Deadspin Baltimore Cop: We’re Hungry And Getting Shorted On Overtime Pay | Gizmodo Combat Tech Is Turning Baltimore Into a Paramilitary Zone | Jalopnik Here’s What It’s Like To Drive A Hummer In A Big, Crowded City | Jezebel New Video Shows BART Cop Breaking a Drunk Woman’s Face in Police Lobby | Kinja Popular Posts

Peter Cronkite, the 22-year-old grandson of the late, great TV newsman Walter Cronkite, was found dead in a dorm building at his college over the weekend. He took his own life.

Colby College, the Waterville, Maine, liberal arts school where Cronkite was majoring in classical civilization and minoring in cinema studies, announced his death in a public letter Monday.

“It is with deep sadness that I write to report that Peter Cronkite ‘15 took his own life this weekend,” college president David A. Greene wrote. “Peter’s death is devastating to his family, his many friends, and the entire Colby community. Our hearts are heavy as we try to come to terms with this tremendous loss.”

Greene described Cronkite, who would have graduated next month, as popular, intelligent, and engaged in both academics and athletics:

Peter was a dedicated member of the men’s rugby team and was sports editor of the Colby Echo. Peter had great passion for the ancient world, and he was slated to receive the department’s Foster Prize for Classical Civilization for achieving excellence in his major. His love of participating in athletics, which had been an important part of his life since he was very young, combined with his intelligence and kind, incredibly likeable personality, won him scores of friends and admirers at Colby.

In a New York Times obituary, his family remembers his love of sports and of film. He spent last summer working for “his beloved Mets,” coached youth hockey, and, as a kid, played Dennis the Menace in an animated film.

Peter is survived by his father, Walter “Chip” Cronkite III; his mother, the actress Deborah Rush; and his brother, Walter Cronkite IV.

No details of his death have been released.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK. It’s free and open 24 hours.

[Photo: Colby College]

North Dakota. The great expanse. Sounds romantic, in that sun setting over a bison grazing on the prairie, Americana sort of way. Great place to visit; not such a great place to work—North Dakota is also full of oil and gas that ain’t gonna extract itself.

And indeed, the fossil fuel-rich state leads the nation in work-related deaths, according to a recent study sponsored by the labor union federation AFL-CIO. Via the Guardian:

In 2013, 4,585 US workers were killed on the job and an estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases, found the report. Additionally, about 3.8m work-related injuries and illnesses were reported. The AFL-CIO estimates that the real number of work-related injuries is somewhere between 7.6m to 11.4m each year as many work-related injuries are not reported.

For the third year in a row, North Dakota was the deadliest state to work in the US.

“The state’s job fatality rate of 14.9 per 100,000 was more than four times the national average,” according to the report. North Dakota’s fatality rate has more than doubled since 2007, with 56 workers killed on the job in 2013.

Four times the national average! And workers keep streaming in because not only are there jobs, but new jobs keep opening up in part because employees keep dying. There’s a guaranteed turnover. The worst offenders are, unsurprisingly, oil and gas companies:

“The fatality rate in the mining and oil and gas extraction sector in North Dakota was an alarming 84.7 per 100,000, nearly seven times the national fatality rate of 12.4 per 100,000 in this industry; and the construction sector fatality rate in North Dakota was 44.1 per 100,000, more than four times the national fatality rate of 9.7 per 100,000 for construction.”

So will anything be done to help these companies manage their rather high employee fatality rate? Probably not. It’s been very lucrative.

This post has been edited to correct an error; the national average was reported as a state average.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Baltimore residents have been protesting for Freddie Gray—the 25-year-old black man whose spine was severed in police custody earlier this month—under the theory that excessive force was involved in his death. But according to a new “report” that surfaced today and started popping up on everyone’s racist uncle’s Facebook feed, Gray had a pre-existing spinal condition that may have contributed to his death. There’s just one problem: this is total bullshit.

It appears this report originated from a right-wing website called the Fourth Estate, under the headline, “BREAKING: FREDDIE GRAY ALLEGEDLY HAD SPINE SURGERY JUST ONE WEEK BEFORE ARREST.”

Explosive news that, if true, could exonerate the police and make a mockery of the protests now taking place in multiple cities. Take a gander at the Fourth Estate’s fine reportage.

UPDATE: More information has serviced, and a story will be released at 6 PM EST Wednesday that blows the Freddie Gray settlement/surgery/car accident story WIDE open

CONFIRMED: Court records show Freddie Gray was receiving a structured settlement from Allstate Insurance and attempted to convert it into one lump sum in early March

———————————————————————————————————————————–

EXCLUSIVE: The Fourth Estate has been told that Freddie Gray’s life-ending injuries to his spine may have possibly been the result of spinal and neck surgery that he allegedly received a week before he was arrested, not from rough excessively rough treatment or abuse from police.

The Fourth Estate has contacted sources who allege that Freddie Gray received spinal and neck surgery a week before we was arrested, and was allegedly receiving a large structured settlement from Allstate Insurance. The surgery is allegedly related to a car accident in which Gray was involved.

Sources allege that Gray also attempted to refinance his structured settlement into one lump sum payment through Peachtree Funding.

If this is true, then it is possible that Gray’s spinal injury resulting from his encounter with the Baltimore Police was not the result of rough-handling or abuse, but rather a freak accident that occurred when Gray should have been at home resting, not selling drugs.

This report, which includes screenshots of a settlement listed on the Howard County Circuit Court Records, apparently has just enough detail to ring true and was quickly picked up by rabid conservatives at the Free Republic in a now-deleted post cited by the Baltimore Sun.

From there it spread to Facebook and Twitter and other unfiltered news outlets, where you may have seen your more enlightened friends connecting the dots.

CNN guest journalist: "..there was nothing wrong with [Freddie Gray]."In fact, he'd had big medical pbms+major spinal surgery a wk earlier.

April 29, 2015

@TheLastRefuge2 Has this been debunked yet? pic.twitter.com/ASxFpGrau3

April 28, 2015

In fact, @ProgPoker, the spinal surgery rumor had been debunked—if you had only been reading credible news reports.

Although Gray’s so-called pre-existing injuries never happened, the court record screenshots used to bolster the claim were real—and the subject of an April 23 Baltimore Sun article about Gray’s involvement in a lead-paint exposure lawsuit.

As children, [Gray] and his two sisters were found to have damaging lead levels in their blood, which led to multiple educational, behavioral and medical problems, according to a lawsuit they filed in 2008 against the owner of a Sandtown-Winchester home they rented for four years.

...

The Grays’ case was scheduled to go to trial in February 2010. It had been postponed to that date because the Grays’ lawyers had four different lead paint trials scheduled to begin in the first two weeks of December 2009.

But both sides agreed to a settlement. It is not known if the Gray siblings received a monetary award, but a friend said the house on Lorraine Avenue was bought with lead paint money.

So Gray and his sisters got a settlement from the city of Baltimore because they were poisoned by lead paint. There is no proof that Freddie received a settlement from the city in connection with a car accident that might have damaged his neck or spine, or that he might have had neck or spine surgery recently.

The truth is out there.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

At least 100 people were arrested in Freddie Gray protests that spread to New York City Wednesday night, ABC News reports.

The protest, which began in Union Square, was reportedly comprised of at least 1,000 people and spread across the city, shutting down parts of the Holland Tunnel, the West Side Highway and Times Square.

CBS reports most of the arrests stemmed from protesters marching on the street and not the sidewalk, although there were some reports of people throwing bottles at officers.

There were too many arrests to track on the ground – some of them more dramatic than others, CBS2’s Weijia Jiang reported.

Jiang reported she and her crew got jostled around running in the middle of the action, and said the confrontation was more physical than those seen in Baltimore on Tuesday – the day after the riots.

Three officers were seen carrying one man, using every ounce of his energy to resist. Another handcuffed man was crouched in the street with his mouth gagged, and police also put several women into custody.

[images via AP]

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

“Whatever happened” to Freddie Gray happened “before he was transported,” the family member of one of the officers involved told CNN Wednesday night—just hours after a report was leaked to the Washington Post alleging Gray intentionally injured himself in the transport van.

Gray died April 19, a week after his spinal cord was severely torn while he was in police custody. Three days after his funeral, it’s still unclear whether that injury was sustained during the arrest or during his transfer to jail.

Both of the accounts broke Wednesday night; the Post’s prisoner story posted around 9 pm and although CNN’s interview was pre-taped, it didn’t run until around 11. Their conclusions contradict one another, but both versions of the story seem to shift the blame away from the transporting officers.

According to the Post, the prisoner’s allegations—made as part of a sealed search warrant affidavit—were elicited by a Baltimore cop and leaked on condition of anonymity.

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.

The relative, whose face was blurred out by CNN, agreed that Gray was “irate” in the van. But she tells Don Lemon she came forward because her cop relative told her the injuries “happened before [Gray] was transported,” likely caused by the arresting officers using excessive force.

She does admit that Gray wasn’t provided a seatbelt in the van, calling it an “unwritten, unspoken rule that when someone is irate in the paddywagon, you don’t reach over someone that’s irate” but emphasized that she thinks the arresting officers are hiding something. [In fact, new departmental policies issued just days before Gray’s death mandated seatbelts for all prisoners.]

How can anyone say that it was a rough enough ride for this gentleman to be as injured as he was. And if he was injured in the wagon, then why wasn’t the other gentleman injured as well when he was giving a statement. Why can’t they figure out whether this gentleman was injured when he was being chased, or where he was injured? There are a million cameras e verywhere.

[Lemon asks why she thinks there might be a cover-up]

Because if they come out and they tell the whole story then what do they do about all of the stuff that’s transpired up until this point? There’s been a riot, there’s now a curfew.

Before the interview abruptly cut off, the relative also denied allegations that the transporting officers gave Gray a “rough ride,” saying those officers weren’t involved in the arrest and had no reason to harm him.

It’s truly hard to tell who deserves more blame in this scenario: Nick Loeb, Sofia Vergara’s aspiring politician ex-boyfriend, for writing a baldly self-serving op-ed about their frozen embryos—or the New York Times, for publishing it.

To read the article on its face, Loeb—desperate to be a dad—would like to implant one of the embryos in a surrogate. But he can’t, see, because his ex, a famous actress, won’t let him use her eggs now that they’ve broken up. Weird.

In 2013, Sofía and I agreed to try to use in vitro fertilization and a surrogate to have children. We signed a form stating that any embryos created through the process could be brought to term only with both parties’ consent. The form did not specify — as California law requires — what would happen if we separated. I am asking to have it voided.

Still unclear is why the Times decided to furnish Loeb with a national platform to whine about voluntarily signing a contract that prohibits him from doing exactly what he’s trying to do now.

It’s not even a good argument! He fully admits he agreed to this ahead of time! Okay, but maybe there’s some sort of legal authority on his side? Maybe—if chemo had killed all his sperm. But it didn’t.

My lawyers have identified 10 other cases in the United States in which a parent tried to have a fertilized, frozen embryo taken to term against the wishes of an opposing parent. In eight of those cases, the parent seeking custody lost. In the other two cases, one in Pennsylvania and one inIllinois, a woman was awarded custody of fertilized embryos over the man’s objections. In both cases, the woman had undergone chemotherapy treatment and the embryos were her last chance to have a biological child; judges ruled that the woman’s interest in becoming a parent outweighed the man’s interest in not becoming a parent. In the Illinois case (now on appeal), the judge found that the form the couple signed was not the binding contract, and instead enforced a verbal promise the man made to help the woman have children.

What is wrong with this man! Does he also still ask her to get drinks every so often because they need “closure?” Did he get mad when she left a box of his stuff with the doorman instead of buzzing him up? Sure sounds like it!

See Loeb never even comes out and confirms that he would, without caveat, implant those embryos in a surrogate and go at it a single dad if he got permission today. He dances around it to be sure, but ultimately all he’s asking for is the right to force his ex-girlfriend to have kids she doesn’t want, with a man she doesn’t want to be with.

But as we began to discuss other potential surrogates, it became clear once more that parenthood was much less urgent for her than it was for me. We had been together for over four years. As I was coming on 40, I gave her an ultimatum. When she refused, we split up.

A few months later, I asked her to let me have the embryos, offering to pay for all expenses to carry our girls to term and raise them. If she did not wish to share custody, I would take on full parenting responsibilities and agree to have her declared an egg donor. She has refused. Her lawyer, Fred Silberberg, has told reporters that she wants to keep the embryos “frozen indefinitely.” In my view, keeping them frozen forever is tantamount to killing them.

Cool guy. Can’t wait for him to run (away).

[image via AP]

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

About half of the people arrested during the Baltimore protests Monday—some of them members of the press—were just released without charges, NBC News reports.

The estimated 100 people were reportedly held in jail for around 48 hours—double the accepted time period—before cops began releasing or charging them. NBC reports the process was apparently nudged along by a habeas corpus petition filed Wednesday morning by the Baltimore Public Defenders’ office.

The processing problems were also apparently self-inflicted—Baltimore City Paper writer Caitlin Goldblatt tweeted Wednesday night that, “Delays in recent releases allegedly partially due to vans dropping detainees off at booking without paperwork.” But, according to NBC, those released may still be charged:

The releases were the result of a logjam for police who were scrambling to pull the necessary paperwork to file charges at the same time they were trying to keep peace on the city’s streets, Kowalczyk said.

Batts, the police commissioner, told reporters Wednesday night: “We’ve come up on a timeline. We are releasing them with future prosecution in mind. ... We’re not giving up on them.

Among those released Wednesday evening was VICE freelancer Shawn Carrié, who was apparently arrested despite showing police his press pass.

I was taking photos & video of the #BaltimoreRiots at Mondawmin when I got shot in the head w/ a rubber bullet https://t.co/4FuYnCvVko

April 30, 2015

About 15 minutes later, a police captain pointed me out while taking photos & said “He goes” – then they arrested me. #BaltimoreRiots

April 30, 2015

I complied with all police orders, & they were very cordial. I showed my press pass, & officer asked his supervisor if he could release me…

April 30, 2015

Captain insisted they take me in. The cop who arrested me said: “I don’t even know why they told to arrest this guy, he’s a reporter."

April 30, 2015

I have so much more to say on the experience in jail, but all I’ll say for right now is that I was released with no charges… #BaltimoreRiots

April 30, 2015

They were holding us even though the law requires you to be charged within 24 hours, or you have to be released. #BaltimoreRiots

April 30, 2015

[image via AP]

Contact the author of this post at gabrielle@gawker.com

When Nancy Page walked into her Rhode Island home last week and found water pouring from the ceiling, she assumed a pipe had burst. No, Nancy. It was a wild turkey who did that to your house.

After noticing the water, Page quickly walked to her upstairs bathroom to investigate the flooding’s source.

“The door was open and I rounded the corner and there was a turkey— sitting on my vanity,” she told WLNE.

The bird had apparently flown through Page’s window, landed on her sink, and somehow turned on the faucet, which ran for hours.

Upon seeing the turkey and the chaotic scene it’d created, Page slammed the door shut and called 911.

“My emergency was water gushing through the ceiling... and a turkey in my bathroom,” Page told WLNE. “[The dispatcher] said what? And I said it again and said this really is true.”

Despite thousands of dollars in damage to her home, Page has remained cheerful about the ordeal.

“Everybody has gotten a really good laugh out of this because it is so comical. No one was hurt so we’re real thankful for that,” she said.

As for the turkey’s fate, there have been conflicting reports: The Associated Press says that police captured the bird and released it later, while WLNE claims the fowl required “little prodding” before standing up and flying off on its own.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Did you know John Mayer has a multi-million dollar watch collection? Mayer, the kind of guy who probably refers to having sex with a woman as “getting snatch,” spoke with the New York Times about—you guessed it—watches. As if this guy couldn’t be more of a parody of himself—sensitive yet manly; sensual but horny; Steve Stifler with a Stratocaster and a chorus pedal—he also knows a thing or two about how to wear an item of jewelry whose only function is to tell you the time of day:

“John is something of a watch-nerd icon,” said Benjamin Clymer, the 32-year-old founder of Hodinkee, which features watch news and reviews catering to next-generation aficionados. “I think, in a lot of ways, John made it O.K. to really go deep into watches and not be embarrassed about it. I can’t tell you how many guys have come up to me at events and said, ‘My wife or girlfriend thought I was crazy for caring about watches so much, until I told her John Mayer was the very same way.’ ”

Women: still caring about John Mayer in 2015? A crude generalization, but let’s move on. Here’s what Mayer has to say about watches (I can’t believe we’re still talking about watches):

“I remember thinking — and this is a very important feeling — that I could go anywhere with this watch, because I couldn’t be lost,” he said. “I could get lost in Paris, but I had my watch. Now, on its face, no pun intended, it doesn’t make sense. All your watch does is tell the time. But why do you feel strapped? Why do you feel equipped?

“It would take a lot of poetry to explain it.”

Speaking of poetry, here’s a brief interlude to recall some lyrics from John Mayer’s 2003 hit song, “Daughters”:

So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too

So earnest and beautiful. Back to what is important—watches—and more specifically, the Apple Watch:

If, indeed, everyone is going to end up with the Apple, that may undercut a subtle joy of connoisseurship: the pleasure of belonging. “The watch community gets its power from being esoteric,” Mr. Mayer said. “We don’t want everybody to be involved in it.”

As the old adage goes, I don’t care to belong to a club that would have John Mayer as a member. Excuseme—I mean “Just John.”

For a celebrity who had grown weary of a life lived on TMZ.com, the watch community also offered escape. In that world, he was just “John,” a guy who loves watches.

Hey, John. I got a watch suggestion for you.

Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

“It’s Jamie Foxx!” The young man standing outside the MGM’s KA Theatre grabbed his girlfriend’s arm. “There! Walking this way!”

She peered down the hallway toward the goateed, freshly dressed, muscled young man approaching. He did look a little bit like Jamie Foxx. He also looked a little bit like Sugar Shane Mosley, as evidenced by the fact that a minute earlier, when he was posing for pictures and signing autographs, people in the crowd kept craning their necks and asking, “Is that Sugar Shane Mosley?” He was not Sugar Shane Mosley.

He was Shawn Porter, a good professional welterweight boxer. There he was, in the MGM Grand Wednesday morning, a crowd magnetically formed around him, clamoring to shake his hand and pose for pictures and generally bask in his aura. I am a very big boxing fan, and even I must admit that the prospect of “seeing Shawn Porter in the flesh” elicits only the very mildest of thrills for me. So how was it, friend, that Shawn Porter was able to enjoy such celebrity status among a throng of spectators in Las Vegas yesterday?

It was because he happened to be in the MGM Grand just days before The Biggest Fight. And he happened to be strolling outside of the KA Theatre just before the pre-fight press conference kicked off—a time at which hundreds of fans had assembled in hopes of catching a glimpse of Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao, or, failing that, anybody. The Big Fight is throwing off a halo effect onto the rest of boxing that allows fighters—gym-bound wretches who usually must satisfy themselves with a few moments of glory when they fight, followed by months of pain and drudgery and anonymity—to be treated like real athletes. To be treated like football players hanging around during Super Bowl week. This is a chance for the tribal members of boxing to taste the American dream of being treated like stars, rather than workingmen. And they would be foolish to pass it up.

I, too, was lined up outside the KA Theatre yesterday as the press conference went on inside. I watched journalist after journalist flash their credentials and breeze past the ten MGM security officers and the nine uniformed Vegas police officers and through a set of metal detectors and inside to absorb platitudes. I and the other uncredentialed hordes watched like panhandlers eying the foot traffic into and out of an expensive store. There was no physical rope line to keep us out; instead, security guards pointed to a single line on the carpet, and ordered us all behind it, and we all dutifully shuffled behind it, held back by the chains of our own minds.

Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s Parkinsons-afflicted trainer, walked by fast in a blue windbreaker, tossing off a quick wave and ducking inside. “Man, he look like he sick!” exclaimed the man next to me. “His head was all bent over and shit.” At one point dozens of fans began streaming off the imaginary rope line towards a nearby hallway where several large men surrounded a short man. The short man was Mike Tyson, in white pants and a plain black t-shirt, his tattoo snaking around his face. He did not seem happy with the crowd. Most of them did not follow him after a long, hard stare.

An hour of waiting brought glimpses of Floyd Mayweather’s little cousin, and Floyd Mayweather’s girlfriend, and the guy who wraps Floyd Mayweather’s hands. But no Floyd Mayweather, and no Manny Pacquiao. For the uncredentialed, there are only crumbs. Eventually more than a dozen yellow-shirted security guards streamed in and started shooing everyone away. “If you’re not with the media, keep moving!”

I willed myself unsuccessfully to shed a single tear at that moment for the sake of creating a poignant scene. Imagine the indignity.

In the afternoon, in the lobby of the MGM Grand Garden Arena, there were “workouts” of the fighters on the undercard of The Big Fight, which were “open to the public.” For a normal fight, no one would attend such a piddling publicity stunt except for a few harried reporters desperate for copy; yesterday, there were hundreds of fans. I walked towards the entrance to the arena when a security guard stopped me.

“You can’t come in here. Only the media.”

“You need a credential to come in here?” I asked.

“You don’t need a credential, but only the media can come in here.”

“I am the media.”

“You got a credential?”

I did not. So instead of walking directly in, I and the other scum were routed down the hall, down stairs, out a door, across a parking lot, in another door, up another set of stairs, and down another hall. This put us in the same place we would have been had we gone in the front. But that entrance is only for the media.

The arena’s lobby was plastered with enough Tecate-branded promo banners for the fight that they almost qualified as wallpaper. A boxing ring had been set up, and Big Tigger stood in it playing hype man as a DJ spun 90s hip hop. “First and foremost I gotta shout out Tecate!” he said. “Also I gotta shout out Paramount Pictures and Terminator Genisys—make sure yall watch that movie after we watch this movie on May 2!”

Promo t-shirts and posters were tossed into the crowd at irregular intervals. I was nearly smacked in the face by each, while trying to take notes. One by one, the undercard fighters came into the ring and shadowboxed for about ten minutes as DMX songs played. Off to the side, in front of a large Tecate backdrop, four “Tecate girls” in red bikinis posed for photos with enthusiastic men who never really grew up. The smell of cologne in the room was overwhelming.

Standing against the wall, a police dog watched us all.

Floyd Mayweather Sr., the champ’s dad and a famed boxing trainer and general lunatic, came into the ring to work the pads with one of his fighters. Just like his son, Mayweather Sr.’s face is smooth and unlined, a result of not being the sort of boxer who takes a lot of punches to the face. The veins in his neck stood out. At the age of 62, he looked very much in shape. Big Tigger gamely “interviewed” him about his thoughts on Saturday’s showdown.

“Manny Pacquiao got one opportunity—dive off a building and kill himself, or let Floyd kill him,” Mayweather Sr. said. The crowd cheered.

“Teach!” exclaimed one middle-aged church lady type who was waving a paddle-shaped fan with Floyd Mayweather’s face on it. “Teach the world!”

Mayweather Sr. launched into a well-rehearsed poem: “Floyd the man to meet/ If you want to get beat!” This went on in the same vein for another 20 bars. The crowd cheered. Muhammad Ali would be ashamed of what passes for boxing poetry these days. When he was done, Big Tigger went on with the show. “Mayweather-Pacquiao is sponsored by: Mexico! Mayweather-Pacquiao is also sponsored by: The Weinstein Company!”

The crowd cheered.

On ESPN, coverage of the fight has reached saturation levels. The Vegas morning TV shows are a procession of C-list celebrities discussing their picks. Vegas locals are grumbling about the shit show to come on Saturday in the same way that New Yorkers grumble when UN meetings shut down traffic in Manhattan. The Big Fight has the gravity of a black hole, sucking in a city’s worth of bystanders. In the lobby of the MGM yesterday, Showtime was filming a pre-fight interview. Signs were tacked up all around: “By entering this area you are giving full consent to the producers of this program, SHOWTIME NETWORKS... to record and use your voice and/ or likeness in any manner, in any media, throughout the universe in perpetuity.”

In all of time and space, there shall be no escape. The fight is two days away.

[Image via Getty]

Once she has lowered herself into the mouth of the cannon and slid down to the base of the barrel, Gemma “The Jet” Kirby performs a series of breath-synchronized movements that seem more suited to yoga or lamaze than to one of the deadliest stunts in circus history. This sequence is the culmination of hours of preparation, the final item on a human cannonball’s pre-flight checklist.

It is essential that Kirby be prepared. The cannon is a notoriously temperamental act, prone to failures human and mechanical alike. Just how temperamental, though, is largely unknown to the general public. Human cannonballing is an exclusive enterprise; of the dozen or so cannonballs performing today, the majority are related by blood or marriage. Their methods are trade secrets, handed down from generation to generation. But Kirby—who, at 25, is currently the feat’s youngest female practitioner—was recruited for the job, and thus inducted into this peculiar guild of athletes who routinely blast themselves more than 100 feet through the air.

From inside the cannon, Kirby can hear the audience chanting backwards from five. She positions her body in a forearm plank—legs together, butt clenched, arms and elbows tucked—and twines her muscle fibers into rigid formation, anticipating the moment when the platform beneath her will stir to life and heave her skyward with tremendous, brain-draining force.

How does one survive being shot from a cannon? Kirby let us in on some of her secrets. Mostly, it’s a combination of aerial instincts and applied physics—but being a Jedi also helps.

Step One: Become A Jedi

When she was three or four, Kirby discovered Star Wars and immediately set her sights on becoming Luke Skywalker. Her parents, to their credit, did not discourage her gender-bent ambitions. “I want to be Luke Skywalker,” she told them. “Yes, Luke,” they told her back. And for a time she would answer to nothing else.

When she was seven, Kirby enrolled in ballet classes and fell in love with performing. At thirteen, she joined Circus Juventas, a circus school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Circus Juventas didn’t have a cannon, Kirby says, “because the cannon act is kind of dangerous.” Instead, she devoted herself to mastering the flying trapeze, an act that involves zipping through the air at vertiginous heights and perilous speeds. How tame.

Conquering the trapeze was not easy, but nothing satisfies Kirby like a challenge surmounted. “I was afraid of heights, and I had to overcome a lot of fears of falling and being up high and things that kids are normally afraid of,” she says. “Mostly, I love to entertain,” she adds. “And I love to push my boundaries.”

Kirby graduated from high school at 16. Between the ages of 17 and 22, she split her time between a traveling trapeze group and college. By 23, she had earned a psychology degree from the University of Minnesota. Having finished touring and finished school, Kirby says she was looking for something new, something besides trapeze that would get her back on the road. “But I wasn’t sure where to go.”

A short while later, in November of 2013, a friend from the trapeze world reached out to Kirby over social media. The message said that Ringling Bros. was looking for a young female to be shot from a cannon. They wanted to know if Kirby was interested.

She was interested.

The Inner Circle Of Human Cannonballs

Kirby’s first training shot would come a month later, in mid-December. She flew 28 feet. That’s small beer, for a human cannonball. Consider, by comparison, the long jump world record of 29 feet 4 inches—a record set, by definition, without the aid of heavy artillery.

Within a few weeks, however, Kirby was regularly soaring more than 100 feet through the air. In early January 2014, Kirby opened for Circus XTREME (“extreeeme!” she exclaims, playfully self-aware, during out interview), a traveling show from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey that showcases the industry’s most breakneck acts. In the span of just two months, Kirby had broken into the highly exclusive cadre of human cannonballs.

Kirby estimates there are no more than a dozen human cannonballs working today, though another recent estimate puts the number at fewer than ten. Her coaches, Brian and Tina Miser, are a husband and wife team famous for lighting one another on fire and shooting in tandem from a double-barreled cannon. Robin and Chachi Valencia – another pair of connubial cannonballs – currently live in Paris and perform on both sides of the Atlantic. Robin’s uncle, David Smith, was a cannonball for over three decades, with his wife, two sons, and three daughters joining him in the act at various points in his career. For years, Smith held the world record for longest human cannonball flight – that was until his son, David Smith Jr., broke that record in March 2011, with a flight of 193 feet 8.8 inches. The cannon act, in other words, is primarily a family affair, and has been for the better part of its 150-year history. Interlopers like Kirby are rare.

Why so exclusive? The cannon, says Kirby, is an act built on trade secrets; keeping things familial helps ensure those secrets don’t wander astray. For instance, it is common knowledge that human cannonballs are forcibly expelled from their cannons not by gunpowder (the pyrotechnics are for show), but by compressed air. But nearly everything else about a cannon’s insides are a mystery, unknown to all but those directly involved in its use. Kirby’s coach Brian, who she says has a mind for mechanics, builds all his cannons from scratch, including the one she uses today. The cannons used by Smith Sr.—a former math teacher—and his family are likewise of his own design. “But there’s no way of knowing if my cannon works the same way as theirs,” says Kirby. She says it’s possible that individual cannons are built very differently from one another, because their mechanistic details are not shared, not even among cannonballs. The details surrounding the cannon’s inner workings, she says, “are the most coveted secrets of the circus.”

You Can’t Wear A Safety Belt

Kirby says being asked to become a cannonball is “kind of unheard of.” So why was she, of all people, ushered in?

Kirby’s coaches, Tina and Brian Miser, told her it was her experience with trapeze, her familiarity with heights, and her outstanding bodily awareness that made her an ideal contender for the cannon act. (The Misers’ daughter, Skyler, was born in 2003, and while she’s grown up with the circus, she’s still too young to trace her parents’ flightpath.)

Beyond being a seemingly qualified candidate, Kirby says there’s not much a person can do to prepare for her first shot. And so you start small. “You can’t wear a safety belt, the way you can with the trapeze,” Kirby says. Usually, when an aerial performer learns a new act, she’s attached to some kind of harness. But for the cannon act there are no training wheels, only weaker propulsive forces. So on your first few flights, your range is shorter. Your height is lower. But when it comes down to it, says Kirby, “you’re still getting shot out of a cannon, completely untethered.”

Early on, Kirby practiced a lot—up to eleven shots a day, she says; but today, the most she’ll do is three. “Every time, you’re taking a big risk,” she says. “You’re using a big piece of equipment with a potentially limited lifespan. I try not to shoot more than is necessary.”

Kirby is right to be cautious; the cannon act’s history is strewn with casualties. Fourteen-year-old Rossa Matilda Richter (stage name Zazel), who launched to stardom in the late 19th Century, was the stunts’s first major headliner. Her career is said to have come to an abrupt end, when she overshot her landing net and broke her back. In 2011, a cannonball named Matt Cranch was performing one of his first shots when his net collapsed. He landed on his head, and later died of his injuries.

The two incidents bookend countless tales of cannon-related death and disfigurement. What records have been kept are, like many circus histories, incomplete and unreliable; but one of the most widely cited statistics on human cannonballs is attributed to late British historian and circus collector Antony Hippisley Coxe. When he stated as much is unclear, but Coxe once claimed that, of 50 human cannonballs known to have attempted the act, more than 30 had perished. It’s difficult to say how many cannonballs have performed throughout history, but Kirby says she would put the number at “a little more than 100 people.” Even if Coxe was exaggerating, and even if Kirby is lowballing, it’s safe to say that “human cannonball” holds a high rank on the list of deadliest professions.

Fortunately, after 15 months and some 550 shots, Kirby is injury free. She attributes her well-being not only to her physical preparation, but the extensive measures that she takes to ensure her safety while performing the act. With the help of her understudy, Nadia Terasova, and Terasova’s husband, Dima Dolgikh (whose job as “trigger person” is to fire the cannon), Kirby inspects and prepares the cannon for every single shot. It’s a process that can take hours to complete.

Do The Math

At 5’8”, Kirby is tall for a woman, but she only weighs about 135 pounds. She says her weight needs to be taken into account when determining how high to raise the barrel, and how far she will ultimately launch. She, Terasova, and Dolgikh make these adjustments based on an equation given to them by Brian Miser.

The trio can adjust the cannon to pitch Kirby’s body over a range of heights and distances, but the 24-foot barrel is typically raised to an angle of 39 or 40 degrees, depending on the size of the arena. The cannon is heated to a temperature between 65- and 75-degrees Fahrenheit (presumably, this is to ensure that the pressurized gas used to power the cannon behaves as expected come showtime), and inspected inside and out. A gigantic airbag—not a net—is centered 104 feet from the cannon’s barrel, and tended to by a team of six crew members. Painted on the bag is a target and a smattering of stars—reference points, Kirby says, that she uses to gauge her body position mid-flight.

Preparations and safety checks continue right up until the launch itself, when Kirby lowers herself into the cannon’s mouth and slides to the base of its barrel. Once settled, she checks in with Dima via headset.

“Dima, can you hear me?”

“Yeah, can you hear me?”

“Yep.”

A few seconds later, Kirby tells Dima she’s ready to proceed with the act.

Everything culminates with a five-second countdown, the crowd chanting in unison. Inside the cannon, Kirby runs through her sequence of breath and movement. She recounted it to me in detail, but you can listen for it yourself in the video below, which Kirby recorded on a recent launch:

Five! Kirby inhales. Her breath is big and deep. Four! She exhales sharply, emptying her lungs of air. Three! She sips a slow, steady breath, stopping short when she hears the audience chant Two!

It’s at this point that Kirby assumes a rigid plank position. From her head to her toes, every fiber of her physique is tightly flexed in anticipation of what comes next. The crowd chants “one!” The announcer says “go!” And suddenly Kirby is gaining momentum, accelerating toward the mouth of the cannon. By the time she exits, she’s traveling between 60 and 66 miles per hour.

The inner workings of these cannons may be closely guarded, but we do know that they pack a wallop. Kirby says the strain on her body is enormous, but that the brunt of it is absorbed by her ankles, knees and glutes. “There’s enough power in there to make peanut butter out of you,” David Smith has said of his home-brew artillery. How much power, exactly? I asked Rhett Allain, a physics professor at Southeastern Louisiana University who has also written extensively on the physics of unconventional artillery, like the cannons used to lob drugs across the U.S./Mexico border.

Above: A photo of a border-defying drug cannon, via the Mexicali Public Safety Department

Allain says we can start with the following kinematic equation. It may look scary to those with a phobia of physics, but it’s actually pretty straightforward:

v_f² = v₀² + 2a(x – x₀)

To translate: The square of Kirby’s velocity exiting the barrel is equal to the square of her velocity at the base of the barrel, plus twice the distance she travels along the barrel multiplied by her acceleration. If we assume a final velocity of 66 mph (29.5 m/s) and an initial velocity of 0 m/s (remember, she’s not moving in any direction while she waits at the base of the barrel), and plug in the length of the barrel (24 feet, or about 7.32 meters), we can solve for Kirby’s acceleration, which comes to to 59.6 m/s ², or about 6 gs.

The video above claims that Kirby experiences a g-force of 7. That’s certainly possible—likely, even. Our back-of-the envelope calculation makes a few assumptions, but the biggest of these assumptions is the distance that Kirby travels while inside the barrel. For simplicity’s sake, we’ve used the barrel’s overall length, but it’s entirely possible that Kirby, when she lowers herself into the cannon, does not slide down the cylinder’s full, 24-foot extent. Perhaps the launching platform at the base of of the tube is positioned such that she slides only 20 feet. The difference may seem small, but the bodily strain one experiences accelerating to 66 miles per hour over 20 feet is significantly more than one experiences over 24. In fact, if we plug the former distance into our equation, we get a g-force of around 7.2.

“You want to keep the acceleration down,” says Allain, “because high accelerations kill humans.” A longer barrel keeps your acceleration small, by allowing you build up speed over a greater distance.

The average person can withstand maybe 5 gs before passing out. Granted, Kirby only endures those 6 or 7 gs for a split second, as opposed to, say, the sustained strain that a pilot feels while pulling out of a nose dive (a maneuver that can lead to “G-induced Loss of Consciousness,” or G-LOC).

“I’ve heard urban legends of cannonballs losing consciousness in the air,” says Kirby. “I don’t know if those legends are true or if they’re just invented,” she adds. But personally? No. She’ll often feel dizzy, but she’s never blacked out mid-flight.

Stick The Landing

As soon as Kirby exits the barrel, she stretches into a bird-like position, thrusting her arms wide, arching her back, and swinging her legs up and over her head as she reaches the peak of her trajectory. Her fingers, she says, are “super straight, super stretched, and super pretty.”

It’s here, about forty feet in the air, that Kirby’s superhuman aerial abilities come into play. The most dangerous part of the cannon act, she says, is the landing; alighting flat, and face up, is key. It’s also easier said than done. Her elapsed flight time is only about 2.6-seconds. “When you’re that high up, and you have that little time, deciding how to have a controlled landing is not something you do intellectually,” she says. “It’s something your body does on feel.” Kirby honed these skills while training for the trapeze. “After years of executing tricks and missing them, intentionally or by accident, trapeze artists develop instincts where we’ll figure out a way to land on our backs,” she says.

On her way down, Kirby keeps her body elongated until right before she hits the airbag. In the last few hundredths of a second, she tucks her chin to her chest so that she lands flat on her back. If she needs to create more rotation mid-flight, she does a pike, quickly touching her toes before opening her body, like so:

“It’s crazy the way we relate to time,” says Kirby, reflecting on her first flights as a human projectile. “The first, maybe, hundred launches that I did, I remember there being all this prep, and it feeling like an eternity,” she says. “Then I’d climb in, and— fivefourthreetwoonefire!—the next thing I knew I was in the airbag. I wouldn’t even know what had happened.”

But the more flights she logs, the longer those 2.6-seconds of airtime seem. “You put three seconds on a microwave and press start, and it’s nothing,” she says. “But when I’m in the air, lately, it feels like a very, very long time.” Her most recent shots have felt especially slow. “I can see my airbag. I can feel my body from head to toe. I’m completely aware of whether my legs are squeezing together. I can feel the position my fingers are in. It’s a much sharper sensory process,” she says.

But time dilation has its tradeoffs. Kirby says she tries not to dwell on the risks of her profession, but that she’s also “kind of a control freak.” The slowing of time, she says, has only augmented this aspect of her personality. But a big part of the cannon act is acknowledging the unknowable, and being at peace with it.

“When you start to fixate on what could go wrong,” she says, “that’s what’s really dangerous.”

Art by Jim Cooke

Contact the author at rtgonzalez@io9.com.

The Hawkins County School District in East Tennessee has reportedly launched a new district-wide meat inspection program after apparently serving six-year-old pork to their students. “It’s not clear,” WATE reports, “if it was tainted.”

Michael Herrell, a parent and Hawkins County, Tenn. commissioner, alerted school district officials to the old meat after he was texted a photo of the six-year-old pork by a cafeteria worker last week, the Nashville Sun Times reports.

He was also apparently told by a cook at Cherokee High School that “the meat was bad,” but that cook was allegedly “told by the manager to cover it with gravy to give it a better taste.”

According to the Associated Press, schools have since inspected their meat inventories, and uncovered products that date back to 2009.

Hawkins County Director of School Steve Starnes told reporters that a new inspection system has been implemented at schools across the district to prevent a future mishap. No students have reported getting sick.

Screenshot via WATE. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

Of all the celebrities that dot our colorful earth, it may come as a surprise to some that Australian actor Russell Crowe is very, very good at Twitter. Russell Crowe, isn’t he too busy shearing sheep and tanning leather to bother with tweets? No. And he will not be misquoted by a jokes website.

Clickhole—the beautiful, life-affirming, viral content parody offshoot of The Onion—has a regular series called Find Out What _____ Has to Say. Today, Clickhole claimed to have a quote from Crowe that was very funny and good:

“Whenever I hear an American say Aussies drive on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ I just lose it. You ever think about how those people grew up driving on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ watched a lot of people get hurt on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ die on the ‘wrong side of the road,’ while other people cheered from the ‘right side of the road’? Australia has a thing called Highway Fights, so it’s touchy.”

—Russell Crowe

On cultural differences

Did Russell Crowe say this? No. Did Crowe know that? No. He’s since deleted the tweet, perhaps when a horse whispered into his ear that Clickhole was just messing. Here are a few other good tweets by Russell Crowe:

So I'm a Scientologist all of a sudden? WTF? ... http://t.co/bHZOx4vtqv

April 3, 2015

Yes, this is true. Amazing performance , the best actor in his price range. https://t.co/uaNXGuKkCY

April 25, 2015

How funny is broke A$$ game show ...

April 25, 2015

How could we forget the epic hat tweets, which are cataloged here:

#1 I just watched a man kick his hat down the street.Just after dawn.Seems a bad way to start the day. It was a nice hat, jaunty, white.

March 28, 2015

And a warning to all villagers:

Just a reminder villagers, I'm not on Instagram or Facebook , only @Twitter , don't fall for imposters

April 22, 2015

Don’t fall for imposters.

Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton hopped aboard the anti-police state wave, announcing in a speech at Columbia University that police brutality and over-incarceration were cultural malignancies that Had To Stop. The move, politically expedient given ongoing unrest in several cities over recent high-profile cases of deadly police brutality, is a little puzzling, considering that today’s problems are partially due to the sort of policy Clinton herself was championing in the 1990’s.

Clinton’s speech was resonant and powerful, if the only thing you know about Hillary Clinton is that she just drove across the country in a van to meet with “ordinary Iowans,” she doesn’t tip at Chipotle (nobody does!), or that one of her opponents, Rand Paul, has very similar views but cannot express anything without sounding like a fuckin’ dick. She condemned the militarization of police, excessive force by officers, legal exceptionalism when it comes to officers who break the law, and the jailing of nonviolent criminals. All of those are good things to condemn, because they are morally bad and inhumane and, to a lesser extent, pour billions of dollars into the pockets of the sort of person who owns prisons or companies that manufacture deadly weapons. We shouldn’t be giving those people money. They’ll just spend it on more evil.

Inspiring and zeitgeisty 2015 Hillary Clinton might be disturbed, then, by the following passage in a book called, It Takes A Village, written in 1996 by a woman named Hillary Clinton. In a paragraph dug up by journalist Zaid Jilani, 1996 Clinton hails the virtues of the “three strikes law” and a ballooning police force.

Clinton's book "It Takes A Village" on the need to get more cops out on the streets and benefits of Three Strikes pic.twitter.com/2vRXLVz7Kx

April 29, 2015

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump further points out that incarceration rates skyrocketed during the Bush, Clinton, and Dumber Younger Bush administrations.

We’ll note again that the increase in the prison population began prior to Bill Clinton. During the administration of George H. W. Bush, the number of prisoners sentenced to more than a year increased by 40 percent. Under Clinton — who served twice as long — it went up 46 percent. Under the first Bush, the black prison population grew 46.7 percent. Under Clinton, it grew over 50 percent.

Bump further notes that violent crime peaked shortly after Clinton took office and declined noticeably throughout the 90’s, while the prison population continued to grow.

It would be cynical to expect that humans are incapable of ideologically evolving, that viewpoints held at some arbitrary date should be gently ethered, pinned, and displayed above the mantle forever. Clinton’s certainly entitled to evolve; she’s been in the public eye for so long that she’s bound to abandon antique views in favor of better, shinier ones. But Clinton’s evolution has often seemed (and pardon the Clinton cliché here) calculated and self-enriching, and it’s hard to hear her saying the words she said yesterday without recalling other times the former Secretary of State has changed her mind when it no longer benefits her.

In Ryan Lizza’s should-read New Yorker story on Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s role in the 2016 Presidential campaign, Lizza notes that a similar evolution occurred in the late 1990’s, when Warren (then a law professor) spent years rallying liberals to oppose a bill that would reform bankruptcy in a way she saw as unfairly favorable to credit card companies. It nearly became law toward the tail end of Clinton’s second term. And then:

Warren targeted the one person in the White House who she believed could stop the legislation: the First Lady. They met alone for half an hour, and, according to Warren, Hillary stood up and declared, “Well, I’m convinced. It is our job to stop that awful bill. You help me and I’ll help you.” In the Administration’s closing weeks, Hillary persuaded Bill Clinton not to sign the legislation, effectively vetoing it.

But just a few months later, in 2001, Hillary was a senator from New York, the home of the financial industry, and she voted in favor of a version of the same bill. It passed, and George W. Bush signed it into law, ending Warren’s ten-year war with a crushing defeat.

Fifteen years later, Clinton’s back to decrying the fact that “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”

Lizza asked Warren if she thought Clinton’s recent Woman of the People turn was simply the former Secretary of State horning in on well-trod Warren territory in order to win progressive support heading into the primaries. Warren replied: “Eh.”

Eh, indeed.

Image via Getty.

“Some heartless monster stole an iPad prototype from an Apple developer’s home in Cupertino,” begins nearly every article written about the incident. It’s still at large! They took drugs and money! Did we mention the iPad? Oh—and a man was also kidnapped. But please do let us know if you hear anything about that iPad.

While CNBC’s original report has been slightly edited to clarify the whereabouts of the kidnapped human man (they eventually let him go and he’s doing fine), the original is very much worth revisiting.

But CNBC was not alone! Just look how many friends came along for the ride: The Register, Cult of Mac, Apple Insider, PC Magazine, and 9 to 5 Mac, to name a few.

Even more incredible than the tech media ignoring a pepper-spray, knife-point kidnapping, though, is the fact that they also completely overlooked the fact that the perpetrator was a woman from an online sex ad. Then again, iPad.

So was the man physically harmed? Why did his captors let him go? How is he dealing with the emotional aftermath?

Who knows. I can’t tell you that. I can, however, tell you that “this isn’t the first time an Apple product has been stolen before its public release.” So take solace in that. [h/t @selenalarson]

Image via AP

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

If you perused Instagram yesterday, you might have seen the following photo posted by future author Kristin Cavallari:

Ah yes. A photo of Kristin’s crotch, adorned with several items of mid-priced turquoise jewelry from Kristin’s line, Emerald Duv.

But wait—that’s not right. Kristin writes in the caption of the photo:

Tanning and turquoise. Yes please.

#regram from@emeraldduvjewelry EmeraldDuv.com I feel like I need to mention that this isn’t a picture of me...that’s why I said regram ;)

Kristin did not say “yes please” to her own vagina.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

As temperatures warm up and the school year winds down for kids across the country, people are eager for summer to arrive before spring has a chance to set in. Everyone wants to know what kind of weather we’ll have this summer, but there’s one factor that could have some consequences: El Niño.

The warming and cooling of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean around the northwestern coast of South America is called the “El Niño Southern Oscillation,” or ENSO for short. Aside from an awesome Saturday Night Live character played by Chris Farley, El Niño is the abnormal warming of these waters around the equator, while La Niña is the abnormal cooling of the same. If you were wondering, “El Niño” is so named because residents first noticed it around Christmas, so the phrase (which translates to “the little boy”) refers to baby Jesus.

An El Niño occurs when the water in four regions of the east-central Pacific is (on average) 0.5°C warmer than normal for three consecutive months. Forecasters seem to have a hard time predicting when an El Niño will occur (remember last year’s “Super El Niño” that didn’t happen?), but with technologies available today, it’s pretty easy to determine when one is ongoing, as is the case right now.

The latest update from the Climate Prediction Center indicates that we’re seeing a weak El Niño in the Pacific Ocean right now—today’s sea surface temperature anomaly chart shows the abnormally warm waters sitting off the coast of Ecuador.

Assuming this weak El Niño stays on course through the summer (CPC gives it a 70% chance of doing just that), what will it do to our summer weather in the United States? Folks in the western half of the country are especially familiar with the wintry effects of this oceanic warming, as a very strong event resulted in devastating flooding in California during the winter of 1997-1998 (caution: PDF file).

The current warming event is relatively weak, so its effects won’t be as defined as if it were the “Super El Niño” we hear hypothesized/predicted every couple of years. That being said, we could still see some noticeable effects here in the States.

Hurricanes

The most heavily-advertised summertime effect that El Niño has on weather in the United States (and countries surrounding the Atlantic Ocean) is the relative lack of hurricanes that form on El Niño years. Warmer equatorial waters help strengthen the sub-tropical jet stream and foster convection over and near the Pacific Ocean, creating strong westerly winds in the upper levels of the atmosphere. This wind shear can bathe the Gulf, Caribbean, and western Atlantic during hurricane season, shredding any whiff of a storm before it has a chance to get its act together.

We can usually expect below-normal tropical activity in the Atlantic (and above-normal activity in the Pacific) during El Niño years, but it only takes one storm to make a mess. The 1992 hurricane season was an especially quiet season—the first named storm didn’t form until late August!

That storm, however, was Hurricane Andrew.

Even if the season is predicted to be quiet, make sure you have a plan and supplies in place and take quick action if you have to get out of the way of a storm.

Temperatures

Aha! Temperatures, the one factor most people care about. Well, bad news.

El Niño events don’t really have a noticeable impact on summer temperatures in the United States, so we have to rely on other factors in the atmosphere to give us hints as to what will happen.

For the first half of the summer, the Climate Prediction Center expects more of the same, with warmer-than-normal temperatures along the West Coast (naturally) and in southern Florida, where they recently experienced all-time record heat for April. Texas has a slightly elevated chance of seeing below-normal temperatures, but as for everyone else, we have equal chances of seeing above, below, or just plain normal temperatures for May, June, and July.

It’s worth keeping in mind that these forecasts are just a guide, and since these are extended-range outlooks (for which there isn’t much skill), there’s a good chance they could be wrong. It’s one of those things where we still have to look at it on a week-by-week basis.

Precipitation

We also don’t see too much of a change in precipitation during these events, but some areas could be in for higher-than-normal amounts of rain if this weak El Niño can start to mess with weather in the eastern Pacific.

The drought is a major issue around the country—as of this Tuesday, more than half of the country (53%) experienced “abnormally dry” or drought conditions, with the worst drought in California, Nevada, and around the Red River in Texas and Oklahoma. Any hint of rainfall is a positive step, but too much all at once is a bad thing.

Increased convection in the eastern Pacific Ocean could give rise to more atmospheric rivers—a ribbon of moisture in the mid-levels of the atmosphere, which occur around the world on a daily basis—which would help transport tropical moisture towards the United States and lead to a higher potential for heavy rain in thunderstorms.

Any uptick in tropical activity in the eastern Pacific Ocean increases the chances that we could see the remnants of a tropical system move north into the southwestern United States, which could bring beneficial (but likely flooding) rainfall to places that desperately need it. The most likely track of storm remnants is up the Gulf of California towards Arizona, or across northern Mexico into places like New Mexico or Texas.

None of these effects are guaranteed, especially when the El Niño is as weak as the one we’re currently experiencing, but it serves as a guide that gives you a peek at what we could see this summer. The warming event could start to tick up in intensity over the next couple of weeks—Eric Holthaus tweeted a great animation of warmer waters lurking just beneath the surface—but things can change in the blink of an eye.

[Images: NASA, NOAA, NOAA, CPC, author]

You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

Freddie Gray sustained a fatal injury after his head slammed into the back of a police van, according to several law enforcement sources who spoke with WJLA.

According to the sources—who were reportedly briefed on the official Baltimore police investigation handed over to prosecutors this morning—a wound on Gray’s head matches a bolt from the back of the van. The investigation, the sources claim, also found no evidence that Gray suffered his injury during his arrest, or at any other time prior to entering the van.

If true, the WJLA story would contradict a report leaked last night to the Washington Post which claimed that Gray somehow broke his own back inside the van; the sources who spoke to ABC affiliate said the official probe didn’t determine whether the injuries were self-inflicted or if they were suffered involuntarily.

The report also contradicts a CNN interview with a family member of one of the officers involved—apparently someone from the van—who said the injuries occurred during the arrest, and not during transport.

What’s more: The WJLA report claims that the person driving the police van has yet to give an official statement to authorities, which certainly makes it seems like he or she is lawyering up or, at the very least, hiding something.

[Image via AP]

Deadspin Chicago News Station Flawlessly Impersonates Miserable Jets Fans | io9 A Glimpse Inside The Secretive World Of Human Cannonballs | Jezebel Cop Resigns After Brushed-Off Domestic Violence Call Ends In Murder | Lifehacker How to Get Better Picture Quality from Your Home Theater PC | Kinja Popular Posts