http://gcaptain.com/giant-rubber-duck-floats-into-port-of-los-angeles-photos/

A giant rubber duck made its way into the Port of Los Angeles on Wednesday.



Ok, now for some context. The 60-foot tall inflatable duck is part of an art installation by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. Since 2007, the duck has called at ports and harbors across the globe including Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney, Auckland, Soa Paulo and Pittsburg, just to name a few.

The arrival of the duck in Los Angeles coincides with the Tall Ships Festival being held San Pedro, California from August 20-24.



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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/costa-concordia-captain-francesco-schettino-sparks-outrage-by-giving-lecture-on-managing-panic-at-rome-university-9651629.html

The Sapienza University of Rome has found itself at the centre of controversy after it emerged Francesco Schettino, the captain of the doomed Costa Concordia, was invited to speak at an event organised by a university professor on 'managing panic'.

Italian newspaper La Nazione reports that Schettino, currently on trial for charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship, described himself an “expert” on panic management in times of crisis as he spoke at the end of a limited access session held off the campus and organised by professor Vincenzo Mastronardi who teaches at the University’s Faculty of Medicine.

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He allegedly told the newspaper: “I was invited as an expert - I know how you behave in these situations. Besides, I have travelled in all the seas of the world, I know how you are supposed to react with ethnically diverse crews."

Schettino also reportedly claimed there are academic studies comparing the maritime disaster to other tragedies, such as the 9/11 attacks in America. He apparently asked: “How is it during the attack on the Twin Towers, there were people who threw themselves from the windows, but during the sinking of the Concordia, no-one did anything of a similar kind?”

http://gcaptain.com/human-remains-found-onboard-costa-concordia/


The Costa Concordia berthed at the Port of Genoa. Photo courtesy The Parbuckling Project

Bones possibly belonging to the Costa Concordia’s only still missing person may have been found onboard the hulk of the vessel.

A search for the last missing person kicked off Tuesday onboard the Costa Concordia at the port of Genoa, where the vessel is now berthed following the successful refloating and towing operation carried out last month.

According to a statement by the Italian Deptartment of Civil Protection, the bones were found by divers on deck number 3 of the ship and they will need to be analyzed to confirm whether or not they below to the missing person.

The green light for the search at the Port of Genoa comes after a search of the seabed at Giglio island following the vessel’s departure returned no signs of the missing person.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

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On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet, although new users only access it after August 23. For this reason this is considered the internaut's day. Several newsmedia have reported that the first photo on the Web was published by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story, writing that media were "totally distorting our words for the sake of cheap sensationalism."

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http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/02/us/hoffa-disappearance-anniversary-searches/index.html?hpt=hp_c2



Detroit, Michigan (CNN) -- The knock came for Pat Szpunar one afternoon in September 2012. At her door on a quiet corner in Roseville, a northeast suburb of Detroit, stood two local police detectives.
After some chitchat, she was hit with this doozy: They suspected a body was buried in her backyard.
Szpunar, a 74-year-old widow who has lived in the house since 1988, couldn't help but laugh.
"What?" she asked. "You think Jimmy Hoffa's buried back there?"
The detectives looked stunned but wouldn't say who they were looking for. She was only joking, but then a local reporter who'd caught wind of the investigation showed up. He wanted to talk about the former Teamsters boss who, he heard, was underneath her property.
Soon, Szpunar says, all hell broke loose, turning her place "not into a three-ring circus" but "a five-ring circus."

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV#Music_Television_debuts

On Saturday, August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time, MTV launched with the words "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll," spoken by John Lack, and played over footage of the first Space Shuttle launch countdown of Columbia, which took place earlier that year, and of the launch of Apollo 11. Those words were immediately followed by the original MTV theme song, a crunching rock tune composed by Jonathan Elias and John Petersen, playing over photos of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with the flag featuring MTV's logo changing various colors, textures, and designs. MTV producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert used this public domain footage as a conceit. Seibert said they had originally planned to use Neil Armstrong's "One small step" quote, but lawyers said Armstrong owns his name and likeness, and Armstrong had refused, so the quote was replaced with a beeping sound.

The first music video shown on MTV was The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". This was followed by the video for Pat Benatar's "You Better Run". Sporadically, the screen would go black when an employee at MTV inserted a tape into a VCR. MTV's lower third graphics that appear near the beginning and end of music videos would eventually use the recognizable Kabel typeface for about 25 years, but these graphics differed on MTV's first day of broadcast; they were set in a different typeface and included record label information such as the year and label name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion

The Black Tom explosion on July 30, 1916, in Jersey City, New Jersey, was an act of sabotage by German agents to destroy American-made munitions that were to be supplied to the Allies in World War I.

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After midnight on July 30, a series of small fires was discovered on the pier. Some guards fled, fearing an explosion. Others attempted to fight the fires and eventually called the Jersey City Fire Department.

At 2:08 AM, the first and largest of the explosions took place. Fragments from the explosion traveled long distances, some lodging in the Statue of Liberty and some in the clock tower of The Jersey Journal building in Journal Square, over a mile away, stopping the clock at 2:12 a.m. The explosion was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale and was felt as far away as Philadelphia. Windows broke as far as 25 miles (40 km) away, including thousands in lower Manhattan. Some window panes in Times Square were completely shattered. The stained glass windows in St. Patrick's Church were destroyed. The outer wall of Jersey City's City Hall was cracked and the Brooklyn Bridge was shaken. People as far away as Maryland were awakened by what they thought was an earthquake.

Property damage from the attack was estimated at $20 million. The damage to the Statue of Liberty was estimated to be $100,000 and included the skirt and torch.

Immigrants being processed at Ellis Island had to be evacuated to lower Manhattan. Reports vary, but as many as seven people may have been killed, including:

a Jersey City policeman
a Lehigh Valley Railroad Chief Of Police
a ten week old infant
a barge captain

Injuries numbered in the hundreds. Smaller explosions continued to occur for hours after the initial blast.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/how-to-swindle-soldiers/375090/



Well, here is a clever new business strategy: Offer service members around the country and around the world financing for their appliances, furniture, and electronics, and then, when they fall behind on their loans, sue them in courts they can't get to to represent themselves.

Turns out: effective! Also: legal.

These are the conclusions of a new report jointly published by ProPublica and The Washington Post that looks at the financial "innovation" of USA Discounters and two other companies, Freedom Furniture and Electronics and Military Credit Services, that sell goods to service members on credit and then, if they fall behind, go after them in Virginia courts, regardless of where the service members are based. Together the three companies have filed 35,000 lawsuits in a little under a decade.

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For service members who don't appear in Virginia, a lawyer is appointed on their behalf. "But," Kiel writes, "the law does not specify what that lawyer must do." ProPublica found that in each of the 11 cases it examined, the same lawyer was selected as the defendant's representative, and he seems to have made minimal efforts on his clients' behalf. USA Discounters denied any "business relationship" with the attorney.

That USA Discounters' strategy lines up so perfectly with the SCRA loophole is, presumably, no accident. As John Odom, whom Kiel identifies as an expert on the SCRA, observes, "This looks like somebody who has really, really researched the best way to get around the entire intent of the SCRA."

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