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Tennis Courts Map Directory > Latest News > 2019 > October > 12
Daniil Medvedev vs Alexander Zverev Shanghai 2019 F Preview and Prediction
Daniil Medvedev looks to continue his incredible second half of the season on Sunday when he takes on Alexander Zverev…
Darcis Announces Retirement Plans
Belgian breaks the news on Saturday in Antwerp
After 16 years on Tour, Belgian Steve Darcis is bringing his fruitful career to a close.
The 35-year-old confirmed he plans to retire after next year's Australian Open. He shared the news during Saturday's draw ceremony at the European Open in Antwerp, which will be his final tournament on home soil.
"I made a successful comeback in 2019, but after Wimbledon, I got problems again with my shoulder. Mentally and physically, I'm no longer at my best," Darcis said. "Plenty of strong career moments will stay with me forever and I hope to end the year in a nice way. This also goes for my last tournament here in Antwerp."
Goffin Leads Home Hopes, Murray Debuts In Antwerp; When Is The Draw & More
Darcis enjoyed a breakout year in 2017, reaching a career-high of No. 38 in the ATP Rankings, but was forced to miss the 2018 season due to an elbow injury. He returned this January and recorded his first ATP Tour semi-final in seven years at his first tournament back in Pune.
The Belgian has had several high-profile wins, but his biggest to date came against Rafael Nadal in the opening round at Wimbledon in 2013. At No. 135 in the ATP Rankings, Darcis was the lowest-ranked player at the time to defeat Nadal in a Grand Slam.
Darcis has received main draw singles and doubles wild cards this year in Antwerp. He'll take on Frenchman Gilles Simon in the opening round and team with fellow Belgian Arnaud Bovy to face Maximo Gonzalez/Pablo Cuevas.
Preview: Medvedev Seeks New Beginning Against Zverev In Shanghai Final
Kubot/Melo face Pavic/Soares in Sunday doubles final
Monumental changes can happen in a year on the ATP Tour. Fifth seed Alexander Zverev was the highest-ranked player on Tour under age 24 just 12 months ago, but third seed Daniil Medvedev has assumed that role with his inspired tennis this season. The pair will add a new chapter to their budding rivalry when they meet on Sunday in the championship match of the Rolex Shanghai Masters.
"I did say before this year and during this year in the beginning that Sascha was the best in our [age] group. He won three [ATP] Masters [1000 titles] when none of us were even close to doing this," Medvedev said. "The positions have changed a little bit, so I think I can contest him now."
When it comes to FedEx ATP Head2Head rivalries, numbers can sometimes be deceiving. Zverev holds a flawless 4-0 record over Medvedev and will take extra confidence from all of their matches being contested on hard courts. But their most recent clash came last year in Toronto, when Medvedev was a qualifier sitting at No. 68 in the ATP Rankings.
Fourteen months later, Medvedev arrived in Shanghai as the more in-form player between the pair. He's at a career-high standing of No. 4 in the ATP Rankings and has added five additional ATP Tour titles on his resume since their Toronto meeting, including his first ATP Masters 1000 crown in Cincinnati (d. Goffin) and maiden Grand Slam final at the US Open (l. to Nadal). He's also through to his sixth consecutive tour-level final and is only the fifth active player to achieve the feat.
Most Tour-level Finals In 2019
Player Finals
Daniil Medvedev 9
Novak Djokovic 5
Rafael Nadal 5
Roger Federer 5
Dominic Thiem 5
Stefanos Tsitsipas 5
"He's different this year than he was the previous years. The last time we played was in Toronto last year. So still a while ago, and he's been playing some unbelievable tennis," Zverev said. "In the past few months, he's probably the best player in the world, making it to six finals in a row, winning an [ATP] Masters [1000 title], making it to the US Open final. He's definitely been playing the best tennis of his life."
The 23-year-old Medvedev continues to add to his astounding season. He has more wins (58) and more appearances in finals (9) than anyone else on Tour this year. The Russian has prevailed in 28 of his past 31 matches and is currently on an eight-match winning streak, all of which have come in straight sets. Medvedev believes his progress this season will enable him to approach Sunday's final against Zverev with a clean slate.
Zverev On Medvedev: 'He's Probably The Best Player In The World'
"I think the [record] doesn't mean anything. It's a new match, new situations," Medvedev said. "This year, I had a lot of matches against opponents I don't like. I remember one against Lucas Pouille. I was 4-0 down in the [FedEx ATP Head2Head] series and still won the match in Queen's Club."
Medvedev's return game has been on point and will need to be equally impressive against Zverev. The third seed converted 10 of 21 break point chances this week, but Zverev's serve is the toughest he'll face in Shanghai. Merely blocking a return back will result in a prompt winner from the German.
Who will win the latest @FedEx ATP Head2Head match between these players?#RolexShMasters
— ATP Tour (@atptour) October 12, 2019
Although Zverev is the first to admit that portions of his season haven't met his lofty standards, he is back to his best tennis in Shanghai. The German scored his first Top 10 victory in a thrilling quarter-final over Roger Federer and put on a dominant display in his semi-final win over Matteo Berrettini,.
The fifth seed dropped just seven points on serve (40/47) against the Italian and didn't face a break point. It's a stark contrast to the serving woes he experienced during the North American hard-court swing, which included 20 double faults in his Cincinnati loss to #NextGenATP Serbian Miomir Kecmanovic.
But Medvedev possesses a far different style of play to Zverev's previous two opponents. Zverev beat Federer and Berrettini to the punch in battles of first-strike tennis, but will need to be more patient against Medvedev and accept that the Russian will retrieve many shots that would be winners against most players.
Sunday's final will also be crucial for Zverev as he looks to qualify for the season-ending Nitto ATP Finals, held from 10-17 November at The O2 in London. Zverev, the defending champion, is currently seventh place in the ATP Race to London (2,855) and holds a healthy lead over eighth-placed Berrettini (2,525). He'll pick up an additional 400 points with a win over Medvedev.
ATP Race To London (after Shanghai semi-finals)
Player Race Points
7. Alexander Zverev 2,855
8. Matteo Berrettini 2,525
9. Roberto Bautista Agut 2,485
10. David Goffin 2,325
The doubles final will feature second seeds and defending champions Lukasz Kubot/Marcelo Melo against eighth seeds Mate Pavic/Bruno Soares. Kubot/Melo defeated Soares/Jamie Murray in last year's final.
Read More: Kubot/Melo Reach Third Straight Shanghai Final
The second seeds seek their second ATP Tour doubles title of the year after prevailing in August in Winston-Salem (d. Monroe/Sandgren). They've finished runner-up at three other events including Beijing (l. to Dodig/Polasek), Halle (l. to Klaasen/Venus) and Indian Wells (l. to Mektic/Zeballos). Kubot/Melo qualified for the Nitto ATP Finals on Friday with their quarter-final win over Ivan Dodig/Filip Polasek.
Pavic/Soares, who haven't dropped a set this week, are looking for their first ATP Tour doubles title as a team. Pavic prevailed in Geneva (w/Marach), while Soares lifted titles in Sydney (w/J. Murray) and Stuttgart (w/Peers).
Zverev On Medvedev: 'He's Probably The Best Player In The World'
The German will play for his fourth ATP Masters 1000 crown on Sunday
Three-time ATP Masters 1000 champion Alexander Zverev takes a 4-0 FedEx ATP Head2Head series lead over Daniil Medvedev into Sunday's Rolex Shanghai Masters final. But the German knows that the Russian, who is now ranked higher than him, is not the same player he was in those four matches.
"In the past few months, he's probably the best player in the world, making it to six finals in a row, winning a Masters [1000], making it to the US Open final," Zverev said. "So he's definitely been playing the best tennis of his life."
Zverev has won eight of his nine previous sets against Medvedev. But this year's Cincinnati champion has now made six consecutive tour-level finals, becoming only the fifth active player to do so.
"He's different this year than he was the previous years," Zverev said. "Yeah, I've got what, 4-0? Whatever. But it was quite a while ago. Last time we played was in Toronto last year. So still a while ago, and he's been playing some unbelievable tennis."
The German has found some of his best tennis this week, too, reaching his first Masters 1000 final of the year and his sixth overall. He had not advanced past the quarter-finals at this level or at a Grand Slam this year.
But in the quarter-finals, he beat Roger Federer for his first Top 10 victory of 2019 and then followed that with a straight-sets triumph against Matteo Berrettini, a fellow contender in the ATP Race To London. Zverev believes he knows what has made the difference in Shanghai.
"My serve, obviously also the mental factor of coming back after you beat Roger and still being focussed and playing still good tennis," Zverev said. "It was a much different match than against Roger. I mean, he's obviously serving 230 [km/h] sometimes and not a lot of rallies. But when we got into the rallies I felt okay. I take a lot of positives from this into the final tomorrow."
Zverev did not face a break point against Berrettini, the recent US Open semi-finalist. That was a marked improvement for the World No. 6, who was broken twice in each of his first three matches this week. And perhaps most importantly, he only struck one double fault, a far cry from the 17 he hit in his Flushing Meadows loss against Diego Schwartzman and the 20 he committed in a defeat to Miomir Kecmanovic in Cincinnati.
For Medvedev's part, he knows the level of tennis Zverev is capable of, and he has held the 22-year-old in the highest regard.
"I did say before this year and during this year in the beginning that Sascha was the best in our, let's say, Next Gen group. He won three Masters [1000 titles] when none of us were even close to doing this," Medvedev said. "Positions has changed a little bit, so I think I can contest him right now."
Zverev's big week has also put him in a good position in the ATP Race To Milan. He has moved up from eighth place to seventh with his Shanghai efforts, and Zverev is 330 points ahead of eighth-placed Berrettini.
"It feels great, obviously. I felt like I've played some decent tennis this week and being in a Masters 1000 final here in Shanghai is also something very special for me," Zverev said. "I'm looking forward to [the final] and hopefully I can play some good tennis tomorrow."
Learn What Medvedev 'Could Never Dream Of'
Learn What Medvedev 'Could Never Dream Of'
World No. 4 discusses finals streak in Shanghai
Daniil Medvedev became just the fifth active player to reach six straight tour-level championship matches on Saturday at the Rolex Shanghai Masters with his straight-sets win against Stefanos Tsitsipas.
But following his match, the Russian was surprised to learn that he still has a ways to go to catch two of those men: Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. While Andy Murray (7) and Rafael Nadal's (9) personal-best finals streaks are not that far off, the Western & Southern Open champion will need to reach another 11 consecutive finals to match the record tallies of this year's Wimbledon finalists.
"They have 17 in a row? Wow. That's far ahead," said Medvedev. "I do think it's impossible, but there are two guys who have done it, which I actually didn't know. It is just unbelievable. I don't have any words to describe this."
Medvedev Extends Finals Streak In Shanghai
Medvedev's achievements over the past three months have catapulted the Russian to a career-high No. 4 in the ATP Rankings. The 23-year-old has compiled a 28-3 record since returning to hard-court action at the Citi Open in July, with his only losses in that period coming in finals. Alongside trophies in Cincinnati and St. Petersburg, Medvedev finished as runner-up in Washington, D.C. (l. to Kyrgios), Montreal (l. to Nadal) and at the US Open (l. to Nadal).
"For myself, making six [finals] in a row — including three ATP Masters 1000's and one Grand Slam — is something I could never dream of, to be honest," said Medvedev. "But I want to keep the momentum going and hope I can make it to seven or eight. Let's see about 17 later."
Medvedev's consistent results at the biggest events in recent months have made him one of the hottest players on the ATP Tour. If Medvedev were to claim his second Masters 1000 trophy on Sunday, he would overtake third-placed Roger Federer in the ATP Race To London.
"I have to say it's a compliment [for people] to say [I will be the next big name after Novak, Rafa and Roger], and I'm happy about it because [it is] my results that make people talk in this way," said Medvedev. "After, the most important is going to be continuing these results, this game that I'm showing, because the moment I drop, people forget good things quite fast. So I know that, and I want to work and improve every day."
With a win in Sunday's final, Medvedev would join Zverev as only the second non-Big Four member to win multiple Masters 1000 trophies in a single season since David Nalbandian in 2007. But first, he will need to overcome the German for the first time in five FedEx ATP Head2Head meetings.
However, the Russian has come a long way since facing Zverev most recently at last year's Roger's Cup. On that occasion, Medvedev was contesting only his second Masters 1000 third-round match while occupying the No. 68 position in the ATP Rankings.
Medvedev is aware that he will need to break new ground to get his hands on the Shanghai trophy, but that challenge is something the World No. 4 has become rather accustomed to in recent months.
Teenager Coco Gauff reaches first WTA final in Linz
Coco Gauff is through to her maiden WTA final as the teenager defeated Andrea Petkovic of Germany 6-4 6-4 in the semi-final of the Linz Open.
The 15-year-old becomes the youngest female to reach a final since Czech player Nicole Vaidisova in 2004.
But she only got into the event as a lucky loser after an injury to former Wimbledon winner Angelique Kerber.
"This is crazy, I thought I was out of the tournament in qualifying," said the American.
Currently ranked 110th, Gauff showed real determination to save nine out of the 10 break points she faced, before she sealed victory on her second match point.
In the final on Sunday, the girl from Florida will play either former French Open winner Jelena Ostapenko of Lativa or Russia's Ekaterina Alexandrova.
Zverev Beats Berrettini To Reach Shanghai Final, Bolster Race Hopes
German to face Medvedev in the Shanghai final
Reigning Nitto ATP Finals champion Alexander Zverev arrived at the Rolex Shanghai Masters in eighth place in the ATP Race To London, with little breathing room. But after already defeating Roger Federer on Friday in the quarter-finals, the German has put himself in strong position to qualify for the season finale for the third straight season.
Zverev beat fellow Race contender Matteo Berrettini 6-3, 6-4 on Saturday evening to reach the Shanghai final for the first time. The 22-year-old now has 2,855 points in the Race, putting him 330 points ahead of eighth-placed Berrettini (2,525) and 370 points in front of ninth-placed Roberto Bautista Agut (2,485).
"It feels great, obviously. I felt like I've played some decent tennis this week and being in a Masters 1000 final here in Shanghai is also something very special for me," said Zverev, who will face in-form Russian Daniil Medvedev for the title. "I'm looking forward to it and hopefully I can play some good tennis tomorrow."
It is the 11-time ATP Tour champion's first ATP Masters 1000 final of the season, having not advanced past the quarter-finals at this level this year. Zverev dismissed the first-time Masters 1000 semi-finalist, Berrettini, to take a 2-1 lead in their FedEx ATP Head2Head series.
"Generally speaking against Matteo this year it's been very, very difficult. I lost to him already once and he's been playing some Top 10, Top 8 tennis this year," Zverev said. "I wish him nothing but the best to qualify for London as well and we'll see how it goes. But he's been playing some decent tennis, so it was going to be difficult no matter what."
Zverev put on a serving clinic in the early going, never allowing the big-hitting Italian to gain an aggressive posture in his return games. The fifth seed continued to put pressure on the 11th seed with his serve, staying on the front foot.
The three-time Masters 1000 titlist lost only two service points in the first set, benefitting from a forehand unforced error off Berrettini's racquet to break for 3-1, and he never looked back, crushing an overhead to clinch the opener.
Berrettini played cleaner tennis to start the second set, not allowing Zverev to gain an early lead. The Italian was especially successful with his drop shot, but that shot was what haunted him in the set's most crucial moment. After he recovered from 0/40 at 4-4, Berrettini faced another break point and used his drop shot, smartly following it to the net. But the 23-year-old was overly anxious to go after the ensuing forehand volley, swatting it long.
And Zverev did not let slip his opportunity, letting out a huge roar after serving out the match to clinch his 67-minute victory. The German struck 11 aces and did not face a break point. He takes a 4-0 FedEx ATP Head2Head series lead into his showdown with Medvedev, although their most recent meeting came more than a year ago, in Toronto last year.
"We've played some fantastic matches, all going my way until now. I hope tomorrow that will not change. But he's been playing some fantastic tennis, sixth final in a row, US Open finalist, won Cincinnati," Zverev said. "He's probably the best player in the world right now. I hope it's just going to be a good match tomorrow."
All four semi-finalists in Shanghai were under the age of 24 for the first time at a Masters 1000 event since 1999 Hamburg.
Medvedev Extends Final Streak In Shanghai
Russian to face Zverev or Berrettini in championship match
After a series of surprises on Friday, one trend continued at the Rolex Shanghai Masters on Saturday: Daniil Medvedev's final streak.
The Russian advanced to his sixth straight tour-level final after beating Stefanos Tsitsipas 7-6(5), 7-5 in Shanghai, extending his FedEx ATP Head2Head series lead against the Greek to 5-0. Medvedev saved four of five break points throughout the one-hour, 36-minute clash to reach an ATP Tour-leading ninth final of the season.
Since arriving at the Citi Open in July, Medvedev has compiled a 28-3 record. The reigning Cincinnati and St. Petersburg titlist's only losses during that period have occurred in championship matches. Medvedev also improves to 58-17 this year, which includes a Tour-leading 45 hard-court wins and 21 ATP Masters 1000 victories.
Medvedev will meet one of two Nitto ATP Finals contenders in the championship match, with Alexander Zverev and Matteo Berrettini meeting in the second semi-final. The 23-year-old is yet to defeat Zverev in four FedEx ATP Head2Head encounters, but claimed victory in his only previous clash against Berrettini at last year's BNP Paribas Open.
With the opening eight games dominated by serve, Tsitsipas created the first break opportunity at 4-4. The Greek dictated the first point of the game with a series of powerful forehands, but was unable to convert three consecutive break points. From 0/40, Medvedev served with power and precision to earn five straight points and a 5-4 lead.
The tie-break followed a similar trend, with the first 10 points won by the server. But Medvedev pounced at 5/5 to take the set. The Russian pushed Tsitsipas off balance with a deep second-serve return to gain a mini-break and captured the set as his opponent misfired on his backhand side.
Medvedev pounced early in the second set to increase his advantage, breaking in style to secure a 2-1 lead. The Western & Southern Open champion created his first break-point opportunity of the match with a crosscourt forehand passing shot on his return, before breaking serve with a pinpoint backhand passing shot after strong defensive play.
Serving for the match at 5-4, Medvedev committed four errors to concede his serve. But the US Open finalist quickly put the disappointment behind him, breaking Tsitsipas with a looping forehand return before booking his final spot with a commanding serve-volley combination.
Tsitsipas was bidding to reach his second final in as many weeks on the ATP Tour. The 21-year-old, who confirmed his debut appearance at the Nitto ATP Finals on Friday, advanced to the China Open final in Beijing last week (l. to Thiem).
Melo/Kubot Reach Third Straight Shanghai Final
Second seeds to meet Pavic/Soares in final
Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo snapped Nicolas Mahut and Edouard Roger-Vasselin's six-match win streak on Saturday, beating the Frenchmen 6-2, 6-4 to advance to their third straight championship match at the Rolex Shanghai Masters.
The Polish-Brazilian team won 85 per cent of their first-serve points (28/33) and did not face a break point during the 67-minute encounter against last week's Tokyo titlists. Kubot and Melo are now one win away from becoming the first team to win back-to-back titles in this ATP Masters 1000 tournament's history.
After falling to Henri Kontinen and John Peers in the 2017 championship match, the second seeds claimed their maiden Shanghai trophy as a team last year with a straight-sets victory against Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares. Melo will try to claim his fourth Shanghai crown, having also lifted the trophy in 2013 (w/Dodig) and 2015 (w/Klaasen).
Kubot and Melo will face eighth seeds Mate Pavic and Soares for the title. Pavic and Soares overcame Jamie Murray and Neal Skupski 7-5, 6-4 in 85 minutes to reach their first final as a team.
Pavic and Soares began their partnership at the Fever-Tree Championships in June and have compiled an 11-7 record on the ATP Tour. The Croatian-Brazilian pairing is yet to drop a set in Shanghai this week.
This will be the first FedEx ATP Head2Head meeting between the two teams. Melo and Soares won four ATP Tour doubles titles together from 2010-12.
GB's Watson into first WTA final since 2016
British number two Heather Watson has reached her first WTA final for three years by beating Veronika Kudermetova in the Tianjin Open semi-finals.
Watson, 27, beat Kudermetova of Russia – ranked 80 places above her – 6-1 6-4 in China.
The world number 125 will face Sweden's Rebecca Peterson, ranked 59th, in Sunday's final – her first since the Monterrey Open in March 2016.
"Hopefully I can play as well as I managed today," said Watson.
After saving four match points and needing more than three hours to beat Magda Linette of Poland in the quarter-finals, things were a lot more comfortable against 22-year-old Kudermetova on Saturday.
Watson broke serve twice to take the first set inside 25 minutes and secured the all-important break at 2-2 in the second, before closing out another impressive victory.
Her form this week means she is guaranteed to climb back inside the world's top 100, while she will look to maintain her 100% success rate in WTA finals, having won at Monterrey in 2016, Hobart in 2015 and Osaka in 2012.


This Lyric is about me, not knowing what I wanted to be, when i left school.
Other pupils start laughing at me and I don't why, they are taking the piss out of me.
So I beat him up and the teacher suspended us both.


text:
THE PHI BETA KAPPA PROSTITUTE
Joel LangTHE HARTFORD COURANT
After work one icy afternoon a month ago, a forty-ish woman named Diane Pellegrino Fabricant climbed to an unused office above the garage at her home in Stonington and stooped to enter a storage crawl space. There, she began to search for the meager worldly goods left behind by her younger sister, Renee.
Soon two musical instrument cases, one black, one brown, both battered, came flying through the crawl space door.
"Those are her flutes," Diane called between grunts as she continued to heave boxes around, invisible inside the crawl space. As a child, gifted with perfect pitch, Renee learned to play the piano, the violin and the clarinet, as well as the flute, with equal ease. Diane already had told the story of being in a piano recital together, when she was about 6 and Renee was about 4.
"I remember someone saying, 'She's not turning the pages!' She didn't have to," Diane had said. "She could turn her back on the piano and know the music. She was doing a Beethoven piece. I was doing some kind of bumblebee piece."
The flutes were followed onto the carpeted office floor by a plastic basket that Diane said Renee called her "box of life." It contained mementos of special meaning. Renee had not treated them carefully, however. The contents of her "box of life" were a jumble.
Diane stuck in her hand and pulled out a fistful of photographs. One showed the older man Renee had lived with in Las Vegas in the mid-1970s soon after she graduated from a Catholic girl's high school. She had tied a bow of pink yarn in his hair, and he stares glumly at the camera. Another photo, taken two decades later, showed her hugely pregnant, wearing only blue tights that did not begin to cover her belly. Renee, breasts bared, grinning, is giving the camera "the finger."
Past the photos, Diane came to Renee's diploma collection. Two bespoke achievements anyone would be proud of. In 1981, Renee had graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Connecticut College, the nationally recognized liberal arts school in New London. In 1987, she graduated from the University of Connecticut Law School in Hartford and then proceeded to pass the bar exams both here and in New York. But the diplomas appeared to have just been dumped in the "box of life." The law school diploma in particular looked mistreated. It was brown and stained, as if it had been rained on.
Near them was a third diploma of the sort someone might buy in a novelty shop. It bestowed upon Renee the title of Happy Hooker in the Society of Streetwalkers. When Renee acquired it, the Happy Hooker diploma might have been a joke -- an acid joke, but a joke still -- because in the final years of her life Renee had become the cheapest kind of prostitute. On the streets of downtown New London, a little more than a mile from the campus where she had impressed professors with her maturity and brilliance, she'd sold herself over and over for the price of a rock of crack cocaine.
But the Happy Hooker diploma ceased to be any joke at all on June 25, 1997. That was the day Renee's body was found strangled and discarded nude at the end of an access road that parallels Interstate 95 in Waterford. She'd been released from one of her brief stints in jail just the day before and had gone straight back to the New London streets to resume her trade. It was there, in the early morning hours, that she was last seen, climbing into someone's car.
Waterford detectives never made an arrest despite an investigation that carried them all over New England to check out leads. Until January, when he retired, the detective in charge of the investigation was Lt. Donald McCarthy, who in law enforcement circles was known as tenacious and clever. McCarthy once cracked a case older than Renee's by having an entomologist fix the age of flies that had infested the victim's brain. It changed the time of death and destroyed the suspects' alibi.
Last November after a newspaper described Renee as having become a "drug-addicted prostitute" in a brief story about the state's boosting the reward in the case from $10,000 to the maximum $50,000, McCarthy fired off a press release that said the description did not reflect the sentiments of police.
"Those of us involved in the arena of homicides, or death investigations, know that the victim, Renee Pellegrino, was a human being, who deserved then and now to be treated with dignity and respect.
"We guarantee that the humanity of the victim will not be obscured by the mayhem of the moment, or what the victim may or may not have been in life," McCarthy wrote.
To her family and some who knew her, Renee was a person of extraordinary and tragic vision. The stupefying contrast between the diplomas in her box of life only hinted at her personality. Her sister saw a better clue in the way the diplomas were dropped together.
"She was very much the first one to have them thrown in the same box, one on top of the other," Diane said.
"Within her scheme of things, it was all a game. She was capable of doing this," she said, waving one of Renee's academic diplomas. "But it did not matter a bag of bones to her. It did not set her apart. To her people were all basically fallible and had shortcomings. She thought, 'What did this really count for in making you a worthwhile contributor to mankind?' "
Long before Renee died, her family had begun to try to explain to themselves what had happened to the child with so much promise.
Diane, who works as a graphic designer for a Mystic ad agency and is married to a lawyer, and her mother, Jean Russell, who works in the Connecticut College post office, both start at the same point. The family was poor, not desperately so, but poor enough that the children felt themselves to be different.
They were four once: Diane, Renee, Laurie and a boy, John. They lived at first in a small house their grandfather had built in Westerly, R.I., a town popular with Connecticut people for its beaches. Their father worked as a cook or chef, depending on the status of the restaurant that employed him. According to Diane, their father drank and could be frightfully abusive with his mouth. Jean stayed at home, a full-time mom who tried to hold things together.
"Oh yeah, we were poor," Diane said on another afternoon when she went into the family's history in detail. "We never went out to dinner. My mother was the greatest economist on the planet. We drove a car that wouldn't start. We had hand-me-down clothes. We had one pair of shoes for the year."
Diane recalled the day some high school friends dropped by the apartment the family had moved to. It was the kind of place where the children huddled against the gas stove for warmth in winter, blankets thrown over their shoulders.
"I was so embarrassed to have them come in there," Diane said. "I think that's how Renee felt. She detested her life by comparison."
Renee, however, had the will and the wit to do something about it. Always an excellent student, in high school she began to agitate to transfer to The Prout School, a Catholic girl's school a half-hour bus ride away in Wakefield, R.I.
Jean remembered that Renee was hard to deny when she wanted something. "I think God gave me a special child, but He gave it to the wrong person. I didn't know what to do with Renee," Jean said, after talking about her for several hours.
Jean herself believed in the transformative power of education and would earn her own college degree as an adult. She took money she had squirreled away for Renee's college tuition and sent her to Prout.
"She was happier," Jean said. "But it's where she got more grandiose ideas. She had a friend who had a mansion in Narragansett [a beach town near Wakefield with turn-of-the-century summer "cottages"].
"The other children accepted their circumstances," Jean said. "But Renee was ashamed of it. She wanted her home to be like some of the friends she favored. She always wanted to be better than she was.
"I think that's why she wanted to be a lawyer. Lawyers drive BMWs, don't they?"
Renee's route to law school was hardly direct, however. Diane said that Renee fixated on going from Prout to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Unlike some of the other elite women's colleges known as the Seven Sisters, Smith had not begun to admit men. "She thought if she went there, her whole life would be different," Diane said. But the family couldn't afford Smith.
Instead, after graduating in 1973, Renee, who spoke and read French fluently and had spent a term abroad, made one of the 180-degree turns she would take in life. She forgot school and moved to Las Vegas.
Diane said Renee went to Las Vegas with the simple goal of getting rich. She ended up living in cheap luxury with an older man who was a card dealer with a sideline in bookmaking, and charging $200 to men who wanted to have sex with her.
Renee was smart, personable, pretty and possessed a knockout figure, Diane said. One of the photos Renee left behind showed her leaning against a Las Vegas bar, wearing a silky, low-cut dress that revealed ample cleavage.
The number of young women who experiment with marketing their bodies and think they can get away with it is probably greater than society dares imagine. Diane said Renee became wily about sex early. She remembered that she and Renee as adolescents often passed a barbershop in their Westerly neighborhood where the gray-haired owner would call out that he could fix the girls up with a date. They laughed it off as vile teasing, but Diane said the barber was later arrested on sex charges.
Diane also believed their father's verbal abusiveness affected Renee. In 1978, he would be killed in a gruesome hit-and-run accident after his car broke down on I-95. Diane said she eventually forgave her father's abusiveness, but Renee never did.
"She hated my father with a consuming kind of hate," Diane said. "I think having an abusive parent -- it isn't something you can't get over -- but I do think you have a different take on the world. I think it makes you a more cynical and tougher person than you might be otherwise.
"She was very cynical. She was extremely cynical. I think that's what drew her to focus only on getting something that was tangible. Her cynicism prevented her from believing love mattered -- you know, home and hearth. She was too hardened to believe in it," Diane said.
"She understood what men wanted, and she was ready to supply it if it was in her best interests. You could say it was cold, but I think she thought she was just being honest and the other person was being less honest. To her it was an exchange."
The sisters were very close. Diane said that Renee told her the sex trade didn't bother her. "She said, 'Oh, it's just like brushing your teeth."' But Diane doubted her.
Despite her bravado about Las Vegas, Renee was picked up a couple of times on prostitution charges, and she'd seen other women drawn into degrading relationships with pimps.
"She came home a complete wreck," Diane said. She showed another photo of Renee taken about that time, curled up in an upholstered chair. "You can see in that picture that person is looking lost. She looks very small and ..." Diane could not find the word she wanted and ended her thought with a sigh.
Back in Westerly, Renee seemingly reversed direction again. She renewed a relationship with a young local man who had a small contracting business and started commuting to Rhode Island College. In the spring of 1977, she transferred to Connecticut College.
After trying dorm life, she moved off-campus, Diane said, and managed to pay her tuition with a combination of help from her mother, financial aid, loans and perhaps, illegal activity. Renee took several semesters off, and her arrest record indicates she returned for a time to Las Vegas.
Jean recalled the names of three faculty members Renee spoke of admiringly. All three remembered her with reciprocal admiration.
"She was a very bright young woman, a very bright young woman," Frances Boudreau, a sociology professor, repeated for emphasis. "If you met her, my impression of her is she'd be somebody you'd like to be friends with."
Boudreau said she was surprised, but not shocked, when Renee proposed a term paper based in part on her Las Vegas experience. "Actually, I'm not shocked by much. Probably that's one of the reasons Renee and I got along so well," Boudreau said.
The class, she recalled, was about deviant behavior and social control, a subject in which Renee was to become personally expert.
"It applies to illegal activities and also to activities that violate significant social norms," Boudreau said. "She talked about pimps and their relationship to prostitution. She said she left Las Vegas because she refused to be associated with anybody who controlled her behavior. ...
"When I talked with her there was always the feeling that this was in her past. ... She was a feminist through and through. ... She said women could make choices and do with their bodies as they wish ... that they could conduct [prostitution] as a business ... that it's not really exploitative.
"We could argue that point. We probably did argue that point," said Boudreau, who has several daughters of her own.
"Bitter is too strong a word," to describe Renee, she said. "Disillusioned is not strong enough."
Marion Doro, a professor of history, thought to write Renee's mother a letter of condolence after she read of the murder in the newspaper. In it she told Jean that Renee was not only one her best students, but one of the nicest.
"I wanted her to know that somebody believed in her daughter. I didn't want the good parts to get lost in all the sensationalism," Doro explained when asked what impelled her to write about a student she hadn't seen more than 15 years.
"Renee would drop by my office. I remember I enjoyed having conversations with her," Doro recalled. "Her interests were wide. I found her to be more mature than most of her classmates. ... I enjoyed reading her term papers. It's a pleasure to deal with a student who has a mind of her own."
Twice Doro said of Renee, "There has to be two people there." She guessed she had seen only one and said she could not fathom how Renee came to die as she did.
"I can't help saying I think intuitively that she wanted it to end," Doro said. "Do you get that?
"Maybe it was situation where she wanted something that she figured was beyond her reach -- not her capacity -- but beyond her reach, or luck. I don't know, maybe she desperately wanted someone to love her for her own sake. That's a personality that's wanting something and not getting it."
Another faculty member who knew Renee outside the classroom was anthropology professor June Macklin. She said Renee's mind was such that she thought of her as a junior colleague. Often they talked about literature. Macklin, however, sensed a conflict within Renee. She thought Renee might have been more comfortable at Harvard or the University of Chicago, schools where intellectual competition is stressed.
"I think this was a young woman who really got excited about ideas, but thought it wouldn't have been cool to show it. ... She always seemed out of her element. She didn't fit in [at Conn] and didn't necessarily want to fit," Macklin said.
The professor also detected a trait in Renee that her family saw more clearly.
"She had such an ambivalence about pretentious people. She really punctured illusions," Macklin said.
"I did think she had a very cynical take on human beings, including herself."
More than her journey from Catholic school girl to call girl to scholar to streetwalker, it was Renee's cynicism -- or her lacerating, ice-cold honesty -- that made her remarkable. In another life she might have been a genius satirist. As it was, she sometimes behaved like a performance artist whose real transgressions were her act.
Diane told one story about Renee that epitomized her. Once when they were young women, the three sisters stopped outside a Dunkin' Donuts shop in Westerly in the wee hours of the morning. They ordered and returned to their car parked in front of the shop's plate-glass window.
"There was this little old man on a swivel stool inside," Diane said. "She just took everything off her top and sat on the hood of the car. The man swiveled around and looked at her, and he just swiveled back and put his head down like he wasn't supposed to see."
The stunt, a female version of flashing, must have done more than embarrass the man. In an instant, it must also have shamed him and proved to Renee once again men's weakness.
Renee seemed to view sex as a kind of performance. Diane said that Renee dated male professors at Conn and at UConn Law School and the few bosses she had. Later, when she began to be arrested in the New London-Westerly area, she told Diane she was angling for a judge.
(Two male law school professors and a male attorney whom Renee once listed as references did not respond to phone calls asking them to comment for this article. They need not have slept with Renee to be afraid of being associated with her.)
Renee's mother said her daughter's view of humanity went from bleak to bleaker. "She thought the world was a terrible place. It was this red tooth and claw idea," Jean said.
"Oh yes, she had an almost cruel perception about her. She would find anybody's Achilles heel. If anybody had a weak spot, she would expose it. ... If she thought you thought you were better than anybody else, she'd take you down a peg or two. And yes, she was brilliant at it," Jean said.
"Did she care what people thought? No, not at all. Did she think prostitutes she worked with could be noble? Yes, she did."
Neither Jean nor Diane harbor illusions of their own about Renee. She had caused them too much pain. Jean, who remarried after the death of her children's father, said she hoped talking about Renee would help others recognize the horrors of drug addiction and the lack of treatment for it. Diane said she shunned Renee in her last years partly to avoid contact between her and Diane's own daughter. Besides, Diane said, "It was too heart-breaking and too futile."
Both Jean and Diane traced the beginning of Renee's descent to another family tragedy. In 1984, the youngest sister, Laurie, was killed in a car accident in Rhode Island. At the time, Laurie was studying for a nursing degree at the University of Rhode Island and Renee, who after Conn had failed to be accepted at the Columbia University graduate business school, was beginning law school.
"Renee took it very hard because it was her car [that Laurie was driving]. She said, 'Oh, if only I had a better car, like a Volvo,' " Jean said.
"The next thing that happened," she continued, as if reciting a history she'd gone over before, "was that Renee called me one day on the phone and told me, 'I have some friends and we took some coke. You should try it.' She said it took all the pain away.
"I said, 'Oh, Renee, please.' I had read such horrible things about it. I told her they can't stop its addiction. She said, 'I know what I'm doing; it's recreational.' "
In the mid-'80s, cocaine was seen as a chic drug used by the kind of young professional person Renee may have wished herself to be. But for her, cocaine could never be safe. The family had a history of depression. Jean suffered from it and so did Diane. The disease is known to have a genetic component and make one prone to addiction. Later, Jean and Diane would be helped by Prozac, or similar medication. But Renee rejected psychiatric help. They believe Laurie's death triggered Renee's depression, and cocaine deepened it.
Diane said she and Renee already shared one addiction. They were compulsive shoplifters. Diane said she managed to quit, but that Renee never did. One of the photographs she left behind was of the tote bag she used for pilfering. Like so much else, Renee viewed shoplifting as a kind of daredevil's game, Diane said.
"She'd take 15 CDs and go back for 15 more and then want to go back and get the last three. It was absolutely an addiction," she said.
Renee curtailed, but did not stop, her shoplifting even while at law school. In a letter to Diane dated Sept. 21, 1984, Renee reported that she was broke, but that she was only stealing to help a friend's mother.
In the letter Renee also revealed an almost exuberant cynicism in describing a professor she'd set her sights on.
"He's 45-ish, thin hair, huge gray/black beard. In short, he's ugly," she wrote. "But he's very kind and a veritable genius. ... He looks like the school janitor but has written a few books. Right now, I'm trying to decide whether coming to school looking like a hippie would score any points. Put away the silk, pull out the burlap."
She also wrote, "Law school is a bunch of shit. Not especially hard -- just time-consuming." The letter was written on law school stationery. Next to the school seal on the first page, she penned the observation, "Big Deal."
The tenor of the letter suggests Renee's depression was not yet present, or at least was not debilitating. She graduated on schedule in the spring of 1987, got a job in Westerly and began cramming for bar exams. Still confident of her academic ability, she took the Connecticut exam and, Diane said, decided to take the New York exam after reading that John F. Kennedy Jr. had failed it twice.
She passed both. But she tripped when she applied to take the Rhode Island bar exam. Doing a background check, a Rhode Island judicial board discovered she had a record of 14 arrests, mostly for shoplifting.
On July 1, 1988, the Committee on Character and Fitness called her to account. The transcript of that hearing is another document Diane inherited and in it Renee is forced to explain herself.
At first she is evasive, but gradually the committee zeroes in on why, in her third year of law school, she bothered to steal a $40 power tool she had the money to buy.
Renee explains she began shoplifting in junior high school, for fun, and later says children of alcoholics tend to be obsessive and compulsive. Then she tells the committee:
"It's a thing that you do in order to be in control. In other words when I'm in school I over-study. I escape into studying. I think I was 20th in my class out of 400. ... I think it all stems from feeling like you're no good and inferior and you need to be better in order to just be good enough."
At the close of the hearing, Renee thanks the committee for its courtesy and says she knows the hearing was embarrassing to both sides.
"You can see I'm not a bad person. Right?" Renee pleads.
"No one is saying that," a committee member replies.
"You know, I'm really normal. I'm really OK," she says.
In hindsight, the transcript reads as if Renee, by the end of the hearing, was trying to persuade herself she was OK. She wasn't.
The Rhode Island examiners rejected Renee and notified their counterparts in Connecticut. Peter Rotella, the attorney who represented Renee at the time and who works in the same firm as Diane's husband, recalled that Connecticut withdrew its initial approval of Renee, then renewed it on the condition that she get psychiatric counseling.
"They set some conditions she would have to live up to," Rotella said. "As far as I know, she didn't follow up."
Diane said that Renee had developed contempt for counselors. She even told the Rhode Island examiners she'd quit counselors in the past because she didn't think they helped or because she didn't like them. Diane said she'd argue with psychiatrists and delight in poking holes in their theories.
Diane recalled that Renee met at least once with the young psychiatrist recommended by the Connecticut bar examiners and made a typically cynical proposal.
"She said, 'You're going to want to see me for 10 sessions. How about I pay you for 10 sessions and you give me the note [of clearance]?"' Diane said.
"I remember Renee was criticizing her for her grammar. I guess her point was, 'How is she going to help me?' "
It was perhaps Renee's last chance to save herself. Diane said Renee had begun to use drugs more heavily and could not abide waiting through the months the counseling would take.
"It was a crushing blow," Diane said. "I think it was like, 'Well, f it.' "
After that, Renee's descent was steady. Damaged by drugs, she turned from shoplifting, which required a respectable veneer, to prostitution. Her relationship with the man who had seen her through college and law school ended.
Diane said it was ironic and tragic to see what Renee became. As a teenager and young woman, she was almost a health nut. She hardly drank and didn't dare try marijuana, Diane said. She was deathly afraid of needles and took special pride in her long, dark hair. Eventually her arms would be scarred with needle-tracks and her hair became so matted she had to shave her head.
She also became more vulnerable to men. "She strayed off into these desperate relationships with abusive, alcoholic men," Diane said. "She'd call me and say, 'What am I going to do if they don't call me back?' I'd spend two or three hours on the phone with her almost every night. It was becoming like a recording."
For a long time, Renee had been able to evade jail. Charges were dismissed or reduced. Judges, noting her education, treated her with leniency. Eventually her luck ran out. In 1994, the woman who was so smart about sex found herself in the York Correctional Center in Niantic and pregnant.
Jean said Renee called, frantic. A pregnancy test given when Renee was incarcerated had registered negative. So she was stunned to learn that what she thought was a weight gain was in fact a pregnancy too advanced for an abortion.
"The last thing she wanted to do was to bring a child into this place," said Jean.
She said Renee became so agitated and angry that the jail discharged her early. "It almost seemed like they wanted to get rid of her," Jean said. She believes correction officials share some blame for what may have been the final blow to Renee. She didn't want to have a child, but once she had it she didn't want to lose it.
Her daughter Lindsay was born on Jan. 14, 1995. The baby tested positive for cocaine and was placed with foster parents. That summer Jean lived with Renee in an apartment in Westerly, hoping to help her get clean and regain her child.
"I was believing that brown rice and tofu and salads and B-vitamins and a jog in the park would cure her of her drug addiction," Jean said.
She thought Renee did improve. She started taking Prozac and earned weekend visits with Lindsay. Jean remembered one day Renee sat on a swing with her baby and said, " 'Oh, look at her laugh. She makes my heart so happy.' I said, 'Good, I'm home.' "
Renee appeared to progress so much that child welfare authorities promised she could have Lindsay back in September. But in the final days of waiting, Renee flunked a drug test
Her improvement had been deceiving. Even the reading Renee did that summer suggested her view of the world was still dark. She returned to an author who had infatuated her in college. It was Hannah Arendt, the philosopher known for her writings on totalitarianism and coining the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe genocidal Nazis. Jean did not remember which Arendt book Renee asked her to get, but she said Renee read it over and over that summer.
Losing the baby gave Renee another reason to lose herself in drugs, Jean said. The last time Renee called from jail wanting help getting out, Jean refused. She thought she was safer off the streets. Instead, Renee was bailed out by a nominal boyfriend. The next day she was dead.
In her last year, Renee looked awful, Jean said. She was 41.
"I don't think Renee cared. She had lost her father. She had lost the baby of the family. Then because of her drug habit, she had lost her own baby. She felt very guilty. She felt like nothing. She just felt the world was a horrible place anyway," Jean said.
"I think she wanted to die. I think she was slowly committing suicide, believing a bad drug would take it all away.
"To go from a Phi Beta Kappa to law school graduate to prostitute is quite a fall and quite a tumble, and it wouldn't do much for anybody's self-esteem."
In the society of outcasts where Renee ended her days, there was no shortage of theories about who might have killed her. It might have been a violent john, a vengeful drug dealer -- for Renee was a brazen snitch -- or a hit man. Renee had told friends she was pregnant again, and if the father was a customer with a reputation to protect, he may have wanted to get rid of her and her unborn child.
Det. Michael Hurley, who worked on her case from the start and took it over after McCarthy's retirement, said police interviewed hundreds of people, including many men who patronized her.
"We haven't solved it yet, but we're not going to forget it," Hurley said. "You go down into New London now, they don't even know who she is. There's a lot of rumors and a lot of rumors we know are not true."
Indeed after her death, a sort of legend grew around Renee. Some said she'd been stabbed as well as strangled. Others said she'd been shocked with a stun gun. People were sure the place where her body was found was not where she'd been killed, because she was naked and no streetwalker, least of all Renee, would be dumb enough to remove her clothes in a john's car. Besides, the oral sex that is a streetwalker's stock-in-trade does not require nudity.
Someone who heard the talk on the streets about Renee and passed it on to police as well as reporters was Mark Braunstein, a man whose life journey rivals Renee's in strangeness. The art librarian at Connecticut College, Braunstein in 1995 began interviewing New London streetwalkers and soon began to plan a book about their lives. He met Renee the following year.
Braunstein also happens to be a nature photographer, an animal rights activist, a strict vegetarian (he's published a philosophical book on the subject), a public advocate of legalized marijuana and a paraplegic. The latter two are connected because Braunstein uses marijuana to relieve the pain of his injury. In 1990 he was paralyzed below the waist in a diving accident in upstate New York.
If Braunstein had ulterior motives in pursuing streetwalkers for their stories, they weren't overtly sexual. Braunstein is frank about having lost sexual function and believes that is one reason streetwalkers are willing to talk to him.
"I use my paraplegia as my sword and shield," Braunstein said. "My sword is my crutches; my shield is my wheelchair."
In the last four years, Braunstein claims to have interviewed almost 200 streetwalkers, most of whom he found in downtown New London. The first time he picked up Renee, he said she asked him how he knew she was a streetwalker.
"I said, 'Any white woman walking alone down here is either a streetwalker or a crack addict.' She said, 'You're right on both counts,' " said Braunstein.
"She revealed later that she already heard of me. Her mother had described me as someone who had a tragic accident and was paralyzed from the waist down and in a year was walking again on crutches. Her mother used my story as inspiration like, 'Look, Renee. Look what he can do.' "
Braunstein also said Renee also immediately remarked on his Jewish name and slapped him with stereotypes about Jews, like some of her professors, of being smart and devious.
He was not surprised to learn she had a law degree. Many streetwalkers have respectable backgrounds, he said. Their common denominator is youthful abuse and drug addiction. He said the working title of his book is "Good Girls on Bad Drugs."
Braunstein said he interviewed Renee a dozen times. They became friendly enough that she sometimes called him for rides and visited his house. On one visit she spotted a book by Hannah Arendt and asked to borrow it. He thought she was interested in the Holocaust.
What set Renee apart was something akin to defiance. He said she didn't care to disguise her contempt for men and talked openly about snitching -- that is trading information for leniency. Braunstein, like Jean, also thought Renee was bent on self-destruction. Once she called him for a ride from a motel where she had taken two men at once. "Nobody would do that, only Renee," he said.
Braunstein said streetwalkers call their nightly perambulations their "stroll." Renee's stroll, he said, took her around several blocks bounded by Washington Street, State Street, Eugene O'Neill Drive and Tilley Street. The stone spire of a Catholic church looks down on those streets and the neighborhood is the location of New London's central firehouse.
Renee knew a lot of the firefighters, Braunstein said. A photograph he took of her that he shared with the New London Day newspaper for a feature story on Renee after her murder showed her wearing a fire department cap. He said some of Renee's companions believe she had a relationship with one firefighter and wonder if he may have impregnated her.
Braunstein arranged for a former streetwalker who knew Renee to confirm the firehouse story. Speaking by telephone, the woman, who did not want to give her name, said she told police Renee regularly visited the firehouse. She said police interviewed her several times. She said she thought a drug dealer might also have hired someone to kill Renee.
She said she thought Renee wanted to die but did not deliberately seek out someone who might kill her.
"I mean you want to die when you're out there, but not that way. You want to die from a hit of bad crack, from an overdose. ... Every girl out there wants to die. I wanted to die," she said.
The woman, who said she was much younger than Renee had been, said she was saved by finally finding a loving relationship. She said she had married and had a child since leaving New London.
A little while after she hung up, the woman called back to say she wanted to deliver a message to women still in the situation she and Renee had been in.
"To get off the streets you need to find something to make you happy," she said. "It can't be just the drug. You've got to believe something besides the drug can make you happy."
If Renee ever found happiness, it was fleeting. But to conclude that her life was defined by depression and addiction -- two of the strongest predictors of suicide -- would rob her life of its significance.
June Macklin, one of Renee's college professors, suggested her unhappiness had a more universal aspect. It had to do with her unmerciful view of the world.
Thinking of Renee, Macklin said, "A writer friend once told me, you should never unmask another person. If you do, you've got to know the price you're going to pay. What it makes you do, if you can see through them, then you are also seeing through yourself.
"I have the feeling she was like that. It's as if she'd given up all illusions, and when one does that life does become almost unbearable."
Had Renee accepted help for her depression, if she'd taken Prozac instead of cocaine, she might have become the rich lawyer she wanted to be.
"Oh yes, I can see her as a criminal lawyer," said her mother, Jean. "Everybody's mask would have been taken off."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Trang chủ > Genera news > Vietnam Gives Eight-Year Prison Term to Man For Role in June 10, 2018 Protests
Vietnam Gives Eight-Year Prison Term to Man For Role in June 10, 2018 Protests
Truong Huu Loc stands in court in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, June 28, 2019
Photo: State Media
RFA, June 28, 2019
A court in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City handed down an eight-year prison term on Friday to a man convicted of "disrupting public security" during rare and widespread protests last year against controversial draft laws, state media said today.
Truong Huu Loc, 56, had brought bread and water to distribute to protesters and had then shouted slogans and exhorted others to join the protests, which swept Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and other Vietnamese cities on June 10, 2018.
Charged under Clause 1, Article 118 of Vietnam's 2015 Penal Code, Loc had also live-streamed videos of the protests that "attracted tens of thousands of viewers and negative comments and were aimed at reducing people's trust in the government," according to reports by VNExpress and Thanh Nien Magazine.
The June 10, 2018 protest in Ho Chi Minh City was one of several held in cities and provinces around the country over two days to express public opposition to a proposed law that would grant 99-year leases for the economic zones to foreign investors.
Many feared that the leases would be snapped up by investors from neighboring China, with which Vietnam has had tense bilateral relations in recent years, in part due to territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
Some of the demonstrations also focused on a proposed cybersecurity law that protesters said would limit free speech in one-party communist Vietnam, where dissent is rarely tolerated and public unrest is quickly suppressed.
More than 100 convicted
More than 100 people have been tried and convicted so far for their involvement in the protests, with trials held in Vietnam's south-central provinces of Khanh Hoa, Binh Thuan and Ninh Thuan, Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Nai, state media said on Friday.
In the last week alone, Vietnam has tried three separate cases involving five defendants, with sentences handed down totaling 46 years in prison, for national-security-related crimes, sources said.
Vietnam now holds an estimated 128 prisoners of conscience, according to a May 13, 2019 report by rights group Amnesty International, which included Truong Huu Loc in its list.
Nguyen Kim Binh of Vietnam Human Rights Network said in December, though, that the one-party communist state currently holds more than 200 political prisoners.


Soon after his father and mother had left him Ernest dropped asleep over a book which Mrs Jay had given him, and he did not awake till dusk. Then he sat down on a stool in front of the fire, which showed pleasantly in the late January twilight, and began to muse. He felt weak, feeble, ill at ease and unable to see his way out of the innumerable troubles that were before him. Perhaps, he said to himself, he might even die, but this, far from being an end of his troubles, would prove the beginning of new ones; for at the best he would only go to Grandpapa Pontifex and Grandmamma Allaby, and though they would perhaps be more easy to get on with than Papa and Mamma, yet they were undoubtedly not so really good, and were more worldly; moreover they were grown-up people--especially Grandpapa Pontifex, who so far as he could understand had been very much grown-up, and he did not know why, but there was always something that kept him from loving any grown-up people very much--except one or two of the servants, who had indeed been as nice as anything that he could imagine. Besides even if he were to die and go to Heaven he supposed he should have to complete his education somewhere.
In the meantime his father and mother were rolling along the muddy roads, each in his or her own corner of the carriage, and each revolving many things which were and were not to come to pass. Times have changed since I last showed them to the reader as sitting together silently in a carriage, but except as regards their mutual relations, they have altered singularly little. When I was younger I used to think the Prayer Book was wrong in requiring us to say the General Confession twice a week from childhood to old age, without making provision for our not being quite such great sinners at seventy as we had been at seven; granted that we should go to the wash like table-cloths at least once a week, still I used to think a day ought to come when we should want rather less rubbing and scrubbing at. Now that I have grown older myself I have seen that the Church has estimated probabilities better than I had done.


Nine republics, almost 2,000 kilometers of road, a maximum elevation of more than 3 000 meters, dozens of ethnic groups, hundreds of dishes, and immeasurable amounts of natural beauty. To remain a passive bystander simply isn't an option throughout this magnificent trip, which includes mountain hikes, crafting workshops, and meetings with local historians, musicians, scientists, and villagers.
Day 1. Welcome to Abkhazia!
The night will be spent in a 3* hotel.
Ritsa lake. Photo: Fedor Lashkov.
Today we will go to Ritsa Relict National Park. We'll see Lake Ritsa, which sits about 950 meters above sea level within a primordial fir forest. We will also visit Stalin's dacha which is located along the lake, and then go up to the alpine meadows for horseback riding, a lovely walk through the mountains, and a tasting of locally-made goat cheeses.
We'll head back to Gagra in the evening and spend another night in a 3* hotel.
Cooking abysta (Abkhazian «bread») in the village.
Today we'll travel around coastal Abkhazia to see the landmarks that it inherited from various empires. Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Russians, and the Soviets — all of them were mere guests in this region. While each empire did leave its mark, none were able to bend this ancient land to their will.
146 km, 3.5 hours + 15-45 minutes for border crossing.
We'll stay at a 3* hotel.
Djery dzuar is the place, where you'll feel the sole of people's religion. Photo: Lana Parastaeva.
Today we'll travel to South Ossetia — a partially recognized republic which resisted Georgian aggression from 1991 to 2008, before finally being recognized as an independent state by four UN member states — Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Nauru. Its military history, however, is far from the only reason for visiting this small country. Here we'll find the most interesting mix of Georgian and Ossetian culture, as well as a distinctive folk faith, a syncretism of Christian Orthodoxy and pre-Christian Ossetian traditions.
We will also visit the Ossetians' most esteemed sacred place, Dzhery Dzuar, and afterwards stroll through the streets of the republic's capital, Tskhinval, accompanied by a veteran of the independence war, concluding the walk with a traditional Ossetian feast.
In the late evening we'll be back at Tsey, where we'll spend the night in a 3* hotel.
We'll spend the night in a 4* hotel in Vladikavkaz.
Tonight we stay in a 5* hotel.
In the morning, we'll take the off-road vehicles across an easy pass to find ourselves in the mountains of Dagestan. Today we'll visit an ancient watermill, where locals make urbech — a Dagestani delicacy made from flax seeds or apricot pits, followed by a visit to a local manufacturing facility for burkas, traditional felt cloaks.
We'll spend the night in a 3* hotel.
Gamsutl' abandoned village. Photo: Nykolay Rykov and Dmitry Chistoprudov.
In the morning, we'll drive to the village of Chokh famous for its unique 19th century architecture. Afterwards, we'll go to Sogratl, an ancient village which once had a reputation for its scientists and magnificent madrasah, a Quar'anic school. To this day, Sogratl's village school is unique — many of its graduates continue their education at Russia's best universities. We'll visit the school, and talk to the students and teachers.
We'll drive back to Gunib to spend the night in the same 3* hotel, so everyone can use the laundromat and rest.
We'll spend the night in the house of a local goldsmith.
Day 19. Dagestan: Towards the Caspian Sea!
In the morning, we'll visit Qala-Quraysh — a deserted village, which in the Middle Ages served as the capital of the Kaytag ustmystvo (kingdom). According to legend, this state was ruled by the arabs from the Quraysh tribe, to which Prophet Mohammed also belonged. In the village one can still find a mosque and a 12th century mausoleum. Many consider Qala-Quraysh a sacred place.
The last few days were filled with diverse experiences and off-road traveling, so after lunch it's time for some rest. Happily, our 3* hotel is just 50m from the beach!
We'll spend another night in our beachside 3* hotel.
In the morning, we'll drive to Makhachkala — directly to Second Marketplace, which resembles an entire city located inside the city. There you'll find all the bounty of the Dagestani land: aged sheep cheeses, alpine herbs, honey and urbech, dried meat from the mountains, fresh fish from the Caspian Sea, and even black caviar (sold on the sly).
For lunch we'll go to an authentic Dagestani restaurant. There, we'll learn to make khinkal, local dumplings, chudu pies and other dishes. Afterwards, we'll visit the Museum of Traditional Dagestani Art and stroll through city streets peppered with antique and craft stores. In the evening, we'll enjoy a farewell dinner and a good night's sleep in a 4* hotel.
We'll drive to the airport.


We had just finished the last of three afternoon sessions today. It was about 4:30 when the ground started trembling. I was standing on the side of the school building where we were located and as I started to notice the ground moving I saw several of the students from the school start to run away from the building. They were obviously more attuned to what was happening than I was. Then I felt a rock or piece of roof or something hit my head and I ran away from the building too!
Many were shaken up and activated. My heart was beating pretty fast! FHE staff immediately went to work with some of the adults and children we had just finished working with and some of our translators and support staff were shaken up as well. I have new appreciation for the phrase "shaken up" Some of our newly trained trainees started using skills they had learned. Others were upset and needed help themselves. I myself used some of the techniques that I have learned from our trainers and Ale Duarte led the entire bus in some tracking exercises as we returned to Jiangyou and then Mianyang. We then sang songs to continue to discharge activation. Ale sang a few good Portuguese songs!
When we returned to Mianyang Lisa LaDue had found that we had experienced a 6.1 aftershock that was centered 45 miles north of Mianyang - Almost exactly where we were.
We are all ok but were all, literally, shaken up!


TT: You weren't aware that they came close—they were within 3200 feet [MSL] of the object above it, and it was either on the ground or hovering above the ground. Now... the instructor pilot on board saw it when they came around from the close approach, and he said as soon as they turned they could see it about 15 mi. ahead on the ground. It didn't move the whole time and when they came within a mile of it they turned to come back in and that's when they lost sight of it, but at that point they would have been almost right over it. You didn't know that at the time?
TT: At the time and now, what do you think about the incident?
TT: The plane was going between 230 and 280.
RC: —but it can't go that way too. And that's why it was phenomenal.
TT: At the time, that's what impressed you?
RC: Well, like I say, it had to be something other than what we were aware of, you know, and I didn't think our technology had anything like that as far as capability, so it's got to be a UFO.
TT: Well, that's almost exactly what the radar-navigator said when he saw that. He realized it was something unique.
RC: And, how fast did it really do it, because you've got three seconds between the scans? Did it take it a second to do it? If so it's going three times as fast as what we computed. Did it take a second and half; did it take the whole three seconds? No, it didn't take the whole three seconds, so here's the minimum speed it could be going: over 3000 mi. an hour. You know if it took it a second you're looking at 10,000 miles an hour.
TT: —it only detected the lower limit.


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text:
// Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
// or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
// distributed with this work for additional information
// regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
// to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
// "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
// with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
//   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
// software distributed under the License is distributed on an
// "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
// KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
// specific language governing permissions and limitations
// under the License.

package org.apache.kudu.client;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.lang.reflect.Proxy;
import java.net.InetAddress;
import java.net.UnknownHostException;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import javax.annotation.concurrent.GuardedBy;

import com.google.common.base.Throwables;
import com.google.common.net.InetAddresses;

/**
 * Fake DNS resolver which allows our tests to work well even though we use
 * strange loopback IP addresses (127.x.y.z) with no corresponding reverse
 * DNS.
 *
 * This overrides the reverse lookups for such IPs to return the same address
 * in String form.
 *
 * Without this class, reverse DNS lookups for such addresses often take
 * 5 seconds to return, causing timeouts and overall test slowness.
 *
 * In the future this class might also be extended to test more interesting
 * DNS-related scenarios.
 */
public class FakeDNS {
  static FakeDNS instance = new FakeDNS();

  @GuardedBy("this")
  private Map<String, InetAddress> forwardResolutions = new HashMap<>();

  @GuardedBy("this")
  private Map<InetAddress, String> reverseResolutions = new HashMap<>();

  /** whether the fake resolver has been installed */
  @GuardedBy("this")
  private boolean installed = false;

  private FakeDNS() {}
  public static FakeDNS getInstance() {
    return instance;
  }

  public synchronized void addForwardResolution(String hostname, InetAddress ip) {
    forwardResolutions.put(hostname, ip);
  }

  public synchronized void addReverseResolution(InetAddress ip, String hostname) {
    reverseResolutions.put(ip, hostname);
  }

  /**
   * Install the fake DNS resolver into the Java runtime.
   */
  public synchronized void install() {
    if (installed) return;
    try {
      try {
        // Override the NameService in Java 9 or later.
        final Class<?> nameServiceInterface = Class.forName("java.net.InetAddress$NameService");
        Field field = InetAddress.class.getDeclaredField("nameService");
        // Get the default NameService to fallback to.
        Method method = InetAddress.class.getDeclaredMethod("createNameService");
        method.setAccessible(true);
        Object fallbackNameService = method.invoke(null);
        // Create a proxy instance to set on the InetAddress field which will handle
        // all NameService calls.
        Object proxy = Proxy.newProxyInstance(nameServiceInterface.getClassLoader(),
            new Class<?>[]{nameServiceInterface}, new NameServiceListener(fallbackNameService));
        field.setAccessible(true);
        field.set(InetAddress.class, proxy);
      } catch (final ClassNotFoundException | NoSuchFieldException e) {
        // Override the NameService in Java 8 or earlier.
        final Class<?> nameServiceInterface = Class.forName("sun.net.spi.nameservice.NameService");
        Field field = InetAddress.class.getDeclaredField("nameServices");
        // Get the default NameService to fallback to.
        Method method = InetAddress.class.getDeclaredMethod("createNSProvider", String.class);
        method.setAccessible(true);
        Object fallbackNameService = method.invoke(null, "default");
        // Create a proxy instance to set on the InetAddress field which will handle
        // all NameService calls.
        Object proxy = Proxy.newProxyInstance(nameServiceInterface.getClassLoader(),
            new Class<?>[]{nameServiceInterface}, new NameServiceListener(fallbackNameService));
        field.setAccessible(true);
        // Java 8 or earlier takes a list of NameServices
        field.set(InetAddress.class, Arrays.asList(proxy));
      }
    } catch (Exception e) {
      throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
    installed = true;
  }

  /**
   * The NameService in all versions of Java has the same interface, so we
   * can use the same InvocationHandler as our proxy instance for both
   * java.net.InetAddress$NameService and sun.net.spi.nameservice.NameService.
   */
  private class NameServiceListener implements InvocationHandler {

    private final Object fallbackNameService;

    // Creates a NameServiceListener with a NameService implementation to
    // fallback to. The parameter is untyped so we can handle the NameService
    // type in all versions of Java with reflection.
    NameServiceListener(Object fallbackNameService) {
      this.fallbackNameService = fallbackNameService;
    }

    private InetAddress[] lookupAllHostAddr(String host) throws UnknownHostException {
      InetAddress inetAddress;
      synchronized(FakeDNS.this) {
        inetAddress = forwardResolutions.get(host);
      }
      if (inetAddress != null) {
        return new InetAddress[]{inetAddress};
      }

      try {
        Method method = fallbackNameService.getClass()
            .getDeclaredMethod("lookupAllHostAddr", String.class);
        method.setAccessible(true);
        return (InetAddress[]) method.invoke(fallbackNameService, host);
      } catch (ReflectiveOperationException e) {
        Throwables.propagateIfPossible(e.getCause(), UnknownHostException.class);
        throw new AssertionError("unexpected reflection issue", e);
      }
    }

    private String getHostByAddr(byte[] addr) throws UnknownHostException {
      if (addr[0] == 127) {
        return InetAddresses.toAddrString(InetAddress.getByAddress(addr));
      }

      String hostname;
      synchronized (FakeDNS.this) {
        hostname = reverseResolutions.get(InetAddress.getByAddress(addr));
      }
      if (hostname != null) {
        return hostname;
      }

      try {
        Method method = fallbackNameService.getClass()
            .getDeclaredMethod("getHostByAddr", byte[].class);
        method.setAccessible(true);
        return (String) method.invoke(fallbackNameService, (Object) addr);
      } catch (ReflectiveOperationException e) {
        Throwables.propagateIfPossible(e.getCause(), UnknownHostException.class);
        throw new AssertionError("unexpected reflection issue", e);
      }
    }

    @Override
    public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args) throws Throwable {
      switch (method.getName()) {
        case "lookupAllHostAddr":
          return lookupAllHostAddr((String) args[0]);
        case "getHostByAddr":
          return getHostByAddr((byte[]) args[0]);
        default:
          throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
      }
    }
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Plus a woman named Diane sat in for a couple of songs (she sang and played harmonica). I'm not sure how much the lineup changes from week to week.
The music was good and there was no cover. (Best song: 'Right String, Wrong Yo-Yo', featuring Keith on vocals and culminating in an awesomely great bass/drum solo.) The food selection was limited and expensive, however ($10 for a hamburger with chips; if you wanted french fries they cost $4; desserts were $7). I didn't have any drinks (I met up with some folks I know there and they ended up buying some rounds; I owe them a round next time) but I assume that their cost is in line with the food, so: expensive. Eat dinner somewhere else first.
Because of the cost this is unlikely to become my new Wednesday night thing (since music Wednesdays at Trinity is, apparently, dead), but I do expect to stop by every so often, particularly if someone's visiting from out of town who would enjoy the music.


text:
Subject: These 3 Tech Stocks Will Keep Crushing the Market
Follow Best Investments Alerts
Stocks: ADBE, PYPL, SQ
Profit Alerts: Best Investments Alerts, Buy & Hold Stocks, Michael A Robinson, Stocks to Watch, Tech Watch
These 3 Tech Stocks Will Keep Crushing the Market
This expert insight from Michael A. Robinson originally ran in Strategic Tech Investor on August 7, 2019
My wife says that at the rate I'm going, we're going to have to buy a new table.
Let me explain. My job as your tech analyst is to go beyond the headlines and find great tech stocks that can absolutely crush the market – in good times and in bad.
And that often means pounding the table for the global tech ecosystem in general, and for market rippers in particular.
That's exactly what I did back on Jan. 11. You may not recall it, but in my mind's eye, it's as if it were just yesterday.
At the time, the tech-centric Nasdaq had entered bear market territory, defined as a 20% drop from a recent high. I said it was "fear and not fundamentals" that was driving the market lower.
I then listed three beaten-down tech leaders I said were poised for big rebounds.
Today, I'm following up to let you know – all three just crushed it, as I'll show you. And I'll also show you why there's still plenty of upside ahead…
5G Revolution: This breakthrough technology is expected to unleash $12 TRILLION in new wealth… and one $6 stock could be better positioned than any other to skyrocket. Learn more.
With apologies to Yogi Berra, it's like deja vu all over again.
During that Jan. 11 chat, I noted the Nasdaq was far from alone in the sell-off. Stocks were broadly and brutally battered with the S&P 500 off 19%.
We're in a similar situation today. Stocks are getting broadly battered on fears about rising trade tensions with China, after President Trump said he'd put tariffs on $300 billion of additional Chinese goods.
But now as then, I pointed out that the economy was in overall great shape, as evidenced by the best jobs market in nearly 50 years.
So, I have no doubt about my mantra – the road to wealth is paved with tech. Here is what I said at the time:
"I believe that tech will once again lead the market higher as it has done since the bull market began nearly 10 years ago. And that means we will have plenty of chances to make money on tech shares in the year ahead."
And to make sure you had actionable intelligence, I listed three beaten-down tech leaders poised for a massive rebound. I'm happy to report that all three have had a great year.
Now then, to be consistent, I'm going to mark their rallies from Dec. 24, when the market rebounded. I've been using that date all year, and I think it's important to remain consistent. Take a look at these three market crushers.
Oversold Tech Leader, No. 1: Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE)
Even in the best of bull markets, a gain of 36.6% in just over seven months is nothing to sneeze at. That means Adobe beat the broad market by 72.6% in the period.
Then again, Adobe said on June 18 that it had achieved record quarterly revenue of $2.74 billion for its fiscal second quarter that ended May 31. Those sales were up 25% from the year-ago quarter.
With earnings of $1.83 a share, it beat forecasts. It also offered an upbeat report for the rest of the year. Following that bullish report, no fewer than 11 analysts upgraded the stock.
I have to say that I'm not surprised at how well this software leader is really doing. I've recommended this stock several times since the summer of 2013.
Watch Now: Robert Herjavec is helping everyday Americans discover the next Airbnb. Click here now…
I've done so because the company has done a great job of moving from standard software sales to recurring revenue through a cloud-delivery format.
It now offers a suite of products through its Creative Cloud platform that is nothing short of a cash machine. It has profit margins of 39% and a 38% return on equity.
The firm also has a crackerjack CEO. Barrons named Shantanu Narayen one of the world's best CEOs in 2016 and 2017. I'm projecting 35% gains over the next three years.
Oversold Tech Leader, No. 2: Square Inc. (NYSE: SQ)
Square once again defied the skeptics with a return of 27.9% since Dec. 24. That was enough to beat the broader market by 31.6%.
Irony abounds. This is one of those stocks where Wall Street periodically hits the panic button – giving savvy tech investors new entry points at a discount from its long-term upside.
That happened again on Aug. 2, when the Street freaked out over the fintech leader's second quarter financials. It beat on sales and earnings, but the stock got hammered.
Turns out Square guided a little lighter for the third quarter than what analysts had forecast. But their loss is your gain.
Square is making a series of bold moves to improve growth and strengthen earnings, moves that will bolster the stock over the long run.
For instance, the firm is selling its Caviar food-delivery unit for $400 million. That means it is exiting a tough business with low margins to invest in products that make it a stronger fintech leader.
Now, it has plenty of money to invest in online shopping business and its CashApp, which competes with Venmo, a unit of PayPal Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: PYPL).
In other words, CEO and founder Jack Dorsey just keeps on defying the skeptics. He's become the king of upsell by adding new products and features that improves service for clients and earnings for the firm. I'm projecting 3-year gains of 50%.
Oversold Tech Leader, No. 3: HealthEquity Inc. (NASDAQ: HQY)
Michael A Robinson (this article)
Buy & Hold Stocks (this article)
Best Investments Alerts (this article)


text:
Mar 12 2021 March 7, 2022
Alleged teen rape by Lapeer County priest in 2010 covered up by Archdiocese of Detroit
Catholic Sexual Abuse
A federal lawsuit has been filed by a Lapeer County man who alleges he was sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest when he was eight years old while attending Bishop Kelley Catholic School in Lapeer.
The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan by the victim, who is now 18 years old. The plaintiff is a former student at Bishop Kelley Catholic School and former member of the Immaculate Conception Catholic Parish. He seeks to use a pseudonym in the case due to his status as a survivor of criminal sexual assault as a minor.
The lawsuit alleges Bishop Kelley Catholic School, Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Parish, the Archdiocese of Detroit and Archbishop Allen Vigneron, allowed the rape
Police misconduct claims cost Detroit taxpayers $19.1 million since 2015
The city of Detroit has paid out $19.1 million to settle claims of police misconduct since 2015, 7 Action News has learned.
The payouts stem from allegations of wrongful arrest, assault and battery, destruction of property and more.
"$19 million? That impacts every single citizen in the city of Detroit," said Reginald Crawford, a retired Detroit police officer who recently completed a term on the city's Board of Police Commissioners.
"The city knows they're liable, they're on the hook for something," he said.
Dec 2 2012 March 8, 2022
Family thinks helmet law could have saved their son's life
It was 82 degrees with low humidity and light wind the day Scott Pohl died.
This is significant because a motorcycle was not Scott's primary transportation. He usually drove his pickup to work.
Scott Pohl died after an SUV turned into his motorcycle's path. He was not wearing a helmet, and suffered traumatic head injuries.
Scott's shift for most of his six-day week started at 4:30 p.m. But on Fridays and Saturdays he'd start at 7 p.m., which is also significant.
It is why he was headed east on North Territorial Road in Salem Township at 6:32 p.m. on the second day of summer, approaching an SUV driver who never saw him coming.
Scott bought the black 2007 Honda Shadow VLX in April, the month


Techniques used by Roman architects approximately 2,000 years ago could be used to create longer-lasting buildings and sea walls capable of withstanding the rising ocean levels expected due to global climate change, according to the authors of a newly-published study.
Writing in the latest edition of journal American Mineralogist, University of Utah geology and geophysics professor Marie Jackson and her colleagues revealed that they used X-ray technology to study samples of Roman concrete made from volcanic ash, baked limestone and seawater.
Their analysis revealed that the concrete contains tiny growing crystals which, according to the Washington Post, appears to interact with the environment to prevent the building material from fracturing. The concrete, they explained, undergoes a rare chemical reaction in which crystals of aluminous tobermorite grow out of a second mineral known as phillipsite.
Furthermore, the authors found that the driving force behind this reaction was seawater, which permeated through cracks in the concrete, reacted with phillipsite (a hydrated potassium, calcium and aluminum silicate) found in the volcanic rock used in the building material and caused it to become more durable.
Jackson and her colleagues used imaging equipment at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to analyze concrete from an ancient harbors and breakwater sites, according to the Post. They hoped to discover the techniques used by Romans to create such long-lasting structures so that those methods could be replicated.
Jackson's research, Brune added, is a "significant accomplishment" towards unlocking the secrets of this long-lasting construction material. The concrete, the researchers behind the new study said, behaves similarly to volcanic deposits found in underwater environments. Even more surprising, it appears to be stronger now than it was when it was originally building, indicating that the interactions with the seawater have increased the substance's durability.
Currently, Jackson's team is attempting to replicate the Romans' results, but doing so has been challenging. As the study author explained to the Post, aluminous tobermorite is very difficult to produce, as extremely high temperatures are needed to synthesize small quantities. While Roman builders used a specific type of volcanic ash from an Italian quarry in their concrete, Jackson and her colleagues hope to replicate their results using volcanic rocks and California seawater.
They have already created several samples that are awaiting testing, the newspaper said, and if their efforts prove fruitful, they could lead to a material which could be used to build better sea walls in order to protect communities threatened by rising ocean levels. Unlike modern concrete, Roman concrete would grow stronger – not weaker – when exposed to ocean waves.


text:
Василь Гнатович Тронь (, село Веркіївка, тепер Вертіївка Ніжинського району Чернігівської області — ?) — український радянський діяч, голова колгоспу імені ХХІІ з'їзду КПРС села Бишів Радехівського району Львівської області. Герой Соціалістичної Праці (8.04.1971). Депутат Львівської обласної ради народних депутатів 13—15-го скликань (у 1971—1977 роках).

Біографія
Народився в селянській родині.

З 1943 року — в Радянській армії, учасник німецько-радянської війни. Служив стрільцем 4-ї стрілецької роти 1083-го стрілецького полку 312-ї стрілецької дивізії 91-го стрілецького корпусу 2-го Прибалтійського і 1-го Білоруського фронтів.

Член КПРС.

З кінця 1950-х років — голова колгоспу імені ХХІІ з'їзду КПРС села Бишів Радехівського району Львівської області.

Указом Президії Верховної Ради СРСР від 8 квітня 1971 року за видатні успіхи, досягнуті в розвитку сільськогосподарського виробництва та виконанні п'ятирічного плану продажу державі продуктів землеробства і тваринництва, Василю Гнатовичу Троню присвоєно звання Героя Соціалістичної Праці з врученням ордена Леніна і золотої медалі «Серп і Молот».

Потім — на пенсії.

Нагороди
 Герой Соціалістичної Праці (8.04.1971)
 орден Леніна (8.04.1971)
 орден Трудового Червоного Прапора (22.03.1966)
 орден Вітчизняної війни І ст. (6.04.1985)
 орден Слави ІІІ ст. (20.08.1944)
 медаль «За доблесну працю. В ознаменування 100-річчя з дня народження Володимира Ілліча Леніна» (1970)
 медалі

Джерела
 газета «Вільна Україна» (Львів) — квітень 1971 року.

Члени КПРС
Уродженці Ніжинського району
Депутати Львівської обласної ради

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
BMW, Intel, Mobileye lay groundwork for self-driving car
By Bill Howard on June 30, 2016 at 3:00 pm
Automaker BMW, chipmaker Intel, and vision systems developer Mobileye are ready to announce a collaboration aimed at ushering in a self-driving car within five years. The three companies have scheduled a briefing for Friday morning (July 1), 10 a.m. East Coast time, or 4 p.m. CEST (central Europe).
It's likely the announcement will be built around advances in sensors and algorithms that improve on cars' abilities to detect and respond to other vehicles, pedestrians, and objects in the road that might collide unless the autonomous vehicle changes course or takes other action. The story was broken Thursday morning by Reuters.
The challenge to autonomous driving: the unexpected
Even now, more than a dozen car models have some measure of autonomous driving — on limited access highways with gradual not hairpin curves, when it's not snowing or raining heavily, and when another car doesn't spin out just in front of you, or an old washing machine doesn't fall off off a pickup truck. But it will follow the car in front (adaptive cruise control), stay centered in the lane (lane centering assist), and keep you from changing lanes if there's a car you don't see in your blind spot.
BMW is talking about taking its cars to a higher level of autonomous driving by 2021. Coincidentally, that could be the likely launch year for the seventh generation of the flagship BMW 7 Series, which is on a 6- to 7-year product cycle (the current 7 Series was launched in 2015). BMW earlier this year said it would launch a flagship car with autonomous driving capability. BMW could also declare its flagship vehicle to be the X7 SUV, which is expected to debut in 2018 and would be due for a mid-life refresh circa 2021.
Self-driving is the new competitive edge
The world's premier automakers see individual driver assist technologies today, and self-driving within the decade, to be potential differentiators. The challenge for the automakers is the core technologies — whether it's vision sensors from Mobileye, night vision sensors from Autoliv, or adaptive cruise control radars from Bosch — come from suppliers that work with multiple automakers.
Individual automakers can still hustle a technology to market by putting more people to work on the project, or make the installation and interface easier for the driver. BMW has an advantage because of its longstanding deployment of head-up displays that can show what the self-driving tools are sensing.
Who is Mobileye
Mobileye was founded in 1999 and has headquarters in Jerusalem, Israel, with several offices in the US. It concentrates on vision systems. BMW, along with GM and Volvo, were its earliest clients. Tesla is a high-profile client that uses Mobileye sensors for its AutoPilot System. The company also makes portable systems that can be installed on cars and trucks already in use.
Mobileye is expected to be the optical systems supplier for the BMW project, while Intel would be the chipmaker for Mobileye's fifth-generation chips, called EyeQ5. The chips and software are believed to offer real-time road mapping (that is, road contours and edges) as well as driving policy, meaning the rules for interacting with other cars and roadside objects, including when they're not behaving as expected. One uncertainty is what happens to Mobileye's existing relationship with STMicroelectronics, a French-Italian chipmaker.
EyeQ5