Fogbow

Reuter wrote:the man was in his 50s and had "behaved strangely."

Reuter wrote:The two busts were damaged but not severely, the source said, adding that they already had been taken to the restoration lab in the museums for repair.

Foggy wrote: ↑Wed Oct 05, 2022 1:05 pm OMG, that's one of those "What is the world coming to?" moments. What's the point of destroying magnificent art, anywhere, any time?

Fascinating @fasc1nate wrote: This 5,000-year-old prosthetic eye found near Zabol in Iran is the oldest in history. It was made from tar and animal fat and painted gold. The wearer was a 6' tall priestess.

At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
Maitland Jones Jr., a respected professor, defended his standards. But students started a petition, and the university dismissed him.

By Stephanie Saul
Oct. 3, 2022

In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors.

But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.

Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.

The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.

The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.”

Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing.

He said the plan would “extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills,” an apparent reference to parents.

The university’s handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decisions, and pro-Jones students, who sent glowing letters of endorsement.

“The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher,” said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones.



https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/n ... ition.html

Michigan lawyer running for judge caught on camera allegedly belt-whipping girlfriend

Two weeks after winning the August primary, judicial candidate Jason Kolkema appeared to viciously whip his girlfriend with a belt during an argument in his western Michigan apartment, presumably unaware that nearby witnesses were recording the scene.

When he noticed the onlookers from his window, the 51-year-old lawyer flashed them the peace sign, and has since claimed the video isn't what it seems: He was striking a chair with his belt, not his girlfriend, the woman and his lawyer have maintained.

But the video triggered criminal charges – and a tsunami of public outrage in the city of Muskegon, which borders Lake Michigan and is about 40 miles northwest of Grand Rapids.

In a scandalous judicial election that has stirred much debate in western Michigan, the topic of domestic violence has taken center stage as women's rights activists fight to keep Kolkema off the bench, arguing he isn't fit to be judge, especially in cases involving battered women and vulnerable children.

Ex-partner of Ukrainian ‘heiress’ who infiltrated Mar-a-Lago club shot outside Canada resort
Valeriy Tarasenko was left with ‘significant injuries’ but expected to survive, according to Quebec police

Edward Helmore
Sat 8 Oct 2022 19.54 BST

An associate of the Ukrainian woman who posed as a member of the Rothschild banking family at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club was reportedly shot outside a lakeside resort north-west of Montreal, Canadian newspaper LaPresse has reported.

The shooting left Valeriy Tarasenko, 44, with “significant injuries”, but he was expected to survive, said the Sûreté du Québec, the Quebec provincial police. The police said it had launched a search for the shooter and any accomplices behind the attack.

Tarasenko is known as a former business partner of Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian immigrant who was identified by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project over the summer for posing as “Anna de Rothschild” at Mar-a-Lago.

Quebec police told LaPresse that they were trying to “shed some light on the circumstances that led to the injuries of the victim”. But for now, “to protect the investigation, no other detail can be shared”, the police added.

Tarasenko, who was born in Ukraine and raised in Moscow, told the Post-Gazette and OCCRP that he had hired Yashchyshyn in 2014 to live in his Miami condo and watch his two daughters while he traveled on business.

The FBI, according to the report, has been looking into a Miami charity, United Hearts of Mercy, Yashchyshyn launched in 2015 and carries the same name as a nonprofit founded by Tarasenko in Canada in 2010.

According to a statement by the charity’s accountant that was turned over to the FBI, the charity, established to collect money for impoverished children, was in fact a front for organized crime.




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -lago-shot