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'Mystery Priest' Vanishes After Anointing Crash Victim
A small Missouri town is looking for a man not suspected of a crime but, rather,
a miracle
"I think that this time I've actually witnessed a guardian angel at work," Jeremiah See of the New London Fire Department told ABC News.
An unidentified allegedly drunken driver hit Katie Lentz, of Quincy, Mo., head on Aug. 4 while traveling on Route 19 near Center, Mo., pinning the 19-year-old in the front seat of her convertible. With her vital signs failing fast, she asked rescue crews to pray with her.
That's when first responders say a man who looked like a Catholic priest seemed to appear out of nowhere, despite a 2-mile perimeter blocking the scene.
"He began to pray and use the anointing oil," New London Fire Chief Raymond Reed said. "There was a calmness that, to me, seemed to come over the entire scene."
But that's not the only seemingly divine detail. Firefighters say their equipment kept failing until the mystery man showed up.
"The words were to remain calm, that our tools would now work," Reed said. "Instantaneously, at that moment, our neighboring department arrived with fresh extrication tools."
Lentz survived, but the man vanished before crews could thank him.
The young woman is recovering in the hospital with broken legs and ribs, but some say it could've been worse, if not for the mystery man on the highway.
"Whether it was just a priest as an angel, or an actual angel coming down," Lentz's friend Travis Wiseman said, "he was an angel to everyone and to Katie."
Source: ABC News
Comments from the public:
(1)
Once I had a car wreck. I drove off the road on the left had side and over corrected. I felt my car start to turn over because I had over corrected. All I had time to say was Jesus. I was ejected through the front window. I had scratches all over my face and body and a compound fracture of my left leg. But I survived. God does hear prayers. We do not always get what we ask for but he does hear. And all those that do not believe in a higher power are missing out on many blessings. Thank you Jesus for this story.(2)
This is a very touching story. Regardless what you believe, a story like this is a breath of fresh air in today's world.
(3)
I believe in miracles. I believe that the Lord sent someone to give her a blessing and that the first responders were blessed also in witnessing this. He is mindful of us. She was praying for His help and she got it.
(4)
My mother when she was in her teens was hiking on a riverbed with her friend. Suddenly, there was some flooding and the water was rising fast. My mom's friend was able to get out. My mom tried to reach out to her friend's outstretched hands but she couldn't. Suddenly, she felt her body being lifted within her friend's reach. While this was happening, she looked down to see what was lifting her up and she said she saw the shape of a man under the surface. As her friend lifted her up she noticed that whoever was in the water never got out or surfaced. Angels exist. And the God that created them.
(5)
People say that God's existence cannot be proven. And yet, here it is right here in front of them. God's existence is proved constantly. There are many stories such as these (that don't make national headlines) that shows God's existence. We must show our gratitude for good things by paying it forward. So when the angels come, then we become like angels for other people.
__________________________________________________________________
A small Missouri town is looking for a man not suspected of a crime but, rather,
a miracle
"I think that this time I've actually witnessed a guardian angel at work," Jeremiah See of the New London Fire Department told ABC News.
An unidentified allegedly drunken driver hit Katie Lentz, of Quincy, Mo., head on Aug. 4 while traveling on Route 19 near Center, Mo., pinning the 19-year-old in the front seat of her convertible. With her vital signs failing fast, she asked rescue crews to pray with her.
That's when first responders say a man who looked like a Catholic priest seemed to appear out of nowhere, despite a 2-mile perimeter blocking the scene.
"He began to pray and use the anointing oil," New London Fire Chief Raymond Reed said. "There was a calmness that, to me, seemed to come over the entire scene."
But that's not the only seemingly divine detail. Firefighters say their equipment kept failing until the mystery man showed up.
"The words were to remain calm, that our tools would now work," Reed said. "Instantaneously, at that moment, our neighboring department arrived with fresh extrication tools."
Lentz survived, but the man vanished before crews could thank him.
The young woman is recovering in the hospital with broken legs and ribs, but some say it could've been worse, if not for the mystery man on the highway.
"Whether it was just a priest as an angel, or an actual angel coming down," Lentz's friend Travis Wiseman said, "he was an angel to everyone and to Katie."
Source: ABC News
Comments from the public:
(1)
Once I had a car wreck. I drove off the road on the left had side and over corrected. I felt my car start to turn over because I had over corrected. All I had time to say was Jesus. I was ejected through the front window. I had scratches all over my face and body and a compound fracture of my left leg. But I survived. God does hear prayers. We do not always get what we ask for but he does hear. And all those that do not believe in a higher power are missing out on many blessings. Thank you Jesus for this story.(2)
This is a very touching story. Regardless what you believe, a story like this is a breath of fresh air in today's world.
(3)
I believe in miracles. I believe that the Lord sent someone to give her a blessing and that the first responders were blessed also in witnessing this. He is mindful of us. She was praying for His help and she got it.
(4)
My mother when she was in her teens was hiking on a riverbed with her friend. Suddenly, there was some flooding and the water was rising fast. My mom's friend was able to get out. My mom tried to reach out to her friend's outstretched hands but she couldn't. Suddenly, she felt her body being lifted within her friend's reach. While this was happening, she looked down to see what was lifting her up and she said she saw the shape of a man under the surface. As her friend lifted her up she noticed that whoever was in the water never got out or surfaced. Angels exist. And the God that created them.
(5)
People say that God's existence cannot be proven. And yet, here it is right here in front of them. God's existence is proved constantly. There are many stories such as these (that don't make national headlines) that shows God's existence. We must show our gratitude for good things by paying it forward. So when the angels come, then we become like angels for other people.
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Evidence Noah's Biblical Flood Happened,
Says Robert Ballard *)
*)
Robert Duane Ballard (born June 30, 1942) is a former United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, thebattleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew. Ballard leads ocean exploration on E/V Nautilus.[1]
This ark, located an hour south of Amsterdam, is a replica of Noah's Biblical boat. Underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard is in Turkey, looking for evidence that the Great Flood happened. (ABC News)
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The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.
In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world's best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah.
Ballard's track record for finding the impossible is well known. In 1985, using a robotic submersible equipped with remote-controlled cameras, Ballard and his crew hunted down the world's most famous shipwreck, the Titanic.
Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.
"Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube," he said. "But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history."
The water from the melting glaciers began to rush toward the world's oceans, Ballard said, causing floods all around the world.
"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods," Ballard said.
According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path.
Fascinated by the idea, Ballard and his team decided to investigate.
"We went in there to look for the flood," he said. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... The land that went under stayed under."
Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.
"It probably was a bad day," Ballard said. "At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under."
The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.
Noah is described in the Bible as a family man, a father of three, who is about to celebrate his 600th birthday."In the early chapters of Genesis, people live 800 years, 700 years, 900 years," said Rabbi Burt Visotzky, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. "Those are mythic numbers, those are way too big. We don't quite know what to do with that. So sometimes those large numbers, I think, also serve to reinforce the mystery of the text."
Some of the details of the Noah story seem mythical, so many biblical scholars believe the story of Noah and the Ark was inspired by the legendary flood stories of nearby Mesopotamia, in particular "The Epic of Gilgamesh." *) These ancient narratives were already being passed down from one generation to the next, centuries before Noah appeared in the Bible.
"The earlier Mesopotamian stories are very similar where the gods are sending a flood to wipe out humans," said biblical archaeologist Eric Cline. "There's one man they choose to survive. He builds a boat and brings on animals and lands on a mountain and lives happily ever after? I would argue that it's the same story."
Catastrophic events of this kind are not unique to the Bible. Some contemporary examples include the 2004 tsunami that wiped out villages on the coasts of 11 countries surrounding the Indian Ocean. There was also Hurricane Katrina, described as the worst hurricane in United States history.
Scholars aren't sure if the biblical flood was larger or smaller than these modern day disasters, but they do think the experiences of people in ancient times were similar to our own.
"If you witness a terrible natural disaster, yes, you want a scientific explanation why this has happened," said Karen Armstrong, author of "A History of God." "But you also need to something that will help you to assuage your grief and anguish and rage. And it is here that myth helps us through that."
Regardless of whether the details of the Noah story are historically accurate, Armstrong believes this story and all the Biblical stories are telling us "about our predicament in the world now."
Back in the Black Sea, Ballard said he is aware that not everyone agrees with his conclusions about the time and size of the flood, but he's confident he's on the path to finding something from the biblical period.
"We started finding structures that looked like they were man-made structures," Ballard said. "That's where we are focusing our attention right now."
At first Ballard's team found piles of ancient pottery, but then they made an even more important discovery. Last year, Ballard discovered a vessel and one of its crew members in the Black Sea.
"That is a perfectly preserved ancient shipwreck in all its wood, looks like a lumber yard," he said. "But if you look closely, you will see the femur bone and actually a molar."
The shipwreck was in surprisingly good condition, preserved because the Black Sea has almost no oxygen in it, which slows down the process of decay, but it does not date back as far as the story of Noah.
"The oldest shipwreck that we have discovered so far of that area is around 500 BC, classical period," Ballard said. "But the question is you just keep searching. It's a matter of statistics."
Still, Ballard said the find gives him hope that he will discover something older "because there, in fact, the deep sea is the largest museum on Earth," he said.
Ballard does not think he will ever find Noah's Ark, but he does think he may find evidence of a people whose entire world was washed away about 7,000 years ago. He and his team said they plan to return to Turkey next summer.
"It's foolish to think you will ever find a ship," Ballard said, referring to the Ark. "But can you find people who were living? Can you find their villages that are underwater now? And the answer is yes."
Click the colored areas for further info
This article is for your private use, only
Source: ABC News, Wikipedia, Various Internet sources
*) Epic of Gilgamesh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Mesopotamia, is amongst the earliest surviving works of literature. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five ...
Gilgamesh flood myth - Enkidu - Category:Epic of Gilgamesh
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July 24, 2012
Source: The New York Times
7/25/
Faulty Criminal Background Checks
The federal government has historically paid little attention to the companies that collect and sell the data used by employers in hiring decisions — including data about an applicant’s criminal history.
But because 9 in 10 employers now use criminal background checks for some applicants, and the data are not always reliable, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which share jurisdiction, need to get a better handle on an industry that has grown so fast over the last 20 years that no one can say how many companies there are.
They must make sure that the reporting companies obey the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires them to strive for accuracy. The law also requires the companies that furnish reports drawn from public records for employment purposes to notify the people named in the reports in a timely manner — so that any inaccuracies in the data can be challenged — or ensure that the public record is complete and up to date.
Sloppy reporting was not a huge problem in the past when there were fewer companies gathering data and the only way to get it was to examine court records in person. But, in recent years, this has become a computer-driven industry, with companies buying often incomplete records in bulk from the courts or from other screening companies and then not updating them. An incomplete report might show, for instance, that a job candidate was charged with a crime but not that he was exonerated. And faulty data can circulate forever.
A study issued in April by the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group, points to many other problems. Background reports often list the same offense many times, making it appear as if the applicant has an extensive record. Worse still, companies sometimes fail to do the basic checking necessary to distinguish among different people who have the same name.
In one particularly startling case that became the subject of a 2011 federal lawsuit in Illinois, a background report on a young white job applicant in his 20s listed several “possible matches” in a nationwide database. According to court documents, three of those “matches” were for a 58-year-old African-American who had been convicted of rape in another state in 1987 — when the applicant was not yet 4 years old.
The federal government clearly needs to step in. It should require companies to be federally registered, outline standards for accuracy, make sure that job applicants have a reasonable time to respond to erroneous reports and seek monetary and other penalties from companies that flout the law.
Source: The New York Times
7/25/
Faulty Criminal Background Checks
The federal government has historically paid little attention to the companies that collect and sell the data used by employers in hiring decisions — including data about an applicant’s criminal history.
But because 9 in 10 employers now use criminal background checks for some applicants, and the data are not always reliable, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which share jurisdiction, need to get a better handle on an industry that has grown so fast over the last 20 years that no one can say how many companies there are.
They must make sure that the reporting companies obey the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires them to strive for accuracy. The law also requires the companies that furnish reports drawn from public records for employment purposes to notify the people named in the reports in a timely manner — so that any inaccuracies in the data can be challenged — or ensure that the public record is complete and up to date.
Sloppy reporting was not a huge problem in the past when there were fewer companies gathering data and the only way to get it was to examine court records in person. But, in recent years, this has become a computer-driven industry, with companies buying often incomplete records in bulk from the courts or from other screening companies and then not updating them. An incomplete report might show, for instance, that a job candidate was charged with a crime but not that he was exonerated. And faulty data can circulate forever.
A study issued in April by the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group, points to many other problems. Background reports often list the same offense many times, making it appear as if the applicant has an extensive record. Worse still, companies sometimes fail to do the basic checking necessary to distinguish among different people who have the same name.
In one particularly startling case that became the subject of a 2011 federal lawsuit in Illinois, a background report on a young white job applicant in his 20s listed several “possible matches” in a nationwide database. According to court documents, three of those “matches” were for a 58-year-old African-American who had been convicted of rape in another state in 1987 — when the applicant was not yet 4 years old.
The federal government clearly needs to step in. It should require companies to be federally registered, outline standards for accuracy, make sure that job applicants have a reasonable time to respond to erroneous reports and seek monetary and other penalties from companies that flout the law.
Will New York City sink beneath the sea?
Dated: November 24, 2012
WE’D seen it before: the Piazza San Marco in Venice submerged by the acqua alta; New Orleans underwater in the aftermath of Katrina; the wreckage-strewn beaches of Indonesia left behind by the tsunami of 2004. We just hadn’t seen it here. (Last summer’s Hurricane Irene did a lot of damage on the East Coast, but New York City was spared the worst.) “Fear death by water,” T. S. Eliot intoned in “The Waste Land.” We do now.
There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. “In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,” said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?
History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live. “Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end,” the critic Frank Kermode proposed in “The Sense of an Ending,” his classic work on literary narrative, “yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end.” What he’s saying (I think) is that there is no pattern. Flux is all.
Last month’s “weather event” should have taught us that. Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either. History offers less dire scenarios: the city could move to another island, the way Torcello was moved to Venice, stone by stone, after the lagoon turned into a swamp and its citizens succumbed to a plague of malaria. The city managed to survive, if not where it had begun. Perhaps the day will come when skyscrapers rise out of downtown Scarsdale.
Humans are ingenious. Our species tends to see nature as something of a nuisance, a phenomenon to be outwitted. Consider efforts to save Venice: planners have hatched one scheme after another to prevent the city from sinking. Industrial development has been curtailed. Buildings dating from the Renaissance have been “relocated.”
The most ambitious project, begun a decade ago, is the installation of mobile gates in the lagoons. Known by the acronym MOSE — the Italian name for Moses, who mythically parted the Red Sea — it’s an intricate engineering feat: whenever the tide rises, metal barriers that lie in concrete bunkers on the sea floor are lifted by compressed air pressure and pivoted into place on hinges.
Is the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico — the project’s official name — some engineer’s fantasy? It was scheduled for completion this year, but that has been put off until 2014. Even if, by some miracle, the gates materialize, they will be only a stay against the inevitable. Look at the unfortunate Easter Islanders, who left behind as evidence of their existence a mountainside of huge blank-faced busts, or the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who didn’t leave behind much more than a few burial sites and a bunch of stone tools. Every civilization must go.
Yet each goes in its own way. In “Collapse,” Jared Diamond showed how the disappearance of a civilization has multiple causes. A cascade of events with unforeseen consequences invariably brings it to a close. The Norse of Greenland cut down their trees (for firewood and other purposes) until there were no more trees, which made it a challenge to build houses or boats. There were other causes, too: violent clashes with the Inuit, bad weather, ice pileups in the fjords blocking trade routes. But deforestation was the prime factor. By the end, no tree fell in the forest, as there was none; and there would have been no one to hear it if it had.
“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,” declared Robert Frost. Another alternative would be lava. Pliny the Younger’s letters to Tacitus described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: A plume of dirt and ash rose in the sky; rocks pelted Pompeii; and then darkness arrived. “It was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but like being in an enclosed place where the light has been doused.” Who did this? It must have been the gods. “Many were raising their hands to implore the gods, but more took the view that no gods now existed anywhere, and that this was an eternal and final darkness hanging over the world.” But of course it wasn’t the end of the world: it was just the end of them.
Contemplating our ephemerality can be a profound experience. To wander the once magnificent Roman cities strung along the Lycian coast of Turkey — now largely reduced to rubble, much still unexcavated — is to realize how extensive, how magisterial this civilization was. Whole cities are underwater; you can snorkel over them and read inscriptions carved into ancient monoliths. Ephesus, pop. 300,000 in the second century A.D., is a vast necropolis. The amphitheater that accommodated nearly 25,000 people sits empty. The Temple of Artemis, said to have been four times larger than the Parthenon, is a handful of slender columns.
YET we return home from our travels intoxicated by beauty, not truth. It doesn’t occur to us that we, too, will one day be described in a guidebook (Fodor’s North America 2212?) as metropolitans who resided in 60-story towers and traveled beneath the waves in metal-sheathed trains.
It’s this willed ignorance, I suspect, that explains why it’s difficult to process the implications of climate change for New York, even in the face of explicit warnings from politicians, not the most future-oriented people. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has been courageous to make global warming a subject of public debate, but will taxpayers support his proposal to build a levee in New York Harbor? Wouldn’t it be easier to think of Sandy as a “once in a lifetime” storm? Even as Lower Manhattan continues to bail itself out — this time in the literal sense — One World Trade Center rises, floor by floor. The governor notes that “we have a 100-year flood every two years now,” which doesn’t stop rents from going up in Battery Park City.
Walking on New York’s Upper East Side, I was reminded by the gargantuan white box atop a busy construction site that the Second Avenue line, first proposed in 1929, remains very much in the works. And why not? Should images of water pouring into the subway tunnels that occupied our newspapers a few weeks back be sufficient to stay us from progress? “I must live till I die,” says the hero of a Joseph Conrad novel. The same could be said of cities.
When, on my way home at night, I climb the steps from the subway by the American Museum of Natural History — itself a monument to transience, with its dinosaurs and its mammoth and its skeleton of a dodo bird, that doomed species whose name has become an idiom for extinction — I feel more keenly than ever the miraculousness, the improbability of New York.
Looking down Central Park West, I’m thrilled by the necklace of green-and-red traffic lights extending toward Columbus Circle and the glittering tower of One57, that vertical paradise for billionaires. And as I walk past the splashing fountain in front of the museum’s south entrance on West 77th Street, I recall a sentence from Edward Gibbon’s ode to evanescence, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in which “the learned Poggius” gazes down at the remains of the city from the Capitoline hill: “The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.”
This is our fate. All the more reason to appreciate what we have while we have it.
By James Atlas is a contributing opinion writer and the author of a forthcoming book about biography
Published in The New York Times in 2012
This is for your private use, only
Can be used for promoting education and safety
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(1) Will New York City sink beneath the sea? Dated: November 24, 2012, (2)
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