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He�s the Niceville crossing guard who salutes every passing car, a holdover from his military and civil service careers.
Lockett has been a crossing guard in Niceville for 19 years. He�s been positioned all over town during that time. His ex-wife is a crossing guard. So is his fianc�.
At 81, Lockett has no plans to retire. He jokes that he doesn�t like to do dishes or vacuum, two domestic chores he might be forced to do more of if he wasn�t working several hours a day.
He likes seeing the kids and the motorists. Many salute him in return.
Lisa Clarrey of Niceville has been appreciating Lockett�s crisp greeting every day for more than a year.
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Activision has announced that Call of Duty: Mobile will be coming this summer to the UK, US, Central Europe, South America and other regions.
The multiplayer online first-person shooter will be available for Android and iOS. It will include maps, modes, weapons and characters from throughout the franchise's history, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the Black Ops series.
Developed by Tencent studio Timi, the game will be exclusively PVP and free-to-play. And, while we don't yet have an exact release date, you can pre-register for more information and a notification of when it is available on a dedicated website here.
Android phone owners can also head straight to Google Play to pre-register there.
The first release will be a public beta in select regions, so look out for it.
Promised gameplay modes include Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, and Free-For-All. Some of the most iconic maps to play on will include the much-loved Nuketown, plus Crash and Hijacked.
Weapons and other in-game items and characters will be unlocked through progress. We also expect an in-app storefront to buy them with real cash as the game is free-to-play.
We don't yet know how the on-screen controls will work, but Fortnite and PUBG Mobile players are well used to touchscreen buttons by now so we can't see this being much of a barrier.
WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (36-0) admits that he was as upset as boxing fans when his scheduled contest with Alexander Povetkin was scrapped because the Russian failed a drug test. "Honestly, I was a bit depressed after he was pulled from the card," he told FOX Sports after a training session Thursday.
"After I thought that fight was going to be good not just for me but for all of boxing."
Fortunately, Wilder got a replacement opponent in Chris Arreola, and will defend his belt Saturday night in Birmingham, live on PBC boxing on FOX. Date and opponent changes are disruptive to a fighter's training schedule and psyche, but Wilder says he was able to rebound with ease, in large part due to his experience.
"Opponents falling out, late, happened a lot as an amateur and early in my pro career so that prepared me for this type of stuff. We took two weeks off and then got back into the gym," he said.
"Then, it wasn't hard at all to be focused and motivated."
Arreola was a loud detractor of Wilder's when the Olympic bronze medalist became world champ. The Tuscaloosa native insists, however, that Arreola's prior trash talk doesn't add any fuel to the fire.
"No, his trash talk doesn't add any motivation for me. I'm used to people saying negative things. They do that because they are jealous," he surmised.
"It doesn't get to me. This is going to be his third chance at a world title and he hasn't gotten one yet. For him, the third time is not going to be a charm."
The words will soon end and both men will have a crack at one another.
"People can talk all they want to talk, but eventually they have to back it up," Wilder calmly said.
"So, he talked a lot, now he gets his chance to back up the talk."
And Arreola will have to try and do it on Wilder's home turf. The two will face off in Wilder's home state, and the defending champ is excited to continue to be able to bring big-time boxing to his native land.
"I consider all of Alabama my home so whenever I fight anywhere in the state, I feel at home. I remember back when we were just starting, me and my coach talking about all the fights we wanted to get, and wanting to bring them to Alabama.
"I'm going to rebuild Birmingham, brick by brick."
Reporting from a city under siege. Train stations closed, streets shut down, military helicopters flying overhead, and state & local police armed with rifles and shotguns every ten feet checking IDs and performing illegal searches and seizures. I was nearly arrested this morning heading into the office and had my briefcase searched – twice – within a distance of fifty feet. Police don’t like it when you remind them of the necessity for probable cause or articulable individualized suspicion.
10:34 am on April 21, 2014 Email Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Veterans Want Yet Another Monument to "Honor" Their "Service"
The breakfast club will offer vital support for Ripon's armed forces.'Picture: The Mayor of Ripon, Coun Pauline McHardy takes the salute at Ripon's Freedom Parade. Picture: Adam Newsome.
A new group is launching to offer comradery and vital support to Ripon's armed forces, veterans and families.
Starting on July 29, The Ripon Armed Forces and Veterans Breakfast Club will meet at The Lamb and Flag on High Skellgate once a fortnight on Saturdays at 10am.
Mick Thompson, 38, said the breakfast club will bring old friends together and help to make new ones.
Mick Thompson, 38, who served in the Royal Engineers for 10 years and was posted to Ripon, said something as simple as bringing the city's forces together to meet and talk around the breakfast table could make a life-changing difference to veterans and servicemen living with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mr Thompson said: "Ex-soldiers miss the social side of things, the comradeship and the lads they serve with - the social side of it.
"Since I left the Royal Engineers in 2004, I have been to various reunions, and it gives you a big lift. But then afterwards you get the blues and you feel down again.
"I think a major thing for people suffering with PTSD, is remembering that the best thing for veterans is veterans. You can go and see counsellors and get help, but I think veterans dealing with veterans gives people such a lift."
Ripon is the latest to join the growing Armed Forces and Veterans Breakfast Club network, with groups springing up across the country, and the world.
Mr Thompson was inspired to inquire about setting up a club in the city when he attended a Sapperfest reunion for the Royal Engineers, and saw firsthand the comradery between members of existing groups from across the country.
He said: "I believe this is very needed in Ripon. Ripon seems to be one of those places where people can be posted anywhere, like Germany or somewhere else, and they come back and stay there.
"There are a lot of people in the city who are ex-forces who live near each other but don't talk or meet each other. This breakfast club is going to bring friends together, people who haven't seen each other for years.
"As a garrison city with our army camp and strong links to the armed forces, it only seems right that Ripon has a breakfast club. Families, people serving now, and veterans, are all welcome.
"People should come along because the banter and humour soldiers have with other soldiers is unparalleled."
Think of a cool shower on a steamy summer day. It makes your skin tingle. It clears your head. Well, the new Museum of Modern Art, which reopened to the public Saturday after a $425 million renovation and expansion, is that bracing shower: a work of architecture that is serene, urbane and blissfully understated.
It is just the right solution for the museum that houses the world's premier collection of modern art. And it is exactly what the world of architecture needs now after the rash of euphoric, look-at-me museums that were more about creating spectacular objects than contemplative settings where people could gaze at art.
In this, his first project in the United States, Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi has saved the best parts of the old MoMA and forged them into a much larger and exquisite urban whole. He has proved equally adept at striking a balance between MoMA's killer cache of paintings and sculptures and his classically modern idiom. Not blandly neutral, but quietly distinctive, his building and its visual drama unfold as unexpectedly -- and as powerfully -- as a concerto by Mozart.
This is something new, or rather, something old that seems new again. In contrast to the spectacle buildings, the museum serves as a frame for viewing art rather than a form whose principal purpose is to draw publicity and tourists. The container and the contained are in perfect harmony.
Though this restrained approach has yielded compromises and disappointments, such as a soaring atrium that doesn't yet make the spirit soar, the overall result feels ordered and inevitable. Sometimes, doing what's right is more important than doing what's radical. Evolution beats revolution.
Think back to 1997 when MoMA picked the Harvard-educated Taniguchi from a field of 10 architects, including such avant-garde heavyweights as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry had just opened his explosively sculptural Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The choice of Taniguchi, who had completed a series of elegantly minimalist museums in Japan, struck many as predictable, even boring.
How times change. Today, with so many lesser talents following Gehry's brilliant but hard-to-match example, the sculptural "wow" building is practically a cliche. Taniguchi's crisp, right-angled design thus seems remarkably fresh, as if architecture, having overheated in the 1990s, had taken a cool shower and emerged stripped of its baroque excess.
In truth, the project's success is as much a matter of planning as of style. In nearly doubling MoMA's overall size to 630,000 square feet, Taniguchi has transformed a museum that had grown incrementally and awkwardly over the decades into a coherent yet vibrant modernist collage. Some intimacy inevitably has been sacrificed, but the trade-off is a significant increase in space and spatial quality.
The museum has gained more room to display its extraordinary collection (it now has 125,000 square feet of exhibition space -- 50 percent more than before the renovation and triple what it had 20 years ago). It also has a new flexibility, dispensing with the old straight-shot sequence through its galleries and affording viewers a variety of visually enticing pathways as they move from Cezanne to Rothko to the artists of today.
These are the essential additions (and subtractions) to the landmark museum complex on West 53rd and 54th Streets just off the shopping mecca of Fifth Avenue: Along West 54th, an old hotel and some old brownstones are gone, replaced by six-story gallery and education buildings that are clad in glass and granite and flank the museum's serene, Philip Johnson-designed sculpture garden. The gallery building provides the museum's first entrance along West 54th and a new entrance on West 53rd. A wide through-block passageway, open to non-museumgoers, joins the entrances, bringing the bustle of the city into the museum as never before.
More startling is the removal of the museum's garden hall, a greenhouselike enclosure that was appended to the back, or garden side, of the museum as part of a controversial 1984 expansion by New Haven architect Cesar Pelli. (The expansion added an income-producing midblock residential tower and six floors of museum space at its base). The garden hall rose the full height of the museum, housing escalators leading to galleries. Originally showered with praise, it turned out to be a banal, shopping malllike space, an uninspired imitation of the glassed-in escalators that slither up the Pompidou Center in Paris. Its disappearance is a blessing.
Yet even as Taniguchi takes away Pelli's garden hall, he showcases Pelli's tower, treating it as a found object that emphasizes Manhattan's soaring verticality. The museum structures that once obscured the tower's base, reflecting MoMA's uneasiness with the tower, are gone. The tower comes straight down to the sculpture garden, forming a campanile for the museum. This is Taniguchi at his best. He's a skilled gardener doing selective pruning, not a madman hacking through the garden with a scythe.
Perhaps his wisest move was the decision to preserve the museum's original 1939 building along West 53rd, a once-shocking International Style intruder designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. Following a renovation overseen by Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York (the firm also served as the executive architect for the museum building project), the building dazzles with its glistening white marble skin and piano-curve canopy. It now serves as the entrance to the museum's theaters and restaurant. Just as alluring is Johnson's 1964 expansion along 53rd, also renovated, which flaunts a once-heretical facade of curving steel.
Not only do these side-by-side buildings play off beautifully against each other. They preserve the delicate scale and soul of the side street, a major accomplishment because the greatly enlarged museum could have been a blockbuster.
The lone weakness comes just west of Pelli's tower, where Taniguchi has placed his addition along West 53rd and his adjoining granite and glass facades form a muddy melange. Along with a sleek new office tower for museum workers and Pelli's now-drab, patterned-glass tower, they makes this part of MoMA look dull and corporate, as if it were the headquarters of Modernism Inc.
But any echoes of bland corporate modernism disappear along West 54th where the new education and gallery wings are as sublime and refined as Japanese temples. They exude a sleek, black-tie formality, but they're not too formal, their square cutouts in their facades resembling winking eyes. The contrast is classically Japanese: An overarching formality is broken up with playful surprises. The irrational tempers the rational, a yin-yang formula for architectural delight.
Taniguchi plays the same game inside, where visitors move from the low-ceilinged through-block passageway into an entry court where a skylit, 110-foot-tall atrium soars above.
The sculpture garden, now restored to its original size, is directly ahead, its centrality reaffirmed. Escalators and elevators are hidden behind the walls, a reversal of Pelli's garden hall. An off-center modern stair leads up to the atrium.
The atrium, as this point, is underwhelming. The big, squarish volume of space needs more boldly scaled art to add to the punch of Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk." Even so, Taniguchi's basic moves -- and the messages they send -- are sound: The atrium forms an extension of the galleries that pinwheel around it. It is urbane, not suburban; about culture, not commerce. Further emphasizing the connection with art, Taniguchi slices a two-story window into a wall near the top of the atrium, revealing Matisse's joyful "Dance."
Half the fun of the galleries is getting there; exit the elevators and escalators and you are greeted with exquisitely framed views of the sculpture garden and the midtown Manhattan cityscape -- Chippendale highboy skyscrapers and the like. Equally compelling are Taniguchi's new switchback stair between the fourth and fifth floors and the restored, sensuously curving "Bauhaus stair" between two and three. They recall MoMA's original domestic scale, breaking down the new vast building into a series of "museums within a museum."
In a bold move sure to rile traditionalists, Taniguchi inverts MoMA's old order of things, beginning the chronological sequence of the painting and sculpture collection on the fifth floor and leading down to four. He puts other departments on three and contemporary art on two (temporary installations will go on six). The placement of the contemporary galleries in such a public place decisively brings MoMA into the present, making it as much a museum of contemporary art as a museum of the history of modern art. Whether the museum's curators can walk that tightrope between past and present remains to be seen.
The galleries themselves perfectly accommodate the art they contain, their varying ceiling heights creating just the right proportions. Often criticized as "white cubes," the galleries hardly appear clinical when you're looking at such revolutionary works as Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The simple backdrop makes the art seem all the more radical.
What is baffling (and always has been, at least to me, about MoMA) is the utter absence of explanatory wall text. How can a museum devoted to spreading the gospel of modern art say almost nothing about the art on its walls? In addition, despite the presence of two cafes overlooking the sculpture garden, Taniguchi appears to have given short shrift to facilities designed to relieve "museum fatigue." There simply aren't enough benches in the galleries. Visitors deserve more creature comforts.
But those are quibbles. On the whole, the new MoMA soars. Architecture, it remind us, isn't about slapdash train-wreck designs that are today's magazine cover and tomorrow's forgotten fashion. It is about the enduring craft of building and the subtle accretion of character that makes museums and their cities intensely rich places. These are the deep rudders of architecture, and Taniguchi's greatest contribution, beyond his splendidly refined building, is to have affirmed them.
Law enforcement officers in Jefferson County, Tenn., have them. The General Services Administration is rolling them out. The City of Williamsburg, Va., gave them to its city council and other key staff. The Interior Department has given them to about 1,000 field agents. As these examples demonstrate, tablets are hot right now, and not just in the public sector.
So much so that after less than a year on the market, tablets have become big business, according to Oppenheimer & Co. The company in January 2011 predicted that the total shipments of tablet devices will explode from 15.1 million units this year to more than 115 million by 2014, topping $55 billion in sales. The numbers are not surprising given the exponential growth of Apple’s iPad, which nearly hit the 7.5 million unit mark between the time it debuted in April 2010 and the end of the third quarter of 2010. The growth will come from Apple’s device as well as from new tablets from Dell, HP, Motorola and Research In Motion, the company behind the ever-popular BlackBerry device. The most surprising part: More than a quarter of the devices will be purchased by the enterprise, according to a Deloitte Consulting report.
“If you think about the movement, what’s driving apps to mobile platforms, you see how tablets can be used in the field when coupled with cloud services,” said Brad Eskind, principal federal technology leader at Deloitte. “Some things like grants management or data or predictive analytics are easily handled on a tablet.” The reasons are simple. Today’s tablets have dual-core processors, which provide the computing power to handle advanced, processor-hungry applications. In addition, tablets ship with touch screens, the ability to connect to a network via Wi-Fi or wireless carrier, and an already well-established software development base so custom applications can be built quickly and cheaply.
“Tablets are basically filling a lot of niche requirements,” agrees Richard Schum, senior industry analyst at INPUT, who says that tablets, at least in the foreseeable future, will be a complement to more traditional computing devices. For instance, Schum recently interviewed law enforcement officials who were looking for a device to use in the field for fingerprinting and photo identification. Tablets worked well, says Schum, because of their form factor and the fact that customized applications were easily created. In effect, they allowed the law enforcement agents to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently, two elements that will come into play as new devices such as Research In Motion’s tablet entry, the PlayBook, is introduced this year.
And then there’s the cloud connection. The tablets play well in the cloud since they can act as not-so-dumb terminals, offloading storage and data, which helps boost end-user security. “Tablets have solid state memory, but not nearly as much as you’d find on a laptop hard drive, so when you attach it to the cloud. the possibilities become unlimited,” said Schum.
A New Zealand woman coughed up three pieces of bloody gauze two days after having her tonsils taken out, 3news.co.nz reported.
Hayley Wahapa was recovering at home from the routine operation when her sore throat closed on her.
“Everything I was eating on, drinking kept coming out of my nose, nothing would go down my actual throat and I just started having a bit of a coughing fit and dry retching and choking,” she said.
Her coughing fit cleared the three pieces of gauze stuck in her throat, which horrified her family doctor when she presented him with the bloody evidence.
“He asked me who did it and I said the surgeon at the hospital and he said, ‘are you sure, it looks like a student, it looks like a hack job; it hasn't been done properly’,” she said.
Last year, there were 308 cases in which something went wrong at a New Zealand hospital, but, an incident doesn’t have to be reported unless it can potentially result in permanent disability or death.
The Health and Disability Commission, which handles complaints regarding health care, received 853 complaints in the last year; 33 patients complained about general surgeons, and 627 complained about suffering an injury from surgery.
Wahapa is filing a complaint against the hospital and the special surgeon who operated on her.
“Doctors and nurses are well trained. In New Zealand they're extremely well trained. But they're only human beings and sometimes systems fail despite the high quality of the individual that's working within that system,” said Dr Peter Foley, chairman of the New Zealand Medical Association.
“If I hadn't been awake and someone wasn't there to get it out, then it could have been pretty fatal really,” Hayley says.
The Accident Compensation Corporation, responsible for compensating New Zealand citizens’ for "no-fault personal injuries," paid out more than $98 million for the year ending in June.
Click here to read more from 3news.co.nz.
ACTU Animaux - SOS- 90 Cemetery Cats at Risk of Euthanasia July 31st - 5 Clicks Every Day to Save Them!
5 clicks every day will save these cemetery cats! Please click for al the other animals too- scroll down the left side of the page, click on each animal's description, then click their red button 5 times- every day, for every animal! Clicks save lives.
ACTU Animaux - SOS - 90 Cats, at Risk of Euthanasia July 20th - 5 Clicks Every Day to Save Them!
5 clicks every day will save 90 street cats from death! Please click for all the other animals too- scroll down the left side of the page, click on each animal's description, then click their red button 5 times- every day, for every animal!
265 animals in Yemens Taiz Zoo including rare leopards havent been fed for days. The government is rejecting proposals to save them. 28 critically endangered Arabian leopards havenâEUR(TM)t eaten in six days. They and nearly 240 other animals are starving!
Pursue the maximum penalties for men who reportedly tortured a dog before slitting its throat.
Never visit or support facilities that keep tigers captive for profit, as these animals are often starved, beaten and otherwise abused.
Four puppies were found covered in hot tar. The dogs were said to be in critical condition & were taken to a veterinarian for treatment. Images released through the media show the poor pups lying helplessly on the ground as the hot sun beats down on them.
Tomi was stolen from an Albanian forest & has been imprisoned in a filthy restaurant cage ever since. Tomi's captor rarely provides food or water; his sole source of nutrition is the junk food patrons feed him. Tomi shakes & bites himself due to stress.
OTTAWA CITIZEN OTTAWA — An abusive Ottawa father who ruled his home’s finances with a frugality so extreme that he deprived his family of heat, lights, water and sometimes food, has been convicted in a rare criminal harassment and assault case.
OTTAWA — An abusive Ottawa father who ruled his home’s finances with a frugality so extreme that he deprived his family of heat, lights, water and sometimes food, has been convicted in a rare criminal harassment and assault case.
The recently convicted man, who moved from Yemen to Ottawa in 1987 to study computer science, would whip his children with a leather belt if they didn’t follow what he called “sensible practices” — a bizarre set of “micro-managing” house rules that tormented his wife for 24 years, and his children for 18.

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