By David Gibson
Religion News Service
(RNS) Reports this week that the late Pope John Paul II may be on the verge of sainthood after a second miracle was credited to his intercession aren’t a huge surprise: When he died eight years ago, crowds were already clamoring for his canonization, and Pope Benedict XVI quickly waived the usual five-year waiting period to get the process rolling.
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 24 (Reuters) – The security planning for last week’s Boston Marathon, where two bombs went off killing three people and wounding 264, included preparation for such an emergency, a top Massachusetts public safety official said on Wednesday.
“We spend months planning for the marathon. We did a tabletop exercise the week before that included a bombing scenario in it,” Kurt Schwartz, the state’s undersecretary for homeland security, told a panel at Harvard University.
Two bombs went off at the finish line of the race, one of the most-attended sporting events in Boston, where there was a crowd of tens of thousands of spectators.
Given the public nature of the marathon, which is run along a 26.2-mile (42.2-km) course stretching from suburban Hopkinton, Massachusetts, to downtown Boston, security officials said they take into account a variety of possibilities.
Planning rules adopted since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington “have forced you to do that, to think about the unthinkable,” Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis told the panel. “When you do that, when you envision what might happen … you respond in a way that is probably more thoughtful.”
Investigators have accused two brothers of Chechen ethnicity – Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gun battle with police, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now in custody – with planting the bombs. (Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Eric Beech)
The PEEL Lamp is an innovative night light from Japanese design duo YOY. This unique electrical fixture utilizes an ultra-thin OLED light source to create the illusion of another, brighter world lurking just beyond our own.
When I think of romantic, when I think of heartwarming, when I think of being sweet… I don’t think of drones. But if I think of awesome and if I think of kickass and if I think of freaking cool… I do think of drones. So guy who used a flying drone to drop off the ring while you proposed, you’re awesome. More »
By Ernest Scheyder
April 24 (Reuters) – General Electric Co discovered it was financing a small number of firearm purchases in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings – despite deciding five years ago to avoid the practice – and moved to stop future loans, the company said on Wednesday.
Many of the conglomerate’s employees live in or near Newtown, about 25 miles (40 km) from GE’s Fairfield, Connecticut, headquarters. Peter Lanza, the father of the Newtown gunman, is a GE executive.
The company’s GE Capital unit stopped providing consumer financing in 2008 at retailers whose primary business was firearms, except to less than 75 grandfathered businesses. After Newtown, it stopped financing even those handful of stores, spokesman Russell Wilkerson said Wednesday.
The news was first reported earlier Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal.
The December massacre that killed 20 children and six adults intensified the U.S. debate on guns, with many states and lawmakers pushing for broader background checks on gun buyers and limits on sales of weapons and ammunition.
GE Capital did not publicly announce the policy change in 2008, but told prospective new customers it was no longer providing the service, Wilkerson added.
The GE Capital loans have typically been for relatively small amounts – most firearms cost only several hundred dollars – and have little effect on GE Capital’s portfolio.
The checks after the Newtown shootings, which GE said involved a “rigorous audit process,” were part of its attempt to distance itself from gun culture.
The Newtown shooting has led to other capital investment changes.
Cerberus Capital Management LP has decided to sell Freedom Group, maker of the Bushmaster rifle used in the Newtown massacre.
Banking sources have told Reuters that major Wall Street firms have been unwilling to finance a bid for Freedom Group, and Cerberus co-founder Stephen Feinberg may end up pursuing a private bid for the brand.
WASHINGTON — Two U.S. officials say the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard.
Authorities originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAHR’ tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him.
He rebuffed the term “hero” in his first post-manhunt interview, but David Henneberry’s quick thinking warrants the accolade.
Henneberry told WCVB on Wednesday the harrowing details of how he discovered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, hiding in his backyard. After the lockdown was lifted on Friday, the Watertown, Mass., resident decided to check on his boat, which appeared to be missing the pads he had put in place to avoid chafing.
It was only after Henneberry grabbed a ladder and climbed up three steps that he noticed the blood on the floor of the boat, which he initially thought was his own. Once Henneberry peered a little closer, he saw the body of the 19-year-old suspect and immediately called the police.
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The downfall of webOS left more than a few canceled devices in its wake, but the most elusive of the bunch tends to be the WindsorNot: a touch-only smartphone. We’ve seen hints of it here and there, but the shy little device has largely been kept under wraps — until now. The dedicated folks at webOS Nation have managed to get their hands on a functional prototype. The 4-inch devices seems to lie somewhere between a Pre3 and HP Touchpad, aping the hardware specifications of the former while adopting the latter’s software version: webOS 3.0. The tweaked software does feature a smartphone-sized keyboard, but webOS Nation says some of the OS’ trappings are difficult to read, and were clearly meant to be refined for the smaller screen before release. The phone’s form, on the other hand, seems to be top notch, indicating that the project was canned before the software team had a chance to catch up. Check out the source link for a full walkthrough of the device and a brief history lesson of webOS’ last days.
Filed under: Cellphones, HP
Source: webOS Nation
WASHINGTON — The CIA added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a U.S. government terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The CIA’s request came about six months after the FBI investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also at the Russian government’s request, but the FBI found no ties to terrorism, officials said.
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Ah, the single life.
Going out every night, playing by your own rules, dropping canned tuna fish into a bowl of Ramen noodles and calling it “cooking.”
While being single does have common tropes no matter where it’s done, much like real estate, location plays a big part of precisely how pleasurable the experience actually is.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
