A bizarre interstellar object called 'Oumuamua continues to perplex astronomers a year after it vanished. Here's why a few scientists still wonder if it was alien.
An illustration of the space object 'Oumuamua flying through the solar system in late 2017.
A building-size object called 'Oumuamua flew through the inner solar system in late 2017.
Telescopes observed the mysterious interloper, but scarce data has left questions open about the object's shape, size, and composition.
A few astronomers wonder whether it could be alien, but 'Oumuamua is most likely a "slightly weird" asteroid, comet, or space rock.
New space missions are being dreamed up to intercept the next interstellar object that visits our solar system.
In 2016, something roughly the size of a skyscraper emerged from deep space and careened toward the inner solar system.
The mysterious object flew within about 15 million miles of our planet on October 14.
But it wasn't until four days later that humanity finally spotted it in telescope data. By then, it was moving away from the sun at a speed of more than 110,000 mph. It took days for astronomers around the globe to point every tool they could in its direction.
Astronomers initially called their unprecedented catch "1I/2017 U1," with "I" standing for interstellar - or from another star system. The object was later dubbed 'Oumuamua, a Hawaiian name that's pronounced "oo moo-uh moo-uh" and means "a messenger from afar, arriving first."
'Oumuamua remains one of the most significant, confounding, and at times contentious astronomical discoveries in recent memory. Little is definitively known about its composition, mass, shape, or dimensions - it may be a 3,300-foot-long cigar, a city-block-size pancake, or something in-between.
"This one's gone forever. We have all the data we're ever going to have about 'Oumuamua," David Trilling, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University who led Spitzer Space Telescope observations of the object, told Business Insider. "Now it's trying to understand if we can tell a story. Do we know what's going on?"
Read more: Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth. A new study explains why we haven't found them yet.
Enough doubt surrounds 'Oumuamua that at least one reputable astronomer and a few of his colleagues continue to speculate about potential alien origins. But nearly all other experts who have studied 'Oumuamua say the aliens hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely.
Here's what we know about 'Oumuamua, why it probably isn't alien, and how astronomers are preparing for another interstellar object to unexpectedly sail through our solar system.
A view of the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii.
Researchers in 1976 predicted that other star systems were likely ejecting big asteroids and comets and flinging them toward our solar system, suggesting we could perhaps spot some in the future.
But the most recent estimate of how often such interstellar vagabonds would pay us a visit (and be detectable) was "bleak," according to the authors of a study published just months before 'Oumuamua was discovered. The odds, in fact, were low enough that practically no one was overtly looking for these space objects.
Then on October 19, 2017, Robert Weryk, a postdoctoral student at the University of Hawaii, discovered 'Oumuamua somewhat by accident.
Weryk was perusing a batch of data collected by an observatory called Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) that sits atop a mountain in Maui. The observatory scans the entire sky each night, allowing astronomers to compare fresh data to the previous evening's. Anything that's bright enough to detect and moving will thus stand out.
As Weryk told The Atlantic in November 2017, he initially thought the object was a typical asteroid. But after a glance at the previous evening's data, he realized it was unusual.
"I'd never expected to find something like this," he said.
Calculating the exact path of 'Oumuamua took about a week. The math showed it was an object from beyond - way, way beyond. Its orbit was "unbound" or loop-less, and it was making a checkmark-shaped trip through the solar system. It had entered from above the plane of the solar system, dipped close to and below the sun, and was exiting out the top.
This realization prompted Weryk, fellow astronomer Karen Meech, and others to launch a global effort to observe 'Oumuamua with as many powerful telescopes as possible before it vanished. More astronomers eventually followed suit, though with some delay.
"I was caught off-guard, and I think a lot of astronomers were, too," Trilling said. "It took a while for many of us to think, 'I should go look at it.' The delay was people thinking, 'Naw, it couldn't be from another solar system.'"
Because of this element of surprise, and the fact that world-class observatories are scheduled months or years ahead, it took a week or more for powerful telescopes to start looking at 'Oumuamua. Hubble didn't observe it until November 2018, then again before the object vanished from sight in January 2018.
No telescope resolved its shape in any discernible detail, though. One observatory was equipped to do so - the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico - but nature had other plans.
"Unfortunately, the Arecibo Observatory missed the opportunity to determine the actual shape of 'Oumuamua due to Hurricane Maria, really bad timing," Abel Méndez, an astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, told Business Insider.
Is it a comet, asteroid, or something else?
An artist's depiction of interstellar object 'Oumuamua.
The observations that were made suggest 'Oumuamua has a fairly uniform surface, is relatively dark, and has a reddish color (which is not unusual for deep-space objects).
Lacking any detailed photograph of 'Oumuamua, astronomers resorted to studying its brightness as the next-best method to deduce its shape. This is because any side of an object that faces the sun will reflect light; a longer side tends to reflect more light than a shorter side because it has a greater area. Repeating changes in brightness can also betray the rough dimensions and 3D-motion of a space object.
Early calculations suggest 'Oumuamua tumbles about once every eight hours and has a cigar-shape, with a large-to-small-dimension size ratio of roughly ten to one. That is abnormal.
"The most extreme bodies we know of in the solar system are three-to-one," Trilling said.
Another peculiarity is that in January 2018, on its way toward interstellar space, 'Oumuamua deviated from its predicted path by about 25,000 miles.
If 'Oumuamua were a typical comet, this might explain its change of direction: Comets that drift close to the sun warm up, which causes internal gases to evaporate. The shooting jets of these gases can act like small rocket engines, altering the path an object travels and the way it tumbles.
In such cases, the evaporating gases form a tail behind the rock. They can also cause big chunks of a comet to break off. But no tail or break-up of 'Oumuamua was definitively seen.
There was also another surprise from the Spitzer Space Telescope: It did not detect a heat signature. The fact that Spitzer was unable to detect that heat suggests 'Oumuamua is somewhat shinier than a normal object, since less warmth being absorbed means more sunlight is getting bounced away.
Trilling said "shiny" is relative, though -'Oumuamua could be as dark as "dirty slush" in a gutter, and that would be shinier than expected.
"We're not talking about a ball of tin foil flying through space," he said.
However, an extraordinary possibility - an unnatural object - did occur to some researchers, a few of whom chose to test the idea against the limited observations.
Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as seen by the Rosetta spacecraft on October 9, 2015.
Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University's astronomy department, took the peculiarities of 'Oumuamua as reason to pursue the remote possibility that 'Oumuamua might be alien in origin.
In December 2017, Loeb directed Breakthrough Listen (an effort to listen for alien signals that Loeb helps run) to point radio antennas toward 'Oumuamua. No alien communications were detected.
In October 2018, Loeb and a colleague wondered in a study whether the object might have a more extreme pancake-like shape. Based on mathematical analysis, they suggested it could perhaps be as thin as a sail that could be pushed by light (also called a lightsail), which might also explain the 0.1% change in direction found by Hubble.
Most recently, Loeb and an undergraduate student published a brief study suggesting 'Oumuamua might actually have a 50-to-1 size ratio if it's cigar-shaped, or a 20-to-1 ratio if it's more of a pancake.
Loeb defends his pursuit of the idea as a valid scientific argument, given the data available. In a blog post at Scientific American, he wrote that humans spotting alien technology "might resemble an imaginary encounter of ancient cave people with a modern cell phone," at first interpreting it as "shiny rock" and not a "communication device."
However, Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory, told Business Insider that Loeb's latest paper is based on a misunderstanding of brightness data from a study that Hainaut co-authored. Hainaut added that Loeb's conclusions "collapse" when the uncertainty of the data is taken into account. Loeb and a co-author disputed this, claiming the uncertainty is not as great as Hainaut said.
Many researchers interviewed by Business Insider also noted that because the observations of 'Oumuamua were relatively distant, limited, and filled with gaps, there's not nearly enough data to reasonably make extraordinary claims (which, as Carl Sagan once quipped, require extraordinary evidence).
Hainaut thinks the object is most likely a "slightly weird" space rock, as does Trilling.
"All of the evidence is consistent with a rock," Trilling said. "We've never seen an alien spaceship - we have no idea what that evidence would look like. So I think it's just a rock."
Trilling said he accepts the possibility, however remote, that Loeb and his colleagues' "extreme" ideas could eventually be borne out.
"I don't have any direct evidence that says it has to be a rock and it cannot an alien spacecraft," he said. "The only way to do that is to go visit it."
But for now, Trilling explained that it's most logical to side with hundreds of years of astronomical research.
A Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX launching a satellite into space.
Since 'Oumuamua, astronomers have made adjustments at major observatories to allow for more rapid-turnaround observations of the next rare interstellar object that comes to town.
"With this one, we were taken fairly by surprise," Hainaut said, adding for the next one: "We are ready."
The research community has also reconsidered how often things like 'Oumuamua might visit the solar system. Trilling and others published a study suggesting that current observatories may see an interstellar interloper about once every five years. By the mid-2020s - after new telescopes come online that are designed to look for Earth-threatening asteroids - they might be spotted at a rate of once per year.
This, in turn, has led multiple groups of researchers to wonder if a small spacecraft could be readied to chase down another interstellar visitor like 'Oumuamua and study it up-close. Hainaut is part of one of the groups researching that idea.
"We had a workshop on this in October, and at the beginning of the workshop we said, 'This is impossible.' But after one week of hard work, we realized it's not impossible anymore, it's just difficult," Hainaut said. "Impossible? That's a problem. Difficult? As a first approximation, that just means expensive."
There's also a chance that, decades from now, a project called Breakthrough Starshot that Loeb is part of might resolve the question of what 'Oumuamua is and is not.
Starshot aims to propel tiny spacecraft to another star system with powerful lasers, perhaps at around 20% the speed of light. Such robots could also hypothetically be sent to catch up to 'Oumuamua in deep space.
"The Breakthrough Starshot is extremely interesting. The problem is that the laser technology that is required is far from being ready," Hainaut said. "I hope it will be one day."


Teen was found safe and sound on Monday.
EDITOR'S NOTE: CBC has removed the name and photo from this story. Now that this person is no longer missing, their identity is no longer in the public interest.
Quebec provincial police say a missing 17-year-old girl has been found.
She was last seen Feb. 5 in Valleyfield, Que., about 60 kilometres west of Montreal.
She was found Monday, Feb. 11, safe and sound, said Sûreté du Québec Sgt. Stéphane Tremblay.


Gayle, who debuted for Liverpool in 1977, said via Facebook that “unfortunately I had to decline the nomination for the reason that my ancestors would be turning in their graves after how empire and colonialism had enslaved them”.
He said he was nominated for the British state honour because of work with the anti-racist group Show Racism a Red Card. Gayle said that while some may be attracted to the title of the MBE, he believed that accepting the honour would “be a betrayal to all the Africans who have lost their lives, or who have suffered as a result of empire”.
Gayle, who was born in Toxteth, in the city's south, has previously said that being Liverpool's first Black player got a lot of media coverage, where many labelled him as an activist and self-righteous.
“I was a landmark as far as Black people were concerned, and I was proud to represent the Black community of Liverpool,” Gayle said on Liverpool fan website, This is Anfield.


Looking for calm? Head to Rüschlikon in Zurich, where, eight metres below the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Centre, IBM Research has six new "noise-free" labs. "Their purpose is to enable research at the scale of single molecules and atoms," says Emanuel Lörtscher, a nanoscale electronics researcher and the designer of the lab. "At this scale, disturbances -matter." The lab doesn't just cancel out sound, but also electromagnetic radiation, vibrations from the ground, temperature and humidity, all of which can affect experiments. "These are varieties of noise -- it's not just acoustic noise," says Lörtscher, who started designing the lab five years ago.
Three pairs of Helmholtz coils provide an active cancellation system and purpose-designed air-conditioning controls -temperature to + or -0.01°C. Lörtscher built two prototype labs before completing the final six in early 2011 -- it took the next two years to set up the ultra-precise equipment. "All the details, they really matter," Lörtscher says. "If you lose a magnetic piece inside the lab, you screw up the whole magnetic-field compensation."


Mounir el-Motassadeq, one of the only men sent to prison because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is now a free man. He was released from the maximum-security Fuhlsbüttel prison in Hamburg on Oct. 15, blindfolded and with his hands sealed, and taken to the airport to board a commercial flight bound for Morocco. No one is quite sure what will happen to him next.
El-Motassadeq was friends with Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. He also signed Atta’s will and had power of attorney over the bank accounts of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of the plane that hit the second tower. They all had prayed together in a mosque in Hamburg, which was shut down eight years ago.
El-Motassadeq, who also spent time in an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, has always denied being anything more than friends with the hijackers. He still maintains he knew nothing of the plot. ”I didn’t even know they had gone to America,” Deutsche Welle reported him as saying in reference to the hijackers.
The Moroccan was arrested in Germany two months after the 9/11 attacks, becoming the first person to be indicted. After five years of trials and appeals, he was convicted of being a member of a terrorist organization and an accessory to the murders of 246 people aboard the two planes that were crashed into the World Trade Center. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he served until this week. El-Motassadeq is banned from re-entering Germany until April 2064.
Not many others have been arrested or charged with crimes in connection to 9/11.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of bin Laden’s deputies, was captured in 2003 in Pakistan and transferred to Guantanamo Bay. He admitted being part of 19 successful or attempted terrorist attacks, including the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, Richard Reid’s attempt to blow up an airline, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, and many more. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said through his personal representative at a military tribunal hearing, the transcript shows (pdf, pp. 17-18).
Barack Obama attempted to try Mohammed in New York in 2009, but after a wave of opposition, it was announced Mohammed—who was waterboarded 183 times in a single month in March 2003—would face a military trial at Guantanamo. His case is still ongoing. Moussaoui has offered to testify at Mohammed’s trial.
Bin Laden was assassinated by U.S. Navy Seals in Pakistan in 2011.


Mexico's first supercar: Can it compete with the best?
When you think of famous car-producing nations, Mexico is probably not at the top of your list. But two brothers, Guillermo and Iker Echevarría, are on a mission to change that with a two-seater built by their own fledgling manufacturer, Vuhl.
Vuhl's first creation, the 05 is a bare-bones halfway home between the sort of car that only cares about going fast around the track, and one that provides more accessible B-road thrills. Yet the fact its 2.0-liter Ford engine develops 285 bhp in something that has a dry weight of 695 kilograms means it is anything but short on performance.
The speed at which the 05 went from an idea to a car you can buy is no less impressive than its design. The 05 first surfaced in concept form back in 2013, unveiled by former British Formula One driver Stirling Moss at the Royal Automobile Club in London. A week later, Formula One driver Esteban Gutiérrez was driving it up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed to show it meant business.
Three years later, sales of the Vuhl 05 have begun.
It was all but inevitable that the brothers, who have a background in industrial design, would be bitten by the motoring bug. Their father, Guillermo Echevarría senior, was a racing driver and loved to tinker with cars at home -- a pastime that lasted 30 years, Iker explained. No wonder, then, the 05's design inspiration comes from a motoring heyday of unlimited power outputs and few regulations that gave us the legendary Porsche 917 and McLaren M8F.
"The Vuhl 05 design is inspired in Can-Am racers from the '70s," Iker said. "No doors, no roof, no windscreen, and an exposed roll bar. The challenge was to make the essence of this iconic cars work in a contemporary concept without looking like a retro."
The resulting design is an aggressive mix of clean lines, gentle curves mixed with a hint of Batmobile and the function over form ethos seen by other cars in its space. "It will age well through time," he added confidently. "We intend the Vuhl 05 and it successors to be renowned for their effective simplicity and aesthetics guided by a purity of function."
Though the spirit is Mexican, the Vuhl is incredibly multicultural. The tub holding everything together is Mexican, but around 50 percent of the components are British. The engine, meanwhile, is American and various body panels come from Canada.
But is an international pedigree enough to tempt the more snobbish buyer used to British, German and Italian cars?
"We are aware that Mexico doesn´t have an engineering or racing heritage as strong as other countries like Germany or UK which will always be a barrier," Iker said. "Nevertheless, Mexico is living one of its best moments in motorsport with two Mexican drivers in F1 -- Formula 1 -- and (FIA World Endurance Race is) back to Mexico."
Like many fledgling supercar makers, Vuhl has had its share of critics who said Vuhl was going to be yet another wannabe supercar maker that dies a death before it has even started. Yet three years on, the company has just announced a more potent version of the 05 known as the 05RR.
With the 05 and 05RR under its belt, Vuhl has cause for celebration yet success takes time and respect must be earned. But for now Vuhl can exploit a gap between a number of established rivals. "It's a lot of money for a not-actually-that-exotic car, but it sits in a niche above (British manufacturers) Zenos (and) Caterham and below Radical (and) BAC that nobody else seems to be in, so the market is there for the taking," motoring journalist Phil Huff, explained. "That it's Mexican is irrelevant -- I think few people will even realize that."
With plans to make around 25 05 cars a year, each one costing from £60,000 ($78,250), Vuhl has a long way to go before Britain, Germany and Italy have anything to worry about, but never has Mexico had such a chance to make an impact in the performance car world.


After the Yes Men pulled their now-famous prank earlier this week on the US Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber issued a vague threat of “law-enforcement action.” The group doesn’t appear to have called the cops on the Yes Men just yet, but on Wednesday it issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down demand notice for the parody site that the Yes Men set up to publicize their fake event, in which the “Chamber” announced that it would support a sane global warming policy after all.
The Chamber’s attorney at the intellectual property law firm Kenyon & Kenyon issued a notice to the Yes Men’s internet service provider, Hurricane Electric, asking them to take down the site. “The website infringes the Chamber of Commerce’s copyrights by directly copying the images, logos, design, and layout of the Chamber of Commerce’s copyright-protected official website, located at www.uschamber.com,” they wrote.
They ask Hurricane to “take down all such infringing material” and/or end their business relationship with the Yes Men. “Continuing to be the ISP for this material could subject Hurricane Electric to legal liability,” the letter states.
“We are certain you can understand our client’s concerns, and its need to protect its intellectual property,” it continues.
And now the Electronic Frontiers Foundation is jumping in, telling the Chamber to take a chill pill. The site, they say, fits within the accepted fair use and parody rights.
UPDATE: It seems that Hurricane, fearing the Chamber’s legal rebuke, pulled the plug on both the Yes Men site and May First/People Link, the group that was directly providing service for the Yes Men. Hurricane was the upstream provider, but a May First/People Link in turn provided service for the Yes Men and 400 other groups. So, for a period last night, all 400 groups had their websites shut down.
The Yes Men issued a press release on Friday stating that May First/People Link was able to get the service reconnected for the other groups. Meanwhile, the Yes Men have relocated the parody site.
It also presented a problem for ticket sales, as the Yes Men’s latest film, The Yes Men Fix the World is currently in theaters. The action, say the Yes Men, threatens theaters (which also happen to be small businesses) who may be selling tickets through the Yes Men site.


Prodigy has invested in an online music industry information service called SonicNet. The service will provide Prodigy with content and a link to their site.
Prodigy announced it has purchased a stake in Sunshine Interactive's SonicNet, an online music industry information service.
Under the agreement, SonicNet will provide Prodigy with exclusive use of original content and a direct link to the SonicNet site. SonicNet offers chat forums, record and performance reviews, and links to other music industry-related sites.
The company did not disclose the financial terms of the arrangement, but said it plans to hire additional staff to assist SonicNet with content development.
The investment is the first for Prodigy's new Wildflower Partners division which provides financial support and distribution to Net-based content providers.


Archives|OFFERS NEW THEORY FOR ALL MEDICINE; Sir James Mackenzie, Just Before Death, Said He Had Hit on a Revolutionary Principle. BASED ON STUDY OF CELLS In a Letter Published in The London Times He Outlined the General Conclusions He Had Reached.
OFFERS NEW THEORY FOR ALL MEDICINE; Sir James Mackenzie, Just Before Death, Said He Had Hit on a Revolutionary Principle. BASED ON STUDY OF CELLS In a Letter Published in The London Times He Outlined the General Conclusions He Had Reached.


CHELSEA legend Didier Drogba will play his last game for the club today.
The Ivory Coast striker returned for his second spell at the club last summer but he's not intending to extend his homecoming into a second season.
Drogba was a doubt for the game at Stamford Bridge agasint Sunderland today due to an ankle injury but it looks likely he will play some part in the game as a substitute to say goodbye to the adoring Chelsea faithful.
Chelsea confirmed the news on their Twitter page.
They said: "Didier Drogba has announced it will be his last game as a Chelsea player today."
They also posted a vine showing the striker's kit laid out for the last time.
It is unclear whether Drogba intends to retire or if he will attempt to find another club.
The 37-year-old has scored 104 goals for Chelsea in 253 league appearances before today.


Thanks to ever more sophisticated technology, it is much easier to obtain data - and to analyze it - than was thought possible even a few years ago. As a result, there is an understandable feeling that decision-making in organizations today is more scientific and soundly based than was the case in the days when hunches, gut feel and experience guided much activity. However, leaders must not be seduced into thinking that basing decisions on data necessarily makes them beyond reproach.
Indeed, in an article in the Fall 2018 issue of Rotman Management, the magazine of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Megan MacGarvie and Kristina McElheran argue that "in some instances, data and analytics actually make matters worse." This is because, even with impressively large sets of data and the latest, most effective analytical tools, executives can still fall into various traps, particularly if they take shortcuts in reasoning in an effort to overcome information overload.
In the article, which was previously published in the HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers, MacGarvie, associate professor in the markets, public policy and law group at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, and McElheran, assistant professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management and a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, point out that it is widely acknowledged by academics in a variety of disciplines that people do not carefully process every piece of information in every decision. Instead, they say, we rely on heuristics, or simplified procedures that help us make decisions when faced with uncertainty or where there is insufficient money or time for extensive analysis. The result is we think we are making sound decisions when in fact we are making systematic mistakes. On top of this, even with access to data, human brains are geared to adopting certain biases that distort choices often without us being aware of them.
MacGarvie and McElheran identify "three main cognitive traps that regularly bias decision-making, even when informed by the best data" and offer suggestions for avoiding them.
The Confirmation Trap. This is what happens when we pay more attention to findings that align with our existing beliefs and ignore other facts and patterns in the data. Confirmation bias can become much harder to avoid when individuals are under pressure from bosses and colleagues to come up with data that supports a pre-existing view of the world, say MacGarvie and McElheran. Their advice for dealing with the issue? Don't avoid information that does not fit with you or your boss's beliefs. Instead, embrace it by such means as specifying in advance the data and analytical approaches that will be used in the decision-making in order to reduce the temptation to "cherry-pick" findings; actively seek out findings that disprove your beliefs; do not automatically dismiss findings that fall below your starting point for statistical or practical significance; assign several independent teams to analyze the data separately and if they do not come to similar conclusions concentrate on the points where they diverge in order to see whether the differences are due to error, inconsistent methods or bias; and treat your findings as if they were predictions and test them.
The Overconfidence Trap. Senior decision-makers are especially prone to this, say MacGarvie and McElheran, for the simple reason that they tend to assume that they have been promoted on the basis of past successes that have themselves been based on making decisions. But overconfidence can also reinforce many other pitfalls of data interpretation. "It can prevent us from questioning our methods, our motivation and the way we communicate our findings to others; and it also makes it easy to under-invest in data analysis in the first place," they write. This can be a particularly difficult problem to crack because, while overconfidence can dissuade us from spending enough time or money on acquiring more information or doing extra analysis, just acquiring more information can make matters worse by adding to the sense of confidence. As MacGarvie and McElheran say, moving from data to insights "requires quality inputs, skill and sound processes." They stress the importance of processes, making several procedural tips for escaping this trap. Among them are describing your ideal experiment and then comparing this with your actual data to see where it might be lacking; making being devil's advocate a formal part of the process; keeping track of predictions and systematically comparing them with what actually happens in order to test their accuracy; and making such processes a part of the decision-making routine in order to avoid persistent biases creeping back in.
The Over-Fitting Trap. This is what happens when a statistical model describes "random noise" rather than the underlying relationship an organization is seeking to capture. As MacGarvie and McElheran put it, "When your model yields surprising or counterintuitive predictions, you may have made an exciting new discovery - or it may be the result of 'over-fitting.'" They quote Nate Silver, the statistician who found fame for predicting the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, as describing this concept as "the most important scientific problem you've never heard of." The problem is that over-fit models look like they do a very good job of explaining the nuances of the past but struggle to predict the future. To overcome this bias, they suggest randomly dividing the data into a training set, on which the model will be estimated, and a validation set, which will be used to test the accuracy of the model's predictions; as with the confirmation trap, avoid cherry picking data; look for relationships that measure important effects related to clear and logical hypotheses before looking at nuances; look to see whether it is possible to construct another story using the same data; and beware the common tendency to see patterns in random data.


The GOP hopes President Obama’s low approval translates to support for Corbett.
How many gubernatorial elections will Pennsylvania hold this November? A trick question? Yes, sort of – but the question reveals an important and too little recognized characteristic of state elections.
The latest poll shows Corbett cutting into Wolf’s lead but still down by double digits.
The latest Magellan survey shows the Democratic candidate’s lead narrowing.
Cosponsored by PoliticsPA & The Law Offices of Adam Bonin, enter for your chance at eternal glory. Winners announced here next week.
Some great polling news for Tom Wolf, McCaffery steps down from the Court and congressional Republicans are in the driver’s seat. See who made this week’s list!
We present our State House races to watch on Election Night, potential Supreme Court nominees are floated and Planned Parenthood goes after Governor Corbett. Good morning politicos, here’s the Buzz!
Top Republican leaders floated potential replacements for the seats left by McCaffrey and eventually Castille.
Over one year after her conviction, the former PA Supreme Court Justice sent out an apology letter.


BRIDGEWATER — Try telling J.R. Hopf that 11 days doesn’t make a baseball season.
The unlikely slugger continued the best power surge of his career Sunday night by hitting two home runs to lift the Somerset Patriots to a 5-2 victory against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs in front of 5,899 at TD Bank Ballpark.
Hopf, who went homer-less in his first 102 at-bats this season, has smashed five in 19 at-bats since Aug. 19 to match a career high set in 57 games between Single-A and Triple-A for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2007.
“Let’s hope he keeps breaking that (record) all the time,” Patriots manager Sparky Lyle quipped.
The Patriots (27-24, 63-58) maintained a one-game lead atop the Freedom Division by prevailing for the eighth time in 10 games and taking the rubber game of the series from the Atlantic League’s winningest team.
Hopf homered in the second inning against starter John Koronka, who issued seven walks in 4 2/3 innings and was fortunate to escape with only four runs on his ledger.
All nine Patriots’ starters reached base at least once by the fourth inning despite a total of four hits off Koronka (0-3).
On the other hand, Bill Pulsipher was plain old effective.
Pulsipher (4-1) scattered five hits, struck out six and walked one. The former major leaguer left after six innings with a 4-1 lead, marking the sixth time in eight starts since his acquisition that he has allowed two runs or fewer.
Ben Grezlovski, who helped recruit Pulsipher to the Patriots, kept the lead in tact through a precarious seventh. The first two batters homered and doubled, respectively, but the submariner induced a ground-ball double play with runners on the corners and one out.
Jeff Kennard’s turn to come up big came in the eighth.
The Blue Crabs (30-18, 71-47) loaded the bases on three consecutive two-out singles but Kennard struck out Ben Harrison swinging on a pitch diving out of the strike zone.
Hopf furthered the momentum swing with a home run to center field in the bottom half of the frame.
Scott Williamson brought the potential tying run to the plate in the ninth but struck out the side to notch his seventh save.
Josh Pressley hit one of the longest home runs in the 12-history of TD Bank Ballpark but the Patriots lost 5-3 to the Blue Crabs. Pressley’s sixth-inning blast was estimated at 430-450 feet. Losing pitcher Brian Adams gave up four runs in six innings.
The homestand continues as Somerset’s Josh Miller (11-8, 3.54) faces Camden at 7 p.m.
Posted in Uncategorized on August 30, 2010 by Ryan Dunleavy.


ENT specialists are aplenty and ear buds too have been around for quite some time, but many Delhiites still love to get their ears cleaned by the traditional ear-cleaners.
Ear cleaning is one of the oldest professions on the streets of Delhi. It is a skill handed down from father to son through generations.
Ask any ear-cleaner and he will say all his ancestors have followed the same profession. “I learnt the art from my father, and my father from his.
We have done nothing else. This has always been our family business,” says 30-year-old Mohammed Anas, who offers his unique service in Connaught Place.
Most traditional ear-cleaners in Delhi come from Moradabad. Like their forefathers, they come to the bigger cities looking for clients. In Delhi, the ear-cleaners find their patrons in Chandni Chowk, Connaught Place, G B Road, in office areas as well as in cinema halls and railway stations. They have not entirely lost favour with the educated elite either.
It is rather easy to spot the ear-cleaners, thanks to their peculiar red headgear and the small shoulder bags that hold their ear-cleaning paraphernalia. They solicit by sidling close to passersby and announcing their trade. If anyone agrees, the ear-cleaners take him or her to a quiet spot and get down to work.
“It is an intricate job and not everyone can do it. We can do it as it is in our blood,” says Sheikh Raza , a 45-year-old ear-cleaner who has been cleaning ears since he was 18.
All ear cleaners have five basic cleaning tools which they make on their own. They are thin and spindly and made of steel. One end of the instrument is wrapped in a small wad of cotton and inserted into the ear. The ear-cleaner rotates his instrument in the ear for a while and removes the wax.
His next task is oiling the ears with mustard oil and then the job is done. In more complicated cases, for instance when a foreign body has to be extricated from the ear, the cleaner has a special tool with a tiny hook at one end. And it is in such cases that the ear cleaners' services are most sought.
“Doctors can never take out objects from ears as successfully as we can,” says Sheikh. He narrates an incident when doctors failed to remove a grain of wheat from a patient's ear. “The doctors only managed to push the grain further into the ear. It took me only a minute to take it out,” he claims.
The doctors on the other hand warn people against accepting the services of ear-cleaners. Rajiv Puri, a senior consultant at Apollo Hospital, says that ears have a self-cleaning process and there is no need to clean them.
“Inserting objects can pose a risk to the eardrum, and other delicate parts of the ear,” he says. But those who love to get their ears cleaned turn a deaf ear to the doctor’s advice to savour the pleasure of traditional ear cleaning.


Ruth Carr only had three runners on Friday...and they all won!
TRAINER Ruth Carr was in dreamland on Friday as she landed three big prizes at Newcastle and Lingfield.
Carr and Jack Garrity struck twice up north before Sovereign Debt made it third time lucky at the All-Weather Mile Championships.
After Dandy Nicholls announced his retirement, Sovereign Debt was moved to her yard just over a month ago.
The eight-year-old had previously finished second in the race twice, but he finally got the deserved win in the race as he held off the fast-finishing Nimr.
Winning jockey James Sullivan, riding the grey for the first time, said: "He's a very good horse. He travelled round lovely. It got a little bit tight round the home bend, but in fairness to the horse he put his head down and went through it and galloped the whole way to the line.
"I've watched him through the years and we're very lucky Mrs Carr got to train him.
"She and the team have done a very good job with him and it's a great result for the yard.
"It's great for me. It's great to be riding a good horse like this."
Who won the 2.05 at Haydock live on ITV4 today?
Carr said: "It's not very often I'm lost for words, but I kind of am at the moment! It's fantastic for the owners and for the horse itself, he's been the bridesmaid so many times, he's really deserved it.
"It's a fantastic day for the yard. Jimmy had him in a really good position early and he's always stuck his neck out and tried.
"Andrew Mullen would have ridden him if he hadn't been banned but one man's good luck is another's bad luck.
"I was hopeful we were going to peg back the leader, I was a bit worried about him, but we were in front where it mattered.
"I'm not sure how much of the credit I can take for the training, but we got him qualified, we got him here and got him right on the day.
"He's eight years old but he's not getting any worse. He's genuine, he tries and it's great for us.
"We're delighted to have a horse of his calibre. A win like this should hopefully raise our profile and it's a big boost for the staff in the yard.
"It's a team effort and I think we will just enjoy today for now."
Art Collection got the day off to a flyer up at Newcastle and made it two out of two since joining her Stillington-based team in the Betway Sprint Handicap.
Winning jockey Garrity said: "They went very fast early and the race developed in front of me.
"He was flat out but when they started coming back to me I was able to pick and choose my way through.
Less than an hour later, Garrity was back in the winners' enclosure at Newcastle with Carr's Chaplin Bay after rallying late to win the sunbets.co.uk Handicap.
"Things are going my way for a change today!" said Garritty.
"Fair play to Ruth, getting him ready to run a race like that first time out."


Warehouse retail king Costco recently ended its relationship with American Express in favor of a new one with Visa and Citigroup. And after a bit of a bumpy start, it looks like the new deal is starting to pay off.
Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti said in a conference call with investors Thursday that nearly 11.5 million former Costco AmEx cards have now been transferred to Visa and Citi.
What’s more, Galanti added that 1.1 million additional customers have applied for the new Costco Visa-Citi card — and that more than 730,000 new accounts have already been activated.
Costco took a lot of heat initially for making the switch. The AmEx card was popular with the retailer’s members … and the execution of the switch from AmEx to Visa wasn’t exactly a smooth one.
But it appears that those problems are in the past. The company is now benefiting from the fact that it is paying lower fees to Visa than it did to AmEx.
Shares of Costco rose 4% Friday. The company also reported quarterly earnings late Thursday that topped Wall Street’s forecasts.
But the stock, which has been a Wall Street darling for the past few years, has stumbled a bit in 2016. Shares are still down 5% this year — even after Friday’s big rally.
Investors are worried about increased competition from Amazon — which is touting home delivery of groceries — as well as Walmart’s Sam’s Club unit.
Lower food prices are hurting too, even though consumers love it.
The big decline in the prices of many agricultural commodities has been a problem for Costco as well as big grocery chains like Kroger, Supervalu, Sprouts and Whole Foods.
Low oil prices — despite a recent uptick — have been a problem too since it means reduced sales and profits for the gas stations that Costco has at many stores.
There are also concerns that Costco could lose customers if it raises the cost of its annual membership fee, something Galanti hinted at in March.
Finally, the company was told by a jury Thursday that it must pay $5.5 million to Tiffany as a result of a lawsuit involving fake Tiffany diamond engagement rings being sold at Costco.
That’s not a huge amount of money for Costco. But the company still could be asked to pay more in punitive damages. And it’s not exactly great for Costco’s image with consumers.
So even though Costco can finally breathe a sigh of relief now that the credit card switch to Visa is complete, the company still faces a lot of challenges.


Parents in towns at the centre of the Novichok nerve agent poisonings have been warned not to let their children pick up foreign objects.
The move comes two days after Dawn Sturgess died from picking up a contaminated container and her partner Charlie Rowley is fighting for his life in hospital.
Today Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies stressed that no-one in Salisbury and Amesbury should pick up anything they haven’t dropped themselves.
She especially stressed youngsters should avoid handling strange objects ahead of the start of the school holidays.
Dame Sally said: ‘I want to emphasise to everyone in the Salisbury and Amesbury area that nobody, adult or child, should pick up any foreign object which could contain liquid or gel, in the interests of their own safety.
‘This, in practice, means do not pick up containers, syringes, needles, cosmetics or similar objects, made of materials such as metal, plastic or glass.
‘This is particularly important as families are starting to prepare for their children’s summer holidays and so I am asking that people are extra vigilant.
The advice from Public Health England remains that the overall threat to the public is low, but that everyone should avoid picking up strange objects.
It is believed that Dawn Sturgess, 44, who died from Novichok poisoning, and her partner, Charlie Rowley, 45, who is critically ill, somehow handled a vessel that contained the deadly substance.
The vessel has not yet been recovered.
There is no evidence to suggest they went to any of the areas that had been decontaminated following the attempted murders of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were also exposed to the nerve agent.
Dame Sally added: ‘Life continues in Salisbury and Amesbury and I want to be clear that the overall threat to the public is unchanged and remains low.
‘I also want to highlight that those areas that have been cleaned and released to the public over the past few weeks are safe, and should be used normally.
‘You do not need to seek advice from a health professional unless you are experiencing symptoms.
‘If you are concerned, you should call NHS 111 and Wilshire Police has also established a helpline to offer further advice: 0800 092 0410.


Apple’s events are getting predictable. Time for a refresh?
Were Apple's iPad sales really as bad as they looked?


Everybody got a little hot under the collar this week as European Council president Donald Tusk became the latest to let his frustration with the United Kingdom get the better of him, suggesting that “a special place in hell” awaits those who backed Brexit without a plan.
“I’ve been wondering what that place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan for how to carry it out safely,” he said after a meeting with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Most seemed to agree it was an unhelpful intervention at a time when relations with the UK are at an all-time low, and the withdrawal agreement at an impasse in the House of Commons with no sign of a way forward.
Tusk should also have known that nobody outdoes the DUP when it comes to fire and brimstone. The party’s Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson channelled his inner Dante to describe Tusk as a “devilish, trident-wielding euro maniac”, no less.
Wilson wasn’t the only one to react. British prime minister Theresa May said the remark had caused “widespread dismay” in the UK, while former Ukip leader Nigel Farage said being free of “unelected arrogant bullies” like Tusk sounded “like heaven”.
These days though, Brexit seems a lot more like purgatory than heaven or hell. There were yet more calls from London this week to reopen the withdrawal agreement and – you guessed it – more refusals from Brussels, leaving the process very much in limbo.
May travelled to Belfast on Tuesday where she told business leaders that her commitment to avoiding a hard border was “unshakeable”. She also signalled her intention to push the European Union to agree to a time limit being placed on the backstop.
German chancellor Angela Merkel suggested a “creative” approach to talks could see the backstop questions resolved, but that re-opening the withdrawal agreement was “not on the order of business”.
If the UK didn’t have enough on its plate dealing with Brussels and Dublin, the United States threw in its tuppence worth during an event in the Capitol building to mark the 100th anniversary of the Dáil.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England warned that Britain faces its weakest economic growth in 10 years this year, blaming mounting Brexit uncertainty and the global slowdown. But it stuck to its message that interest rates will rise, if a Brexit deal is done.
The latest company to jump ship in the UK was UBS which received approval from a London court to move up to €32 billion in assets from Britain to Germany.
The uncertainty surrounding Brexit was the main reason the European Commission cut its growth forecasts for Ireland this week.
In its latest set of winter forecasts, Brussels forecast the Irish economy would grow by 4.1 per cent this year in gross domestic product (GDP) terms, down from 4.5 per cent previously. That was lower than the Government’s forecast of 4.2 per cent.
There was a warning also from the Central Bank, which said that if the State’s transition to a low-carbon economy is too slow, it will pose macroeconomic and financial stability risks as sharper adjustments will be necessary.
Governor Philip Lane said the financial system had a central role in managing climate risks and financing decarbonisation, but that regulatory policies and supervisory practices must also play their part.
That being said, the latest economic indicators painted a pretty rosy picture for the State. Household debt fell in the third quarter of 2018, reaching its lowest level in 13 years, the latest figures from the Central Bank showed.
The regulator said household debt fell by €518 million in the third quarter to €137.5 billion, or €28,316 per capita, at the end of the three-month period, the lowest point since 2005.
Meanwhile, the Republic’s jobless rate remained steady at 5.3 per cent for the second consecutive month in January. That was the lowest recorded since February 2008 and is almost three points below the euro zone average.
Elsewhere, VAT receipts jumped to a record €2.7 billion in January as strong pre-Christmas sales boosted the Government’s tax take for the month. The latest exchequer returns show the sales tax accounted for more than half the €5.4 billion in tax collected.
Three of Ireland’s richest men – Denis O’Brien, Dermot Desmond, and Michael O’Leary – will be glad to see the back of this week after each suffered setbacks in their business dealings.
Digicel, the Caribbean telecoms company owned by O’Brien, became embroiled in a $1.5 billion US lawsuit over allegations it is a “co-conspirator” in a “ruse” to divert cash that is meant to fund education in Haiti, but is instead allegedly spent corruptly.
Digicel said it “categorically denies . . . any wrongdoing of any kind” and insisted it follows the law. “Digicel has always conducted its business in Haiti consistent with all applicable laws and regulations,” it said.
Elsewhere, the Central Bank opened an investigation into Datalex, in which Desmond holds a 26.4 per cent stake, after it issued a massive profit warning last month and revealed that it had uncovered a possible accounting issue.
The regulator is understood to be looking at Datalex’s trading statement less than eight weeks earlier in which the company said it was performing in line with expectations and was “confident” about posting double-digit percentage earnings growth.
Finally, O’Leary said he was “disappointed” as Ryanair recorded a loss of €20 million in the three months ended December 31st due to a fall in air fares and a rise in fuel prices.


Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis, which started with strikes by teachers, students and those in the legal profession in late 2016 and now includes groups calling for secession, is deepening. People from English-speaking South-West and North-West regions of Cameroon have long complained about their marginalisation in the centralised state apparatus in Yaoundé and the government’s failure to protect Anglophone heritage.
Opinion is divided on how to address the Anglophones’ concerns. Victor Mukete, member of the ruling party and the country’s oldest senator, tells sister publication Jeune Afrique that a federal system should be created “as soon as we are capable of financing it.” A fringe group has declared an independent state of Ambazonia, but many people say that a fairer system rather than a separate system would be the best solution. Yaoundé’s response so far has been a security crackdown and creating a weak national commission on the issues of bilingualism and multi-culturalism. President Paul Biya launched a government reshuffle in early March, separating the decentralisation portfolio from the interior ministry. Elanga Obam George, a technocrat who worked in prime minister Philémon Yang’s office, is the new minister of decentralisation.
The Anglophone crisis also highlights the often difficult relationship between neighbouring Cameroon and Nigeria. Back in 1961, the United Nations (UN) organised a referendum in the areas colonised by Britain, giving northern and southern Cameroon the options of joining Nigeria or joining Cameroon. The North went to Nigeria, and the South went to Cameroon.
Since the flare-ups of late 2016, the UN estimates that nearly 20,000 Cameroonian refugees have fled to Nigeria. Anglophone Cameroon’s economy, heavily integrated with Nigeria, has been severely affected as many small towns and villages have been abandoned. Businesses often close down for ‘ghost town’ protests. Meanwhile big firms with interests in the region are reporting reduced profits, and cross-border trade has slowed to a trickle.
Cameroon and Nigeria share a long border, with security flashpoints along the 1,975km frontier. Nigeria’s north-eastern states of Borno and Adamawa and Cameroon’s Far North Region continue to deal with a significant Boko Haram insurgency while an escalating pastoral conflict between Fulani herdsmen and settler communities is currently raging from Adamawa through Taraba and Benue into parts of Cross River, with small arms proliferation in Akwa Ibom and other states in the Niger Delta.
The stakes are getting higher, as Cameroon will hold elections in 2018, and President Muhammadu Buhari will be up for re-election in 2019. A wider expansion of the anti-separatist crackdown could lead to increased tensions between the governments in Abuja and Yaoundé, a state of affairs not unheard of as both countries have clashed over territory, access to resources and political interference in the past.
Anger from citizens who feel left behind by South Africa's development -- known as 'service protests' is resurfacing ahead of elections; anger that politicians are navigating around, and even capitalising on.


Thousands of Oregon hunters need to start planning their fall forays this weekend as Monday's deadline for controlled hunt application looms.
Fall may be months away, but it’s time to start planning your big-game hunt. Apply online, at a license sales agent or Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife office that sells licenses by 11:59 p.m. Monday to get a shot at controlled-hunt tags for most big-game species.
The cost is $8 per application, and hunters need a 2017 annual hunting license to apply.
While it doesn't pay to be a latecomer to the drawing, it certainly seems to be an ingrained trait among Oregon hunters.
Last year, more than half of the 467,028 applications were submitted in the week before the deadline, including nearly 74,149 on deadline day, according to ODFW.
Many hunters wait until the last minute to apply, which can cause long lines at stores and ODFW offices, ODFW Wildlife Division spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy says.
New this year, as part of efforts to simplify the regulations, final tag numbers are already printed in the 2017 Oregon Big Game Regulations.
In the past, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission did not set big-game tag numbers for the fall hunts until June.
The agency has reduced tag numbers for some Eastern Oregon big-game hunts to account for high winter mortality of deer and pronghorn in some Eastern Oregon units, the agency says.
ODFW used the controlled-hunt lottery as a way to mete out tags and distribute hunting pressure for specific hunts and species. It does not include general-season hunts such as deer and elk hunts in the south Cascades.
The Rogue Valley's younger outdoors enthusiasts will have a chance to test-drive a variety of outdoor activities, including hunting and fishing, during a free Saturday event May 20 at the Denman Wildlife Area.
Young Oregon Hunters Day will give youth ages 5 to 16 a chance to try such activities as trout fishing, tomahawk throwing, shotgun and archery shooting and laser shooting, and they'll have a chance to learn to identify animal species by their pelts.
The 16th annual event, often referred to as YOH Day, will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Denman, 1495 E. Gregory Road in White City. Parental consent and chaperones are required.
The event is sponsored annually by the Rogue Valley Chapter of the Oregon Hunters Association, along with ODFW and Black Bird Shopping Center.
Food and beverages will be available, and a free raffle drawing will occur. However, drawing participants must be present to win.


Making the most of natural resources of farms is critical in today’s environment, where rainfalls are becoming ever so scarce.
While in Queensland the use of animal recognition technology is being used to conserve water, on the other side of the country in Western Australia, satellite technology is providing farmers with a suite of tools to accurately estimate the amount of feed in their pastures, how quickly their pastures are growing and the pasture quality.
Jointly developed by the CSIRO and Western Australia’s Department of Agriculture and Department of Land Information, the project, called Pastures from Space, uses satellite data from NASA to monitor the efficient use of feed resources in the livestock industries.
The Pastures from Space message is clear: use it or lose it.
For maximum efficiency on a farm, farmers need to use the pasture when it is at its best. This was one of the main drivers for the project, which predicts the quantity of green pasture in each paddock for a farm, or Feed on Offer (FOO), as kilos of dry matter per hectare.
According to Gonzalo Mata, who is in charge of farming systems and web development for the project, the general rule of thumb is that only about 20 to 30 per cent of pasture grown is utilised in many beef and sheep production systems. This is because a lack of information on feed resources leads to conservative management as a means of mitigating risk.
“Farmers need this information in order to match the animals’ nutrient demands for growth and reproduction with the supply of feed which can be very seasonal. If this is not achieved, production is lower or costs increase through the use of supplements to achieve the balance,” Mata added.
According to Mata, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, hence the need for allowing farmers to measure how much pasture there is on their farms. The project also predicts the rate of growth of pasture, or Pasture Growth Rate (PGR), on a weekly basis as kilos of dry matter per hectare per day.
The PGR tool uses images from a NASA satellite to create a composite greenness index. The climate data is sourced from the Bureau of Meteorology on a weekly basis and the two data sources are combined in a pasture growth model.
Pastures from Space boasts a 97 percent accuracy and it is possible farmers with a subscription (which costs $900 per year) to have sustainable pasture utilisation of more than 50 percent.
“When the farmers get their system up and running, the level of interaction that they have is only limited by their ability to ask questions of the data. New information is downloaded on a weekly basis using a software package called ‘Pasture Watch’ and can review the automatically generated graphs showing PGR for individual paddocks or combination of paddocks depending of what decision he is trying to make,” Mata said.
By going online, the farmer can also look at maps of PGR for their farm, giving them a better understanding of why some parts of a paddock or of the farm are performing better than others.
As of 2007, Pastures from Space had 80 commercial subscribers, and the numbers of people accessing the non-specific satellite measurements on the free Web site is growing.
Mata says the numbers have been growing every year by at least 10 percent, and up to late last year, nearly 10,000 unique IP addresses had visited the Web site.


The local comedy world is in mourning following the shock death of beloved satirist John Clarke.
Clarke, a regular fixture in TV and film – most prominently his groundbreaking political interviews with Bryan Dawe – died while on a hiking trip in Victoria, aged 68.
His death has sparked countless tributes from local comedy personalities who worked with the prolific star and have spoken about his enduring legacy.
Most notable among those has been fellow giant of Australian comedy Barry Humphries, who is outraged at Clarke's sudden passing.
"How dare he die! John wasn't just funny, he was original and he was very, very nice," Humphries said.
"When Bruce Beresford and I were making the first Barry Mackenzie movie in the early '70s we had a scene in a London pub favoured by Australians. We'd cast a mob of noisy Aussies drinking and when we ran the somewhat random footage Bruce said, 'Watch this bloke'. We ran it again and froze frame on a young man at the bar drinking. He might have had one line, or maybe just a word, but he was terribly funny and terribly real. It was John Clarke.
"I've been watching him and admiring him ever since. He deserves a state funeral."
Frank Woodley, who worked as a script editor and "mentor" on his 1997 series The Adventures Of Lano And Woodley with Colin Lane, shares Humphries' admiration. "From the first time I heard a Fred Dagg cassette to this week's Clarke and Dawe, John Clarke made me laugh. Every time," he said.
"John could be silly and serious but he always had a twinkle in his eyes that made me happy. 'Trust your instincts. You boys know what you're doing.' I can still hear John's distinctive dry voice saying that to me as if it was yesterday."
Charlie Pickering, host of ABC's comedy slot The Weekly, on which Clarke and Dawe appeared last year, praised Clarke's towering impact on local political satire.
"If you are going to have the nerve to make jokes about the news in Australia, you do so knowing you will never clear the bar set by John Clarke," he said.
"John and I once talked about how writing a good comedy script was somewhere between poetry and physics. Whatever that middle ground is, John Clarke deserved the Nobel Prize."
He had "an incalculable gift" for comedy, said Max Gillies, for whom Clarke wrote The Gillies Report in 1984. "At school we were told sarcasm was the lowest form of wit, but John Clarke spent his whole life giving the lie to that. It was in his comic bloodstream, a deep sense of outrage that kept his blood pumping and the electricity in his brain firing."
Wendy said Clarke was instrumental in making comedy mainstream by fighting for television funding in the mid '80s. In doing so, he gave and many others their big break.
"Comedy then just completely took off," she said. "It was the thing everybody wanted to watch. John had sown the seed. For something like 30 years, John has been advocating and mentoring for comedy to take its place among the Australian arts.
"I think his contribution to the nation has been peerless."
Fans, both local and from across the Tasman ("Now we'll claim him back. He's our Phar Lap of comedy," New Zealand director Taika Waititi said), shared personal recollections of the man – and tidbits of his most celebrated work.
"He was always a lovely guy to me," said Dave Hughes. "He was a brilliant man who made me laugh a lot from a very young age and continued to make me laugh over the past 25, 30 years. It's such a big loss."
"John can read the Mildura phonebook and get a laugh," said Matthew Saville, who directed him in his final film role, as real estate agent Phillip Lang in 2015's A Month of Sundays.
Wil Anderson, who spent much of the day leading a YouTube deep-dive into Clarke's best bits, called Clarke "the funniest satirist on TV, until the end that came way too soon."
Clarke's stablemates over at ABC, including 7:30's Leigh Sales, also shared their memories of the comedy legend.
"Respected by his peers, adored by his fans, loved by his colleagues with a reputation as one of the nicest blokes," wrote Sales.


Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard says he has "no respect" for Charlton boss Les Reed after the way he treated him during England's Euro 2000 campaign.
Reed, who faces Gerrard at The Valley on Saturday, was part of Kevin Keegan's coaching team in Germany.
And Gerrard said in his autobiography: "To this day I have no respect for Reed or (England coach) Derek Fazackerley.
"I felt they could have shown me more sympathy. They were always pushing me, telling me to buck up my ideas."
He added: "They didn't seem to understand that not everyone can board a plane, settle in a strange hotel far from the family they love and find it easy.
"My homesickness worsened whenever I was forced to be in their company."
Reed did not appear aware of Gerrard's ill-feeling towards him when he discussed their meeting when in-form Liverpool travel to Charlton.
He said: "Steven Gerrard came into the senior England squad for the first time when I was working with Kevin Keegan.
"I've got his framed Euro 2000 shirt hanging on my wall saying 'best wishes Steven Gerrard', so I have come across him.
"I think he's such a dedicated player, he loves playing for Liverpool and he loves playing for England. He'll do whatever his coach asks him to do."


The Crescenta Valley Community Assn. on Wednesday will meet to discuss a number of development issues, including the planned office building on Foothill Boulevard and the old fig tree that members say could die as a result of the construction.
Residents held a candlelight demonstration earlier this month to promote protecting the tree.
The association will also discuss the new water well at the historic Rockhaven Sanitarium site, a planned condominium development and efforts to establish residential building standards.
The meeting starts at 7 p.m. at the Dunsmore Park Community Room, 4700 Dunsmore Ave.


Carl Johnson, co-founder of Anomaly, a marketing communications firm and advertising agency, isn’t actually staying in Cannes. He’s staying at the historic Hotel du Cap in Antibes, an extravagant celebrity destination since the early days of Hemingway. Johnson has a bit of the Hemingway in him himself, insofar as he has a gut and some stubble, curses somewhat liberally, and actually says what he thinks. In a town—he drove in to Cannes for our interview—where so many people are repeating variations on familiar themes, he made for a refreshing lunch partner.
Johnson, now in his early 50s, hadn’t been to Cannes for over a decade. After Sept. 11, 2001, the then-COO of TBWA\Worldwide packed up the family and moved from New York to Sydney, where he spent two years “on the beach.” He only got back into advertising in 2004, when he started Anomaly: the firm or agency or whatever you want to call it—he prefers “a place for clients to go when they don’t know where to go”—that is responsible not only for successful Budweiser, Converse, and Sony campaigns, but for the Emmy-winning television show Avec Eric, the experience of flying Virgin America (down to the interior, the uniforms, and the entertainment), and all the posters and stickers around New York City for a soccer team that doesn’t even exist . . . yet. In 2010, Adweek picked Anomaly as one of six top insurgent agencies to watch.
We were sitting at a table on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel, which is to Cannes Lions’ wealthier delegates what Rick’s was to Casablanca. Arguably, you could meet everyone you wanted to meet at this festival without leaving your table. (Ours, incidentally, had been offered to us by Arianna Huffington.) But that also had something to do with the fact that so much of what was being said on stage sounded the same. The chances of getting through a lecture in Cannes without hearing a CEO or CMO or COO talk about the importance of “content” was about as good as your chances of getting a helicopter ride out to a yacht, which is to say, roughly one in 20.
Here was something else. And that, of course, is what Anomaly set out to be. But it’s been seven years since 2004, and in the new landscape, there are many agencies that describe themselves as “not an agency” and talk about “breaking down silos.” So how long can Anomaly continue to be an anomaly?


A straight man discovers his inner drag queen in Matthew Lopez's gender-bending comedy, The Legend of Georgia McBride, being given its New York premiere by off-Broadway's MCC Theater. Featuring enough amusingly bitchy one-liners and energetic musical numbers to be a genuine crowd-pleaser, the play is frothy to the extreme, a show for people who find Mamma Mia! heavy lifting. But its relentless silliness is sweet and amiable enough to make it go down easy.
Set in Panama City in the Florida Panhandle, the comedy centers on good-hearted slacker Casey (Dave Thomas Brown), trying to make ends meet by performing as an Elvis impersonator at Cleo's, a seedy beachside bar run by the financially hard-pressed Eddie (Wayne Duvall). When Casey bounces a rent check buying pizza, and his wife Jo (Afton Williamson) suddenly announces she's pregnant, their situation goes from dire to desperate. And things get even worse when Eddie informs Casey that he's dropping the Elvis act in favor of a drag routine performed by his cousin Tracy (Matt McGrath) and his — excuse me, her — equally flamboyant friend Rexy (Keith Nobbs), whose stage name is Anorexia Nervosa.
Casey reluctantly stays on as bartender, but when Rexy shows up for work drunk one night he's recruited to take her place performing an Edith Piaf number. Quickly coming up with the stage name Georgia McBride — inspired by the state in which his mother was born and the last name of the first girl he kissed — Casey receives a crash course in drag performing from Tracy, which, it turns out, is all about attitude.
At first his performance is dismal, but Casey discovers that he has a nascent talent and quickly adapts to his new persona, becoming a local sensation, lip-synching to the likes of Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette. His renewed joy in performing, however, is offset by his determination to keep his new identity a secret from Jo and, well, you can guess the rest of the plot from here.
Making a major stylistic departure from his previous work The Whipping Man — a searing post-Civil War era drama that's become a favorite on the regional theater circuit — Lopez demonstrates an equally stellar gift for amusing dialogue and farcical humor. While not all the one-liners land — Rexy's comment, "I've been raped in better places than this," upon setting foot in Cleo's being one unfortunate example — the ratio of hits to misses is admirable.
Brown is boyishly appealing in the title role, tearing into his drag routines with gusto and looking gorgeous as his female persona. McGrath is even better as his drag queen mentor, investing his portrayal with equal amounts of hilarious bitchery and hard-won dignity. The supporting players are also impressive, particularly Nobbs, who doubles as the married couple's good-old-boy landlord.
Director Mike Donahue's staging is sleek and fast-paced; set designer Donyale Werle has expertly transformed the stage into a rundown dive bar, complete with Christmas lights and neon signs; Anita Yavich's costumes and Jason Hayes' wigs are amusingly over-the-top; and Paul McGill's choreography of the drag routines would pass muster in any nightclub.
Despite its earnest message of tolerance, The Legend of Georgia McBride is too lightweight to register as anything more than a mild diversion. But it's highly entertaining nonetheless.


New Delhi: Apollo Tyres said on Wednesday its board would seek shareholders’ guidance and independent counsel regarding the compensation for its managing director Neeraj Kanwar, whose reappointment was rejected by shareholders last month.
The company’s board, which met on 1 October, however, expressed “unanimous approval" for his leadership.
“The board will now seek shareholder guidance and independent counsel, on a compensation level commensurate with the position. Once this process is complete, it will re-nominate Kanwar to be re-appointed as MD, effective 28 May 2019," an Apollo Tyres spokesperson said in a statement.
Minority shareholders of the company had last month rejected the reappointment of Kanwar as MD. Kanwar is also the vice-chairman of Apollo Tyres. In 2017-18 Kanwar received ₹ 44.64 crore as compensation, up from ₹ 30.89 crore in 2016-17.
The resolution for “reappointment of Kanwar as MD" was not passed as a special resolution as the votes cast in favour (72.72% ) were less than three times the number of votes cast against (27.28%), Apollo Tyres said said in a regulatory filing last month.
The company said it board reiterated its approval of Kanwar’s leadership.
Kanwar had spearheaded Apollo Tyres’ growth in India, taken the brand onto the world stage, and grown its market capitalisation around 700% since his appointment as MD, the spokesperson said.
“The board has full confidence in Kanwar to continue Apollo’s sustainable development and expansion," the spokesperson added.


Bible Lite is an easy to navigate offline Bible Application for Mac. It has got a beautiful design with a number of useful features. It allows you to dive into the Sacred Scriptures without all the clutter of Internet. Speak Mode: Bible Lite will read out Bible Verses for you. Write Journals or take notes and save them for future reference. Share Journals via all the available sharing options. Search the entire Bible with Keywords and get to a specific Chapter or Book. Mark Bible verses as favorite and browse all of them in one place. Highlight Bible verses with color and browse all of them in one place. Copy Bible verses from the app and paste anywhere.
Limitations The free version has limited functionalities. Only one Bible Translation (KJV) is available in the Free version (Bible Lite).
Access and read the Bible easily.


East Brunswick Buick Pontiac & Gmc Truck is located at the address 1120 State Route 18 in East Brunswick, New Jersey 08816. They can be contacted via phone at (732) 651-6200 for pricing, hours and directions.
East Brunswick Buick Pontiac and GMC TRUCK located at 1120 State Hwy No 18 in East Brunswick, NJ services vehicles for Auto Repair. Call (732) 651-6200 to book an appointment or to hear more about the services of East Brunswick Buick Pontiac and GMC TRUCK.


This year will mark the 40th year of this exhibition. Organized and hosted by the Art League, this juried exhibition will highlight the work of talented high school artists from eleven area high schools. High school art teachers select the best works by their students to submit for the show. Professional artists in each category will select those to be included. There are usually over 300 entries and only 1/3 will be chosen for the exhibit. Cash awards are given by category and for the “best of show.” In addition, there are several special awards bestowed. One of our most-visited exhibitions, New Artists annually draws over 4,000 visitors from throughout our region.
Museum will be open Easter Sunday.


According to a report issued by the Pew Research Center, American adults have a sub-par knowledge of basic science. The organization surveyed 3,278 Americans of various social, racial and academic backgrounds. The questionnaire involved a simple set of 12 questions that assessed basic science competencies. Despite the quiz was far from demanding, most test-takers answered only 7.9 questions out of 12 correctly. That’s 66% or a big fat ‘D’.
See the rest of the questions and take the quiz yourself here.
Only 6% of the quizzed participants answered all 12 questions correctly. At the other end of the spectrum, 1% of those surveyed missed 11 of the questions, 2% missed 10 and 3% missed nine.
formal education predicted how well respondents fared on the quiz. Those who earned at least a graduate degree got 9.5 questions right, on average, compared to 6.8 for those who only finished high school.
men answered more correct questions than women, even when correcting for social background or education. Men outscored women, 8.6 to 7.3, on average.
whites did better on the test than Latinos or African Americans. Their average scores were 8.4, 7.1 and 5.9, respectively.
more than one in five respondents thought “the study of how the positions of stars and planets can influence human behavior” was astronomy, instead of astrology. For quite a few, it seems, the two are interchangeable.
Now, I don’t think this poll was the best way to gauge American interest or general knowledge in science, but it was interesting nonetheless. It shows the American public is still lagging behind the needs and expectations of an increasingly technology-driven society. It also means that people are more susceptible to fraud and rhetoric when discussing topics like climate change, genetically modified organisms or energy policy. The more you know, the harder you are to fool.


An all-out strike by state sector teachers in Nigeria has ended after four weeks with a government recommendation that teachers get a 27.5 percent pay increase.
Teacher’s pay is awarded locally in Nigeria’s 36 federal states, but the Nigerian Union of Teachers demanded that the government introduce an enhanced teachers’ salary structure to improve and regulate their wages nationally.
The strike did not achieve this, but the pay award it did win has been an enormous boost to workers’ confidence in Nigeria.


SAN FRANCISCO — The outgoing chair of the California GOP — the nation’s largest state Republican Party — has issued a dire warning that his state represents “the canary in the coal mine” for the party‘s national fortunes unless it confronts demographic shifts that have already turned California into a majority-minority state.
“We have not yet been able to figure out how to effectively communicate and get significant numbers of votes from non-whites,’’ said former state Sen. Jim Brulte, who’s held the job of state GOP chair since 2013 and will retire in February.
Despite trend lines that show the “the entire country will be majority minority by 2044,’’ he said, the GOP has failed to confront the reality of those changes — or recognize the possibility that the recent "blue tsunami" midterm election in California was a harbinger of what lies ahead for the national party.
But he said those warnings about the changing political and ethnic landscape have gone unheeded.
“And that’s why I have said that I believe California is the canary in the coal mine — not an outlier,’’ for the GOP in the coming cycles, he told POLITICO.
The California chairman’s comments come days after some state party leaders — including former state party chair Shawn Steele — charged that the party’s shellacking in 2018 was less about demographics and more about Democrats’ use of new practices at the ballot box, suggesting they could have involved voter fraud.
Brulte told POLITICO he categorically rejects the notion that voting irregularities may be the source of the party’s historic beating in the 2018 midterms in California, where Democrats flipped seven House seats and left the party with just seven members in the congressional delegation, the lowest number since the 1940s. He said Republicans were repeatedly informed of ways that Democrats were marshaling new and effective ways to get out the vote — but campaigns failed to take action.
“We personally briefed the candidates, the congressional delegation, the legislators,’’ and even staff inside the White House in 2017 on the upcoming changes in California laws that might affect turnout,’ said Brulte, who lead his party for decades in the legislature.
Brulte pointed to new laws that allowed for “motor voter” registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles, same-day registration, and new efforts to register younger voters. And, he said, campaigns were specifically informed of changes which legalized “ballot harvesting” — coordinated efforts to gather and return absentee ballots with voters’ permission, a program which backers said would assist older or disabled voters.
While Democrats used ballot harvesting with great success in a collection of key races here where mail ballots made up the margin of success, “we’ve not been able to find Republicans having a lot of success anywhere related to ballot harvesting,’’ he said.
Brulte, who said in 2013 it would take a minimum of six years to rebuild the dilapidated state party, has taken heat within the GOP for speaking out about the dangers it faces.
Despite Brulte's stark assessment of the GOP's future, three potential candidates are vying to replace him as chair when his term ends next February — and all of them insist the real problems lie somewhere other than in its message to the changing ethnic electorate.
Steve Frank, a conservative Republican activist and former party official, said that the GOP has “unilaterally disarmed itself,’’ by failing miserably in outreach to church-going conservatives and other GOP voters — and by standing by helplessly while laws that have advantaged Democrats, including the state’s top-two primary, act as “illegal voter suppression” against Republicans in California.
Former Assemblyman Travis Allen, a favorite of the party’s far right conservative wing — who failed to get the GOP gubernatorial nomination last year — says he strongly rejects Brulte’s suggestion that demographics are at fault for the party’s 2018 battering.
“We need to start with the central matter at hand: the Democratic Party, and the special interests that control it, are the mightiest political machine in the history of American politics,’’ he said.
In California, as in the national party, Republicans continue to dismiss the stark evidence of growing ethnic voter clout in hopes of returning to “an America that was the way it used to be,’’ Sragow said. “They’re rubbing the rabbits’ foot and think they’re going to take back the homeland."


A Los Angeles-bound Alaska Airlines flight was forced to return to Seattle's airport Monday afternoon after an airport worker fell asleep and became trapped in the cargo hold.
Alaska Airlines said the flight had taken off from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport at 2:39 p.m. local time. Fourteen minutes later, the plane's captain and some first-class passengers heard banging coming from beneath the aircraft. The pilot decided to return to the airport and declared an emergency for priority landing.
"I think we’re hearing a noise from the baggage compartment," the pilot said, according to KCPQ. "Might be a person in there, so we’re going to have to come back around."
After the plane landed a ramp agent came out from the front cargo hold, which Alaska said is pressurized and temperature-controlled. The area is often where animals are kept during flights.
"Upon exiting, he told authorities he had fallen asleep," the airline said.
The man, an employee of Alaska contractor Menzies Aviation, walked off the plane. He was initially checked by medics at the airport and found to be unhurt, airport spokesman Perry Cooper said.
The man was also checked at a hospital and released, the airline said Monday evening. After his release from the hospital, he passed a drug test, airline spokesman Bryan Zidar said.
The airline did not identify the worker. A Menzies spokesman did not immediately return an email request for comment and details about the employee.
Alaska Airlines said the man started work at 5 a.m. Monday and was due off at 2:30 p.m.. He had been part of a four-person team loading baggage onto the flight.
Before the plane departed, the leader of the man's team noticed he was missing, called into the cargo hold for him and called and texted the man's cellphone but got no answer, the airline said. Co-workers thought he had finished his shift and gone home.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident, spokesman Allen Kenitzer confirmed in an e-mail.
All ramp employees undergo full criminal background checks and drug checks before hiring and are subject to random drug tests during their employment, the airline statement said.
The plane carried 170 passengers and six crew members.
The flight departed again at 3:52 p.m. and arrived at a terminal gate in Los Angeles at 6:29 p.m., more than an hour late, the airline said.


While cybersecurity should be a year-round concern for small business owners, income tax filing season can bring some particular risks, according to the IRS.
The agency says it has gotten an increase in reports of attempts to obtain employees' W-2 forms in hopes of stealing people's personal information and identities. The scams often go after employees in companies' human resources and payroll departments, but any staffer or manager could be a target. In the scam, a potential thief poses as a company executive, sending an email from an address that might look legitimate, and requests a list of employees and their W-2s.
Owners need to be sure that anyone with access to employee records including W-2s understands that they shouldn't send the forms or staffer information to anyone without checking to be sure this isn't an attempted scam. The IRS also wants companies to report W-2 scam emails to the agency, and it also wants to know if anyone has become a victim. For more information, visit the IRS website, www.irs.gov , and search for "Form W-2/SSN Data Theft: Information for Businesses and Payroll Service Providers."
The IRS also warns all taxpayers about emails that look like they're coming from the agency but that are phishing attempts aimed at getting harmful software into a PC or a server. The emails might say that the taxpayer has a refund waiting at the IRS, or that the agency needs more information from the taxpayer. There's likely to be a link or an attachment that the reader of the email is supposed to click on - and that's how thieves and hackers gain entry to a computer.
The IRS does not initiate contact with taxpayers by email, text messages or social media; it sends letters by U.S. mail. Company owners and their employees need to be on guard against all kinds of phishing scams, and no one should ever click on a link or attachment until they're completely sure the email is legitimate. And if an email says it's from the IRS, it's not.
Accountants and other tax professionals are also targets of thieves looking to steal personal information and identities, the IRS says. It has a page on its website devoted to providing paid tax preparers with information so they can protect themselves and their clients. The address is www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/protect-your-clients-protect-yourself .
Some small business owners struggle with getting their financial records organized and keeping them that way, and that makes tax filing season more difficult. SCORE, the organization that offers free advice to small companies, is sponsoring an online seminar to help owners get their books in order. It will be held Tuesday, Jan. 9 at 1 p.m. Eastern time. You can learn more and register at http://bit.ly/2CSfKwW .


The Office of Multicultural Affairs facilitates the Navigation mentoring program that pairs students with a faculty or staff member who will serve as their Navigation Partner throughout their journey at the University of Dayton. A Navigation Partner can answer questions, be a listening ear, and connect students with resources and opportunities for success.
Student engagement with faculty members outside of the classroom has been consistently found to promote student persistence, educational aspirations, and degree completion (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005). Positive faculty relationships have been shown to predict student learning and other positive outcomes for African-American, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American students (Kuh & Hu, 2001; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Tinto, 1993). We offer this program as we believe that this is an experience that all students will find valuable.
Name at least one other faculty or staff resource with whom they have met during the semester.
Name at least one campus resource.
Describe at least one leadership or involvement opportunity.
Describe at least one semester goal they set for themselves and 2-4 mini goals or actions they took to work toward achieving their goal.
CLICK HERE if you are a student and would like to be paired with a faculty or staff mentor.


Iglesia collections stashed in Cayman?
IGLESIA ni Cristo (INC) members in the United States were asked to bring $100 bills for their offerings, a former head of the church’s foreign mission said as he confirmed receiving reports about INC leaders skimming cash off collections as early as 2011.
Allegations that collections from cash offerings in the United States were being stashed possibly in the Cayman Islands have been swirling for some time, said former minister Isaias Samson Jr., who was expelled in July on suspicion that he was the one who wrote critical online stories about the INC governing council.
Samson said that back in 2011, the arrival of a roving auditor to pick up the entire collections after worship services, instead of these being deposited in a bank, raised alarm bells among some congregations in the United States.
“I know the members. They’re very close to me. And they were asking me: ‘How come offerings are being picked up immediately and the members were being asked to bring $100?’” he said in an interview last week.
Samson received the reports when he headed the church’s foreign mission from 2007 to 2012. An ordained minister for 43 years, he was a resident minister in the United States for 18 years and in Europe for two years.
When the new scheme was carried out, only amounts below $100 were deposited in the bank, Samson said.
“This scheme probably began in 2011. The members were shocked but they’re very obedient. They just rationalized that the church needed the money for the construction of chapels until they found out that commissions were being made out of the construction of chapels,” he said.
Samson was unaware if the reports reached INC executive minister Eduardo V. Manalo.
Of an estimated 3 million INC members in the Philippines and abroad, some 100,000 can be found in the United States, according to Samson.
He accused INC leaders of illegally detaining him in mid-July, a charge dismissed by state prosecutors. He had been suspected of blogging about corruption in the 101-year-old homegrown church under the pseudonym Antonio Ebangelista. He has denied this.
American Vincent Florida, a former minister in the INC Northern Virginia congregation, has reported the sect, Manalo and general auditor Glicerio Santos Jr. to the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for tax fraud.
Florida told the Inquirer he filed his report in IRS form 3949A for failure to pay taxes in August.
The form is used for reporting suspected tax fraud, including false exemptions or deductions, kickbacks, false or altered document, failure to pay tax, unreported income and organized crime.
Florida left the church on July 30 amid charges of corruption in the INC and abduction of ministers critical of the sect’s leadership.
He claimed that congregations were asked to convert cash collections into $100 bills and turn over the money to district auditors. He said only offerings in checks were deposited in the bank.
The district auditors in turn remitted the cash to Santos during pastoral visits.
He did not respond when the Inquirer sought his comment on the alleged diversion of INC collections.
INC insiders, collating testimonies from members in the United States, documented a scheme committed right under the noses of some ministers.
The offerings are converted into $100 bills at a local or parish for easier transport, collected by the district auditor or minister “under duress” and brought to a collection center, like a conveniently located chapel.
The collections are consolidated at a hotel where Santos, the INC’s chief finance officer, is billeted, or stashed in a vault at the church’s US main office in California, for eventual pickup.
The scheme is carried out during “big events”—when Manalo or Santos is around for a pastoral visit—and in locals headed by “obedient” resident ministers.
In their calendar, the major cash-generating thanksgiving services are held in the third or fourth weekend of July and in the third week of December.
Congregations in Long Beach, California; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Washington, DC; Temple Hills, Maryland; Bronx, New York; Seattle, Washington; Anaheim, California; and Corpus Christi, Texas, received verbal instructions to collect $100 bills for the thanksgiving service in July, the insiders said.
The insiders said it wouldn’t be a surprise to find a huge drop in bank deposits.
For instance, from $20,000 in December 2011 and $20,500 in December 2012, the deposits dropped to $12,000 in December 2013 in a certain local, they said.
“These are brought to the Cayman Islands through a small plane and then a big plane. The plane is registered in Cayman,” Samson said, citing reports from members in the United States.
The transport of money allegedly by the church-owned Airbus could not be confirmed.
Florida alleged that Manalo, Santos and other INC leaders had managed to stay under the radar for years because they carried the cash on a private plane that they used for their regular pastoral visits to the United States.


RACIST supporters at Colchester United have been blasted by Burnley boss Stan Ternent who claims they almost forced Ian Wright to quit the game after just two matches in the Second Division.
In his autobiography Stan The Man, Ternent describes Layer Road as an "Essex fleapit" and accuses U's fans of hurling "the foulest racist abuse I'd ever heard at a football match".
Ternent was furious after former England striker Ian Wright MBE was subjected to the tirade of abuse during a Second Division game in February 2000.
Colchester United made a full and unreserved apology after the incident and have worked tirelessly to eradicate the racist problem at their ground.
Marie Partner, the U's chief executive, last night said: "At the time, the club dealt with the incident in the appropriate manner and made a full apology to Ian Wright. With that in mind, we feel it is a shame that Mr Ternent – who has a reputation for being an extremely professional manager – has to stoop to that level to sell books and we will not be drawn into making similar comments."
It was only Wright's second game for Burnley where he joined after suffering abuse in Scotland while playing for Celtic.
He wrote: "Whether running out for Arsenal at Wembley or for us in an Essex fleapit, with his jokes and gold-toothed smile, he gave the impression it didn't matter a damn."
He went on to describe the appalling abuse Wright suffered at Layer Road.
"Throughout each of the previous 90 minutes the Colchester crowd hurled at Wrighty the foulest racist abuse I'd ever heard at a football match.
"My face was red with shame as I stood on the touchline, powerless to stop the narrow-minded scum chanting sick songs at one of England's greatest players.
"The pride I'd felt for Ian as he ran out on to the pitch in Burnley colours rapidly became embarrassment.
"I'd persuaded him to play in a league where I believed he would be afforded dignity and respect."
He said that all the small section of racist supporters had to offer was "jealousy, bile and bitter insults based on his skin colour."
They "had had the chance to watch one of the most talented players our country has ever produced yet they chose to barrack him instead", he said.
Ternent goes on to explain how Wright called him to say he wanted to quit because of the abuse but was eventually persuaded not to by Ternent and others but only played 17 times for Burnley before packing the game in to work in the media.
It is not the first time Colchester supporters have been labelled racist, among those left unhappy at a visit to Layer Road were Luton Town supporters who complained players and fans had been targeted.
Ms Partner added: "Colchester United has one of the best records for crowd behaviour, indeed last season saw the U's have one of the lowest policing bills in the Nationwide League. Further to that, our record of just six arrests was again amongst the lowest, with none of those being for racist abuse.
"We are proud of that fact and are keen backers of the Kick Racism Out of Football scheme. In fact, our Community Sports Trust provided sporting and educational projects for thousands of local children, which cut across social, educational and racial boundaries."