CLEVELAND (AP) — The first of three women kidnapped and held for a decade in Ariel Castro's Cleveland home was chained and raped by her captor, who struck her with a barbell to force a miscarriage when she became pregnant and snapped her dog's neck after it tried to protect her and bit Castro, the woman said in a taped interview Tuesday on the "Dr. Phil" show.
Michelle Knight recounted graphic allegations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse and said Castro kept her in filthy conditions, sometimes naked and freezing, after she was kidnapped in 2002, when she was about 20.
Knight said Castro lured her inside with the promise of a puppy for her young son. She said she was kept in a basement and a boarded-up bedroom and once tried to escape, using a needle to pick a lock on chains that bound her. She said she made it to a window before Castro returned and punished her.
Knight said she sometimes fell asleep praying that her lock would open, and she feels she survived because of her son, now a teenager.
"I want my son to know me as a victor, not a victim," Knight told the TV host. "And I wanted him to know that I survived, loving him. His love got me through."
Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus escaped from Castro's house May 6 when Berry pushed out a door and called for help. Knight has been the most public since, including a visit to Castro's neighborhood before his house was demolished.
Castro, 53, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. A month into his sentence, he was found dead in his cell. His hanging death was ruled a suicide, but a prison report indicated he may have died accidentally while choking himself for a sexual thrill.
In the "Dr. Phil" interview, Knight said Castro had a sexual fetish about choking her but never himself.
Knight also raised previously reported allegations that Castro had held someone else and said he'd told her that there was another girl before her. Authorities have said no remains were found at the home.
The second part of Knight's interview airs Wednesday.
Berry and DeJesus plan to share their stories in a book about their ordeal.
Looking for a little more flair? A white Nexus 5 may be for you
The LG Nexus 5 is finally on sale, and yes, it comes in white. No matter the storage size choice you make you'll have the option to get a different colored back on the phone, and for some it'll be a better-looking option. There's a slight materials difference between the black and white models, with the white one being a little "harder" plastic on the back and having glossier plastic sides, but other than that you're basically getting the same phone in a different color. Hit the break for a photo gallery of the Nexus 5 in white.
The U.S. Department of Justice recently announced $6.7 million in grants to provide more legal defense services for the indigent. But will the money really help with what some critics call overworked, underpaid, and poorly trained public defenders? Host Michel Martin asks law professor Eve Primus and Jonathan Rapping of Gideon's Promise.
In her journal in the mid-1960s, Susan Sontag vowed “to give no interviews until I can sound as clear + authoritative + direct as Lillian Hellman in Paris Review.” Sontag’s ongoing investment in the development and definition of herself always seemed less like self-obsession than a kind of existential industriousness. Reading through the odds and ends that have been published since her death almost 10 years ago—the two volumes of her journals, in particular—you get the sense of a person who was always working toward an ideal version of herself. The ideal changed in its particulars over time, but the ideal of change remained constant. She’s often a reassuringly pretentious figure in the early diaries, which are themselves a useful reminder that being a pseudo-intellectual is a necessary stage on the way to being a nonpseudo-intellectual, and that the two classifications aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Being an intellectual is often, after all, a matter of getting away with trying to be seen as one.
In his introduction to Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, Jonathan Cott—whose 1978 interview with Sontag got chopped down by the magazine to one-third of its length—remembers that journal entry, and writes that “as I listened to her clear, authoritative, and direct responses to my questions, it was obvious that she had attained the conversational goal that she had set for herself many years before.” The idea of this persuasive fluency of speech as something constructed, something striven for and achieved, reveals the extent to which Sontag’s position as one of the most public of 20th-century public intellectuals was one she had always wanted to arrive at. As brilliant an essayist as she was, talking brilliantly was almost as significant a part of her job.
And so the Sontag colloquy shares certain key qualities with the Sontag essay—in particular the magnetic mixture of intellectual self-assurance and relaxed inclusivity. She was a virtuoso of the literary sit-down, working the form into an occasion for informal self-portrait. There’s no one topic that particularly dominates in this 138-page interview, but there are certain themes and preoccupations that assert themselves throughout: the ideal of personal autonomy, the complexities of love and friendship and sexuality, the historical constitution of ideas and behaviors we tend to think of as natural. The interview is from around the time of the publication of Illness as Metaphor, and so there’s a fair amount of talk about mortality, and the personal experience of being a cancer patient which informed that book. “We’re all,” she says at one point, “going to die—that’s a very difficult thing to take in—and we all experience this process. It feels as if there’s this person—in your head, mainly—trapped in this physiological stock that can only survive seventy- or eighty-plus years normally, in any kind of decent condition. It starts deteriorating at a certain point, and then for half of your life, if not more, you watch this material begin to fray. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re trapped inside it, and when it goes, you go.”
But it’s Sontag the reader who gets most airtime here—which is to say the critic rather than the novelist (although she would probably have argued the distinction could never hold up). There’s always the sense, with Sontag, of reading as a process of acquisition and assimilation, as a kind of territorial expansionism of the self. All those itemized resolutions in the journals, all those lists of things to be read and absorbed; her project was, as she put it, “taking all of knowledge as my province.” And this is one of the most striking things about her, this conquistadorial spirit brought to bear on a basically democratic sensibility—the famous imperative to be interested in everything. She seems to have read all of Western literature, and to have learned from it everything that might be worth knowing.
This, of course, is exactly the impression you’d be well advised to start giving off if you wanted to make any kind of impact as a public intellectual. But with Sontag, you suspect that she really has read everything—and not in the Harold Bloom way, either, where encyclopedic erudition starts to look like a kind of petrification, where the critic manifests himself as the canon made flesh. Change is, for her, the end of reading; what she prizes in literature is its capacity to bring otherness into the self—the paradoxical way in which books take us outside the limits of ourselves while pushing those limits outward. “It’s exciting to me to subscribe to something that’s foreign to my earlier taste,” she says. “Not in an unfriendly spirit with respect to the earlier work—but just because I need new blood and new nourishment and new inspiration. And because I like what I’m not, I like to try to learn what isn’t me or what I don’t know. I’m curious.”
And that’s one of the more inspiring things about Sontag: the way in which she positions curiosity as not just a primary critical value, but a primary human value. To be curious is, in the most vital sense, to be serious. There’s another wonderful moment, later on, when Cott mentions phoning her to ask about completing the interview, to which she replied that “We should do it soon because I may change too much.” Sontag sees nothing very unusual about this; it’s simply good practice to move on from being the person you’ve already established yourself as being:
I feel I’m changing all the time, and that’s something that’s hard to explain to people, because a writer is generally thought to be someone who’s either engaging in self-expression or else doing work to convince or change people along the lines of his or her views. And I don’t feel that either of those models makes much sense for me. I mean, I write partly in order to change myself so that once I write about something I don’t have to think about it anymore. And when I write, it actually is to get rid of those ideas. That may sound contemptuous of the public, because obviously when I’ve gotten rid of those ideas, I’ve passed them on as things that I believe— and I do believe them when I write them— but I don’t believe them after I’ve written them because I’ve moved on to some other view of things, and it’s become still more complicated ... or perhaps more simple.
But this long and largely genial portrait of the (not always quite so genial) intellectual in middle age also amounts to a strong and deeply personal argument about what it means to be cultured—an argument for why a middle-aged intellectual might be something worth being in the first place. Part of what is so appealing about Sontag’s thinking is the absence of any heavy intellectual machinery being brought to bear on whatever topic she happens to be considering; there is rarely very much in the way of dogma to be contended with. But there is a kind of personal dialectic at work in her attitude toward herself, toward her writing and reading and thinking and speaking. “The most awful thing,” as she puts it in the book’s final lines, “would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written—that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.”
Contact: ANU Media Hotline media@anu.edu.au 61-026-125-7979 Australian National University
ANU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ian Young AO, has just published research that will help you every morning with the surf report.
Research led by the Vice-Chancellor will allow oceanographers and meteorologists to better predict the rate at which ocean swells decay, or deteriorate, as they travel across the globe.
"Ocean cargo shipping, offshore oil and gas production, and even recreational activities such as surfing, are all dependent on wave action," says Professor Young.
"It is therefore critical that we are able to predict swell."
It is estimated that 75 per cent of waves across the world are not actually generated by local winds. Instead, they are driven by distant storms which propagate as swell.
"Imagine you drop a rock in a pond. Waves radiate out from the rock. You don't need anything to push the waves. Once generated, they propagate by themselves.
"So, for most of the Indian, Pacific and South Atlantic oceans, it is actually the weather in the Southern Ocean thousands of kilometres away that dominates the wave conditions," explains Professor Young.
"The Southern Ocean is dominated by big low pressure systems that move across it year round. These systems generate waves that then grow and can travel tens of thousands of kilometres from where they were actually formed, to crash on a beach in Australia."
Professor Young, who is affiliated with the Research School of Earth Sciences, used orbiting satellites to track swell generated in the Southern Ocean and measure the rate of decay as it travelled north towards Australia.
The results showed that the decay of the swell depends on how steep the wave actually is.
"Steep waves decay very quickly. However, typical swell is not very steep and can travel across oceanic basins with only a relatively small loss of energy."
Over 200 individual cases were tracked, making this study the first to provide such comprehensive data of this decay.
"What we were able to do is track the swell from the satellite as it moved from the south to the north, some 1400 kilometres. We only chose cases where there was no wind so that we could be confident that all we were measuring was the swell decay.
"We can take these results and put them into a mathematical formula that can be put straight into computer models used by national weather bureaus.
"This will increase our ability to better predict wave action. As 70 per cent of the world's oceans are dominated by swell, it's extremely important to be able to predict them accurately."
###
Professor Young's research is published today in The Journal of Physical Oceanography.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
VC predicts the motion of the ocean
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
5-Nov-2013
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Contact: ANU Media Hotline media@anu.edu.au 61-026-125-7979 Australian National University
ANU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ian Young AO, has just published research that will help you every morning with the surf report.
Research led by the Vice-Chancellor will allow oceanographers and meteorologists to better predict the rate at which ocean swells decay, or deteriorate, as they travel across the globe.
"Ocean cargo shipping, offshore oil and gas production, and even recreational activities such as surfing, are all dependent on wave action," says Professor Young.
"It is therefore critical that we are able to predict swell."
It is estimated that 75 per cent of waves across the world are not actually generated by local winds. Instead, they are driven by distant storms which propagate as swell.
"Imagine you drop a rock in a pond. Waves radiate out from the rock. You don't need anything to push the waves. Once generated, they propagate by themselves.
"So, for most of the Indian, Pacific and South Atlantic oceans, it is actually the weather in the Southern Ocean thousands of kilometres away that dominates the wave conditions," explains Professor Young.
"The Southern Ocean is dominated by big low pressure systems that move across it year round. These systems generate waves that then grow and can travel tens of thousands of kilometres from where they were actually formed, to crash on a beach in Australia."
Professor Young, who is affiliated with the Research School of Earth Sciences, used orbiting satellites to track swell generated in the Southern Ocean and measure the rate of decay as it travelled north towards Australia.
The results showed that the decay of the swell depends on how steep the wave actually is.
"Steep waves decay very quickly. However, typical swell is not very steep and can travel across oceanic basins with only a relatively small loss of energy."
Over 200 individual cases were tracked, making this study the first to provide such comprehensive data of this decay.
"What we were able to do is track the swell from the satellite as it moved from the south to the north, some 1400 kilometres. We only chose cases where there was no wind so that we could be confident that all we were measuring was the swell decay.
"We can take these results and put them into a mathematical formula that can be put straight into computer models used by national weather bureaus.
"This will increase our ability to better predict wave action. As 70 per cent of the world's oceans are dominated by swell, it's extremely important to be able to predict them accurately."
###
Professor Young's research is published today in The Journal of Physical Oceanography.
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Two encrypted communication service providers are turning to you for help in building the next-generation of secure email services. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison and Silent Circle recently began a Kickstarter initiative to help fund the development and roll out of the first Dark Mail clients.
"The Summer of Snowden may have taken the Lavabit email service offline," the project's Kickstarter page says, referring to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, "But the lifeblood of the service is still alive and relevant to Dark Mail."
Dark Mail is a newly proposed email protocol from Levison and Silent Circle that promises to encrypt not only the body of messages, as is the norm with today's email encryption, but also protect the "header" metadata accompanying every message, such as the subject line, sender, recipient, and so on.
The plan is to turn Dark Mail into an open source protocol so that any email provider or client app maker can make their services Dark Mail compatible.
Mucking with metadata
Metadata is one of the big weakpoints of secure email communciations , since you cannot hide it from a third-party observing Internet traffic—a fact highlighted this summer when leaks about the National Security Agency's surveillance activities started coming to light.
Lavabit and Silent Circle were not directly affected by the NSA Snowden revelations, but both companies are familiar with the legal issues surrounding U.S. government surveillance.
Lavabit shut down in August in protest after a court order compelled Levison to hand over the service's SSL encryption keys to U.S. law enforcement. Shortly thereafter, Silent Circle decided to shutter its email service rather than face legal challenges similar to Lavabit's. (Silent Circle continues to provide other privacy services such as encrypted voice calls and text messaging.)
The core Dark Mail ideal is that even if law enforcement forced a service provider to hand over its users' communications, all the company could hand over would be unintelligible junk. Like other encryption schemes, only the recipient with the proper decryption keys would be able to read the message.
Making encryption easy
Levison and Silent Circle also hope that open-sourcing the Dark Mail protocol would encourage software providers to build Dark Mail capabilities into email clients, and that in turn will make using encrypted communication as seamless as using Gmail or Outlook.com is now. Current efforts to encrypt the body of email messages requires at least a modicum of technical knowledge and a willingness to troubleshoot potential set-up problems.
The Dark Mail Kickstarter campaign hopes to raise $196,608 to clean up the Lavabit secure webmail source code and build in the Dark Mail protocol. The campaign would also fund development of the first Dark Mail clients for numerous platforms, including Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android. Pledges for the campaign start at $25, which will give you access to the project's official binary package for the apps and the Lavabit webmail code.
Pledges of $1,000 and up also give you access to the binaries in addition to technical assistance and a limited edition polo shirt. So far, the campaign has raised just over $16,000, mostly from $25 and $100 contributions. At this writing one backer has ponied up for the $1,000 contribution while no one has yet gone for the $5,000 and $10,000 donor levels.
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