Last hurrah, with any luck

Kevin McSpadden has a Time article about the latest storm:

Winter weather began to slam the mid-Atlantic region of the US overnight and is expected to inundate the Northeast on Thursday. Kentucky and West Virginia are expected to see the heaviest snowfall, with the National Weather Service Prediction Center forecasting anywhere from five to ten inches.
Temperatures should be be significantly colder than average— anywhere from ten to thirty degrees— across the region.
The governors of Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, and New Jersey have all declared states of emergency, and even Congress sped up its work in light of the six to eight inches of snow that was forecast to hit DC, The Associated Press reports.
But at long last, one of the worst winters in recent memory may be relenting, according to Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. He told the AP the storm “might be winter’s last hurrah”.
But some Bostonians, who are two inches away from breaking their all-time snow record, are saying bring it on. “I want the record. We earned the record,” said Erin O’Brien, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. And they may just reach that mark, with the possibility of an inch or two falling across the city.

Rico says the crazy Bostonians can have the fucking record...

John Bolaris has more at Philly.com:

The changeover from rain to snow is here. The latest models this morning are lining up to produce a major snowstorm for Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs.
Tropical moisture is riding along an Arctic front, which is acting like a snow conveyer belt and will pump in about six to eight inches of snow for the city by 7 pm this evening. Higher amounts are expected across parts of Southern New Jersey and Delaware. 

Timing:The brunt of the snow: 9 a.m-3 p.m. Heavy accumulating snow. Temperatures falling into the twenties. Snow emergency in effect, schools closed. 3-4 p.m.: Snow tapers to light to moderate snow. After 4 p.m.: Snow tapering to light snow. Still heavy across parts of South Jersey and Delaware. 6-9 pm.: Snow ending west to east.
Accumulations:
Philadelphia: six to eight inches.
Parts of South Jersey and Delaware: eight to ten inches.
Lesser amounts north and west.

Rico says that's enough, already...

Hackers, again

The New York Times has an article by Nicole Perlroth and Brian Chen about why hacking works:

A government policy that forbade the export of products with strong encryption in the 1990s has years later left users of devices like Android and Apple phones vulnerable to hackers when they visit one-third of all websites, including whitehouse.gov and nsa.gov.
Researchers last month discovered millions of devices and websites were using an outdated encryption key to secure their communications. The weak key resulted from a Clinton administration mandate that software and hardware makers use weak cryptography in products exported outside the United States.
Once those restrictions were relaxed in the late 1990s, many technology makers abandoned the weak cryptography. But researchers said this week that the old keys were included in the code that is still being used in a variety of modern devices and websites.
The discovery of the old vulnerability comes as officials in the United States and Britain press the technology industry to create so-called back doors for law enforcement agencies into the new and hard-to-crack encryption used by its products. Those back doors, industry officials argue, can just as well be used by hackers to intercept communications and pose an unnecessary risk to customers.
“When computer scientists say you can’t build a crypto back door without weak encryption for everyone, this is exactly what we’re worried about,” said J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan.
The debate over encryption, touched off by Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures of the nation’s efforts to crack and circumvent such protections, has intensified over the last year as technology companies added stronger security that would lock out government agencies.
The National Security Agency and the FBI have urged tech companies to keep a back door open through their security technology for law enforcement agencies. And David Cameron, the British prime minister, has threatened to outlaw encrypted apps like Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service.
But many tech companies have repeatedly said they have no intentions of changing what they’re doing, as Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, signaled in a speech last month at Stanford University. “If those of us in positions of responsibility fail to do everything in our power to protect the right of privacy, we risk something far more valuable than money, we risk our way of life,” Cook told an audience of White House officials, executives, and cybersecurity experts. “Fortunately, technology gives us the tools to avoid these risks, and it’s my sincere hope that by using them and by working together, we will.”
There is no indication that hackers have exploited the newly discovered flaw, and technology companies say they are working to fix the problem.
Apple said it would patch the vulnerability through software updates for its mobile operating system, iOS, and its Macintosh operating system, OS X, next week. Google said it had developed a patch to protect Android connections to websites and provided the patch to Android manufacturers. BlackBerry and Amazon, whose products are also affected by the flaw, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Researchers are updating a list of vulnerable websites and services on their website, Freakattack.com, and pushing site administrators, device manufacturers, and users to upgrade their software. More than a third of the fourteen million websites scanned by researchers at the University of Michigan are still vulnerable.
Security researchers are calling the vulnerability Freak, short for factoring attack on RSA export keys, because it can be used to crack a 512-bit encryption key in seven hours, using Amazon’s readily available cloud computer service, at a nominal cost of a hundred dollars per website. A 512-bit key was the strongest allowed for export at the time. Today, that is considered inadequate.
After researchers from Microsoft and Inria, the French computer science lab, discovered the vulnerability last month, Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, warned the researchers that it could be more widespread or dangerous than they had thought. Soon after, the researchers discovered that nearly forty percent of online servers were vulnerable. Green alerted the affected technology companies. Green said the vulnerability demonstrated the risk inherent in weakening encryption in order to allow law enforcement agencies access to secured communications.
The flaw is the fourth major and old security issue to be discovered hidden in a variety of tech products. Critics say that part of the problem is that there are not enough people paid to test and monitor the security of widely used Internet systems. Also, the Internet consists of a lot of moving parts with different people responsible for software, servers, bugs and more, and they often do not communicate. “Nobody was kind of looking down to see how all these different issues fit together,” Green said.

Rico says that these were supposed to be smart people...

More winter

Anthony R. Wood has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about yet more fucking snow:

Hundreds of flights were canceled and towns declared emergencies in advance of snowfall likely to be the signature event of a tenacious late-winter spell that has iced the region with record cold and nuisance storms.
"It's been horrendous," Steve Lorenz, the Philadelphia Streets Department chief engineer, said as he was preparing his crews to do battle yet again, this time with up to eight inches of snow possible by day's end. "In the last month, it feels like it's every other day," he said, adding that winter was making him a stranger in his household. "My kids introduce themselves to me every time I go home."
The National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New Jersey posted a winter-storm warning until 7 pm Thursday for four to eight inches of snow throughout the region, followed by another arctic invasion, with record low temperatures possible Friday morning.
Mayor Nutter declared a snow emergency for Philadelphia starting at 6 am Thursday. Cars must be cleared from designated snow emergency routes, and scheduled Thursday trash and recycling collections will be delayed a week.
If it arrives as predicted, the storm would be the biggest snowfall of the season. Almost as if to make up for lost time, since late January a persistent spell of wintry weather has left a legacy of compacted ice on sidewalks and streets, busy emergency rooms, and well-mined salt domes.
As of Tuesday, the winter of 2014-15 in the Philadelphia region ranked second for salt use, at 142,965 tons, in the 33 years of records kept by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said spokesman Gene Blaum. In Philadelphia, it is Number Four, Lorenz said. All that for just fifteen inches of snow, according to official measurements. However, that snow has occurred on sixteen different days, Blaum said.
Since 26 January 2015, when the cold spell took hold, freezing rain or sleet has fallen at least seven times, adding to the ice woes, said Gary Szatkowski, meteorologist in charge of the Mount Holly office. The ice is so thick, he said, "you could do a snow archaeology."
The muck has been cemented on sun-deprived Philadelphia streets and elsewhere by almost unrelenting cold that has chilled the East. In February of 2015, abnormal cold covered just about all of eastern North America, from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, according to NASA satellite data.
In Philadelphia, the last two weeks of February were the coldest such stretch in 141 years of government record-keeping. Since 26 January, temperatures have averaged just 26.7 degrees in Philadelphia, close to nine below normal, with temperatures failing to go below freezing on only one of those days.
Emergency rooms in the region have seen brisk traffic, the result of ice slips or car accidents, hospital officials said. "We have been very busy," said Michael H. Goodyear, chief of emergency medicine at Riddle Hospital in Delaware County, part of the system that includes Lankenau Medical Center, Bryn Mawr Hospital, and Paoli Hospital. "It's been lots of fender benders, and a ton of slip-and-falls, it seems."
Forecasters said they were confident that the ice finally will disappear, but under several inches of snow. The weather service said five inches would be the minimum in the immediate Philadelphia area by the time the snow stops Thursday. At least 250 Thursday flights to and from Philadelphia International Airport had already been canceled Wednesday evening, representing about twenty percent of all arrivals and departures, according to airport spokeswoman Mary Flannery.
Temperatures are due to tumble Friday morning to near or below the record of ten degrees, set in 1978, and flirt with the 1960 record of nine on Saturday morning.
The equinox, however, will occur on schedule, and meteorologists say temperatures should punch into the fifties next week.

Rico says he and the ladyfriend got spoiled by all that warmth in Mexico, so Spring (remember that?) can't come anytime too soon...

To those Hungarian spammers

Itt senki sem beszél magyarul. Ne kuldjon tobb hirdetest erre a cimre.

Normal

Kathryn Doyle has a Reuters article at Philly.com about every man's concerns:

Are you self-conscious about your penis size? Odds are you don't need to be, but now there's a chart of what's "normal," just in case. This may be the most accurate estimate so far, according to Dr. Gordon Muir of King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London, England, coauthor of the new study.
Muir and his coauthors set out to create "nomograms" of flaccid and erect penis size measurements, excluding men with erectile dysfunction, past surgery, or abnormalities.
"The data comes from a very large number of men, from the best existing studies," Muir told Reuters Health by email. "We are particularly aware that many men with normal penis size can feel inadequate or ashamed, and this paper should allow specialists to reassure them. We also hope that men may be spared unnecessary and harmful surgery, which some less reputable surgeons still promote," he added.
Using more than twenty thousand measurements of flaccid length, stretched length, erect length, and flaccid and erect circumference, collected by health professionals for other studies, the researchers plotted the distribution of measurements to find the average.
The average flaccid penis was 3.58 inches long and 3.66 inches in girth, while the average erect penis was 5.16 inches long and 4.59 inches in circumference, according to results in BJU International. Stretched flaccid length was often very similar to erect length, the authors found, which may be good news for men and their doctors since clinical measurements of the erect penis may not be necessary.
Comparing these measures to other physical qualities, like age, body mass index, or foot size, the authors found little or no association. Erect penis length and overall height did seem to be related at least somewhat, however: taller men had longer penises.
"There is not a 'right' penis size for a man of any height, just a range of 'normal,'" Muir said. "A bit like shoe size, really!"
As far as how one man compares to another, according to the distribution graphs the authors plotted, men in the ninetieth percentile for erect length were upwards of 5.9 inches long, and some of the longest penises in the study were more than seven inches long erect (about 18 cm).
Technically, less than one percent of the male population has a "micropenis", which in this group included men with flaccid length below 2.04 inches. Other researchers have suggested that the smallest twopercent of the population should be eligible for penile augmentation surgery, which would include those with flaccid length up to 2.36 inches.
But defining "too big" or "too small" still hasn't been firmly nailed down, Muir said.
"Many men with a 3.54 inch erection will have no problems having mutually satisfactory sexual relations, and few men with a longer than average penis seek medical help," he said. "Research shows that women are rarely concerned about the penis size of their partner, rating it much less important than many other factors."
Men may suffer psychological harm and relationship difficulties as a result of worrying about their size, and potential surgical "remedies" may be dangerous and are often unsatisfying, he said. "We hope that these results will be of help to reputable clinicians who can use them to help reassure men with normal penis size they are indeed normal," Muir said. "We also hope that no man will be subject to physical treatment without a clear understanding of where he sits in the normal range."
There has been little to no similar research on discovering the "normal" for female genitalia, including vaginal capacity, he said. According to some studies, women who have reductive labiaplasty may generally be more satisfied than men who have penile enlargement surgery.

Rico says that, according to the data, he's within the 'normal' range; fortunately, he's never heard complaints from the women in his life...

Back to the snow

Rico says he forgot to mention that he and the ladyfriend came back from nice-and-warm Mexico to yet another fucking snowstorm, so he'll quote Sam Gamgee, from the end of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings:

"I'm back, he said."

World War One for the day

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this photo, with the note that 'there are worse things than snow... or at least as bad':

Rico says that mud isn't good, either, but he refuses to like snow...

History for the day

On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

Movie for the day (Waterloo)

Rico says that Waterloo stars the always-magnificent Rod Steiger as Napoleon; and the equally-impressive Christopher Plummer as Wellington; if you haven't seen it, you should:

And the best, if obscure, scene isn't the glorious battle, but the dinner the night before; it's where Rico (known to be a bit of a slob) learned to wear his napkin like a French general:

More history for the day

Time has an article by Jennifer Latson about a disappearance in the maybe-it-was-maybe-it-wasn't Bermuda Triangle:

The USS Cyclops (photo) was seen for the last time, headed north from Barbados through what’s known as the Bermuda Triangle, and the Cyclops went off the grid somewhere north of Barbados, it became one of the most popular examples of the uncanny dangers lurking within the Bermuda Triangle.
One of the Navy’s largest fuel ships, the Cyclops was last seen on 4 March 1918, when it stopped in the West Indies on its way from Brazil to Baltimore, Maryland, carrying ten thousand tons of manganese ore to be used in manufacturing munitions. But the ship never made it to Baltimore, nor did any of its three hundred or so passengers and crew members. Despite an exhaustive search effort, no trace was ever found of the ship, and Navy investigators never landed on a definite cause for its disappearance.
What made it all the more mysterious, according to a contemporary account in The New York Times, was that the captain never sent a distress signal, nor did anyone aboard respond to radio calls by the hundreds of American ships in the vicinity. What’s more, there were no storms strong enough to cause the Cyclops to founder, according to the Times, which went on to suggest that the ship might have been the target of German mines or U-boats. According to the Naval History and Heritage Command, one contemporary magazine suggested that a giant octopus had “risen from the sea, entwined the ship with its tentacles, and dragged it to the bottom.”
The Navy, however, discounted the likelihood of either German or giant octopus attacks, opening the door to more supernatural speculation, and the Cyclops joined the list of more than a hundred ships and planes to have disappeared under strange circumstances in the triangular region roughly bounded by Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico.
While the Bermuda Triangle became a cultural fixation of the 1950s and 1960s, it has by now been repeatedly and comprehensively debunked. Its reputation as a kind of earthly black hole suffers every time a vanished plane or vessel reemerges, as when the remains of five Navy bombers, which became known as the Lost Squadron after they disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in 1945, turned up off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1991.
And, although there’s still no trace of the Cyclops, there is, at least, an alternate explanation. It centers on a captain more eccentric than Ahab, with a fondness for “pacing the quarterdeck wearing a hat, a cane, and his underwear,” and against whom some of his crew had already attempted a mutiny before they reached Barbados, per the Navy. As quoted in Gian Quasar’s book Distant Horizons, the US Consul in Barbados wrote to the State Department following the ship’s disappearance, noting that the captain had appeared to be deeply disliked by his fellow officers, and that, in suppressing the recent mutiny attempt, he had imprisoned members of his crew and executed one.
“While not having any definite grounds I fear a fate worse than sinking,” the consul writes, “though possibly based on instinctive dislike felt towards master.”

Rico says it wouldn't be the first mutiny in the Navy over bad officers...

Misheard song for the day

Rico says it's really a line from that Sade song, but he heard (okay, Rico was too long in Mexico) it as "from Ellay to cielago".

(A cielago is Spanish for bat, but apparently Rico remembers it from Dune...)

Strange places

The Door to Hell in Turkmenistan:

A creepy name for a creepy place. The door to hell is a big gaping hole of fire that truly makes you wonder where it leads to. Originally a gas field that Soviet scientists set on fire, it has been burning for over forty years. The creepy part is that spiders love it and swarm there by the thousands.

Silicon Valley for the day

Jack Ewing has an article in The New York Times about the auto industry's fear of Silicon Valley:

Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler, began a meeting with reporters at the Geneva International Motor Show on Tuesday by half-jokingly asking them not to spend too much time talking about Apple.
And at a news conference later, the first question for Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, was: what about Apple?
The scenes are an indication of how much Silicon Valley has set its sights on the car industry, and how companies like Apple and Google have intruded on what could reasonably have been expected to be one of the most cheerful industry gatherings in years.
Passenger car sales in the European Union have risen for seventeen consecutive months, a sign that the industry is emerging from a brutal slump, though sales remain far below the level of 2007. Cheaper gasoline has made driving more attractive, and the decline of the euro against the dollar and other major currencies has made it easier for European manufacturers to compete in foreign markets.
But there is palpable nervousness among automakers that the car industry could be next in line for disruption by Silicon Valley.
Apple and Google, which had no visible presence at the Geneva auto show (photo), are using their domination of smartphone operating systems to take over car dashboards, elbowing aside the carmakers’ proprietary systems. Someday, they or other upstarts could try to build entire vehicles. Apple has reportedly assembled a team of about two hundred people to develop technologies for an electric car.
Zetsche and other auto executives here were quick to point out the huge differences between making a smartphone and a car. Cars take seven years or more to develop and bring to market, compared with eighteen months or so for a new smartphone. A vast amount of engineering expertise is required to design a car that is safe as well as pleasant to drive. Auto manufacturing also requires a tightly coordinated network of suppliers. Unlike in the smartphone business, fabrication cannot simply be outsourced to a factory in China, at least not yet.
But it is clear that the technologies used to propel cars are in flux, even if electric cars account, so far, for only a sliver of the auto market. Software is playing an increasing role in helping drivers navigate and avoid accidents. Within a few years, cars will most likely be able to drive themselves, at least in standard situations like driving on highways or in stop-and-go traffic.
Zetsche said he thought it was good that Silicon Valley was showing an interest in the car business. “The convergence of automobile technology with the tech world is a huge opportunity,” he said during a meeting with a small group of reporters. Systems that take over much of the driving provide a new selling point and can improve safety. “I see it as only positive,” Zetsche said. But, he added: “it’s clear that new technologies can have a destructive quality.”
Ghosn agreed, saying it was refreshing that tech companies were interested in electric cars, an area in which the French-Japanese company Renault-Nissan has made major investments.
The risk for automakers is that these technology shifts will provide openings for new competitors to steal a share of sales. The sector does not want to follow in the footsteps of PC makers, which have been relegated to becoming mere platforms on which software developers run their wares.
Carmakers in Geneva said they did not rule out the possibility that new competitors could emerge, and acknowledged that some already had, like the electric carmaker Tesla. But they were skeptical that anyone would displace the established car brands anytime soon. “We always take competitors seriously,” said Norbert Reithofer, the chief executive of BMW. “Apple is a very strong brand,” he said, but “we know how cars are built.”
Whether prodded by Apple and Google or not, BMW is hiring more software engineers to work on technologies like autonomous driving. BMW, which has come through the European downturn with its profitability intact, can afford such investment. But it is an added burden for the midrange carmakers like Ford of Europe and the General Motors subsidiary Opel, which are still struggling to make money on the Continent.
While the overall market is growing again, and countries like Spain and Portugal are rebounding strongly, carmakers still have more production capacity in Europe than they need. And they have been hit by a severe slump in the Russian market caused by that country’s poor economic performance, the plunge in the value of the ruble, and political tension with the West.
“I’m not very optimistic in total about the European market,” Karl-Thomas Neumann, the chief executive of Opel, said during a meeting with reporters. The European car industry still has twenty percent more capacity than it needs, Neumann estimated. Underused factories are deadly for profits because they still must be maintained even if they are sometimes idle.
James D. Farley Jr., president of Ford’s business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said that “2015 will be a year of financial progress” for the company. But he said Ford of Europe also faced headwinds, not only because of Russia but also because of low interest rates. While low rates reduce customers’ financing costs, they raise the price of providing benefits to retired Ford workers, because it is harder for the pension fund to earn an adequate return.
Some auto executives in Geneva found all the speculation about Apple’s getting into the car business a bit too much. “A car is so complex, inside and out,” said Gorden Wagener, vice president for design at Daimler-Benz, the maker of Mercedes cars. “A smartphone is fairly simple compared to that.”
While visibly annoyed to be talking so much about Apple, Wagener acknowledged that the technology company exemplified the challenge that automakers will have to overcome as they integrate ever more digital technology into their vehicles. “What’s the success of Apple? It’s simplicity and user-friendliness,” Wagener said. “The one who does it the best will succeed.”

Rico says this is reminiscent of the days when the buggy-whip manufacturers said that that automobile thing would never catch on...

Yet more World War Two for the day

This is a photo of Hitler's bunker, shortly after his death:

Rico says some places reek of evil...

Diabetes for the day

Kevin McSpadden has an article in Time about a new hormone:

Scientists have discovered a new hormone that mimics the health benefits of exercise by normalizing the metabolism and slowing the weight gain caused by fatty diets.
Appearing in the scientific journal Cell Metabolism, the study found the newly discovered MOTS-c hormone increases insulin sensitivity, allowing the body to more effectively process glucose sugars, according to a press release from the University of Southern California.
Insulin is a hormone that is used to move glucose sugars from food into the blood stream; resistance occurs when levels are high for a long period of time— commonly from a poor diet— which increases the body’s tolerance to the hormone and can lead to type 2 diabetes.
The new MOTS-c hormone targets muscle tissue and reverses age-dependent and diet-related insulin resistance. “This represents a major advance in the identification of new treatments for age-related diseases such as diabetes,” said Dr. Pinchas Cohen, senior author of the study.
Researchers injected the new hormone into lab mice eating high-fat foods that usually lead them to become obese. The injection suppressed the weight gain and also reversed the insulin resistance caused by their diet. While tests were only administered on mice, the necessary mechanisms are present in all mammals, humans included.

Rico says there's an old stupid joke about how you make a 'whore-moan', but it would be out of place here. However, he will volunteer for the human trials for this stuff...

More World War Two for the day

Rico says the Holocaust is with us still, and the WW2 Database has an article about another (finally) dead Nazi:

Austrian Nazi Alois Brunner (photo, top) oversaw the deportation of more than forty thousand Austrian Jews, forty thousand Greek Jews, over twenty thousand French Jews, and fourteen thousand Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz (photo, bottom), a great many of them would perish at that extermination camp in occupied Poland. At the end of the war, he was able to hide before the Allies identified him as a key player in the Holocaust. He was found to be in Syria, but, unlike his former commanding officer Adolf Eichmann, Israeli authorities were not able to assassinate nor capture him. In 2010, a source considered to be reliable by the Simon Wiesenthal Center informed the center that Brunner had died of natural causes in 2010. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, removed Brunner from the wanted list in 2010, despite the inability to confirm the intelligence, since Brunner would have been of advanced age regardless. Zuroff expressed regret that Brunner, who continued to persecute Jews as an advisor to the Syrian government, escaped justice.

The BBC has more:

The chief investigator pursuing Alois Brunner, one of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals, has told the BBC that he is "99% sure" that he died four years ago in Syria. "We cannot prove it forensically, but we are certain that is the case," Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff said.
SS Captain Brunner (photo, top), who would now be 102, is accused of deporting more than a hundred thousand Jews to death camps in World War Two. For many years there has been uncertainty as to whether he was dead.
Brunner was right-hand man to the Gestapo's 'technician of death', Adolf Eichmann.
Dr. Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Israel, told the BBC that new information had recently come to light about Brunner's death and burial in Damascus, Syria from a "reliable" former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East. He said that the new evidence revealed that Brunner was buried in an unknown location in Damascus around 2010, and was unrepentant of his crimes.
In April of 2014, Brunner was removed from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted list, in a move signifying that it considered him to be dead. Dr. Zuroff, who is also a Holocaust historian, said that the latest information provided more concrete evidence to support that conclusion. "Brunner played a key role in the implementation of Hitler's 'Final Solution' to murder Jews," Dr Zuroff said, "and was a monster." He said that Brunner sent 47,000 Jews in Austria, 44,000 in Greece, 23,500 in France and 14,000 in Slovakia to camps where most were murdered.
In the 1950s, Brunner is believed to have fled to Syria. He reportedly served as an adviser to President Hafez al-Assad and is thought to have instructed his government on torture tactics.
The Austrian-born SS chief was once described by Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the 'Final Solution', as one of his best men. Eichmann dispatched Brunner wherever he felt round-ups of Jews were proceeding too slowly. From June of 1943 until the liberation of France, he sent thousands of Jews to their almost certain deaths. He waged a reign of terror on the French Riviera, hunting down Jews who had sought refuge in the relative safety of the Italian occupied zone
It is widely believed that he fled to Syria in the 1950s, living under the false name of Georg Fischer, and that successive regimes offered him protection, though Syria has repeatedly denied harboring him. In 2001 he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a court in France.
Brunner was in charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris, where Jews rounded up in France were held before being sent to the death camps. An estimated 345 children were among his victims.
Dr. Zuroff said that Brunner survived at least two Israeli intelligence assassination attempts while in Syria, in 1961 and 1980. He said that the Syrian civil war made it impossible to know the precise location of Brunner's grave.

Rico says the location of his grave is unimportant (other than for pissing-on purposes), as long as he's in it...

World War Two for the day

The BBC has an article about a long-lost battleship:

American billionaire Paul Allen has announced the discovery of the famous World War Two Japanese battleship, the Musashi, more than seventy years after it was sunk by US forces. Allen said the vessel was found by his private exploration team at a depth of more than three thousand feet on the floor of the Sibuyan Sea off the Philippines.
The Musashi and its sister vessel, the Yamato, were two of the largest battleships ever built. American warplanes sank the Musashi (photo, top and photo, bottom, at right) on 24 October 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, believed to be the biggest naval encounter of World War Two, in which American and Australian forces defeated the Japanese.
Allen announced the discovery on his Twitter page, which also showed photos of the submerged vessel. He began his search for the Musashi eight years ago, "because since my youth I have been fascinated with Second World War history", according to CNBC.
The Musashi was found in the middle of the Philippine archipelago using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) after Allen's team had carried out a thorough survey of the seabed.
The Musashi was a "mighty battleship" with "mammoth eighteen-inch guns", the Navy's website says. Its twin ship, the Yamato (photo, bottom, at left), was damaged in the fighting, according to the Navy, and American warships finally sank it a year later as it tried to get to Okinawa.

The Musashi
Constructed: March of 1938
Sunk: October of 1944
Length: 862 feet
Speed: 27 knots
Crew: 2,399
Aircraft: seven
Armament: nine eighteen-inch guns with a range of more than twenty miles
Machinery: Twelve oil-fired burners
Weight: 73,000 tons, fully loaded

Coming under sustained American aircraft attack in her final days, the Musashi defended itself by firing its huge anti-aircraft weapons into the sea "to make huge geysers aimed at knocking down American torpedo bombers", the WW2 Database website says.
"Running into one of these geysers would be like running into a mountain," pilot Jack Lawton recalled. "Without adequate air cover, however powerful Musashi was, she was helpless against multiple waves of attacking aircraft," the website says.
After the final attack ended in mid-afternoon, the vessel was hit by twenty torpedoes, and seventeen bombs; there were eighteen near-misses.
By early evening, the Musashi capsized and sank. More than a thousand of its crew were killed, with the loss of eighteen American aircraft.
Seattle, Washington-born Allen, 62, founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, and is believed to be the fifty-first richest person in the world, with a net worth of nearly eighteen billion dollars, according to Forbes Magazine.
Allen describes himself on his website as a philanthropist, investor, entrepreneur, author, and space pioneer. He is currently working on an initiative called Stratolaunch, set up to enable "cost-effective" cargo and manned missions to go into space. He launched SpaceShipOne, a suborbital air-launched space plane, in 2004.

Rico says that, as ever, it is good to be the prince, even if it's of Microsoft...

Bad priest for the day

It's, unfortunately, not much of a surprise, but Chris Palmer has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a priest caught with child porn:

A Bucks County priest removed from ministry last month was placed on leave because it was discovered that a trove of pornographic images he had downloaded in 2005 included up to a dozen photos of minors, the archdiocese said in a recent statement.
The Reverend Louis J. Kolenkiewicz, 47, most recently of St. Bede the Venerable Parish in Holland, had been disciplined in 2005 and 2011 for downloading pornography, Archdiocese of Philadelphia spokesman Ken Gavin said. But recently, Gavin said, the Bucks County District Attorney's Office, which had investigated the previous cases but declined to press charges, told the archdiocese that among the twelve thousand images Kolenkiewicz downloaded in 2005, up to twelve may have depicted juveniles.
The archdiocese had announced in February of 2015 that Kolenkiewicz had been placed on leave, but did not specify why. The details were explained to St. Bede parishioners at a recent meeting, Gavin said.
Kolenkiewicz will remain on leave "pending the outcome of this matter", Gavin said.
The priest could not immediately be reached for comment.
Since being ordained in 1993, Kolenkiewicz has served in six parishes, according to the archdiocese: St. Gabriel in Norwood, in 1993 and 1994; St. John Bosco in Hatboro, from 1994 to 2002; St. Ignatius in Yardley, from 2002 to 2004; St. Bede's, from 2004 to 2008; Our Lady of Peace in Milmont Park, from 2008 to 2011; and St. Bede's again over the last year.
In 2005, according to Gavin, Kolenkiewicz admitted using a parish computer to view pornography, and in 2011, he was caught again possessing illicit images.
After the second incident, Gavin said, Kolenkiewicz spent three years on administrative leave while participating in treatment for his "issues with pornography".
Kolenkiewicz returned to active ministry at St. Bede's in June of 2014, Gavin said. There is "no evidence to suggest that Father Kolenkiewicz has viewed any pornographic material since his return to ministry," Gavin said.
Still, Gavin said, there is no time frame for when a decision might be made about Kolenkiewicz' ability to return after his most recent stint on leave.

Rico says they just don't get it, do they? (Again, Shakespeare was right...)

History for the day

On 4 March 1933, the start of President Franklin Roosevelt's first administration brought with it the first woman to serve in the cabinet: Labor Secretary Frances Perkins.

Quote for the day

"It doesn't block Iran's path to the bomb.

It paves Iran's path to the bomb."

Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, addressing Congress on nuclear talks with Iran.

Rico says that, of course, this fits right in with his upcoming book, Armageddon...

Vatican for the day

Rishi Iyengar has a Time article about the Pope and ISIS:

The commander of the Vatican’s security forces acknowledged the existence of a real threat to Pope Francis from ISIS, but said there is no indication of a planned attack on the Catholic leader.
“The threat exists,” Domenico Giani told the Italian state publication Polizia Moderna, reports the Catholic news website Crux. Giani is the inspector-general of the Corpo della Gendarmeria, the police unit that protects Vatican City. “At the moment, I can say that we know of no plan for an attack against the Vatican or the Holy Father,” he said.
ISIS explicitly mentioned Italy and its Christians as a potential target recently, calling it “the nation signed with the blood of the cross” in a video that featured images of twenty Egyptian Christians beheaded this month. The Islamic militant organization also warned of its proximity to Italy, saying its forces are “south of Rome” in Libya.
Four months ago, ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq also featured Vatican City’s famed St. Peter’s Square on its cover, with the headline The Failed Crusade, depicting the terrorist group’s flag flying over the piazza’s central obelisk.

Rico says you don't fuck with the Swiss Guard; they may look pretty, but they will kill you, and they have some serious gubs to do it with, too:

Idiot criminal for the day

The BBC has an article about yet another idiot:

In 2012, an Indian student was violently raped on a moving bus in Delhi and died of horrific internal injuries. Leslee Udwin spoke to one of the rapists on death row while spending two years making a film about the case. She came away shocked by India's treatment of women, but inspired by those seeking change:

The horrifying details of the rape had led me to expect deranged monsters. Psychopaths. The truth was far more chilling. These were ordinary, apparently normal and certainly unremarkable men.
On 16 December 2012, the 23-year-old woman had been to see a film, the Life of Pi, with a male friend. At 8.30 pm they boarded an off-duty bus, with six men on board, five adults and a juvenile. The men beat the friend and each raped the woman in turn, before assaulting her viciously with an iron instrument.
Mukesh Singh (photo), the driver of the bus, described to me every detail of what happened during and after the incident. While prosecutors say the men took turns to drive the bus, and all took part in the rape, Singh says he stayed at the wheel throughout.
Along with three of the other attackers, Singh is now appealing against his death sentence. In sixteen hours of interviews, Singh showed no remorse, and kept expressing bewilderment that such a fuss was being made about this rape, when everyone was at it. "A decent girl won't roam around at nine o'clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy," he said. "Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About twenty percent of girls are good." People "had a right to teach them a lesson" he suggested - and he said the woman should have put up with it. "When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they'd have dropped her off after 'doing her', and only hit the boy," he said. Chillingly, he went on: "The death penalty will make things even more dangerous for girls. Now when they rape, they won't leave the girl like we did. They will kill her. Before, they would rape and say, 'Leave her, she won't tell anyone.' Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death." I had the long and shocking list of injuries the young woman had sustained, read out to him. I tried, really hard, to search for a glimmer of regret. There was none.
It would be easier to process this heinous crime if the perpetrators were monsters, and just the rotten apples in the barrel, aberrant in nature. Perhaps then, those of us who believe that capital punishment serves a purpose, and I am not among them, could wring their hands in relief when they hang.
For me the truth couldn't be further from this - and perhaps their hanging will even mask the real problem, which is that these men are not the disease, they are the symptoms.
My encounter with Singh and four other rapists left me feeling like my soul had been dipped in tar, and there were no cleaning agents in the world that could remove the indelible stain.
One of the men I interviewed, Gaurav, had raped a five-year-old girl. I spent three hours filming his interview as he recounted in explicit detail how he had muffled her screams with his big hand. He was sitting throughout the interview and had a half-smile playing on his lips throughout; his nervousness in the presence of a camera, perhaps. At one point I asked him to tell me how tall she was. He stood up, and with his eerie half-smile indicated a height around his knees.
When I asked him how he could cross the line from imagining what he wanted to do, to actually doing it, given her height, her eyes, her screams, he looked at me as though I was crazy for even asking the question and said: "She was beggar girl. Her life was of no value."

These offences against women and girls are a part of the story, but the full story starts with a girl not being as welcome as a boy, from birth. When sweets are distributed at the birth of a boy, not of a girl. When the boy child is nourished more than the girl, when a girl's movements are restricted and her freedoms and choices are curtailed, when she is sent as a domestic slave to her husband's home. If a girl is accorded no value, if a girl is worth less than a boy, then it stands to reason there will be men who believe they can do what they like with them.
I spoke to two lawyers who had defended the murderers of the 23-year-old student at their trial, and what they said was extremely revealing. "In our society, we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening with any unknown person," said one of the lawyers, ML Sharma. "You are talking about man and woman as friends. Sorry, that doesn't have any place in our society. We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman."
The other lawyer, AP Singh, had said in a previous televised interview: "If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight." He did not disown that comment when I put it to him. "This is my stand," he said. "I still today stand on that reply."
Gender-inequality is the primary tumor and rape, trafficking, child marriage, female foeticide, honor killings and so on, are the metastases. And in India the problem is not lack of laws; after all, India is a democracy and a civilized, rapidly developing country. The problem is implementation of them.
Article 14 of the Indian Constitution confers absolute equal rights on women. The giving of dowry is a legal offense, but many families maintain the custom nonetheless. Until and unless the mindset changes, the cancer will thrive and continue to spread.
But what compelled me to leave my family and go to Delhi to make this film was not the rape itself, nor the horror of it. It was what followed. Starting on the day after the rape, and for over a month, ordinary men and women came out on to the streets of India's cities in unprecedented numbers to protest. They braved a freezing December and a ferocious government crackdown of water cannons, baton charges, and teargas shells. Their courage and determination to be heard was extraordinarily inspiring.
There was something momentous about their presence and perseverance - reminiscent to me of the crowds that had thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt: a gathering of civil society that demanded a conversation that was long overdue.
It occurred to me that, for all its appalling record of violence against women and relentless rapes, here was India leading the world by example. I couldn't recall another country, in my lifetime, standing up with such tenacity for women, for me. And I knew at once that I simply had to use whatever talents and skills I had, to amplify their cries of "enough is enough!" which were reverberating across the whole world.
As is often the case with extremely challenging endeavours where the human stakes are high, the main struggle for me was the emotional and psychological toll the work imposed.
When you look into the blackest recesses of the human heart, you cannot but be depressed and deeply disappointed. I woke one morning on the shoot, wet from head to toe, bathed in sweat and fear and my heart knocking against my ribcage. This was a panic attack. I phoned home, thinking my husband would answer, but my thirteen-year-old daughter, Maya, did. She immediately sensed I was in trouble. And when I told her, in tears, that I was coming home because this was too big for me, the mountain was just too high to scale, she said: "Mummy, you can't come home because I and my generation of girls is relying on you."
What carried me through, apart from Maya, was what had inspired me in the first place: the new-thinkers, especially among the youth, in India who want change and are clamoring for it. And I am absolutely optimistic that we are now on the cusp of change.

Leslee Udwin's film, India's Daughter, will be broadcast on Storyville on BBC Four on Sunday 8 March at 22:00 GMT. It will be shown in India on NDTV at 21:00 local time. 

Rico says there are times when hanging's too good for some people...

A rare bird

The BBC has an article by Matt Walker about a rare bird:

One of the world’s rarest birds has been sighted for the first time in almost four decades.
An ornithological search-team has caught a glimpse of the critically endangered Zapata Rail, Cyanolimnas cerverai, one of the world’s most threatened waterbirds.
The bird was sighted at the Zapata Swamp in south-west Cuba; the location gives the bird its name. Fewer than four hundred individual Zapata Rails are estimated to exist.
Island rails, often poor fliers, are vulnerable to predators and habitat destruction, and fifteen species have become extinct since the seventeenth century.
The fleeting encounter occurred in November of 2014, but has only now been made public by BirdLife International. A group of ornithologists spotted the bird while surveying the swamp, having cut thin temporary strips, known as rides, into the vegetation in the hope it might lead to a sighting. “In the first instance, the head protruded from the sawgrass at the side of the ride,” says ornithologist Andy Mitchell, who spotted the bird alongside colleagues from the Cuban Museum of Natural History.
“After a few seconds the bird emerged slowly into the open, stopped for a few seconds before moving off into the sawgrass on the other side of the ride.”
Few images of the bird exist, and hopes were fading that viable populations of the Cuban waterbird remained. (The photo is of a rare, faded museum specimen of the Zapata Rail.)
First described in the early twentieth century, only one nest has ever been found, and little has since been discovered about the bird's behavior and breeding ecology. But the new sighting is encouraging, and conservation efforts will now target the wetland in which the rail was spotted, says Birdlife International.

Rico says it's always good when a species doesn't go extinct...

Hillary for the day

Rishi Iyengar has an article in Time about another stupid Clinton move (no, not by Bill, for once):

Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account while she was Secretary of State, according to The New York Times, possibly breaching a Federal law mandating the archiving of all correspondence by State Department officials.
Clinton’s aides allegedly made no effort to upload her personal emails to the department’s servers during her four-year tenure, as stipulated under the the Federal Records Act, the Times says. Instead, they reportedly went through thousands of emails two months ago, selecting which to submit as part of a renewed compliance effort from the State Department.
Attorney Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told the Times that it was “very difficult to conceive of a scenario— short of nuclear winter— where an agency would be justified in allowing its Cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel.”

Rico says there are those who still think she should be President...

Why convenience stores in Israel are never robbed

Rico says that cops provide the same service here...

Cancun vacation

Our room at Excellence:

Excellence, the place:

The beach:

The sea birds (gulls, cormorants, and pelicans) would play a little game on those abandoned pier pilings; one would take off, circle around, and push another bird off a piling they wanted. No obvious reason, just 'cause...

Big fish

The New York Times has an article (with it's usual fuck-you-no-upload video by Nadia Sussman) by Simon Romero about some really big fish in the Amazon:

As the howler monkeys roared near Tefé, Brazil, in the far reaches of the Amazon rain forest, Valdenor da Silva grasped his harpoon and guided his canoe through the dazzling floodplain mosaic of lakes and channels in a quest for his prey.
“The river giants are plentiful this year,” said da Silva, 44, a father of eight who puts food on his family’s table by hunting down the pirarucu, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish. Flashing a smile, the fisherman, standing just over five feet tall and weighing a hundred and sixty pounds, added: “Every pirarucu I’ve harpooned this season is bigger than I am.”
In piranha-infested waters, fishermen go in search of the pirarucu, which can grow as long as seven feet and weigh more than four hundred pounds, placing them in the ranks of freshwater megafish like the Giant Pangasius (often called the dog-eating catfish) and the Mekong giant catfish, both found in the distant Mekong River basin in Vietnam.
With overfishing and habitat degradation threatening such Goliaths in different parts of the world, riverbank dwellers and biologists in the Amazon are working together to save the pirarucu by prohibiting outsiders from catching the fish and overhauling their own methods of pursuing it.
Their effort to save the fish is yielding a pioneering conservation success story in the Amazon while offering a strategy for fending off a broader freshwater extinction crisis, according to fisheries experts who track the depletion of big fish in the world’s rivers and lakes.
“Just a short while ago, we feared that wild pirarucu could disappear from the Amazon,” said Ruiter Braga, a fishing technician for Mamirauá, a rain forest reserve that helped develop the management regime, during which the stocks of pirarucu in the area have climbed more than four hundred percent. “But we figured out that the only way to save the pirarucu was to involve the people living in the forest who depend on the fish for their own survival.”
Authorities began by issuing a general ban on pirarucu fishing in 1996 in Amazonas— the giant Brazilian state in the Amazon River basin that is three times the size of California— but granting local peoples exclusive fishing rights to waters in their territory.
Some riverbank villages also prohibited the use of curtain-like gill nets, which are used to vertically ensnare the pirarucu, called arapaima in English. And, crucial to boosting the size of the pirarucu, communities also commanded the release of pirarucu smaller than five feet, allowing potential spawners to grow; pirarucu generally reach maturity at three to four years.
While cast nets are still permitted in some places, pirarucu fishing otherwise returned to its roots, a tradition involving little more than harpoons, wooden clubs, canoes, and a great deal of patience.
During the dry season, when water levels fall in the Amazon’s wetlands, fishermen fan out in their canoes looking for pirarucu, which rise to the surface to breathe air every fifteen minutes or so, a result of a labyrinthine organ that enables the fish to survive in oxygen-poor waterways.
Once the pirarucu is spotted, the frenzied pursuit resembles seal hunting almost as much as it does fishing. Interrupting the eerie calm of the forest, fishermen impale the pirarucu with their spearlike projectiles. When lashing about, the pirarucu are often strong enough to capsize the fishermen’s small canoes, casting them into waters teeming with caimans and piranhas.
When a fish is hauled in, it is pulled halfway into the canoe, and the fishermen then use wooden clubs to bludgeon it on the head several times to get the job done. In the end the pirarucu, often larger than the men pursuing it, emits a death groan sounding like something between a murmur and a gurgle.
“Going after pirarucu isn’t for everybody, but we treasure every single part of the fish,” said Henrique Alcione Batalha, 46, a fisherman from the community of São Francisco da Capivara, as he and his family feasted one evening on the viscera and head of pirarucu, prepared with a sprinkling of manioc flour and eaten the day it was caught.
Some villages even use the pirarucu’s scales as nail files or ornaments, while the fish’s bony tongue is used for grating guaraná, the caffeinated Amazonian berry considered an aphrodisiac by some Brazilians, and consumed in soft drinks around the country.
But a larger trade involves selling pirarucu meat, consumed for centuries in boneless steaks coveted as a delicacy in the Amazon. Some of the larger pirarucu fetch more than two hundred dollars each when sold whole in the street markets in Amazonian outposts, bolstering the income of families subsisting on the fish they catch and the manioc they grow on small plots of land.
“Pirarucu was one of the most important food fishes in the Amazon long before the Europeans arrived,” said Donald Stewart, a fisheries biologist at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The early explorers soon learned that the meat could be salted and dried in the sun, and then it would last for a long time without spoiling.”
While lacking the subtle flavors of the non0salted variety, salted pirarucu is rising in popularity in parts of Brazil. It is marketed as “cod of the Amazon” in a bid to compete with bacalhau, the dried, salted, and strong-smelling cod that is often fished in Norway and imported to Brazil, where it is a costly staple of Portuguese-inspired cuisine.
More than fourteen hundred fishermen in and around Mamirauá take part in the pirarucu management regime, hewing to quotas and tagging each fish they catch. In 2013, fishermen took home an average of about six hundred dollars each from pirarucu fishing, a welcome sum in far-flung villages. Still, illegal pirarucu fishing flourishes in parts of the Amazon, lowering prices for the fish in street markets.
While fisheries experts are generally encouraged by projects that have recovered badly overexploited pirarucu populations in some pockets of the rain forest, the illicit trade, especially in the neighboring state of Pará, has caused the megafish to disappear near large cities, while threatening its survival in some forest settlements.
“We’re hoping the pirarucu can withstand such challenges, since a die-off would rob villages across the Amazon of their lifeblood,” said Claudio Batalha, 47, a coordinator of the fishing project here. “Without making such fishing sustainable, more outsiders could claim the forest as their own,” he added. “That’s when the threat of greater forest devastation gets real.”

Rico says he's just as happy not to have to catch the big tuna he eats in Japanese restaurants...

History for the day

On 3 March 1991, in a case that sparked a national outcry, Rodney King was severely beaten by LAPD officers in a scene captured on amateur video (above).

Shakespeare was right

The New York Times has an article by Adam Liptak entitled Lawyer Put Health Act in Peril by Pointing Out Four Little Words:

Thomas Christina, a lawyer from Greenville, South Carolina, unearthed the language about tax credits that fueled a case that will be heard soon by the Supreme Court.

Rico says that Shakespeare said we should kill 'em all, and he was right...  (Fortunately, the lawyers in Rico's family are all retired, and thus exempt.)

Fuck winter

Rico's friend Kelley forwards a cartoon that explains why Rico won't be sending out a bunch of photos (well, maybe a couple) about his recent trip South...

New portrait of the Queen

The BBC has an article about a new picture of Queen Elizabeth on UK coins:

The Royal Mint has unveiled a new coinage portrait of the Queen. It shows a side profile of the 88-year-old monarch wearing a crown and drop earrings. It is only the fifth definitive coin portrait to have been created during her sixty-three-year reign. Coins featuring the new image will only appear in circulation later this year.
The portrait was designed by Royal Mint engraver Jody Clark (photo), whose design was selected in a competition organized by the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, a consultative panel to HM Treasury. The Queen had final approval of the winning image. Clark, 34, said: "I hope that I've done Her Majesty justice and captured her as I intended, in a fitting representation. The news that my design had been chosen was quite overwhelming, and I still can't quite believe that my royal portrait will be featured on millions of coins."
Adam Lawrence, chief executive of the Royal Mint, said the change of royal portrait made 2015 a "vintage year" for UK coins. He added: "Capturing a portrait on the surface of a coin demands the utmost skill, and is one of the most challenging disciplines of the coin designer's art."
The winning art work was recommended to the Chancellor, and then the Queen, for final approval.

Rico says that she, like the rest of us, is showing her age...

Police shoot homeless man in LA

The BBC has an article (with yet another non-downloadable video) about yet another police shooting:

Police have shot and killed a homeless man during an altercation in central Los Angeles, California, in an incident caught on video (above). The graphic film shows a violent struggle between the man and several officers in the city's Skid Row area. Police say that three officers opened fire after the man tried to grab a gun from an officer. Witnesses said the dead man was known as Africa and had been homeless after treatment for mental illness.
The LAPD said officers had been responding to reports of a robbery and had attempted to use a Taser to subdue the suspect but he had "continued fighting and resisting". A witness said five officers were involved in the altercation. No other gun was recovered at the scene, LA police commander Andrew Smith said.
Last year, highly publicized killings of black men sparked weeks of protests in the US. 

LA police fatal incidents: 16
People shot dead by police in city of Los Angeles in 2014: 252
People killed by police in LA since 2000: 606
People killed by police in LA county since 2000: 38 

The victim, nicknamed Africa, had been living on the street for months, and eyewitnesses say he spent ten years in a mental health institution before winding up homeless; people who knew him said he not been violent but still exhibited "mental problems".

It is unclear from the video what exactly happened, the BBC's Alastair Leithead reports from Los Angeles. The video begins with what appears to be a black man swinging punches at four police officers in daylight, near the tents and cardboard of a pavement homeless camp. Two other officers run up to join their colleagues. As the man is knocked to the ground, a woman can be seen picking up a fallen police baton and a voice seems to shout "Give me my stick! Give me my stick!"
Several police officers turn to tackle the woman, in the foreground of the video, and her detention partially obscures what is happening with the man on the ground.
A voice can be heard shouting "Drop the gun!" four times before five shots ring out.
The police officers step away from the suspect lying on the ground. No one approaches the body again for one minute and thirteen seconds, by which time police reinforcements have arrived.
The man taking the video can be heard swearing as he records it. After the shooting, he can be heard saying: "Ain't nobody got no fuckin' gun. I'm gonna record this shit... They just shot that man right here, man, they just shot that fuckin' man right here, yeah." 

Skid Row is the name given to a central district of Los Angeles with a large homeless population. Estimates of the district's population range from eight thousand to eleven thousand people, predominantly black, with a homeless population of about twenty-five hundred, according to the LA Chamber of Commerce.
Described by The Associated Press as a "tenuous comfort zone for many who hit rock bottom". Homeless people tended to gravitate to the area historically as it was near a railway terminal, "the last stop on the train for the whole country", according to the Union Rescue Mission charity
Other American cities have their own "skid rows", with the term believed to have originated in Seattle, Washington.
Commander Smith said three officers, including a sergeant, had fired their guns as they struggled on the ground for control of one of the police officer's weapons. He said the department was aware of the amateur video and would attempt to amplify its sound and pictures to establish exactly what had happened. "The video is disturbing," he told reporters. "It's disturbing any time anyone loses their life. It's a tragedy." The commander added that at least one of the police officers had been wearing a body camera.
According to an ABC News report, the three officers have been placed on leave pending the outcome of an investigation into the shooting.
Steve Soboroff, president of LA's Police Commission, told the BBC it was important to investigate the facts before making any conclusions.
Witnesses told The Los Angeles Times that the man who died had been living on the street for four or five months.
Ina Murphy, who lives in an apartment nearby, said he had told her that he had recently been released after spending ten years in a mental health facility. People on Skid Row who knew him said he was not violent. "What did he do?" said Steven Tugmon to ABC News. "He wasn't an aggravated person. He wasn't mad all the time. He just had mental problems."

Rico says that police work is hard enough, but trying to deal with crazy people is impossible...

Snow for Philadelphia

Philly.com has an article about yet more fucking snow:

Clouds moved in over the region this morning, bringing with them the chance for more snow.  According to John Bolaris, snow will move in around 12 pm, and could leave Philadelphia covered with one to two inches of snow before changing over to sleet and freezing rain. Bolaris expects precipitation to switch over completely to rain sometime between 8 and 10 pm.
More to the north, up to three inches is expected for the Lehigh Valley, while parts of Northern Montgomery, Western Chester and Upper Bucks counties can expect two to three inches before the snow changes over to freezing rain. Prolonged icing could be a problem on Sunday night.
Southern New Jersey is also expected to get an inch or two of snow west of Interstate 295, while Northern Delaware will probably receive just a coating.
Rain should continue through the Monday morning rush hour, but temperatures will get slightly warmer, with highs expected to reach the lower forties.

Rico says he and the fiancé missed it, having come back from Mexico on Monday, but it's still here...