calico koi fish
calico koi fish
The mystery surrounding at least one of the unexplained drones causing Americans to look toward the night sky in recent days was solved late Saturday evening, when Boston police arrested two men for allegedly flying their unmanned aerial device too close to Logan Airport. According to police, 42-year-old Robert Duffy of Charlestown and 32-year-old Jeremy Folcik of Bridgewater were arrested Saturday on Long Island, after officials noticed the drone on their monitoring systems. “The incident began earlier that evening, at 4:30 p.m., when a Boston Police Officer specializing in real-time crime surveillance detected an Unmanned Aircraft System operating dangerously close to Logan International Airport. Leveraging advanced UAS monitoring technology, the Officer identified the drone’s location, altitude, flight history, and the operators’ position on Long Island,” the Boston Police Department said in a Sunday statement. After rallying officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Massachusetts State Police, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Federal Communications Commission, and Logan Airport Air Traffic Control, the Boston Police Harbor Patrol Unit was dispatched to the Boston Harbor Islands, where they allegedly found Duffy and Folcik, along with another man on the closed Long Island Health campus. All three attempted to flee on foot, according to police, but the arrested pair were caught and a drone found in their possession. The third man, according to police, is “believed to have fled the island in a small vessel.” Police say that all three were engaging in seriously dangerous behavior. “Operators are prohibited from flying drones over people or vehicles and must be aware of airspace restrictions. Even small drones pose significant risks, including the potential for catastrophic damage to airplanes and helicopters. Near-collisions can cause pilots to veer off course, putting lives and property at risk,” they said. Both Duffy and Folcik will appear in Dorchester District Court on charges of trespassing, police said. This is a developing story and it will be updated.
The President of Worldwide Miracle Outreach (WMO), Rev. Dr. Lawrence Tetteh, has called on Ghanaians to prioritize values over superficial attributes when casting their votes in the upcoming elections. Speaking during a media engagement in Accra, Rev. Dr. Tetteh emphasized the importance of making informed choices based on moral and developmental principles rather than physical appearance, religious affiliations, or background. “It is very important that I admonish every Ghanaian to vote on values—not on how good-looking somebody is, not how fair someone is, not on their religion, or where they come from. We must vote on values,” he stated firmly. In a lighthearted moment, he alluded to a prophecy, saying, “I jokingly said the last time that I had a prophecy—the person who wins this election is a ‘not-man.’ And the person who will be our next vice president is also a ‘not-man.’” While leaving room for interpretation, he reiterated the focus should remain on nurturing Ghana’s future through education and informed decision-making. “Let’s educate our children, ensure they attend school, and pursue academic programs that shape their future. Education is key to national progress,” he urged. Rev. Dr. Tetteh’s comments come as Ghana gears up for its election, with citizens keenly watching how values and integrity will shape leadership choices. Source: Isaac Kofi Dzokpo/newsghana.com.ghHealey: Proscription status of Syria’s new rulers is not a matter for now
The Johnstown Tomahawks have won 12 of their past 16 games entering a pivotal stretch in the North American Hockey League East Division schedule. Coach Jared Kersner’s Tomahawks begin a 10-game homestand against the North American Hockey League East Division-leading Rochester Jr. Americans at 7:30 p.m. Friday at 1st Summit Arena @ Cambria County War Memorial. The teams meet again at 7 p.m. Saturday. Trailing the Jr. Americans by five points in the division standings, Johnstown has an opportunity to gain ground and build on the past month’s momentum. “Weekend’s huge,” Kersner said. “Having 10 games at home is really exciting for us. This is an opportunity to try to gather as many points as possible on home ice, but Rochester presents a huge challenge. First place – we’re five points back. We feel like we have been playing well. We have obstacles in our lineup – injuries. We’re short some guys.” Kersner’s team lost some depth on defense. “The biggest one, Dylan Shane, suffered a laceration last Saturday in Maryland, and he’s out,” Kersner said of the team captain. “Jacob Ingstrup is out, too. Michal Capos will leave to join Team Slovakia U-18 (program), and that will leave us with five available defensemen on Saturday. We definitely will have to use an affiliated player in that game.” The Tomahawks are 8-2-0 in their past 10 games and have 28 points at 13-10-2 overall. Rochester is 7-2-1 in its past 10 contests and is 14-6-5 with 33 points. “Rochester is going to bring quite a bit of challenges we need to be prepared for,” Kersner said. Three Jr. Americans have combined to score 32 goals. Hugo Branthsson and Calle Karlsson each have 11 goals and 27 points. Owen King has 10 goals. Adam Gionta, a 19-goal scorer in 2023-24, has nine goals and 25 points. Goaltender Danick Leroux has 10 wins, including two shutouts, a .920 save percentage and 2.20 goals against average. “After all of the success we’ve had lately, we want to see how we stack up against the division’s No. 1 (team),” said Kersner, whose Tomahawks won a pair of one-goal games against Rochester at 1st Summit Arena Oct. 18-19. Since Oct. 12, Johnstown is 12-3-1 with 25 of a possible 32 points. “Our team has been built from the backside out lately – goaltending, defense, defensive play by our forwards,” Kersner said. “The biggest thing is the connectivity – learning how to play together. Learning to play inside the team structure. The guys have put in the hard work and bought into each other.” Both the power play and penalty kill have been assets during the current run. “The biggest change is the special teams,” Kersner said. “In November, our power play clicked at nearly 27% and the penalty kill (success) was 90%. We’ve been able to really take advantage of the special teams. Last week in Maryland, we won 4-1. We scored two power-play goals, had a short- handed goal, and didn’t allow any goals on the penalty kill. Special teams have been a huge part of our success.” Tate Pecknold, Ryan Flaherty and Cullen Emery each have three power-play goals this season. Nick Jarmain, Hank Reed, Nick White and Jack Genovese have been mainstays on the penalty kill. “We only allowed one 5-on-4 goal in the month of November,” Kersner said. “In that game, Nick White and Nick Jarmain were hurt, or our percentage might be even better.” The Tomahawks will be at home Friday through a two-game set against the Maine Nordiques Jan. 10-11. In between, Danbury will visit for four games on back-to-back weekends, and Northeast will be in town for a pair, including New Year’s Eve. “I’m excited to be in front of our home crowds for the next 10 games,” Kersner said. “We’re looking forward to playing hard for them over these next 10 games.” Mike Mastovich is a sports reporter and columnist for The Tribune-Democrat. He can be reached at 814-532-5083. Follow him on Twitter @Masty81. (c)2024 The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.) Visit The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.) at www.tribune-democrat.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Despite Mary Lou McDonald’s confidence around shaping a coalition without Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – the two parties that have dominated the landscape of Irish politics for a century – the pathway to government for Sinn Fein still appears challenging. With counting following Friday’s election still in the relatively early stages – after an exit poll that showed the main three parties effectively neck-and-neck – there is some way to go before the final picture emerges and the options for government formation crystalise. Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Simon Harris, has dismissed talk of a Sinn Fein surge and said he was “cautiously optimistic” about where his party will stand after all the votes are counted. Meanwhile, Ireland’s deputy premier and Fianna Fail leader, Micheal Martin, insisted his party has a “very clear route back to government” as he predicted seat gains. The counting process could last days because of Ireland’s complex system of proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV), where candidates are ranked by preference. The early indications have turned the focus to the tricky arithmetic of government formation, as the country’s several smaller parties and many independents potentially jockey for a place in government. Ms McDonald told reporters at the RDS count centre in Dublin that she would be “very, very actively pursuing” the potential to form a government with other parties on the left of the political spectrum. The smaller, left-leaning parties in Ireland include the Social Democrats, the Irish Labour Party, the Green Party and People Before Profit-Solidarity. Ms McDonald said her party had delivered an “incredible performance” in the election. “I think it’s fair to say that we have now confirmed that we have broken the political mould here in this state,” she said. “Two party politics is now gone. It’s consigned to the dustbin of history and that, in itself, is very significant.” She added: “I am looking to bring about a government of change, and I’m going to go and look at all formulations. “If you want my bottom line, the idea of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael for another five years, in our strong opinion, is not a good outcome for Irish society. “Obviously, I want to talk to other parties of the left and those that we share very significant policy objectives with. So I’m going to do that first and just hear their mind, hear their thinking. But be very clear, we will be very, very actively pursuing entrance into government.” In Friday night’s exit poll, Sinn Fein was predicted to take 21.1% of first-preference votes, narrowly ahead of outgoing coalition partners Fine Gael and Fianna Fail at 21% and 19.5% respectively. Prior to the election, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael both ruled out entering government with Sinn Fein. Fine Gael leader Mr Harris rejected suggestions Sinn Fein had broken new ground. He told reporters in his count centre in Greystones, Co Wicklow: “Certainly we haven’t seen a Sinn Fein surge or anything like it. “I mean, it looks likely, on the figures that we’ve seen now, fewer people, many fewer people would have voted Sinn Fein in this election than the last one. “In fact, I think they’re down by around 5% and actually the parties, particularly the two parties, the two larger parties in government, are likely to receive significant support from the electorate. So definitely, politics in Ireland has gotten much more fragmented.” He said it was too early to tell what the next government would look like. “I think anybody who makes any suggestion about who is going to be the largest party or the construct of the next government, they’re a braver person than I am,” he said. “Our electoral system dictates that there’ll be many, many transfers that will go on for hours, if not days, before we know the final computations at all. “But what I am very confident about is that my party will have a very significant role to play in the years ahead, and I’m cautiously optimistic and excited.” Fianna Fail’s Mr Martin told reporters at a count centre in Cork he was confident that the numbers exist to form a government with parties that shared his political viewpoint. Mr Martin said it “remains to be seen” whether he would return to the role of Taoiseach – a position he held between 2020 and 2022 – but he expressed confidence his party would outperform the exit poll prediction. “It’s a bit too early yet to call the exact type of government that will be formed or the composition of the next government,” he said. “But I think there are, there will be a sufficiency of seats, it seems to me, that aligns with the core principles that I articulated at the outset of this campaign and throughout the campaign, around the pro-enterprise economy, around a positively pro-European position, a government that will strongly push for home ownership and around parties that are transparently democratic in how they conduct their affairs.” Asked if it would be in a coalition with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Social Democrats, he said that would be “racing a bit too far ahead”. The final result may dictate that if Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are to return to government, they may need more than one junior partner, or potentially the buy-in of several independent TDs. Mr Martin said it was unclear how quickly a government can be formed, as he predicted his party would gain new seats. “It will be challenging. This is not easy,” he added. The junior partner in the outgoing government – the Green Party – looks set for a bruising set of results. Green leader Roderic O’Gorman is in a fight to hold onto his seat, as are a number of party colleagues, including Media Minister Catherine Martin. “It’s clear the Green Party has not had a good day,” he said. The early counting also suggested potential trouble for Fianna Fail in Wicklow, where the party’s only candidate in the constituency, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly, is considered to have a battle ahead, with the risk of losing his seat. Meanwhile, there is significant focus on independent candidate Gerard Hutch who, on Saturday evening, was sitting in fourth place in the four-seat constituency of Dublin Central. Last spring, Mr Hutch was found not guilty by the non-jury Special Criminal Court of the murder of David Byrne, in one of the first deadly attacks of the Hutch-Kinahan gangland feud. Mr Byrne, 33, died after being shot six times at a crowded boxing weigh-in event at the Regency Hotel in February 2016. A Special Criminal Court judge described Mr Hutch, 61, as the patriarchal figurehead of the Hutch criminal organisation and said he had engaged in “serious criminal conduct”. The constituency will be closely watched as other hopefuls wait to see if transfers from eliminated candidates may eventually rule him out of contention. In the constituency of Louth, the much-criticised selection of John McGahon appeared not to have paid off for Fine Gael. The party’s campaign was beset by questioning over footage entering the public domain of the candidate engaged in a fight outside a pub in 2018. The Social Democrats have a strong chance of emerging as the largest of the smaller parties. The party’s leader, Holly Cairns, was already celebrating before a single vote was counted however, having announced the birth of her baby girl on polling day.
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Repealing no-fault divorce has so far stalled across the US. Some worry that'll changeEvery few years, an asteroid that’s about the size of a bus strikes Earth. These rocks are much smaller than the one that drove dinosaurs to extinction , but they can still have a significant impact. And yet, their relatively small sizes made it difficult for surveys to spot them in advance. Now, an international team of astronomers has located more than 100 of these so-called “decameter” asteroids, named because they measure tens of meters in diameter, or roughly 30 to 1,600 feet across. For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature , they employed an image processing technique originally used to search for exoplanets. As a result, they spotted the smallest asteroids ever detected in the main belt , a vast field of rubble between Mars and Jupiter. “These asteroid findings fill an important knowledge gap for tracing the source of meteorites and larger potentially hazardous asteroids in Earth’s vicinity,” study co-author Richard Binzel , a physicist at MIT, tells Sky & Telescope ’s David L. Chandler. Compared to larger asteroids, decameter asteroids have less stable orbits, making it much more likely for them to depart from the main asteroid belt and slam against another cosmic entity, such as Earth. But even a tiny asteroid can cause real damage—the famous Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013 was a small decameter asteroid. These events can send “shockwaves through entire regions,” according to a statement from MIT. Given the potential risks, NASA and collaborators like the European Space Agency (ESA) have long worked on developing an early detection system for observing and tracking asteroids. When an asteroid somewhat bigger than a cat flew over Siberia last week, the ESA was able to issue an alert around half a day in advance . While not perfect, our ability to spot asteroids before they hit is improving, astrophysicist Alan Fitzsimmons of Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland said to New Scientist ’s Matthew Sparkes about the recent warning. In general, the new method for spotting decameter asteroids is expected to contribute greatly toward scientists’ databases as they further refine these warning systems. The research team sifted through existing images of the TRAPPIST-1 star system taken by the James Webb Space Telescope , which had initially been captured to find exoplanets. The method they used, called the “shift and stack” technique, assembles dozens to hundreds of images of fast-moving objects. Eventually, the frames collect into a faint picture that emerges from background noise, or the other random objects that are not the subject of investigation. Usually, this would only be possible if the observer had a good idea of what orbit a certain object moves in, which isn’t the case for asteroids. The MIT team was able to bypass this complication by depending on “powerful computational tools” designed for graphic processing to “search blindly,” testing every possible direction and reasonable speed for the asteroids, explains lead author Artem Burdanov , a research scientist at MIT, to Sky & Telescope . “We decided to push the limits to see how faint objects we could find with this telescope.” From the initial search results, Burdanov and his colleagues found more than 1,000 candidates. Then, they reviewed each image to narrow the list down, eventually confirming the discovery of 138 new decameter asteroids. And they’re hoping to find thousands more in the “archives” of astronomy data that have yet to be analyzed, using the same method, MIT planetary scientist Julien de Wit , a co-author of the study, tells the publication. “This is a totally new, unexplored space we are entering, thanks to modern technologies,” Burdanov adds in the statement. “It’s a good example of what we can do as a field when we look at the data differently. Sometimes there’s a big payoff, and this is one of them.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. Gayoung Lee | | READ MORE Gayoung Lee is a science journalist from South Korea, now based in New York. Her main interest lies in exploring the unlikely connections between science and everyday life.
