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#ala

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Spin Doctors - Cleopatra's Cat

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On Saturday, Yosemite National Park workers hung an upside-down American flag — traditionally a symbol of distress or a national threat — thousands of feet off the ground on the side of El Capitan.

The flag was hung from El Capitan near Horsetail Fall to protest the thousands of federal job cuts made by the Trump/Musk administration.

Statement by Yosemite NPS workers: “These losses, while deeply personal and impactful, may also be invisible to visitors and members of the public — we are shining a spotlight on them by putting a distress flag on El Capitan in view of Firefall. Think of it as your public lands on strike.”

Tracy Barbutes/Special to the SFChronicle

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BY EMAIL Re: United States v. Eric Adams, 24 Cr. 556 (DEH)

Mr. Bove,

I have received correspondence indicating that I refused your order to move to dismiss the indictment against Eric Adams without prejudice, subject to certain conditions, including the express possibility of reinstatement of the indictment. That is not exactly correct. The U.S. Attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, never asked me to file such a motion, and I therefore never had an opportunity to refuse. But I am entirely in agreement with her decision not to do so, for the reasons stated in her February 12, 2025 letter to the Attorney General.

In short, the first justification for the motion—that Damian Williams's role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys is so weak as to be transparently pretextual. The second justification is worse. No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.

There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake . Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.

Please consider this my resignation. It has been an honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Yours truly,

Hagan Scotten

Assistant United States Attorney

Southern District of New York

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ASL Performance of Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show Ft. Kendrick Lamar | Mat...

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Salutations. This is your Uncle Sam. And this is the Great American Game.

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Audrey Hepburn with Edith Head (1958)

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Sigmar Polke’s agate ‘stained glass’ windows for the Grossmunster church in Zurich

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Get to know the smallest raptor in Africa, the African Pygmy Falcon (Polihierax semitorquatus)! Growing around 8 inches (20 centimeters) long and weighing about 0.18 pounds (85 grams), this petite bird of prey is still a fierce predator. In the dry, sparsely vegetated habitats where it lives, this bird uses its keen sense of sight to spot prey from a perch. Once it locks in on a target, it quickly swoops down from above to claim its meal. What’s on the menu? A mix of lizards, insects, small birds, and rodents. Photo: Francesco Veronesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, flickr https://www.instagram.com/p/CKk4VZUAnMf/?igshid=1gspaxfn1az64

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In November 1889, American journalist Nellie Bly began her record-breaking 72 day trip around the world. She was inspired to take this trip after reading Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly traveled mostly by steamships and railroads with the journey taking her through England, France, Pakistan, and Japan. On January 25, 1890, Bly returned to New Jersey 72 days and 6 hours after her trip began.

Nellie Bly became a media sensation and a board game was created to celebrate her accomplishment. Gamers of 1890 would spin the dial and travel around the board until they reached the end. They would also want to avoid certain squares on the board which saddled them with delays similar to those Bly encountered, such as waiting for a ship to depart. If you look closely at the game board, you can see that a stormy day would take you back 10 days.

Sounds like fun!

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Question: What do you get when you go walking with the nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the actor and musician Johnny Flynn on a scorching hot summer’s day in Wandlebury?

Answer: A Neolithic track, an Iron Age fort, a Roman road, a holm oak, cow pats, a mighty avenue of sun-dappled beech, a buzzard, a grasshopper orchestra, a dragonfly, the stories of a mysterious white horse and a dread augury and countless busy, buzzing bees. Oh, and no fewer than six extraordinary songs performed along the way.

New Folk on Foot podcast with Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane is out!

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SewBeautifulx on Etsy

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Throughout the late 1980s, University of Wisconsin–Stout English professor Virginia L. Wolf was engaged in research for a Twayne biography of Louise Fitzhugh, and she would fill me in on all her latest discoveries. She was able to confirm what I had long suspected — that Fitzhugh was a lesbian. Thirty years ago, this bit of information was considered a lot more scandalous than it is today. So many of Fitzhugh’s friends interviewed for the book told Virginia, “Yes, she was gay, but you didn’t hear it from me.” Others tried to convince Virginia that she shouldn’t mention Fitzhugh’s sexual orientation in the book because it wasn’t an important part of her biography. Virginia had the foresight to disagree. One of the most tantalizing bits of information Virginia learned from Alixe Gordin, Fitzhugh’s lover at the time she was writing Harriet the Spy, was that Fitzhugh had written a more serious novel, called Amelia, about an adolescent girl who had fallen in love with another girl. It was completed in the early 1960s, but the novel never saw publication. If it had, it would have been the first gay novel for teens, predating John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip by several years.

  —  Spying on Louise Fitzhugh

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Miniature house of the Addams Family.

Artist Kelly Little-Kuehnert of K&K Custom Miniature Creations made this amazing miniature models of the Addams Family home for a client. The house took about a year to built.

Keep reading

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when albert camus said “the sea; i didnt lose myself in it. i found myself in it” and when sylvia plath said “if i lived by the sea i would never be really sad” and when hozier said “love, when the sea rises to meet us” and when an anonymous writer said “and yet my heart wanders away, my soul roams with the sea” and when homer said “I’d rather die at sea”