Cape Charles Christian is looking for a new Pre-K teacher.
To apply and to get more information, go to: CCCSESVA.ORG.
Reflections on Cape Charles and the Eastern Shore
Cape Charles Christian is looking for a new Pre-K teacher.
To apply and to get more information, go to: CCCSESVA.ORG.
Northampton Middle School will be hosting a Town Hall which will cover and discuss writing for the 8th Grade SOL.
There will be a free dinner and a question and answer period with teachers.
Paint Party at the American Legion Post 56, Cheriton.
Saturday, February 29 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. – Cost: $35
Pattie Shockley will be instructing the group how to paint a Koi fish. Light finger foods will be provided.
Register on FaceBook at Pattie Shockley Art…. or just walk in. All proceeds will benefit Girls State scholarships.
Sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary Post 56.
Science and Philosophy Seminar of the Eastern Shore of Virginia has scheduled its next seminar, “Insectivory: The Eating of Insects.” The free 90-minute seminar will be held at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, February 28 in the Room 113 of the new building of the Eastern Shore Community College, 29300 Lankford Hwy, Melfa, VA 23410.
Jack Cranford will discuss how many mammals, small and large, birds, and other bugs eat insects, and what is needed to eat them.
Cranford, ex-airman and ex-professor, spends his “retirement” in Melfa with the USCG Auxiliary.
These seminars are occasionally rescheduled or postponed on short notice. Prospective attendees are urged to check the Seminar’s website (www.SciPhi.org) shortly before a scheduled date.
USER FRIENDLY ONLINE UTILITY PAYMENTS ON TAP FOR EXMORE
Residents and businesses in the Town of Exmore will soon have a quick and paperless way to pay, manage and track utility bills, and pay their taxes. Beginning the first week in March, Exmore will activate a new, user-friendly online payment system in partnership with Paymentus, a leading national firm. “It is easy, simple and secure,” said Mayor Douglas Greer. “And it is convenient.”
The new service will be “live” on the Town of Exmore’s website (www.exmore.org) the week of March 3, 2020. Residents and businesses can pay with Visa, MasterCard or Discover credit cards or with Electronic Checks. The online payments will incur a nominal processing fee, established by the third-party bill-pay vendor, Paymentus. This covers the costs associated with providing this service.
For those without access to the internet, payments will still be accepted at the Exmore Town Hall, but the processing fee still applies.
The online payment system includes features such as “Pay Now”, an option that allows the user to make a quick payment without having to register for an account. Registered account users will be able to view and pay multiple accounts at once. They will also be able to view payment history and utility consumption information and access past billing statements.
Among the multiple features offered, account users will also be able to securely save payment information and choose to sign up for paperless billing with email reminders. They will also have the opportunity to schedule automatic payments from their checking account or credit card.
“We are pleased to introduce this new convenience to Exmore,” added Mayor Greer. “This is a reflection of our continual commitment to enhancing the hometown experience for our residents and to our business community.”
For questions or more information, call 757-442-3114 x10.
Clarice MacGarvey
Cell: 757-651-8260
February 22, 1980 – The “Miracle on Ice” was a medal-round game during the men’s ice hockey tournament at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, played between the hosting United States and the four-time defending gold medalists, the Soviet Union.
It was more than just an Olympic upset; to many Americans, it was an ideological victory in the Cold War as meaningful as the Berlin Airlift or the Apollo moon landing. After the degrading and humiliating events of the flaccid Carter administration (Iran Hostage Crisis), this win lifted an entire nation.
Watch the greatest moment in American sports, and arguably the greatest call by Al Michaels, a call which launched him into stardom. “Do you believe in Miracles? YES!!!”:
The Soviet Union had won the gold medal in five of the six previous Winter Olympic Games, and they were the favorites to win once more in Lake Placid. The team consisted primarily of professional players with significant experience in international play. By contrast, the United States’ team—led by head coach Herb Brooks— comprised mostly amateur players. With only four players with minimal minor-league experience, the United States was the youngest team in the tournament and in U.S. national team history. In the group stage, both the Soviet and U.S. teams were unbeaten; the U.S. achieved several notable results, including a 2–2 draw against Sweden and a 7–3 upset victory over second-place favorite Czechoslovakia.
600AD: Pope Gregory the Great issues a decree that confirms, “God bless you” is the correct response to a sneeze.
1431: After finally defeating the French forces of Charles VII, the English army, now occupying north-central France, begins a heresy trial of 19 year old Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose visions from God induced her to lead the armies of France into several notable victories over the English. Convicted, she is burned at the stake on 30th May.
1473: Birth of Nicolas Copernicus (d.1543) in Torun, Poland. A mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe and the earth revolved around it. Disturbed by the failure of Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe to follow Aristotle’s requirement for the uniform circular motion of all celestial bodies and determined to eliminate Ptolemy’s equant, an imaginary point around which the bodies seemed to follow that requirement, Copernicus decided that he could achieve his goal only through a heliocentric model. He thereby created a concept of a universe in which the distances of the planets from the sun bore a direct relationship to the size of their orbits. At the time Copernicus’s heliocentric idea was very controversial; nevertheless, it was the start of a change in the way the world was viewed, and Copernicus came to be seen as the initiator of the Scientific Revolution.
1621: The newly arrived Plymouth Colony elects Myles Standish as its Commander, a position to which he was repeatedly re-elected to the end of his life.
1801: After 35 ballots in the House of Representatives, and only 15 days before the inauguration, Thomas Jefferson is elected 3rd President of the United States, finally defeating his running mate, Aaron Burr (DLH 2/6). The November 4th general election gave both Burr and Jefferson 73 electoral votes each, thus sending the vote to the House. An electoral technicality- the winner needed a majority of state votes (9 needed (Jefferson had 8))- kept the election in turmoil for over three months. The logjam was broken when the Federalists reasoned that a peaceful turnover of power required that the majority party be allowed to have its choice for President. The following vote gave Jefferson 10 states, Burr 4, and two states voted “blank,” thus launching Jefferson into his highly eventful presidency.
1804: American naval captain Stephen Decatur leads a daring nighttime raid in Tripoli harbor. He and a hand-picked cadre of men re-board and set fire to the American frigate USS Philadelphia, which grounded last October and was subsequently captured by the Pasha of Tripoli. The raid climaxes by burning the ship to the waterline to prevent its use by the Barbary pirates. None other than Horatio Lord Nelson called Decatur’s work “the most bold and daring act of the Age.” Decatur himself returned to the United States a national hero.
1846: The United States Navy issues a General Order replacing the term “larboard” with “port.”
1847: The first rescuers reach the remnants of the Donner Party, a group of pioneers who left the Midwest the previous July for the promise of California. In late October, they became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains by an early snow, and the ensuing four months saw them reduced to cannibalism as all of their supplies and oxen were consumed during the brutal winter. Of the original 89 who set out, only 45 made it to the Golden State. Donner Pass and Donner Lake are named for the tragedy. Today’s Interstate 80 runs along the original route through the mountains.
1848: German economist and historian Karl Marx publishes The Communist Manifesto.The opening and closing lines of the book: “A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism.” and “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a whole world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”
1864: Under the command of Lieutenant George Dixon, and with a volunteer crew of seven others, the Confederate submarine CSS Hunley sinks USS Housatanic in Charleston harbor. After completing the attack, the hand-crank powered sub mysteriously sank and remained unlocated until 1995. On recovery, her entire crew of 8 was found entombed on board. They were subsequently re-buried with full military honors in a Confederate cemetery in Charleston. The submarine itself is now on display in the recovery laboratory on the grounds of the former Charleston Naval Base. This was not her first sinking; twice before, she flooded and went to the bottom, the first time killing five, and the second time killing all 8 aboard, including the designer himself. You would correctly surmise that Dixon had no little trouble recruiting another crew for the machine.
1865: General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army sacks Columbia, SC, creating havoc that consumes more than 2/3 of the city by fire. Commenting later, Sherman said, “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event because I believe it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the War.”
1867: The first ship passes through the Suez Canal.
1895: The North Carolina legislature adjourns for a day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass.
1898: Birth of il Commendetore, Enzo Ferrari (d.1988), the Italian race car driver for Alfa Romeo, who went on to produce his own series of works of art that bear his name.
1902: Birth of photographer Ansel Adams (d.1984). His work was the result of exceptional patience and a deep understanding of the interplay of light within both the scenes themselves and on the emulsion of his film. Besides his superb eye for composition, his photos technically represent the ultimate in depth, contrast, and clarity. His camera of choice was almost always large format (70mm) because of the negatives’ sharpness when enlarged.
1915: Gallipoli Campaign: Opening guns of what will become a futile 8 month Anglo-French campaign to capture Constantinople and secure the Bosporus and Dardanelles for transit of the Russian fleet. On this day, British warships begin shelling Ottoman coastal artillery positions on the Gallipoli peninsula.
1916: The Battle of Verdun begins with a German artillery barrage on the French fortress city. The battle ends 10 months later with the lines of contact essentially unmoved from their opening positions. What did change is the shattered and cratered landscape, littered with the corpses of 143,000 Germans and 162,440 French soldiers, many of whom remain in situ to this day in the tortured French soil. Total casualties are over 750,000 with some reasonable estimates approaching a million.
1922: The Italian airship Roma explodes over Hampton Roads, killing 34.
1930: Clyde W. Tombaugh, an astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovers Pluto. The formerly 9th planet’s average distance from the sun is 4 billion miles, and it takes 248 earth years to complete one orbit. Without getting into too much detail, the search for “Planet X” had been ongoing since 1906 under the guidance of the great mathematician and astronomer Percival Lowell. The search was a result of observed differences between the actual and predicted positions of the recently discovered planet Neptune, which itself was discovered by similar mathematical calculation (vice direct observation and discovery) in 1846. Tombaugh targeted the predicted position of Planet X with systematic exposures of discrete sky sections taken roughly two weeks apart. The images were then studied through a blink comparator, a device that flashed from one image to another to show motion, similar to the little cartoons you make when you flip the edges of a stack paper. Through this process, the fixed stars will- of course- stay fixed, but planetary motion will be exposed.
1936: Death of Army Air Service Brigadier General Billy Mitchell (b.1879), whom one might either call an “outspoken advocate” or a “grandstanding blowhard” over the nascent capabilities of air power as an arm of combat. He pretty much set the tone for future Air Force-Navy relationships throughout 1921, when both the Army and Navy were conducting tests on the vulnerability of battleships to aerial bombardment. By July, 1921, with the sinking of the ex-German battleship Ostfriesland, the public dispute between Mitchell & his acolytes and the leadership of the Navy and Army reached its nadir. He was court-martialed and convicted for insubordination in 1925, and suspended from active duty on half pay for five years. After his death, and with the rise of the actual viability of air power, Mitchell’s legacy was rehabilitated, including having the B-25 named after him.
1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible relocation of citizens of Japanese descent into remote internment camps. Nearly 120,000 were arrested in the ensuing dragnet. Great Britain issued a similar order for Canada on the 24th of the month.
1942: Lieutenant Commander Edward “Butch” O’Hare, flying on defensive Combat Air Patrol (CAP) from USS Lexington (CV-2), personally shoots down five Japanese “Betty” bombers in four minutes. His action earns him a Medal of Honor in addition to becoming the first U.S. fighter ace of WWII. He was lost at sea on a night combat mission in November of 1943. Chicago’s major airport is named in his honor.
1943: First day of the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the first major engagement of American units against German forces. The battle ended in a rout, with the combined Anglo-American force pushed back nearly fifty miles from their starting positions. The German commander, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, was contemptuous of the Americans but wary of their potential. In the aftermath of the defeat, General Eisenhower relieved the Corps commander and replaced him with Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who in short order proved Rommel right to be wary of American potential.
1945: Three years after its loss to the Japanese, American forces re-take the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay.
1950: Birth of Cybill Shepherd. Writer Larry McMurtry said of her on the set of Last Picture Show, “She’s like two scoops of vanilla ice cream.”
1953: Baseball great and USMC combat pilot Ted Williams is shot down over Korea. He rejoined the Red Sox late in the 1953 season.
1959: Fidel Castro is sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba after forcing former dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile in the Dominican Republic. The event is the culmination of the three year guerrilla campaign that Castro, his brother Raul and Che Guevarra, the hard-line Argentine Marxist, led from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Fidel’s dictatorship was the first Communist government in the western hemisphere.
1959: Birth of tennis great and notorious Bad Boy, John McEnroe.
1962: In the United States’ first orbital mission and Project Mercury’s third manned space flight, Marine LtCol John Glenn makes three orbits of the earth in his capsule “Friendship-7.” His Atlantic Ocean recovery ship was the USS Noa.
1963: Birth of basketball great, Michael Jordan.
1963: The San Francisco Giants sign Willy Mays for a record $100,000 per year contract.
1967: Death of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (b.1904), who served as head of the Manhattan Project in WWII. Following the war he served as chief advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission. He lost his security clearance in 1954, in part for opposing continuing development of the hydrogen bomb. The other part was his outspoken political opinion-making during the Red Scare, a position deemed inappropriate for someone in the AEC. After the 1945 Trinity detonation, Oppenheimer stated that one of the first things he thought of was a quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
1972: Wilt Chamberlain scores his 30,000th point in a game against the Phoenix Suns.
1972: President Richard Nixon departs on his historic trip to Communist China.
1972: President Richard Nixon arrives in China.
1976: President Gerald Ford rescinds Executive Order 9066 with Presidential Proclamation 4417, which opens the door for reparations to surviving Japanese internees.
1997: 25-year-old Jeff Gordon becomes the youngest winner of the Daytona 500, a record that held until 2012 when Trevor Baine took the title the day after his 20th birthday.
1997: The San Francisco Giants sign Willy Mays’ godson Barry Bonds for a record $22,900,000 per year contract.
MIT Review Boston – On May 15 this year a pandemic exercise, CladeX was held at a hotel in Washington, DC. The players included former Senate leader Tom Daschle (reprising that role), onetime Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Julie Gerberding, and Tara O’Toole, the creator of the original pandemic Dark Winter exercise scenario.
The group’s task: respond to a fictional outbreak. A virus is killing dozens in Frankfurt, Germany, and spreading in Venezuela, though that country’s president denies the problem. It’s moving fast and has a high mortality rate. The leaders immediately must decide whether to shut airports (they don’t) and give assistance to Venezuela (they do), and how to calm the public as fake news spreads paranoia on social media.
First, they have to understand the enemy. In the real world, says Jonathan Quick, a doctor who attended the exercise and is the author of a book on preparedness, The End of Epidemics, three out of five novel diseases come from “the bush or the barn.” That is, like Ebola and SARS, they make the jump to humans from animals. In this scenario, the players also initially suspect a zoonotic source but quickly learn that this disease doesn’t fit any known family of viruses, called clades. Could it be man-made?
Someone has genetically modified a mostly harmless parainfluenza virus to kill. The fictional culprit is A Brighter Dawn, a shadowy group promoting the philosophy that fewer people—a lot fewer—would be a good thing for planet Earth. In fact, they want the population to return to preindustrial levels.
The scenario was created by Eric Toner, an emergency physician and pandemic specialist with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, which sponsored the exercise. Toner carried out meticulous research to come up with a plausible threat using real virology and epidemiological models. The result was so realistic that the organizers chose not to present too many details. “For obvious reasons,” he says. “It does not require a nation-state to do it.”
Since genetic engineering has become easier, and powerful tools like CRISPR are easily obtained. “The most fascinating thing is that technology used to be up here,” says Scott Lillibridge, the onetime head of the CDC’s bioterrorism program and now a professor at Texas A&M. “I can tell you in the 1990s we were thinking about state actors. It was a virus in the freezer. Fast-forward 20 years and the appearance of synthetic biology means that things which used to require a major investment are cheap and easy to acquire.”
In the past, it was enough to stockpile vaccines against familiar germs—smallpox, polio, anthrax. But now an evildoer could create new threats not on anyone’s list of bogeymen. As Bill Gates put it this year, “The next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist.”
Yet as real cases such as the Zika outbreak show, science can also move faster in response than ever before. In Toner’s scenario, it’s only a matter of days before the fictional CladeX virus is sequenced, laying naked its genetic code and setting off a coordinated and competitive assault by scientists and vaccine makers. “We’re getting better,” says Lillibridge. “The discussion is more complex, but the ability to focus on the key issues is greater.”
The organizers of the germ-game exercise, who had prepared their recommendations in advance, repeated familiar calls for inter-agency coordination and more public health infrastructure in the developing world. But they also included in their six recommendations a call for international oversight of the most risky types of experiments (say, synthesizing viruses from scratch), perhaps via the United Nations. That’s necessary, they say, because “few countries in the world have explicitly acknowledged the possibility that new pandemic risks could emerge from scientific research or the application of new biotechnological tools.”
This story was originally published in May 2018 by MIT Technology Review. The story was written by Antonio Regalado.
AP Delhi by ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL and LAURAN NEERGAARD- In South Korea, Singapore and Iran, clusters of infections are leading to a jump in cases of the new viral illness outside China. But it’s not the numbers that are worrying experts: It’s that increasingly they can’t trace where the clusters started.
World Health Organization officials said China’s crackdown on parts of the country bought time for the rest of the world to prepare for the new virus. But as hot spots emerge around the globe, trouble finding each source — the first patient who sparks every new cluster — might signal the disease has begun spreading too widely for tried-and-true public health steps to stamp it out.
“A number of spot fires, occurring around the world is a sign that things are ticking along, and what we are going to have here is probably a pandemic,” said Ian Mackay, who studies viruses at Australia’s University of Queensland.
That worst-case isn’t here yet, the WHO insists. It isn’t convinced that countries outside China need more draconian measures, but it pointed to spikes in cases in Iran and South Korea to warn that time may be running out to contain the virus.
“What we see is a very different phase of this outbreak depending where you look,” said WHO’s Dr. Sylvie Briand. “We see different patterns of transmission in different places.”
The World Health Organization defines a “global pandemic” as a disease spreading on two continents, though some public health experts would call an outbreak a pandemic if the spread is over a wide area or across many international borders.
The newest red flag: Iran has reported 28 cases, including five deaths, in just days. The cluster began in the city of Qom, a popular religious destination, but it’s not clear how. Worse, infected travelers from Iran already have been discovered in Lebanon and Canada.
In South Korea, most of the hundreds of new cases detected since Wednesday are linked to a church in the city of Daegu and a nearby hospital. But health authorities have not yet found the “index case,” the person among the church’s 9,000 followers who set off the chain of infections.
There also have been several cases in the capital, Seoul, where the infection routes have not yet been traced. In Europe, Italy saw cases of the new virus more than quadruple in a day as it grapples with infections in a northern region that apparently have spread through a hospital and a cafe.
A cluster of cases isn’t inherently worrying — in fact, it’s expected as an infection that’s easy to spread is carried around the world by travelers. The first line of defense: Isolate the sick to treat them and prevent further spread, and quarantine people who came in contact with them until the incubation period is over.
But as the virus becomes more widespread, trying to trace every contact would be futile, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong acknowledged earlier this month.
“If we still hospitalize and isolate every suspect case, our hospitals will be overwhelmed,” he said. So far, the city-state has identified five clusters of transmission, including two churches. But there remain eight locally transmitted cases with no links to earlier cases, or to China.
Viruses vary in how they infect. The new coronavirus — unlike its cousins SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, and MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome — spreads as easily as a common cold.
And it’s almost certainly being spread by people who show such mild symptoms that no one can tell, said Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“If that’s the case, all of these containment methods are not going to work,” Adalja said. “It’s likely mixed in the cold and flu season all over the place, in multiple countries” and gone unnoticed until someone gets severely ill.
These milder symptoms are good news “in terms of not as many people dying,” said Mackay, of Australia. “But it’s really bad news if you are trying to stop a pandemic,” he added.
When Hong Kong reported it first death from the virus earlier this month, it also confirmed three locally transmitted cases with no known link to any previous cases or any travel history to China. Chuang Shuk-kwan of the Center for Health Protection warned then that “there could be invisible chains of infection happening within communities.”
Officials in both South Korea and Japan have signaled in the past week that the spread is entering a new phase in their countries.
On Friday, South Korean Prime Minister Chung Se-kyun said the government would have to shift its focus from quarantine and border control to slowing the spread of the virus. Schools and churches were closed and some mass gatherings banned.
Takaji Wakita, head of Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases, earlier urged people to work at home or in shifts to avoid being in a crowd, and refrain from holding non-essential and non-urgent meetings.
But Adalja cautioned that far-reaching measures like China instituted in the outbreak’s epicenter of Wuhan — where citizens have been ordered to stay in their homes for weeks — can backfire. While it remains to be seen if the new virus is waning, that kind of lockdown makes it hard for people to get other critically important care, like fast treatment for a heart attack.
There’s no way to predict if the recent clusters will burn out or trigger widespread transmission.
For now, health officials should try and contain the infection for as long as possible while preparing for a change in strategy by preparing hospitals, readying protective equipment and bolstering laboratory capacity, said Gagandeep Kang, a microbiologist who leads India’s Translational Health Science and Technology Institute.
“Although the window of opportunity is narrowing to contain the outbreak, we still have a chance to contain it,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “But while doing that, we have to prepare at the same time for any eventualities, because this outbreak could go any direction – it could even be messy.”
WASHINGTON – Today, Congresswoman Elaine Luria issued the following statement on the Vice President’s tour of NASA Langley. This visit comes after the President announced his budget proposal, which would increase funding for NASA overall, but cut funding for critical programs impacting her district’s constituents, like the CLARREO Pathfinder.
“I am glad the Vice President’s visit provided an opportunity for him to witness the innovation that occurs at NASA Langley,” Congresswoman Elaine Luria said. “I was pleased to see that the Administration appropriately funded many of Langley’s programs, including work designing critical systems for the Artemis program that will propel the next generation of human space exploration. However, I was disappointed by cuts to STEM Engagement, which helps inspire Coastal Virginia students to become scientists and engineers, and to the CLARREO Pathfinder (CPF) mission. This mission will bolster our national security by giving us the data necessary to plan for climate change’s effects on infrastructure. It is my hope that the Vice President’s tour showed him the immense value of CPF and will cause the Administration to reconsider its opposition to funding this program.”
The President’s FY21 budget requests $25.2 billion in appropriations for NASA, a 12% increase over the previous fiscal year. Of this amount, NASA’s Langley Research Center would receive $865.5 million. While deep space exploration systems and technologies would see significant increases under the budget, NASA’s funding for science and STEM engagement would decline. Specifically, the science account would see a 12% decrease in funding. This account supports research into Earth’s geology and climate, including NASA Langley’s CPF. CPF will provide the data needed to better understand climate change and protect against severe weather events before they occur. It is currently on track to be deployed on the International Space Station in 2023.
Congresswoman Luria has been a staunch advocate of the CPF mission. Last December, she secured $26 million in funding for the program in the enacted FY20 appropriations package.