Cherry Blossom Festival

Cherry Blossom Festival, On March 27, 1912, Helen Taft, the wife of President William Howard Taft, and Viscountess Iwa Chinda, who was married to the Japanese ambassador to the United States, planted two cherry blossom trees in West Potomac Park, a green space on the banks of the Potomac River not far from the National Mall.

The next month, more trees were planted along the Tidal Basin and into Rock Creek Park, the vast urban park that stretches through the capital. Eighteen cherry trees were soon planted on the White House grounds.

This year, Washington will mark the 100th anniversary of those trees, some of which still exist, though most of the originals have died and been replaced. Their blossoming is celebrated annually with the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which is timed for late March, when the blooms are at their peak. This year the festival runs from March 20 to April 27. The peak, when 70 percent of the trees are covered in blossoms, is forecast for March 20-23.

But while the capital celebrates the centennial of the cherry blossom trees (they do not bear fruit), in fact the push to bring the delicate blossoms to Washington began much earlier.

A journalist and a government bureaucrat deserve the credit for what has become one of the signature aspects of the U.S. capital.

The journalist, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, was the first to sing the praises of the blossom of the sakura trees that she’d found in Tokyo. In 1885, she suggested to the U.S. Army superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds that the trees be brought to the U.S. capital and planted. She repeated that suggestion to successive superintendents for years, without success.

The bureaucrat was David Fairchild, who would become a world renown botanist for his work in the Department of Agriculture’s Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, which dispatched “plant explorers” around the world to find new species to add diversity to the American landscape.

An avid botanist from his youth in Michigan and Kansas, Fairchild joined the section in 1889. In a career that lasted until 1933, he introduced more than 75,000 plants to the United States, including various species of oranges, mangos, dates, cotton and bamboo.

On a trip in 1902, he landed in Japan. Like Scidmore, he was smitten by the cherry blossom trees of Tokyo, with their small pink blossoms.

As a member of the Office of Plant Inspection, he had more luck raising the blossoms’ profile.

New Madrid Fault

New Madrid Fault, A 4.0 earthquake within the New Madrid Seismic Zone gently shook southeast Missouri Tuesday morning at 3:58 a.m. The quake was centered about nine miles east of Sikeston, Missouri, and no damage or injuries were reported.

Just ten days ago, engineers, scientists, emergency first responders and earthquake history fans gathered at Saint Louis University for an event commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the mighty New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 and 1812.

That quake, estimated to be an eight on the Richter scale, wrought devastation throughout the New Madrid Zone of Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.

This is the quake that famously made the Mississippi River run backward — the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2010 was magnitude ten, by way of comparison.

43 Rival Gang Members Arrested

43 Rival Gang Members Arrested, Over 40 members of two feuding gangs have been indicted in connection with a series of shootings and killings in Brownsville, Brooklyn after they boasted about their crimes on Twitter.

CBS New York reports the violence stemmed from territorial disputes between the Wave Gang and the Hood Starz, the office of District Attorney Charles Hynes said.

In the last year, three people were shot dead and 19 others, including innocent bystanders, were injured.

On Thursday, authorities announced charges against 43 members of the two rival gangs in Brownsville. The charges were a result of a long investigation during which officers pursued the gangs not only on the streets, but also on Twitter and Facebook, where members left a trail of clues as they bragged of their violent crimes, police said.

Charges against the defendants, the average age of those arrested being 17, include murder, assault, robbery and conspiracy.

Police commissioner Ray Kelly said a special squad cracked the gangs’ lexicon by following their social network postings to link the crimes to suspected murders.

The New York Times reports when gang members ventured into territory controlled by the rival Wave Gang, they called it “going to the beach,” on the social networking site.

When these outings occurred, it often led to shootings between the rival groups. When Hood Starz gang members would shoot a rival Wave, they congratulated themselves with another phrase.

“They would say they ‘clapped him off the surfboard,'” Kelly said.

In the last 18 months, the gangs were responsible for 6 homicides and 32 shooting episodes. Most of shootings occurred in or around Brownsville that left 38 people wounded, Mr. Kelly said.

Gang Members Arrested Facebook

Gang Members Arrested Facebook, Police investigating three murders arrested 43 feuding New York gang members on Thursday based on evidence collected from monitoring what the gang members were saying about the cases on Twitter and Facebook, authorities said.

The 25 accused members of the Wave Gang and 18 accused members of rival Hoodstarz have been terrorizing streets in Brooklyn with shootouts that led to the killing of three people and wounding of several others, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

The gang members, ages 15 to 21, bragged about the shootings on the social media sites Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, he said.

“By linking their postings and boastings to active cases and other crimes, these officers were able to build their case,” Kelly said.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said authorities will next be going after gangs in other Brooklyn neighborhoods.

“We know who you are. We know how you operate,” he said. “Make no mistake about it. We’re coming after you next.”

Hynes said the feud that started in August between Wave Gang and Hoodstarz resulted in the death of an innocent bystander, and the wounded included a 9-year-old boy and his father.

Ben 10 Ultimate

Ben 10 Ultimate, Ben 10: Ultimate Alien is an American animated television series – the third incarnation of Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 franchise created by Dwayne McDuffie and Glen Murakami and the studio “Man of Action” (a group consisting of Duncan Rouleau, Joe Casey, Joe Kelly, and Steven T. Seagle), and produced by Cartoon Network Studios. It was slated to premiere after the series finale of Ben 10: Alien Force, which was on March 26, 2010.

The show itself aired on April 23, 2010 in the US and in the UK and Latin America on October 10, 2010 at 10am (10/10/10). The plot follows on from Ben 10: Alien Force, set a few weeks after the events of the last series, the Omnitrix being destroyed, Ben, now being 16 years old, must now master the Ultimatrix; the third series takes the features of the original series with the second series, keeping the suspense and investigation, and also adds more humor. Before the title was announced, the show went under the working title of Ben 10: Evolution. It was declared by the makers of Ben 10 that there would be 32 more episodes for the series run. In the summer of 2011, it was also announced that there would be a new film called Ben 10: Destroy All Aliens coming in 2012.

In Canada, the series started airing on September 12, 2010, on Teletoon.

Next Page »