The person is male. Racially, the person is white. The person is 30 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 5000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 5.5 in openness, 3.5 in conscientiousness, 1.5 in extraversion, 3.5 in agreeableness, and 4.0 in stability.

Airline worker gunned down at Oklahoma City airport, suspect found dead —  A gunman murdered a Southwest Airlines employee, then killed himself Tuesday at Oklahoma City's Will Rogers World Airport in what police described as a premeditated attack.   Michael Winchester, 52, was shot while walking between a crowded terminal and the airport employee parking area. The unidentified suspect was later found dead in a pickup truck in public parking garage overlooking the scene. Police said the suspect appeared to die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Oklahoma City Police Capt. Paco Balderrama said the shooter apparently knew the victim's schedule and routine.   "This individual went there and waited for the employee to either be coming or going to take this opportunity," Balderrama said. He wouldn't say conclusively that it was a "sniper-type" attack. A LinkedIn page with Winchester's name described him as a ramp supervisor for Southwest and said he was from Washington, Okla., about 35 miles south of the airport.   Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King said in a statement that the airline would cancel all flights scheduled to depart Oklahoma City for the remainder of the day Tuesday.   The 1 p.m. shooting set off a scramble at the airport, with police immediately closing the sprawling complex and asking passengers inside to seek cover. They diverted incoming flights and refused to give already-loaded aircraft permission to leave. There were concerns the gunman might have entered the terminal and mingled among passengers or employees. "We have a heightened level of security all the time. These people have access to aircraft so we're very concerned about that," airport spokeswoman Karen Carney said. Hundreds of people were stranded inside the terminal for more than three hours before officers began letting them leave slowly. Carney said about 300 people were held on aircraft away from the terminal after their planes landed ahead of a ground stop. Once police determined that a suspect found in a red pickup truck on the second floor of a public parking garage was dead, officers gave an all-clear. The airport handles between 7,000 and 8,000 passengers daily for Alaska, Delta, Southwest and United airlines and has a separate terminal that serves as a transfer center for federal inmates. A jet carrying inmates to the transfer site was allowed to land while the rest of the airport was shuttered. Video from a television station helicopter showed what appeared to be a pool of blood about 100 feet from the airport's employee parking area -- and about 100 yards from the airport's ticket counters and departure area. While airports have high security, it wasn't immediately known whether surveillance cameras might show the shooting, Balderrama said. Balderrama initially said police had received reports of a possible second victim, but no one was found. Police found the suspect's truck in the garage about three hours after the shooting and determined that someone was inside. They were not sure whether he was dead or alive. After about 75 minutes, using a robot, officers determined the suspect was dead. A number of inbound flights were diverted to other airports after Will Rogers suspended operations. Southwest redirected one flight back to Dallas while a Las Vegas to Houston flight that stops in Oklahoma City went to Amarillo, Texas, instead. Two commercial flights from Chicago's O'Hare Airport were directed to Tulsa, about 100 miles away. Michael Winchester was a punter on the University of Oklahoma's 1985 national championship team. His son, James, also played for the school and currently plays for the Kansas City Chiefs. "Our hearts are truly heavy for the entire Winchester Family. Mike was a former Sooner student athlete as was his son James/daughter Carolyn," the school's athletic director, Joe Castiglione, tweeted Tuesday afternoon. He added "daughter Becca was also a student athlete. Please keep this beautiful family in your prayers" in a later tweet.

That's awful, I feel that Oklahoma City might not be as safe as I thought. After 9/11 they raised security around airplanes a lot, but it hasn't been perfect. They probably can never get it perfect. I guess it wasn't terrorism exactly though? Just a regular murder. That's just awful either way. There should definitely be a thorough investigation.


Sheriff: Police dog dies in hot car in western Arkansas —  HUNTSVILLE, Ark. –  A police dog died after she was left in a hot patrol car by her handler in western Arkansas, officials said. Madison County Sheriff Phillip Morgan said the dog, named Lina, died Friday. The sheriff said the dog's handler was placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation. The 5-year-old dog had been with the sheriff's office for three years, and the sheriff said the animal was used in drug investigations. Morgan described the dog's death as a "bad accident." He said the investigation into the dog's death is being handled by the Washington County Sheriff's Office. Last month, a police dog in Stephens County, Oklahoma, died after being left for 38 hours in a hot car and its handler was charged with animal cruelty.

This is sad. Dogs don't deserve that. Police that leave dogs in cars should be ashamed. I don't really believe they suffered consequences for it, police never do. I think that there should be more precautions to make sure dogs are not left alone in cars, especially when the one responsible is supposed to have training to deal with that sort of thing.


That's terrible that the dog was left to die. Maybe there should be consequences for it. You should know that I feel good about dogs and don't want them to die. It is upsetting especially given their important role and how much training is required for them, and how much responsibility their handlers are supposed to have.


Surprise! British Red Squirrels Carry Leprosy —  Some of them harbor strains that infected medieval Europeans, but that have been eradicated on the U.K. mainland for centuries. In 2006, Anna Meredith came across a dead red squirrel with a weird skin disorder. Its ears lacked the characteristic red tufts, and were instead swollen, smooth, and shiny, like the cauliflower ears of boxers and rugby players. Its nose, muzzle, and eyelids were similarly swollen and hairless. Meredith, a professor of conservation medicine at the University of Edinburgh, had never seen anything like this before. But she soon saw the same problems again—in six more squirrels over the next six years. She and her colleagues analyzed tissue samples from the dead animals. And to their surprise, they discovered that the squirrels had leprosy. That’s astonishing for two reasons. First, even though leprosy still affects at least 385,000 people around the world (including a few hundred in the U.S.), the disease was eradicated from Britain several centuries ago. Second, squirrels aren’t meant to get leprosy. The disease is mainly caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium leprae, which attacks the skin and peripheral nerves. Chimps and some monkeys can occasionally catch it from people, but until now, scientists knew of only two species that naturally harbor the disease: humans, and nine-banded armadillos in the southern United States. The latter actually acquired the disease from the former; European settlers brought leprosy to the New World and then passed it onto armadillos several centuries ago. Meredith’s discovery generated enough publicity that members of the public started sending her pictures of squirrels from their own backyards, some of whom had the same lesions. Most of the shots came from Scotland, but one was from Brownsea Island—an island off the southern coast of England, and some 480 miles away from Edinburgh. “Someone had done a day trip there, seen a squirrel, and said: Is this leprosy?” says Meredith. “I looked at it and said: Wow, it’s identical!” Working with Stewart Cole, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Meredith analyzed the cadavers of 110 red squirrels from Great Britain and Ireland, and found that almost a third of them had leprosy, including several without any clinical signs. Those in Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Wight were infected with Mycobacterium lepromatosis—a second species of leprosy bacterium that was only identified in humans in 2008. By contrast, all the squirrels from Brownsea Island had M. leprae, the more traditional leprosy microbe. By comparing the microbes’ genomes, the team showed that the M. leprae strains currently infecting the Brownsea squirrels are almost identical to those recovered from a medieval human skeleton buried in the nearby city of Winchester some 730 years ago. So it’s possible that humans passed M. leprae to red squirrels several centuries ago, and that the Brownsea individuals have harbored the microbe long after its eradication on the mainland. Could the squirrels ever pass the disease back to us? Armadillos certainly do in the United States, but for the moment, there’s no evidence of squirrel-to-human transmission in Britain. “It’s not impossible, but there’s no evidence that we’re at risk,” says Meredith. “We’re more concerned about the squirrels.” Red squirrels are an endangered species in Britain. Once common, they’ve had to contend with the introduction of gray squirrels from the Americas, which outcompeted them and infected them with squirrelpox—an often fatal disease. As a result, the country is currently home to more than 2.5 million grays but just 140,000 reds, most of which live in Scotland. Those that get leprosy can live for many years with the condition, but Meredith wants to see if their health suffers in the long run. They might eventually die because they’re unable to feed properly, or because leprosy makes them more vulnerable to other infections. (Contrary to stigma, leprosy doesn’t make body parts fall off; instead, deadened peripheral nerves sometimes stop people from noticing injuries or infections in their extremities, leading to eventual amputations.)   Why did the squirrels become infected in the first place? They belong to a different order of mammals than either humans or nine-banded armadillos, and all three species are separated by around 100 million years of evolution. And yet the three of us, out of all the mammals in the world, are the only ones know to harbor M. leprae. And for that matter, why does the red squirrel get infected when the closely related grey squirrel doesn’t seem to? No one knows. Meredith’s team looked at an immune gene called TLR1. A few mutations in this gene have been linked to either a greater or lower risk of leprosy in humans, but none of these specific mutations are found in either armadillos or squirrels. Some squirrels did seem to have their own TLR1 mutations that reduced their risk of infection, but with such a small sample, it’s hard to say for sure. Perhaps the weird troika of host species simply reflects our ignorance about where leprosy hides. It may be lurking in more animals than we realize. “We need to look more closely at the possibility of a wildlife reservoir,” says Meredith. And “there is circumstantial evidence that M. leprae has an environmental reservoir,” says Helen Donoghue, from University College London. That is, the microbe might hide out in water, soil, vegetation, or something else. Perhaps that’s how the red squirrels originally became infected, she adds. The idea of an environmental reservoir has been long disputed, but perhaps needs to be revisited in light of the squirrel discovery. “Although leprosy has been known since biblical times, and still remains a major public health problem in many parts of the world, our understanding of how this infection transmits and causes disease is very limited,” says Anura Rambukkana from the University of Edinburgh. And since the infected squirrels develop symptoms that “somewhat resemble human leprosy”, he adds, they may help us to understand how the disease manifests in humans, and how it spreads between us.

Wow, I had no idea squirrels had leprosy. That's crazy. And it's the same type that afflicts humans? I didn't think it was a very big problem or something worth paying attention to though. I wonder if this article is really true. It probably is. Leprosy is a pretty sad disease since it makes people nto feel pain and injure themselves.


The person is male. Racially, the person is white. The person is 45 years old. The person has a went to college but did not get a degree. The person earns 40000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 4.0 in openness, 6.0 in conscientiousness, 2.5 in extraversion, 5.5 in agreeableness, and 5.5 in stability.

Shooting Occurs Near California Polling Station —  Police have rushed to the scene in Azusa on the night of the election. The person who opened fire earlier this afternoon is dead. Police identified him as a Hispanic male. Police found the suspect dead when they entered the home he had barricaded himself in. It is unclear if he killed himself or whether he died from police fire. The suspect had an assault-style rifle. Police are now searching the area to make sure there are no other suspects and there are no victims. Officials also confirmed the shooting was not related to the election. Previous reports the suspect was a woman were false, police say. Shooting Victim Identified The one fatality from the shooting Tuesday afternoon was a man in his 70s, police say. He was killed after an assailant with an assault-style weapon opened fire. The shooter is still surrounded by police, barricaded in a nearby home.

There are a lot of troubled people in the world today. Every time I read an article or see a news story about another shooting, I get a little bit on edge. These kind of things happen too much these days. I long for the time when we were growing up when you didn't see this in the news every day. It's good that more people weren't hurt.


The person is male. Racially, the person is white. The person is 19 years old. The person has a went to college but did not get a degree. The person earns 40000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 4.0 in openness, 6.0 in conscientiousness, 1.5 in extraversion, 6.0 in agreeableness, and 6.0 in stability.

A month after Hurricane Matthew, 800,000 Haitians urgently need food —  FONDTOUTANU, Haiti — There is no food, so along the road through the mountains there are children begging for something to eat. Most of the trucks rumble past with donations for somewhere else. But one stopped here the other day with sacks of rice, beans and dried herring, setting off a stampede. Valleur Noel, a trim, short man with a checkered shirt and a shiny crucifix, climbed to the top of the tailgate and told everyone to calm down. It was futile. His organization, Pwoje Men Kontre, had 412 bags of food, a gift from the German ambassador and U.S. donors. Within minutes there were people pouring through a notch between the mountains, hollering and stumbling down the rocky hillside toward the truck. “No pushing, no pushing!” Noel yelled. “There is enough for everyone!” It wasn’t true. The latecomers got nothing. But many others did, and Figaro Phito, 29, hugged his sack with both arms, like a pillow. “This will keep us alive until another donation arrives,” he said. “Because that is our only way to survive right now.” A month after Hurricane Matthew blasted through southwestern Haiti, the region is a blighted, apocalyptic landscape of wrecked homes and growling hunger. At least 800,000 people need food urgently, according to the United Nations, including more than two-thirds of families in the worst-hit departments of Grand’Anse and Sud. Emergency help is arriving, but there is not enough of it, and it will take several more weeks to reach remote mountain communities where officials say the destruction was total. The desperation is so explosive that truckloads of food and medical supplies have been looted by crowds gathered along the roadways. A teenage boy was killed Tuesday by police in the city of Les Cayes, where hungry crowds burned tires and blocked roads. Haitian police shot four people, one fatally, on Oct. 26 in the coastal village of Dame Marie, where the arrival of an aid shipment sent crowds surging onto the docks. The Oct. 4 hurricane hit some of the poorest places in the Western hemisphere. It smashed fishing villages and shredded mountain hamlets with the force of a bomb blast, obliterating crops, killing livestock and leaving fruit trees as bare as matchsticks. Haiti, a country still digging out from its devastating 2010 earthquake, will need months of emergency aid to stave off famine, according to relief groups and government officials. More than 141,000 storm victims are in shelters, and those are just the ones with someplace to go. “We are sleeping under the trees,” said Jeudina Alexis, 63, who hadn’t eaten in two days but now had a sack of food from Noel to carry home up the mountain. In some towns, 80 to 90 percent of homes were destroyed by Matthew’s 140-mile-per-hour winds. The Category 4 storm converted tin roofing panels into flying razors and broken tree branches into spears. The death toll stands at 546, according to the government, but local officials have reported more than twice that many killed. Some remote mountain villages are so inaccessible that government emergency workers say they will not be able to reach them until the end of November. One man who walked out of the mountains recently after hiking two days told authorities that too many people had died in his town to bury the bodies, so villagers burned them and put the ashes in the river. The United Nations has raised just one-third of the $120 million in emergency funding it says it needs to help 750,000 people, including 315,000 children, get through the next three months. Noel has told his donors he will need to feed people for even longer. “If they plant sweet potatoes and corn, it will be three or four months before they can harvest, but they don’t have seeds,” he said. ‘We are starving, too’ The storm-hit areas have reported at least 3,500 suspected cholera cases in recent weeks, but some of the outbreaks are happening in far-off settlements where help has yet to arrive. The aid organization Doctors Without Borders recently sent staff by helicopter to one village, Pourcine, to investigate reports of a patient with cholera, only to find 20 stricken from it. The disease spreads rampantly once the bacteria enters the water supply. “We are sending materials to contain the epidemic, but there are people dying from cholera every day,” said Emmanuel Massart, the group’s field coordinator in Grand’Anse. It is largely a challenge of distribution. Tim Callahan, the U.S. official in charge of the American emergency response, said the U.S. government has delivered 34 metric tons of water treatment tablets to Haiti, enough to supply the entire country for three months. But getting them to families is another matter because roads are impassable or nonexistent in the worst-affected areas. The 2010 earthquake killed at least 200,000 and damaged many of the government buildings in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. The city was largely spared by the recent storm, and that has allowed the Haitian government to take a more active role in directing the relief effort, Callahan and others say. Peter Mulrean, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, said the fact that so many international relief organizations were doing post-quake reconstruction left them better prepared to respond to the hurricane. Unlike in the post-quake period, when aid efforts were often haphazard and inefficient, international relief organizations have been coordinating their donations and activities with Haitian officials, using the network of modern, air-conditioned emergency response centers set up in every region after the earthquake. “We want Haitian institutions to come out stronger than before,” Mulrean said. But the man-made disasters of Haitian politics remain an obstacle. Last year’s contested presidential election led to a political impasse and the installation of a caretaker government. New elections are scheduled for Nov. 20, but it’s hard to see how Haitian officials can deliver and count ballots in hurricane-hit areas. Making matters worse, the public schools that double as polling stations are being used as homeless shelters. At the Lycee Nord Alexis in Jeremie, the battered capital of Grand’Anse, children sleep on the cement floors of classrooms, some naked or clothed in adult-sized T-shirts that hang below the knee. Food comes irregularly. The blind, disabled and maimed lie around in dark, stifling rooms, swarmed by mosquitoes. Guerline Brumaches, 40, was languishing in a corner, naked from the waist up, with a suppurating wound the size of a baseball on her swollen left foot where she had been cut by flying debris. A month-old chemistry lesson was written on the chalkboard above her. Flies nibbled at her foot. “If I lose my foot, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said. The school had no running water. One of the stairwells had become a latrine. Xavier Charlemagne, 20, said there were several hundred people sleepingevery night in the classrooms and corridors. “We’re not leaving until they give us tarps,” he said. Jeremie is the only town with large-scale daily food distribution in Grand’Anse, in part because it is the only place with armed security to suppress potential rioting. The U.N. World Food Program gives out 1,000 one-month rations of rice, chickpeas and cooking oil each day in the central plaza, in the shadow of a 200-year-old cathedral with a ripped-off roof. But the sight of so many convoys headed to Jeremie has stirred resentment in towns that say they are not getting their share. At one highway junction where a broken-down truck carrying beans had been attacked a day earlier, dozens of young men lingered on a recent day, watching for signs of mechanical trouble among the vehicles groaning up the pass, as if stalking wounded herd animals. “We are starving, too,” said Ricardo Dauphin, 29, alongside dozens of other men in the town of Carrefour Charles, watching U.N. trucks roll by in a cloud of dust, escorted by police and Brazilian soldiers. There is no electricity across a wide swath of southern Haiti where utility lines are down, so at night families burn storm debris and garbage with huge bonfires that leap into the darkness and foul the air. On a muddy hillside near the town of Cavaillon, scores of people have settled in crude lean-tos made of sticks, plastic and tattered bedsheets. The nearby river flooded in the storm, forcing those living along the banks to higher ground. Olicia Jean-Louis, 23, said her widowed mother was washed away in the storm, along with the family’s house and all the secondhand footwear they used to sell in the market. Now Jean-Louis was in charge of her siblings, ages 12, 10, 5 and 2. The youngest ones had started calling her “mama,” she said. None of them had eaten that day, Jean-Louis said. It was raining again, and the 2-year-old boy, naked, leaned into her threadbare blue dress, his nose running. Asked what she would do next, Jean-Louis shook her head. “I will rely on you,” she said. “Can you help me?”

I just read an article about recent tragedies that have taken place on the island of hati. It talked about a hurricane and then the earthquake that happend their. Both were awful, terrible events. Many people were dis placed and chaos ensued. This was because many homes were destroyed and people did not have the chance to settle down after these disasters


The person is male. Racially, the person is white. The person is 32 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 15000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 6.0 in openness, 5.5 in conscientiousness, 2.5 in extraversion, 6.5 in agreeableness, and 6.0 in stability.

Aleppo’s oldest residents fear they’ll die alone —  BEIRUT — Before the war convulsed his native Syria, Marea Marea relished retirement. He enjoyed leisurely morning walks, played with his grandchildren and took afternoon catnaps. Then the fighting began in rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Airstrikes have pulverized his neighborhood, and a brutal siege has forced him to skimp on food so other members of his family have enough to eat. ADVERTISING Now the 70-year-old feels weak, frightened and helpless. “My entire life has been spent trying to build something for my family,” he said, speaking by Skype from his home in the war-divided city. “I built this home. My body aches from the decades of work that I did to make them a better life. But now this? There’s little dignity in this kind of life.” The war has taken an immense toll on the more than 200,000 people still in eastern Aleppo. Marea and other older residents face especially difficult circumstances, according to aid workers and doctors there. Some choose — or are asked — to make sacrifices for younger family members or are left to cope on their own after their children and grandchildren flee to safety in other countries. “People are being forced to make sacrifices, and this often involves the older people getting neglected,” said Bacry al-Ebeid, who distributes food to residents in rebel areas of Aleppo for Mercy-USA, a Michigan-based charity. [Darkness and fear in Aleppo as the bombs rain down] Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, has become perhaps the most important battleground in the conflict, which began in 2011 and has left more than 400,000 dead and millions displaced. Rebels seized the city’s eastern districts in 2012, and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have intensified efforts to take them back. If they do, it would mark a significant victory for the embattled leader. In recent months, warplanes operated by Assad’s government and its ally, Russia, have increasingly bombed hospitals and homes in the city’s opposition-held areas. Food and fuel shortages have worsened because of the siege imposed by pro-government forces, who control the city’s west end. As a result, residents and aid workers in eastern Aleppo say, it has become nearly impossible to find medicine to treat heart disease, diabetes, rheumatism and other conditions most commonly experienced by older people. Overstretched medical facilities must turn away people suffering from such conditions because of the overwhelming number of more-urgent cases, such as people with shrapnel wounds and other war-related injuries. Pablo Marco, Middle East operations manager for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, said the situation is so bad that fewer than three dozen doctors are still working in eastern Aleppo. The area has only one functioning dialysis unit left, he said. “If that unit stopped working, then that would mean more deaths,” he said. “The doctors just don’t have the time and facilities to take care of chronic diseases that, if not properly treated, will kill you in a matter of weeks and months.” As some become frail, they might see themselves as a burden on their family, which can fuel anxiety, Ebeid said. Some families have had to take extreme measures and have abandoned older family members, he said. In Arab societies, older people generally live with their children until death. [Syrian regime and Russia may have killed more children in latest bombing] There are no reliable age breakdowns of people living in the city’s besieged eastern areas, but before the war, Aleppo had a population approaching 3 million. Hundreds of thousands of residents have fled since the conflict erupted. “In a lot of cases, though, what we see are elderly people who refuse to leave their homes,” Ebeid said. “So that means their families, when they flee to other countries, are forced to leave them behind.” In another neighborhood of eastern Aleppo, 83-year-old Reema Salama lives alone in the home where she raised her children. Most of her family escaped to Turkey last year, but Salama chose to stay put, she said during a recent interview over Skype. Because of the siege, she cannot leave, and her family cannot visit. She receives food from Ebeid’s organization but struggles to cook it, relying on neighbors for help. “I’m all alone! I’m going to die alone here!” she said before abruptly ending the conversation. Marea said he would never leave his home. To pay for it, he worked for years as a freelance farmhand and day laborer. But even if he tried to leave, the government’s siege would prevent him. So he spends most of his time at home feeling isolated and hoping airstrikes do not obliterate him and his family. “I’m afraid our house will get bombed but that we won’t die in the attack,” he said, describing the fate of many people in his area of town. “We’ll just be stuck in the rubble for days and slowly die.” He also thinks constantly about trying to balance what he and his 70-year-old wife, Ajoun, need to survive with the demands of the 10 children and grandchildren living with them. Already, the family struggles to care for one son, 45-year-old Ahmed, whose leg was amputated last year after shrapnel struck it during an attack. “We eat twice — once in the morning and once in the evening — because we are trying to reduce the amount we eat so the kids still have enough,” he said. He fears the effect this could have on his wife, who suffers from high blood pressure and rheumatism. Marea has received unexpected help from another son, Hameed, who was visiting from Turkey and became trapped in the city when the government imposed its siege several weeks ago. Asked whether Hameed intends to return to Turkey, Marea choked up. “No, he can’t go back. The siege. He can’t leave us here,” Marea said. Then, he said, “I’m an old man. I shouldn’t have to think about these kind of things.” Heba Habib in Stockholm and Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report.

I read an article about old people in Aleppo where they ended up being neglected in the conflict. Their children and grandchildren often flee to safer countries but the elderly aren't usually afforded the same luxury. One old man lamented that he had spent his whole life to create a better place for his children and grandchildren and all that work was now null and void. What a tragedy.