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It all starts with Thompson. Kittley spoke with him before the school year, explaining to the senior the importance of setting the standard. And Thompson obliged. |
"If I go out there and work hard every day, then I feel like other people will follow," Thompson said. "And if I don't, then they don't. That also drives me to try to go out there and leave everything on the track, field, court, whatever it is. I try to set a good example." |
While it would be easy to rest on his laurels, Thompson is as driven as ever. It helps that the senior, who was limited to one race prior to district because of a lingering hamstring injury, feels the target on his back as a state champion. |
"I feel like there's a little bit more pressure, maybe, now that I've won state," Thompson said. "(More) than before, when I could just go and run and be free. Now there's definitely that pressure on your shoulders a little bit. |
"I feel like that drives me even more, too. That pushes me to want to give people what they want to see, (to) come back and try and three-peat." |
That's exactly the attitude Thompson needs, his coach said. Kittley, who was part of Rule's 2007 state champion track team, knows past success doesn't promise anything. During his senior year, Kittley had one of the top times in the 200 heading into state but finished sixth. |
"There's never a guarantee," Kittley said. "It's nice everyone knows he's been a state champion. But I tell kids all the time, if you make it to state, you can never take that for granted...because there's just so many different factors that go into it. It's a lot more than just how fast you are. |
"He understands there's no guarantee that just because he won state in the past that it's just going to be a shoo-in. He's got a big target on his back because everybody knows about Chase Thompson...And he knows that. He's embraced it. He's got his mentality around that." |
Thompson started the road back to state on a high note Thursday. He won the District 14-1A title in the 400 — the first he's run this season — in a time of 53.17. Thompson also placed first in the 100, beating out Roby's Kaige Covington, who entered the day with the fastest 1A time in the region. |
Thompson expects to be battling Covington in the meets to come. |
"(It was a) great race. He's fast," Thompson said of the second-place Covington. "(He's) someone to help me every track meet, push me, give me that drive. He's a good runner. It'll push both of us to want to do better, for sure." |
More importantly to Thompson, the Bobcats' 400 relay that included Jones, Michael Medford and Fabian Hollingsworth, finished second. Not bad for a foursome running its first relay of the season. |
"I feel like we're not there yet, but we're getting there one step after the other," Thompson said. "We'll get there eventually. We were going to advance no matter what, but to get that second place, that was awesome." |
While the relay faces an uphill battle in a tough region, Kittley thinks Thompson is poised to return to the state meet. It would be a fitting ending to the senior's career, and another chapter in the history of five-time team champion Rule. |
"There's always room for improvement. I feel like I can get better every day," Thompson said. "As the year goes on, I'm hoping my times will continue to improve. Then, by the time, hopefully, state rolls around, I'll be prepared well enough to hopefully bring home some more medals. |
"A couple of those guys that (Kittley) has talked about that were really good (at Rule) have talked to me before. It's like we're setting a legacy. I just want to be part of the legacy, trying to set my own legacy." |
The Cottages of Chapel Hill is located on the north side of Lake Macatawa. It is also very close to Holland State Park and Lake Michigan. This peaceful and stunning community encompasses all that the lake shore has to offer, cozy wooded lots, full landscaped yards, enhanced exterior architecture, and maintenance-free l... |
Nice open parcel in desirable Laketown township and Hamilton schools. Surrounded by bike paths and just a few minutes from Saugatuck and Holland.Build your ideal dream home! |
1.35 acres commercial parcel with frontage on US31. All utilities are in and ready for you to build on. Seller says present all offers. |
Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager for Lincoln Park, which has struggled with deficits and rejected an agreement to bring its finances under control. |
Four other Michigan cities and three school districts, including Detroit and its schools, are under state-appointed emergency managers. A 2012 law gave emergency managers broader authority, including the power to nullify union contracts. The law gives distressed cities and school districts more choices to address fisca... |
Snyder named Brad Coulter, a Detroit-area finance consultant, to oversee the Detroit suburb of 37,000, which, like other Michigan municipalities, has been squeezed between the cost of employee pensions and falling property-tax revenue to pay for basic services. |
Coulter is an independent contractor for O’Keefe & Associates, a turnaround consultant in Bloomfield Hills. He has 25 years experience in corporate finance and restructuring, according to a release from the state Treasury Department. |
“I know Brad will work collaboratively with city officials to address the financial emergency and to ensure Lincoln Park residents receive the critical services they expect and deserve,” Snyder, a 55-year-old Republican, said in the release. |
The city diverted $2.5 million from water and sewer funds to prop up pensions in fiscal 2013, according to an April state report. The pensions were only 28 percent and 34.6 percent funded, and retirement health care was underfunded by more than $100 million, according to the report. Standard & Poor’s in December cut th... |
The city must find a way to raise property values to increase revenue long-term, Coulter said in a phone interview. “It can’t be a 100 percent cost-cutting exercise,” he said, added that rising retirement costs must be constrained. |
The Lincoln Park City Council in May rejected a state consent agreement that would have given a new manager power to create a deficit-reduction plan, including the ability to restructure government, terminate union contracts and honor debt obligations. It’s better to let the state appoint its own manager with more expe... |
Although Lincoln Park adopted a balanced budget for its fiscal year beginning July 1, it will create a deficit of “a couple million dollars” by next year, said City Attorney Ed Zelenak. |
ON May 5, just after sunup, 750 militants surrounded Dr. Hawa Abdi’s hospital. Mama Hawa, as she is known, heard gunshots, looked out the window and saw she was vastly outnumbered. |
They did not seem to care that Mama Hawa, 63, was one of the only trained doctors for miles around, and that the clinic, school and feeding program she built on her land supported nearly 100,000 people, most of them desperate refugees from the fighting and poverty that has afflicted this nation. |
For hours, militia commanders held Dr. Abdi at gunpoint while their underlings — mostly 15- to 16-year-old boys — ransacked the hospital, shooting anesthesia machines, smashing windows and tearing up records. |
The gunmen, who belonged to one of Somalia’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups, notorious for chopping off hands and stoning adulterers, put Dr. Abdi under house arrest for the next five days and shut down the hospital, causing two dozen malnourished children to die in the bush after their families fled. |
But something extraordinary happened. Hundreds of women from the sprawling refugee camp on Dr. Abdi’s property dared to protest, adding to a flood of condemnation from Somalis abroad that forced the militants to back down. Dr. Abdi even insisted that the gunmen apologize — in writing — which they grudgingly agreed to d... |
Somalia has been at war with itself for 20 years. The health care system, like much of the country, has been demolished. There are very few functioning hospitals left. But for decades — as the government imploded, warlords took over, more warlords came and an Islamist insurgency swept across Somalia — Dr. Abdi has pers... |
In a nation where the government controls only a few blocks in this war-torn capital, Dr. Abdi and her daughters, who are also doctors, are essentially running a small, desperate city on their own. But that is not enough, in her estimation. So, on separate patches of land she owns, she is organizing families to run far... |
Dr. Abdi’s daughter Amina, who first learned to practice medicine trudging behind her mother during visits to the bush, said her mother needed to rest. |
“But she has never rested in 20 years,” Amina laughed. |
In fact, Dr. Abdi recently had a benign tumor removed from her brain. She is better, she said, but she is tired. Still the work continues, and Dr. Abdi plans to return in a few months. |
“I can’t run away to save myself,” she said. |
Dr. Abdi comes from a different generation of Somalis, one with opportunity. At 17, she won a scholarship to study gynecological medicine in Kiev, in what is now Ukraine; she was the only woman among 91 Somali students. Her dream to become a doctor began when she was 12, she said, watching her mother die in childbirth. |
“I used to think and dream that one day I, myself, could save lives so no other mother would die helpless,” she said, her eyes bright behind thick glasses. |
After Kiev, she returned to Somalia and worked for government hospitals. She married and had three children, two daughters and a boy, though her son was killed in a car accident in 2005. He was 23. Both daughters, Amina and Deqa, became doctors. |
In 1983, she opened a one-room private women’s clinic on land her family owned and began persuading nomadic women to deliver their babies with her. Dr. Abdi said Somalia’s president at the time, Mohammed Siad Barre (the last president of a permanent central government in Somalia) personally gave her the permission. |
That one-room clinic has steadily grown, almost unrecognizably. Today, Hawa Abdi Hospital has 400 beds, 3 operating theaters (still badly damaged from the attack), 6 doctors, 43 nurses, an 800-student school and an adult-education center that teaches women how to cook nutritious meals and make clothes. |
Dr. Abdi has long performed surgical procedures herself, everything from Caesarean sections to tweezing out bullet fragments, though operations have been on hold because of the damage from the assault. Measles, malaria, diarrhea, epilepsy, tuberculosis and especially life-threatening malnutrition in a country constantl... |
AROUND the two-story hospital, 15 miles down a shelled-out road from Mogadishu, a veritable city has sprung up over the years, 90,000 refugees living in bubble-shaped huts made out of plastic sheeting and sticks, people who have flocked here because it is considered one of the few safe zones in southern Somalia. The me... |
The haven comes with some security guards and a few important rules. Among them: no man may beat his wife. The property even has a storeroom that doubles as a jail for offenders. |
Hakima Mohamoud, a 50-year-old mother who had just given birth, recently arrived here with a tiny, listless, malnourished baby, who was immediately put on a feeding tube. It seemed to be working, and Mrs. Hakima marveled that her daughter’s life could be saved — for free. |
Many Somalis have essentially given up on their government helping them. So, too, it seems, has Dr. Abdi. When asked if she thought of calling the government forces that day in May, when she was surrounded by hundreds of militants, Dr. Abdi simply laughed. |
She gets excited every time the story comes up and described how the militants, during their brief seizure of her compound, even raised one of their signature black flags. |
“As soon as they left, we pulled it down and put up a white one,” Dr. Abdi said. |
It was made out of a hospital sheet. |
How do you make a Smart car even smarter? You guessed it: Create an app for that. |
Smart has developed an iPhone app that acts as a infotainment system for the Fortwo. |
Smart’s new Smart Drive App for the Lilliputian Smart Fortwo is more ingenious than most. Developed by Mercedes-Benz software engineers, the coming application for the iPhone not only adds features like navigation to the car, but also does something the iPhone usually can’t do on its own: multitask. |
Demonstrated at the New York auto show, the software is part of a package that will include a cradle than needs to be installed by dealers. The application divides the iPhone screen into larger, legible quadrants, rather than using tiny icons that might tend to distract the driver (or distract the driver even more). Th... |
The phone button takes drivers to the usual hands-free calling functions, while the quadrant entitled maps takes drivers to a full, turn-by-turn navigation program based on Navteq’s maps. Like built-in nav systems, it will mute a call in favor of spoken instructions, and it’s here where the multitasking function comes ... |
Also tapping into the iPhone’s abilities, the Smart app can play music from the phone or tune in countless Internet radio stations from around the world using the vTuner service (sorry, no Pandora yet). Again, because it can trick the iPhone into multitasking, the program will automatically mute the music for instructi... |
Lastly, the car assistance section includes Google 411 for free searches of local points of interest via voice instructions, and it will find and call a local dealer should your Fortwo break down. Best, however, is the automatic car finder feature. Like the coming iTag software for Android phones, the Smart software au... |
The company says the software will be available by June for $9.99, but a price for the cradle and professional installation hasn’t been set yet. |
Canadian infosec pros are still too cocky about their ability to spot and stop data breaches, says a consulting company. |
Sixty-five per cent of the 124 cyber security and IT executives in Canada from large organizations – among 2,000 in 15 countries surveyed last summer by Accenture – agree their organization is confident their cybersecurity will demonstrate valuable results. That compares to 75 per cent globally. |
Over three quarters of Canadian respondents are confident their top strategies are achieving desired business outcomes, including protecting customer information and the organization’s brand. |
In fact, Canadian respondents were more confident than their peers in other countries on a range of capabilities. |
At the same time the Canadian group admitted in the previous 12 months an average of one-third (32 of 96) attempted breaches they discovered were successful. |
The results released Wednesday are a breakdown of the Canadian numbers in the global survey, which Accenture made public last November. |
Asked why infosec pros in companies this big who presumably have large cyber security budgets shouldn’t be confident in their abilities, Thomas admitted that “most organizations are doing a decent job.” But he also pointed out that in the survey just over half of Canadian respondents admitted it takes months to detect ... |
That, Accenture suggests, is no reason to be confident on detection and remediation abilities. |
Interestingly the survey also shows that compared to other countries large Canadian firms surveyed spend the least amount of their IT budget (7.3 per cent) on cyber security. Organizations in France spend the most (9.4 per cent) of their total IT budget on cyber security compared to the global average of 8.2 per cent. |
The survey results show many Canadian companies invest ineffectively in cybersecurity. That’s because when asked if they got extra money for cyber security about half of respondents said they would spend on the same things they’re doing now. Only 20 per cent said they would put the extra money to mitigating financial l... |
The results suggest Canadian organizations see spending on perimeter-based controls as more important than on “high-impact internal threats,” says Accenture. |
Overall, it takes longer to spot a breach in the U.S. and the U.K. with over a quarter of organizations taking a year or more to detect a successful attack. (30 per cent in the US; 26 per cent in the U.K.). |
Organizations in Canada (52 per cent), Germany (52 per cent) and the UK (50 per cent) are the most confident in monitoring for breaches compared to the global average (38 per cent). |
They also need to improve the alignment of their cyber security strategies with business imperatives, says the company. |
This morning, I water our garden and eat some breakfast before heading out to Mayberry Elementary School in Silver Lake, where the community and the school have organized the planting of 10 trees. The students sing a song and recite a poem about trees. A volunteer from Tree People—an amazing local group that helped pio... |
After the assembly, I drive to City Hall and attend an Environmental Quality and Waste Management Committee meeting. At 9:45, I go outside to the steps in front of City Hall. The mayor and two of my colleagues join me for a press conference to protest the Bush administration’s recent rule changes and proposed cuts to t... |
At the press conference, one mother who recently received a Section 8 voucher and made a deposit to secure housing describes, in anger and sadness, what it is like to walk through feces and urine each morning as she goes to work. She shows everyone the voucher that she finally received this year, as well as the housing... |
Afterward, I head back into City Hall. Today’s City Council meeting runs long—until about 2 p.m. During public comment, the farmers who are trying to preserve the South Central Community Garden show up, as do the Milonopolous brothers, two high-school students who for years have been calling for a ban on ammunition sal... |
Later in the afternoon, I have a series of meetings, including one with representatives from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest. Our city is in the process of the largest school construction program in our nation’s history. We are 200,000 seats short of what we need, and, in my distri... |
Today, the district asks for help locating a new middle school and a high school. My council district includes areas that are the most-densely populated parts of the United States outside of Manhattan, so finding the 14 acres of land necessary for these two schools is challenging to say the least. The sites under discu... |
After the committee meeting (we pass both of the Section 8 resolutions from this morning’s press conference), I drop by a reception at Getty House, the official residence of the mayor, which is used mainly for ceremonial and social purposes. (Mayor James Hahn actually lives in San Pedro, near the Los Angeles Harbor, in... |
The mayor speaks, mentioning some of the work he has done over the last three years, including a law that recognizes matriculas consulares as legitimate forms of identification in the city of Los Angeles. Matriculas consulares, or consular cards, can be used by noncitizens to open bank accounts, visit libraries, fill o... |
My last stop is at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. The museum pays homage to Hollywood with a Cheers bar and a Star Trek Transporter room but also runs a school to train young people who are coming out of the juvenile justice system in movie and TV production. Tonight, the museum i... |
At 8:30 I drive home, and I count four sofas, one shopping cart, two mattresses, and some tires on Echo Park Avenue. I call my office and ask to have them removed tomorrow. The graffiti situation, at least, appears to be better. |
John Hyde, riding JR, pulls Will Faust over a jump in Steamboat Skijoring’s inaugural race. |
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — The hooves flew and the skiers did too at Steamboat Skijoring’s inaugural race. |
Hosted at the Bitter Sweet Ranch on the Elk River, the event drew about 50 competitors in 30 teams made up of equine riders, horses and skiers. Each team was made up of one horseback rider rope towing one skier over jumps and around obstacles. Racers came from all across the states of Colorado and Wyoming to compete. |
The race differs from the classic Winter Carnival event in a few ways, though Zhimanskova said the skijoring races compliment the Carnival. Teams are around the same age, so adults pull adults and kids pull kids. They race on a straight course made up of jumps, gates and rings. |
To get the best score, racers had to be the fastest to land each of the three jumps, maneuver around a gate and grab two plastic rings hanging over the course. Miss any of these steps, and a team received a two-second penalty on their final time. Groups are split into divisions based on their time. |
The race had a prize pot of $3,000 to $4,000, which Zhimanskova hopes to grow next year. The event also raised money for the Veteran Barn Door Project, which conducts equine therapy programs for veterans, and Mountain Valley Horse Rescue, a rescue and rehabilitation facility for horses on the Western Slope. |
The racers fly down the track — skiers compared it to being pulled behind a car or being shot out of a canon. |
It’s been proven this season already that anyone can win. First time skijoring racer Natty Hagood took home first place at a race last weekend in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He turned out again for the race in Steamboat. |
Steamboat was Marmor’s first skijoring competition. He got into the sport because his girlfriend, who owns a horse, was interested in it. They’ve been practicing at a track near their home in Golden. |
He was impressed by how welcoming the community of cowboys was. |
He’s hooked. He plans to compete in Kremmling next weekend. The race was Skijor USA’s inaugural race in Steamboat. The nonprofit formed in March 2018 and has built a network of affiliated skijor events in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Montana, culminating in a national championship in West Yellowstone, Montana. |
Though it was a first-time event, Faust said the competition was fierce. Many of the teams vying for the National Championship Finals were competing. |
“The level of competition at this race for the southern division is about as tough as it’s going to get,” Faust said. He said many of the horses racing Sunday would be competing in Leadville, one of the largest skijoring contests. |
Today’s winners included Division 1 champion TJ Simmons of Ordway, Colorado, riding Turbo and pulling skier Jason Decker of Denver, Division 2 champion Joh Hyde of Boulder, Wyoming, riding J.R. and pulling skier Natty Haygood of Jackson, Wyoming, and Division 3 champion Jorge Calzadillas of McCoy, Colorado, riding Anto... |
Barri Daino pulls Fritz Gamber in an exhibition run in Steamboat Skijoring’s inaugural event. |
After the competition, members of the public who didn’t wish to compete could participate in just-for-fun exhibition races. This included children and those who are growing more confident on their ski legs. As much as Zhimanskova loves the serious competitors, she said the reason she does it is for these recreational s... |
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