Cmdr. Chris Hadfield will be the most relevant Stampede parade marshal in years

Chris Hadfield. (QMI File)

Report an error

If you?re finally going to set the bar a little higher, you may as well set it 370 kilometres higher.

That?s the orbit at which the Calgary Stampede?s next parade marshal is currently flying around the earth, Cmdr. Chris Hadfield having accepted an offer to lead this July?s festivities.

?I would be THRILLED to be the Stampede Parade Marshall! A great reason to come back to Earth!? was the tweet literally heard around the world, after Hadfield sent a message from space to Earth?s social media network, saying yes.

It?s a major score for an important city event, so recently troubled by tedious, lack-lustre parade leaders.

Hadfield is a Canadian icon, who happens to be interesting, inspiring and actually relevant to 2013 ? just as he was relevant in 2001, when the then space-shuttle astronaut led the Stampede?s parade for the first time.

He?ll make for an excellent parade marshal, one that impressed parents might actually point out to their children as the astronaut rides by ? and that makes Hadfield a pretty rare commodity among recent parade bosses.

By finally shooting for the stars, the Calgary Stampede has landed a good one ? completing a turn-around started back in 2011 when Man in Motion Rick Hansen was awarded the parade?s helm.

Hansen wasn?t exactly awe-inspiring either, but the wheelchair hero was a massive improvement over the dismal duds that preceded him.

Last year?s choice of Ian Tyson was a slight hiccup ? the singing cowboy looked good on paper as marshall for the Stampede Centennial, but when it came to drumming up excitement, Tyson showed all the enthusiasm of a turnip, mumbling a few tired words about getting his horse ready. Yahoo, indeed.

But if Mr. Four Strong Winds was a bit of letdown, Hadfield promises to be a breath of fresh air.

The retired colonel and former CF-18 pilot, who was the first Canadian to fly an intercept of a Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 ?Bear? bomber, has used his current assignment to bring global attention to the space station, mainly through being really interesting.

The guitar-playing top gun recently led a live orbit-to-Earth video sing-along with thousands of young kids, featuring the Is Somebody Singing? song he co-wrote with Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies.

As well as music, there?s been photographs, a constant stream of fascinating tweets and some awesome experiments ? Hadfield?s video showing what happens when you wring a wet towel in zero gravity went viral and now has 7,325,784 views.

The moustachioed space man has somehow made the coolest job in the solar system seem even cooler, while proving himself a very chill commander under stress.

On Thursday, just as the Stampede was celebrating it?s best marshal in at least a decade, Hadfield was calmly reporting a critical ammonia leak aboard the station, potentially threatening power generation.

?It is a serious situation, but between crew and experts on the ground, it appears to have been stabilized. Tomorrow we find out for certain,? he tweeted Thursday afternoon.

He?d used the same social media channel to accept the Stampede?s offer, having previously tweeted photos of Calgary from space.

Hopefully, the Stampede holds this impressive trajectory for the foreseeable future.

Before Hansen, the Stampede was in a crater when it came to marshals, choosing C-grade reality-show contestants and a string of charisma-challenged semi-celebrities to fill boots once worn by prime ministers, movie stars and monarchs.

Jet and Cord McCoy, both Amazing Race contestants, exhausted their 15-minutes of fame even before leading the show in 2010, while the quartet of fund-raising skateboarders given the honour in 2007 was surely the Stampede scraping the barrel of relevance.

Hadfield is a timely Canadian icon ? and the perfect of example of how high the Stampede must aim, if it really wants to be the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.

michael.platt@sunmedia.ca

On Twitter: @SUNMichaelPlatt?

What do you think of the choice of Commander Chris Hadfield as Stampede parade marshal?

Source: http://www.calgarysun.com/2013/05/09/col-chris-hadfield-will-be-the-most-relevant-stampede-parade-marshal-in-years

julio cesar chavez jr Topless Kate university of texas UT Austin Lizzie Velasquez NFL Network att

US unveils Arctic strategy, but is it keeping pace with other countries?

The National Strategy for the Arctic Region focuses on security, environment, and international cooperation. But with retreating sea ice creating opportunity as well as potential conflict, the US is seen as lagging.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / May 10, 2013

Saunders Island and Wolstenholme Fjord with Kap Atholl in the background is shown in this picture taken during an Operation IceBridge survey flight in April 2013. IceBridge, a six-year NASA mission, is the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown. The Obama administration released new priorities for policy in the region on Friday.

Michael Studinger/NASA/Handout/Reuters

Enlarge

The Obama administration on Friday unveiled its National Strategy for the Arctic Region ? three broad priorities it plans to pursue, as opportunities open to drill for oil and gas, harvest minerals, and increase other forms of economic activity at the top of the world.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; // google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

The priorities in the 13-page document include beefing up defense and other national security activities in the region, as well as the infrastructure to support them; working to safeguard the region's environment; and working with other Arctic nations one on one and through multicountry organizations, such as the Arctic Council, to manage activities in the region in ways that reduce the potential for conflict. In addition, the strategy calls for a push for ratification of the UN's Law of the Sea Treaty, which failed to clear the Senate last year.

Participation in the treaty regime would give the US standing in disputes that might arise with nations that have ratified the treaty over conflicting claims of sea-floor sovereignty.

Given the rising interest in exploiting the region's resources, particularly on the sea floor, the new strategy hits specific themes ?we need to focus on to make sure that can happen in a safe and responsible manner,? a senior administration official said at a briefing Friday morning.

The announcement comes at a time when carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are flirting with a level that last existed on Earth 3 million years ago, when global average temperatures were from 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than today's temperatures.

At that time, the Arctic was far warmer. Forests of Douglas fir and hemlock reaching all the way to the shores of an Arctic Ocean. The ocean likely was ice free in the summer, according to a study of the region's ancient environment published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

No one expects to see hemlock on the shores of the Arctic Ocean any time soon. But the extent and thickness of summer sea ice has been declining dramatically over the past 34 years, when satellites have been gathering consistent records of the ice.

The Arctic Ocean's Northeast Passage, which skims the northern coast of Russia, opened for the first time on record in the summer of 2005. Two German cargo ships with Russian icebreaker escorts took advantage of another opening in 2009, sailing from South Korea to Rotterdam across the top of the world.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/LUsjkEqX2Kk/US-unveils-Arctic-strategy-but-is-it-keeping-pace-with-other-countries

looper New Years Eve New Year Outback Bowl washington redskins Carly Rae Jepsen Rose Bowl 2013

Ryan Gosling refuses to eat cereal in new video

Pop culture

Randee Dawn TODAY contributor

2 hours ago

Director Ryan McHenry misses Ryan Gosling (who recently announced he'd be taking a hiatus from acting) more than the rest of us. McHenry has put together a collection of scenes using the Vine short-video app that feature the actor looking thoughtful.

But there's a twist: To each scene, McHenry has added a cereal-filled spoon aimed directly at the actor's mouth ... which is repeatedly batted away. Random, hilarious, and exactly what the internet was made for!

Check it out!

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/ryan-gosling-refuses-eat-cereal-new-viral-videos-1C9872900

secret service prostitution 4 20 george zimmerman sheree whitfield weather dallas pat summitt real housewives of atlanta

Analysis: After months of deadlock, diplomacy gets another chance in Syria

By Arshad Mohammed and Timothy Heritage

ROME/MOSCOW (Reuters) - If Russia has decided to make a new diplomatic push to drag Syria's warring parties into peace talks, it may be because of signs that the United States could slowly get sucked into the conflict.

The two major powers' joint announcement that they would try to bring together representatives of President Bashar al-Assad's government and the rebel forces fighting to oust him represents their first serious diplomatic initiative in nearly a year.

After lengthy talks in Moscow on Tuesday, the United States and Russia said they would try to breathe life into a carefully negotiated agreement they both endorsed in June 2012 that left open the question of whether or not Assad must leave power.

Their idea is to prod both sides to the negotiating table - possibly in Geneva by the end of May - to try to end the war and to get them to form a transitional government by mutual consent.

That framework to end the conflict, in which more than 70,000 people have been killed since it began in 2011, was laid out in the so-called June 30, 2012 Geneva Communiqu?.

After showing little interest in getting it implemented, Moscow's apparent willingness to revive the idea may reflect concern that U.S. President Barack Obama is rethinking his opposition to some kind of military intervention in Syria.

Signs of this include the White House's acknowledgement on April 25 that U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Syrian government probably used chemical weapons against its people, something Obama had previously described as a "red line".

There are also indications the conflict is widening - Israel bombed targets in Syria twice at the weekend - and concerns about the prominence of Islamist militants, some loyal to al Qaeda, among the armed opposition, as well as about the role of Iran and its Lebanese Hezbollah ally in supporting Assad.

FEAR OF INTERVENTION

Finally, there are louder American voices urging Obama to arm the rebels, among them Senator Robert Menendez, the chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee who introduced legislation to that effect on May 6.

"Of all those arguments, I think the greatest Russian fear is that the U.S. and the West are headed for some form of military involvement in Syria, one way or another, and that is likely to have been operative in their minds," said one Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A Russian Foreign Ministry statement alluded to that fear on Monday. Expressing alarm at the Israeli air strikes, it said Russia was "seriously concerned by the signs of preparation of global public opinion for possible armed intervention" in Syria.

Obama has made no secret of his desire to avoid military entanglement in Syria as he has brought U.S. troops home from Iraq and is trying to wind up the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Diplomats said if this were to change, arming selected rebel groups is a likelier first step than direct intervention such as a bombing campaign to take out Syrian air defenses and impose no-fly zones, let alone sending in U.S. troops.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with Kerry on Tuesday that Moscow was not fixated on Assad's future.

"We do not care about the fate of particular people. We care about the fate of the Syrian people. And the fate of the Syrian people, the fate of Syria, the fate of specific people must be decided by the Syrians themselves," he said.

Diplomats voiced some skepticism about whether Russia was truly prepared to cut Assad loose - its position on this has shifted little in practice over the past two years.

"The way they committed to it publicly is new but on substance, it's not really clear to me ... how much they are going to push Assad to give a chance to these negotiations," said another diplomat, noting that "this whole dance on should Assad leave, when should he leave" remained unresolved.

Russia has insisted Assad's exit cannot be a precondition for talks, a point Washington appears to have conceded.

The United States has said Assad must go but it has not explicitly made this a condition for holding talks, and it may be open to some kind of formula where Assad might step down later, assuming he is willing to leave power at all.

DIPLOMATIC AMBIGUITY

The Geneva Communiqu? did not demand Assad's removal and it was vague on who might form a transitional government, saying: "It could include members of the present government and the opposition and other groups and shall be formed on the basis of mutual consent."

The United States has long argued that the phrase "mutual consent" meant the opposition could veto any role for Assad.

Diplomats said that while Russia might be able to get the government to the negotiating table, it would be hard for the United States and its Western and Arab allies to persuade the opposition to swallow the bitter pill of going to talks with the possibility that Assad might stay in power for some time.

Washington, however, could tell the opposition further U.S. support was conditional on their participation in the talks.

But the Western-backed, Cairo-based opposition National Coalition, which welcomed the U.S.-Russian initiative, while saying hopes for democracy rested on Assad's exit, has almost no control over rebel forces on the ground.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was worth exploring how hard the Russians might be willing to lean on Assad.

"There had been a sense the Russians were totally immovable on Syria and it's good to question that, both in the wake of increasing concerns about chemical weapons use and in the wake of concern that extremists are gaining a greater foothold," he said.

MUTUAL CONCERNS

Alterman said the United States and Russia have some shared interests in Syria, among them concern that "extremist activity" in Syria could spread through the Middle East and Central Asia.

"A significant part of the (Syrian) population is afraid that ... the regime will be overthrown," Lavrov said on Tuesday.

"It is not because they like this regime. It is not because they like the ongoing, horrific events in Syria ... but because they are afraid that if those who fight the regime win, then Syria, from a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state ... will turn into a country where extremists rule the day," he said.

"And (while) it is not spoken out publicly today, this opinion is shared by all my interlocutors. This is why ... we have tried (to) put forward an initiative to unite all groups represented both by the regime and by the opposition."

Doubts remain over whether Moscow has significantly shifted policy or is buying time by showing it is trying to cooperate with the Western powers over Syria, at a time when Washington also wants to show its own public it is seeking a breakthrough.

In one sign that Russia may by no means have jettisoned its support for Assad, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Israel has told the United States that a Russian deal to sell Syria advanced ground-to-air missile systems to Syria was imminent. Moscow did not immediately comment on the report.

Alterman also noted Russia's deep reluctance, following the Western intervention that helped Libyan rebels topple Muammar Gaddafi, to see the West help overthrow another Arab leader.

"Russian concern with reinforcing the precedent of outside intervention and with the United States displacing Russian allies with American ones has driven Russia to opposing international cooperation on replacing the government of Assad."

Alterman said reaching a peace settlement in Syria "will be extraordinarily difficult but not impossible and it's probably a better outcome for the Russians than completely losing control".

(Additional reporting by Thomas Grove, Steve Gutterman and Alexei Anishchuk in Moscow; editing by Alistair Lyon)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-months-deadlock-diplomacy-gets-another-chance-syria-163139112.html

Hunter Pence NBCOlympics Danell Leyva Ye Shiwen

Man Has Surgery For 134-Pound Scrotum

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/05/man-has-surgery-for-134-pound-scrotum/

university of louisville louisville ky lotto winners mega ball winning numbers baltimore county current tv megamillions

APNewsBreak: Gay marriage bill wording may change (Star Tribune)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/304413998?client_source=feed&format=rss

ariel winter Paige Butcher David Petraeus Petraeus Mia Love wall street journal us map

20-million-year-old amber shatters theories of glass as a liquid

May 7, 2013 ? Fact or fiction? Stained glass found in medieval cathedrals becomes thicker at the bottom because glass moves over time. For years researchers have had their doubts, now a team at Texas Tech University has further evidence that the glass is not going anywhere.

"Glass transition is related to the performance of materials, whether it is inorganic glass or organic polymers," said Gregory McKenna, professor of chemical engineering at Texas Tech. "For example, this would be important to people who own a boat made of fiberglass, or fly in an airplane made with epoxy-based composites. Information like that can help predict if that jet will still be flying in 30 years."

The idea for this research came from a doctoral student's qualifying exam, McKenna said. He gave Jing Zhao a problem relating to diverging time-scales using polyvinyl acetate, a substance often found in adhesives. Her results were consistent with a lack of divergence -- contrary to received thought. So they decided to up the ante by performing similar experiments on a much older, ultra-stable glass.

They chose 20-million year old Dominican amber, and together with Whitacre Department Chair and Horn Professor Sindee Simon, Zhao performed calorimetric and stress relaxation experiments on the samples.

"What we found is that the amber relaxation times did not diverge," McKenna said. "This result challenges all the classic theories of glass transition behavior."

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under a grant from the Division of Materials Research, Polymers Program. The process and results were recently published in Nature Communications.

Meanwhile, McKenna has recently acquired additional samples from around the world, including 220-million-year-old Triassic amber from Eugenio Ragazzi, a pharmacology professor at the University of Padova in Italy. The team now has plans to perform similar experiments on the new samples.

"We are in the very early stages," McKenna said. "However, our research definitely is 'to be continued.'"

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/kCS2B52S0po/130507154937.htm

dear abby WRAL John Harbaugh jill biden jill biden martin luther king jr baltimore ravens