NEWS OF THE FORCE | Sunday, November 8, 2015 - Page 2

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  NEWS OF THE FORCE | Sunday, November 8, 2015 - Page 2

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U.S. Army

    

    The 7th MSC is a U.S. Army Reserve Command that provides forward-stationed consequence management and civil affairs assets to the U.S. Army in Alaska.

    A city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., employee paid his bride's father $2,000 for his daughter in a forced marriage in Africa, court records allege, and he then kept her as a virtual prisoner in their Oak Ridge home. The accused is a member of the U.S. Army Reserve.

    In the past, Maine Army National Guard helicopters were used as spotters seeking marijuana-growing operations. But now, the state's governor wants to use the soldiers in a fight against a heroin epidemic.

    And family and friends have turned out to celebrate the return from their deployment of California Army National Guard members in Riverside, Calif.

 

NOAA news

    

    The year 2015 remains on a record warm pace in Florida and much of the western U.S., according to a NOAA report released on Friday.

    Scott Winfield Harrington has died at the age of 76 in Kitsap, Wash. He was a Sea Grant Field Agent for the University of Washington (UW), a lead fisherman on NOAAS Miller Freeman in the Bering Sea, and built trawl nets for the NOAA fleet.

    The White House is preparing for a "huge" solar storm. Once an eruption on the sun occurs, NOAA can give the proper agencies - including airlines, space satellite operators, and power companies - a 12 to 15 hour warning notice.

    And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recommends viewing Hawaiian monk seals from a distance of 50 yards or more.

 

U.S. Navy and Marine Corps

    

    The town Jackson, Ohio, will be holding their annual Veterans Day program at the Veterans Memorial Park on Wednesday, Nov. 11, beginning at 11 a.m.

The guest speaker will be Paul Haller, a 1977 graduate of Jackson High School, and holds a Bachelors Degree from the University of Rio Grande and a Masters Degree from Ohio University. He was a teacher in the Jackson City School District for 10 years, and currently serves as a Jackson County Commissioner. Haller has 37 years of service on active and reserve duty in the U.S. Navy. He has three completed Command Master Chief tours including Navy Operational Support Unit Great Lakes, Illinois, and the 4th Marine Division's headquarters in New Orleans, La., as well as a Marine combat tour in Iraq and a three-year tour as advisor on the Secretary of Navy’s Reserve Policy Board at the Pentagon. He is a graduate and "Plank Owner" of the Navy’s Senior Enlisted Academy Non-Resident Course, and he has the privilege of being the first Navy Reserve senior chief to meet the qualifications for the Fleet Marine Force Warfare Qualification. Haller currently serves as the Reserve Command Master Chief at the Navy Operational Support Center in Columbus, Ohio. In his civilian capacity, Haller represents the County Commissioners Association of Ohio, is a board member to the Ohio Department of Veterans Services' Advisory Committee representing all 88 counties in the state, and is the Chairman of the Board and Veterans Representative for the "Buckeye Hero Hunt," a handicapped-accessible crossbow deer hunt in the Zaleski State Forest for disabled veterans. He resides in Jackson with his wife of 32 years, Dr. Marla Haller. They have three children and one grandchild.

    The U.S. Marines have released the findings on a chopper crash in May during the Nepal quake rescue mission, saying bad weather caused the helicopter to crash.

    Camp Lejune, N.C., is celebrating the 240th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps this weekend. And an event on Friday in Grand Rapids, Mich., honored retired members of the U.S. Marine Corps on its 240th birthday.

    And a civilian professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md., is suing the Department of the Navy for allegedly violating his First Amendment right to free speech.

 

Today in history

    On Nov. 8, 1519, Aztec ruler Montezuma welcomed Hernan Cortez into the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. In 1602, the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University, was opened to the public. In 1793, The Louvre was opened as a public museum in Paris, France. In 1889, Montana was admitted as the 41st U.S. state. In 1895, while experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Rontgen discovered the X-ray. In 1933, as part of the "New Deal," U.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the Civil Works Administration, which created 4 million jobs. In 1960, John F Kennedy was elected as the 35th (and 2nd youngest, and first Catholic) President of the United States. In 1970, the NFL's Tom Dempsey kicked the longest field goal in history. In 1990, John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation" opened on Broadway. Read more.

 

The parting shots

    A Missouri prosecutor has called out members of a small community for shunning a sexual abuse victim while publicly supporting a community leader who confessed to molesting her for more than a decade. In a scathing news release last week, Platte County Prosecuting Attorney Eric Zahnd listed 16 Dearborn residents who had either written letters or testified in court in support of Darren Paden after he admitted the girl's claims were true. Paden, 52, pleaded guilty in August to two counts of statutory sodomy, admitting that he molested the girl up to 300 times over a 10-year span, starting when she was 5. He was sentenced on Oct. 30 to 50 years in prison. A lifelong resident of the northwest Missouri town of about 500 residents 40 miles north of Kansas City, Paden is the former chief of the local volunteer fire department.

    Actress Tara Reid turns 40 today, and TV chef Gordon Ramsey is 49.

    Among those struggling with psychological issues in modern America are the rich "one-percenters" (especially the mega-rich "one-percent of one-percenters"), according to counselors specializing in assuaging guilt and moderating class hatred. London's The Guardian, writing from New York, found three such counselors, including two who barely stopped short of comparing the plight of the rich-rich with the struggles of "people of color" or out-of-closet gays. Sample worries: isolation (so few rich-rich); stress, caused by political hubbub over "inequality"; and insecurity (is my "friend" really just
a friend of my money?).

    Stories surface regularly about a hospital patient declared dead but who then revives briefly before once again dying. However, Tammy Cleveland's recent lawsuit against doctors and DeGraff Memorial Hospital, near Buffalo, N.Y., reveals an incident more startling. She alleges that her late husband, Michael, displayed multiple signs of life (breathing, eyes open, legs kicking, attempted hugs, struggles against the tube in his throat), for nearly two hours,
but with two doctors all the while assuring her that he was gone. The coroner came and went twice, concluding that calling him had been "premature." The lawsuit alleges that only upon the fourth examination did the doctor exclaim, "My God, he has a pulse!" Michael Cleveland died shortly after that - of a punctured lung from CPR following his initial heart attack - an injury for which he could have been treated.

    For an October report, Vice Media located the half-dozen most-dedicated collectors of those AOL giveaway CDs from the Internet's dial-up years ("50 Hours Free!"). Sparky Haufle wrote a definitive AOL-CD collector's guide; Lydia Sloan Cline has 4,000 unique disks; Bustam Halim at one point had 20,000 total, before weeding to 3,000. The AOL connoisseurs file disks by color, by the hundreds of packaging styles, by the number of free hours, and
especially by the co-brands - the rare pearls, like AOL's deals with Frisbee and Spider Man. Their collections, said both Halim and Brian Larkin, are simply "beautiful."

    In 20th-century Chicago, according to legend, one did not have to be among the living to vote on election day, and a 2013 policy of the city's community colleges has seemingly extended rights of the dead to receive unearned degrees. City Colleges of Chicago, aiming to increase graduation numbers, has awarded a slew of posthumous degrees to former students who died with at least three-fourths of the necessary credits to graduate. The policy also now automatically awards degrees by "reverse transfer" of credits to students who went on to four-year colleges, where they added enough credits, hypothetically, to meet City Colleges' standards.

    It would be exhaustive to chronicle the many ways that the woman born Carolyn Clay, 82, of Chattooga County, Ga., is different from us. For starters, she was once arrested for stripping nude to protest a quixotic issue before the city council in Rome, Ga.; for another, her driver's license identifies her as Ms.
Serpentfoot Serpentfoot. In October, she filed to change that name to one with 69 words, 68 hyphens, an ellipsis, and the infinity sign. One judge has already turned her down on the grounds that she cannot recite the name, though she promised to shorten it on legal papers to "Nofoot Allfoot Serpentfoot."

    Hinton Sheryn, 68, on trial at England's Plymouth Crown Court in September, denied he was the "indecent exposer" charged with 18 incidents against children dating back to 1973, that he would never do such a thing because he would not want anyone to see his unusually small penis. In response, the prosecutor brought in a prostitute known to have serviced Sheryn, to testify that his penis is of normal size. Sheryn was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

    A Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff's SWAT team surrounded a mobile home on Oct. 14 to arrest Ryan Bautista, 34, and Leanne Hunn, 30, on armed burglary and other charges, but since two other women were being held inside, officers remained in a stand-off. Hunn subsequently announced by phone that the couple would surrender after having sex one final time. Deputies entered the
home around 4 a.m., on the 15th, and made the post-coital arrest without incident.

    The 27-year-old owner of the Hookah House, in Akron, Ohio, was fatally shot by an Akron narcotics officer during an October raid for suspected drugs. The man had his arms raised, according to the police report, but dropped one hand behind him, provoking an officer to shoot. Only afterward did they learn that the man was unarmed; they concluded that he was reaching only to secure or to push back the packet of heroin he felt was oozing out of its hiding
place in his buttocks.

    In September, village officials in Uzbekistan's Shahartepeppa, alarmed that Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev would be driving through and notice barren fields since the cotton crop had already been harvested, ordered about 500 people into the fields to attach cotton capsules onto front-row stalks to impress Mirziyaev of the village's prosperity.

    The naked bodies of a man and a woman, both aged 30, were found in August, 40 feet beneath a balcony, in the moat surrounding the Vauban Fort Castle on an island in the English Channel. Police speculated that the couple had fallen during exciting sex "gone wrong."

    A woman was killed in an accidental head-on collision in Houston, Texas, last June 18 as she was racing after another car. She was angrily chasing her estranged husband, who was with another woman, but neither of those two
was hurt. The driver of the crashed-into SUV, however, was severely injured.

    Jorge Vasconcelos, 25, was traffic-stopped in El Reno, Okla., in October because he was reportedly weaving on the road, but deputies detected no impairment except possibly for a lack of sleep. Then, "out of nowhere," according to a KFOR-TV report, Vasconcelos, instead of quietly driving off, insisted that he was doing nothing wrong and that deputies could check his truck if they thought otherwise. They did - and found an elaborately rigged
metal box in the engine, containing 17 pounds of heroin, worth over $3 million. He was charged with aggravated trafficking.

    Norway's notorious 77-murder terrorist Anders Breivik, serving only 21 years because that's Norway's maximum sentence, complained in September that he was feeling so oppressed behind bars that if conditions didn't improve, he would go on a hunger strike and starve himself.

    In July, artist Hilde Krohn Huse, alone shooting a video in a forest near Aukra, Norway, accidentally got hung upside down naked in a tree for nearly four hours.

    In October, hunters who had shot two elk in Norway were informed that they had inadvertently wandered into an area of the Polar Park zoo and that, thanks to them, the zoo's elk population was now down to three.

    And The X-Files will return to your TV screens sometime in 2016 with a six-part mini-series, apparently to see if the show will become a hit, again. Bonus: Both FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are returning to do the show.

    (Some of today's "The parting shots" entries were provided courtesy of newsoftheweird.com, in Tampa, Fla.)

 

          

 

 

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