ST. LOUIS, MO. (KMOX) — There’s an alert out about recent assaults on bike riders in south St. Louis.
Trailnet.org, an organization that promotes hiking and biking, is cautioning riders to be on the alert for roving bands of teenagers who swarm and attack riders.
Trailnet says the latest attack was last Thursday (8/25) afternoon near Missouri Botanical Garden where a group of 10 to 15 African-American teens charged and attacked a cyclist.
What costs more: a home in San Francisco's Sunset District, or a wheelchair ramp in the Board of Supervisors' chambers?
If you picked the house, you're wrong.
By the time the final tab comes in, the cost of designing and installing a ramp to the president's chair at the Board of Supervisors - a project now under way - is expected to top out at $699,413.
That is about $50,000 more than the median cost of a home in the Sunset.
Why so much for a 10-foot ramp?
First, it took two companies, at a total cost of $132,205, to come up with a design that passed architectural muster for a designated historic landmark. The cost in city staff time to oversee the planning hit $38,434. That's $170,639.
Then came the job itself....
ONE VOICE OF SANITY, RARE IN SF-
Supervisor John Avalos - the lone "no" vote on the project when the board approved it in February- said the political math just doesn't add up.
"This is a tremendous amount of money being spent on something in City Hall that rarely or may never even get used," Avalos said.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/28/BA7I1KMRO0.DTL#ixzz1WR1NwZmNWASHINGTON (AP) - Hurricane Irene was no mystery to forecasters. They knew where it was going. But what it would do when it got there was another matter.
Predicting a storm's strength still baffles meteorologists. Every giant step in figuring out the path highlights how little progress they've made on another crucial question: How strong?
Irene made landfall Saturday morning at Cape Lookout, N.C. - a bull's-eye in the field of weather forecasts. It hit where forecasters said it would and followed the track they had been warning about for days.
"People see that and assume we can predict everything," National Hurricane Center senior forecaster Richard Pasch said.
But when Irene struck, the storm did not stick with the forecast's predicted major hurricane strength winds.
The arrest ends a mystery over the fate of a relative that the US President wrote in his memoir had moved to America from Kenya in the 1960s, although the circumstances of his discovery may now prove to be an embarrassment for the White House.
Official records say Onyango Obama, 67, was picked up outside the Chicken Bone Saloon in Framingham, Massachusetts, at 7.10pm on August 24. Police say he nearly crashed his Mitsubishi 4x4 into a patrol car, and then insisted that the officer should have given way to him. A report filed with the Framingham District Court said that a breathalyser at the police station registered his blood alcohol at 0.14mg/100ml of blood, above the state limit of 0.08mg.According to a local newspaper, Mr Obama was charged with driving under the influence and driving to endanger, as well as failing to use a turn signal. He was detained as an illegal immigrant because the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an outstanding warrant for him because he was previously ordered to be deported to Kenya.
The Times has established from his birthdate that Mr Obama is the Uncle Omar mentioned in President Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father. In the 1995 book, President Obama writes of "the uncle who had left for America 25 years ago and had never come back". [more at link.]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mayor in possession of a problem must be in want of a policy. But not all policies are created equal, and almost none are as silly or as counter-productive as the one that London mayor Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday: Children will be barred from watching shooting events at the 2012 London Olympics.
The restriction is designed to help stem London’s rising gun-crime rate, and to prevent the “glorification” of firearms. But it is predicated upon a farcical misconception, best characterized by the secretary of the British Shooting Sports Council, David Penn. “There is no link between Olympic-level shooting and crime,” he argued. “It is like saying that a thief would use a Formula One car as a getaway car.”
It is absurd and unsurprising in equal measure. Successive British governments have been nothing if not consistent in their asinine attitude toward firearms, and, since the Dumblane school massacre in 1997, official policy appears to have been to irritate the majority of the citizenry as much as is humanly possible, while leaving the source of gun crime — criminals who don’t follow the rules anyway — untouched. And so the British now have a country in which the national shooting team has to travel to France to practice its sport, pentathletes training for the Olympic games have had to waste time facing down a comical plan to replace their air rifles with laser guns, and farmers are subjected to training courses and expensive compliance procedures in order to avoid confiscation of the shotguns on which their livelihoods rely. Meanwhile, the instances of gun violence on Britain’s streets have doubled in number in the last ten years, and rioters have recently proven that they can roam wild, striking blows against civilization with impunity.
[Read on at above link.]
Even most successful entrepreneurs do not change an entire industry. But that’s exactly what Steve Jobs did to personal computing — three times.
With the Apple II, Jobs made personal computers useful. In the mid-Seventies, home computers were build-it-yourself hobby boxes, useful only to the nerdiest nerds. By the time I entered middle school in 1981 there was an entire lab filled with Apple II Plus machines, and lots of fun software to run on them. The first computer “clone” wasn’t Compaq’s copy of the IBM PC — it was a clone of the Apple II. An industry was born.
Three years later Jobs made the personal computer approachable with the Macintosh. He didn’t invent the GUI or the WIMP metaphor but he and his team made them useable and affordable. What most computer users took for granted in 1995 was deemed a “toy” by many critics when the first Mac arrived in 1984.
And last year, Jobs made the personal computer ubiquitous with the iPad. This third revolution is only beginning, yet still many critics deride this “toy” as a “media consumption device.” I do most of my photo editing on my fat, slow, first-generation iPad — and I’m outlining a novel on it, too. Others use it to create music, paintings and video. That’s some “consumption” going on. ...
So, thanks, Steve, for all the insanely great stuff. Thanks also for leaving Apple in such capable hands. But thank you most of all for setting an example that never failed to inspire.
Even most successful entrepreneurs do not change an entire industry. But that’s exactly what Steve Jobs did to personal computing — three times.
With the Apple II, Jobs made personal computers useful. In the mid-Seventies, home computers were build-it-yourself hobby boxes, useful only to the nerdiest nerds. By the time I entered middle school in 1981 there was an entire lab filled with Apple II Plus machines, and lots of fun software to run on them. The first computer “clone” wasn’t Compaq’s copy of the IBM PC — it was a clone of the Apple II. An industry was born.
Three years later Jobs made the personal computer approachable with the Macintosh. He didn’t invent the GUI or the WIMP metaphor but he and his team made them useable and affordable. What most computer users took for granted in 1995 was deemed a “toy” by many critics when the first Mac arrived in 1984.
And last year, Jobs made the personal computer ubiquitous with the iPad. This third revolution is only beginning, yet still many critics deride this “toy” as a “media consumption device.” I do most of my photo editing on my fat, slow, first-generation iPad — and I’m outlining a novel on it, too. Others use it to create music, paintings and video. That’s some “consumption” going on. ...
So, thanks, Steve, for all the insanely great stuff. Thanks also for leaving Apple in such capable hands. But thank you most of all for setting an example that never failed to inspire.
