In letter, Sue Paterno defends late husband

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) ? Breaking more than a year of silence, Sue Paterno is defending her late husband as a "moral, disciplined" man who never twisted the truth to avoid bad publicity.

The wife of the former Penn State coach is fighting back against the accusations against Joe Paterno that followed the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Her campaign started with a letter sent Friday to former Penn State players.

She wrote that the family's exhaustive response to former FBI director Louis Freeh's report for the university on the Sandusky child sex abuse case will officially be released to the public at 9 a.m. Sunday on paterno.com.

Freeh in July accused Joe Paterno and three university officials of covering up allegations against Sandusky, a retired defensive coordinator. Less than two weeks later, the NCAA levied unprecedented sanctions on the program that Joe Paterno built into one of the most well-known in college football.

"When the Freeh report was released last July, I was as shocked as anyone by the findings and by Mr. Freeh's extraordinary attack on Joe's character and integrity. I did not recognize the man Mr. Freeh described," Sue Paterno wrote. "I am here to tell you as definitively and forcefully as I know how that Mr. Freeh could not have been more wrong in his assessment of Joe."

The family directed its attorney, Washington lawyer Wick Sollers, to assemble experts to review Freeh's findings and Joe Paterno's actions, Sue Paterno wrote.

She did not offer details on findings in the letter, "except to say that they unreservedly and forcefully confirm my beliefs about Joe's conduct.

"In addition, they present a passionate and persuasive critique of the Freeh report as a total disservice to the victims of Sandusky and the cause of preventing child sex offenses," Sue Paterno wrote.

Sue Paterno said neither Freeh's report, nor the NCAA's actions, should "close the book" on the scandal.

"This cannot happen," she wrote. "The Freeh report failed and if it is not challenged and corrected, nothing worthwhile will have come from these tragic events."

Sandusky's arrest in November 2011, triggered the sweeping scandal, including the firing of Paterno and the departure under pressure of Graham Spanier as president days later. Prosecutors filed perjury and failure to report charges against former athletic director Tim Curley and retired vice president Gary Schultz.

Sandusky, 69, was sentenced last fall to at least 30 years in prison in after being convicted in June on 45 criminal counts. Prosecutors said allegations occurred on and off campus.

"The crimes committed by Jerry Sandusky are heartbreaking," Sue Paterno, who has five children and 17 grandchildren, wrote. "It is incomprehensible to me that anyone could intentionally harm a child. I think of the victims daily and I pray that God will heal their wounds and comfort their souls.

Freeh released his findings the following month. His team conducted 430 interviews and analyzed over 3.5 million emails and documents, his report said.

"Taking into account the available witness statements and evidence, it is more reasonable to conclude that, in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at Penn State University ? Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley ? repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse" from authorities, trustees and the university community, Freeh wrote in releasing the report.

Less than two weeks later, Penn State hastily took down the bronze statue of Paterno outside Beaver Stadium. The next day, the NCAA said Freeh's report presented "an unprecedented failure of institutional integrity leading to a culture in which a football program was held in higher esteem."

Penn State was given a four-year bowl ban, strict scholarship cuts and a $60 million fine. The NCAA also vacated 111 wins under Paterno, meaning he no longer held the record of most wins by a major college coach.

Since then Spanier, Curley and Schultz have also been charged with obstruction and conspiracy, among other charges. They have vehemently denied the allegations. So has the Paterno family, though they have promised a more detailed response with its own investigation was complete.

Paterno's true legacy wasn't his statue or his 409 wins, but family and players, his widow said.

"The great fathers, husbands and citizens you have become fulfill the dreams Joe had," she wrote to the former players. "All that we want ? and what I believe we owe the victims, Joe Paterno and everyone who cares about Penn State ? is the full record of what happened."

Paterno died in January 2012 at age 85, about two months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. The way university leadership handled his ouster ? over a late-night telephone call ? and its handling of the Freeh report and NCAA sanctions remains a sensitive topic for factions of dissatisfied alumni, former players, staff and community members.

Trustee Anthony Lubrano, who joined the board last year after drawing support from disgruntled alumni, has been among more vocal critics who say that school leaders rushed to judgment on Paterno. Critics have also said Freeh's report downplayed failures of Pennsylvania's child-protective services.

"I knew Joe Paterno as well as one human being can know another. Joe was exactly the moral, disciplined and demanding man you knew him to be," Sue Paterno wrote. "Over the years I watched as he struggled with countless personal and professional challenges. Never ? not once ? did I see him compromise his principles or twist the truth to avoid bad publicity or protect his reputation."

The Paterno family has remained supportive of the football program and Paterno's successor, Bill O'Brien. Sue Paterno has been active in organizing Special Olympics, which was again held on campus last summer; and son and former assistant coach Jay Paterno has done speaking engagements with students and attends sporting events.

The family's response comes a month after Gov. Tom Corbett filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA to overturn the sanctions. The NCAA this week asked a judge to throw out the suit.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/letter-sue-paterno-defends-husband-175528020--spt.html

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Canada PM calls job losses "disappointing", sees positive trend

Feb 8 (Reuters) - FedExCup champion Brandt Snedeker, the hottest player on the PGA Tour this year, took advantage of ideal scoring conditions by charging into a share of the second-round lead at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am on Friday. The fast-talking American fired a flawless four-under-par 68 on a glorious sun-splashed afternoon at Spyglass Hill, one of three venues being used for this week's pro-am celebrity event, to post an eight-under total of 134. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/canada-pm-calls-job-losses-disappointing-sees-positive-184701209--business.html

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House Democrats to unveil gun control package; mirrors Obama's (reuters)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/283364500?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Archer, Season 4

Sterling Archer (voice of H. Jon Benjamin) and Ron Cadillac (voice of Ron Liebman).

Photo by FX Network

In?Slate?s Archer TV Club, Jeremy Stahl will IM each week with a different fan of the FX spy comedy. This week he chats with?freelance writer and Archer fan Mark Joseph Stern.

Jeremy:?Bonjour, mon ami! Merci beaucoup for joining today.

Mark: My pleasure! I'm especially happy to chat about this episode, because, true story, I once lost 120 (Canadian) dollars at the Montreal casino in 40 minutes flat. So I can relate to Archer's woes.

Jeremy:?Archer's Qu?bec expedition was even more fraught than your own. He gets stuck there without any money, or a passport, and probably with a drug resistant strain of socialist Canadian V.D. He then had to be rescued by his hated stepfather Ron Cadillac (n?e, as we find out in this episode, Kaczynski). A bonding plotline between the two men ensues, and we also get the Ron Cadillac back story. So, then: how freaking epic is Ron Cadillac?

Mark: FRIGGIN. EPIC. And voiced beautifully by Ron Leibman, Jessica Walters' real-life husband. It was a busy episode?maybe a little too busy, although that's a hard line to draw. Adam Reed likes to have as many balls in the air as possible, and the fast pace really serves his style of humor. The intercutting between past/present, action/office comedy here was divine. As much as I adored Ron's backstory, I think the ultimate twist was a pretty thin reed upon which to hang a narrative!

Jeremy: I agree. Oftentimes the narrative arc of Archer is the least important part of an episode. The story is just there to deliver really great punch lines or some keen, meta look at the way television tropes work.

Mark: Indeed. Like porn, no one watches Archer for the plot.

Jeremy: This episode, however, was very much about what it was about, which was bringing Archer and Ron Cadillac together. Because of that, some of their misadventures?especially the tranny truckers sequence?seemed forced. Also, when I heard that phrase I thought, That's not cool? Even for Archer. Is it? You wrote a great post last week about how you think Adam Reed regularly crosses a line with his LGBT jokes. I wasn't entirely convinced at the time, but this episode raises more of those questions. Did you think the drag trucker sequence was offensive? Or like me did you just find it to be kind of a cheap, lame joke that felt a little too random?

Mark: Not to get oversensitive and earn the ire of a legion of Archer fans (again), but a lot of members of the trans community view the word "tranny" as analogous to "faggot" in terms of offensiveness. I can't imagine Archer, for all its edginess, would ever play off the word "faggot" as a joke. But right now, "tranny" is, culturally, in a transitional phase, probably on par with "retarded" in terms of offensiveness. I think most people still throw it around lightly, and without malice.

To the bigger issue, though: In the four episodes of this season so far, two have employed sexual minorities as the characters' primary antagonists. Using LGBT characters as menaces is nothing new; historically, Hollywood routinely implied that villains were gay, adding a new component to their villainy: not only are they looking to bring down the hero, but they also threaten his masculinity, and sometimes even present a sexual threat. Archer?s use of LGBT characters as villains could even be a meta-joke, parodying the use of such characters as antagonists in older films, especially spy films (even James Bond!).

But: Was the sequence a little random? And did it contribute to my developing theory that Adam Reed is inexplicably fixated on the comic potential of sexual minorities? Yes. Was it cheap? Probably. I mean, the drag trucker thing was pulled out of thin air, and it was basically a sight gag of saggy, hairy, grotesque men in bras and heels. However, I don't think it quite crossed the line into transphobia. More like trans panic, or perhaps trans fixation. Also, the entire sequence could, as Archer explicitly notes, be seen as a parody of The Road Warrior ("as directed by John Waters").

Jeremy: I agree with you, that in this case the truckers feel like they are there to set up jokes?some of them are funny (craft services table on the set of a snuff film), others less so (trucker high heels getting caught in mud). Personally I think the biggest sin of this episode was trying for a cheap laugh and failing.

Mark: Indeed?and in an episode otherwise stuffed with brilliant laughs! A running joke about Master P! C.W. McCallgirl! Guy Owen! (Read a book.) Aside from the trans panic, this episode is an immediate top five for me.

Jeremy: One more note on the trans panic stuff: the first thing that the lead trucker says to Archer and Ron when offering them a ride is that the law requiring them to ride in the back was "compliments of those Democratic queers in Congress." In retrospect, this feels like an attempt to set up the trucker characters as a bunch of bigoted red-staters who secretly got their jollies filming pornographic snuff films in drag. This makes the case stronger that the whole sequence was knowing parody: Reed is playing on homophobic stereotypes about homosexuality and masculinity, but he's also playing on liberal stereotypes of evil, prejudiced conservatives who are actually just projecting their own hidden self-hatred. Viewed like this, the sequence is easier to read as satire.

Mark: I'll tentatively concur with that theory, although I think "satire" has too intellectual a connotation. If that's truly the joke, it's fairly broad?I'd call it burlesque parody, or maybe just a spoof, or, best yet, comic absurdity. Actually, come to think of it, we might just round most of these eyebrow-raising jokes to absurd humor, which Archer usually excels in.

Jeremy: It?s been a pleasure chatting with you, Mark, but I've got to go make sure that no WWII veterans have stolen my gold-plated tank.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=ac0792953692754770cfe30e0b071de0

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Toyota wins back world's top auto sales crown from GM

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp regained the crown as the world's top selling automaker in 2012, posting record-high sales and beating rivals General Motors and Volkswagen .

Toyota said on Monday it sold 9.75 million vehicles group-wide around the world last year, a record for the 75-year-old Japanese automaker and up 22.6 percent from a year ago.

The result was in line with the company's December forecast, and put it back in the No. 1 spot, which it lost in 2011 when it was hit by a wave of negative publicity after a recall crisis in the United States, and a disrupted supply chain following an earthquake in Japan and floods in Thailand.

Toyota held the global sales crown from 2008 through 2010, but fell to third place in 2011 behind GM and Volkswagen.

GM sold 9.28 million vehicles in 2012, up 2.9 percent from a year ago, while Volkswagen sold 9.07 million vehicles, up 11.2 percent.

Toyota aims to sell 9.91 million vehicles group-wide globally in 2013, up 1.6 percent from 2012.

The Toyota group also includes sales at Daihatsu Motor Co and Hino Motors Ltd . Toyota-only sales hit a record-high 8.72 million vehicles, up 22.8 percent on a year ago.

Toyota's domestic rival Nissan Motor Co said on Monday it sold a record 4.94 million vehicles globally in 2012, while Honda Motor Co sold 3.82 million vehicles, up 19 percent.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Richard Pullin)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/toyota-sells-9-75-million-vehicles-2012-regains-045233982--finance.html

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Urine the Army Now

Sargent Sheena Adams, 25, US Marine with the FET (Female Engagement Team) 1st Battalion 8th Marines, Regimental Combat team II blows bubbles with Afghan boys surrounding her while on patrol on November 21, 2010 in Musa Qala, Afghanistan.

Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Should women be allowed in combat? The Pentagon says yes, but Jerry Boykin knows better. Boykin, a former Army lieutenant general, is the executive vice president of the Family Research Council. Since last week, when the military announced its decision to rescind the combat ban, Boykin has become the point man for opponents of the decision. It isn?t easy in 2013 to make the case that every man should be eligible for the draft but that no woman should be permitted to compete for a combat role in much of the armed forces. Is Boykin man enough for the job? Let?s see how he?s doing.

1. Women are too weak. ?We have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that ground combat still requires levels of sheer physical strength, speed, and endurance that are relatively rare among women,? Boykin wrote in a USA Today op-ed on Thursday. A day later, in a commentary on CNN, he added,

The slots that may be opened are in our infantry and Special Forces units. The purpose of such units is to directly and physically engage enemy forces. This can often involve personal, hand-to-hand combat in which women will now have to fight men. These units can often be deployed in prolonged operations that can last for months. The physical toll is constant and wearing.

When Boykin talks about hand-to-hand combat and women fighting men, he seems to be suggesting that women can?t or won?t fight men effectively. But if combat-level physical abilities are ?relatively rare? among women, rather than nonexistent, doesn?t that undermine the idea of a categorical ban on women in combat? So Boykin turns to other arguments.

2. Combat missions are too gross for women. Boykin objects that infantry and Special Forces units are sometimes sent on months-long missions:

During operations of this kind there is typically no access to a base of operations or facilities. Consequently, living conditions can be abysmal and base. There is routinely no privacy or ability to maintain personal hygiene for extended periods. Soldiers and Marines have to relieve themselves within sight of others.

So the problem isn?t that women are inherently too weak to carry the gear or kill a man in a knife fight. The problem is that they might have to skip showers or pee in the wild.

3. Combat missions with women are too humiliating for men. On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace pointed out that Col. Martha McSally, the country?s first female combat pilot, defeated her male competitors in the military division of the Hawaii Ironman World Triathlon Championships. ?Clearly, some women can meet the standard? for combat, Wallace suggested. Boykin replied:

Some women can, and there will be few, but some can. But that's not the issue I raised initially. What I have raised is the issue of mixing the genders in those combat units where there is no privacy, where they are out on extended operations, and there's no opportunity for people to have any privacy whatsoever. Now, as a man who has been there, and a man who has some experience in these kinds of units, I certainly don't want to be in that environment with a female, because it's degrading and humiliating enough to do your personal hygiene and other normal functions among your teammates.

Ah. So the problem isn?t that women might have to pee near men. The problem is that men might have to pee near women.

4. Women are too sexy. In his essay for CNN, Boykin argued,

This combat environment?now containing males and females?will place a tremendous burden on combat commanders. Not only will they have to maintain their focus on defeating the enemy in battle, they will have to do so in an environment that combines life-threatening danger with underlying sexual tensions. This is a lot to ask of the young leaders, both men and women, who will have to juggle the need to join and separate the sexes within the context of quickly developing and deadly situations. ? Men and women can serve together in the armed forces productively, but that service needs to be prudently structured in a manner that reflects the differences between the sexes and the power of their attractions.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=8916a0c1377c50b50ee9fc0ded013866

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Stanford Breaks The Million-Core Supercomputer Barrier To Study Jet Turbulance

Stanford has grabbed the supercomputer crown with Sequoia, a million-core computer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that is being used to simulate jet turbulence in real time. This isn't the fastest supercomputer per se, but it is the first to use one million cores simultaneously which is an amazing feat for big iron.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/sBJ6lMI3iKU/

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