The post Massive ‘boots on the ground’ search underway in Colorado for missing mom Suzanne Morphew appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>A grassroots search for missing Colorado mom Suzanne Morphew began Thursday with hundreds of people looking for the Mayville resident who went for a bike ride on Mother’s Day and never returned.
Morphew’s brother, Andy Moorman, is leading the six-day “boots on the ground” search of the mountainous area where Morphew was last seen.
“I’ve got to find my little sister, and I have to bring closure to my family,” Moorman said. “We were quiet for a while because the investigators asked that of us, but it’s time now to rally the troops.”
SEARCH FOR MISSING MOM SUZANNE MORPHEW IN COLORADO EXPECTED TO DRAW HUNDREDS OF VOLUNTEERS
Moorman said the several hundred volunteers that have signed up will be looking for pieces of clothing and other items that might lead them to Morphew. He said the group will not be digging but added that some volunteers would be bringing boats and sonar equipment to search surrounding lakes, as well as drones, search dogs and other tools.
“My sister was murdered,” Moorman said. “And she was hidden within a three-and-a-half-hour window. I can draw a circle on that and tell you she’s within that circle. And that’s what I know happened.”
Small groups of volunteers have been assigned team leaders, who are familiar with the terrain, to help guide them. Each volunteer has been asked to use tracking apps, which will collect data and inform search organizers. The apps allow searchers to take pictures, describe items found, and record the location of where those items were found.
Among those helping search for Morphew is the mayor of Moorman’s small town in Indiana as well as local business owners and friends who made the trek to Colorado.
A GoFundMe page set up to help with costs associated with the search has surpassed its $10,000 goal. As of Thursday morning, $12,793 had been raised.
The Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office, Colorado Bureau of Investigation and Federal Bureau of Investigation have been looking into Morphew’s disappearance. Despite 10 large-scale searches and hundreds of tips, they have not been able to locate her.
The CBI and the sheriff’s office told Fox News they cannot comment on an active investigation.
“I can share that the investigation team has, and continues, to follow up on the hundreds of leads that have been reported since Suzanne went missing in May,” Susan Medina, a spokeswoman for the CBI said.
The Chaffee County Sheriff’s office has not named any suspects in Morphew’s disappearance, though her husband Barry Morphew, who was purportedly out of town on business, has been subjected to public scrutiny about his movements over the course of the Mother’s Day weekend. He has denied having anything to do with his wife’s disappearance and said claims he cheated on Morphew are false.
“Everybody’s out there saying, ‘Oh, you got a girlfriend, you must have had an affair,'” he told FOX21. “…There’s nobody. There’s never been another love in my life.”
Morphew was last seen going on a bike ride on May 10. The couple’s two daughters, Mallory and Macy, were on a camping trip. Morphew’s friends called one of her neighbors when they couldn’t reach her. That neighbor called the police to report her missing.
Barry Morphew has said he believes his wife may have been attacked by a mountain lion.
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Moorman has dismissed the theory and said his sister’s disappearance involves foul play.
Investigators searched the area where Morphew was riding her bike. They found the bike, but not Morphew.
“The bicycle was not ridden over the hill,” Moorman told Fox59. “It was thrown there by human hands.”
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]]>The post Massive ‘F–k Cuomo and de Blasio’ mural painted on Brooklyn street appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>For less than 24 hours this weekend, an all-caps, block-length message painted on a Brooklyn street in yellow contained the rage of New York City: “F–k Cuomo and de Blasio.”
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The New York Post reported the shout-out to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was created around 1 a.m. Saturday at an annual block party that also served as a “small business owner protest.”
“A few partygoers got the idea to paint in huge [letters, using] yellow paint with rollers on North 15th, ‘F–k Cuomo and de Blasio,’” an unidentified attendee said Sunday. “The party continued. Everyone took photos. It was a big hit. The crowds cheered, even the cops chuckled.”
The Department of Transportation covered the street art in black less than 24 hours later around 10 p.m. Saturday.
“They told the partygoers it came from up top and they were told the sign said ‘F–k the police,’” the unidentified attendee reported.
The street art was written in the style of city-sanctioned projects reading “Black Lives Matter” that popped up during summer protests, including one outside of Manhattan’s Trump Tower, which de Blasio was seen personally helping create and which also has become a vandalism magnet.
CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Cuomo and de Blasio have been routinely criticized for their leadership during the coronavirus lockdown and economic fallout.
Frank Miles is a reporter and editor covering geopolitics, military, crime, technology and sports for FoxNews.com. His email is Frank.Miles@foxnews.com.
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]]>The post Massive breakthrough: 155 mm howitzer artillery destroys incoming cruise missile appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>In an amazing first, an artillery cannon took out a cruise missile.
An M109 Paladin 155 mm howitzer made history recently by shooting down a fast-moving maneuvering cruise missile with a “hypervelocity projectile” able to travel at speeds up to Mach 5, according to an Air Force announcement. Historically, armored vehicles such as tanks, howitzers or infantry carriers have not operated with an ability to destroy fast-moving, long-range cruise missiles, yet the successful demonstration breaks new ground.
The shoot-down, which took place at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, destroyed a “surrogate” Russian cruise missile target using the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).
CHINA WILL DOUBLE ITS ARSENAL OF NUCLEAR WARHEADS, REPORT SAYS
In development for several years now, ABMS represents an Air Force technical initiative to engineer a “meshed” network of otherwise disconnected sensor “nodes” throughout a theater of combat operations. While an Air Force program, the effort is intended by all estimations to inform the Pentagon’s broader Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) technological system.
Artillerymen of 1st Battalion, 41st Field Artillery Regiment fire M109 Alpha 6 Paladins, on Tapa Army Base, Estonia, Nov. 27, 2015.
(U.S. Army photo by Sgt Caitlyn Byrne, 10th Press Camp Headquarters)
The concept with JADC2 is to integrate sensor-to-shooter capabilities across air-land-sea-space and cyber domains in real-time, decreasing latency, expediting attacks and bringing new dimensions to “joint warfare.”
“Future battlefields will be characterized by information saturation. One of the key objectives of this onramp was to present a dizzying array of information for participants to synthesize, just like they would see in a real operation,” Dr. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in an Air Force report.
PENTAGON: CHINESE AIR FORCE FAST-BECOMING MASSIVE THREAT
Firing a hypervelocity projectile (HVP) from an artillery cannon is a concept that has been under development for many years, dating back to Roper’s time directing the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office. The origins of the HVP can be traced to the Navy’s Rail Gun developmental effort as well as initiatives intended to explore firing the HVP from deck-mounted guns on Navy surface ships.
Due to its ability to reach speeds of up to 5,600 miles per hour, the hypervelocity projectile is engineered as a kinetic energy warhead, meaning no explosives are necessary. It can travel at speeds up to 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) per second, a speed which is about three times that of most existing weapons. The weapon brings such force, power and range that could hold enemies at risk from greater distances and attack targets with the kinetic energy force equivalent to a multi-ton vehicle moving at 160 miles per hour, developers have said.
The success of the shoot-down, Roper added, relied upon the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled data analytics increasingly able to gather, organize and analyze data with great reliability in a near-instantaneous fashion. So not only will air-sea-and land targeting sensors have an ability to exchange information across otherwise disparate information systems, but AI-enabled algorithms can gather the data, perform near real-time analytics and efficiently distribute organized information where needed.
Longer-range sensors also further enable this technical possibility, allowing for bombers in the air, surface ships, fighter jets, drones and land-based command and control to operate across previously inaccessible vast distances.
NAVY ELECTRONIC WARFARE STOPS MULTIPLE ENEMY MISSILE ATTACKS AT ONCE
“This compelled commanders and operators to trust data analytics and artificial intelligence to understand the battle. Valuing data as an essential warfighting resource, one no less vital than jet fuel or satellites, is the key to next-gen warfare,” Roper said.
Cloud computing, Roper added, is among a series of AI-integrated technologies now ready for combat.
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AI-empowered algorithms can gather information and bounce new data off of a nearly limitless database to establish comparisons, identify items of relevance, perform analyses, solve problems and efficiently organize problem-solving “data.” The success of this relies upon a number of variables, including increased reliability of algorithms programmed to identify patterns, recognize essential indicators and provide the necessary context.
Kris Osborn is the Managing Editor of Warrior Maven and The Defense Editor of The National Interest.
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]]>The post The massive West Coast wildfires have killed 7 and forced hundreds out of their homes appeared first on Virus Reports.
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]]>The post OHSU ends massive coronavirus study because it underrepresented minorities, university says appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>A study intended to track the coronavirus in Oregon and understand its impacts on minorities is now dead because Oregon Health & Science University, which led the research, failed to ensure enough minorities would sign up to participate.
The Key to Oregon study, which had been projected to cost $24 million over a year, was to track 100,000 people’s coronavirus symptoms and regularly test 10,000 Oregonians who volunteered. One of its original goals was to make sure people of color signed up to participate, but that did not happen.
“OHSU realizes that this research cohort does not currently represent the state in the way that is necessary,” the university said in a statement Thursday morning.
With a 2.4% random sample of Oregon’s population, the study was expected to help the state understand where the virus is most prevalent, catch new cases and outbreaks early, open schools faster and help prevent future outbreaks, the university has said.
Gov. Kate Brown called the program a “game changer” when it was announced in May.
The program’s failure is a major hit to Oregon’s effort to monitor, study and ultimately curb the pandemic. The pandemic has affected Black people, American Indians and Pacific Islanders particularly hard, with case rates many times higher than those for whites.
But in OHSU’s attempts to enroll Oregonians, the university struggled to enroll those and other underrepresented populations. That happened because OHSU didn’t make sure those communities’ representatives participated in designing the study, the university said. The university later realized some of the study’s flaws and, in June, pulled in outside experts to help redirect the study.
One of those experts, Dr. Frank Franklin, said he knew immediately the study wouldn’t reach enough people of color. The Multnomah County epidemiologist said that in a state like Oregon, where people of color represent just a sliver of the population, mass-mailing postcards to a random slice of the population would get proportionately few people of color to enroll.
Instead, researchers could have targeted the communities directly, even if that would have changed the fundamental structure of the study. Direct outreach might not meet the gold standard of a randomized study, he said, but it’s better than not studying the communities at all.
Asking people to participate is particularly important in the case of minority communities because of the historic distrust those communities have of medical officials, said Multnomah County public health director Rachael Banks.
“Even if we had the best methodology, we need to develop trust,” Banks said.
OHSU used up less than half of the $6 million the state gave to fund the project through November, a spokeswoman for the university said, most of which went towards buying and sending out thermometers and test kits.
Oregon has other programs to track the spread of disease, said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the state’s chief health officer, though none can provide the same state-wide perspective as the aborted OHSU study.
Monica Maxwell, a Hispanic Oregonian, was turned away by OHSU after she tried to enroll in the study, according to emails she forwarded The Oregonian/OregonLive newsroom. Maxwell wrote the university an email in May to ask to participate, adding that she is Hispanic. In its reply, the university said the study would include only those selected at random.
“I was hoping that being a Hispanic woman, that would give them information they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Maxwell said.
That’s exactly the kind of person Franklin said could have been invited to participate in the study.
Ultimately, Franklin commended OHSU for owning its mistakes in pulling the plug on the project.
“I respect the humility in being able to make that tough decision,” Franklin said.
Did you enroll or try to enroll in this program? If so, please email or call.
Oregon Public Broadcasting contributed to this report
— Fedor Zarkhin
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]]>The post Massive Californian wildfire forces evacuations appeared first on Virus Reports.
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Image copyright
EPA
More than 1,300 firefighters are fighting the blaze with help from aircraft
Fire crews in California are battling a massive wildfire that has forced thousands of people from their homes east of Los Angeles.
More than 1,300 firefighters, backed by helicopters and water-dumping planes, have been tackling the blaze dubbed the Apple Fire which started on Friday.
Parts of the fire are on steep, rugged hillsides, making it hard for fire engines to reach.
Around 7,800 residents have been told to evacuate the area.
Images show flumes of smoke filling the sky over the mountainous region. In a tweet, the National Weather Service said some smoke had blown east to Phoenix, Arizona – nearly 300 miles (482km) away.
The wildfire began as two adjacent blazes in Cherry Valley, an area near the city of Beaumont.
It has since stretched out to 20,516 acres (8,302 hectares), San Bernadino National Forest said in a tweet on Sunday.
Image copyright
EPA
Roughly terrain has made it dangerous for firefighters, the US Forest Service said
The government body said the blaze had been fuelled by high temperatures, low humidity and dry vegetation in the area.
The US Forest Service told the Riverside Press-Enterprise, a local newspaper, that because the fire was on rugged terrain, it was dangerous for firefighters to try and surround it.
“We don’t want to put fire-fighters in a dangerous situation,” said spokesperson Lisa Cox. “It’s burning in a straight line up a mountain.”
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]]>The post Massive Las Vegas sportsbook loss – appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>LAS VEGAS — The nearly quarter-million dollars in winning wagers reportedly placed at MGM Resorts last Sunday might be the largest sportsbook loss in Las Vegas history on bets made after an event has started.
Seven longtime Las Vegas bookmakers can’t recall a larger loss, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. But each oddsmaker has taken hits on past posts and said it’s a fairly common occurrence at books.
According to an ESPN report, Sunday’s bets were allowed to be placed because incorrect start times were posted on some Korean and Chinese baseball games due to a manual entry error.
LAS VEGAS CASINO REMOVES STATUE AT REQUEST OF FAITH LEADERS
Nearly all of the approximately 50 wagers were placed on self-serve kiosks at the Bellagio between 1:30 a.m. and 3 a.m. when the games in question started at 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.
Among the bets was a $250, 10-leg parlay that paid more than $137,100.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board is reportedly investigating the matter. Anytime there is a dispute in excess of $500, the state’s books are required to contact the board, which conducts an investigation and makes a ruling the books must abide by.
“It’s happened to all of us,” Westgate sportsbook director John Murray said. “I think every sportsbook probably since the beginning of time has dealt with this at some point.
“I think every sportsbook probably since the beginning of time has dealt with this at some point.”
— John Murray, Westgate sportsbook director
“We’ve had past post situations where our employees put in the wrong time or put in the wrong number or they forgot to close something. It’s manual entry and humans are going to make mistakes.”
Robert Walker, USBookmaking director of sportsbook operations, is still haunted by getting past-posted during his tenure as MGM Resorts sportsbook director from 1996-2008.
“I still haven’t gotten over some mistakes I made at The Mirage 20 years ago,” he said. “There’s no worse feeling than when you see a bet come across on a game that’s already started.
“There’s no worse feeling than when you see a bet come across on a game that’s already started.”
— Robert Walker, USBookmaking director of sportsbook operations
“I got lit up on some halftimes before. If you don’t manually close out the halftime line, they keep betting it and that’s what they did.”
Walker said a college football bettor once placed a $3,000 halftime wager on Louisiana State late in the fourth quarter, when the bet couldn’t lose.
“Once I saw that bet come across the ticker in the fourth quarter, I was mortified,” he said.
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The sportsbook locked out the ticket from cashing while Walker went to the MGM Grand to explain his mistake to the bettor.
“He gave me the story that they didn’t know and they were LSU fans. But yet you’re watching the game,” he said. “But it was 100% my fault. They were guests of the casino, so at that point I sided with them and it was a mistake we had to eat.”
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]]>The post Massive bird of prey snags shark-like fish in wild video appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Eat your heart out, Jaws.
Stunning video footage shows a ruthless bird of prey soaring above a South Carolina beach while clutching a shark-like fish — that’s destined to become dinner.
“Anyone know what type of bird this is and is it holding a shark?” the Twitter account @trackingsharks posted on Thursday, along with the video, which was shot on Myrtle Beach.
Eagle-eyed experts soon determined the ill-fated fish was not actually a shark but rather a ladyfish, a species that can grow up to 3 feet long with sharp teeth and a dorsal fin.
The killer bird was most likely an osprey, David Barrett, a birdwatcher who runs the twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert, told The Post.
Observers called the high flying footage “the coolest thing on Twitter today” and quipped that the bird deserves a cameo on “the next Sharknado film.”
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Another joked, “NEVER LET IT TASTE HUMAN!!!”
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]]>The post Massive spider found clinging to Texas home: ‘I was terrified!’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Not since Peter Parker stepped into the spider’s parlor has anyone been caught in a web like this.
Video and images of an engorged arachnid clinging to the door of an Texas apartment last week have gone viral.
On June 19, the couple found the eight-legged unwelcomed guest, which appeared to be bigger than the size of a human hand, crawling on the back patio door of their San Antonio home, Teouna Thomas told Fox News.
“I was terrified! My husband actually saw it before me because my back was turned to the patio door,” Thomas said.
However, her biggest concern was her 12-week-old puppy.
“We could see him trying to sniff at it several times as it moved up the door, “she said.
GUESTS WATCH IN HORROR AS MASSIVE HUNTSMAN SPIDER EATS A POSSUM IN THEIR SKI LODGE
As soon as spidey reached the top of the door, Thomas said her husband, Ken, ran outside to try and capture it.
She was tasked with finding something big enough to put it inside.
“I’ve never been so nervous looking for a for Tupperware,” Thomas said, adding that her husband was the “real hero.”
“He now says he knew he had to catch it or else I would have made us move again,” she added.
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After it was safely captured, the couple called the leasing office to report the spider and request pest control.
The woman from the leasing office gladly took the critter off their hands and later informed them that the spider had been released back into the wild.
Her only wish: “I pray not near our apartment complex!”
(Teouna Thomas)
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]]>The post Massive Saharan dust cloud makes its way to Southern states still battling coronavirus appeared first on Virus Reports.
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Published on Jun 23, 2020
Even as states battle surges of coronavirus infections, some are preparing for a massive dust storm to hit in the next few days. And that’s not the only unusual weather event occurring this week. Siberia is dealing with an intense heat wave, recording temperatures as high as 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. CBS News meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff Berardelli joins CBSN to explain.
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