The Florida woman who was forced to walk naked down a frigid Harlem street by her unhinged boyfriend bravely took the stand against him Monday, telling jurors how she’d planned to leave the jealous monster in the days before the incident. The 24-year-old threw Jason Melo a steely glance before she began to describe his years of abuse, which included calling her a “whore” and throwing her phones out the apartment window in envious fits of rage. Melo cowardly stared down at the defense table as the woman, whose name is being withheld, walked in – even going so far as to limply leaf through some papers in front of him to avoid looking at the mother of his child. “He made it very clear to me many times that we were not together, he said that many times–that he didn’t love me,” she said softly as Melo avoided eye contact. “He broke several phones of mine,” the woman, who moved back to Florida after the incident, told jurors. “It would be over stupid things. One time he didn’t like a picture I took, so he threw my phone out the window.” She described another incident, at a family party, where Melo’s uncle asked her to dance, and then Melo forced her to leave and derided her as a “whore” on the way home. On another instance, he bit her cheek in anger, she told jurors. “I was going to leave,” she said of the days leading up to the incident. Jurors earlier heard that Melo punched the then-22-year-old in the face before forcing her into the street wearing boots and a towel in January 2016, after he allegedly found pictures of other men on her phone. In footage that horrified the city, but which has since been removed from Instagram, Melo could be seen following the woman, her thin frame wrapped in a bath towel, down the block while he berates her in Spanish. Jurors Monday watched the disturbing two-minute clip, in which Melo reaches out and yanks the towel away, forcing the naked woman to seek refuge between two parked cars as she attempts to cover herself. “This is what you deserve,” he shouts. She eventually wraps herself in a dirty-looking motorcycle cover as he continues to film her. Melo faces up to seven years behind bars if convicted on the top count of felony coercion.


If massive black holes (BHs) are ubiquitous in galaxies and galaxies experience multiple mergers during their cosmic assembly, then BH binaries should be common albeit temporary features of most galactic bulges. Observationally, the paucity of active BH pairs points toward binary lifetimes far shorter than the Hubble time, indicating rapid inspiral of the BHs down to the domain where gravitational waves lead to their coalescence. Here, we review a series of studies on the dynamics of massive BHs in gas-rich galaxy mergers that underscore the vital role played by a cool, gaseous component in promoting the rapid formation of the BH binary. The BH binary is found to reside at the center of a massive self-gravitating nuclear disc resulting from the collision of the two gaseous discs present in the mother galaxies. Hardening by gravitational torques against gas in this grand disc is found to continue down to sub-parsec scales. The eccentricity decreases with time to zero and when the binary is circular, accretion sets in around the two BHs. When this occurs, each BH is endowed with it own small-size (< 0.01 pc) accretion disc comprising a few percent of the BH mass. Double AGN activity is expected to occur on an estimated timescale of < 1 Myr. The double nuclear point-like sources that may appear have typical separation of < 10 pc, and are likely to be embedded in the still ongoing starburst. We note that a potential threat of binary stalling, in a gaseous environment, may come from radiation and/or mechanical energy injections by the BHs. Only short-lived or sub-Eddington accretion episodes can guarantee the persistence of a dense cool gas structure around the binary necessary for continuing BH inspiral.


We measure the clustering of non-quasar X-ray AGN at z=0.7-1.4 in the AEGIS field. Using the cross-correlation of 113 Chandra-selected AGN, with a median log L_X=42.8 erg s^-1, with ~5,000 DEEP2 galaxies, we find that the X-ray AGN are fit by a power law with a clustering scale length of r_0=5.95 +/-0.90 h^-1 Mpc and slope gamma=1.66 +/-0.22. X-ray AGN have a similar clustering amplitude as red, quiescent and `green' transition galaxies at z~1 and are significantly more clustered than blue, star-forming galaxies. The X-ray AGN clustering strength is primarily determined by the host galaxy color; AGN in red host galaxies are significantly more clustered than AGN in blue host galaxies, with a relative bias that is similar to that of red to blue DEEP2 galaxies. We detect no dependence of clustering on optical brightness, X-ray luminosity, or hardness ratio within the ranges probed here. We find evidence for galaxies hosting X-ray AGN to be more clustered than a sample of galaxies with matching joint optical color and magnitude distributions. This implies that galaxies hosting X-ray AGN are more likely to reside in groups and more massive dark matter halos than galaxies of the same color and luminosity without an X-ray AGN. In comparison to optically-selected quasars in the DEEP2 fields, we find that X-ray AGN at z~1 are more clustered than optically-selected quasars (with a 2.6-sigma significance) and therefore likely reside in more massive dark matter halos. Our results are consistent with galaxies undergoing a quasar phase while in the blue cloud before settling on the red sequence with a lower-luminosity X-ray AGN, if they are similar objects at different evolutionary stages.


Ahhhh, Thanksgiving. It’s the holiday that’s impossible to hate. It’s all about one thing – food. Lots and lots of delicious food. While Thanksgiving dinner itself is incredible, some say that leftovers are even better. With that in mind, here are 9 tasty ways to use your leftovers. You’re welcome. A Thanksgiving Sandwich Listen – there’s an art to turkey sandwiches. You can’t just slap some turkey on bread and call it a day. Anyone who has watched Friends knows what I’m talking about. You’ve got to take it to the next level! Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce between two pieces of bread. Get. In. My. Belly. (bonus points if you give it a quick toast on the panini grill) Cheesy Mashed Potato Pancakes We checked, and science has proven that this is the greatest use for leftover mashed potatoes of all time. Turkey Soup/Stew A classic. Is Thanksgiving really Thanksgiving without next-day turkey soup/stew? The answer is no, so bust out those slow cookers! A post shared by The Inspired Home (@theinspiredhome) on Sep 15, 2017 at 5:45am PDT Turkey Poutine Now that you think about it, isn’t it obvious?!? Bacon Wrapped Stuffing Bites When two of the most beautiful foods known to human kind come together, magic happens. Turkey & Cranberry Quesdillas A great way to get your kids to eat leftovers. Whip this up for a quick day-after lunch that is as tasty as it is easy. Casserole Casserole’s don’t get the love they deserve these days. They’re warm, comforting and you can pretty much put anything in them and it’ll still turn out great. This option can also be swapped out for a Shepard’s Pie if that’s more your thing.