The confession specifically named US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as motives for the attack, and called the Boston Marathon bombing victims ‘collateral damage’ in the same vein that Muslim civilians had been killed in American led wars, CBS news reports.”When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note allegedly added. Dzhokhar reportedly declared he did not mourn the death of his older brother Tamerlan – the other suspect in the bombings, who died from injured received during a shootout with police – saying he was already a martyr in paradise. Dzhokhar added that he expected to join his brother in the afterlife. Law enforcement sources told the network the wall the note had been scribbled on was riddled with bullet holes. Police unloaded a volley of shots after Dzhokhar lifted up the tarpaulin, claiming they feared he had another bomb. He had sustained multiple gunshot wounds and was severely bleeding from injuries to his left ear, neck and thigh. Initial reports said his neck wound was possibly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a botched suicide attempt, though it was later revealed that Dzhokhar was unarmed when captured in Suburban Watertown Massachusetts on April 19. His arrest followed a massive manhunt which brought the greater Boston area to a standstill. Police say the contents of the confession mirror many of the things he communicated to investigators while recovering from his injuries at a hospital several days later. The confession will be admissible in court. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is currently convalescing in a federal prison hospital in Massachusetts and has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in the deadly attack which killed three people and injured 264 near the marathon finish line on April 15.If found guilty, he could face the death penalty. … Read More
House Republicans blame Hillary Clinton for deadly Benghazi attack
A report by the US Congress on Wednesday faulted former secretary of state Hillary Clinton over the deadly attack on the US mission in Benghazi, saying she rejected requests for greater security. The report by the Republican chairmen of five committees in the House of Representatives said that the…
What I Saw at the Boston Marathon Bombings
We love to celebrate our
Revolutionary War heritage in Boston. We love it so much that
we’ve created multiple holidays to commemorate key events in the
war that you non-Bostonians have probably never heard of like
Evacuation Day and
Bunker Hill Day. The granddaddy of all these holidays is
Patriots’
Day as it is celebrated statewide instead of just the Greater
Boston area. It’s a day where people go to a Red Sox game that
starts at 11 a.m., start drinking at 9 a.m., and encourage people
in much better shape than them to run 26.2 miles all the way to
Copley Square. It’s a holiday where people celebrate Boston as much
as they celebrate the
Shot Heard Round The World with nifty reenactments by guys in
colonial garb pretending to shoot the British.
Yesterday I passed on the reenactments (they’re boring after
you’ve seen them once) and headed to Copley Square to do what most
Bostonians were doing: drinking at a bar with friends, complaining
about
the Red Sox bullpen, and cheering marathon runners while in a
heightened state of inebriation. It’s something I’ve done many
times before and yesterday’s Marathon Monday seemed like just
another day of celebration. It was brisk out, so I grabbed a
heavier jacket and my camera just before leaving.
Of course I never made it to the bar and ended up spending the
evening covering a horrible tragedy. I cabbed it over to as close
as I could to get to Copley Square and found
a scene that was, at best, calmly chaotic. People were
predominantly orderly and first responders appeared to have the
situation largely under control, though they provided everyone,
including journalists, with very little information as to what was
going on. We were stuck at the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth for
some time before we were moved two blocks away from the scene of
the explosion.
Men in military fatigues and heavily armored SWAT teams were
everywhere you turned. Adding to the bizarreness of what I was
seeing was the large number of drunks that were in a strange state
of terrorism-induced-soberness. People in Red Sox jerseys, clearly
under the influence, were walking around in a daze next to
lanyarded marathon volunteers. One kept muttering “Holy fuck dude!”
while another clad in an Ortiz jersey fumbled with his phone
presumably trying to call Mom and let her know he was OK.
As it became clear that we were not going to get any closer I
retreated to the patio of a nearby bar to charge my phone. By now
hundreds of marathon runners in space blankets were starting to
make their way down the Commonwealth Avenue median. They looked
like stunned refugees from outer space.
Few wanted to talk but those that did told me that
they were pulled from the course around Mile 25 near Kenmore
Square. The race was over and nobody was going to officially
finish the race at that point. Many were understandably upset about
the bombing and the ensuing cancelation of the race. These runners
were too far away to hear or see the bombings on Boylston Street so
their knowledge of the incident was limited. One runner I spoke
with echoed the sentiments of many, saying they were told very
little of what happened.
“They haven’t told us much of anything,” said runner Pat Hogan,
61, of Gig Harbor, Washington.
Others in the parade of distraught marathoners were frantically
trying to get in touch with loved ones. One emotionally distraught
runner, Frank Mairano, 66, of the Harbor Towers came up to me while
I was charging my phone and asked if I could help find his wife. I
told him we could try texting her but phones were useless because
cell phone networks were overloaded. He then relayed to me his
ordeal of being separated near the finish line from the friend he
was running with. He was in rough shape but when we confirmed his
wife was safe via text message he was overcome with joy and went on
his way.
Inside the bar there was a mix of satisfied marathon runners,
volunteers, journalists frantically trying to file or charge their
equipment, and drunk people. Me and my fellow journo friends
abandoned all hope of trying to cross the barriers to get to the
press conference so we hunkered down at the bar to watch it. A
drunk young couple kept talking loudly throughout the presser
before shutting up after being repeatedly shushed. Outside a drunk
young woman in a chicken outfit and Red Sox jersey was going back
and forth between sadness and loud laughter.
Eventually I took off for a local Catholic shrine that does
outreach during major public outdoor events. I found one of the
priests talking outside with a handful of people. There were more
cops and SWAT officers in military fatigues than people at this
point. The Green Line was running again, albeit in a delayed
manner, which is actually normal for the pesky old trolley.
The ride home on the oldest subway line in America to file was
quiet and somber. Even the drunks on the train were sad. They
didn’t care about the Red Sox game that took place hours earlier.
They just wanted to go home and hug their loved ones.
I did too. ; … Read More
The Place Beyond the Pines and The Host
The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie in three parts,
tracking the lives of a doomed loser and a conflicted cop and
contemplating the interlocked fates they pass on to their children.
Fortunately — this being a film that runs two hours and 20 minutes
– there are also propulsive jolts of police corruption, botched
robberies and hair-raising chases. Director Derek Cianfrance’s last
movie, Blue Valentine, was a powerful downbeat chamber
piece; here he’s going for grand sweep, and I think his gift for
mood and structure (he cowrote the script), and his trust in the
talents of some fine actors, lifts the picture above whatever
objections there might be to its deterministic
worldview. ; ; ; ;
The story takes a number of surprising narrative turns and is
packed with intricate character detail, which mustn’t be spoiled.
The movie opens with a five-minute tracking shot in which we meet a
motorcycle daredevil named Luke (Ryan Gosling). The camera surveys
his bare torso, thick with tattoos, and then follows along behind
his blond dye-job as he traverses the midway of the traveling
carnival in which he works. Luke makes a bare-bones living roaring
around inside a big round metal cage with two other bikers, for the
entertainment of onlookers who presumably would be even more
entertained if something went seriously wrong. He’s a guy whose
life isn’t adding up to much, and Gosling, as effortlessly
charismatic as he was in Drive, but to greater purpose,
uses his eloquent stillness to project this man’s unformed yearning
for something more.
Fateful shadows gather. Luke is startled to learn that a woman
named Romina (Eva Mendes), with whom he hooked up on his last pass
through town (we’re in Schenectady, New York), has since given
birth to a baby boy – his son. Uncharacteristically, Luke feels the
pull of paternal connection. But Romina and the baby are
contentedly settled down with a good man named Kofi (Mahershala
Ali, of House of Cards), who owns his own home and has
happily taken on the role of father to Romina’s child. Luke is an
unlikely candidate for solid-citizenship (his tattoo collection has
crept up onto his neck and even his face), but he decides to give
it a shot, delusionally hoping to win back Romina and become a real
dad to their son. Quitting the carnival, he goes to work as a car
mechanic for a creep named Robin (pungently unsavory Ben
Mendelsohn, of Animal Kingdom). Luke needs money to
finance his dream of domesticity. Robin has a plan. Luke is
listening.
About a third of the way through the movie, after a rousingly
cranked-up chase sequence, a new character is introduced — a
rookie policeman named Avery (Bradley Cooper) — and the story
smoothly changes lanes to follow him. Like Gosling, Cooper has a
distinctive charisma; here, though, he carefully mutes it to play
an increasingly wary man who seems beset by shadows. Avery has a
wife and child – the happy family that Luke was fated never to
have. He’s a straight-arrow cop, but when a nasty senior detective
(scuzzball virtuoso Ray Liotta) starts leaning on him, we wonder
how long he can resist being sucked into darkness.
The movie becomes a precinct procedural for a while. Then, as
years pass, Avery becomes a politician, preoccupied with large
ambitions. His now-teenage son, AJ (a fiery Emory Cohen), has grown
into an abrasive young thug. One day, in the cafeteria of his new
school, AJ encounters a troubled kid named Jason (an intense Dane
DeHaan). The final third of the movie focuses on their interaction,
and the story of Luke and Avery continues.
Is all of this too pat and predictable? Maybe. But Gosling and
Cooper bring a weighty emotional conviction to their roles, and the
picture plays out almost as ritual. Philosophical objections aside,
the movie is a dark, hypnotic experience. ; ;
The Host
It’s not often — not ever, in fact — that even the clunkiest
sci-fi movie will put you in mind of Battlefield Earth.
The Host, however, manages it. Like that earlier John
Travolta catastrophe, the new film presents a world that has been
conquered by space aliens. Here, though, the intergalactic
oppressors aren’t dreadlocked clods in Kiss boots; they’re glowy
insects that resemble off-world silverfish, who apparently hand out
lasery contact lenses to the humans whose bodies they take over.
The upside of this body-snatching invasion is that the planet is
now free of hunger and violence, “the environment is healed,” and
everybody is very, very nice. The downside is that this global
upgrade seems in several ways like a socially-engineered one-world
Hell. ; ; ; ;
The movie is based on a doorstopping 2010 novel by Stephanie
Meyer. Having once made a forced march through Meyer’s first
Twilight book, I took her participation here as an
unpromising portent. But the story — a sort of existential romance
– isn’t the problem; it’s the picture’s execution by
writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, In Time).
The Host isn’t as overwhelmingly awful as Battlefield
Earth, but it’s woeful in some similar ways. The action, if
that’s the word, is unthrillingly limp; the picture feels
under-inhabited; the characters are in some cases interchangeable;
and the pictorial values – lots of dusty tan desert, soundstage
caverns, and a sterile alien office (!) – are unremittingly
dull. ;
Saoirse Ronan, so good in Hanna and The Lovely
Bones, is trapped in a dual role here. As Melanie Stryder,
she’s one of a group of rebel humans who falls into the clutches of
the shiny-eyed Souls (as the aliens are oddly called). After having
an extraterrestrial bug inserted through a slit in her neck (is
this really how these creatures conquered the planet?), she becomes
Wanderer – same girl, but with shiny eyes of her own and a mission
to ransack Melanie’s memories for the location of her fellow
partisans. Immediately there’s a problem: Although Wanderer has
moved into Melanie’s body, Melanie refuses to evacuate the
premises. This leads to endless silly scenes of Ronan arguing with
herself – as Wanderer in the flesh and as Melanie in voice-over.
Ronan does what she can with this nonsense, but – in the screening
I attended, at least — not enough to smother audience
snickers.
After some light complications — including pursuit by an alien
Seeker (grim-lipped Diane Kruger) intent on dragging the runaway
bug-girl back to the head office — Melanie and Wanderer set out
for the rebel stronghold in the bowels of a faraway mountain. The
rebels are led by Melanie’s Uncle Jeb (William Hurt with a
half-hearted ponytail), and include among their number Melanie’s
generically hunky boyfriend Jared (Max Irons) and her little
brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury). Jared and the rest of the
unassimilated humans are all for terminating the shiny-eyed
interloper, but Uncle Jeb, emotionally torn, commands forbearance.
(“I’m in here!” Melanie cries in voiceover, and in vain.)
This story is not without interest. Will true love enable
Melanie to somehow break out of her shell, so to speak, and reunite
with Jared? Will Wanderer’s encounter with unfamiliar human
passions push her over to the rebel side, or at least into a maiden
bonk with one of the other generically hunky young men on hand?
The Host isn’t as dire an undertaking as the
Twilight films, but it exhausts what small portion of
narrative vigor it has pretty early on. There’s no reason this
movie should run a little more than two hours in length. A little
more than two hours shorter might’ve been a better way to go. … Read More
US lost almost half a billion dollars due to Daylight Saving Time
The Carpenter Co. commissioned the group Chmura Economics &Analytics to conduct a study in order to see what the real cost ofthe annual transition is, aside from just losing 60 minutes ofslumber. The results, a report entitled “Estimating the EconomicLoss of Daylight Saving Time for US Metropolitan StatisticalAreas,” concludes that the total price of pushing the hour handahead is roughly $433,982,548.00 for the United States — or around$1.65 per person.Chmura says they came to their conclusion after going throughpeer-reviewed academic journals where the aspects of economiclosses are shown with solid evidence. The result, they report, isthat the annual DST change is linked to an increase in heartattacks, workplace injuries in the mining and construction sectorsand “increased cyberloafing that reduces productivity for peoplewho typically work in offices.”The group says they studied more than 300 MetropolitanStatistical Areas (MSA) in the United States to come to theirfindings. Of those they researched, four of the five regions withthe biggest loss the day DST kicks in all include areas of WestVirginia. The West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety andTrainins reports that coal occurs naturally in 53 of the 55counties in the state, and that more than $3.5 billion annually ofthe gross state product comes from the natural resource. Also hithard was the Kingsport-Bristol region near the Tennessee/Virginiaborder and sections of Florida.At number 349 on the list of cities struck hardest by DaylightSaving Time is the greater Washington, DC metro area, whichincludes parts of Maryland, Virginia and that state’s coal-richneighbor. Chmura Economics say that the one lost hour this weekleft DC losing nearly $7 million, but when is Washington not toblame for the country’s economic woes? … Read More
Portland Radon Levels Reveal Potential Health Risks
One in four homes in the greater Portland, Ore., area contain radon levels well above the safety limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to a recent study by Portland State University.Read More…
AR-15 Defense Weapon: New York Resident Scares the Hell out of Intruders
As the mainstream media continues to label weapons such as the AR-15 “Assault Weapons”, this story of a New York resident proves that such weapons serve a greater purpose, SELF-DEFENSE. … Read More
