O’Neal said Allen Iverson was the one player he wished he could have played with. Both men will are being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday. “If there was one guy I would have liked to played with, it definitely would have been A.I.,” O’Neal said Friday. That’s high praise from a man who played with Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James, as well as a young Penny Hardaway....
Cynthia Robinson, of Polk County, said she was walking her 100-pound pit bull, called Tank, at roughly 7 a.m. when a large alligator attacked it from behind, pulling the dog into the water. Robinson told WFLA the brutal attack made her large pet look like a Chihuahua. “My dog didn’t even know what happened to him. He had that look like, [he was] yelping. He was like ‘Help me mama,’ but I couldn’t do nothing,” she told the news outlet....
Competing in her fifth Olympics, Felix netted her 10th Olympic medal on Friday racing in the 400-meter final when she finished with a season-best time of 49.46 to capture the bronze, breaking a tie with Jamaican sprinter Merlene Ottey to become the most decorated female track and field athlete in Olympic history. In netting the medal, Felix also tied Carl Lewis’ record for the most Olympic medals with 10. She could pass him with a medal in Saturday’s final of the 4x400-meter relay....
The latest The Economist/YouGov survey asked 1,500 U.S. adults how they thought Trump would be remembered. Poll participants were asked to choose from the options “outstanding,” “above average,” “average,” “below average” or “poor.” The largest share of respondents—40 percent—said they Trump will be described in the history books as a “poor” commander-in-chief. Another 9 percent of those polled said that Trump would go down as a “below average” president....
As The Washington Post reported on August 18, five years after 9/11 the FBI’s computer system is still not fixed. How can this be? It’s an ugly story of poor management, contractor abuse and an agency that cannot electronically connect the dots–even though nearly everyone agreed in 2001 that developing that ability should be among the top priorities for the United States. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor President Franklin D....
As this case shows, surgery can be brutal. “The 18th-century surgeon John Hunter was fond of saying, ‘A surgeon is like a barbarian who gets by force what someone much more clever would get by artifice’,” says Sherwin Nuland, professor of surgery at Yale Medical School and a fellow of the World Economic Forum. Doctors have made great strides in recent years in taking the barbarism out of surgery. Tiny surgical robots, for instance, allow doctors to avoid making large chest incisions when doing coronary-bypass surgery....
So it was all the more shocking when, one sunny day last year, a military helicopter descended from the sky and disgorged Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and technology guru Nicholas Negroponte and American philanthropist Bernard Krisher. They had come to announce that something called the Internet had arrived at last in the village. “You probably will not understand what I am telling you today,” said Krisher over a squeaking public-address system, “but in six months you will....
The rehabilitation of Homebush Bay is an example of ““sustainable development’’–economic growth that preserves the environment for future generations. Since 1992, when 100 world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit, sustainable development has ostensibly been a planetwide goal. But a lack of progress, especially in the developing world, has disappointed environmentalists. The Sydney Games, however, may provide a new spark. The city and its Olympic committee, along with environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace, are aiming to make the Games a living laboratory for sustainable-development techniques....
The program entails dedicating one percent of the church’s budget - roughly $6,000 - to reparations efforts as well as encouraging parishioners to donate for a reparations fund that distributes money through lotteries held twice a year - on Juneteenth and in December. Applicants can use the money for anything they need. “The white American church has always been complicit in the evils of white supremacy,” Marsh, of Salt House, told his young Lutheran congregation in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland....
Investment? Did she really buy it for profit? ““Of course! What else?’’ she said. ““A home should be a way of increasing capital.’’ I thought about that concept of investment. I never considered a home as a moneymaker. Did it matter that my property did not increase in value? Six months after I bought my two-bedroom condo I could have turned it over for $25,000 more than I’d paid for it....
Since he began his career in journalism, Blair has been known for two things: being able to play the internal politics of an institution with uncanny skill and having a problem with accuracy. Those two traits combined in a horrible confluence for the Times. Blair’s remarkable fraud had come unraveled in late April. The editor of the San Antonio Express-News had officially requested that the Times investigate a story about the family of a missing soldier that carried Blair’s byline, a story that seemed almost identical to one the San Antonio paper had run....
“Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson. The most exquisite rendering of a parent’s love for a child. “Dreams of My Russian Summers” by Andreï Makine. A novel about what it takes to live in a brutal world. “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier. For showing me what could be accomplished in historical fiction. “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard, which taught me to look harder at the natural world. “The Norton Anthology of Poetry....
“The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse” edited by E. K. Chambers. Here are the glories of English poetry: Wyatt, Campion, Shakespeare, giving sparks of genius as they play with words and verse forms. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. One of the twin jewels of the English language. The other? Below. The Bible. No one can live without the Bible in the Authorized Version. “The Diary of Samuel Pepys” edited by Latham and Matthews....
The book you cared most about sharing with your kids: The two Alice books by Lewis Carroll are the finest literary fantasies ever written. They will last forever, and the Harry Potter books are going to wind up in the rubbish bin. The first six volumes have sold, I am told, 350 million copies. I know of no larger indictment of the world’s descent into subliteracy. An Important Book that you admit you haven’t read: I cannot think of a major work I have not ingested....
The book you care most about having children read: I would give young readers T. H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, or Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim.” A classic that, on rereading, was disappointing: None yet. In rereading “The Red and the Black” by Stendhal, I am still stunned at how adventurous it is, full of subtle character and experimentation.
“Honey From a Weed” by Patience Gray. Autobiography, travelogue and recipe collection, all woven together. It transports like a novel. “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan. A poetic discourse on the nature of relationships—it has changed the way I see the world. “The Book of Salt” by Monique Truong. The imagined story of a chef who cooks for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Gorgeous prose. “Home Cooking” by Laurie Colwin....
Even by Moscow’s increasingly violent standards, the shoot-out was shockingly brazen and bloody. But to some Muscovites, Kvintirshvili’s funeral was more of an affront. The mafia godfather was buried in the exclusive Vagankovskoye Cemetery, right next to the revered singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky. “The Italian mafia are peasants compared to ours,” said Yuri Shchekochikhin, one of Moscow’s leading crime reporters. “They have no fear anymore.” Moscow, one of the world’s safest cities in the days of the Soviet police state, is now being lashed by a summer crime wave....
“I’m willing to wait the entire year out, but it’s definitely going to be it for me (after that),” he told ESPN’s Josina Anderson. “I still want to play one more year. I’m going to keep my options open and not rush into it.” MORE: NFL Draft Big Board | Latest Mock Draft Vick’s legacy will be a troubled one. He’ll be remembered for his rushing ability, and being a trailblazer at the position....
Every home run requires a pitcher to serve it up, so here are the pitchers who gave up the most home runs to the players in the 500 home run club. Barry Bonds The all-time home run leader did not have one particular favorite victim, as he hit eight homers apiece off Greg Maddux, Terry Mulholland, Chan Ho Park, Curt Schilling and John Smoltz, for 40 of his 762....
Freud, who turns 80 this year, is a realist painter in an age of gloss and abstraction, accused by critics of emphasizing human ugliness, putrefying flesh and death in his brutally frank portraits. Late last month the Tate Britain opened the largest retrospective of Freud’s work, displaying more than 180 paintings. Some, like a striking new self-portrait and a nude of his 27-year-old girlfriend, are so recent the paint is barely dry....
