The ASUS Eee PC was launched in 2007 and while it had all the characteristics of a “netbook,” it arrived before the term had wormed its way into popular vocabulary. This species of compact computer — essentially miniaturized, internet-focused…
At first glance you don’t notice the Ford F-150, not when there’s a vast Liebherr T282B dump truck towering above. Looks can be deceiving, though: this is no ordinary Ford … Continue reading
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — A New York man who told police he “just snapped” and killed his girlfriend with his fists and a curling iron while visiting her college dorm has been found guilty of murder.
The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester reports (http://on.rocne.ws/1rufsVe ) that a jury on Friday found 22-year-old Clayton Whittemore guilty in Monroe County Court in Rochester. Prosecutors said Whittemore killed 18-year-old Alexandra Kogut in her dorm room in September 2012 at the State University of New York College at Brockport, 15 miles west of Rochester. Both are from New Hartford.
Whittemore was enrolled at Utica College when the former high school swimming star was slain.
Whittemore could face 25 years to life in prison at his sentencing July 16.
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Information from: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, http://www.democratandchronicle.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama will press European leaders this week to keep up pressure on Russia over its threatening moves in Ukraine, while seeking to assuage fears from Poland and other NATO allies that the West could slip back into a business-as-usual relationship with Moscow.
Obama’s four day trip to Poland, Belgium and France comes against the backdrop of successful national elections in Ukraine and signs that Russia is moving most of its troops off its shared border with the former Soviet republic. Yet violence continues to rage in eastern Ukrainian cities and there remains deep uncertainty about whether Ukraine’s new president-elect can stabilize his country. U.S. officials contend that, even with some signs of progress, Russia has not taken the necessary steps to ease tensions and could still face additional economic sanctions. Obama will look for Western allies to show a united front during a meeting of the Group of Seven major industrial nations that was quickly arranged after leaders decided to boycott a meeting Russia had been scheduled to host this week.
But at least some parts of Obama’s visit will challenge the notion that the West has isolated Moscow. Russian President Vladmir Putin is scheduled to join U.S. and European leaders in France Friday for a day of events marking the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. Putin will also hold one-on-one talks with French President Francois Hollande, his first meeting with a Western leader since the Ukraine crisis began.
“Putin may not get to host the G-8 but if he gets to go to Normandy with everybody, it begins to diminish the appearance of isolation,” said Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who now serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The White House says Obama will not hold a formal bilateral meeting with Putin, though the two leaders are expected to have some contact. Officials also disputed the notion that Putin’s presence constituted a return to normal relations, noting that Obama and other leaders have talked with the Russian president throughout the crisis with Ukraine.
Yet those reassurances may be of little solace to NATO allies who sit near the Russian border, particularly Poland, where Obama will open his trip Tuesday. In April, the U.S. moved about 150 troops into Poland to try to ease its security concerns, but Obama is likely to get requests from Polish leaders for additional support.
“He’s going to hear a very strong message from Polish officials that the mission has not been accomplished,” said Heather Conley, a Europe scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In fact, the work has only begun.”
While in Warsaw, Obama will also meet with regional leaders who are in town to mark the 25th anniversary of Poland’s first post-communist free elections. Among those leaders will be Ukrainian President-elect Petro Poroshenko, who won Ukraine’s May 25 election and will hold his first bilateral meeting with Obama.
“We very much admired that the people of Ukraine have turned out in huge numbers to elect President-elect Poroshenko,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. “We’ve admired his commitment to pursue dialogue and to aim to reduce tensions and put Ukraine on a positive path.”
From Warsaw, Obama will head to Brussels to meet with leaders from the other G-7 nations: U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan. The wealthy nations will discuss ways to wean Europe off of Russian energy supplies, as well as gauge interest in levying more sanctions on Russia.
The U.S. and European Union have each sanctioned Russian businesses and individuals, including some people in Putin’s inner circle, and threatened the prospect of broader penalties on Russia’s key economic sectors. But with European nations that have close economic ties with Russia already wary of those sector sanctions, Obama is likely to face an uphill climb in cementing those commitments amid the recent signs of progress with Ukraine.
“I think there is no political appetite for further sanctions,” Conley said of the European nations.
Many of the G-7 leaders will also travel to Normandy for the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. But all eyes will be on Obama and Putin, who have a history of tense public encounters even before the Ukraine crisis worsened their relationship.
Obama and Putin will both attend a leaders’ lunch and a ceremony at Sword Beach, one of the five main landing areas during the Normandy invasion. The U.S. president will also attend a separate ceremony at Omaha Beach, the largest of the assault areas during the June 6, 1944, invasion.
The president’s trip comes during an intense stretch for his foreign policy agenda. He made a surprise visit to Afghanistan last week, followed by an announcement that he would be bringing the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan to a close by the end of 2016. Obama also delivered a major foreign policy speech last week that aimed to push back at critics who say he has been too cautious, including in his dealings with Russia.
And on Saturday, the White House announced that the U.S. had freed Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the lone U.S. prisoner of the Afghan war, after nearly five years in custody.
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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC
Life moves fast, especially for all you New Yorkers out there. On your average commute to the office, between the train delays, the pushy pedestrians, the strangely long line at the bagel place, we’re not surprised you’re not exactly drinking up the scenery.
But then again, rush your way through New York City and you’ll miss one of the many reasons you moved there in the first place. No matter how fast you’re trying to get from Point A to Point B, we highly recommend taking one, small moment to pause and look up.
Below, you’ll see 12 gorgeous reasons why. We’ve captured a selection of New York buildings that, head on, look like nothing special. But take a moment, crane your neck and you’ll see the mundane ground floors morph into something different altogether, their highest levels emitting a magnificence we’d never suspect.
Scroll down and watch your average-looking Duane Reade or Pret A Manger blossom into glorious architectural feats. Whether flaunting Greco-Roman columns, Baroque ornamentation or futuristic geometry, the following buildings really couldn’t say it much clearer: Look up, New York!
It’s known as the mammoth cemetery for good reason. Along the banks of a Siberian river not far from the Arctic Ocean lie thousands of bones, most of them belonging to the giant, shaggy relatives of today’s elephants. A new study argues that such mysterious graveyards were not the results of a natural catastrophe, but rather the work of early human hunters—who may have had help from some of the world’s first dogs.
“This is the first time that someone’s gone out on a limb and suggested something different than what we thought before,” says Angela Perri, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and an expert on dog domestication. “But it’s still very speculative at this stage.”
Study author Pat Shipman first became interested in what she calls “mammoth megasites” in 2009. About 30 such spots have been unearthed in central Europe and North Asia, some with tens of thousands of bones packed tightly on top of each other across areas as small as 60 square meters. The massive tusks and femurs of mammoths jut out among the remains of wild horses, deer, foxes, and other animals. “They’re crazy sites,” says Shipman, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. “The sheer number of dead mammoths is astounding.” More than 160 of the tusked goliaths lie in the mammoth cemetery—a site known as Berelekh—alone.
How did they get there? Some scientists think it was an act of nature—perhaps a flood that swept dozens of animals to a particular spot, or an unlucky herd that fell through thin ice. But recent evidence has suggested that people may to be blame. Shipman says the mammoth megasites begin to appear about 44,000 years ago, just about the time that modern humans entered this part of the world. What’s more, archaeologists have found evidence of huts made of mammoth bones at some of these locations, as well as cuts and burn marks on the bones that could only have been made by people.
To get a clearer picture, Shipman combed through the literature on more than a dozen mammoth megasites, paying particular attention to the age and sex of the mammoths unearthed there. She then compared these demographics with those seen with the deaths of large numbers of elephants, the mammoth’s closest living relative. Natural disasters such as droughts kill the youngest and oldest elephants, but other sudden die-offs—such as a herd falling through ice or a cull of elephants to control their population—kill indiscriminately, leaving behind the carcasses of young and old, male and female. Elephant hunters, meanwhile, tend to kill each animal in a different place. “To my surprise, hardly anything matched these patterns,” Shipman says of the mammoth bones. What’s more, the dating on the bones indicated that they had been laid down over hundreds of years. That suggests that the animals were killed over and over in the same spot over many generations, she reports in Quaternary International. “There’s something that’s drawing them to that location.”
Shipman says the data point to a scenario in which humans killed the mammoths, but not in the way people do today. Instead of culling them or hunting them across vast plains, ancient peoples may have ambushed the creatures. The reason so many bones are found in the same location may be that these spots were ideal for such ambushes. Perhaps they were surrounded by thick brush, in which spear-hurling humans could hide, or maybe they lay along a commonly traveled migration route. Shipman also thinks the hunters may have had some help from dogs.
It’s still unclear exactly when or where dogs became domesticated, but some recent archaeological evidence suggests it may have happened around the same time and place as the mammoth megasites. A skull recovered from a cave in southern Belgium, for example, has both wolf- and doglike features, and it dates to about 32,000 years ago. Though genetic evidence indicates that this animal may not have been an ancestor of today’s dogs, the find suggests that the process of canine domestication could have begun tens of thousands of years ago. Significantly, Shipman says, similar skulls have been found among the mammoth bones at several megasites. Many of the skulls bear healed fractures, a possible indication that these animals were cared for by humans.
Shipman speculates that the mammoth megasites may be the first significant evidence of a cooperative relationship between man and dog. The canines could have corralled the mammoths at the ambush sites and held the prey in place while human hunters moved in for the kill, Shipman says. Once the mammoths were dead, the dogs could have protected the sites from scavengers. “All of that mammoth meat would have brought predators from miles around,” she says. In return, the humans may have provided these canines with food and protection. And slowly, a closer relationship may have begun to form.
Finding more large and strong doglike animals at these sites would support her hypothesis, Shipman says. Such finds will be necessary to convince archaeologists like Nicholas Conard that the new work is more than just a leap of faith. “I like it as an idea, but there’s no smoking gun,” says Conard, who works at the University of Tübingen in Germany and who has personally excavated mammoth megasites. Perri agrees. “We don’t know enough about what early dogs—or even the wolves of the time—looked like,” she says. “This is extrapolating from too few examples.” Still, Conard says, “there are so few ideas about how these sites formed, and what Shipman is arguing is possible and testable. It’s a move in the right direction.”
Original article:
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/05/did-dogs-help-drive-mammoths-their-graves
This story has been provided by AAAS, the non-profit science
society, and its international journal, Science.
June may mean the end of the school year or the time to start thinking about vacations but here on the LGBT page (which has a snazzy new design if you didn’t notice) June is Pride Month where you may come across the occasional gay pride festivities but there’s also much to proud about on our television screens this month. Here is your handy guide for the month of June as to which shows are coming back with new episodes, which old shows are coming back and where to find some very fun – and very gay – movie collections out there. Grab your pride flag and let’s do this!
Each week HuffPost Gay Voices, in a partnership with bloggers Liz Margolies and Scout, brings you a round up of some of the biggest LGBT wellness stories from the past seven days. For more LGBT Wellness, visit our page dedicated to the topic here.
By Rick Clemons for YourTango.com
Being a gay man does not make me feel less manly or more feminine. All it does it make me more appreciative of what it means to be a woman in our society.
Granted, I have three very important women in my life — my ex-wife and two daughters — who provide me with a road map for understanding women and appreciating the connection that women and gay men share. But ever since I came out as a gay man, I discovered I had more in common with women than I ever thought possible and my respect for women has intensified even more. A couple ways that I relate to women below:
• We are sexualized. Gay men and women both have to endure being treated as a piece of meat. Society sees women as sexual delicacies for men to devour and gay men as sexual deviants who exist to show straight boys what not to do. What this really means is that the desires of women and gay men are not considered as legitimate as those of heterosexual men. That, of course, is archaic thinking that needs to stop.
• We’re both considered weak, but are actually very strong. For all the mockery, demeaning behaviors and not-good-enough messages (i.e. “that’s so gay” or “you throw like a girl”) that are thrown at us, we sure know how to stand up and prevail. Our fights as women (lesbians included) and gay men show that we have the strength to overcome any obstacles that hold us down.
• We don’t fit gender stereotypes. One of the highest hurdles I had to cross coming out of the closet was the belief that my masculinity was at stake because I was gay. Boy was I wrong. I’m a 6’4, 280 pound guy who is built like a linebacker and you’re going to tell me I’m not masculine enough because I’m more attracted to men than women? Fine. Let’s go rumble. Likewise, women are constantly criticized for either being too feminine when they are not aggressive or too masculine when they are. Instead, we should judge people on their own merit and not let our perceived notions of gender color our expectations of how people should and should not behave.
• We have trouble with confidence, self-esteem and self-love. Ninety percent of my clients — gay, straight, male, female — have one thing in common that freezes them up in life: low self-confidence. When you are a woman or a gay man, you are constantly being told that you aren’t good enough and that is enough to wear anyone down. In response, we need to fight even harder to prove to the world that we have a lot to offer and that we deserve to be taken seriously.
If I’ve learned nothing else from women since I came out of the closet, it’s that you are only not good enough if you allow other people to treat you like you aren’t good enough. This goes for straight men as well, who are often in closets of their own struggling to assume their roles as tough guys.
Funny how if we stripped down to our naked truths and were just humans, there would be no closets to come out of because there would be no need for closets to hide in.
Ready to break out of stereotypical man vs. woman assumptions? Tired of playing to please? Give yourself a complimentary life coaching session if for no other reason to say, “I’m worth it!”
More on YourTango:
Study: Women Get More Bisexual as They Grow Older
Homosexuality: Your Coming Out Story
This article originally appeared on YourTango.com: “Why Being Gay Makes Me Appreciate Women”
A new photography book that documents the life and experiences of a then-closeted gay artist during his time working as a youth minister for a conservative, evangelical Christian organization during the late ’70s and early ’80s has just launched a Kickstarter campaign.
Jesus Days, 1978-1983 is a project from photographer Greg Reynolds that showcases his experiences leading Bible studies and prayer meetings, counseling students and engaging in overseas mission projects.
Renyolds wants to share these experiences through Jesus Days, 1978-1983 and has launched a Kickstarter campaign in an effort to fund the project. In order to better understand his experiences while working as a closeted youth minister and his goals with this project, HuffPost Gay Voices chatted with the photographer this week about Jesus Days, 1978-1983.
The Huffington Post: How did the book come about? Was there a moment you can recall or point to when you thought “I should really share these with the world”?
Although the pictures from Jesus Days, 1978-1983 had been around for some time, the “maybe-I-have something-here” moment occurred in 2007. While visiting my family in Kentucky, I found dusty boxes of kodachromes in a closet. I had not looked at the pictures for many years, mainly because the images reminded me of a period in my life that I wanted to forget, my Jesus Days. At the time, I was in my 20s, a deeply closeted gay born-again Christian working as a Youth Minister for a large, U.S. based, evangelical Christian organization. It took me until age 30 before I came out and left the movement, moving to NYC where I entered the film school of Columbia University.
The years that had passed since then now gave me the distance to look at the pictures with a new eye. I realized that the person taking those images back then, (myself), was not just a religious evangelical worker but an emerging artist, although I did not know this at the time. As I watched the pictures flicker on the old movie screen at my parent’s home, I thought to myself, that perhaps I have something here. It was then that I started editing the hundreds of pictures and showing them to friends and colleagues. Their response encouraged me to make a book.
Looking back on that time in your life, what strikes you as the most powerful thing you experienced?
This is a difficult question to answer. Now looking back, what strikes me as the most powerful thing I experienced was the realization that I could determine the direction of my life. I realized that the world would not fall apart, I would not die, nor would anyone else die, if I came out as a gay man. It would not be the end of my life but the beginning of my life.
What kind of an effect has making this book had on you? Did you learn anything about yourself that you hadn’t realized before?
It has had a big impact on my life. I realize now that the artistic impulse arrives far earlier than the moment when we identify ourselves as artists. Working on this photobook has brought closure to a period of my life that I had walked away from but from which I had never entirely left.
What do you hope readers take away from this project?
I am happy to share the photographs and story, but what it is that the viewer/reader takes away is for them alone to decide.
For more information about Jesus Days, 1978-1983 head here to visit the project’s Kickstarter and check out a slideshow of images from the book below.
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.
