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imjustthemechanic · 7 years ago

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The Stone Knight

Part 1/? - Two Statues Part 2/? - A Curious Interview Part 3/? - John Doe Part 4/? - Escape Attempt Part 5/? - Making the News Part 6/? - Fallout Part 7/? - More Impossible Part 8/? - The Shield Thieves Part 9/? - Reality Sinks In Part 10/? - Preparing a Quest Part 11/? - The Marvelous History of Sir Stephen Part 12/? - Uninvited Guests Part 13/? - So That’s What It Does Part 14/? - The What and the Where Part 15/? - Gearing Up Part 16/? - Just Passing Through Part 17/? - Dinner with Druids Part 18/? - Kracness Henge Part 19/? - A Task Interrupted Part 20/? - The Red Death Part 21/? - Aphelion Part 22/? - The Stone Giants Part 23/? - Nat the Giant Killer Part 24/? - An Interrogation Part 25/? - Guilt Part 26/? - Rushman’s Brilliant Idea Part 27/? - Hunter in Hiding Part 28/? - Ridiculous Part 29/? - The Guy from Barton Part 30/? - Sherwood Forest Part 31/? - Buckeye’s Fall Part 32/? - Robin Hood Part 33/? - Fantasies and Consequences Part 34/? - Swords of Damocles Part 35/? - The Road to London Part 36/? - View from the Top Part 37/? - Storming the Castle

Don’t try this at home.

Shortly after midnight, the group packed up their equipment as if they were hikers, and set out for the Tower. They took a taxi to Southwark, but had it drop them off at the Jubilee Gardens so the driver wouldn’t be able to say he took them to the Tower. From there it was a forty-minute walk to the Tower Bridge, but they made it there in respectable anonymity. People in London were used to backpackers and travelers, and nobody took them for anything else.

They crossed the Bridge, stopping at the North Tower, where the visitor’s entrance was. This was closed for the evening, but Nat slipped around to the opposite side where there was an employee entrance and access to the hydraulic machinery that raised and lowered the bridge deck. There she picked the lock on the door, and waved to Allen to join her. Together, they began climbing a flight of metal stairs that led up to the observation decks.

“You said if you guys get caught, you just carry on,” Allen said. “What happens if I get caught?”

“Pretend you were in the bathroom or something when the place shut down, and you’ve been waiting for somebody to find you,” Nat suggested.

“Then they’ll throw me out,” he said. “What’ll that mean for you guys?”

“It’ll mean we carry on as best we can,” Nat told him. “Like I said, the most important job is getting the Grail out. If anything happens to you, text me, and then go back to the hostel and wait for us. We’ll come back for you if we can, and if we can’t, I’ll try to find an opportunity to let you know.”

They reached the top, and Nat picked another lock to get them into the visitors’ area. The overhead walkways had exhibits on the history of London and the construction and working of the bridge. The interior lights had been turned off for the night, but the exterior ones were shining brightly, providing plenty of light for Nat to disarm an emergency exit and get them out to the exterior catwalk.

“It’s cold out here!” Allen protested.

“Yes, but if you’re indoors you’ll have glare off the windows, and you’ll have fewer options to change position if you need a different angle,” Nat pointed out. She found a place with a good view of the Tower grounds, and waved him over. “If you need to hide, you can crouch in one of the shadowy spots around the stonework,” she said. “If a guard comes along, pretend you got locked out.”

Allen nodded. He hung the binoculars she’d given him around his neck and checked the buckle with shaking hands.

“Are you okay?” asked Nat.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, uh… you said you’d come back for me if you can. What are the odds of that, do you think? Even if you do get the Grail, you might not be able to stop for me.”

That was true – she didn’t want to leave him stranded. “Let me give you a credit card number,” she said, opening her wallet to fish out the card she’d written it down on, but Allen reached out to stop her. She looked up at him, puzzled. “What?” she asked.

“Can I be a silly old man for a moment?” he asked.

“Uh… sure?” said Nat uncertainly.

He pulled her in and hugged her.

Natasha couldn’t remember ever having a hug like the one he now gave her. Sharon had hugged her on Flotta, but that had been gentle sympathy. Allen clung to her as if he feared somebody would come and drag her out of his arms, as if she were the most precious thing he could possibly imagine. Nobody had ever loved Nat enough to hold her like that. Sometimes she doubted anybody had ever loved her at all. Even now, Allen Rushman only loved her because of a lie.

But this was what he needed right now – some semblance of the daughter he’d come to see. She let her purse drop and put her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder.

“I love you, Ginger Snap,” he murmured.

Nat swallowed hard. “I love you, too, Dad,” she said, because that was what he needed to hear.

“Have fun storming the castle,” he said, without letting go.

She knew exactly what the reply to that needed to be. “You think it’ll work?”

“It’d take a miracle,” said Allen, and kissed her cheek.

Natasha kept her head down as they finally parted, and didn’t look back as she went back inside to descend to the street level. What she’d just done had doubtless made Allen Rushman feel better, but Nat was already regretting it deeply, and she didn’t even know why. It couldn’t just be that she’d lied to him, because he knew perfectly well that she was lying. He’d asked for an indulgence, something to make him feel a little more able to cope with the lonely vigil ahead of him, and she’d given it to him. Surely that wasn’t a moral problem, and even if it were, the fact that they were saving the world ought to placate Natasha’s misdirected conscience.

Maybe it was the fear that after they came back for him – assuming they were able to – he might expect her to continue the charade. Maybe it was the fear that they wouldn’t be able to come back for him, and the last thing she’d ever said to him would be a lie. Maybe it was just that she didn’t actually want or need a father.

What she did know was that she couldn’t allow it to prey on her mind right now. She had to focus. That was a good alternate way of dealing with ugly truths – you could always just ignore them.

“Everybody ready?” she asked, when she re-joined the others at the bottom.

There were general sounds of agreement, so they got started.

Below the Tower Bridge, they scaled the outer wall of the castle. Even this late at night there was vehicle and foot traffic on the streets of London, but the gap between the highway and the building hid them effectively, and they climbed unseen to the crenellated top of the Develin Tower. From there they got to the roof of the Workshops as planned, and crouched there to take stock of the next set of obstacles. Directly below them was a cobblestone street in front of the buildings, and beyond that a narrow lawn, with the ruins of the Wardrobe Tower and the foundation of the Roman Wall of Londinium visible in it. Displayed in various places was an art exhibit – life-sized sculptures of animals made out of layers and layers of chicken wire. Most of these were ordinary animals such as bears, lions, and a gorilla, but there was also a sabre-toothed tiger and a beautifully sinuous Chinese dragon.

In the middle was the White Tower, with the Chapel Apse almost directly in front of them. They couldn’t go in that way, though – the entrance was around the other side of the building, and as Natasha had expected, the place was well-guarded at night. The decorative Yeomen were gone, and in their place were proper armed security guards in bullet-proof vests. Natasha counted them as they made their rounds, then nodded to Robin Hood.

He stood up, fitted an arrow to his bow, and released it with a soft thwock of recoiling wood and a whistle of wind over the fletching. For a moment Natasha was sure he’d aimed too high, but then gravity took over, and the missile’s arching path took it right through a window in the Royal Mint on the far side of the Tower complex. An alarm began to blare.

Nat smiled as the guards moved in response, some taking up cover positions while others ran to investigate the disturbance. She hadn’t been able to shoot first on Flotta because the sound of gunshots would have given away their position, but they didn’t have that problem now – arrows were all but silent.

“Bullseye!” Nat whispered, giving Robin a thumbs-up.

“I told you, I’m the best,” he whispered back.

In Nat’s pocket, her phone vibrated. Allen was letting her know what he could see.

One of the guards, a woman, took up position almost directly beneath their hiding place, with a gun in her hands. Robin nocked another arrow, but Nat held up a hand to stop him, and somersaulted down, landing like a cat directly behind the guard. Before the other woman knew what was happening, Nat had a hand over her mouth and took the gun from her, then hit her behind the ear with it. She’d knocked Robin Hood out the other day because she’d hit him where she hadn’t meant to. Now she hit the guard exactly where she meant to, and lowered her unconscious body gently to the cobblestones.

Nat motioned to the others, and they dropped a rope and slid down it one by one. Together, they scurried across the cobbled courtyard to hide among the ruins of the Wardrobe Tower, where they crouched while another guard passed by. This one noticed his fallen colleague and ran to check on her. Finding her unconscious, he called for help.

Crouching among the chicken-wire lions and in the shadow of the Chapel apse, the group of intruders went unnoticed while the guards held a brief conversation and then split up and spread out to look around. Another distraction was now necessary. Nat signaled to Robin, who quickly stood up, loosed an arrow, and crouched down again in one smooth, swift motion that required only seconds. Again, the arrow arced up before coming back down, using gravity to accelerate it right through a window in the corner of the Waterloo Block. Another alarm began to ring, and the guards changed their plans at once. The man who’d found the unconscious one dragged her into the Workshop building, while the rest ran for the location of the alarm.

The Jewel House was in the Waterloo Block. The guards thought somebody was trying to steal the Crown Jewels.

With all attention now focused there, Natasha and the rest slipped around the other side of the building, to where a flight of modern metal stairs led up to the original entrance at the second storey level. Sure enough, there was a contractor’s lock on the door. She opened that easily and got out the key. Once they were inside, a security system began beeping to let them know they had only a few seconds to deactivate it before it summoned the police. Nat deftly took it apart and shut it down with time to spare.

“You know, even if we hadn’t already committed thirty-one crimes this week, after seeing you do that I might have to arrest you on general principle,” Sharon observed.

“I’d like to see a jail cell that could hold me,” said Nat.

“Good point,” Sharon nodded.

“Thirty-one?” asked Sam. “That’s very specific.”

“I’ve been counting,” Sharon told him.

Nat shut the door behind them and let it lock. When the guards realized there was nobody in the Jewel House and resumed their search, they’d be unlikely to notice it had ever been opened and would have to unlock it themselves in order to search the building.

The main hall of the White Tower was where the Royal Armories were, a museum displaying medieval and modern armor and weaponry. Much of this had been moved into another part of the Tower so the public could still visit it during the restoration work, but other objects had been left behind, in their display cases or with cloths draped over them. Everybody passed those by and went down the stairs to the basement.

This was not lit, so Nat turned on her LED flashlight and looked around. When the Tower was open, this part displayed instruments of torture, but now these macabre displays too were packed away and covered with drop cloths. The walls here were stone and mortar with no plaster on them, probably not so much because it was historically accurate than simply to enhance the impression of being in a dungeon. The ceilings were barrel-vaulted to take the weight of the masonry above. After several weeks without visitors, a layer of dust had accumulated on the horizontal surfaces.

At the end of the small hall was the basement of the chapel. This had the same shape as the room above it – a long rectangle with a semi-circle apse at one end. There was only one tiny window high in the far wall, but that let in a surprisingly bright stream of light from a lamp just outside it. The floor was simple stone tiles, uncovered by early restoration work in the eighteenth century. Thank heavens they hadn’t dug any deeper.

The archaeologist in Nat was absolutely appalled by what she was now thinking. That stone floor had been there for a thousand years. Digging it up was like walking into the Museum of Natural History in New York and pushing over the Aztec Calendar Stone to let it smash on the floor. Was Natasha, who’d chosen a profession dedicated to preserving and learning from the past, really going to be the one who did this terrible thing?

Yes. Yes, she was. Somebody had to.

Sam took off his backpack and unzipped it to start taking tools out. “Where do we dig first?” he asked.

“Directly under the altar, I think,” said Nat. That would be the most holy place in a chapel. “But put up the wards first – you guys do that, while I do this.” She got a digital camera out of her bag, turned the flash off and the shutter speed way down, and began taking pictures.

“What are you doing?” asked Robin.

“I am documenting the initial condition of the site,” Nat replied. “Because I’m a god-damned archaeologist.”

#fanfic #natasha romanov #black widow #steve rogers #captain america #sam wilson #falcon #sharon carter #agent 13 #clint barton #hawkeye

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csnews · 7 years ago

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As Seas Warm, Whales Face New Dangers

Karen Weintraub - Oct. 2, 2017

From the top of the six-story lighthouse, water stretches beyond the horizon in every direction. A foghorn bleats twice at 22-second intervals, interrupting the endless chatter of herring gulls.

At least twice a day, beginning shortly after dawn, researchers climb steps and ladders and crawl through a modest glass doorway to scan the surrounding sea, looking for the distinctive spout of a whale.

This chunk of rock, about 25 nautical miles from Bar Harbor, is part of a global effort to track and learn more about one of the sea’s most majestic and endangered creatures. So far this year, the small number of sightings here have underscored the growing perils along the East Coast to both humpback whales and North Atlantic right whales.

This past summer, the numbers of humpback whales identified from the rock were abysmal — the team saw only eight instead of the usual dozens. Fifty-three humpbacks have died in the last 19 months, many after colliding with boats or fishing gear.

Scientists worry that the humpbacks may have been forced elsewhere in a search for food as the seas grow rapidly warmer and their feeding grounds are disturbed.

“Food is becoming more patchy and less reliable, so animals are moving around more,” said Scott Kraus, vice president and chief scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium. “The more you move around, the higher the chance of entanglements.”

The North Atlantic right whales, which prefer colder waters, are also on a changed course — with even more dire consequences. Fifteen of the animals have died since mid-April in a population that has now slipped to fewer than 450.

“We haven’t seen this level of mortality in right whales since we stopped whaling them” in coastal New England in the 1700s, said Dr. Kraus.

The aquarium maintains a catalog of images of North Atlantic right whales, in part to track their population levels. The pictures, spanning decades, are crucial to understanding these elusive leviathans..

From the office computer in Mount Desert Rock’s only house, researchers use 36,000 images depicting some 9,500 animals to track whales. It was on this island in the 1970s that scientists first confirmed that each whale’s fluke pattern is unique. A humpback’s tail is an unchanging signature and as distinctive as a face — except if it’s been struck by a ship, bitten by a shark or slashed by a fisherman’s gear.

Digital algorithms make identifications a little easier, dividing the photos into categories of fluke patterns, mainly by determining how much of the tail is white or black. But researchers, including Lindsey Jones, a graduate student at the College of the Atlantic, which runs the station, must still look through several thousand images one by one to match by eye.

It should be possible to build a better algorithm, but no one in the small, dedicated field of whale research has the funding to pay for one.

Luckily, some matches are easy. Researchers on the island see many Gulf of Maine whales often enough that they recognize them on sight.

The high number of humpback deaths from January 2016 to Sept. 1 of this year led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare an “unusual mortality event.” No one knows exactly what’s going on, but the agency’s investigations attributed half of the deaths to ship strikes.

The Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly — at one of the fastest rates on earth — and the temperature change might be causing shifts along the food chain, said Dan DenDanto, station manager at Mount Desert Rock’s Edward McC. Blair Marine Research Station. As the whales follow food sources into new areas, they wander into the paths of ships and into fishing gear.

Mr. DenDanto and several investigators with Allied Whale, a group affiliated with the College of the Atlantic, plan to begin a research project next year, analyzing bits of skin from humpbacks, collected using biopsy darts, to determine what the animals are eating and how that affects their health.

Steven Katona, a co-founder of Allied Whale, was one of the first researchers to begin identifying whales here in the 1970s. Dr. Katona and his collaborators took pictures for the humpback whale catalog, which later confirmed their hunches that fluke patterns were consistent across a whale’s lifetime.

In 1975, they named one of the first North Atlantic humpbacks na00008, or Number 8. The whale has been spotted three times since: in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence in the 1980s, off the coast of the Dominican Republic in 1993, and earlier this year off the coast of New Jersey.

“We have only a handful of sightings of this whale, yet these link together the efforts of collaborators spanning much of the North Atlantic,” Peter T. Stevick, a senior scientist with the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, said in an email.

The sightings occurred in four distinct humpback habitats, providing insights into where these giants feed, breed and migrate. Another sighting matched a whale in Brazil to one observed in Madagascar — a distance of about 6,500 miles — proving that an animal the length of a school bus can travel a quarter of the way around the world.

The catalog has also allowed researchers to see that the whales breed at the edge of the Caribbean Sea, then fan out to traditional feeding areas, from the East Coast to Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland and Iceland.

Understanding the whales’ behavior remains key to helping them survive in warming waters shared with fishermen and ships, said Judy Allen, associate director of Allied Whale.

“These are animals that are difficult to study,” Ms. Allen said. “They spend most of their lives underwater. We see a brief glimpse when they lift their tails out of the water and somebody happens to be there with a camera.”

Right whales are generally seen in the Gulf of Maine, the coast of the Canadian Maritimes and the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the summer. In the winter, pregnant females and others migrate along the Eastern Seaboard to the Southeast.

They don’t have distinctive flukes; their bodies are wider, and they’re less graceful than their humpback cousins. So researchers identify them using the pattern of each animal’s “callosity” — the roughened skin patches on their heads. Because these formations can only be seen from the top, scientists must use planes and boats to track them.

Researchers based on Cape Cod begin flying in the winter months when right whales, which can grow as long as a five-story building, seek out food and social interaction in the waters off Massachusetts. The low-flying plane rides are so dangerous that scientists undergo “dunk training,” learning to survive if the plane drops into the frigid sea, miles from shore.

The North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog, managed by the New England Aquarium, includes images of 722 whales, chronicling the population since the early 1970s. The work has been particularly crucial this year, when there have been so many unexplained deaths.

Twelve carcasses have turned up so far this year in Canada and three more in American waters; only five calves were born, as far as researchers can tell. The latest estimates, released by the New England Aquarium, put the population of North Atlantic right whales at 458 — but that was before this year’s deaths, Dr. Kraus said.

Flying 750 to 1,000 feet over the animals also allows researchers to check on their health, making sure they are not dragging fishing ropes or bearing new scars, said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass.

Right whales are baleen whales, so they filter feed, supporting their 70-ton weight — nearly as much as the Space Shuttle — solely with microscopic animals called zooplankton. That search can push whales into shipping lanes, where the animals are sometimes struck, or into the gear of fishing boats.

Despite federal protection efforts, about 80 percent of right whales bear scars from past entanglements or ship strikes. “They are remarkably built for a life in an ocean, which unfortunately is changing,” Dr. Mayo said. He worries that “they’re not finding what they need where they ought to.”

“It’s a perilous place to live, that’s for sure,” he added.

Cape Cod Bay, one of the first places that right whales were hunted — eventually nearly to extinction — is now a favorite hangout.. After routinely seeing up to 100 per winter field season, researchers have cataloged 200 to 300 most years since 2009, Dr. Mayo said.

Researchers at the Center for Coastal Studies are now trying to determine how plankton levels, temperature, currents, and salinity might affect the whales’ movements.

It’s not even clear how right whales find their food. Christy Hudak, a research associate at the center, said she thinks the whales probably use a combination of senses.

Amateurs also participate in whale catalogs, both to help researchers and for their own pleasure.

Gale McCullough of Hancock, Me., has set up a Flickr page and one on Facebook where people can post sightings and share their love of whales.

“It’s important for people to see that [each whale] is an individual with a life history and a group of offspring, like us,” Ms. McCullough said.

Another participant, Ted Cheeseman, also maintains an online public catalog of humpback sightings, linking Allied Whale’s database with others around the country.

He lets people know when a whale they once photographed has been sighted again. In the two years he’s been collecting images, 1,400 people have submitted more than 60,000 shots of more than 10,000 identifiable whales.

“The vision is that it becomes a regular thing that people understand these whales are out there, they are to be respected and valued and really appreciated,” said Dr. Cheeseman, a wildlife photographer and safari company operator.

“We’ve had a few cases of, ‘Hey, this known whale is entangled.’ People react very differently when it’s ‘my’ whale.”

#whale #cetacean #news #wild #global warming #dolphin

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news4dzhozhar · 8 years ago

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Its been 20 years since Dr Allen Ault stood in a death chamber and gave the order for the execution to go ahead. “I said, ‘It’s time,’ and the electrician threw the switch.” Despite the passage of so many years, he feels troubled to this day by what he did. “I had a lot of guilt, my conscience totally bothered me,” he said. “When the switch was thrown that first time, and I realized I had just killed a man, that was pretty traumatic. Then to have to do it again and again and again, it got so that I absolutely could not go through with it.” As commissioner of the department of corrections in Georgia, Ault gave the order for five executions by electric chair in 1994 and 1995. After the fifth life was taken, the cumulative distress reached breaking point and he resigned from the post and moved to a job in the US justice department that had nothing to do with the death penalty. Since then, he has found himself haunted by the memory of the five men whose lives he ended. “I don’t remember their names, but I still see them in my nightmares,” he said. Now those nightmares are back in force, triggered by the knowledge that what Ault considers to be a disaster-in-the-making is about to unfold in Arkansas. Next month, the state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, has scheduled no fewer than eight executions over 11 days – a conveyor belt of killing dispensed at a clip not seen in the US for at least half a century. The executions are set to take place by lethal injection at a rate of two a day over four separate days. On 17 April, it will be the turn of the inmates Don Davis and Bruce Ward; on 20 April, Stacey Johnson and Ledell Lee; 24 April, Marcel Williams and Jack Jones; 27 April, Jason McGehee and Kenneth Williams. On Wednesday, 23 former corrections officials from 16 different states sent a joint letter to Hutchinson urging him to reconsider. They warned, several on the basis of personal experience, that participating in executions can exact a “severe toll on corrections officers’ wellbeing” and that by doing so many so quickly Arkansas was “needlessly exacerbating the strain and stress placed on these officers”. One of Ault’s prime concerns relates not to the eight convicted capital murderers who are set to die, but to the men and women of the execution team who are being asked, just as he was two decades ago, to kill in the name of justice. “To ask corrections officials in Arkansas to kill eight people, two a day – as someone who went through this, I can’t tell you how deeply concerned I am for their mental health,” he said. “As the old saying goes,” he went on, “you dig two graves: one for the condemned, one for the avenger. That’s what will happen to this execution team – many of them will figuratively have to dig their own grave too.” Ault said his role at the head of the team that had killed five men left him feeling “lower than the most despicable person”. He felt degraded to a level below that of the heinous murderers he was confronting, a sense that was amplified by how much planning went into the protocols. “I had a manual about an inch thick that I had to follow. What I did was much more premeditated than any of the murders committed by those I executed.” Then there was the defenselessness of the man on the gurney: “You are taking a totally defenseless person, planning, premeditating, even rehearsing, then killing him – any sane person other than a psychopath would be dramatically affected by that.” The Arkansas governor has so far given scant details about how he intends to deal with the intense psychological burden he is placing on the shoulders of the state’s execution team, beyond indicating that counseling will be available. When the Guardian put a series of questions to Hutchinson, including what was being done to protect the execution team from potential mental or emotional harm, a spokesman declined to answer. All the spokesman would say was that the governor had no intention of talking to the national or international media before next month’s executions, on the grounds that there was nothing to discuss. “There’s no debate here – this is not like the future of healthcare in America. The governor has the duty to carry out these executions that were decided by a jury. This is the law of Arkansas and of the federal government of the United States.” In previous statements, the governor’s office has argued that it will be “more efficient and less stressful” for those involved in carrying out the killing to see them through in quick succession. Given his rich personal experience, that sounds like arrogant negligence to Allen Ault. “If the governor is so hot on this, he ought to go down to the death chamber and do it himself. But he won’t, they don’t, they never do. Politicians are never in the room when it happens, they never have to suffer anything.” Ault found that several members of his team were so troubled by the part they played in snuffing out life that they required therapeutic help, and one senior member of the corrections department had to be relieved of his job. He has seen the same pattern of damaged psyches repeated in death penalty states across the country. He personally knew, he said, three former corrections officials who participated, to their distress, in executions and went on to take their own lives. The psychological impact on execution teams is one of the least discussed aspects of capital punishment in the US, yet arguably one of the most disturbing. There Will Be No Stay, a documentary filmreleased last year, profiles two former majors in South Carolina’s department of corrections Swat team who sued the state for allegedly pressuring them into assisting in multiple executions with minimal training and no counselling (the case was eventually dismissed by a judge). Craig Baxley, who was responsible for plunging the lethal injection syringe into at least eight prisoners, has himself attempted suicide and is now on six types of medication for PTSD and depression. One detail of his years working in the death chamber stuck in his mind: the cause of mortality given on the inmates’ death certificates was always the same: “homicide”. The other major, Terry Bracey, told the film-makers he had struggled with the effects of trauma for years: “I expected to be trained and counseled – none of that took place. Taking that plunger and pushing it in set me on a course I wasn’t prepared for.” The members of the Arkansas execution team are shrouded in anonymity, as they are in all death penalty states. Typically, the group consists of a “tie-down team” who escort the prisoner from his cell to the death chamber and then strap him to the gurney; medically trained personnel who set the intravenous lines; and those, like Bracey and Baxley, who sit on the other side of a glass wall and press the buttons to inject the lethal drugs into the prisoner once the team leader gives the order. Frank Thompson gave that order twice when he was superintendent of Oregon state penitentiary – the only two completed executions in that state in over 50 years. Thompson said he could not comment on the specifics of the Arkansas team, but he was clear that based on his own experiences, they needed to be extremely careful. Several of the members of his own team quit their jobs in the fallout of what they went through. Despite the intensive training he put them through, he said he was ultimately unable to spare them the brutalizing consequences. “There is absolutely no way to conduct a well-run execution without causing at least one person to lose a little bit of their humanity, or to start at least one person on the cumulative path to post-traumatic stress. So for Arkansas to do this eight times in 10 days, to me that is unimaginable – it is compounding the stress, laying traumatic experiences on top of each other.” There's no way to conduct a well-run execution without at least one person losing a little bit of their humanity. Such trauma often manifests itself in fevered sleep and harrowing dreams. Rich Robertson recalls being hounded by a recurring nightmare after the then local TV reporter witnessed the last use of the gas chamber in Arizona in 1999 – he watched a prisoner named Walter LaGrand being engulfed in a light fog of cyanide, then gagging forcefully and flailing from side to side before slumping forward into unconsciousness. Robertson described his dream to the Guardian: “I was standing at a window with venetian blinds just like the actual gas chamber, and the blinds opened up and I could see a crib in the middle of the room. There was a baby in the crib with lines running from its arms and legs that ran to a set of levers on the wall, and standing there was an evil-looking clown throwing the switches.” It’s not just potential psychological damage that is raising the alarm over the Arkansas plans. Legal experts also fear that the unseemly rush could greatly increase the risk of mistakes. Hutchinson’s professed reason for the tight schedule is that the state’s batch of midazolam, a sedative used in many recent US executions, reaches its expiration date at the end of April and fresh supplies of the drug will be hard to secure because of the boycott of US corrections departments by pharmaceutical companies and foreign governments. Yet even without the added complications that can come from haste, midazolam has a patchy reputation in capital punishment. It was the same drug that was deployed in the gruesome killing of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in 2014, in which the inmate writhed and groaned on the gurney for 43 minutes. The state’s subsequent investigation found that one factor behind the calamity was that the execution team had been placed under undue stress as they were primed to carry out two judicial killings on the same day. “Due to manpower and facility concerns, executions should not be scheduled within seven calendar days of each other,” the report concluded. “The example of Oklahoma should be very troubling for Arkansas officials,” said Dale Baich, a defense attorney who represented Joseph Wood, who died in similarly grotesque circumstances in a botched execution involving midazolam in Arizona that same year. “What will happen if the first prisoner has the same sort of reaction as Wood or Lockett – will the governor press ahead with the next execution? This rush to execute is foolish and irresponsible.” Jennifer Moreno, a staff attorney with the Berkeley Law death penalty clinic, said that by choosing to use midazolam, Arkansas had opted for a protocol that had no margin of error. “When you add to that the pressure of executing eight men in 11 days, you are just asking for something to go wrong – they are putting their team in a really difficult spot.” The eight condemned men on Monday lodged a new lawsuit in a federal court in Arkansas seeking to prevent Hutchinson from going ahead with his plan. The complaint warns that the intense stress placed on the execution team, and the lack of a pause between killings to allow for review, will heighten the risk of the inmates suffering unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment as they die. “The people who will make up the execution team will be called upon to take part in the killing of an otherwise healthy human being, under intense scrutiny and pressure, in a process that they have little to no prior experience with, using a drug that has not been used before for executions in this state. And then they are going to be asked to do it again. And then come back to work and do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And finally again, for the eighth time.”

#abolish the death penalty #abolish capital punishment

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gordonwilliamsweb · 5 years ago

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Born Into A Pandemic: Virus Complicates Births For Moms And Babies

Mallory Pease’s contractions grew stronger as her husband, Mitchell, drove her to Oaklawn Hospital in Marshall, Michigan, to give birth to their second child. It had been a routine pregnancy, but she told her doctor she’d recently developed a sore throat, aches, coughing and shortness of breath — symptoms her provider knew could indicate COVID-19.

So, when she arrived at the hospital, she was taken to an isolation area, tested for the coronavirus and given oxygen. She took shallow, panting breaths as she delivered her daughter on March 23 in about five hours.

But she could hold little Alivia for only five minutes before the newborn was whisked off to a nursery. Pease, 27, was transferred to a COVID-19 floor, where she was told her test came back positive. By the next morning, she was so ill that her doctors discussed putting her on a ventilator.

As she struggled to breathe and worried for her life, her heart ached to hold her newborn. Instead, she held tight to the memory of that brief glimpse.

(From left) Mallory, baby Alivia, daughter Emma Jean and husband Mitchell.(Courtesy of the Pease family)

When she finally got to cradle Alivia in her arms four days later, she said, “it was kind of like meeting her all over again.”

Across the U.S., COVID-19 is radically altering medical care, not only for vulnerable elders but also for pregnant women and their babies entering the world. “In the last six weeks, our entire world that was known as being normal has completely turned around,” said Dr. Edith Cheng, division chief for maternal fetal medicine at the University of Washington.

Hospitals from Seattle to St. Louis are recommending separating infected mothers from their newborns for days, and asking the women to forgo the intimacy of skin-to-skin contact, and sometimes breastfeeding, to help prevent their infants from contracting the disease.

The actions are based on guidance from medical associations. Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had advised separation across the board until updating their guidance on April 4 to consider it case by case.

Separation runs counter to most any parent’s birth plan — and to the best research on family-centered care. But experts say it’s important to put protections in place, given the still-evolving understanding of the effects of COVID-19 during pregnancy and childbirth.

“Can babies be infected if the mother is infected at birth? The answer is yes, not commonly, but yes,” said Dr. Karen Puopolo, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on COVID-19 and newborns.

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It’s not clear how many pregnant women have been infected with COVID-19 across the U.S. They accounted for just 2% of cases tallied in one early report. With more than 830,000 confirmed infections in the U.S. as of Wednesday afternoon, that’s still many thousands of expectant women potentially affected by the deadly respiratory virus.

Many pregnant women may be infected and not know it. Of 215 women admitted for delivery at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City from March 22 to April 4, about 15% tested positive for the coronavirus, but the vast majority showed no symptoms upon admission.

Scattered reports of infants possibly being sickened by the coronavirus are surfacing nationwide. A 9-month-old baby in Chicago who tested positive for COVID-19 died in March, though further investigation has raised questions about whether the virus was to blame. This month, a 6-week-old girl who tested positive for the virus died in Connecticut; investigation also continues into her cause of death. Kentucky’s governor recently announced that the state’s new cases included a 10-day-old boy.

Very young babies may be at higher risk for serious complications from COVID-19 than other children. Although those 18 and younger make up fewer than 2% of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S., infants accounted for most of the hospitalizations in pediatric cases, according to the CDC. Of 95 children younger than 1 hospitalized between Feb. 12 and April 2, at least 59 were hospitalized, and five were admitted to the ICU.

That information — plus limited data on infections in babies in China — has shifted the thinking of many obstetrics specialists, said Cheng.

In recent weeks, several pregnant women infected with COVID-19 have delivered babies at Cheng’s hospital, the UW Medical Center in Seattle. Their newborns were sent to a special section in the neonatal intensive care unit. At other facilities, separation might involve taking the newborn to another room, or letting the mother and baby stay in the same room, but 6 feet apart and often separated by a curtain.

They’re kept apart from moms — and sometimes dads, who also may be sick — until the parents have had no symptoms for three days or for a week after their first symptoms, whichever is greater.

Given the still-scant data about the effects of COVID-19, some experts question whether separating mothers and newborns is wise or warranted. Disrupting the bonding that occurs in the first days of life could have far-reaching consequences, said Dr. Yalda Afshar, an OB-GYN at UCLA Health in Los Angeles.

“Being completely data-blind but counseling women on their outcomes and their babies’ outcomes is just wrong,” she said.

To fill the data void, Afshar and colleagues at the University of California-San Francisco have created a nationwide pregnancy registry to track the effects of COVID-19 on pregnant women and their newborns. Already, more than 1,000 people have signed up for the study.

Silvana Vergara Tobin, 33, who runs an online art gallery in New York City, is among them. Tobin fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-March and is worried about the potential effects on the baby boy she expects to deliver in August.

“What really scares me is that I might get it again,” said Tobin, whose symptoms included sinus headaches, body aches and a persistent cough. “Or that the baby didn’t get immunity and he might get it once he’s born.”

The registry will track women and their babies from early pregnancy through a year postpartum, trying to answer basic questions. “Do pregnant women with COVID have more severe, less severe or different disease?” Afshar said. “Does it transmit in utero? Does it cause birth defects?”

Doctors and patients said it’s frustrating that so much remains unknown.

Alaine Gilpin, who lives near Louisville, Kentucky, tested positive for COVID-19 in early April after coughing for a month but showing no other symptoms. She gave birth at Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital on April 11 at 5½ months’ gestation. The baby boy weighed just 1 pound, 9 ounces and needed the aid of a ventilation machine. She now wonders: “Could this be a result of COVID?”

To protect moms and babies, many hospitals with enough test kits are starting to test all women who show up to give birth. Dr. Chemen Neal, an OB-GYN with Indiana University Health, said her colleagues bathe the babies of COVID-positive moms just after birth. And like medical professionals elsewhere, they talk to each mom about pumping breast milk for her baby or breastfeeding only after washing her torso and hands and wearing a surgical mask.

At some hospitals, COVID-19 births can be especially challenging. At Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, for example, women with symptoms can’t give birth in the normal labor and delivery area because it’s in a building that also houses severely immunocompromised patients. A triage tent has been set up outside, and moms with known or suspected COVID-19 are routed through the emergency room into a special delivery area.

Another challenge is keeping babies safe after they are discharged from the hospital. Ideally, experts recommend infected moms stay 6 feet from their babies while another caretaker provides daily care, but often this is difficult, particularly for women who lack family support.

Pease worried about passing the virus to her baby after getting home. Before embracing Alivia at her aunt’s house, and for the next few days, she said, she wore a mask and “washed my hands like crazy.”

But over time, Pease’s symptoms have eased and she’s gotten stronger. Though she still gets tired in the evenings, she’s now able to feed, change and care for her newborn. And she said her bond with the baby is strong.

“Alivia is good. She’s happy,” Pease said. “She never skipped a beat.”

Born Into A Pandemic: Virus Complicates Births For Moms And Babies published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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stephenmccull · 5 years ago

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Born Into A Pandemic: Virus Complicates Births For Moms And Babies

As she struggled to breathe and worried for her life, her heart ached to hold her newborn. Instead, she held tight to the memory of that brief glimpse.

(From left) Mallory, baby Alivia, daughter Emma Jean and husband Mitchell.(Courtesy of the Pease family)

When she finally got to cradle Alivia in her arms four days later, she said, “it was kind of like meeting her all over again.”

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Subscribe to KHN’s free Weekly Edition newsletter.

Please confirm your email address below:

That information — plus limited data on infections in babies in China — has shifted the thinking of many obstetrics specialists, said Cheng.

They’re kept apart from moms — and sometimes dads, who also may be sick — until the parents have had no symptoms for three days or for a week after their first symptoms, whichever is greater.

“Being completely data-blind but counseling women on their outcomes and their babies’ outcomes is just wrong,” she said.

Doctors and patients said it’s frustrating that so much remains unknown.

“Alivia is good. She’s happy,” Pease said. “She never skipped a beat.”

Born Into A Pandemic: Virus Complicates Births For Moms And Babies published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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dinafbrownil · 5 years ago

Text

Born Into A Pandemic: Virus Complicates Births For Moms And Babies

As she struggled to breathe and worried for her life, her heart ached to hold her newborn. Instead, she held tight to the memory of that brief glimpse.

(From left) Mallory, baby Alivia, daughter Emma Jean and husband Mitchell.(Courtesy of the Pease family)

When she finally got to cradle Alivia in her arms four days later, she said, “it was kind of like meeting her all over again.”

Don't Miss A Story

Subscribe to KHN’s free Weekly Edition newsletter.

Please confirm your email address below:

That information — plus limited data on infections in babies in China — has shifted the thinking of many obstetrics specialists, said Cheng.

They’re kept apart from moms — and sometimes dads, who also may be sick — until the parents have had no symptoms for three days or for a week after their first symptoms, whichever is greater.

“Being completely data-blind but counseling women on their outcomes and their babies’ outcomes is just wrong,” she said.

Doctors and patients said it’s frustrating that so much remains unknown.

“Alivia is good. She’s happy,” Pease said. “She never skipped a beat.”

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/born-into-a-pandemic-virus-complicates-births-for-moms-and-babies/

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newstechreviews · 5 years ago

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(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — Ohio called off its presidential primary just hours before polls were set to open there and in three other states, an 11th-hour decision the governor said was necessary to prevent further fueling the coronavirus pandemic that has paralyzed the nation.

Health Director Amy Acton declared a health emergency that would prevent the polls from opening out of fear of exposing voters and volunteer poll workers �� many of them elderly — to the virus. Arizona, Florida and Illinois were proceeding with their presidential primaries.

DeWine failed to get a judge to halt the primary Monday evening, even though the governor contended the election results wouldn’t be viewed as legitimate in light of the pandemic.

“To conduct an election tomorrow would would force poll workers and voters to place themselves at a unacceptable health risk of contracting coronavirus,” he said.

It wasn’t clear what would happen, but DeWine said officials were considering how to give voters an opportunity to cast their ballots.

DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose had supported a lawsuit by voters seeking a delay in the primary until June 2, in the hope that the outbreak subsides by then. Ohio Judge Richard Frye ruled against the motion Monday night, saying it was not his place and would set a terrible precedent.

Officials in Arizona, Florida and Illinois felt they had done enough to ensure the safety of voters, even as concerns mounted that there will not be enough poll workers in some precincts and voters will be confused after polling places in nursing homes were moved to other locations.

Elsewhere, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana have postponed their scheduled primaries.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said late Monday the state believes the election can proceed safely. Arizona’s governor and secretary of state also said Monday they did not want to postpone the election.

In Illinois, elections board spokesman Matt Dietrich said in a statement that the state’s primary will move forward. He said Gov. J.B. Pritzker does not have the power to order the date moved and does not intend to ask a court to do so.

“We believe that by following guidance from our state and federal health professionals, voters can vote safely,” Dietrich said.

That assurance did not appear to satisfy volunteer poll workers, many of whom are senior citizens and have decided to bail out on staffing their precincts.

Chicago election officials on Monday said they had received a “tsumani” of cancellations from planned poll workers, particularly those who are older and considered at a higher risk of facing serious health consequences if they contract the virus. They begged healthy people to volunteer to work at polling sites.

Marisel Hernandez, chair of the city’s election commission, said people can be sworn in to act as election judges at polling locations on Tuesday. She also asked people to be patient at the polls, warning that it’s possible for locations to open late or still be setting up as voters arrive early Tuesday morning.

“Please, please heed our call and volunteer,” she said. “Help us.”

Pressed on whether they have asked the governor to delay the state’s primary, Chicago elections commission spokesman Jim Allen said election officials statewide were in an impossible position.

“We are under orders to conduct an election, end of story, period,” Allen said. “If we say anything now to raise doubts, we stand accused of violating the law, undermining turnout and discouraging voters.

“This is the biggest test that any election jurisdiction has faced in the last hundred years, period,” Allen said.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said she will not make an effort to delay the election. She said she came to the decision in consultation with county election officials, health authorities and the Democratic Party.

“What it all comes down to is that we have no guarantee that there will be a safer time to hold this election in the future,” Hobbs said during a news conference in Phoenix alongside Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and other state officials.

Turnout at polling places is already expected to be light Tuesday as only the Democrats have a contested presidential primary, and that is down to two contenders: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Add that the states were pushing early voting and vote-by-mail even before the coronavirus outbreak, and fewer voters are expected to appear Tuesday at their neighborhood precinct.

Meanwhile, the states have been taking steps to limit voter and poll worker exposure to the coronavirus.

In Florida and Arizona, the states moved polling places located in nursing homes and assisted living facilities to avoid exposing the residents to outsiders. For some counties like Volusia, Florida, and Maricopa, Arizona — by far that state’s largest — that became a benefit. The counties combined those polling places with others nearby, meaning they needed fewer workers.

DeSantis said he is allowing the Florida election to proceed unabated because “there is no need to panic” and can be done safely. He said most voters will only be in the polling place for a few minutes with only the presidential race on the ballot in most Florida cities.

“We can do it in a way that protects people,” DeSantis said.

Broward County, Florida, is stocking its 421 polling locations with extra supplies, including 4,000 rolls of paper towels, gloves and more than 400 bars of soap.

The states have also been pushing early voting and voting by mail as a way to curtail any crowds at the polls. Chicago election officials say the effort paid off with 118,000 voters casting ballots in the mail in the city, which is an all-time record, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

#Blogger

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itsfinancethings · 5 years ago

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Health Director Amy Acton declared a health emergency that would prevent the polls from opening out of fear of exposing voters and volunteer poll workers — many of them elderly — to the virus. Arizona, Florida and Illinois were proceeding with their presidential primaries.