https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/body-found-in-patapsco-river-near-ellicott-city/2018/05/29/7bd90d04-6360-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.1ac493d01458&wpisrc=nl_buzz&wpmm=1

A man’s body found by searchers in the Patapsco River is that of Eddison “Eddie” Hermond, a National Guard sergeant who went missing after he tried to rescue a woman trapped by rapidly rising water Sunday in Ellicott City, Md.

Howard County police said Hermond’s body was found across the county line in Baltimore County. The discovery came after Ellicott City was hit over the weekend by widespread flooding.

Hermond, 39, of Severn, Md., had been at a restaurant Sunday helping to celebrate the owner’s birthday. The woman who was trapped, Kate Bowman, said Hermond stepped over a ledge and was “immediately washed away.”

“It was so fast,” Bowman recalled. “He just got washed away real quick.”

It’s Been 40 Years Since This Man Traveled 6,000 Miles To Be With The Love Of His Life, Here’s How They Both Live Now
https://www.boredpanda.com/indian-man-6000-miles-marry-swedish-woman-pradyumna-kumar-mahanandia/

More than 40 years ago a beautiful love story began between an Indian artist and a young Swedish woman. After defeating all the odds this beautiful couple is still together. Here’s their story.

Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia was born an “untouchable” in a remote village of India in 1949. According to prophecy, told by an astrologer after Kumar’s birth, he was meant to marry a musician woman from a faraway country, who is born under the zodiac sign of Taurus and owns a forest. “I believed strongly in the prophecy and now know that everything is planned on this planet,” Kumar told National Geographic.

The man remembers very clearly the day when prophecy came true. The beautiful story began on December 17, 1975. Back then, Kumar was a street artist. A beautiful blonde woman with blue eyes, named Charlotte Von Schedvin, asked him to draw a portrait of her. “When she appeared before my easel, I felt as though I didn’t have any weight. Words are not accurate enough to express such a feeling,” he said. “Her eyes were so blue and big and round, I felt as if she was not looking at me, she was looking inside me, like an X-ray machine!” The nervous young man couldn’t properly draw a woman of his dreams the first time, so he asked Charlotte to come back another day. “She ended up coming back three times and I did three portraits, ” he said. “After the second time, I felt, she’s the one!” Turns out the mysterious foreign woman was born under the sign of Taurus, owns a forest and plays the flute, just as the prophecy said. “You will be my wife. We were destined to meet.” Kumar told her.

Charlotte, who was 19 years old at the time, wasn’t scared of this unexpected confession and decided to give the young man a change. The couple spent 2-3 weeks together before Charlotte came back home to Sweden.

The love story could’ve ended there, but young and determined Kumar decided not to let it happen. After a year and a half spent apart, the artist sold everything he had and bought a bicycle. With very little money and the help of a few kind people he met on the way, Kumar managed to travel 6,000 miles to see Charlotte. “The biggest obstacle was my own thoughts, my doubts,” he said.

The two lovers ended up getting married and have been together for more than 40 years now. The couple has raised two children together and their love is as strong as ever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cops-son-charged-in-terror-case-expected-to-plead-guilty/2018/05/20/4e5d21c0-5c9f-11e8-b656-236c6214ef01_story.html?utm_term=.aea9b5bddbfa



SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — The son of a Boston police captain pleaded guilty Monday to plotting to use guns and homemade bombs to attack a college campus to support the Islamic State group, three years after his arrest after his father alerted the FBI.

Alexander Ciccolo’s guilty plea comes a month before he was scheduled to go to trial. He faces 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in September.

Ciccolo was arrested in July 2015 after he received four guns he ordered from a person who was cooperating with the FBI. Boston police Capt. Robert Ciccolo tipped off authorities after his son said he wanted to join the Islamic State group.

Federal authorities said Ciccolo’s case is a reminder that ‘homegrown’ radicalization remains a threat and that citizens must speak up when they become aware of a potential threat.

Prosecutors say Ciccolo told the person cooperating with authorities that he planned to commit acts of terrorism to support the Islamic State group, including attacking an unidentified university using assault rifles and homemade bombs similar to the pressure cooker bombs used in the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon attack. The bombing at the marathon finish line killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/25/a-london-couples-shared-psychosis-led-to-the-torture-and-death-of-french-au-pair/?utm_term=.d81c775bb44b

Neighbors spotted the black smoke lifting from behind the house on Wimbledon Park Road in the Southfields neighborhood of southwest London. The smell was so alarmingly pungent and foul firefighters were called to the scene. When the crew pushed into the garden of the $1.2 million residence, a bonfire was belching flames. Once the blaze was doused, firefighter Thomas Hunt’s eyes zeroed in on the ashes: clothing, jewelry, and a human nose and fingers appeared to be in the smoking pile.

“Why are you burning a body?” the disturbed firefighter asked the homeowner, Ouissem Medouni, Hunt would later testify.

“It’s a sheep,” Medouni, a French Algerian financial analyst, replied.

“Bollocks,” the firefighter answered. Later, Hunt would tell a court Medouni then insisted the remains were from an animal, but that a look of “resignation” crossed his face, as if “the game’s up.”

Police arrived at the London house that day — Sept. 20, 2017 — to recover what would be later identified as the charred body of Sophie Lionnet, the 21-year-old French au pair hired to care for Medouni’s two young children.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/18/news/nfl-nba-mlb-owners-diversity/index.html?iid=surge-story-summary

The three biggest US sports leagues have just six people of color as principal owners.
Team ownership is still largely the territory of white men.

It's a trend that doesn't look like it'll change anytime soon.

"Historically the wealth in this country belongs to white males," said sports attorney Richard Roth. "It's the same reason most Fortune 500 companies, most law firms, etc. are owned by white males."

Owning a pro sports team can be very lucrative but they're also obscenely expensive to buy, fetching billions of dollars. That's something even most wealthy people can't afford single-handedly, according to Roth.

"I do believe you'll see more [people of color] break that glass ceiling," he said. "It just takes a little longer because of the size of the money."





Kim Pegula, co-owner of the Buffalo Bills, and Shahid Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/news/economy/employers-opioid-rehab-belden/index.html

This past winter, John Stroup had a problem.
Roughly one out of 10 applicants for jobs at his factory in Richmond, Indiana, had failed their drug tests, disqualifying them for employment at the safety-conscious company. A handful of the 450 people already working there had failed random drug tests as well. With opioids ravaging the region, the CEO of Belden Inc. was short-staffed while orders for the company's computer networking equipment were pouring in.

"Now that we're seeing a bit of a manufacturing renaissance, unfortunately we don't have the qualified labor that we need, and we have this terrible epidemic," says Stroup.

It's a challenge confronting employers across America. Drugs are sapping a workforce already spread thin across a tight job market. Factories are particularly affected, with high overdose rates concentrated in counties that have a greater number of manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis by the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation.

Some employers have dealt with the opioid crisis by altering their insurance contracts to discourage physicians from prescribing addictive painkillers, a survey by the National Business Group on Health found. Many also offer Employee Assistance Plans, which generally cover a few sessions of counseling.

For Stroup, the decision was a simple cost-benefit analysis: How much would it cost to help people get sober in this Rust Belt town of 37,000, compared to what he was losing by not having them available to work?

After a few meetings with board members and addiction experts, he came up with a plan. If an applicant or a current employee failed a drug test, but they still wanted the job, Belden would pay for an evaluation at a local substance abuse treatment center.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/investing/business-spending-tax-law-trump/index.html

President Donald Trump's tax law was sold as a transformative overhaul that would unlock an ocean of money Corporate America could spend on job-creating investments.
The Republican tax cuts enacted last December immediately sparked millions of one-time bonuses for employees as well as some wage hikes. And the windfall led to a record-shattering stock buyback bonanza that enriched shareholders.

However, the promised investment boom has not materialized -- not yet anyway. Business spending is humming along at healthy levels, but economists see little evidence that the tax cuts sparked an acceleration of investments in new equipment, factories or other projects.

"There is nothing to suggest the tax law is lifting investment in any substantive way, at least so far," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

One broad measure of business spending, real nonresidential fixed investment, rose by 6.1% during the first quarter. That's solid growth signaling a strong economy. However, it was roughly in-line with the past several quarters. It even marked a slight deceleration from the final three months of 2017.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/19/stephen-paddock-las-vegas-shooter-conspiracy-theories-documents-explained

In the documents, those who encountered gunman Stephen Paddock say he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs characteristic of the far right

What’s the latest development in the Stephen Paddock story?
Stephen Paddock was the gunman who killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more last October, when he opened fire from the window of his room at the Mandalay hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

Yesterday, following legal action from news organizations, the Las Vegas police department released a trove of documents on the investigation, including statements from witnesses and victims.

What did the document release tell us?
Mostly the documents contain harrowing accounts from victims of Stephen Paddock’s shooting spree. There is also an interview with Paddock’s wife. As police said in the press conference announcing the release, there is nothing definitive in the material about Paddock’s motives for the massacre.

In a handwritten statement, one woman says she sat near Paddock in a diner just a few days before the shooting, while out with her son. She said she heard him and a companion discussing the 25th anniversary of the Ruby Ridge standoff and the Waco siege. (Each of these incidents became touchstones for a rising anti-government militia movement in the 1990s.)

She says she heard him and his companion saying that courtroom flags with golden fringes are not real flags. The belief that gold-fringed flags are those of a foreign jurisdiction, or “admiralty flags”, is characteristic of so-called “sovereign citizens”, who believe, among other things, that the current US government, and its laws, are illegitimate.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/18/news/companies/amazon-mcdonalds-chipotle-walmart-prices/index.html

You're not imagining things: Prices are creeping up.
Americans want to buy more stuff, and businesses are rushing to meet demand.

Unemployment is below 4% for the first time in 17 years, wages are slowly inching up, and consumers are spending money on clothes, furniture, and cars. At the same time, elevated labor, transportation and commodity costs are pinching their profit margins.

Both consumers and producers are feeling the squeeze from a healthy US economy. After years of low inflation, prices rose 1.9% in March from a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve's favored inflation measuring stick.

Consumer prices were up 2.1% in April from a year ago, while suppliers paid 2.6% more.

Auto loans are getting more expensive because the Federal Reserve is gradually raising interest rates. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has moved to a seven-year high above 4.6%, according to Freddie Mac.

Dozens of companies in recent weeks have said they already hiked prices or plan to in the coming months to combat inflation.