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Every Christmas Rudi Gresham, a former combat soldier in Vietnam, gets a Christmas card from a fellow veteran who was nearly pushed to the brink of suicide because of despair.
"The guy was in his late 50s and his wife had left him and he came down with cancer from Agent Orange, he was broke and he had to move in with his mom and dad--he didn't know where to go from there," said Gresham, who was then serving as senior advisor to the Department of Veterans Affairs under the George W. Bush administration.
"Everything had gone to hell," said Gresham. "But I communicated with him."
Now 68 and retired in South Carolina, Gresham was able to get the veteran the 10 years of back pay he deserved by authenticating his service with a commanding officer. Today, the man's cancer is under control and he has a new woman in his life.
Gresham said getting that thank you card for saving the veteran's life was "the gratifying moment" in his eight-year career with the VA. "I tell my kids, this is the reward for my work."
But three other depressed friends were not so lucky and took their own lives, becoming statistics in a rising tide of suicides among baby boomers, many of them Vietnam War veterans.
Just this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its latest statistics on suicide rates among Americans, finding that the number of middle-aged Americans who took their own lives was up more than 28 percent.
Joe Amon/Denver Post/Getty Images
Vietnam Vet's 2nd Chance at College Football Watch VideoThese statistics reversed a longtime demographic trend for the generation born between 1946 and 1964: The suicide rate for people in this group rose by about 30 percent in the decade ending in 2010. The rate for people over 85, formerly the most likely to kill themselves, dropped by 12 percent, according to the CDC.
Analyzing the National Vital Statistics System for mortality data between 1999 and 2010, the CDC said the annual age-adjusted suicide rate among those aged 35 to 64 was 17.6 percent per 100,000. For people ages 45 to 54, the suicide rate was 19.6 per 100,000 in 2010. For people ages 55 to 64, it was 17.5 per 100,000.
For the whole population, the national rate was 12.4 per 100,000 in that decade, according to the CDC. The most common mechanisms were suffocation or hanging, poisoning and firearms. Increases were seen among both men and women.
The CDC cites the recent economic downturn, a "cohort effect" among baby boomers who had unusually high suicide rates during their adolescent years, and a rise in intentional overdoses because of increased availability of prescription opiods.
But suicide rates among Vietnam veterans are the highest of any particular group, according to John Draper, project director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Eight million Americans report suicidal thoughts, and 1.1 million will attempt suicide. An estimated 38,000 will succeed in killing themselves, according to the CDC. Most are male, by a four to one margin, and are single and lack a college education.
"Men tend to be more lonely and have a harder time maintaining and replacing relationships than women, especially when they get into middle age," said Draper. "Men are busy working or tie their relationships to work and when they lose their job, they lose their relationships."
Those who are less stable in their personal lives are also less stable in the workforce, he said.
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Top Line
Even as most Americans wonder what planet politicians are from, is it possible that the government is squelching evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth? One former presidential hopeful says yes ? and that the conspiracy goes all the way to the top.
Former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) says the White House has helped keep the truth about the ?extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet? from the public.
?It goes right to the White House, and of course, once the White House takes a position, ?well there's nothing going on?...it just goes down the chain of command, everyone stands toe,? Gravel tells Top Line.
Gravel is one of six former congress representatives who were paid $20,000 by the UFO advocacy group Paradigm Research to participate in a Congressional-style Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington this week, where witness after witness has presented first-hand accounts of UFO sightings and extraterrestrial visits.
Gravel says the strongest accounts of alien encounters are from former military officers, such as retired Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, who testified that UFOs temporarily disabled nuclear weapons on his watch.
?The smoking gun of the whole issue, which is when they saw hovering space craft in Wyoming and South Dakota over the ICBM missile silos that the missiles couldn't work,? Gravel says.
Gravel says the media has aided what he sees as a government cover-up by not taking reports of ET encounters seriously.
?What we're faced with here is, in areas of the media, and the government too, an effort to marginalize and ridicule people who have specific knowledge,? he says.
When asked about the fact that he was compensated for his participation in the hearing, Gravel says it did not influence him to agree with the testimony.
?This is an opportunity which I've taken to focus on this issue for an entire week and the preparation I made in coming to it, for my enrichment that's very important,? Gravel says.
For a ride into the outer limits of human knowledge on the possibility of alien life, and to hear how Gravel thinks the world should treat potential alien visitors, come along for this expedition of Top Line.
ABC's Eric Wray, Betsy Klein, Melissa Young, and Bob Bramson contributed to this episode.
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This photo made available on Friday May 3, 2013 by the RAF Museum London shows a formation of German WWII Dornier Do17 bombers. The only known surviving example of the German Dornier Do 17 bomber known as the ?flying pencil? is to be salvaged from its watery grave in the English Channel. RAF Museum director Peter Dye said Friday the bomber is roughly 60 feet below the surface and that bringing it to the surface intact will be tricky. (AP Photo/RAF Museum)
This photo made available on Friday May 3, 2013 by the RAF Museum London shows a formation of German WWII Dornier Do17 bombers. The only known surviving example of the German Dornier Do 17 bomber known as the ?flying pencil? is to be salvaged from its watery grave in the English Channel. RAF Museum director Peter Dye said Friday the bomber is roughly 60 feet below the surface and that bringing it to the surface intact will be tricky. (AP Photo/RAF Museum)
This 1937 photo made available on Friday May 3, 2013 by the RAF Museum London shows a German WWII Dornier Do 17 bomber in Zurich. The only known surviving example of the German Dornier Do 17 bomber known as the ?flying pencil? is to be salvaged from its watery grave in the English Channel. Museum director Peter Dye said Friday the bomber is roughly 60 feet below the surface and that bringing it to the surface intact will be tricky. (AP Photo/RAF Museum)
LONDON (AP) ? The only known surviving example of the German Dornier Do 17 bomber known as the "flying pencil" is to be salvaged from its watery grave in the English Channel.
The RAF Museum says the challenging operation will be the biggest recovery of its kind.
Museum director Peter Dye said Friday the recovered bomber will be put on display in London next to a British bomber that had also been shot down during the Battle of Britain during World War II.
He said the bomber is roughly 60 feet (30 meters) below the surface and that bringing it to the surface intact will be tricky.
Experts say the bomber, which was discovered underwater by divers five years ago, is remarkably undamaged despite the passage of time.
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May 3, 2013 ? A new kind of cosmic flash may reveal something never seen before: the birth of a black hole.
When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), just before the black hole forms, the dying star may generate a distinct burst of light that will allow astronomers to witness the birth of a new black hole for the first time.
Tony Piro, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, describes this signature light burst in a paper published in the May 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. While some dying stars that result in black holes explode as gamma-ray bursts, which are among the most energetic phenomena in the universe, those cases are rare, requiring exotic circumstances, Piro explains. "We don't think most run-of-the-mill black holes are created that way." In most cases, according to one hypothesis, a dying star produces a black hole without a bang or a flash: the star would seemingly vanish from the sky -- an event dubbed an unnova. "You don't see a burst," he says. "You see a disappearance."
But, Piro hypothesizes, that may not be the case. "Maybe they're not as boring as we thought," he says.
According to well-established theory, when a massive star dies, its core collapses under its own weight. As it collapses, the protons and electrons that make up the core merge and produce neutrons. For a few seconds -- before it ultimately collapses into a black hole -- the core becomes an extremely dense object called a neutron star, which is as dense as the sun would be if squeezed into a sphere with a radius of about 10 kilometers (roughly 6 miles). This collapsing process also creates neutrinos, which are particles that zip through almost all matter at nearly the speed of light. As the neutrinos stream out from the core, they carry away a lot of energy -- representing about a tenth of the sun's mass (since energy and mass are equivalent, per E = mc2).
According to a little-known paper written in 1980 by Dmitry Nadezhin of the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Russia, this rapid loss of mass means that the gravitational strength of the dying star's core would abruptly drop. When that happens, the outer gaseous layers -- mainly hydrogen -- still surrounding the core would rush outward, generating a shock wave that would hurtle through the outer layers at about 1,000 kilometers per second (more than 2 million miles per hour).
Using computer simulations, two astronomers at UC Santa Cruz, Elizabeth Lovegrove and Stan Woosley, recently found that when the shock wave strikes the outer surface of the gaseous layers, it would heat the gas at the surface, producing a glow that would shine for about a year -- a potentially promising signal of a black-hole birth. Although about a million times brighter than the sun, this glow would be relatively dim compared to other stars. "It would be hard to see, even in galaxies that are relatively close to us," says Piro.
But now Piro says he has found a more promising signal. In his new study, he examines in more detail what might happen at the moment when the shock wave hits the star's surface, and he calculates that the impact itself would make a flash 10 to 100 times brighter than the glow predicted by Lovegrove and Woosley. "That flash is going to be very bright, and it gives us the best chance for actually observing that this event occurred," Piro explains. "This is what you really want to look for."
Such a flash would be dim compared to exploding stars called supernovae, for example, but it would be luminous enough to be detectable in nearby galaxies, he says. The flash, which would shine for 3 to 10 days before fading, would be very bright in optical wavelengths -- and at its very brightest in ultraviolet wavelengths.
Piro estimates that astronomers should be able to see one of these events per year on average. Surveys that watch the skies for flashes of light like supernovae -- surveys such as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), led by Caltech -- are well suited to discover these unique events, he says. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which improves on the PTF and just began surveying in February, may be able to find a couple of these events per year.
Neither survey has observed any black-hole flashes as of yet, says Piro, but that does not rule out their existence. "Eventually we're going to start getting worried if we don't find these things." But for now, he says, his expectations are perfectly sound.
With Piro's analysis in hand, astronomers should be able to design and fine-tune additional surveys to maximize their chances of witnessing a black-hole birth in the near future. In 2015, the next generation of PTF, called the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), is slated to begin; it will be even more sensitive, improving by several times the chances of finding those flashes. "Caltech is therefore really well-positioned to look for transient events like this," Piro says.
Within the next decade, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will begin a massive survey of the entire night sky. "If LSST isn't regularly seeing these kinds of events, then that's going to tell us that maybe there's something wrong with this picture, or that black-hole formation is much rarer than we thought," he says.
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>>> the first person to ever be exonerated from death row due to dna evidence was released in the state of maryland . his name is kirk . here he is on june 28th , 1993 , when he was released from prison after nearly nine years. he was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a child and dna evidence cleared him of that crime and helped identify the perpetrator. this is a picture of him today, and one of the pens the governor used to sign that state's repeal of the death penalty . this morning, martin o'malley signed senate bill 76 which abolished the death penalty in his state making maryland the 18th state in the country without the death penalty . since his exoneration, kirk has been on a mission to repeal the death penalty by telling his own story.
>> at the time, i was married. i was newly married. i was 22 years old, never been arrested before, discharged marine, went to a christian high school . i don't pretend to purport i was an angel but i certainly knew what i wasn't and that was a child killer . my mother passed away before the result results even. this was in january of 1993 . and she died of a massive heart attack when i was in prison. i was allowed to see her before before -- for five minutes in handcuffs and shackles and i went back to prison. not the dna evidence that cleared kirk back in the earl ly 1990s , a scientific break through changed the way we think of dna evidence . it made it clear some like kirk were not guilty of the crimes they had been sentenced to death. that began to give many states pause and another giving states reason to reconsider their execution practices is theory shall equation of capital punishment . back in 1999 , then maryland governor commissioned this study to factor how they were factored to death and the study found a vicious alchemy and the race of the assailant and race of the victim that made a big difference. when the victim is black this man, wesley eugene baker died at the hands of the state, 2005 , more than seven years ago. the reason no one has been executed in maryland for more than seven years before today 's official ban on capital punishment was signed into law? because maryland had a de facto ban on the death penalty that had nothing to do with dna evidence or study showing racial disparities in the way death is being handed out. the reason for the state's de facto ban on capital punishment was an obscure regulation. prison officials in maryland have come up with their own processes by which they put people to death and they were not signed off by the appropriate authorities. that is why maryland had to stop executing people in 2006 unofficially. when we talk about capital punishment in this country, we talk about the science or the race or guilt and innocence and oversight. rarely do we talk about whether or not we want to be a society that chooses to kill its own citizens for their crimes. only china, iran, iraq or saudi arabia put more of their citizens to death than we do. do we want to be in the company of those countries on this issue? if not, is maryland 's repeal of the death penalty a promising sign we could be moving the country in the right direction. joining us now is kirk , the first american inmate exonerated by evidence and now with an organization to empowering death penalty survivors. so nice to have you here tonight.
>> melissa , it's a pleasure to be here. a big day .
>> it is. your group on innocence is working on this appeal across the u.s. tell me how important the maryland victory is.
>> 28 years ago, i was sitting in a prison cell waiting to die for a crime i didn't commit. there's been 142 americans who have been found wrongfully convicted and witness to innocence has been showing these individuals for the last 10 years. our anniversary is coming up this october. i have to say since i got out in 1993 , it's just one right after another. honestly, we don't need to be executing our citizens like you say, because in fact, they are innocent people.
>> so it does feel to me like a lot of the argument, a lot of the momentum around abolishing the death penalty is about that, the idea of people like you for whom dna evidence shows that they are not guilty of those crimes. can we get to a point where we can make an argument even if someone is guilty of the crime, we don't believe the state should be putting them to death?
>> i think so. i mean, we've come a long way in this thing. dna has shown us that we have a ton of problems. you were talking about one of them earlier, the racial disparity in maryland , it's quite evident. i was on the commission as well. i sat there and was just flabbergasted by some of the stuff that i didn't know. you know, the way we do forensic sciences. racial disparity, jurisdictional disparity, you name it. it comes down to it, melissa , that the death penalty is a failed policy. it hasn't deterred anybody and certainly hasn't detected a soul since it's been enacted.
>> it's also an expensive policy. i was just talking to the governor of rhode island about the merits and economic arguments. is there an economic argument to a state for abolishing the death penalty ?
>> absolutely. the state of california for example just spent -- had a 725 people on death row , billions of dollars in up front costs. maryland , we found the same thing. about $3 million more to execute a person and put him in prison for life or life without parole. i think we have found this practice is expensive and for witness to innocence, and people like myself, the worst thing that could happen and the most expensive is the execution of an innocent person.
>> absolutely. kirk bloodsworth , thank you for your advocacy and joining us tonight and enjoy this night, which is a big win for you.
>> i will indeed, melissa . thank you.
>>> at the new george w. bush library in dallas, we get this version, verse from the president about the response to hurricane katrina . it is an incredible bit of self-written history and it's next. did i mention i live in
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5/2/13 4:02pm
Ron Bailey, a Pocono Lake, Pa.-based broker, recently learned that a scammer scraped his Zillow rental listing and reposted it at a lower rent on Zillow, where the original listing already was.?After hearing from a potential renter, the scammer corresponded through email with her, using Bailey?s name, an email address with Bailey?s name in it, and a phone number bearing Bailey?s area code, writes Inman.
The chairman of the Pocono Mountains Association of Realtors? MLS, Malcolm Waring said he's?been assured that they?re going to beef up fraud prevention. But, he added, if he learns of a similar scam perpetrated on Zillow ($60.17 0%) or HotPads again, "it?s going to be the last time."
Source: http://www.housingwire.com/fastnews/2013/05/02/real-estate-website-fraud-becomes-issue
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