A police officer in Phoenix, Arizona was fatally shot today while he was on an investigation for a suspicious vehicle. Murphy and his partner were first on the scene of a call where neighbors reported someone hit a parked car and was trying to hide a Ford Mustang in the carport of a vacant home. The officers got out of their cruiser and split up in search of a suspect. Moments later shots were heard and Murphy’s partner rushed to his aid to find him shot. He was rushed to the hospital by his partner but was pronounced dead upon arrival. The Neighborhood was blocked off and a perimeter was set and several of the K-9 units were called to the scene in search of the suspect. He was eventually found hiding in a shed. Danny Martinez was booked on murder and weapons charges. This is not his first brush with the law, he has a history within Arizona including theft, abuse, and DUI. He will be missed and is survived by his wife and two young children. 1,192
Here we are a month and a week since the largest environmental disaster of my lifetime hit the press, and although there have been a few attempts already, there has been no solution to it. Of course you know I’m talking about the Gulf Oil Spill. Today BP announced a new attempt to seal the burst in the pipe, its called top kill, the way it works is the break is stuffed with mud at a faster rate than the oil is pouring out of the pipe and eventually the mud will dry and create a seal until a much more permanent solution is devised. It has worked above ground several times but has never been attempted at 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. BP has issued several statements about how they are trying to solve this crisis as quickly as possible, though thousands of activists and average citizens alike are growing tired of their “promises” and are equally disappointed in the government because they aren’t doing anything to help the problem either. BP has said that this time there is a 60%-70% chance that it will succeed. I certainly hope that it does work this time because the sensitive wildlife is beginning to take a hit, and even if the pipe gets sealed there will still be a pollution problem for months to come, so the sooner this gets fixed the better! not only is it a visual and economical eyesore it is beginning to smell, one man described how the area smelled like a dirty auto repair shop. Once again I come back to the point this is the product of our dependence on oil and greed. If we could figure out new technologies that could wean us off of oil then we wouldn’t have to resort to such dangerous things as this, and this disaster will affect generations to come. 1,014
Today after a month of speculation, the worst of scientists predictions has finally happened, thick and gritty oil has reached the sensitive marshlands. This once again shows how huge this spill is, even after British Petroleum has tried to claim that the spill isn’t as big as everyone is making it out to be. Technically, oil has been washing up for a while but it was in thin films or tar balls, but the oil has REALLY showed up this time. Its thick, rust colored, and is the consistency of latex paint. Even though the oil has just arrived biologists and environmental activists are shocked that there haven’t been mass deaths of local wildlife and plants. As of today the spill is estimated to be at 6 million gallons, quickly closing the gap on the Exxon Valdez spill. Another huge problem is that a large amount of the oil has become caught in a loop current and is in danger of running up the Florida keys, and much of the Atlantic coast if nothing is done in response to stop it. There has been a pipe inserted in a spot on the pipe below the break and is capturing approximately 210,000 gallons a day, however it has not completely stopped some from running up through the crack and further contributing to the spill. Hopefully there will be something somebody can do before this problem gets even more out of hand. It is obvious that animals and the marshes will be affected forever by this spill, another thing we can hope for is that companies like BP can see the extreme environmental dangers that are associated with offshore drilling and can come up with better fail-safes or just stop offshore drilling altogether. 701
A natural gas drilling rig sank off of the coast of Venezuela today. Thankfully there was no spillage as the manager on the ship said that the pipe was shut off and removed properly before everyone safely evacuated. Many workers told of how astonishing and frightening it was to see such a huge platform suddenly start tilting. Before the operation had begun there was the standard inspection and the rig was found to be in optimum condition. However as we now see, after the rig has collapsed is not the case, which will lead to investigations to see what exactly went wrong.
In a technologically related note, the President of Venezuela announced the collapse on Twitter, instead of making a press release as would be the norm. So is this the way the future will be? A world centered around sites such as Twitter and Facebook instead of using the news or television? 412
As almost everyone must know by now, there was a “prototype” iPhone left in a bar last week and found by a local man. Eventually it was sold for a price of $5000 to the Tech Blogging Forum Gizmodo. Jason Chen was the lucky man who got to Take an exclusive first look at the phone. He said it was disguised to look like the older iPhone, and that the case could have been put onto the internals, indicating a clone. When Jason took a look inside, he said the product was unmistakably Apple. The next night as Jason was coming home from dinner as he noticed his garage door was open, he found San Mateo Police and a Tech Group inside called REACT, who claimed to have a search warrant, and they took the phone, five computers and his iPad. The controversy behind this was that Chen is a journalist for the sight and it is illegal to take a journalists information as it may incriminate people, another thing is that the biggest sponsor of REACT is in fact Apple. It was found that the phone was never claimed as a product owned by Apple so it would have been Jason’s phone in the first place so why would they take the phone in the first place? It really makes no sense for them to take it, unless they are trying to cover their own asses by having the police fetch it for them instead of having to come forward and embarrassingly say that they lost an unreleased product. 259
After a relatively quiet four months in Iraq, many people were killed in Baghdad after a man with explosives strapped to his chest detonated his bomb in the middle of a crowd. In other parts of Iraq, Shiites fired upon multiple security checkpoints. Iraqi officials quickly pointed at Al Qaida and placed the blame on them. They said that they are attempting to destabilize the fragile government that is currently trying to figure out who will take over in the new government. This brings back the realization that Iraq needs to get their government together and figure out what they are going to do. After the gunmen had hit ten cities in all many stopped to wonder if the Iraqi security forces are prepared to take over as the main police and military force as the U.S. prepares to pull almost half of the remaining 92,000 troops left in the Middle East. Even though together we have successfully taken out hundreds of Al Qaida members and two of the top men in Al Qaida it still hasn’t convinced everyone that they are fully ready to function by themselves.
This is a very touchy topic because the war in Iraq is questioned by many people. However I don’t think that we should pull out just yet, hell all I thought we should do at first was to bomb them to oblivion so that we wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore, it’s what we should have done back in ’91 with the first Gulf War. But we never finished the job, so it came back to haunt us and even though we’ve taken the head from the giant, it still functions and it wont be to long before there is another man like Saddam Hussein. I don’t think it would be a wise idea to leave the Iraqi police force to do all the work by themselves yet. It may do well for a couple years but if we don’t take care of everyone the government will again be overthrown by a dictator and we will have a relapse of 9/11 or something similar to it.
On May 1st Faisal Shahzad parked his gray Nissan in a red zone in busy and bustling Times Square, an honest mistake is what some people may think. That is what it seemed like at first until he left it running and several people noticed that the vehicle was smoking from inside. The bomb squad and fire department were called and Times Square was immediately closed as the masterfully trained bomb squad took control of the situation. After the crisis was averted it was discovered that the bombers choice of materials weren’t the right combination, which is why the bomb didn’t go ff in the first place. Inside the Pathfinder was fertilizer, gasoline, propane, and some cheap firecrackers. Thankfully the bomb was assembled improperly and never went off according to plan, otherwise the toll could have been devastating, not to mention the probable panic that would ensue. Fortunately for the FBI Shahzad’s identity was quickly confirmed and he was tracked down and arrested moments before his flight to the Middle East was set to take off.
This shows how easily it would be to assemble and plant a bomb in bustling New York, in one of the articles I read gathering information on this topic a man said it would be easy to wrap a bomb in a garbage bag and nobody would be the wiser, and the effects would be horrendously devastating. Even though there is extremely tight security I believe it could be better. I think part of America’s problem is that everyone is too concerned with everyone being politically correct and so careful not to offend anybody that in the end we are screwing ourselves over. If we could just get over ourselves and not worry about offending people and tighten security and “profile” which is an officers job to do anyways, I believe the would be many fewer problems in America.
April 20th, 2010 is a day that will not soon be forgotten. It will have marked one of the worlds largest natural disasters, on the scale of the Exxon-Valdez or Chernobyl. It is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is now estimated that as of May 1st, there are over 12 million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf. It all started when a pipe ruptured and the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, and then sank. 11 workers are missing but are presumed dead. As of the 3rd the spill covers over 2500 miles of the Gulf. There have been multiple attempts to close off the line, a total of six remotely operated subs have been sent down in hopes of closing the fail-safe that failed to close the pipe off in the first place unfortunately all of the attempts were unsuccessful. More recently a gigantic dome was constructed to be set atop the rupture and collect the oil spilling out and send it up a tube to be sent to tankers on the surface. This has also failed as oil crystals had begun to accumulate inside the dome, so it had to be lifted off of the pipe. There have been major efforts by BP, the military and thousands of volunteers, to contain and clean the oil spill, there have been planes dumping oil dispersant onto the slick, there have been controlled burns to dissipate the oil, the oil however has become thick gritty and concentrated rendering most developed dispersents useless. Many of the volunteers have begun cleaning birds and other wildlife affected by the spill.
This oil spill is the largest natural disaster that has occured in my lifetime, it has presented the extreme environmental dangers that are involved with offshore drilling. I know that oil is a limited resource and that one day it will run out, but there is still plenty of oil that is readily available without the need to drill into the oceans and put water and precious eco-systems at risk of destruction and extinction. This will show just how much damage can come of this hazardous task. it will give people reason to put more effort into finding alternatives to oil so as not to spoil the many wonderful things on our planet. Hopefully there wont be much more offshore drilling anytime soon until there can be ways that there is absolutely no way anything like this can happen again, because if Obama gets his way there will be numerous drills off of the coast of California, and I don’t want my beaches to become nasty and oily like the Gulf is right now. It is not even close to worth the environmental destruction it would cost and affect permanently than it would be to save three cents per gallon the next time you fill up your car.
Late Blog Addition
My late essay will be on 9/11.
The attacks on the twin towers, and the pentagon, and the attempted attack on Washington, occoured shortly before 10 am on September 11th 2001, 19 Al-Quida terrorists hi-jacked 4 loaded airliner 747′s. Two crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon in Virginia, and the fourth plane was to an unidentified location but was retaken by the passengers and crashed into a Pennsylvania field. Altogether there were a total of 2,995 deaths including the 19 hi-jackers. There were two people who died in 2007 and 2008 from causes that were contributed to the attacks. The Towers in NYC fell, but not many people knew that so did most of the World Trade Center block. Including two smaller trade offices and a large hotel. Half of the NYFD was deployed almost immediately to the site of what was later called Ground-Zero. The idea for the September 11 plot came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who first presented the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996. At that point, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were in a period of transition, having just relocated back to Afghanistan from Sudan. The 9/11 attacks had immediate and overwhelming effects upon the American people. Many police officers and rescue workers elsewhere in the country took leaves of absence to travel to New York City to assist in the process of recovering bodies from the twisted remnants of the Twin Towers. Blood donations across the U.S. also saw a surge in the weeks after 9/11. Over 3000 children were left without one or more parents. Children’s reactions both to these actual losses, yet also to feared losses of life and a protective environment in the aftermath of the attacks are well-documented, as were their effects on surviving caregivers. On September 20th, 2001, Bush spoke before the nation in a joint session of the U.S. Congress, regarding the events of that day, the intervening nine days of rescue and recovery efforts, and his intent in response to those events. In addition, the highly visible role played by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani won him high praise nationally and in New York.
September 11th, 2001. A day that I will remember for the rest of my life. It was an unprovoked attack on our World Trade Centers, crippling trading and commerce worldwide for days. Although from my understanding that Al-Quida was solely responsible for the attacks, I feel that Iraq and Afghanistan were in on it together otherwise why would we have gone after Saddam. In the first Gulf War America deployed troops into Kuwait because Iraq decided it wasn’t going to leave. Even though they were forced to leave Bush Sr. neglected to cut the head from the monster. That played a part in the 9/11 attacks, because if we had taken care of the problem, it might not have happened. Another reason it happened was because there was a lack of security in the airport, it always seems like that something has to go wrong or somebody has to die before things get to the way their supposed to be.
