The War Zone- San Fernando.

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Francisco Garcia had left a party at his girlfriend's house and was on a sidewalk in the San Fernando Valley around 2 a.m. when two cars pulled up. A man got out of one vehicle, smashed a beer bottle on the ground and yelled at Garcia before going back to the second car to grab a gun, police said. Garcia died at the scene. No one else was injured.
Garcia is a 21-year-old Army veteran  who return from, the war zone in Afghanistan, only few months earlier. 

Brian Enriquez, 21, told the Los Angeles Times that he, Garcia and a group of friends left Garcia's girlfriend's house when she decided to go to sleep. They headed to another gathering when the cars pulled up.

The ironies are obvious. To survive as a soldier in an overseas conflict, only to be killed in your neighborhood upon your return.

How ironic?  Just a thought.

Mitch McConnell

Speaker John Boehner, celebrating a widened majority, said he is "humbled by the responsibility the American people have placed with us."

"But this is not a time for celebration," he said. "It's time for government to start getting results and implementing solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our still-struggling economy.

 

The message from voters is clear: they want us to work together," Reid said. "I look forward to working with Senator McConnell to get things done for the middle class."

 

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that he expects to get things done and will open the Senate floor to amendments once he takes over as the new majority leader early next year.

 

He wants to work with the president on a variety of issues, including passage of international trade agreements and tax reform, which he said Obama indicated in a phone call earlier that he was interested in pursuing.

 

He also clearly said there is no shut down of the government nor default on the Debt ceiling.

 

Let us hope for action soon and let us not start a new war.

 

Just a thought.

No End.

The sister of Boston Marathon bombing suspect was arrested in New York City for allegedly making a bomb threat, police said.

Ailina Tsarnaev, 24, was charged with aggravated harassment after a bomb threat was made by phone to another woman. The recipient, notified police of the threat. 

Ailina's boyfriend shares a child with the woman who was threatened.

On another case, prosecutors said Tsarnaeva failed to cooperate with a police officer. The officer was investigating the passing of a counterfeit bill by a group of people eating at an Applebee's restaurant in  a mall in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, on April 16, 2010. A server saw the group leaving and wrote down their license plate number.

Police traced the car to Tsarnaeva at her family's Cambridge home. When questioned, she said she did not know the names of the people she picked up from the restaurant. She also told police that she had not lied but "did not want to be a snitch," according to the report.

The stories of this family may not end here.  Just a thought.

The next Wall Street Bubble, ?

"Margin" is borrowing money from your broker to buy a stock and using your investment as collateral. It increase the purchasing power and own more stock without fully paying for it.  

You buy a stock for $50 and the price rises to $75.  On margin, paying $25 in cash and borrowing $25 from your broker will earn a 100 percent return on the money you invested. Of course, you'll still owe your firm $25 plus interest.

If the stock price decreases, substantial losses can mount quickly. For example, the stock you bought for $50 falls to $25.  On margin, you'll lose 100 percent, and you still must come up with the interest you owe on the loan.

In volatile markets, investors who put up an initial margin payment for a stock may, from time to time, be required to provide additional cash if the price of the stock falls.

The brokerage firm has the right to sell their securities that were bought on margin – without any notification and potentially at a substantial loss to the investor. If your broker sells your stock after the price has plummeted, then you've lost out on the chance to recoup your losses if the market bounces back.

In other word, the Brokerage owns everything by lending you a some.

Just a scary thought.

Tim Cook...A new look ?

Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly confirmed he is gay.
In an essay by Bloomberg Businessweek advocating for human rights and equality, Cook says he was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King to set aside his desire for privacy to do something "more important."

"While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven't publicly acknowledged it either, until now,". "So let me be clear: I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."

Cook becomes the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
"Tim Cook's announcement today will save countless lives," says HRC President Chad Griffin. "He has always been a role model, but today millions across the globe will draw inspiration from a different aspect of his life."

"Alabama was too slow to guarantee the rights of minorities during the civil rights era, and now it's too slow to ensure the rights of people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Monday in challenging his home state to do better.

Just a thought.

Buffer- !!

Egypt has started work on a buffer zone by destroying homes along its border with the Gaza Strip, following some of the worst attacks by terrorists on the army.
Bulldozers began destroying several abandoned houses along the frontier, just days after armed men attacked an army post killing 31 soldiers in the area.

Egypt has declared a state of emergency in the Sinai Peninsula and indefinitely closed the Rafah crossing, the only non-Israeli passage for Gazans.  It also accelerated plans to create the 500-metre deep buffer zone, and told the area's 10,000 residents they had 48 hours to pack up and leave before they would destroy around 800 homes.

The buffer zone will extend along the 10km border with Gaza, with water-filled trenches to thwart tunnel diggers. Authorities say the border area is used by criminal gangs to smuggle arms from Gaza to Sinai.

The Egyptian army has waged a broad offensive in northern Sinai against armed groups who have emboldened their presence in several areas in the neglected eastern region over the past three years, destroying much of the web-like network of smuggling tunnels that connect the area with Gaza.

Hamas really pulled Israel and Egypt together against their criminal activities in the area. Just a thought.

Goog and Cancer.

Google-Chrome Contact Lenses.

Google is working on a wearable device that would detect changes by monitoring nanoparticles in a person's body. That way, they could detect minor swings in tumor cells and other diseases before it becomes a problem. This would not be Google's first foray into healthcare.

Google has partnered with Alcon and Novartis to make a smart contact lens that measures the glucose levels in diabetics' tears.

The company's research lab is already in the midst of a study involving 10,000 people for its nanoparticle platform, but is looking for partners to help scale it.

Google's announcement was certainly opposite of Apple's.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told the same audience: "I don't see Apple getting into cancer research ...That's well beyond our expertise."

Between 2009 and 2012, Apple shielded at least $74 billion in profits from U.S. tax laws by setting up subsidiaries in Ireland under a special arrangement, the report said. While the practice of using foreign operations to avoid U.S. taxes is legal and common among multinationals, Apple’s scheme was unprecedented in its use of multiple affiliates that had no semblance of a physical presence, Senate staffers said.

You be the Judge, it's your money.           Just a thought.

The Code breaker.

Alan Turing, was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, pioneering computer scientist, mathematical biologist, and marathon runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine.

He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.  He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Turing's pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in several crucial battles. It has been estimated that Turing's work shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.

Turing has received a royal pardon, almost 60 years subsequent to his suicide. Turing’s homosexuality culminated in the renowned mathematician and computer scientist being subject to criminal prosecution in the early 1950s  a time when homosexual activities were criminalized in the U.K.

Just a thought.

Nurse Kaci

Nurse Kaci Hickox [worked overseas with Doctors Without Borders] said of her three-hour wait at Newark Airport: “No one seemed to be in charge. No one would tell me what was going on or what would happen to me.” An hour later, with little to eat or drink in the meantime, a forehead-scanning thermometer found her temperature to be 101 degrees but staffers refused to use an oral thermometer.
       

"I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine," she said.
       

She was taken by police escort to an isolation tent outside Newark’s University Hospital, where an oral thermometer found a normal temperature of 98.6 degrees, but a forehead scanner again read 101 degrees — a bad reading she blamed on being flushed from her ordeal. A blood test later tested negative for the virus.
                

Hickox will remain in a mandatory 21-day quarantine as part of new procedures put in place by the governors of NY and NJ after a doctor tested positive for the virus.

So there is more to be done. This courageous woman did the best anyone can do. Then the bad news, two million people using the subway like sardines] on a daily basis . Imagine??

Just a thought.

Subway and the Ebola?