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Add Josh Freeman's name to the list of disappointing quarterbacks drafted in the first round.
The 17th pick in the 2009 draft by Tampa Bay, Freeman was one of only two quarterbacks chosen in the first round that year. The other was top overall pick Matthew Stafford by Detroit.
Freeman lost his job last week when benched for rookie Mike Glennon, the team's third-round pick this year.
Freeman's career in Tampa is over. Coach Greg Schiano not only benched him, but declined to say whether he or Dan Orlovsky will be the Bucs' backup.
Freeman said in an ESPN interview that the best option for him is a trade, but nobody is knocking down the door trying to deal for him.
Freeman will probably be released at the end of the year and join the ranks of the unemployed former first-round quarterbacks, including Vince Young and Matt Leinert.
Schiano said he made the move because Glennon gives the Bucs the best chance to win.
Schiano made it obvious in the offseason that he wanted a new quarterback. The Bucs pushed for Carson Palmer, but lost him to Arizona. The Bucs then drafted Glennon and it was only a matter of time before he got the job.
With the Bucs at 0-3 and the passing game ranked 31st in the league, that time is now. Freeman not only struggled on the field, he overslept and missed the team photo earlier this year. And his teammates didn't pick him as a team captain.
Meanwhile, Glennon faces a tough situation.
Tight end Tom Crabtree has been ruled out and the two starting wide receivers, Mike Williams and Vincent Jackson, are both listed as questionable for Sunday's game against Arizona.
In a quirk of fate, Glennon's first game is against Palmer, the veteran quarterback the Bucs wanted.
Another former first-round quarterback who will be on the bench Sunday is Minnesota's Christian Ponder. The former FSU standout has a broken rib, but also hasn't played well.
Matt Cassel will replace him. Cassel was a flop in Kansas City, but now has an opportunity against the 0-2 Steelers in London. If Cassel plays well, he could create a quarterback controversy.
The last time he faced the Steelers was last November in Pittsburgh when Lawrence Timmons intercepted an overtime pass and returned it to the Chiefs 5 to set up a game-winning field goal.
Cassel was benched at halftime the next game and his Kansas City days were over.
Cassel has one last chance to show he's more than a career backup.
The four teams playing in London this year - Minnesota, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Jaguars - are a combined 2-11.
Chris Parsons, the head of NFL International, put the best spin on the Vikings-Steelers game (both are 0-3), saying it's a "huge game'' for both teams.
"Whoever wins this game is going to be very much alive,'' he said.
The Vikings and Steelers took different approaches. The Vikings arrived Tuesday and the Steelers on Friday.
The NFL is trying to grow the sport in London, but the players don't seem to be buying the idea. Ryan Clark of the Steelers said he'd retire before playing for a London team. Cincinnati's Andrew Whitworth said the same thing last year.
"I've never talked to the guy besides the few choice words on the field. Other than that, I don't know him. I don't talk to him.'' Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler on Detroit's Ndamukong Suh, who called Cutler a "great guy,'' although he was fined $15,000 for a hit on Cutler in 2010.
STOKE striker Kenwyne Jones is set to move to Cardiff as part of a swap deal which will see Peter Odemwingie link up with the Potters.
Jones, 29, has fallen out of favour at the Britannia and is keen for a fresh start as he looks to revive his career.
The Trinidad and Tobago international was fined and dropped for the recent 1-0 defeat to Crystal Palace after refusing to play against Liverpool, and wants to leave the club he joined for £8m from Sunderland in 2010.
Odemwingie, 32, has failed to make an impression in Wales, finding the back of the net just twice in 17 appearances since his £2m move from West Brom last summer but Mark Hughes is delighted to be closing in on a deal.
He said: "It should go through tomorrow and will be concluded then.
The Nigerian wants more first-team football as he enters the twilight of his career, and feels that linking up with Hughes' side would guarantee him game time.
Cardiff boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is keen for the switch to happen, saying: "There is potentially a deal to be done, with Peter going to Stoke and Kenwyne coming to us.
"Obviously, you cannot confirm anything until papers are signed and medicals are done, but we are quite a long way down that road.
"I can't say anything about any other players, but I know Stoke have brought out a statement so I can confirm what they have said."
It's been an interesting start to the year for the stock market writ large and for our Motley Fool 100 Index specifically. A market-cap-weighted index that tracks the performance of The Motley Fool's 100 largest investing ideas, the Fool 100 was up 2.04% in the first quarter of 2018 compared to a 1.58% decline for the S&P 500. That's good, but we strive for better. The Fool 100's outperformance narrowed toward the end of the quarter due to declines in the value of big technology company stocks such as Facebook and Alphabet, which represent a hefty percentage of the Fool 100's composition.
Having said that, we'd like to think this recent performance lends credibility to the simple idea that powers the Fool 100: We'd rather own all high-quality businesses than any low-quality businesses.
To that end, we reconstitute the Fool 100 quarterly to make sure the index reflects our company's latest and greatest thinking on the stocks our analysts follow. This quarter, six companies came into the index and six went out.
Leaving the index were commercial truck manufacturer Paccar (NASDAQ: PCAR), industrial engineering company Emerson Electric (NYSE: EMR), biotech BioMarin Pharmaceutical (NASDAQ: BMRN), aircraft market Textron (NYSE: TXT), aircraft parts maker Transdigm Group (NYSE: TDG), and oil pipeline and storage firm Magellan Midstream (NYSE: MMP). Paccar and Emerson both left the Fool universe after our analysts issued sell recommendations on the stock, while BioMarin, Textron, Transdigm, and Magellan became too small to qualify for the Fool 100.
Replacing these stocks were open-source tech giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), consumer finance lender Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), veterinary healthcare equipment provider IDEXX Laboratories (NASDAQ: IDXX), pipeline operator Spectra Energy (NYSE: SEP), cyber security specialist Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW), and paper and packaging maker WestRock (NYSE: WRK). Red Hat, Discover, and Spectra entered the Fool 100 thanks to new buy recommendations from our analysts, while IDEXX, Palto Alto, and WestRock grew large enough to qualify for inclusion in our top 100 ideas.
Those changes, though, were mostly on the margin, and the Fool 100 remained substantially the same, with low turnover, relatively more exposure to the technology and consumer discretionary sectors than the broader market, and recognizable names making up its top 10 constituents.
To learn more about the Motley Fool 100 index, including all of the Fool picks that make up its 100 constituents, visit the Fool 100 website at www.fool100.com.
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Teresa Kersten is an employee of LinkedIn and is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Tim Hanson owns shares of Alphabet (C shares), Amazon, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway (B shares), Facebook, Microsoft, and Visa. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (C shares), Amazon, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway (B shares), Facebook, Idexx Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson, TransDigm Group, and Visa. The Motley Fool owns shares of Paccar and has the following options: long January 2020 $150 calls on Apple and short January 2020 $155 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool recommends BioMarin Pharmaceutical, Intel, Magellan Midstream Partners, Palo Alto Networks, Spectra Energy Partners, Textron, UnitedHealth Group, and WestRock. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The Seattle Seahawks have agreed to trade star defensive end Frank Clark to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Cornerback Keith Reaser is headed from the AAF to the NFL, after agreeing to sign with the Kansas City Chiefs Thursday.
The San Francisco 49ers signed former Los Angeles Chargers cornerback Jason Verrett, the team announced Thursday.
As free agency gets ready to kick off in the NFL, one player who will be in demand is Seattle Seahawks free safety Earl Thomas.
The San Francisco 49ers are a professional American football team located in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 49ers are currently members of the West Division of the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL). The team currently plays its home games in Santa Clara, California at Levi's Stadium.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "San Francisco 49ers."
A troubling feature of political disagreement in the United States today is that many issues on which liberals and conservatives hold divergent views are questions not of value but of fact. Is human activity responsible for global warming? Do guns make society safer? Is immigration harmful to the economy? Though undoubtedly complicated, these questions turn on empirical evidence. As new information emerges, we ought to move, however fitfully, toward consensus.
But we don’t. Unfortunately, people do not always revise their beliefs in light of new information. On the contrary, they often stubbornly maintain their views. Certain disagreements stay entrenched and polarized.
Why? A common explanation is confirmation bias. This is the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs and to disfavor information that counters them — a tendency manifested in the echo chambers and “filter bubbles” of the online world.
If this explanation is right, then there is a relatively straightforward solution to political polarization: We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.
But what if confirmation bias isn’t the only culprit? It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe. Though there is a clear difference between what you believe and what you want to believe — a pessimist may expect the worst but hope for the best — when it comes to political beliefs, they are frequently aligned.
For example, gun-control advocates who believe stricter firearms laws will reduce gun-related homicides usually also want to believe that such laws will reduce gun-related homicides. If those advocates decline to revise their beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, it can be hard to tell which bias is at work.
So we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases. This way, we could see whether a reluctance to revise political beliefs was a result of confirmation bias or desirability bias (or both). Our experiment capitalized on the fact that one month before the 2016 presidential election there was a profusion of close polling results concerning Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
We asked 900 United States residents which candidate they wanted to win the election, and which candidate they believed was most likely to win. Respondents fell into two groups. In one group were those who believed the candidate they wanted to win was also most likely to win (for example, the Clinton supporter who believed Mrs. Clinton would win). In the other group were those who believed the candidate they wanted to win was not the candidate most likely to win (for example, the Trump supporter who believed Mrs. Clinton would win). Each person in the study then read about recent polling results emphasizing either that Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump was more likely to win.
Roughly half of our participants believed their preferred candidate was the one less likely to win the election. For those people, the desirability of the polling evidence was decoupled from its value in confirming their beliefs.
After reading about the recent polling numbers, all the participants once again indicated which candidate they believed was most likely to win. The results, which we report in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, were clear and robust. Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief about which candidate was most likely to win the election. In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win.
Importantly, this bias in favor of the desirable evidence emerged irrespective of whether the polls confirmed or disconfirmed peoples’ prior belief about which candidate would win. In other words, we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.
What about confirmation bias? To our surprise, those people who received confirming evidence — polls supporting their prior belief about which candidate was most likely to win — showed no bias in favor of this information. They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed. In other words, we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.
We also explored which supporters showed the greatest bias in favor of the desirable evidence. The results were bipartisan: Supporters of Mr. Trump and supporters of Mrs. Clinton showed a similar-size bias in favor of the desirable evidence.
Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se. This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.
Ben Tappin is a graduate student, and Ryan McKay is a reader in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Leslie van der Leer is a lecturer in psychology at Regent’s University London.
This year, the impact for White River was fairly minimal, Fitzwilliams said. But it can create accounting headaches for the country’s busiest national forest, covering 11 ski resorts, eight wilderness areas, 10 fourteener peaks and nine counties, including Pitkin and Eagle.
The change is apparent in its staff composition, as well. Over the past two decades, the Forest Service lost at least 7,000 employees dedicated to managing forestlands, even while its overall staffing levels increased by 114 percent, according to the report. The growth came exclusively from fire personnel, who now outnumber forest employees by at least 1,000.
More frequently, the Forest Service relies on volunteer help to maintain its recreation lands.
It’s been seven years since Taejun “TJ” Lee lived the college life at Cal State Fullerton. Since then, he’s snagged a career as an assistant occupational therapist and is inspiring friends to join athletic competitions with him, despite his own physical limitations.
In September of 2003, when Lee was 18 years old and a recent high school graduate, he and two other friends were in a major car accident on the way back from a San Francisco road trip.
On an empty road in Bakersfield, Lee said his friend fell asleep at the wheel and was knocked unconscious after his car rolled around 10 times into a ditch on the side of the road. He was immediately concerned about his friends but then realized he couldn’t move himself.
The accident left Lee with a spinal cord injury at the C4-C5 cervical level. Doctors told Lee he had a 10 percent chance to walk again. He was paralyzed from the neck down for almost a year, but has been able to slowly recover and gain mobility with the help of therapy.
Lee was a CSUF transfer student and earned his bachelor’s degree in health science with an emphasis on health education in 2011. Now, the 33-year-old does children’s therapy and travel therapy at rehab and nursing facilities.
He was also very active on campus as a member of the Pilipino American Student Association, Association of Chinese Students and the Peer Health University Network. Lee was one of the founding members of Alpha Phi Omega, a coed community service fraternity on campus.
Lee’s accident pushed him into his career today, because of his ability to relate to his therapy patients with his own experience.
“It was like double-dipping, I could find out more about myself and, at the same time, achieve something,” Lee said.
His experiences allowed him to see his therapy sessions from the other side of the spectrum. He reassures his clients he doesn’t have them do anything he wouldn’t do himself.
“A lot of therapy is very personal because I do it too. Every day is therapy,” Lee said.
Looking for work right out of college was tough for Lee – he figured people in the therapy field would be more accepting of people with disabilities, but that wasn’t his experience.
“People said, ‘Oh, you don’t have any experience,’ but I never emphasized that ‘Being disabled is more experience than you guys will ever have.’ I’ve been disabled since 2003 and that’s all experience in occupational and physical therapy,” Lee said.
In 2015, Lee was convinced by a friend to participate in the Spartan Sprint, a three-mile course with 20 to 30 obstacles, according to its website.
“I thought, ‘Why would a disabled person do that kind of stuff? That’s not me,’” Lee said.
Lee gave himself three and a half months to train, and with the help of his friends carrying him through obstacles and sharing burpees for penalties, the group crossed the finish line in close to five hours.
“He doesn’t have a strong grip and he has limited mobility of his legs so I never knew he would do it himself, but I think his own determination is what got him to do it,” said Christian Almonte, who completed the Spartan Sprint with Lee and has known him for eight years.
The euphoric runners high of crossing the finish line that day started Lee’s obsession with races.
“It was a really empowering day. It was a hot day, the conditions were rough, there was dust, but he was smiling throughout the whole course,” Almonte said.
Last September, Lee traveled to Park City, Utah for the Red Bull 400, which is considered the world’s toughest 400-meter race, according to the Red Bull 400 website. The hill used for the race is normally used as an air jump for skiers in the Olympics.
Earlier this year, Lee also completed his first adaptive triathlon, which was a five-kilometer walk, 11-mile bike ride and 150-meter swim.
“It’s cool because he wants to be sure he knows where he stands in life in terms of his physical abilities,” said Aris Paracuelles, one of Lee’s friends from college.
Lee said he has completed three Spartan Races, the Red Bull 400, two adaptive bike rides (a 38-mile ride and 22-mile ride) and more than a handful of 5K races.
He walks with a limp and uses crutches but feels stronger both mentally and physically. Lee plans to continue competing in events later this year but wants to find balance between doing competitions and focusing on his profession.
Householders claim flies have appeared since the closure of Greenlight Environmental Ltd’s base at Lomond Industrial Estate.
Fed-up residents in Jamestown say their neighbourhood is riddled with flies due to the sudden closure of a nearby recycling plant.
Householders say they are having sleepless nights and have to keep all their windows closed following an infestation of flies.
They claim the bugs have come from Greenlight Environmental Ltd’s base at Lomond Industrial Estate as they say they appeared following the site’s closure.
The recycling firm went into administration on August 31, and the recycling plant closed its doors.
But residents say the area has become infested with flies since.
West Dunbartonshire Council confirmed it received five complaints of flies in the Jamestown area last week, which environmental health teams are now investigating.
Administrators RSM Restructuring Advisory LLP said they are in the process of clearing the site.
Carol Cochrane-Watson, who lives beside Bramble Hedge Path in Jamestown, said: “It’s been shocking.
“It started about three or four days after Greenlight shut down.
“We have to keep our windows closed at all times and make sure all food is covered up because there are flies everywhere.
“You can’t even get to sleep.
“It’s pretty gross. There are just more and more. It’s very unsanitary.

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