Does WWE need blood?

The icon of WWE's PG-era made some surprising remarks regarding the state of the company in an interview with Rolling Stone. 15-time WWE champion John Cena, who debuted a year after the Attitude Era is considered to have ended at WrestleMania X-Seven, said that he misses the days when blood often stained the mat after matches and wrestlers were free to use salty language on air.

"I'd much rather it be a program geared toward me, whether that's TV-14 or sometimes even more graphic than that, which is what I like. For one thing, profanity brought fire out of people with personalities that backed the language. It's very difficult to say, 'Oh, you're being poopy,' especially when they're meant to be fighting words. And now, if someone starts to bleed, the referee intervenes to stop the bleeding. But before, you'd just let it fly. Blood is one of the things that made fights cool. Like, you knew it had gotten serious. I understand why we don't do it anymore. Vince has been a coach to me, a father figure, a boss and a friend, and his goal and my goal are the same: to make the company be as big as it can be. But, yeah, the blood is one thing I miss."

When disaster relief brings anything but relief

Many of the well-meaning articles we Americans donate in times of disaster turn out to be of no use to those in need. Sometimes, they even get in the way. That's a message relief organizations very much want us to heed. Our Cover Story is reported now by Scott Simon of NPR:
When Nature grows savage and angry, Americans get generous and kind. That's admirable. It might also be a problem.
"Generally after a disaster, people with loving intentions donate things that cannot be used in a disaster response, and in fact may actually be harmful," said Juanita Rilling, director of the Center for International Disaster Information in Washington, D.C. "And they have no idea that they're doing it."
Rilling has spent more than a decade trying to tell well-meaning people to think before they give.
In 1998 Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras. More than 11,000 people died. More than a million and a half were left homeless.
And Rilling got a wake-up call: "Got a call from one of our logistics experts who said that a plane full of supplies could not land, because there was clothing on the runway. It's in boxes and bales. It takes up yards of space. It can't be moved.' 'Whose clothing is it?' He said, 'Well, I don't know whose it is, but there's a high-heeled shoe, just one, and a bale of winter coats.' And I thought, winter coats? It's summer in Honduras."
Humanitarian workers call the crush of useless, often incomprehensible contributions "the second disaster."
In 2004, following the Indian Ocean tsunami, a beach in Indonesia was piled with used clothing.
There was no time for disaster workers to sort and clean old clothes. So the contributions just sat and rotted.
"This very quickly went toxic and had to be destroyed," said Rilling. "And local officials poured gasoline on it and set it on fire. And then it was out to sea."

Tons of donated clothing on the beach at Banda Aceh, Indonesia.

USAID/OFDA

"So, rather than clothing somebody, it went up in flames?" asked Simon.
"Correct. The thinking is that these people have lost everything, so they must NEED everything. So people SEND everything. You know, any donation is crazy if it's not needed. People have donated prom gowns and wigs and tiger costumes and pumpkins, and frostbite cream to Rwanda, and used teabags, 'cause you can always get another cup of tea."
You may not think that sending bottles of water to devastated people seems crazy. But Rilling points out, "This water, it's about 100,000 liters, will provide drinking water for 40,000 people for one day. This amount of water to send from the United States, say, to West Africa -- and people did this -- costs about $300,000. But relief organizations with portable water purification units can produce the same amount, a 100,000 liters of water, for about $300."
And then there were warm-hearted American women who wanted to send their breast milk to nursing mothers in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
"It sounds wonderful, but in the midst of a crisis it's actually one of the most challenging things," said Rebecca Gustafson, a humanitarian aid expert who has worked on the ground after many disasters.
"Breast milk doesn't stay fresh for very long. And the challenge is, what happens if you do give it to an infant who then gets sick?"
December 2012, Newtown, Connecticut: A gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Almost instantaneously, stuff start arriving.

Tens of thousands of stuffed animals, donated to the children of Newtown, Conn., following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, fill a warehouse. Most donations were sent away.

Chris Kelsey

Chris Kelsey, who worked for Newtown at the time, said they had to get a warehouse to hold all the teddy bears.
Simon asked, "Was there a need for teddy bears?"
"I think it was a nice gesture," Kelsey replied. "There was a need to do something for the kids. There was a need to make people feel better. I think the wave of stuff we got was a little overwhelming in the end."
And how many teddy bear came to Newtown? "I think it was about 67,000," Kelsey said. "Wasn't limited to teddy bears. There was also thousands of boxes of school supplies, and thousands of boxes of toys, bicycles, sleds, clothes."
Newtown had been struck by mass murder, not a tsunami. As Kelsey said, "I think a lot of the stuff that came into the warehouse was more for the people that sent it, than it was for the people in Newtown. At least, that's the way it felt at the end."
Every child in Newtown got a few bears. The rest had to be sent away, along with the bikes and blankets.
There are times when giving things works. More than 650,000 homes were destroyed or damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Thousands of people lost everything.

Donated clothing on a basketball court following Hurricane Sandy, in the Bronx, N.Y.

HelpAfterSandy.org

Tammy Shapiro is one of the organizers of Occupy Sandy, which grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
"We were able to respond in a way that the big, bureaucratic agencies can't," Shapiro said.
When the hurricane struck, they had a network of activists, connected and waiting.
"Very quickly, we just stopped taking clothes," Shapiro said. Instead, they created a "relief supply wedding registry."
"We put the items that we needed donated on that registry," said Shapiro. "And then people who wanted to donate could buy the items that were needed. I mean, a lot of what we had on the wedding registry was diapers. They needed flashlights."
Simon asked, "How transportable is your experience here, following Hurricane Sandy?"
"For me, the network is key. Who has the knowledge? Where are spaces that goods can live if there's a disaster? Who's really well-connected on their blocks?"
Juanita Rilling's album of disaster images shows shot after shot of good intentions just spoiling in warehouses, or rotting on the landscape.
"It is heartbreaking," Rilling said. "It's heartbreaking for the donor, it's heartbreaking for the relief organizations, and it's heartbreaking for survivors. This is why cash donations are so much more effective. They buy exactly what people need, when they need it.
"And cash donations enable relief organizations to purchase supplies locally, which ensures that they're fresh and familiar to survivors, purchased in just the right quantities, and delivered quickly. And those local purchases support the local merchants, which strengthens the local economy for the long run."
Disaster response worker Rebecca Gustafson says that most people want to donate something that is theirs: "Money sometimes doesn't feel personal enough for people. They don't feel enough of their heart and soul is in that donation, that check that they would send.
"The reality is, it's one of the most compassionate things that people can do."

Doctor learns her fate for viral Uber driver attack

Miami doctor Anjali Ramkissoon confronts an Uber driver in a video posted to YouTube

Doctor caught on camera attacking an Uber driver

Anjali Ramkissoon, the woman at the center of the viral video, is entitled to an appeal, Jackson Health System said in a statement.
The fourth-year neurology resident was placed on administrative leave shortly after video of the incident went viral on the Web.
The incident took place in the early morning hours of Jan. 17 in the Brickell area of Miami.
The video was uploaded to YouTube by a poster named Juan Cinco, who said he had called for an Uber driver but when the driver arrived "out of nowhere the girl in the video gets in the backseat of his car and won't get out. We told the driver it was OK, to just cancel our ride, but he did not want to take her anywhere so he kept telling her to get out."
Juan Cinco recorded the confrontation.
In the video, Ramkissoon can be seen attempting to hit the driver and knees him in the groin. He pushes her off, and she falls to the ground, then comes back for more, cursing at him and taking out her feelings on his belongings.
She's seen in the video throwing out various items from his car, including a Master Lock, which she hurls at him, scissors, a large amount of Uber fliers and his iPhone.
At one point, the driver appears to be speaking to someone on the phone, presumably to police.
Miami police said they responded to a call of a disturbance but did not arrest Ramkissoon. Juan Cinco wrote online that the driver did not want to press charges and that Ramkissoon gave him a small amount of money as an apology.

Doctor in Uber meltdown video fired by hospital

A Miami neurologist whose profanity-laced rant at an Uber driver became a viral sensation has gotten her walking papers.
Jackson Health System officials released a statement Friday saying that fourth-year resident Anjali Ramkissoon, 30, would be terminated, the Miami Herald reported.
The hospital’s statement said she has a right to appeal her termination.
The video, shot in Miami’s Brickell area and posted to YouTube on Jan. 19, shows the apparently drunk, shorts-clad neurosurgeon trying to commandeer another Uber customer’s ride.
She is seen hitting the Uber driver in the face and screaming profanities and insults at him. After landing on the ground following a tussle in which she tried to knee the driver in the groin, she jumps up and climbs into the front seat of his car, demanding the driver “get the f–k in the car!”
When he instead calls the police, she remains in the front seat, throwing papers, scissors, an iPhone and other objects from the car, all the while shouting that the police will not believe that she had assaulted the driver because of her size.
The diminutive doc, who for all her fury stands just 5-feet tall, then climbs out of the vehicle and walks away.
When she was confronted by police, she pleaded with them, tearfully claiming that she would lose her medical license if she were arrested. The driver declined to press charges.
The brain surgeon was placed on administrative leave and “removed from all clinical duties” soon after the video went public.

The video, which has been viewed more than 6.8 million times, made Ramkissoon a poster child for bratty behavior. It prompted tens of thousands of comments, and even spawned a mocking online site featuring more than a dozen photos of her pulled from social media, and urging viewers to call the hospital and demand that she be fired.
All of her social-media accounts have apparently been shut down.
In a round of media interviews a week after the meltdown, Ramkissoon offered a long list of excuses for the now-infamous tantrum.
“Just minutes prior to that altercation with the Uber driver, my boyfriend and I of two years had just broken up,” she told “Good Morning America.” Her father was also hospitalized that morning, she said.
“It was probably one of the worst days of my life, and I was caught at my lowest moment.”

Obama may finally reveal secret Saudi connection to 9/11

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will likely soon release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry into 9/11 that may shed light on possible Saudi connections to the attackers.

The documents, kept in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol, contain information from the joint congressional inquiry into “specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”
Bob Graham, who was co-chairman of that bipartisan panel, and others say the documents point suspicion at the Saudis. The former Democratic senator from Florida says an administration official told him that intelligence officials will decide in the next several weeks whether to release at least parts of the documents. The disclosure would come at a time of strained U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, a long-time American ally.
Tim Roemer, who was a member of both the joint congressional inquiry as well as the 9/11 Commission and has read the secret chapter three times, described the 28 pages as a “preliminary police report.”
“There were clues. There were allegations. There were witness reports. There was evidence about the hijackers, about people they met with — all kinds of different things that the 9/11 Commission was then tasked with reviewing and investigating,” the former Democratic congressman from Indiana said Friday.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government says it has been “wrongfully and morbidly accused of complicity” in the attacks, is fighting extremists and working to clamp down on their funding channels. Still, the Saudis have long said that they would welcome declassification of the 28 pages because it would “allow us to respond to any allegations in a clear and credible manner.”
The pages were withheld from the 838-page report on the orders of President George W. Bush, who said the release could divulge intelligence sources and methods. Still, protecting U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relations also was believed to have been a factor.
Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said Obama asked National Intelligence director James Clapper to review the papers for possible declassification.
“When that’s done we’d expect that there will be some degree of declassification that provides more information,” Rhodes told reporters in Riyadh last week where Obama met with King Salman and other Saudi leaders. The White House says the 28 pages did not come up during discussions.
Neither the congressional inquiry nor the subsequent 9/11 Commission found any evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials knowingly supported those who orchestrated the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. But Graham, the relatives of victims and some lawmakers think there is reason to further probe possible Saudi links.
Roemer said many questions remain about the roles of Fahad al Thumairy, an official at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles who allegedly helped two of the hijackers find housing and transportation after they arrived in Southern California. Al Thumairy was later denied entry into the United States in May 2003 after the State Department alleged that he might be involved in terrorist activity. Roemer also wants to know more about Omar al Bayoumi, who was strongly suspected of being a Saudi spy and was alleged to have been helpful to the hijackers.
“We did not discover … Saudi government involvement at the highest level of the 9/11 attacks,” Roemer said. But he added: “We certainly did not exonerate the Saudis. … Saudi was a fertile ground for fundraising for al-Qaida. Some of these issues continue to be problems today. That’s why we need to continue to get to the bottom of this.”
The online 28pages.org, an Internet site pushing to get the documents released, points to another document declassified in July 2015 that outlined ways in which the commission could examine possible Saudi links.
The 47-page document lists several pages of individuals of interest and suggests questions that could be pursued. One name is suspected al-Qaida operative Ghassan al Sharbi.
Al Sharbi, who was taking flight lessons in the Phoenix area before 9/11, was captured in 2002 in the same place in Pakistan as Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaida trainer who was apprehended and waterboarded dozens of times by U.S. interrogators.
The document said that after al Sharbi was captured, the FBI discovered some documents buried nearby. One was al Sharbi’s pilot certificate inside an envelope from the Saudi Embassy in Washington, although it’s unclear whether the license had been mailed by the embassy or if the envelope was simply being reused.
A CIA’s inspector general report in June 2015 said there had been no reliable reporting confirming Saudi government “involvement with and financial support for terrorist prior to 9/11.” But it also that people in the CIA’s Near East Division and Counterterrorism Center “speculated that dissident sympathizers within the government may have aided al-Qaida.” The rest of chapter, titled “Issues related to Saudi Arabia,” is blacked out.
A bill directing the president to release the 28-page chapter was introduced in the Senate, and nearly three dozen Republicans and Democrats in the House are backing a similar resolution.
Reps. Walter Jones, R-N.C., Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., wrote Obama last week saying they don’t think releasing the chapter will harm national security and could provide closure for the victims’ families.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has read the pages and said this past week that while he wants to see them declassified to end speculation about what they say, releasing them will not quell the debate over the issue.
“As is often the case, the reality is less damaging than the uncertainty,” he said.