In its 1996 year-end report, released today, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (the Board) concludes that additional studies beyond those planned for the viability assessment (VA) will be needed to evaluate the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a potential site for a permanent repository.
Arlo and Jackie Guthrie in 1999. On Sunday, Jackie died of cancer. The couple was married for 43 years. (AP)
Folk singer Arlo Guthrie's wife of 43 years died Sunday of cancer at the couple's home in Sebastian, Fla.
"We didn't always like each other," he wrote. "From time to time there were moments when we'd have our bags packed by the door. But, there was this great love that we shared from the moment we met — a recognition — It's YOU! And we would always return to it year after year, decade after decade and I believe life after lifetime."
A Salt Lake City native, Jackie Guthrie met her future husband in 1968 while working as a cashier at the Troubadour, the Hollywood nightclub that was an epicenter for folk music at the time.
The next year, the couple bought a 250-acre property called "The Farm" that the family still owns in Washington, in western Massachusetts. They were married on the front lawn in October of that year.
The couple raised four children, and in recent years the family toured together, with Jackie working as the videographer.
But this summer, during a tour to mark the centennial birthday of Woody Guthrie, Jackie became so weak she could barely hold up the camera. In early September, she was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer.
Jackie Guthrie is survived by her four children with Arlo Guthrie and 10 grandchildren. She also is also survived by the daughter she had with prolific folkie David Crosby in the early 1960s.
According to the Manhattan court filing, the estate seeks full death benefits for Benitez (pictured) because he “died on the job based on emotional stress negligently caused by the NYPD.” (Showalter, Aaron/NY Daily News)
A sleep-deprived NYPD sergeant who grappled with bipolar disorder was driven to suicide when his supervisors stuck him on the midnight shift, according to new court papers.
Nine-year police veteran Jose Benitez hung himself on March 10, 2015 — roughly five months after the diagnosis of his mental health woes, the officer's estate charged in a 9-page Manhattan filing.
Benitez, a lifelong distance runner once hailed as the fastest cop on the force, left behind an infant son.
"He was a great officer. He graduated second in his class and just was overworked at his precinct," family lawyer Nicholas P. Iannuzzi said Friday.
"Essentially they didn't take care of him. He was diagnosed with a condition and they didn't take care of it correctly."
The court documents sought to file a late Notice of Claim in the death because of delays by the city in providing psychiatric health documents regarding Benitez.
The notices are the first step in the filing of a lawsuit against the city or its agencies, and potential plaintiffs typically have 90 days to file.
Iannuzzi argues the clock only started running from the end of this past November when the first FDNY medical files were turned over.
According to the Manhattan court filing, the estate seeks full death benefits for Benitez because he "died on the job based on emotional stress negligently caused by the NYPD."
Police brass, despite knowledge of Benitez's mental health problem, "assigned him to a position that would become the trigger for his eventual demise," the court papers charged.
The 30-year-old cop, after several hospital stints, was sent to monitor surveillance cameras at a city housing development in Brooklyn, the estate alleged.
While experts say regular, quality sleep is important for bipolar patients, the NYPD had Benitez "working through the night ... with no sleep," said the filing against both the city and the NYPD.
The police department declined comment, while the NYC Law Department said it would review the court filing.
A July 2013 story in the Queens Gazette detailed how Benitez began running at age 8, and continued even after he moved up through the police ranks to become a sergeant at the 48th Precinct in the Bronx.
NYPD hunts sex assault suspect who attacked 29-year-old woman in Morningside Heights - NY Daily News
The NYPD has released images of a man suspected of sexually assaulting a woman in an upper Manhattan park.
Cops say the broad-shouldered suspect pounced on the 29-year-old woman as she walked along a path in Morningside Park near W. 116th St. about 6 p.m. Sunday.
The suspect is described as a man in his 20s wearing a black sweatshirt, black doo rag and blue jeans.
A version of this archives appears in print on October 7, 1888, on Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: CITY AND SUBURBAN NEWS; NEW-YORK. BROOKLYN. WESTCHESTER COUNTY. LONG ISLAND. STATEN ISLAND. NEW-JERSEY. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A Former President Jimmy Carter predicted today that President Reagan would not debate Walter F. Mondale, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, in the fall campaign.
In an interview on the CBS ''Morning News,'' program Mr. Carter said that he expected the President ''will hide behind all kinds of excuses to avoid debating'' with Mr. Mondale.
But a White House spokesman responded in sharply that Mr. Carter, more than most Ameicans, appreciated the danger of debating Ronald Reagan.
''The President has said he believes in the principle of debating his opponentm'' said Peter Roussel, ''and you can either believe the President or Jimmy Carter,'' Mr. Roussel added.
A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 1984, on Page B00028 of the National edition with the headline: Carter Predicts That Reagan Will Avoid Debating Mondale. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Tim Breene has said he would resign as chief executive of Eurocom WCRS Della Femina Ball, the parent agency of Della Femina, McNamee WCRS in New York.
The move resulted from a decision to relocate E.W.D.B.'s headquarters from London to Paris, said Louise McNamee, Della Femina's president. Mr. Breene was a top executive of the WCRS Group last year when WCRS sold a majority interest in its ad agencies to Eurocom S.A. in Paris.
Pierre de Plas, Eurocom's chief operating officer, will replace Mr. Breene as chief executive of E.W.D.B. Jean de Yturbe, the chief executive of HDM Europe, another international agency in which Eurocom owns a minority interest, is joining the parent company to help manage its international network.
A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 1990, on Page D00021 of the National edition with the headline: THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING; Eurocom Head Is Quitting. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 1990, on Page D00019 of the National edition with the headline: SNC Group Inc. reports earnings for Qtr to March 31. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The Fifth Symphony is often described as the work in which Prokofiev definitively left behind the industrial sonorities of his Parisian phase and embraced Soviet optimism. It is nothing of the kind. Under a veneer of tonal lyricism, the same glinting gears grind away, most particularly in the infernal-machine music of the finale. I cannot comprehend how people hear unambiguous uplift in this work; to my ears, it is a far darker piece than the Shostakovich Fifth, whose ambivalence is so often touted.
Kurt Masur, conducting the New York Philharmonic in the Prokofiev Fifth on Thursday night, took the more traditional view. He softened edges and added the shadings of a humanist statement. It was an effective reading within its bounds, although I thought Mr. Masur lost touch with Prokofiev's idiom at several crucial moments, notably the transition back to the "A" section of the Scherzo, which started too loud and failed to gather sinister momentum. He tended to overlook the flare-ups at the ends of phrases or the subtle shifts of pulse that give this symphony its continually seething texture.
More satisfying was a set of Dvorak concert overtures, the trilogy that the composer planned to call "Nature, Life and Love" but later divided into "In Nature's Realm," "Carnival" and "Othello." It is an important novelty to hear them together, although I think Dvorak had a point in keeping them apart; "Othello" makes for a somewhat disappointing finale, ill nourished in its primary material and long-winded in its development. Mr. Masur drew a glorious sound from the orchestra, sinewy and startlingly tight; the hell-bent close of "Carnival" took the breath away. ALEX ROSS
A version of this review appears in print on October 3, 1994, on Page C00013 of the National edition with the headline: In Performance; CLASSICAL MUSIC. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
WHY has there been so much fuss about New York City’s attempt to impose a soda ban, or more precisely, a ban on large-size “sugary drinks”? After all, people can still get as much soda as they want. This isn’t Prohibition. It’s just that getting it would take slightly more effort. So, why is this such a big deal?
Obviously, it’s not about soda. It’s because such a ban suggests that sometimes we need to be stopped from doing foolish stuff, and this has become, in contemporary American politics, highly controversial, no matter how trivial the particular issue. (Large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity? Really?)
Americans, even those who generally support government intervention in our daily lives, have a reflexive response to being told what to do, and it’s not a positive one. It’s this common desire to be left alone that prompted the Mississippi Legislature earlier this month to pass a ban on bans — a law that forbids municipalities to place local restrictions on food or drink.
We have a vision of ourselves as free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life. Give us complete liberty, and, barring natural disasters, we’ll end up where we want to be. It’s a nice vision, one that makes us feel proud of ourselves. But it’s false.
John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859 that the only justifiable reason for interfering in someone’s freedom of action was to prevent harm to others. According to Mill’s “harm principle,” we should almost never stop people from behavior that affects only themselves, because people know best what they themselves want.
Mill was wrong about that, though. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.
Research by psychologists and behavioral economists, including the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, identified a number of areas in which we fairly dependably fail. They call such a tendency a “cognitive bias,” and there are many of them — a lot of ways in which our own minds trip us up.
For example, we suffer from an optimism bias, that is we tend to think that however likely a bad thing is to happen to most people in our situation, it’s less likely to happen to us — not for any particular reason, but because we’re irrationally optimistic. Because of our “present bias,” when we need to take a small, easy step to bring about some future good, we fail to do it, not because we’ve decided it’s a bad idea, but because we procrastinate.
We also suffer from a status quo bias, which makes us value what we’ve already got over the alternatives, just because we’ve already got it — which might, of course, make us react badly to new laws, even when they are really an improvement over what we’ve got. And there are more.
The crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to take in the relevant information and choose accordingly. It’s not quite the simple ignorance Mill was talking about, but it turns out that our minds are more complicated than Mill imagined. Like the guy about to step through the hole in the bridge, we need help.
Is it always a mistake when someone does something imprudent, when, in this case, a person chooses to chug 32 ounces of soda? No. For some people, that’s the right choice. They don’t care that much about their health, or they won’t drink too many big sodas, or they just really love having a lot of soda at once.
But laws have to be sensitive to the needs of the majority. That doesn’t mean laws should trample the rights of the minority, but that public benefit is a legitimate concern, even when that may inconvenience some.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Three Cheers for the Nanny State. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
I grew up in Manchester, Conn. When I was a high school freshman, my piano and organ teacher, Frederic E. Werner, took me to New York City. I did not appreciate just how special the experience was until many years later.
Everything was new: my longest trip from home (142 miles at the time), my first hotel (the Taft, according to the hanger still in my closet), my first restaurant (the Brass Rail), the cigarette-puffing billboard in Times Square and the Queen Mary, which was docked in town.
But the highlights of our visit were a live radio broadcast (television was in its infancy), two Broadway shows and a live stage show at Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Werner bought our tickets, mentioning in passing that there was another show that he had wanted to see. But that one would be opening on Thursday, and we were returning home on Wednesday.
All I recall of the radio show was the packed house, the man who came on stage and skillfully warmed up the audience, and the actor who dropped each page on the floor as he finished reading it.
The Broadway shows were “Where’s Charley?” (with Ray Bolger) and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (the original production). The show at Radio City featured a spectacular opening with theater organs on each side of the stage playing at the same time.
While double-checking these dates, I discovered, for the first time, the name of the show we missed by a day. The year was 1949. The date was Thursday, April 7. The show was “South Pacific.”
Shannon Falls is composed of a series of cliffs, rising 335 meters, and a system of pools at the top of the falls. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police recovered the bodies of three people who had fallen from one of the pools.CreditCreditGregory Simpson/ BC Parks
Built in 1962, this building consists of 6 floors, made up of apartments, none of which is currently for sale, and none are available for rent. Located in Bronx's North Riverdale neighborhood, features of this building include a garage, laundry room and pool.
A fungus responsible for deci­mating amphibian populations around the world has struck one of New Zealand’s rare native frogs. Researchers working in the Coromandel Range have found a dead Archey’s frog with skin lesions, suggesting that it died from a chytrid fungal infection caused by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.
Chytrid fungi are found mainly in fresh water, but the group has estuarine and soil-dwelling representatives as well. Some species live in the guts of herbivores and some are parasites and saprophytes of algae, plants, nematodes, insects and even other chytrids
B. dendrobatidis is the only species known to parasitise vertebrates. It infects an animal’s epidermal cells, causing a thickening of the outer layer of the skin, but it is not known how that change leads to death.
Globally, two amphibian orders, the Anura and Caudata, comprising 14 families and 93 species, are known to be infected by this fungus. Diseased species have been found in Africa, South America, Central America, North America, Europe, Australia, and now Oceania. The first record was from North America in 1974. Australia, where the fungus arrived in 1978, has been the hardest hit, with 46 species affected, including eight listed as endangered and five as vulnerable.
The fungus was first found in New Zealand in 1999 in two well-established Australian species, the southern bell frog and the green and golden bell frog.
Archey’s frog is found only in the Moehau and Colville Ranges on the Coromandel Peninsula and at Whareorino Forest west of Te Kuiti. The species was in decline even before this current fungal problem was discovered.
“Frog populations have been decreasing worldwide since the 1980s, and New Zealand is unfortunately following the global trend,” says Department of Conservation officer Andrew Harrison. “Chytrid fungus has the potential to decimate New Zealand frogs if it spreads.”
He said that more information was required on the fungus, particularly its method of transfer from introduced frogs to native species. Other research is centred on detecting the fungus in water and on vegetation.
Harrison says New Zealand’s leiopelmid frogs are “of huge scientific interest interna­tionally, as they are the most ancient frogs left on the planet, survivors of the Jurassic period some 200 million years ago.”
Because the fungus is a possible biosecurity issue, a technical advisory group to the Ministry of Agriculture has been set up. Victoria University researcher Ben Bell, a member of the group, says, “The next step is to survey the extent of popula­tion decline and to find out if the survivors have been infected.”
The group is anxious to stop the fungus spreading to New Zealand’s other three native species, particularly Hochstetter’s frog, which shares native forest habitat with Archey’s frog.
Bell says the group is considering moving some frogs to a safe facility where they may be bred in captiv­ity. Meanwhile, Department of Conservation workers are taking strict precautions when visiting frog habitats to try to minimise the spread of the fungus.
Harrison said an infected frog would appear emaciated and lethargic, often with abnormalities of the skin or eyes. “The fungus infects the skin of frogs. We’re not yet sure whether it suffocates them or kills them as they absorb the toxins released by the fungus.”
While some funding has been directed at chytrid research in the United States and Australia, many ques­tions remain unanswered. For instance, no one knows why the fungus, which belongs to a group that has been in existence for 550 million years, has suddenly come to be toxic to frogs and tadpoles. One theory speculates that the pathogen is a mutated form. Other researchers suggest that climate change, such as drier conditions, are causing amphibians to crowd together at water sources, helping the fungus to spread.
Other factors have been blamed for some frog die-offs, such as uncontrolled chemical use. But nearly half the dead frogs handed in during a three-year Austral­ian survey were diagnosed with chytridiomycosis, showing no other disease and no evidence of depressed immunity.
Chytridiomycosis has recently been reported in amphibians collected for the global pet trade. Given that 180,000 animals of at least 21 endangered European species were imported into the UK alone between 1981 and 1990, there is huge potential for chytrid infec­tion to spread still further.