- Explosive does not begin to describe the current situation in Libya, where anti-government forces have seized control of Libya's second-largest city, Benghazi, following days of violent clashes. Sunday quickly emerged as the most violent day of the uprising, as security forces in Libya killed another 25 people and protesters used an explosives-laden car and a tank to attack a military camp. That explosive scene followed a clash between troops and marchers in a funeral procession in Benghazi. The estimated number of deaths came from a doctor at Benghazi's Al Jalla Hospital, raising the toll in the recent unrest to 209. Tensions were high from the time the sun rose Sunday as thousands of mourners, some carrying coffins above their heads, packed the streets of Benghazi in a funeral procession honoring those killed Saturday. The procession passed by the Alfadeel Abu Omar military camp, where troops reportedly opened fire on the mourners. That spark set off an incredible scene in which protesters packed at least one car with explosives Sunday and sent it crashing into a compound wall at the camp. Security forces responded by opening fire on protestors who attempted to breach the camp. While all of this was going on, protesters drove a tank from a nearby army base into a barrier on the camp's southern side in another attempt to break in. Reports from the area claimed that some protestors had also obtained weapons. Clearly, frustrations are über-high after more than a week of demonstrations against longtime Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi, inspired by the wave of protests that has swept the Arab world since January's revolt in neighboring Tunisia kicked off the festivities. Libya’s conflict hasn’t received as much attention in large part because the Libyan government maintains an iron grip on communications and will not comment on the turmoil. Protestors have made a point of targeting the military camp in Benghazi fighting because it houses Gadhafi's eastern palace and is view as the last symbol of his dominance in the region. Numerous foreign powers have weighed in on the situation and British Foreign Secretary William Hague spoke on Sunday with Gadhafi's son, Saif to express “the U.K.'s grave concern at the escalation of violence.” The U.S. State Department piled on with a statement saying had authorized the voluntary departure from Libya of family members of U.S. embassy staff. In predictable fashion, Libya's state-run JANA news agency blamed "acts of sabotage and burning" on outsiders aiming to undermine the nation's stability, security and unity. Right, because foreigners are bum-rushing your borders to inspire a violent uprising amongst your people. Either that or citizens are tired of decades of oppressive rule by Gadhafi and have decided to do something about it. Hospitals are filling up with wounded protestors and dead bodies are piling up faster than they can be dealt with. Ironically with the government’s allegations of outsiders stirring up dissent in Libya, it was the government that had what appeared to be African mercenaries circled Benghazi's security headquarters Sunday. As the mercenaries were maneuvered into place, thousands of protestors remained camped outside the city's high court chanting, "The people want to bring down the regime." A citywide food shortage is also a growing issue and with similar protests in the cities of al-Baida, Ajdabiya and Misratah, the anger that has previously been focused in the east now appear to spreading west. Prepare for more riots, y’all…………
- While it may not be a great indication of how his season will end, needless to say, New York Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano’s year isn’t off to the best of starts. Even though spring training information and details are available from myriad sources all over the Internet and any fan with even the mildest interest in Major League Baseball can track down the pertinent information on when practices and spring training games begin within 10 seconds, Cano had no idea when his team’s spring training started and had to be called by a member of the team’s front office to find out that things were getting started in Tampa. Cano was home in New York when he received a phone call from a member of the Yankees staff. "He said, 'Where are you?' I said, "I'm in New York,"' Cano recalled. "I said 'I'll be there for the physical [Sunday]." He says, 'No, the physical's today.' So I apologized and today I'll be ready for the first workout." After getting the call, Cano found the quickest flight out of either JFK or LaGuardia and arrived in Yankees camp Sunday morning. "I got my dates messed up," he said upon arriving. "It's not funny. I don't like to be late. You guys know I'm always on time." So while his teammates were rolling into camp and taking physicals on Saturday morning. Cano took his physical early Sunday morning and was in the first group of regulars, along with Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada, to take batting practice later in the day. It’s probably not what manager Joe Girardi was hoping for from the guy who led the Yankees with a .319 batting average in 2010 while posting career highs of 29 home runs and 109 RBIs and won his first Gold Glove. Attention to detail tends to help the best athletes stay a cut above everyone else and not knowing when spring training starts doesn’t exactly scream eyes on the prize. While it might be asking too much, figuring out when spring training begins and punching it into the calendar on your BlackBerry or iPhone so you get an alert when it’s time to hop a plane and head south actually seems like a fairly simple task. In the end, it might net Cano a small fine in the players’ kangaroo court, but beyond that it’s simply a good reason to laugh as a long, grinding season gets underway. Just hope that Cano remembers when the regular season begins and shows up for all your games this season, Yankees players, management and fans……….
- Detroit, we did it! Technically, you and a nonprofit group did it, but I’ve supported this idea wholeheartedly since it first went public and seeing as I’ve pimped this concept as loudly as anyone, I now consider it my own. The push to put the Motor City on the map by dropping a statue of Detroit icon RoboCop at the edge of the city began a few weeks ago. A Detroit resident calling himself 'MT' tweeted: “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky, RoboCop would kick Rocky's butt. He's a great ambassador for Detroit.” It was a brilliant idea from a brilliant man and aside from giving MT a key to the city and possibly his own office at city hall, the logical response was to get on board with the idea and turn the dream into reality. Unfortunately, Mayor Dave Bing lives life with a giant stick up his ass and he tried to stop the will of the people by tweeting, “There are not any plans to erect a statue of Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.” That calloused dismissal of an idea that would breathe life into a beaten-down, financially troubled city could have been the death knell for the RoboCop statue, but a local l non-profit organization, Imagination Station, rode to the rescue and kept the dream alive. The organization set up a fund, 'Detroit Needs A Statue of RoboCop!', where people could donate online, which was bolstered by an Internet campaign and Facebook page. Within a matter of days, $25,000 had been raised by RoboCop fans and people who wanted Detroit to have its own great statue to be compared to the likes of Philadelphia’s Rocky statue. Seeing donations flood in, a Californian man, Pete Hottelet, then gave a $25,000 to double the money for the RoboCop tribute. His gift was appropriate considering that he owns a company called Omni Consumer Products, the same name as the fictional conglomerate that controls the crime-ridden, dystopian society that RoboCop cleans up in the movie. Hottelet is a huge fan of the movie and of the metallic, half-human cyborg who carried the film. “I think it's a fantastic film. The special effects were incredible for the era,” Hottelet said. “The more money we raise the bigger the statue can be.” A truly brilliant thought and one that will hopefully inspire more people to donate to a great cause. Credit is also due to Detroit resident Brandon Walley, who has led the campaign to get the statue built because he believes the statue will be a major boost for tourism in Detroit. That too is a true statement, even if the futuristic and crime-riddled Detroit where a murdered police officer returns as a super-human cyborg played by Peter Weller doesn’t actually exist. Just because a character is fictional doesn’t mean that character cannot inspire a city. I personally cannot wait for Fred Barton Productions, which makes high-tech replicas of famous Hollywood androids for museums and collectors, to get started designing the RoboCop statue. Even Weller himself is on board, issuing a statement declaring that the statue would be good for the city: 'I think it's a great thing as far as a public service,' Weller said. Agreed and agreed………
- Believe it or not, Liam Neeson is once again leading the charge for the top movie at the box office for a weekend and, shockingly, he’s angry and kicking plenty of asses. In a slightly different take on his ass kicking in the monosyllabic Taken, Neeson stars as a man who awakes from a coma and finds that someone has stolen his life in Unknown, which earned $21.7 million in its opening weekend to beat out fellow newcomer I Am Number Four for the top spot. Number Four opened solidly with $19.5 million and the action thriller is off to a decent start in breaking even on its $60 million budget. In third place was Gnomeo and Juliet, holding the same spot it occupied in its debut last weekend and making an additional $19.4 million to elevate its cumulative total to $50.4 million. On its heels was last weekend’s top film, Adam Sandler’s Just Go With It, which plummeted to fourth place as word of mouth about how terrible a movie it actually is circulated. Go With It made $18.2 million and has garnered $60.8 million in its first two weeks. The fifth-place finisher for the weekend was a gawd-awful movie that is the third installment of a franchise that never should have seen one movie made, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son. Somehow, this train wreck of a film made $17 million and with a modest $32 million budget (surprising that a movie with relatively little spent to produce it could be so awful, I know), it has a solid chance to actually turn a profit. Rounding out the remainder of the top 10 were: Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (No. 6 after a four-spot drop from its opening weekend, a 54-percent decline in earnings and a two-week earnings tally of $48.5 million), The King’s Speech (hanging in at No. 7 after a whopping 13 weeks in theaters thanks to a $6.6 million weekend that finally pushed the film over the $100 million mark at $103.3 million), the wretchedly awful The Roommate (No. 8 with $4.1 million and a three-week haul of $32.7 million and counting), The Eagle (No. 9 and plummeting 59 percent in its second weekend with a scant $3.6 million for a cumulative total of just $15 million) and No Strings Attached (somehow hanging in at No. 10 in its fifth weekend of release with $3.2 million and $66 million overall). Two films from last weekend’s top 10, True Grit (No. 11) and Sanctum (No. 12) fell out this time around and for True Grit, that was the first time it had happened in more than two months of release…………
- Unless you’re a total a-hole, you have at least a small soft spot in your heart for people with speech impediments, i.e. those who stutter. Stutterers are invariably made fun of growing up and battle all manner of stereotypes and since stuttering typically starts around 2 to 4 years of age, after the stutterer already had learned language, time spent growing up tends to feel much longer for them. Even legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud weighed in on the issue and Fraud believed stuttering was attributable to parenting or something else in the environment. Those beliefs have since been refuted by numerous studies pointing to biological mechanisms in the brain can explain stuttering. New findings on the topic were presented at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C. Now is as appropriate a time as ever to shine a spotlight on the issue of stuttering, which has been thrust to the forefront because of its prominent role in "The King's Speech," nominated for Oscars in 12 categories at next weekend's 83rd Annual Academy Awards. The movie shines a light on a problem that impacts thousands of people, about half of whom have a clear family history of the speech disorder. Research into the genetics of stuttering has found that genes that appear to be involved all control some aspect of cell metabolism and that the mutations linked with it are also associated with genes for rare childhood diseases called mucolipidosis type 2 and type 3. Another study by Luc De Nil of the University of Toronto and some of his colleagues examined the brains of people who stutter and discovered particular signatures in function and structure. By conducting MRI exams on the brains of stutterers, De Nil and his team learned that the speech-motor control region of the frontal cortex, the premotor cortex and the cerebellum all play a part in stuttering, along with an underactivation in the auditory cortex. This study also unearthed data suggesting that patients who develop a stutter after a stroke often have lesions in the same areas of the brain implicated in stuttering and that stuttering also appears to be related to motor coordination. Having thrown all of this effort and research dollars at the issue, however, the question is whether any of these studies have found a treatment for stutterers that is more effective than anything currently available. The answer for that, unfortunately, is that we just have to wait and see………
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