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Ravens roost and crackle in the gnarly snags. Under the coniferous canopy, wildflowers and mushrooms color the forest floor. The only obstacles along the road that makes a straight shot south through patchy woodlands are occasional mud puddles and uneven footing.
Depending on where you parked, the hike to Sheep Creek Point is about 2 miles one way. You’ll know you’re close when canyon winds pick up and a broad mesa appears directly ahead.
A few more minutes of walking brings you to a precipice at the border of the Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests. The exposed nose of the point hovers above Valentine Canyon with views of historical OW Ranch and the Canyon Creek Hatchery situated along green creek corridors 900 feet below.
Across the chasm, the ragged, vertical cliffs of Mule Creek Point to the east and OW Point to the west appear as flat-topped jetties with sporadic stands of pines that survived the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire.
A stroll along the point’s margins reveals intriguing glimpses of the hatchery complex. Managed by the U.S. Forest Service, the site’s water “raceways” produce an average of 80,000 pounds of trout annually that are used to stock Arizona lakes and streams. Most of the trout that end up in White Mountains waterways and 2...
This wind-in-your-face edge is the turnaround point of a modest trek with a pretty sweet special place in the middle.
Length: Depends on where you park. It’s 2.7 miles one way from State Route 260 to the point.
Getting there: From the State Route 260/87 junction in Payson, go 35.5 miles east on SR 260 to Forest Lakes. Just before mile marker 289, turn right (south) on Merzville Road (Forest Road 260B) and park in one of the many dirt turnouts within the first half-mile. The road is open to motorized use and turns into a very ...
Details: Canyon Creek Hatchery, fishaz.azgfd.com/canyon-creek-hatchery.
Only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. What's worse is this low number has barely budged since Gallup began reporting engagement worldwide in 2009, meaning that the vast majority of workplaces have failed to engage their employees.
Why isn't engagement improving? Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement across business units. When Gallup asked U.S. managers why they thought their company hired them for their current role, managers commonly said the organization promoted them because of their s...
Gallup estimates that only about one in 10 people naturally possess high talent to manage, and organizations name the wrong person as manager about 80% of the time. And we've learned that one in two employees have left a job to get away from a manager and improve their overall life at some point in their career.
Given the troubling state of employee engagement in companies worldwide, it follows that most managers aren't creating environments in which employees feel engaged -- or involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.
What's more, companies that fail to engage their employees are missing out on the powerful results that come from engagement. Gallup's latest employee engagement meta-analysis shows that business units in the top quartile are 17% more productive, experience 70% fewer safety incidents, experience 41% less absenteeism, h...
Badly managed teams breed poorly performing companies, and that weak performance puts added stress on employees, resulting in a negative feedback loop that is dangerous to any business' long-term health. Fortunately, Gallup has identified a straightforward way businesses can reverse this negative trend: managing employ...
Gallup has studied thousands of work teams and millions of leaders, managers and employees and discovered the significant potential in developing what is innately "right" with people versus trying to fix what's "wrong" with them. A focus on employee strengths proceeds from the simple notion that we are all better at so...
Gallup researchers recently completed an extensive study of companies that have implemented strengths-based management practices. Though many research studies have shown that strengths-based employee development leads to more engaging and productive workplaces, we believe this study is by far the largest and most compr...
Almost seven in 10 employees (67%) who strongly agree that their manager focuses on their strengths or positive characteristics are engaged. When employees strongly disagree with this statement, the percentage of workers who are engaged in their work plummets to 2%.
For organizations seeking to improve performance on crucial business outcomes, strengths-based development is a proven solution. To boost their business, leaders need to start developing people based on what is right with them.
Johnson came up with most of the approximately $2,000 to buy the ad through the GoFundMe online fundraising site.
A separate group of activists has scheduled a meeting on Wednesday in Cary and invited Burr and Sen. Thom Tillis. Some politicians have faced rowdy crowds at public meetings in Raleigh, Charlotte and in other states, following the election, many upset at the uncertain future of federal health care and other issues.
Earlier this month Tillis wrote a letter to constituents saying it was difficult to schedule such meetings weeks in advance, and noted that some people are more interested in disrupting meetings than in meaningful dialogue.
Burr’s spokeswoman could not be reached for a comment.
Burr and Tillis are traveling out of state on official congressional business during this 10-day recess, which began Friday. Democrat U.S. Rep. David Price is also traveling. On March 6, Tillis will participate in a lunch meeting as part of a speaker series hosted by the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce; admission is...
Shortly after Arizona lawmakers passed SB 1070, a number of All-Star-caliber players promised to boycott the game if it were held in Arizona. Among the most prominent was Adrian Gonzalez, who was born in San Diego and grew up in Tijuana. Last year, Gonzalez, then playing for the Padres, called the law "immoral" and a v...
But recently Gonzalez, who as a member of the Boston Red Sox was voted into the American League's starting lineup at first base, said he was "not big into politics" and that he intended to play in Phoenix.
Rob Cross will face an opponent from Japan or Australia on his debut at the William Hill World Darts Championship next month.
The St Leonards-based player was handed a first round tie against Japan’s Seigo Asada or Australia’s Gordon Mathers in this evening’s (Monday’s) draw for the sport’s blue riband event.
International qualifiers Asada and Mathers will meet in the preliminary round for the right to face Cross, the 20th seed and 9/1 joint third favourite for the title with William Hill following a remarkable first year as a professional.
The World Championship will be held at London’s Alexandra Palace from December 14 to January 1 and will be broadcast live on the dedicated Sky Sports Darts channel.
The schedule of play will be confirmed in due course.
Another local player, Adrian Gray, reached round three of the PDPA Qualifier for the World Championship on Monday.
Gray won 5-4 against Ian Withers and 5-3 against Arron Monk before losing 5-3 to Jeffrey de Graaf.
These and other strange discoveries about Mercury were announced in seven papers released in the Sept. 30 issue of the journal Science, a trove of knowledge from NASA's Messenger probe, covering everything from odd landscape to the planet's magnetic core.
"Messenger is revealing that, contrary to many people's preconceptions, Mercury is a fascinating world with a complex history," study author Patrick Peplowski, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., told SPACE.com.
Early in the planet's history, some 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, these gigantic volumes of lava poured from cracks in the surface as far as 125 miles (200 kilometers) outside the volcanic zone, flooding the surrounding, low-lying plains "like a bathtub," Head said.
Based on the way this lava apparently eroded the underlying surface, the researchers suggest it rushed out rapidly. "We can't say if it took 2.7 days or 15 years or any exact time from orbit, but it wasn't hundreds of millions of years," Head added.
Mercury's northern high latitudes had largely escaped view until now.
"When we flew by Mercury the first time with Mariner 10, we weren't really sure if volcanism caused these smooth plains," Head told SPACE.com. "Now we're in orbit with Messenger, we're up close and personal, just going around and around and really building up our picture of Mercury."
Head and his colleagues expect that other parts of Mercury also experienced volcanism. "This one deposit is so huge, volcanism has got to be important elsewhere," Head said.
This Mercury map shows the contiguous northern high-latitude smooth plains mapped by NASA's Messenger spacecraftfrom orbit (inside the black line) covers 4.7 million square kilometers, over 6 percent of the planet. Red circles show the locations of impact craters larger than 20 km in diameter.
Planetary scientist David Blewett at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory and his colleagues suspect these hollows were created when volatile materials — perhaps sulfur-bearing compounds — were liberated from the surface through some combination of heating, outgassing, explosive volcanism, micrometeoroid bombardme...
"Analysis of the images and estimates of the rate at which the hollows may be growing leads to the exciting possibility that they are actively forming today," Blewett told SPACE.com. "It is exactly this kind of unexpected discovery that makes planetary exploration such an adventure."
This NASA illustration shows how the Messenger spacecraft uses its gamma-ray spectrometer to spot the gamma rays and neutrons, which allows it determine the chemical composition of the planet's surface.
The composition of Mercury's surface is substantially different from that of other terrestrial planets, according to Messenger's scans of the X-rays emanating from the planet. For instance, Mercury's surface possesses at least 10 times more sulfur, or brimstone, than Earth or the moon.
"These are the first measurements of the composition of the planet Mercury," study author Larry Nittler, a cosmochemist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told SPACE.com.
Altogether, this surface chemistry suggests the planet formed from material now seen in certain stony chondritic meteorites and cometary dust particles.
"It's thought that the terrestrial planets accreted from smaller bodies that were probably similar to or the same as the asteroids that give us chondritic meteorites as well as the dust that makes up comets," Nittler said. "Our work is showing that at some level, Mercury formed from a different mix of these building bl...
Measurements of gamma rays emanating from the planet's surface also support theories that Mercury originated from material comparable to that of stony chondritic meteorites.
"Our discovery of higher-than-expected volatiles on the surface is one of many results indicating that Mercury has more in common with Venus, Earth and Mars than was expected," Peplowski said. "These findings shed light on planetary formation processes in the early solar system, and by extension tell us about the forma...
These findings also suggest that Mercury did not get as extremely hot as some models of the world's formation have suggested, because extreme heat would have baked out these volatiles. The findings also suggest Mercury's internal heat declined substantially since its formation, consistent with widespread volcanism abou...
"As we continue to collect data from orbit, data from the Messenger Gamma-Ray Spectrometer will be used to measure global abundances of stable elements, like iron, silicon, and oxygen," Peplowski said. "We'll also start mapping the abundances of elements on the surface, which can tell us about regional geologic process...
Messenger also investigated the magnetic field of Mercury, the only terrestrial planet besides Earth to possess a global magnetic field. These fields come from the dynamos of these planets: electrically conducting fluids flowing in their liquid metallic cores.
"It is Earth's magnetosphere that keeps our atmosphere from being stripped away, and that makes it vital to the existence of life on our planet," said study co-author Jim Raines at the University of Michigan.
Magnetometer data found that Mercury's magnetic poles are lined up almost exactly with its rotation axis, off by no more than 3 degrees. At the same time, its magnetic equator is north of its geographical equator by about 300 miles (484 kilometers).
"The offset implies that the surface field in the north is three to four times stronger near the pole than it is near the southern magnetic pole," study author Brian Anderson, a space physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told SPACE.com. This in turn can affect how space radiation impact...
The magnetic field of Mercury is much weaker than Earth's. This is likely because Mercury's dynamo comes from just a thin shell of molten metal in its outer core.
"Now we have to understand how the circulation of the outer portion of the core, the part that is still molten, can generate a field that is both aligned with the spin axis of the planet and yet be so strongly skewed to the north," Anderson said. "My own hunch is that there are some subtle differences in the history of...
This weak magnetosphere also "provides very little protection of the planet from the solar wind," said study author Thomas Zurbuchen at the University of Michigan.
Earth's magnetosphere is strong enough to deflect most of the solar wind, but on Mercury, the solar wind apparently sandblasts the surface at the poles, knocking sodium particles off the planet, Zurbuchen and his colleagues said. Those particles become part of the "exosphere," the extraordinarily tenuous layer of molec...
Messenger also found that, unlike Earth and the other planets in the solar system with internal magnetic fields, Mercury is not surrounded by rings of charged particles. (Earth's rings are the Van Allen radiation belts.) Mercury's field is apparently too weak to support them. Instead, the spacecraft detected energetic ...
"We have seen both proton and electron bursts in our own Earth's magnetosphere, but what really set these observations apart is the time scale and recurrent nature of these electron bursts at Mercury," study author George Ho, a space scientist at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory, told SPACE.com. "On Earth, suc...
On Earth, these bursts are due to the planet's magnetic field interacting with the interplanetary magnetic field. This might be going on at Mercury as well, or the bursts could be the result of Mercury's interaction with the solar wind. Ho said he hopes this data will help theorists better explain the bursts.
"All these findings are what exploration is all about," Head noted. "You can say you think you know what a place is like, but then you go there and orbit up close and personal, and you learn what's really going on. You challenge all your knowledge and come up with new ideas."
The Financial Services Ombudsman’s office said that in 2017 there were 1,914 complaints about insurance.
AN INSURANCE COMPANY refused to pay a woman’s claim after an accident because she told them in her claim form that she was unemployed.
The woman had listed her occupation as ‘gardener’ when she renewed her policy, but was unemployed at the time of the claim. Her case is one of a number of examples given in an annual report by the Financial Services Ombudsman this week.
The ombudsman’s office said that in 2017 there were 1,914 complaints about insurance.
In this instance, the woman was asked her occupation when she renewed her policy and she told the company she was a gardener.
Following an accident, she submitted a claim in which she stated that she was unemployed. The provider declined the claim on the grounds that she had not disclosed that she was unemployed at the time of renewal.
The woman claimed that the information she provided upon renewal was accurate, as she had been working as a gardener in the community on a voluntary basis, and that she had provided the information in the interests of full disclosure.
During mediation facilitated by the Ombudsman’s office, the provider agreed to assess her claim and subsequently paid her over €4,000.
Complaints about insurance products and services accounted for 42% of all complaints received in 2017. Similar to 2016, motor insurance was the main product type complained about, representing 33% of insurance complaints.
Another example given in the report was of a woman whose car insurance was cancelled due to non-disclosure when she was applying for the policy.
The non-disclosure related to whether or not she had been involved in an accident – regardless of blame – in the past three years. As a result of the cancellation, she struggled to afford insurance premiums, and it negatively affected her business.
As part of a mediated agreement, the provider decided to rescind the cancellation on the basis that the woman may not have fully understood the questions because English was not her first language.
She also received a refund of the premium loading applied during the period in question. Although this was not a large sum, the woman felt this was a significant result as it provided financial freedom and the ability to shop around for new cover.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie last year, ombudsman Ger Deering expressed concern about insurance companies refusing claims and cancelling customers’ policies because of minor non-disclosures.
In many of these cases, companies are asking “vague questions” and leaving it to the consumer to decide whether something is a material issue.
“I would say that consumers need to be very careful about the kind of questions they’re being asked and answer them correctly and providers need to ask the questions in a clear manner that is understandable,” he said.
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Hamas asked for an additional 24-hour humanitarian cease-fire, after Israel called off its own 24-hour unilateral cease-fire due to continued rockets fired from Gaza.
Hamas requested a 24-hour humanitarian cease-fire to begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday through Robert Serry, the United Nations envoy to the Middle East Peace Process.
“In response to U.N. intervention and considering the situation of our people and the occasion of Eid, it has been agreed among resistance factions to endorse a 24-hour humanitarian calm, starting from 2 p.m. on Sunday,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Rockets from Gaza continued to be fired at Israel after 2 p.m.
Israeli officials indicated that Israel would not recognize Hamas’ request until it stopped firing rockets, according to reports.
Israel observed a 12-hour humanitarian cease-fire from 8 a.m. on Saturday, during which time Gaza civilians stocked up on essential supplies and buried their dead.
Israel offered to extend the cease-fire by four hours, and later by 24 hours but was rebuffed in the form of rockets fired from Gaza. Israel continued to observe a cease fire until mid-Sunday morning when volleys of rockets led the security Cabinet to order the Israel Defense Forces to continue its strikes on Gaza.
Israel’s security Cabinet Friday unanimously rejected a cease-fire proposal made by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, which was seen as giving Hamas significant concessions, and not giving Israel the right to continue to seek out and destroy terror tunnels.
Also on Sunday, an Israeli reservist soldier died from injuries sustained Saturday night in Gaza, bringing the Israel Defense Forces death toll in the military operation to 43.
ST. LOUIS, Aug. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Patriot Coal Corporation (OTC: PCXCQ) announced today that employees represented by the United Mine Workers of America have ratified 5-year labor agreements. These agreements were reached between Patriot's signatory subsidiaries and the UMWA, as previously announced on August 12...
"Ratification of these agreements provides labor stability and ensures cost savings essential to Patriot's plan of reorganization," said Patriot President and Chief Executive Officer Bennett K. Hatfield. "These agreements should set Patriot on a path to emerge from bankruptcy by the end of 2013."
A motion seeking authorization to enter into these agreements has been filed with the Bankruptcy Court in St. Louis and will be heard at the August 20, 2013 Omnibus Hearing.
Note: Background of Patriot's restructuring and transformation can be found at the Company's website, www.patriotcoal.com.
Patriot Coal Corporation is a producer and marketer of coal in the eastern United States, with 11 active mining complexes in Appalachia and the Illinois Basin. Patriot ships to domestic and international electricity generators, industrial users and metallurgical coal customers, and controls approximately 1.8 billion to...
Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve certain risks and uncertainties that may be beyond our control and may cause our actual future results to differ materially from our current expectations both in conn...
I had to laugh. Watching the CNBC panel at the World Economic Forum last Friday in Davos, the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, kind of stole the show in his dry, wry way.
Having been one of the biggest critics of the European Central Bank's quantitative easing (QE) program from the start, he walked a delicate line defending the German position a day after the ECB unveiled its full scale, 60 billion euros a month stimulus measures.
He spoke about how he respected the independence of the ECB: "I don't comment on decisions by the ECB. Never ever."
He reiterated that Germany wants to see the euro zone stick together: ' We did whatever could be done to support Greece through difficult times, again and again…We had to convince the IMF to come up with very extraordinary conditions, in line with IMF rules, so that we could support Greece."
And when billionaire legendary investor, George Soros, offered his views on Germany, Schauble stepped in saying that Soros perhaps wasn't the best person to ask: 'If I (Schauble) am asked on German fiscal policy, I have to explain, because I know it better than anyone else'.

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