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Explosions, then a race for cover: Rep. Mo Brooks describes shooting at baseball field.
Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama was at Wednesday morning's practice for an upcoming congressional charity baseball game and describes the shooting.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Rep. Mo Brooks rode his bicycle to the Eugene Simpson Stadium Park in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday morning to practice for an upcoming congressional charity baseball game.
The Republican from Huntsville, a former all-city baseball player in high school, was looking forward to it. It was a relief, he said, from the pressures of lawmaking.
Brooks plays outfield for the GOP team and said he usually spends time in left field for fielding practice. But Wednesday, Brooks decided to go in early for batting practice. He walked to home plate, toward the fencing of the park, about 10 to 15 feet high.
Brooks waited, standing on the third base line, while Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., took his swings. Davis finished, and Brooks was about to take his turn at the plate.
Then, from behind, he heard an explosion.
He turned. Down the baseline, past a dugout, a man had pushed a rifle through the chain-link fence, firing toward second base and the outfield.
Bedlam erupted on the field. Brooks heard someone scream “active shooter.” Someone else yelled “take cover.” In the chaos, Brooks heard a yell from Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House Majority Whip, who was standing at second base.
Brooks quickly realized that the shooter, despite shooting into the outfield, would not have to move his gaze very far to target those near home plate. He raced toward some blue plastic.
The shooting continued. Brooks could see Scalise gesturing toward right field. Those behind the blue plastic realized they were hidden from view, but “sitting ducks” if the shooter came onto the field. Quickly they made a break for the first-base dugout.
The goal was to get to a gate near the dugout. In the dugout was Zachary Barth, an aide to Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas.
Brooks and another person in the dugout tied a tourniquet around Barth’s leg using Brooks’ belt.
They planned to roll over and try to make a break for the gate when, above them, they heard another explosion. David Bailey, a Capitol Police officer, had drawn his pistol and was firing at the shooter.
At first, Brooks said, he thought they were pinned down. Then he realized it was the police.
“Thank goodness the good guys are here,” Brooks recalled thinking. It was the only time the congressman became emotional in a 25-minute interview.
Gunfire kept crossing the field. Time slowed to a crawl, and the congressman couldn’t say how long they were there. “Probably what was 10 seconds might have seemed like 60,” he said.
Brooks emerged from the dugout. Scalise had crawled from second base to the outfield grass, leaving a blood trail. Brooks went to him with others on the field. He could see a patch of blood on his hip. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, a medical doctor, provided first aid on the field; Brooks helped hold a cloth in place to ...
The shooter was later identified as James T. Hodgkinson, 66, of Belleviille, Ill. Witnesses said Hodgkinson asked before the shooting if he was looking at the Republican team or the Democratic one. Scalise went into surgery following the shooting. Besides Bailey and Barth, Matt Mika, director of governmental relations ...
The game will go on Thursday night. Brooks says he plans to play.
“We should not let lone wolf shooters or terrorists have the satisfaction of stopping America from being America, stopping us from what we would normally do,” he said.
If the ground-level perspective of the post-Sandy New Jersey coastline can break your heart, the aerial view can melt your mind.
A new site from NOAA allows you to navigate along the shoreline, layering and unlayering aerial photography taken by NOAA's National Geodetic Survey following the storm. As you place new images over old, dark sand extends its reach onto roads, roofs disappear, and bright beaches become messy disaster zones. The picture...
Here is a shot-by-shot progression of what happens as you gradually shift from a pre- to post-Sandy view taken from above the beach town of Seaside Heights.
For homeowners, local officials, and people whose livelihoods depend on the shore's tourism industry, the images in this tool can help them estimate and plan for losses they may not yet have been able to assess in person. For the rest of us, it's yet another over-the-Internet exhibit of the fury this storm brought.
When the restitution agreement was debated in the Bundestag on March 18th 1953, the Communists voted against, the Free Democrats abstained and both the Christian Social Union and Adenauer’s own CDU were divided, with many voting against any Wiedergutmachung (reparations). In order to get the agreement approved Adenauer...
Any suggestion that Germany, and especially the German armed forces, had behaved in ways that precipitated or justified their suffering was angrily dismissed. The preferred self-image of Adenauer’s Germany was that of a victim thrice over: first at Hitler’s hands—the huge success of films like Die Letzte Brücke (The La...
Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember. Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and had been properly punished.
To those of us who've studied the Civil War, this is a very, very familiar line. I'm not sure how Rommel fits in here, but my intellectual instincts say that he'd be a natural hero for this kind of sentiment. The idea of blaming some crazed, maniacal monster for the evils of actual men is another familiar theme. Here a...
Early in his book The Seventh Million, Israeli historian Tom Segev visits with the author, and Holocaust survivor, Yehiel De-Nur. Segev quotes De-Nur coming to the realization that ultimately the Holocaust was not the work of God, but the work of man and thus, in some profound way, condemns us all—"Wherever there is hu...
Accepting that the structures of evil are not mystical, but are the work of actual humans who parent children is terrifying. It is terrifying to understand that you could be under the chain or you could be holding it, that evil is common and can't be passed off to some amorphous evil in the hazy past, or condemned to t...
ANKARA (Reuters) - Just over a year ago, Turkey’s prime minister addressed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus as “my brother”. Today, illusions of kinship are long gone and the region’s rising power finds itself marshalling efforts to press him from power, but increasingly wary of being pitched into military ...
The falling out between Assad and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan grew personal as well as diplomatic as Syria’s president ignored Turkish calls for restraint and pressed his attacks on protesters. Erdogan drew a comparison with Nazi Germany in some of the strongest words of any major leader on Syria.
The Syrian insurrection has tested the limits of Turkish regional diplomatic power that has grown markedly under Erdogan’s stewardship. For years Ankara invested heavily in relations with Syria and Assad, calculating closer ties could foster both trade and reforms in its southern neighbour, as well as weaken its relian...
“They thought that because of the personal relationship that had developed between Erdogan and Bashar, the Syrians would be a pushover,” said Philip Robins of Oxford University.
Syrian protests escalated from March last year. Assad failed to heed ever more insistent telephone calls from Erdogan and visits from Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu appealing for reform. By August, Ankara had had enough.
Having seen the rapid revolution in Egypt and with the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi seemingly imminent, Turkey sharply turned against its erstwhile ally in Damascus.
“They wanted to position themselves on the right side of history, expecting the Syrian regime to fall in weeks as in Tunisia and Egypt,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
Turkey now hosts Syria’s main opposition groups and shelters the rebel Free Syria Army on its side of the common frontier. On April 1, it will be the venue of a meeting of Western and Middle Eastern officials and groups involved with Syria.
Assad has shown himself to be impervious to verbal assault and resilient to increasingly violent protests and guerrilla attacks. He is also for now at least largely insulated from strong United Nations-backed action due to the vetoes of China and his backer Russia on the Security Council.
Without backing from the U.N., or at least the Arab League and NATO, Turkey is unwilling to go it alone in Syria. But with a 900-km (560-mile) border with Syria, more than 16,000 Syrian refugees on its soil and hundreds more arriving each day, it is not a problem from which Ankara can simply walk away.
Turkey has signalled a huge flood of refugees or massacres on its door-step would be red lines that would force it to act, but short of military intervention, there are few effective options available, analysts said.
Erdogan said last week setting up a “safe” or “buffer zone” along the border was one of the options under consideration, but that would mean troops going into Syria to seize and secure territory which the rebel Free Syrian Army has failed to do.
“We need to consider maybe to have a buffer zone inside Syrian territory, but without Syrian consent this may lead to some kind of military conflict ... and this may escalate the situation,” said Kamer Kasim of the International Strategic Research Organisation (USAK), Turkish think-tank.
Like it or not, Turkey finds itself centre stage of diplomatic efforts to dislodge Assad, and would be on the front line of any military intervention, whether an Arab peace force or arming the Free Syrian Army, both measures the Arab League could discuss when it holds a summit in Baghdad next week.
But there are very good reasons why Turkey should be wary of intervening in Syria, given its strategic backing by Turkey’s neighbour and regional power Iran, and the closeness to Iran of Ankara’s other Middle Eastern neighbour, Iraq.
Some in Turkey see a Western attempt to push Ankara into taking the leading role, and a large part of the risk, in Syria.
That at least was how many observers saw last week’s visit to Ankara of CIA Director David Petraeus.
“It seems Turkey has been left holding the baby,” said Ali Nihat Ozcan, a security analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey.
Turkey has not yet rowed back, but much of the rhetoric has been replaced by a determined attempt to forge more consensus on Syria, hosting a “Friends of Syria” meeting in Istanbul on April 1 to try keep it high on the international agenda.
There Turkey will do what it diplomatically does best, bringing together the West and the Middle East where it uniquely has a foot in both camps.
“I would have thought the thing to do is to get back in the pack as far as NATO and the Western alliance is concerned; you are not exposed in the way that Turkey has been,” said Robins.
Are you able to support the finance control team in helping meet the changing needs of the organisation?
The Treasury Administrator will undertake operational control processes to assist in providing assurance that the British Red Cross' treasury accounting banking records are complete and accurate. You will be dealing with our staff as well as our bankers and investment advisers and must be a strong communicator.
You will also be responsible bank reconciliations, the payment of all international payments, investigating potential issues and will also be responsible for seeking ways to continually strengthen the organisation's treasury procedures and controls.
This role is part of the finance control team which is responsible for controlling the general ledger as well as operational treasury management and fixed assets. The tasks performed by the finance control team are continually changing to match the needs of the organisation.
With a sound knowledge of double entry book-keeping, you should be highly computer literate and familiar with Microsoft office tools, with in particular an effective working knowledge of Microsoft excel.
You should also have strong analytical and problem solving skills, experience in working in a pressurised environment and to tight deadlines, used to performing financial reconciliations and accounting for foreign currency transactions.
Closing date for applications is 23:59 on the 30th of January 2019 with interviews to follow.
First of all, I am really amazed about how well this season’s Dancing With the Stars: All-Stars show has been, along with the way it was handled and perceived by the public. The competition was really fierce, with all of the competitors having to bring their A-game. One of the competitors this season who brought their ...
Rycroft joined the show in season 8 as a replacement for Nancy O’Dell (Access Hollywood host) after she(O’Dell) encountered an injury prior to the show and had to withdraw. Rycroft was paired with professional dancer Tony Dovolani, who has partnered her for both of these seasons; however, the couple had never won a mir...
During the All-Stars season, Melissa and Tony started to rise above the pack of other dancers during the “Swing Dance Marathon,” where the couple were the last ones dancing and achieved the highest score. As the season came down to the last few weeks, competition became harder as she competed against other mirror-ball-...
On Tuesday, November 28th, 2012’s Dancing With the Stars: All-Stars results show, it was announced that Melissa Rycroft won the season’s trophy, making this her first mirror-ball trophy. Rycroft definitely earned the trophy this season, and we congratulate her for her amazing victory on America’s most-watched dance rea...
WASHINGTON (AP) - The clock has started to tick on a 50-day deadline for foreign governments to meet new U.S. standards for passports and sharing information about their citizens. Failing to meet the deadline risks having some categories of nationals banned from traveling to the U.S.
The State Department on Thursday sent a cable to all U.S. embassies and consulates instructing U.S. diplomats to inform their host governments that the 50-day period has begun for them to meet the new criteria, devise a plan to meet them or face the possibility of travel sanctions. The seven-page State Department cable...
The 50-day deadline and sanctions threat had been were laid out in President Donald Trump's March 6 executive order on protecting the U.S. from terrorist threats that the Supreme Court partially reinstated last month. That executive order also contained the travel ban for residents of six mainly Muslim nations and the ...
The new standards involve the quality and integrity of identity documents such as passports as well as sharing information about security threats and public safety concerns. Many nations, including the 38 countries that are part of the U.S. Visa Waiver Program, already meet the criteria, which include biometric, machin...
It was not immediately clear how many countries might have to adopt new policies to comply with the new requirements. A separate classified cable sent was sent to embassies and consulates in countries that are believed not to be meeting the standards or that have been determined to be at risk for noncompliance.
Two days after the Maccabi Haifa soccer team was attacked in Austria, another Israeli soccer team is attacked.
Two days following an attack on Macabbi Haifa soccer players by pro-Palestinian rioters during a friendly match in Lille, France, a second anti-Semitic has taken place in Poland. On Friday, the F.C. Ashdod soccer team, which has been training in a town near Warsaw, Poland, was attacked by at least 30 skinheads during a...
According to reports, the skinheads sat in the stands and started chanting anti-Semitic epithets at the Israeli players. They tried to rush the field, but were stopped by security. The skinheads then returned with reinforcements, and succeeded in bursting onto the playing field, pepper-spraying team owner Jacky Ben-Zak...
Assistant Coach Shmuel Buchris attempted to resist the attackers, but following a blow to the head, lost consciousness for a few minutes, for which he received medical attention.
Team management said that some of the attackers had been armed with knives, and that it was quite fortuitous that the situation did not have graver results.
Management decided to return to Israel ahead of schedule. The team will be flying in on Sunday.
A good night’s sleep is nature’s best medicine. But unfortunately, many Americans find it difficult to get their six to eight hours of shuteye. The problem with sleeplessness is that it gets worse as one grows older.
There are many reasons why this happens, so it is a good idea to get an understanding of the causes of insomnia, and the symptoms of insomnia, before we discuss natural sleep remedies and tips for better sleep.
1. Your internal sleep clock is broken!In the good old days, when the sun went down most people went to sleep. But because of the easy access to the entertainment industry via television and computers, our natural sleep cycles have been interrupted, and our body’s internal sleep clock is broken.
2. Your mind is racing.
Life today is more hectic, with higher levels of stress and greater anxiety than ever in history. The media does a good job of funneling all the world’s troubles into your brains daily, and by the time night comes, your mind is racing to the point of keeping you awake.
3. Your body is working against you.
These days, we live a lot longer than our ancestors did. While this is good, we have to deal with problems of an aging body – aching, creaky joints, restless leg syndrome, aches and twinges, muscle stiffness and general weariness. These seem to further magnify when you lay down at night, so it’s harder for your body an...
You may think you are getting the sleep you need, but insomnia can slip in quietly so it’s best to be aware of its symptoms. In fact, if you keep getting up during the night, get up too early, don’t feel rested after a night’s rest, or have daytime sleepiness, you already are a victim of insomnia.
Setting a regular bedtime. Choose a time when you normally feel tired, so that you don’t toss and turn. If you find yourself getting sleepy way before your bedtime, do something mildly stimulating to avoid falling asleep. If you need to change your bedtime, help your body adjust by making small changes, such as 15 minu...
Wake up at the same time every day. If you’re getting enough sleep, you should wake up naturally without an alarm. Once you know what your waking time is, try not to break this routine on weekends when it may be tempting to stay up late.
Nap to make up for lost sleep. If you need to make up for a few lost hours, opt for a daytime nap rather than sleeping late. If you must nap, do it in the early afternoon, and limit it to 30 minutes.
Remove your sunglasses during the day to let light onto your face.
Spend more time outdoors. Try to take your work breaks outside in sunlight, exercise outside, or walk your dog during the day instead of at night.
Make your home or workspace bright during the day. Keep curtains and blinds open during the day, and try to move your desk closer to the window.
Move your TV and computer out of your bedroom. Many people use the television to fall asleep or relax at the end of the day, and this is a mistake.
Don’t read from a backlit device at night. If you use a portable electronic device to read, use an eReader that is not backlit.
Keeping noise down. Sometimes it’s difficult to eliminate noises that are beyond your control, like the sounds of barking dogs, city traffic or loud neighbors. In these situations, mask the irritant sounds with soothing music, a metronome, or you could even buy a special sound machine that lulls you to sleep (you can g...
Controlling room temperature. A bedroom that is too hot or too cold can interfere with quality sleep. Most people sleep best in a slightly cool room (around 65 degrees Fahrenheit) with adequate ventilation.
Alone with these three tips, you can make a few lifestyle changes, especially in your eating habits to help you sleep better. Doing regular exercise has been proven to help fight sleeplessness, so you might want to exercise to sleep right. And when it comes to dinner, have it early, and avoid heavy, rich foods within t...
Also cut down your intake of alcohol and other fluids at least two hours before you sleep. This way, you can empty your bladder just before you sleep and sleep uninterrupted.
And for all you avid smokers, just Google, “caffeine and smoking associated to insomnia,” and you‘ll know why I recommend staying away from artificial stimulants to sleep better.
To conclude, let me borrow a phrase from a famous poem. The poet writes…“I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep.”Thankfully, you don’t have miles to go before you sleep. Just a few steps to take.
Reprinted with permission from Bel Marra Health.
Are You Physically or Emotionally Hungry?
The numbers of gays who have been thrown out of their parents’ homes and evicted from apartments have increased to eight in the last week.
Yesterday’s High Court ruling on T&T’s buggery law was a victory for 21-year-old aspiring gay activist Mikhail Alexander.

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