The Independent has new details on the recent South Carolina alligator victim’s final moments.
A woman was killed by an alligator as she attempted to touch the animal after spotting it in a nearby pond, authorities said.
Cynthia Covert, 58, was at her friend’s home on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, painting her nails. According to the police report, the friend said Ms Covert was “very talkative and strangeâ€.
“At the salon Covert acts very professional but today she was very relaxed and excited that her boyfriend was coming from Tennessee to visit,†the friend added, The Post and Courier reported. Ms Covert had one glass of wine during the interaction but the friend did not know if she was on other substances.
After doing the woman’s nails, Ms Covert reportedly spotted the alligator in the pond and was “fascinated†by the animal.
Ms Covert walked over to the pond and started taking pictures of the animal, at which point the friend warned about how she saw a deer getting attacked by the alligator at that same location, deputies said.
“I don’t look like a deer.†Ms Covert responded before she reportedly reached out to touch the animal.
It then attacked and grabbed the woman’s leg, pulling her into the water.
“I guess I won’t do this again,†Ms Covert was heard saying after the alligator grabbed her, according to the police report.
George Peter Alexander Healy, Horatio, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1844 National Portrait Gallery, London.
Taki differs completely from the great majority of commentators gloating over the sacking of Neil Ferguson for violating “social isolation” by receiving visits from his mistress.
Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson. The prize is awarded every year to a man who casts convention aside and — lockdown or no lockdown — continues to shag his mistress and to hell with the coronavirus. The professor has apologised but Antonia Staats, the mistress, has not. Neither of them has anything to feel sorry about. When the urge comes, social distancing grows smaller, pardon the reverse pun. We all want to flatten the curve, and Ferguson did just that. He has proved by his rash action that sex conquers all, following in the tradition of England’s greatest hero, Horatio Nelson, and countless others, unsung heroes all. They have been overshadowed by the French and Italians to be sure, but now, with the prof leading the way, there’s hope that Britain can emerge as a nation of shaggers who are fearless in their pursuit of sexual gratification even in the face of Chinese efforts to turn us all into a nation of self-abusers.
T Harry shooting driven birds at Sandringham in better times.
The Sun is happy to poke fun at Harry for giving up his guns to please his boss Meghan, but “Royal Correspondent” Matt Wilkinson, and whoever-is-his-editor, were themselves obviously neutered so long ago that they never owned any to give up.
Since it was a pair of Purdeys that were sold, they were obviously shotguns, not “handmade hunting rifles.”
The Star simply stole the same story from The Sun, and they refer to Harry selling his “handmade shooting rifle collection.”
Prince Harry has flogged his handmade hunting rifles after giving up bloodsports to please wife Meghan.
A fellow hunter bought the pair of prized Purdey firearms, thought to be worth at least £50,000, in a private deal.
Harry learnt to shoot as a child and once killed a one-ton buffalo.
But Meghan is opposed to hunting and pals hinted the Duke of Sussex would give up to appease her.
Harry, 35, was also absent from the recent shoots at Balmoral and Sandringham. He sold his two British-made guns five months ago — before he and Meghan, 38, quit the UK for a new life in North America.
A friend of the anonymous buyer said: “He bought them because he wanted them, not because they belonged to Harry, but he was quite chuffed when he found out. They are beautiful examples and he’s very pleased with them but he’s not the sort of yperson who wants to boast about the royal connection.â€
Last week conservationist Dr Jane Goodall said she expected Harry to turn his back on bloodsports.
Health care workers that came to New York to help fight the coronavirus pandemic at its epicenter will have to pay state taxes, according to the governor.
He addressed the issues Tuesday at a news conference.
“We’re not in a position to provide any subsidies right now because we have a $13 billion deficit,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “So there’s a lot of good things I’d like to do, and if we get federal funding, we can do, but it would be irresponsible for me to sit here looking at a $13 billion deficit and say I’m gonna spend more money, when I can’t even pay the essential services.”
Even though the state government asked thousands of people to come to New York from out of state to help fight coronavirus, they will have to pay New York state taxes, even on income they might make from their home states that they’re paid while in New York.
Cuomo said he needs help from Washington in order to cover budget deficits from COVID-19, let alone subsidize state income tax for essential workers that flocked to New York’s aid.
“If we don’t get more money from Washington, we can’t fund schools, right, so at the rate we want to fund them. We are in dire financial need,” he said.
The issue first came up when the temporary hospital in Central Park was being erected by Samaritan’s Purse.
“Our financial comptroller called me,” said Ken Isaacs, a vice president of the organization, “and he said, ‘Do you know that all of you are going to be liable for New York state income tax?’
“I said, ‘What?'” Isaacs continued. “[The comptroller] said, ‘Yeah, there’s a law. If you work in New York State for more than 14 days, you have to pay state income tax.'”
Britain always leads the way, even preceding California, in reaching new levels of left-wing tyranny.
Nobody in America knows who Michael Gove is. But, it should be suficient to explain that he is high-ranking Tory politician and cabinet member.
Gove is in the news currently because his wife, Sarah Vine, a prominent newspaper columnist, indiscreetly published a photo of one of their bookshelves on Twitter, and some of its contents provoked leftist accusation of thought-crime.
People want to know why Michael Gove owns “racist” and “anti-Semitic” books’, reports the Independent’s website. By ‘people’ it actually means the time-rich Twitterati, who have discovered a new hobby: bookshelf policing. And the latest bookshelf to fail their purity test, to commit the sin of containing books these people disapprove of, is Gove’s.
Yes, not content with policing speech, tweets, jokes and even hairstyles (witness the screams of ‘cultural appropriation’ that greet any celeb who wears her hair in a way her race isn’t meant to), now the offence-taking mob is policing bookshelves. The Shelf Stasi, we might call them, peruse the tomes in people’s private book collections and bark ‘Verboten!’ if they spy something unacceptable.
Sarah Vine the Daily Mail columnist and Gove’s wife, posted a photo of one of their bookshelves on Twitter and almost instantly the literature cops were out in force. As the Independent puts it, people spotted ‘something sinister’. They always do. Everything’s sinister to people who live to take offence.
The sinister thing in this case was a book by David Irving, the historian and Holocaust denier. And a copy of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnstein, which argues that intelligence is shaped by environmental factors and genetic inheritance. Oh, and Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, which, as the Independent balefully informs us, ‘praises individualism and defends capitalism’. Lock up Vine and Gove instantly!
The meltdown was epic. Owen Jones, who can never resist the thrill of censorious rage, pointed a judgemental finger. It is very iffy, he said, that a Cabinet member owns a book by ‘one of the most notorious Holocaust deniers on earth’. Hicham Yezza, a writer for the Guardian, went further. If this bookshelf had been on Through the Keyhole, he said, ‘I’d have guessed Anders Breivik’.
Right, so Michael Gove is being spoken about in the same breath as one of the worst mass murderers on the basis of his bookshelf. That is deranged. It isn’t Gove and Vine who have behaved badly (by merely owning books!) – it’s the frothing Twitterati with their borderline medieval insistence that certain books should be banned. Why don’t they draw up an Index Librorum Prohibitorum decreeing which books are ‘contrary to morality’ and should never be read, as the Vatican did in the 1500s?
David S. Wills, in Quillette, celebrates the great and degenerate Hunter Thompson who successfully turned bad behavior into art.
[W]hen Thompson called Hinckle at three o’clock one morning in April 1970 and said he wanted to write a feature about the Kentucky Derby, Hinckle readily agreed. Thompson had been having dinner with his friend, Jim Salter, in Aspen, Colorado, when the subject came up. Salter had asked him if he was planning to attend the derby and Thompson said he wasn’t. After the spell in jail that had cost him his high school diploma, Thompson had joined the Air Force and considered his escape from Louisville to be more or less permanent. He did not particularly feel like going back to rub shoulders with the people who had looked down on him and, finally, turned their backs as he wept in a lonely courtroom.
Thompson was a night owl and, after dinner, he stayed up pondering Salter’s question. Maybe it was time to go back and see the derby. It might be the sort of thing he could write about: the outsider returns after more than a decade on the road. This needn’t be a dull article for a conservative newspaper or magazine, which was the sort of work on which he’d cut his teeth in the early Sixties. So, he called Hinckle up in the middle of the night and asked if he would pay for a flight to Kentucky plus expenses. “The story, as I see it,†he explained, “is mainly in the vicious-drunk Southern bourbon horse-shit mentality that surrounds the derby than in the derby itself.â€
Thompson’s writing was already beginning to resemble what readers would later come to call Gonzo journalism. He tended to insert himself into the prose as observer and participant, embark on weird and irrelevant digressions, recount conversations and events that probably never happened, discard any pretense of objectivity, lurch erratically in and out of hyperbole and paranoia, and dust his prose with a litany of stylistic quirks and a peculiar lexis that included words like “atavistic,†“swine,†“savage,†and “doomed.†It was a subjective, chaotic, and messy approach to journalism unsuited, Thompson felt, to the blank objectivity of a photojournalist’s camera. So, he asked Hinckle to assign him an illustrator instead.
Ralph Steadman was one of the best young cartoonists in Britain and, just like Thompson, had a wonderful talent for bringing out the inner ugliness of his subject. Neither of them liked to dress a subject up and make it look pretty; they preferred to identify a flaw and blow it out of all proportion. The art director at Scanlan’s had heard that Steadman was looking for work and called him up. On the way to the airport, he realized he’d forgotten his artist’s toolbox. He stopped briefly at the home of one of the magazine’s editors to scavenge what he could and left with eyebrow pencils and lipstick.
Among the Kentucky Colonels, Thompson and Steadman stood out like sore thumbs. Fresh from his failed Freak Power campaign for sheriff in Aspen the same year, Thompson was sporting a shaved head. He was also tall, handsome, and usually dressed in bright clothes. Steadman, on the other hand, had long hair and a wild beard. The two men should have found it easy to locate one another, but somehow it took them two days before they finally met in the press room. They immediately set about drinking and did not stop until several days after the race.
When eventually it came time to leave Louisville and produce the article and illustrations, Scanlan’s brought both writer and artist to New York and had them hole up at the Royalton Hotel. It took Steadman two days to complete his illustrations, but Thompson found himself confronted with a brutal case of writer’s block. He lay in the bathtub, slugging whisky from the bottle, and awaiting inspiration. Eventually, his frantic editors called and demanded something. The magazine was due to go to press and there was still a huge hole in the middle of the issue where Thompson’s story was supposed to go. Thrown into a panic, Thompson ripped pages out of his notebook and handed them to the copyboy. Hinckle called and declared it brilliant. Within an hour, the copyboy was back for more, and Thompson’s story appeared as scheduled in the next issue beneath the eye-catching headline “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.â€
Thompson later admitted that he felt guilty and ashamed about his failure to write the article. The magazine’s editors and readers, however, felt differently. It was, they thought, a triumph. The first half recounts Thompson’s arrival in Kentucky, a prank played on a gullible racist at the airport, and then his meeting with Steadman. The second half is a disjointed but somehow intensely personal account of a day spent staggering around the derby in an inebriated state, terrifying attendees and spraying a restaurant full of patrons with mace. Thompson and Steadman didn’t bother to actually watch the race they had been sent to cover. Instead, they went in search of a “special kind of face†that they hoped would allow Steadman to produce a representatively scathing portrait of Kentucky’s upper class. As they are about to despair of finding someone suitable, Thompson glances in a mirror and realizes:
There he was, by God—a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature… like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s fancy photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for—and it was, of course, my own.
It was a highly unusual piece of writing that trashed the conventions of traditional reporting in favor of a freewheeling rock’n’roll antagonism. It was funny but aggressive, satirical and cruel, and only loosely factual. It was neither exactly journalism nor exactly fiction… it was something in between and something quite new.
CBS News also has a video, explaining that the woman tried to stop the alligator from taking her dog. It attacked her instead.
Deputies in South Carolina shot and killed an alligator that fatally attacked a woman on Friday, authorities said. CBS affiliate WCSC-TV reports that the coroner identified the victim as Cynthia Covert, 58, of Johns Island.
The officers were called to a pond on Kiawah Island around 5 p.m. and saw the animal attack, the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office said. Covert was found dead and deputies retrieved the alligator’s carcass to help with the investigation.
