chevyplaces.com

Thursday, November 9, 2017

On Monday, Italian midfielder Andrea Pirlo formally announced his retirement from football. A 2006 FIFA World Cup winner with Italy, Pirlo had announced his intentions to end the 22-year-career last month, and his final professional game ended in a 2–0 win for New York City FC (NYCFC) against Columbus Crew in Major League Soccer play-offs at Yankee Stadium.

“As my time in NYC FC comes to an end, I want to thank everybody for the kindness and support they have shown me in this incredible city”, 38-year-old Pirlo wrote on Twitter. Last month, the Italian told La Gazzetta dello Sport “You realise yourself that the time has come. Each day, you have physical problems and you can’t train as you would like to. At my age, it’s fine to say enough is enough.” ^{((it))Italian language: ?Ti rendi conto da solo che è arrivato il momento. Ogni giorno hai problemi fisici, non riesci più ad allenarti come vorresti perché hai sempre qualche acciacco. Alla mia età ci sta di dire basta.}

Pirlo spent 20 years playing in Italy, making his professional debut for Brescia Calcio before moving to Internazionale in 1998. Three years later, in 2001, he made a switch to Inter’s local rivals, AC Milan. Pirlo spent a decade with Milan, and won two Serie A titles, and two UEFA Champions League titles — in 2003 and in 2007, just a year after Pirlo won the World Cup in Germany with Azzurri defeating France.

His contract with Milan expired in 2011, and then 32-year-old Pirlo moved to Turin and joined Juventus. He won four consecutive Serie A titles with the Old Lady. He was close to winning a third UEFA Champions League gold medal in 2015, but Juventus lost 3–1 against FC Barcelona in the final.

Having won six Italian league titles, two Champions League and Coppa Italia as well as a World Cup with the national team, Pirlo moved to Yankee Stadium in July 2015. Pirlo was substituted in during the 90th minute in his last match for NYCFC, losing 4–3 on aggregate in the MLS play-offs. NYCFC’s manager Patrick Vieira said, “He [Pirlo] had a fantastic career, not just on the field but off it because he’s a true gentleman. He’s a really good guy.”

Friday, August 26, 2005

A Midland, Michigan hotel was temporarily quarantined Thursday night when a letter with suspicious white powder was opened at the Ashman Court Hotel on Main Street.

A hotel employee is said to have opened the letter around 16:00 UTC time on Thursday. Shortly after, the police, FBI and HAZMAT teams were called to the building. Preliminary results from FBI tests showed that the envelope did not contain the deadly bacteria anthrax, as first thought.

The letter contained “a threat” according to local reports, however details were not released. It is also unknown as to what substance the white powder is.

This is the second anthrax scare on the city this year, exactly four months ago the Midland Daily News office, located across the street to the hotel, was sent a similar envelope with suspicious powder. It is not known if the two cases are related or not.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre.

PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington University, volunteered at a lab run by Edward Taub, who was testing neuroplasticity on live monkeys. Taub had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys’ fingers, hands, arms, legs; with some of the monkeys, he had severed the entire spinal column. He then tried to force the monkeys to use their limbs by exposing them to persistent electric shock, prolonged physical restraint of an intact arm or leg, and by withholding food. With footage obtained by Pacheco, Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty—largely as a result of the monkeys’ reported living conditions—making them “the most famous lab animals in history,” according to psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Taub’s conviction was later overturned on appeal and the monkeys were eventually euthanized.

PETA was born.

In the subsequent decades they ran the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty against Europe’s largest animal-testing facility (footage showed staff punching beagle puppies in the face, shouting at them, and simulating sex acts while taking blood samples); against Covance, the United State’s largest importer of primates for laboratory research (evidence was found that they were dissecting monkeys at its Vienna, Virginia laboratory while the animals were still alive); against General Motors for using live animals in crash tests; against L’Oreal for testing cosmetics on animals; against the use of fur for fashion and fur farms; against Smithfield Foods for torturing Butterball turkeys; and against fast food chains, most recently against KFC through the launch of their website kentuckyfriedcruelty.com.

They have launched campaigns and engaged in stunts that are designed for media attention. In 1996, PETA activists famously threw a dead raccoon onto the table of Anna Wintour, the fur supporting editor-in-chief of Vogue, while she was dining at the Four Seasons in New York, and left bloody paw prints and the words “Fur Hag” on the steps of her home. They ran a campaign entitled Holocaust on your Plate that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. In 2003 in Jerusalem, after a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up in a terrorist attack, Newkirk sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. As the film shows, they also took over Jean-Paul Gaultier‘s Paris boutique and smeared blood on the windows to protest his use of fur in his clothing.

The group’s tactics have been criticized. Co-founder Pacheco, who is no longer with PETA, called them “stupid human tricks.” Some feminists criticize their campaigns featuring the Lettuce Ladies and “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads as objectifying women. Of their Holocaust on a Plate campaign, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham Foxman said “The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.” (Newkirk later issued an apology for any hurt it caused). Perhaps most controversial amongst politicians, the public and even other animal rights organizations is PETA’s refusal to condemn the actions of the Animal Liberation Front, which in January 2005 was named as a terrorist threat by the United States Department of Homeland Security.

David Shankbone attended the pre-release screening of I Am An Animal at HBO’s offices in New York City on November 12, and the following day he sat down with Ingrid Newkirk to discuss her perspectives on PETA, animal rights, her responses to criticism lodged against her and to discuss her on-going life’s work to raise human awareness of animal suffering. Below is her interview.