HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? The murder case against former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez has led investigators to his hometown of Bristol, Conn., the working-class Hartford suburb where he began a meteoric rise that would carry him to the upper echelons of the NFL.
He is remembered as a fun-loving teenager at Bristol Central High School, where he followed in the footsteps of his older brother, D.J., who would star as a quarterback and tight end at the University of Connecticut.
Some recall him struggling with the death of his father, Dennis, in 2006, but remaining determined to become a pro athlete, spending hours working out before and after school. As Bristol police assist Massachusetts investigators, arresting one local man as a fugitive from justice, the community was left to ponder the fall of the hometown hero with the $40 million pro contract and a new family of his own.
A former high school teammate, Andrew Ragali, 24, said the troubled street hood he has seen portrayed on television is not the Aaron Hernandez he knew.
"You could maybe say he was immature, but he wasn't a gang-banger at all," Ragali said. "I think when he went to college things might have changed, hanging around with the wrong people, but in high school, he wasn't like that at all."
The 23-year-old Hernandez was arrested Wednesday at his mansion in North Attleborough, Mass., and accused of orchestrating the execution-style shooting of his friend, Odin Lloyd, allegedly because Lloyd had talked to the wrong people at a nightclub. He was denied bail at a hearing Thursday in a Massachusetts courtroom, where a prosecutor said a Hummer belonging to Hernandez turned up an ammunition clip matching the caliber of casings found at the scene of Lloyd's killing.
Hernandez's lawyer argued his client is not a risk to flee and the case against him is circumstantial.
On June 16, the night before the slaying, a prosecutor said, Hernandez texted two unidentified friends and asked them to hurry to Massachusetts from Connecticut. A few minutes later, he texted Lloyd to tell him he wanted to get together, the prosecutor said. Authorities say the three picked up Lloyd at around 2:30 a.m. June 17, drove him to an industrial park near Hernandez's home and shot him five times. They have not said who fired the shots.
New Britain State's Attorney Brian Preleski said Thursday that his office and Bristol police have been assisting investigators in Massachusetts and that Carlos Ortiz, 27, of Bristol, had been charged as a fugitive from justice. He waived extradition to Massachusetts and was being held on $1.5 million bail in Hartford.
Ortiz's public defender, Alfonzo Sirica, declined to comment about the case.
Massachusetts state police said Thursday night they were seeking another man, Ernest Wallace, in connection with Lloyd's killing. They issued an alert and wanted poster for Wallace, saying he was considered armed and dangerous, and sought the public's help in tracking down a silver or gray 2012 Chrysler 300 with Rhode Island license plates he was seen driving.
In Connecticut, Bristol is known to many as the home of ESPN, Otis Elevator and the Hernandez family.
Aaron and his brother each earned honors as the state's Gatorade high school player of the year, although they played several years apart at Bristol Central. Aaron would often visit his brother at UConn, and at one point verbally committed to follow D.J. and play for UConn himself. But Aaron became too big a star for the state school and signed instead to play at the University of Florida, a national powerhouse where he was an All-American.
Ragali recalled seeing Hernandez again, years after high school, at a Hartford bar. He described him as quieter, with more tattoos. But said he was very nice, asked about his family and took pictures with his girlfriend.
It was after his father's death that Hernandez began smoking marijuana and hanging out with a rough crowd, Hernandez's mother, Terri, told USA Today in 2009.
"The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger," she said at the time.
Hernandez's mother works in the office at the local South Side elementary school, and other family members still live in Bristol.
"All I can say is that he will be cleared of all these charges in the end," she told the Bristol Press outside her home Wednesday. "Just let it play out until the end."
On Wednesday night, police searched a Bristol home and garage owned by Andres Valderrama, whom WFSB-TV identified as an uncle. A message was left at the home Thursday seeking comment.
The Patriots, who cut Hernandez following his arrest Wednesday, drafted him in 2010 and signed him last summer to five-year contract worth $40 million.
During the draft, one team said it wouldn't take him under any circumstances, and he was passed over by one club after another before New England picked him in the fourth round. Afterward, Hernandez said he had failed a drug test in college ? reportedly for marijuana ? and was up front with teams about it.
A Florida man filed a lawsuit last week claiming Hernandez shot him in the face after they argued at a strip club in February.
Hernandez became a father on Nov. 6 and said he intended to change his ways: "Now, another one is looking up to me. I can't just be young and reckless Aaron no more."
Hernandez could face life in prison if convicted.
___
Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Fall River, Mass., contributed to this report.
Monoliths were first made famous in the sci-fi masterpiece?2001, A Space Odyssey, but now a different sort of monolith? could be moving from fiction to reality in the near future. Columbia University professor Peter Eisenberger hopes to use monoliths?a component similar to the catalytic convertor that cleans up a car?s exhaust?to pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
The potential is huge: once captured, the carbon dioxide captured by monoliths can be used to feed algae which in turn can produce fuel oil. But?Eisenberger is quick to note that his monolith technology is still in its very early stages and not ready for any kind of widespread commercial development. Currently it is neither cost-effective nor practical to install enough monoliths to balance the amount of carbon dioxide we?re emitting, though one day that could change.
But as NPR reports, some greens are concerned more with the politics of Eisenberger?s work, rather than its potential:
?It?s catchy,? Socolow admits. ?It?s attractive conceptually that one could basically pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the next several decades and pull it out later and everything would be fine.? But the appeal of the idea also worried him ? people might use the mere prospect of this technology as an excuse not to act.
So Socolow spearheaded a critique of the technique, on behalf of the American Physical Society. [...]
Researchers currently working on carbon dioxide capture technologies say the American Physical Society critique has made it much harder for them to raise money. Klaus Lackner at Columbia University says he was turned down for a government grant. David Keith at Harvard and the University of Calgary says he struggled to get funding for his small company.
Rather than getting behind promising ideas like this and pressing for more research into potential fixes, some short-sighted greens are trying to stop them in their tracks?not because they?re bad ideas, but because they would make?it difficult for them to continue using scare tactics about the imminent death of the planet. This is a shame. These kinds of ideas are going to be critical to how we adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change, and we?d like to see more money spent on research and development for ideas like this. Greens should be behind this kind of research as well; goodness knows that today?s current crop of green technology isn?t up to the task.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is under investigation for allegedly leaking classified information about a covert cyberattack on Iran's nuclear facilities, according to media reports.
Retired Marine Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright has been told he is a target of the probe, NBC News and The Washington Post reported Thursday. A "target" is someone a prosecutor or grand jury has substantial evidence linking to a crime and who is likely to be charged.
The Justice Department referred questions to the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore, where a spokeswoman, Marcia Murphy, declined to comment.
The investigation of the leak about the Iran cyberattack is one of a number of national security leak investigations that have been started by the Obama administration, including ones involving The Associated Press and Fox News.
In June 2012, the New York Times reported that Cartwright was a crucial player in the cyber operation called Olympic Games, started under President George W. Bush.
Bush reportedly advised President Barack Obama to preserve Olympic Games.
According to the Times, Obama ordered the cyberattacks sped up, and in 2010 an attack using a computer virus called Stuxnet temporarily disabled 1,000 centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.
Congressional leaders demanded a criminal probe into who leaked the information, and Obama said he had zero tolerance for such leaks. Republicans said senior administration officials had leaked the details to bolster the president's national security credentials during the 2012 campaign.
The Times said Cartwright was one of the crucial players who had to break the news to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden that Stuxnet at one point had escaped onto the Internet.
An element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it out on the Internet, the Times reported. After the worm escaped onto the Internet, top administration officials met to consider whether the program had been fatally compromised.
Obama asked if the program should continue, and after hearing the advice of top advisers, decided to proceed.
Cartwright, a four-star general, was cleared in February 2011 of misconduct involving a young aide. An anonymous accuser had claimed Cartwright acted inappropriately during a 2009 overseas trip on which the aide traveled as a military assistant. Several sources confirmed that the former aide was a young woman.
The Pentagon inspector general quickly cleared Cartwright of the most serious allegations, which involved claims that he may have had an improper physical relationship with the woman. The report did find that Cartwright mishandled an incident in which the aide, drunk and visibly upset, visited his Tbilisi, Georgia, hotel room alone and either passed out or fell asleep on a bench at the foot of his bed. Cartwright denied any impropriety and was later cleared of all wrongdoing.
Cartwright, once considered the leading candidate to become Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, resigned from the military in August 2011.
NBC said Cartwright did not respond to request for comment and that his attorney, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, said he had no comment.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Taliban fighters ambushed a national police patrol in western Afghanistan, killing a commander and four of his men, authorities said Thursday.
Herat province police spokesman Abdul Raouf Ahmadi said that Taliban fighters were believed to have been killed in the overnight attack, but that it was too dark to find any bodies.
On the other side of the country in Ghazni province, deputy police commander Assadullah Ensafi said police ambushed a group of Taliban fighters and killed five, including a leader believed to have been responsible for making roadside bombs and organizing suicide attacks in the area.
The Taliban has signaled that they are willing to talk peace with the U.S at a new office in Qatar, but at the same time have said they will continue fighting.
In the eastern province of Laghman, four people on their way home from a wedding were killed and another injured when a roadside bomb exploded next to their car, governor's spokesman Sarhadi Zwak said. A local police officer was also killed in the attack.
Game of Thrones' and Lego fans rejoice: the Warden of the North, Arya, the Mother of Dragons?sadly with only one baby dragon?John Snow andTyrion Lannister can be allyours in precious minifig form for $70, a price that will feel something between the Red Wedding and Theon Greyjoy's torture to your credit card.
According to the manufacturer on Etsy, "they are being made in very limited numbers and won't be available long!" They say that all these minifigs have been designed by their house artist and custom pad printed?which means they are high quality. Pad printing is the same printing method Lego uses.
These are not Lego or Game of Thrones' official products. They are not the first Game of Thrones' minifigs either?Lego expert Sam Beattie made his own characters last year. Sam's minifigs are not as faithful as these ones, but they are are really good, as you can see here:
The Starks
The Lannisters
The Baratheon Brothers
The Small Council
The Clegane Brothers
Jorah, Daenerys and Drogo
Sansa, Bran, Hodor (Hodor!) and Rickon Stark
If you have Game of Thrones' withdrawal syndrome you can go to this Lego site fully dedicated to Game of Thrones. Or just do like me and read the Wikipedia entries to know everything that's going to happen because you are too impatient to wait or read the books.
The Myth of the Komodo Dragon?s Dirty Mouth In 1969, an American biologist named Walter Auffenberg moved to the Indonesia island of Komodo to study its most famous resident?the Komodo dragon. This huge lizard?the largest in the world?grows to lengths of 3 metres, and can take down large prey like deer and water buffalo. Auffenberg watched the dragons for a year and eventually published a book on their behaviour in 1981. It won him an award. It also enshrined a myth that took almost three decades to refute, and is still prevalent today.
Source: National Geographic Posted on:
Thursday, Jun 27, 2013, 8:51am Views: 14
Nonprofit organizations that depend on the generosity of donors are currently facing an urgent threat as Congress considers proposals that will upend the charitable tax deduction.
The Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees have presented tax reform options to modify the charitable deduction as they consider overhauling America?s tax system. The Charitable Giving Coalition, a group of more than 60 diverse nonprofits, foundations and other charitable organizations serving communities across the nation, is working to ensure there is a clear understanding of how tampering with the charitable deduction could impact giving and hurt those who need help the most.
Consider the millions who depend on a network of highly effective, compassionate organizations across the country that provide jobs, economic development, food, shelter and more.
For instance, on an annual basis, Catholic Charities USA?s network of local agencies across the country raises more than $679 million of contributed income.? In fact, many rely on individual donors for more than half of their contributed income to provide funding to:????? ? Meet the needs of the more than 10 million people that come to their doors for help and hope, regardless of race or religious background. ????? ? Employ nearly 66,000 and engage more than 311,000 volunteers annually. ????? ? Public release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
The genome of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense GSF30T identifies diverse strategies in the Herbaspirillum genus to interact with plants
Microbes whose habitat is inside other organisms, such as so-called "endophytic" bacteria that live inside plants, have evolved genes that enable them to overcome their host's defensive mechanisms. But once they have entered the host tissue, such microbes may actually benefit their host, for example, by activating genes that capture atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into natural fertilizer to promote plant growth. Daniel Straub and colleagues from the University of Hohenheim and the Helmholtz Zentrum Mnchen, Germany, found that the genomic "toolbox" of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense, which lives inside grasses, is very different from the toolbox of its closest relatives: unlike other Herbaspirillum species, H. frisingense can fix atmospheric nitrogen to benefits its host, and also uses very different molecular pathways and metabolic modules to enter and survive in host cells. These results can help to identity endophytic bacteria that can be added to soil to improve the yield of crops, without posing a risk to human health or to the environment.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Daniel Straub
Crop Science Institute,
University of Hohenheim, Germany
Email: d.straub@uni-hohenheim.de
Flying fruit flies correct for visual sideslip depending on relative speed of forward optic flow
Flies are spectacular in flight, executing precise maneuvers at high speed. But because they are small, they are easily blown off course, and must correct their heading using tiny brains with limited neural resources. When moving forward, images of distant objects travel across the retina more slowly than nearby ones. This geometrical effect, called motion parallax, informs us if we run through the forest that the hovering moon is far off, and that the tree branches whizzing by are near and must be dodged. To determine if flies use motion parallax for corrective flight maneuvers, Stephanie Cabrera and Jamie Theobald, of Florida International University, used a cube with images on the sides to simulate three dimensional forward flight for a fruitfly that was held in place in the cube's center. They found that fruitflies responded more strongly to images that, by virtue of speed, appeared closer. But the crucial variable wasn't absolute speed; it was that some images moved faster than others. These results suggest that tiny fly brains use geometrical clues to identify the closest objects during flight.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Jamie Theobald
Department of Biological Sciences
Florida International University, USA
E-mail: theobald@fiu.edu
Clustering the lexicon in the brain: a meta?analysis of the neurofunctional evidence on noun and verb processing
Virtually every known human language features two different classes of words, one for "calling" things like dogs, clouds, or rumours and one for saying something about how they are or what they do dogs bark, clouds are coming, rumours spread. These classes are called nouns and verbs in Western languages, and sits at the very heart of human communication. It was widely believed that separate areas in the brain subserve the production and comprehension of nouns and verbs, based on the outcome of individual studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Davide Crepaldi, Manuela Berlingeri and colleagues from the University of Milan Bicocca and the University of Milan have put together the evidence coming from those individual studies through a hierarchical clustering technique, and have found that, once results from different experiments are considered as a whole, evidence shows instead that the brain areas deputed to nouns and verbs are mostly overlapping, and the difference in the neural circuitries deputed to either grammatical class scale down to spatial and temporal resolutions that are far out of the grasp of current brain-snapshot techniques. According to the researchers, these results impact deeply on how functional specialization of individual brain areas is currently conceived.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Davide Crepaldi
Department of Psychology
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: davide.crepaldi1@unimib.it
A double-edged sword: how oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes can contribute to chromosomal instability
Cells rely on an intricate network of signaling pathways to govern a number of processes ranging from tissue repair to programmed cell death. De-regulation of signaling pathways is a hallmark of cancer and responsible for driving tumor formation. Aneuploidy, defined as an abnormal chromosome number, is a distinct feature commonly observed in most solid tumors that arises from errors in cell division during mitosis. While some tumors maintain a stably aneuploid genome, many cancer cells persistently mis-segregate their chromosomes during mitosis, a phenomenon known as chromosomal instability (CIN). CIN is thought to drive the genomic re-shuffling that enables cells to acquire new phenotypes such as drug resistance and is intimately associated with loss of mitotic fidelity. Emerging data show that CIN and de-regulated cell signaling pathways are closely interrelated suggesting the roles that signaling pathways play in the accuracy of mitosis may be underappreciated. These results imply that the induction of CIN can no longer be thought of as a separate event from the cancer-associated driver mutations found in cell signaling pathways. In the context of tumorigenesis this may turn out to be a double-edged sword that combines de-regulated cell cycle progression with the disruption of mitosis to generate the highly complex genomic rearrangements typical of solid tumors. These results change the way we think about how to intervene therapeutically in cancer patients and provide insights on the molecular targets that may contribute significantly to improve patient prognosis.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Duane A. Compton
Department of Biochemistry
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, USA
Email: duane.a.compton@dartmouth.edu
For copies of embargoed papers, please contact: Gozde Zorlu, Communications Officer: Tel: +41 (0) 21 693 9203. Interview requests should be directed to the corresponding author and appropriate contact details are provided above.
For online articles, please cite "Frontiers in xxx" followed by the name of the field as the publisher and include a link to the paper; active URLs for each paper are listed.
About Frontiers
Frontiers is a community driven open-access publisher and research networking platform. Launched and run by scientists since 2007, and based in Switzerland, Frontiers empowers researchers to advance the way science is evaluated, communicated and shared in the digital era. Frontiers joined the Nature Publishing Group family in 2013.
The "Frontiers in" series of journals publish around 500 peer-reviewed articles every month, which receive 5 million monthly views and are supported by over 25,000 editors and reviewers around the world. Frontiers has formed partnerships with international organizations such as the Max Planck Society and the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). For more information, please visit: http://www.frontiersin.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
The genome of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense GSF30T identifies diverse strategies in the Herbaspirillum genus to interact with plants
Microbes whose habitat is inside other organisms, such as so-called "endophytic" bacteria that live inside plants, have evolved genes that enable them to overcome their host's defensive mechanisms. But once they have entered the host tissue, such microbes may actually benefit their host, for example, by activating genes that capture atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into natural fertilizer to promote plant growth. Daniel Straub and colleagues from the University of Hohenheim and the Helmholtz Zentrum Mnchen, Germany, found that the genomic "toolbox" of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense, which lives inside grasses, is very different from the toolbox of its closest relatives: unlike other Herbaspirillum species, H. frisingense can fix atmospheric nitrogen to benefits its host, and also uses very different molecular pathways and metabolic modules to enter and survive in host cells. These results can help to identity endophytic bacteria that can be added to soil to improve the yield of crops, without posing a risk to human health or to the environment.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Daniel Straub
Crop Science Institute,
University of Hohenheim, Germany
Email: d.straub@uni-hohenheim.de
Flying fruit flies correct for visual sideslip depending on relative speed of forward optic flow
Flies are spectacular in flight, executing precise maneuvers at high speed. But because they are small, they are easily blown off course, and must correct their heading using tiny brains with limited neural resources. When moving forward, images of distant objects travel across the retina more slowly than nearby ones. This geometrical effect, called motion parallax, informs us if we run through the forest that the hovering moon is far off, and that the tree branches whizzing by are near and must be dodged. To determine if flies use motion parallax for corrective flight maneuvers, Stephanie Cabrera and Jamie Theobald, of Florida International University, used a cube with images on the sides to simulate three dimensional forward flight for a fruitfly that was held in place in the cube's center. They found that fruitflies responded more strongly to images that, by virtue of speed, appeared closer. But the crucial variable wasn't absolute speed; it was that some images moved faster than others. These results suggest that tiny fly brains use geometrical clues to identify the closest objects during flight.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Jamie Theobald
Department of Biological Sciences
Florida International University, USA
E-mail: theobald@fiu.edu
Clustering the lexicon in the brain: a meta?analysis of the neurofunctional evidence on noun and verb processing
Virtually every known human language features two different classes of words, one for "calling" things like dogs, clouds, or rumours and one for saying something about how they are or what they do dogs bark, clouds are coming, rumours spread. These classes are called nouns and verbs in Western languages, and sits at the very heart of human communication. It was widely believed that separate areas in the brain subserve the production and comprehension of nouns and verbs, based on the outcome of individual studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Davide Crepaldi, Manuela Berlingeri and colleagues from the University of Milan Bicocca and the University of Milan have put together the evidence coming from those individual studies through a hierarchical clustering technique, and have found that, once results from different experiments are considered as a whole, evidence shows instead that the brain areas deputed to nouns and verbs are mostly overlapping, and the difference in the neural circuitries deputed to either grammatical class scale down to spatial and temporal resolutions that are far out of the grasp of current brain-snapshot techniques. According to the researchers, these results impact deeply on how functional specialization of individual brain areas is currently conceived.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Davide Crepaldi
Department of Psychology
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: davide.crepaldi1@unimib.it
A double-edged sword: how oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes can contribute to chromosomal instability
Cells rely on an intricate network of signaling pathways to govern a number of processes ranging from tissue repair to programmed cell death. De-regulation of signaling pathways is a hallmark of cancer and responsible for driving tumor formation. Aneuploidy, defined as an abnormal chromosome number, is a distinct feature commonly observed in most solid tumors that arises from errors in cell division during mitosis. While some tumors maintain a stably aneuploid genome, many cancer cells persistently mis-segregate their chromosomes during mitosis, a phenomenon known as chromosomal instability (CIN). CIN is thought to drive the genomic re-shuffling that enables cells to acquire new phenotypes such as drug resistance and is intimately associated with loss of mitotic fidelity. Emerging data show that CIN and de-regulated cell signaling pathways are closely interrelated suggesting the roles that signaling pathways play in the accuracy of mitosis may be underappreciated. These results imply that the induction of CIN can no longer be thought of as a separate event from the cancer-associated driver mutations found in cell signaling pathways. In the context of tumorigenesis this may turn out to be a double-edged sword that combines de-regulated cell cycle progression with the disruption of mitosis to generate the highly complex genomic rearrangements typical of solid tumors. These results change the way we think about how to intervene therapeutically in cancer patients and provide insights on the molecular targets that may contribute significantly to improve patient prognosis.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Duane A. Compton
Department of Biochemistry
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, USA
Email: duane.a.compton@dartmouth.edu
For copies of embargoed papers, please contact: Gozde Zorlu, Communications Officer: Tel: +41 (0) 21 693 9203. Interview requests should be directed to the corresponding author and appropriate contact details are provided above.
For online articles, please cite "Frontiers in xxx" followed by the name of the field as the publisher and include a link to the paper; active URLs for each paper are listed.
About Frontiers
Frontiers is a community driven open-access publisher and research networking platform. Launched and run by scientists since 2007, and based in Switzerland, Frontiers empowers researchers to advance the way science is evaluated, communicated and shared in the digital era. Frontiers joined the Nature Publishing Group family in 2013.
The "Frontiers in" series of journals publish around 500 peer-reviewed articles every month, which receive 5 million monthly views and are supported by over 25,000 editors and reviewers around the world. Frontiers has formed partnerships with international organizations such as the Max Planck Society and the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). For more information, please visit: http://www.frontiersin.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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