the press wasn't aggressive enough, but when it came to Katrina, they found themselves and told truth to power."
MR. BROKAW: Well, there were no gray areas in Katrina. A lot of what happened during the Iraq War and the lead-up to it was unknowable, and what happened with Katrina was there for everyone to see. And, in fact, having gone down there several days after Katrina struck--in fact, 10 days after it struck--I was stunned by the fact that it's a lot worse on the ground than it even appeared to be on television. But the rest of the country was witness to what Reuven Frank, who was the founder of "Huntley-Brinkley," once called television's greatest strength: It transmits experience. And that experience came into every home in America, and then the people sat there. And you had that parish chief on your program, weeping, saying they held--"They didn't come. They promised they would come and they didn't come."
MR. RUSSERT: Aaron Broussard.
MR. BROKAW: And you had the little--Charles Evans saying to Campbell Brown, "It's pitiful down here"--a 10-year-old boy who summed it up better than anyone else, probably, in his kind of naive eloquence. And everyone got it. It was just--it was indefensible. So then that's when you hold government accountable.
MR. KOPPEL: But the analogy would have been, let's say, two days before the storm if we had said, "Local government's not ready..."
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: "...state government is not ready, the federal government's not ready," everybody would have said, "Who the hell are you to be judging these various branches of government before the fact?" You almost have to when you're dealing with the elected representatives of the people. And we are heading into a crisis, whatever that crisis is, you have to begin by assuming that they're going to do their jobs and do their jobs properly, and that they are responding to us in an honest fashion. It's only after the fact, it's only after you see that they're not doing it properly, that you can come back with the kind of response that you're talking about. Now, should we be skeptical? Do we have a right to ask critical-- not just a right; do we have an obligation to ask critical questions? And did we fall short of that prior to the Iraq War? That's a perfectly legitimate point, and I think we all have to plead guilty, to one degree or another, to having been, you know, a little bit soft on the administration beforehand.
But in large measure, when the president and his top people tell you, as they did, "Here's our perception of what exists. Here's our perception of the danger to the United States. Here's our perception of a relationship between this guy who has weapons of mass destruction and the group that just blew up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center," I don't know that reporters as a whole can sit there and say, "Oh, hokum. You know, it's just not true." We can raise questions, and I...
MR. BROKAW: Given the absence of hard evidence.
MR. KOPPEL: Hard evidence. Right.
MR. BROKAW: There was not--you know, the French intelligence were sharing the same conclusions with the administration. I thought--I agree with you that I don't think that we pushed hard enough for vigorous debate. I think that on Capitol Hill that the debate was anemic, at best. You had--Ted Kennedy and Senator Byrd, really, were the only ones speaking out with any kind of passion in the Senate, the people who...
MR. RUSSERT: And they were not questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
MR. BROKAW: No. No. No.
MR. RUSSERT: That seemed to be a uniformly held belief.
MR. BROKAW: Right. Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Nor did the Clinton administration beforehand.
MR. BROKAW: No.
MR. KOPPEL: I mean, the only difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration was 9/11.
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: If 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch, he would have gone into Iraq.
MR. BROKAW: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me continue on Iraq and show you pictures from December 15. These are 11 million Iraqis voting, proudly holding up their fingers, having dipped it in ink as evidence that they had cast their vote; even on their hospital beds, making their vote and their views known. The president then embarked on a series of speeches. Some were vintage Bush--tough, draw the line, "stay the course"--and others were a bit contrite. Let's look at two quick...
(Videotape, November 30, 2005):
PRES. BUSH: We will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory.
(End videotape)
(Videotape, last Sunday):
PRES. BUSH: The work in Iraq has been especially difficult, more difficult than we expected.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Two different George Bushes, Tom.
MR. BROKAW: Yes, and I think if we'd seen the latter George Bush earlier, his polls wouldn't have plummeted as much as they did. They're making a pretty remarkable bounce-back now, based on what we're seeing after these four speeches. What still is unclear to me is--and you and I have talked about this--is what does he mean by "complete victory"? I think that election day was a very positive sign for the Iraqi people and certainly for the Bush administration and what it's attempting to accomplish there. I also think that the Democrats are fumbling when they don't acknowledge that. I think that they then resort to the same kind of negativism they used to complain about when they were in power at the White House and on Capitol Hill, the Republicans only engaging in negative attacks. There ought to be some way that the Democrats should be able to hold this administration responsible and accountable for its actions, but at the same time acknowledge, it seems to me, the courage of the Iraqi people for going to the polls in the way that they have.
I was in Iraq before, twice, before the war began and the year before, and it was a horrifying place in terms of the political oppression and the fear that existed and the stories that the Sunnis would tell about what they'd been subjected to down south. And for all of them now to show up and vote, I think that that's a signal achievement. At what cost, what's the end game, that's still to be resolved. And the Democrats, I think, do themselves some damage when they don't acknowledge that.
MR. RUSSERT: What do you see?
MR. KOPPEL: What's intriguing to me, Tim, is we're still talking about the war as though it were in a vacuum, and we're still talking about victory and what is to be achieved as though it were in a vacuum. And the one thing that we are not talking about, because it somehow seems indelicate or unpolitic or even inappropriate, is the simple fact of the matter that, while we did not go to war because of Iraq's oil, we did, in fact, go to war because it is absolutely essential to the national interest, not only of this country but also of the Europeans and of the Japanese, that the Persian Gulf remains stable. We have--when I say "we" I mean U.S. administrations going back to the Eisenhower administration--have been intervening in the Persian Gulf in one form or another--we overthrew the Iranian prime minister, Mossadeq--that is, the CIA did--precisely because we felt he was too close to the Communist Party at that time and we were afraid what that would mean if Iran became a Communist state.
As long as we had the shah of Iran there, he was our surrogate. In fact, you may remember the Nixon policy was that the shah would be our surrogate in the Persian Gulf. When the shah was overthrown, we shifted our chips onto the Saudi board, and then it became the House of Saud that became our representative. The Saudis are, indeed, troubled. The royal family of Saudi Arabia is in deep trouble. Therefore, we need to have a stable Iraq in order to guarantee a stable Persian Gulf, and the name of that game is oil. Nobody talks about that.
MR. RUSSERT: And the administration, when they went to war, used as the primary rationale the weapons of mass destruction.
MR. KOPPEL: Sure.
MR. RUSSERT: Is it possible for a president to say just what you did: "We are going there because we need a stable Middle East because we need ready access to oil supply to continue--our economy to soar"?
MR. KOPPEL: I think it has to be possible. I understand why politicians and even statesmen--or maybe that is the difference between a politician and a statesman. A politician can't do it; a statesman must do it.
MR. BROKAW: The other thing that can happen domestically, Tim, is that--and I completely agree with Ted on this. I think that--and I've been talking about this around the country some--this disconnect between those people who are in uniform and fighting this war over there and a large portion of our population, because no sacrifice is being asked of anyone at home. The president is not asking us to conserve oil or to ration gasoline or to push hard for alternative sources of energy in this conflict.
MR. KOPPEL: Or to pay a nickel more in taxes.
MR. BROKAW: Or to pay more in taxes for it. And so it allows someone to say, "Well, we have a mercenary army." I don't believe that we have a mercenary military. I think people volunteer for the right reasons. No one is going to go over there for the kind of paychecks that they get and expose themselves to IEDs and the kind of random death that exists all day, every day for any kind of a group. But I don't believe that this administration, or, for that matter, the opposition has asked enough of the American people, or raised that as an issue about we're all involved in this at this point and we're all going to get--we all got into it and we're all going to get out of it if we all play a part.
MR. KOPPEL: But the point--the one issue I would add, Tim, is the mousetrap that is waiting for the Democrats is if they do not publicly acknowledge that U.S. national interest is just fundamentally involved in a stable Iraq and a stable Persian Gulf, if they simply come after the Republicans, and take the cheap shots on the war, and say, "You gotta bring the troops home at all costs," they might even win the election, but if they win the election, they're going to find themselves confronting the same issues of national interest that the Republicans are facing right now. The simple fact of the matter is it is in America's national interest that there be stability in the Persian Gulf, and if we precipitously pull the troops out of that area now, there'll be hell to pay.
MR. RUSSERT: Wouldn't it be easier to develop a bipartisan consensus if there was more acknowledgment of mistakes being made?
MR. BROKAW: It would be. I think that the--one of the reasons the president's doing better in the national polls is he's beginning to say that "It was more difficult than we thought," "the intelligence was flawed," "it would have been a lot easier if we had our allies with us, as well." I think that they fumbled that at the beginning. The comments of Don Rumsfeld about old Europe and new Europe, the refusal of the president to reach out, to take a little more time to have inspections.
Go back to Katrina for a moment. I think that Katrina then became a metaphor for our political culture. We have a political culture of blame now. Everybody after Katrina was blaming everyone else. No one wanted to step up and take responsibility or accountability for what had happened there. And that's going on with Iraq. One of the reason that I think John McCain continues to get good notices is that he put together the Gang of 14 in the Senate, to say, "Enough of this; we've got to find a way through..."
MR. RUSSERT: The swing moderates.
MR. BROKAW: ...the swing moderates--"through these intractable positions in which we constantly find ourselves." Unless we can build a coalition in the middle, deal with filibuster, with our--the tricky issues of torture or what we're going to do about Iraq, and the budget, and the deficit, we're going to be stuck in this place that is a polarized national capital when the rest of the country longs for pragmatic solutions and moving forward.
MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, what is it about political leaders that prevent them from fessing up? If they say that "the war is going to cost X amount," or "we're not going to need hundreds of thousands of troops," or "we'll be greeted as liberators"--if things on the ground are different, why not come on "Nightline" or "Meet the Press" and say, "You know what? We got it wrong. But this is how we're adjusting to fix it"?
MR. KOPPEL: I think all the political analysts and the same people who advise our bosses as to what kind of a demographic we need to get on a news program are the same people who are advising the politicians. They say you come out and tell the truth, "You're gonna get nailed. Your hide will be nailed to the wall. I mean, people 50 years from now will admire your courage, but the other guy's gonna win the office."
MR. BROKAW: I don't agree with that. I think the--I think that the--there's a longing now...
MR. KOPPEL: I'm not saying that's what it should be. I'm saying that's what the advisers...
MR. BROKAW: No. I know. But I think they give that kind of advice, I agree with that. But I think that there's a longing now for people who will acknowledge that they--that there were mistakes made and that we need to reach across lines a lot more and work together. Doesn't mean you have to give up your ideology or your most cherished beliefs. But, you know, the great strength of this country is we've always been able to find the center and find our way through our most difficult crises by forming these coalitions, and people, at the end of the day, getting together in the Senate caucus or being summoned down to the White House, and working things out, and saying, "Look, I'll give a little on this if you'll give a little on that," and we're gonna move forward. There's previous little of that these days.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me talk about an issue that is of grave concern to people but we don't know much about it and that's the avian flu, the potential for pandemic. We had Dr. Michael Ryan of the World Health Organization on MEET THE PRESS. Let's listen to him and come back and talk about how to deal with this.
(Videotape, November 20, 2005):
DR. MICHAEL RYAN (World Health Organization): The avian flu strain has the potential to become a pandemic strain. It is very worrying that we see this virus transmitting across the species barrier into humans and the virus itself is evolving and we are probably closer to a pandemic at any time in the last 37 years, since the last pandemic of '68. This virus has crossed the species barrier. It has infected humans. It's killing a high proportion of those human beings and we need to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, how do you cover a story like that without alarming people and still do your job as a journalist to prepare people?
MR. KOPPEL: You can't. You have to alarm people because until people are sufficiently alarmed they're not going to listen to what has to happen. You know, what you don't hear in that sound bite, and what is rarely spoken of, especially among the politicians, is that the kind of vaccine that would be necessary to treat the avian flu does not exist. It cannot exist until the strain of avian flu is developed and can be sampled and can be tested and then, and only then, can you begin to develop the vaccine. In order to develop sufficient quantities of that vaccine, to vaccinate people twice, you're going to need so many hundreds of millions of doses that it will take a minimum of two to three years to get them. In other words, by the time you get them, it'll be too late to treat most of the people that would get the flu.
Now, you know, obviously, that raises questions as to what needs to be done, what can be done. I tried, just before I left "Nightline" to do a broadcast in which we brought some of the best experts on and said, "Tell us what we need to know. Tell us what we need to do." Among the things we need to do, and it sounds horrific, to say it, is to put in a decent supply of food and water and whatever medicine is needed by a family in each American home now, before it's too late, so that if, and when, a flu hits an area, like, let's say, our area here in Washington, the people, especially older people, or people who have breathing problems, lung problems, people who have heart problems, can afford to stay home for two or three weeks, or longer.
MR. BROKAW: Have you done that at your house?
MR. KOPPEL: No, in truth. Have you?
MR. BROKAW: We have.
MR. KOPPEL: Have you?
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Good for you.
MR. BROKAW: Well, we did it for a couple of reasons. Meredith--we live in New York and we have a house outside of New York and Meredith said, "This is going to be our sanctuary. We have to be prepared in case something happens." And we did put in a small supply of food and water and...
MR. KOPPEL: Yeah.
MR. BROKAW: ...other things to have on the ready. It's also--the avian flu and the pandemic possibilities are a real commentary on the world in which we're living now. The mobility of people to move across places that--the crush of population everywhere, how rapidly these things spread. And I think that leads in this country to a kind of unsettled feeling on the part of a lot of people. They have so much access to information now. They don't feel that they have their own sanctuary because it all happens at warp speed and I think politicians are not doing a very good job in my impression.
MR. KOPPEL: But, you see, doing what Tom and Meredith have done, and what my wife and I have not done, yet--will do, I promise--wouldn't at this stage cause any shortages...
MR. BROKAW: No.
MR. KOPPEL: ...it wouldn't cause any panic. I'm not suggesting that people go out and instantly buy a four-week supply of medicine...
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: ...food, water. But if you start...
MR. BROKAW: You have to think about it. Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: ...over a period of the next three months...
MR. RUSSERT: And that's the hard truth, it's probably the only thing you can do.
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Just--it's the only thing that the individual can do...
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: ...so that at the very least, if the pandemic hits your community, you can stay at home, don't go out.
MR. BROKAW: And having said that, I'm on my way to Southeast Asia. My doctor said to me "Are you going to go to the countryside?" And I said, "Some." And he said, "Oh, God, you got to be really careful." So I thought...
MR. RUSSERT: Is there a story that you think was underreported this year?
MR. BROKAW: Yes, I do. I think a big story that was underreported within industrial foundation of America, General Motors may not survive. That has been the cornerstone of American industry, all those manufacturing jobs in Detroit, the automobile industry defined who we were. And at the secondary level of that story is "What's going to happen with pensions in America and companies and corporations?"
MR. RUSSERT: A thousand companies...
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: ...have failed pensions.
MR. BROKAW: Yeah. And the arithmetic is pretty simple. We're either all going to pay for it at great expense or a lot of people are going to get to age 65 and not have the money that they expected to have there. In the meantime, both members of that family are working and they're on a constant consumer binge and they're thinking it's going to be there for them and it's not going to be there for them. And the largest automobile company in the world is about to be Toyota. America will give up that leadership.
MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, I was reading a Government Accountability Office report. $20 trillion in government liabilities in 2000. It's now $43 trillion in 2004--Medicare, Social Security, pensions.
MR. KOPPEL: Right.
MR. RUSSERT: And yet you talk about it, people's eyes glaze over.
MR. KOPPEL: Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you make these stories interesting to people?
MR. KOPPEL: I think the only way you can make them interesting is to bring them down to the individual level. And the fact of the matter is that when we show one person whose pension has just been taken away from her or him...
MR. RUSSERT: That's memorable.
MR. KOPPEL: That's memorable, and you can say, "I identify with that person," or people out there watching your program can say, "I identify with that person." But, you know, to follow up on Tom's point. I think the medical care, which is a function of what we're talking about--yes, we have been priding ourselves on having the best medical care in the world--and you know something? You can get the best medical care in the world, he can get the best medical care in the world, I can. Most Americans can't. And there are 43 million Americans who aren't getting any medical care at all. That is a scandal. And...
MR. BROKAW: That is getting attention at least, where people are trying to come to grips with that. And what was so stunning to me was that the Bush administration, after winning very sizeable popular vote in the 2004 election, put as its highest priority the reform of Social Security and not health care in America because I thought that's where most people were concerned.
MR. RUSSERT: Agree?
MR. KOPPEL: Sure. I'm not gonna disagree with him. I'm at NBC here. I got to agree with Brokaw.
MR. RUSSERT: What a team player. We're going to take a quick break. Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, we'll be right back after this.
MR. RUSSERT: More of our special edition of MEET THE PRESS with Ted Koppel and Tom Brokaw after this station break.
(Videotape, "Nightly News," December 1, 2004)
MR. BROKAW: What have a I learned here? More than we have time to recount this evening, but the enduring lessons through the decades are these: It's not the questions that get us in trouble; it's the answers.
MR. RUSSERT: That was Tom Brokaw signing off "Nightly News" a year ago. You still stand by that statement?
MR. BROKAW: I do. I thought about it a long time and I also think, however, it's a matter of how you ask the questions. They should be pertinent, relevant, and they should address the issues that people really are concerned about. An awful lot of questions in this new media environment, which we're all living, with 24-7 cable and blogging and so on, that are, putting it bluntly on a Christmas morning, smart-ass questions that, you know, don't seem to address that, that they seem to be questions only to try to make the questioner look good. So I think interrogation is a critical role for journalists but they have to think them through.
MR. RUSSERT: Just to show you that some things never change, 55 years ago, on Christmas, Senator Paul Douglas, Democrat from Illinois, was on MEET THE PRESS, and they turned the tables and let Senator Douglas ask questions of the media. Let's watch this, and note that--the command of language that Senator Douglas has.
(Videotape, December 24, 1950)
SEN. PAUL DOUGLAS, (Democrat, Illinois): Previously, the politicians who have been unwary enough to accept the invitation to appear on this program have been thrust into the limelight, have been quickly stripped of their clothes, and then, like St. Simeon of old, exposed to the whizzing of arrows, some of them poisoned, which come from the crossbows of the men and women of the press. It is a tribute to the healing powers of Christmas that it has led the directors of this program to reverse the roles and permit a member of that most-abused of American classes, a public official, to question his tormenters.
Now, Mr. Spivak, I would like to ask you a question, if I may. Do not newspapers and newspapermen frequently weaken national unity by unduly disparaging the characters of our public officials, and, hence, do they not often breed a mistrust on the part of the public of the good intentions of our government?
MR. LAWRENCE SPIVAK (NBC News): Well, I wouldn't say so, Senator. I'd say about questions that it is hard ever to give a public official a difficult question. I will admit the answers sometimes are very difficult. But I do think that you people in public life have the obligation of giving the answers to the people, not to the press. Where the press has asked an unfair question, most of you are able enough to handle the situation, and almost all of you do, and do it very well.
SEN. DOUGLAS: But is there not a tendency to blow up small abuses and to represent them as great evil...
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Koppel?
MR. KOPPEL: I was just thinking that reporters being asked questions by politicians look like weasels, don't they? I mean, I would like to point out, first of all, that Senator Douglas, who was, of course, a man of great eloquence, was reading his question.
MR. RUSSERT: I noted that.
MR. KOPPEL: And, you know, as you have tendency to do there on occasion there, Timmy, and but I think in this day and age when we have--and I remember I did some research on this about 10 years ago, and we had about 3,000 accredited reporters in this town at that time, and about 10,000 PR people, I guarantee you today both numbers have gone up. We probably have 4 or 5,000 reporters in this town and we probably have about 20,000 PR people. The problem is that every organization, be it a governmental organization, or be it a commercial organization, or an entertainment organization, has got plenty of skilled men and women who will make sure the news gets out when news is good. The only kind of news that they try to conceal is the bad news, and that's where the American democracy really requires a vigilant press corps and people who will ask tough questions as you do every Sunday in this spot. You know, that's an important thing to do. If you just threw patty-cake questions at people every Sunday morning, this show wouldn't last long.
MR. RUSSERT: And what some people consider nitpicking or small abuses and presenting them as great evils, in fact, are very legitimate questions.
MR. BROKAW: They are, and when Ted and I were young reporters in this town, there was a wise old newspaperman who was--been writing for The New Republic. He'd been one of the stalwarts of Life magazine in the early days, a guy by the name of John Osborne. He had this great line about all journalists have glass jaws. They throw punches all day long. Somebody takes a swing at them, they go down with the first punch.
MR. KOPPEL: Yeah.
MR. BROKAW: And I think there is a fair amount of that that goes on, as well. I do believe, however, that we've gotten into this kind of frenzied culture with all the attention that's paid to politics, that if someone steps forward and says, "I'd like to run for public office," or--and "I'd like to get in the public arena," there is kind of a declaration that he or she is guilty as charged before they get one foot into the arena and we need to step back sometimes and examine real motivation in people. And an awful lot of folks who don't want to come to work in Washington anymore who have real skills and something to give to their country because they don't want to go through that. Not just with the press, but they don't want to go through the disclosure forms, and all the other things that may happen to them.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me...
MR. KOPPEL: If I may, Tim...
MR. RUSSERT: Please.
MR. KOPPEL: ...just a couple of nights ago my wife and I watched for about the third or fourth time what I still think is the best political movie ever made, "The Candidate." And you remember the essential theme of "The Candidate" is Robert Redford playing this idealistic young lawyer who is in effect thrown into the meat grinder to run against this establishment Republican senator in California and he's gonna get his butt handed to him, except that by telling the truth and speaking candidly during the first half of the campaign, he pulls within 7 or 8 points of the incumbent. At which point, of course, all of his advisers say, "Well, you can't do that anymore."
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: You know, whatever you do now...
MR. RUSSERT: We might win.
MR. KOPPEL: We could actually win this thing and you're gonna have to be careful. And what I thought in watching that movie the other day is how little things have changed, except that the people who run campaigns now have an even more iron control...
MR. BROKAW: There are more gunslingers.
MR. KOPPEL: ...over the campaign than they did 25 or 30 years ago. And that's more the pity. I don't know if any one of the three of us were ever a candidate--and, don't worry, it'll never happen in my case. Him, I'm not so sure about. But if that were ever to happen, we wouldn't be able to do it any different. It just is impossible in this day and age for anybody to speak his mind plainly and not to be ripped to shreds by some PR machine on the other side.
MR. RUSSERT: And you lose the real characters...
MR. KOPPEL: Yes, you do. Yep.
MR. RUSSERT: ...and American politics becomes this...
MR. BROKAW: Well, one of the big stories of this past year is, of course, two of our most venerable press institutions, The Washington Post and The New York Times, found themselves square in the bull's- eye for all the anticipation about what the special prosecutor was gonna do and ended up indicting Scooter Libby, who worked for the vice president. The big after story was about The New York Times and it's internecine warfare within its own newspaper and its own family, which has not yet been resolved. And then America's best-known investigative reporter, Bob Woodward, becomes a principal in that story, as well, and comes into play. So these are turbulent times for the press.
MR. RUSSERT: In fact, I want to explore that a little bit. Let me show you the press conference of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, October 28, 2005. Let's listen.
(Videotape, October 28, 2005):
MR. PATRICK FITZGERALD (Special Prosecutor): I was not looking for First Amendment showdown. I tell you, I will say this, I do not think that a reporter should be subpoenaed anything close to routinely. It should be an extraordinary case. But if you're dealing with a crime--and what's different here is the transaction is between a person and a reporter. They're the eyewitness to the crime. If you walk away from that, and don't talk to the eyewitness, you are doing a reckless job of either charging someone with a crime that may not turn out to have been committed--and that frightens me because there are things that you can learn from a reporter that would show you the crime wasn't committed.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: By my last count, myself, Walter Pincus, Glenn Kessler, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Matt Cooper, Vivica Novak of Time magazine, Judy Miller of The Times, all been subpoenaed. Where is this headed, Ted Koppel?
MR. KOPPEL: I don't know. And, you know, it's--on the one hand, it is frightening. On the other hand, it is also frightening the way that informed sources are now being used and it's become more and more of a problem over the last few years. I remember about 25 or 30 years ago, The Washington Post tried very briefly--I was covering the State Department in those days, and they tried very briefly--it instructed its diplomatic correspondents that as soon as a spokesman went on background, which meant that he could not be directly quoted, that, in this case, Marilyn Berger, should get up and walk out. And she did. And, of course, nobody else did. And The Washington Post lasted about a week before Marilyn had to come back and accept the notion that information of some kind would be given to the press on a background basis or a deep background basis or an off-the-record basis.
That is not only the meat and potatoes of the media, it is also the meat and potatoes of the establishment in this town. Washington could not long survive, the White House could not long survive, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Congress, could not long survive, if they did not have the instrument of being able to go to a trusted reporter and say, "Look, you can't put my name on this but here's a piece of information I think you need to know. I'm deeply troubled by what is happening in this organization. I think you need to know it." And a professional reporter who will then take that information and not put into a newspaper or put it on the air right away, but seek then to confirm it with a second source or a third source or even a fourth source. But we wouldn't get that kind of information if we didn't know ultimately that we had the protection of being able to protect our own sources.
MR. RUSSERT: Look at the situation now with the eavesdropping debate, the National Security Agency. The president said that he in fact authorized intercepting conversations, domestic to international or vice versa. It clearly came from someone who...
MR. BROKAW: Who was troubled.
MR. RUSSERT: ...troubled by that policy. And yet the president said that it is a shameful act in damaging the national security.
MR. BROKAW: But The Times also sat on it for a year because they apparently bought into the idea that this could be damaging to national security. This is another very complex case that I think we'll learn a lot more about with the congressional hearings that are coming forward. To address that and the larger issue, I think that the press is in its hubris and its self-induced error against has not done a very good job of connecting itself to the public that it claims to serve. I think the Judy Miller case was confusing to a lot of people.
I had a call from an editor in the Midwest who was going to put together an ad that he wanted a lot of folks to sign off on. The ad effectively said, "Stand by the First Amendment. Support Judy Miller. Kind of the heck with the process." And I said, "You know, that's not good enough." So we put together a much more sophisticated ad, explaining why it's important to have a federal shield law, why sources are important, as Ted has just described them, do a kind of an outreach program with the public so that they do understand why it's important that we have these sources and to exercise more care in how, as Ted said, you go and get the second source and, you know, you got the story and you run the traps on it before it ends up in the newspaper.
I think there was a fair amount of damage done with what happened at The Post and the confusion that-- apparently, in the very senior ranks there, about--nobody asked Judy Miller who her sources were, or nobody went through the notes, and there was fighting going on before and after and during that she was in jail. And Bob Woodward comes up and turns out he's been holding this information, as well. I think that confuses the public a lot when we say, "Look, we're here to represent your interests," and many of them--they say, "It looks to me like you're just representing your own interests."
MR. KOPPEL: We do a great job, Tim, of patting ourselves on the backs, not just the media but the great American democracy, for how much we believe in the process of disclosure, of public debate, of fully vetting the issues and deciding them through our elected representatives. In point of fact, often as not, we don't do that. Often as not the decision is made that you, the public, simply are not mature enough or sophisticated enough to understand everything that's at stake here. What scares the heck out of me is that there will be another terrorist attack in this country. And after the next terrorist attack, if it's anything like 9/11, there won't be any debate about whether the government should have the right to eavesdrop. The appropriate time to have this discussion, this debate, in Congress, in the media, is now.
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: Because after the next event, it'll be Katy, bar the door. Why didn't you do more? And the fact of the matter is, in saying we need the debate, I'm not prejudging what the outcome would be. Quite frankly, I think the outcome may well be that the American public, through its elected representatives, will say, "You know something? We feel the president needs that right. He has to have the right to be able to order the wiretapping of terrorist suspects."
MR. RUSSERT: Let's have the debate.
MR. KOPPEL: But let's have the debate. Let's argue these issues out before it's too late.
MR. RUSSERT: Where's the media going, television, the blogs, Internet, cable?
MR. BROKAW: Well, the new universe of the blog and the Internet is a--is the new frontier. It's--I liken it to the Oklahoma land rush. I mean, everybody's rushing across this new landscape, hoping that they're gonna land on a pot of oil somewhere, and it's, you know, unknowable now about how it's all gonna play out. If you think of the changes in just the last five years, and the Internet alone, blogs were little-known five years ago. And now they're a powerful new instrument in the exchanging of information, propaganda, commentary on what's going on. We do a lot of it at NBC now. I liken what we're going through to the big bang. We've created a new universe. There are a lot of new planets out there and which ones are the brightest, which ones are gonna survive, which ones can support life, we're finding out, and working our way through it. So it's a profound change that I don't think even these two old-timers sitting next to you could have anticipated when we were young reporters about what would be possible.
MR. RUSSERT: We have to leave it there. Well, you two are terrific. Thank you both for a very, very interesting hour.
MR. BROKAW: Good. Thank you.
MR. KOPPEL: When are you getting to the tough questions? Come on, Tim.
MR. RUSSERT: We'll be right back with our MEET THE PRESS Minute from Christmas 50 years ago.
MR. RUSSERT: Christmas Day, 50 years ago, Robert Frost was right here on MEET THE PRESS.
(Videotape, December 25, 1955)
MR. NED BROOKS (NBC News): Our guest on this Christmas Day is the four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Mr. Robert Frost. Robert Frost is now past 80 years old. But he is still young in hope and in dreams, free from despair and pessimism. Mr. Frost is a man of deep loyalty to his land, to people in general and people in particular.
MR. SPIVAK: And, Mr. Frost, is there any one of your poems that better expresses how you feel about America than any other poem?
MR. ROBERT FROST (Poet): I suppose that'd be hard to narrow down. There's one--the one that's historic, almost. If you want me to say it; it's a short one.
"The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than 100 years before we were her people. She was ours in Massachusetts, in Virginia, but we were England's, still Colonials, possessing what we still were unpossessed by, possessed by what we now no more possess, something we were withholding made us weak until we found out it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living and forthwith found salvation and surrender. Such as we were, we gave ourselves outright, the deed of gift was many deeds of war, to the land vaguely realizing westward but still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, such as she was, such as she would become."
And it all lies in that first line: "The land was ours before we were the land's." We had to belong to the land that belonged to us. And that's my nearest talking about America directly.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: At the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Robert Frost was to deliver a special poem for the occasion. The glare from the sun prevented him from reading it. Instead, Frost recited from memory "The Gift Outright," the same poem you've just heard on MEET THE PRESS.
As we leave this morning, all of us at MEET THE PRESS hope you and your families have a wonderful Christmas and holiday and New Year and during this season we remember especially the men and women who are serving our country in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. In that spirit, we are joined by the United States Navy Band Brass Quintet.
(United States Navy Band Brass Quintet performs)
(United States Navy Band Brass Quintet performs)


text: The new Dynamic Earth wall map illustrates plate tectonics and features new bathymetry and naturally colored relief, as well as current volcano and earthquake data. Notable earthquakes and eruptions lists are updated to include the significant earthquakes in Haiti (2010) and Japan (2011) and volcanic eruptions in Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland (2010) and Merapi, Java, Indonesia (2010). Like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, tectonic plates fit together to form the earth's outer shell. The interaction of these plates causes earthquakes and volcanoes and shapes the earth's crust into mountains, valleys and deep-sea trenches. The Dynamic Earth map illustrates 17 major tectonic plates and highlights diffuse plate boundaries, convergent boundaries, spreading boundaries, fault zones, hot spots, notable earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of the 20th and 21st centuries, earthquakes with a magnitude of greater than 6.5 during the 20th and 21st centuries, and notable volcanic eruptions during the past 10,000 years.


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The Slope of Kongwa Hill by Tony Edwards
1958 MOW Magazine
1959 MOW Magazine
Nanny Get Your Gun Rumuruti - Car Hartly 1956-7 by Neil McLeod
Nyali Beach
Thomas Evan Morgan
Open Golf 2003
History - Sport
Cricket - History
History of Trains
1962 Hawke House rugby team
1964 Rhodes House
1962 Rhodes House
1962 Prince of Wales School, Rugby team
1962 Prince of Wales School Hockey team
1965 Prince of Wales school prefects
1954 Class photograph - St Mary's School
1954 St Mary's School - Mrs Matthews Class
1953 St Mary's School MrsMatthews class
1952 choir - St Marys School
St Mary's School 1960 Pre-Junior Cass
1962 Nakuru School
Lugard School, Nakuru
1937 under 16 cricket team
Kenya High School
General photographs of Kenya
Parkland Primary School
Greensted School
Nicholson House
1964 Nicholson House
1962 Nicholson House
1961 Nicholson House
1960 Nicholson House
1959 Nicholson House
Kenya Girls High School
St Mary's School class photograph
Delamere School 1959 1st year intake.
Delamere Boys High School 1962
Agakhan School
Eldoret Railway Club 1958
Eldoret Prinsloo family
Kevin Patience
Kevin's father Denis arrived in 47 as a Lt R.E. posted to Mackinnon Road. Retired in 48 joined PWD later MoW.
Worked for Kenya Govt till 69 retired as Chief Purchasing Officer. Retired to Msa and passed away in 98.
Denis was a founder member of the Nairobi National Theatre and together with Kevin's mother Dorothy was very active on stage.
Kevin and his mother arrived Mombasa in 48, Schooled at Loreto Convent Valley Rd. 48-50.. Kisumu school 50 - 53.
St Marys, Nairobi. 53 - 61. Joined R.A.F. 61 - 73.. Returned to Mombasa freelance diver for DIVECON.
Electrical foreman for Southern Engineering, Msa. 74 - 76. Commercial diver in Middle East 77 - 82.
Returned Msa - MD of DIVECON 82 - 84. Returned Bahrain. Set up TECHDIVE as MD. 84 - 99.
Retired to Poole. Ran five steam safaris in Kenya and Tanzania 2001 - 05.
Led three safaris to Kenya to look at WWI battlefields near Voi - Taveta area..2005 - 10.
Kevin Patience's new AVIATION in KENYA CALENDAR 2011 is now available
Having published Kenya calendars for 2003, 2005 and 2008 with Churches, Railways and Postcards, the new calendar features 24 black and white photographs, two per month of aircraft in Kenya from the first powered flight at Maktau in October 1915 through the early biplanes and seaplanes to aircraft of World War II and on to the jet age.
The photographs are captioned and the A4 format with a ring binder and brown envelope retails at £6.50 for the UK and £7.50 P&P Overseas
257 Sandbanks Road,
Poole, BH14 8EY
Tel: 01202 707450
Short Solent on Lake Naivasha c 1949
kindly supplied by Kevin Patience
My father also worked for PWD ( MOW )
and a treat for our family was meeting someone returning from England on a seaplane landing on Lake Naivasha.


text:
TCP Idle Scan (-sI
Note | |
Volunteers have translated this section into Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil) |
In 1998, security researcher Antirez (who also wrote the hping2 tool used in parts of this book) posted to the Bugtraq mailing list an ingenious new port scanning technique. Idle scan, as it has become known, allows for completely blind port scanning. Attackers can actually scan a target without sending a single packet to the target from their own IP address! Instead, a clever side-channel attack allows for the scan to be bounced off a dumb "zombie host". Intrusion detection system (IDS) reports will finger the innocent zombie as the attacker. Besides being extraordinarily stealthy, this scan type permits discovery of IP-based trust relationships between machines.
While idle scanning is more complex than any of the techniques discussed so far, you don't need to be a TCP/IP expert to understand it. It can be put together from these basic facts:
One way to determine whether a TCP port is open is to send a SYN (session establishment) packet to the port. The target machine will respond with a SYN/ACK (session request acknowledgment) packet if the port is open, and RST (reset) if the port is closed. This is the basis of the previously discussed SYN scan.
A machine that receives an unsolicited SYN/ACK packet will respond with a RST. An unsolicited RST will be ignored.
Every IP packet on the Internet has a fragment identification number (IP ID). Since many operating systems simply increment this number for each packet they send, probing for the IPID can tell an attacker how many packets have been sent since the last probe.
By combining these traits, it is possible to scan a target network while forging your identity so that it looks like an innocent zombie machine did the scanning.
Idle Scan Step by Step
Fundamentally, an idle scan consists of three steps that are repeated for each port:
Probe the zombie's IP ID and record it.
Forge a SYN packet from the zombie and send it to the desired port on the target. Depending on the port state, the target's reaction may or may not cause the zombie's IP ID to be incremented.
Probe the zombie's IP ID again. The target port state is then determined by comparing this new IP ID with the one recorded in step 1.
After this process, the zombie's IP ID should have increased by either one or two. An increase of one indicates that the zombie hasn't sent out any packets, except for its reply to the attacker's probe. This lack of sent packets means that the port is not open (the target must have sent the zombie either a RST packet, which was ignored, or nothing at all). An increase of two indicates that the zombie sent out a packet between the two probes. This extra packet usually means that the port is open (the target presumably sent the zombie a SYN/ACK packet in response to the forged SYN, which induced a RST packet from the zombie). Increases larger than two usually signify a bad zombie host. It might not have predictable IP ID numbers, or might be engaged in communication unrelated to the idle scan.
Even though what happens with a closed port is slightly
different from what happens with a filtered port, the attacker
measures the same result in both cases, namely, an IP ID increase
of 1. Therefore it is not possible for the idle scan to distinguish
between closed and filtered ports. When Nmap records an IP ID
increase of 1 it marks the port
For those wanting more detail, the following three diagrams show exactly what happens in the three cases of an open, closed, and filtered port. The actors in each are:
the attacker, the zombie, and the target.
Idle scan is the ultimate stealth scan. Nmap offers
scanning (-D
to help users shield their identity, but
that (unlike idle scan) still requires an attacker to send some
packets to the target from his real IP address in order to get scan
results back. One upshot of idle scan is that intrusion detection systems will
generally send alerts claiming that the zombie machine has launched a
scan against them. So it can be used to frame some other party for a
scan. Keep this possibility in mind when reading alerts from your
A unique advantage of idle scan is that it can be used to defeat certain packet filtering firewalls and routers. IP source address filtering is a common (though weak) security mechanism for limiting machines that may connect to a sensitive host or network. For example, a company database server might only allow connections from the public web server that accesses it. Or a home user might only allow SSH (interactive login) connections from his work machines.
A more disturbing scenario occurs when some company bigwig demands that network administrators open a firewall hole so he can access internal network resources from his home IP address. This can happen when executives are unwilling or unable to use secure VPN alternatives.
Idle scanning can sometimes be used to map out these trust relationships. The key factor is that idle scan results list open ports from the zombie host's perspective. A normal scan against the aforementioned database server might show no ports open, but performing an idle scan while using the web server's IP as the zombie could expose the trust relationship by showing the database-related service ports as open.
Mapping out these trust relationships can be very useful to attackers for prioritizing targets. The web server discussed above may seem mundane to an attacker until she notices its special database access.
A disadvantage to idle scanning is that it takes far longer than most other scan types. Despite the optimized algorithms described in the section called "Idle Scan Implementation Algorithms", A 15-second SYN scan could take 15 minutes or more as an idle scan. Another issue is that you must be able to spoof packets as if they are coming from the zombie and have them reach the target machine. Many ISPs (particularly dialup and residential broadband providers) now implement egress filtering to prevent this sort of packet spoofing. Higher end providers (such as colocation and T1 services) are much less likely to do this. If this filtering is in effect, Nmap will print a quick error message for every zombie you try. If changing ISPs is not an option, you might try using another IP on the same ISP network. Sometimes the filtering only blocks spoofing of IP addresses that are outside the range used by customers. Another challenge with idle scan is that you must find a working zombie host, as described in the next section.
Finding a Working Idle Scan Zombie Host
The first step in executing an IP ID idle scan is to find an appropriate zombie. It needs to assign IP ID packets incrementally on a global (rather than per-host it communicates with) basis. It should be idle (hence the scan name), as extraneous traffic will bump up its IP ID sequence, confusing the scan logic. The lower the latency between the attacker and the zombie, and between the zombie and the target, the faster the scan will proceed.
When an idle scan is attempted, Nmap tests the proposed zombie and reports any problems with it. If one doesn't work, try another. Enough Internet hosts are vulnerable that zombie candidates aren't hard to find. Since the hosts need to be idle, choosing a well-known host such as www.yahoo.com or google.com will almost never work.
A common approach is to simply execute a Nmap ping scan of some
network. You could use Nmap's random IP selection mode
but that is likely to result in far away
zombies with substantial latency. Choosing a network near your source
address, or near the target, produces better results. You can
try an idle scan using each available host from the ping scan results
until you find one that works. As usual, it is best to ask permission
before using someone's machines for unexpected purposes such as idle
We didn't just choose a printer icon to represent a zombie in our illustrations to be funny—simple network devices often make great zombies because they are commonly both underused (idle) and built with simple network stacks which are vulnerable to IP ID traffic detection.
Performing a port scan and OS identification
on the zombie candidate network rather than just
a ping scan helps in selecting a good zombie. As long as verbose mode
is enabled, OS detection will usually determine
the IP ID sequence generation method and print a line such as
"IP ID Sequence Generation: Incremental".
If the type is
given as Incremental
or Broken
little-endian incremental
, the machine is a good zombie
candidate. That is still no guarantee that it will work, as Solaris
and some other systems create a new IP ID sequence for each host they
communicate with. The host could also be too busy. OS detection and
the open port list can also help in identifying systems that are
likely to be idle.
Another approach to identifying zombie candidates is the run the
NSE script against a host. This script probes a host to classify its
IP ID generation method, then prints the IP ID classification much
like the OS detection does. Like most NSE scripts, ipidseq.nse
can be run against many hosts in parallel, making it another good choice
when scanning entire networks looking for suitable hosts.
While identifying a suitable zombie takes some initial work, you can keep re-using the good ones.
Executing an Idle Scan
Once a suitable zombie has been found, performing a scan is
easy. Simply specify the zombie hostname to the -sI
option and Nmap does the rest. Example 5.19 shows an example of
scanning the Recording Industry Association of America by bouncing an
idle scan off an Adobe machine named Kiosk.
# nmap -Pn -p- -sI kiosk.adobe.com www.riaa.com
Starting Nmap ( https://nmap.org )
Idlescan using zombie kiosk.adobe.com (184.108.40.206:80); Class: Incremental
Nmap scan report for 22.214.171.124
(The 65522 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
21/tcp open ftp
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
111/tcp open sunrpc
135/tcp open loc-srv
443/tcp open https
1027/tcp open IIS
1030/tcp open iad1
2306/tcp open unknown
5631/tcp open pcanywheredata
7937/tcp open unknown
7938/tcp open unknown
36890/tcp open unknown
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 2594.47 seconds
From the scan above, we learn that the RIAA is not very security
conscious (note the open PC Anywhere, portmapper, and Legato nsrexec
ports). Since they apparently have no firewall, it is unlikely that
they have an IDS. But if they do, it will show kiosk.adobe.com as the
scan culprit. The -Pn
option prevents Nmap from
sending an initial ping packet to the RIAA machine. That would have
disclosed Ereet's true address. The scan took a long time because
was specified to scan all 65K ports. Don't try
to use kiosk for your scans, as it has already been removed.
By default, Nmap forges probes to the target from the source
port 80 of the zombie. You can choose a different port by appending a
colon and port number to the zombie name (e.g. -sI
). The chosen port must not be filtered
from the attacker or the target. A SYN scan of the zombie should show
the port in the open
Idle Scan Implementation Algorithms
While the section called "Idle Scan Step by Step" describes idle scan at the fundamental level, the Nmap implementation is far more complex. Key differences are parallelism for quick execution and redundancy to reduce false positives.
Parallelizing idle scan is trickier than with other scan
techniques due to indirect method of deducing port states. If Nmap
sends probes to many ports on the target and then checks the new IP ID
value of the zombie, the number of IP ID increments will expose how
many target ports are open, but not which ones. This isn't actually a major problem,
as the vast majority of ports in a large scan will be
only open ports cause the IP ID value to increment, Nmap will see no
intervening increments and can mark the whole group of ports as
. Nmap can scan groups of up to 100 ports in parallel. If Nmap
probes a group then finds that the zombie IP ID has increased
times, there must be
open ports among that group. Nmap then finds
the open ports with a binary search. It splits the group into two and
separately sends probes to each. If a subgroup shows zero open ports,
that group's ports are all marked closed|filtered
. If a
subgroup shows one or more open ports, it is divided again and the
process continues until those ports are identified. While this
technique adds complexity, it can reduce scan times by an order of magnitude over scanning just one port at a time.
Reliability is another major idle scanning concern. If the zombie host sends packets to any unrelated machines during the scan, its IP ID increments. This causes Nmap to think it has found an open port. Fortunately, parallel scanning helps here too. If Nmap scans 100 ports in a group and the IP ID increase signals two open ports, Nmap splits the group into two fifty-port subgroups. When Nmap does an IP ID scan on both subgroups, the total zombie IP ID increase better be two again! Otherwise, Nmap will detect the inconsistency and rescan the groups. It also modifies group size and scan timing based on the detected reliability rate of the zombie. If Nmap detects too many inconsistent results, it will quit and ask the user to provide a better zombie.
Sometimes a packet trace is the best way to understand complex
algorithms and techniques such as these. Once again, the Nmap
makes these trivial to produce when
desired. The remainder of this section provides an
annotated packet trace of an actual seven port idle scan. The
IP addresses have been changed to Attacker
, and Target
and some irrelevant
aspects of the trace lines (such as TCP window size) have been removed
for clarity.
Attacker# nmap -sI Zombie -Pn -p20-25,110 -r --packet-trace -v Target
Starting Nmap ( https://nmap.org )
is necessary for stealth, otherwise ping packets would be sent to
the target from Attacker's real address. Version scanning would also
expose the true address, and so -sV
not specified. The -r
option (turns off port randomization)
is only used to make this example easier to follow.
Nmap firsts tests Zombie's IP ID sequence generation by sending six SYN/ACK packets to it and analyzing the responses. This helps Nmap immediately weed out bad zombies. It is also necessary because some systems (usually Microsoft Windows machines, though not all Windows boxes do this) increment the IP ID by 256 for each packet sent rather than by one. This happens on little-endian machines when they don't convert the IP ID to network byte order (big-endian). Nmap uses these initial probes to detect and work around this problem.
SENT (0.0060s) TCP Attacker:51824 > Zombie:80 SA id=35996 SENT (0.0900s) TCP Attacker:51825 > Zombie:80 SA id=25914 SENT (0.1800s) TCP Attacker:51826 > Zombie:80 SA id=39591 RCVD (0.1550s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51824 R id=15669 SENT (0.2700s) TCP Attacker:51827 > Zombie:80 SA id=43604 RCVD (0.2380s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51825 R id=15670 SENT (0.3600s) TCP Attacker:51828 > Zombie:80 SA id=34186 RCVD (0.3280s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51826 R id=15671 SENT (0.4510s) TCP Attacker:51829 > Zombie:80 SA id=27949 RCVD (0.4190s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51827 R id=15672 RCVD (0.5090s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51828 R id=15673 RCVD (0.5990s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51829 R id=15674 Idlescan using zombie Zombie (Zombie:80); Class: Incremental
This test demonstrates that the zombie is working fine. Every IP ID was an increase of one over the previous one. So the system appears to be idle and vulnerable to IP ID traffic detection. These promising results are still subject to the next test, in which Nmap spoofs four packets to Zombie as if they are coming from Target. Then it probes the zombie to ensure that the IP ID increased. If it hasn't, then it is likely that either the attacker's ISP is blocking the spoofed packets or the zombie uses a separate IP ID sequence counter for each host it communicates with. Both are common occurrences, so Nmap always performs this test. The last-known Zombie IP ID was 15674, as shown above.
SENT (0.5990s) TCP Target:51823 > Zombie:80 SA id=1390
SENT (0.6510s) TCP Target:51823 > Zombie:80 SA id=24025
SENT (0.7110s) TCP Target:51823 > Zombie:80 SA id=15046
SENT (0.7710s) TCP Target:51823 > Zombie:80 SA id=48658
SENT (1.0800s) TCP Attacker:51987 > Zombie:80 SA id=27659
RCVD (1.2290s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51987 R id=15679
The four spoofed packets coupled with the probe from Attacker caused the Zombie to increase its IP ID from 15674 to 15679. Perfect! Now the real scanning begins. Remember that 15679 is the latest Zombie IP ID.
Initiating Idlescan against Target
SENT (1.2290s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:20 S id=13200
SENT (1.2290s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:21 S id=3737
SENT (1.2290s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:22 S id=65290
SENT (1.2290s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:23 S id=10516
SENT (1.4610s) TCP Attacker:52050 > Zombie:80 SA id=33202
RCVD (1.6090s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:52050 R id=15680
Nmap probes ports 20-23. Then it probes Zombie and finds that the new
IP ID is 15680, only one higher than the previous value of 15679.
There were no IP ID increments in between those two known packets,
meaning ports 20-23 are probably closed|filtered
It is also possible that a SYN/ACK from a Target port has simply not
arrived yet. In that case, Zombie has not responded with a RST and
thus its IP ID has not incremented. To ensure accuracy, Nmap will try
these ports again later.
SENT (1.8510s) TCP Attacker:51986 > Zombie:80 SA id=49278
RCVD (1.9990s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51986 R id=15681
Nmap probes again because four tenths of a second has gone by since the last probe it sent. The Zombie (if not truly idle) could have communicated with other hosts during this period, which would cause inaccuracies later if not detected here. Fortunately, that has not happened: the next IP ID is 15681 as expected.
SENT (2.0000s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:24 S id=23928
SENT (2.0000s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:25 S id=50425
SENT (2.0000s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:110 S id=14207
SENT (2.2300s) TCP Attacker:52026 > Zombie:80 SA id=26941
RCVD (2.3800s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:52026 R id=15684
Nmap probes ports 24, 25, and 110 then queries the Zombie IP ID. It has jumped from 15681 to 15684. It skipped 15682 and 15683, meaning that two of those three ports are likely open. Nmap cannot tell which two are open, and it could also be a false positive. So Nmap drills down deeper, dividing the scan into subgroups.
SENT (2.6210s) TCP Attacker:51867 > Zombie:80 SA id=18869 RCVD (2.7690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51867 R id=15685 SENT (2.7690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:24 S id=30023 SENT (2.7690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:25 S id=47253 SENT (3.0000s) TCP Attacker:51979 > Zombie:80 SA id=12077 RCVD (3.1480s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51979 R id=15687
The first subgroup is ports 24 and 25. The IP ID jumps from 15685 to 15687, meaning that one of these two ports is most likely open. Nmap tries the divide and conquer approach again, probing each port separately.
SENT (3.3910s) TCP Attacker:51826 > Zombie:80 SA id=32515 RCVD (3.5390s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51826 R id=15688 SENT (3.5390s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:24 S id=47868 SENT (3.7710s) TCP Attacker:52012 > Zombie:80 SA id=14042 RCVD (3.9190s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:52012 R id=15689
A port 24 probe shows no jump in the IP ID. So that port is not open. From the results so far, Nmap has tentatively determined:
Ports 20-23 are
Two of the ports 24, 25, and 110 are
One of the ports 24 and 25 are
Port 24 is
Stare at this puzzle long enough and you'll find only one solution:
ports 25 and 110 are open while the other five are
. Using this logic, Nmap could
cease scanning and print results now. It used to do so, but that
produced too many false positive open ports when the Zombie wasn't
truly idle. So Nmap continues scanning to verify its results:
SENT (4.1600s) TCP Attacker:51858 > Zombie:80 SA id=6225 RCVD (4.3080s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51858 R id=15690 SENT (4.3080s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:25 S id=35713 SENT (4.5410s) TCP Attacker:51856 > Zombie:80 SA id=28118 RCVD (4.6890s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51856 R id=15692 Discovered open port 25/tcp on Target SENT (4.6900s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:110 S id=9943 SENT (4.9210s) TCP Attacker:51836 > Zombie:80 SA id=62254 RCVD (5.0690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51836 R id=15694 Discovered open port 110/tcp on Target
Probes of ports 25 and 110 show that they are open
, as we deduced previously.
SENT (5.0690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:20 S id=8168 SENT (5.0690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:21 S id=36717 SENT (5.0690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:22 S id=4063 SENT (5.0690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Target:23 S id=54771 SENT (5.3200s) TCP Attacker:51962 > Zombie:80 SA id=38763 RCVD (5.4690s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51962 R id=15695 SENT (5.7910s) TCP Attacker:51887 > Zombie:80 SA id=61034 RCVD (5.9390s) TCP Zombie:80 > Attacker:51887 R id=15696
Just to be sure, Nmap tries ports 20-23 again. A Zombie IP ID query shows no sequence jump. On the off chance that a SYN/ACK from Target to Zombie came in late, Nmap tries another IP ID query. This again shows no open ports. Nmap is now sufficiently confident with its results to print them.
The Idlescan took 5 seconds to scan 7 ports. Nmap scan report for Target PORT STATE SERVICE 20/tcp closed|filtered ftp-data 21/tcp closed|filtered ftp 22/tcp closed|filtered ssh 23/tcp closed|filtered telnet 24/tcp closed|filtered priv-mail 25/tcp open smtp 110/tcp open pop3 Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 5.949 seconds
For complete details on the Nmap idle scan implementation, read
from the Nmap source code
While port scanning is a clever abuse of predictable IP ID sequences, they can be exploited for many other purposes as well. Examples are peppered throughout this book, particularly in Chapter 10, Detecting and Subverting Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems.


text:
Pastina is a tiny pasta used for soups, more commonly found in a star shape.
Keeping with its traditional use I've made a very simple but nourishing soup using beef stock, onions, carrots, red capsicums, peas and zucchini flowers
Vegetable Soup with Pastina
1 red onion, finely sliced
2 carrots, diced
1 red capsicum, diced
zucchini flowers, stamen removed and roughly chopped
beef or vegetable stock or even water
Sauté the onion, carrot and capsicum in a little olive oil and butter - cook slowly to allow the flavours to develop and the vegetables to soften and only slightly colour.
Add the hot stock and allow to simmer until the vegetables are almost done. Add the peas and pastine and simmer until both are tender. Remove from the heat and stir through the zucchini flowers.
Pour into bowls and serve at once.
Because this is a fresh pasta it cooks really quickly. It also will expand on sitting - so when reheating you'll need to add more liquid.


text:
First, I'll wear light-colored clothing. Second, I'll bathe more often in an attempt to be as odorless as possible. Third, I won't exhale while I'm in the woods.
"Snow mosquitoes," the big, sluggish mosquitoes that are the first to irritate us, survive the winter by bundling up in leaf litter or wedging themselves under loose tree bark. Like many hibernating insects, overwintering mosquitoes depend on supercooling, a process by which an animal has the ability to rid its body fluids of impurities that would trigger the formation of ice, thereby allowing it to cool down below 32 degrees Fahrenheit without bursting its cell walls.
Mosquitoes in hibernation can survive temperatures down to about 25 below zero. But years with a meager snowpack may cause quite a few mosquitoes to freeze and die when the mercury plummets. Yellowjackets, also supercoolers, may take quite a hit in low snow years. But a lack of snow doesn't effect the eggs of mosquitoes. Those eggs are the source of the smaller, faster mosquito species that hatch later in the summer.
Mosquito eggs laid last fall will soon be floating atop standing bodies of water ranging in size from Wonder Lake to a water-filled moose track in the tundra. The dozens of Alaska mosquito species that will hatch from these eggs won't be sluggish to strike — they'll act like a human male in a grocery store: quick in, quick out.
Only female mosquitoes bother us. Females need blood's protein to develop their ovaries and make more mosquitoes. Males survive by sipping nectar from flowers and sucking juices from fruit; females also supplement their diet with nectar. While both males and females have antennae, the males' are much more garish, protruding like large feathers. The males' antennae act as tuning forks, resonating to the whine produced by the wings of females. During mating season, a few to a few thousand males gather together in swarms. Males in the cloud seize any female that wanders inside. Like dragonflies, mosquitoes mate in mid-air.
Once fertilized by the male, the female mosquito searches for a blood donor. Using sensors on its antennae, a mosquito picks up animals' body odor and carbon dioxide (a gas we exhale, along with water vapor). The female mosquito follows the trail upwind to its source. Once mosquitoes get closer, they're attracted to other cues such as dark colors, moisture in the air, and silhouettes of potential victims. Researchers found that mosquitoes responded to the cues of a calf when the calf was standing 45 feet away, as was reported in the British text, The Biology of Mosquitoes. Insect repellents are designed to block mosquitoes' sensory organs with heavy, bulky molecules. When its sensors are clogged with repellent a mosquito is fooled into looking elsewhere for its blood meal.
Mosquitoes may not prefer human blood, though. In the 1949 book, The Natural History of Mosquitoes, researcher Marston Bates reported that one species of mosquito laid half as many eggs after feeding on man than it did after digesting the blood of rabbits, guinea pigs and rats. Bates reported on another experiment where mosquitoes were released in a room containing humans, pets and livestock. Factoring in the size difference of each animal, cows were the mosquitoes' favorite target, swelling with 47.6 percent of the bites. Goats followed at 25 percent, then pigs at 13.8, humans at 4.8, dogs at 3.6, cats at 3.4, and barnyard fowl at 1.8 percent.


text:
Hunters Advised to Check Water Conditions
The North Dakota Game and Fish Department advises hunters to be cautious with their dogs around water this time of year, due to potential health hazards associated with blue-green algae.
Dr. Dan Grove, wildlife veterinarian for the Game and Fish Department, said late summer and early fall offer prime conditions for blue-green algae growth in many state waters. Ingestion by a hunting dog while perhaps retrieving a bird during the early goose season, or just practicing retrieving, can lead to severe illness and potential death.
"Conditions are right this year for stagnant water to become contaminated, especially with all of the rainfall that has occurred," Grove said.
Potentially toxic algae blooms occur under conditions of hot, dry weather. Shallow, stagnant water with moderate to high nutrient content provides an optimum environment for algal growth. Water or wind movements often concentrate the algae, and eventually the bloom appears as a blue-green "scum" floating on the water's surface. The threat disappears once the weather turns colder.
"Hunting dogs shouldn't drink or swim in discolored water or where algal blooms are apparent," Grove said. "If dogs retrieve in these conditions, they should be rinsed off immediately and shouldn't be allowed to lick their coat."
For additional information about the effects of blue-green algae blooms on hunting dogs, contact the Animal Health Division, North Dakota Department of Agriculture, at (701) 328-2655; or a local veterinarian.


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CAMBRIDGE — New Year's Eve is not the time for heavy intellectual lifting. Bubbly and sparkly is what the people want. And bubbly and sparkly is what they got (both musical and liquid) at Monday's entertaining edition of what has become an annual event, the Boston Baroque New Year's Eve concert.
Martin Pearlman, the group's music director and conductor, served as avuncular host of a program of "bright, celebratory music": concertos by Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Marcello, and Georg Philipp Telemann in the first half, followed by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's short comic opera "The Maid Mistress" in the second. As usual, the ensemble performed on Baroque-era instruments, with their more muted, mellow, and subtle sound.
During intermission, champagne was offered in the lofty grand foyer as 2012 was flying away. Yes, the interval did last longer than usual.
The most substantial musical offering was Pergolesi's "La serva padrona" (The Maid Mistress). First performed in Paris in 1733, this charming piece in two scenes is scored for two singers, bass and soprano, and tells a domestic tale of an overbearing master (Uberto) and his clever housekeeper (Serpina). When Uberto vows to take a wife and replace the willful Serpina, she plots with the male servant Vespone to trick him (disguise, please) into marrying her instead. The subversive anti-aristocratic political message shocked audiences of the time.
Boston Baroque mounted a semi-staged version sung in English. Bass-baritone David Kravitz, familiar from performances with the Boston Symphony and Boston Lyric Opera, sang the role of Uberto with impeccable musicality, fine comic timing, and exemplary enunciation. On only four days' notice, soprano Sara Heaton stepped in to replace the ailing Courtney Huffman as Serpina. Under the circumstances, Heaton (carrying a score) did very well indeed, employing her agile, full voice with taste, style, and wit. In the mimed role of Vespone, Remo Airaldi relied on world-weary commedia mugging.
With Pearlman at the helm throughout, the orchestra provided unusually sensitive and balanced accompaniment both here and in the three concertos. The string players dug into the contrasts in Corelli's "Concerto Grosso in D Major, Op. 6, No. 7." They were joined by baroque oboist Marc Schachman for a restrained performance of Marcello's "Concerto for Oboe in D Minor," then by Christopher Krueger (baroque flute) and Aldo Abreu (recorder) in a suave account of Telemann's rustic "Concerto for Flute and Recorder in E Minor, TWV 52."
Harlow Robinson can be reached at harlo@
Correction: Because of a reporting error, an earlier version of this review misidentified the performer who played Vespone in Pergolesi's "La serva padrona." It was Remo Airaldi.


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Reflecting on his first months in the role of chief registrar, Dr Tahir Akbar discusses the power of small changes to motivate the workforce at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT).
Today, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has published a report looking at the clinical effectiveness of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) care in primary care in England.


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Timing is no friend of Tim Tebow.
Rex Ryan finally benched Mark Sanchez on Sunday, but New York Jets fans weren't chanting Tebow's name. Instead, it was "Mc-El-Roy," as in second-year quarterback Greg McElroy, who helped lead the Jets to a 7-6 win over the Arizona Cardinals.
Tebow, inactive with a rib injury, said he tried to convince Ryan to let him play against the Cardinals.
"Could I have pushed, went out there and played? I think I could have managed it," Tebow said Monday, via the New York Daily News. "I feel like I'm healing up."
Ryan didn't commit to a starter for next Sunday's game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tebow's hometown team. Ryan said Tebow is "in the mix."
Rapoport: McElroys avoid drama
Greg McElroy and his father are taking a diplomatic approach to the Jets' quarterback saga, Ian Rapoport reports. **More...**
"You just have to look at it as another game," Tebow said, according to the Daily News. "It doesn't matter how many family or friends are going to be there."
Tebow underwent more X-rays Sunday, the results of which will dictate his ability to practice. Ryan said Tebow isn't close to 100 percent while admitting it was wrong to even dress the quarterback for the Thanksgiving game against the New England Patriots.
Tebow was asked if he'd be upset if McElroy started over him.
"I'm not into hypotheticals," he said. "I'm trying to get healthy right now."
If Tebow is cleared to play, he has every right to be unhappy if McElroy gets the nod ahead of him. Tebow was brought to the Jets to be a hybrid weapon and premium insurance policy if Sanchez were to miss time. If Ryan goes with a seventh-round draft pick ahead of Tebow, it tells you everything you need to know.
Follow Dan Hanzus on Twitter @DanHanzus.