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This article was originally published in Orion Magazine.
Not since the glaciers pushed toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today. But the coal-extraction process decimating this landscape, known as mountaintop removal, has generated little press beyond the region.
Photo: Vivian Stockman/SouthWings.The problem, in many ways, is one of perspective. From interstates and lowlands, where most communities are clustered, one simply doesn't see what is happening up there. Only from the air can you fully grasp the magnitude of the devastation. If you were to board, say, a small prop plane at Zeb Mountain, Tenn., and follow the spine of the Appalachian Mountains up through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, you would be struck not by the beauty of a densely forested range older than the Himalayas, but rather by inescapable images of ecological violence. Near Pine Mountain, Ky., you'd see an unfolding series of staggered green hills quickly give way to a wide expanse of gray plateaus pocked with dark craters and huge black ponds filled with a toxic byproduct called coal slurry. The desolation stretches like a long scar up the Kentucky-Virginia line, before eating its way across southern West Virginia.
Central Appalachia provides much of the country's coal, second only to Wyoming's Powder River Basin. In the United States, 100 tons of coal are extracted every two seconds. Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last 20 years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop-removal sites.
In the name of corporate expedience, coal companies have turned from excavation to simply blasting away the tops of the mountains. To achieve this, they use the same mixture of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel that Timothy McVeigh employed to level the Murrow Building in Oklahoma City — except each detonation is 10 times as powerful, and thousands of blasts go off each day across central Appalachia. Hundreds of feet of forest, topsoil, and sandstone — the coal industry calls all of this "overburden" — are unearthed so bulldozers and front-end loaders can more easily extract the thin seams of rich, bituminous coal that stretch in horizontal layers throughout these mountains. Almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below. As a result, 6,700 "valley fills" were approved in central Appalachia between 1985 and 2001. The U.S. EPA estimates that over 700 miles of healthy streams have been completely buried by mountaintop removal and thousands more have been damaged. Where there once flowed a highly braided system of headwater streams, now a vast circuitry of haul roads winds through the rubble. From the air, it looks like someone had tried to plot a highway system on the moon.
Photo: Antrim CaskeySerious coal mining has been going on in Appalachia since the turn of the 20th century. But from the time World War II veterans climbed down from tanks and up onto bulldozers, the extractive industries in America have grown more mechanized and more destructive. Ironically, here in Kentucky where I live, coal-related employment has dropped 60 percent in the last 15 years; it takes very few people to run a strip mine operation, with giant machines doing most of the clear-cutting, excavating, loading, and bulldozing of rubble. And all strip mining — from the most basic truck mine to mountaintop removal — results in deforestation, flooding, mudslides, and the fouling of headwater streams.
Alongside this ecological devastation lies an even more ominous human dimension: an Eastern Kentucky University study found that children in Letcher County, Ky., suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath — symptoms of something called blue baby syndrome — that can all be traced back to sedimentation and dissolved minerals that have drained from mine sites into nearby streams. Long-term effects may include liver, kidney, and spleen failure, bone damage, and cancers of the digestive tract.
Erica Urias, who lives on Island Creek in Grapevine, Ky., told me she has to bathe her 2-year-old daughter in contaminated water because of the mining around her home. In McRoberts, Ky., the problem is flooding. In 1998, Tampa Energy Company (TECO) started blasting along the ridgetops above McRoberts. Homes shook and foundations cracked. Then TECO sheared off all of the vegetation at the head of Chopping Block Hollow and replaced it with the compacted rubble of a valley fill. In a region prone to flash floods, nothing was left to hold back the rain; this once-forested watershed had been turned into an enormous funnel. In 2002, three so-called hundred-year floods happened in 10 days. Between the blasting and the flooding, the people of McRoberts have been nearly flushed out of their homes.
Related Stories
We Live It Every Day Portraits and words of people on the front line in Appalachian fight against destructive mining practices.The Legend of Weepy Hollow An excerpt from Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop but It Wasn't There
Consider the story of Debra and Granville Burke. First the blasting above their house wrecked its foundation. Then the floods came. Four times, they wiped out the Burkes' garden, which the family depended on to get through the winter. Finally, on Christmas morning 2002, Debra Burke took her life. In a letter published in a local paper, her husband wrote: "She left eight letters describing how she loved us all but that our burdens were just getting too much to bear. She had begged for TECO to at least replace our garden, but they just turned their back on her. I look back now and think of all the things I wish I had done differently so that she might still be with us, but mostly I wish that TECO had never started mining above our home."
In the language of economics, Debra Burke's death was an externality — a cost that simply isn't factored into the price Americans pay for coal. And that is precisely the problem. Last year, American power plants burned over a billion tons of coal, accounting for over 50 percent of this country's electricity use. In Kentucky, 80 percent of the harvested coal is sold and shipped to 22 other states. Yet it is the people of Appalachia who pay the highest price for the rest of the country's cheap energy — through contaminated water, flooding, cracked foundations and wells, bronchial problems related to breathing coal dust, and roads that have been torn up and turned deadly by speeding coal trucks. Why should large cities like Phoenix and Detroit get the coal but be held accountable for none of the environmental consequences of its extraction? And why is a Tampa-based energy company — or Peabody Coal in St. Louis, or Massey Energy in Richmond, Va. — allowed to destroy communities throughout Appalachia? As my friend and teacher the late Guy Davenport once wrote, "Distance negates responsibility."
The specific injustice that had drawn together a group of activists calling themselves the Mountain Justice Summer movement was the violent death of 3-year-old Jeremy Davidson. At 2:30 in the morning on Aug. 30, 2004, a bulldozer, operating without a permit above the Davidsons' home, dislodged a thousand-pound boulder from a mountaintop-removal site in the town of Appalachia, Va. The boulder rolled 200 feet down the mountain before it crushed to death the sleeping child.
But Davidson's death is hardly an isolated incident. In West Virginia, 14 people drowned in the last three years because of floods and mudslides caused by mountaintop removal, and in Kentucky, 50 people have been killed and over 500 injured in the last five years by coal trucks, almost all of which were illegally overloaded.
Photo: Antrim Caskey
Fighting for Their Lives
On the third of July, I drove across 10,000 acres of boulder-strewn wasteland that used to be Kayford Mountain, W.Va. — one of the most hideous mountaintop-removal sites I've seen. But right in the middle of the destruction, rising like a last gasp, is a small knoll of untouched forest. Larry Gibson's family has lived on Kayford Mountain for 200 years. And most of his relatives are buried in the family cemetery, where almost every day Gibson has to clear away debris known as "flyrock" from the nearby blasting.
Last year, Kenneth Cane, the great-grandson of Crazy Horse, came to this cemetery. Surrounded by Gibson and his kin, Cane led a prayer vigil. Then he turned to Gibson, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, "How does it feel to lose your land?"
"What was I going to say to him?" Gibson asked me, sitting at the kitchen table of his small, two-room cabin beneath a single, solar-powered fluorescent bulb. Certainly an Oglala Lakota heir would know something about having mountains stolen away by people in search of valuable minerals.
A short, muscular man, Gibson is easily given to emotion when he starts talking about his home place — both what remains of it and what has been destroyed. Forty seams of coal lie beneath his 50 acres. Gibson could be a millionaire many times over, but because he refuses to sell, he has been shot at and run off his own road. One of his dogs was shot and another hanged. A month after my visit, someone sabotaged his solar panels. In 2000, Gibson walked out onto his porch one day to find two men dressed in camouflage, approaching with gas cans. They backed away and drove off, but not before they set fire to an empty cabin that belongs to one of Gibson's cousins. This much at least can be said for the West Virginia coal industry: it has perfected the art of intimidation.
Gibson knows he isn't safe. "This land is worth $450 million," he told me, "so what kind of chances do I have?" But he hasn't backed down. He travels the country telling his story and has been arrested repeatedly for various acts of civil disobedience. When Gibson talks to student groups, he asks them, "What do you hold so dear that you don't have a price on it? And when somebody comes to take it, what will you do? For me, it's this mountain and the memories I had here as a kid. It was a hard life, but here I was equal to everybody. I didn't know I was poor until I went to the city and people told me I was. Here I was rich."
Photo: Antrim CaskeyJust down the mountain from Gibson's home, in the town of Rock Creek, stands the Marsh Fork Elementary School. Back in 2004, Ed Wiley, a 47-year-old West Virginian who spent years working on strip mines, was called by the school to come pick up his granddaughter Kayla because she was sick. "She had a real bad color to her," Wiley told me. The next day the school called again because Kayla was ill, and the day after that. Wiley started flipping through the sign-out book and found that 15 to 20 students went home sick every day because of asthma problems, severe headaches, blisters in their mouths, constant runny noses, and nausea. In May 2005, when Mountain Justice volunteers started going door-to-door in an effort to identify citizens' concerns and possibly locate cancer clusters, West Virginia activist Bo Webb found that 80 percent of parents said their children came home from school with a variety of illnesses. The school, a small brick building, sits almost directly beneath a Massey Energy subsidiary's processing plant where coal is washed and stored. Coal dust settles like pollen over the playground. Nearly 3 billion gallons of coal slurry, which contains extremely high levels of mercury, cadmium, and nickel, are stored behind a 385-foot-high earthen dam right above the school.
In 1972, a similar coal impoundment dam collapsed at Buffalo Creek, W.Va., killing 125 people. Two hundred and eighty children attend the Marsh Fork Elementary School. It is unnerving to imagine what damage a minor earthquake, a heavy flash flood, or a structural failure might do to this small community. And according to documents that longtime activist Julia Bonds obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the pond is leaking into the creek and groundwater around the school. Students often cannot drink from the water fountains. And when they return from recess, their tennis shoes are covered with black coal dust.
Massey responded to complaints about the plant by applying for a permit to enlarge it, with a new silo to be built even closer to the school. It was this callousness that led to the first major Mountain Justice direct action on the last day of May 2005. About a hundred out-of-state activists, alongside another hundred local citizens, gathered at the school and marched next door to the Massey plant.
Inez Gallimore, an 82-year-old woman whose granddaughter attended the elementary school, walked up to the security guard and asked for the plant superintendent to come down and accept a copy of the group's demands that Massey shut down the plant. When the superintendent refused, Gallimore sat down in the middle of the road, blocking trucks from entering or leaving the facility. When police came to arrest her, they had to help Gallimore to her feet, but not before TV cameras recorded her calling Massey Energy a "terrorist organization."
Photo: Antrim CaskeyThree other protesters took the woman's place and were arrested. Three more followed.
In the end, the media coverage at the Marsh Fork rally prompted West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D) to promise he would put together an investigative team to look into the citizens' concerns. But seven days after that promise, on June 30, Massey received its permit to expand the plant.
An Ugly History
The history of resource exploitation in Appalachia, like the history of racial oppression in the South, follows a sinister logic — keep people poor and scared so that they remain powerless. In the 19th century, mountain families were actually doing fairly well farming rich bottomlands. But populations grew, farms were subdivided, and then northern coal and steel companies started buying up much of the land, hungry for the resources that lay below. By the time the railroads reached headwater hollows like McRoberts, Ky., men had little choice but to sell their labor cheaply, live in company towns, and shop in overpriced company stores. "Though he might revert on occasion to his ancestral agriculture," wrote coal field historian Harry Caudill, "he would never again free himself from dependence upon his new overlords." In nearly every county across central Appalachia, King Coal had gained control of the economy, the local government, and the land.
In the decades that followed, less obvious tactics kept Harlan County one of the poorest places in Appalachia. Activist Teri Blanton, whose father and brother were Harlan County miners, has spent many years trying to understand the patterns of oppression that hold the Harlan County high-school graduation rate at 59 percent and the median household income at $18,665. "We were fueling the whole United States with coal," she said of the last hundred years in eastern Kentucky. "And yet our pay was lousy, our education was lousy, and they destroyed our environment. As long as you have a polluted community, no other industry is going to locate there. Did they keep us uneducated because it was easier to control us then? Did they keep other industries out because then they can keep our wages low? Was it all by design?"
Whether one detects motive or not, this much is clear: 41 years after Lyndon Johnson stood on a miner's porch in adjacent Martin County and announced his War on Poverty, the poverty rate in central and southern Appalachia stands at 30 percent, right where it did in 1964. What's more, maps generated by the Appalachian Regional Commission show that the poorest counties — those colored deep red for "distressed" — are those that have seen the most severe strip mining and the most intense mountaintop removal.
There is a galling irony in the fact that the 14th Amendment, which was designed to protect the civil liberties of recently freed African slaves, was later interpreted in such a way as to give corporations like Massey all of the rights of "legal persons," while requiring little of the accountability that we expect of individuals. Because coal companies are not individuals, they often operate without the moral compass that would prevent a person from contaminating a neighbor's well, poisoning the town's drinking water, or covering the local school with coal dust. This situation is compounded by federal officials who often appear more loyal to corporations than to citizens. Consider the case of Jack Spadaro, a whistle-blower who was forced out of his job at the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration precisely because he tried to do his job — protecting the public from mining disasters.
When the Buffalo Creek dam in West Virginia broke in 1972, Spadaro, a young mining engineer at the time, was brought in to investigate. He found that the flood could have been prevented by better dam construction, and he spent the next 30 years of his career at MSHA investigating impoundment dams. So when a 300-million-gallon slurry pond collapsed in Martin County, Ky., in 2000, causing one of the worst environmental disasters this side of the Mississippi, Spadaro was again named to the investigating team. What he found was that Massey had known for 10 years that the pond was going to break. Spadaro wanted to charge Massey with criminal negligence.
There was only one problem. Elaine Chao, Spadaro's boss at the Department of Labor, is also Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell's wife; and it is McConnell, more than anyone else in the Senate, who advocates that corporations are persons that, as such, can contribute as much money as they want to electoral campaigns. It turns out that Massey had donated $100,000 to a campaign committee headed by McConnell. Not surprisingly, Spadaro got nowhere with his charges. Instead, someone changed the lock on his office door and he was placed on administrative leave.
Spadaro's story seems to validate what many coal-field residents have been contending for years — that the very agencies that should be regulating corporations are instead ignoring the law, breaking the law, and at times even rewriting the law in their favor, as when deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior (and former coal lobbyist) Steven Griles instructed his staff to rewrite a key provision of the Clean Water Act to reclassify all waste associated with strip mining as merely benign "fill material." A federal judge rejected that change, arguing that "only the United States Congress can rewrite the Act to allow fills with no purpose or use but the deposit of waste," but the change was upheld in 2003 by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court — on which sat John Roberts, the recently appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Terrorizing Little Old Ladies
On July 8, I was standing in Richmond, Va.'s Monroe Park, next to a pretty girl with pierced lips and colorful yarn braided into her blond hair, as Mountain Justice activists prepared to march 10 blocks to the headquarters of Massey Energy to demand the closure of the prep plant behind Marsh Fork Elementary School.
Short, gray-haired Julia Bonds stepped to the mike and told the crowd, "I'm honored to be here with you. We're an endangered species, we hillbillies. Massey Energy is terrorizing us in Appalachia. Little old ladies in their 70s can't even sit on their porches. They have to cut their grass wearing respirators. That's how these people have to live. The coal companies are the real terrorists in America. And we're going to expose them for the murdering, lying thieves that they are."
With that, the marchers started down Franklin Ave., behind a long banner stretching across the street that read: INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM KILLS OUR LAND AND PEOPLE. They marched on past blooming crepe myrtle trees and exclusive clubs. Then they hung a right, and suddenly we were all standing in front of a granite-and-concrete monolith that had been cordoned off with yellow tape.
Don Blankenship is the CEO of Massey, a man that many feel has dubious access to the Bush administration. Records show that from 2000 to 2004, whenever MSHA Assistant Secretary David Lauriski weakened a mine safety standard, it usually followed a meeting with Blankenship.
The stated goal of the Richmond march was to get Blankenship to personally accept Mountain Justice's demand that Massey shut down the prep plant next to the Marsh Fork Elementary School. Of course, everyone knew that wasn't going to happen.
This Wouldn't Go on in New England
On April 9, 1963, snarling police dogs pinned a black protester to the ground on a Birmingham, Ala., street. The New York Times was there to report it. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were ecstatic. "We've got a movement, we've got a movement!" one member exclaimed. "They brought out the dogs." Without the arrests in Birmingham, and the press that followed, John Kennedy would not have pushed for the Civil Rights Act, and without daily attempts to register black voters in Selma, and the violence that followed, Lyndon Johnson would have dragged his feet for years on the Voting Rights Act. King and the SCLC knew they needed numbers and they needed confrontation. They needed Bull Connor's dogs and Selma sheriff James Clark's police batons coming down on the heads of older African Americans. They needed to call out, for all to see, the people who enforced brutal oppression every day in the South.
In their own way, Mountain Justice activists worked hard to expose the injustice spreading across the coal fields of Appalachia. Through nonviolent actions and demonstrations, they attempted to show the nation how coal companies break the law with a pathological consistency and operate with little regard for the human consequences of their actions. But on the national stage, Mountain Justice Summer couldn't compete with high gas prices and a foreign war, even though it is precisely that war over oil that is driving coal demands higher and laying mountains lower faster. That plus the fact that U.S. energy consumption increased 42 percent over the last 30 years. Urban affluence and this country's shortsighted energy policy are making Appalachia a poorer place — poorer in beauty, poorer in health, poorer in resources, and poorer in spirit.
"This wouldn't go on in New England," Jack Spadaro told me last July, up at Larry Gibson's place. It wouldn't go on in California, nor Florida, nor along the East Coast. After the '60s, America and the mainstream media seemed to lose interest in the problems of Appalachia. Though the Martin County slurry pond disaster was 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, The New York Times ignored it for months. But the seeming invisibility of the people in Appalachia does not make their plight any less real.
That the civil-rights movement happened so recently in our country's history can seem dumbfounding, but not to the people who still live in the shadow of oppression. Those who live in the path of the coal industry — beneath sheared-off mountains, amid unnatural, treeless landscapes, drinking poisoned water and breathing dirty air — are fighting their own civil-rights battle. And, as in the past, justice may be slow coming to the mountains of Appalachia. But justice delayed could mean the ruin of a place that has sacrificed much for this nation, and has received next to nothing in return.
See the faces of the people fighting against mountaintop-removal mining.
You can read more about mountaintop-removal mining at OrionOnline.


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There's no doubt about it: This was a really exciting week. With the 2012 election officially over, I wanted to do a recap of the event, searching engine marketing style. In addition to following the election, I was also following how search engines kept us all up-to-date on the election progress. Below, you will see three screenshots. They show the search results for the keyword "election". As you can see, all three engines, especially Google and Yahoo, did an amazing job displaying the election results in rich format.
I'm the biggest proponent of ad extensions around. I'm talking about extensions like sitelinks, call extensions, social extensions, and more. All of these extensions make the user experience better. They offer more ways to reach and dazzle your target audience. I view these custom "election" results (within organic search) as ad extension-like functionality. Organic search is not just about traditional text-based search results anymore. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are now offering new ways of viewing data. They are not just offering links, they are offering answers. I hope you enjoy the screenshots below: Way to go Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Aside from the 2012 election, have you seen any other neat examples of search engines providing a rich organic search experience?
Images in this post © Google, Yahoo, and Bing

subset: commoncrawl


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Diana Kuan's General Tso's Chicken and the American Admiral
In 1953 Admiral Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Taiwan for talks with President Chiang Kai-Shek. The presidential palace chef, Peng Chang-Kuei (彭長貴), was asked to create a banquet to entertain the illustrious guest. After planning some traditional Hunan dishes, he decided to create a few new dishes for the menu. One of them was General Tso's Chicken. Thus the world's most famous Chinese dish was born.


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The highest anxiety moment in the holiday season (outside of finding the one dead bulb in a 40-foot string of lights) must be the moment just before your loved ones unwrap their gifts. The ribbon comes untied, the paper falls to the floor—what will their expression be? Figuring out the right gift can be very difficult, and we can easily make mistakes.
Before picking a gift, we all ask ourselves two questions: How much to spend and what to get. While both questions are complex, the more complex one by far is what to get. We may not know the exact preferences of the other person (what he or she enjoys and does not enjoy); even if we know what kind of gift they would absolutely love, we might still not know the exact color, size, etc. With these risks, giving an ill-suited gift risks showing the other person exactly how little we really know them. And from there the path to a deteriorated relationship is short.
The risk of giving the wrong thing is why gift givers often end up giving consumables such as wine and chocolate, or non-committed gifts such gift cards. After all, these are unlikely to be the "wrong" gift for anyone. But there's a catch: These safe gifts are not very "gifty" and are unlikely to strengthen our relationship with the recipient. In contrast, when we give jewelry, art, or furniture, we take a risk that the other person will not like the item and get stuck with a less-than-ideal gift. But these risky gifts are more "gifty" and, if they are successful, will achieve their goal of strengthening the social fabric between the person giving the gift and the person receiving it.
So how much risk do most give givers take—too little, too much, or just the right amount? To examine this question empirically, together with Loop Commerce, we asked about 5,000 gift givers to think about the last gift they gave, and about the same number of gift receivers to think about the last gift they got.
Not surprisingly, the majority of givers and receivers said the last gift they gave or received was a safe gift. Food and wine topped the list, with clothes, books and movies coming in next. Fewer givers went out on a limb to give more risky gifts, such as tickets to a play or concert, a piece of art, or jewelry.
But were they right in playing it safe? In short: They were not.
When we asked the gift givers to rate how much they expected recipients to enjoy the gift, and contrasted this with the actual level of enjoyment of the person getting the gift, we found three systematic biases:
- First, gift receivers rated the gifts as more exciting than gift givers; in general, gift givers underestimated how much joy their gifts would bring.
- Second, gift receivers preferred the riskier gift and wished that gift givers took more chances.
- Finally, the underestimation of how much people would like the gifts was particularly large for risky gifts.
So while, in general, we don't appreciate how much others will enjoy our gift, our underestimating is particularly pronounced for the more risky gifts.
Given humankind's collective experience at gift giving, how could we get this process so fundamentally wrong? The reason is that we are uncomfortable with uncertain outcomes. We look at the range of gifts that we can give, imagine the worst possible reaction to a bad gift, and thus the safe gifts call out to us. In contrast, the person getting the gifts does not see the whole range of gifts we considered; they focus on the gift they actually got as token of our friendship.
So perhaps this holiday season we should put an extra effort into gift giving. Let's throw caution to the wind, skip the wine, chocolates, and gift certificates and give real gifts. The biggest risk is being boring.
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and the author of Predictably Irrational and, most recently, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves. Kristen Berman is the founder of Irrational Labs, a non-for-profit that attempts to get people to behave irrationally, but in better ways.


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NEW YORK (AP) — The NFL has picked Twitter to stream its Thursday night games.
When the league negotiated its latest deal for Thursdays, it decided to sell the streaming rights separately for an "over the top" broadcast. This past season, it partnered with Yahoo to stream a game from London that took place on a Sunday morning in the United States.
Only the 10 Thursday games on CBS and NBC will be streamed through Twitter under a one-year agreement, the NFL announced Tuesday. They will be free worldwide on all devices through the Twitter platform. Viewers will not need to be registered Twitter users.
The NFL Network-only Thursday games are not part of the deal.
The league wants to experiment with digital broadcasts to see how they might fit into future strategies. In the meantime, this also offers a new revenue source with digital companies eager to get involved in live sports.
So far, the audience for NFL streams has been significantly smaller than that for traditional television. The Yahoo broadcast of the Bills-Jaguars game from London in October averaged a worldwide audience of about 2.4 million. A Jets-Dolphins matchup from London earlier that month, which started at the same time, averaged more than quadruple that in the U.S. alone with 9.9 million viewers on CBS.
The Bill-Jaguars game was available on TV only in the teams' home market, whereas the Thursday night broadcasts are nationally televised.
The London game took place at a time of day when fans might be less likely to find themselves in front of a TV. For "Sunday Night Football," only a tiny percentage of viewers typically watch online. Those broadcasts are "authenticated," which means fans must log in as a subscriber to a cable or satellite package. The Thursday night Twitter streams will be available free to any user.
The NFL launched "Thursday Night Football" on NFL Network in 2006 with eight games, which grew to 13 by 2012. In 2014, the league partnered with CBS for a 16-game slate — half simulcast on CBS and NFL Network and half solely on NFL Network, with CBS producing all the games with its top announcing team. CBS received the rights again for 2015.
In 2016 and '17, CBS and NBC will each air five games, which will be simulcast on NFL Network. Another eight will be exclusively on NFL Network.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed the news Tuesday morning.
This fall Thursday Night Football will be streamed live @twitter so fans will see more of this. https://t.co/s6tbr9FjvY
— Roger Goodell (@nflcommish) April 5, 2016


text:
This section addresses problems with job submission. Most of the problems associated with submission or launch are very site specific.
First, make sure the runscript, $CASE.$MACH.run, is submitted using the correct batch job submission tool, whether that's qsub, bsub, or something else, and for instance, whether a redirection "<" character is required or not.
Review the batch submission options being used. These probably appear at the top of the $CASE.$MACH.run script but also may be set on the command line when submitting a job. Confirm that the options are consistent with the site specific batch environment, and that the queue names, time limits, and hardware processor request makes sense and is consistent with the case running.
Review the job launch command in the $CASE.$MACH.run script to make sure it's consistent with the site specific recommended tool. This command is usually an mprun, mpiexec, aprun, or something similar. It can be found just after the string "EXECUTION BEGINS HERE" in the $CASE.$MACH.run script.
The batch and run aspects of the $CASE.$MACH.run script is setup by configure and uses a machine specific mkbatch.$MACH script in the $CCSMROOT/scripts/ccsm_utils/Machines directory. If the run script is not producing correct batch scripts or job launching commands, the mkbatch.$MACH script probably needs to be updated.


text:
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text:
Today a good recipe, particular and well balanced.
I don't like to make extravagant combinations that give a particular taste, I prefer simple flavors and well-balanced, this does not mean that you can not do original plates.
I ate this receipe by my cousin for dinner and I was excited, the only difference from her version is that I used goji berries instead of raisins.
The type of rice is an integral red, called Hermes, with elongated grain and typical aroma.
It 's a variety of natural rice like the black one, it contains powerful antioxidants.
To you the recipe:
- 240 g red rice Hermes
- 2 small heads of Belgian salad
- 30 g of pine nuts
- 20 g of goji berries
- extra virgin olive oil to taste
- 1 shallot
- salt to taste
- Cook rice for 40-45 minutes in salted water plentiful.
- Soak for a few hours goji berries
- Clean and cut into strips envy Belgian.
- Meanwhile in a wok cooking, fry in a little oil finely sliced shallots, add envy, salt and cook 5 minutes making it dry.
- In a separate pan toast pine nuts and add it to Belgian salad in the wok.
- Also add goji berries.
- Drain the rice and cook it in the sauce obtained.


text:
Robert Morris Page
Our editors will review what you've submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
- Died:
- May 15, 1992, Edina, Minnesota (aged 88)
- Inventions:
- plan position indicator
- pulse radar
- Subjects Of Study:
- electronics
- radar
Robert Morris Page (born June 2, 1903, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.—died May 15, 1992, Edina, Minnesota) was an American physicist known as the "father" of U.S. radar.
Page changed his major from theology to physics in his senior year at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating in 1927, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and attended George Washington University (M.A., 1932). In 1934 he began work on developing pulse radar. In spite of its receiving low priority and limited support from the U.S. Navy administration, he successfully demonstrated a radar in 1936 and tested it at sea in 1937. By the time the United States entered World War II, there were 79 radars installed on various ships of the U.S. Navy. These radars, and those that followed, were credited with providing the U.S. Navy a significant advantage over the Japanese navy in the Pacific.
Page, who held 75 patents on inventions in precision electronics, developed the first radar duplexer capable of using a single antenna for transmitting and receiving. He invented the monopulse tracking radar, which is still the preferred approach for precision tracking radars and for military applications. He also obtained the patent on the widely used plan position indicator (PPI) radar display, which provides the location and direction of a target on a maplike presentation that is easy to interpret. Page conceived and initiated the first successful demonstration of high-frequency over-the-horizon (HF OTH) radar, whose propagating waves are refracted by the Earth's ionosphere. The detection of ships, aircraft, and ballistic missiles was thereby extended out to about 3,200 km (2,000 miles), approximately 10 times the range of microwave radars, which are limited to the line of sight by the horizon.
Page successively served at the NRL as a physicist and head of the Radar Research Section (1938–45), superintendent of Radio Division III (1945–52), associate director of research in electronics (1952–57), and director of research (1957–66). He was the recipient of several national awards and the author of The Origin of Radar (1962).


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The human papillomavirus is a big cause of mouth and throat cancers, and those cancers have been getting more and more common.
So researchers asked: Could brushing and flossing make a difference?
It looks like the answer is yes, at least when it comes to being infected with oral HPV.
People with poor oral health are more likely to have an oral HPV infection, according to research from the the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston.
To find out, Thanh Cong Bui and his colleagues looked at data from a national health survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That survey included testing people for oral HPV and also asked how they'd rate their oral health.
People were also asked if they thought they had gum disease, and if they'd used mouthwash to treat an oral health problem in the last week. Dental hygienists conducted an oral health exam and noted if people were missing teeth.
Almost one-third of the 3,439 people said they had poor to fair oral health. They were about 50 percent more likely to have an oral HPV infection. The three specific indicators of oral health also were associated with HPV infection.
The results were published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research.
The scientists also looked at whether smoking cigarettes and having oral sex, two known risk factors for oral HPV infection, could be influencing the results. They found that people with poor oral hygiene were still more likely to have an HPV infection, even when they adjusted the data to account for smoking and frequency of oral sex.
"They're not a smoker; they're not having wild and crazy sex all over the place," says Christine Markham, an associate professor and a co-author on the study. "Even if they're not doing any of those things, not having good oral hygiene is still a risk factor for oral HPV."
[After this story was first posted, Markham told Shots that she felt her initial statement didn't fully reflect the survey data. Regardless of whether or not survey participants were engaging in these behaviors or had in the past, she said, their risk of oral HPV infection was increased if they reported poor to fair oral health compared with those who reported good to excellent oral health.]
This study didn't look at poor oral hygiene and cancer — only at the relationship between oral health and HPV. But it's not hard to make that leap and figure that this is yet another reason to stick with brushing and flossing.
"Exactly!" Markham tells Shots. "Good oral hygiene is good for your health in general, and it may reduce your risk of HPV infection."
About 7 percent of Americans have oral HPV infections, but some forms of the virus are more apt to cause cancer than others. The cancer is most common in men. It typically affects the tongue, the tonsils or the back of the throat. About 36,000 people are diagnosedwith it each year, according to the American Cancer Society.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. We begin today with a story that's making headlines around the world. We're talking about the conviction of three journalists in Egypt in connection with their reporting. On Monday, Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were found guilty of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood and spreading false news.
Greste and Fahmy were sentenced to seven years in prison, and Mohamed is set to serve an additional three years for possession of ammunition. They're all with the network Al Jazeera. Their detention and, now, conviction have sparked outrage. The U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, called the conviction, quote, "chilling, draconian and a setback to Egypt's transition," unquote.
As you might imagine, many news organizations around the world, including NPR, are objecting to the treatment of these journalists and are participating in a Twitter campaign around the hash tag, freeajstaff.
Now this is noteworthy because so much of Egypt's recent political transition has been chronicled by - and some even credit it to - the work of journalists and bloggers in Egypt and the region.
We wanted to hear more about the rulings and life as a journalist in Egypt right now. So we've called upon Mona Eltahawy. She's a freelance journalist who's been active in the press and on social media during and after the Arab Spring. She's with us by phone from Cairo. Mona, nice to have you back with us.
Also joining us is Basil ElDabh. He's the politics editor for Daily News Egypt. That's an independent English-language newspaper. He's also with us from Cairo. Thank you both so much for joining us.
MONA ELTAHAWY: Thank you, Michel.
BASIL ELDABH: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: Mona, may I start with you? Your reaction to the ruling.
ELTAHAWY: I'm outraged. I think it's an utter disgrace and a really shameful day. I think that the charges that they were put on trial for were absolutely ridiculous. And by all accounts, from all the people who attended the trial, none of those charges have been proven.
I think it's an awful day, but I think it's also really important to put this very, very chilling trial in the perspective of the terrible crackdown that's been happening in Egypt over the past year against civil liberties in general - and to remember that there are at least 16,000 prisoners of conscience in Egyptian jails who - many of whom we know nothing about. So I think that we have a lot to be outraged about in Egypt today.
MARTIN: Basil, would you - amplify that, if you would. And I do want to mention that there were those who had hoped that the new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, might have pardoned these journalists. He has said he will not interfere. There are some who would hope that he would have overturned the verdicts or pardoned them as some sort of a gesture of conciliation. He has said he will not. So, Basil, I wanted to ask more about what you feel this is really about. What is the intention here?
ELDABH: Well, there are a few things going. First of all, there has been a lot of sort of unprecedented crackdown on the freedom of the press in Egypt. In terms of independent media, foreign and domestic, Al Jazeera has been a news organization that has been specifically called out by various members of the government at various times for, you know, allegedly presenting a Brotherhood agenda. And this goes into sort of the strange relationships between Egypt and Qatar.
So really, when we're looking at this trial - yes, it very much has to do with freedom of the press, and it will always be tied to that. But there's also sort of this aspect to go along with it where really, you know, there are political scores that, you know, are being settled between Egypt and Qatar. And really these journalists just sort of found themselves in the middle of it.
MARTIN: Mona, what about you? I think for those who follow your work, and those who've heard you on this program and others, you - may remember that you were brutally attacked in 2011 as you covered the Tahrir Square protests. You were, you know - both of your arms were broken. You were assaulted. You know, viciously - you were detained by military intelligence for about 10 hours. You know, I confess that at the time, I believed that it was because you were a woman, and as a visible woman journalist - what do you think is the real agenda here?
ELTAHAWY: I think that the fact that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as you mentioned, is our new president is one of the main things that we have to focus on here. He's the former head of military intelligence. You mentioned that I was detained by military intelligence. And we have to put this in the bigger picture of Egypt basically struggling against six decades of military rule. So the fact that the head of military intelligence is now running the country, and he's running the country - now what happened to me is by no means unusual.
In fact, I consider myself very lucky in the fact that I'm a dual citizen, so the State Department intervened. Al Jazeera and The Guardian, at the time, gave wide coverage to the fact that I had disappeared and was being detained. And because I had a profile, I think it protected me in a way that had I been, as I told you at the time, an ordinary Egyptian woman who had none of those so-called protections, I very well might have been killed. So despite what happened to me, I feel very lucky.
But if you look at the case yesterday, none of those so-called protectors have helped the journalists because of the political climate between Egypt and Qatar that Basil mentioned. And because I believe that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi understands now - and this is very sinister. He understands that he can really push the boundaries, and Egypt's international allies will do absolutely nothing because you have to remember that the verdict was passed while John Kerry was still in Egypt. And just the day before the verdict, John Kerry, the Secretary of State, told Egypt that the U.S. would release millions of dollars that had been suspended in aid to Egypt.
Just a few months ago, Apache helicopters, which had also been put on hold, were promised back to Egypt. And the Canadian government - now, Mohamed Fahmy, one of the journalists who's been convicted, is a dual citizen also - a Canadian-Egyptian. The Canadian government has said, quote, unquote, "it's disappointed." Now I think it deserves a bit more than disappointment.
So if you're in Sisi's shoes, you're former military intelligence. You know the military runs the country, and your allies are just disappointed and still give you aid, you know that you can keep pushing this.
MARTIN: If you've just joining us, we're talking about life in Egypt as journalists.
We're talking about this in the wake of the sentencing of three journalists to long prison sentences on charges of spreading false news. We're speaking with freelance writer, Mona Eltahawy and political reporter, Basil ElDabh. Both are with us from Egypt, from Cairo. So, Basil, what now? How do you proceed?
ELDABH: You know, over the last year or so, things have become increasingly difficult. You know, what to report on, you know, the - when you look at this case, they're being accused of, you know, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. And they just gave interviews to some members. We could be implicated by simply based on, you know, talking to people - you know, a certain side of the conflict which is obviously a very fundamental part of what we have to do.
At the same time, you know, there's pressure out on the street. When we're doing fieldwork, we get hassled a lot by security. In terms of our foreign reporters - we have some of those at Daily News Egypt. You know, there's a growing xenophobia out on the street and lack of trust in the foreign press - and the press in general, but the foreign press, specifically. So we're kind of seeing this increasingly hostile environment where it's becoming very difficult to do our jobs on a daily basis.
MARTIN: Well, can I ask about that? And, well, Mona - and as a freelancer, I'm wondering how it is for you? I mean, you're both Egyptian nationals, and you're both - and you both have family in the country as well. And you both write in English. I mean, what - how do you navigate that?
ELTAHAWY: Well, I, you know - personally speaking, there are many things to balance here. Just about 10 days or two weeks before our presidential election that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi won in a landslide, a pro-Sisi TV anchor used a segment on her show to claim that I was basically a U.S. and an Israeli spy, and that I was being antimilitary.
And she brought on a mother to speak to her on the phone during her show who claimed that I had gone to a high school the week before to speak to students about my work. And I had answered a question about the presidential elections. And I'd said that, you know, I believed that we should end military rule. And I brought up the fact that Sisi was head of military intelligence that had during the revolution - or shortly after Mubarak stepped down - subjected Egyptian female activists to so-called virginity tests which are considered, rightfully so, sexual assault.
So this mother was on television basically saying that I had gone to the high school to brainwash her kids. So to have this said on Egyptian television and to be so clearly labeled as being antimilitary during a time that this crackdown is happening is extremely worrying. And I have, you know, my mother saying get out of the country, get out of the country. And I don't want to. I want to stay. So it is very worrying on a personal level.
Now when it comes to being a woman in Egypt, there's another level of worry because when I was attacked in 2011, I was sexually assaulted as well as had my arms broken. The levels of sexual violence in Egypt and the complete lack of safety for women on the street touches on everybody, not just me.
But this is a real concern, and we've had a rise in mob sexual assaults that they are not specific to any political group. Any Egyptian woman is - can face these sexual assaults. So you're talking about a political worry that covers - that basically affects all Egyptians. But as a woman, the fear of being sexually assaulted, again, is definitely a concern for me on a daily basis.
MARTIN: Well, can I just ask, Mona - before we let you go here - is there any leverage in this situation? Is there any leverage on the other side? Are there any voices speaking up in favor of free and thorough media presence, Mona? Is there anybody pushing against that?
ELTAHAWY: Oh, yeah, absolutely - I mean, there are incredibly courageous activists who are opposing the regime in various ways everyday. That's why I was saying earlier that it's important to put this in that larger perspective of the crackdown. A couple of days before the Al Jazeera trial verdicts, we saw at least 20 activists - peaceful protesters - taken in because they were protesting the very draconian protest law that we have in Egypt. So despite all of these fears, despite this terrible crackdown, there are still people who are willing to go out there and risk their lives in protesting.
There are others who, perhaps, don't want to be on the streets and use other forms of activism. But I think it's - the thing that keeps me in Egypt and the thing that keeps me optimistic is that unlike many years of the Mubarak regime, there is a significant enough - albeit a minority - but it's not about minorities or majorities. It's the importance of the existence of a group of Egyptians - and they do exist - who understand that a huge injustice is happening and continue to fight that injustice. As long as that group remains, that's really important. And it's important to remember that. But for people to look at Egypt just three years after Mubarak stepped down and to say you have failed, I think that, in itself, is an injustice.
MARTIN: Basil, final thought from you?
ELDABH: Yeah, I mean, moving forward, as Mona said, there are a lot of, you know - there's a core of young activists that has really kind of - they stood in front of the Military Council in 2011 and did the same under Morrissey when, you know, his regime was overseeing violations. And they're standing up now.
And I think on top of that, they're - you know, Egypt is lucky enough to have sort of, you know, some civil society and human's rights organizations that are very principled who have documented things very carefully. You know, it's a very polarized society. So to be able to stand back and have people sort of say it how it is, document things objectively, provide sources, things like that - I think this is a very important sort of cornerstone moving forward. And Egypt, at the very least, is lucky enough to have that.
MARTIN: Basil ElDabh is the politics editor for Daily News Egypt. Mona Eltahawy is a freelance journalist who writes about Arab politics and feminism. We reached them both in Cairo. Thank you both so much for speaking with us.
ELTAHAWY: Thank you, Michel.
ELDABH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.