‘Do you see lights?” Ruben Robles asked his brother, Mark, in 2007. Bright, star-shaped and white, they flashed before Ruben’s eyes while he was driving, shopping at Costco, feeding the cats. Mark didn’t see anything, so Robles went to a doctor, who thought that the visions might be stress-induced. Robles ran a collection agency in Los Angeles, and the hours were long, the debtors argumentative. Several weeks later, Ruben began suffering seizures. He went to see another doctor, and this one ordered an M.R.I., which revealed a ghostly white orb on his left frontal lobe. The diagnosis was brain cancer. Only 36 years old, Ruben was told that he might not live to see his 38th birthday.
Horrified, Robles says he thought constantly about God. But his crisis was practical as well as existential. Over the next year and a half, surgeons operated on his brain three times, excising as much of the cancer as they safely could. The side effects of the operations left Robles barely able to walk and unable to speak more than a word or two at a time. He shuttered the collection agency. His wife left him, and Robles, needing daily help, squeezed into his mother’s Chihuahua-filled apartment. The medical bills were mounting, and Robles was worried: though he believed God would provide for him in the afterlife, what he desperately needed until then was money.
Ron Escobar, a close friend of Robles’s, went to Carole Fiedler, an insurance expert, for help. Fiedler saw that there was no vacation home or Google stock to unload. But Robles did have a life-insurance policy for half a million dollars. Life insurance is designed to benefit the living, a spouse or heirs, not those who perish. But Fiedler, who owns a firm called Innovative Settlements, knew that a life-insurance policy is an asset that can be resold to a friend or stranger just as a car, boat or house can. In a transaction known as a viatical settlement (for terminally ill patients) or a life settlement (for everyone else), the person selling his insurance gets an immediate cash payment. The buyer, in exchange, is named as the beneficiary and pays the premiums until the insured person dies. Life no longer afforded Robles a traditional way to make money, but to the right investor, Fiedler advised, his imminent death was worth a great deal.
Selling your life and selling a house have more in common than you’d think. The seller puts a listing on the market. Prospective buyers do research and get inspections; there are offers and counteroffers until the seller accepts a bid. The seller doesn’t literally peddle his own life, of course, but his life-insurance policy. The distinction is in many ways moot, however, as the sales value is inextricably linked to a cold-eyed estimation of how much longer the seller has to live. In the case of Robles’s policy, a life-settlement company in Georgia, Habersham Funding, expressed interest. Escobar shipped off six boxes’ worth of Robles’s medical records, thousands of pages in all, to Habersham. The firm, in turn, analyzed the records and also had them scrutinized by an external company specializing in life-expectancy analysis. Fiedler’s recollection is that the reports confirmed the grim prognosis and that Robles had less than two years left to live.
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CEO Express “The site’s ultimate goal is to be the best executive assistant imaginable, providing a tool that users would have created themselves if they had the time and knowledge of the Internet. CEOExpress filters and organizes the content executives need on the Internet while adding features to the site to make their lives even more streamlined and efficient. Email, stock quotes, headline news and customization are all conveniences users appreciate.”
The Renaissance is the name of an important artistic and scientific period that began about 1400 and went on for 200 years in Italy and, eventually, all of Europe. Renaissance means rebirth and this period was a time when scholars revived interest in learning and the arts of ancient Greece and Rome. The people of the Renaissance looked for new explanations, new ways of doing things, new interpretations of writings, new ways of building their homes and public buildings.” – Provided by Reference.com
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Brainwashed by the Westboro Baptist Church | Watch Free Documentary Online
ICE followed the story of the Westboro Baptist Church as families split and children were brainwashed into picketing funerals and bashing homosexuals. During that time, VICE interviewed more than a dozen members of the reviled group, including some of the only members not related by blood, the Drains.They welcomed the filmmakers into their homes and gave them access to 17 years of home video footage. In return, they produced an unbiased look into the lives of one of America’s most despised organizations.
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Rat and ant rescues ‘don’t show empathy’.
The power to heal at the tips of your fingers.
Climate History Revealed Through Ages – Science News – redOrbit.
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IN COURT Jennifer Sultan, 38, faces charges including selling prescription painkillers to an undercover officer. She had lived in a loft on East 17th Street, right.
OF the five members of a purported crime ring who appeared in court last month, Jennifer Sultan could not help but stand out. She seemed to have little in common with those said to be her accomplices: among them, a police officer charged with stealing his colleagues’ guns to support a painkiller habit and two unemployed young men from Brooklyn and Queens charged with selling guns and drugs.
The prosecutor, who opposed bail for most of the defendants, pointed out to the judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan why each one might be a risk for flight. When it came to Ms. Sultan, 38, every head in the courtroom swiveled at the main point: she had once been a dot-com millionaire.
The finer details were not mentioned that day: at the high-water mark, she and her boyfriend were co-founders of a small Internet company that sold for $70 million. They rented a summer house in the Hamptons for $400,000. They bought a 6,000-square-foot loft on East 17th Street just off Fifth Avenue.
Now, a little more than a decade later, Ms. Sultan is bankrupt and sitting in a jail cell, unable to pull together $85,000 for bail. If convicted, she faces 15 years to life in prison on charges of selling prescription painkillers to an undercover police officer and of trying to sell a .357 Magnum to the man accused of being the ringleader.
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The man who saved 900 Jewish boys INSIDE a death camp
For decades, Jews around the world have sought out examples of non-Jews like Raoul Wallenberg, whose centennial birthday was observed last week, and Oskar Schindler, who defied the Nazis to prevent the murder of Jews. In Israel, the Righteous Among the Nations is Yad Vashem’s highest honor, and over 23,000 people have been awarded this status since the program began in 1953.
The criteria established by Yad Vashem is straightforward: Jews can nominate individuals who provided substantial assistance to save Jews, provided that said assistance was not given with the expectation of financial gain. Honorees receive a medal, a certificate of honor and have their name engraved on the Wall of Honor in Yad Vashem’s Garden of the Righteous. If the recipient is no longer alive, the awards are given to next-of-kin.
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A Dictionary of Despicable Words
First, let it be said that words are not terrible. Often, word-hate is not the fault of the word itself; it’s due to the meanings humans have attributed to the poor word. It’s us, not them. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s just say that the public has many opinions about which of our frequently or occasionally used English words are “bad” or “good.” On Friday I’d argued, in response to Sarah Miller’s nomination of literally as the worst word on the planet, that the dubious achievement actually belongs to actually. As it turns out this is a topic a lot of people have feelings about, so many feelings that we could practically create an entire dictionary of words you hate. So we did. The following A to Z list is culled from your comments, emails, tweets, and occasionally from our own strong opinions.
arguably. “What, actually, does arguably mean? Indisputable? Able to be argued about? It is a non-word. Another filler, actually.”
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Human ancestry has just got more complicated
ONE of the oddest things about Homo sapiens is that he is alone. Though storytellers have filled the world with imaginary hominids—from woodland pixies to mountain giants—no sign of the real thing has ever been seen. But that was not true in the past. As recently as 40,000 years ago there were three other species of human on Earth: Neanderthals in Europe, the “hobbits” of Flores, in Indonesia, and a recently discovered and still mysterious group of creatures called the Denisovans, who lived in Central Asia. And now there is evidence that similar diversity existed earlier in human history, a little under 2m years ago, in Africa.
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Possible Egyptian pyramids found using Google Earth
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Survivors Hope to Take a Bite out of Shark Fin Soup
One would expect survivors of shark attacks to harbor ill will toward the creatures that maimed them, but one group of survivors is doing its best to save them. As many as 73 million sharks are killed each year for their fins, which are used to make the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup. Samples of the soup taken from US restaurants by shark attack survivors revealed that 81 percent were made using the fins of endangered, vulnerable, or near-threatened sharks. The group hopes that this knowledge will make restaurant patrons think twice before ordering the dish.
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10 of the Most Impressive Old Aqueducts
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A Wild Bunch of drinkers: Century-old photos of Utah bars include rare shot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with their gang
An incredible image has emerged featuring Butch Cassidy’s notorious train-robbing gang The Wild Bunch, posing outside their favourite bar in the early 1900s.< Posing in a relaxed manner, the outlaws look right at home, the photo of the gang also includes Harry Longbaugh (better known as the Sundance Kid). The image is one of a series of pictures depicting saloon life in the early 1900s in Utah, which has a reputation as one of the most conservative states in the U.S.
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Crime and Punishment (book review)
An Indonesian woman was caned by a Shariah police officer in April for having premarital sex in public. Her partner was also caned.
In recent years, America has succumbed to a peculiar form of Shariah-phobia. According to this narrative, covert jihadis are working to usurp the law of the land and replace it with Islamic rule. A caliphate will rise on the ashes of the Constitution, Americans will be forced to pray in mosques and judges will mete out stonings and amputations. “Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Newt Gingrich told the American Enterprise Institute in July 2010. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.” During the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate weighed in on the Shariah threat. In November 2010, Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the use of Islamic law in court. A federal appeals court blocked the amendment, but more than two dozen other states have considered legislation to restrict judges from consulting foreign and religious laws.
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The Last Knight of Germany, Erwin Rommel 1940
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Farmer eats hamburger at cornhusking contest, Marshall County, Iowa (Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration).
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On this day in 1923 Ernest Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. This was an edition of 300 copies, put out by friend and fellow expatriate, the writer — publisher Robert McAlmon. Both had arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway an unpublished twenty-two-year-old journalist with a recent bride, a handful of letters of introduction provided by Sherwood Anderson, and a clear imperative: “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” This effort would take place in his garret hotel room and in the café — bars where, if you were lucky, the oysters were fresh, the wine was dry, the girls were pretty and life was A Moveable Feast:
It was a pleasant café, warm clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story….
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
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Zoologger: The longest tunnels dug by a mammal .
Short Sharp Science: Today on New Scientist: 10 August 2012.
Searching salt for answers about life on Earth, Mars.
UCLA scientist discovers plate tectonics on Mars | e! Science News.
‘Smart Fingertips’ Pave Way for Virtual Sensations – ScienceNOW.
Years After Slash and Burn, Brazil Haunted by ‘Black Carbon’ – ScienceNOW.
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The Lesson of the Monkeys
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Middle School Sex Ed Questions
Here are some questions submitted by middle school students in a sex ed class. Keep in mind they are just figuring things out so it’ pretty funny to see how much they know.
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LONDON — And so the Olympics come to an end. The last medals awarded, the 16 days of competition having left behind with images of greatness and disappointment, memories that already fade. Time inside the Olympic bubble simply ceases to exist. It’s not Tuesday to you anymore, it’s Day 11. Michael Phelps becoming the most decorated athlete in Olympic history? Seems like it happened months ago, and not just last week.
Here in London, the story has been the astounding performance of the British team, which has won a record 65 medals, an increase of 18 over the team’s total in Beijing. That success didn’t come cheaply — the UK government invested £264 million ($413 million) over the past four years to support the country’s elite sports programs. The funds come the UK national lottery, as well as from the general governmental fund.
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9 popular IT security practices that just don’t work | Security – InfoWorld.
Hackaday Links: August 12, 2012 – Hack a Day.
Urban disasters spotlight strain on Asian cities.
Scientists advance understanding of how flowers are formed.
New bacteria resistant materials discovered.
Yale team discovers how stress and depression can shrink the brain | e! Science News.
Of mice and melodies | e! Science News.
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Marilyn Monroe. Gone but never forgotten!
