Mark Simone has just been named one of the 50 most powerful Talk Radio show hosts. The best of the best in distinguished radio. Congratulations Mark for a fine job. All the best to you now and in the future.
07/14/2009
FOX BUSINESS TICKER...7-14-09**Dow: 8359.49**Nasdaq: 1799.73
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DOW | 8,359.49 | +27.81 (+0.33%) |
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NASDAQ | 1,799.73 | +6.52 (+0.36%) |
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S&P 500 | 905.84 | +4.79 (+0.53%) |
Passenger Recalls Southwest Flight With Hole In Roof
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. --(FOX NEWS) A Southwest Airlines 737 aircraft that originated in Nashville made an emergency landing in Charleston after the passenger cabin became depressurized because a hole appeared in the fuselage.
Central West Virginia Regional Airport Authority spokesman Brian Belcher said Flight 2294 was diverted to Yeager Airport and landed shortly after 6:30 p.m. Monday. There were 126 passengers and five crew members on board.
John Benson of Knoxville was on Flight 2294 with his two sons. Benson was planning on taking his sons to New York by way of Baltimore. What was supposed to be a nice family trip, quickly turned into one of the most frightening experiences of his life.
"Literally the whole top of the plane ripped off," Benson said.
Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said a football-sized hole was located mid-cabin, near the top of the aircraft.
Benson captured cell phone video from the Southwest flight. The sky can actually be seen through a hole in the ceiling that was peeled back. It has not been said what caused the hole, but Benson said he had to calm his children down after a rough takeoff.
After takeoff, Benson thought everything was fine - until about a half hour into the flight. Part of the plane peeled open, causing it to lose cabin pressure. Then the oxygen masks dropped.
"When we looked out the windows all we saw are mountains, and they told us we're about to land. You know everyone's looking out the windows saying, 'Where are we gonna land?' My friend Julie asked the attendant, 'Are we gonna land at the airport?' and she said, 'no we aren't going to make it to the airport,'" Benson said.
According to Benson, the flight crew told them the closest airport was seven away. Benson said it was the longest seven minutes of his life. Thankfully, the plane landed at Yeager airport, where a replacement plane was waiting to take the passengers to Baltimore.
Of the 131 crew and passengers on board, no one was hurt. Benson said his family will continue their journey to New York, just not on a plane.
The National Transportation Safety Board said they have been trying to determine what might have caused the damage.
Any Tips On Making a Cell Phone Battery Last Longer Besides Replacing It?
Its not designed just to die after a year. Rechargable batteries have certain chemicals inside that can hold a charge and regain the charge by adding electricity. Over time, these chemicals (usually nickel and cadmium) lose their potency. The best way to extend their life is to periodically run the battery completely dead, and then recharge it fully. Most take several hours to actually recharge, and if you take them off too soon it can reduce their potency. Always leave your batteries to charge for at least a couple hours, don't always trust what the phone says.
As far as the on/off question, the batteries will keep the current charge for longer if you turn it off, but it shouldn't affect the lifetime of the battery. Vibrate does use more of the current charge, but ditto on the lifetime. If your battery won't keep a long enough charge, the potency is permanently affected and you do need a new battery.
Freezing the battery may work, but it may also cause the battery to explode. Do that at your own risk.
Vandals Deface Vegas Sign With Red Ink
LAS VEGAS --(FOX NEWS) Graffiti vandals have defaced the world famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign on the southern end of the Las Vegas Strip.
The graffiti, which appeared to be written with a marker rather than spray paint, was spotted Monday. Several letters were written on the sign, but no profanities.
Russell Davis of Clark County Public Works said the graffiti will be cleaned up Tuesday morning. He said this was the first time he could remember that graffiti had been tagged on the famous sign.
Davis said sign maintenance workers discovered the graffiti, which they believe happened sometime over the weekend. Every day, hundreds stop to have their photographs taken at the sign, making it highly unusual that a person would be able to deface it without being seen.
Although the sign falls outside city lines, Las Vegas Mayor Goodman issued a statement to FOX5 saying, "When they [defaced] my tortoise, I said, 'off with their thumb!' This deserves, 'off with their head!'"
Goodman was referring to a time in 2005 when he suggested police cut the thumbs off vandals who defaced a tortoise statue near downtown Las Vegas.
Built in 1959, the Las Vegas sign has become a symbol of the city, appearing in ad campaigns, films and even board games. In May, the sign was officially welcomed onto the National Register of Historic Places.
Shuttle Launch Postponed For Third Straight Day
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (FOX NEWS) -- Weather forced NASA on Monday to scrub a launch of space shuttle Endeavour, marking the spacecraft's third takeoff postponement in three days and fifth since mid-June.
Space shuttle Endeavour is shown Monday shortly after the day's launch was called off.
Monday's attempt was scheduled for 6:51 p.m., but storm cells with lightning were within 20 nautical miles of the launch area, violating safety guidelines, NASA said.
"The vehicle and our teams were ready, but the weather has just bitten us again," launch director Pete Nickolenko told the shuttle crew.
"We understand, Pete. That's the nature of our business," Mark Polansky, shuttle commander, responded. "Like we said before, when the time is right, we'll be here and we'll be ready."
NASA said it will next try to launch Endeavour at 6:03 p.m. Wednesday.
Weather forced the cancellation of launch attempts Saturday and Sunday. And last month, two launch attempts were scrubbed because of a hydrogen leak.
On Sunday, lightning and cumulus clouds violated guidelines in case of an emergency landing and sent astronauts back to their quarters for the night. Cumulus clouds are tied to volatile weather such as lightning and tornadoes.
On Friday, 11 lightning strikes hit within a half-mile of the launch pad, scratching Saturday's launch.
FOX BUSINESS TICKER...7-13-09**Dow: 8331.68**Nasdaq: 1793.21
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DOW | 8,331.68 | +185.16 (+2.27%) |
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NASDAQ | 1,793.21 | +37.18 (+2.12%) |
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S&P 500 | 901.05 | +21.92 (+2.49%) |
07/13/2009
The New York City Blackout of 1977
The ’77 Blackout: Writing by Candlelight
By Robert D. McFadden
Reporters in the newsroom of The New York Times, including Robert D. McFadden, in stripes, worked by candlelight during the blackout. (Photo: The New York Times).When the lights went out at 9:34 p.m. on July 13, 1977, it set off a night of rioting, looting and general mayhem in neighborhoods across the city. Starting today, City Room will feature the reminiscences of New York Times reporters who covered the blackout from the streets, City Hall and the candle-lit newsroom.
The city was magical that night. From my rooftop on the Upper West Side, the skyline of Manhattan glittered like a wedge of stars across the intergalactic gulf: the Upper East Side, the towers of Midtown, Broadway, all ablaze every point of light a story of ambition, murder, love. I flipped sizzling hamburgers on a grill, sipped a beer and listened to the music drifting from the doorway.
Somewhere in the distance, lightning danced and summer thunder rumbled. A weather story? Perhaps for someone else. It was my night off, an unchoreographed evening away from the Times newsroom, away from the pounding typewriters and the relentless deadlines.
It happened in stages. The Upper East and West Sides disappeared first blink, blink, blink, 20 or 30 blocks at a time, like dominoes falling split-seconds apart, the darkness moving south with incredible speed as I watched in disbelief, swallowing Broadway, Midtown, Chelsea. The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn were gone too. The great city of millions had vanished into inky blackness. I looked around in amazement and, oddly, found New Jersey blithely aglow. It was not the end of the world.
Cars were honking below, as if a celebration had begun. I looked over the parapet and saw rivers of light in the streets vehicles moving slowly, or halted altogether. I stepped back into my apartment. The air-conditioner was dead, and it was sweltering. I picked up the phone and was surprised to get a dial tone. The city was down and out, but the phones still worked. I called the Metropolitan desk and was told to get to work, fast. I kissed my wife, Judy, and 2-year-old son, Nolan, goodbye, as if for the last time, and went out into the chiaroscuro madness.
The front page of the July 14, 1977, issue, which featured Robert D. McFadden’s byline. To see the front pages from the blackout up close, download the PDFs: July 14, July 15, July 16. The elevator was out, of course, so I walked down a pitch-black stairway, feeling my way blindly along the walls, trying to remember how many floors I had passed and where the door to the lobby came out. The streets were chaotic but illuminated by the headlights of marauding vehicles. At Broadway and 72nd Street, a big traffic jam was developing. Stop lights were out. People were stepping out of trapped cabs and buses, pouring out of restaurants and bars, ambling out of apartment buildings as if looking for an explanation.
The subways were not running. I began walking south on Broadway, heading for Times Square, my route marked by streaming headlights and blaring horns. Outside Lincoln Center, New York’s performing arts mecca, huge crowds of displaced patrons were milling about. Twenty blocks farther, the eerie glow of taxicab lights enveloped Times Square, normally a circus of glaring, moving neon lights. The crowds that had spilled out of the Broadway theaters were enormous, people robbed of their last act and stumbling into the streets to compete with the traffic and jostle with pickpockets.
At the offices of The Times on West 43rd Street, the stairways were already lighted by candles, and in the third-floor newsroom, editors and reporters were clustered and conferring by candlelight at the Metro Desk, poring over notes and assignment lists. Down the blocklong newsroom, candles glowed softly at the reporters’ ranks of steel desks. The wire room the nerve center of teletype and Telex communications where a million words a day clattered into the newsroom from Times correspondents across the nation and around the world was as silent as a tomb.
An army of reporters was being called in for a long night. Many had already been dispatched into the chaotic city, where the looting had begun in earnest and countless fires had been set by arsonists, where motorists had blundered into accidents and people trapped in elevators and subway tunnels were waiting to be rescued by an overwhelmed police force. Lucky, indeed, about those phones still working.
Lucky, too, that reporters were still a couple of years away from turning in trusty Smith-Corona and Royal typewriters for newfangled computers and other electronic marvels useless in a power failure. But how was the paper to be printed? Articles could be written and edited, but there was no power for the Mergenthaler Linotypes where printers set articles into hot type, or for the gargantuan high-speed presses that shook the building foundations when they rolled, printing a half-million newspapers an hour.
But a solution had already been devised. The Jersey Journal would print the edition for us. The newspaper would look a bit odd, with headlines in an unfamiliar type face, but the articles, the thoroughness and ingenuity of the reporting, the quality of the editing, would be thoroughly Timesean.
My assignment was to write the lead of the paper taking notes from reporters in the field and writing a comprehensive account of all major aspects of the blackout: the disruption of nine million lives, the wide looting and vandalism, the arrests and rescues, the stranded trains, wailing sirens in crowded streets, the closed airports, the hospital emergencies, Con Edison’s explanations, and the countless ways New Yorkers coped: civilians with flashlights pitching in to direct traffic, strangers helping strangers.
For me, it was the beginning of a hard but satisfying week that included four follow-up articles on the restoration of power and the examination of what went wrong, the gradual resumption of normal life in the city, the legal processes for thousands arrested on criminal charges, the woes of looted shop owners and the political fallout for city and utility officials. But those stories did not have to be written by candlelight.
The New York City Blackout of 1977
The ’77 Blackout: Writing by Candlelight
By Robert D. McFaddenReporters in the newsroom of The New York Times, including Robert D. McFadden, in stripes, worked by candlelight during the blackout. (Photo: The New York Times).When the lights went out at 9:34 p.m. on July 13, 1977, it set off a night of rioting, looting and general mayhem in neighborhoods across the city. Starting today, City Room will feature the reminiscences of New York Times reporters who covered the blackout from the streets, City Hall and the candle-lit newsroom.
The city was magical that night. From my rooftop on the Upper West Side, the skyline of Manhattan glittered like a wedge of stars across the intergalactic gulf: the Upper East Side, the towers of Midtown, Broadway, all ablaze every point of light a story of ambition, murder, love. I flipped sizzling hamburgers on a grill, sipped a beer and listened to the music drifting from the doorway.
Somewhere in the distance, lightning danced and summer thunder rumbled. A weather story? Perhaps for someone else. It was my night off, an unchoreographed evening away from the Times newsroom, away from the pounding typewriters and the relentless deadlines.
It happened in stages. The Upper East and West Sides disappeared first blink, blink, blink, 20 or 30 blocks at a time, like dominoes falling split-seconds apart, the darkness moving south with incredible speed as I watched in disbelief, swallowing Broadway, Midtown, Chelsea. The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn were gone too. The great city of millions had vanished into inky blackness. I looked around in amazement and, oddly, found New Jersey blithely aglow. It was not the end of the world.
Cars were honking below, as if a celebration had begun. I looked over the parapet and saw rivers of light in the streets vehicles moving slowly, or halted altogether. I stepped back into my apartment. The air-conditioner was dead, and it was sweltering. I picked up the phone and was surprised to get a dial tone. The city was down and out, but the phones still worked. I called the Metropolitan desk and was told to get to work, fast. I kissed my wife, Judy, and 2-year-old son, Nolan, goodbye, as if for the last time, and went out into the chiaroscuro madness.
The front page of the July 14, 1977, issue, which featured Robert D. McFadden’s byline. To see the front pages from the blackout up close, download the PDFs: July 14, July 15, July 16. The elevator was out, of course, so I walked down a pitch-black stairway, feeling my way blindly along the walls, trying to remember how many floors I had passed and where the door to the lobby came out. The streets were chaotic but illuminated by the headlights of marauding vehicles. At Broadway and 72nd Street, a big traffic jam was developing. Stop lights were out. People were stepping out of trapped cabs and buses, pouring out of restaurants and bars, ambling out of apartment buildings as if looking for an explanation.
The subways were not running. I began walking south on Broadway, heading for Times Square, my route marked by streaming headlights and blaring horns. Outside Lincoln Center, New York’s performing arts mecca, huge crowds of displaced patrons were milling about. Twenty blocks farther, the eerie glow of taxicab lights enveloped Times Square, normally a circus of glaring, moving neon lights. The crowds that had spilled out of the Broadway theaters were enormous, people robbed of their last act and stumbling into the streets to compete with the traffic and jostle with pickpockets.
At the offices of The Times on West 43rd Street, the stairways were already lighted by candles, and in the third-floor newsroom, editors and reporters were clustered and conferring by candlelight at the Metro Desk, poring over notes and assignment lists. Down the blocklong newsroom, candles glowed softly at the reporters’ ranks of steel desks. The wire room the nerve center of teletype and Telex communications where a million words a day clattered into the newsroom from Times correspondents across the nation and around the world was as silent as a tomb.
An army of reporters was being called in for a long night. Many had already been dispatched into the chaotic city, where the looting had begun in earnest and countless fires had been set by arsonists, where motorists had blundered into accidents and people trapped in elevators and subway tunnels were waiting to be rescued by an overwhelmed police force. Lucky, indeed, about those phones still working.
Lucky, too, that reporters were still a couple of years away from turning in trusty Smith-Corona and Royal typewriters for newfangled computers and other electronic marvels useless in a power failure. But how was the paper to be printed? Articles could be written and edited, but there was no power for the Mergenthaler Linotypes where printers set articles into hot type, or for the gargantuan high-speed presses that shook the building foundations when they rolled, printing a half-million newspapers an hour.
But a solution had already been devised. The Jersey Journal would print the edition for us. The newspaper would look a bit odd, with headlines in an unfamiliar type face, but the articles, the thoroughness and ingenuity of the reporting, the quality of the editing, would be thoroughly Timesean.
My assignment was to write the lead of the paper taking notes from reporters in the field and writing a comprehensive account of all major aspects of the blackout: the disruption of nine million lives, the wide looting and vandalism, the arrests and rescues, the stranded trains, wailing sirens in crowded streets, the closed airports, the hospital emergencies, Con Edison’s explanations, and the countless ways New Yorkers coped: civilians with flashlights pitching in to direct traffic, strangers helping strangers.
For me, it was the beginning of a hard but satisfying week that included four follow-up articles on the restoration of power and the examination of what went wrong, the gradual resumption of normal life in the city, the legal processes for thousands arrested on criminal charges, the woes of looted shop owners and the political fallout for city and utility officials. But those stories did not have to be written by candlelight.
