She was the artist who put the contemporary in contemporary Inuit art, a catalyst for other Inuit artists, young and old, to deal with life as it was in Canada’s North, an award-winning international standard-bearer. And now Annie Pootoogook is dead at 47.

 Officials with the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in her hometown of Cape Dorset confirmed Friday afternoon that the woman whose body had been recovered Monday morning from the Rideau River in Ottawa was Ms. Pootoogook.

 Police said they were not treating the incident as a homicide but crime investigators are seeking the public’s help in retracing the artist’s last hours and days.

 Ms. Pootoogook had been living for roughly the past nine years in Ottawa, sometimes on the street and in shelters, sometimes plagued by alcohol and drug abuse and, in 2012, an unwanted pregnancy. She’d relocated there from Nunavut in the wake of a string of major artistic successes in southern Canada and internationally. These included an acclaimed solo exhibition, in 2006, of her ink, crayon, pencil and chalk drawings at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, one of Canada’s premier venues for cutting-edge art. This in turn led to her winning the $50,000 Sobey Art Award that same year, given annually to an artist of singular talent under 40. In 2007 she was invited to participate at the prestigious Documenta 12 showcase, held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Two years later, she was given a solo show at New York’s National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center.

 In photos: The work of artist Annie Pootoogook

 Ms. Pootoogook’s art was far removed from the imagery of kayaks, walruses, harpoons and the other tried-and-true themes and subjects that had informed much Inuit art from the 1950s onward. She wielded a matter-of-fact, almost deadpan style to closely depict all facets of modern Inuit life, from a husband beating his wife and families shopping, to men watching television porn and women beading.

 Ms. Pootoogook, who began drawing in 1997, was the granddaughter of Pitseolak Ashoona, one of the earliest Cape Dorset drawers and print-makers. Her mother Napachie was a prolific graphic artist while father Eegyvudluk was similarly esteemed as a carver and print-maker.

 However, after her triumphs of 2006-09, Ms. Pootoogook’s output slowed, then seemed to stop. Toronto dealer Pat Feheley, who’d given Ms. Pootoogook her first commercial bow in 2001 as part of a group show called The Unexpected, then her first solo outing in 2003, told The Globe and Mail in July of 2012 that she hadn’t received an original Pootoogook drawing in more than three years.

 In an interview Friday, Ms. Feheley said she was “stunned” by the loss. “She had a rough couple of years but I always thought she’d be back. We’d go back to Dorset and the image bank she would have had would have been amazing.”

 Ms. Pootoogook’s art, at least initially, was almost a kind of therapy, Ms. Feheley said. “It was simply to get it out of her head. She didn’t particularly care if they sold or not.”

 Tributes were quick to pour in.

 Andrew Hunter, Canadian art curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, called her “a profoundly influential artist who had the courage to push the boundaries of Inuit art.”

 Academic curator Gerald McMaster said “her legacy will not be forgotten, in that she leaves us thinking about the same troubled world she was brave enough to depict.”

 Nancy Campbell, former AGO associate curator of special projects, spoke of Ms. Pootoogook’s “poignant, often difficult pictures” being “a crucial part of opening the dialogue about art-making in the North.”

 Report Typo/Error ||||| Prominent Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook has been identified as the woman whose body was found in Ottawa's Rideau River earlier this week.

 Officials with the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in her hometown, Cape Dorset, Nunavut, confirmed the death of the chalk-and-ink artist, who rose to prominence when she won the Sobey Award in 2006.

 Pootoogook, 47, had been living in Ottawa.

 Her drawings offered a contemporary take on her culture, where old customs intermingled with modern technology and goods.

 Her work is part of the collections at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario and was recently part of an exhibition on Indigenous pop art at Ottawa's Saw Gallery.

 "Her inclusion in the exhibition was a no-brainer, in that she looked at contemporary life in a way no other artist had ever done," said Saw Gallery curator Jason St-Laurent, who first met Pootoogook five years ago.

 Fine Liner Eyebrow one of Pootoogook's drawings on display at the National Gallery of Canada. (Annie Pootoogook/National Gallery of Canada/Dorset Fine Arts)

 'Revolutionary' impact

 Pootoogook was from an artistic family. Her parents, Napachie and Eegyvudlu Pootoogook, and her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona were all artists.

 It was "like the artistic lives were already aimed to be passed on to Annie," said Jimmy Manning, the president of the Inuit Art Foundation, in Inuktitut.

 Saw Gallery curator Jason St-Laurent, standing in front of one of Annie Pootoogook's drawings, said the artist was a "shining light" to those who knew her. (CBC News)

 "As soon as she started sketching [when she was a child] you knew her art was going to go somewhere."

 "Her impact was revolutionary and it's no surprise she had international acclaim for her work," he said.

 St-Laurent described Pootoogook as a free spirit who lived life on her own terms. He said he lost touch with her a few months ago, but said she was always welcome at the gallery.

 "When she came into Saw, she was a shining light, and made everyone laugh… she was the kindest soul you could ever meet. If you talk to anyone who has met Annie Pootoogook, they'll never forget her," he said.

 AGO Canadian art curator Andrew Hunter said in a statement Pootoogook would "be deeply missed."

 "She was a profoundly influential artist who had the courage to push the boundaries of Inuit art, capturing in her work challenging and even troubling themes that reflected the reality of contemporary life for women in the North. Her work has had a remarkable impact not only on Inuit art, but on contemporary Canadian art as well."

 Major crimes unit investigating

 Ottawa police say they are not treating it as a homicide, but the major crimes unit is investigating. Police are hoping to get the public's help in retracing her steps leading up to the discovery of her body on Sept. 19.

 A city worker called 911 just before 9 a.m. ET Monday after seeing a body in the river near Bordeleau Park, which sits off King Edward Avenue, Cathcart and Bruyère streets in the Lowertown neighbourhood.

 Anyone who saw Pootoogook in the days leading up to Sept. 19 is asked to contact the major crimes unit at 613-236-1222 ext. 5493.

 Anonymous tips can be submitted by calling Crime Stoppers toll-free at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS), or by downloading the Ottawa Police Service app. ||||| Ottawa police are asking for the public’s help in tracing the last movements of Annie Pootoogook, an acclaimed Inuit artist whose body was found in the Rideau River earlier this week.

 Pootoogook’s body was discovered Monday at about 8:50 a.m. in the water close to Bordeleau Park in Lowertown. Police do not consider her death to be suspicious or a homicide, said Const. Marc Soucy. “We just want to recreate her final moments.”

 Soucy said an autopsy has been performed, but police are not releasing a cause of death. It is unclear where Pootoogook was last seen.

 Pootoogook’s story is one of a rocket ride to superstardom in the art world, followed by a crash into addiction, life on the street and tragedy.

 Originally from Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Pootoogook was considered one of Canada’s most pre-eminent Inuit artists. Her grandmother, Pitseolak Ashoona, an artist, was the last to grow up in the traditional Inuit lifestyle. Her mother, Napachie Pootoogook, was also an artist who died in 2002.

 Pootoogook began drawing in 1997 and was discovered about 14 years ago by Patricia Feheley of Feheley Fine Arts, a Toronto art gallery that began buying her work through the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset. Her drawings were a jarring chronicle of modern Inuit life — a family watching Jerry Springer on television, ATM cash machines, scenes of alcoholism and spousal abuse.

 Feheley helped to raise Pootoogook’s profile and sold her drawings in coloured pencils for as much has $2,600.

 Related

 “I was just hit by their power,” Feheley said in a 2012 interview. “The best I have ever heard it described is they are so direct, they are so honest, they so come from the head to the hand to the paper, and that is why they resonate so much with people.”

 Pootoogook won the $50,000 Sobey Art Award in 2006 and exhibited on an international scale. In 2007, showed at the Montreal Biennial, the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland and Documenta 12 in Kasel, Germany. In 2009-10 there was a solo show in New York, and a review in the New York Times which called her work “disconcertingly autobiographical.”

 Her last solo show was in 2011 in Kingston.

 Pootoogook, who has lived in Ottawa since 2007, battled the demons of sexual abuse, alcohol and drugs. By 2012 she had disappeared from view and journalists who attempted to track down the media-shy artist were disappointed. She drew attention again when Citizen reporter Hugh Adami found her in July of 2012, pregnant, panhandling and selling drawings for $25 to $30 on the street to pay for cigarettes.

 That September, she gave birth to a baby girl, named Napuchie, in a bathroom at the Shepherds of Good Hope. The baby was a month premature and weighed three pounds, 10 ounces. (She had two previous children on Baffin Island.) Three days later, Pootoogook was back on Rideau Street.

 Her art appeared to reflect the torment of her life. Crying While Making a Drawing, dated 2003, shows a woman in tears on her knees in a near-empty room, with drawings of Christian crosses on the floor in front of her. Another drawing from that time period, called Evil Spirit, shows a woman on her hands and knees being tormented by a horned demon.

 Last October, Pootoogook told Adami that she was living at a women’s shelter after moving out of an ex-boyfriend’s apartment in the wake of a tumultuous relationship. She said she knew she had an alcohol problem and planned to see an addiction counsellor. She was on probation because she made a “mistake” related to drinking.

 “When people tell you to stop drinking,” Pootoogook told Adami, her tendency is to “keep drinking and drinking.”

 On Friday, Adami, now retired, said when he first met Pootoogook “I thought she was going to pull it together. People in the art community were reaching out to her. Lots of people wanted to help.”

 He interviewed her several times after that, most recently last October. “It was getting worse and worse. She was ravaged by alcohol. She mentioned her baby and started crying. It was very, very sad.”

 In a 2012 interview with Citizen arts writer Paul Gessell, Feheley said Pootoogook’s fame was “just too much, too fast.”

 “Her vault to stardom, which was serious stardom, was really a two-and-one-half year thing for someone who was living a relatively sheltered life and not that happy a life in Cape Dorset, when suddenly she was in Switzerland and she was in Germany and she won all this money and there were three books and two movies,” said Feheley.

 “I think she just literally got overwhelmed.”

 Police ask anyone who saw Pootoogook in the days leading up to the discovery of her body to contact the Ottawa Police major crime unit at 613 236 1222, ext. 5493.

 Anonymous tips can be submitted by calling Crime Stoppers toll-free at 1-800-222-8477.

 jlaucius@postmedia.com ||||| The body of Pootoogook, 46, was spotted in the water around 8:50 a.m. Monday near Bordeleau Park in Lowertown, near the Ontario-Quebec border. An autopsy was performed later in the week to confirm her identity; Ottawa police identified Pootoogook in a news release Friday.

 Pootoogook, born in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, was an acclaimed, award-winning contemporary Inuit artist best known for her frank, ink-and-crayon drawings of contemporary northern life. Her work was reflective of her own life and community, at times chronicling her experience of physical and sexual abuse and living with relatives suffering from alcoholism.

 In 2006, Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award, beating out four other shortlisted artists from across Canada for the $50,000 prize. The same year, her work was exhibited at a landmark show at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery, the first time Canada’s pre-eminent contemporary art venue had held a major show by an Inuit. In 2007 she took part in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, a prestigious, invitation-only art exhibition — held once every five years — that defines the current state of contemporary and modern art. Pootoogook’s Toronto dealer, Pat Feheley, said at the time that it was the first time that an Inuit artist had been invited to participate.

 Nunavut Premier Peter Taptuna offered his condolences to Pootoogook’s family Friday afternoon on Twitter.

Summary: – An Inuit artist whose "impact was revolutionary" but who had trouble coping with "serious stardom" was found dead in a river this week. Annie Pootoogook's life changed dramatically in 2006, the Ottawa Citizen reports. She went from drawing in a tiny town in Canada's deep north to having her work displayed in Toronto, New York, Germany, and Switzerland. She won a $50,000 award for her art, which could sell for up $2,600 per piece. But it was "too much, too fast," says the art dealer who discovered her. According to the Globe and Mail, Pootoogook had largely stopped creating art by 2009. She was living on and off the street in Ottawa and struggling with drugs and alcohol. She could occasionally be found selling drawings for cigarette money. Authorities confirmed Friday that a body pulled from a river on Monday was Pootoogook. She was 47. Authorities haven't released a cause of death but aren't treating it as a homicide. "She has left a tremendous legacy to the Canadian cultural fabric,” the Toronto Star quotes a statement from the Sobey Art Foundation. Her work will be remembered for portraying contemporary Inuit life—from women beading to spousal abuse—in a "poignant, often difficult way." "She was the kindest soul you could ever meet," a gallery curator tells CBC. "If you talk to anyone who has met Annie Pootoogook, they'll never forget her." (Her art was her photos. She didn't take a single one.)


The singed fur and charred feet are testament to the weasel’s last stand: an encounter with the world’s most powerful machine that was never going to end well.

 Now an exhibit at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum, the stone marten met its fate when it hopped over a substation fence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva and was instantly electrocuted by an 18,000 volt transformer.

 The incident in November last year knocked out the power to the vast particle accelerator which recreates in microcosm the primordial fire that prevailed at the birth of the universe. The partly-cooked corpse was duly secured for inclusion in the museum’s Dead Animal Tales exhibition.

 “It’s a fine example of what the exhibition is all about,�? said Kees Moeliker, director of the museum. “It shows that animal and human life collide more and more, with dramatic results for both.�?

 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Cern stone marten, secured for inclusion in the Rotterdam Natural History Museum’s Dead Animal Tales exhibition. Photograph: Kees Moeliker

 The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armoured, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defence did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week.

 It was another unfortunate incident that spurred Moeliker to establish the exhibition in the first place. In 1995, a male duck flew into the glass facade of the museum and died on impact, a fate that did not deter another male duck from raping the corpse for 75 minutes. The incident ruffled feathers in the community but earned Moeliker a much-coveted IgNobel prize when he published his observations . “I was the one and only witness,�? Moeliker said. “I’m a trained biologist but what I saw was completely new to me.�?

 The LHC has been brought to its knees by stone martens before. In April last year, one of the animals bounded into a 66,000 volt transformer and shut the collider down for a week. The Rotterdam museum tried to obtain the remains of the beast, known as the “Cern weasel�?, but the highly efficient staff at the European particle physics laboratory had already disposed of the corpse. When a second stone marten met a similar fate in November, Moeliker was ready to secure the animal for the exhibition.

 Stone martens - or “fouines�? - have a habit of gnawing through electrical cables and are known for causing power outages in the region. “We want to show that no matter what we do to the environment, to the natural world, the impact of nature will always be there,�? Moeliker said. “We try to put a magnifying glass on some fine examples. This poor creature literally collided with the largest machine in the world, where physicists collide particles every day. It’s poetic, in my opinion, what happened there.�? ||||| World's Most Destructive Stone Marten Goes On Display In The Netherlands

 Enlarge this image toggle caption Natural History Museum Rotterdam Natural History Museum Rotterdam

 The remains of the world's most destructive stone marten are now on display at a museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

 On Nov. 20, 2016, the animal hopped over a fence at the $7 billion Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, touched a transformer and was electrocuted by 18,000 volts.

 The marten died instantly. The collider, which accelerates particles to near the speed of light to study the fiery origins of the universe, lost power and shut down.

 "There must have been a big flame," said Kees Moeliker, the director of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam and the man behind its Dead Animal Tales exhibit, where the preserved marten is now displayed.

 "It was scorched. When you're not really careful with candles and your hair, like that," he explained. "Every hair of this creature was kind of burned and the whiskers, they were burned to the bare minimum and especially the feet, the legs, they were cooked. They were darker, like roasted."

 "It really had a bad, bad encounter with this electricity."

 The November incident wasn't the first time a marten has sabotaged the vast scientific instrument. In April 2016, an animal originally thought to be a weasel and later guessed to be a marten, which is in the weasel family, appeared to have gnawed through a power cable, as we reported. (OK, to be fair, maybe that animal was really the world's most destructive marten.)

 "This was big news [in April]. The collider was out of work for a week, so they had other things on their mind than an excited museum director in the Netherlands," explained Moeliker, who said he could understand why staffers at the collider weren't able to provide him with the animal's corpse.

 When it happened again in November, he was ready.

 "We had a couple of people who got interested in the request from April, and we contacted them and they made sure [the corpse] wasn't destroyed," Moeliker said.

 He outfitted a car with a small refrigerator that plugged into the vehicle's cigarette lighter, bought a block of ice at a local supermarket and drove to France's border with Switzerland to pick up the carcass.

 "It was in good condition," he said. "Well, for an electrocuted marten it was in good condition."

 The exhibit also houses a sparrow that was shot to death after knocking over 23,000 dominoes in the Netherlands in 2005, sabotaging a world record attempt. And a seagull that died after it flew into an ambulance. And a mallard duck known in the scientific community for its documented history of homosexual necrophilia. And a hedgehog that died after it put its head into a McDonald's McFlurry cup and could not escape.

 And then there's the smallest critter in the collection.

 A few years ago, Moeliker started collecting pubic lice after two British doctors alerted him that the animal might be endangered by habitat destruction associated with modern personal grooming habits. Moeliker said he has since provided specimens of human pubic lice to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

 Enlarge this image toggle caption Natural History Museum Rotterdam Natural History Museum Rotterdam

 "The things we get are so surprising," Moeliker said. "Just before the stone marten we had a fish that lodged himself in the throat of a man."

 The man had deliberately swallowed the catfish as part of a game with friends — they had reportedly worked up from goldfish to larger, more exotic species. But he didn't know it was an armored catfish.

 When it entered the man's throat, the catfish raised spines to defend itself, which did not save its life but did put the 28-year-old man in the hospital for a week.

 "I never thought we would get a fish ... that had qualifications to be part of this show," Moeliker remarked.

 "Let me be clear, I prefer all wildlife to be happy and flying and crawling around alive," he explained of the museum's approach to the Dead Animal Tales exhibit.

 "But if [an animal] has a story attached to it [that] shows how and when animal and human life collide, then they are welcome here. It's only going to increase, the collisions between man and animal. We more and more share the same environment, the same habitat. Nature strikes back. We have to get used to it." ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.

Summary: – The Large Hadron Collider facilitated the discovery of the Higgs boson, but it's not yet immune to animal troubles. Following a similar incident last April, a stone marten jumped a fence at the $7 billion site in Switzerland on Nov. 20 and came into contact with a transformer, causing the LHC to lose power, reports NPR. "There must have been a big flame" because "every hair of this creature was kind of burned" and the feet and legs "were cooked," says Kees Moeliker. He should know. After making some calls, Moeliker, of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, got his hands on the marten, had it stuffed, and put it on display in the museum's "Dead Animal Tales" exhibit, which shows how "animal and human life collide … with dramatic results." "We want to show that no matter what we do to the environment, to the natural world, the impact of nature will always be there," Moeliker tells the Guardian. The marten—a member of the weasel family—is "a fine example" of that, he adds. Among the other animals on display: a sparrow killed after knocking over 23,000 dominoes meant to be part of a world record attempt, a seagull that died after colliding with an ambulance, a hedgehog that died with its head stuck in a McDonald's McFlurry cup, an armored catfish that got stuck in a man's throat, and pubic lice said to be endangered thanks to humans' sudden dislike of pubic hair. (Perhaps this squirrel would qualify for a place in the exhibit.)


This artist's rendering shows NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015. The spacecraft awoke from its final hibernation period on Dec. 6, 2014 in preparation for the epic Pluto encounter at the edge of the solar system.

 LAUREL, Md. — Pluto, get ready for your close-up: A NASA spacecraft has roused itself from the final slumber of its nine-year trek to the edge of the solar system, setting the stage for the first close encounter with Pluto next year.

 The New Horizons spacecraft, currently located 2.9 billion miles (4.6 billion kilometers) from Earth, had been in hibernation since August — with most of its systems turned off to reduce wear. But late Saturday (Dec. 6), mission scientists received a confirmation signal from New Horizons at the probe's Mission Operations Center here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The probe is now wide awake for its 2015 flyby of Pluto.

 At the time of its wakeup call, New Horizons was just over 162 million miles (261 million km) from Pluto. About 20 people gathered in a conference room here at APL to await the signal from New Horizons. [Photos from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Probe]

 NASA's New Horizon Pluto flyby mission operations manager Alice Bowman and operations team Karl Whittenburg watch screens for signals confirming that the New Horizons probe awoke from hibernation on Dec. 6, 2014. The New Horizons mission is managed from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Credit: NASA

 First word from the probe arrived at about 9:30 p.m. EST on Saturday (Dec. 6) — generating a burst of happy applause from the attendees, including Alan Stern, New Horizon's principle investigator, and Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary sciences.

 At 9:52 p.m. EST (0252 GMT), mission managers confirmed that New Horizons was awake, with all systems functioning normally. The wakeup sets the stage for the probe's flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015.

 "This is the turning of a page. This is changing from a mission in cruise to a mission at its destination," said Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Stern popped a champagne bottle and offered a toast to the mission following the signal confirmation.

 New Horizons even got a wakeup song to mark the occasion: the tune "Where My Heart Will Take Me" by English tenor Russell Watson. The song, which included a special greeting from Watson for New Horizons, was played in the mission operations center after the confirmation signal was received. You can hear Watson's New Horizons wakeup song here.

 This photo of Pluto (center) and its largest moon Charon was captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in July 2014 and released on Aug. 7. New Horizons took this image and others from a range of 267 million to 262 million miles (429 million to 422 million kilometers). Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

 English tenor Russell Watson recorded a special version of his song "Where My Heart Will Take Me" to help wake up NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on Dec. 6, 2014 ahead of the probe's 2015 Pluto flyby. Credit: NASA

 New Horizons will begin its Pluto science campaign in January, and will make its closest approach to Pluto in July. It will explore the outer-most and most-populated region of the solar system, the Kuiper belt, which is full of rocky, icy objects that have remained largely unchanged since the formation of the solar system.

 "This is the place that this spacecraft was built to operate, and these are the operations that this team has waited a decade to actually go and execute," Stern said. "So it's game time."

 NASA launched the New Horizons mission in 2006 on a $700 million mission to be the first spacecraft ever to see Pluto and its five moons up close. The piano-size spacecraft is powered by a nuclear power source and has traveled nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) to reach Pluto in a mere nine years, making it the fastest space probe ever launched). It has spent two-thirds of its journey in a hibernation state that has both prolonged the life of the instruments and reduced staff costs on the ground.

 While New Horizons has gone through 18 hibernation periods, sleeping for about 1,873 days in all, this is the last one before it begins taking data on the Pluto system.

 For 20 weeks of its flyby of Pluto, New Horizons will provide better photos of Pluto and its moons than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, Stern said. In analogy, if the spacecraft were flying over a city it would be able to count the individual buildings on the ground. New Horizons may also identify as-yet-unknown moons or rings around Pluto.

 At the wake-up event, Stern handed out small, 2-inch-long pencils — whittled down from extensive use.

 "This is the metaphor for persistence," Stern said, holding up the pencil stub. "Since this mission went through so many ups and downs — the way the exploration of Pluto did — I thought this was an appropriate thing to give away. It's very simple, but it's meaningful."

 Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

 Pluto, the most famous dwarf planet in our solar system, underwent a well-publicized (and somewhat controversial) reclassification that took away its title as the ninth and most distant planet from the sun. So, how well do you know this fascinating world? Start the Quiz 0 of 10 questions complete ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.

Summary: – New Horizons just got what's probably the earliest wakeup call ever. Even though it's not supposed to fly by Pluto—the destination of its nine-year, 3-billion-mile journey—until July, the NASA craft roused itself from its "hibernation" slumber and is fully awake for the last leg of its mission, Space.com reports. Russell Watson's "Where My Heart Will Take Me" blasted NH out of its somnambulant state with a personal message from Watson himself before crooning the appropriate lyrics, "It's been a long road/Getting from there to here." About 20 scientists waiting back home in Maryland at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory got the confirmation signals on Saturday evening that New Horizons was up and at 'em, just over 162 million miles from Pluto. The piano-sized craft, which was launched in 2006, had been "asleep" since August to conserve energy and reduce wear and tear on its systems. It's been asleep before (18 other times, to be exact) during its long trip, but this was the last sleep before it makes it to the Kuiper Belt, the icy "disc-shaped region" that harbors Pluto and other dwarf worlds, NASA notes. "This is the place that this spacecraft was built to operate, and these are the operations that this team has waited a decade to actually go and execute," New Horizons' principle investigator says. "So it's game time." (New Horizons got some great pics of Jupiter during its flyby nearly eight years ago.)


Bill Keller’s column in The Times on Monday about Lisa Bonchek Adams has generated a great deal of negative response. Xeni Jardin, the well-known writer who blogs on Boing Boing, sometimes about her own experience with cancer, was outraged, calling it bullying.

 Ms. Adams herself responded this way on Twitter:

 I don’t know why I, a person dedicated to education and personal choice by cancer patients, have been so mischaracterized as lay in hospital — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) 13 Jan 14

 And a reader, Ximena Pena, who wrote that she has breast cancer, included this among her several objections: “The piece lacks empathy. It is an open attack on someone who has decided to be open about her treatment to help people with my diagnosis.”

 A particularly tough takedown came from Zeynep Tufekci, writing in Medium. She wrote that Mr. Keller “has something he wants to say about how end of life is perhaps unwisely prolonged by small, painful amounts with massive technological intervention in this country so projects this situation to Lisa Adams – except that is not applicable in this case. Lisa Adams is not prolonging her last few weeks with a cascade of interventions. She’s getting treatment for pain in her bones – the type of tumors that won’t kill her till they spread elsewhere which may be soon or may be years away.”

 One of the odd aspects of the column is that it follows, by just days, a column about Ms. Adams by Mr. Keller’s wife, Emma Gilbey Keller, who writes for The Guardian. Ms. Keller’s piece was also criticized, and she added a line at the bottom that said she regretted not letting Ms. Adams know in advance that the post was coming. Now the piece has been removed from the site, “pending investigation.” The Guardian told iMediaEthics that the piece was “inconsistent with The Guardian editorial code.”

 That negative response was not universal. My email on Monday included correspondence from those who defended the column. And the comments under the column itself include many positive ones.

 But for most of those who have been in touch with me, the subject matter is intensely personal. And for those who know and admire Ms. Adams, that personal reaction is multiplied.

 I asked Mr. Keller, a former executive editor of The Times, to respond. He wrote to me, noting that “it’s clear the column touched a nerve, particularly among her devoted following.”

 He added:

 Some of the reaction (especially on Twitter, which as a medium encourages reflexes rather than reflection) has been raw, and some (especially in comments posted to the article online, where there is space for nuance) has been thoughtful and valuable. I tried to be clear in the column that I respect Lisa Adams’s choices, and I meant it. I wish every cancer victim could have those options – to fight with all the resources of medicine, or not. By living her disease in such a public way, by turning her hospital room into a classroom, she invites us to think about and debate some big, contentious issues. I think some readers have misread my point, and some – the most vociferous – seem to believe that anything short of an unqualified “right on, Lisa!” is inhumane or sacrilegious. But I’ve heard from readers who understood the point and found it worth grappling with.

 I followed up with a question about the similarity of his piece to that of his wife’s in The Guardian, making the point that many critics see the two pieces together as a sort of double-pronged slam, greater together than the sum of their parts. He answered:

 I only learned of Lisa Adams’s story because of Emma, who follows the subject of breast cancer with personal interest. (See her Guardian piece from 2012.) She told me she was planning to write about Lisa for The Guardian. Normally I would have left the subject alone, or put it off until later, but it turned out Emma and I had different angles on the subject. She was interested in it as a new frontier in social media – a woman living every intimate detail of her disease in such a public way, and why readers are so drawn to such unsparing self-revelation. Except for the snarky headline, which Emma didn’t write, I thought she wrote a sensitive and provocative piece, clearly aimed at stimulating a reader discussion of this hyper-transparent world we inhabit. (She responded to the backlash in The Guardian’s comments section.) My interest, as I said in the column, was in the continuing debate in American medicine about how aggressively to fight terminal diseases if the fight may mean trading quality of life for quantity. My view is that this is a highly personal choice that should be made by patients in consultation with their families and physicians. It is not always presented that way to patients. I don’t think either of the Keller pieces was a “slam” of Lisa Adams or her choices.

 As a columnist, Mr. Keller – by definition – has a great deal of free rein. As I’ve written before, Times opinion editors very rarely intrude on that process by steering a writer away from a topic or killing a column before it runs. It’s a columnist’s job, in short, to have an opinion and to speak it freely. That’s as it should be.

 I don’t make a practice of commenting on whether I agree with columnists, or if I like their columns in general or on a particular day, whether it’s David Brooks on pot-smoking or Maureen Dowd on Chris Christie. That is pretty clearly not my job as public editor.

 In this case, I’ll go so far as to say that there are issues here of tone and sensitivity. For example, when Ms. Adams has made it so abundantly clear in her own work that she objects to the use of fighting metaphors in describing experiences with cancer, it was regrettable to use them throughout a column about her, starting with the first sentence. It suggests that Mr. Keller didn’t make a full effort to understand the point of view of the person he’s writing about on the very big and public stage that is The Times. And although I haven’t read all of Ms. Adams’s writing, readers are complaining about other examples of this disconnect. The Times should consider publishing some opposing points of view, possibly in the form of an Op-Ed column from a contributor.

 In addition, Mr. Keller’s views here fall within what journalists would call “fair comment” only to the extent that they are based on facts. A line often attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former New York senator, makes this point well: “You’re entitled to your own opinion; you’re not entitled to your own facts. “

 Anything that’s not accurate must be corrected, and one such correction – concerning Ms. Adams’s number of children – has already been made to Mr. Keller’s column. Many readers are making the point that Ms. Adams’s cancer metastasized in 2012. Mr. Keller suggests in his lead sentence (“Lisa Bonchek Adams has spent the last seven years in a fierce and very public cage fight with death”) that the known seriousness of the disease came much earlier. ||||| Last week at the Guardian, the writer Emma Gilbey Keller wondered aloud, “Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?” Her commentary centered on the public presence of Lisa Bonchek Adams, who has blogged and tweeted her way through treatment for metastatic breast cancer. “As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn’t stop reading — I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism,” Keller explained. “Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?”

 Keller’s rhetorical questions were met with anger and hurt from her audience, including Adams, and the Guardian has since removed the entire column, but not before she passed the obsession on to her husband, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller.

 In the Times today, Mr. Keller picked up where his wife left off, likening Adams’s treatment and personal writing to “a military campaign” and contrasting her cancer fight with that of his father-in-law’s: “His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America,” Keller wrote.

 I've written extensively on my hatred of war metaphors and cancer. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014

 His point, like his wife’s, is underinformed and muddled in a mess of condescension toward Adams’s suffering and her work. In addition to factual errors, he described Adams as “a cheerleader for cancer research,” noting the research fund she helped start, but added, “Beyond that, whether her campaign has been a public service is a more complicated question.” Her writing was described as pecking, and so on:

 “The words of disease become words my brain gravitates to,” she pecked the other day after a blast of radiation. […] … any reader can see that Adams’s online omnipresence has given her a sense of purpose, a measure of control in a tumultuous time, and the comfort of a loyal, protective online community. Social media have become a kind of self-medication. […] Her digital presence is no doubt a comfort to many of her followers. On the other hand, as cancer experts I consulted pointed out, Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures.

 Adams responded in a huge, emotional string of critical tweets:

 I don't know why I, a person dedicated to education and personal choice by cancer patients, have been so mischaracterized as lay in hospital — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014

 my dear family should not be subjected to this. Hope some of you can help me get this fixed. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014

 As did Jeopardy! celeb Ken Jennings and Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin, who has written extensively about her own breast cancer:

 Terrified I might get cancer, because what if Bill and Emma Keller yell at me. — Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) January 13, 2014

 God forbid a person with metastatic cancer cope with it by telling people what it feels like and how the science works. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014

 Let the little lady peck her Tweets and receive her silly treatment. Real men know how to do cancer right: by dying offline. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014

 Even before her husband doubled-down on the unnecessary second-guessing, Ms. Keller’s column had problems. “Since this article was published two days ago, there’s been a lot of negative comment on Twitter and below the line. Lisa Adams herself was upset by it,” Emma Keller amended in an update on Friday. “I had been in communication with her a number of times in recent weeks; given her health, I could have given her advance warning about the article and should have told her that I planned to quote from our conversations. I regret not doing so.” The piece has since been taken down for quoting the private correspondence, “pending investigation.”

 But beyond the potential journalistic malfeasance, the larger issue remains the discounting of one woman’s vast and varied experiences to make more general, misguided points about the types of treatment available or our culture’s urge to “overshare.” Adams is very much alive and has found an audience that values her personal journey as more than just voyeurism. Instead of using their respective positions of power to wrestle awkwardly with something that makes them uncomfortable, the Kellers could attempt to consider Adams’s online presence on its own terms, or just unsubscribe.

 Update: “Some of the reaction (especially on Twitter, which as a medium encourages reflexes rather than reflection) has been raw, and some (especially in comments posted to the article online, where there is space for nuance) has been thoughtful and valuable,” Bill Keller told Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who took on the issue in a post this afternoon. “I think some readers have misread my point, and some – the most vociferous – seem to believe that anything short of an unqualified ‘right on, Lisa!’ is inhumane or sacrilegious. But I’ve heard from readers who understood the point and found it worth grappling with.” ||||| Unranked media power couple Bill and Emma Keller have discovered a question so pressing, so important to our time that they both felt the need to write a column in their respective papers about it in the same week. Is Lisa Bonchek Adams, a stage four cancer patient, having cancer wrong? According to the Kellers, the answer is "yes."

 The biggest problem in their views, seems to be that Adams — who is aggressively blogging and tweeting about every aspect of illness and treatment — just won't be quiet about having cancer.

 Emma Keller, who has had cancer herself, published a critical op-ed in the Guardian last Wednesday about Adams's Twitter feed. In it, Keller seems to be concerned about whether Adams's decision to publicly discuss her diagnosis and treatment is "dignified," both for Adams (who "is dying," according to Keller, even though this is a characterization Adams rejects), and for Emma Keller personally. You see, a particularly intense series of updates from Adams apparently ruined the Kellers' Christmas, because Emma couldn't stop reading what Adams wrote, and that gives her complicated feelings:

 She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn't stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?

 But the Kellers' concern with how Adams is doing cancer actually goes deeper than Emma's reading habits. Keller's Sunday New York Times piece goes after the aggressive, no-holds-barred manner in which Adams has decided to pursue treatment for the disease. She is willing to try anything, no matter how risky, if it might prolong her life, instead of a more peaceful pain management and palliative approach that others have chose, like Keller's father-in-law. He died from cancer in the U.K., and Keller decides to compare Adams's approach (which he characterizes as "her decision to treat her terminal disease as a military campaign") unfavorably to that of his father-in-law's:

 [In the U.K.] more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

 For the record, the "military" metaphors Keller repeatedly associates with Adams's approach to treatment and choice to be public about it is a metaphor Adams herself soundly rejects.

 To hear it from the Kellers, Adams's public engagement with cancer invites "judgement" as the "ethical questions abound," as Emma writes. Or, as Bill posits, "her decision to live her cancer onstage invites us to think about it, debate it, learn from it." Not only is it incorrect to assume that Adams's writing comes with an RSVP for judgement from Team Keller, it also appears that the Kellers aren't even looking closely at what they're attacking. For instance, Keller states that Adams has two children at home. According to her Twitter bio, Adams actually has three. They are young — 15, 11, and 7, as of last November. Although it should be obvious, it seems that the Kellers forgot to notice that Adams is neither Bill Keller's father-in-law, nor is she a generic idea of a cancer patient. She is a person, pursuing treatment to extend her life, so that she can spend as much of it as possible with her kids. That is a different thing from refusing palliative — or pain management — care at the end of one's life, as Bill Keller seems to believe (erroneously) that Adams is doing.

 And then there's Bill Keller's mini-investigative mission into the parts of Adams's medical treatment and prognosis that remain confidential. Keller apparently asked both Adams and her hospital to detail the financial costs of her treatment, so he could weigh it more accurately against his own assessment of whether it's worth it or not: "Whether or not this excellent care has added months or years to her life, as she clearly believes, is a medical judgment, and her doctors, bound by privacy rules, won’t say," he writes. The insinuation is that her choice to continue to treat her cancer after her stage four diagnoses "may raise false hopes." Keller thinks that such an approach "implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures."

 Except, is not what Adams is doing, as Adams herself said in response:

 Again, let me make it clear. honest discussion and acceptance of the reality of diagnosis is what I have always been doing. READ MY WORK. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014

 I've been doing exactly what he supports all along. If he'd actually been reading the posts. — Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 13, 2014

 Others have rightly responded with anger to the tag-team cancer-explaining (or "cansplaining," as Megan Garber put it in the Atlantic). Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin — who live-tweeted her own cancer diagnosis — took on Bill Keller's piece in particular. Her whole Twitter response to Keller is worth a read. But here are a few highlights:

 Problems I have w Bill Keller's bullying NYT oped about @AdamsLisa, which oddly mirrors & follows his wife's earlier Guardian shitfest: — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014

 14) “Lisa Adams’s choice is in a sense the opposite” of “my father-in-law’s calm death.” SHE'S ALIVE AS YOU CAN TELL BY HER FUCKING TWEETS. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014

 15) “there is something enviable about going gently” LADIES WITH METS SHOULD BE SEEN AND NOT HEARD. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014

 False hopes my ass! I remember the day she called me before my mastectomy, with pragmatic, calm, not-fun info. She told me a story. — Xeni Jardin (@xeni) January 13, 2014

 I am appalled on every level by Bill Keller's oped piece about @AdamsLisa. Astonishing. — Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) January 13, 2014

 Meanwhile, Adams has taken a break from addressing the Kellers' concerns about Adams's life choices, because she is in the middle of a round of treatment . Luckily, she's got plenty of people online to respond for her.

 Update: The Guardian has since removed the piece in question by Emma Keller, "because it is inconsistent with the Guardian editorial code."

Summary: – A pair of columns questioning a woman's very public battle with Stage IV breast cancer are lighting up the Internet. Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and his wife, writer Emma Gilbey Keller, both wrote pieces on Lisa Bonchek Adams, who is chronicling her fight via Twitter and her blog. Emma Keller's column (with a headline that compared Bonchek Adams' social media postings to "funeral selfies"), posted last week, was removed from the Guardian's website yesterday amid all the furor; Bill Keller's column was published in the Times yesterday. Both Kellers weigh various questions that seem to come down to this: Is Bonchek Adams engaging in "TMI"? And would it be better for someone like her to opt for a peaceful, quiet death instead of "heroic measures"? A sample of the reactions: "[Emma] Keller seems to be concerned about whether Adams's decision to publicly discuss her diagnosis and treatment is 'dignified,' both for Adams ... and for Emma Keller personally. You see, a particularly intense series of updates from Adams apparently ruined the Kellers' Christmas, because Emma couldn't stop reading what Adams wrote, and that gives her complicated feelings," writes Abby Ohlheiser for The Wire. Ohlheiser refers to the Keller columns as "tag-team concern trolling," and goes on to quote the relevant portion of Emma Keller's piece: "As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn't stop reading—I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck—but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies?" As for Bill Keller's column, "His point, like his wife's, is underinformed and muddled in a mess of condescension toward Adams's suffering and her work," writes Joe Coscarelli for Daily Intel. "Instead of using their respective positions of power to wrestle awkwardly with something that makes them uncomfortable, the Kellers could attempt to consider Adams' online presence on its own terms, or just unsubscribe." There's much, much more—but in a response to the uproar posted on the Times website yesterday, Bill Keller insists he's also "heard from readers who understood the point and found it worth grappling with."


While people were standing by at a Chevron gas station in Beaverton, taking video of a woman trapped inside of her burning car, a 19-year-old came to her rescue.

 "I wasn't really thinking, I just saw her and knew I had to get her out of there before it gets worse," Phillipe Bittar said after saving the woman's life Saturday.

 Bittar was on his way to get some food with his brother when they saw the plume of smoke and fire.

 But what surprised Bittar wasn't the flames, it was the crowd of people he said standing around, taking video of what he found to be a woman trapped in her burning car.

 "There was like six bystanders just videotaping like oh man she needs to get some help."

 PHOTOS: Woman rescued from burning car at gas station

 That's when Bittar took the situation into his own hands. "I told her, hey I'm going to pull you out, get away from the window because I have to break it and she's like okay," he described.

 The woman was taken by medic crews to a nearby hospital.

 And now, Bittar is being called a hero.

 "I just did what any person's supposed to do," he said.

 Fire crews later said in a statement that Bittar's actions were nothing short of "heroic". They said if he didn't pull the woman out in time, she probably would not have survived.

 Crews also said one of Chevron's employees turned off the gas pump right away, preventing the fire from spreading.

 Right now the cause of the fire is being investigated.

 Bittar walked away with cuts from breaking the window while the woman suffered non-life threatening injuries from smoke inhalation.

 Copyright 2015 KPTV-KPDX Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. ||||| It's not every day that you see a car burning in front of you. So when Phillipe Bittar and his 16-year-old brother, Raphael, spotted flames and thick smoke rising from a sedan Saturday at a Raleigh Hills Chevron station, they stopped to take a picture.

 Then they noticed the woman inside.

 Another woman ran up to the car and desperately tried to open the passenger side door as the fire spread to a gas pump and worked its way through the car's trunk. The passenger, who firefighters say is in her 70s, was shaking in the seat.

 "Seeing her like that hit me in a certain way that just made me react," said Bittar, 19, of Raleigh Hills.

 Though a Chevron attendant scrambled to shut the lines that flow gasoline to the pumps, Bittar didn't see anyone else trying to help and ran to the car. By this time the flames had reached the back seats, and the woman in the car was still frantically trying to free herself. Bittar looked for another way in.

 Then with only one punch, the former Beaverton High School linebacker shattered the window.

 The 19-year-old told the woman he was going to get her out. He reached in and grabbed her under her armpits and pulled her through the window. "She was light in my arms," he said.

 Once out of the car, Bittar held her up and walked her over to two other women, who embraced her. Then they hugged and thanked him.

 By the time Bittar turned back to look at the car, it was engulfed in flames.

 Adrenaline helped mask the heat of the fire and the initial pain of smashing the window with his bare fist, Bittar said. Firefighters responded around 2:15 p.m. to the station along Southwest Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, and paramedics treated the cuts on his hand.

 The woman, whose name has not been released, was treated at the scene for smoke inhalation, said Alisa Cour, a Tualatin Fire & Rescue spokeswoman. She was taken to a hospital as a precaution, but is expected to recover.

 What caused the fire is still under investigation, Cour said. No one else was injured.

 Firefighters likely would not have been able to reach the woman in time had Bittar not gotten her out, said Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue Battalion Chief Leonard Damian.

 "His actions were nothing short of heroic," he said.

 The brothers had been leaving a nearby New Seasons Market to get some food when they drove toward the gas station and saw the burning car. Afterward, once the woman was safe, Bittar said that he felt dazed as he watched the flames consume the car.

 "I didn't really have much time to think and process everything as it was happening," he said. "But seeing the fire and the car and knowing she was out, it really hit me that I saved her life, and it felt really good."

 Bittar, a pre-med student at Oregon State University who is on summer break, said he's often seen videos on YouTube of people captured in life-or-death situations and always wondered how he would react if he happened upon one.

 He comes from a family of people who work in the medical field and hopes to become a doctor one day. He said he's relieved to know that he won't shy away from a situation where someone needs help.

 "I just wanted to make sure she was safe," Bittar said. "Now that I know she is, I know I'll be able to rest a little easier tonight."

 -- Everton Bailey Jr.

 ebailey@oregonian.com

 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey ||||| PORTLAND, Ore. – Two brothers pulled a woman from a burning car Saturday afternoon after it had crashed into a gas pump.

 One of the brothers punched through the car's passenger-side window to get inside the car as it and two gas pumps burned.

 The crash happened at a Chevron service station at 7200 S.W. Beaverton Hillsdale Highway around 2 p.m.

 Phillipe and Raphael Bittar pulled their car over to take a picture of the flames and spotted the woman inside the Volvo. Phillipe, 19 years old and a student at Oregon State, ran toward the burning sedan. He said the older woman inside the car had tried to get out herself. She had managed to move from the driver seat to the passenger side but was trapped.

 "The woman, she was just panicking inside the car and I told her, 'I'm going to get you out of here as fast as I can,'" said Phillipe. "I just punched the window and I took her out. I picked her up and gave her to her friends."

 "The flames were already starting to creep into the back seat, and after we got her out and go her behind the building for safety, we came back (and) the flames were already out of the front seat," said Raphael.

 According to Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue, the woman suffered from smoke inhalation and was taken to the hospital. She was expected to recover.

 A gas station employee quickly shut off the main switch to the gas pumps, preventing the situation from becoming worse, TVF&R said.

 Phillipe got scraped up during the rescue.

 “Had this individual not broken out the window and pulled the patient out of the burning car and to safety, I don't believe she would have survived. His actions were nothing short of heroic," said TVF&R Battalion Chief Leonard Damian.

 Video and photographs taken at the scene showed the car completely engulfed in flames as well as the gas pumps. At one point an explosion occurred, shooting a ball of flame toward the station's building.

 While the car burned, people stopped to take pictures and video with their phones, but Phillipe and Raphael were two of only one or two others to put down their phones and rush to help.

 "I was expecting for everybody to be safe because there was nobody trying to intervene or anything," said Phillipe. "So I just kind of came over here and I was like, 'Oh wow, that's a pretty bad fire.' I didn't realize there was somebody in the car until a woman ran up and my brother's like, 'There's a woman in there.' And I was like, 'Let's go.'"

 The Washington County Sheriff's Office is investigating the crash.

 Heroes! These brothers pulled a woman from a burning car at a Chevron. Pure bravery. Punched through glass#liveonk2 pic.twitter.com/KKleiNve2M — Julie Murray (@videojulie) July 18, 2015

 Below Video: Joshua McCool:

Summary: – An Oregon State University student is being called "heroic" for rescuing an elderly woman from a burning car while others stood by shooting videos. Phillipe Bittar, 19, says he didn't have much time to react yesterday afternoon when he saw the car at a Chevron station in Portland, KPTV reports. "I wasn't really thinking, I just saw her and knew I had to get her out of there before it gets worse," he says. "There was like six bystanders just videotaping like oh man she needs to get some help." With the passenger frantic inside, Bittar smashed the car window open with a single punch, the Oregonian reports. A former high-school linebacker, he easily pulled her out: "She was light in my arms," he says. Right after, the fire grew so rapidly that flames were already shooting out of the car's front seat, Bittar's brother Raphael tells KVAL. A gas station worker swiftly turned off the gas pump, but the car and more than one pump were toast; an explosion rocked the gas station at one point, sending a ball of fire into the main building. The woman was taken to hospital with smoke inhalation and is expected to recover, while Phillip received treatment on the scene for cuts to his hand. "Had this individual not broken out the window and pulled the patient out of the burning car and to safety, I don't believe she would have survived," says a local fire chief. "His actions were nothing short of heroic."


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 Nov. 17, 2016, 3:54 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 17, 2016, 7:24 AM GMT By Amanda Sakuma

 The man who helped write the book on creating a federal Muslim registry in the name of national security, now has Donald Trump’s ear as a top member of his transition team.

 Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a policy wonk with a reputation for handcrafting the legal means to political ends, says he has a plan to help Trump pull off some of his most contentious campaign promises.

 Trump has explored a variety of methods to vet potential terror threats, targeting specifically Muslims by proposing outright travel bans or creating a federal database of all people in the United States who practice Islam.

 Kobach believes Trump can take action immediately with the swipe of a pen. In an interview with Reuters this week, Kobach said Trump's immigrant transition team proposed drafting executive actions to reinstate a post-9/11 era program that registered immigrants and visitors from countries designated as havens for extremist activity.

 Related: Trump Backer Cites Japanese Internment as Precedent for Registry

 Kobach would know — he helped write the blueprint for it while working for the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

 “These programs had Kobach’s signature all over them,” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the non-partisan think tank the Migration Policy Institute. "Now, the architect of the old program again has a seat at the table."

 Kobach is renowned as the mastermind behind the Republican Party's heavily contested anti-immigrant bills and restrictions on voter registration.

 Kobach first met Trump days before the New Hampshire primary, the Kansas secretary of state said last month in a podcast with Politico’s Glenn Thrush. The policy savant said he offered his services in helping Trump nail down the details of his immigration platform.

 Related: Mike Pence Orders Lobbyists Be Removed From Transition Team

 But Kobach soon had his fingerprints all over Trump’s policy white papers. He even found a potential way to pull off even Trump’s most far-fetched of campaign promises — like forcing the Mexican government to write a blank check to build a massive wall along the U.S. border.

 Using a technicality tucked within the Patriot Act, Kobach plotted a way to force Mexico’s hand by holding hostage the millions of dollars that Mexican nationals in the U.S. send home to family each year.

 Kobach is now on a tour touting himself as the brains behind the border wall payment plan. And with Trump assembling the final pieces of his cabinet, Kobach has indicated he may have another trick up his sleeve.

 The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, targeted people from 25 countries that were considered "higher risk" of extremist activity. The program focused only on young men over the age of 16, who underwent intense interrogations. An earlier iteration asked for Muslims to come forward and identify themselves, provide fingerprints and personal information.

 Chishti says the registry was broad by design. Rather than discriminate people by religion, the program instead focused on all people from Muslim-majority countries.

 “There is no way of establishing a registry of Muslims because there is no way of establishing who is a Muslim and who is not,” he said.

 President Obama shut down the operations in 2011, but the policy infrastructure technically remains on the books. Trump could simply revitalize the program by designating which countries were deserving of the "extreme vetting" of all individuals, Muslim or not.

 The DHS Inspector General later issued a report finding that the program was costly and unreliable. More than 80,000 men participated in the registry. Thousands of those were interrogated and even detained. None were ever prosecuted on terrorism charges.

 Related: 'Never Ever Give Up': Clinton Makes First Public Appearance Since Conceding the Election

 Instead the program created a pipeline for deportation. More than 13,000 men were removed from the country for either overstaying a visa or being unlawfully present in the U.S.

 Fahd Ahmed, executive director of New York-based Arab and south Asian advocacy group DRUM, said the program had a lasting impact on Muslims who soon grew accustomed to being targeted for interrogation at airports.

 “For thousands of people, families were destroyed, livelihoods were destroyed, the social fabric of our communities — destroyed,” Ahmed said.

 And Kobach’s new proximity to the power structures in a future Trump administration has top Democrats sounding alarms that he is unfit to serve.

 Rep. John Conyers issued a statement on Wednesday railing against two Trump advisers — Kobach and Frank Gaffney, founder of the hard-right Center for Security Policy — for being “right wing extremists.”

 Conyers took particular aim at Kobach’s tenure at the Justice Department and his blueprint for a Muslim registry, calling it "a proposal that flies in the face of the constitution and is a threat to the civil liberties of all Americans." ||||| NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An architect of anti-immigration efforts who says he is advising President-elect Donald Trump said the new administration could push ahead rapidly on construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall without seeking immediate congressional approval.

 Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach talks in his Topeka, Kansas, U.S., office May 12, 2016. REUTERS/Dave Kaup/File Photo

 Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write tough immigration laws in Arizona and elsewhere, said in an interview that Trump’s policy advisers had also discussed drafting a proposal for his consideration to reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.

 Kobach, who media reports say is a key member of Trump’s transition team, said he had participated in regular conference calls with about a dozen Trump immigration advisers for the past two to three months.

 Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for confirmation of Kobach’s role. The president-elect has not committed to following any specific recommendations from advisory groups.

 Trump, who scored an upset victory last week over Democrat Hillary Clinton, made building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border a central issue of his campaign and has pledged to step up immigration enforcement against the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. He has also said he supports “extreme vetting” of Muslims entering the United States as a national security measure.

 Kobach told Reuters last Friday that the immigration group had discussed drafting executive orders for the president-elect’s review “so that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security hit the ground running.”

 To implement Trump’s call for “extreme vetting” of some Muslim immigrants, Kobach said the immigration policy group could recommend the reinstatement of a national registry of immigrants and visitors who enter the United States on visas from countries where extremist organizations are active.

 Kobach helped design the program, known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, while serving in Republican President George W. Bush’s Department of Justice after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants.

 Under NSEERS, people from countries deemed “higher risk” were required to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting on entering the United States. Some non-citizen male U.S. residents over the age of 16 from countries with active militant threats were required to register in person at government offices and periodically check in.

 NSEERS was abandoned in 2011 after it was deemed redundant by the Department of Homeland Security and criticized by civil rights groups for unfairly targeting immigrants from Muslim- majority nations.

 Kobach said the immigration advisers were also looking at how the Homeland Security Department could move rapidly on border wall construction without approval from Congress by reappropriating existing funds in the current budget. He acknowledged “that future fiscal years will require additional appropriations.”

 Congress, which is controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans, could object to redirecting DHS funds designated for other purposes.

 HELPED DRAFT TOUGH ARIZONA LAW

 Kobach has worked with allies across the United States on drafting laws and pursuing legal actions to crack down on illegal immigration.

 In 2010, he helped draft an Arizona law that required state and local officials to check the immigration status of individuals stopped by police. Parts of the law, which was fiercely opposed by Hispanic and civil rights groups, were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011.

 Kobach was also the architect of a 2013 Kansas law requiring voters to provide proof-of-citizenship documents, such as birth certificates or U.S. passports, when registering for the first time. A U.S. appeals court blocked that law after challenges from civil rights groups.

 Kobach said in the interview he believed that illegal immigrants in some cases should be deported before a conviction if they have been charged with a violent crime. Trump said in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday that once he took office, he would remove immigrants with criminal records who are in the country illegally.

 Kobach said the immigration group had also discussed ways of overturning President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive action that has granted temporary deportation relief and work permits to more than 700,000 undocumented people or “dreamers” who came to the United States as children of illegal immigrants. ||||| poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201611/883/1155968404_5214507358001_5214501338001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Trump supporter cites Japanese internment 'precedent' in backing Muslim registry

 A spokesman for the pro-Trump Great America PAC cited World War II Japanese internment camps as "precedent" for President-elect Donald Trump's discussed plan for a Muslim registry system.

 Carl Higbie, a former Navy SEAL, appeared on Fox News' "The Kelly File" to argue in favor of the plan, which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said in a Reuters interview is being modeled after the highly controversial National Security Entry-Exit Registration System implemented after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

 Story Continued Below

 Confronted with questions about the constitutionality of such a plan, Higbie cited history, in particular the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.

 "We've done it based on race, we've done it based on religion, we've done it based on region," he said. "We've done it with Iran back — back a while ago. We did it during World War II with [the] Japanese."

 Pressed by host Megyn Kelly on whether he was suggesting re-implementing the internment camps, Higbie said no, before adding: "I'm just saying there is precedent for it."

 Kelly then swiftly rebuked his suggestion.

 "You can't be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is gonna do," she said.

Summary: – How might Donald Trump translate his calls for restrictions on Muslim immigration into policy? One possibility is the reinstatement of a national registry of visitors from high-risk countries. The revelation comes from a Reuters interview of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is known for his anti-immigration views within the GOP and who has been advising Trump since the campaign's early days. Kobach said Trump's transition team is considering dusting off the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which Kobach himself helped design as a member of George W. Bush's Justice Department in the wake of 9/11. Under the program, people from nations deemed high-risk had to undergo interrogations, fingerprinting, and, in some cases, periodic check-ins upon entering the US. The program, NSEERS, was abandoned in 2011. "These programs had Kobach's signature all over them," the director of the Migration Policy Institute tells NBC News. "Now, the architect of the old program again has a seat at the table." Kobach, in fact, is rumored to be on Trump's list of attorney general candidates, reports McClatchy. Meanwhile, a spokesman for a pro-Trump super PAC has drawn attention for saying the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII could serve as a model for Trump's policy on Muslim immigrants. "We've done it based on race, we've done it based on religion, we've done it based on region," Carl Bigbie of the Great America PAC told Fox News, per Politico. “Come on, you’re not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope,” responded Megyn Kelly. “I’m not proposing that at all,” Higbie responded. "But I’m just saying there is precedent for it."


The Oregon Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a southern Oregon couple must quiet their incessantly barking dogs by sending them to the vet to have their voices surgically squelched.

 The Appeals Court ruled “debarking” surgery is an appropriate solution to a noisy and relentless problem that neighbors living next to the dogs have had to endure for more than a decade on their rural property outside Grants Pass.

 Debarking operations, also known as devocalization, are highly controversial. Groups such as the Oregon Humane Society and American Humane have spoken out against them. Six states have outlawed the procedure under certain circumstances, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

 The surgery involves cutting the vocal cords. Opponents say removing a dog or cat's prime means of communication is cruel and unnecessary. Proponents say if done correctly, it can save problematic animals from being euthanized and still allow them to express themselves with a soft, raspy bark or muffled squeak.

 But it’s rare for courts in Oregon to order the procedure done, in part because barking-dog disputes usually are resolved long before cases get that far.

 “We are just shocked,” said David Lytle, a spokesman for the Oregon Humane Society. Lytle said his organization pushed for a bill to outlaw debarking surgeries in Oregon, but it failed a few years ago.

 The lawsuit began as a last resort, according to the neighbors who filed it.

 Debra and Dale Krein said they could no longer take the barking of the six or more Tibetan and Pyrenean Mastiffs owned by the couple who lived next door for almost 20 years.

 The barking started in 2002, but the Kreins didn't sue Karen Szewc and John Updegraff until 10 years later, according to a court summary of the case. Like the Kreins, Szwec and Updegraff are married.

 The Kreins contended the barking started as early as 5 a.m. and continued for hours on end after Szewc and Updegraff left the house for the day.

 The dogs routinely roused the Kreins from sleep, deterred relatives from visiting their property and forced them to turn up the volume of their TV to watch shows, they said. Their children dreaded coming home from school.

 The Kreins made audio recordings to prove their case.

 After a four-day trial in Jackson County Circuit Court in April 2015, a jury ruled that Szewc and Updegraff had to pay the Kreins $238,000.

 The Kreins at the time also argued that while the money compensated them for several years of disruption, it didn’t stop the problem.

 Judge Timothy Gerking agreed and ordered that the Mastiffs be debarked, given that the owners hadn't stopped the barking by other means, including using citronella-spray and shock collars or erecting a visual barrier between the dogs and the neighbors’ property.

 The Appeals Court upheld the $238,000 verdict and Gerking’s ruling, reasoning that the Kreins shouldn't have to file lawsuit after lawsuit to recover compensation as the problem continues. In his written opinion, Appeals Judge Joel DeVore likened that to a “judicial merry-go-round.”

 Reached by phone, Debra Krein declined comment. The Kreins' Medford attorney, Michael Franell, couldn't be reached for comment.

 Szewc told The Oregonian/OregonLive that efforts to silence her dogs have threatened her ability to run her farm.

 “The dogs are my employees,” she said. “We do not have the dogs to harass the neighbors. We have the dogs to protect our sheep.”

 The dogs bark, she said, when they sense predators, such as bears and cougars. She said agricultural properties generate farm noise -- something her neighbors haven't come to accept.

 “The next line of defense is a gun. I don’t need to use a gun, if I can protect my sheep with dogs," Szewc said. "This is a passive way of protecting livestock.”

 Szewc said she and her husband currently have six dogs, but the number has fluctuated over the years.

 In 2005, Jackson County cited Szewc for allowing two of her dogs to become a public nuisance with frequent and prolonged barking. After reviewing the case, county hearings officer Donald Rubenstein in 2006 ordered Szewc to pay a $400 fine and have the dogs debarked or moved off of her land.

 In making his decision, Rubenstein found that Szewc’s farm activities then were so small and unprofitable that they didn't fall under farm-use laws that might have protected the sound of the barking dogs.

 Szewc and Updegraff have strongly disputed that. Szewc said the farm made $26,000 last year and it has supplemented their income.

 Court papers describe the couple's land as a 3.4-acre parcel, populated by sheep, goats and chickens.

 Szewc said the couple did debark the dogs, but it had disastrous effects in 2010. A cougar ran off with six lambs in a single week, she said.

 “That’s $3,000 of income,” Szewc said.

 Now, Szewc said, she doesn’t know what she’ll do -- whether she’ll try to appeal the decision or accept it. Only one of the couple's six dogs have been debarked.

 The ruling was made by a three-judge panel of the Appeals Court: Joel DeVore, Chris Garrett and Bronson James. Read the opinion here.

 -- Aimee Green

 agreen@oregonian.com

 o_aimee ||||| Full Width Column 1

 Decisions of the Oregon Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, and Tax Court are posted weekly after 8:00 a.m., or as soon as available, on the day issued by the court. Final publication in the bound volumes of the Oregon Reports are accessible through the State of Oregon Law Library Digital Collection.

 Opinions ||||| Owners must surgically 'debark' loud dogs, court rules https://t.co/cnggmgZZdj pic.twitter.com/148pp9Y9mk — The Oregonian (@Oregonian) August 31, 2017

 An Oregon appeals court agreed Wednesday that a couple must surgically lacerate their dogs’ vocal cords in a procedure known as “debarking” or “devocalization,” following a lawsuit brought by neighbors annoyed by the pets’ “incessant barking.” The ruling upheld a lower court order.

 The case began in 2002, when Karen Szewc and John Updegraff began breeding Tibetan Mastiffs, large fluffy dogs often employed to protect sheep from predators, at their home in Rogue River, Ore., about 150 miles south of Eugene.

 The married couple’s neighbors, Debra and Dale Krein, quickly grew tired of the dogs’ barking. According to the Kreins, the “dogs bark[ed] uncontrollably for long periods of time while defendants [were] away from the residence,” court documents state.

 But they weren’t the first ones to take action against the dog owners. In both 2004 and 2005, Jackson County cited Szewc for violating a county code provision on public nuisance “by allowing two of her dogs to bark frequently and at length,” according to court documents.

 Szewc argued the provisions didn’t apply to her because she ran a farm on the couple’s 3.4-acre parcel of land, which includes sheep, goats and chickens. Farms fall under different ordinances.

 The Jackson County Circuit Court rejected this argument, saying the property was not a farm, ordered her to pay $400 and to debark the two offending dogs or to move them to a different area.

 It is unclear if she debarked these dogs, but in 2012, the Kriens filed a lawsuit against Szewc and Updegraff, claiming they had not taken the necessary actions to prevent the dogs from barking. At that point, there were at least six dogs on the property, all either Tibetan or Pyrenean Mastiffs, the Oregonian reported.

 Again, the dog owners argued that they were not subject to the dog barking ordinance because they were running a farm.

 The Kreins claimed the dogs often began barking at 5 a.m., sometimes waking the couple. Relatives refused to visit, and their children hated being around the house, according to the Oregonian. They recorded the barking to prove it.

 “The dogs are my employees,” Szewc told the Oregonian. “We do not have the dogs to harass the neighbors. We have the dogs to protect our sheep.”

 “The next line of defense is a gun. I don’t need to use a gun, if I can protect my sheep with dogs,” she added. “This is a passive way of protecting livestock.”

 In April 2015, a jury sided with the Kreins and ordered Szewc and Updegraff to pay them $238,000 in damages. Also in response to the suit, Judge Timothy Gerking ordered the couple to debark the mastiffs, since they hadn’t stopped them from barking using other means such as shock collars.

 Szewc and Updegraff again argued unsuccessfully that the dogs were necessary because they had a farm.

 On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals consisting of Joel DeVore, Chris Garrett and Bronson James upheld that ruling, agreeing that the dog owners were not running a farm.

 The question of whether debarking is an appropriate remedy was not at issue in the case.

 Debarking is a surgical procedure in which parts of a dog’s vocal folds or cords are cut out in an effort to lower the volume of its barks or, more severely, to eliminate the dog’s ability to bark altogether, according to the American Veterinary Medical Foundation.

 The procedure is partially prohibited in six states, according to the AVMF. Many animal welfare organizations oppose it, as do some veterinarians.

 “Debarking is not a medically necessary procedure,” Jeffrey S. Klausner, chief medical officer of the Banfield Pet Hospital, told the New York Times in 2010. “We think it’s not humane to the dogs to put them through the surgery and the pain. We just do not think that it should be performed.”

 Wednesday’s ruling left some animal rights activists reeling.

 “We are just shocked,” David Lytle, a spokesman for the Oregon Humane Society, told the Oregonian.

 More from Morning Mix

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 Investors say SeaWorld lied about business downturn after orca outcry. Now feds are investigating.

 Evangelicals’ ‘Nashville Statement’ denouncing same-sex marriage is rebuked by city’s mayor

 Lesbians win $10,000 judgment against county clerk for calling them an ‘abomination’ ||||| MEDFORD-- An Oregon couple who sued their neighbors because of their constantly barking dogs was awarded nearly $240,000 in damages.

 The Mail Tribune reports that a Jackson County jury found in favor of Dale and Debra Krein of Rogue River, awarding damages for what was described as more than a decade of ceaseless barking.

 The defendants, John Updegraff and Karen Szewc, said their dogs were necessary to protect their livestock from predators.

 The court last week found that the Tibetan mastiffs weren't ideally suited to be livestock guardians and ordered them debarked within 60 days or replaced with a more suitable breed.

 Szewc and Updegraff reportedly began breeding the dogs at their home around 2002. According to the Mail Tribune, the Kreins claimed the dogs would often begin barking at 5 a.m. and would continue throughout the day. They also claimed the couple did nothing to quiet their dogs even after being cited by Jackson County Animal Control in 2002 and 2004 for violating public nuisance codes.

 -- The Associated Press

Summary: – "We are just shocked." That's the reaction of the Oregon Humane Society to a Wednesday ruling by the Oregon Court of Appeals that will require a Rogue River couple to have their six dogs' vocal cords cut. The court case was one between neighbors of nearly 20 years, reports the Oregonian: Debra and Dale Krein said the barking from Karen Szewc and John Updegraff's Tibetan and Pyrenean Mastiffs began in 2002—at 5am each day, and didn't stop. The suit was filed 10 years later, with the Kreins alleging an auditory hell so bad their kids didn't want to come home from school. Szewc and Updegraff reportedly did attempt to rectify the situation with methods including shock collars, to no avail. A jury ruled in the Kreins' favor in 2015; Szewc and Updegraff were ordered to pay the couple $238,000 and have their dogs undergo devocalization. The Appeals Court upheld that ruling. Szewc and Updegraff had argued that the dogs were what kept their livestock—sheep, goats, and chickens on 3.4 acres—safe from predators. The Washington Post reports that as such, they argued the county's public nuisance code didn't apply as they were subject instead to farming ordinances. But the AP in 2015 reported on the original ruling, which found Tibetan mastiffs aren't a breed designed to guard livestock. It also cited the 2006 decision of a local hearings officer (related to a citation over the barking) who found the farm use defense was unavailable to the couple due to the small size and profits of their farming endeavors. They have not decided whether to appeal the latest decision. The Oregonian notes the surgery still allows dogs to make a very quiet bark or squeak; critics call it a "cruel and unnecessary" procedure. (Read about another case of discord between neighbors.)


A group founded by American actor George Clooney said Tuesday it has teamed up with Google, a U.N. agency and anti-genocide organizations to launch satellite surveillance of the border between north and south Sudan to try to prevent a new civil war after the south votes in a secession referendum next month.

 Clooney's Not On Our Watch is funding the start-up phase Satellite Sentinel Project that will collect real-time satellite imagery and combine it with field analysis from the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, organizers said.

 The data will point out movements of troops, civilians and other signs of impending conflict. The U.N. Operational Satellite Applications Program and Google will then publish the findings online.

 "We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we're watching, the world is watching," Clooney said in a statement. "War criminals thrive in the dark. It's a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight."

 The groups hope that early warnings will reduce the risk of violence.

 Southern Sudan's looming Jan. 9 independence referendum has raised fears of renewed north-south civil war. The vote is the result of a 2005 peace deal that ended a 21-year conflict that claimed the lives of two million people and left twice as many displaced.

 Organizers said the Satellite Sentinel Project will be available online Wednesday at http://www.satsentinel.org.

 . ||||| Tim Freccia / Enough Project George Clooney visits Sudan to draw attention to the dangers that could result should southern Sudan vote to separate from the north

 George Clooney and John Prendergast slumped down at a wooden table in a dusty school compound in southern Sudan. It was Oct. 4, and the two men were in the hometown of Valentino Achak Deng, whose experiences wandering the desert as a refugee during Sudan's last civil war were the basis for the best-selling book What Is the What.

 Clooney, the actor, and Prendergast, a human-rights activist with 25 years of experience in Africa, had heard enough on their seven-day visit to know that a new round of atrocities could follow the January referendum on independence. If it did, the likelihood was that no one would be held accountable. Why not, Clooney asked, "work out some sort of a deal to spin a satellite" above southern Sudan and let the world watch to see what happens? (See photos of Clooney in Sudan.)

 Three months later, Clooney's idea is about to go live. Starting Dec. 30, the Satellite Sentinel Project  a joint experiment by the U.N.'s Operational Satellite Applications Programme, Harvard University, the Enough Project and Clooney's posse of Hollywood funders  will hire private satellites to monitor troop movements starting with the oil-rich region of Abyei. The images will be analyzed and made public at www.satsentinel.org (which goes live on Dec. 29) within 24 hours of an event to remind the leaders of northern and southern Sudan that they are being watched. "We are the antigenocide paparazzi," Clooney tells TIME. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum."

 You don't have to be a spook to have an eye in the sky anymore. Private firms with names like GeoEye, DigitalGlobe and ImageSat International have a half-dozen "birds" circling the globe every 90 minutes in low-Earth orbit, about 297 miles (478 km) up. The best images from these satellites display about 8 sq. in. (50 sq cm) of the ground in each pixel on a computer screen. That is not enough granularity to read a car's license plate or ID a person, but analysts can tell the difference between cars and trucks and track the movements of troops or horses. "It is Google Earth on lots of steroids," says Lars Bromley, a top U.N. imagery analyst. (See pictures of southern Sudan preparing for nationhood.)

 But you need money for it. A hurry-up order of what Bromley calls a "single shot" from a satellite covers an area of about 105 sq. mi. (272 sq km) and costs $10,000. A rush job on a "full strip" image of land roughly 70 miles (115 km) long and 9 miles (14 km) wide could run nearly $70,000. Sentinel is launching with $750,000 in seed money from Not On Our Watch, the human rights organization Clooney founded along with Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, David Pressman and Jerry Weintraub. Clooney predicted he won't have much trouble raising more money once the project goes live. (See the top 10 world news stories of 2010.)

 Prendergast's group, the Enough Project, is the human-rights arm of the liberal Center for American Progress; it recruited Bromley's team at the U.N. and brought in analysts from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to pore over the images as they arrive. "Generally, what we have done in the past is an after-the-fact documentation exercise," Bromley explains. "This is proactive, wide-area monitoring," he says.

 Clooney, who has made four trips to Sudan since 2006, believes Sentinel might have applications in other global hot spots. "This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, 'O.K., if you guys don't want to do anything about it, that's one thing,'" Clooney says. "But you can't say you did not know."

 See the best pictures of 2010.

Summary: – As southern Sudan votes on a secession referendum Jan. 9, sparking fears of a new civil war with the north, someone will be watching: George Clooney. And the actor hopes you’ll watch, too, via his new Satellite Sentinel Project website, the AP reports. The idea: Train a bunch of cameras on Sudan in an effort to spotlight the region—and hopefully halt genocide and war crimes. “We are the anti-genocide paparazzi,” Clooney tells Time. The project, a joint effort with Google, the UN, and anti-genocide organizations, will provide real-time satellite surveillance of the border, because “it’s a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight,” and Clooney wants Sudanese leaders “to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get,” he says. “This is as if this were 1943 and we had a camera inside Auschwitz and we said, 'OK, if you guys don't want to do anything about it, that's one thing. But you can't say you did not know.’”


If you suffer from a fear of sheep you might want to skip this video showing 1,300 sheep running on the loose and basically taking over a town as if they were in New Zealand horror movie Black Sheep.

 The freakish incident occurred just after 4 a.m. in the northeastern Spanish city of Huesca, south of the Pyrenees mountains, on the French border, after a shepherd fell asleep, according to local police.

 SEE ALSO: A little town is being ruled by hundreds of crazy goats

 Alerted by several phone calls from residents, Huesca police were forced to round up the flock, which had already taken over the city centre, and deliver them back to the shepherd.

 Two police cars were sent to the scene and five officers spent about 45 minutes trying to round up all the sheep and return them to their pen.

 A video posted by Huesca police on their Facebook page shows a police car with it lights on pulling up in front of the flock.

 The shepherd had dozed off instead of guiding the sheep onto the pastures of the Pyrenees, where they'll spend the summer.

 Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. ||||| Rating is available when the video has been rented.

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Summary: – A YouTube video proves why you should never fall asleep on the job—particularly if you have 1,300 sheep in your care. A resident in the Spanish city of Huesca called police around 4:30am Tuesday to report a herd of sheep making its way through the city streets, per the Telegraph. And what a herd it was. About five officers spent 45 minutes rounding up the animals before delivering them to their shepherd, who was fast asleep, reports Mashable. The shepherd—who was apparently waiting to begin an age-old tradition of migrating the sheep through the city to summer grazing grounds in the Pyrenees mountains—hadn't even realized the sheep were missing.