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USDA says NC health agency met food stamp deadline
The federal government is satisfied that North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services has met the final deadline to whittle down its backlog of food stamp applications at local social service offices.
A U.S. Agriculture Department regulator wrote DHHS Secretary Dr. Aldona Wos Tuesday and said her agency had met the requirements to reduce its backlog by March 31.
USDA had threatened the state with losing $88 million to administer the program. Several thousand cases still were behind schedule a week before the deadline.
Regional administrator Robin Bailey said the state had "made significant strides" involving households experiencing delays to obtain or renew food stamps. Bailey still wants weekly reports for at least the next two months.
An intermediate deadline was also met in early February.


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Thursday, Dec 13, 2012 6:36 PM UTC
It was worldwide news when a woman died in Ireland after being denied an abortion. She was hardly the only tragedy
By Irin Carmon
By now, many have heard the name of Savita Halappanavar, whose death in a Galway hospital this fall was a chilling reminder of how abortion bans can be deadly.
That case had the benefit of a vocal and angry person to speak on the dead woman's behalf — her husband, Praveen. He has said she requested a termination that may have saved her life — but was told, "This is a Catholic country." (An official inquiry by the hospital has yet to be released, and Praveen Halapannavar isappealing to the European Court of Human Rights.) But for every Savita, there are thousands of women whose names we don't know, women who aren't even counted.
The most commonly cited statistic suggests that complications from unsafe abortions led to approximately 13 percent of maternal deaths worldwide. That's a World Health Organization figure first arrived at in 2000, which hasn't been re-evaluated. Every year, when WHO says how many women have died from unsafe abortions, they're simply taking the same percentage of the global maternal mortality figure — 56,000 in 2003, or 47,000 in 2008. But one epidemiologist, Caitlin Gerdts, wondered if that number wasn't a potentially vast understatement.
A few years ago, Gerdts was planning to write her dissertation about maternal mortality at a hospital in Zanzibar, Tanzania. "From the data we were able to gather I was sure that we had missed a number of women who had died likely from unsafe abortion," she told Salon. Even in the original WHO report, she said, the authors "talk about how unsure they are about that estimate, and how they have the aggregate data, and how the data that they did have from countries where abortion-related mortality is the highest were of the poorest quality. They say directly, this is the best number we can come up with – but we think it's an under estimate."
And a lot has changed since 2000, in both directions: Some countries, including in sub-Saharan Africa, have liberalized their laws; others, notably in Central America, have toughened their bans. Meanwhile, misoprostol, a pill which can induce a miscarriage identical to a spontaneous one, has become more widely distributed across the developing world. "There has been so much happening in the last decade," said Gerdts, who is now affiliated with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at University of California, San Francisco. "It's impossible that the number has stayed the same."
She eventually proposed a statistical model that would take into account what the researchers were getting at but not naming: Stigma. Specifically, women who were coming into hospitals seeking post-abortion care and would be reluctant to attribute the bleeding to a self-induced abortion because they feared social and criminal consequences. And, said Gerdts, "Doctors aren't going to record it because they're afraid of repercussions. Or maybe the woman hasn't even told her family she was pregnant or that she had induced abortion."
Gerdts and her colleagues canvassed 300 women treated for post-abortion or miscarriage care in that Tanzanian hospital, and found that only seven of them admitted they had induced abortion. But over 85 percent of these women said they were "unsure or unhappy" about their pregnancies, suggesting that not all of them had spontaneous miscarriages. And that's not even counting women like Halappanavar, who may have been eligible for what life-saving exceptions sometimes do exist on the books but who died out of physician reluctance to test the boundaries of the law.
If these women hemorrhaged to death or died of sepsis because they couldn't access a safe termination, few, if anyone, would have known that it was no ordinary miscarriage — or that it could have been prevented.

subset: commoncrawl


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The titular town is a human colony at the heart of an alien city on the planet Arieka, a trading post on a backwater notable for two things--lying at the very edge of known space, and the bizarre linguistics of its native inhabitants, colloquially known as Hosts. The Ariekene language--called simply Language, its own thing unlike all others--is not simply a collection of phonemes assembled into shapes and given meaning by consensus. To understand Language, Ariekei must hear it spoken by a sentient person who understands its meaning and imbues their speech with it--"Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen." This has two implications. One, the Ariekei can't conceive of any abstract concept unless there exists an embodiment of it somewhere on their world, and therefore they also cannot lie. Two, because Ariekei speak simultaneously from two mouths, a single human can't communicate with them, nor can two people speaking in tandem, because the singular intent isn't there.
Embassytown has thus adapted to both serve the Ariekei and position its staff as their sole alien interlocutors. For generations, it has been breeding Ambassadors--cloned pairs who are psychologically molded to think of themselves as a single person, and whose empathy is enhanced by technological means to enable them to speak to the Hosts. And, as the Ariekei become exposed to new concepts through their interactions with offworlders, they require physical manifestations of those concepts in order to speak them. This is one of the earliest experiences of our narrator, Avice Benner Cho, who as a girl is turned into a simile--the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her, an image of making do--by playing out that experience. Later in her life, Avice leaves Arieka to become an "immerser," one of the few who can crew spaceships through the subspace that makes interstellar travel possible. As Embassytown opens, however, she's been back for a while, at the behest of her offworlder, linguist husband Silce, from whom she is now estranged for reasons that Miéville spends much of the novel's first hundred pages explaining.
Embassytown is a smart, well-written novel that constructs its world, plot, and central concepts with impressive panache. But of all the many things it does well, perhaps the best is its recreation of the company outpost in outer space. The small town politics of such postings, the battles for supremacy between local authority and the government back home, the oligarchy of clerks and lifelong staffers who actually run the operation, the carefully stratified social structure--all are recreated on an alien planet. Embassytown resonates with its canonical, 19th and early 20th century antecedents, complete with swanky staff parties where everyone is trying to search out a juicy bit of gossip or political leverage, and long-held, impossibly baroque feuds in whose wake the bitter losers bide their time until they can stick the knife in and maybe even regain the upper hand--but all with good manners, and with half an eye on the canapé tray. (In addition to being quite funny, these references elicit the company outpost's associations of Empire, of corruption, and of course of exploitative colonialism, which the remainder of the novel both plays with and contravenes.) But Embassytown also makes sense within the futuristic, far-flung setting that Miéville has created--for example, the ingrained taboos against referring to paired Ambassadors as individuals rather than a single person or trying to tell them apart (which extend to cutesy, portmanteau names like CalVin or MagDa), and the deference that ordinary Embassytowners (called "commoners") like Avice feel towards them. Avice, who is both an insider and an outsider to this community, provides the perfect viewpoint on it. She's seen enough of the outside world to know how small Embassytown is and how parochial its habits and conventions are (and is therefore often perversely driven to defy them), but she's also a native, capable of understanding those habits and conventions in a way that Silce, or the new government representative Wyatt, can't.
It's Wyatt who sets the novel's events in motion when, as a power play against the local embassy staff, who have been parlaying their control over the Ambassadors into a power base and a possible bid for independence, he brings in his own, non-native Ambassador to Arieka. EzRa--a seemingly impossible pairing of two genetically different individuals rather than clones--defy Embassytown politesse by referring to themselves as distinct persons rather than a singular entity, but all seems to be going well until they speak to the Ariekei for the first time: "The Hosts were swaying as if they were at sea. One spasmed its giftwing and its fanwing, another kept them unnaturally still. One opened and closed its membranes several times in neurotic repetition." EzRa's connection, it transpires, is close enough to singularity that the Ariekei can understand them, but far enough from it that their essential separateness registers. The impossibility of this contradiction, that there-not-there unity, intoxicates the Hosts, and they transmit that addiction to others. Before long, Embassytown is surrounded by addicts, craving a drug that will eventually kill them, and willing to kill for their next fix. The colonists must trade poison for their survival, but when some Ariekei find way to escape their addiction and march on Embassytown intent on its destruction, the slaughter of all humans seems imminent.
For a novel that loads itself up with so much meaty material--the very concept of Language, the way that it shapes the Ariekei's habits of thought, the way that humans' thoughts are shaped by their own use of language, the thorny moral dilemma the Embassytowners find themselves in when the scope of the Ariekei's addiction becomes known, and, in flashback chapters that chart the reasons for Silce and Avice's breakup, the emergence of a fascination among Ariekei with lies, and of a group who try to train themselves to do so--Embassytown is a curiously weightless exercise. Not bad, but nowhere near as dramatic and impactful as these plot summaries suggest. Partly this is down to Avice, whose voice is too flat and too impersonal to give the novel emotional weight. Over the course of Embassytown Avice loses her husband, her lover, and her best friend, witnesses the collapse of her community, the breakdown of Ariekene civilization, the exposure of the lies that have underpinned Embassytown's way of life for generations, and seemingly endless amounts of death and carnage, and spends long stretches utterly convinced of her impending death. Some of this registers--in particular, the collapse of Ariekene society, right down to their infrastructure (the architecture and technology are all biological, and they become addicted along with the Ariekei), and the despair that sweeps through Embassytown and especially the Ambassadors when the full scope of the disaster becomes clear, are deeply horrifying--but not enough, and a lot of this emotional battery seems to bypass Avice, who keeps functioning for no apparent reason other than that Miéville needs her to.
Avice is a good viewpoint character--clever, observant, and as I've said, perfectly situated between thoughtless adherence to Embassytown customs and ignorance of them--but Miéville never really bothers to make a person out of her. It's never clear, for example, just why she works so hard to insinuate herself into the upper echelons of Embassytown's staff when the novel's events kick into gear. A self-described "floaker"--someone who does just enough to get by without becoming burdened with unwanted responsibility--Avice seems content, after returning to Embassytown, to live off her savings and accrued coolness points as a former immerser and someone who has been offworld. And yet when the plot gets rolling, she's constantly at the center of it, or trying to get there. Her efforts to find out the meaning of EzRa's effect on the Ariekei at the beginning of the novel, and to manage the situation when its full extent becomes clear, are only explainable if we think of her as Miéville's stand-in, someone who can witness or set in motions the events necessary to get the plot where it's going, but not a person in her own right. (There are, however, instances in which Avice's emotional flatness feels gratifying. Her marriage to Silce is matter-of-factly introduced to us as a sexless, but nevertheless affectionate, union; later in the novel she becomes sexually involved with another character, and though the relationship is obviously important to both of them, it is only mentioned as an aside. It's nice, especially for a novel with a female lead, that Miéville has managed to write sex and romance in a way that recognizes their importance without making them the crux of the story.)
Another possible reason that the stakes in Embassytown never seem as high as they ought to be is that Language never feels as believable, or as thought out, as Miéville and his characters insist it is. Miéville hangs a lantern on this early in the novel, when he has Silce exasperatedly exclaim
"Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?" he said. "Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don't have polysemy. Words don't signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There's not one mind behind Language when they speak it..."But raising the question only serves to draw attention to the fact that Embassytown can't come up with a persuasive answer. How can the Ariekei be sentient without symbolic language? How can they have created a vastly advanced, technological society with complex social customs when they have to struggle towards even the simplest of abstract concepts? It doesn't help that in constructing Language Miéville piles one implausibility on top of another with only the most tenuous connections between them: not only the double mouth, but the seemingly psychic ability to detect whether a speaker is sentient or not, whether they understand Language or are simply mimicking its sounds (Miéville compounds this by deciding, in order to make the plot work later in the book, that Ariekei can understand recorded speech, so long as it was originally spoken by a person who knows Language), and on top of all this, the inability to lie or express oneself symbolically, to see words as more than their referents. I'm not sufficiently versed in the philosophy of language to say whether these attributes naturally flow from one another, or whether there's even a persuasive argument that they should, but building that argument feels like something the novel ought to have done.
In his review of Embassytown at the London Review of Books, Sam Thompson argues that this isn't the novel's concern: "like H.G. Wells in The Invisible Man or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Miéville takes an impossible proposition and works through its implications with rigour." But that isn't actually an accurate description of the novel. Rather than working through Language's implications, Miéville's preoccupation is with the way that humans change it--the Ariekei's fascination with lies, which extends to festivals in which they compete to see who can come closest to uttering a non-truth (one Ambassador describes this to Avice as "an extreme sport"), and later on, the way that EzRa corrupts it. Language itself, and its implications, are obscured by these effects, where a less event-laden novel might have developed them into a more believable--and thus more engaging--central concept. (In contrast, the reason that The City & The City worked for me despite having an equally implausible premise is that that novel was dedicated to rigorously working through its premise.)
But the main reason, I think, for Embassytown's centerlessness is that, like the repeated scenes in which wannabe liar Ariekei struggle to stretch similes into something broader and less literal, reading the novel is an exercise in recognition and contrast--of the novels, the touchstones of SF, that Miéville is echoing and recalling, and of the ways in which he diverges from their tropes. Embassytown is like Mary Gentle's duology Golden Witchbreed and Ancient Light, another story of well-meaning human colonists who royally fuck things up, but its aliens are less differentiated, and their personalities less vivid. It's like the work of Ursula K. Le Guin (whose The Left Hand of Darkness also feels like the inspiration for Golden Witchbreed) in that it looks at a supposedly soft science like linguistics through SFnal glasses, but unlike Darkness, human interference on Arieka disrupts its society rather than being subsumed into the planet's existing political matrix. The novel's middle segments, in which social roles and conventions break down under the stress of the colony's peril, feel like a siege novel along the lines of J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (which is itself both a comment and a complication of siege novels published in the immediate wake of the Indian Rebellion in the mid-19th century), but here the besiegers are unambiguously the victims, and the besieged clearly complicit in their predicament and morally compromised by their attempts to survive it. In the religious fervor that Silce develops towards the Ariekei, and his conviction that those among them who are learning to lie are agents of evil, Embassytown is like A Case of Conscience, but reversed--here the aliens are angels, not devils, and humans are the serpent offering forbidden knowledge. At no point does Miéville resort to outright cribbing--recognition, here, is always mingled with contrast--but these moments are jarring nevertheless. I found myself constantly thinking of what Embassytown was like, rather than what it was.
It's hard to know how much of this recognition is a product of deliberate references by Miéville (though the siege novel reference feels quite deliberate given how much Embassytown is made to resemble a colonial outpost), and how much the result of Embassytown's being, as I've said, a very Old School novel treading on familiar ground. Nevertheless, the effect is that Embassytown often feels more like a virtuoso mimicry and recombination of familiar tropes than a thing in its own right. Which may be intentional. The process of storying, of altering and repurposing story, and of recognizing one story in another, is something that Embassytown is very concerned with. It's what Avice is doing--what she admits to doing on more than one occasion--in her own narrative (when she explains her plan to save the day to another character but conceals it from us, she justifies doing so by saying that "Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you"). It's what she resents another simile for when he tells the story of what he had to endure at the hands of the Ariekei--"I hated that when he took his own turn, described terrible things done to enLanguage him, Hasser, who had been opened and closed again, modulated his voice and timed his delivery and turned it, true as it was, into a story." During the siege, the humans rifle through their cultural archives and find what is clearly recognizable, even through Avice's garbled description, as Dawn of the Dead, into which they pour their own meaning--"We read the story as ours, of course." Turning uninflected truth into story, and one story into another, is an artifact of our ability to use symbolic language, metaphor, and imagery, of the "slippage between word and referent" that Language lacks. At the end of the novel, when the Ariekei discover this space, one of them tells the others a story of how that change came about and what it means, and through that telling, makes the story--and the vision for the future couched in it--true.
But perhaps the most important comment on story, storying, and the way that they can affect and shape reality comes relatively early in the novel, when Avice visits Wyatt shortly after EzRa's first, disastrous meeting with the Ariekei, and wonders if the Embassy hasn't committed a disastrous faux pas.
"This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact." He laughed and shook his head. "Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur'asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I've ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult's intended, and when it's a misunderstanding."What's interesting here isn't that Wyatt is right, which of course he is, but that even as he's making this thoroughly logical, persuasive argument, we know that he's wrong. Not because of anything that's happened, or even because of Avice's dubiousness of his assurances, but because we know what kind of story we're reading. The setup is too blatant, too calculated to recall Empire and its excesses. The references to the Fall and the temptation of knowledge overlaid on this setup only cement our conviction that the humans are going to damage the Ariekei horribly. That awareness, of the inevitability of a catastrophic fuckup, of some insurmountable cultural difference that is going to lead to disaster, permeates Embassytown. It has the effect of leeching it of much of its tension (Avice, for example, takes nearly half the novel to figure out what EzRa's effect on the Ariekei is, but anyone who is a little genre aware will have figured it out after their first or second meeting). But it also has the very strange effect of obscuring, or maybe dampening, the fact that this isn't what ends up happening at all.
Miéville is known for playing with genre expectations--the ending of Perdido Street Station famously relies on both the readers and the main character having imposed a fairy tale narrative on another character, only to discover a gruesome, un-fairy tale-ish truth--and in Embassytown he seems to be playing with the gruesome, tragic expectations of all the novels that this novel recalls. Human presence on Arieka does have a disastrous effect on its inhabitants, cultural contamination does occur, a horrible misunderstanding does send humans and aliens to the very brink of annihilation, Adam and Eve do eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But this disaster turns out to be survivable, maybe even, ultimately, a good thing. Ariekene society is irretrievably altered, the Ariekei learn to speak lies and will never be the same, but this opens their minds to new possibilities, and lays those possibilities before humans as well. The novel ends on a note not merely of hope, but of staunch belief in the bright future and humans and Ariekei are going to build together, now that they've left the Garden of Eden.
Along with the mindbending concept of Language, this hopeful confounding of our expectations is where Embassytown is most its own creation, rather than a repurposing of known tropes. But like Language, it doesn't quite work. Perhaps because Miéville has, somewhat manipulatively, constructed his premise so that the eradication of Language, of the Ariekei's unique cultural heritage, by alien interlopers is ultimately held up as a good thing. Or because the means by which Language is done away with stretch that already implausible concept well past its breaking point, suggesting that an entire species can be taught to think symbolically in a matter of months. Or simply because I'm a cynic, and more likely to accept corrupted fairy tales than averted tragedies. Whatever the reason, the result is a novel that never quite manages to overcome its referents. Embassytown is a smart, engaging novel and a fine read. There's no part of it, aside perhaps from a slow beginning and a dull narrator, that even comes close to being badly done. But when all's said and done, it feels like less than the sum of its parts.
For the last few days I've been engaged in a very frustrating conversation over at The Millions, where Kim Wright has followed up her article Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting Into Genre? with The Genre Games. In both pieces, Wright tries to address her frustration at a publishing industry that seems to arbitrarily impose genre labels on books for pure marketing reasons--an understandable frustration, and something that authors might reasonably be concerned about--by arguing that genre doesn't actually exist. I've tried, again and again, to protest that this is a dismissive approach that, in the name of so-called inclusiveness, effaces entire literary traditions, but so far I've met with little success. Embassytown was the perfect accompaniment to this discussion. On the one hand, it's a reminder, if one was needed, of the unique perspective that the science fiction genre offers authors and readers, and of the richness of the tradition that Wright dismisses, and that Miéville so joyfully revels is. But on the other hand, it's a reminder of the danger of reveling in that tradition too much. Embassytown is Golden Age, Old School SF. It's Big Idea SF. It's social SF. It's a smart and thought-provoking novel, but it doesn't quite work. There's too much mimicry here, too much recalling of earlier work, not enough emphasis on developing new ideas. The avant garde, as it turns out, can't come full circle. That doesn't mean that Embassytown isn't worth a read, but in a way, maybe I like it better for what it signifies than for what it is.


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From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
If you have up to 25 employees, pay average annual wages below $50,000, and provide health insurance, you may qualify for a small business tax credit of up to 35% (up to 25% for non-profits) to offset the cost of your insurance. This will bring down the cost of providing insurance.
In order to take advantage of these tax credits, you must file by a certain date. Here are two important tax filing deadlines in coming weeks that you should be aware of:
- September 15. Corporations that file on a calendar year basis and requested an extension to file to September 15 can calculate the small employer health care credit on Form 8941 and claim it as part of the general business credit on Form 3800, which they would include with their corporate income tax return.
Important tips:
- October 17. Sole proprietors who file Form 1040 and partners and S-corporation shareholders who report their income on Form 1040 have until October 17 to complete their returns. They would also use Form 8941 to calculate the small employer health care credit and claim it as a general business credit on Form 3800, reflected on line 53 of Form 1040.
- Even if you've already filed your 2010 taxes, you can still claim the credit. Just file an amended 2010 return.
- Even if you don't have tax liability this year, you can still benefit, since eligible small businesses can carry back the tax credit five years. (It used to be that you could carry back general business credits like this just one year.)
- Businesses that couldn't use the credit in 2010 can claim it in future years.


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What's for dinner tonight?-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm having the midnight special at the Olympus Diner. Lamp chops with baked potato, soup and salad. Us old guys get discounts.Next Thursday I'm having Evelyn Kenney's corned beef & cabbage with a side of Mama Mia's meatballs.S.
I'll take either LaBonte in the Nascar race. LOL
SMD's - Mickey & Snewser on Chatter and Knowsalittle on RFF
have a message for everyone, from Mickey. Oh, and I can confirm what she says about Brady.Quote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------HI everyone..I have some conflicting evidence that it is possible my next 2 boots that I listed are incorrect. Now if Meatball Mia is not going in episode 3 and the cute girl is to be voted out I can assure you that Julie is not her, she just misses the merge. Jalynne can confirm that I had posted Brady then deleted it, and as seen in episode 2 he is a big threat .So take my advice and make your picks based on what you see and what you choose to go with. Either way, it's been fun.Hope to see you all very soon!MK PS: The answer to the fake Mickey Nocks is: John K and Mia. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Seattle Seahawks (1997–2000)
Jon K. Kitna (born September 21, 1972 in Tacoma, Washington) is an American football quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League. He was signed by the Seattle Seahawks as an undrafted free agent in 1996. He played college football at Central Washington.
Kitna has also played for the Cincinnati Bengals and Detroit Lions.


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Thanks WalkingPneumonia!Question: Why are Jet/Cord running to the finish line at 1.08pm and Daniel/Jordan at the club at 1.11pm?
I have surmised that most of those times are one hour off. If you subtract an hour, leaving the few that don't seem to fit, they will all fit together.For example, Dan & Jordan doing the memory challenge should be 12:11 not 13:11.
Hmm, so Jet and Cord really won but they edited it to show otherwise?
So much for that. Who said Brent could not do the Roadblock? Or that after he did it Caite would also have to climb the tower. And we had a spoiler who claimed that both Caite and Brent climbed Coit Tower. False. If there is a rule that says that Roadblocks have to be done equally by the team members, I would like some one to quote chapter and verse (not on spec.) And if there is a fast and true rule that RBs have to be done equally, then rules can be broken just as the rule about you must be 21 to compete was waived so that Caite could participate. Special rules for this team? Dam. cost me points!
Caite has said in an interview that they could do 6-6 or 7-5.
Caite has said in an interview that they could do 6-6 or 7-5.
Quote from: georgiapeach on May 15, 2010, 09:02:32 PMCaite has said in an interview that they could do 6-6 or 7-5. I'm starting to think the puzzle Roadblock didn't count for the limit because they didn't have a choice of which racer would perform it
I haven't been on this thread for over a week, so I have no idea of whether someone has already posted this. If so, forgive me in advance. I want all those who say that the ROADBLOCKs have to be evenly split or the ROADBLOCK count cannot go above 6 in a 12 leg season to note that Brent performed 7 ROADBLOCKS in AR!6.
I dont want to start rumor or conspiracy but something doesnt look right in the last leg of the Amazing Race 16. The problem is in the United flight from Shanghai to San Francisco. There is no way, the brothers can talked a flight attendants to allow them to be in business class (not first class as commented by the winners). I fly United all the time between San Francisco and Shanghai the plane is the Boeing 777. The first class seats are lay flat 180 degrees version and they were not those in the show. They were clearly in the business class section. I was on the same flight they were on. I am a high level United mileage member and I was on standby for an upgrade from economy to business (which I did not get). The only way United would hold 3 business class seats without putting revenue customers in them is someone buying the business class tickets (3 of them since the camera man also went up to business class section). United never leave the business seats empty when there are revenue customers and upgrade standby customers. The brothers were not an upgrade since the they moved from economy to business right before the landing during final approach into San Francisco. All of the other team members are up when they moved so they did not sneak into business class while they were asleep. The ability to exit the plane first is what gave them the lead and ultimately won the race. So did CBS purchased the business class tickets?
Airport -> Coit Tower -> Letterman -> Tonga -> Trunk Place -> Candlestick Park seems to be the likely order. If they throw in a memory task, it should be at Hunter's Point (which is adjacent to Candlestick Park).Do we know when the flight from Shanghai landed? We could then trace the teams' movement from there.EDIT: Airport -> Letterman -> Tonga -> Coit Tower -> Trunk Place -> Candlestick Park now seems more likely.
In season 7 Deana and I worked on a flight attendant for much of the early part of a flight, complimenting her and flirting as well. We then made up a bogus issue about our tv not working properly and used that in our argument to get moved up to first class. This was a long transcontinental flight from South America to South Africa. Although we did not mention the Race or a million dollars, they had to take note when we told them our camera and sound man had to be provided seats as well or we couldnt make that move. Once the camera crew started filming us enjoying the benefits of traveling in first class, the flight crew realized something of significance was happening. The co-pilot came out and we struck up a conversation with him - still not telling him why we were traveling with a camera crew. He agreed to lead us out of the plane first, before ANY passengers, and he walked us down as we opened and read our next clue. It involved a Fast Forward and he was able to give us directions to get there first. We won two vehicles on that leg by accomplishing the fast forward (crossing cooling towers) first. Our negotiations got us great food and comfort on that flight, and an invaluable contact that gave us his cell phone number, and even agreed to meet us in the middle of the next night so we could follow him to our next roadblock. Finally I called him on the way to the airport from that roadblock, and even had him book our next tickets for us while we were on the road. I am still in touch with this co-pilot today! This was an agressive but effective move that paid off hugely for us. We did it all within the restrictions of our race.
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Have you ever noticed that the most exciting inventions and breakthrough discoveries are sometimes stumbled upon purely by accident? From medical research, to science and technology right on down to recipes, some of our biggest boo boos can be and have been turned into "Eureka!" moments. For example, the discoveries of penicillin, quinine, the smallpox vaccine and even x-rays were all the happened upon by accident. Indispensable innovations like the microwave, the pacemaker, the computer mouse and even Post-Its were invented by chance.
So then, what about serendipity in the kitchen? Many of you may be familiar with the story of Ruth Wakefield, the inventor of the original chocolate chip cookie. In the 1930s, Ruth and her husband owned the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. One evening in 1937, she was making butter cookies for her guests and thought she would make them all chocolate instead. She cut a bar of chocolate into tiny pieces and added them to the cookie dough, thinking that the chocolate would melt completely, giving her chocolate butter cookies. When the cookies came out of the oven, the chocolate hadn't melted at all! Instead, the "chocolate chips" had kept their form. Thus, the Toll House chocolate chip cookie was born and went on to become the most popular and well-known cookie of all time!
I've certainly had my share of culinary flops that I was able to transform into some pretty terrific recipes. This decadent and devastatingly delicious Pumpkin Cheese Pie with Toffee and Caramel Swirl is a perfect example. Let me tell you how it came to be.
It all started with some very disappointing sugar cookies that I made last week. They were the refrigerator kind that come ready to bake (not Pillsbury). Mini SGCC sneaked them into my cart at the supermarket and I never even noticed them until I got home. Since I had them, I decided to pop them in the oven for a quick snack. They were awful! The cookies spread into flat, sugary pancakes that all ran into each other. They also had a very artificial vanilla taste. Not good at all. I hated to just throw them away, so I stuck them in a zip lock bag, figuring that I might be able to use them for something later.
A few days later, I made pumpkin muffins for my Tuesdays with Dorie assignment. I ended up with some leftover pumpkin puree, which I also saved for another use.
Still later, I was twirling some ideas around in my head for what to make for October's edition of Sugar High Friday. The very appropriate theme for this month is "Spices", and is being hosted by the very talented and creative Anita from Dessert First.
I decided to mix my leftover pumpkin with cream cheese, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to make a pie. I already had the ingredients needed for the filling, so all I needed to do was figure out what to use for my crust. That was when I had my "Eureka!" moment. The sugar cookies! It was brilliant!
I tossed those cookies into the food processor with a touch more cinnamon and pulverized them into crumbs. Then, I mixed in some melted butter and voila! Pie crust!
To take the pie up a notch, I mixed some toffee bits that were hanging around into the filling and swirled globs of dulce de leche all through it. To make it a little prettier, I also spread a layer of dulce de leche on top of the pie and piped little dulce de leche blobs all around the perimeter.
Let me tell you, this pie was To. Die. For! Really, it was amazing! The filling was oh, so rich and creamy, with gorgeous, thick caramel ribbons running through it. The toffee bits added a just a little bit of crunch. And the crust? Well, the crust worked out beautifully. It tasted great, yet it didn't interfere with the other flavors in the pie. You could certainly use any kind of cookie crumbs you like. If I hadn't had the sugar cookies, I probably would have tried this with ginger snaps.
As I contemplated my accidental triumph, I was reminded of the old adage, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Well, when life give you crappy sugar cookies, make pie crust!
Pumpkin Cheese Pie with Toffee and Caramel Swirl (aka Serendipity Pie) (Printable Recipe)
For the crust:
2 cups sugar cookie crumbs (pulverize 6-8 large sugar cookies in the food processor)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
In a medium bowl, mix cookie crumbs, cinnamon and melted butter until well blended. Press mixture into an 8 or 9 inch pie plate.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 10 minutes. Cool.
For the filling:
2 8-ounce packages of cream cheese, softened
2/3 cup sugar ( Use more or less according to your taste)
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 cup toffee bits
2 cups dulce de leche or caramel sauce of your choice, divided. (You may have to soften the dulce de leche to make it "swirlable". I microwaved mine on 50% power for about 10-15 seconds.)
Beat cream cheese and sugar together on medium speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add pumpkin, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg and beat until completely combined.
Mix in the toffee bits and swirl in 1 cup of the dulce de leche or caramel sauce.
Pour the filling into the pie plate and smooth it out. Refrigerate until firm, about 4 hours.
Spread the second cup of dulce de leche or caramel sauce evenly over the top of the pie.
If desired, use another 1/2 cup of dulce de leche to pipe rosettes or other design on top of the pie.
Chill until the topping is firm.


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How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker
The newspaper that rules Britain
On Thursday, January 19th, the front page of the Daily Mail carried a story about Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. During Goodwin's tenure, from 2000 to 2008, R.B.S. quadrupled its assets, became the fifth-largest bank in the world, and then failed spectacularly, at a cost to British taxpayers of seventy billion dollars. The Mail illustrated the piece with a large photograph of Goodwin. He was dressed in hunting gear, with a shotgun hanging over the crook of his left elbow. "Reviled: Sir Fred Goodwin," the caption read. Any further doubt about the Mail's stance was relieved by the headline: "STRIP FRED 'THE SHRED' OF TAINTED KNIGHTHOOD DEMAND MPS." The exclusive story, the latest in a series of unflattering pieces about Goodwin, revealed that Prime Minister David Cameron was "sympathetic" to the idea that the honor should be revoked. Two weeks later, Goodwin became the only Knight Bachelor in memory to lose his commission without having been censured by a professional body or convicted of a criminal offense. "Fred Goodwin joined the ranks of Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu last night when his knighthood was removed by order of the Queen," the Mail announced.
The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail's closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, "The paper's defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs." Nor is the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its traffic.
The Mail presents itself as the defender of traditional British values, the voice of an overlooked majority whose opinions inconvenience the agendas of metropolitan élites. To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. ("WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD," a recent headline warned.) A Briton's view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters. In 2010, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with "The Daily Mail Song," which, so far, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. "Bring back capital punishment for pedophiles / Photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles / Binge Britain! Single Mums! / Pensioners! Hoodie Scum!" Dan sings. "It's absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail." The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others' ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers.
In 2000, Tony Blair wrote a memo to his advisers (it later leaked) in which he pinpointed some "touchstone issues" that he wanted to address immediately. They were: the family ("we need two or three eye-catching initiatives that are entirely conventional in terms of their attitude"); asylum ("where we are perceived as soft"); crime; defense; and the case of Tony Martin, a fruit farmer from the Norfolk village of Emneth Hungate, who had been sentenced to life in prison after killing a burglar on his property. Blair feared, he wrote, that he was perceived as being out of touch with "gut British instincts." That morning, the Mail had run an editorial lambasting him as "the worst offender in the new politics of intolerance," in which a citizen who expressed unfashionable views was branded as a "xenophobic little Englander." The paper had enumerated five areas of concern. As it happened, they mirrored almost precisely the quintet, including the fruit farmer, that Blair had suddenly become so eager to deal with.
Fred Goodwin, a married father of two, was an especially tasty mark for the Mail. He had demonstrated personal frailty as well as professional incompetence, by conducting an affair with a colleague as R.B.S. collapsed. In the Mail's cosmology, men are giants or pygmies, strong or weak. (Women are assessed by other metrics.) Such is the Mail's censoriousness that British Esquire recently deemed it the nation's "purse-lipped mother-in-law." After the affair, Goodwin obtained from the High Court a gag order that forbade the British media from reporting it. This rankled the Mail, which flouted the injunction without technically violating the law. If its competitors lob spitballs at their bugbears, the Mail strafes them with righteousness.
The Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, considers it a compliment when critics accuse the paper of moralizing. "The family is the greatest institution on God's green earth," he told me recently, sitting on a dotted-swiss sofa in his London office, which is swagged in the camels and burgundys, the brasses and woods, that one would expect of a man who, as a student at the University of Leeds, chanted "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" but now says, "For the life of me, I'm not quite sure why." According to one editor, Dacre is enamored with New Zealand: "He thinks it's like Britain from the nineteen-fifties." This retrograde mind-set has recently been notable in the Mail's insistence that marriage should be solely between a woman and a man.
The paper, which runs to about a hundred pages a day, is not all gloom. It has an equable rhythm. The serious stuff is supplemented by a beguiling lineup of novelty stories (the girl who eats nothing but chicken nuggets), animal stories (the surfing hippopotamus), personal essays ("I married a skinflint!"), barely disguised press releases (cranberry-cheese-flavored crisps on sale at Tesco), recipes, gossip, crosswords, obituaries, amusing pictures, and heartwarming fluff. The Mail is the place to go if you want to see a house that looks like Hitler, or a tabby with its head encased in a slice of bread. These are, as the former Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen, one of Dacre's heroes, once wrote, the "human twiddly bits that make for conversations in the pubs."
The Mail has an oral quality, prompting the exclamations of wonder or disgust that attend what the media critic Roy Greenslade has called "Hey, Doris!" stories. Its quirks include a love of aviation, and the annoying habit of inserting real-estate prices into stories that have nothing to do with them, such as the death in a ski-resort accident of a boy whose parents "live in a £1 million house." Its columnists range from sensible to unhinged. (One, Liz Jones, recently wrote about stealing her husband's sperm in an attempt to have a child without his permission, earning her the nickname Jizz Loans.) Some of the paper's greatest interest arises when Doris hollers back. Harry Simpson, of Northwich, Cheshire, wrote recently:
I'm sick of Melvyn Bragg, Hugh Grant, Joan Bakewell, and Anne Robinson. I'm sick of Vince Cable, the entire Labour Shadow Cabinet, and all the politicians.
I'm sick of squatters and travellers, pop music, the BBC, surveillance cameras, my rotten pension, terrorists, Anglican bishops, and having no money, and I just want to die.
My country, which I loved is ruined. It will never be happy again. It is all self, self, self, moan, moan, moan. I cannot wait to get out and rest in peace.
He had forgotten wind turbines and E.U. bureaucrats.
Last week, the Mail swept the British Press Awards, winning nine, including Newspaper of the Year and Website of the Year. The Mail's competitive advantage lies in its connection to its readers. "There's a lot of rubbish talked about what people are interested in," Dacre told me. "When my executives tell me everyone's fascinated by a particular subject—say, a pop star or a film—I ask myself, 'Would my family be interested?' Eight times out of ten, I instinctively know when the answer is no."
Dacre is a divining rod for stories, detecting journalistic gold on ground that others have bypassed or hurried over. Simon Kelner, a former editor of the Independent and the chief executive of the Journalism Foundation, said, "What the Mail does so well is to shamelessly borrow from other media. Even if a story has been somewhere else, you'll find it the next day in the Mail, done bigger, very often done better, with a real sense they have that the people who read the Mail only read the Mail." A reporter on a rival paper told me, "Dacre has this sense for what's really going to get the average punter wound up."
As the British press faces the heat of the phone-hacking scandal, which has most heavily involved Rupert Murdoch's News International group, the Mail has not withered. The arrests of dozens of journalists, for illegally accessing the voice-mail messages of more than eight hundred victims, led Murdoch, in July, to close the News of the World, and resulted in the resignation of Cameron's press secretary Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor. Rebekah Brooks, who ran News International for Murdoch, has been arrested twice.
Because the Mail has not been implicated in phone hacking, Dacre, the longest-serving editor on Fleet Street, has emerged as the person best able, and most willing, to articulate an uncowed defense of popular newspapers. (He also holds the executive role of editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, a group that includes the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, Mail Online, and Metro, a free newspaper.) Called to testify at the ongoing Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press, he was unflinching, bordering on truculent. Recently, his colleagues were amused to see a framed cartoon go up on his office wall. It features a lone figure flying through the window of Lord Justice Leveson's courtroom. He wears a red-and-blue unitard and carries a banner that reads "Press Freedom."
Two lawyers below ask, "Is it a bird?" "Is it a plane?"
A third answers, "No, it's Dacreman!"
In January, Gary Dobson and David Norris, two white men, were convicted in the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teen-ager who was attacked by a racist gang in 1993. The case had been re-opened largely on the strength of a long-running campaign by the Mail, which, in 1997, took the gamble of putting the men's photographs on its front page, under the headline "MURDERERS," and declared, "The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us." When the verdict was announced, Dacre, who rarely speaks in public, issued a twelve-minute video speech, saying that it was a "glorious day for British newspapers." Many of Dacre's peers found the video to be over the top, but its point was clear: the Mail would not be joining the British press in its collective self-flagellation.
Mail Online, with its parade of celebrities in their bathing suits, gained six million viewers between December and January alone. American traffic was up sixty-two per cent last year. Its home page has become furtively prevalent in Manhattan cubicles. In January, when Mail Online surpassed the Times, a spokeswoman for the latter said, "A quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set." The Mail's contention is that American newspapers have become too effete to prosper. Its ambitions transcend Pulitzers. "They're not in our competitive set, to be honest," Martin Clarke, the editor of Mail Online, said when I asked him about the Times. "I did think they were spectacularly sore losers, but I could not care less if we overtake the Times. What matters to me is: Are we bigger than MSN? Are we bigger than Yahoo?"
The first issue of the Daily Mail appeared on May 4, 1896. At a halfpenny per copy, it was designed to attract the newly literate masses, whose education had been insured by the Education Act of 1870—"the £1000 a year men." Lord Salisbury, the former Prime Minister, sneered that it was written "by office-boys for office-boys," but the first edition sold 397,215 copies, far exceeding the expectations of its proprietor, Alfred Harmsworth. He wrote, "It is essentially the busy man's paper."
Harmsworth, the son of a creative but ineffectual Irish barrister, had decided to become a journalist after leaving school at sixteen. His first success was a light magazine called Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject Under the Sun, which engaged such questions as how long a severed head could remain conscious after a decapitation. As Answers took off, Harmsworth brought in his brother Harold to run the financial side. Answers thrived in part owing to Alfred Harmsworth's genius for promotion. In 1889, he hit upon a scheme he called A Pound a Week for Life!, which assured a perpetual income to the person who came closest to guessing the amount of gold in the Bank of England. The magazine received 718,218 postcard entries. The winner, a surveyor from Southampton, was able to marry on his prize.
With the launch of the Mail, Harmsworth became a political force. During the Boer War, he used the paper to cheer on the imperialist project of Cecil Rhodes. Soon, the Mail's circulation had risen above a million, making it the largest in the world. By 1903, Alfred and his brothers Harold and Leicester owned the Mail, the Evening News, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Record. Harmsworth, who received a baronetcy in 1904 (he joked that he'd gone from "Mr. 'Armsworth to Sir Halfred") and became Lord Northcliffe in 1905, browbeat public opinion without compunction. "See if I don't force everybody in the country to eat Standard Bread," he is said to have boasted, after reading a pamphlet on the dangers of white bread. (It was written by a landowner from Staffordshire named Sir Oswald Mosley.)
By 1914, Northcliffe owned one out of every two papers read in London. Two years later, he helped to bring down Herbert Asquith's government. The Mail, a bellicose presence during the First World War, became known as "the soldier's friend." When Northcliffe died, of a heart condition, in 1922, his brother Harold—by then Lord Rothermere—inherited the paper. As the decade wore on, Rothermere became increasingly reactionary. In 1934, the Mail promoted the ideas of another Mosley—Oswald's namesake grandson. This time, it was the British Union of Fascists, not bread, as the Mail published a now infamous editorial entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts." Throughout the thirties, Rothermere, who supported appeasement, maintained a close relationship with Hitler. His papers reflected the admiration that he expressed in an October, 1938, telegram:
When the Second World War began, the Mail changed its course, writing on September 4, 1939, "We now fight against the blackest tyranny that has ever held men in bondage," but its credibility was damaged.
The Mail languished until the nineteen-seventies, when Vere Harmsworth, the third Viscount Rothermere, brought in David English as its editor. In 1971, they relaunched the paper as a tabloid. It was younger, brighter, and explicitly targeted toward a female readership. ("Every woman needs her Daily Mail.") Today, the Daily Mail and General Trust, which owns the Mail, is controlled by the fourth Viscount Rothermere, Jonathan, a graduate of Gordonstoun and Duke. Associated Newspapers made a hundred and eighteen million dollars last year, but the Mail is still very much a family business. (According to "Lords of Fleet Street," by Richard Bourne, the Mail for many years did not review James Bond novels, because Ian Fleming had an affair with the wife of the second Viscount Rothermere.) In 1992, Rupert Murdoch offered Dacre the editorship of the London Times. He agonized over the offer but turned it down, because of his loyalty to the Rothermeres. He has said, "I am deeply aware of the privilege of working for a company run by a family that believes in letting editors edit."
Each weekday, Dacre presides over a series of meetings in which his editors pitch stories for the next day's paper. The meetings take place in his office, in the Mail's headquarters, at Northcliffe House, in Kensington. Northcliffe House is built around a central atrium, with glass-walled elevators and corporate vegetation—it could be a hotel in Hong Kong—but Dacre's realm is clad in white wood panelling. He sits at a boat of a desk, in front of a gilt-framed seascape. Editors take their positions on chairs and couches, or stand against the walls, according to their seniority. Men wear suits, ties, and black lace-ups, in imitation of their boss. Women preferably wear skirts. The news editor sits closest to Dacre, a man of both prim and volcanic temperament, at the risk of attracting his fury. "It's like a ducking stool," a former Mail editor said. Because Dacre tends to refer to underlings as "cunts," the daily meetings are known as the Vagina Monologues.
On February 22nd, just after noon, a secretary announced over an intercom that a "pre-pre-conference" was about to begin. Editors scurried into Dacre's office. He was annoyed that his night staff had not got much coverage of the previous evening's Brit Awards—the U.K.'s Grammys—into the morning's paper. "Unacceptable," he said. Adele had given the middle finger to the audience after the show's organizers cut off her acceptance speech. Dacre, channelling the average punter, thought it a good subject. "It's the arrogance of celebrity, isn't it?" he said.
The debate was smart and fast. The surety with which Dacre and his editors moved gave the meeting the feeling of a tribunal, in which the heroes and the villains of each day's news cycle would be made to answer for their actions. There can be a certain J. Edgar Hooverishness to the Mail's surveillance of the scene. Dacre could never stand Tony Blair, in part, the Guardian reported, because he had been horrified to see Cherie Blair breast-feeding in public. In 2007, the socialite Sabrina Guinness sought the aid of the Press Complaints Commission with regard to an article in the Mail that had implied that she was in a relationship with Paul McCartney. The commission's records state, "The complaint was resolved when the newspaper placed a note on its internal files making clear the complainant's position that she was not romantically involved with Sir Paul."
At one point, the editor of Femail, the paper's section for women, mentioned that she was seeking a piece from Ulrika Jonsson, a British television presenter, on why she'd got so horribly thin. "And what is her explanation?" Dacre intoned, with the lethal diction of a prefect.
One of Dacre's contributing editors proposed a review of the red-carpet fashion from the Brit Awards, which he approved. "Why don't we just keep it to the 'misses,' " he said. "They looked awfully tarty to me, but what do I know?" He was especially interested in One Direction, a previously clean-cut post-pubescent group that had celebrated its win for Best British Single by downing numerous bottles of champagne in full view of the cameras.
"We've got to do this boy band, don't we?" he said. "After all, all boy bands come and go. Are we going to have an idiot's guide to this one?"
No one had any ideas.
"But I repeat," he said, crossing his arms over his chest. "Is it worth doing this boy group?" (It was.)
Dacre O.K.'d a piece on outlet shopping ("Do it. Don't rush it," he said), and another on London Fashion Week ("I think we need a lot of slightly raised-eyebrow analysis"). He wasn't interested in a new statistic that said that the number of children in the U.K. who smoked had hit a million—too obvious—but he wanted to go big on coverage of the Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, who had been killed in Syria that morning. He had in mind a great, passionately done piece, he said, that was a mixture of profile, remembrance, and—perhaps remembering Leveson—polemic on how the press gets a bad press.
Jon Steafel, the paper's executive editor, brought up the story of a gang of men who had allegedly plied five young women with alcohol and raped them. The case, one of a spate of "sex grooming" incidents, was being tried in Liverpool.
"Why is this case more shocking than the others?" Dacre asked.
"Scale. Sheer scale," Steafel answered.
"Shocking phenomenon," Dacre said.
Another editor chimed in. "What's shocking is that a thirteen-year-old got pregnant," she said. "Grotesque."
"Let's get on it, then," Dacre said.
In 2004, Dacre appeared on "Desert Island Discs," the BBC Radio program in which "castaways" tell the story of their life through songs. His first selection was "Night Train," by the Oscar Peterson trio. "This seems to sum up newspapers—repetitive, metallic, coming out every day, remorseless energy," he said. The song sounded like a Mondrian in Dacre's rendering. When the show's host asked how he thought his colleagues would characterize him, he said, "I think they'd say, 'He's a hard bastard, but he leads from the front.' " The host pressed him about his management style, but he was unapologetic. "Shouting creates energy, energy creates great headlines," he said.
Dacre was born in London in 1948. His father, Peter, an orphan who had made his way from Yorkshire to Fleet Street, worked as a show-biz editor for the Sunday Express. His mother, Joan, a teacher, bore five sons, of whom Paul was the eldest. The family lived in Arnos Grove, a middle-class area just north of the city. Dacre still thinks of his childhood neighborhood as the spiritual habitat of his archetypal reader: "Its inhabitants were frugal, reticent, utterly self-reliant, and immensely aspirational. They were also suspicious of progressive values, vulgarity of any kind, self-indulgence, pretentiousness, and people who know best." Friday nights, Dacre would rush to grab the carbon-copy black out of his father's briefcase. The ticking of a telex machine lulled him to sleep.
"From virtually the moment I was born, I wanted to be an editor," Dacre told the Society of Editors in 2008. "Not just wanted, if I'm being honest. Hungered. Lusted with a passion that while unfulfilled, would gnaw at my entrails." He won a scholarship to a private school, where he edited the campus magazine. One of the first issues, an "achingly dull" examination of the preacher Billy Graham, who was touring Britain at the time, "went down like a sodden hot cross bun." The next month, he sneaked some expletives into the magazine. He realized, he said, that "sensation sells."
Dacre studied English at Leeds, where he met his wife, Kathleen, a professor of theatre studies. (The couple sent their two sons to Eton. One of them is a businessman and the other is James Dacre, a theatre director who, in 2009, premièred Katori Hall's Olivier Award-winning play, "The Mountaintop," in London.) At Leeds, Dacre edited the Union News. He took a paper, he has said, that looked like "the Times on Prozac" and infused it with tabloid excitement in the form of pinups whom he dubbed the "Leeds Lovelies." Under Dacre's editorship, the paper supported campus sit-ins. When, on the ground of obscenity, the Yorkshire Post refused to engrave the picture blocks for an investigation of pubs that were putting on strip shows, Dacre accused its editor of censorship. The Union News was named Britain's collegiate Newspaper of the Year.
Dacre's first job after graduating was as a reporter in the Manchester office of the Daily Express. When we spoke, he recalled "the thrill of seeing my first story in hot metal." I asked him what the story had been. "It's too absurd for words," he replied, smiling. "It was six pages about a donkey derby in Blackpool." In 1976, the Express sent Dacre to New York to cover the American elections. "I left an ossified, sclerotic Britain of great state-nationalized, money-losing industries and vast council estates of despair in thrall to corrupt Labour councils, and I went to America, and it was an utter revelation to me," he once said. Dacre stayed in America for six years, shedding his student politics and becoming a disciple of self-reliance. A photograph from the era shows him sitting in the Baton Rouge airport a seat away from Sid Vicious, looking perplexed. When the picture surfaced, last year, no one could believe that Paul Dacre had ever been in the same room with Sid Vicious.
When I interviewed Dacre, he was courteous, if slightly brittle. When I asked a question, he would close his eyes and rub them, as though they were magic lamps that might conjure answers. "My guiding principle is to produce the best journalism possible every day and to connect with and give voice to as many readers as possible," he said. "There is a passion in the Mail that isn't in other papers."
The Mail pours money into its product, triple-commissioning features and flooding doorsteps with reporters when its competitors are content, or compelled, to rely on wire reports. Its staff journalists are decently paid, but many of them speak of a savage work environment. "I subsisted largely in a state of paranoia and panic for most of my time there," a former Mail journalist told me. (Others said that recently, with the defection of several Mail editors to the Telegraph, the atmosphere in the newsroom has mellowed somewhat.) "I just got fed up with writing picture captions about celebrities' saggy knees, and thought they were hypocritical and unfair," she continued. "I thought, I'm going to hell if I keep writing this."
Occasionally, Dacre, with Harmsworthian vim, will fixate on a subject. In 2008, it was plastic bags, which he came to loathe after seeing one stuck in a tree while he was driving in the countryside. Mail employees were surprised to see the paper, which had for years dismissed global warming as a scam, taking up an environmental cause, but soon it had launched a campaign to "Banish the Bags." When Dacre, who has worked fifteen hours a day for forty years, comes storming into the office with an obsession, his colleagues say, jokingly, that he must have had "a near-life experience."
On January 25th, the model Kate Moss went to some parties in Paris. The next morning's Mail read, "The Croydon beauty had very obvious crow's feet and lines beneath her eyes as well as blemished skin from years of smoking and drinking." Another journalist, interviewing her that day, asked why she thought the Mail was so focussed on her aging.
"I don't know. 'Cause it's the Daily Mail ?" Moss replied. "They just get on everyone's tits, don't they?"
The Mail takes a skeptical view of celebrities. It covers them, maximally, but often its stories are about their fading looks, their failing marriages, their hypocrisy, their illegitimate children. In 1997, after Princess Diana's death, the third Viscount Rothermere promised that the paper would no longer use photographs taken by paparazzi—a vow that didn't last. Recently, the phone-hacking scandal has provided an opportunity for celebrities to exact revenge on the British press. This winter, parts of the Leveson Inquiry were overtaken by a grudge match between the Mail and Hugh Grant.
Grant took the stand on November 21st. In the course of bemoaning the intrusiveness of the press, he brought up a story that had appeared in the Mail on Sunday in February, 2007, about an affair that he was supposedly having with a "plummy-voiced studio executive." (Grant sued the Mail on Sunday, which admitted that the story was false and paid him damages.) The proceedings continued:
LAWYER: Are you suggesting there that the story must have come from phone hacking?
GRANT: Well, what I say in this paragraph is that the Mail on Sunday ran an article in February, 2007, saying that my relationship with my then girlfriend, Jemima Khan, was on the rocks because of my persistent late-night flirtatious phone calls with a "plummy-voiced studio executive" from Warner Brothers, and it was a bizarre story, completely untrue . . . . But thinking about how they could possibly come up with such a bizarre left-field story, I realized . . . there was a great friend of mine in Los Angeles who runs a production company which is associated with Warner Brothers, and whose assistant is a charming, married, middle-aged lady, English, who, as happens in Hollywood, is the person who rings you. . . . She used to call and she used to leave messages and, because she was a nice English girl in L.A., sometimes when we spoke, we'd have a chat about English stuff, Marmite . . . and she has a voice that could only be described as "plummy." So I cannot for the life of me think of any conceivable source for this story in the Mail on Sunday except those voice messages on my mobile telephone.
LAWYER: You haven't alleged that before, have you, in the public domain?
GRANT: No, but when I was preparing this statement and going through all my old trials and tribulations with the press, I looked at that one again and thought, That is weird, and then the penny dropped.
Dacre heard of Grant's allegations as he was listening to the 4 P.M. news in the back of a town car. Within seconds, he was on the telephone, drafting a rebuttal with his lawyers and deputies. The Mail released a statement that afternoon. It said, in part, "Mr. Grant's allegations are mendacious smears driven by his hatred of the media."
Grant told the BBC that the Mail had attacked him because, for once, someone had had the temerity to stand up to its bullying. "If you do," he said, "you will be trashed."
On February 6th, it was Dacre's turn to face the inquiry. He carried an ochre briefcase and wore a double-breasted gray suit. He is an imposing man of six feet three, with a ruddy complexion and the thin-lipped glare of a coach. As he hulked into the courtroom, everyone seemed to straighten up. Twitter was less reverent, but no less riveted. "Will Dacre defy his tender years in a vampish red dress?" @ozzfan123 wrote, in the style of the Mail's celebrity pages.
Dacre spoke quietly, his voice at times shading into, as Simon Carr, of the Independent, later wrote, "the electrifying growl every regular reader would recognise as the authentic voice of the Mail." During the early two-thousands, Mail reporters, like those on many papers, regularly used private investigators, some of whom resorted to illegal means to obtain personal information such as phone numbers and addresses. In 2006, the Information Commissioner's Office released a tally of assignments that had been found in the notebooks of the private investigator Steve Whittamore, who was convicted in 2005 of violating Britain's Data Protection Act. (In one of the instances for which he went to jail, Whittamore did an illegal trace for the Mail on Sunday on the license plate of a scooter that a union leader had been seen riding.) The Mail topped the list, with nine hundred and fifty-two requests by fifty-eight journalists, for jobs such as those, for various papers, which Whittamore noted in his invoices: "Bonking headmaster, Lonely heart, Dirty vicar, Street stars split, Miss World bonks sailor, Dodgy landlord, Judge affair, Royal maid, Witchdoctor, Footballer, TV love child." But the Mail has insisted that it did not hack phones, and no one has produced proof that it did. "Let me say as clearly and as slowly as I can: I have never placed a story in the Daily Mail as a result of phone hacking that I knew came from phone hacking," Dacre told Leveson. "Having conducted a major internal enquiry, I'm as confident as I can be that there's no phone hacking on the Daily Mail."
During three hours of questioning, Dacre refused to rescind the slur against Grant. "I will withdraw that statement if Mr. Grant withdraws his statements that the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday were involved in phone hacking," he said. Justice Leveson, angered by the stalemate, called Dacre back for another day of questioning. Again he didn't budge. Asked at one point about the merits of a (true) report in the Mail that Grant had fathered a "love child," Dacre parried that Grant had invited such attention by placing himself in the public eye. The paper subsequently carried a box entitled "How Hugh Grant Invaded His Own Privacy (with a little help from his friends)." It was illustrated with a demonic picture of Grant, and featured basically every embarrassing thing that he, or anyone he knows, has ever said.
Robert Jay, the counsel to the Leveson Inquiry, questioned Dacre about a column, by Jan Moir, that had caused outrage by insinuating that the death of the singer Stephen Gateley, of the boy band Boyzone, had had something to do with his being gay. (A coroner found that he had died of natural causes.) "I think the piece—the column could have benefitted from a little judicious subediting," Dacre said. "But I'd die in a ditch to defend a columnist's right to have her views, and I can tell this Inquiry there isn't a homophobic bone in Jan Moir's body." But gay people, and others not in traditional relationships, seem lacking in the Mail's estimation. Dacre once told an interviewer that he didn't think a newspaper could have an editor who wasn't married with children, because he "wouldn't understand the human condition."
In March, the longtime editor of the Mail on Sunday, Peter Wright, stepped down. His replacement, Geordie Greig, is a Rothermere appointee, rather than a Dacre loyalist, which has led speculators within the British media to suggest that the Rothermeres have had him installed as a potential successor to Dacre, who is sixty-three. Dacre's bold behavior at the Leveson Inquiry heartened some journalists, but it struck others as impolitic and ill-advised. Kevin Marsh, a former executive editor of the BBC's college of journalism, faulted Dacre, in a just published book called "The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial," for a "performance before Leveson that was defiant, disingenuous and in denial." He continued, "It was a chilling insight into a warped mindset."
Faced with criticism of the Mail, Dacre presents a sort of market justification, in which he argues that the only way to insure a free press is to have a commercially viable press. If the paper's contents didn't appeal to the majority of people, he argues, it wouldn't be so successful, and if it weren't so successful it wouldn't be able to hold powerful institutions to account. I asked him what he makes of the perception that the Mail is intolerant. "The Mail is a much more subtle, much more richly diverse paper than its critics would like to think," he said. "I have six million readers who love the Mail and go out every day, often in the rain, and pay fifty-five pence for their copy."
Dacre has said that while the Mail may once have been a racist paper, it is not anymore. To some extent, he is correct—the Mail of today will stand up for people like Stephen Lawrence, as long as they are the Mail's kind of people. The paper occasionally takes surprising positions—it opposed extraordinary rendition, and wrote, this summer, that for the police to shoot rioters would violate the British forces' tradition of restraint. But several Mail employees told me that they felt pressure, as one editor put it, to "hit certain buttons and keywords." Brendan Montague, a former Mail reporter and the director of the Request Initiative, a community-interest company that makes Freedom of Information requests for charities, said, "The censorship is almost entirely self-imposed, and done through a severe form of natural selection. If you write something that's blatantly prejudicial but not legally racist, you will be rewarded. None of the front-line reporters I worked with were racist, but there's institutional racism. "
The Guardian reporter Nick Davies conducted a study for his book "Flat Earth News" (2008), in which he found that sixty-four per cent of black people pictured in the features and news pages of the Mail in a nine-month period were criminals. (Dacre has said that "the book, which began with a presumption of guilt, was itself a pretty sloppy piece of journalism.") At one of the editorial meetings I attended, Sue Reid, the paper's investigations editor, said that the Mail should mention that the men involved in the sex-grooming gang were South Asian; otherwise, the paper wouldn't be able to criticize the BBC, as it has, for failing to note the ethnicity of perpetrators of crimes. At another meeting, Simon Heffer, a columnist, expressed sympathy for the French far-right politician Marine Le Pen. (Private Eye, the British magazine, got wind of my visit and later reported that "the room fell silent" at Heffer's outburst during the meeting, because "Mail hacks and executives had been ordered not to swear: there were to be no 'fucks' and most definitely no 'cunts.' As importantly, no one was to say a word that might be interpreted as sexist, racist or homophobic in the lady's presence.")
The Mail plays a double game with women, who account for fifty-three per cent of its readership, engaging their interests while denigrating their outfit choices and making much of studies that say their children will suffer if they return to work. "We target anew every morning how we are going to connect with women," Dacre told me. "Upmarket women, women juggling families with careers, women going through the menopause or divorce or looking after aged parents. Empathizing with women is much of the secret of the Mail's success."
Louise Mensch, a Tory M.P., has accused the paper of sexism, for the way it trivializes prominent women. "Shock horror, some actress didn't put mascara on to go to the gym!" she told me. Recently, the Mail returned the compliment, in a parliamentary sketch, by describing her raised voice as "dental-drill shrill, shrieky enough to curdle a mobile blood bank." Mensch told me that she "doesn't sit comfortably" with the Mail's social illiberalism, but that she and her friends are nevertheless addicted, especially to the Web site. "One of the reasons it's so egregious is because it's so readable," she said. "We're clicking on 'Oh my God, one of the WAGs couldn't put her hair up because she'd freshly painted her nails' "—this was a real item on Mail Online—"and then you're thinking, Why am I reading this? I'm an adult."
The most egregious story I ever saw in the Mail involved, as the Mail asserted in the headline and in the first sentence, "a hardworking cafe owner" who was "ordered to tear down an extractor fan—because the smell of her frying bacon 'offends' Muslims." (The story's byline was Daily Mail Reporter.) The café owner was white and blond. If she had to remove the extractor fan because of the sensitivities of Muslims, it was going to cost her money and a lot of work. Except, it turned out, if one read to the bottom, that the café owner's husband was a Muslim. The person who had complained about the smell was a neighbor named Graham Webb-Lee, who had tried to bolster his petition to the local council by saying that he had "a lot of Muslim friends" who, when they visited, didn't like bacon smells.
The Mail's approach to the Internet was initially as wary as its politics. (Dacre still doesn't have a computer in his office.) "A lot of people say that the Internet is the future for newspapers," he declared in 1999. "Well, I say to that: bullshit.com."
Until 2006, the Mail's Web site was an embarrassment—five articles a day slapped onto a spare background, cut off by a paywall. "When the paper first took over, it wasn't the world's best Web site," Martin Clarke, Mail Online's editor, said recently. In April, 2006, the paper reconsidered the site. It would be free, with a stand-alone staff. "We took the decision to not integrate Mail Online, because the Daily Mail was a fantastically successful newspaper, and we didn't want to do anything that was going to compromise that," Clarke said.
The site evolved on the fly. "We just decided to go hell-for-leather for ratings," someone who was involved in the launch told me. "Anything relating to climate change, American politics, Muslims—we just chased the numbers very ruthlessly." Traffic, at home and abroad, began to climb. By the summer of 2007, Mail Online's traffic had risen a hundred and sixty-two per cent, to make it the U.K.'s second-largest newspaper Web site. The Drudge Report started linking to some of its stories. In 2010, it became the U.K.'s biggest newspaper Web site.
Clarke and his staff built the site by instinct. "I didn't look at that many Web sites for design ideas," he told me. Formally, they stuck with what they knew, developing a publishing system that allows them to put together the home page with the glue-pot flexibility of a newspaper, rather than having to slot stories into a template. The home page is hectic, with hundreds of stories competing for the reader's attention. It is unusually long—literally, like a scroll—as are its headlines. (Both tactics help to bolster its search-engine rankings.) It uses far more pictures, and in larger sizes, than its competitors. "The site breaks all so-called 'usability rules,' " Clarke said. "It's user-friendly for normal people, not for Internet fanatics."
Mail Online rarely embeds links to stories. Writers from both the Washington Post and Gawker have recently criticized Mail Online for this practice. Danny Gold, of Gawker, wrote that Mail Online goes "out of their way to fuck over journalists and they reap the benefits by becoming the most highly trafficked newspaper on the Internet." When I asked Clarke about the charge, he said that the site adhered to fair-use rules, adding, "We never like to follow a story without improving it, with either new facts, graphics, pictures, or video." He went on, "We are also still catching up on some aspects of our Web-publishing platform, which was originally built just to put a newspaper online rather than run a rolling Internet news service. We will soon be introducing features that will allow us to link easily and prominently to other sites when further recognition of source material is needed."
Mail Online's personality is distinct from that of its parent publication, from which it derives only about twenty-five per cent of its content. It emanates tabloid energy, focussing on human-interest stories, fashion, entertainment, popular science, and crime, but it gives somewhat shorter shrift to the right-wing politics that turn people off the Daily Mail. Mail Online's readers are, as Clarke put it in a 2010 presentation to investors, "a younger, richer version of the people who read our papers." Most obviously, Mail Online is both more enthusiastic and more irreverent about celebrity than the Mail. When a prominent actress such as Keira Knightley has a movie première, the Mail might cover the red carpet, while Mail Online will home in on her "fake-tan fail." The demimonde of reality shows is Mail Online's. "Half of the women on Mail Online, I don't even know who they are," Stephen Glover, one of the Mail's political columnists, told me.
Mail Online brings British cheek to the sort of celebrity journalism that took off in the Hiltonian heyday of the mid-two-thousands. Perhaps its signature innovation is a column of stories on the right-hand side of the page, chronicling the most trivial events, or non-events, of celebrities' lives. Readers have taken to referring to it as "the sidebar of shame"; Clarke calls it "the right rail of genius." It is amazing how often one can be lured into viewing a page by the promise of good-looking people on vacation. "Mail Online found the perfect Venn-diagram intersection of being a mainstream news site but also doing the sort of snarky commentary that you find on Perez Hilton or TMZ," Jo Piazza, the author of "Celebrity, Inc.," and a former gossip reporter at the Daily News, said. "They're not drawing with a marker on Jennifer Aniston's face, but they happily give you enough innuendo to show you exactly where her cellulite is."
I went to see Clarke, whom the Guardian once described as having "the man-management skills of a galley-master on a Greek trireme," at Northcliffe House. He has worked in various capacities at the Mail for much of his career. (After a stint at the Daily Mirror, he earned the nickname Mickey Rourke, because his term as news editor lasted only nine and a half weeks.) Like Paul Dacre, he is a feared boss, but Mail Online is Clarke's show. He is famous for admonishing reporters, "I want every cough and spit!"
His office was mostly bare. He was sitting behind a desk, on top of which were three computer monitors, an Evian bottle, and some loose change. The perimeter of the office was lined with electric-blue sectional couches, upon one of which he instructed me to sit. The setup was awkward: the couch was much lower than the desk, and too far from it for me to be able to hear and speak without straining. I asked if we could move to a round table near the window. Clarke, who has a hawkish look, declined. "O.K., can I bring this chair over and pull it up in front of your desk?" I asked. Clarke watched as I dragged the chair across the office. I started to get a sense of why he has a reputation for being aggressive.
"What's made Mail Online a success is its heritage," Clarke said. "Fleet Street newspapers have always had eclectic taste, which makes us perfect for the Internet. The beauty of this is that Britain's always exported its creative talent—going back to Charles Dickens—but we've never really been able to export our actual journalism itself."
Dacre told me, "At its best, American journalism is unbeatable. But the problem with many of your newspapers is that they became too high-minded, too complacent, and self-regarding. As they became increasingly monopolist, some of them also became—if you'll forgive the phrase—too up themselves. They forgot that there's a huge market out there of people who are serious-minded but also want some fun in their reading."
In 2010, Mail Online opened offices in Los Angeles. Last year, it expanded to New York. The site has a separate home page for the U.S., but the content is surprisingly similar. "Some people get hung up on 'Are we going to call it a "sidewalk," or a "pavement"?' Who cares?" Clarke said. The range of Mail Online's dramatis personae makes it a portal for a kind of gossip tourism. "When we set up in L.A., in 2010, we started geo-targeting a right rail just for the U.S.," Clarke recalled. "What we discovered very quickly was that Brits were just as interested in 'Jersey Shore,' even though they'd never seen it at that point. We didn't think anyone in America would be interested in Wayne Rooney, but he was being clicked very heavily." The one thing that doesn't translate, Clarke said, is British soaps like "Coronation Street" and "EastEnders." Occasionally, a moment of postcolonial conflict will flare. One of Mail Online's most commented stories was a piece deriding Sean Penn's meddling in the Falkland Islands. "Hey Sean, remember when you held a big party, got the Indians drunk and then kicked them off their lands onto reservations . . . think you call it thanks giving or something," wrote Eddie, whose comment garnered 10,878 green arrows, Mail Online's version of "like"s.
The whims of Internet audiences are unpredictable. "Things that you think are absolute dead certs sink without a trace, and things you've never heard of are runaway hits," Clarke said. "You never know. One of our best-read stories yesterday was about a guy who made a portrait of his father with dots." But Clarke is increasingly a technician, editing according to what he calls "a synthesis of instincts and numbers." He pays close enough attention to the data so that he has developed a taxonomy of animal stories. "The animals that do best are monkeys, dogs, and cats, in roughly that order," he told Esquire. I watched him surf Mail Online's home page, assessing the mix.
"That broke on the wires," he said, of a story about the former British politician Edwina Currie. There was a piece about a cooking-show contestant who had been accused of reinflating a collapsed chili-and-pineapple soufflé. "I think, to be honest, I saw that in the Daily Express," Clarke said.
"This one, somebody saw on the telly last night," he said, of a grotesque but irresistible story about a man who had been left, after a car accident, with half a head.
Mail Online brought in twenty-five million dollars last year, a sixty-five-per-cent increase from the year before, but it is not yet profitable, as the company continues to invest in its expansion. A few competitors suggested to me that Mail Online could be a short-term success story, racking up large numbers of visitors but failing to foster the sort of deep engagement that attracts advertisers. Clarke dismisses the suggestion that the discrepancies in content between Mail Online and the Mail dilute the brand. He said, "You might as well say, Why is the Scottish Daily Mail full of Scottish stories? Mail Online is full of Internet stories because it's on the Internet!" Recently, Mail Online launched a smartphone app, which two hundred and thirty thousand iPhone and Android users have bought, visiting the site for an average of twenty-five minutes twice a day. "What I'm proudest of about Mail Online is that it insures us as a newspaper against the future," Clarke said.
As he spoke, his cursor hovered over an image of AnnaLynne McCord, a young actress, pictured in extreme close-up with some pimples on her cheek, around which Mail Online had drawn a big red circle.
I asked how he had decided to run the story.
"Well, we all just looked at the picture and went 'Yuck,' " Clarke said. "Look, she's an actress in '90210,' and she's spotty." ♦


text:
A notary public who signed tens of thousands of false documents in a massive foreclosure scam before blowing the whistle on the scandal has been found dead in her Las Vegas home.
NBC station KSNV of Las Vegas reported that the woman, Tracy Lawrence, 43, was scheduled to be sentenced Monday morning after she pleaded guilty this month to notarizing the signature of an individual not in her presence. She failed to show up for her hearing, and police found her body at her home later in the day.
It could not immediately be determined whether Lawrence, who faced up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000, died of suicide or of natural causes, KSNV reported. Detectives said they had ruled out homicide.
Lawrence came forward earlier this month and blew the whistle on the operation, in which title officers Gary Trafford, 49, of Irvine, Calif., and Geraldine Sheppard, 62, of Santa Ana, Calif. — who worked for a Florida processing company used by most major banks to process repossessions — allegedly forged signatures on tens of thousands of default notices from 2005 to 2008.
Trafford and Sheppard were charged two weeks ago with 606 counts of offering false instruments for recording, false certification on certain instruments and notarization of the signature of a person not in the presence of a notary public. You can read a .pdf version of their indictment here.
Police said at the time that the alleged scam had thrown into question the legality of most Las Vegas home foreclosures in the past few years, leaving many people living in foreclosed-upon homes that they unknowingly don't actually own.
"I would suggest you review your documents and bring them to an expert and an attorney," said John Kelleher, chief deputy attorney general for Nevada's fraud unit.