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[MIKA27]

The Tragic Futility of World War I

If you find human behavior discouraging today, consider what happened a century ago. A Martian might have gazed down upon Europe in 1914 and seen a peaceful, prosperous continent with a shared culture. Pretty much everyone had enough to eat. The English listened to Wagner, Germans savored Shakespeare, Russian aristocrats mimicked the French, Mozart and Italian opera were loved by all. Then, Europe imploded.

Ten days before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, prompting the descent into the Great War, “people everywhere were working, resting, eating, sleeping, dreaming of nothing less than of war,” a British political scientist wrote in The Atlantic the following year. “War came upon them like a thunderclap.”

Philosophers, pundits, and poets spent the four-plus years of the war flailing around for explanations. They scoffed at the notion that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was much more than a pretext. A web of entangling alliances and the maneuverings of diplomats and generals dragged ambivalent nations into an unnecessary war.

A group of U.S. Marines in 1918 (U.S. Marine Corps Recruiting Publicity Bureau/National Archives)

But the deeper causes? It was the greed of rich belligerents trying to get richer. W.E.B. Du Bois, the black writer and activist, said it was the competition over resource-rich colonies in Africa. It was a struggle between liberty and autocracy (although czarist Russia’s alliance with France and England undercut that argument). It was because mankind’s moral instincts—this was philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell’s view—lagged behind its material wealth. It was Germany’s psychological insecurity, triggered by Britain’s naval supremacy and the fear of Russia’s rising might. It was, simply, the insanity of the only carnivorous species that kills its own kind for no good reason.

Or, all of the above.

Fourth Liberty Loan, circa 1917

And for this, more than 16 million men went to their slaughter, many of them in cruel and creative ways. In trenches that stretched an unbroken 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border, the Germans constructed walls using corpses, so that French troops who captured a trench hung canteens from protruding ankles. Along the Somme River, in northern France, more than 1 million men were killed or wounded in 1916 for an Allied advance of seven miles. Poisonous gas filled a quarter of all the artillery shells fired on the western front in 1918. More than a third of German males born between 1892 and 1895 died in the course of the war. The killing spread to civilians in England and France attacked by German zeppelins. War was no longer noble, even as some of the men who fought it were noble beyond compare.

It was a sad, pointless war, for which we’re still paying a price. A hard-hearted peace treaty and a ravaged economy produced a “lost generation” of young Germans and led directly to the rise of Hitler and an even uglier worldwide conflagration. The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement reached by Britain and France in 1916 drew arbitrary boundary lines across the postwar Middle East—around Iraq, for instance—that are returning deadly dividends to this day. The toppling of the Russian monarchy and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a balkanized Europe that, as recently as the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over strife-torn Ukraine, pains us still. The world was a nastier place after the war than before it.

All wars tell us something about the basest regions of human nature, the First World War (caustically named in 1918 by an English journalist who thought it would not be the last) more than most. About the nature of covetousness, the perils of insecurity, the ease of losing human control over human events.

Decommissioning after the Treaty of Versailles

So, has our species evolved? The counterevidence is distressingly abundant. The Nazis’ ovens in World War II. Stalin’s gulags. The genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. The return to seventh-century standards of thought and behavior incited by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and practiced by jihadists across the Middle East.

Indeed, evidence is slim that we’ve grown wiser since the war intended to end all wars did nothing of the sort. Still, if it’s any consolation amid the tragedies and disorder of today’s world, Homo sapiens have been way stupider in the past than they are right now.

[MIKA27]

POLARIS SLINGSHOT

It isn’t widely known that when the automobile was first invented, it had 3 wheels. Karl Benz called it the “Benz Patent Motorwagen” and it was first shown to the public by Mr Benz and his wife in 1885.

Since then we’ve seen a huge range of 3-wheeled vehicles, perhaps most famously the Morgan Three-Wheeler, and the slightly awkward Reliant Robin of Top Gear and Mr Bean fame. What we hadn’t seen until the Slingshot came along was a 3-wheeled design that genuinely attempted to create a modern performance roadster, using the benefits afforded by the lower weight of the 3-wheeled design.

The Polaris Slingshot is powered by a 173hp/2.4 litre DOHC engine mated to a 5-speed manual transmission, power is fed to the single rear wheel via a carbon fibre reinforced belt drive and it’s all bolted to a lightweight space-frame chassis. The seating capacity is 2, the gross weight is 1,700lbs (771kgs) and it’s licensed as a motorcycle rather than a car – due to the fact that it’s classed as a tricycle.

The Slingshot was only released yesterday, so it’s still early days for the new roadster, though it’ll be interesting to see if a dedicated track-day car will catch on in the United States. In Britain they’ve proven to be hugely popular and with a relatively low starting MSRP of $19,999 USD – the new 3-wheeled Polaris could create itself an interesting new niche.

[MIKA27]

Third Siberian Crater “Doesn’t Look Like Natural Formation”

OK, this hole definitely needs to be looked into. A third mysterious crater has been found in Siberia. This one was discovered in the Taymyr Peninsula by local reindeer herders who live in the northern village of Nosok.

Map showing locations of the three Siberian craters reported so far.

The area is east of Yamal, where the first crater was reported last week, and northeast of the Taz district where the second one was found. This hole is smaller than those two – about 4 feet in diameter – and observers say its perimeter is perfectly round and the 100-to-300-feet-deep hole is shaped like a cone. According to The Siberian Times, one described it this way:

It is not like this is the work of men, but also doesn’t look like natural formation.

News travels slowly in Siberia. Local residents say the hole was formed on September 27, 2013. Shortly after, Mikhail Lapsui, a deputy of the regional parliament, flew over the area by helicopter and gave this account:

“There is ground outside, as if it was thrown as a result of an underground explosion. Observers give several versions. According to the first, initially at the place was smoking, and then there was a bright flash. In the second version, a celestial body fell there.”

Geologists, ecologists and historians are unable to come to a consensus on the causes of the craters. The prevailing theory on the other two is methane gas releases caused by global warming melting the permafrost. However, the Taymyr crater is far from the gas fields of the Yamal and Taz areas and is smaller, cone-shaped and perfectly formed.

A view inside the Taymyr crater taken by herder who stayed far enough away to not fall in.

Could it have another cause? Marina Leibman, chief scientist of the Earth Cryosphere Institute, says more information is needed.

Undoubtedly, we need to study all such formations. It is necessary to be able to predict their occurrence.”

Especially if it “doesn’t look like natural formation.”

[Fuzz]

River In China Mysteriously Turns Blood Red Overnight

MIKA: Whatever it is, it can't be good.

Aww crap. I import stuff from that town.

[MIKA27]

Crime Fiction

Did the Chicago police coerce witnesses into pinpointing the wrong man for murder?

At around two-thirty in the afternoon on May 8, 1993, Marshall Morgan left his mother’s house, on the South Side of Chicago, and drove off in her light-blue Chevrolet Cavalier. Morgan was borrowing the car and, in return, had agreed to get it washed. It was a warm day, and he wore denim shorts, a black-and-white pin-striped shirt, and black sneakers. After he got the car cleaned, he planned to return home and spruce himself up: he had a date with his girlfriend that night.

Morgan was a twenty-year-old sophomore at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he played point guard on the basketball team. The season had just ended, and he had performed notably well, averaging eighteen points and three steals a game; he had been the runner-up for the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference’s most-valuable-player award. His coach, Ed McQuillan, told me recently that Morgan was a “great kid” and a complete player, who was “quicker than hell, great on defense—he could shoot long, and he could drive and penetrate.”

When Morgan didn’t come home, his mother, Marcia Escoffery, grew worried. She and Morgan were close: she became pregnant at fifteen and brought him up, an only child, on her own. “All we had was each other,” Escoffery told me.

Morgan’s father, Marshall Morgan, Sr., had recently come back into his life, after an absence of seventeen years. He had attended his son’s basketball games and made other efforts at reconciliation: that day, he had booked a room for Morgan and his girlfriend, Lorena Peete, at a local Days Inn. Escoffery had warned her son to be wary of such gestures, but he welcomed them. “He would never back off from family,” Peete told me.

Escoffery stared at the phone for hours. Morgan always called to say that he’d be late. After nightfall, she notified the police that her son was missing.

Morgan’s disappearance made the Chicago evening news. Police created a toll-free number to encourage leads and plastered the South Side with photographs of him. Nine days after Morgan disappeared, the Cavalier was found parked in front of a run-down building on South Michigan Avenue, near Fifty-eighth Street. Neighbors had reported a putrid smell escaping from a cracked rear window. A forensic team arrived to find a decomposing male corpse on the floor, between the front and back seats, with a .38-calibre gunshot wound in the stomach and two more in the back. The body was naked, except for a black-and-white pin-striped shirt. Dental records confirmed that it was Morgan.

Homicide investigators from Area One, the branch responsible for the neighborhood around Fifty-eighth and Michigan, took up the case. Even in a city that was averaging three murders a day, Area One detectives were exceptionally busy. Their territory included the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, twenty-eight public-housing towers whose stairwells were controlled by drug gangs. Robbery, rape, and murder were commonplace. “They were killing people left and right,” Kenneth Boudreau, a veteran detective who served in Area One, told me. The neighborhood was overwhelmingly black, but the police force was overwhelmingly white, and it struggled to establish authority. Tenants, seeing police below, sometimes threw trash from their windows. Many crimes went unsolved.

Cases that attracted significant media attention, however, often became known as “heaters,” drawing the resources necessary to make arrests and secure convictions. According to a 1992 article by Myron W. Orfield, Jr., a law professor at the University of Minnesota, heater cases were diverted to “judges statistically far more likely to convict.” Some cops tried to avoid the stress of such cases: in 2005, a retired detective told the Chicago Tribune, “You pray to God not to give you a heater case.” Others, like Boudreau, didn’t shirk the challenge.

Morgan’s case was a heater. Crime-lab technicians dusted the Cavalier, and three days later they pulled fingerprints from a Miller High Life bottle and a Löwenbräu forty-ounce that had been found in the car; the prints matched a set on file for Tyrone Hood, a resident of a South Side neighborhood eight miles away. Two detectives immediately began searching for him.

Shortly before 4 P.M., Hood was walking from his house to a corner store, the Munch Shop, when the officers, in an unmarked police car, pulled up alongside him. They informed him that his prints had turned up at a murder scene. Hood, who was twenty-nine, had a full, unpicked head of hair, and a tattoo of his nickname, Tony, on his left forearm. A married father of three, he cobbled together a living through temporary auto-repair jobs, construction gigs, and clerical work. He had grown up in a chaotic home, the eighth of ten children. An older brother had served time for robbing McDonald’s restaurants. When Hood was seventeen, two thieves shot and killed his father. Not long afterward, Hood was arrested twice for aggravated assault—one of the incidents involved unlawful use of a firearm—and once each for marijuana possession, battery, and theft. He had served a year on probation for the weapons charge. Now, facing the cops, he dismissed the possibility of his prints being at the scene. (“Someone must have put them there,” he later declared.) But he agreed to answer questions at the police station, to “clear his name.”

On May 8th, Hood said, he had spent the day at home with his family; that evening, he had watched “Cops” with his wife, Tiwanna. Later in the interrogation, though, he said that several people had come over, among them his friend Wayne Washington. When Hood was asked about his whereabouts on May 9th—Mother’s Day—he initially said that he had been with his mom. Then he said that he had stayed home with Tiwanna.

Kenneth Boudreau and his partner, John Halloran, took over the interrogation the next day. Boudreau considered himself an expert at separating a man from his secrets. “I have spent a lot of time learning how to interview people, and have been trained by the F.B.I.,” he told me recently. “You don’t have to beat people to get them to talk.” Chicago cops, however, have long been criticized for being overly aggressive. In 1931, a White House commission warned that the “third degree”—methods that “inflict suffering, physical or mental, upon a person in order to obtain information about a crime”—was “thoroughly at home in Chicago”; one preferred tactic involved beating a suspect in the head with a phone book, since it could “stun a man without leaving a mark.” In the late sixties, Chicago police officers shot and killed a Black Panther activist while he was in bed; his relatives received a large wrongful-death settlement. In 1982, a lieutenant named Jon Burge was accused of torturing Andrew Wilson, an alleged murderer of two police officers, who was in his custody. A doctor who examined Wilson found “multiple bruises, swellings, and abrasions,” and several “linear blisters.” Wilson claimed that he had been cuffed to a hot radiator and that “electrical shocks had been administered to his gums, lips, and genitals.” Burge was eventually fired for “systematic” misconduct.

Boudreau, a solidly built man who is now in his mid-fifties, told me that he had never relied on physical intimidation during interrogations. At the time of his encounter with Hood, Boudreau was an Army reservist. In 1990, during the Gulf War, he had deployed to Saudi Arabia; after the September 11th attacks, he had participated in the Ground Zero rescue effort. When he discussed interrogations with me, he spoke like a student of cognitive science. “It’s all right-brain, left-brain,” he said. “When someone is recalling something, they look left. But when they’re creating an answer they look right.” He claimed that people who spoke with their hands near their mouths were acting suspiciously, and theorized that “when someone’s tapping their leg you can see that if they had full movement they would be running away.”

Hood took a polygraph exam. Many scholars have questioned the reliability of such tests, but cops regularly use them. The polygraph technician detected “deception” in Hood’s answers. When Boudreau and Halloran pressed him over the inconsistencies in his story, Hood was impassive, telling them, “If I don’t say anything to explain, I will go to jail for a long time. If I do tell what happened, I will go to jail.” Hood later reported that Boudreau and his fellow-interrogators, frustrated with his refusal to confess, slapped him in the head and thrust a gun in his face, telling him that he could go home “if he signed ‘the papers.’ ” (Boudreau told me that he had not engaged in any abuse; Halloran declined to comment.)

After forty-eight hours in detention, Hood still maintained his innocence. Boudreau and his colleagues couldn’t hold him any longer without formally charging him, and they didn’t have enough evidence to succeed in court. On May 22nd, they let him go.

Three days after Hood left the station, investigators pulled another set of prints from a beer can in Morgan’s car and traced them to Joe West, who lived two blocks away from Hood. On May 27th, two detectives went looking for West; they didn’t find him, but came across Hood hanging out at the Munch Shop with his friend Wayne Washington. The cops, recalling that Washington had figured in Hood’s alibi, asked him if he would answer questions at the station. Washington agreed. Hood, who said that he didn’t want Washington to mistake him for a snitch, volunteered to go along and face further interrogation.

At the station, Hood and Washington were ushered into separate rooms. Detectives also tracked down West and another friend of Hood’s, Jody Rogers. Boudreau and three other detectives questioned West, who initially denied any knowledge of Morgan’s murder. But after West was informed that his fingerprints had been found on the beer can he told a different story. Wayne Washington and Jody Rogers, in turn, provided details that complemented West’s account.

On the evening of the murder, Washington and Rogers said, they had been idling with Hood on a front porch in the neighborhood. Rogers suggested getting high, according to Washington, and asked him to roll a “mo”—a cigarette sprinkled with cocaine. Washington, who belonged to a street gang and sold drugs, said that he was thirty dollars short for the day and couldn’t afford to dip into his supply. He told the police that Hood proposed getting cash by doing a stickup, and that Rogers, who was on parole for armed robbery, declined to participate. Nevertheless, Rogers told detectives, he offered his friends a .38 revolver, and Hood took it.

According to Washington, he and Hood set out on foot. After a few blocks, they spotted a blue sedan pulling up to the curb, and saw a man they didn’t recognize—Marshall Morgan—getting out. “There’s a vic,” Hood said, aiming the .38 at Morgan. Washington told police that Morgan gave Hood money from one of his pockets and was reaching into the other when Hood shot him in the gut; as Morgan doubled over, screaming for help, Hood and Washington grabbed his arms and legs and shunted him between the front and back seats of the car. Hood, Washington said, took the car keys from Morgan’s pocket, then climbed into the driver’s seat and sped away.

Joe West told investigators that, on May 10th, he had recognized Hood driving around the neighborhood in a blue sedan, and waved him down: he wanted to buy a dime bag of marijuana, and knew that Hood could help him find one. West got in, pushing aside a pile of empty beer cans and bottles at his feet, and they headed a few blocks east to make a deal. At one point, according to West, Hood ran a red light, and West, anxious about police, glanced backward and spotted someone sprawled across the floor of the back seat. West recalled that, when he asked what was going on, Hood avoided the question and said that he was “zoning”—stoned. At a corner, West continued, Hood got out and bought a dime bag. After that, Hood drove him home. As West got out, he said, “You are some kind of crazy ******.”

West told police that he watched Hood ease down the street and park a few hundred feet away; the dome light flipped on, and two gunshots rang out. Panicked, West ran inside.

With West’s statement in hand, detectives entered Hood’s interrogation room and charged him with killing Morgan. Washington was also indicted. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office assigned Hood’s case to Michael Rogers. Rogers—no relation to Jody—was a prosecutor pointedly averse to compromise. Years of contending with violent criminals had left him with a dark view of humanity. The previous year, he and Boudreau had worked on a case in which three men confessed to raping a woman, strangling her, and setting her on fire. “Most of the people who live in the criminal world are riding their own trail down the razor blade of life,” he wrote in a forty-page memo that circulated around the state’s attorney’s office in 2004.

The memo offered advice to young prosecutors. It warned them about the “anti-state judge” who is “bent on screwing you for a discovery violation.” Rogers added, “You will want to punch this judge.” He portrayed appellate clerks as fifth columnists whose “only exposure to the criminal justice system [will] be some professor who is a former public defender who wore Birkenstocks to class.” Rogers cautioned against picking jurors who looked “like the defense lawyer or defendant,” and mocked appellate judges who, “for some reason,” believed that “the Constitution is more than a technicality.”

Hood hired an attorney. But he couldn’t keep up with the payments, and turned to a public defender named Jim Mullenix, who had spent two years living in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps volunteer. “People like me root for the underdog,” Mullenix said. In their jailhouse conferences, Hood insisted upon his innocence, even though the three witness statements—and Hood’s fingerprints on the beer bottles—suggested otherwise.

The judge, Michael Bolan, scheduled the trial for April, 1996. On the eve of jury selection, three detectives intending to bolster the state’s case visited a woman in Hood’s neighborhood, and asked her if she could help them confirm identities in some photographs. After they fanned several Polaroids—including one of Hood and one of the Cavalier—across the woman’s kitchen table, her sister’s fiancé entered the room in search of an onion and said, “I seen that guy before.”

The fiancé, a former prison guard named Emanuel Bob, pointed at a picture of Hood. Bob said that he had run into Hood “off and on” over the years. Three years earlier, on the night after the killing, Bob explained, he had been looking out his second-story window sometime between midnight and 3 A.M. when he spotted, about a hundred feet away, Hood sitting in the Cavalier. When asked why he hadn’t reported this to the police, he said, “I figured, ‘Well, they done caught the person who did it.’ It’s in the paper.” Rosemary Higgins, who prosecuted Hood with Rogers, felt that Bob’s eyewitness account sealed their case, and had come about “almost by divine providence.”

Hood waived his right to a jury trial, placing his fate in Judge Bolan’s hands. Two weeks later, Bolan found Hood guilty of murder and armed robbery. At the sentencing hearing, Higgins read a statement from Morgan’s mother, who pleaded with Bolan not to show Hood mercy. “He took my son’s life so brutally,” she said. “He must pay for his crime so no other parent or child has to go through what I am going through.” Later, Higgins called Hood a “heartless killer” who possessed no “rehabilitative potential.” (Higgins, now a judge, declined to comment.)

Hood’s family and friends and former bosses lobbied Bolan for leniency. A relative characterized Hood as a “lovable and devoted father” with a “smile as big as the sun.” Mullenix pointed out that Hood had spent three years in pre-trial detention, and that much time had passed since his previous run-ins with police. Before his arrest, Hood had graduated from high school, married, brought up children, and earned twelve hours of community-college credit in automotive mechanics. A supervisor at Catholic Charities, where Hood had done clerical work, said that he was admired there. Mullenix submitted a review from the director of the PACE Institute, a social and academic program for inmates; it described Hood as “highly motivated,” and cited his inclusion on the honor roll and his publication of “inspirational articles” in the PACE newsletter as indicators of a “successful future adjustment.”

Bolan, unmoved, sentenced Hood to seventy-five years. Before leaving the court, Hood submitted a statement, which Mullenix read aloud. “Life is too precious to take away and not give back,” Hood wrote. “An innocent man’s life or freedom” was “about to be taken away.” The statement continued, “I pray that the truth will come out. In the Bible in Luke, chapter eight, verses seventeen to eighteen, it says, ‘Whatever is covered up will be uncovered, and whatever is hidden will be found, therefore, consider carefully how you listen.’ I say to myself, ‘Tony, they will find out that I’m an innocent man, just have patience for the Lord to help you.’ ”

Hood was sent to a maximum-security facility in Menard, Illinois. The prison, which sits at the foot of a bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi River, was built in the late nineteenth century, of sandstone blocks ornamented with Egyptian Revival and Greek Revival motifs. It looks like a derelict boarding school.

Shortly after Hood arrived, he listened as an inmate in a nearby cell killed another inmate by bashing a television against his head. Hood started lifting weights to protect himself from potential attackers. Eventually, he got a job at the fry-cook station in the kitchen. He worked there for three and a half years before moving to the knit shop, where he made T-shirts for the prisoners. He received a pittance, but the money hardly mattered. “The more time you spend working, the better chance you will be out of harm’s way,” he told me recently.

Menard is seven hours south of Chicago, and the distance deterred Tiwanna and the kids from visiting. Calling was expensive, and Tiwanna told me that she’s “not a writing person.” Some inmates encouraged Hood to forget about her. Women never wait, they told him.

One day when Hood called home, he could tell by Tiwanna’s voice that something had changed. “She said she had company, and I knew right there, this ain’t good,” he recalled. He heard a man speaking in the background. “You ever heard of a Dear John letter? I got a Dear John call,” Hood told me. “I was, like, ‘How could you? You was one of my alibi witnesses—you know I didn’t kill this guy.’ ” He removed snapshots of Tiwanna from his photo album, and mailed them back to her. Eventually, he filed for divorce.

In 2000, Hood submitted a request for legal assistance through a pen-pal network for inmates. In a letter, he introduced himself as a victim of wrongful conviction, seeking someone to do footwork for him on the outside, so that he could mount a successful appeal. Months later, he received a reply from an Australian woman. The woman, Barbara Santek, had been attending an Amnesty International meeting one night in Fremantle, a town outside Perth, and had agreed to correspond with an American inmate. At first, she was wary of Hood’s letter. Weren’t judicial measures in place to prevent innocent people from going to jail? Moreover, she told me, exchanging letters with a convicted murderer “took me out of my comfort zone.”

After they exchanged a few letters, Hood shipped Santek a packet containing trial transcripts, witness statements, and police files. In a letter to one of Santek’s friends, Robyn Fisher, who also corresponded with him, Hood emphasized that he had always maintained his innocence: “If the prosecutor ask me to plea guilty to this crime and they will let me go with time served, well, I would have to say NO because I will be admitting to something that I didn’t do, and that would be lying. And I would have to explain that to God on Judgment Day.” After his mother became sick, Hood wrote, “This is why I work vigorously on my case, to get out before some else bad happen and I won’t be able to see her.”

He urged Santek not to take his word for anything, telling her, “Read the stuff and make your own decision.”

Santek began leafing through the contents of the package. Forty-seven, with blue eyes and a sandy-blond bob, she grew up as one of four children on a farm on the southwestern tip of Australia. She hadn’t seen a black person until she went to boarding school, at the age of fifteen, in the coastal town of Busselton. After graduation, she stayed in Busselton, married, had two children, divorced, and married again, giving birth to a third child. Her second husband abused her, to the point of hospitalization, and she left him. She lived alone in an apartment on the beach, but compared life in Busselton to “God’s waiting room”: “Everybody says, ‘I want to live there,’ but then you have it and it’s really quite boring.” Searching for something meaningful, she began attending the Amnesty International meetings.

She knew little about the law. But as she read Hood’s papers she sensed that his case was far more convoluted than the outcome suggested. At various points before the trial, three of the main witnesses against Hood—Wayne Washington, Joe West, and Jody Rogers—had all, in some manner, recanted.

Three years passed between Morgan’s murder, in 1993, and Hood’s conviction. Eight months after Joe West told Boudreau about buying a dime bag with Hood and seeing someone in the back of the Cavalier, Mullenix, the public defender, arrived unannounced at West’s door. Mullenix always tried to interview witnesses himself, in search of inconsistencies. “A lot of times, witnesses don’t know what they’ve told the police,” he explained. “When you meet the witness on the street and don’t drag them to the police station, oftentimes they will say something completely different from what’s in the police report.”

West invited Mullenix inside, and told him that everything he had said to the police—including the dime bag and riding with Hood in the sedan—was “a lie.” At the station, he recalled, detectives had grilled him about his fingerprints on the beer cans and accused him of killing “the next Michael Jordan.” One officer, West said, had pointed a pistol at him. The only way to be released, he felt, was to pin Morgan’s murder on someone else.

In a recantation, signed by West more than two years before Hood’s trial, Mullenix wrote, “The story was just something he made up. He never met Tyrone Hood that day, he never saw Tyrone Hood drive a car, he never saw a body in the back seat of that car, he never heard 2 gun shots come from that car.”

Soon afterward, Mullenix visited Jody Rogers, the parolee who had supposedly given Hood his gun. Rogers also revised his story. Three days after Hood’s arrest, Rogers told Mullenix, police had dragged him from his house, telling him that he was “going down for a murder.” At the station, Boudreau and Halloran gave him a choice: he could admit to seeing Hood shoot Morgan or admit to hearing him talk about it later. A third option, Rogers felt, was implicit: if he refused to coöperate, they could send him back to jail on a cooked-up parole violation. In truth, he told Mullenix, he never heard Hood say anything about a murder. He also signed a recantation statement.

Then, in August, 1995, Washington, Hood’s co-defendant, appeared at a pre-trial conference, and claimed that his confession also had been coerced. Halloran, he said, had slapped him, then tricked him into thinking that he could go home if he signed a prepared statement. (He made a few minor alterations so that it would look more authentic.) Washington’s own trial, which was held in late 1995, ended in a hung jury: jurors obviously doubted his confession. Nevertheless, the state’s attorney’s office prepared to retry the case, and after Washington saw Hood get seventy-five years he consulted with his lawyer, who brokered an agreement with prosecutors. Washington pleaded guilty to murder; by doing so, he told me, he “would still have a chance to catch my kids and have a life.” In 2005, after serving twelve years, Washington was released on parole.

Mullenix suspected that Boudreau, Halloran, and the other cops had taken shreds of truth—West’s prints on the cans, Hood’s mention of Washington in his alibi—and sewn together a false narrative, one that they subsequently strengthened through coercion. But before Hood’s trial began Mullenix’s case collapsed: West fell ill and died of cancer, and Rogers flipped yet again. The prosecutor Michael Rogers had gone to see Jody Rogers at a Cook County facility, where Jody had recently been detained on carjacking and cocaine charges. Jody initially stood by his recantation. According to trial testimony, Michael warned Jody that admitting that he had misled a grand jury put him at risk of perjury. But he could offer a deal: if Jody repeated his original version of events at Hood’s trial, he would avoid a perjury charge—and the state’s attorney’s office would recommend a lighter sentence in the carjacking case. Jody agreed.

When Jody testified at Hood’s trial, Mullenix assailed his credibility. Under questioning, Jody admitted that, in various attempts to evade police, he had used eight different first names and made up three different birthdays. He also conceded that he had negotiated an “agreement” in exchange for his testimony. “His testimony was simply bought,” Mullenix declared, later in the trial.

Santek was dismayed as she finished reading the court files. Given the recantations and other irregularities, how could a judge have determined Hood to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

The witness testimony wasn’t the only aspect of the case that made Santek believe in Hood’s innocence. Mullenix, she believed, had identified Morgan’s killer.

One day in late 1995, as Mullenix was preparing for Hood’s trial, he received a call from Renee Ferguson, an investigative reporter at NBC in Chicago. Ferguson had gathered information that she felt could be pertinent to Hood’s defense.

A few months earlier, an administrator at James R. Doolittle, Jr., Elementary School, on the South Side, had contacted Ferguson after the school’s computer teacher, Michelle Soto, was murdered. Police found Soto’s naked body a week after she disappeared, wedged between the front and back seats of her Chrysler LeBaron, with a fatal gunshot wound to the face. Detectives investigated Soto’s fiancé but did not arrest him. It was not a heater case.

Still, Soto’s family harbored suspicions about the fiancé, and the school administrator asked Ferguson to look into the case. Ferguson discovered that he was a thirty-nine-year-old public-school janitor with a history of violence and insurance abuse, whose own son had been murdered two years earlier, and had been found wedged between the front and back seats of a car. The fiancé’s name was Marshall Morgan, Sr.

Born in Chicago, Morgan, Sr., was good-looking, with coppery skin and a groomed mustache. In 1972, he had married his high-school sweetheart, Marcia Escoffery; they named their one son after his father. Morgan, Sr., lived with Escoffery’s family for a short time, and then he started staying out all night. Escoffery filed for divorce. “I told him, ‘If you want to be free, be free!’ ” she said to me.

Around this time, Morgan, Sr.,’s relationship with a friend named William Hall turned bitter over seven hundred dollars that Hall owed him. As Morgan, Sr., later told the authorities, one night, when they were parked in front of a liquor store, he pulled out a revolver and “accidentally” shot Hall, killing him. Morgan, Sr., pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and got seven years. He was paroled after two.

Once out, he remarried, divorced, and married again. In May, 1992, his third wife, Dolores Coleman, filed a restraining order, alleging that Morgan, Sr., had choked her “almost to unconsciousness” and had put a gun to her head. They eventually divorced.

His finances crumbled. An affidavit indicated that his expenses exceeded his monthly income by more than sixteen hundred dollars. In September, 1992, he received a foreclosure notice on his house. The next month, he took out a fifty-thousand-dollar Allstate life-insurance policy on his son, the college basketball star, whom he had abandoned when he was a toddler. Young Morgan was murdered seven months later. Three weeks after his body was found, his father collected forty-four thousand dollars from Allstate.

The insurance money did not solve all of Morgan, Sr.,’s financial problems. In 1993, another woman, who claimed that he was the father of her baby, took him to court for child support, and the bank came after his house. Around that time, he and Michelle Soto, the computer teacher, bought a split-level home in Country Club Hills, a Chicago suburb. Soto had recently separated from her husband, Reynaldo Soto, a marine. The Sotos’ oldest daughter, Micaela, spent weekends with her mother and Morgan, Sr. Micaela remembers Morgan, Sr., spoiling her and her mother with jewelry. In February, 1995, as a testament to his commitment to Soto, he took out a life-insurance plan for her.

Their relationship, however, deteriorated as the year went on. One evening, Micaela recalls, her mother and Morgan, Sr., quarrelled at the house in Country Club Hills. “I could hear them in their bedroom,” Micaela told me. “He was cussing. My mom said, ‘I’m leaving,’ and Marshall said, ‘You better not.’ ” Soto ignored his threat and left with Micaela. Soon afterward, she disappeared.

After detectives found Soto’s body, they opened a homicide investigation. Soto’s sister, Doreen Brown, told them that, two weeks before Soto disappeared, Soto had given her an envelope containing “important papers,” telling her not to show the envelope to Morgan, Sr., if anything happened to her. “She knew she was getting ready to die,” Brown told me, declaring that Morgan, Sr., “had my sister killed.” Alonzo Burgess, Morgan, Sr.,’s nephew, told police that he suspected his uncle of having planned a murder. According to Burgess, Morgan, Sr.,’s ex-wife Dolores Coleman reported that Morgan, Sr., had told her he was “about to come into some money.”

The police questioned Morgan, Sr., several times, and they detected inconsistencies. At his first interview, he neglected to mention the life-insurance policy for Soto; he later called the omission “a misunderstanding.” He denied any involvement in Soto’s death.

Laura Burklin, the Allstate claims adjuster who reviewed Morgan, Sr.,’s death claim on Soto, suspected that he was involved in the homicide. He had recently received thirty thousand dollars on a stolen-vehicle claim, and soon after Soto’s death he had sold the house in Country Club Hills, using what Soto’s family members alleged was a forged deed. But, as Burklin told me, “if the police aren’t arresting someone you have to pay the claim.” In June, 1997, two years after Soto’s death, a judge approved a final settlement, and Morgan, Sr., received a check for a hundred and seven thousand dollars.

In the months before Hood’s trial, Jim Mullenix, the public defender, scrambled to incorporate this information into his defense. Everything now made sense to him—even Hood’s fingerprints on the bottles. According to Mullenix’s theory, Morgan, Sr., had killed his son and then grabbed an armful of loose bottles from a random dumpster and thrown them into the car to confuse detectives. Corliss High School, where Morgan, Sr., worked as a janitor, was two blocks from Tyrone Hood’s house.

At Hood’s trial, Mullenix argued to Judge Bolan that Morgan, Sr., had a suspicious “connection between two dead bodies” and needed to explain it away. He called Burklin, the Allstate adjuster, to the stand. Burklin told me that Morgan, Sr., was “definitely abusing insurance”—that he had started with an “unusual amount” of petty insurance claims, graduated to stolen cars and house fires, and “worked himself up to people.” But she never had a chance to discuss Morgan, Sr.,’s previous insurance claims in court. When Mullenix tried to bring them up with her, prosecutors objected, and Judge Bolan sided with them.

When Morgan, Sr., took the stand, aspects of his testimony contradicted the statement that he had previously given to police. He initially said that he saw his son that Saturday afternoon; now he said that they last saw each other in the morning. Previously, he said that he had given his son a hundred and twenty-five dollars for his date; in court, he revised that amount to three hundred and fifty. Mullenix highlighted these discrepancies and attempted to question Morgan, Sr., about murdering his friend in 1977. Judge Bolan rebuffed these efforts.

When Mullenix asked Morgan, Sr., about the life-insurance policy—“How much money did you collect from your son’s death?”—Higgins and Rogers, the state’s attorneys, objected. At one point, Judge Bolan told Mullenix, “Perry Mason does this. Perry Mason proves the guy in the back of the court did it.” He criticized Mullenix for failing to establish a “relevant nexus” between the Hood case and Morgan, Sr.,’s past. Any similarity between the deaths of Morgan, Jr., and Soto was mere “coincidence.” He ridiculed Mullenix’s argument as one more appropriate for the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries.”

In late 2001, Barbara Santek ran across a series of articles in the Chicago Tribune titled “Cops and Confessions.” The reporters described how the Chicago police had relied on “coercive and illegal tactics” to solicit dubious confessions. Among the articles was a profile, by Maurice Possley, Steve Mills, and Ken Armstrong, of Kenneth Boudreau, one of the officers who had culled incriminating statements about Hood from West, Rogers, and Washington. Boudreau, the article stated, had “helped to get confessions from more than a dozen defendants in murder cases in which charges were dropped or the defendant was acquitted at trial.” Even in a police department beleaguered by false confessions, Boudreau stood out—“not only for the number of his cases that have fallen apart, but for the reasons.” He had targeted suspects especially vulnerable to intimidation, including teen-agers and the mentally retarded, and stood accused of “punching, slapping, or kicking” them. One man, Derrick Flewellen, spent four and a half years in jail after confessing to Boudreau about a rape and a murder—“I wasn’t going to get beat up again,” he told the paper—before DNA evidence acquitted him. Between 1991 and 1993, Boudreau had allegedly helped elicit at least five dubious confessions from suspects who were later acquitted.

Santek felt sick as she read the article. She told herself, “These were the same guys.”

In 2002, Santek came to America for an extended vacation. While in Pittsburgh, she began dating an engineer, and by the end of the year they had married. They started a family together in Pennsylvania, adopting three girls. Meanwhile, Santek and Hood continued to correspond. He wrote to Santek that, after two years of friendship, “I have riches and I can never be poor.”

In 2006, Santek and her friend Robyn Fisher travelled to the prison to see Hood. Guards escorted them to a visitation room. “When he walked through the door, I wasn’t sure at first if it was him,” Santek recalled. His head was shaved, his mustache and goatee flecked with gray. Prison had changed him in other ways. “I learned not to get in nobody’s business,” he told me, as the possibility of violence lurked behind most prison interactions. “Some guys down here, they like to be right all the time, about anything.”

They talked for hours. Hood reminded Santek of her father—“gentle man, good values.” She no longer worried that his letters had been a con. “Everything he had written over the years, he was that person,” she told me.

A few days later, Hood wrote to Fisher. “During our visit, my mind frame was not in prison at all,” he explained. “When it was time for me to lay down, I did hug my pillow and thought about Barbara with a slight smile.”

Hood and Santek began talking on the phone several times a month, and he wrote to her frequently. “Your strength has sustained me,” he declared in one letter. “Your courage has moved me. Your humor has cheered me. Your wisdom has inspired me.” In another, he wrote, “There is not a statement in the English language, or any other language, that could possibly captivate the very essence of how much I truly treasure your Existence.” Santek was falling in love, too, and contemplated divorce. In the end, she stayed with her husband, but they began sleeping in separate rooms.

In early 2007, Santek decided to send a plea for help to Loevy & Loevy, a law firm in Chicago that specializes in police-misconduct and wrongful-conviction suits. To insure that her request would attract attention in the firm’s mail room, she had Fisher send a parcel of materials, covered in international stamps, from Australia. Gayle Horn, an attorney there, agreed to take the case, on a pro-bono basis. When Hood heard this, he was ecstatic. He wrote to Fisher, “I’m taking the right step to obtain my freedom, and God is going to give me the rest of the steps that I need to walk out this place.”

After assessing the case, Horn and her colleagues went out to reinterview witnesses. Wayne Washington reiterated that his confession had been false, saying, “The detectives told me that they wouldn’t let me go until I confessed to murdering Marshall Morgan.” Jody Rogers signed another sworn recantation. Then Jody’s brother, Michael, who had corroborated Jody’s false testimony at the trial, revealed something startling: the Chicago police had secretly been paying him for his coöperation. “Every time they picked me up, I got some money,” he wrote in a sworn statement. “They told me if I had any problems with anyone in the neighborhood they would take care of it.” This struck Horn as a possible infringement of the 1963 Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland, which prohibited the government from withholding information that could help a defendant’s case.

In a separate civil suit centering on abusive interrogations, Horn’s associates deposed the detectives involved in Hood’s prosecution. When John Halloran, Boudreau’s partner, was asked if he had hit Washington during an interrogation, Halloran replied, “I invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.” Boudreau, however, told Horn’s associates that he would answer questions. “I’m not Michael Corleone,” he told me. “I don’t take the Fifth.” (In fact, Boudreau invoked his Fifth Amendment right in 2005, before a grand jury probing abusive interrogations. He later clarified to me that he had never taken the Fifth in a civil suit.)

Russell Ainsworth, a partner at Loevy & Loevy, asked Boudreau if he had grabbed Jody Rogers’s arm and twisted it. “I don’t recall my involvement with Jody Rogers,” Boudreau said. “I may have placed handcuffs on him. If I put handcuffs on him, it would require twisting the arms up behind your back. I’m not sure what you mean by the word ‘twist.’ ”

“Did you push Jody Rogers into the wall?” Ainsworth asked.

“If I was handcuffing somebody, I would have them stand up against the wall,” Boudreau said. “Can you define the word ‘push’? . . . The word ‘push’ has many meanings.”

Boudreau is now a sergeant, and oversees the police department’s gang-outreach program in area high schools. I met him recently at a diner in Bridgeport, an Irish neighborhood on the South Side. We had apple pie and coffee on tables set with jelly caddies and paper placemats. A cold front was rolling through, causing the awning out front to snap. When I went to turn on my audio recorder, Boudreau flashed a dimpled grin and said, “Nobody tapes me.”

He told me that allegations that he had beaten or coerced confessions out of people were “f**king ridiculous.” (Years earlier, Boudreau had said in a deposition, “The term ‘excessive force’ to me is relative. What may be excessive to one person may not be excessive to another.”) In one affidavit, a convicted murderer, Kilroy Watkins, claimed that, during an interrogation in 1992 by Boudreau and Halloran, he was “handcuffed to a ring in the wall” and “choked and assaulted repeatedly by Detective Boudreau” until he was “forced into signing a false confession.” In 2000, another convicted murderer, Jaime De Avila, said in a sworn statement that Boudreau had threatened to “plant a ****** at the crime scene” who would claim that De Avila had been the driver of a suspect’s car. “You’ll be surprised what a ****** will do,” Boudreau reportedly said. “They will disrespect God before they will disrespect the police.” Boudreau denied making such threats, and said, “Have you asked yourself why all the accusations are coming from people in the penitentiary?”

During the past two decades, Chicago has paid substantial legal fees and settlement costs related to Boudreau’s discredited cases. In 2011, the city issued a $1.25-million settlement to Harold Hill, a man who was exonerated by DNA evidence years after Boudreau produced a rape and murder confession from him. When I asked Boudreau about the Hill case, he said, “I believe he did it—still to this day. I believe what Harold Hill told me.” Asked if he had any regrets, Boudreau said, “I probably should have corroborated more of his statements at the time. Does it aggravate me when I see people walk away and escape justice? Sure. But I can’t worry about that. I suppose if I worried about it I’d be biting the barrel of a gun.”

Boudreau said that “gravy train” firms like Loevy & Loevy had helped to create a spurious wrongful-conviction industry. I later spoke with Martin Preib, a Chicago cop and author, who said that Boudreau was being maligned by a few firms angling for large settlements. Preib called Boudreau “an unbelievable investigator” and said that wrongful-conviction firms had “ruined the lives of some very good police officers.”

The Chicago Police Department has frequently been accused of refusing to acknowledge internal problems. Two years ago, a bartender sued the city after an off-duty policeman pummelled her in a barroom. She alleged that a “code of silence” among officers impeded investigations into misconduct. A jury awarded her eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages.

At the diner, Boudreau said, “I’ll tell you what’ll happen. Loevy & Loevy wants to get Hood a new trial. The state won’t pursue it, Hood will walk, and then Loevy & Loevy will sue me.” He took a sip of coffee. “I know in my heart that, when we die, we’re going to either Heaven or Hell. I’m convinced that I will be standing at the gates of St. Peter with some homicide victims on my left and some homicide offenders who’ve made peace with the Lord on my right. And I know that Loevy & Loevy will go straight to Hell for what they do. They call it honor, but they are letting criminals walk free.”

We discussed one of the statements attributed to Hood in the police record of his interrogation: “If I don’t say anything to explain, I will go to jail for a long time. If I do tell what happened, I will go to jail.” At the trial, prosecutors had brought up the statement repeatedly to imply guilt. Hood denies ever saying it.

“So I made it up?” Boudreau asked, his lips pursed in amusement. “I’d like to think if I made up a statement I could make up something better than that.”

One morning in August, 2007, Hood boarded a corrections bus heading upstate. He had received a message from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, instructing him to report to Chicago for an interview. Days later, he was sitting across from two prosecutors. One of them opened a folder, and Hood saw a photograph of a man he recognized from his trial: Marshall Morgan, Sr. The prosecutors explained that Morgan, Sr., was about to stand trial for the murder of his girlfriend Deborah Jackson.

The circumstances echoed the deaths of his friend, his fiancée, and his son. On September 8, 2001, Morgan, Sr., and Jackson got into an argument about kitchen cabinets. In the middle of the dispute, he left for work, at Barton Elementary School, on the South Side. After a while, Jackson drove to the school and found Morgan, Sr., outside, picking up trash. He got into the car. They continued to argue, with Jackson driving. She stopped a few miles away, and Morgan, Sr., got out. She did, too, and followed him on foot. As he recalled, in a videotaped statement, she slapped him, and he “pushed her.”

Jackson’s purse slipped off her shoulder and, according to Morgan, Sr., a pistol tumbled out, hit the ground, and misfired. He grabbed the weapon and, after a brief struggle, fired it. The bullet pierced her elbow and her chest. He shot her again, in the stomach. When investigators asked him why he shot her twice, Morgan, Sr., said, “Out of rage, I guess.”

The bullets did not kill Jackson, Morgan, Sr., said; when he popped the trunk and shoved her inside, he “saw her hands moving.” As she bled out, he placed the pistol under the driver’s seat and “went and caught the El” to complete his shift. The next morning, he moved Jackson’s car and took the pistol, which he later threw into Lake Michigan.

Jackson’s body was found a week afterward, and police questioned Morgan, Sr. For days, he denied knowledge of the murder, but eventually he made a taped confession. He told the police, “I wanted to clear my conscience.”

Hood listened to the assistant state’s attorneys, confident that they had all arrived at the same conclusion—that Morgan, Sr.,’s murder of Jackson was “proof that I didn’t kill his son.” But they didn’t consider it a vindicating event: instead, they asked Hood if Morgan, Sr., had paid him to kill his son. “I never seen the father, I never seen the son,” Hood recalls telling them. A conversation that had begun with him anticipating exoneration had ended with the accusation that he was a hit man. He returned to his cell downstate. In 2008, Morgan, Sr., received a seventy-five-year sentence for murdering Jackson. (Morgan, Sr., denied requests to be interviewed.)

Gayle Horn, Hood’s attorney, told me that, by targeting the wrong man, Boudreau and his colleagues had allowed a murderer to remain at large. “There was a serial killer—Morgan, Sr.—who should have been arrested and prosecuted in 1993, ” she said. “Instead, he went on to kill two other women.”

In February, 2011, Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago. He apologized for abusive police tactics, referring to them as a “dark chapter” in Chicago’s history, and said, “This is not who we are.” Meanwhile, the Illinois state government was establishing a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, to consider retrial for dozens of prisoners who were interrogated by Jon Burge, the detective who had been fired for “systematic” abuse of suspects. (In 2010, Burge was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying misconduct even when, according to the judge, a “mountain of evidence” suggested otherwise.) Cook County began exonerating prisoners at a record rate, freeing more prisoners a year than any other county in the nation. But was it enough? Did even more people deserve freedom?

In February, 2012, Anita Alvarez, the state’s attorney, said in a speech, “My job is not just about racking up convictions. It is about always seeking justice—even if that measure of justice means that we must acknowledge mistakes of the past.” Signalling a “shift in philosophy,” she announced the creation of a Conviction Integrity Unit, to insure “that only guilty people are convicted here in Cook County.” Her spokesperson, Sally Daly, told the Tribune that the unit would commence with Hood’s case, which “merits further investigation and a full review.”

Three months later, James Papa, the assistant state’s attorney supervising the new unit, travelled to a prison in southeastern Illinois to interview Jody Rogers, who was now locked up for armed robbery. Rogers said of Hood, “The man didn’t do it.” He told Papa that he’d been intimidated by police and had always maintained that he didn’t know anything about Morgan’s murder. Rogers said of Hood, “Let him out.” Papa and his investigator drove to Michigan, to try to speak with Wayne Washington; Washington refused to talk without his lawyer present, and Papa never followed up. Papa and his investigator also flew to Florida to question Emanuel Bob—the man who had testified about seeing Hood sitting in a car, at night, from a hundred feet away. Bob stood by his story, saying, “Nobody could ever put words in my mouth.” (According to the Innocence Project, nearly three-quarters of the convictions that have been reversed through DNA evidence have featured mistaken eyewitness testimony.)

At the Cook County criminal courthouse, Papa interviewed Hood, who told him that, before his arrest, he “drank mostly Miller products or rum.” He described being threatened and roughed up by Boudreau and Halloran. Hood added that another detective had brandished a pistol and threatened to “put five slugs in him.” Papa asked him if he had ever met Morgan, Sr. “Never,” Hood replied.

Two months later, Papa visited Morgan, Sr., in Stateville, a prison forty miles outside of Chicago. He denied killing his son. “You can take a look at me all you want—I don’t care, I am at peace with myself,” he said. He also denied that he had experienced financial troubles during that period, saying that he had given “most of his money” to “people who were in need.” He had created a life-insurance policy for Morgan, he added, at the request of Morgan’s mother, Marcia Escoffery. (“Bullshit,” Escoffery told me.) “You have the right guys,” Morgan, Sr., told Papa.

A year after Alvarez formed the Conviction Integrity Unit, Papa went before a judge to share its findings on Hood. He did not recommend overturning the conviction. He offered no explanation.

The decision left Hood, his attorneys, and Santek in disbelief. Santek filed a Freedom of Information request with the state’s attorney’s office, seeking documents pertaining to the Conviction Integrity Unit’s investigation and its methods. A week later, a letter arrived informing her that the unit “has no documents that are responsive to this request,” and noting, “There are no forms, protocols, or other documents regarding the creation, implementation or operations of the SAO’s Conviction Integrity Unit.”

Hood’s lawyers petitioned Richard Brzeczek, a former superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, to review the memos that Papa had written after each interview. (None of them featured the phrase “Conviction Integrity Unit,” perhaps explaining the fruitless results of Santek’s FOIA request.) Brzeczek was appalled by Papa’s interview with Morgan, Sr., calling it “superficial, cosmetic, and perfunctory, at best.” Not only had Papa failed to push Morgan, Sr., on the claims about his finances; he had not questioned him about the strong similarities among the deaths of his friend, his son, his fiancée, and his girlfriend. Brzeczek concluded that Hood deserved a “legitimate reinvestigation.”

Over the years, Brzeczek said, he had watched the Cook County state’s attorney’s office fight several “nasty, protracted battles” on cases that “it eventually lost.” He added, “Most of the decisions were based not on legalities or what’s right or what should be done but, rather, on ‘How is this going to wash politically?’ ”

Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, is a member of the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission. He told me that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had “fairly consistently stood behind shaky convictions”—even ones that he described as a “shame and stain” on the city. He suggested several reasons that the office might resist rigorous reviews of certain cases. There were “economic incentives,” given the potential liabilities, and “relationship issues” flowing from the office’s “heavy reliance” on the testimony of officers. Internal investigations of abusive practices had the potential to “undermine hundreds of felony convictions that relied on the word of crooked detectives,” triggering a cascade of overturned verdicts. Eighty per cent of Chicago police officers, Futterman said, have received three or fewer misconduct complaints in their careers; in 2012, a court document filed by the torture-inquiry commission listed thirty-eight incidents of alleged misconduct involving Boudreau—“an eye-popping number.” Futterman continued, “If an individual police officer is exposed, how many other criminal cases might that undermine? If you have a proven instance where an officer lied to put an innocent person in jail, it calls into question all the other cases in which his word has been a primary source of information.” He said of the Conviction Integrity Unit, “Its record is pretty dismal.” He added, “Was it simply a P.R. move? Thus far, there’s no evidence of more than paper reform.”

Papa did not respond to several requests for comment. In an e-mail, Sally Daly, the spokesperson, said, “It would be inappropriate to discuss the specifics of the case,” because of Hood’s ongoing appeal. “More than 12 individuals were interviewed as part of the reinvestigation,” she later noted, including people “located out of state.” Daly added that, since 2012, the office “has vacated the convictions of 9 individuals following comprehensive conviction integrity reviews” and is examining hundreds of others.

One of the prosecutors litigating against Hood in recent proceedings is an assistant state’s attorney named Kurt Smitko. Smitko, I discovered, had participated in the integrity unit’s review of Hood’s case, joining Papa when he interviewed Marcia Escoffery. Wasn’t this a conflict of interest? Daly told me that Smitko “went along” for the interview because he “had a rapport” with Escoffery, but he “did not evaluate the evidence.” Daly added, “There is no conflict.”

I visited Escoffery on a snowy night in January. She and her sister, Sharon Murphy, led me into a living room with a baby grand piano, giant houseplants, and a bay window overlooking an ice-crusted street. It was Morgan’s birthday. “Hell, he would be forty-one today,” Escoffery said, blinking back tears. “I can’t go out there now, but normally I go to the cemetery and take a six-pack.”

I asked them if they thought that Morgan, Sr., had been involved in his son’s death. “Logically?” Murphy said. “You take out life insurance on my nephew? You probably had something to do with it!”

Escoffery stared at the floor and nodded. From what she had seen at the trial, eighteen years ago, she believed in Hood’s guilt. But she wouldn’t rule out Morgan, Sr.,’s involvement. “He hadn’t seen his son in seventeen years and then he got a life-insurance policy,” she said. “How do I know he didn’t kill him for money?” She paused. “If he did it, whatever the penalty is, go for it. Kill him, I don’t care. . . . If they can help me prove that he killed my son, hell, I will pull the lever.”

One morning in April, Santek was sitting in the parking lot outside the medium-security wing of the Menard prison, fixing her hair in the rearview mirror of a rental car. She and her daughter Nyasia got out and headed for the entrance. Nyasia, a thirteen-year-old with long spiral curls, had visited Hood several times before, spoke with him regularly on the phone, and thought of him as a stepfather. A female guard checked their underwear for contraband after Santek signed in. “All the stuff he puts up with,” Santek said, as we waited for Hood.

Hood entered the room without handcuffs. Nyasia nearly leaped into his arms. They hugged, and Hood kissed her on the forehead. He kissed Santek on the cheek. We had been assigned stools around a metal table, and Hood sat down on one, facing the guards. Aloe plants lined the sill.

“May I have a cup of water?” Hood asked a female guard. That morning, the authorities had turned off the water supply as part of a lockdown. The guard, somewhat grudgingly, obliged.

I mentioned to Hood that, amid the tightened security, Santek’s daughter had had to run back to the car twice: once because she had accidentally left her cell phone in her pocket and once because Santek had forgotten to remove a lighter in her purse. (Both were considered contraband.) “You know what you just did?” Hood said to me, smiling. “You just let the cat out of the bag.” Apparently, Santek sneaked the occasional cigarette.

“Only when I’m stressed,” she said.

“It don’t mean I love you less,” Hood said. He winked at her and reached across the table to caress her hand.

Hood could be up for parole in 2030. He would be sixty-seven, and Santek would be in her seventies. His lawyers hope to get him out long before then. In 2009, Gayle Horn and another lawyer, Karl Leonard, filed a petition for post-conviction relief for Hood, arguing that the evidence against him had “unraveled,” and that the officers involved had “a long history of similar misconduct.” Morgan, Sr.,’s most recent murder conviction, they argued, demonstrated a “clear modus operandi: Morgan, Sr. has killed close friends and loved ones for financial gain by shooting them . . . and leaving their partially or fully nude bodies to die in and around abandoned cars.”

The petition contained several components: the claim that Morgan, Sr.,’s “pattern” of murder pointed to Hood’s innocence; police misconduct; and constitutional violations related to the prosecution’s undisclosed payments to Jody Rogers’s brother. The judge, Neera Walsh, granted an evidentiary hearing about the payments, but dismissed the other components, calling the pattern of evidence against Morgan, Sr., “immaterial in nature,” and rejecting the police-misconduct and innocence claims on procedural grounds. No date has been set for the payments hearing.

The state also agreed to conduct a test of “hair-like fibers,” fixed to a strip of black tape, that had been found in Morgan, Sr.,’s trunk during the Michelle Soto investigation. Morgan, Sr., had claimed that the hairs came from a ferret that Michelle’s daughter kept as a pet. The hairs had never been analyzed. In May, the results came back, and indicated that the hairs belonged to a human female. Horn told me she hopes that the judge will consider a new evidentiary hearing.

Hood, sitting in the visitors’ room, steeled himself against getting needlessly excited—especially given that his fortunes depended on the discretion of Cook County judges and prosecutors. On an earlier visit, I had asked Hood if he ever got angry.

“Every day,” he said. “How can you not think about it when you looking at what I’m looking at? Twenty-one years.” He said he realized a while ago that “this thing is bigger than me,” and that “there’s a chain of corruption.”

Hood knew four prisoners at Menard who, since 2010, had been cleared of charges and released. “I see people getting out of the penitentiary, right?” he said. “Exonerated. I read about how they were arrested, how they were exonerated. And I’m, like, ‘Wait a minute—what is going on? You got all this evidence pointing to somebody else? You got nothing pointing at me but some prints.’ ” He couldn’t help feeling that justice was a kind of lottery, and that he was stuck holding a bunk ticket. “Do I have something written on my forehead saying, ‘Y’all can just do something to me’?” he pleaded. “What’s wrong with me?”

[Fuzz]

How Military Guns Make the Civilian Market

So when will we see phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range available in our local gunshop?

[MIKA27]

Take A Sneak Peek At The Simpsons Vs Family Guy Crossover Episode

http://youtu.be/-7YzXMzZ1bU

Later this year, The Simpsons is going to have its first big crossover in almost 20 years, when the cast of Family Guy visits Springfield. It’s going to be the second time ever in which characters from other animation series appear in full capacity in the longest running sitcom in American TV history.

The first crossover was with The Critic, in the episode A Star Is Burns, broadcasted on March 5, 1995. While The Critic was great, it definitely didn’t have the same star status as the Griffins.

The other incoming one-hour-long crossover will be the much awaited appearance of the full Futurama cast in an episode called Simpsorama, which will broadcast in November.

[MIKA27]

Japanese schoolgirl arrested on suspicion of decapitating classmate

A teenage girl has been arrested on suspicion of murdering her classmate and dismembering her body, Japanese police say.

The 15-year-old suspect is accused of attacking her victim with a metal instrument before strangling her to death.

She then severed her victim’s head and left hand, according to police in the city of Sasebo, in Japan’s south west Nagasaki Prefecture.

The body of 15-year-old Aiwa Matsuo was found on a bed at the suspect's condominium on Sunday, according to the Kyodo news agency.

Aiwa’s concerned parents contacted local police when she failed to return home after a night out with friends on Saturday.

The suspect, who has been granted anonymity because of her age, has confessed to the gruesome killing and remains in custody, local media reported.

“She has not provided us with a motive for the attack at the moment,” said a police spokesman.

The two girls are believed to have graduated from the same junior high school.

“I feel so sad and frustrated,” said the principal of the girls’ high school.

“We have kept calling attention to the value of life, but the message has not been delivered.”

The murder comes ten years after a primary schoolgirl stabbed her classmate to death in the same city.

[MIKA27]

DontKillSeanBean campaign launches

Sean Bean has appeared in blockbuster films and TV shows as well as small independent movies, but he rarely comes out of them unscathed. Having been run off a cliff by rampaging cows, shot in the neck with a grappling hook, beheaded and quartered by horses in his 31-year acting career, the Sheffield-born actor hasn’t had much luck cheating death.

Bean himself has acknowledged his fictional mortality, saying: “I've died a lot of different deaths. Maybe it’s the quality of my death people are fascinated by. I liked Lord of the Rings. Big death.”

A still from Black Death, which saw Bean quartered by horses

Now, after a tongue-in-cheek plea by fans, the producers of Bean’s latest TV series Legends have launched #DontKillSeanBean on social media in order to try to keep Bean alive in his new show. The campaign has already gone viral after launching over the weekend, with T-shirts supporting the hashtag appearing at San Diego Comic-Con. Tricia Melton, a marketing executive at TNT, said: “Sean laughed out loud when we first talked to him about it and is 100 per cent behind not getting killed in Legends. He’s got a great sense of humour and is enjoying the fun the fans are having.”

Legends, set to air on TNT in the US, sees Bean play a gruff FBI agent able to adopt a new identity each episode. A source at the channel refused to reveal any information surrounding Bean’s fate on the show, saying that it “will depend on the ratings. He’s safe for a bit.”

[MIKA27]

John Oliver Reminds The US How Badly It Takes Care Of Its Nukes

If you’ve been paying attention since, well, since the Cold War started, you know that the United States has an insanely huge number of nuclear weapons. And if you’ve been paying even closer attention, you’ll know that the military is not very good at keeping track of them. In fact, it’s laughably bad at it.

Enter John Oliver. The former Daily Show correspondent made nuclear weapons the focus of his latest rant. More specifically, he made the utterly horrifying truth that our nuclear arsenal of over 4800 warheads can be controlled with “LP-sized floppy disks” and military officers whose diplomacy efforts are nothing short of insulting. Go ahead and start laughing. At least it’s better than crying.

[MIKA27]

Cryptids of the Caribbean, Part 1: Cuba

Ah, the Caribbean. Long a premiere location for cruise ships and romantic getaways, the area is known for its clear blue waters, fantastic scuba diving, year round sunshine, lush resorts, and stunning white sand beaches. Yet there is more to this paradise of tropical islands and sunshine that many don’t know about. Go beyond the bustling tourist areas of the many idyllic islands of the region and you will find that in addition to postcard perfect beaches and colorful reefs, the islands of the Caribbean are also home to mysterious creatures that hide from man.

The Caribbean Sea is located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and the mainland of the United States, and holds hundreds of islands, islets, reefs, and cays. The region has vast biodiversity, not only within its myriad coral reefs, but also inland as well, largely due to the incredibly wide range of ecosystems to be found here. Dispersed among the islands, one can find everything from rain forests to arid scrub-land habitats, all within relatively close distance of each other. The waters of the Caribbean also boast exceptional diversity of marine ecosystems, and are home to 8% of the world’s coral reefs by surface area. The biodiversity here is so astounding that the Caribbean islands have been classified as a biodiversity hotspot by Conservation International.

It is here among these sun-soaked islands and their clear, azure waters so imbued with natural beauty and diversity of life, that we will take our tour of Caribbean mysteries. In this extensive, 5-part series of articles, let us go out beyond the luxury resorts and throngs of tourists to take a peek at some of the mysterious denizens of these islands.

The start of our journey takes us to Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean and also the second most populous after Hispaniola. Cuba may conjure up images of sipping mojitos on the beach or vintage 1950s cars cruising down old fashioned cobblestone streets, but it is also said to be inhabited by its share of mystery beasts.

Giant Sharks

The seas off of Cojimar, most famous for being the town where Ernest Hemmingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, have long been said to harbor enormous sharks known to terrorize fishermen of the area. In June of 1945, it was also the setting for a harrowing struggle with a huge shark that turned out to be one of the largest great white sharks ever recorded.

It was June of 1945, and a group of Cuban fishermen headed out from Cojimar early in the morning in their boat to fish for marlin and dorado, and tuna. Their boat was a humble affair, a wooden skiff measuring just 14 feet long. The fishermen went out about 3 miles from shore and set out baited long lines as was usual. As the morning wore on under the hot, tropical sun, the fishermen had no luck at all. Not a single fish took their bait, and they came to the realization that other boats in the area also appeared to have not caught anything. It was perhaps not so unusual, yet the fishermen thought it slightly odd that absolutely no fish should be in an area that had consistently produced plentiful catches before.

At around 9 Am, a startled crewman aboard the skiff pointed out across the water and the probable reason for no tuna or marlin in the area made itself apparent. Cutting through the sun-flecked water not far from the skiff was a huge dorsal fin the likes of which none of the fishermen present had seen before. These were all experienced fishermen who had seen a lot of sharks, but this dorsal fin caught their attention due to its sheer size. They decided that such a large shark may be worth some money, and subsequently went about trying to catch it.

Lacking the tackle necessary to pull in such a large shark, the resourceful fishermen cobbled together an improvised set up made of several other lines braided together and topped off with a heavy wire leader and shark hook. The hook was baited with fish and thrown overboard. At first the shark showed no interest, but then the behemoth began to approach the bait. It was then that the horrified fishermen realized that the shark was far larger than their boat.

The shark took the line and was so powerful that the fishermen had to use special wooden floats known as palangres in order to slow the beast down and wear it out. After an hour of the huge shark pulling the boat and floats around, it began to slow down and the fishermen moved in to harpoon it. However, at this point the shark did something highly unusual and actually turned around to attack the boat. It aggressively rushed the wooden skiff and began gnawing at the keel, which reportedly sent splinters of wood flying everywhere as the terrified crew looked on. After heavily damaging the keel, the enraged shark circled and made another rush at the boat, whereupon the fishermen were able to successfully harpoon it. Even after being harpooned, the monstrous shark continued its vicious attack, biting at the rudder and thrashing at the boat for some time before it finally succumbed to its wounds and was brought to shore.

It was then that the size of the shark truly became apparent. It was measured at well over 21 feet in length, around 23 or 24 feet by some accounts, and said to weigh around 7,100 pounds. Since great white sharks are known to reach around 17 feet on average, and attain maximum lengths of around 20 feet, the Cuban shark would be one of the largest, if not the largest, ever recorded. It was so large that locals called it El Monstruo De Cojimar, or “The Beast of Cojimar.” The specimen would certainly outclass the current record for the largest reliably measured specimen, which was a female caught in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence off Prince Edward Island in 1988 and was 6.1 meters (21 feet) long. The problem with the Monster of Cojimar is that, while many experts deem it as a reliable account, the accuracy of the measurements have been called into question by some and so it remains officially unverified.

The Monster of Cojimar

This specimen may be enormous, but fishermen in the area have brought in unverified reports of even larger sharks prowling the waters of Cuba. Sharks up to 30 feet or more have been allegedly sighted on occasion, the claims of which are somewhat made more credible in light of the capture of the Monster of Cojimar. Perhaps when visiting Cuba, it may be a good idea to just stay on the beach.

Flying Dinosaurs

The seas are not the only place in Cuba to hold mysteries. The skies are also allegedly prowled by large, unexplained winged beasts.

One Californian woman by the name of Patty Carson reported seeing something both inexplicable and frightening in the skies above Guantanamo Bay when she was a little girl living there at the naval base. In 1965, Carson was walking home one day with her little brother when they noticed something large rummaging through tall grass by the side of the road. She recounted how a featherless, winged creature that was as tall as a man and possessed a plenitude of small, needle-like teeth, as well as a long tail with a tip shaped like a diamond, suddenly popped its head and shoulders up over the top of the grass. She described it as a “flying dinosaur,” and said that it was very close, only about 30 feet away.

The creature was apparently just as startled as the two children were, and after freezing for a few moments, the thing soared up into the air and away with a swoosh of its massive wings as the two astonished children looked on. The woman immediately told her parents, who perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t believe her and admonished her for telling tall tales. Nevertheless, the memory of the event and of the creature’s appearance has remained fresh and clear in the woman’s mind to this day. Carson continues to insist that her story is true.

Sketch of the creature Patty Carson saw.

In 1966, only a year after this incident, Patty’s brother Tom Carson would have another separate sighting of the same beast. This time, the boy, who was 10 years old at the time, saw the creature when he was by himself. Although he only glimpsed it for a few seconds, Tom remembered that it had a tail that resembled “the shaved tail of a dog.”

At this point, one could be forgiven for questioning the reliability and veracity of these particular reports, but they becomes more intriguing when compared to another eyewitness account that occurred in the same area just a few years later in 1971. A U.S. marine by the name of Eskin Kuhn, who was stationed at the base in 1971, reported seeing what he described as two “pterodactyls” one day while taking a break outside of the barracks.

Kuhn described the creatures as having 10 foot wingspans, with leathery wings that had a structure similar to that of bats. The creatures were also described as having short hind legs attached to the rearward part of the wings, as well as long tails with what he called “tufts of hair” at the end and prominent vertebrate jutting out between the shoulder blades. The two creatures were flying in close formation at an altitude of around 100 feet. Kuhn said that he sketched a picture of the creature not long after the sighting.

The marine’s physical description of the creatures closely matched that of Carson 7 years prior, a person with whom Kuhn had never had contact.

That these two sightings match each other so closely and occurred in the same area within the same time frame by two unconnected eyewitnesses certainly is interesting. Are these fabricated tall tales, or did these people really see something?

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker

Many of you are probably already at least somewhat familiar with the ivory-billed woodpecker of North America. The ivory-billed woodpecker was one of the largest species of woodpecker in the world and was native to virgin forests of the southeastern United States. It was a striking looking bird, with a shiny blue-black body, white markings on the body and wings that stand out in stark contrast to the overall dark coloring, and a bright red crest on males of the species. The ivory-billed woodpecker’s habitat was devastated by logging in the late 19th century, and the last known specimens were killed in Florida in 1920. Although thought to have been extinct from this time, the birds are occasionally sighted to this day and have become sort of a Holy Grail for birdwatchers and ornithologists.

What many people may not be aware of is that there was also a subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker native to the old-growth forests of Cuba. The Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker was once common throughout the island, but the clearing of much of the birds’ lowland deciduous forest habitat pushed them into ever more limited areas until they were practically extinct by the 1940s. The Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker was considered to be critically endangered by the 1950s. The birds were hardly ever seen and numerous expeditions to locate them at the time were often unsuccessful. In 1956, researcher George Lamb found only 6 viable territories within the heavily deforested Cuchillas de Moa range, which was one of the only places left to still have a surviving population.

Photo of a Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker taken by George Lamb in 1956.

There were conservation efforts to save the birds in the 1950s, but these efforts were hindered by the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

The last confirmed specimen of the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker was a female that was found in a hilly pine forest of an area known as Ojito de Agua by a group of ornithologists in 1987, who were following up on recent sightings in the area. It was a hopeful find, but sadly would prove to be the last official sighting of one. In 1988, calls from ivory-billed woodpeckers were heard on 8 separate occasions in the area by ornithologists, but no birds were sighted during the expedition. The government immediately took measures to protect the habitat, but subsequent surveys of the area turned up no further signs of the bird. The Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker is thought to have become extinct in 1990 at the latest.

Much like its North American counterpart, the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker has since become a highly sought after, almost mythical animal. Sightings continue to trickle in to this day, and the birds’ distinctive calls are reported on occasion from remote pine forests on the island. A very reliable report of calls came in 1988 from high in the Sierra Maestra of southeastern Cuba. Follow up expeditions to the area not only found no woodpeckers, but also deemed the area to be a poor habitat for the birds, a dire assessment further supported by the lack of any historic sightings in the region.

Rare photo of a Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker.

To this day, the area originally set aside for the woodpeckers is still there. It’s a remote and little explored area that is now part of Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, and is still protected land. It is from this rugged wilderness that the bulk of modern day sightings of the woodpeckers originate. There have continued to be sporadic attempts to officially locate surviving ivory-billed woodpeckers in the area, but so far nothing has been found except what was thought to be perhaps the roost hole for one. It is fortunate that such a promising habitat has remained protected, but until more solid physical or photographic evidence for its continued existence comes to light, it seems that the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker will continue to remain officially extinct.

Nevertheless, sightings continue and with the unmistakable plumage exhibited by the ivory-billed woodpecker, birdwatchers who have claimed to have spotted the birds have little doubt of what they have seen. Maybe these majestic birds are still out there in the wilds of Cuba, far from the city lights of Havana and the prying eyes of humankind.

Well, it’s time to depart Cuba and head to our next Caribbean destination in search of mysterious animals. Please be sure to read the upcoming next part in the series “Cryptids of the Caribbean: Part 2,” and join us on the next leg of our Caribbean cryptid cruise which will be departing very soon!

[MIKA27]

When gin was full of sulphuric acid and turpentine

Gin did not shake off its bad reputation in the 19th Century

It's 250 years since the death of William Hogarth. His famous work Gin Lane still informs the way people think about the drink.

It's arguably the most potent anti-drug poster ever conceived. A woman, her clothes in disarray, her head thrown back in intoxicated oblivion, allows her baby to slip from her grasp, surely to its death in a stairwell below.

She's the centrepiece in an eye-wateringly grim urban melee - full of death, misery, starvation and fighting.

The year was 1751. The drug in question was gin. And the engraving was a conscious effort by William Hogarth, along with his friend novelist Henry Fielding, to force the government to do something about a drink that was threatening to tear apart the social fabric of England.

The craze had started with changes in the laws at the end of 17th Century aimed at curbing consumption of French brandy by liberalising the distilling industry.

The Glorious Revolution in 1688 saw the arrival of William and Mary, from the Netherlands, to topple James II. The Dutch influx brought a new spirit - genever - which rapidly caught on in England.

"There was a good chance in the 18th Century that the gins being drunk in London were genever-style," says Gary Regan, author of the Bartender's Gin Compendium. "A lot of it was probably really terrible. People were distilling in their houses."

Of course, the genever being drunk by William III and his successors was not easy to replicate in a bathtub in a basement. The eager entrepreneurs reached for just about any additive they could in an effort to make the drink even vaguely palatable.

Types of gin

Genever, Jenever: Dutch spirit, still immensely popular in the Netherlands today. Distilled from malt wine and flavoured with juniper, hence the name jenever. Also referred to as Madam Geneva in English.

Old Tom Gin: Now used to refer to a style of gin popular in England in the 19th Century. Typically sweeter than modern gin. Various explanations for how name came to be. Traditionally often featuring some sort of cat on the bottle.

London Dry Gin: Modern style of gin, which has dominated since the late 19th Century.

Plymouth Gin: Similar to London dry gin, although said to be slightly sweeter, and the subject of protected geographical indication status, meaning it can only be made in Plymouth.

Sloe Gin: A liqueur made from gin and sloe berries from the blackthorn.

"You had a poorer populace who aspired to drink like the king," says Lesley Solmonson, author of Gin: A Global History. "They wanted novelty. But the poor couldn't afford the genever that the king was drinking."

Instead home distilling operations mushroomed, with some areas having every single building churning out bad gin.

"They were using sulphuric acid, turpentine and lime oil," says Solmonson. "It was like death in a glass. One tankard could kill you."

"People were drinking to forget their misery. These gins were roughly double what the proof of a modern gin is. And they were drinking a whole tankard of it."

For even the most virtuous pauper, temptation was hard to avoid.

"It was ferociously adulterated," says Jenny Uglow, author of Hogarth: A Life and a World. "And it was sold everywhere - in grocer's shops and ship's chandlers. There was a bar in every building. It has been said that it tasted more like rubbing alcohol."

The first half of the 18th Century saw rapidly escalating concern over the new drug's effects, as the records of the Old Bailey show.

From Gin Lane to the height of sophistication

Take the case of William Burroughs, charged with assault and robbery in 1731. The court heard: "He drove hackney Coaches, and by that means fell into that dreadful Society of Gin-drinkers, Whores, Thieves, House-breakers, Street-robbers, Pick-pockets, and the whole train of the most notable Black guards in and about London."

Or James Baker, convicted of robberies in 1733. The court records say: "He was one of them who frequented Gin-Shops, where he got into acquaintance of the vilest Company in the World, who for two or three Years past, drove him headlong to destruction, and into all kind of Villanies."

But arguably the most shocking case of the era was that of Judith Defour, convicted in 1734 of taking her daughter out of the workhouse and strangling her in order to sell her clothes to raise money to buy gin. She confessed and was hanged.

There was legislation throughout the first half of the 18th Century but nothing that adequately tackled the issue. Hogarth and Fielding thought they could finally be the ones to get the message across.

Fielding's contribution was an investigation into the crime, entitled an Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers. "Fielding was a magistrate," says Uglow. "It was very much a case of trying to solve an urban crisis that gave rise to a lot of other crime and domestic abuse and violence and robbery. The demon drink was an instrument of wider and deeper social malaise."

Hogarth's engraving, paired with its companion Beer Street, singing the praises of a much weaker drink, hammered the message home. Gin was evil. Beer was good.

Not that those lying around sozzled in basements were moved by the engraving. "I shouldn't think the people drinking the gin took too much notice but the people living and working among them did," says Uglow.

"Engravings would have been bought by opinion formers. But they also hung in the print shop windows."

Soon a new law followed. "This new legislation came a few months after the prints were published," says Val Bott, of the Hogarth Trust. The Gin Act 1751 effectively eliminated most of the smaller gin shops, where the worst excesses occurred.

William Hogarth 1697-1764

• English artist, satirist and social reformer
• Other famous works include A Rake's Progress, Marriage A La Mode, and Heads Of Six Of Hogarth's Servants
• Made living by selling engravings of his work, rather than relying on rich patrons

Hogarth and Fielding recognised the underlying problems. The desperate poor were driven to drink. The mere existence of gin didn't cause the social problems.

"Gin Lane is about the destruction of the social fabric. But it is not snarky, it is not getting at the poor," says Uglow.

"Hogarth was very concerned about the children - the future of the nation."

The legislation of 1751 only really targeted the tipple of the poor. "It was a time when many drank heavily," says Uglow. "There was the four-bottle man in the club drinking claret and port. There was no crackdown on that."

There was a decline in gin consumption after the 1751 act, although some historians blame either rising grain prices or a switch to other drinks.

Gin wasn't dead. But it did change.

"I don't think the sort of thing we are interested in today, with elegant botanicals, would have been recognisable to Hogarth," says Bott.

But there is at the moment, with the decidedly retro-obsessed cocktail trend, greater interest in the history of gin than ever before.

In 1830, the invention of the Coffey still changed the way gin was made. By the end of the 19th Century, the London dry gin style, familiar to modern drinkers, was dominant.

Drinks giant Diageo has just launched Tanqueray Old Tom Gin, referring to a type of slightly sweeter gin believed to be a "missing link" between the horror of Hogarth's gin and London dry gin. The new formulation uses a recipe from the archives of Charles Tanqueray in the 1830s.

Tanqueray joins other brands of Old Tom Gin being bought by cocktail enthusiasts, including Hayman's and Jensen's in the UK, and Ransom in the US.

There's a colourful story behind the name, says Hayman's director Miranda Hayman. She is the 5th generation of a gin distilling family. Her great-great grandfather was James Burrough, who created Beefeater gin in the late 19th Century.

"A gentleman called Captain Dudley Bradstreet got a figure of a cat put outside his house. If you put money in the mouth, a shot of gin would come out of the paw."

Another less exotic explanation is simply that Old Tom was named after a distiller, Thomas Chamberlain.

We'll never even know if the taste of the modern Old Tom Gins are anywhere near to the gin of the early 19th Century.

But what we do know is that gin was left, at least in part thanks to Hogarth's propaganda, with a slightly grubby reputation, long after the poisons were removed and the proof was lowered.

Use the expression "mother's ruin" and people know you're referring to gin.

And consider the number of people who avoid gin, while stating it is a depressant. It is, but only because all alcohol is a depressant. Any extra effect is entirely psychosomatic.

So if you feel gin has a particularly bad effect on you, perhaps you should blame Hogarth. His depiction has been hard to shake.

[MIKA27]

Is Cannibalism Unhealthy Or Just Awful?

If, say, a human ate another human in an apocalyptic scenario, would it be unhealthy? Or gross? Or just generally awful? It would, in fact, be all kinds of bad. Allows us to explain how.

Unhealthy

For the Devourer

Depending on what parts are eaten (the most infected include the brain, spinal cord, bone marrow and small intestine), human cannibals run the risk of contracting a fatal prion malady, similar to Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (think Mad Cow), known as kuru.

First discovered among the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, kuru (“shaking death”) was contracted when people (mostly women) consumed their dead as part of a funereal ritual of respect and mourning (transumption).

The Fore believed that a person’s spirit could not be free until his body was consumed. So when a family member died, she was ritualistically cooked and then eaten, mostly by women and the children they fed. As part of the ritual, every part of the body, with the exception of the bitter gall bladder, was consumed.

Not all prions are bad, but some develop an abnormality in their shapes. As these abnormal prions from the infected deceased worked their way into their new victim’s brains, they caused great destruction due to their ability to make other proteins conform to their same, abnormal shape. These conformed proteins aggregate in sponge-like clumps that prevent brain cells from functioning properly.

When the disease strikes, a variety of symptoms can be displayed including loss of coordination (to the point of appearing drunk), uncontrollable trembling, rictus and unresponsive paralysis. Ultimately victims either suffocate or starve to death as their internal organs also become paralysed. From first appearance to death typically takes only 6 to 12 months.

Over two decades spanning the late 1950s to 1970s, the Fore suffered an epidemic of kuru with over 2,500 people, mostly women and children, succumbing to the disease.

Remarkably, although the practice of transumption among the Fore ended (for the most part) shortly after Australian authorities outlawed it in the mid-1950s, people continued to contract, and die from, kuru even into the 21st century. This has led some scientists to conclude that kuru may have a 50-year incubation period.

Other than kuru, I could find no evidence of cannibals suffering from any other illnesses (setting aside potential mental health) as a result of eating human flesh. This includes no record of physical illness in anyone from the infamous Donner party, the 1972 Andean plane crash memorialised in the book Alive, or any of the modern day cannibals described below.

For the Devoured

Although cannibalism is brutal by its nature, not everyone who is attacked by cannibals dies, and one victim lived to tell her tale:

Soldiers marched into her home carrying machetes and told her . . . “Today we are going to cut off your arm” . . . “They cut off my arm . . . cooked it, while they were drinking our . . . beer, and ate it with the rest of the beans and rice . . . They told me they were going to find my husband and eat his heart.

Just Awful

Warlords

During the worst of the Ituri Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1999-2003), rebel groups used cannibalism as a way to get their fighters to “cross a psychological line, making them more willing to follow orders that would otherwise be unthinkable.” With the added benefit of intimidating the civilian population and striking terror in their enemies, they saw it as a win-win. Over the past decade, the International Criminal Court has been holding hearings and trials, in an effort to try their leaders for war crimes.

Worse still is the story of General Butt Naked, a Liberian warlord-priest who killed and consumed his first person, as part of a devil-worshiping ritual sacrifice, at the age of 11 in 1982. Over the next 14 years, he led an army of (mostly) naked child soldiers (they wore boots) and flamed the fans of Liberia’s civil war. Before each battle, General Butt Naked would choose, kill and consume a child, the sacrifice of which he and his brigade believed gave them strength, and “purified them for battle.” Luckily for those around him, in July 1996, General Butt Naked saw Jesus in a blinding vision, converted to Christianity, and today lives as a Christian preacher. (You can read more about General Butt Naked here.)

Fetishists

In 2001, Armin Meiwes of Rotenburg, Germany, placed an ad seeking “young, well-built men aged 18-30 to slaughter.” Remarkably, the ad was answered, and Bernd Jürgen cooperated with Meiwes, while the latter cut off his penis and cooked it for the two to eat together (we know this because the entire scene was filmed). While Jürgen was bleeding to death, he was also filmed telling Meiwes, “If I’m still alive tomorrow morning, we’ll eat my balls.”

After initial legal obstacles, such as the victim’s consent, prosecutors were able to successfully convict Meiwes of murder in 2006.

In July 2014, the former New York City police officer and so-called “cannibal cop,” Gilberto Valle, was freed on bond after his conviction for conspiracy to kidnap, kill and eat his estranged wife and other women was overturned due to lack of evidence. That lack of evidence included testimony that he had intended to eat women, for instance after roasting one alive over an open fire and boiling another down and placing her on a platter with an apple in her mouth. After overturning the conviction, the U.S. District Court Judge Paul Gardephe stated that, while gruesome, the evidence at hand amounted to nothing more than “fantasy role-play.” His attorney stated, “We don’t put people in jail for their thoughts. We are not the thought police.”

[MIKA27]

The Business Behind Fake Hollywood Money

In late 2000, the producers and crew for action flick Rush Hour 2 gathered at the now-defunct Desert Inn in Las Vegas and prepared to blow up a casino. The scene, which pitted policemen and Secret Service agents against a counterfeiter attempting to launder $US100 million in superdollars, was to culminate with hundreds of thousands of fake bills floating through the air.

After several days of filming, the sequence was a success. Then, something incredibly odd happened. The bills, which had been supplied by a major Hollywood prop house, were picked up by movie extras and passersby and were attempted to be passed off as legal tender in various stores along the strip. The authorities weren’t too thrilled. Secret Service agents glided in, swiftly detained somewhere north of $US100 million worth of prop money, then accused the prop maker — Independent Studio Services (ISS) — of counterfeiting, and ordered a cease and desist on all of their faux cash.

For ISS (the company who produced the money), the premise of Rush Hour 2 had become a reality — and they were penned as the bad guy. Sadly, their story is indicative of a constant dilemma faced by prop suppliers in Hollywood: the necessity to skirt the line between strict counterfeiting laws and producers’ demands for incredibly realistic money.

Money in the Movies: A Brief History

A counterfeit Mexican bill used in 1940s-era cinema

Today, “movie money” is ubiquitous and plays a multitude of roles in TV shows and films. It can be seen clutched in the hands of heisters and gangsters, tucked covertly into steel suitcases, and splayed across poker tables in smoky rooms. But as far back as the inception of film (anywhere from 1878 to 1895, depending on one’s definition of the medium), money has been represented on the big screen.

Fred Reed, author of Show Me the Money, a book compiling the history of currency in the movies (both real and fake), chronicles how the use of real money gradually transitioned into the use of fake money. Legal tender made its big-screen debut in Thomas Edison’s 1895 kinetoscope film of a cock fight, in which two men wager ferociously; a few years later, in 1903′s The Great Train Robbery, real money was prominently featured during a stick-up scene.

But just as film began to flourish in the early 1900s, counterfeiting crimes rose; as a precaution, Federal laws were enacted that barred the use of real currency in full-scale photography. Studios found a replacement in 1920: when the Mexican Revolution ended, vast quantities of Mexican currency, rendered worthless by the war, were acquired by Hollywood producers and used in lieu of U.S. tender. When the supply of these notes diminished a decade later, studios began replicating other Mexican currencies. By the 1960s, this crude prop money was in widespread use.

Gradually, prop houses in Hollywood began sensing producers’ demands for more believable U.S. currency, and a new era of movie money was born. Between 1970 to 2000, nearly 270 types and 2,000 sub-varieties of movie money were produced for Hollywood’s use. To win market share, prop masters increasingly competed in creating the most realistic fake cash available — but it came at a very real cost.

Legal Counterfeiters

Modern-day movie prop bills

Gregg Bilson Jr. is the CEO of Independent Studio Services, a Sunland, California-based prop company his father started out of an abandoned Lockheed hangar nearly 40 years ago. Today, his company houses over one million props in seven locations around the United States and Europe. They have provided props for nearly every blockbuster movie and hit TV show in the last few decades, from 90210 to Indiana Jones. They also fatefully supplied the prop money for Rush Hour 2, a job that still haunts them 13 years later.

When Priceonomics called Bilson to discuss his business, he painstakingly recalled the repercussions of the 2000 incident. The Secret Service came knocking on his door — first with a cease and desist ordering production of the fake currency be cut off, then again to confiscate all of his digital files and currency inventory as it returned from movie sets around the world. In all, they eradicated nearly $US200 million in fake studio bills. At roughly an $US8 real money cost per $US10,000 stack of fake bills, the loss was steep for the company.

As it turns out, the Feds have strict laws about the production of fake currency. According to the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, a reproduced bill must be: a.) either less than 75% or more than 150% the size of a real bill, b.) one-sided, and c.) made with only one colour (so as to discourage the reproduction of identifying factors). Over the phone, Bilson elaborates that his bills at the time fit most of the criteria:

“The bills looked pretty god awful…we had 28 factors that were different — they said “In Dog We Trust,” for instance — but the Secret Service is very clear on their definition of counterfeiting. Honestly, if you followed their instructions, you may as well use Monopoly money. Feature films demand a certain bar of quality, so everyone is asked to break law in a sense by making prop money.”

The Secret Service begged to differ. “They thought they’d followed the rules,” said Chuck Ortman, a special agent in Los Angeles, following theRush Hour 2 incident. “In reality, the product they were producing was just too close to genuine…son of a gun, if it’s green and it says ’20′ on it, somebody will take it.”

A real $US100 bill (top) vs. Bilson’s $US100 bill (bottom)

Bilson was eventually forced to destroy his entire inventory of currency — “somewhere in the billions” — at considerable loss for ISS, which is one of only two firms in Los Angeles that produces fake currency for the movies. The other, Earl Hays Press, came under fire of its own in 2000. When a hard-core metal band rained its audience with the company’s fake bills at a music video shoot, unwitting participants attempted to spend the money; the stunt resulted in the confiscation of Hays’ entire inventory. Subsequently, some of the bills ended up at Ellis Props and Graphics (one of Hollywood’s oldest outfits), and the Secret Service ordered that they cease operation, costing them tens of thousands of dollars.

To re-enter the fake currency market, Bilson had to drastically change his product. Today, he manufactures stacks of blank paper, then tops them with one real hundred-dollar bill — a practice that is permitted legally. “There’s a wive’s tale out there that you can’t use real money on camera,” he says, referring to laws from the early 20th century, “but that’s no longer true.” His stacks are glued together so they can’t be separated and “used to buy Slurpees at 7-11″ by movie assistants and interns.

Even with its altered appearance, ISS’s movie money has appeared in “tens of thousands of commercials, films, and TV shows” — 24, CSI, The Dark Knight, Dexter, and The Hangover included. In a now-iconic Breaking Bad scene, characters sprawl out on massive stacks of the company’s bills.

Bilson and other prop builders’ ultimate goal — “to blur the line between what’s legitimate and what’s not” — creates problems for them beyond movie money. “Police stuff, for instance, is something you’ve got to be careful with,” says Bilson. “If it’s too real, you’ll have issues.” For this reason, prop houses make themselves accessible only to “bona fide motion picture entities,” which must have $US1 million insurance policies on file to merely rent out something as simple as a ten-dollar police badge.

While Bilson understands the intentions of the Secret Service, he also feels the efforts are misappropriated. Confiscations have drummed up concerns about on-screen realism; if prop houses continue to be heavily monitored, Bilson fears Hollywood may be forced to seek out less-trackable, more illegal options. “If you make all of this illegal for anyone in any capacity to possess, then what you have is a black market with no controls,” he says. “When fake money is within a prop house’s jurisdiction, we have level of control. If something’s missing, we can alert authorities.”

Fake money from “To Live and Die in L.A.,” a 1985 film about a counterfeiter

So why not avoid all of this by using stacks of real money? According to Bilson, that would be a major logistical issue. “If you’re shooting a scene with $US100,000 in cash, you don’t want to have $US100,000 of actual money on set,” he reasons. “That’s a liability.” While a small number of films do employ real money, it’s usually for special reasons.

Producers for 1978′s The Brinks Job opted to use real cash for a scene with extreme close-ups of huge piles of money; it was loaned from a bank, guards hawked over it for the duration of the scene, and it was collected, counted, and returned immediately following the shoot. There is also a small market for “period money.” Pam Elyea of History for Hire, a family-run prop business in Sun City, stays out of the phony lucre business, instead renting out small amounts of real money for historical films. For instance, her business was recently commissioned by the producers of Betsy Smith, a movie set in the 1920s, to provide bills from that era. Elyea adds that it’s “hard for production companies to liquidate assets after the film or television series,” so they choose to rent cash out instead of purchasing it at face value.

If Gregg Bilson truly intended to be a counterfeiter, he jokes that he could produce “much more exceptional money.” Instead, he chooses to “do good rather than evil.”

Like other prop masters, Bilson isn’t trying to “dupe the public” — he’s just trying to help make movies a more life-like experience. Despite his efforts, it seems the stigmas around counterfeiting will always create problems for him in the industry. “We try to make realistic props — that’s it,” he says, “sometimes we cross the line of realism, but that’s our job.”

[MIKA27]

Fighter Jet Pilot Takes Badass Selfie Worthy Of A Sci-Fi Nightmare

Cool selfie of an Eurofighter Typhoon jet fighter pilot looking all badass and futuristic, like snapshot from some future Halo game cutscene.

[MIKA27]

Cocoa Farmers Trying Chocolate For The First Time Is A Must-Watch

You would think that chocolate is universal. Something that is everywhere, that everyone can enjoy. It’s not. There are people who have never tried it, even the farmers who break their backs to harvest cocoa beans for a few cents in the Ivory Coast. Watch their faces light up when they eat it for the first time.

Watching them marvel about this sweet food that comes from the beans they harvest is amazing to me. First, because it’s a joy to see their faces. Then, because it’s a stark reminder of how amazingly lucky we are.

For us westerners chocolate is just one more thing. It’s inconsequential. We like to eat it, sometimes we get delighted by it for a minute. But more often than not it’s just one more snack to stuff our fat faces with. We don’t think about it and the incredible effort and resources that are required to make it. We take it for granted along with the other billion foods and the other billion other technologies and privileges we didn’t fight for.

I’m not posting this to be preachy. This comes from a place of true wonder, to remind myself about my own comfortable numbness and the hundred things that I take for granted every day. One day something fatal will happen and then you will realise how much time you wasted whining about this or that rather than enjoying the infinite amount of awesome (yes, everything is awesome!) stuff that exists around you.

I hope those men deservedly enjoy many more bars of Chocolate.

[MIKA27]

China's Building The World's Biggest Sea Plane

Just because the Spruce Goose never took off doesn’t mean that aquatic planes in general are wholly useless; these aquatic turbo-props are still used for a variety of humanitarian efforts throughout the world. Now, China has announced that it’s currently developing the world’s biggest functional sea plane. But will it ever get off the ground?

Built by China Aviation Industry General Aircraft (CAIGA), the TA “Dragon” 600 amphibious aircraft will boast an estimated 50-tonne maximum takeoff weight and upper operational range of 5000km, making the aircraft ideal for emergency operations — including firefighting and humanitarian relief efforts — where short takeoff and landing (STOL) capabilities are required. Plus, its seafaring abilities enable the plane to land in remote areas where lakes and other bodies of water are present but where landing strips or airfields may not be.

The plane is still under development, although CAIGA officials are confident that it will be ready for initial flight testing by the end of 2015. Should the Dragon 600 pass its tests, it should enter service shortly thereafter, dethroning Japan’s ShinMaywa US-2 (shown above) as the world’s largest operational amphibious aircraft.

[MIKA27]

Spectacular Kung Fu Goal Is Pure Soccer Magic

This amazing goal is why Swedish soccer player Zlatan Ibrahimović is one of the very best in the world. Watch as he flies through the air, kicking the ball like he’s some kind of kung-fu master and changes its direction with a twist of his foot. The goalie is so stunned that all he can do is watch in disbelief.

For cocky Zlatan, however, it’s business as usual.

Another angle, which makes it look even more impossible.

http://youtu.be/AUSOrrJngM8

[MIKA27]

Scientists Reveal The Secrets Of Mysterious Ship Found Under Twin Towers

Scientists have found the secrets of the old ship unearthed in 2010 under the ruins of the Twin Towers. First, the large vessel — buried under 6.7m of soil and wreckage — was built around the same time the Declaration of Independence was signed. There’s more — but there’s also one big mystery left unsolved.

By comparing the wood’s ring patterns with the historical record, researchers at Columbia’s Tree Ring Lab led by Dr Martin-Benito found that the ship was built in a Philadelphia shipyard around 1773. Most importantly, the rings matched samples from Independence Hall — the building where the founding fathers signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

From the study abstract:

On July 2010, archaeologists monitoring excavation at the World Trade Center site (WTC) in Lower Manhattan found the remains of a portion of a ship’s hull. Because the date of construction and origin of the timbers were unknown, samples from different parts of the ship were taken for dendrochronological dating and provenancing. After developing a 280-year long floating chronology from 19 samples of the white oak group (Quercus section Leucobalanus), we used 21 oak chronologies from the eastern United States to evaluate absolute dating and provenance. Our results showed the highest agreement between the WTC ship chronology and two chronologies from Philadelphia (r  =  0.36; t  =  6.4; p < 0.001; n  =  280) and eastern Pennsylvania (r  =  0.35; t  =  6.3; p < 0.001; n  =  280). The last ring dates of the seven best-preserved samples suggest trees for the ship were felled in 1773 CE or soon after. Our analyses suggest that all the oak timbers used to build the ship most likely originated from the same location within the Philadelphia region, which supports the hypothesis independently drawn from idiosyncratic aspects of the vessel’s construction, that the ship was the product of a small shipyard. Few late-18th Century ships have been found and there is little historical documentation of how vessels of this period were constructed. Therefore, the ship’s construction date of 1773 is important in confirming that the hull encountered at the World Trade Center represents a rare and valuable piece of American shipbuilding history.

Past analysis of the wood also found burrowing holes produced by a worm plague, which researchers think the ship got in a trip to the Caribbean. Dr Martin-Benito believe that this was the reason why the ship suffered a premature death on the coast of Manhattan.

One mystery remains, however: How the hell did the ship end down here? Here’s a possible answer:

Historians still aren’t certain whether the ship sank accidently or if it was purposely submerged to become part of a landfill used to bulk up Lower Manhattan’s coastline. Oysters found fixed to the ship’s hull suggest it at least languished in the water for some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt.

[MIKA27]

Australian 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Poster Pulled After Controversial Terrorism References

Paramount Pictures in Australia is into some hot water today following a poster promo for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and its abstract links to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Whoops.

The poster, published on Twitter and Facebook last night, depicts the Turtles jumping off a tower as it explodes, while prominently featuring the release date “September 11″ on the poster.

Obviously, Paramount isn’t making a movie about the tragic September 11 terrorist attacks in New York back in 2001, but some people seemed to interpret it that way.

The building poster appears to only have been published on Australian social media channels. The poster in the US simply features the heroes standing in a circle against a black background.

It’s not the first time that September 11 references have been pulled from movies. As far back as the originalSpiderman movie, scenes were being altered and promotional material has been pulled.

Add this one to the pile.

http://youtu.be/nCjsWpM9zFU

[MIKA27]

Dark Data, Amber, and Attenborough

When Sam Heads started his new job at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS) in 2009, he heard rumors of buried treasure. As a paleoentomologist, his research focuses on insects of the past. While Heads ramped up his research on the evolution of insects as recorded in fossils, he also started digging around in random closets and cupboards. He was looking for a treasure in amber.

Amber is fossil tree resin. It’s not technically “sap”; resins don’t have any nutritional value to the plant, and often contain terpenes and very sticky, gummy compounds. The Dominican Republic has a great deal of amber, although it’s only about 20 million years old. Dominican amber is from a legume that grew like a tree; a surprising ancestral relative of our modern bean plants.

Some of the 160 pounds of amber that are yielding new discoveries.

In 1959, another INHS scientist, Milton Sanderson, collected 160 pounds of amber during research travels in the Caribbean and had it shipped back to Illinois in 5-gallon drums. He published a short paper in the journal Science in 1960 describing the many insects, plants and spiders he found in some amber as inclusions. And then he moved onto other things. When Sanderson retired in 1975, the buckets of amber went into storage. Somewhere.

Amber with insect inclusions is an insect net extending back into the distant past. The inclusions were created by resin rolling down the trunk of a tree, entombing a mix of different animals, pollen, and other organisms. Amber helps us reconstruct the ecological communities of the past. It’s probably the closest to time travel a scientist can get without a Tardis.

“One day, we opened up a cupboard under a sink of all places, and here were these buckets of amber.” Heads, a proper Brit, could neither confirm nor deny that there may have been some strong words of excitement upon making the discovery.

Forever Amber

In a new paper published today, one of the treasures stashed under a sink was revealed: a remarkably intact pygmy grasshopper from the Early Miocene, 20.4 million years ago.

Electrotettix, a new genus and species of pygmy grasshopper discovered in amber.

What makes this grasshopper exciting is that it’s a transitional fossil; it shows an intermediate stage between insects of the past and modern insects. Today’s pygmy grasshoppers do not have wings; our oldest pygmy fossils do have wings. This fossil lands right in the middle of the timeline, and has vestigial wings. The reduced wings of the newly described fossil would not have supported the grasshopper in flight.

This hopper is also tiny, only 8 millimeters long, and was in a large chunk of amber full of other interesting fossils (see photo above). How do you get a close look at a minuscule insect in a piece of 20-million-year-old hardened plant goo? You cut it into pieces with a jeweler’s saw. That is just as nerve-wracking as you might imagine.

“Amber is horrible stuff to have to image and photograph. It really is a pain to work with,” said Heads. Jared Thomas, INHS amber preparator, explained: “You practice with amber that doesn’t have inclusions. That makes it much more ok if you screw up. ‘Hey, I found a fossil! Oh, just obliterated it. Sorry.’”

Thomas and Heads spent several hours trying to decide where to cut. “I held my breath, and cut the piece. We were quite pleased that we didn’t destroy anything” said Heads. Thomas added “Sam (Heads) cut this piece, because I thought ‘If I screw this up I’m done for.” Fortunately, the cuts went as planned.

The new species was christened Electrotettix attenboroughi. Electrotettix, the genus name, combines electrum (Latin, “amber”) and tettix (Greek, “grasshopper”). The species name honors Sir David Attenborough, British naturalist and film maker, who inspired Heads and many others to study natural history.

A transitional fossil is a fitting tribute; Attenborough’s Life on Earth remains one of the best explanations of animal and plant evolution around decades after its release. Attenborough has several other tribute species, including a tree, a ghost shrimp, a pitcher plant, a goblin spider, and an echidna.

Then something amazing happened. When Diana Yates, University of Illinois News Bureau, contacted Sir David for a comment about his new namesake species, he was apparently so delighted that he offered to both narrate and appear in a video about the digital curation of the 20-million-year-old amber collection at the Illinois Natural History Survey at Illinois.

Neither of the scientists knew about his participation until they saw the finished video. “Hearing Attenborough say my name…Oh. I’m done. I’m good. I can die happy now.” said Thomas. “Attenborough! My all-time hero and idol… We couldn’t believe it.” said Heads.

Here’s the video; it’s a great overview of the amber research program.

Dark Data of Insect Collections:

Much of the information about what is in insect and fossil collections lives in the heads of taxonomists, many of which have retired or are deceased. Some information isn’t used simply because no one knows it exists — rather like buckets of fossils under a sink in Illinois.

“Dark data” describes the vast amounts of scientific raw data and specimens that are collected by individuals, kept for the tenure of their research activity, and then….storehoused. Somewhere. Because it’s largely undocumented and unindexed, the information is unknown.

Head’s research is part of a new project to help researchers (and members of the public) access collections around the country. iDigBio, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a project to digitize important non-fossil insect collections in North America. A companion project, iDigPaleo, will also image and store fossils.

Want to look at a grasshopper collected in 1966? Here it is. Each specimen also gets a digital identifier, which helps match research publications back to actual museum specimens. The project is only one year old, so the coolest stuff is yet to be added.

This project underscores importance of collections and museums, which are chronically underfunded. “You can make significant discoveries in a collection,” said Heads. “There are glamorous stories of entomologists in the jungle making discoveries; but you don’t have to go to an exotic place to make a discovery. You can make great discoveries inside a museum.”

[MIKA27]

Australia banker caught viewing erotic photos keeps job

David Kiely, background seated, garnered global internet support

An Australian banker caught viewing erotic images in the background of a live TV interview will keep his job, his employer, Macquarie Bank, has said.

David Kiely became an internet sensation when the Channel 7 interview, showing him looking at images of model Miranda Kerr, was posted on YouTube.

A massive internet campaign was launched to save his job and Ms Kerr also pleaded his case.

Macquarie said it had completed an inquiry and that Mr Kiely would stay.

In a statement it said: "He will remain an employee of Macquarie. Macquarie and the employee apologise for any offence that may have been caused."

Macquarie did not specify any other measures against Mr Kiely, only that "action had been taken" after talks with him.

'Wrong place, wrong time'

Mr Kiely's colleague, Martin Lakos, was discussing interest rates live on Channel 7 on Tuesday when Mr Kiely opened an e-mail containing pictures of Ms Kerr.

Mr Kiely turned around part-way through, apparently in surprise, fuelling speculation that he was the victim of a practical joke.

There are reports that Mr Kiely, who works for Macquarie Private Wealth in Sydney, was deliberately sent the e-mail and opened it unwittingly, before being told to look round.

A global campaign on Mr Kiely's behalf got under way after the YouTube posting, which has had more than 1.3 million hits.

Financial website Here is the City News set up a Save Dave page and more than a dozen Facebook pages also supported him.

"Whether set up or not, Kiely was really only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There but for the grace of God," the web campaign petition said.

Ms Kerr, a 26-year-old Victoria's Secret model engaged to Pirates of the Caribbean star Orlando Bloom, gave her backing to Mr Kiely.

"I am told there is a petition to save his job, and of course I would sign it," she said.

Ms Kerr has had a surge of interest in her.

The number of searches for her name on Google soared by 100% after the appearance of the clip on YouTube.

Here's the video:

[MIKA27]

Just How Likely Is Another World War?

A century ago this month, Europeans stood on the brink of a war so devastating that it forced historians to create a new category: “World War.” None of the leaders at the time could imagine the wasteland they would inhabit four years later. By 1918, each had lost what he cherished most: the kaiser dismissed, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of the flower of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which European leaders had been masters of the globe came to a crashing halt.

What caused this catastrophe? President John F. Kennedy enjoyed needling colleagues with that question. He would then remind them of his favorite answer, quoting German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg: “Ah, if we only knew.” When, in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Kennedy found himself “eyeball to eyeball” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, making decisions that he knew could mean quick death to 100 million people, he reflected on the lessons of 1914. At several decision points, he adjusted what he was inclined to do in an effort to avoid repeating those leaders’ mistakes.

As they were choosing to fulfill commitments, or not, to mobilize forces sooner or later, the participants in the First World War were simultaneously seeking to frame public perceptions of the crisis. Each sought to blame its adversary. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the victors took considerable liberty with the facts to justify punishing the vanquished. The Treaty of Versailles imposed such draconian penalties that it created conditions in which, just two decades later, the Second World War erupted. This larger drama has understandably shaped historians’ accounts of the causes of the war. But as the best of the new books on this conflict, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, concludes forthrightly, the available evidence can be marshaled to support an array of competing claims. “The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol,” Clark writes. “There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character.”

In this centennial of what participants named the “Great War,” many have recalled Mark Twain’s observation that while history never repeats itself, it does sometimes rhyme. As a rising China claims islands administered by Japan in the East China Sea, or controlled by neighbors in the South China Sea, many hear echoes of events in the Balkans a century earlier. Could an incident between Chinese and Japanese naval or air forces lead to the sinking of a ship or downing of a plane? If so, would the U.S. meet its treaty commitment to stand with Japan, even if that meant firing on Chinese ships or planes? If it did so, could events escalate to a larger war between the U.S. and China? It seems (and I believe, in fact, is) unlikely. But according to a recent Pew poll, large majorities of citizens in nations throughout Asia believe China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors will lead to war.

Historical analogies like 1914 can be fertile sources of insights about contemporary challenges. One danger, however, is that people can find an analogy so compelling that they conclude that current conditions are “just like” 1914. My late, great colleague Ernest May provided an appropriate antidote. He noted that as a matter of fact, the most common form of analysis used by leaders in crises is historical reasoning from analogies. He urged both analysts and policymakers to be more systematic about the effort. In a legendary course taught at Harvard for many years, he challenged students attracted by a historical analogy to follow a simple procedure: put the analogy as the headline on a sheet of paper; then draw a straight line down the middle of the page and write “similar” at the top of one column and “different” at the top of the other. Under each column, list at least three points that capture similarities and three that note differences between the analog and the current case.

This essay attempts to use the “May Method” to highlight seven salient similarities and seven instructive differences between the challenges confronting Chinese and American leaders today and those facing world leaders in 1914. While most of the similarities make the possibility of conflict today more plausible that it might otherwise seem, and most of the differences make conflict seem less plausible, instructively, some have the opposite effect.

The USS Arizona returns to New York after escorting Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, in 1918.

Similarities

1. “Thucydides’s Trap”: structural stress that inevitably occurs when a rapidly rising power rivals a ruling power. As Thucydides observed about ancient Greece, an ascendant Athens naturally became more ambitious, assertive, arrogant, and even hubristic. Predictably, this instilled fear, anxiety, and defensiveness among the leaders of Sparta.

Accustomed to economic primacy, naval dominance, and an empire on which the sun never set, Britain in 1914 viewed with alarm the unified German Reich that had overtaken it in industrial production and research, that was demanding a greater sphere of influence, and that was expanding its military capability to include a navy that could challenge Britain’s control of the seas. In the decade before the war, this led Britain to abandon a century of “splendid isolation” to tighten entanglements with France and then Russia. During the same period, German military planners watched with alarm as Russia rushed to complete railways that could allow it to move forces rapidly to the borders of Germany and its faltering Austro-Hungarian ally.

In 2014, what for most Americans is our natural, God-given position as “Number One” is being challenged by an emerging China on track to surpass the United States in the next decade as the world’s largest economy. As China has grown more powerful, it has become more active and even aggressive in its neighborhood, particularly in what it believes are the rightly named “China” seas to its east and south. Fearful neighbors from Japan and the Philippines to Vietnam naturally look to the U.S. for support in its role as the guardian of what since World War II has been an American Pax Pacifica.

2. The virtual inconceivability of “total” war.

In 1914, aside from occasional small wars and colonial smackdowns, war was “out of fashion.” The best-selling book of the era by Norman Angell argued that war was a “great illusion,” since the nominal winner would certainly lose more than it could possibly gain.

In 2014, the “long peace” since World War II, reinforced by nuclear weapons and economic globalization, makes all-out war between great powers so obviously self-defeating that it seems unthinkable.

3. Thick interdependence: economic, social, and political.

In 1914, the U.K. and Germany were each other’s major European trading partner and principal foreign investor. King George and Kaiser Wilhelm were first cousins, the latter having sat by the deathbed of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, in 1901, and marched as second only to George at the funeral of George’s father, King Edward VII, in 1910. Elites of both societies studied at each other’s major universities, were partners in business, and socialized together.

In 2014, China is the United States’ second-largest trading partner, the U.S. the largest buyer of Chinese exports, and China the largest foreign holder of American debt. A quarter of a million Chinese students study annually in American universities, including most recently Chinese President Xi Jinping’s only daughter.

4. Rising nationalism that accentuates territorial disputes.

In 1914, as the Ottoman Empire unraveled, Serbian nationalists aspired to create a greater Serbia, and Russia and Austria-Hungary competed for influence among the Ottoman successor states in the Balkans. Meanwhile, resurgent Germans planned for a larger Germany and French patriots dreamed about recapturing Alsace-Lorraine, provinces taken by Germany from France after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

In 2014, China’s claim to the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan in the last China Sea, and the “9-dash line” by which it asserts ownership of the entire South China Sea, are reflections of ambitions that are defining new facts in the surrounding waters, exciting nationalism among its neighbors and in its own population.

5. Powerful military establishments focused on a primary enemy for the purposes of planning and buying (and justifying defense budgets).

In 1914, Britain and Germany’s militaries viewed each other as major threats, Germany and Russia saw the other as major rivals, and France was focused on the danger posed by Germany. In 1907, as Germany’s naval expansion approached the point at which it could challenge British naval primacy, the British prime minister asked the leading analyst in the foreign ministry for a memorandum “on the present State of British relations with France and Germany.” That now-famous document written by Eyre Crowe predicted that Germany would not only establish the strongest army on the continent, but also “build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” Germany’s pursuit of what the memorandum called “political hegemony and maritime ascendency” would pose a threat to the “independence of her neighbors and ultimately the existence of England.”

Today, the U.S. Department of Defense plans against something it calls the “Anti-Access/Area Denial threat,” a thinly veiled “you know who” for China. Since its humiliation in 1996, when it was forced to back down from threats to Taiwan after the U.S. sent two aircraft carriers to support Taiwan, China has planned, built, and trained to push U.S. naval forces back beyond Taiwan to the first island chain and eventually to the second.

6. Entangling alliances that create what Henry Kissinger has called a “diplomatic doomsday machine.”

In 1914, a web of complex alliance commitments threatened rapid escalation into Great Power war. After unifying Germany in the late nineteenth century, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck constructed a network of alliances that would keep the peace in Europe while isolating Germany’s principal enemy, France. Kaiser Wilhelm wrecked Bismarck’s finely tuned alliance structure by refusing to extend Germany’s alliance with Russia in 1890. Two years later, Russia allied with France. This led Germany to strengthen its ties to Austria-Hungary, and Britain to entertain deeper entanglement with both France and Russia.

In 2014, in East Asia, the United States has many allies, China few. American obligations and operational plans cover a spectrum from the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which obligates the U.S. to regard any attack upon Japan as an attack on the U.S., to agreements with the Philippines and others that require only consultation and support. As an assertive China defines air identification zones, drills for oil and gas in contested areas, excludes other states’ ships from waters around disputed islands, and operates ships and aircraft to redraw “rules of the road,” it becomes easier to imagine scenarios in which mistakes or miscalculation lead to results no one would have chosen.

7. Temptation of a coup de main to radically improve power and prestige.

In 1914, a declining Austria-Hungary faced rising, Russian-backed Pan-Slavism in the Balkans. Seeing Serbia as the epicenter of Pan-Slavism, Emperor Franz Joseph imagined that this menace could be contained by a decisive defeat of Serbia. The assassination of his heir, Franz Ferdinand, provided an opportunity.

In 2014, Shinzo Abe seeks to reverse Japan’s “lost decades.” A quarter-century ago, Japan appeared to be on the threshold of becoming “Number One.” Since then, it has stagnated economically and become almost irrelevant in international politics. Abe’s program for revival thus includes not only “Abenomics,” but also restoration of Japanese influence in the world, including revision of the constitution and expansion of Japan’s military forces to meet what he explicitly calls the “China threat.”

In sum, those who see reminders of events a century ago in developments today are not deluded. But as Professor May would remind us, on the other hand, there are significant differences as well.

A Chinese surveillance vessel passes a Japanese Coast Guard ship near the contested Senkakuku Islands

Differences

1. Clash of civilizations: As argued by Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations, deep differences in values and worldviews between civilizations are a significant systemic factor favoring conflict. On this dimension, 2014 is more dangerous than a century ago.

In 1914, Europe was the epicenter of civilization and its leaders masters of the universe. Most of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean—were blood relatives, with the tsar and the kaiser addressing each other as Nicky and Willy. Nonetheless, as Huntington noted, a fault line between Western Civilization and Eastern Orthodoxy ran right through the Balkans.

In 2014, China and the United States are separated by more than just the Pacific Ocean. Significant differences between values in Beijing and Washington include hierarchical harmony vs. freedom; communal values vs. individualism; and the Communist Party’s monopoly of political power vs. democracy.

2. Financial foundations of hegemonic power.

In 1914, Great Britain was the world’s largest creditor.

In 2014, the United States is the largest debtor in the world. As a result of a combination of low taxes and high spending, Washington has borrowed more than $17 trillion. Much of this comes from foreign lenders, with the largest share held by China. America’s position as both a debtor and as the major market for Chinese products, matched by China’s position as America’s banker and major supplier of consumer goods, create conditions that have been called MADE (Mutual Assured Destruction of Economies).

3. Shared geography.

In 1914, the European competitors had contiguous physical borders. This created incentives for rapid mobilization, accelerating the pace of decision-making in crisis.

In 2014, the U.S. and China are oceans and even hemispheres apart. Nonetheless, as a Pacific power with alliances and bases throughout Asia, the U.S. is a constant presence in the seas adjacent to China. Moreover, as a result of advances in technology, there are no borders in space and cyberspace. In these realms, the possibility that rapid advances could achieve (or be imagined to have achieved) decisive advantages raises the specter of “crisis instability,” reminiscent of Europe in the early twentieth century.

4. Nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.

In 1914, the thought that a Pan-European war could be so devastating that it would end a millennium in which European leaders ruled the world was almost inconceivable.

In 2014, nuclear weapons have a “crystal-ball effect” that allows leaders to see clearly that escalation to a nuclear war could erase their nations from the map.

5. Military balance.

In 1914, the balance of military power among the major states of Europe was fragile. The U.K. had the world’s greatest navy, Germany had the strongest army, and the capabilities of Russia and France were significant. Moreover, all of the states were active participants in a delicate game of power-balancing.

In 2014, the U.S. military is without equal. After two decades in which it spent more on defense than all other countries combined, America has by far the best-trained and best-armed fighting forces on earth. For the foreseeable future, no rational Chinese military planner could present a war plan to defeat the U.S. military on the battlefield, even in East Asia. On the other hand, after more than a decade of what two-thirds of Americans now judge to have been misguided wars, the U.S. is war-weary and war-wary. Assessing the will and capabilities of the U.S. today, China could be tempted to take excessive risks.

6. Technology and transparency.

In 1914, Russia and France feared that Germany could mobilize in secret. Uncertainty about mutual mobilization timetables and troop movements contributed mightily to the dynamics of escalation. Governments sent cables to ambassadors who transmitted messages to foreign offices, increasing the chances of miscommunication.

In 2014, intelligence systems provide near-real-time information on movements of ships, aircraft, and troops. This information equips leaders with significantly more and better information to make decisions in a crisis. Moreover, they can talk directly to one another by telephone and video teleconference.

7. Structure of world politics.

In 1914, global politics were clearly multi-polar, making delicate balancing essential, and miscalculation difficult to avoid.

In 2014, the U.S. remains the sole superpower in a world that is, on current trendlines, evolving toward polarity: bi-polarity with China, or even multi-polarity if Europe becomes a player, India rises to the ranks of a great power, and Russia is able to sustain its new assertiveness. Chinese or Russian miscalculations about the relative balance of power pose potential risks.

So which are more salient: the similarities or differences? Weighing the array on both sides, would a Martian strategist comparing conditions in January 1914 with those at the beginning of 2014 judge the likelihood today of great-power war significantly higher or lower? For the “complacent” who live in what Gore Vidal labeled the “United States of Amnesia,” the similarities should serve as a vivid reminder that many of the reasons currently given for discounting threats of war did not prevent World War I. In particular, the fact that war would be irrational does not make it unthinkable. For “alarmists” who extrapolate from the past to predict imminent disaster, the May Method provides a salutary correction. For myself, this exercise in historical analysis leads me to conclude that the probability of war between the U.S. and China in the decade ahead is higher than I imagined before examining the analogy—but still unlikely. If statesmen in both the U.S. and China reflect on what happened a century ago, perspective and insights from this past can be applied now to make risks of war even lower.

[MIKA27]

Cryptids of the Caribbean, Part 2: The Bahamas

In the first part of this series, I covered the mysterious hidden animals of Cuba. Our next stop on our cryptid journey is the beautiful islands of the Bahamas. The Bahamas is a sovereign island nation located east of the Florida Keys and is comprised of around 700 islands, islets, and cays that are all part of a greater chain of islands shared with the Turks and Caicos Islands. All of the islands in the Bahamas are low and flat, with the highest elevation belonging to Mt. Alvernia on Cat Island, which stands at a height of 63 meters (207 feet). The Bahamas also has some curious cryptozoological oddities.

The Lusca

Among these myriad islands can be found the island of Andros. The island is well known for its striking underwater vertical sinkholes and meandering undersea cave systems that form the mysterious and beautiful blue holes, as well as the mysterious, man-eating octopus-like creature known as the Lusca.

Dean’s blue hole on Long Island, the Bahamas

The Lusca is variously described as either a giant octopus, a sort of half shark-half octopoid abomination, or a squid-eel combination, and is said to lurk within the extensive underwater cave systems of the blue holes. The Lusca is said to attack swimmers and even boats, sucking them down beneath the waves to be eaten within the dark caves. Missing swimmers, underwater cave divers, and even flotsam of wrecked boats floating in the water have all been blamed on the Lusca. Purported victims of Lusca attacks who survived their encounters have told of being grabbed by tentacles, and some have even reported welts reminiscent of sucker marks on their bodies after being attacked.

One of the hallmarks of a Lusca attack, according to witnesses, is that the water will often bubble or roil beneath the victim just before they are sucked under. This unique detail has caused speculation that rather than a giant octopoid monster, the victims could be succumbing to spontaneous whirlpools that are created when rapid tidal changes draw water through the blue holes. Such whirlpools would certainly resemble the phenomenon of boiling water just before an attack, and they would surely be capable of pulling people under. However, such whirlpools certainly would not account for the actual sightings of the the monstrous Lusca itself, nor would it account for the mysterious sucker marks on victims. The Lusca remains a curious mystery.

The Chickcharney

The island of Andros holds mysteries on land as well as in the sea. Stories have long circulated among the islanders here of a large mystery bird known locally as the Chickcharney, which is only sighted within the ancient pine forests of Andros Island. The Chickcharney is said to have an appearance very much like an owl, and is typically described as being around 3 feet tall and covered with fine feathers that resemble fur. The creature is said to have three fingers, three toes, and large, piercing red eyes situated on a head that allegedly has the ability to turn around nearly 360 degrees. There is also often mention of a prehensile tail that helps the arboreal birds to climb in the trees where they make their homes. Chickcharney nests are reportedly composed of the tops of two pine trees tied together.

Chickcharnies feature heavily in the folklore of Andros, where they are said to be elfin humanoid creatures that merely resemble birds rather than actual birds. The creatures are known to be very mischievous and on occasion quite aggressive. It is said that if a traveler happens to come across a Chickcharney, it would be wise to treat it kindly. Those who treat the Chickcharney well and show respect are said to be rewarded with good luck, while those who don’t, or even worse those who laugh at the creature, will meet with bad luck and hard times. If the Chickcharney is especially offended, it is said that the creature will violently and forcibly twist the persons neck all the way around. Andros islanders once were so wary of Chickcharnies that they often carried brightly colored flowers or pieces of cloth in order to charm the creatures and dissuade them from attacking or causing trouble.

Don’t laugh the Chickcharney’s looks, or it will twist your head right off

One legendary story of the wrath of Chickcharnies involves a former Prime Minister of England, Neville Chamberlain. According to the tale, Chamberlain took over his father’s plantation in the Bahamas and upon arriving did a large amount of rampant land clearing. Unfortunately for him, some of the decimated vegetation had been home to Chickcharnies, which immediately sought revenge. The planation was a failure and financial disaster in the end, and locals have long attributed this misfortune to the vindictive Chickcharnies wreaking havoc.

Despite the various folkloric connections, sightings of the Chickcharney persist right up into the modern day. Interestingly, the creature may have a basis in fact. Andros was once the home of a large, flightless species of owl that closely matches descriptions of the Chickcharney, both in terms of appearance and of size. Tyto pollens was a large, 1 meter tall (3.3 feet) burrowing owl related to the barn owl that once inhabited Andros island and coexisted with early colonial settlers until it supposedly went extinct in the 16th century due to hunting and rampant destruction of its habitat by new settlers of the island. Although Tyto pollens was flightless and not known to be arboreal, its similarity in appearance and historical presence on the island mean that a surviving population could certainly account for modern reports.

Columbus’s Mystery Serpent

The Bahamian island known as Isabela is also home to a rather curious historical oddity. It seems that during his journey to the New World, Christopher Columbus himself killed a mysterious serpent here. Columbus’s diary entry for October 21, 1492 described how the explorer killed and later skinned a 5 foot long creature described as a “serpent,” that he had seen in a lake on the island. The next day, a similar serpent was reportedly killed in another lake on the island by Martin Alonso Pinzon, who was captain of one of the ships under Columbus’s command.

Sadly, both specimens were never properly preserved so it is impossible to know just what kind of animals were killed. Further complicating matters is the rather loose definition of the word “serpent” in the vernacular of the era. In Columbus’s day, the term “serpent” could be applied not only to large snakes, but to practically anything large and reptilian. Crocodilians, lizards, and even mythical dragons were all equally known to be referred to as serpents. This muddies the waters a bit when searching for an answer to the mysterious diary entry because Columbus could have killed an actual serpent by our understanding of the word, which is to say a giant snake, or it could have been a large type of lizard, a crocodile or alligator, or who knows what else. Considering that the entry offers frustratingly few details, it is impossible to say.

An expedition led by Florida State Museum’s assistant curator, Bill Keegan, in 1987 uncovered the remains of an alligator in the ruins of a village on Isleta believed to have been visited by Columbus. It was suggested that the serpent described by Columbus may have actually been an alligator, which were previously unknown to have ever inhabited the Bahamas and so making it a rather interesting find in its own right. If alligators existed at one time n the Bahamas, it could mean that they were merely imported from elsewhere, but could also represent an unknown population of the animal’s historical range or even a new species. However, the presence of alligator bones in a village that Columbus just happened to have visited is far from concrete evidence to link the alligator remains to the diary entry, and so what exactly was killed on that day long ago remains a mystery.

Columbus would later go on to log yet another mysterious sighting in the Caribbean when in September 1494, while sailing along the east coast of the Dominican Republic, he and his crew apparently sighted what was described as a gigantic turtle the size of a whale, with a long tail and fins on its sides. The enormous creature apparently was keeping its head out of the water. The Dominican Republic lies on the island of Hispaniola, and giant turtles are not the only mysterious creatures that would call this place home. In fact, let’s make Hispaniola our next stop on our cryptid Caribbean cruise.

[MIKA27]

BO18 NIGHTCLUB BEIRUT

Located at the north-eastern entrance of Beirut, B018 is a spectacular nightclub designed by Bernard Khoury (same genius that designed the amazing NBK Residence). B018 is one of Beirut´s most popular nightclubs and has been voted several times by Wallpaper Magazine as one of the best clubs in the world. B018 is shaped like a coffin, and looks like an old bomb shelter, but under what looks like a gloomy parking lot, lays a glamorous nightclub. The unassuming metal facade is equipped with a massive hydraulic apparatus that articulates the infamous retractable roof which gives revellers a mind-blowing night-time view of the stars and city lights.