From The Associated Press

NEW YORK – The Pakistani-American who police say admitted to igniting a failed car bomb in busy Times Square has made no court appearance since his arrest early this week and, though he is cooperating, authorities remain unsure he was acting alone.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly declined Friday to discuss what Faisal Shahzad is telling investigators, including what his motives were. He was arrested Monday aboard a Dubai-bound plane two days after the nighttime bomb scare cleared several blocks of the bustling district.

“This individual is cooperating. In these types of situations, you let the information flow, so to speak,” Kelly said.

Police have surveillance images of Shahzad around Times Square and video that shows his car traveling to the spot where they say he left a smoking sport utility vehicle May 1 rigged with a gasoline-and-propane bomb.

Law enforcement officials say they are trying to find links between the Bridgeport, Conn., man and possible financing sources, including the Pakistani Taliban, which has both claimed responsibility for and denied roles in the botched bombing.

A money courier was being sought who may have funneled cash to the 30-year-old budget analyst, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, said Friday the Times Square suspect had apparently operated as a “lone wolf” who did not work with other terrorists. Petraeus said in a statement to the AP that the alleged perpetrator was inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn’t necessarily have direct contact with them.

Investigators believe Shahzad had some bomb-making training in Pakistan as he claimed to investigators, and his training may have been sponsored in part by the Pakistani Taliban, a senior military official told the AP. But it was not clear where the training took place nor the quality of it, the official told the AP on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

Shahzad has told investigators that he trained in the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan, where both al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban operate, and that he came up with the attack plan himself.

Investigators have not been able to establish whether Shahzad was recruited for the Times Square operation by the Pakistani Taliban or another militant group — or whether Shahzad came up with the attack plan himself, the official said.

American officials have been quoted as saying they believe the Pakistani Taliban, which has no history of attacks on U.S. soil, had a role in the Times Square plot, either in funding or motivating and training.

Half a world away Friday, police cleared the streets around Times Square and called in the bomb squad to dismantle what turned out to be a cooler full of water bottles. Earlier in the day, police were called in to check a suspicious package that turned out to be someone’s lunch.

Since the bomb scare in the heart of the city, false-alarm calls are up dramatically, nerves are jangled, and media and law enforcement are rushing to the scenes to make sure the reports aren’t something bigger.

More than 600 calls came in since the attempted car bombing a week ago — about 30 percent higher than normal, police said.

Times Square vendor Walter “Candyman” Wells said the constant scares aroused more suspicion.

“I think they’re testing us, whoever is doing this,” Wells said, sitting on a stool near his table of T-shirts. “They’re playing chess with us right now, but they ain’t gonna win. ‘Cause we’re the Bobby Fischers.”

From The Associated Press

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP’s internal investigation.

While the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and touched off the underwater gusher that has poured more than 3 million gallons of crude into the Gulf.

Portions of the interviews, two written and one taped, were described in detail to an Associated Press reporter by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety and worked for BP PLC as a risk assessment consultant during the 1990s. He received them from industry friends seeking his expert opinion.

A group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project’s safety record, according to the transcripts. Meanwhile, far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.

Based on the interviews, Bea believes that the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, Bea said.

“A small bubble becomes a really big bubble,” Bea said. “So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face.”

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air, he said. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

“What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run,” Bea said. “The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing.”

The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.

“That’s where the first explosion happened,” said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. “The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below.”

According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set “everything on fire,” the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.

BP spokesman John Curry would not comment Friday night on whether methane gas or the series of events described in the internal documents caused the accident.

“Clearly, what happened on the Deepwater Horizon was a tragic accident,” said Curry, who is based at an oil spill command center in Robert, La. “We anticipate all the facts will come out in a full investigation.”

The BP executives were injured but survived, according to one account. Nine rig crew on the rig floor and two engineers died.

“The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they managed to get in the life boats with assistance from others,” said the transcript.

The reports made Bea, the 73-year-old industry veteran, cry.

“It sure as hell is painful,” he said. “Tears of frustration and anger.”

A 100-ton concrete-and-steel vault has been lowered onto the ruptured well, an important step in a delicate and unprecedented attempt to stop most of the gushing crude fouling the sea.

“We are essentially taking a four-story building and lowering it 5,000 feet and setting it on the head of a pin,” BP spokesman Bill Salvin told The Associated Press.

Underwater robots guided the 40-foot-tall box into place in a slow-moving drama. Now that the contraption is on the seafloor, workers will need at least 12 hours to let it settle and make sure it’s stable before the robots can hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to a tanker.

On Saturday, the boat with the plumbing equipment for the containment box was about 1.5 miles from the vessel that lowered the box. It’s unclear exactly when the pipework will begin.

“It appears to be going exactly as we hoped,” Salvin said on Friday afternoon, shortly after the four-story device hit the seafloor. “Still lots of challenges ahead, but this is very good progress.”

It could be Sunday or Monday before officials learn whether the box the size of a house can capture up to 85 percent of the oil.

The task became increasingly urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta.

A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been laying booms, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo — arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons — is drawing ever closer to Louisiana’s coastal communities.

The Coast Guard and BP said Saturday about 2.1 million gallons of an oil-water mix had been collected, with about 10 percent being oil and the rest water. More than 160 miles of boom to contain the oil has been put out and crews have used nearly 275,000 gallons of chemicals to break up the oil on the water’s surface.

There are still untold risks and unknowns with the containment box: The approach has never been tried at such depths, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine, and any wrong move could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse. The seafloor is pitch black and the water murky, though lights on the robots illuminate the area where they are working.

If the box works, another one will be dropped onto a second, smaller leak at the bottom of the Gulf.

At the same time, crews are drilling sideways into the well in hopes of plugging it up with mud and concrete, and they are working on other ways to cap it.

Investigators looking into the cause of the explosion have been focusing on the so-called blowout preventer. Federal regulators told The Associated Press Friday that they are going to examine whether these last-resort cutoff valves on offshore oil wells are reliable.

Blowouts are infrequent, because well holes are blocked by piping and pumped-in materials like synthetic mud, cement and even sea water. The pipes are plugged with cement, so fluid and gas can’t typically push up inside the pipes.

Instead, a typical blowout surges up a channel around the piping. The narrow space between the well walls and the piping is usually filled with cement, so there is no pathway for a blowout. But if the cement or broken piping leaves enough space, a surge can rise to the surface.

There, at the wellhead of exploratory wells, sits the massive steel contraption known as a blowout preventer. It can snuff a blowout by squeezing rubber seals tightly around the pipes with up to 1 million pounds of force. If the seals fail, the blowout preventer deploys a last line of defense: a set of rams that can slice right through the pipes and cap the blowout.

Deepwater Horizon was also equipped with an automated backup system called a Deadman. It should have activated the blowout preventer even if workers could not.

Based on the interviews with rig workers, none of those safeguards worked.

From The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Lettuce grown in Yuma, Ariz., may be the source of a widespread E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce that has sickened at least 19 people and prompted a recall in 23 states.

Federal investigators are looking at a farm in Yuma as a possible source for the outbreak, according to the distributor who sold the lettuce.

Freshway Foods of Sidney, Ohio, said Thursday it recalled lettuce sold in 23 states and the District of Columbia because of a possible link to an E. coli outbreak that has sickened at least 19 people — three with life-threatening illness.

College students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Ohio State in Columbus and Daemen College in Amherst, N.Y., are among those who were affected by the outbreak, according to health departments in those states. The health officials said most of the victims were sickened in April and have already recovered.

Vice president Devon Beer said Freshway Foods worked with the Food and Drug Administration to trace the contaminated lettuce to a Yuma grower, whom he would not identify.

The recall only applies to romaine lettuce with “best if used by” date before or on May 12, when Freshway Foods stopped buying its romaine from Yuma, Beer said.

Officials in Arizona also confirmed the investigation. Laura Oxley, a spokeswoman for Arizona’s agriculture and health departments, said federal officials contacted them and told them they suspected the source of the E. coli outbreak was lettuce grown in the state. She said there were no additional shipments to stop because the winter lettuce season has mostly ended for the year.

The Yuma area is the source of much of the nation’s winter lettuce crop, but farmers switch to other crops at the end of winter.

Freshway Foods said Thursday it was recalling romaine lettuce sold under the Freshway and Imperial Sysco brands. No contamination was found at the company’s processing plant, according to the FDA. New York state’s Public Health Laboratory discovered the contamination in a bag of Freshway Foods shredded romaine lettuce on Wednesday after local authorities had been investigating an outbreak for several weeks.

The most common strain of E. coli found in U.S. patients is E. coli O157. The CDC said the strain linked to the lettuce, E. coli 0145, is more difficult to identify and may go unreported.

E. coli infection can cause mild diarrhea or more severe complications, including kidney damage. The three patients with life-threatening symptoms were diagnosed with hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can cause bleeding in the brain or kidneys.

It was not immediately clear why students on college campuses were sickened. Freshway Foods said the lettuce was sold to wholesalers, food service outlets, in-store salad bars and delis. The recall also affects “grab and go” salads sold at Kroger, Giant Eagle, Ingles Markets and Marsh grocery stores. Bagged lettuce at the grocery store is not involved in the recall so far.

Most of the recalled lettuce was sold in states east of the Mississippi River. It was sold in Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

From The Associated Press

NEW YORK – Authorities say a Staten Island ferry with a history of accidents lost power and crashed into a pier as it approached its terminal, leaving as many as 37 people with minor and moderate injuries.

The accident happened at around 9:20 a.m. Saturday as the Andrew J. Barberi approached the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island.

The city’s transportation commissioner says the ferry’s throttle failed to engage as it came in for a landing.

That meant the crew was unable to use the engines to slow the vessel.

Coast Guard officials say the ferry suffered serious damage to its ramps and decks above the waterline. More than a dozen people were checked out at area hospitals.

The Andrew Barberi was also involved in a 2003 wreck that killed 11 people after the pilot passed out at the wheel.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

NEW YORK (AP) — A Staten Island ferry boat with a history of accidents struck a pier as it approached a terminal Saturday, seriously hurting at least one person and leaving as many as 35 with minor injuries.

The Andrew J. Barberi hit the pier at around 9:20 a.m. as it approached the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island.

Passenger Jason Watler, 30, of St. George, said he realized the ferry was moving faster than usual as it approached the shore, became alarmed and began to run toward the back of the boat.

“It was not slowing down,” he said. “He was going too fast.”

Then, he heard a “a real big boom.”

“I stumbled a little bit,” he said. “People were screaming. People were crying.”

Fire Department officials said some passengers were being taken by ambulance to hospitals. Others were being bandaged and comforted by firefighters at the scene.

City officials were still struggling to gather information on the crash and what might have caused it more than 90 minutes after it happened. They said there were unsure how much damage was done to the boat, which was still afloat.

Service on the ferry line was suspended after the accident, then restored by late morning.

The Andrew Barberi was also involved in a 2003 wreck that killed 11 people. That accident also occurred at the St. George Terminal, when the boat failed to slow down and hit the pier at full speed.

The ferry runs across New York harbor between Manhattan and Staten Island.

If it wasn’t enough that Arnold Schwarzenegger settled for three films kicking machine ass, the Terminator is back fighting the latest threat to human existence: Video games?

If it wasn’t enough that Arnold Schwarzenegger settled for three films kicking machine ass, the Terminator is back fighting the latest threat to human existence: Video games?

California’s appeal for managing violent video games was accepted by the Supreme Court on Apr. 26. The bill, which was first signed by California governor Schwarzenegger in 2005, seeks to ban the sale or rental of violent video games to minors as well as reinforce the video game rating system. In addition, retailers in violation of the law would face fines of up to $1000. Initially, the bill was rejected by a California federal court because it conflicted with the constitutional concept of free speech, resulting in awarding the Entertainment Software Association $282,000 in legal fees. Now, the clash between Arnold Schwarzenegger, his California backing, and the gaming industry is drawing national upset for the regulation of violent video games, a topic that’s been steadily receiving intense scrutiny over the years.

According to California definition, interactive games are those in which the player is given the choice of “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in offensive ways. The bill examined “ultra-violent games” whose violence causes them to “lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors” as well as those whose violence “is especially heinous, cruel, or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim,” said California assemblyman Leland Yee. Such games have been at the center of controversy, begging the question of whether the state or parents should be the ones to regulate what their children play.

Parents have raised the issue of psychological damage to children that may generate aggression, isolation, and an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. In fact, there have been complaints about the effect that graphic depictions in video games have on children’s behavior. “We have a responsibility to our kids and our communities to protect against the effects of games that depict ultra-violent actions, just as we already do with movies,” governor Schwarzenegger proclaims.

The game Rapelay allows players to rape women, impregnate them, and even persuade them to abort pregnancies. Manhunt allows players to use explicit and brutal violence to kill enemies and as the levels increase, the methods to execute enemies get more gruesome and extreme. Condemned 2: Bloodshot, a psychological horror game, depicts a swearing alcoholic investigator who uses graphic violence in a crime-infested world. Dante’s Inferno includes players slashing possessed babies. And in Gears of War, players can use a chainsaw bayonet to chop enemies in half. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 consists of a level where players watch terrorists slaughter civilians at an airport by shooting them in the back of the head. Despite these complaints, the game industry says: “Sex, unlike violence, is a subject uniquely considered to be outside children’s purview. Violence, on the other hand, is a regular part of children’s literature and stories…as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales are aware.”

In response to the recent appeal, ESA president and CEO Michael D. Gallagher says: “What the state proposes in this case would effect a sea change in the permissible regulation of all media—including books, movies, and television programs—that contain violent content and are accessible to minors. We have the opportunity to make our case again and hopefully put this issue to rest.”

The Supreme Court will be hearing the case in October.

VENICE, La. – BP PLC  gave some assurance Monday to shrimpers, oil workers and scores of others that they will be paid for damage and injuries from the explosion of a drilling rig and the resulting massive oil spill in the Gulf.

A massive amount of crude oil lurks off Gulf Coast shores, threatening to devastate ecosystems to livelihoods from Louisiana to Florida. What began as an oil rig explosion has turned into a potential environmental disaster of epic proportions.

A fact sheet on the company website says BP takes responsibility for cleaning up the spill and will pay compensation for “legitimate and objectively verifiable” claims for property damage, personal injury and commercial losses. President Barack Obama and several attorneys general have asked the company to explain what exactly that means.

People like Dana Powell, manager of the Paradise Inn in Pensacola Beach, Fla., have feared what will happen to the Gulf Coast’s staple industries such as tourism and commercial fishing.

“Now when there’s a hurricane, we know it’s going to level things, devastate things, be a huge mess and it’s going to take several years to clean up,” she said. “But this? It’s going to kill the wildlife, it’s going to kill lifestyles — the shrimpers, the fishermen, tourism. Who’s going to come to an oil-covered beach?”

BP CEO Tony Hayward said Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America that BP was not responsible for the accident. He said the equipment that failed and led to the spill belonged to owner Transocean Ltd., not BP, which operated the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Guy Cantwell, a Transocean spokesman, responded by reading a statement without elaborating.

“We will await all the facts before drawing conclusions and we will not speculate,” he said.

A board investigating the explosion and oil leak plans to hold its first public hearing in roughly two weeks. The cause of the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers, has not been determined.

Coast Guard Capt. David Fish, chief of the Washington-based Office of Investigations and Analysis, said the six-member board — three from the Coast Guard and three from the U.S. Minerals and Management Service — will likely meet in the New Orleans area and take testimony from experts and workers who survived the disaster.

“We want to get it public because that’s just what our rules are and while everything is fresh in everyone’s mind, particularly with the witnesses,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hayward said chemical dispersants seem to be having a significant impact keeping oil from flowing to the surface, though he did not elaborate.

The update on the dispersants came as BP was preparing a system never tried to siphon away the spill of crude from a blown-out well a mile underwater. However, it will take at least another six to eight days before crews can lower 74-ton concrete-and-metal boxes being built to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface.

That delay could allow at least another million gallons to spill into the Gulf, on top of the roughly 2.6 million or more that has spilled since the April 20 blast. Those numbers are based on the Coast Guard’s estimates that 200,000 gallons a day are spilling out, though officials have cautioned it’s impossible to know exactly how much is leaking.

By comparison, the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons off the Alaska coast in 1989.

Crews continued to lay boom in what increasingly felt like a futile effort to keep the spill from reaching the shore, though choppy seas have made that difficult and rendered much of the oil-corraling gear useless.

In Pensacola, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist characterized the spill as “sort of an underground volcano of oil.” He said Monday that BP was responsible for the cleanup and added “we’ll be more than happy to send them the bill.”

Everything engineers have tried so far has failed to stop the leak. After the explosion, the flow of oil should have been stopped by a blowout preventer, but the mechanism failed. Efforts to remotely activate it have proven fruitless.

The oil could keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to relieve pressure from the first.

Besides the immediate impact on Gulf industries, shipping along the Mississippi River could soon be limited because the slick was precariously close to a key shipping lane. Ships carrying food, oil, rubber and much more come through the Southwest Pass to enter the vital waterway.

Shipment delays — either because oil-splattered ships need to be cleaned off at sea before docking or because water lanes are shut down for a time — would raise the cost of transporting those goods.

“We saw that during Hurricane Katrina for a period of time — we saw some prices go up for food and other goods because they couldn’t move some fruit down the shipping channels and it got spoiled,” PFGBest analyst Phil Flynn said.

The Port of New Orleans said projections suggest the pass will be clear through Tuesday.

Obama toured the region Sunday, deflecting criticism that his administration was too slow to respond and did too little to stave off the catastrophe. The administration has also strongly defended any comparison to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

A piece of plywood along a Louisiana highway had these words painted on it: “OBAMA SEND HELP”

The containment boxes being built were not part of BP’s original response plan. The approach has been used previously only for spills in relatively shallow water. Coast Guard Adm.Thad Allen said engineers are still examining whether the valves and other systems that feed oil to a ship on the surface can withstand the extra pressures of the deep.

BP was trying to cap the smallest of three leaks with underwater robots in the hope it will make it easier to place a single oil-siphoning container over the wreck. One of the robots cut the damaged end off a pipe at the smallest leak Sunday and officials were hoping to cap it with a sleeve and valve, Coast Guard spokesman Brandon Blackwell said Monday. He did not know how much oil was coming from that leak.

“We see this as an opportunity to simplify the seafloor mission a little bit, so we’re working this aggressively,” BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said.

A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that tens of millions of barrels of oil were beneath the seabed being tapped by the rig when it blew up. Bob Fryar, senior vice president for BP in Angola, said any numbers being thrown out are just estimates at best.

On Sunday, fishermen from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle got the news that more than 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas were closed, fracturing their livelihood for at least 10 days and likely more just as the prime spring season was kicking in.

Peter Young has worked nearly 18 years as a fishing guide and said he’s afraid his way of life may be slipping away. The government has overreacted by shutting down vital fishing areas in the marshes, he said.

Until he sees oil himself, Young will keep fishing the closed areas.

“They can take me to jail,” he said. “This is our livelihood. I’m not going to take customers into oil, but until I see it, I can’t sit home and not work.”

A mantis shrimp is neither a mantis nor a shrimp; however, their physical features resemble that of both species. They can reach a length of up to 38 centimeters and they may exhibit multiple colors from brown to bright neon hues. They are common predators found in the shallow waters of the tropical and subtropical marine habitats, and they reside mostly in burrows and holes. The mantis shrimp are currently referred to as thumb splitters due to the fact that they are able to dismember small human appendages with ease. With their powerful claws, they are able to stun, mutilate, or spear their prey. In some rare cases, larger species of mantis shrimp are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike.

Did You Know? The swing of a mantis shrimp is so powerful that one of its mighty blows counts as two strikes due to the impact of its appendage on the victim and the shockwave that follows. Even if it misses, the shockwave is sufficient enough to kill or stun its prey.

Mantis shrimp are generally solitary animals that live in burrows and only come out during feeding time or when they relocate. In order to obtain their food, they either wait for their prey to chance near them or they hunt, chase, and kill them. The type of mantis shrimp is dependent on their claw structure. Spearers contain spiny appendages that are attached to barbed tips and are used to stab and grab prey. Smashers, on the other hand, contain a more complex club used to smash their meals apart. These appendages also possess a sharp edge which can cut prey while the mantis shrimp swims. The strike of a smasher is so rapid that they may swing at speeds equal to that of a .22 caliber bullet.

Cinco de Mayo, of the fifth of May, commemorated the Mexican army’s 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the French-Mexican War. In the United States, it has taken on significance and commercial value as a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage, particularly in areas with substantial Mexican-American populations.

Cinco de Mayo, or the fifth of May, commemorated the Mexican army’s 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the French-Mexican War.

In 1861, the liberal Mexican Benito Juárez became president of a country in financial ruin, and he was forced to default on his debts to European governments. In response, France, Britain, and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz to demand reimbursement. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew but France, ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to carve a dependent empire out of Mexican territory. Late in 1861, a well-armed French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large French force and driving President Juárez and his government into retreat.

Certain that French victory would come swiftly, 6,000 French troops under General Charles Latrille de Lorencez set out to attack Puebla de Los Angeles, a small town in east-central Mexico. From his new headquarters in the north, Juárez rounded up a rag-tag force of 2,000 loyal men and sent them to Puebla. Led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, the vastly outnumbered and poorly supplied Mexicans fortified the town and prepared for the French assault. On May 5, 1862, Lorencez drew his army, well-provisioned and supported by heavy artillery, before the city of Puebla and began their assault from the north. The battle lasted from daybreak to early evening, and when the French finally retreated they had lost nearly 500 soldiers to the fewer than 100 Mexicans killed.

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is primarily observed in the state of Puebla, where Zaragoza’s unlikely triumph occurred. In the United States, revelers mark the holiday with parades, parties, mariachi music. Mexican folk dancing and traditional foods such as tacos and mole poblano are eaten. Some of the largest festivals are held in Portland, Denver and Chicago.

I hope that everyone has a great Cinco de Mayo. I hope you all enjoyed my Did You Know? articles. Look forward for them to start again next fall!

Fellow UNH students,

USGA President's Corner

I would like to send a huge congratulations to all of the members of SCOPE for planning a wonderful spring weekend! I hope everyone had as much fun as I did! Great job to everyone who had a part in making this weekend such a success, it couldn’t have been done without you.
I wish you all the best of luck with finals, and thank you for your support this year. For the seniors who are moving on, I wish you the best of luck wherever life may take you. Thank you all for being my classmates, my friends, and for helping me to have the best four years of my life.
I hope everyone has a wonderful summer and continues to have happy and healthy lives!

Best,

Christopher Rinck
USGA President
USGAPresident@newhaven.edu

I hope you all enjoyed spring weekend! This week I need to start by thanking a few people! THANK YOU to all of the volunteers out there who helped out with the spring concert, spring carnival, and the drive-in movie! This was such a busy weekend for SCOPE and we really appreciated all the help; we could not have pulled off any of it without you so thanks again for all your help. The concert went really well; we even sold out! Everyone seemed to have a great time and it was awesome when, during the last Cobra Starship song, we were able to have our confetti cannon fire! So much planning went on for the concert and it was great to see it run so smoothly.

Hats off to Jen Cross and Rachel Nichols for planning such an amazing carnival! This year there was no elephant, but it was still fantastic! They brought bumper cars, swings, many other carnival rides, gave out awesome t-shirts for free, two great stage shows, roaming artists, novelties, and had fantastic giveaways, not to mention it was a beautiful day! Between the sunshine, the rides, and the yummy food it really got me excited for spring and summer weather.

The spring comedian was also a huge hit! If you see Farren Sandquist or Annie Luccarelli please thank them for such an awesome night! They sure know how to pick a funny comedian.

We were actually able to have a drive-in this spring weekend. Can you believe it? The past two spring weekends it has rained and we had to move inside, which definitely takes away from the drive-in feel. Nick Shirley picked an awesome movie, The Book of Eli, and despite some technical problems at the start, the drive-in was fantastic! The quad was full of glow sticks, blankets, and towels from the comedian.

SCOPE also finished out the year with a few other events after spring weekend. On Monday, comedy and lecture had the real live hitch, the Dating Doctor, which was a great event. On the last day of classes, the day programming committee planned the relaxation package, which is always a big hit! You could get a massage, eat yummy treats, decorate a bath robe, and more!

Overall it was a great year and I am happy I was co-chair. I had the opportunity to work with some really great people and it was a great experience. This year was amazing and I think Glenn would agree with me: our committee heads did a great job so a special thanks to ALL of them. There is also another group of people I would like to personally thank, and that is all of our general members! They are all so amazing and they are truly the people that help to make our events successful, without them we would not get half of what we accomplish done!

I really can’t believe that this is my last SCOPE It Out article. Ever since I started this little column this year it’s just been something that I have looked forward to writing every week so everyone was up to date with upcoming SCOPE events. With all that said, I do have faith that our future co-chairs for next year will take this on and continue SCOPE It Out in The Charger Bulletin. Thanks so much everyone, it was a great year! HAVE A FANTASTIC AND SAFE SUMMER!