STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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McLaren's New 675LT Spider Coupe Will Be Limited To 500 Cars

Gloriously fast and deliciously gorgeous cars exist. I should know — I’ve seen them in pictures. The problem is always cash-related, but a shortage of megabucks won’t stop me from admiring McLaren’s latest beauty: the 675LT Spider.

While Australian pricing is unavailable right now, the 675LT will set you back $US372,600, which works out to be over half a million dollars in local currency. A purchase however does put you in an exclusive club with 499 others, as McLaren plans to only produce — you guessed it — 500 vehicles.

Part of the manufacturer’s “Super Series”, it joins the ranks of the 570S and 540C Coupes, along with the P1 GTR. As for specs, it comes with a 3.8L V8 engine that can pump out 666hp in controlled conditions; it’s seven-speed, weights 1270kg dry and can manage a top speed of 326km/h.

Oh and it’ll hit 100km/h in less than three seconds.

Is it worth considering if you have $500,000 spare? I’m sure that’s a question most of us aren’t really in a position to answer. Nice to ponder, though.

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81-Year-Old Time Capsule Discovered Inside Artillery Shell (But It's Missing Some Brandy)

People in Arlington, Washington, recently discovered an old artillery shell filled with treasures from 1934. But it seems someone beat them to it, sometime within the last eight decades. And whoever it was left a note: “Thank you for the brandy.”

The shell was sitting in a memorial display at American Legion Post 76, where two volunteers recently decided that the device should probably be affixed to the floor. They took off the shell head and were shocked to discover a trove of documents, magazines, a menu from a local hotel, and a trench lighter from World War I.

But this wasn’t the first time the shell’s time capsule had been opened. It’s unclear exactly how many times it has been accessed in the past, but we know that it’s been unsealed at least once since 1934: Not only was there a note inside about some missing brandy, some of the newspaper clippings and magazines were sealed in zip-loc bags, which of course didn’t exist in 1934. But according to the Arlington Times, it doesn’t appear that anyone has added anything else to the capsule in its 81-year existence.

Contents of the 1934 time capsule, including a WWI-era trench-lighter, Monte Cristo Hotel menu, Legion magazine, and newspaper clippings (Kirk Boxleitner/Arlington Times)

The folks at American Legion Post 76 are now considering whether to add something from their own time to the existing contents — creating something I’ve come to call a “leapfrog” time capsule.

But if they ultimately choose to add something, they know they will be confronted with one of the hardest questions posed to time capsule makers of the 21st century: What medium will be future-proof?

“We’ve talked about storing music and photos on memory sticks,” Randy Harper, one of the time capsule discoverers told the Arlington Times. “But depending on how data storage technology progresses in the future, I’m afraid of future generations opening it all up and saying, ‘So what the heck are we supposed to do with these things?'”

It’s a tough question. I have hard drives merely a decade old (with firewire ports) that I have no way of accessing with my current computers. Humbly, I’d suggest that they use as many deadtree materials as possible. And if they’re going to include digital materials, use the most common drives and most common ports (I’d vote USB in this case) and the most common file types (jpegs, mp3s and Word docs?).

Newspaper from July 18, 1934 included in the time capsule (Kirk Boxleitner/Arlington Times)

Frankly, I don’t know for certain what will last into the future. Even deadtree materials degrade over time. In retrospect, it’s probably good that whoever snagged that brandy did so before it could have potentially leaked all over the paper items in the time capsule.

Whatever the people at American Legion Post 76 decide to do, I wouldn’t suggest adding any more brandy. If the thieves don’t get at it first, it will become a potential danger to any paper and electronics they include inside this 1930s treasure. Time capsule creators should always save the brandy for themselves. It’s generally much more useful inside your belly.

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How The Gun Turrets Work On A B-29 Bomber

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers were one of the biggest and deadliest aircraft used during World War II. They were the bombers used to drop the atomic bomb and were also used during the Korean war. Here’s a video from Bryce Richert showing how the gun turret system worked on the B-29. Like the guy in the video said, it’s basically Robocop. Which is very impressive considering the B-29’s first flight was in 1942.

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Would You Buy This BB-8 Made Of 18-Carat Gold And 860 Diamonds?

A plastic Star Wars BB-8 toy? Gosh no, that’s for the commoners! If you’re serious about your paraphernalia sourced from a galaxy far away, then the only item that will satisfy your lofty demands is this incredibly shiny 18-carat gold BB-8, studded with 860 diamonds.

Crafted by the folks at Kay Jewelers, this $US135,000 marvel is destined for a charity auction, the proceeds of which will go to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, based in Memphis.

According to Leah Melby at Glamour, the dazzling artefact took 600 hours to make, weighs around 700g and stands 10.79cm tall.

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‘The Rest Is History. I Killed Him.’ The True Story Behind ‘Casino’

There are certain thoughts that manifest when you’re engaging in conversation with a man that willingly took another man’s life. Despite the inherent reservations, I felt no danger: Frank Cullotta is half-way through his 70s at this point, his days of pointing pistols are well behind him. Still, the man’s words crackle and whip like the syllables were poisonous. He drops his “R” pronunciations, and rifles off f-bombs with the grace of a hobbled Cirque de Soleil dancer. There’s a hazard to his huffs, even at his age. The former mafioso-turned-witness had a contract on his head for at least a decade, and when speaking to him, it’s obvious that the remnants of his past boil the cuss stew escaping through the phone’s speaker.

A Chicago tough guy in the mafia, Cullotta made his way to Las Vegas in the late ’70s, and became a part of the mob machine helping run the desert city. He was there through the bloodshed, the big business, and the mob’s eventual implosion. Now, Cullotta runs several tours in Las Vegas that take visitors through the old haunts the mob used to frequent. He also has thoughts on the film that loosely documented his era in Sin City, Casino, along with, of course, his own brand.

“It’s about 75% to 90% accurate,” he told me. “They got to juice it up. It’s a movie. Real life is boring. Movies, that’s what they do, they juice them up. I was the technical consultant on the movie. Nick Pileggi did a tape on me. If it wasn’t for me, there would be no book Casino, and there would have been no movie Casino.”

More than just a technical advisor on the film, Cullotta is also portrayed in the movie by actor Frank Vincent. Yet, the truth is, in order to get the full story of the mafia’s time in Las Vegas, one needs to go deeper than just absorbing Martin Scorsese’s mafioso masterpiece. The film does have a lot of truths in it, but it’s just one era of the mob’s stranglehold of the Vegas strip represented in the movie. The mafia began their domination of the desert town long before the film begins.

What was Las Vegas really like when major mafia families held their interests there? How exactly did they come to control one of the most lucrative cities in America? What did Casino get right?

To understand the gravity of the mafia’s control of America’s gambling capital, you need to start at the beginning…

Blood on the Strip

circa 1947: The outdoor swimming pool at Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Las Vegas was being built on a foundation of gold.

“The state of Nevada legalized gambling and reduced the residency requirement for divorce[1931] ; both of which were designed to get people to come here, like the place, and stay here and invest,” UNLV Associate History Professor, and author of the History of the Silver State, Michael Green explained over the phone. “But if they didn’t, at least they would spend some money while they were here.”

“World War II was a key turning point thanks to a lot of military bases being built in Nevada and the surrounding states,” Green continued. “Also in 1941, the first hotel on the strip opened — the El Rancho Vegas — on April 3. It had about 65 rooms so it wouldn’t exactly fit in today. The El Cortez opened the same year, downtown, and that may have been the first [Meyer] Lanksy/[bugsy] Siegel property. It’s also in 1941 that Nevada legalized off-track betting which made the race wire very profitable, and that’s really what excited the interest of Lansky and Siegel. The hotel business followed.”

The Flamingo can be considered an inception point for the Vegas mafia. The Lansky and Siegel property — which Siegel helped build and manage — was the first real luxury hotel in Las Vegas. But, the building and maintenance of the mob-owned property wasn’t without its problems. Most notably, was the fact that Siegel and his girlfriend Virginia Hill were skimming money from the resort’s budget.

“There was no doubt in Meyer’s mind,” Charles “Lucky” Luciano wrote in his memoir, “that Bugsy had skimmed this dough from his buildin’ budget, and he was sure that Siegel was preparin’ to skip as well as skim, in case the roof was gonna fall in on him.”

The mafioso leadership grew increasingly tired of Siegel’s skimming, and — despite the supposed intervention of his associates Lansky and “Lucky” Luciano, and the fact that the resort finally began to turn a profit — Siegel was murdered inside his Beverly Hills home on June 20, 1947. (It’s believed that Lansky ordered the hit, but there’s much debate to whether that’s true or not.)

According to Green, things moved quickly after that:

The Thunderbird is built soon afterward and that’s tied to Lansky. The Desert Inn is being started; the builder of it, Wilber Clark, runs out of money. In comes [mobster] Moe Dalitz and the Mayfield Road Gang from Cleveland, and you do have — at this point — a proliferation of mob ownership and investment. Throw in that in November of 1950, Estes Kefauver brought his Senate organized crime committee hearing here, and he talked about how terrible legal gambling was in Nevada because of the mob. The result of his hearing was that they were shutting down illegal operations around the country. Where were they going to go to run casinos? Well, Nevada was the logical place and Las Vegas was the most logical place in Nevada. So there’s also this outside factor influencing things. But, certainly the success of the Flamingo, especially after Siegel is the victim of a hostile takeover — and when you’re shot that may times it’s certainly a hostile takeover — I think that contributed greatly to the mob’s interest in the area.

The mob was able to infiltrate the budding Las Vegas complex by acquiring land at a cheap rate, specifically land that was on the road to Los Angeles. It also didn’t hurt that the mob were experts at managing gambling rackets.

“These were professionals at running casinos, at gambling,” Green explained. “They’ve been involved in these activities for a long time. It was not as if there was a group out here training them. We did not have a hotel college then. These were the guys with experience. That certainly helped them — they knew how to run these operations. The truth is, the mob here in the ’50s would be, compared with the mob of Frank Cullotta’s era, boring, because they didn’t have burglary rings and killers running around. These were business people.”

Another thing helping the propagation of the mob in Las Vegas was the ineptitude of the cities and counties in properly investigating the backgrounds of the casino and resort ownerships. When Nevada legalized gambling, the state regulated that the county would police their own turf, and Las Vegas was not properly equipped — at that time — to manage an operation of that magnitude.

“The state finally got involved in ’45,” Green said, “[but] the mob was already starting to move in and they did not have the investigative arm they needed to dig into these guys’ backgrounds. By the time they got it, the mob was here. There was one reform governor, Grant Sawyer, who said something along the lines of, ‘Well, we can’t force people who are here to get out, unless they really do something, but we can keep others from coming in.’ So, the fact that you don’t really have proper of in-depth state action at that point helps them.”

There was also a huge, undeniable reality: The mafia was making money for the state, hand over brass-knuckled fist. Regulation would change the flow of those funds (moving some of it underground through bribes, etc.) and many ascribed to the old saying, “don’t mess with a good thing.”

As Green said:

In the ’40s and ’50s, just about all the biggies got in here. I mentioned Lansky and the Cleveland group. There was a guy from Houston who’d been involved in illegal gambling. Benny Binion came here from Dallas, where he had been involved in various rackets. The Riviera supposedly included the patriarchies from New England, and Sam Giancana. You could go up and down the strip and find almost all of the casinos connected to organized crime groups from other cities, and if they weren’t involved in organized crime, they were involved in illegal activities elsewhere because gambling was illegal. There was always a tension involved as to just how much Nevada could do about them, and when you consider they were the golden goose of the state’s economy, do you kill that goose? You got good business on the part of the mob, with the exception of the fact that they have a tendency to skim a lot of money out of here, but they certainly knew how to run casinos and the state was not really in the position to crack down on them.

In Casino, Joe Pesci’s character narrates a scene that shows the count room, where a mobster associate walks inside and takes a large satchel of money back to the mob bosses. That part — the skimming operation — was real.

“I think it’s fair to say that the skimming was the golden egg,” Green explained. “They could take that money and put it into so many other things. Yes, they made a profit, no question, running the casinos and that was the center of things. They probably could have made even more money, but they centered their profit on the casino itself. The skimming, then, can be put into all kinds of illegal and legal activities around the world. And if you think of the scene in The Godfather, there’s the marvelous scene where Don Corleone is saying drugs are wrong. Well, there were some that felt that way, but for the most part they were going into anything they could make money at, and Las Vegas helped bankroll what they’re doing elsewhere.”

With the exception of Senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate crime committee hearings in New York and Las Vegas, the mob was going relatively untouched in their running, managing, and skimming of the casinos on the back end. But, like many smooth running operations, things fall apart (indeed this seems to be the main theme of Casino). Greed, murder, and mismanagement would soon infiltrate the sturdy business dealings of the mob much in the same way the mob infiltrated Las Vegas.

The ‘Casino’ Era

So it took two weeks after we received the information, I got a guy and we went over there and the rest is history. I killed him.

As the ’60s turned into the ’70s, a new crop of gangsters were beginning to work their way up the ranks of the mafia’s hierarchy. Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, represented in Casino as Robert De Niro’s Sam “Ace” Rothstein, was a gambling mastermind. Numbers, odds, and betting lines populated his mind that same way football routes germinate in the minds of offensive coordinators.

“‘Lefty’ was from Florida. ‘Lefty’ was a sharp guy. ‘Lefty’ was probably the best oddsmaker in the country,” Frank Cullotta, a former associate of “Lefty” and mobster boss Tony Spilotro, told me. “Remember, this guy put the first race book up in the casinos. The first one. He had a dream that he could do this, and he did. And everyone else followed suit. Otherwise, all the sports books were off the Strip. He put them right in the casinos with all these TVs. He was a smart man. He knew all the athletes, and he’d know who was sick and who wasn’t sick. He’d find out from the trainers who had a cold, who had a tooth ache, who had a sprained ankle and that means a lot when you’re setting the line. He was pretty sharp.”

Professor Green doesn’t hold Rosenthal with the same regard, not by a long shot. “[Frank “Lefty”] Rosenthal [was] an overrated figure in our history,” he said.

Rosenthal made his start in the Chicago mob, helping “The Outfit” make money through illegal sports-betting rackets. Eventually, “Lefty” moved to Florida, and continued his betting operations out of Miami. Several charges followed him, seeing arrests for illegal gambling and bookmaking rackets in both states, but his proficient skills in bookmaking and gambling led “The Outfit” to send him to Vegas. Acting as one of the mob’s primary cash conduits, Rosenthal took over management of four casinos — the Hacienda, the Stardust, the Freemont, and the Marina — that were all funded by theArgent Corporation, a company owned by real estate mogul Allen Glick. The Glick-owned company was given loans by the Teamsters pension plan, which was under control of the mafia. This is the fashion in which the mob, or as Cullotta calls it, “The Outfit,” solidified their presence and domination of the Strip.

“The outfit purchased the four casinos and we used Allen Glick — he was a real estate mogul out of San Diego and he had a clean name,” Cullotta says. “So, you needed somebody in there like that. ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal had a criminal record and he couldn’t be an owner in the casinos, so he had to remain a host or something like that.”

“The Argent casinos were tied to three main mid-Western families: Chicago, Kansas City, and Milwaukee,” Green told me. “It was symbiotic in that you had the Teamsters controlling certain things and you had the mob controlling certain things, and you different groups involved. Certainly Chicago was crucial. Jimmy Hoffa, as part of his rise to power, had made his deals with the Devil, and the deals included bringing in Alan Dorfman to run the pension fund, and Dorfman was the adopted son of a Capone buddy; he came through it through divine right, you might say. So, he was running the pension fund out of Chicago, and they loaned money to, yes, Argent, but also for the building of Caesar’s Palace and Circus Circus. In the early 70s, Dorfman asked [ hotelier, Jay] Sarno to allow a friend of his to take over the gift shop, and the friend he sent under an assumed name was Tony Spilotro.”

Anthony “Tony” Spilotro was another Chicago “made man” who moved up the ranks of the outfit. He, too, was sent by the Chicago mafia to Vegas to help control their interests in the casinos. In the film, Casino, Spilotro is loosely portrayed by Joe Pesci — in real-life, Tony was tied to at least two dozen murders.

Frank Cullotta grew up with Tony in Chicago.

“I met Tony [when] we were about 12-years old. Like most guys, we shined shoes,” Cullotta said. “I became friends with Tony, and we started hanging together, and robbing together, and doing everything together. Tony always had this notion that he wanted to be a boss in the outfit. And he always said, ‘When I get there I want you to be with me.’ And I laughed and I said, ‘I didn’t want to be in no outfit.’ I was content in what I was doing in far as making money. And he moved up the ladder and became a boss in the Chicago outfit. Tony was a good guy back in the days; he was a kind guy. He was a violent guy, but you had to do something wrong, I guess, to bring that out in him, and I never had that opportunity to get him that angry at me… at that time. But I wasn’t afraid of anybody anyway.”

Tony Spilotro

Later, Cullotta moved to Vegas to help manage the mob pipeline with his childhood friend Tony.

“I arrived in Vegas in 1978,” Cullotta told me. “I was ordered to go there by Joe Lombardo who was a boss in the outfit. Tony had asked me several times to move out to Vegas cause he wanted someone that he grew up with and watch his back more or less. I didn’t want to move. So, one day, Joe Lombardo come up to me and tell me, ‘You know you gotta move to Vegas. He’s your best friend. You gotta go there. You’re the only one he trusts.’ That was the offer I got. I couldn’t turn it down.”

In Scorsese’s vision of the Las Vegas mob era, Pesci and De Niro’s characters are portrayed as childhood friends. The myth following the film is that Tony and “Lefty” were chums, growing up on the streets of Chicago together. Cullotta doesn’t see it that way:

“I know Tony didn’t grow up with this guy, but they say he’s a childhood friend. That’s bullsh*t. Tony probably met ‘Lefty’ somewhere around in the ’60s, because I know in 1961, when I first met ‘Lefty,’ he was by Tony’s house and he was gambling. They were playing gin. And Tony beat him out of a lot of f*cking money and if this was his good friend…I know Tony and he wouldn’t gamble with good friends. Tony was close to [‘Lefty’] but he didn’t grow up with him like I did.”

When Cullotta got to Vegas, he and Tony had a discussion as to what Frank would be handling while in Sin City.

“I told him, ‘I’m gonna bring these guys here like you suggested but they gotta earn and as far as I know, we’re not allowed to steal in this town,'” Cullotta says. “He said, ‘Well, you got the “okay.” Just make sure I get a percentage. I don’t want to meet your crew. I don’t want to know who they are. I’ll tell you what I want them to do. I’ll never give them any orders directly, they’ll be coming through you. And anytime you got any monies to give me, you give me directly.’ I said, ‘What else I gotta do out here?’ He said, ‘I want you to stay in touch with four casinos and the casino managers. They’ll know who you are right away. And you’ll deal with these guys. If there’s any cheaters in the casinos — that means employees — you’ll come back and tell me and we’ll take care of it.’ That’s what I did. Those were my functions.”

Spilotro and Cullotta were talking about the impetus of the infamous “Hole in the Wall Gang” in which Cullotta and several associates from Chicago were known for going through the walls of homes, banks, and various estates in order to reap the rewards of a successful burglary. It’s a similar series of events that’s portrayed in Casino, except that in real-life, Spilotro rarely went on jobs with the gang. He was more of their silent leader.

“We didn’t just go around burglarizing any house,” Cullotta said. “We used to have information. We did it on tips. Information from insurance agents, people that worked in casinos — friends of friends that knew friends have money and, of course, we gave them 10-20% of whatever we made. That was basically our life. We didn’t just rob every house for a TV set. We robbed drug dealers. We’d go to them and put the muscle on [them]. Take their dope from them, take their cash, which was pretty dangerous. When you’re robbing a drug dealer, they’re bad people to start with. So you know if you rob one, and they come looking for you, you probably have to kill them.”

Murder was, in fact, a part of the gig in Las Vegas. Cullotta told the story like this:

This guy, Jerry Lisner — as you well know, I got immunity from prosecution on any murders or anything, so I can talk about this freely — was introduced to me by a guy by the name of Joey DeFranzo. All this took place in Las Vegas. As soon as Lisner knew who I was connected with, he immediately tried to attach himself to me. Anyway, this guy wound up being an informant. He was testifying in front of a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. and we didn’t notice, but [his] attorney stopped in this place called the Villa, which was owned by Sam Giancana, and the place was ran by Joe Pignatelli. Sam gave it to him. The lawyer was talking about how he was defending a guy that was testifying on this guy Tony Spilotro and Frank Cullotta. Joe acted like he didn’t know us, and he conned this information out of this lawyer. And that’s how we knew this Jerry Lisner was testifying on us in front of a Grand Jury. [Tony] said, ‘Well we gotta kill this guy.’ So with that, he kept on telling me, ‘Well, when you gonna do it?’ I said ‘I gotta put it together. Tony, you should know that’s not something you run and do if you don’t wanna get caught.’ Of course, he knew that but he was desperate to get it done. So it took two weeks after we received the information, I got a guy and we went over there and the rest is history. I killed him.”

As Tony, Cullotta, and the “Hole in the Wall Gang” cut a blood path through Vegas, “Lefty” was busy making the mob money and becoming famous. “Moe Dalitz and his generation had tried very hard to fly under the radar,” Green said. “Frank Rosenthal ends up writing a ‘Man About Town’ column in one paper, a betting column in another, and has a TV show. Frank Cullotta once referred to hubris — they all got so sure of their own invulnerability that they were incredibly vulnerable.”

Hubris wouldn’t be the only downfall of the mafia in Las Vegas. The Federal government was already probing deeply into mob dealings in the city, and as they gathered information, their end game began to crystalize.

Snake Eyes

Tony Spilotro's grave

The only time it became violent is when someone didn’t do what they were supposed to do, or if they were an informant, or they were stealing on you — then it would become violent. If you didn’t do any of them things wrong, you had nothing to worry about. It was nice times. It was enjoyable times. You woke up and you were happy to wake up. Of course we had a lot of heat. The Feds would be all the time following you around. And then they created this strike force and all this bullsh*t and then it became worse. And then when they came out with that RICO, that’s when everything got f*cked up.

Senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate commission on organized crime served as a warning shot for the mob. In 1960, the Black Book was created to help keep gangsters off the casino premises.

“Grant Sawyer who’d been elected Governor in 1958, had promised tougher gaming control and he was delivering it,” Professor Green told me. “His regulators came up with this idea to just ban certain people from the casinos. The first 12 people in the black book were Italian gangsters. Giancana was in it. Sawyer, who was about as liberal as you’re going to get in a Nevada governor, said that he thought it was illegal. But, when it went into federal court, it was upheld. So, people have been added to it over the years and now [the people in the book] are somewhere in [the range] of the 40s, and today it tends to concentrate more on cheats, hackers, but there’s still some mobsters in it. The idea was that certain people shouldn’t be allowed on the premises. There’s a moment in the ’70s when Tony Spilotro was under consideration for it.”

In 1960, Robert Kennedy published The Enemy Within, a work decrying the practices of the Teamsters and organized crime in America. Shortly thereafter, J.F.K. was elected president and he appointed his brother as Attorney General. Bobby Kennedy’s focus was on dismembering the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, and their organized crime connections. Part of that strategy was approving illegal wiretaps in the Las Vegas casinos. But, due to their illegality, all the wiretaps could do were gather information and leak it out to the public.

“It [the wiretaps] didn’t do a lot to clear the mob out,” Green says. “It did create embarrassment for the state, and it helped the state move to do more to get rid of the mob including the passage of the Corporate Gaming Act in 1969. The Corporate Gaming Act changing the law so that only the key stockholders and executives needed to be licensed. Before this, anyone owning part of a casino needed to be licensed. This changed the law made it possible for corporations to come in [and buy casinos]. [Grant] Sawyer opposed this, saying the mob would find a way around this, and he was right.”

The biggest salvo against the mob was the RICO act. Passed in 1970, the RICO act “allows prosecution and civil penalties for certain acts (including illegal gambling, bribery, kidnapping, murder, and money laundering) performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise,” and has been used to wrangle whole groups of criminal empires in one swoop.

According to Green:

The RICO act was an important step on that road because it led to indictments, it led to the organized crime strike force being able to go after the mob families, especially in the mid-West, and with the Teamsters Union. So, you combine the state changing its laws and doing more investigating, the federal government getting the means to go after the mob families with RICO, and that combination helps bring them down.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the 1969 Corporate Gaming Act was another turning point towards the mafia’s downfall. Howard Hughes bought into the Desert Inn, and other corporations began investing in the city, buying some of the precious market out from under the mob.

“The corporations definitely helped,” Green told me. “I think the corporations made the federal and state officials more aware of just how bad it was. An example: Kirk Kerkorian, who really is a key figure in the transition to corporation, he bought the Flamingo, and he reported profits beyond whatever the mob had reported. He wasn’t skimming! And I think that’s the kind of thing that helps bring attention. Hughes is great for the image… he wasn’t a gangster. The idea of image has always been so important here in a variety of ways that the image presented of a billionaire clearing out the mob was important. Corporations were coming in once the law changed in the late ’60s and Hilton, Ramada, Sheraton — there were various corporations that helped clean things up.”

Frank Cullotta doesn’t totally agree that it was Hughes and the influx of corporations that helped drive the mob out of Las Vegas.

“[Howard Hughes] didn’t run nobody out of town,” Cullotta said. “He was his own corporation. It didn’t have anything to do with us. Matter of fact, I was told he did us a favor. He actually opened up the door more. The Feds were concentrating on him. He was a f*cking nut. He wasn’t bothering us at all. If it was, I’m sure at the time we could have done something about it. All the money in the world can’t protect you. When you got a big organization, guys are just dying to make their superiors proud of him. It’s like the army: You can’t wait to do something so you can get a medal.”

It wasn’t just the law and the corporations that were helping to clear out the mafia from Las Vegas. Internal strife would soon become another bullet point on the laundry list of missteps in the outfit’s plans. Tony Spilotro’s “Hole in the Wall Gang” were about to make a serious misjudgment, one that would cost them much more than the sledgehammers used to break down the walls of their targets. Frank Cullotta remembers the day well — when the Gang were caught.

“His name was Sal Romano. He was never a member of the ‘Hole in the Wall Gang.’ Let’s gets the record straight,” Cullotta says.

[Note: Cullotta is likely referencing the online reports and mentions of a Sal Romano being a member of the Gang.]

“I never liked him. He was from Chicago, he was a burglar,” Cullotta said. “This guy was on the fringe of rolling [informing] at the time; he hadn’t rolled yet.”

He continued:

He got busted with a load of furs at O’Hara airport that he stole out here [Las Vegas], that he was bringing back to Chicago, and the local cops busted him. The Feds stepped in, maybe a month later, and pulled the case away from Chicago PD, and they never prosecuted him. Chicago PD came down and told me, two detectives who I know, about this whole incident, and they said, ‘Do you not think it’s strange that they haven’t taken it to trial, and it’s not showing on the records?’ I said, ‘Oh, absolutely. The guy’s a f*cking rat.’

So, I told Tony, and Tony didn’t want to believe it. And at that particular time, Sal wired Tony’s house and put a burglar alarm in there, probably put all kinds of f*cking bugs in there, too. I still wouldn’t take the guy on any scores with me, or with my crew. But one day, Ernie Devino, part of my ‘Hole in the Wall Gang,’ we had this big, enormous score we were going to do. We were gonna do it on the Fourth of July. The place had an alarm, which I could’ve shut off, but it was impossible to shut off because [the shutoff button] was on a main street. So, I had to find out if the vault in there had motion detectors because I knew we were going to go through the roof. So, Ernie Devino pulls this Sal in. I said, ‘What the f*ck, are you crazy? I don’t like this guy.’ He said, ‘Well, he can shut the alarm off.’ I said, ‘Ernie, I could have shut the alarm off. There’s no sense in shutting the alarm off. We’re going through the vault. What’s the matter with you?’ I was screaming at him. I told Tony that we had to pass on the score because this Sal knows. ‘Ah, just keep him with you,’ Tony said. ‘Have Larry ride around with him.’ Larry Neuman — we used to call him Lurch. He liked to kill people. But, he got away from Larry, he knew we were going in, and that’s when the cops folded in on us — as soon as we made a hole in the roof. Sal Romano is the one that set it up. He had a wire on.”

Unlike his compatriots, Cullotta decided to flip and testify against his friends. Frank claims that he did so because the mafia had put a contract on his head: The Jerry Lisner murder had come back to haunt him. Tony Spilotro apparently did not seek the proper authority from his bosses when sending Cullotta to kill the man, and now the criminal organization had grown upset at the situation.

Cullotta continued:

I asked [Tony], ‘Did you get the okay from Chicago?’ He said, ‘Of course.’ That’s the way I was brought up — you got to get the okay. Come to find out, [Tony] didn’t have an okay. They questioned him on it, over a taped conversation. He didn’t know it was being taped. And one of the guys he was talking to said, ‘Then you know what you gotta do. You gotta clean your dirty laundry.’ That means get rid of me. He was saying I did it on my own; that I did it without his permission, which is bullish*t. I testified in court because they tried to kill me. There was a contract out on me. I’ve seen too many guys that said, ‘It’s not possible. It’s not gonna happen to me,’ and they got killed. I was too smart for that. I’ve had 46 friends that were all murdered one way or another from their own friends, and I decided no way am I gonna get whacked. So that’s why I became a federal witness.”

Cullotta pointed to Spilotro as the perpetrator of a double killing 20 years earlier — dubbed the M&M murders — but Tony was able to beat the charges. Because of his apparent treachery, Cullotta was placed under witness protection for at least two years — a contract remained on his head for over a decade. These days, though, Cullotta is sure that anyone who knew about the price on him is dead or in jail. “There’s nobody left to enforce it. The only guy that’s alive is in jail. He’s got lung cancer, he’s in a wheelchair,” he says. “He’ll never see the light of day. The contract is long gone. I don’t have a worry in the world.”

Meanwhile, “Lefty” had his own issues. On October 4, 1982, Rosenthal entered his vehicle outside of a restaurant and turned the ignition whichtriggered an explosive located underneath the car. The explosion did not go as planned, rocketing out of the rear of the vehicle instead of blowing up the interior. “Lefty” was burned and injured, but he survived. The theories surrounding the assassination attempt have revolved around a love triangle between “Lefty,” Tony Spilotro, and Rosenthal’s estranged wife Geri (sounds like Casino, right?). The other possibility is that the outfit was through with Rosenthal, after he had been expelled from his position at the Stardust.

As for Tony, in 1986, he was found in a grave in an Indiana cornfield, beaten to death along with his brother Michael. The murders were reconstructed on film in Casino.

Here’s how Cullotta told it to Uproxx:

My belief is that Tony’s brother was causing a lot of problems in Chicago. Tony was informed that he needed to come back to straighten these issues out that his brother was causing. Tony knew that when he was contacted that if he didn’t, the chances of saving his brother’s life was slim to none. But if he went back there, being that he was such a powerful guy, he may be able to talk these people out of killing him and his brother. The object of getting Tony back to Chicago was that if they killed [his brother] Michael, without Tony, then Tony would have started a f*cking war. It would have been the worse war you have ever seen. You think New York was killing people? Huh. There would have been bodies everywhere. They knew to get Tony with his brother at the same time. Tony realized it right away when he was going down those stairs in that basement. The FBI called me; they said, ‘Tony’s missing.’ I said, ‘Then he’s dead.’ They said, ‘How do you know.’ I said, ‘He’s f*cking dead. He ain’t gonna run. Him and his brother ain’t gonna run. He’s dead.’ They said they found him in a cornfield. They weren’t killed in no cornfield. That’s bulls*it. They were killed in the f*cking basement of somebody’s house, in the suburb, probably around the airport, and I was right.

House of Cards

Between the corporations buying in, the RICO act allowing the Las Vegas organized crime strike force leeway in attacking the mob members, and the inner turmoil ripping the mob machinations apart at the seams, the house of cards eventually fell.

In 1986, the Chicago mafia’s highest chiefs were all indicted for skimming from the casinos’ profits. The final blow came in 1997, when a final investigation by authorities had scattered the last vestiges of the mafia machine.

Professor Green explained it thusly:

Back in the ’70s, these [mobsters] were at discos, they were at restaurants, and by ’97, the last remnants [of the mob] were at a used car dealership. I think that speaks to how far down they’ve gone. The last big moment, in terms of getting the mob out of the casinos on the strip — I think most people would be likely to point to the post-Casino Stardust, because a new ownership group came in after Glick, but it included a bunch of people who’d been there before Glick, and the skimming went on. Finally the state forced out that group, asked the Boyd Family to run it — the Boyds had been in the casino business forever and were clean — and eventually the Boyds bought it and Boyd gaming is now a major corporation. It’s a difficult question. It’s kind of like: When did the Civil War begin and end? It just kind of peters out in the end.

“The resources that they had. The publicity. The newspapers. We were fighting everybody within law enforcement,” Cullotta said. “It’s hard. It’s hard to beat them all because they have more team players. They have more money. You’re just eventually gonna get caught up in it. The biggest thieves are the ones in f*cking Washington as far as I’m concerned and they’d love to see guys like us off the street because they want control.

Frank Cullotta still traverses his old hangouts, the places where he and Tony and the “Hole in the Wall Gang” once frequented, where the booze and broads and money flowed freely. It was a nice time to be a mobster back then. Back before everything shifted, when the tectonic plates of the mafia careened off the face of Las Vegas. That era is over now, and there can never be a mafioso “wild west” again.

“I think there’s thieves out here. I doubt there’s organized crime, outfit or syndicate out here,” Cullotta said at the end of our conversation. “I don’t see that here. I don’t feel it. I don’t hear anyone talk about it. It’s definitely not in the casinos. All the corporations are in the casinos now. There’s no more organized crime in these casinos at all. I’m sure there’s some guys that still do it, but they’re not high-rollers. They’re not big guys.”

The “big guys” are all gone.

[MIKA27]

UFO Appears After Mysterious Dome Discovered on Mars

Hot on the heels of the discovery of a dome-like structure on the surface of Mars, a UFO was spotted by the Curiosity rover. Are the two events related? The number of UFOs on Mars seems to be increasing. Are the UFOs a sign that someone is getting nervous about human exploration on Mars? Or is someone trying to hide evidence of past human residence on the planet?

The latest UFO appears in a photo taken by Curiosity rover on December 4th, 2015. The image shows a disc-shaped UFO above the surface with the rover visible in the fish-eye view. Is this UFO in the same area as the dome? It’s hard to tell from the photo. Is its appearance related to the discovery of the dome?

UFO (upper left) seen by Curiosity in December 2015

That’s a question worth contemplating as it seems the number of UFOs being spotted above and on the surface of Mars is on the increase. This odd-shaped UFO was photographed in August 2015.

UFO photographed on Mars in August 2015

In March 2015, what appears to be a flying saucer that either landed or crashed in the Aram Chaos region of Mars was photographed by the Mars Observer orbiter.

Is this a flying saucer on the Martian surface?

That’s a lot of UFOs seen in just a span of a few months. Prior to this, they have been seen often but less frequently. A flying saucer-shaped UFO appears in a photograph taken by Curiosity in July 2014.

Flying saucer seen on Mars in July 2014

This UFO was photographed in January 2014 by Curiosity and appears to have some sort of exhaust or trail of emissions behind it. Is it making a quick getaway after being spotted?

Martian UFO with exhaust trail (right side)

Why do the UFO sightings on Mars appear to be on the increase? One theory is that they are from secret bases on Mars run by corporations and business is picking up. A series of interviews were conducted in 2014 with Randy Cramer, also known as Captain Kaye, who claims he spent 17 years living on Mars as part of the Mars Defense Force run by the Mars Colony Corporation which had established settlements and conducted mining operations there.

Wait, what? Where are the pictures of THAT?

Whatever they’re doing and wherever they are from, more and more UFOs on Mars are being photographed from both above and below. Is the news about water just a distraction from a bigger story? Is it under the dome?

[MIKA27]

Serious Pig Snackingham Meats Prevent Hangovers

If you’re like us, you have a drink of choice. If you have a drink of choice, you’ve also had a hangover. The guys at London-based charcuterie Serious Pig had a revelation (the next day, at the pub, obviously) that they could create a hangover-preventing meat snack. Hangover Cured uses high quality protein rich in amino acids, ginger (for nausea remedy) and chili (thought to boost levels of feel good endorphins and improve circulation) that an expert food nutritionist has actually signed off on. You’re never gonna get anything like an “approved by the FDA” statement when it comes to a hangover cure, but the guys at Serious Pig have been testing these “meat treats” on themselves and others whilst enjoying a pint (or three) to verify the effectiveness. We never really needed a reason to eat deliciously spiced pieces of meat while drinking, but if it also prevents hangovers all the better.

[MIKA27]

JACK DANIELS SINATRA CENTURY WHISKEY

To celebrate what would have been Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday, the folks at Jack Daniels have something special to share that Ole Blue Eyes himself would be proud to pour. Jack Daniels Sinatra Century Whiskey is a fitting tribute to The Chairman of the Board, featuring juice from carefully selected barrels by Master Distiller Jeff Arnett and tasted with members of the Sinatra family, including Frank Jr. It opens up at 100 proof, and comes with a luxury gift box and a selection of previously unreleased Sinatra tracks.

[Habana Mike]

A Trip to Los Glaciares National Park

With the United Nations holding its climate change conference in Paris, Getty Images photographer Mario Tama traveled to Argentina’s Los Glaciares National Park, to capture images of the beautiful region, and of climate change in action. In Los Glaciares, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, most of its 50 large glaciers have been retreating during the past half-century due to warming temperatures, according to the European Space Agency.

People view Perito Moreno Glacier from a platform on November 27, 2015.

Truly amazing place. One of my more memorable trips!

Perito Moreno is one of the few glaciers actually still advancing versus receding though there's a lot less snow than 10 years ago.....

Definitely recommend a visit if you can swing it!

[MIKA27]

Truly amazing place. One of my more memorable trips!

Perito Moreno is actually one of the few glaciers actually still advancing versus receding though there's a lot less snow than 10 years ago.....

Definitely recommend a visit if you can swing it!

Nice one Mike!!

[MIKA27]

A Rare Glimpse Of A US Seaplane Lost In The First Minutes Of The Pearl Harbour Attack

For the past 20 years, divers have unsuccessfully tried to explore and photograph a PBY-5 Catalina seaplane shot down during Japan’s opening salvo of the Pearl Harbour attack. Now, some 74 years after that fateful day, archaeologists have finally accomplished the task. Here’s what they saw at the bottom of Kāne‛ohe Bay’s murky waters.

Just minutes before its devastating attack on the US military base stationed at Pearl Harbour, aircraft from the Japanese Imperial Navy bombed a nearby US Air Station on the east coast of Oahu.

The results were catastrophic: 27 Catalina PBY “flying boats” were destroyed on the ground or while they were moored on Kāne‛ohe Bay, while another six were damaged. It was a devastating and sudden loss of airpower; these long-range patrol bombers could have followed the Japanese planes back to their carriers. It’s for this reason that the Japanese chose to strike here first on 7 December 1941 — an attack that resulted in the United States’ entry into the Second World War.

The starboard engine nacelle, or housing, extending into the silt.

Back in 1994, a team of archaeologists failed to photograph the wreck of one of these Catalina PBY-5 planes. A second effort in 2008 achieved limited results. But this past June, a team of archaeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Hawaii returned to the wreck and managed to conduct a detailed survey. The team, led by Hans Van Tilburg of the NOAA, was assisted by improved visibility and camera equipment.

The tail section structure.

“The new images and site plan help tell the story of a largely forgotten casualty of the attack,” noted Van Tilburg in a statement. “The sunken PBY plane is a very important reminder of the “Day of Infamy,’ just like the USS Arizona and USS Utah. They are all direct casualties of December 7.”

The PBY anchor in its anchor well, and the cockpit (upper right).

The precise identity of the plane, which rests 9m below the surface, is still unknown, but it’s possible the crew died while trying to take off during the attack. The plane is protected by the Sunken Military Craft Act of 2004, which strictly forbids the tampering of military vessels or planes owned by the US government, as well as sunken military craft belonging to those of other nations.

A tear in the port hull and mid-fuselage break.

“This sunken flying boat is a window into the events of the attack, a moment in time that reshaped the Pacific region,” added June Cleghorn, senior archaeologist at Marine Corps Base Hawaii. “Understanding this site sheds light on the mystery of the lost PBYs and honours the legacy of the Navy and Marine Corps Base in Hawaii.”

[MIKA27]

A Sunken Spanish Galleon Worth Billions Has Been Discovered Off The Coast Of Colombia

A Spanish galleon sunk in the Caribbean 300 years ago with an exceptionally valuable cargo has been discovered near the port city of Cartagena, Colombia. Called the San Jose, the ship is rumoured to contain gold, silver, and jewellery worth an estimated $US4 to $US17 billion.

President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia made the announcement this past weekend by tweeting, “Great news! We have found the San Jose Galleon.” His proclamation was followed by a press conference where more details were disclosed. Santos says the find “constitutes one of the greatest — if not the biggest, as some say — discoveries of submerged patrimony in the history of mankind.”

The sinking of the San Jose (Credit: National Maritime Museum/Samuel Scott).

The San Jose was attacked and sunk by a British warship in June 1708. During the fighting, the galleon was reported to have exploded, killing most of those on-board. Packed with gold, silver, and gems collected in the South American colonies, it was en route to Spain to help finance the king during the War of the Spanish Succession.

For years, the sunken galleon has eluded treasure hunters, but it now appears the “holy grail” of shipwrecks has finally been found.

The precise location of the wreck was not disclosed, but it’s near the vicinity of Cartagena. The ship’s treasures of bullion and coins has been estimated between $US4-17 billion, which at the time was worth more than Spain’s annual national income from all sources. The sinking of the San Jose was obviously a terrible military and financial disaster for Spain.

It’s expected to take years for a recovery team to fully explore and excavate the wreck, but a legal battle over who gets the booty is already underway. The Colombian government has a long-standing disagreement with US-based salvage company Sea Search Armada (SSA) over who has the rightful claim over the treasure. A group now owned by SSA claims it located the wreck back in 1981.

According to the BBC, the SSA has been claiming billions for breach of contract from Colombia, but four years ago a US court decided that the galleon was the property of the Colombian state. Further, the wreck is reported to fall within the UN’s definition of an underwater cultural heritage site. Nonetheless, a CNNreport suggests that the SSA may demand half of the value of the ship’s sunken treasure.

In consideration of the discovery, the Colombian government is planning to build a museum in Cartagena to showcase the treasures.

[MIKA27]

Why The World's Most Powerful Telescope Has Just Been Ruled Unlawful

Last week, Hawaii’s Supreme Court voided a construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a $US1.4 billion observatory that would peer into distant corners of our universe and back in time, exploring new cosmic landscapes with a resolution twelve times sharper than that of Hubble.

The TMT is intended to be the flagship observatory of the northern hemisphere and the most powerful optical telescope on Earth. There’s just one problem: the telescope’s construction site, near the summit of the dormant volcano of Mauna Kea, has another celestial heritage. In the Hawaiian religion, Mauna Kea is a home of deities, the fiery birthplace of all life.

“Mauna Kea is an origins place,” Kealoha Pisciotta, a spokeswoman for the native Hawaiian organisation Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, told Gizmodo. “It is not a realm for mankind, but a realm where we go to learn the ways of the heavens.”

To Pisciotta and her people, the eighteen-and-a-half story high TMT — the largest observatory by far on a summit that already hosts thirteen — would be a desecration. And after a bitter fight over the legality of the TMT’s construction, Hawaii’s advocates for the preservation of natural and cultural heritage have just scored a major win.

“For the Thirty Meter Telescope folks, this is a moment of reckoning,” science historian Leandra Swanner of Arizona State University told Gizmodo. “The TMT activists feel that justice has been served. But I don’t think it’s the end of the story.”

Two Celestial Traditions

A simmering cauldron of lava ensconced in a pile of basalt, Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world, from its underwater base to its snowcapped peaks, which reach nearly 4,267m into the sky. The name “Mauna Kea” means white mountain, but some say it is short for “Mauna o Wākea,” after the Hawaiian sky father Wākea. In any case, it’s a sacred spot, home to several Hawaiian gods and numerous family burial grounds. For thousands of years, pilgrims have been drawn to its slopes, seeking wisdom and connection with otherworldly forces.

Mauna Kea is also where native Hawaiians learn about their traditional cosmological model of the universe. Thousands of years ago, Pisciotta’s people were circumnavigating the globe, using nothing but the stars as their guide. “We had an advanced system of navigation around the time of the birth of Christ,” Pisciotta told me. “A lot of that knowledge is derived from the mountain and the ceremonies we do there.”

Milky Way from near the summit of Mauna Kea.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a mountain which was has long been a seat of cosmic teachings now attracts scientists seeking to unravel the greatest celestial mysteries of all. Unsullied by city lights or air pollution, Mauna Kea’s summit boasts some of the clearest skies in the world. For nearly fifty years, astronomers have built observatories there; today, the mountain is home to 13 world-class telescopes. Astronomy on Mauna Kea is a boon to the University of Hawaii and brings substantial income to the state.

Prized by astronomers, revered by Hawaiian cultural practitioners, Mauna Kea now finds itself at the center of an ideological clash. To native Hawaiians, the mountain offers connection with everything sacred, and they don’t want its natural majesty spoiled by anything. But to scientists trained according to secular Western principles, nature has no enchanted qualities: it’s something to be reduced, analysed, and explained.

On Mauna Kea, Western logic is clear. “To move the TMT to another site would mean moving the TMT to an inferior site,” Nick Suntzeff, an astronomer at Texas A&M University, told Gizmodo in an email. For decades, Suntzeff has aided in site selection for Chilean telescopes, and he’s has had to eliminate some exceptional summits because of their cultural heritage. “The northern hemisphere is different,” he notes. “There are fewer sites that are outstanding. Mauna Kea is the best.”

The needs of astronomers on Mauna Kea have long held precedence over the wishes of those who would keep the mountain pristine. But in 2011, when Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources issued a construction permit for the mountain’s 14th observatory before Hawaiians could air their complaints in a court hearing, the seed was planted for an opposition movement that would change everything.

A Telescope Steeped in Controversy

The TMT would be the largest telescope in the northern hemisphere by a wide margin, rivaled only by two other massive scopes currently under construction in Chile. Sponsored jointly by Japan, China, the US, Canada, and India, and partially funded by nonprofits, the University of California and Caltech, the $US1.4 billion observatory is a tremendous international collaboration. As Swanner puts it, “It’s big science at its biggest.”

Artist’s concept of a Thirty Meter Telescope

This colossal investment will allow scientists to answer some equally big questions. The TMT’s 30-metre wide primary mirror will peer up to 13 billion light years away, traversing deep space and time to reveal the birth of galaxies at the beginning of the universe. The scope will also be an asset for exoplanet researchers, as one of the first ground-based observatories powerful enough to catch light bouncing off the atmospheres of distant planets. In these faint planetary flickerings, astronomers will search for “biosignatures”, mixtures of chemicals like oxygen and methane that could indicate alien biology.

So the TMT may help us answer the most profound questions about the place of the human species in the universe. But that knowledge would come at a price — the violation of a place held sacred by a people whose values have been overridden by Western colonial interests for more than a century.

“This isn’t simply a native beliefs versus science narrative,” Swanner said. “It is more accurately a natives versus settlers narrative.”

“You have an outside group coming in and making decisions about what should be done with native land without hearing native voices,” she continued. “That is very disturbing for cultural practitioners who don’t want to see themselves as a dispossessed people.”

Tensions over the construction of the TMT came to a head in October 2014, when a group of protestors halted the telescope’s groundbreaking ceremony by blocking its access road. In April, 300 protestors gathered on the mountain to block the TMT’s construction once again. Several dozen were arrested. On June 24th over 700 protestors gathered on the mountain, pushing boulders into the TMT access road and forcing construction crews to retreat. By that time, opposition to the telescope had gone viral on social media, and the Hawaiian cause was garnering allies across the world.

“Social media is playing a role I haven’t seen before,” Swanner said. “It is making the people in small groups on the mountain feel connected — feel that they are taking a stand with other groups around the world.”

Protestors opposed to the TMT gather outside the Hawaiian Legislature on April 21st, 2015.

There have been attempts at reconciliation. Since 2010, TMT astronomers have held hundreds of “talk story” sessions, community meetings to share and discuss their work with the public. Plans to decommission older observatories are being accelerated, with governor David Ige vowing to remove at least three of the mountain’s existing telescopes by the time the TMT is operational in 2024. Just last month, the University of Hawaii confirmed that the TMT site is the last new area on the mountain that will ever be developed for astronomy.

But to many activists, these gestures are too little, too late. Moreover, they don’t address the real problem with the TMT: it’s utterly enormous. “The TMT will be very large and limit our ability to do ceremonies that need to see the star alignment,” Pisciotta explained. “Astronomy is permitted on Mauna Kea if and only if it can meet the strict regularly rules — and they aren’t doing that.”

That’s why the Mauna Kea Anaina Hou decided to take legal action. While Pisciotta would argue that the TMT is industrial development that violates the rules of Mauna Kea as a state-designated conservation district, the case that ended up in the Supreme Court was one of due process. Specifically, the court had to decide whether Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources was right to issue a construction permit for the TMT before a contested case hearing was held. It wasn’t. Last Wednesday, the TMT’s permit was ruled invalid.

“Quite simply, the Board put the cart before the horse when it issued the permit,” the court decision reads. “Accordingly, the permit cannot stand.”

Last week’s ruling was a major victory for the TMT’s opponents. But in light of everything that’s been invested in the observatory, it’s hard to imagine that the astronomy community will just give up. The telescope’s components continue to be built on schedule at facilities worldwide. To proceed with construction, the TMT will have to acquire a new permit from the board.

“TMT will follow the process set forth by the state, as we always have,” TMT’s chairman Henry Yang said in a statement. “We are assessing our next steps on the way forward.”

But if the TMT didn’t face an uphill battle with the Board of Land and Natural Resources before, it certainly does now.

UK Infrared Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea

“The permitting process should be tougher for them now, because there are more people who are publicly opposed, but also, because everyone is on their guard,” Jonathan Osorio, a history professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa told Gizmodo. “All of the people who made the decision to grant a licence before holding the fair hearing will not be doing that this time around.”

Perhaps the most optimistic view is that this ruling becomes a watershed moment for astronomy, one where an open and honest dialogue between scientists and cultural practitioners begins to emerge. “I think that if we have honest dialogue, there might be some [compromise] that can be found,” Pisciotta said. “Something that maybe we didn’t think of before.”

“But,” she continued, “they have to be open to the fundamental question of should [astronomy] be allowed at all.”

To some astronomers, the price of building another observatory on Mauna Kea if an accord cannot be reached is simply too great. “To me, as a New Zealander, Native Hawaiian objections to astronomy on Mauna Kea look very similar to deeply held Māori positions on the use of the natural environment, which reflects the two cultures common Polynesian roots,” astrophysicist Richard Easther of the University of Auckland told Gizmodo in an email. “I hope that this latest development is an opportunity for dialogue and understanding, not just litigation — I wouldn’t want to see the TMT built at the end of a bitterly contested process.”

Even to cultural practitioners who oppose the observatory, this isn’t a black-and-white issue. Many native Hawaiians work closely with astronomers — Pisciotta herself was a telescope operator for over a decade. Time and again, she’s forced to defend her people against accusations that they’re anti-science. “If you wanted to build a hospital up there, we would still fight you — but it doesn’t mean we’re against healthcare,” Pisciotta said. “This is a land use issue.”

Will astronomy and spirituality one day co-exist in peace on Mauna Kea? It’s impossible to say at this point. When asking himself that question, Suntzeff recalls a conversation he had about Mauna Kea with an older Hawaiian woman in the early 1980s.

“I asked her what she felt about the observatory,” he said. “What she answered was at first strange to me. She told me that the problem with Mauna Kea is that on top of the mountain, people are too close to God. I leave it to you to put your own meaning on what she said, but I think that is wisest insight to the mountain I have heard.”

[MIKA27]

EARTHS DEEPEST LAKE IS SERIOUSLY ILL

On the main drag of Khuzhir, the principal town of Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal, Siberia, the dust blown from buses delivering tourists billows through the windswept streets. By the upturned chassis of vehicles picked clean of parts, babushkas wade through piles of trash, searching for anything worth claiming. In the shadows of a former prison, sunbathers line a beach around clumps of algae and rusted metal detritus. While Buryat shamans, who revere the lake as holy, perform ceremonies around totem poles festooned with ribbons on a bluff above town, in a ship graveyard below them, children toss empty vodka bottles at each other for entertainment.

Stretching for 395 miles, thirty-million-year-old Baikal is the world’s deepest lake, its volume roughly equivalent to the five Great Lakes of North America combined. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Baikal contains one-fifth of the unfrozen freshwater on the planet. Its unique closed ecosystem is home to over 3,500 species and subspecies of animals and plants, roughly sixty percent of which are not to be found anywhere else on Earth. The lake is now subject to an unprecedented catalogue of threats.

I visited the region this summer, when wildfires the likes of which had never been seen before were raging, leading locals to describe the scene as feeling “like doomsday.” The lake faces a range of environmental issues: phosphate run-off from unplanned tourist developments and poor sewage treatment, the rampant growth of algae mats and a sponge die-off, and low inflow that saw water levels hit critical marks this year, down 40cm since 2013. A waterfront industrial plant that producedcellulose fiber for Soviet aircraft tyres is now closed, but dotted around the dimly-lit derelicts lie 13 toxic reservoirs, each the size of two football fields. Now, Baikal is further endangered by Mongolian plans for hydropower plants which, Professor Marianne Moore from Wellesley College told Motherboard, would effectively starve the lake of oxygen.

Detritus on the beach near the tourist town of Khuzhir

A few miles from Khuzhir, beyond an abandoned fish factory that had operated as a gulag, I came across the rotting corpses of Nerpa seals which had washed to shore.According to Greenpeace, the number of these unique seals, one of only three entirely freshwater seal species, has decreased by approximately a third since the beginning of the 1990s. Commenting on this “huge die-off,” Greenpeace Russia campaigner Roman Vazhenkov noted that although the seals had died of disease, chlorine substance found in the creatures' fatty tissues suggests their immune systems had been weakened.

I spoke to Professor Oleg Timoshkin from the Limnological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences about the levels of pollution threatening the lake. “In some areas of Northern Baikal, a crust of rotten spirogyra algae up to ten meters [wide] covers the once cozy beaches,” he told me. “Even cows and horses refuse to drink the water.”

Emissions from a failed sewage treatment plant in the town of Severobaikalsk on the northern shore have caused a bank of foul-smelling algae to form that stretches for six miles. In addition to this, locals report that for years, sewage trucks pulled up daily to dispose of wastewater at another dilapidated station near the shoreline.

“The [new] plant failed in large part because the railroad industry dumped a bunch of cleaning products into the sewage treatment facility,” Moore told Motherboard. “They were cleaning railroad cars with heavy duty detergent and it killed the microbes that helped remove nutrients. Untreated sewage has been entering the shallow waters up there.”

Discarded piles of litter at the abandoned gulag fish factory, Khuzhir.

I took a hydrofoil across the lake to Ust-Barguzin, the boat cutting through swathes of smoke rising from the mainland. In this remote hamlet of feral dogs and high-walled compounds, we docked at a port choked with the rusting hulks of half-sunken ships. In an effort to dampen the acrid fumes, some residents had hung wet cloths across their windows. Despite being home to some 7,000 people, the sewage treatment facilities in Ust-Barguzin are, according to Timoshkin, “completely destroyed.”

With tourist numbers around Baikal rapidly increasing from 300,000 in 2009 to 1.3 million in 2015, according to the Siberian Times, infrastructure is struggling to keep up with demand. “Down at the southern end of the lake, there’s a town called Listvianka,” Moore continued. “It’s a tourist mecca and the hotels there, many of which have gone up in the last fifteen years, none of them have treatment facilities, so sewage is going right into the lake.”

During his group’s latest expedition, Timoshkin and his colleagues also found that a pathogen had been killing sea sponges, which naturally filter the water. In the area under investigation, “from 30 to 100 percent of branched Lubomirskia baicalensisspecimens were either sick or damaged and died,” Timoshkin commented.

On the shoreline near the monogorod (single-factory town) of Baikalsk lie the ruins of the Baikal Paper and Pulp Mill. The plant, from which chlorinated waste found its way into the lake, finally closed at the end of 2013—for financial, not ecological reasons—but 6.2 million tons of toxic waste still remain in the aforementioned reservoirs. The Baikal trough is located on a rift zone and should an earthquake strike, the contaminated holding pods could easily rupture, causing an ecological disaster.

Buryat shaman performing a ceremony on the bluff above Maloe More

In 2014, the Moscow Times reported that the site of the old factory would be turned into a “Russian Disneyland” called "Precious Russia" following the biggest clean-up in the country’s history, projected to take six years. With the economic crisis continuing though, those plans have now been shelved. “I just don’t think Russia has the political will,” Moore told Motherboard.

Now, with Mongolia planning to build a series of massive dams upstream, Lake Baikal is facing a challenge which Moore believes could make all other problems “pale in comparison.” The plans, which are being evaluated as part of a World Bank-funded environmental and social impact assessment, include a project to dam the Selenga River, which provides nearly 50 percent of the lake’s water.

“If this dam were built then this might cause major damage to Baikal’s ecosystem,” Professor Anson Mackay of University College London told Motherboard. “The Selenga is the lake’s largest tributary. Should flow be reduced [there could be] long-term catastrophic consequences for the ecology and wildlife in and around the lake.”

When NGOs met with local authorities in Irkutsk and Baikalsk last week, Mongolian plans for the so-called Shuren Hydropower Project were high on the agenda. As the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage states that countries should not take actions that could affect World Heritage Sites in other nations, environmental groups have questioned the legality of the project.

As this row rumbles on, the Russian authorities have continued to drain the lake for an existing hydroelectric station downstream, which is at least partly culpable for water levels that Jennie Sutton from NGO Baikal Wave describes as “critically low.” A source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the source did not have authorization to speak publicly, said that despite having poured 54 billion roubles into protecting the lake over the last three years, mismanagement of government funds has seen the state of the region continue to deteriorate. Disregarding evidence to the contrary, however, the most recent report from the Ministry of Environment and Ecology on the state of Baikal maintains that the ecosystem has not undergone “any significant changes.”

Ruminating on what needs to be done to save the lake, which he describes as “seriously ill,” Timoshkin says he is calling for the introduction of a more effective system of government monitoring. He is not alone in concluding that the current approach is only fit to “diagnose cancer in the last stage.” UNESCO has accused Moscow of "dereliction of duty," per Deutsche Presse-Agentur, with regard to its handling of the Baikal region.

As the sun set, having completed their daily pilgrimage to the sights, a clutch of minivan drivers returned tourists to Khuzhir.

Beneath ominous skies, Russian holidaymakers hit the bars, discarding their trash as they tottered down the dung-spattered streets. Illegal campfires illuminated the dusky woods along the Maloe More Strait. Mats of algae and flotsam washed to shore.

With more of Baikal than ever before open to tourism, dependence on this source of income continues to grow. The future is uncertain for a lake that until recently was considered the cleanest on Earth.

[MIKA27]

Watch: ‘Crouching Tiger’ Sequel’s Trailer

Coming in hot from Netflix, who inked the deal last year, the sequel to modern martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has its first trailer. Catch it in full on Feb. 26, 2016, via Netflix and IMAX.

[MIKA27]

TAFT'S ALE HOUSE LIQUID ADVENT CALENDAR

Since you're already drinking leading up to Christmas, you might as well do it in style with the Liquid Advent Calendar from Taft's Ale House in Cincinnati, Ohio. The box holds 24 16 ounce cans of Liquid Advent beer, a chocolate brown Porter brewed with cinnamon, chilies, cacao nibs, and roasted cacao husks from Maverick Chocolate Company, also from Cincinnati. It tastes as great as it looks, and if nothing else, it's a solid excuse to tip one back each and every day of the month leading up to Christmas.

[MIKA27]

TEFORIA INFUSER

We drink tons of tea, especially in cold weather months, but most of us just grab a bag and drop it in some boiling water. But the truth is, for a great cup of tea, there are loads of intricacies we ignore, unless you use Teforia. It's the most intelligent tea brewing device around, using advanced algorithms to bring out the richest, most robust cup of tea you've ever had. Teforia allows the use of any loose leaf tea, and boosts the levels of antioxidants while allowing you to control the caffeine levels while brewing by adjusting the time and temperature.

The beautifully designed Teforia machine will look great in any kitchen, and environmentally conscious tea pods are also available for a consistent cup each and every time. Limited to only 250 units, don't hesitate to claim yours before they're gone.

[MIKA27]

Looks Like The Iron Fist TV Show Is Really Happening!

Everyone’s been wondering if Netflix is really going to make a TV show based on Iron Fist, the comic about a blond guy who goes to Asia and becomes a martial-arts master. While Daredevil and Jessica Jones have been huge hits, there have been repeated rumors that Marvel was struggling to make Iron Fist work. But it seems like the show is on the way now, with the reveal of its showrunner.

Comicbook.com is reporting that Scott Buck—whose eclectic resume includes Executive Producer credits on Dexter and Six Feet Under, as well as scripts for Rome, Everybody Loves Raymond, and more—has been put in charge of the series. It’s the first real good bit of news for Iron Fist since was announced as one of the four Netflix series that would form Marvel’s Defenders crossover.

But now that there’s that out of the way, when will we actually get to see Iron Fist? It’s hard to say. We’ve got Daredevil Season 2 early next year, followed by the currently-filming Luke Cage later in the year. The success of Jessica Jones makes a second season seem increasingly likely... could we see Jessica Jones season 2 in early 2017, followed by a mid-t0-late Iron Fist debut in 2017? It’d be a bit tight if the characters were to potentially appear in the opening half of Avengers: Infinity War as their own superteam, the Defenders, that same year.

At least it really is a little bit of good news for Iron Fist.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Have Found Arsenic From Chilean Mines In Antarctica

A team of researchers working in Antarctica have discovered ice that contains arsenic, thought to have originated from copper mines in northern Chile.

Arsenic is used to smelt copper, and is typically released into the air during the process. In this instance, though, the substance appears to have drifted over 6500km south to Antarctica. The finding is to be published in Atmospheric Environment.

While the concentrations found in Antartica are unlikely to cause ill effects to the local ecosystem, the researchers point out that Chile itself will have likely suffered much larger deposits, as winds containing arsenic passed over the land. Prolonged exposure to the chemical can cause cancer and other diseases.

It’s not the first worrying substance to be identified in Antarctic ice. In the past, lead and uranium have also been observed.

[MIKA27]

This Shipwreck Gave Doctors The First Clue Mercury Might Not Be Good For You

For centuries people with maladies of any kind could look forward to a good dose of mercury, as the medical establishment had pretty much concluded that shiny things were good for people. This shipwreck made them think again.

In 1810, a Spanish ship got caught in a storm near Cadiz. Fortunately for the sailors onboard, a Brtish naval ship was nearby. The HMS Triumph sent out its longboats to help the vessel — but also to help itself to the cargo of the ship. Unfortunately for the sailors on the Triumph, the Spanish ship was headed for South Africa, and it contained vast stores of mercury. Mercury is used to extract gold from gold mines — some old mines still have high levels of mercury and are a danger to hikers and explorers who venture inside.

The mercury had been held in leather bags. In the Spanish vessel, those bags were stored in closed-off areas; on the Triumph, they were stored in the sailor’s living quarters. It wasn’t long before people started feeling ill effects. Sailors started salivating constantly and copiously — a sign of mercury poisoning. Their gums became inflamed. They’d lose consciousness. While the men only sickened, every animal on the ship, including a canary, died. Even the cockroaches died. Eventually, the ship had to be purged of all the mercury that it couldn’t store away from people.

This was odd. While doctors knew that too much mercury could do harm (as could too much of any other medicine), it never occurred to anyone that just being near mercury was dangerous. At first, experts who heard of the case thought that the problem was a strange reaction between the mercury and the leather. It was another 13 years before a Dr William Burnett read about an experiment done by Michael Faraday, during which Faraday found that mercury emitted vapour. Perhaps this vapour was not so good for people, Burnett posited.

It would be at least another 50 years before the scientific establishment considered that mercury in general wasn’t good for people. Sometimes it takes a while to change a set idea. But the incident of the HMS Triumph at least got the ball rolling.

[MIKA27]

Extreme Chinese Military Training

Lots of countries don’t just have military training, but extreme military training. China is no exception.

As noted on 2ch, the People’s Liberation Army holds special combat training exercises — many of which appear to involve jumping over flames. Or between flames. Or through flames. Whatever, there’s fire.

The Chinese military doesn’t only jump through burning rings, it also performs an array of other exercises you’d expect, from hand-to-hand combat training to target shooting as well as various tests of physical and mental endurance.

But few training exercises look as spectacular as the fire-based ones.

Check out this barelegged badass.

If there’s ever a conflict that involves jumping through fire, the smart money is on the Chinese military.

And when you’re all hot from the flames, what better way to cool off than with a tire full of snow?

Or a yellow plastic bowl of snow?

Beat jumping shirtless into a fire, that’s for sure.

[MIKA27]

Ace Combat 7 Is Coming With VR

Here’s a game that slipped through the cracks — Bandai Namco announced Ace Combat 7 for PS4. It will have VR features too!

[MIKA27]

YOU'LL LOVE THIS COLORFUL STAR WARS GRAFFITI MURAL

This colorful mural has Yoda changing from Jedi Master to anti-war activist. His "Stop Wars" message comes at an interesting time as American is not only involved in conflicts abroad but it also experiencing much violence on it's own shores. Perhaps Yoda is the voice of wisdom we need right now.

The colorful graffiti mural was created by artist Eduardo Kobra on a wall in the the Wynwood art district of Miami. Shortly after completion, Kobra uploaded a pictures to Instagram and Facebook.

[MIKA27]

WOODEN WHISKEY TUMBLERS BY ROYAL NORTH COMPANY

Wooden whiskey tumblers are an excellent solution for activities that are unsuitable for glass – like hikes, camp outs and family trips to the cabin. In other words, times when you’ll need a stiff drink.

This set is made by The Royal North Company, each tumbler is made on a lathe from a single piece of Canadian maple, then finished with natural, plant-derived and food safe oil. It’s then coated with an alcohol, water and fluid resistant hard gel finish to ensure that your Talisker won’t damage the wood.

[MIKA27]

US FDA Approves Device That Can Plug Gunshot Wounds In 15 Seconds

The US Food and Drug Administration has cleared the use of the XSTAT 30 — an innovative sponge-filled gunshot wound dressing device — for use in the general population. Approved last year for battlefield use, the device can plug a gunshot wound in just 15 seconds.

The XSTAT Rapid Hemostasis System is an expandable, multi-sponge dressing that’s used to control severe, life-threatening bleeding from wounds in bodily areas where a traditional tourniquet is of no use, such as the groin or armpit. It works by pumping expandable, tablet-sized sponges into the wound, staunching bleeding while a patient is rushed to hospital.

The tablets are standard medical sponges that expand on contact with blood, and the dressing lasts for about four hours. Each applicator absorbs about 0.5L of blood, and up to three applicators can be used on a patient. To assist with extraction, each tablet contains a radioplaque marker that can be spotted under an X-ray.

XSTAT was originally developed for the military, but the FDA says first responders can now use the device to treat adults and teens in the general population who are experiencing life-threatening and severe hemorrhagic shock.

Early control of severe bleeding is critical. The US Army Institute of Surgical Research says that 30-40 per cent of civilian deaths by traumatic injury are the result of haemorrhaging, and 33-56 per cent of those deaths happen before the patient reaches a hospital.

“When a product is developed for use in the battlefield, it is generally intended to work in a worst-case scenario where advanced care might not be immediately available,” said Dr. William Maisel in a FDA release. “It is exciting to see this technology transition to help civilian first responders control some severe, life-threatening bleeding while on the trauma scene.”

The FDA’s guidelines specify that the device is only to be used when “definitive care at an emergency care facility cannot be achieved within minutes,” and is not to be used in certain parts of the chest, abdomen, pelvis, or tissue above the collarbone.

Approval was granted after the manufacturer, RevMedX, successfully demonstrated that its civilian model was essentially the same as its military version, which was approved in April 2014.

Guns in the United States kill about 33,000 people annually, of which some 20,000 are suicides and 11,000 are homicides. This year alone, the United States has experiences 462 mass shootings. So the announcement of the XSTAT 30’s approval comes at a time when they appear to be most needed.