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From his fourth-floor window at Tampa's Moffitt Cancer Center, Robert A. Gatenby can look down to where patients stand waiting for valets to retrieve their cars. They have gone through chemotherapy, biopsies, radiation. They are pale, anxious, resolute. Some will live and some will die: a young woman with short hair, clutching her partner's hand; an older man, alone. Students from the nearby University of South Florida pop out of patients' cars. Peppy and dressed in blue vests, these cheerful valets look as if they could be working at a luxury hotel in the tropics. But nobody here is on vacation.
Gatenby says he sometimes sees patients retching after chemotherapy, which reminds the 62-year-old radiologist that his Integrated Mathematical Oncology Department—the only full-scale outfit of its kind in the nation—does not have the luxury of time. Mathematics is not generally known for urgency. Few lives hinge on proof of the twin prime conjecture, but the mathematicians and oncologists Gatenby has assembled in Tampa are trying to tame the chaos of cancer in part through the same differential equations that have tortured so many generations of calculus students. By mathematically modeling cancer, they hope to solve it, to make its movements as predictable as those of a hurricane. The patients down there, fresh from treatment, need shelter from the storm.
Gatenby's small corner of Moffitt bears little resemblance to a medical center: There are no white-coated doctors frantically rushing to save patients or synthesizing miracle cures deep into the night. You might think you've found yourself in a sleepy academic department where abstract ideas are kicked around like a soccer ball on the college green. Which, come to think of it, is actually a pretty accurate description of what goes on in Gatenby's lab, though not at all a pejorative one. The mathematicians in his employ are convinced that we do not really understand cancer and that, until we do, our finest efforts will be tantamount to swinging swords in utter darkness. As far as these Tampa iconoclasts are concerned, your average cancer doctor is trying to build a jetliner without having grasped aerodynamics: Say, how many wings should we slap on this thing?
A Malicious Green Cloud
We have been fighting the War on Cancer since 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon declared that the "time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease." Four decades later, 1,665,540 Americans per year hear the dreaded diagnosis, and about 585,720 die annually from some variety of the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. Smallpox and polio have been cured or largely eradicated, but cancer remains the same scourge it was 4,500 years ago, when the Egyptian doctor Imhotep mused, in what may have been civilization's first stab at oncology, about how to treat "bulging masses on [the] breast." Modern oncology makes incremental advances, with a melanoma drug that extends survival by three months passing for a major breakthrough. This is nobody's fault, but everybody's problem.
Gatenby is tired of a fight we keep losing. After 30 years, he has come to the uneasy conclusion that cancer is smarter than we are, and will find ways to evade our finest medical weaponry. The weary warrior wants to make peace with cancer's insurgent cells—though on his own terms, terms that would spare the lives of many more patients. To some within the medical establishment, this might seem preposterous, but Gatenby relishes the role of the outsider.
Gatenby grew up in the Rust Belt town of Erie, Pa., where 12 years of Catholic school instilled in him "an incredible hatred of dogma." At Princeton University, he studied physics with some of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century. Figuring he wasn't fated to join the physics pantheon, Gatenby turned to medicine. But medical school at the University of Pennsylvania was dismayingly similar "to the rote learning of catechism" he remembered from Saint Luke School. It felt like he was "going backwards."
Whether in the lab, the classroom or the clinic, Western medicine relies on cautious experimentation, its zeal for breakthroughs tempered by the Hippocratic injunction to do no harm. But that can foster a frustrating incrementalism that is itself injurious. David B. Agus, one of the nation's most prominent oncologists and a professor at the University of Southern California, explains that "you are not rewarded, in general, for taking risk. It's very scary to do something radically new."
Gatenby specialized in radiology and, after receiving his medical degree in 1977 and completing a residency, went to work in 1981 for the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Fox Chase is to cancer research what the Boston Garden was to professional basketball. It was home to David A. Hungerford, one of two researchers responsible for discovering the Philadelphia Chromosome, a major clue to cancer's birth within the human genome. Among its current éminences grises is Alfred G. Knudson Jr., whose "two-hit" hypothesis holds that cancer is triggered by an unfortunate accumulation of errant genes, harmful outside events (too much sun, too much red meat) or a combination of the two.
The study of genes did not interest Gatenby back then, nor does it interest him now, even though much of medicine is now in the thrall of genomics. Gatenby wanted to discover cancer's "first principles," the basic ideas behind the seemingly sudden explosion of cells that want to kill the very body that nourishes them. Sure, you could know the BRCA1 gene better than you know your own mother, but unless you had some insight into why it caused a furiously impervious breast cancer, you were trying to find your way out of a forest by studying the bark of a single tree. Gatenby sought to understand cancer with the same totality that Newton had understood gravity.
As with Newton's famous laws of motion, mathematics seemed to hold the key. Math had been used to model the weather and financial markets, which like the human body are fickle and incredibly sensitive to outside forces (a run on Greek banks; a low-pressure system moving down from Canada). Gatenby saw no reason the same could not hold true for cancer. He spent a year reading math, which puzzled his colleagues. Then, while visiting the Cloisters museum in upper Manhattan with his family, he took a sheet of stationery and started scratching down equations he thought could get him closer to cancer's fundamental truths.
"To say they hated it would not do justice," Gatenby says of the response of his Fox Chase colleagues. Other oncologists told him that "math modeling is for people too lazy to do the experiment" and that "cancer is too complicated to model." The latter is a refrain that, 30 years later, still dogs Gatenby and his staff at the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Department, which includes five mathematicians with no formal experience in medicine.
Among those five is Sandy Anderson, a young Scotsman who dresses as if he were on the way to a Beck concert. There is a bottle of single malt on his desk. "Of course cancer is complex," Anderson tells me, brogue rising. "But how can you say it's too complex? That complexity should be viewed as a challenge that we have to try and tackle. And just because there's complexity doesn't mean there aren't simple rules underlying it.
"What we'd love to do is have everybody's own little hurricane model for their cancer," he explains. This is less a metaphor than you may imagine. Anderson shows me computer models of a breast cancer's growth, the cells spreading like a malicious green cloud across the screen. Different versions of the model show what happens when different treatments are applied: Sometimes the cancer slows, but sometimes it explodes. This seems like an intuitively rational approach to the disease, predicting how it responds to a variety of treatments. But it isn't common. There are about a dozen drugs for breast cancer approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Depending on which form of the disease is diagnosed and at what stage it's discovered, there's a maddening number of viable drug combinations. Best practices exist, but these can be anecdotal, doctors simply doing what they think works. The War on Cancer is fought by competing bands with their own weapons, cancer's chaos exacerbated by our own dismaying disorder. Anderson would like to provide the onco-soldiers with battlefield maps.
Wrong But Useful
Weather often came up during my time in Tampa, and not only because a wet dreariness lingered in the Florida skies. In 1961, Edward N. Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tried to create computer models for weather, only to stumble into the field of chaos theory. He saw that weather was entirely dependent on initial conditions, so that if he altered his inputs by even a fraction of a percentage, the weather model would fluctuate to an unexpected degree, in unexpected directions. Yet patterns did emerge. This would come to be called "deterministic chaos," for the way complex adaptive systems—the weather, the global economy, maybe cancer—can both hew to our expectations and routinely subvert them. Sometimes, autumn acts like autumn. But once in a while, in Lorenz's famous formulation, a butterfly causes a hurricane.
One refrain I heard several times at Moffitt was that "all models are wrong, but some are useful," a quip by the late mathematician George E.P. Box. A mouse injected with melanoma is only an imperfect model of human cancer; if it weren't, you wouldn't be reading this article today, for, as Anderson acidly notes, "We've solved cancer in mice a hundred thousand times." This is a model, too:
If that freaks you out, don't worry—it freaks out a lot of clinicians. Gatenby and his team are doing the math for them, convinced that their models of cancer strike the right balance between specificity and universality.
The other option is to keep chasing errant genes and trying to snuff them out, but that seems to many like a futile enterprise, sort of like trying to plug a leaking dam with wads of cotton. A tumor that weighs just 10 grams, Gatenby says, contains more cells than there are humans on earth. Nor are those cells a uniform gray mass, as the popular conception of cancer has it. As the tumor grows, different mutations may come to the fore, sort of the way a military assault may deploy infantry and artillery at different times in an attack. The cells of a single cancer differ within a single patient, and the same types of cancers differ from patient to patient. Talking about a prototypical cancer, then, is about as helpful as talking about a prototypical dog.
"It's almost like it's an intelligent opponent," says Donald A. Berry, who heads the biostatistics department at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "It has many, many paths that it can take." Mathematics, Berry says, can "provide answers where biology runs into a wall."
One of those walls is the sheer amount of information cancer researchers would need to map every possible genetic mutation possible for the 200 cancers that can ravage the human body. Researchers have spent $375 million to create the Cancer Genome Atlas, which is based on the screening of 10,000 cancer samples for the responsible genes. Some think that until we've sorted through about 100,000 samples, the cancer gene compendium will be woefully incomplete. "It would be crazy not to have the information," the geneticist Eric S. Lander told The New York Times.
But information brings its own delusions. Gatenby laments the "vast industry that's developed over molecular data." He is frustrated by the narrow focus of many of his colleagues. The bookshelves in his office don't hold the standard medical tomes; they are instead lined with rare physics texts from the early 20th century, including several volumes of the Annalen der Physik, which published the pioneering work of Einstein, Hertz and Planck. Nestled among these is a copy of Everyone Poops—Gatenby recently became a grandfather.
The most curious (and most telling) book on Gatenby's shelf is The Truth in Small Doses: Why We're Losing the War on Cancer-and How to Win It. Having survived Hodgkin's lymphoma as a young man, Clifton Leaf decided to investigate why cancer medicine had made so few advances in recent years. The resulting Fortune article in 2004, as well as his book last year, offers little cause for optimism, with their depiction of a medical culture whose caution has gradually ossified into maddening inertia.
"I like big thinkers," Leaf told me when I asked him about Gatenby's work. "He's a guy who doesn't get stuck in orthodoxy." As Leaf writes in his book, the whack-a-gene approach to cancer has its finest success story in Gleevec, which, since its introduction about a decade ago, has proved an adept warrior against chronic myelogenous leukemia. It does exactly what proponents of the genetic approach to cancer hope, seeking out the tyrosine kinase enzymes that drive the growth of the once-deadly blood cancer. Time magazine put Gleevec on its cover in 2001, asking, "This little pill targets cancer cells with uncanny precision. Is it the breakthrough we've been waiting for?"
Unlike most solid-tumor cancers, the type of leukemia Gleevec cured is spurred by a single "driver" mutation. Render it inert, as Gleevec does, and the cancer is largely defeated. But few other iterations of the disease are so simple. The closest successor drug is Herceptin, which targets breast cancer tumors with the HER2-positive genetic alteration. Otherwise, targeted therapy has not fulfilled its promise; chasing after errant genes through the body is like trying to catch a school of tuna with a Ziploc bag.
And so Gatenby and his team have taken the opposite tack, going way big and trying to understand all of cancer, instead of just one or two genes. Gatenby told me a story about a cancer conference in Toronto where all attendees were introduced by the name and the molecule they were studying. He chuckles at this myopia, divorced from any greater vision of the Brobdingnagian disease.
'A Blind, Emotionless Alien'
Gatenby knows that all his equations will mean nothing if they don't help patients. Ultimately, he will have to convince the very clinicians who frustrate him that his abstractions can have real-world benefits. He needs to not only predict the hurricane but also save the cities in its path.
In 2000, Gatenby went to the University of Arizona and was named the head of radiology at its College of Medicine in 2005. It was here in the desert of Tucson that he had an intellectual conversion. He had been publishing mathematical models of cancer during the past two decades at Fox Chase, but now he began to understand the role that evolution plays in carcinogenesis. The first principles of cancer that he had been trying to find, Gatenby surmised, lay in the Darwinian concept of natural selection.
Gatenby's insight was brilliantly counterintuitive: Cancer is really, really good at evolution. So damn good that our bodies nourish it, even as it hijacks blood vessels and nutrients. It fools the immune system, nestling so deep within normal tissue that we can't easily extract it. And then, in what amounts to suicide, it kills the very body in which it has taken root. The writer Christopher Hitchens once described the esophageal cancer that would soon kill him as a "blind, emotionless alien." But that alien is actually a native son.
Math could provide a map of cancer's movements; Gatenby now understood that only Darwin could explain why that movement was so hard to arrest. We were unwittingly helping that evolution along, turning all too many cancers into hurricanes. Worst of all, we were doing it in the name of saving lives.
Gatenby was convinced by studying pest management, of all disciplines. By the early 1970s, the agricultural industry had come to realize the limit of synthetic pesticides, which had been famously demonized by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. They were not only potentially harmful to humans but possibly not all that good at protecting crops. If used indiscriminately, chemical agents would indeed kill plenty of insects, but those that survived had a resistance to the toxic substance, which could do nothing against the remaining pests, which were free to breed. This was the evolutionary version of the cliché about how the thing that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Our efforts to vanquish the bugs forced evolution's hand.
A little more than a month after signing the National Cancer Act on December 23, 1971, Nixon addressed Congress on the nation's environmental challenges. Among the initiatives he introduced was Integrated Pest Management, which promised "judicious use of selective chemical pesticides in combination with nonchemical agents and methods," like the deployment of natural predators. Instead of trying to kill all bugs, Integrated Pest Management would try to control the population, less concerned with annihilation than watchful containment. There would always be some bugs; the goal was to keep them from spreading, often by using less than the maximum dosage of pesticide.
The War on Cancer sold the American public (and much of the medical establishment) on the idea that cancers must be vanquished entirely, that no stalemate was possible. Thus the endless rounds of chemo a patient faces today, killing good cells with the bad. Gatenby thought that Integrated Pest Management offered a rejoinder to that all-or-nothing mentality. The bug guys had realized what the cancer guys hadn't: You raze an entire enemy city, and those who remain will be hardened insurgents with a lust to kill. But trim away strategically at the enemy's forces, and the rest of the population will be kept at bay. Treatment, in other words, may aggravate a cancer's growth by stripping away the easy-to-kill cells and leaving behind hardened carcinogenic warriors.
"Evolution will win this game," Gatenby tells me. Malignant cells will eventually evolve beyond the capacity of any drug to hold them at bay. Even the patients of wonder drug Gleevec face an eventual recrudescence of chronic myelogenous leukemia. The question is whether a mathematical understanding of how cancer progresses can lead to treatments that are less prone to aggravating resistant cells into proliferation.
Gatenby came to Moffitt in 2008 to fix the radiology department. Though he continues to do clinical rounds one day each week, his intellectual energies have clearly shifted to the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Department, which has six full-time members and about a dozen postdoctoral and graduate students. They know that many think they are on a quixotic quest. They know that the money is in drug development. They know that too many people are dying. And yet there they are, jovially scrawling equations on a blackboard.
Ravaged by Rambo
So how do you defeat a disease that is constantly evolving a resistance to our weapons?
Maybe by turning your swords into plowshares. In 2009, Gatenby published a paper in Cancer Research called "Adaptive Therapy." Gatenby posited that a tumor consisted, in essence, of chemo-sensitive cells, fast to proliferate, and chemo-resistant cells, more reluctant to grow. The standard practice of giving the maximum tolerated dose of chemo would clear out the sensitive cells, leaving behind a tough nugget of impervious cells, the al-Qaida rebels of the bunch. These previously dormant cells would now pour out of their caves, suddenly finding both space and nourishment to grow. And grow they would, with the barrier of the sensitive cells gone. In essence, cancer therapy was killing "good" cancer cells while leaving behind "bad" ones.
Gatenby used both mathematical models and in vivo experiments to show that adaptive therapy, which kept some of cancer's petty criminals around, actually held the most dangerous cells in abeyance. One of his co-authors on the 2009 paper was Ariosto S. Silva, a mathematician now at Moffitt. Silva, who is Brazilian, likes to explain cancer through the Rambo film First Blood, about a bloodthirsty Sylvester Stallone protagonist who is made an especially vicious killer because of the suffering he endured in Vietnam. Our approach to chemotherapy is turning cancer cells into Rambos, Silva explained when I met him in Tampa.
A recent innovation is the use of ersatzdroges, or "fake drugs," which target chemo-resistant cells without killing them. In a draft paper titled "Sweat but No Gain," Gatenby and his Moffitt colleagues describe how multi-drug-resistant cells "continue to activate their membrane pumps to extrude the ersatzdroge as though it were a cytotoxic agent," that is, an actual chemotherapeutic drug. But it isn't. The cells don't know that, however, working furiously to defend themselves, "thus causing a decrease in fitness by limiting available resources for proliferation and invasion." While research into ersatzdroges is relatively new, Gatenby's paper suggests that tiring cells out instead of killing them does slow tumor growth. Instead of evolving with their resistance, the cells expend all their energy staying afloat.
Some oncologists are skeptical of Gatenby's approach. Robert Weinberg, the MIT cancer researcher who discovered the first cancer-causing gene, does not believe mathematical oncology is a fruitful pathway because it "lacks predictive powers that extend beyond predictions made from simple, intuitive assessments of future behavior," as he told me in an email. Others say that while Gatenby's evolutionary portrait of cancer is a clever analogy, it is not instructive for treatment of the disease. Marc B. Garnick, a urologic cancer specialist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, says Gatenby's ideas mirror the practice of metronomic therapy, which "has been around for decades." (Gatenby disputes this claim.)
But for clinicians frustrated with the current pace of progress in the War on Cancer, Gatenby at the very least offers a new way of thinking about a disease that has perplexed humanity for thousands of years.
Athena Atkipis, an evolutionary biologist and co-founder of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the University of California, San Francisco (and a sometime colleague of Gatenby's), likes to think of the different approaches to the War on Cancer in terms of Greek mythology. "My name is Athena, I know," she says by way of disclaimer before launching into an explanation: The god of war, Ares, understandably "likes a good fight." Athena, meanwhile, is a master strategian, always scheming about how to outwit the enemy. Her namesake would know better, Atkipis implies, than trying to "intimidate the cancer into retreating."
In Tampa, Gatenby and I went to dinner at a Cajun restaurant with Anderson and Silva, two of Moffitt's mathematicians. Downing his first drink, Anderson indicated his distaste for most of what passes for oncology today: "We keep measuring s**t without getting anything out of it." Everyone laughed. Gatenby complained about how the first fancy car he'd ever purchased had had its cool compromised by the installation of a car seat. Everyone laughed again. It was like the scene in The Untouchables when Eliot Ness, the famed Prohibition enforcer played by Kevin Costner, takes his lawmen out for a celebratory dinner after a huge cache of booze has been found and summarily destroyed. They are drunk with elation, but also a little anxious: The main target, Al Capone, remains at large. So it was in Chicago. So it was in Tampa, only with drinks.
"I've never seen a dogma I didn't hate," Gatenby told me. That was true at the Catholic school in Pennsylvania. And it is true today, at the hospital in Florida, where the cancer patients are waiting.


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A new book puts hard numbers to the intuitive case for more bike-friendly neighborhoods for all.
We all know that cycling is good for us and that it benefits the environment. But if you want to make the case for something, it helps to have numbers to back you up, especially in policy circles.
We've covered a few cycling-economics studies here at Co.Exist. But in Bikenomics: How Cycling Can Save The Economy, the Portland-based activist Elly Blue goes further. Her book is comprehensive account of all the ways cycling can save money, boost revenues, and help the economy broadly and locally.
Here are five key arguments she makes:
Health costs
Health is the biggie. "Bicycle infrastructure makes so much economic sense that it can accurately be described as a health investment," Blue says. Portland says health savings could allow it to recoup spending on cycling by 2015; by 2030, it could save $600 million a year. Blue argues that short trips by bike are a more convenient way for people to get daily exercise (more realistic than going to the gym all the time). Inevitably, she cites Copenhagen, that pre-eminent cycling city. It expects to save $60 million a year in health costs once its network of 26 cycling "superhighways" is completed.
Bike infrastructure is cheap, and creates jobs
On average, urban freeways cost $60 million a mile to build. The best type of protected bike lanes cost between $170,000 and $250,000 per mile and need much less maintenance. "Off-street paths cost less than a freeway project would spend on photocopying in a year," Blue says. Bikeways also create more jobs per dollar than roads, according to one study.
Blue devotes a lot of her book to ways we subsidize car ownership--for example, in providing free parking downtown. "An astonishing amount of space in most urban cores is dedicated to the publicly subsidized storage of private property," she says. When you throw in roads, many cities give up over half their area to cars: 65% of Houston is paved with asphalt, for example. Cites are losing a lot of potential income, Blue says. "Highways and parking lots represent a massive amount of taxable property that could yield thousands of dollars per lot, per year--representing millions of dollars of lost revenue for cities."
An astonishing amount of space in most urban cores is dedicated to the publicly subsidized storage of private property.
Local economies
Studies show that bike parking brings in more revenue than car parking--at least on certain streets. Blue cites a project in Fort Worth, Texas, where 160 bike spaces cost $12,000--about the same as a single car space. Bikers are more likely than drivers to stop and spend, and, of course, you can accommodate more people in the same space. There's also a potential "green dividend" when people bike about town, rather than driving to suburban malls. Their cash goes to local businesses, not to oil companies and Middle Eastern sheiks. By driving 20% less than other cities, Portlanders contribute $800 million to the local economy, one study says.
Cars are expensive--particularly for people of low income
The American Automobile Association says driving a sedan costs $9,122 a year on average, not including expenses like parking. Households earning less than $70,000 spend nearly 20% of their income on transport, Blue says. Bikes are much cheaper--just a few hundred dollars a year for maintenance, gear upgrades, and the annualized cost of a bike. She admits people living outside cities face "tremendous" opportunity costs from not driving. But she refutes the stereotypes that cycling need only be for white professionals, Latino laborers, and DUI offenders. Many other people could cycle and benefit from doing so.
In an email, Blue says she wrote the book to give bike advocates stronger arguments than "but bicycling is really healthy and doesn't pollute." "I was watching bicycling enter the national conversation as this sort of goofy stereotypical thing that liberals do, like drink lattes and shop at Whole Foods," she says. "I kept hearing people make economic arguments against bicycling ... but bike advocates didn't have the tools to respond."
While it has a strong point of view, Blue's book is rational, fully footnoted--and, in the main, persuasive. There is a clearly a lot of economic benefit to cycling, particularly in and around cities. That doesn't mean outlawing cars. But it does mean evening up the playing-field in debates. This book should help.
[Image: Bike World Travel via Shutterstock]
Source: fastcoexist.com
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subset: commoncrawl


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Share your reaction to the DADT ruling
Washington (CNN) -- The military's prohibition of openly gay people serving within its ranks is one step closer to ending, after the Senate voted Saturday to repeal the armed forces' "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Eight Republicans and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut joined the chamber's Democrats to back the legislation, which passed around 3 p.m. by a 65-31 margin. The bill needed a simple majority -- meaning support from 51 of the Senate's 100 members -- to pass.
"I want to thank all of the gay men and women who are fighting for us today," said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who pushed hard for the measure. "We honor your service, and now we can do so openly."
President Barack Obama will sign the bill into law next week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a Twitter post moments after the Senate vote.
"Gay and lesbian service members -- brave Americans who enable our freedoms -- will no longer have to hide who they are," Obama said in an e-mailed statement to supporters. "The fight for civil rights, a struggle that continues, will no longer include this one."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, in a statement, that he'll "approach this process deliberately, (making changes) only after careful consultation with the military service chiefs and our combatant commanders."
Clifford Stanley, a retired Marine and the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, will "immediately proceed" to execute the Pentagon's plan, Gates said.
The entire process, Collins estimates, will take "months, not years" to complete. Until then, Gates said that "the current law and policy will remain in effect."
Still, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, said Saturday afternoon that she believed no man or woman would be outed or kicked out of the military in the meantime.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, applauded Congress's action. He and Gates were among the civilian and active-duty military leaders who had rallied for the change.
"It is the right thing to do," he said in a statement. "No longer will able men and women who want to serve and sacrifice for their country have to sacrifice their integrity to do so. We will be a better military as a result."
"Don't ask-don't tell" became law in 1993, after opposition ballooned to then newly elected President Bill Clinton's plan to lift the military's complete ban on gay service members. The policy stopped the practice of asking service members if they are gay, but still called for the dismissal of openly gay service members.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Saturday's vote a "historic step forward ... toward a more perfect union and a more perfect reflection of our core values."
A Pentagon study released earlier this month concluded that allowing openly gay or lesbian troops to serve in the military would have little lasting impact on the U.S. armed forces. Opposition to the change was much higher in Army and Marine combat units than in the military as a whole.
Obama and fellow Democrats were pushing for a speedy repeal, before the more conservative incoming Congress is seated the first week of January. Gates warned that court challenges to "don't ask, don't tell" could force an abrupt repeal of the policy, rather than the process in the legislation that would allow the military to manage the change on a longer timetable.
The House of Representatives acted first, passing the measure -- by a 250 to 175 margin -- last Wednesday. Four days later, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, cheered the Senate for following suit.
"Today's landmark vote closes the door on a fundamental unfairness," Pelosi said in a statement. "It reflects a core principle in our nation: that anyone who wishes to serve, secure and defend this country should be welcomed, judged by their abilities, and honored for their sacrifice."
Gay rights groups cheered the bill's passage, sending out congratulatory statements soon after a key cloture vote Saturday morning paved the way for the final tally in the afternoon. After that first vote, repeal supporters hugged and shook hands in the corridor off the Senate floor, and Lieberman said one of his aides reported "great jubiliation" at the White House as well.
Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign -- a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights group -- said "America lived up to its highest ideals of freedom and equality" with the vote.
"Plenty of people had already planned the funeral for this legislation," he said. "Today, we pulled out a victory from what was almost certain defeat just a few days ago."
While Democrats roundly rallied behind the policy change, Republicans largely opposed it.
Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-South Carolina, cited a Marine Corps commandant as saying he believes that "changing this policy this way would cause distraction among the Marine Corps to the point that he is worried about increased casualties."
"Let's hope he's wrong," Graham said Saturday, "but you've got to ask yourself, is he crazy to say that?"
Ultimately, eight of Graham's Republican colleagues ended up supporting the repeal on Saturday. In addition to Collins, they were Sens. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Richard Burr of North Carolina, John Ensign of Nevada and George Voinovich of Ohio.
Voinovich said he made up his mind after the reviewing the Defense Department's report on the policy.
"I accept its findings and Secretary Gates' recommendation and reassurance that the repeal will be implemented when the battle effectiveness of our forces is assured and proper preparations have been completed," he said.
The executive director of Servicemembers United, the nation's largest organization of gay and lesbian troops, said after the key cloture vote Saturday that the legislation's passage marked a "historic step forward for this country" and "very likely be a life-changing moment for gay and lesbian troops."
That includes men such as Alexander Nicholson, a former multi-lingual Army interrogator discharged under the policy.
While noting a certification and "yet-to-be-determined implementation period" awaits, he said Saturday, "Those who defend our freedom while living in fear for their careers will finally breathe a sigh of relief tonight, and those who have fallen victim to this policy in years past will finally begin to see true closure and redemption on the horizon."
CNN's Ted Barrett contributed to this report.


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Tip: goes great with an Aberlour 16 yr single malt, a vesper martini or a summer type beer. But you may want a diet coke on hand if you know what I'm sayin'
Great smoke.
I wasn't real impressed to be honest. Don't get me wrong, it's a great cigar and the unlit aroma and construction is remarkable. Mine had a tight....draw so that took away from my enjoyment quite a bit I suppose. In the end, the flavors are there, but the experience to price point just doesn't jive. Do yourself a favor and grab an Undercrown at half the price. I'd score it a solid 90 if it weren't for the draw issues. Perhaps I got a bad stick. Props to my buddy for picking me up one of these though. At the zero dollar price range, it's all good! Happy smoking gents!
Only one thing to say about this cigar. WOW! Drew Estate & great cigars are synonymous. I do NOT care for the infused line. I like my cigars like I like my whisky: naturally occurring flavors. That being said; this is a nice stick. Rich, smooth, flavorful, to name a few. I have had the Undercrown & I really enjoy it. This cigar is no different. I had some burn issues (tunneling), but attribute it to the fact that it was off the truck & I smoked it in a hot bath which surely contributed to high humidity levels. All that aside, I enjoyed this cigar to no end & will surely enjoy it even more once they've had time to rest. The price point is a little off putting, but once you smoke one, you'll know it was a wise investment. Great stick!
If you are looking for a bold, long-lasting smoke, look no further. Perfect for summer nights and sitting by a bonfire. Fair warning: a five-pack is not enough; well-worth getting a box for these smokes.
Quite possibly the finest cigar I have ever had. The smooth flavor from the first puff to the last has no equal. I'll be buying this stick whenever it's available.
The Liga Privada No. 9 is an amazing cigar. I've sampled a few of these and although very pricey, they are worth the money. From the first this stick has an easy draw, is very appealing to the eye, possesses a slightly oily wrapper, burns like a dream, and possesses a symphony of flavors. It should for the price. I detected some taste of fine leather, a natural sweetness that is just barely detectable, an earthy type quality that probably reflects the fine soil the tobacco was grown in, and, maybe, just a hint of European, fine chocolate. All these are natural, not infused flavors. For a medium-full bodied cigar it is very smooth even to the end. It billows out clouds of beautiful smoke. From first light to last draw the flavor was consistent, rich, and even enigmatic in a way. My palate kept trying to chase the various flavors I kept encountering. Save your pennies for a five pack of these and stash them away in the humi for a day when your boss gave you a hard time or you won $60 on a scratch-off. If Pope Francis is a cigar smoker, even he wouldn''t object to the expense!
I will make this short, this is the best cigar I have smoked till now, I say NOW, because Drew Estates will some day top this.
These are excellent cigars!!!! Great smoke!
Pretty oily out of the box. Could use some humidor time, like most good smokes. This is one of my favorites.
While I lean more toward the T52, have picked up a couple of boxes of each. These two have to be the best legal cigars on the market. The No.9 is a solid 93 with an incredible aftertaste. The flavors left after putting it down are so sweet and diverse you'll want to light up again. Don't do it, just enjoy the next 2 hours.
I as I type this I am smoking my first Liga Privada number 9. I got it from a good friend, now a very great friend. It is so well balanced. Taste, ash, burn, the smoke is thick and so rich and the draw is perfect! I thought I would never find a better cigar than the Gurkha Cellar Reserve, I have now. I highly recommend this cigar and I will be buying some very soon. Thank you Drew Estate for making this GREAT cigar!
One of the best cigars I have ever smoked. I cannot wait to get my hands on some more!
Liga #9 has earned a position of distinction in my humidor. As many reviews have already stated, this is one of the best smokes on the market today, bar none. A perfectly constructed even burning jewel that immediately wins you over. A full body in my humble opinion with volumes of smoke and a wonderful after taste on the pallet. Pricey, yes, but what isn't that brings such pleasure these days. So..please don't buy this stick, it leaves more for the rest of us who appreciate quality.
Cant say enough about this cigar! One of the best I have ever had. I have 3 more of these to enjoy. Im pretty stoked about letting them rest for a while in the humidor. I was out this up against any stick in the industry being in my top 5 easily. I will enjoy these for years to come. Hoping to score some more soon!
Quite simply my favorite cigar on the planet. Worth the splurge!
I can't let people be misinformed, PK was told an incorrect story. It is the UNDERCROWN that was developed by and for the rollers. To keep them from smoking these! If you don't believe me, click over to the UNDERCROWN description, you can read the story for yourself.
Anyhow, no. 9 is a wonderful smoke. Usually CI is sold out of them, so I have to go to the local high-end cigar shop and take it right up the tail pipe, paying $26.99 a stick. I need to just buy a freaking box when CI is stocked up! This is probably the greatest cigar in the world along side the T-52. These are the only cigars that I've smoked, that right after the cigar is stably lit, I take a deep draw, and I get chills!! The flavor of these cigars and the T-52's is unbelievable!!! NOBODY makes a better cigar! Try one, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about, and WHY I would make such a bold statement!
Amazing cigar. I will buy these on a regular basis, even though they are a bit on the pricey side. The flavor and smokiness are something everyone should experience on a special occassion.
The Liga Privada No. 9 is in the top 5 cigars I have smoked to date. While smoking the No. 9, you will notice the effortless draw and the bellowing clouds of smoke that it produces. It has an unmatched flavor, construction, and look; it really is a beautiful cigar. Note to self, no need to wait for a nice occasion, the Liga No. 9 is the nice occasion! I would have to rate this cigar a 97/100.
Simply the best. I am surprised to even see them here in stock. They seem to be sold out whenever I look. I wish I could afford to smoke these all the time.
There's a reason why the no.9 as well as the T52 always sold out. These cigars are the best in today's market. You can check any other cigar website and you're fine they are sold out or in back order I have yet to smoke a bad one yet. I smoke them sparingly since they're hard to find so do yourself a favor and try them, you will not be disappointed. Great construction, great smoke output and beautiful flavors. My go to cigar on special occasions.
The liga privada#9 series: wow the best cigar out there right now my favorite is the parejo oscuro and the robusto. The T52 is also great. Thick white smoke, sharp burn nice favors. Leaves a nice aroma in the air I'm hooked on the #9 line and my last 7 purchases have been the #9. It's hard to let them rest.
This is a very good cigar but at this price point I was expecting more. The quality and construction of this stick is impeccable, but I'm not smoking cigars because of the way they are constructed. With that said, if you are trying to add value to what you are buying then this cigar may not be for you. On the flip side, if you're buying cigars and the cost is not a concern then you may enjoy this cigar a lot more than I did. The Liga Privada Undercrown is also a very good cigar but at considerable less cost and in my opinion a much better value.
I'm not the one who normally posts comments. However. There are exceptions to every rule. And this my fellow CI friends.... Is one EXCEPTIONAL cigar. I'll spend top dollar on a top range cigar and i'll hunt down those Two dollar bargain sticks as well. All I can say is get one. NO! Two or Three. You will NOT be disappointed! The Corona Doble (7.0" x 54) is my fave, but the Gran Toro (6.0" x 52) is a great choice too. I guess what I'm trying to say is the larger ones make for a more enjoyable smoke as there's more cigar and time for all the great blends to meld together and give you that "wow" trippy thing you sometimes get from a great cigar. I hope you like these as much as I do. Only one small problem with this cigar that I can find? Good luck finding them in stock! ANYWHERE. These suckers fly out of the stores. My local shop got in Six assorted boxes and put them out on a Saturday when he opened at 10:00am. When I got there at 3:00pm he was almost sold out! I grabbed 10 of them and left a few for the next lucky person! Enjoy enjoy enjoy.....
Have a safe and Happy New Year everyone. See you all at Cigarfest 2012! Come find me and let's chat and meet. I'll be the only guy there driving the Orange 2012 Lamborghini Aventador.....
A couple of years back, I bought 5 of these after reading favorable reviews on the net. Since then I have bought two boxes of 24. My only regret is not buying more boxes when the price point was more favorable. I have about 6 left from the last box and note that I will pay quite a bit more for my next order AND have to wait on backorder. AGHHH!!! These and La Aurora Tubo Preferidos are always in my humidor.Even though I continue to try other smokes, these just make me appreciate my two favorites even more. I typically enjoy with Diplomatico fine Venezuelan rum or a smokey single malt, such as Lagavulin.
Had my first Liga Privada #9. What stood out the most was the light spicy, flavorful taste you get when letting the smoke go further on the back of your throat. Unable to describe it but was good. Otherwise you get the typical light leather, toasty woodsy flavor. At times it even had a stale tobacco flavor, which I didn't care for. Best way I can describe it. Nothing special about this cigar in my humble opinion. Also not a good price point. I will pass on this cigar.
Had one of these (Liga Privada #9) for the first time last week, and it blew me away. It topped all my other favorites such as, Graycliff 1666, CAO Brazilla, & M.O.W. This has become my new #1, so complex, rich, but so smooth. To put it simply, the best tasting cigar that I have tasted in my short 2 years of smoking.
Hey gang!If you haven't tried this one,you're missing out-definitely in a class by itself.IMO it's worth more than what C.I. offers it for and is so rich in flavor and complexity that like another reviewer indicated ,the few rollers chosen to roll LP#9 have a unique opportunity to make this blend and we're fortunate to experience it.( I have wondered for a long time what type of blends rollers smoked while they were working-you know like the same blend they're producing or some special blend that they would only have access to for various reasons like limited inventory,experimentation,etc.)This stick knocks most traditional sticks d#@$ in the dirt! Well done Mr Drew well done ,thanks C.I.
Got a 5-pack of Parejo Oscuro size-(LP#9)-I really don't know how to describe this taste-just excellent ,and they were offered on MMAO too!Do the math! Thanks C.I.
By far one of the best cigars I have ever had! I ordered a 5pack and fell in love! Worth the price at any cost. Great flavor and a nice smooth draw. I have found the promise land!
These are the best cigars on the market right now (Liga Privada #9). My last favorite non-cuban (Cubans only when I'm traveling of course) were the La Flora Dominicana El Jacko #2, and the Opus X. . . These Liga's are fantastic and WAY up there. I liked the T52's as well, but . . . not as much. Don't bother trying to find anything close (I've been on the hunt, and just spent money un-necessarily), if you want a quality smoke this is it.
I gotta admit I am more of a Gurkha fan and my son is a Acid/Drew Estates fan. They smell too incensy for me. But I heard about these Liga Privada's, they intrigued me so I bought one. I smoked it last night and I gotta tell ya it has got to have been the best made cigar I ever had. It was a little tight on the draw but the ash was flawless. The taste and aroma were great and I almost got 2 1/2 hours out of it. My only complaint is that I can't afford to smoke these on a regular basis. They need to have some good sales on these babbies.
Tried it for the first time last night. It was great! Great burn, very smooth, mellow but full flavored at the same time. This is a must try!
Great cigar with a very consistent burn. The long fillers blended in these cigars gives them quite a flavorful taste. For those of you concerned with the high price, take a chance on a 5-pack first. Just to good of a cigar to not give your palate a chance to enjoy.
I have found myself to like only a few of the non flavored cigars that drew is known for, but when puts a cigar together like this and the chateau real i was really impressed. This cigar will find many in a state of amazement as soon as they fire it up and sit back and smoke this beauty.
excellent cigar with a heck of a blend of long fillers. Very aromatic and consitent.
get them while you can folks!
great cigar (Liga Privada No. 9 by Drew Estate) ...(period) Im on my first one and i am so satisfied. I just got my 5 pack in earlier to day and I was so whipped by my night at chase(work).I got in and lit her up and im feeling great!!!
Amazing cigar (Liga Privada No. 9 by Drew Estate)! Delicious, perfect construction, beautiful burn and draw, pretty as a prom queen, just fantastic. Best cigar I have ever smoked in my 55 years. Think Playboy Centerfold quality, but in a cigar. I still can't believe the same people that make ACID make this... wow!
I am on my third box:Liga Privada No. 9 by Drew Estate it is one of the best, if not the best, cigar I have ever smoked (though the more I smoke, the less precise "the best" becomes). It would easily rate in the mid to high 90s for me. Consistent flavor and burn. I'll take it over any cuban any day.
I heard the story that the top Drew Estate torcedores developed this cigar to be what they smoked while working...they were given the opportunity to build the best cigar available with all of the Drew Estate tobaccos at their command and...Voila!(Liga Privada No. 9 by Drew Estate)
Bar none, this is the best non flavored Drew Estate cigar of the bunch.
It's very complex with a wonderful wrapper. It's dense and swirling with flavor. You can taste the efforts of a group of people given such a wonderful opportunity.
This cigar is worth more than the price tag at CI. It could easily go for twice the amount and it would still move out the door at the same rate...but CI is smart....why price it out of the reach of most cigar smokers?
It ain't cheap, but it's worth every dime.....you can't say that about a lot of high ends with great reps.....I could name them but then you wouldn't get to read this.
This is a must have for everyone's humidor.


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The Center for Applied Behavioral Science (CABS) combines MDRC's decades of experience tackling social policy issues with insights from behavioral science. This graphic explains the CABS's approach to solving problems.
The SIMPLER framework was developed for the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project ― the first major effort to apply behavioral insights to human services programs in the United States. SIMPLER summarizes several key behavioral concepts that can guide practitioners interested in using behavioral insights to enhance service delivery.
As the first major effort to use a behavioral economics lens to examine human services programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States, the BIAS project demonstrated the value of applying behavioral insights to improve the efficacy of human services programs.


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800 Walnut Drive
A location in Saratoga
Commute to Downtown Clifton Gardens
Almost all errands require a car.
Minimal bike infrastructure.
800 Walnut Drive has a Walk Score of 14 out of 100. This location is a Car-Dependent neighborhood so almost all errands require a car.
Explore how far you can travel by car, bus, bike and foot from 800 Walnut Drive.
Bus lines:
540 NX - Northway Express
0.8 mi


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Express Invoice for Mac Free Mac
version 4.10 | mac
Name: Express Invoice for Mac Free
Version: 4.10
Size: 2.12 MB
Category: Finance
License: Free
Released: 2014-07-29
Developer: Nch Software
Downloads: 1073
Version: 4.10
Size: 2.12 MB
Category: Finance
License: Free
Released: 2014-07-29
Developer: Nch Software
Downloads: 1073
|Rate this software:
DescriptionExpress Invoice Free for Mac OS X business invoice software. Billing software made easy. Includes remote web console access so multiple users can generate invoices, manage clients and generate billing reports. Express Invoice for Mac allows you to create recurring invoice templates for ongoing services and link to credit card gateways to easily process payments for goods and services. Express Invoice for Mac also includes a number of standard reports such as unpaid accounts, payments, sales person, accounting reports and more. You can then print, email or fax your invoices to your clients directly.
Express Invoicing Software Free for Mac features:
* Send invoices by email or fax directly from the application.
* Remote web access for multiple users from a standard web browser.
* SMTP email send settings include Secure Socket Layer (SSL).
* Select from multiple tax rates when creating invoices.
* Regional format settings include currency symbol, decimal point display and paper size.
* Automatically send statements to customers with overdue payments.
* Configure multiple invoice template layouts including the invoice title, alignment, font size and foot comment.


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Two-thirds of baby boomers will inherit a total $7.6 trillion in their lifetimes, according to the Boston College Center for Retirement Research — that's $1.7 trillion more than China's 2012 GDP.
But they'll lose 70 percent of that legacy, and not because of taxes. By the end of their children's lives — the third generation — nine of 10 family fortunes will be gone.
"The third-generation rule is so true, it's enshrined in Chinese proverb: 'Wealth never survives three generations,' " says John Hartog of Hartog & Baer Trust and Estate Law, (www.hartogbaer.com). "The American version of that is 'shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations."
There are a number of reasons that happens, and most of them are preventable say Hartog; CPA Jim Kohles, chairman of RINA accountancy corporation, (www.rina.com); and wealth management expert Haitham "Hutch" Ashoo, CEO of Pillar Wealth Management, (www.pillarwm.com).
How can the current generation of matriarchs, patriarchs and their beneficiaries beat the odds? All three financial experts say the solutions involve honest conversations – the ones families often avoid because they can be painful – along with passing along family values and teaching children from a young age how to manage money.
• "Give them some money now and see how they handle it." Many of the "wealth builders," the first generation who worked so hard to build the family fortune, teach their children social responsibility; to take care of their health; to drive safely. "But they don't teach them financial responsibility; they think they'll get it by osmosis," says estate lawyer Hartog.
If those children are now middle-aged, it's probably too late for that. But the first generation can see what their offspring will do with a sudden windfall of millions by giving them a substantial sum now – without telling them why.
"I had a client who gave both children $500,000. After 18 months, one child had blown through the money and the other had turned it into $750, 000," Hartog says.
Child A will get his inheritance in a restricted-access trust.
• "Be willing to relinquish some control." Whether it's preparing one or more of their children to take over the family business, or diverting some pre-inheritance wealth to them, the first generation often errs by retaining too much control, says CPA Kohles.
"We don't give our successor the freedom to fail," Kohles says. "If they don't fail, they don't learn, so they're not prepared to step up when the time comes."
In the family business, future successors need to be able to make some decisions that don't require the approval of the first generation, Kohles says. With money, especially for 1st-generation couples with more than $10 million (the first $5 million of inheritance from each parent is not subject to the estate tax), parents need to plan for giving away some of their wealth before they die. That not only allows the beneficiaries to avoid a 40 percent estate tax, it helps them learn to manage the money.
• "Give your beneficiaries the opportunity to build wealth, and hold family wealth meetings." The first generation works and sacrifices to make the family fortune, so often the second generation doesn't have to and the third generation is even further removed from that experience, says wealth manager Ashoo.
"The best way they're going to be able to help preserve the wealth is if they understand what goes into creating it and managing it – not only the work, but the values and the risks," Ashoo says.
The first generation should allocate seed money to the second generation for business, real estate or some other potentially profitable venture, he says.
Holding ongoing family wealth meetings with your advisors is critical to educating beneficiaries, as well as passing along family and wealth values, Ashoo says. It also builds trust between the family and the primary advisors.
Ashoo tells of a recent experience chatting with two deca-millionaires aboard a yacht in the Bahamas.
"They both built major businesses and sold them," Ashoo says. "At this point, it's no longer about what their money will do for them — it's about what the next generations will do with their money."


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Janet McTeer
Born: 1962
Birthplace: York, England
An acclaimed British stage actress, McTeer made her big-screen debut in 1986's Half Moon Street. Although she appeared in several other films, including Wuthering Heights (1992) and Carrington (1995), it was not until she played Mary Jo, a vivacious, independent mom who uproots her young daughter to start anew in California, in 1999's Tumbleweeds that she earned much-deserved fame on these shores. The performance earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination and a Best Actress Golden Globe. She won a Tony Award in 1997 for her turn in Ibsen's A Doll's House. She also had a leading role in Songcatcher (2000).


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Lumo Studio 516-884-2228
Feel free to download and share the link.
To download an image in full quality, browse to the photo you want and click the download icon (arrow) next to the image. It will save the image to your device.
To download all the images in full quality from a gallery, click the download icon on top and follow the on-screen prompts, provide your email address. Once the gallery is ready for download, we'll send an email with the download link.


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When I come up with an idea for an ElvisBlog post, I often go to Google Images to find some new pictures to supplement what I've already got in my files. As I scroll down through all the choices, sometimes I see one that I know I had created by modifying an original photo slightly to get rid of extraneous stuff. (For example, the rest of the couch on either side of Elvis above.)
So, I saw one of mine on Google and clicked on it. But that didn't' take me to ElvisBlog. It took me to Pinterest. Somebody had liked the picture and pinned it there. To my utter delight, I discovered there are dozens of categories of Elvis photos to browse through.
I found many, many pictures that were worthy of saving to my files, and in no time I had enough for this post. Let's take a look at some.
How do you like this outfit? The tag under it on Pinterest said, "Two-toned Wine Glass Leather Two-piece – One of four similar leather suits Elvis wore during 1974." I've never seen Elvis in this before. At first glance, this almost looks like George Harrison.
This is tagged as a screen grab from G.I. Blues, and the Army insignia seems to verify that. Next time I watch the movie, I'll be on the lookout for Elvis making this face.
Some of the pics on Pinterest are obviously Photoshopped, and some make you wonder if they are. I'm guessing this is Photoshopped for two reasons. Look at the uncropped stuff beside Priscilla's arm. But the big red flag is her huge right hand – big enough to palm a basketball.
This one looks legit.
They don't make panties like this anymore, do they? I wish I had created a category for "Stuff Thrown on Stage as Elvis Performs." You wouldn't believe all the different items fans have showered Elvis with.
The tag said simply "Atlanta, 1976." So, did somebody toss the hat on stage, or did Elvis bring it out from backstage to wear and celebrate the Bi-centennial?
The tag on this one was very informative. "March 26, 1976, Memphis, Elvis spots a traffic accident, pulls over, gets out of his car, walks to the scene of the accident and offers the stunned participants any help they need."
I looked for more information on this, and found that Elvis pulled out his police badge to justify his presence on the scene. He sure did love those law-enforcement badges.
This is so cool. Somebody recognized that this orchid looks like an Elvis jumpsuit. For the record, it is a Monkey orchid found in Famagusta, Cyprus.
How about Elvis showing off his moves in those baggy Zoot Suit pants.
Have you ever seen Elvis wearing a bathrobe? This shot is identified as Elvis and Sonny West on the beach while Blue Hawaii was being filmed in 1961. I'm guessing the third guy with his back to us is Red West.
There was no tag on this, so I'll label it "Elvis with a Rod Stewart hairdo."
I guess this is legit. Does anybody know what a Grit button is?
This is just adorable. I hope it's not Photoshopped, but I'm guessing it is.
This is a shot of Linda Thompson at Elvis' funeral. I'm sorry, Linda, but that was not the right wardrobe choice for mourning Elvis.
I've collected many photos of Elvis playing football, but this is the first time I've seen him doing it while wearing glasses.
Study this photo for a minute. Did you figure out that this is the back of Elvis' head while he is performing on stage?
You might think this was a publicity photo for King Creole. However, before I cropped off a lot of extraneous stuff off the right side, you could see it was a casual moment backstage.
We'll end with this incredible shot. I certainly hope it's a real photo. Does anybody know?
I thought this was a lot of fun. There are many more photos, so we'll do it again.
© 2018 Philip R Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister All Rights Reserved www.ElvisBlog.net
Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.


text:
World News
Nun Gives Birth To Baby Boy In Italy
The 31-year-old mother and her baby boy, who weighs 3.5 kilograms (9 pounds), are doing well and other new mothers in Rieti hospital have begun collecting clothes and donations for her, the reports said.
"I did not know I was pregnant. I only felt a stomach pain," the nun was quoted as saying at the hospital, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. La Repubblica said she gave birth on Wednesday.
ANSA said the nun had named her baby Francesco (Francis) — also the pope's chosen title and one of the most popular names in Italy, where St Francis of Assisi is the much-loved national patron saint.
The hospital could not be reached for comment.
The nun belongs to the "Little Disciples of Jesus" convent in Campomoro near Rieti, which manages an old people's home and reports said she would keep the baby.
Her fellow nuns were quoted saying they were "very surprised".


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|Ballpoint Pen
|Caran d'Ache
190.00€Price including VAT: 155.74€


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Debt-to-Income Ratios for Mortgages
Jana Bottass
Mortgage Banker
Email: [email protected]
Debt-to-income ratio (DTI) is one of the key factors mortgage lenders use to determine whether or not a potential borrower can afford a mortgage. The debt-to-income ratio is calculated by dividing total monthly debt payments by total monthly income. Monthly debt payments generally include expenses such as:
- mortgage payments
- auto payments
- student loan payments
- credit card payments
- child support payments
Monthly expenses such as utilities, auto insurance and phone services are not included toward the monthly debt calculation. Monthly gross income, meanwhile, generally includes the borrower's monthly income, his/her spouse's monthly income, any savings income, and any business or side incomes.
To learn how to calculate DTI, let's consider the following example:
|Monthly Mortgage Payment:
|Monthly Auto Payment:
|Credit card payment (minimum):
|Total Monthly Debt Payment =
|$(1500+500+500) = $2000
Suppose the monthly incomes are as below:
|Borrower's Monthly Salary:
|Spouse's Monthly Salary:
|Other Income:
|Total Monthly Income =
|$(6000+2500+500) = $6500
Total Monthly Debt Payment/Total Monthly Income = (2000/6500) = 30.76% DTI ratio
When underwriting a mortgage, a lender will typically consider two kinds of debt-to-income ratios. First is the front ratio, which includes all housing costs (i.e. mortgage principal, interest, mortgage insurance premiums, and property taxes). The second is the back ratio, which includes non-mortgage debt such as credit card payments, auto loan payments, child support payments, and student loan payments.
As a general rule of thumb:
- Front ratio = Housing DTI: Total Monthly Housing Payment / Gross Monthly Income Before Taxes
- Back ratio = Total DTI: Total Housing Payment + Other Debts / Gross Monthly Income Before Taxes
The maximum allowable DTI to qualify for a loan is going to depend upon your lender, your financial situation, and your loan program. Underwriting standards may vary from lender to lender, so you will want to contact your lender of choice to find out how it calculates DTI for a given loan program.


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They address the main areas of [Professor Billings's] research, nineteenth century Louisiana and seventeenth century Virginia. From Opechancanough, a seventeenth-century Indian chief to Sir William Berkeley, colonial governor of Virginia, to Edward Livingston, coauthor of Louisiana's first civil code, to the legendary Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator Huey Long, Billings brings to life the forces behind the legal development of these two historically distinctive states. Many of these are classic essays, all are essential to students of American legal history.Here are the blurbs:
Kevin R. Hardwick James Madison University:
"Few scholars match Warren Billings for the depth and integrity of their research, or the elegance of their prose. These essays, the fruits of four decades of immersion in technically difficult archives and spanning four centuries of Virginia and Louisiana history, gracefully connect often arcane legal processes to the larger cultures in which they were situated. Even scholars well conversant with his work will benefit from having this selection of Billings' essays gathered in a single place. The lead essay, a charming and deeply humane scholarly autobiography, adds a grace-note to a volume rich in erudition and learning. Scholars of southern history especially will find much to savor in this superb collection."
Ellen Holmes Pearson University of North Carolina Asheville:
"Warren M. Billings, one of the leading scholars of early American legal culture, has produced a rich collection of essays drawn from his writings of the past four decades. These elegantly written works reveal the depth and breadth of Billings' expertise in seventeenth-century Virginia legal history, The New Louisiana Legal History, and the history of the law book. This learned collection merits a place in every American legal scholar's library."
From the Foreword by Mark F. Fernandez Loyola University New Orleans:
"For four decades Warren Billings has been one of the most productive and prolific scholars of early American history. His books, all unanimously well received, and his "vintage" articles have stamped out impressive imprints in several different areas of American history. His work on the colonial Chesapeake ranks as nothing short of seminal. Leading his graduate students at the University of New Orleans and a handful of other interested scholars, Billings almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the vital field that he helped to christen the New Louisiana Legal History. Recently, he's been able to fuse these interests into deeper, thoughtful, and expansive synthetic essays on aspects of American history from 1607 to the present. This impressive array of interests is evident in the essays in this volume."


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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Simon Hughes
Posted by ahoi! at Wednesday, June 30, 2010 0 comments
Labels: california, children's art, drawing, exhibitions, friends, painting, simon hughes, watercolour
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
acrylic and hardboard on hardboard---5.75 X 7.25 inches---2010
(just starting to get back in the studio after a break. preparing for a group show at MKG127)
Posted by ahoi! at Tuesday, June 29, 2010 3 comments
Labels: other things I've made, painting, sculpture
withdrawn and discarded
Posted by ahoi! at Tuesday, June 29, 2010 1 comments
Labels: books, Ex-lib, rubber stamps, trashed
Monday, June 28, 2010
Barbara and Michael Leisgen, 1974
Exhibition catalogue made up of approx. 45 loose sheets in a folder---Divided into 6 chapters (each also wrapped). Essay by Wolfgang Becker. German and English language. The work dates from 1970-71
I first saw this work via AAPC (via Little Lamb)--Thanks! I was lucky to find this beautiful catalogue on Abe (from a german bookseller) for next to nothing.
Posted by ahoi! at Monday, June 28, 2010 3 comments
Labels: art, books, editions, landscapes, photography
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Patt Nathe
The Spirt of Zen by Alan J. Watts, Grove Press Inc., NY, 1958 (Evergreen Edition, 1960) cover by Roy Kuhlman (with inscription "STOLEN FROM PATT NATHE")
(Somehow this book made its way to a garage sale in Winnipeg. A google search found one reference to Patt Nathe, thanked in the credits of Charles Perry's 1984 book The Haight-Ashbury: A History)
Posted by ahoi! at Sunday, June 27, 2010 1 comments
Labels: book covers, books, california, garage sale finds, handwriting, inscriptions, philosophy, stolen goods, trashed
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Posted by ahoi! at Saturday, June 26, 2010 0 comments
Labels: book covers, books, illustration, landscapes, travel
Posted by ahoi! at Saturday, June 26, 2010 0 comments
Labels: alphabets, books, children's books, endpapers, fonts
Friday, June 25, 2010
Art Education 4
Posted by ahoi! at Friday, June 25, 2010 0 comments
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Posted by ahoi! at Thursday, June 24, 2010 0 comments
Labels: colour, ESG, india, lee hazlewood, lp jackets, music, Ravi Shankar, Records
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Ruth Krauss: Something Else Press
There's a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells by Ruth Krauss (with graphics by Marilyn Harris), Something Else Press, 1968
One of only a few books Ruth Krauss wrote for an adult audience, this book of "Theatre Poems" was published by Something Else Press (founded by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins). Includes contributions by Dick Higgins, George Brecht, and Remy Charlip. Some of the poems previously appeared in her 1965 book The Cantilever Rainbow.
Maybe best known as the author of The Carrot Seed (illustrated by her husband Crockett Johnson), Ruth Krauss was also Maurice Sendak's mentor and early collaborator. She worked with countless illustrators, including Ad Reinhardt (!), Phyllis Rowland, Marc Simont, Mary Blair, Ellen Raskin and Remy Charlip.
"At a time when children's books tended to be didactic, with lots of text, Ms. Krauss pioneered the use of minimal text, concentrating on precise language and working closely with an illustrator". -From NY Times obituary
A Hole is to Dig: A First Book of Definitions by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak, 1952
Is This You? by Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson, 1955
The Thumbprint by Ruth Krauss, 1967
A Moon or a Button: A Collection of First Picture Ideas by Ruth Krauss and Remy Charlip, 1959
See also Daddytypes on Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak and The Carrot Seed.
More Ruth Krauss at Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves and Curious Pages
Posted by ahoi! at Wednesday, June 23, 2010 0 comments
Labels: art, books, children's books, fluxus, illustration, poetry, Remy Charlip, ruth krauss, something else press
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text: A Blackberry firmware update pushed out to subscribers of United Arab Emirates carrier Etisalat contained spyware, Research in Motion confirmed Tuesday.About a week ago, Blackberry users in the UAE began complaining that an update pushed out to Etisalat subscribers was killing battery life on their phones. The update was supposed to improve Blackberry performance, but after some investigation, technical users reported that it actually contained software that could spy on users activities.On Tuesday, Blackberry's manufacturer, Research in Motion, confirmed that diagnosis and offered a new firmware update, designed to remove the spyware."Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server," RIM said in a note on its Web site. The update was not written by RIM, the company noted.In a July 17 note to customers, posted Tuesday to the Dutch Web site Automation Guide, RIM explained things in more detail, saying that, "Etisalat appears to have distributed a telecommunications surveillance application that was designed and developed by SS8."SS8 is a Milpitas, California, company that develops communications surveillance products for law enforcement. The company did not respond to a telephone call seeking comment.Etisalat has described the problem as a "slight technical fault," and said that the company's 145,000 subscribers can uninstall the update by pressing 101 on their phones.The company, which is based in Abu Dhabi, could not be reached immediately for comment.


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Mining personal data to deliver targeted ads is the lifeblood of Google's business -- and of many other online firms. But what if that data dries up at the source?
Google released an early version of a new tool recently that will provide full "end-to-end" encryption for email. It's a super-strong cloaking technology that scrambles messages before they leave their browser and keeps them that way until they're decoded by the recipient.
The technology makes use of a private key-string that only the user has access to, meaning even the email provider can't read the contents of messages. Google says anyone will be able to use the tool with their existing web-based email service.
It was hailed as a big step forward in privacy, but the increased use of strong encryption also threatens the ability of online firms to sell targeted ads, altering the calculus that makes it worthwhile for them to offer online services for free. Google, after all, scans emails to deliver keyword-based advertising, and for other purposes like blocking spam and malware. Yahoo also scans email, though Microsoft says it does not.
"This tool is in direct conflict with their business model," said Tyler Cohen Wood, an online security expert and cyber branch chief for the Defense Intelligence Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense. For Google to offer it, she said, is strange.
Google said the tool is intended for a subset of users who want additional security beyond what the company already provides. "We recognize that this sort of encryption will probably only be used for very sensitive messages or by those who need added protection," Google said in its announcement.
But its goal is to eventually make a more polished version available for download in its Chrome Web Store. And as users become more insistent about privacy, other online firms may offer similar capabilities.
End-to-end encryption is attractive to privacy advocates because if law enforcement or intelligence agencies want to get hold of personal communications, they have to target the end user directly -- the service providers don't hold the encryption keys. That's a more labor-intensive process than bulk surveillance of a provider's servers.
It can also be attractive to service providers, because it removes them from involvement in providing access to their users' data.
But if encryption is adopted by a significant percentage of users, online firms could find it more difficult to monetize their services.
"With targeted ads based on email, if there's less to see, there's less to target," said Matthew Green, a cryptography expert and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University.
If they're unable to scan users' emails, online firms will be forced to offer less targeted advertising for those services, which could mean they'll make less money from them.
"Their business models would have to change," said Matt Bishop, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies computer security.
Service providers might have to start charging for some services that are currently free, or at least charge people who opt to use the added encryption. "It will become less valuable for companies to move your emails around for free," said Johns Hopkins' Green.
Online service providers have focused most of their encryption efforts so far on protecting data flowing from customers to their own servers. Google has been encrypting user communications with Gmail using SSL by default since 2010. Facebook implemented the technology by default in 2013 and Yahoo switched it on for all mail users in January.
That form of encryption scrambles messages while they're traveling over the Internet, but service providers can still read their contents once they reach their servers to target their ads.
End-to-end encryption scrambles data from the moment it leaves a person's browser and keeps it encrypted until the recipient decides to view it. With Google's new tool, therefore, the company has no opportunity to generate contextual ads.
Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Google may be trying to indicate that providing more advanced privacy control outweighs the potential impact to its bottom line.
"It's a sign that Google sometimes puts principles ahead of a narrow conception of the bottom line," he said.
"Google is trying to be a good Netizen," echoed Ronald Woerner, director of the cybersecurity program at Bellevue University. "They see the problem and are trying to do their part as one of the largest providers on the Internet," he said.
It will probably be some time before Google's tool sees wider use. Right now it exists only as source code that developers must compile themselves. Both the sender and receiver must have it installed -- or some other OpenPGP encryption tool -- for it to work.
It will also require a few more steps than sending a regular email. The recipient will need to share their "public key" ahead of time with the sender. Your public key will be created when you set up the extension in Chrome. The sender will need to save the recipient's key on his or her computer, and import it into the plug-in.
Google didn't say when it expects to make a polished version of the tool available for download, or whether it will automatically incorporate the tool into Gmail. But whether new tools like Google's are made the default or not, with enough support, they could complicate the lucrative relationship Internet giants have with our data.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com


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Update: Chrome Gets Google Cloud Print service
Google says get ready to experience the ultimate things with Chrome web browser. We all know, Google is integrating many web based applications into its browser and making users to get everything at one place.
Yes! I agree Chrome users will surely enjoy all this updates. Google is showing the future of browsing.
We have been updating you with every move of Chromium 7 or for simplicity Chrome 7 project. First we noticed 7 changes in Chrome 7 when compared to Chrome 6. Recently we saw integration of Instant search, UI tabs, Remote hosting in Chrome 7.
Now its time to update more and yes, again we got some new features being integrated in Chrome 7 latest build 7.0.548.0. This time Google moves one step ahead and brought something new. Here are the new features integrated in Chrome,
#1. Google Cloud Print
Google Cloud Print enables any application (web, desktop, mobile) on any device to print to any printer.
Applications submit print jobs to the service via the web-based common print dialog or API offered by the service. Google Cloud Print then sends the print job to the selected printer which the user has previously registered with the service. A new class of cloud-aware printers connects directly to the service and offers the best user experience. Legacy printers connect to the service via a proxy.
Tech Tip: Learn more about Google Cloud Print
#2. Background WebApps
Background Web Apps enable a future app to boot in the background at system startup and continue running even if all Windows have been closed. There was no further information and it is unclear if and when this feature will make it into a beta, developer or final version of Chrome.
#3. XSS Auditor
Enables WebKit's XSS Auditor (cross-site scripting protection). This feature aims to protect you from certain attacks of malicious web sites. It improves your security, but it might not be compatible with all web sites.
Tech Tip: Do you remember the recent bom sobando attack on Orkut.com ? Hackers used XSS to attack the website and spread unwanted messages around, that too without any action from a user.
#4. Disable outdated plug-ins
Automatically disables plug-ins with known security vulnerabilities and offers update links for them. Outdated plugins create another loophole for hackers to gain control of your system. Most of the times plugin authors roll out new updates to fix vulnerabilities.
Tech Tip: This is very true in the case of Flash on browsers. That's why Flash has been integrated in Chrome 6.
These are the new features which have been added about:lab in Chrome latest build. Still we aren't clear whether these new features will be integrated upcoming Chrome 7 or it is a preparation for Chrome 8.
As we are getting closer to Chrome 7 release these features are making users go crazy about this web browser. Well these features can put Chrome on upper hand in browsers war as compared to Firefox and Internet Explorer 9.
Again! What you feel? These are the best features which other browsers are missing? Share you thoughts and let others know why Chrome is one of the best browser out there 🙂


text:
But if they allow WiFi, they shouldn't be able to stop you from setting up ad-hoc networks for free with other people on the plane for multi-player gaming, at least. Sure, it's not internet-connectivity, but it's still fun.
United To Be The First Domestic Airline With WiFi In The Sky
from the finally... dept
In 2001, a bunch of US-based airlines bought into Boeing's vision of internet in the skies. However, in the wake of September 11th, 2001, they all pulled out of the project to focus on things like, well, surviving. Boeing did still manage to sign up foreign airlines, but the US airlines all managed to avoid offering real internet access in the skies. When they did offer any kind of internet access it was extremely limited and ridiculously pricey. However, it was only a matter of time before US airlines jumped on the surf-while-you-fly bandwagon, and apparently United now has regulator approval to offer real WiFi in the sky. The good thing for the airlines, of course, is that more people now have WiFi equipped laptops, which should increase the demand for such things. What's not at all clear, though, is how United intends to price the service, and if it will be as ridiculous as many people expect. Considering that the plan is to piggyback the data on the ridiculously over-priced seatback phones, it wouldn't be surprising at all to find this service priced out of usefulness for most people. To be honest, it's a bit surprising that some of the more innovative domestic airlines weren't the first to move on WiFi in the sky — but hopefully this jumpstarts others to get into the game at more reasonable price levels.


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Do You Answer Telephone Surveys? – Survey of the Day
When news organization want to find out what the public thinks about an issue, they often turn to opinion polling. Most of these surveys are of the telephone variety, meaning a random sample of people are called and asked if they would like to participate in a poll.
According to the Pew Research Center – which does a great deal of opinion polling — most say no. In all the surveys Pew has done 2012, only 14 percent of the people they reached on the phone agreed to participate. This marks a sharp decline from 1997 when 43 percent of the households contacted agreed to take part in the survey.


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- Reduce rodent habitat around your home, work place, and recreational areas. Remove brush, rock piles, junk, cluttered firewood, and possible rodent food supplies, such as pet and wild animal food. Make your home and outbuildings rodent-proof.
- Wear gloves if you are handling or skinning potentially infected animals to prevent contact between your skin and the plague bacteria. Contact your local health department if you have questions about disposal of dead animals.
- Use repellent if you think you could be exposed to rodent fleas during activities such as camping, hiking, or working outdoors. Products containing DEET can be applied to the skin as well as clothing and products containing permethrin can be applied to clothing (always follow instructions on the label).
- Keep fleas off of your pets by applying flea control products. Animals that roam freely are more likely to come in contact with plague infected animals or fleas and could bring them into homes. If your pet becomes sick, seek care from a veterinarian as soon as possible.
- Do not allow dogs or cats that roam free in endemic areas to sleep on your bed.
Note: A plague vaccine is no longer available in the United States. New plague vaccines are in development but are not expected to be commercially available in the immediate future.
Page last reviewed: November 27, 2018


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An armed robbery gang who specialize in dressing up as women and robbing unsuspecting victims have been arrested by the Oyo State police Command. They were paraded recently where they told their stories. Vanguard reports
An unsuspecting womanizer would easily fall into their traps seeing their feminine faces made-up with cosmetics, with weave-on hairdo that dangles on both sides of their broad shoulders.
Their coated lips look inviting. No doubt, countless men must have fallen prey to them. Many passersby who thronged the state headquarters of the Police command at Eleiyele, Ibadan to catch a glimpse of these attractive "women" could not hide their disbelief.
Though, their chests were flat which should convince doubting Thomases that the suspects were not women, some still insisted on seeing their private parts due to their looks.
But, behind these deceptive looks are more than meets the ordinary eye. The hearts of both Omooba Oyewole and Lawal Kabir are fortified with cold steel. They are suspected dare-devil robbers. If they have conscience, it must be made of solid concrete.
One of the suspects, Lawal Kabir whose eyelids blink momentarily like a doll in the old Kingsway Store claims to be a devout Muslim and considers only Fridays and the Ramadan period as sacred days in the whole year when he thinks he should not engage in armed robbery.
These days, especially Fridays, he said, he would go to the mosque to pray to God to forgive all his criminal tendencies only to continue his devilish acts thereafter. In fact, the suspect said he was arrested on Friday after observing the Jumat prayers.
Given their looks, one needed no soothsayer to discern that the suspects had carried out numerous deadly attacks on their victims even though they admitted to have participated in no fewer than four successful robbery operations.
According to them, they had made people cry in places like Osun, Sawmill, Iyana-Agbala and other places when they unleashed terror on them. Knowing their days of reckoning had finally come, the eight-man gang confessed some of the crimes they had committed to Crime Alert.
Ayodele Olaitan, who wore a mask, one of the tools they use in their nefarious activities shook his head in regret and said: "It was my friends that pushed me into this. I joined the gang sometime ago and I have participated in at least three robbery operations.
I am not the owner of the mask you see on me. It belongs to one of us called pastor. He is dead now. I regret all my actions. I didn't realize we could be caught. But, now the game is up, " he said as he burst into tears.
Like other criminals, Lawal Kabir said he was pushed into the criminal world as a result of an unsuccessful business venture. "I took to robbery when my plumbing work was not booming.
Three years after my freedom as an apprentice, I tried all I could to make both ends meet, but things did not work for me. I first stayed in Lagos before I later came to Ibadan where I was introduced to a gang of armed robbers. I have participated in four armed robbery attacks.
I went with them to Osun State, Ibadan, Sawmill and Iyana -Agbala. I was arrested on Friday after I finished praying in the mosque. Somebody we call a pastor, also a member of the gang called me without knowing the police had already arrested him.
I don't rob on Fridays and during Ramadan. I used those periods to pray to God to forgive me my sins. I know what I was doing was wrong but it was difficult for me to break away from it."
Another member of the gang, Biola Alaba who wore a weave-on hairdo said they were eight in number and that they were arrested at a drinking joint while preparing to carry out a robbery operation at Bodija area of the city. He denied ever killing any of their victims.
"How can I commit two sins at the same time. I cannot rob and kill at the same time. It is unfair to rob someone of his belongings and kill him. We don't even r*pe our victims, " he said.
As for Sunday Omooba from Ogbomoso who says he is a member of the Oodua Peoples Congress, OPC, he narrated how he took charge of the armoury for the gang. "I helped them get bullets through one man. I just call the man any time I need bullets for the gang.
I don't rob with them. In fact, I did not know that they were using the bullets to rob. I also supplied that pump action gun to them. I bought the gun for N70,000 from a friend. If I knew that they would use the weapons for robbery, I would not give them."
The Investigating Police Officer in charge of the case alleged that Omooba supplied the pump action gun and killed the owner of the gun so that he could get the gun from him and did not give the money he promised to give him.
Other suspects who are car snatchers including those who bought the stolen vehicles from them were also arrested in Kaduna and Kano. Two of the suspects, Dolapo Olayinka and Yusuf Ibrahim, robber and accomplice respectively; gave their own accounts. Olayinka said he only used his commercial motorcycle to convey the robbers who dispossessed people of their items. He recalled how they crossed a woman's vehicle and took N20,000 from her at gun point.
The owners of the stolen vehicles were at the police command to identify their vehicles. All of them pleaded anonymity for fear of being attacked by yet-to-be-identified members of the gang.
One of them said his car, a Toyota Camry, was snatched at gunpoint on October 1, last year around 8pm and he reported at the Special Anti robbery squad.
He specifically commended the efforts of one SP Sola Aremu, the O/C SARS, Ogbomoso and his boys for going ahead to recover the car. He said: "I am full of thanks to the police. I never thought I could recover my car again. The SARS in Ogbomoso acted promptly. I have never seen police work like that."
The State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Mohammed Indabawa said, "sequel to tip-offs about a criminal hideout at a mechanic village, Iyana Church, Ibadan, a raid was organized and SARS operatives arrested the following suspected armed robbers: Olaitan Ayodele, Abiola Alaba, Oyewole Ogunwole, Adedeji Mustapha, Omooba Oyewole and Adedeji Mustapha. On interrogation, they all confessed to their past and present crimes within and outside Oyo State. They also confessed to have attacked and robbed two police officers.
All the people they confessed to have robbed were contacted and they corroborated their confessions.
In order to recover some of their loot as well as arms and ammunition, a search was conducted in the house of the leader of the gang, one Ayodele Olaitan along Airport Road, Ibadan and the following exhibits were recovered; one pump action gun, one English cut-to-size double barrel gun, one single-barrel gun, locally made cylinders and many others.
Source: Vanguard Newspaper
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|Gordon Paynter
|Thu, 7 Feb 2002 11:44:45 -0800
|Re: Excel Plug-in?
|On Thursday 07 February 2002 09:27, George Buchanan wrote:
> Jared Potter wrote:
> > I have read your posts for both excel and quark. What about not
> > having it parse the files? All that an excel file really needs to
> > be indexed with would be the title and subject information, for our
> > organization anyway.
As I think I recently said, this is what UnknownPlug is for. Here's
plugin ImagePlug
Note that the associated file's name will be stored in a metadata
format CL1VList '<td>[link][Title][/link]</td>