GREECE, N.Y. — Jason McElwain had done everything he was asked to do for the Greece Athena High School basketball team keep the stats, run the clock, hand out water bottles. That all changed last week for the team manager in the final home game of the season. The 17-year-old senior, who is autistic and usually sits on the bench in a white shirt and black tie, put on a uniform and entered the game with his team way ahead. McElwain proceeded to hit six 3-point shots, finished with 20 points and was carried off the court on his teammates’ shoulders. I ended my career on the right note, he told The Associated Press by phone Thursday. I was really hotter than a pistol! In recent days, McElwain’s phone has hardly stopped ringing. When his family went out for a meal, he was mobbed by well-wishers. A neighborhood boy came by to get a basketball autographed. McElwain, 5-foot-6, was considered too small to make the junior varsity, so he signed on as team manager. He took up the same role with the varsity, doing anything to stay near the sport he loves. Coach Jim […]
Fed up with what they call “betrayal” by the government, thousands of Gush Katif evacuees have broken off talks with the government on a variety of issues and are planning a mass struggle beginning next week to force the state to dramatically improve its efforts in caring for their well-being. Organizers of the Forum for those Injured in the Disengagement, as they are calling it, are making plans to jam roads across the country, hold mass demonstrations in front of prominent politicians’ homes, seal off caravan communities in Nitzan and other towns, pull their children out of school, and generally “create total chaos,” according to Forum leader Yoram Musavi. “Until today we were good children. That’s over now. We’re not going to be good kids anymore,” Musavi said. “It wasn’t God who evacuated Gush Katif, it was the State of Israel. And like it took them out, it needs to take care of them and until then we are going to make total chaos.” In response, Government Spokesman Ra’anan Gissin called the timing of the protests political. “It’s election time, what do you want?” Gissin said. “The administration that’s taking care of it is going out […]
America’s largest companies expect the federal government to pay them about $4 billion over the next four years to help keep their retiree health plans alive at a time when such benefits are increasingly on the chopping block, according to a new study by Credit Suisse First Boston. The money is due to start flowing to employers this month as part of Medicare’s new prescription drug benefit. When Congress authorized the Medicare drug benefit, it also agreed to start subsidizing the drug component of employers’ retiree health plans, to keep them from shifting their retirees into the government program. The goal is to save the government money, even after the subsidies, while giving the retirees a better deal than they might get if they were pushed into Medicare. Among the nation’s 500 largest companies, 331 offer retiree health plans. With the program just starting its first year, it is not yet clear whether the subsidy will achieve its goals. For one thing, there are about 36 million people 65 and older in this country who are eligible for Medicare, but only about 7 million retirees currently covered by employer-sponsored health plans. Still, the Credit Suisse study, […]
Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research. Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products. The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say. “Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it’s slowed everything down, paradoxically,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. “We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you’re on to the next thing,” Challenger said on Wednesday. “It’s harder to feel like you’re accomplishing something.” Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, voice mails and the like, research showed. The average time spent on a computer at work was almost 16 hours a week last year, compared with 9.5 hours a decade ago, according to the Day-Timer research released this […]
LONDON — Gladiators may have fought and died to entertain others in the brutality of the Roman arena, but they appear to have abided by a strict code of conduct that avoided savage violence, forensic scientists say. Tests on the remains of 67 gladiators found in tombs at Ephesus in Turkey, a center of power for ancient Rome’s eastern empire, show they stuck to well-defined rules of combat and avoided gory free-for-alls. Injuries to the front of each skull suggested that each opponent used just one type of weapon per bout of face-to-face contact, two Austrian researchers report in a paper to be published in Forensic Science International. Savage violence and mutilation, typical of battlefields 2,000 years ago, were out of order. And the losers appear to have died quickly. Despite the fact that most gladiators wore helmets, 10 of the remains showed the fighters had died of squarish hammerlike blows to the side of the head, possibly the work of a backstage executioner who finished off wounded losers after the fight. The report confirms the picture given of battles in the arena by Roman artwork, which suggests gladiators were well-matched and followed rules enforced by […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
