Category Archives: History

Photo by Sarah Fanning, courtesy of Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt.

Insect herbivores have caused more damage to plant matter from leaves in recent history than millions of years ago, according to a new study led by a University of Maine postdoctoral researcher.

Despite global insect decline and biodiversity loss fueled by human activity, the frequency of leaf damage by insects among forest plants in recent history, post-1955, is more than twice that of vegetation from the Pleistocene, 2.06 million years ago, and the Late Cretaceous period, 66.8 million years ago. The unprecedented increase in insect damage on leaf matter could pose negative effects on plant productivity and forest health.

To conduct their study, Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt, a postdoctoral researcher with UMaines Climate Change Institute, and her colleagues collected leaf samples deposited within sediment across three modern forest ecosystems Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, and La Selva in Costa Rica and compared them to previously published leaf litter and fossil data.

The research team, which also includes Emily Meineke of University of California, Davis and Ellen Currano of the University of Wyoming, used radiocarbon dates to verify the ages of modern leaves along with quantifying the frequency and diversity of insect damage in each sample.

The causes of this increase in leaf damage due to insect herbivores and the specific consequences of it remain unknown. However, researchers believe widespread change influenced by human activity, such as the rate of global warming, urbanization and the introduction of invasive plants and insects, could be driving the uptick. Human activity may have drastically changed how insect herbivores are interacting with their food source, the researchers say.

The research team published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Humans understand that climate is always changing and that the Earth has previously been hotter, but we often cant grasp the oddity of modern climate change, Azevedo-Schmidt says. The geologic record reported here should have supported comparable levels of insect herbivory, but it didnt because humans werent present in our post-industrial revolution capacity. This shows the heartbreaking reality that humans have a much higher impact on forest ecosystems than increased atmospheric CO2 alone. However, we can work to minimize our impacts on forest ecosystems by considering the intersection of these findings.

The researchers also found that the damage caused by insects in leaf samples from recent history is slightly more diverse than that in fossilized leaves. The increase in leaf damage diversity, however, is not as drastic as the spike in damage frequency.

Researchers examined total damage frequency and diversity along with various types of damage including specialized, piercing and sucking, surface feeding, hole feeding, galling, mining, skeletonization, margin feeding and specialized damage. In addition to discovering an overall uptick in total damage frequency, the team also found an increase across all groupings of damage.

Increased insect feeding cant be explained by one group of insects but rather, all groups of feeding damage analyzed here, Azevedo-Schmidt says. This suggests that all insect herbivores within these three modern forests are increasing their feeding damage; complicating the story as we cant simply blame one species or group.

No correlation was identified between damage diversity and frequency, according to researchers. The drivers behind the uptick in damage diversity are also unknown.

This is interesting because it suggests that insect diversity isnt influencing insect feeding frequency and that other drivers are responsible for the drastic increase we are seeing, Azevedo-Schmidt says.

According to researchers, insects and plants possess the most diverse lineages on the planet, and how they interact has evolved over millennia in response to natural and unnatural causes.

How plant-insect relationships change over time, including the extent to which the latter feeds on the former, has implications for biodiversity, plant functionality and mortality, and carbon balance in forests the loss of plant life can decrease the ability for a forest to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.

This study is the first to compare similar records of plant-insect interactions across modern and fossil datasets, Azevedo-Schmidt says. These findings highlight the importance of humans interacting with landscapes and although climate change influences ecosystem processes, it is not the only factor we need to consider. Humans are agents of disturbance and dispersal, greatly influencing the natural world around us.

Contact: Marcus Wolf, 207.581.3721; marcus.wolf@maine.edu

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Insects cause more damage to leaves in recent history than millions of years ago, study finds - UMaine News - University of Maine - University of...

Over the last several years, theres been a trend towards designing ever more complex and powerful electronic event badges. Color displays, sensors, WiFi, USB, Bluetooth you name it, and theres probably a con badge out there that has packed it in. Even our own 2019 Supercon broke new ground with the inclusion of a Lattice LFE5U-45F FPGA running a RISC-V core. Admittedly, observing this unofficial arms race has been fascinating. But as we all know, a hacker isnt defined by the tools at their disposal, but rather the skill and imagination with which they wield them.

So this year, weve taken a slightly different approach. Rather than try and cram the badge with even more state of the art hardware than we did in 2019, weve decided to go back to the well. The 2022 Supercon badge is a lesson in what it means to truly control a piece of hardware, to know what each bit of memory is doing, and why. Make no mistake, its going to be a challenge. In fact, wed wager most of the people who get their hands on the badge come November 4th will have never worked on anything quite like it before. Folks are going to get pulled out of their comfort zones, but of course, thats the whole idea.

Those well versed in the history of desktop computing will likely find the front of this years Supercon badge strangely reminiscent. Festooned with buttons and LEDs, its designed to resemble the front panel of early microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI 8080 made famous in War Games.

But the resemblance is more than just skin deep. The badge doesnt just look like the front panel of an early microprocessor, it actually is. Well, a simulated one, at least. While the PIC24FJ256GA704 on the back of the badge is technically running the show, the user interacts with a virtual 4-bit processor designed by the legendary Voja Antonic.

Programs can be entered into the computer, bit-by-bit, using the row of tactile buttons on the front of the badge. Each 12-bit sequence, made up of an opcode and one or two operands, gets deposited into the memory address indicated by the program counter LEDs. If you make a mistake (and you will), you can step back and forth through the program counter to review and correct the instructions given to the CPU.

To help you out, the 31 instructions accepted by the badges 4-bit CPU are listed on the backside of the board. In addition, once youve entered in the binary opcode, a LED will illuminate next to the appropriate mnemonic on the front of the badge. While the silkscreen notes cant compare to the exceptional documentation Voja has put together, at least youll always have a quick reference.

Programming is also made easier by the fact that all of the opcodes are between 4 and 8 bits in length. While a machine like the Altair may have required you to deposit as many as three binary sequences per instruction, the shorter opcodes mean theres always enough space left over to enter the required operands simultaneously.

True to the early computers that the badge is trying to emulate, theres not much in the way of onboard hardware. In isolation, all youve got for input are the physical buttons on the front of the badge, and output is limited to what you can show using the 816 LED array which provides a window into the CPUs memory. A close examination of the documentation does reveal theres a pseudorandom number generator you can poke around at, but dont expect any more luxuries than that.

But dont worry, we wouldnt leave you without some room to grow. As you might expect from a modern electronic event badge, theres a 4-pin Simple Add-On (SAO) header which lets you plug in various little gadgets and do-dads. The standard I2C data and clock signals have been replaced with simple UART in this case, but that shouldnt break compatibility with most add-ons which do little more than pull power from the port anyway.

Theres also a dedicated I/O connector in the form of a 12-pin standard pitch header along the top-right edge of the badge. This header shares the UART TX and RX pins with the SAO connector, but is capable of quite a bit more. For one thing, it serves as the badges In Circuit Serial Programmer (ICSP) interface should you want or need to reprogram it. But more interestingly, it offers four input and four output pins that can be accessed in your programs by reading and writing to the appropriate memory registers.

Badge hacking is a big part of the Supercon experience, and over the three day event, we hope to see all kinds of interesting software and hardware developed for this faux-retro computer. Given the relatively short amount of time youll have, teamwork is strongly encouraged dont be shy to ask other attendees what theyre working on to see if you can lend a hand.

Of course, collaborative development is a bit difficult if the only way to share your code is by scribbling out binary on pieces of paper. While youll have our eternal respect (and perhaps even earn a special award) if you manage to accomplish something substantial on your badge using nothing but the integrated peripherals, were not so evil that wed make you do it that way.

As such, the UART pins on the expansion port can be used to upload a program from the badge to your computer by way of a standard USB-to-serial adapter. With the adapter already connected, you simply need to put the badge into DIR (Direct) mode and press the SAVE button.

This will cause the badge to immediately start spitting out data, so you should already have your receiving side setup and ready to go before pressing the button. On a *nix machine that would look something like this:

If you press the LOAD button, the process works in reverse. A hex file sent from your computer will be loaded into the badges memory where it can be immediately executed. In this way, a program that was entered by hand into one badge can be quickly backed-up and distributed to others. It also means that if you formatted it appropriately, you could write the code on your computer and simply send it over to the badge for execution

Incidentally, while the badge can only have one program loaded at a time, up to 15 can be stored to the onboard flash. This is accomplished by first holding ALT and using the OPERAND Y buttons to cycle through the available storage slots, and then with ALT still held, pressing either SAVE or LOAD. With this technique you can keep your own personal programs safely stored away while you experiment with whatever hot new hex is making the rounds.

Now, the best way to get one is to buy yourself a ticket and come join us at Supercon. But if you just cant make it, we understand. Well be releasing the Gerbers, a full badge emulator, and the code for the PIC soon, so stay tuned.

Go here to see the original:

The 2022 Supercon Badge Is A Handheld Trip Through Computing History - Hackaday

Theres a modest home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Cheviot Hills, with a stucco roof, a jacaranda tree out front, and a 1989 Mercedes 560SL in perfect condition resting in the driveway. Beyond a front porch with wind chimes and a couch pillow that reads This is our happy place, past a kitchen with copper pots hanging above the sink, youll find a living room with a floral stained-glass lamp standing in a corner. Its the very lamp that Michelle Phillips seized from her Bel Air mansion in 1969, when she decided to leave her husband behind. I walked out with three things, Phillips, 78, says. My daughter, her crib, and the Tiffany lamp that I had to go back and steal, because I was so afraid of John.

John Phillips the cruel and domineering yet charismatic and gifted figure who dubbed himself L.A.s Wolf King has loomed large in her life ever since they met in the early months of the Kennedy administration, when Michelle was still a teenager. In the years that followed, they had a whirlwind romance and formed the Mamas and the Papas, scoring six Top 10 hits and redefining pop with their sunny, tight harmonies. When average Americans pictured hippies, these were the four people they saw, thanks to their frequent TV appearances.

Michelle was 24 when the group imploded, along with her marriage, leaving deep scars. In the years after she left Bel Air, she went on to a long career as an actress, working on everything from Knots Landing to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a series of Hollywood romances (not to mention an eight-day marriage to Dennis Hopper). She worked incessantly, paid off her post-divorce debt, and bought the house were standing in. She swore to herself that she would never, ever be in a position again where she would be dependent on a man, says her daughter, Wilson Phillips singer Chynna Phillips. Shes a determined woman.

Yet shes often reduced to the beautiful blonde in a short-lived band, arm candy for an eccentric songwriter, frozen in amber holding a tambourine. John Phillips and Denny Doherty wrote the songs; Mama Cass had the great voice; Michelle Phillips had the blond hair and the legs, read one typical 1986 profile. Shes always been more than that, and shes been trying to tell us all along. In a world thats changed in immeasurable ways since the Summer of Love, who does she want to be seen as?

DURING THE DIVORCE, John threatened Michelle with Youll never ride in a limo again! but she prefers her Mercedes, anyway. Shell drive it to Pastina, the Italian restaurant where she orders spaghetti aglio e olio and chicken milanese. Or she might drive it to the Hollywood Bowl, where she recently saw Andrea Bocelli. Being at the venue brought her back to the first time the Mamas and the Papas performed there, in 1966. I remember throwing up, she says. Cass is about to go running out, and Im frozen in place. She grabs my hand: Weve got to go now.

In addition to the Tiffany lamp, Phillips home contains several relics from her past. Theres the Grammy trophy that the Mamas and the Papas won for Monday, Monday; several gold records on the wall; and framed magazine covers ranging from the Seventies through the Nineties. On top of the piano sits a photo of John and Michelle, with three Marlboro Reds sticking out of her mouth. Theres also a telegram from the Beach Boys framed on the wall. The note, sent after Michelle was briefly kicked out of the band in 1966, reads, Your secret is safe with us.

Phillips gives me a tour of her backyard, which contains a tiki bar with a mural of a hula dancer on the wall. Her dogs Chloe and Lulu run playfully around her legs as she takes a seat clutching a glass of watermelon juice. In black leggings, a black top, and a black scrunchie, she looks more like a New Yorker than a Laurel Canyon legend. Large sunglasses mask her piercing blue eyes, and she brushes her blond bangs to the side as the sun begins to set.

Theres a monstrous gorilla sculpture made of tires in the yard, but she casually gestures to it as if its a lawn hose. Thats my dads idea of a wonderful garden piece, she says. Phillips was close to her father, Gardner Gil Gilliam, a Coast Guard veteran who raised her and her older sister in Mexico City after their mother died from subacute endocarditis when Phillips was five. Once there, Phillips attended private school, where she learned to read and write Spanish before English. It was important to Gil that his daughters be self-sufficient: He told me that I would always be able to take care of myself, she recalls. He said, You know why? Because youre a woman, and you can do anything you want, she recalls. Then as I grew older, I thought, That doesnt really seem to be true for a lot of women that I know.

When Phillips was about 12, her family returned to L.A. She looked to fill the void left by her mother by befriending older girls like her neighbor Tamar Hodel, who was almost a decade her senior. (Hodels father would later become a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder, and its hard not to notice several books on this topic on Phillips bookshelf.)

In 1961, at 17, Phillips followed Hodel to San Francisco, where her friend bought her a fake ID and a black cocktail dress, taking her to clubs to meet comedians like Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory. They were at the Hungry I one evening when she fell in love with the guitar player onstage. John was married with two children, but as his then-wife, Susan, later told her over martinis, He has a Michelle in every town.

John divorced Susan and married Michelle, and the two moved to New York, living first in an apartment on 70th and Third Avenue, and later downtown. She remembers John asking her fathers permission for the move. John just charmed him like a bird off a tree, and they became very good friends, she says. I remember my father saying, John, youve been to college. She hasnt even finished high school. And John said, Gil, I promise you Ill teach her everything she has to know.

With the Mamas and the Papas still a few years away from existing, Michelle found work as a model in the early-Sixties, Mad Men ad industry. I was having a great time in New York City, she says. I had just been offered a big contract to do teenage lingerie, which was my specialty. Lingerie paid double.

The story of how the newlyweds co-wrote their breakthrough hit, California Dreamin, is almost as well-worn as the song itself, but to hear Phillips tell it is like hearing it for the first time. She becomes animated as she recalls how she hated the East Coast winter (I didnt have any gloves. I didnt have a hat. I was like, Who would live here?), how John woke her in the middle of the night with the opening lines, and how she groggily helped finish it. He said, Youll thank me for this someday, she says. And, God, I do thank him every day.

THE SUNSET IS at its peak now, with a golden-pink haze falling over Phillips. She reminisces through the bands early days moving back to L.A., meeting Cass Elliot for the first time on LSD, secretly kissing Denny Doherty on a beach in the Virgin Islands, getting signed by producer Lou Adler, watching Jimi Hendrix light his guitar on fire at Monterey Pop. A festival, she likes to point out, that occurred prior to another one that gets all the counterculture credit. Woodstock was just huge and ugly, she says. People rolling in the mud and freezing their asses off.

The Mamas and the Papas story is full of as much drama and betrayal as, say, Fleetwood Macs, even if its a fraction as known to Gen Z. Elliot was in love with Doherty, yet perpetually stuck in the friend zone; Doherty, meanwhile, was busy having an affair with Michelle. John didnt actually find us having sex, but he did come downstairs and I was sitting on Dennys bed in my night gown, feeding him candies, she says. He said, You could do a lot of things to me, Mich, but you dont fuck my tenor.

Naturally, though, John was free to have as many affairs as he liked. He wrote that song Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon, Phillips says. I used to say to him, Yeah, John, and youve fucked them all.

Their tumultuous marriage came to its first halt in June 1966, when he found out Michelle was having an affair with the Byrds Gene Clark and ousted her from the group. She had invited the singer to a Mamas and Papas show at Melodyland in Anaheim on June 4 (her birthday); John spotted Clark in the crowd and put two and two together. Mich went through a lot with him, Lou Adler recalls. He was destructive, and he was tough to live with It was bound to explode, as it did that night onstage when Gene was in the audience.

Soon after she exited the band for the first time, Phillips crashed a recording session, grabbed her tambourine out of the hands of her blonde replacement (Adlers girlfriend Jill Gibson), and famously cried, Ill bury you all! Elliot died tragically less than a decade later, and John followed in 2001; with the death of Doherty in 2007, her prophecy came true. So far, so good, she says. Everyone but Jill.

As the last remaining Mama and Papa, Phillips can get to work on the biopic shes been trying to make for decades. Now, mercifully, John is dead, she says. So he cant stand in the way of me doing it, and neither can Denny. She wants her granddaughter, Brooks Baldwin, to audition for the role of Michelle. Once youve taken the knife out of your heart, it makes for a wonderful story, she says. Were going to get this movie made, come hell or high water.

Phillips declines to talk about her brief marriage to Hopper, referring to him as the name that shall never pass my lips. But she glows when talking about Warren Beatty (It took me a long time to get over him) and Jack Nicholson, who encouraged her to take acting classes in the early Seventies. He said, If you want to be an actress, join every workshop you can, she says. That was the best advice that I could have been given.

Acting came naturally to Phillips. I enjoyed acting more than I enjoyed singing, she admits. Singing for me was so difficult. In 1974, she met producer Aaron Spelling, who cast her in a campy TV film about vigilante cops opposite Melvyn Douglas and Robert Forster. She spent the next 25 years as a recurring player in Spellings TV empire from Fantasy Island to The Love Boat to Beverly Hills, 90210, where she had a nine-episode arc as Tiffani Thiessens mom and made one largely forgotten solo album, 1977s Victim of Romance. Everyone wants to have a solo album, she says. If they tell you they dont want to, thats a lie.

All through those years, though, shes been working on another longterm project: protecting the legacy of the Mamas and the Papas, reframing their story from her own perspective. In 1986, she published a memoir, California Dreamin, the same year as her ex-husband published his, Papa John. My book isnt as sensational as Johns, Phillips said that year. I wanted people to know who John had been when he had been at his best.

Even now, Phillips still looks back on him with admiration and respect, though many have come to view him as a toxic, manipulative force. Shes unflinching, at least, about his post-Mamas and Papas descent into cocaine and heroin use. There was no love lost between John and I towards the end, she says. At all. I saw how he had changed from that handsome, wholesome, all-American boy into this depravity of addiction. He was not the same person I had loved.

The group became eligible for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, and she remembers urging record executive Ahmet Ertegun to nominate them. I sat in Ahmets lap and said, We have not been nominated, she says. He said, Well, Michelle, John made a lot of enemies. I said, How about you just nominate the Mamas? We havent done anything to you. The band was inducted in 1998.

Even by Sixties L.A. standards, John had a reputation during his life as a volatile, lecherous presence a man who continually pushed boundaries. That reputation was detonated further in 2009, when Mackenzie Phillips his daughter from his first marriage published a memoir, High on Arrival. Mackenzie, who acted in American Graffiti and the sitcom One Day at a Time, had been three when her father remarried. In High on Arrival, she wrote that John raped her in 1979, and that they then began a consensual incestuous relationship that lasted for 10 years. Michelle expressed doubts about the allegations upon the books release; during our first interview, she claims that Mackenzie approached her with the allegations while her father was still alive, only to take her story back. Frankly, I do not believe it, Michelle says. She called me and said, I had a love affair with my dad. I was absolutely mortified. Eight minutes later, she called me back. She says, Michelle, I hope you know I was kidding. I said, Thats not funny. She says, Well, I guess we just have different senses of humor.

Phillips tells me later that this part of our conversation gnawed at her that evening. During our next three interviews, she veers back and forth on her belief clearly grappling with the scandals that have tarnished her late ex-husbands legacy. When I ask if he ever got violent with her during the divorce, she pauses, then calmly says, I have never, ever mentioned this to my children or to my friends, but there was a night when John let me have it, she says. He mentioned it in his book. I think he said there was a little slapping. It was more than that.

She says several times that the incest allegations are Mackenzies story to tell, not hers. Im not going to say whether its true or not, because I dont think she knows if its true or not, Phillips concludes. She waited, very conveniently, for John to die [before publishing the book].

In an email to Rolling Stone, Mackenzie strongly denied her stepmothers assertions. I stand by my truth as I always have and as I always will, Mackenzie wrote. Plus which, who on Earth would fabricate such a story as mine? To what end? Its not exactly a rsum builder, for Gods sake....[High on Arrival] is true, and it was my story to tell. If I had to live it, I had the right to tell it. She added that she takes some comfort in the ways the worlds perspective on abuse allegations has changed in the past decade. Imagine if [my memoir] had been published during the me too movement. I sometimes wonder what that wouldve been like.

Thirteen years after Mackenzies memoir was published, Phillips says their relationship is nonexistent. I will never speak to her, she tells me. I have nothing to say to her, because I dont trust anything that comes out of her mouth. As this story was being reported, though, the two got back in touch at first acrimoniously and then, perhaps, more warmly. After Cass Elliot gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in October, Mackenzie sends me a photo of her and Michelle smiling together at the ceremony. I told her I loved her and always had, she writes. She took my hand and said I love you, too. I was moved.

THE PANDEMIC TOOK an emotional toll on Phillips. She found herself missing the dinner parties she used to host, where shed regularly make meals for 10 to 12 people. Everything just stopped, she explains. I would stay in my pajamas for a couple of days at a time. I was drinking red wine with my breakfast. It got to that point.

Chynna introduced her to Wellbutrin an anti-depressant her daughter describes as the skinny, happy, horny pill and it rid her of the urge to drink. In fact, she hasnt had one in six months. I saw her in person and I almost fell over, Chynna says. Her eyes were crystal blue, her skin was so clear, and her smile was so bright. I dont know if it has anything to do with her sobriety, but I will say that her phone is ringing a lot and people are wanting to hang out with her all of a sudden. I think shes putting two and two together. Oh, people like the sober Michelle a lot better than the non-sober Michelle.

Although Chynna is a born-again Christian and Phillips is an atheist, both tell me that it doesnt get in the way of their relationship. Chynna has a successful YouTube series called California Preachin, where she calls her viewers Bible Babes and gets incredibly candid about her personal life and her familys, which Phillips isnt crazy about. There is a bit of a rub there, Chynna says. Its a sensitive thing, because Im entitled to tell my stories, because theyre my stories and my memory. Now, does that always match up with what my mother remembers?

Chynna has little memory of her parents together, since they split when she was a baby a divorce prompted in part by Chynna crawling around their Bel Air home and nearly popping one of Johns Benzedrines in her mouth. But she has vignettes of her early life here and there, like when she accompanied her mother to a glamorous Hollywood party at the Polo Lounge, or when they went to Cass Elliots house to play with Cass daughter, Owen.

She feels that Phillips stepped into motherhood naturally, despite having lost her own at such a young age. I think that she overcompensated in some ways because she didnt have the role model, Chynna says. She was terrified of motherhood, and she didnt want to screw me up.

Long after the Mamas and Papas ended, Phillips continued to play a nurturing role in Owen Elliots life, too. On a phone call in early September, Owen mentions that it was Phillips who helped her connect with her biological father, guitarist Chuck Day, in 1986, when Owen was 19. Michelle put a plane ticket in my hand to San Francisco and said, Go meet him, she says. Shes been a form of a surrogate mom to me.

Owen has noticed how content Phillips seems these days. I just think of Michelle in her Spanish style-home that shes lived in for the last three decades or more, on her porch, she says. Shes at a really great point in her life. Shes settled. Its a beautiful thing. Shes earned it.

Mich is a survivor, Adler adds. She can get through anything.

Michelle has been single since her longtime boyfriend, plastic surgeon Steven Zax, died in 2017. Shes open to dating again; shed also love to act again. I wish that I could be Jean Smart and do something like Hacks, but its very hard for older actresses, she says. And Im a lot older than Jean Smart.

Phillips spontaneously calls me on a Saturday in early September for one final conversation. She was supposed to head to Spain soon, but pushed back the trip. Instead, shell head to some land she owns in Idyllwild, California, high in the San Jacinto Mountains, for some me time. She tells me shes been thinking about our hours together, and what she really wants the world to know about her. The most important thing is my children and my grandchildren, she says. The rest is my past.

Read the original here:

Michelle Phillips Finally Reveals the Secret History of the Mamas and the Papas - Rolling Stone

The Maui News

WAILUKU A Lanai man with a long criminal history was placed on probation for drug crimes, in what his attorney called a compassionate last chance.

Jesse Spitalsky, 61, also was sentenced Wednesday to a one-year jail term with the possibility of being released early to enter a drug treatment program.

In following a plea agreement to impose the sentence, 2nd Circuit Judge Kirstin Hamman said Spitalsky would need support to address his drug addiction and make the best of his time.

He pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree promotion of a dangerous drug for taking a substantial step toward distributing methamphetamine on Jan. 8 and to third-degree promotion of a dangerous drug for possessing methamphetamine on June 16, 2020.

Spitalskys criminal history began with his first conviction in 1980 and continued to 2012, said Deputy Prosecutor Shelly Miyashiro.

It appears the defendant has been part of the criminal justice system for most of his life, she said.

While recommending a sentence of probation, she said Spitalsky would probably face prison if he continued in criminal activity.

Deputy Public Defender Tyler Stevenson said Spitalskys involvement with a classmate, who is a co-defendant in his latest case, led him to relapse.

He is still reeling from the loss of his wife, Stevenson said. He does need help.

Defense attorney Jon Apo said the plea agreement was a very compassionate last-chance opportunity that the states giving.

There is a 10-year prison sentence over his head if he does not, in fact, comply, Apo said.

Spitalsky said he also is dealing with a medical condition.

I dont know how long I going live, he said.

As part of his probation, Spitalsky was ordered not to consume alcohol or illegal drugs.

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

See the original post:

Probation is 'last chance' for man with long criminal history - Maui News

There's a good chance we'll never see someone break Wilt Chamberlain's single-game scoring record.

On March 2, 1962, Chamberlain led the Warriors to victory over the Knicks by scoring 100 points, the most ever in an NBA game. He made 36 field goals and 28 free throws, both of which are also single-game records.

In the six decades since, the closest anyone has gotten to Chamberlain's record is Lakers legend Kobe Bryant, who scored 81 points on Jan. 22, 2006.

Only one active player has even scored 70 points in a game: Suns star Devin Booker.

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Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for most points scored in an NBA game with 100. Kobe Bryant ranks second with 81 points.

Other than Chamberlain and Bryant, the only players in NBA history who have scored 70 points in an NBA game are David Thompson (73), Elgin Baylor (71), David Robinson (71) and Devin Booker (70).

Chamberlain is the only player in NBA history with multiple 70-point games. He had six such games in his career.

Booker has the highest scoring game among active players with 70 points. A number of active players have scored 60 points in a game, including James Harden, LeBron James, Bradley Beal and Kemba Walker.

At the age of 20, Booker is also the youngest player ever to score 60 points in a game. The oldest? Bryant, at 37.

Fun fact: Kevin Durant, who has the fourth-highest career scoring average in NBA history, has never scored 60 points in a game. His career high is 55 points.

See original here:

Who has the most points in a game in NBA history? Full list of player leaderboard - Sporting News

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has told the Council of Europes Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) that dialogue between Europeans has had historically important results. We see actions that have made Europe unprecedentedly stronger. Never yet in history was united Europe as strong as it is today. So, focus on everything that is needed to prevent the Russian terrorists from destroying our lives. This is the power of dialogue. He added Together we are isolating Russia. Together we are punishing it for the terror and making it feel the price of the war it has unleashed. Thanks to our dialogue we have very important programmes of support for Ukraine. Defence programmes, financial support, programmes to support Ukrainians, the ones who had to flee their homeland to save themselves from hostilities

This dialogue must continue, Mr Zelenskyy stressed, to make Russia responsible as the aggressor state, and every Russian murderer and butcher for all the crimes of this war, for every manifestation of their terror. When legal mechanisms are created, when they start working, this will become one of the most powerful guarantees for long-term peace. Europe can play a historic role in creating a special tribunal for Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Let's do it. It will be the best way to protect the principles of international law, he said.

Thanking the Ukrainian President for his intervention before the Assembly, PACE President Tiny Kox said: the applause you just received shows how much we appreciate your courage, your determination, but also your wise words and the wisdom that you shared with us on how to bring this war to an end as soon as possible and to restore justice, national sovereignty, and the territorial integrity of your country.

We all consider Russia's unilateral aggression as an attack against the multilateral cooperation that is meant to protect all our citizens in Europe. That is why we try to do whatever is in our mandate to support your country and your citizens in these most challenging and dangerous times, Mr Kox added.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells PACE: 'Never yet in history was united Europe as strong as it is today' - Council of Europe

Serena Williamss fellow tennis professionals already know what their sport is like without her.

She has played very little in the past two years and has played just two singles matches in the past 13 months.

But as Williams, now 40 years old, made plain in announcing her impending retirement on Tuesday, it will very soon be time for the wider world to become accustomed to her absence from the courts, as well.

Tennis is a global game, which is a big part of its charm, and despite Williamss part-time status of late, if you ask anyone on just about any street to start naming womens tennis players, the first name most would produce would still be Serena Williams.

With her technically sound and forceful serve, she possessed perhaps the most decisive shot in the long history of the womens game. But there has been much more to her tennis: powerful, open-stance groundstrokes; exceptional and explosive court coverage; and a ferocious, territorial competitive drive that helped her overcome deficits and adversity throughout a professional career that has lasted a quarter century.

At her peaks and there were several she was one of the most dominant figures in any sport: able to overwhelm and intimidate the opposition with full-force blows and full-throated roars, often timed for maximum effect.

By force of serve and personality and long-running achievement, she has become synonymous with tennis while managing to transcend it as a Black champion with symbolic reach even if she long eschewed political or social commentary, in part because of her upbringing as a Jehovahs Witness. Years after Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe blazed trails for Black champions, Williams created new paths for modern athletes balancing competition and outside pursuits.

Her off-court world including acting, fashion design, venture capital, family life and motherhood most likely allowed her to remain fresh and competitive far longer than expected. And we are not just talking about the publics expectations. Her father and longtime coach, Richard Williams, clearly had vision: He dreamed up a far-fetched and ultimately right-on-target family plan for Serena and her older sister Venus to dominate womens tennis. But he also predicted that both would retire early to devote themselves to other endeavors.

Father did not know best in this instance. Both sisters have played into their 40s, displaying an undeniable love of the game that is rather surprising considering that they were given no choice in whether they would play it.

I got pushed hard by my parents, Serena Williams wrote in the Vogue essay released on Tuesday announcing her impending retirement. Nowadays so many parents say, Let your kids do what they want! Well, thats not what got me where I am. I didnt rebel as a kid. I worked hard, and I followed the rules.

She then talked about her 4-year-old daughter, Olympia. I do want to push Olympia not in tennis, but in whatever captures her interest, Williams said. But I dont want to push too hard. Im still trying to figure out that balance.

It is a delicate dance, and my suspicion is that many a tennis family has run aground trying to follow the Williams template, which included a cradle-to-tour focus on greatness but also extraordinarily no junior tournaments after age 12.

Thousands of lives probably went down the wrong path trying to follow that, said Rick Macci, the fast-talking coach who shaped the games of both Serena and Venus Williams in their youth under Richards watchful gaze. That playbook only worked for the sisters because they were both so amazingly competitive that they maybe did not need to play junior tennis. Other kids need to compete to learn how to win and how to lose.

Though the sisters will always be, in some manner, packaged together in the collective consciousness, it was Serena who grew up, as her father correctly predicted, to be the greater player.

Serena would go on to win 23 Grand Slam singles titles (for now) to Venuss seven, and to spend 319 weeks at No. 1 to Venuss 11 weeks. Serena says she takes no joy in that disparity, emphasizing that she would never have scaled such heights without her sisters high-flying example.

Without Venus, there would be no Serena, Serena once said.

It would come as no surprise if Venus, 42, soon joined Serena in retirement at some stage after the U.S. Open or if they decided to call it a career together in New York. But for now, only Serena has made it plain that the end is truly nigh and that to deploy her own rather endearing sneaker-dragging code for retirement she is evolving away from tennis.

She has certainly helped tennis evolve with point-winning power from all areas of the court; she has certainly helped society evolve with her willingness to change the dialogue about body image and strong women ferociously pursuing their goals. She has had the confidence to take risks, sometimes sartorial, like her French Open catsuit, and sometimes more profound, such as her decision to boycott the tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., after she was booed and her father said he heard racial slurs in 2001. Fourteen years later, she returned in the interest of bridging the divide and sending a message about second chances.

But it is her tennis that has spoken loudest the longest. The sport, like many sports, remains fixated on the debate about the greatest of all time, and Williams certainly belongs in the heart of the conversation. It is easy to believe that she, at her best with the same equipment, would have beaten any woman at their best.

But she was not nearly as consistent a winner in regular tour events as past womens champions like Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Steffi Graf.

Williams picked her spots, and her 73 tour singles titles rank her fifth on the Open Era career list. Navratilova won 167 singles titles and 177 doubles titles at a time when doubles was much more prestigious and widely played by the stars. Evert won 157 singles titles. Graf, who retired at 30 years old, won 107 and remained No. 1 for a record total of 377 weeks.

But Serena, who has amassed a womens record of $94.5 million in prize money, played at a time when the Grand Slam tournaments have become evermore the measuring stick of greatness and the focus of global interest and attention.

To her evident frustration, she remains one short of the record of 24 major singles titles, held by Margaret Court, a net-charging Australian who played when Grand Slam tournament fields were smaller and the womens game lacked the depth it possesses today.

But comparing across eras remains a particularly tricky task in tennis (non-Australian greats of the past often skipped the Australian Open altogether). Perhaps it is wisest not to seek a definitive answer.

Shes the greatest player of her generation, no doubt, Navratilova said.

That brooks no argument, and though tennis generations have a way of getting compacted to just a few years, Williamss greatness was genuinely true to the term. She is the only player to have won singles titles in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Ten of her Grand Slam singles titles came after age 30: more than any other player. She also reached four major singles finals after giving birth to Olympia.

She was fresh at 30, a lot fresher than other players and champions in the past, Navratilova said. We would have played a lot more matches at that point. But the physical issues meant that she had taken a lot of breaks.

That enduring excellence a tribute to Williamss deep drive, phenomenal talent and innate belief in her own powers will be a huge part of her legacy, no matter how far she advances in what is surely her final U.S. Open.

See the rest here:

Serena Williams Forced Her Way Into the Tennis History Books - The New York Times

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The Atlantic recently referred to gasoline as the only product whose prices are advertised on big signs by the side of the highway.

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No other commodity not gold and not the wheat we use to make bread can compete with oils power to stoke geopolitical conflict, steer international trade and determine the foreign policies of nations. For most people, however, gas is just the stuff you set on fire to make your car go and no one likes when its expensive.

Gas prices had fallen for 51 days straight as of Aug. 5, providing sorely needed relief from their June highs above $5. But why did prices ever climb so high in the first place, whats making them fall now, and what has driven the cycles of high and low gas prices throughout history?

Economists tend to frame historical gas prices as being reactionary to the major social, political and economic events of their day. Common examples include:

International economic expert Mykola Volkivskyi, founder of the First International Ukrainian Foundation of Development and a former advisor to the committee chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament, believes its usually the other way around: Oil prices have more power to influence events than events have power to influence oil prices.

Today, the world is critically dependent on the stability of the energy market, Volkivskyi said. The slightest fluctuations in prices affect the cost of products, the currency market, the ratio of the money supply in the economy and the property status of the population. One cannot speak of a clear cause and effect, as if an increase in energy prices will lead to a revolution or the collapse of the state. Nor can it be said that some culminating event by itself has a significant effect on prices.

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That said, global events and gas prices have been influencing each other since the dawn of the automobile.

Oil prices fluctuate throughout the day, every day, but the history of gas prices in the United States can be loosely organized into four distinct periods.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T. Three years later, the Supreme Court backed the governments breakup of John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil which owned 90% of the countrys refineries and pipelines into the companies that would become Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco and Conoco.

It was the beginning of an era defined by low inflation and remarkably steady gas prices, which held within a penny or two of $0.20 for decades between the 1920s and the end of World War II.

The Allied victory in World War II ended the era of rock-steady gas prices that had defined the past two-plus decades. The economy absorbed an avalanche of pent-up consumer demand and the price at the pump rose but a more consequential story was playing out far away.

According to NPR, America started on the path to foreign dependence the moment the worlds largest oil reserves were discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938. A flood of cheap foreign oil fueled the postwar boom but it came at a price.

A region of the world that most Americans back then couldnt have pointed to on a map held sway over the price of gas in the United States for the eight decades that followed.

A new geopolitical force emerged when Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960.

Many factors contributed to the economic and political turmoil of the 1970s, but none more so than OPECs oil embargo and the energy crisis it created.

The era of cheap energy that had defined the 1950s and 60s oil often cost less than $1 per barrel ended in 1973. That year, OPEC initiated an oil embargo that cut America off from the crude supply that it had come to depend on. The embargo was retaliation for Americas support of Israel against its Arab neighbors in the 1967 and 1973 wars. It laid the groundwork for the now-famous images of endless lines of cars snaking into filling stations that had run out of gas.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran created a second energy crisis and, when the dust settled, gas prices had tripled over the course of the decade and the Middle East was a powerhouse.

According to NPR, most Americans at that time believed that the gas they pumped into their cars still came from American oil fields, as it had in the time of Henry Ford. The decades events served as a reality check: Adversarial foreign nations now had the power to cripple the American economy at will by manipulating its oil supply.

Starting in the late 1970s, the global market was flooded with newly discovered oil from non-OPEC sources, including Alaska, Siberia, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, India and Brazil. By 1981, non-OPEC countries were outproducing OPEC, which lost control over global supply and prices.

The bottom dropped out of the oil market and gasoline was dirt cheap once again starting in the late 1980s. Although prices rose incrementally in the 21st century, there was no repeat of the 1970s energy shock until the price of gas breached $5 per gallon in June 2022.

Today, America produces 16.59 million barrels of oil per day compared to Saudi Arabias 10.95 million, making the United States both the largest producer and the largest consumer of oil in the world.

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Andrew Lisa has been writing professionally since 2001. An award-winning writer, Andrew was formerly one of the youngest nationally distributed columnists for the largest newspaper syndicate in the country, the Gannett News Service. He worked as the business section editor for amNewYork, the most widely distributed newspaper in Manhattan, and worked as a copy editor for TheStreet.com, a financial publication in the heart of Wall Street's investment community in New York City.

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The History of Gas Prices in the US - GOBankingRates

Its hard to argue that the introduction of the NextGen car hasnt been a success for the NASCAR Cup Series. There have been 15 different race winners through the 23 races run so far this season. While the rule book is new and new teams have been able to find their way to victory lane the NextGen regulations were built atop a foundation from almost 75 years of competition. NASCAR has recently released a short video to illustrate how the sanctioning body got to this point, as told by the people who lead the sport on and off the track.

The Evolution of Stock Car to Race Car: Seven generations of NASCAR race cars explained

The 17-minute video features archival footage, studio footage of surviving historic vehicles and interviews with prominent figures from NASCARs history. With these parts, viewers are guided through the seven generations of NASCAR stock car and, indirectly, a brief history of the sport. The early portion of the video somewhat romanticizes NASCARs first two decades, but its reasonably well-balanced when discussing the two generations of stock car before the NextGen. Despite being produced by NASCAR, the Car of Tomorrow and the Gen6 are fairly criticized for their flaws. The CoT was derided for initially featuring a rear wing and the body that was basically uniform between manufacturers. The Gen6 sparked a costly spending war fueled by a search for marginal advantages.

The video concludes by contextualizing the NextGen car within the history of NASCAR. This current generation of machinery continues the push for bodywork similar to road cars started in the sixth generation harkening back to the original age of stock cars. But underneath the bodywork, the NextGen car is effectively a purpose-built racing car reaching the end goal that Cup Series teams have unintentionally been pushing towards for decades.

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NASCAR Retells 7 Generations of Stock Car History in 17 Minutes - Jalopnik

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I am appalled at the intentional cruelty and shocking incompetence that drove the Trump administrations family-separation tragedy.

But first, heres more from The Atlantic.

Welcome to the week, and allow me to introduceor reintroducemyself to you. Im Tom Nichols, a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where Im also the proprietor of the Peacefield newsletter. If youre a regular Daily reader, you might remember that I authored this newsletter in June; Im back, and Ill be writing the Daily most days of the week. Along with some of my Atlantic colleagues, Ill be sharing thoughts and analysis about the days news and other issues.

I write, among other things, about the perilous state of democracy in the United States and around the world. Today, I urge you to read The Atlantics new cover story by my colleague Caitlin Dickerson about the origins and consequences of the disastrous decision by President Donald Trump and his advisers to curtail illegal immigration by instituting a brutal family-separation policy in which childrenincluding infants and toddlerswere intentionally taken from their parents.

Caitlins intense and detailed examination shows that the family-separation policy was not a misunderstanding, or a bureaucratic error, or some sort of overzealous interpretation of otherwise sensible rules. It was, as one government figure told her, evil, and intentionally so: The goal of the policy was to pull children from their parents at the border as a deterrent, to inflict so much pain on people trying to enter the United States illegally that no one would be brave or tough enough to keep trying to do it.

Heartbreaking stories of children torn from their parents and then subjected to inhumane detention conditions should afflict the conscience of any decent person. But Americans should also be enraged by the completely dysfunctional nature of their own government. Even if you believe in taking a tough stand against illegal immigration (as I do) the combination of moral rot and bureaucratic incompetence produced outcomes that were far worse than the policys designers expectedand they already expected it to be bad.

When Trump officials such as Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions finally got the family-separation policy under way, the immigration systems courts, shelters, and other assets were almost instantly overwhelmed by a flood of traumatized children. The fallout was so awful and so obvious that soon, even Trumps people began to backpedal away from it. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsenwho spoke with Caitlin on the recordadmitted that she did not understand how bad the situation would get and that she regretted caving to the pressure to sign the order.

The family-separation nightmare is what can happen when zealots who have no idea what theyre doing get control of the levers of a gigantic and powerful government. Not only were Trumps aides clueless about how the immigration system worked, but they took pride in their ignorance and saw any attempt to inject facts or caution into the debate as a sign of weakness. Theres this worship of process, one member of Millers team said. Process, process, process. Process is code for We can slow down the quick impulses of a fiery political administration with no experts. Well, thats not what was voted for.

The public never votes for process, but thats how governments work, and it is how, in a system of separated powers, policies are formed, funded, and implemented. But immigration was merely one of many areas in which the Trump White House regarded the Constitution and federal law as little more than annoyances. At one point, according to the notes of a senior DHS official, Trump told Chief of Staff John Kelly to tell Nielson to, Round them all up and push them back into Mexico. Who cares about the law.

According to this officials notes, silence followed.

This silence was part of a persistent cowardice among senior figures in the U.S. government. Opponents of the policy thought that the system, or the courts, or the person in the next office down the hall would somehow stop the cruelty. But the people who wanted to do the right thingor, at the least, knew how the immigration system actually workedwere shouted down by low-level minions such as Katie Waldman (who was soon to be Mrs. Stephen Miller). This kind of bullying, Caitlin writes, was part of an administration plagued by insecurity and imposter syndrome. Whether out of misplaced loyalty or fear of professional repercussions, the professionals just took it. They made me lie, claimed one government official who misled Caitlin when she was reporting an earlier story about the policy.

This remarkable article is a cautionary tale for Americans and other citizens of democratic nations, a story of a political monkeys paw. When people vote for incompetent and cowardly leaders to execute policies founded on ignorance and cruelty, they will get what they asked forto their shame and regret.

Related:

Join Caitlin Dickerson and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a live discussion about the secret history of the U.S. governments family-separation policy on August 12 at 2 p.m. ET. Register here.

Fish Oil Is Good! No, Bad! No, Good! No, Wait

By Jacob Stern

At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenlands northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat dietin other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution. I remember how exciting those studies were when they first came out, Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at NYU, told me. The idea that there were populations of people who were eating fish and were protected against heart disease looked fabulous.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Read. Hotel Earth, a poem from our September issue.

Watch. Netflixs The Sandmanespecially if youre a fan of the original comic books.

Play our daily crossword.

The launching of the Webb space telescope has, for many of us, rekindled a fascination with space. I feel it, and Im now binge-watching two television shows about it: The Star Trek series Strange New Worlds on Paramount+, and the Apple TV+ series For All Mankinda what if alternate history of the Cold War space race. Both of them are throwbacks to a time in the late 1960s when Americans took the conquest of space as their birthright, a natural extension of our technological optimism and can-do approach to the world. I wont spoil the major plotlines of either for you, but I recommend them both. I miss the days when Americans were space pioneers, and now that the Russians have threatened to pull out of international space cooperation with the United States, I hope that the Americans take up the challenge of space once again.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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The Secret History of Family Separation - The Atlantic