Tanier: Tight ends are still evolving. Given how athletically gifted they are, it?s not surprising that the 49ers and Patriots are finding new roles for players like Vernon Davis, Delanie Walker, Aaron Hernandez, and Rob Gronkowski.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/46031058#46031058
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MEXICO CITY ? The Mexican armed forces and prosecutors have suffered at least 28 gunfire attacks on helicopters in the five years since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels, according to official documents made public Monday.
The attacks show the increasing ferocity of Mexico's drug gangs, and also suggest support for what the Mexican government has said in the past: that 2010 may have been the worst year for the upward spiral in violence.
In the first two years of the drug war, reporting government agencies such as the air force, navy and Attorney General's Office reported no chopper attacks. But in 2008, four helicopters were hit by gunfire, wounding at least one officer aboard.
In 2009, bullets struck six government helicopters in the rotors, side doors or motor compartments. All the craft were apparently able to land safely.
2010 was the worst year for helicopter attacks, with 14 hit and one crew member wounded. Some craft had as many as seven bullet holes in them when they landed, with rounds going through windshields, fuselages, rotors and even landing gear.
In 2011, only three helicopters were hit by gunfire, but the number is almost certainly higher. The federal police refused to release data on attacks on its craft, but publicly acknowledged that on May 24, suspected cartel gunmen opened fire on a federal police chopper, hitting two officers and forcing the craft to land, though officials insisted it had not been shot down.
Federal police said the pilot in that incident landed "to avoid any accident." The Russian-made Mi-17 touched down about 3.5 miles (6 kilometers) from the shooting scene in the western state of Michoacan. Two officers aboard suffered non-life-threatening wounds.
Mexico has long used helicopters in anti-drug operations. While security forces have updated their helicopter fleet in recent years, they have also retired some older craft, so the total number of choppers would not account for the variation in attacks.
The newspaper Milenio originally requested the attack reports through a freedom of information request, and the reports were independently accessed by The Associated Press.
Mexican drug gangs have long strung steel cables around opium and marijuana plantations to try to bring down police and military helicopters. In 2003, in what prosecutors said was the first fatal attack of its kind by drug traffickers in Mexico, gunmen guarding an opium-poppy plantation shot down two police helicopters, killing all five agents aboard.
But those attacks were infrequent compared to what's occurred since 2008.
Overall Drug-related killings rose 11 percent in the first nine months of 2011, when 12,903 people were killed, compared to 11,583 in the same period of 2010, the office said. But the Attorney General's Office found one small consolation: "It's the first year (since 2006) that the homicide rate increase has been lower compared to the previous years."
Drug-related killings jumped by 70 percent for the same nine-month period of 2010 compared to January to September 2009, when 6,815 deaths were recorded.
The carnage continued Monday, when seven gunmen were killed in a pre-dawn shootout with police on a highway in the city of Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City.
A federal police officer was recovering from a gunshot wound to the foot following the confrontation.
The prosecutors office in the central Mexican state of Morelos says the gunmen belonged to an organized crime gang, but did not say which one.
"Organized crime" in Mexico generally refers to drug cartels, and remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel have been fighting for control of Cuernavaca.
Prosecutors said the gunmen were traveling in three stolen vehicles when police confronted them early Monday.
Also on Monday, Mexico City's top prosecutor said the two decapitated victims left inside a burning SUV a the entrance of a high-end fashion mall had been kidnapped a day before and lacked criminal backgrounds.
Jesus Rodriguez Almeida, the capital's attorney general, said the victims were a 19-year-old secretary in a state-owned educational radio station and her 28-year-old boyfriend who sold household appliances.
The headless bodies were found in the wealthy district of Santa Fe, but Rodriguez said they were killed in a different borough. The motive in the killings remains a mystery, but the pattern is common among Mexico's drug gangs.
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YORBA LINDA, Calif. ? Just days before being arrested, a Marine veteran suspected in the deaths of four homeless men in Southern California visited his father, who is himself homeless, warning of the danger of being on the streets and showing him a picture of one of the victims.
"He was very worried about me," Refugio Ocampo, 49, told The Associated Press on Sunday. "I told him, `Don't worry. I'm a survivor. Nothing will happen to me.'"
The father also said his son came back a changed man after serving in Iraq, expressing disillusionment and becoming ever darker as his family life frayed and he struggled to find his way as a civilian.
The father said he lost his job and home, and ended up living under a bridge before finding shelter in the cab of a broken-down big-rig he is helping repair.
His 23-year-old son, Itzcoatl Ocampo, is awaiting charges in connection with the serial killings of four homeless men since late December.
He was arrested Jan. 13 after a locally known homeless man, John Berry, 64, was stabbed to death outside a Carl's Jr. restaurant in Anaheim. Bystanders gave chase, and police made the arrest.
Refugio Ocampo said that on Jan. 11 his son came to him with a picture of the first victim, 53-year-old James Patrick McGillivray, who was killed on Dec. 20.
"'This is what's happening,'" the father quoted his son as saying.
Itzcoatl Ocampo had been living with his mother, uncle, and younger brother and sister in a rented house on a horse ranch surrounded by the sprawling suburbs of Yorba Linda. At the humble home, his mother, who speaks little English, tearfully brought her son's Marine Corps dress uniform out of a closet and showed unit photos, citations and medals from his military service.
The son followed a friend into the Marine Corps right out of high school in 2006 instead of going to college as his father had hoped. Itzcoatl Ocampo was discharged in 2010 and returned home to find his family in disarray, the father said.
That same month, Itzcoatl Ocampo's friend, Cpl. Claudio Patino IV, 22, of Yorba Linda, was killed in combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
"Once he received the news he was never the same," said the suspect's younger brother, 17-year-old Mixcoatl Ocampo. He said his brother visited Patino's grave twice a week.
Refugio and Mixcoatl both described a physical condition Itzcoatl suffered in which his hands shook and he suffered headaches. Medical treatments helped until he started drinking heavily, both said.
"He started drinking like crazy, too much, way too much," the father said.
A neighbor who is a Vietnam veteran and the father both tried to push Itzcoatl to get treatment at a Veterans hospital, but he refused. Refugio Ocampo said he wanted his son to get psychological treatment as well.
"He started talking about stuff that didn't make any sense, that the end of the world was going to happen," he said.
While Refugio Ocampo lives away from his family, they remain close. He saw his children every day, and his wife brings food to the parking lot where the truck is located in the city of Fullerton. He and his two sons went to get haircuts together just a day before the arrest, the father said.
Refugio Ocampo, who said he was educated as a lawyer in Mexico, immigrated with his wife and Itzcoatl in 1988 and became a U.S. citizen. He described building a successful life in which he became a warehouse manager and bought a home in Yorba Linda. In the past few years he lost his job, ran out of savings, lost his house and separated from his wife.
Standing near the truck where he sleeps, the father fought back tears as he described the changes he saw in his son in the year since returning home.
"Before, he had the initiative to do things, the desire. But after the military, he didn't have any of that," he said.
That was far from the son who in high school was a polite and motivated student, he said.
A school friend, Brian Doyle, portrayed Itzcoatl Ocampo as a fun-loving teen who liked to hit on girls when he joined the military. After he was discharged and returned home he became isolated and trusted no one, Doyle, 23, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Doyle had difficulty describing the change he saw in his friend from high school.
"He went from being a tall, geeky kid, really fun-loving...," he said, trailing off.
Doyle said he once offered his friend a self-help book based on Eastern philosophy that he had found useful but Itzcoatl Ocampo rejected it.
Doyle said he tried to find out what was going on with his friend but didn't press it, never imagining something like the serial killings.
"Everyone's got their issues, you know," he said.
Refugio Ocampo said investigators came to him on Friday night and showed him surveillance photos from a crime scene, but he did not recognize his son as the person in the images.
"If he did it, it wasn't right, obviously. But there's something wrong with him," he said.
In addition to Berry and McGillivray, Lloyd Middaugh, 42, was killed near a riverbed trail in Anaheim on Dec. 28; and Paulus Smit, 57, was found dead outside a Yorba Linda library on Dec. 30.
Anaheim Police Chief John Welter has said investigators are confident they have the man responsible for the string of murders that struck fear into Orange County's homeless since Dec. 20. Prosecutors have yet to file charges.
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MOSCOW |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Pieces of a failed Russian Mars probe plummeted into the Pacific Ocean far off the Chilean coast Sunday, Russian news agencies cited a military official as saying.
Debris from the Phobos-Grunt craft fell into the sea some 1,250 km (775 miles) west of the coastal island of Wellington, state-run RIA and Itar-Tass cited Aerospace Defense Forces spokesman Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin as saying.
The spacecraft never made it out of Earth's orbit after its November launch on a rare interplanetary mission for Russia's struggling space program.
It was not immediately clear whether all the parts of the craft that did not burn up in the atmosphere had fallen in the same area.
RIA cited an unnamed source in a separate Russian military branch as saying ballistics experts calculated that debris could have fallen anywhere in a broad area centred on Brazil.
Russia's space agency Roskosmos had said debris from its doomed 14-ton craft, which included 11 tons of toxic rocket fuel, might fall in the Atlantic Ocean about midway between Brazil and West Africa.
Roskosmos and the military could not be reached for comment.
Due to constant changes in the upper atmosphere, which is strongly influenced by solar activity, the exact time and place of the probe's return had been unknown.
The $165-million spacecraft, designed to retrieve soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos, was meant to be Russia's first successful interplanetary mission in over two decades.
But it became stuck in orbit after a botched launch on November 9, and had since been slowly losing altitude due to gravity's pull.
SPACE JUNK
Experts said the falling space junk posed little risk, with the probe's aluminium fuel tank expected to burn up high in the atmosphere.
"If anyone gets to see it, it will be a fabulous show. I don't think there has been an explosion of such a large volume of fuel in space history," Igor Marinin, editor of a space journal published by Roskosmos, said earlier Sunday.
Some 20 to 30 small pieces of debris with a total weight of 200 kg (440 lb) could hit Earth, Roskosmos said, adding that a tiny radioactive cargo of Cobalt-57 was too small to cause harm.
One component likely to survive re-entry was a small return capsule specifically designed to crash-land back on Earth in 2014, mission scientist Alexander Zakharov said.
"This is the capsule that was meant to bring back samples from Phobos, it's disappointing," Zakharov said. "We're hoping Roskosmos will approve a new craft to accomplish this mission."
Phobos-Grunt was one of five botched launches last year that marred celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering first human space flight and hurt Moscow's pride.
In an apparent attempt to deflect blame, Russia's space agency chief hinted last week that foreign sabotage might be the reason.
"I don't want to blame anyone, but there are very powerful means to interfere with spacecraft today whose use cannot be ruled out," Vladimir Popovkin told the daily Izvestia.
Stargazers watching for reentry included the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordinating Committee, an offshoot of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Under a U.N. space convention, Russia could be liable to pay compensation for any harm caused by bits of falling spacecraft.
In 1981, the Soviet Union paid Canada $3 million for the cost of cleaning up radioactive debris scattered in the crash of a Soviet nuclear-powered reconnaissance satellite, Kosmos 954.
When NASA's defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell out of orbit in September, it showered debris into the Pacific Ocean. Germany's Rosat X-ray telescope re-entered a month later over the Bay of Bengal.
(Additional reporting by Steve Gutterman; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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The United Nations is a huge organization: 193 member states and six major organs. As you can imagine, running the UN's social media networks is no walk in the park. But the international organization is incredibly active on social media, using it as a tool to spread knowledge and information about its mission, goals and accomplishments. So how does the UN, a very complex organization, manage such an active online presence?
[More from Mashable: This Web-Connected Robot Gives Your Tweets and Facebook Comments a Smell]
We sat down with Nancy Groves, social media manager at UN headquarters in New York, to find out. Groves is part of the Secretariat, the UN body charged with carrying out the day-to-day work of the organization. She maintains an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr and other networks.
"We're very involved in social media," says Groves, whose previous job was working as a UN librarian. "There's not much understanding of how the United Nations works out there, and we're using social media to get our message out."
"We're very involved in social media," says Groves, whose previous job was working as a UN librarian. "There's not much understanding of how the United Nations works out there, and we're using social media to get our message out."[More from Mashable: Comedy Central App Lets You Program Its Friday Night Line-Up]
Educating people about the UN's work, a mystery to many, is a top priority. Groves's team often posts information and videos about the United Nations's humanitarian work and other positive efforts to keep followers feeling good about the UN.
But not all the UN's content makes you feel warm and snuggly inside. Groves posts about peacekeeping efforts, natural disasters and other emergency situations. And Groves definitely feels a "sense of urgency" when sharing info about disaster relief. The UN's social media team was very active in connecting victims and relief centers during the recent tsunami and earthquake in Japan, for example. Groves says that Twitter is very important for the UN in times of crisis, because tweets are easily shared and can go viral quickly.
"We have to cover a broad range of work," says Groves. "Famine, genocide, et cetera. We want to get the tone right."
Groves's team gets a lot of questions from followers. There's a lot of UN haters out there, too, and Groves deals with them, well, diplomatically.
"We try to respond to every question that can be answered," says Groves. "We do answer any criticism with statistics pages and informative links."
The process of posting material online can sometimes lag for two reasons.
First, the UN works in six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and every post has to be translated into all of them for inclusion's sake. Groves often experiments with platforms popular amongst a particular language group, too. She sees her best numbers on Weibo, a Chinese site with over 300 million users, which is similar to a cross between Facebook and Twitter.
Second, all posts have to go through the UN's political review process. But Groves has a few tricks up her sleeve.
"Info can be a little slow to get out because of the translation and political review process," says Groves. "For that reason, we're often using pre-approved content. There's been one time when we didn't get approval, but people who do social tend to already have sound judgement. More than one person reads everything," says Groves.
That content could come from a more formal press release or a video that's already gone through the UN's formal review process. Groves has to be ever-mindful about language and wording, lest she inadvertently cause an international social incident. Her peer-editing process helps make sure that doesn't happen.
?The 'Be a Human Rights Defender' campaign was an excellent way to spread knowledge about rights that a lot of people aren't aware they have."
The UN's most successful social effort has been the "Be a Human Rights Defender" campaign, created to celebrate Human Rights Day. Groves's team pushed out 30 different articles on human rights, each centered around one article in the Declaration of Human Rights. People that shared the articles were titled "Human Rights Defenders." Groves said it was an excellent way to spread knowledge about rights that a lot of people aren't aware they have.And what about coordinating the social media efforts of the UN's 17 specialized agencies, 62 Information Centers and 15 peacekeeping operations worldwide? After all, Groves is only part of the Secretariat, one of many UN bodies.
"We've got an informal working group of UN social media agents," says Groves. "We try to have meetings based in New York at least once a month. It's a positive trend for the UN as a whole, because it brings together all these different agencies and we can see how our work is inter-related. I know pretty much everyone doing social media at all the different agencies."
Groves's team is continuing to seek out new ways to use social media to spread their message. Groves says she's even looking at Pinterest, the hot new image-heavy site popular amongst the Fashion and DIY community. She's also gearing up for a major conference on sustainable development happening this summer in Rio, Brazil. For that, she's making sure she has access to Portugese translators and a presence on the social media services that Brazilians love to use.
Do you follow the United Nations on social media? If so, what do you think of their digital efforts? Let us know in the comments below.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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The Kangaroos gave ORU one of its two league losses last season 81-77 in Kansas City, Mo., on Feb. 12 and many of the same faces return.
Senior guard Dayon Hall-Jones scored 16 in the win over ORU and is UMKC's current scoring leader.
The Kangaroos and Eagles are 1-2 in Summit League scoring offense averaging 75.2 and 74.8 points respectively.
Source: http://www.tulsaworld.com/site/articlepath.aspx?articleid=20111231_95_B6_hWOMEN223028&rss_lnk=95
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