Tuesday, October 22, 2013

NBC news clips

He was aiming 'at my chest': Middle-schooler recalls Nev. shooting
Sparks, Nev. middle-schooler Jose Cazares and his mom, Marisela are "forever grateful" for a hero teacher they say saved the boy's life Monday.
A young student opened fire on the school's basketball court Monday, shooting and killing math teacher Mike Landsberry and wounding two students before taking his own life. 
"I was hanging out with my friends, and then we heard a loud gunshot and we thought it was firecrackers," Jose Cazares told Matt Lauer on TODAY Tuesday as he recounted the chaos of the scene. "So then we looked back toward where we saw the noise, and we saw the kid pull out his gun and shoot the kid in the arm, so then they started running and I froze because he was aiming his gun right at my chest. And I looked at the gun and my chest like, 'He's going to shoot me.'
"I turned around and I ran. I heard a gunshot, and I thought he shot me. Then I looked back, and he shot a kid in his leg, arm and stomach."
Cazares and other witnesses said Landsberry quickly stepped forward and spoke to the boy. 
"(Landsberry) was telling him to stop and put the gun down, and then the kid, he yelled out 'No!' yelling at him, and he shot him," Jose said. "(Landsberry) was calm and he was holding out his hand like, 'Put the gun in my hand,' like to just stop." 

TODAY
Landsberry was a National Guardsman and former Marine who served two tours in Afghanistan.
Landsberry, 45, a National Guardsman and former Marine, died at the scene. Sparks Mayor Geno Martini said Landsberry served two tours in Afghanistan with the Nevada National Guard.
"I'm forever grateful for everything that he did," an emotional Marisela Cazares told Lauer. "Just grateful he was there to help our children out."
Jose heard one of the students pleading with the shooter, saying, "Why me?''
"(The shooter) didn't say nothing,'' Jose said. "He just kept on shooting them." 
After Landsberry was shot, Jose said he and several other students ran and hid, but the shooter found them when he heard one of the students crying loudly. 

TODAY
Landsberry is survived by his wife, Sharon, and her two children.
"He started yelling, 'If you guys say anything about me coming here, I'm going to shoot you,' so then he shot twice to the windows, and then it seemed like he was out of bullets, so then he left,'' Jose said. 
Landsberry's brother, Reggie, told NBC News that the 8th-grade teacher is survived by his wife, Sharon, and two of her children from a previous relationship.
"I want to say that they're in my thoughts and prayers today and for the rest of the days," said Marisela. "I hope that God gives them the encouragement that they need to go on. Mr. Landsberry, he sacrificed his life to take our kids into safety, and I thank him for that. He's a true hero."
The two wounded students are in stable condition expected to survive, according to authorities. 


Another student goes off the deep end and another school tragedy. Sometimes I think that teachers don't step forward when they should, as in so many of the bullying cases, but this man ran a huge risk and paid the ultimate price. He surely is a hero.




How a teenager beat out the pros to find a weird baby dinosaur

Kevin Terris discovered the skeleton of a baby dinosaur named Joe in 2009, when he was a high-school student.
It's amazing enough that a 17-year-old high-school student was behind the discovery of the youngest fossil skeleton from a weird-looking breed of boneheaded dinosaur. But it's even more amazing that two professional paleontologists walked right past the bones before the kid spotted them.
"It's a little embarrassing to walk by something like that," admitted Andrew Farke, curator of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology at The Webb Schools, "but he was just in the right place at the right time, looking in the right direction."
Farke and the California museum's director, Don Lofgren, had checked out the territory at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, and passed within several feet of the exposed fossil. A couple of days later, they brought their Webb students through the place for a field trip — and it was 17-year-old Kevin Terris who spotted the first bone.
"At first, I was interested in seeing what the initial piece of bone sticking out of the rock was," Terris recalled in a news release. Then he called Farke over to investigate. Together, they picked away at the overlying rock to see what lay beneath. "When we exposed the skull, I was ecstatic," Terris said.

That was back in 2009. Today, Terris is an aspiring paleontologist at Montana State University, and his discovery is the subject of a research paper published Tuesday by the journal PeerJ. In that paper, Farke and his colleagues report that the fossil is the "youngest and most complete specimen" representing Parasaurolophus, one of the strangest creatures in the dinosaur menagerie.
Crazy crest
Parasaurolophus was a plant-eating dinosaur that lived throughout western North America about 75 million years ago. Its most notable feature was a long hollow crest that stuck up from its head. Paleontologists believe the crest served not only as a kind of visual display, like the cockscomb on a rooster, but also as a resonator for deep, booming calls. (Check out this archived news release and audio file to sample the dinosaur's sound.)
During the four years that followed the find, researchers carefully excavated Terris' discovery, had it airlifted to the lab, analyzed the fossilized bones and put the skeleton on display at the Alf Museum. It's been nicknamed "Joe" — in honor of the late Joseph Augustyn, a contributor to the museum.

Little Joe would have been about 8 feet (2.5 meters) long in life, compared with a typical length of 33 feet (10 meters) for an adult Parasaurolophus. A sample taken from the fossil's leg bone indicated that Joe was less than a year old when it died.
"Dinosaurs have yearly growth rings in their bone tissue, like trees. But we didn't see even one ring," one of the PeerJ study's co-authors, Sarah Werning of Stony Brook University, explained. "That means it grew to a quarter of adult size in less than a year."
Woofers and tweeters
Joe also had made a good start on its crest — which came as a surprise, because previous studies suggested that related types of dinosaurs didn't start sprouting their ornamentation until they were at least half of their adult size. The researchers suggest that Parasaurolophus youngsters had to start early in order to develop the ornate crest that the grownups had.
"If adult Parasaurolophus had 'woofers,' the babies had 'tweeters,'" Farke said in the news release. "The short and small crest of baby 'Joe' shows that it may have had a much higher pitch to its call than did adults. Along with the visual differences, this might have helped animals living in the same area figure out who was the big boss."

Webb Schools student Brandon Scolieri looks in on the bones of the baby Parasaurolophus as they're being prepared for a CT scan. Scolieri is one of the authors of a newly published paper on the fossil.
The research team had Joe's bones scanned to produce a virtual 3-D representation of the skeleton, which is being made available via the DinosaurJoe website. That way, scientists and the public will get access to Terris' find even if they can't see Joe in person at the Alf Museum in Claremont, Calif.
Dinosaur skeletons are bought and sold for millions of dollars, but Farke declined to say how much Joe would be worth on the fossil market. It can't be sold, because it was found on federal property. "We can't actually place a value on it," Farke told NBC News. "Its primary value is scientific."
Meanwhile, Terris isn't resting on his dino-finding laurels. The Houston native, who attended The Webb Schools because of its paleontology curriculum, told NBC News he's already working on his next publication.
"Paleo is something I've been interested in since I was a kid," he said.


I've never heard of this dinosaur. This must have been a really exciting find for the student. He's in college now, specializing in paleontology. The following clip about the dinosaur is from Wikipedia.

Parasaurolophus (/ˌpærəsɔːˈrɒləfəs/ PARR-ə-saw-ROL-ə-fəs or /ˌpærəˌsɔrəˈloʊfəs/ PARR-ə- SAWR-ə-LOH-fəs; meaning "near crested lizard" in reference to Saurolophus) is a genus of ornithopod dinosaur that lived in what is now North America during the Late Cretaceous Period, about 76.5–73 million years ago.[1] It was a herbivore that walked both as a biped and a quadruped. Three species are recognized: P. walkeri (the type species), P. tubicen, and the short-crested P. cyrtocristatus. Remains are known from Alberta (Canada), and New Mexico, Montana, Utah (USA). The genus was first described in 1922 by William Parks from a skull and partial skeleton found in Alberta.
Parasaurolophus was a hadrosaurid, part of a diverse family of Cretaceous dinosaurs known for their range of bizarre head adornments. This genus is known for its large, elaborate cranial crest, which at its largest forms a long curved tube projecting upwards and back from the skull. Charonosaurus from China, which may have been its closest relative, had a similar skull and potentially a similar crest. The crest has been much discussed by scientists; the consensus is that major functions included visual recognition of both species and sex, acoustic resonance, and thermoregulation. It is one of the rarer hadrosaurids, known from only a handful of good specimens.




'Will I be next?' Rights groups say US drone strikes violate law

Two leading human rights groups have jointly released detailed reports on U.S. drone strikes that charge the government with violating international law by killing civilians, including a grandmother and a teen boy, and demand that the Obama administration prosecute anyone responsible for unlawful deaths.
Amnesty International, which studied 45 drone strikes in Pakistan in 2012 and 2013, says the U.S. violated the internationally recognized “right to life” and may have committed war crimes.

“There are real threats to the U.S. in the region,” said Naureen Shah, Amnesty’s advocacy adviser, “but it is hard to imagine that a 68-year-old grandmother or a 14-year-old boy are among them. Something clearly went wrong and the U.S. government needs to come clean.”

Human Rights Watch, which focused on six drone strikes in Yemen over the past four years, said the U.S. is undermining its own efforts against al Qaeda with drone attacks.
“The U.S. says it is taking all possible precautions during targeted killings, but it has unlawfully killed civilians and struck questionable military targets in Yemen,” said Letta Tayler, HRW’s lead researcher. “It’s long past time for the U.S. to assess the legality of its targeted killings, as well as the broader impact of these strikes on civilians.”
U.S. intelligence officials have downplayed the number of civilian deaths from drone strikes. In a 2011 speech, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, who is now CIA director, said that "for nearly the past year, there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency (and) precision" of U.S. counterterror strikes. Later, the CIA acknowledged civilian deaths to Congress but said they were in the “single digits.”

HRW’s report, “Between a Drone and al Qaeda,” alleges that two of the Yemen attacks it examined killed civilians “indiscriminately” in violation of the laws of war, and that others may have targeted people who were not legitimate targets. HRW researchers spent six weeks in Yemen and interviewed more than 90 people, including witnesses and relatives of those killed, and reviewed evidence that included ordnance and video. Researchers were able to visit two attack sites, but security concerns prevented visits to the others.


This is one policy of Obama's that I don't agree with due to the uncertainty as to who is being targeted and the possibility of missing the original target and killing an innocent bystander. It's true that he didn't start the policy, but he did continue it. Killing al Qaeda members is understandable if we are at war with them, but if the drone strikes are causing public opinion among our allies to turn against the US, it almost certainly causes new al Qaeda members to commit to their cause, taking the places of those killed. It is also against the basic morality of our society. We are supposed to be the “good guys.”




Herpes virus genome traces the ancient path of human migration

To confirm the theory that humans spread out from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, all you have to do is follow the cold sores. Or, to be more precise, follow the mutation patterns encoded in the genome of the virus that causes those cold sores.
That's what researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison did: In the journal PLOS ONE, they describe how they sequenced the genomes of 31 samples of herpes simplex virus type-1 to reconstruct how it hitchhiked on humans as they dispersed around the world.
The results match the pattern proposed by the "Out of Africa" theory, which has become the most widely accepted scenario for ancient human migration. The analysis showed that African strains of the virus contained the most genetic diversity — suggesting that they had the oldest roots.
“The viral strains sort exactly as you would predict based on sequencing of human genomes. We found that all of the African isolates cluster together, all the virus from the Far East, Korea, Japan, China clustered together, all the viruses in Europe and America, with one exception, clustered together,” senior author Curtis Brandt, a professor of medical microbiology and opthalmology, said in a UW-Madison news release.
“What we found follows exactly what the anthropologists have told us, and the molecular geneticists who have analyzed the human genome have told us, about where humans originated and how they spread across the planet,” he said.

Almost all of the samples from the United States were linked to European strains, but one sample from Texas was more closely linked to Asia. Brandt and his colleagues said that particular sample may have come from someone who picked up the virus during a trip to the Far East, or perhaps from someone with Native American heritage whose ancestors passed over a "land bridge" between Asia and North America.
“We found support for the land bridge hypothesis, because the date of divergence from its most recent Asian ancestor was about 15,000 years ago," Brandt said. “The dates match, so we postulate that this was an Amerindian virus.”
The researchers said HSV-1 strains are ideal for tracking long-term migration patterns because they're easy to collect, usually not lethal, and capable of forming lifelong latent infections. Because the virus is spread by close contact, through kissing or exposure to saliva, it tends to run in families. And because the viral genome is so much simpler than the human genome, it's cheaper to sequence.
"While preliminary, our data raise the possibility that HSV-1 sequences could serve as a surrogate marker to analyze human migration and population structures," the researchers say.


It seems that archeologists examining old bones and tools have been mostly correct, even to the date that the Amerindians spread from Asia. This was a good article about a new tool. Archeologists have to be at least dabblers in a large range of subjects to reach their conclusions. That's one reason it can be so interesting to study.



­ The Racial History Of The 'Grandfather Clause'
­ People aren't exempted from new regulations because they're old and crotchety, even if that's what it sounds like when we say they're "grandfathered in."
The term "grandfathered" has become part of the language. It's an easy way to describe individuals or companies who get to keep operating under an existing set of expectations when new rules are put in place.
The troubled HealthCare.gov website reassures consumers they can stay enrolled in grandfathered insurance plans that existed before the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010. Old power plants are sometimes grandfathered from having to meet new clean air requirements.
But like so many things, the term "grandfather," used in this way, has its roots in America's racial history. It entered the lexicon not just because it suggests something old, but because of a specific set of 19th century laws regulating voting.
The 15th Amendment, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, was ratified by the states in 1870. If you know your history, you'll realize that African-Americans were nevertheless kept from voting in large numbers in southern states for nearly a century more.
Various states created requirements — literacy tests and poll taxes and constitutional quizzes — that were designed to keep blacks from registering to vote. But many poor southern whites were at risk of also losing their rights because they could not have met such expectations.
"If all these white people are going to be non-citizens along with blacks, the idea is going to lose a lot of support," says James Smethurst, who teaches African-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
The solution? A half-dozen states passed laws that made men eligible to vote if they had been able to vote before African-Americans were given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the lineal descendants of voters back then.
This was called the grandfather clause. Most such laws were enacted in the early 1890s.
"The grandfather clause is actually not a means of disenfranchising anybody," says Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor. "It was a means of enfranchising whites who might have been excluded by things like literacy clauses. It was politically necessary, because otherwise you'd have too much opposition from poor whites who would have been disenfranchised."
But protecting whites from restrictions meant to apply to African-Americans was obviously another form of discrimination itself.
"Because of the 15th Amendment, you can't pass laws saying blacks can't vote, which is what they wanted to do," says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian. "But the 15th Amendment allowed restrictions that were non-racial. This was pretty prima facie a way to allow whites to vote, and not blacks."
Some state legislatures enacted grandfather clauses despite knowing they couldn't pass constitutional muster. The Louisiana state constitutional convention adopted a grandfather clause even though one of the state's own U.S. senators warned it would be "grossly unconstitutional."
­ For that reason, nearly every state put a time limit on their grandfather clauses. They hoped to get whites registered before these laws could be challenged in court.
"Once you've got people removed from the rolls, it becomes less necessary," Smethurst says. "The white people are on the rolls and the black people are not."
African-Americans typically lacked the financial resources to file suit. The NAACP, founded in 1909, persuaded a U.S. attorney to challenge Oklahoma's grandfather clause, which had been enacted in 1910.
Of the more than 55,000 blacks who were in Oklahoma in 1900, only 57 came from states that had permitted African-Americans to vote in 1867, according to Klarman's book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality.
In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Guinn v. Oklahoma that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. The court in those days upheld any number of segregationist laws — and even in Guinn specified that literacy tests untethered from grandfather clauses were okay.
The justices were concerned that the grandfather clause was not only discriminatory but a clear attempt by a state to nullify the federal Constitution. It "was so obvious an evasion that the Supreme Court could not have failed to declare it unconstitutional," the Washington Post wrote at the time.
The decision had almost no effect, however. The Oklahoma legislature met in special session to grandfather in the grandfather clause. The new law said those who had been registered in 1914 — whites under the old system — were automatically registered to vote, while African-Americans could only register between April 30 and May 11, 1916, or forever be disenfranchised.
That law stayed on the books until a Supreme Court ruling in 1939.
The intent of the grandfather clause, however, was not strictly to placate some whites while discriminating against blacks, says Spencer Overton, author of Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression. It was also about power.
In that era, most African-Americans voted Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln.
"The whole objective of excluding African-Americans was not just white supremacy," Overton says. "It was, 'We're Democrats, they're Republicans, and we're going to exclude them.' I'm not saying there weren't racial overtones, but there were significant partisan overtones as well."
The same trick had been used against white immigrants in the Northeast. It's worth remembering that Massachusetts and Connecticut were the first states to impose literacy tests, in hopes of keeping immigrants — who often supported Democrats in a largely Republican region — from voting.
At least one grandfather clause in the South was based on a Massachusetts statute from 1857, says Overton, who teaches law at George Washington University.
Perhaps it's because the grandfather clause was not solely about race — and because it was banned a century ago — most people use the term "grandfathered in" and never realize it once had racial connotations.
"This term grandfather has been kind of deracialized," Overton says. "It's really a very convenient, shorthand term. We probably would not be as comfortable with using it if we associated it with grandfather clauses in the past and poll taxes and things like that."


Underhanded subterfuge is not new to politics. It's like the history of the term “gerrymandered” –- congressmen looking for every scheme they can find to get what they want without having to win a debate and a vote in an upfront manner. This story from the 1890's is still continuing today. Florida's Governor Scott is even now trying to eliminate people from the voter rolls. See the following story below.

(Reuters) - Florida Governor Rick Scott is planning a new effort to purge non-U.S. citizens from the state's voter rolls, a move that last year prompted a series of legal challenges and claims from critics his administration was trying to intimidate minority voters.
Voter protection groups identified a number of errors in the state's attempt to identify people who are not American citizens on Florida's voter lists months ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November 2012.
The search also sparked several lawsuits, including one by the U.S. Justice Department, which claimed the effort violated federal law since it was conducted less than 90 days before the election.
Advocacy groups called the review of non-citizens a thinly veiled attempt to disqualify Hispanic and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. A disproportionately large number of those identified in 2012 were either Hispanic or black, the groups said.
Last year, Florida officials said they had drawn up an initial list of 182,000 potential non-citizens. But that number was reduced to fewer than 200 after election officials acknowledged errors on the original list.
In identifying potential non-citizens, Florida officials sent their information to county election supervisors who then mailed letters to voters requesting proof they were U.S. citizens. If no response was received, the voter was dropped from the rolls.
The effort, which angered some county election supervisors, was the subject of lawsuits from five voter protection groups and at least two individual plaintiffs.
Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he expected many county election supervisors to press the state to offer precise documentation that a voter may not be a U.S. citizen in any forthcoming review.
"If it will be a fairer process this time, it will be because the County Supervisors of Elections got burned last time and are more skeptical now," he said.


I would like to know what criteria the State is using to select those people to be removed from the voter rolls. I wonder why a push to remove illegal aliens catches black people, too. What questions did they ask to cause that to happen? I also wonder why out of 182,000 potential non-citizens less than 200 were actually illegal aliens. It makes me feel tired to think about it. Why do the so-called conservatives keep trying such tricks? It seems radical to me, and not “conservative.”



More on the boy scout leaders:
Man seen toppling boulder claims 'debilitating injuries' from car crash in recent lawsuit
Los Angeles (CNN) -- One of the men who toppled an ancient boulder in Utah's Goblin Valley State Park last week filed a personal injury lawsuit just a few weeks earlier, claiming he suffers from "serious, permanent and debilitating injuries."
Video of Glenn Taylor shoving the huge rock off a slender pedestal where it rested for millions of years went viral online and prompted media scrutiny. As his friend sang "Wiggle it, just a little bit," Taylor pushed the delicate sculpture over, which was followed by laughter and high fives with his son.
The attention has led to revelations that Taylor filed a personal injury lawsuit in September, claiming he had suffered "serious, permanent and debilitating injuries" from a 4-year-old car crash.
"Someone with a bad back who's disabled, who can't enjoy life, to me, doesn't step up and push a rock that big off the base," the defendant in Taylor's lawsuit, Alan MacDonald, told Salt Lake City television station KTVX.
Taylor's lawyer did not return calls for comment. But when CNN affiliate KUTV noted that Taylor didn't look particularly debilitated in the video, he replied, "You didn't see how hard I pushed."
CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos said when someone has a pending disability lawsuit, "you'd think they'd avoid the camera like the plague.
"But instead, they think no one will ever see it or repercussions will ever come of it," Cevallos said.


I wonder how the man's lawsuit will go now? I saw the video and his back looks fine!




Chicago woman hid terrorist past on citizenship application, say feds

A Chicago-area woman has been charged with immigration fraud for failing to tell U.S. authorities that she took part in a deadly terror bombing in Israel, federal prosecutors in Detroit said Tuesday.
Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, 66, was sentenced to life in prison by Israeli authorities for placing multiple bombs at the British Consulate and a supermarket in Jerusalem in 1969 on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of the supermarket bombs killed two people, while the explosives placed at the consulate caused only structural damage.
Odeh was released after 10 years as part of a prisoner exchange and returned to the West Bank, according to the indictment. She immigrated to the U.S. and became a citizen in 2004. In her immigration documents, say prosecutors, she failed to disclose her arrest, conviction and imprisonment in Israel. Odeh was arrested Tuesday in suburban Chicago.

“An individual convicted of a terrorist bombing would not be admitted to the United States if that information was known at the time of arrival,” said Barbara McQuade, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.
“The United States will never be a safe haven for individuals seeking to distance themselves from their pasts,” said William Hayes, acting special agent in charge for homeland security investigations in Detroit. “When individuals lie on immigration documents, the system is severely undermined and the security of our nation is put at risk.”
If convicted, Odeh will be stripped of her citizenship. She also faces up to 10 years in prison for naturalization fraud.


Now this is a true case of an illegal alien, and not an attempt to strip Democrats off the registered voter lists.