Mayor Bob Buckhorn wants to tighten rules on panhandling and other problems associated with homelessness downtown and in Ybor City.
"It's going to be a holistic approach," Buckhorn said. "I don't think we have any desire to criminalize homelessness, but I do think there's a recognition, particularly in downtown, that homelessness and the aggressive panhandling that comes with it and the public nuisances associated with it are increasing."
Police average four complaints a day about panhandling and solicitation, mostly in downtown, Ybor City, East Ybor and the V.M. Ybor neighborhood.
As a result, the mayor said officials are looking at measures "that would largely track some of the ordinances that both Clearwater and St. Pete have passed, as well as some other things we think will be effective."
Buckhorn said he expects a City Council discussion scheduled for Thursday to help define the plan, but new regulations could restrict panhandling near ATMs, restaurants and outdoor cafes, among other places.
That's what officials do in St. Petersburg, which also has a "no panhandling" zone for its downtown and waterfront.
In July, Clearwater approved a ban on sitting on sidewalks and sleeping outdoors, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 60 days in jail. In 2011, St. Petersburg began enforcing a ban on sleeping or reclining on public sidewalks.
Buckhorn also is concerned about city parks.
"Some of our parks in downtown literally have become campgrounds for the homeless," he said. "Those parks belong to everybody, and to have people using them as public bathrooms or to sleep is just not acceptable."
Camping at Phil Bourquardez Park, just north of the Stetson University College of Law, this month prompted a Tampa Heights resident to complain to the City Council.
And the Bush Ross law firm, next to the park, has hired nighttime security and put up fences so that its 120 employees feel safe.
The problem has gotten worse in the past six months, said Jeffrey Warren, the firm's managing partner.
"Once that park became popular, it just kept growing in terms of the number of people who came and occupied the park," he said. "That then precluded other people from feeling comfortable using that park."
• • •
Tampa's code already bans panhandling in a threatening, intimidating or harassing way.
If city officials write additional rules, they will need to remember that courts have ruled solicitation to be protected speech.
"We can't ban it outright," Tampa assistant city attorney Rebecca Kert said.
But under federal case law, communities can regulate the time, place and manner of solicitations.
The rules have to be content-neutral, meaning they can't favor one type of speech over another. They have to serve a significant government interest. They have to be narrowly tailored. And they have to leave open alternative avenues of communication.
Consequently, local officials can regulate solicitations like panhandling in three ways:
• For safety. Tampa's roadside solicitation ordinance, passed in 2011, is an example of this. Officials concluded it is dangerous for people to stand on the curb and ask motorists for money. (While the law was widely referred to as a panhandling ordinance, it only addressed transactions between pedestrians and motorists — not the problems Buckhorn is talking about now.)
• In certain limited areas, such as near ATMs, bus stops and outdoor cafes. But there has to be a significant government interest, such as keeping people from feeling threatened when they are approached by a stranger in a place where their freedom of movement is limited.
• In defined geographic areas. In Fort Lauderdale, officials banned all forms of solicitations — including, for example, giving out free samples — on a 5-mile stretch of beachfront,
The city's rationale, upheld in court, was that its local economy depended on tourism, so it needed families to feel safe and comfortable going to the beach.
Courts also have allowed communities to enact local laws regarding certain behaviors — such as sleeping on sidewalks, urinating outdoors or storing personal possessions on public property — but only when there are alternative services offered.
Otherwise, courts have ruled that enforcing outright bans on actions so closely associated with being homeless amounts to criminalizing homelessness.
In both St. Petersburg and Clearwater, city ordinances prohibit sleeping in the right of way — but only when there is space available in a shelter for the homeless.
Pinellas has Safe Harbor, a county shelter for the chronically homeless located inside a former bus building. It houses about 300 people a day.
And in Tampa? The City Council has asked Buckhorn's administration to report on what it is doing to reduce the number of homeless people on the street or create beds for them.
• • •
Buckhorn said cracking down on nuisance behaviors has not been the city's only approach to issues associated with homelessness.
"Particularly for the chronically homeless, I think we also have an obligation to do the best we can to find facilities that are available to house them so they're not having to sleep in our parks at night or during the day," he said.
Over the past two years, the city has participated in a public-private partnership called Steps Forward.
In January, the effort resulted in the opening of Cypress Landing, 23 furnished apartments for the chronically homeless with leases covered by vouchers from the Tampa Housing Authority. An on-site manager can connect tenants 24 hours a day with a nurse or therapist so they stay on their medications, out of jail and away from the emergency room.
And a little more than a year ago, Tampa police assigned Officer Daniel McDonald to work with the homeless full time.
"Basically, I'm a problem-solver," said McDonald, a 15-year police veteran.
He approaches homeless men and women on sidewalks, in parks and even under bridges. He asks what they need to get off the street and, if possible, helps them get it.
Up to three times a week, McDonald drives people to the Department of Motor Vehicles for identification cards. With the IDs, they can apply for jobs and, in one case, avoid eviction.
He has helped them secure Social Security benefits.
He has given people rides to labor pools and other employers.
He has called out-of-state relatives about buying bus tickets home.
He has helped people find affordable housing and veterans' assistance.
Working with LensCrafters, he got one man his first pair of eyeglasses in at least five years. With the glasses, the man began to look for a job.
In a place like Bourquardez Park, McDonald said he tries to focus on those most willing to accept help as a way of reducing the number of people camping out.
If others commit nuisance offenses like drinking or urinating in the park, he can issue them a trespass notice.
Last winter, he said, he did that to two or three people who had been drinking and making lewd comments to yoga classes and people ice skating at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.
In West Tampa, he has succeeded in getting a vacant building fenced off so people couldn't squat there.
McDonald said he probably has regular contact with 50 to 100 homeless people and enjoys the work.
"No problem is too big or too small," he said, "because it might make a difference in their life."


C-CAMP startup Bugworks, incubated at C-CAMP since 2014 has truly gone global.
Bugworks who are developing next-generation broad spectrum antibiotics to tackle the global problem of antimicrobial resistance has raised $9 million (approx. ₹62 Cr.) from Japanese venture capital firm University of Tokyo Edge Capital (UTEC), the first time that UTEC has invested in the Indian life sciences market. This comes close on the heels of their prestigious CARB-X funding.
Bugworks plans to utilise these funds for their soon-to-be-started clinical trials.


Maintenance and Cleaning for Concrete Floors
Having a concrete floor sealed with the right concrete sealer is a key component of any good maintenance program. The proper sealer can help your floor resist water, stains, and dirt. Usually, it is best to ask your contractor which sealer products will be used and what kind of maintenance schedule that will translate into.
How often you will need to clean and seal is dependent upon how much wear and tear the floor is exposed to. Floors in residential settings (such as living rooms) are likely to take less abuse than those in the kitchen of a busy restaurant. Regardless of the setting, however, one of concrete's strongest benefits is that it is simple to maintain. Beyond an occasional resealing (which is best discussed with your contractor), light mopping is probably the most your concrete floor will need in terms of keeping it clean. It is recommended that you talk to your concrete contractor also about any specific instructions there might be for the type of products or colors used on your floor.
Here are three common steps to cleaning concrete floors:
- For general cleaning, just simple mopping with water and a soft, non-metallic brush should remove any surface dirt.
- For deeper cleaning, use water with a mild soap, then water with a stronger soap, then water with a stronger soap plus ammonia.
- For areas where it looks as though the sealer may have been worn through, general cleaning is recommended, and the surface may need to have the sealer reapplied in high traffic areas.
Read more about cleaning concrete floors at ConcreteNetwork.com.


WWDC Worldwide Developers Conference
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC, is organized every year in California. It serves as a platform to showcase the emerging technologies that Apple has to offer. It is also a forum where computer developers and engineers from different web design schools and companies can access hands-on labs, and Apple employees can get feedback on their products and services.
Generally, the number of attendees for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference amounts to about 4000. However, the success of the conference has helped to increase the headcount gradually. In the 2007 WWDC, the number of attendees from design schools and companies exceeded 5000. The last WWDC conference that was held in San Francisco in June, 2008 was also a resounding success.
The very first session of the WWDC was held in 1983 in Monterey, California. From 1993 to 2002, the conference was always held in the month of May. However, from 2003 onwards, the month of the conference was rescheduled to June. Interestingly, the opening of the conference has remained unchanged since 1998. At the outset, the conference is flagged off by a keynote presentation made by Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple. This event is also referred by many as the "Stevenotes". The attendees of the conference also need to sign a non-disclosure agreement that covers all the sessions that are held during the conference. A number of materials are distributed to the attendees of the WWDC as well.
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference brings together computer specialists from all over the world, as well as its own employees. Some of the major events that were held in the conferences from 1983 to 2008 include:
- The introduction of the quartz imaging model and Carbon, Apple's new application programming interface, in 1998.
- The release of Quick Time 6 as well as the new version of the MacOS, the Mac OS X v.10.2, in 2002.
- Announcement of the Xserve, which is a rack mounted server, in 2002.
- Introduction of the Apple product iSight and the Power Mac G5 in 2003.
- Launch of a new version of Apple Cinema Displays in 2004.
- Announcement in 2005 that the next line of Mac OS would be compatible with Intel's x86 processors. Earlier, Apple computers were installed with PowerPC microprocessors from IBM
- The release of the premium range computer Mac Pro as well as the X Serve server, which is based on Intel's Xeon microprocessor, in the 2006 conference.
- The unveiling of the beta version of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard in 2007, and the announcement that the Safari browser would be available for the Windows platform too. Support for the soon-to-be-launched Apple iPhone was also announced in the same conference.
The 2009 Worldwide Developers Conference is slated to be held from 8th to 12th of June. The venue for the conference is Moscone West, San Francisco. The conference will focus on popular Apple products such as the Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard, iPhone, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and the Macbook. The tickets for the conference have already sold out, which goes to show the kind of success and popularity the WWDC has achieved over the years.
Latest Web Design Articles & News
Top five Boston schools websites
Website design has become imperative to business, schools and organizations alike, as many turn to the internet for information.
Amazon revamps website design
Amazon.com, the online retail supergiant, has recently started to test out a new design for its website, which has been completely revamped, according to the Wall Street Journal.


Perhaps Hannah and other godly mothers in the Bible have been your role models for years. You have studied the Bible in your home with your child ever since you can remember. Your family is regularly involved in serving God in a variety of ways. You teach your child God’s principles and how to apply them on a daily basis. Maybe your child is already a baptized believer and is developing her own faith.
Part of dedicating your children to God is teaching them how to share God’s Words with others. If Christianity is to continue to be a living faith, then we and our children will have to really begin spreading God’s Words just like the church in the first century did. This summer, I am working with the children in our church to help them learn not only how the early church spread the Good News throughout the known world, but how they to can be missionaries now and in the future.
For the next nine weeks, I will give you a peek into our classes. We will share with you what we are teaching and the experiential ways we use to make the lessons memorable. Many of the things we do, you can replicate at home with your children. Or you may want to use them in a children’s Bible class. Space will not permit a detailed lesson plan, but feel free to contact me if you would like copies of them.
For now, I would encourage you to spend some time reading the book of Acts for yourself. Pray about your willingness to share God’s Words with others and how you can help your children do the same. Being a missionary takes courage. Being the parent of a missionary takes the kind of spirit Hannah had – a willingness to give the most important thing God has given you back to God.
Your child may never even travel outside of his hometown, but he can be a missionary even in the smallest village. The activities and lessons I will share with you this summer, can help you prepare him to share his faith with those he encounters here or abroad. So pull out your Bible and get ready for some Bible fun with your children this summer. Who knows how many people your children will help bring to God!


What is needed for strapless bridal gowns to be comfortable to wear and help them stay up?
It "must have" boning and lots of it!
Since strapless bridal dresses have no shoulder support, it is supported from the waist up.
For a good comfortable fit, the gown must fit snug... but not too tightly in the bust and waist areas.
Part of the "support system" comes from boning in the seams. The more boning your gown has, the better the gown will look and fit. So pay close attention to the structure inside of the dress.
Also strapless wedding gowns should have a waist stay or inner belt. This will give you a sense of security while wearing your gown.
It prevents your bridal gown from sliding around or up and down on you.
The overall "best" support system that securely holds your strapless wedding dress in place is a built in inner bustier.
The "bustier" is attached at the neckline and center back. The lower edge hangs separate from the dress and has lots of boning plus a belt attached.
You will find a built in bustier mostly in the mid price range to high-end strapless wedding dresses.
I can't stress enough how important it is for you to have the proper amount of boning and/or bustier in your gown. Your dress will fit better and you will be comfortable for hours in it. So make sure yours has this!
Budget For Your Wedding Dress
Tips on how to budget for your wedding dress and how to pick a dress that will give you more value for your dollar.
Strapless Wedding Dress Alterations
There are some areas of concern you should know about regarding strapless wedding dress alterations. The advice given will help you make sure your gown is fitted properly.
Looking for something
on this site?


This Jet Propulsion Laboratory website contains the science mission overview of the Mars Rover Curiosity. Links provide information about the scientific studies to be performed and the technologies to be employed, both established and innovative. From this overview page the visitor can navigate to numerous other well-illustrated pages that discuss the various vehicles involved, the mission timeline, communication with Earth, the mission team, and more.
%0 Electronic Source %D February 5, 2010 %T Mars Science Laboratory Mission %V 2016 %N 10 February 2016 %8 February 5, 2010 %9 text/html %U http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/
Disclaimer: ComPADRE offers citation styles as a guide only. We cannot offer interpretations about citations as this is an automated procedure. Please refer to the style manuals in the Citation Source Information area for clarifications.


If MAKJ's 2014 is anything like his 2013, we're in for a real treat. It only took three days for his massive Hardwell collaboration "Countdown" to hit #1 on Beatport, but that's not even the tip of the iceberg. He embarked on a sold-out tour of Mexico with Nervo, toured North America with Bingo Players and Bassjackers, played the main stage of the inaugural TomorrowWorld, had two top 15 records, and has done so while continuously gaining the support of the people. It makes sense that he'd round out his 2013 with a celebratory remix of Nervo & Ivan Gough's "Not Taking This No More." Were you expecting anything different? This one is pure adrenaline, giving you the goods early before delving into Beverley Knight's beautiful vocals. Another one of those tunes that we fully expect heads to be going mental over during various NYE parties. You can grab this tune exclusively on Beatport right now.


27-Jul-2011 -- We were on a tentative confluence point trip along the west coast of Norway, but due to bad planning (no studies in advance) and a lot of rain we spent a few days on the E39 and a few side steps without getting close to any new confluence points. We arrived at Trondheim to visit our daughter who is teaching at the university there, but had not planned that either. She and her husband were very busy so we decided to see the surroundings and went to an old nunnery at Tautra, about 100 km north of the city. The weather improved and we continued north and west of the Trondheim Fjord towards N64E10 which turned out to be at a charming spot in the sea on the west coast of the Fosen peninsula. To get within the 100 m I had to walk out on a tentative jetty (never completed) made by stones covered with slippery seaweeds. A walking stick was a useful support.


Credit: © Paul Smith / Featureflash / Retna Retna Ltd.
Charlize Theron (Oct 1st, 2005)
Squared Off Pompadour
Blow-dry for root lift with a half paddle brush, then set your hair on hot rollers directing the top back. Undo rollers and tease with a fine tooth comb at the base of each curl. Direct your hair back and secure with pins into a bun or roll in back.Try on celebrity hairstyles in the Makeover Studio!


Sunglasses are essential for kids who love the outdoors. This does not only serve as an accessory but more importantly, it protects their eyes from the harmful rays of the sun. The SG 24 sunglasses is ideal, as it not only provides the best protection, they are stylish and comfortable to wear as well. Your little girls will definitely enjoy strolling outside in style! Available in pink, white and yellow colors and is suitable for young girls between 2 to 7 years old.


City: Oosterhout (Holland)
The idea for this blog started in January 2018 during a nice dinner with a friend in one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
My passion has always been music. The last couple of years i’ve been researching music education and the possibilities within the world of music. I realized that there are so many professions in the music industry not everyone is aware of.
Hopefully Musiqnote can become your source of information regarding all you need to know about music education and careers in the music industry.


Report on Comments - UPC/UMC
The Report on Comments (ROC) is published during the final year of the code development process. This document will contain the comments received on proposed changes, the committee’s action, the committee’s statement as to the reason for other than an affirmative vote, and a summary of the voting outcome. For members of the Technical Committee who choose to abstain from voting or voted negatively, a statement as to their reasons will also be included. Lists of documents available for review are shown below.
Also included below is the form for submitting a comment to a proposed code change. This form is available as a Word document that can be filled in and emailed or faxed to IAPMO.
Where referencing a standard in your comment, such standard needs to be submitted in accordance with the Guidelines for Referencing Mandatory Standards.
Guidelines for Referencing Mandatory Standards (PDF Format)
Online Report on Comments Form
(Current deadline: January 3, 2014)
Report on Comments


I remember the so-called prequel being announced back in 2010; at the time there wasn’t much info on it – definitely not what actors would appear in it.
We would later learn that Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) and John Hawkes (star of Sundance 2012 hit “The Surrogate”) had signed on to star in the film, and are joined by Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, Isla Fisher and Will Forte.
Dan Schechter directed the film from his own script adaption.
Titled “Life of Crime,” based on Elmore Leonard’s novel “The Switch” (the original 1997 film, “Jackie Brown,” which starred Pam Grier, was also based on an Elmore Leonard novel, titled “Rum Punch”), the dark caper comedy follows the kidnapping of the wife (Aniston) of a corrupt real estate developer (Robbins) by two common criminals (Bey and Hawkes), who intend to extort the husband with inside information about his crooked business and off-shore accounts. But, their plan takes an unexpected turn when the husband decides he’d actually rather not pay the ransom to get back his wife, setting off a sequence of double crosses and plot twists that one would expect from an Elmore Leonard original.
So obviously the prequel will focus on the relationship between Ordell and Gara, characters played by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown, and now are being played by Yasiin Bey and John Hawkes.
And, by the way, Quentin Tarantino doesn’t have anything to do with this film, although he gave his “blessings.”
So, expect a whole new look both in front of and behind the camera, in a film that made its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, as the festival’s closing night film!
“Jackie Brown” was both a commercial and critical success, raking in over $72 million in box office worldwide, on a $12 million budget. It also earned co-star Robert Forster an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions will release “Life Of Crime” in theaters on August 29th, 2014.
Check out the first trailer below:


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Jan 07, 2017 06:53 AM EST
‘Magic School Bus’ On Netflix Want To Teach STEM [VIDEO]
Generations who followed "The Magic School Bus" would know about the elementary school teacher, Miss Frizzle, and her group of students who traveled on a magical school bus. The bus takes them on spectacular field trips. Their destinations are mostly impossible to reach like the clouds, past events in history, the galaxy and even inside the human body.
Now, "The Magic School Bus" is making a come back. The focus is to teach the newer generations about STEM. The red-headed teacher and her pet lizard made their last appearance on television on December 6, 1997 and had several reruns on different television networks after that.
This time, Netflix and Scholastic Media announced that Ms. Frizzle is coming back to Netflix, as reported by Education Week. Stu Stone, who used to voice Ralphie in the original series and is currently the show's producer said Ms. Frizzle is taking the kids on a confidential field trip.
"The Magic School Bus" reboot will return many of the original characters and will also welcome newer and younger voices. Stone teased that there will be potential celebrity cameos, too.
Netflix's Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, explained to New York Times that the show teaches science in a way that surpasses generations. "The Magic School Bus" will take viewers on a trip that promotes science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The Netflix reboot hopes that the new generation of kids will find the magic of discovery in "The Magic School Bus." Scholastic Media said that in order to make the show much more relate-able and current, the bus is reported to be much more high-tech this time. It will have modern science tools and will include robots and smart space suits.
"The Magic School Bus" revival is arriving at a perfect time because of a nationwide push for STEM Education. President Barack Obama himself championed STEM for many years under his administration. The show is expected to be released within 2017.
Check out this TMZ video of Stu Stone getting excited about "The Magic School Bus" reboot:
Join the Conversation


September 2008 Archives
But what has the government done in the past to alleviate the stress and shore up the markets? And what can be done if this uncertainty continues as Election Day approaches?
Why Tuesday's Jacob Soboroff noticed an interesting fact this week - that in 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving in an effort to spur the economy. Soboroff asks in Bail Out Our Voting System, "If we can move Thanksgiving for the convenience of retailers, what about moving Election Day for the convenience of voters?"
While the Thanksgiving move was incredibly unpopular, it's not the first time the federal government has changed tradition. Other attempts at shifting dates of important events for the public good - like saving energy by moving daylight savings time, have been more successful.
Would you support moving Election Day if it would help the economy get back on track?
Friday's debate between presidential candidates Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain marked the beginning of the end to a very long election cycle. But the debate also brought a renewed interest in the candidates and the electoral process that will undoubtedly only build through to the November election.
Online, more and more tools are launching to get people involved and keep a handle on the growing amount of commentary and information about the election.
Fact-checking the debates can happen almost instantly with the tools now available online. MediaShift looks at what's available now, and found a number of nonpartisan sites, from Media Matters to FactCheck.org and NewsBusters that take a deep dive on politicians' claims. MediaShift also addresses fears from academics that regardless of the available information, people often go online to confirm what they already believe, rather than to get the facts.
Last week, the Washington Post launched its Political Browser, a site that pulls together news and opinion from across the web, dividing sound bites into categories like "Punchlines" (quick hits from the comedy shows and humor web sites), "Trench Warfare" (left and right-wing political blog posts), and the "Blunder Box" (quotes that politicians probably wish they could revise).
To learn more about how traditional journalists are coping with the online space and how political coverage is changing, join in a chat with PBS Engage and NewsHour correspondent Judy Woodruff, where you can both ask questions and rate submitted questions. Possible topics that have been submitted so far include:
Add your questions and participate in the chat at 1pm tomorrow by visiting pbs.org/chat.
From defense spending and defining leadership to potential cabinet appointees and how the voting process could be improved, citizens are speaking up about what they want to hear from the candidates in the debates.
With both candidates now confirmed to appear at tonight's first debate in Oxford, Mississippi, the focus can turn away from the debate over whether there will be a debate back to the issues.
NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer's questions to Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama will likely focus on the economy in addition to the assigned topic of foreign policy. The questions are up to Lehrer -- who was called "the most important person in presidential politics who isn't running for president" by Time's Mark Halperin - for tonight's debate. But on the Bill Moyers' Journal blog, viewers have responded in huge numbers to the question 'What questions would you ask of the candidates?'
Kent C. from Portland, Oregon asked: As President what will you do about this hardship and corruption that the government has inflected upon the American People?
Mick Rosenthal asked: I would like each candidate to discuss Climate Change, and not just what the Federal government will do to help, but what everyone can DO NOW to help.
Michael Beard asked: I would like to ask both candidates, or for that matter all candidates from the past twenty years, if they have ever had to sign a check and pay for personal health care insurance?
To see more and add your own question, visit the Bill Moyers Journal blog.
Tonight's debate falls on an auspicious day -- the anniversary of the Kennedy/Nixon debate that ushered in a new era of televised presidential politics. Will there be any more surprises tonight? To follow real-time updates of the debate, take a look at Twitter's new election updates site where keywords like "obama" "mccain" "debate" and "
And tune in to the NewsHour at 9pm ET to watch the debate and come back to Vote 2008 to discuss who you think won, whether the right issues were covered and what you're looking for from future debates.
The upcoming presidential debate may be focused on foreign policy issues, but that's not the issue on the minds of many voters this week.
With the bailout bill working its way through Congress and
the stock markets trembling, it's clear that the economy and housing are taking
center stage. Even with Sen. John McCain's running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin
meeting world leaders at the U.N. and President Bush making his final address
there yesterday, the events were merely a blip on the radar for most of
Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni is traveling to key states this week and he reports on how voters are following the turmoil on Wall Street and whether the "Palin effect" is still holding strong for McCain.
"I sent out a query about the economy last week to of all my communities and heard back from nearly all of them close to immediately. The upshot was most of them were waiting to see what the candidates were saying, but there was, even in the early stages, a sign of softening for McCain.
All the Obama supporters said the news on the economy made them more fervent in their support and most of the McCain people said it wouldn't make any difference. But at least one McCain supporter was backing off. And the people I would say are undecided were... well ... undecided, but seemed to be leaning toward Obama."
What has been the reaction to Palin, now that she is becoming more known politician on the trail? Chinni says the "Palin effect" is starting to wear off in some of the communities he has visited.
"The other interesting thing going on out there is the sudden diminishing of the Palin effect. Is it because of the economic crisis, or simply a concurrent development, based on her performance? It's not clear, maybe some of both. But it looks like she may be costing McCain votes, especially among better educated, wealthier women. People I spoken with in Eagle, Los Alamos, and even here in
(where I am today) have said she has pushed them away from McCain. One of the women here, who owns a restaurant, said Palin was the deciding factor in pushing her from McCain." El Mirage, AZ
What are the trends in your community? Do they reflect what Patchwork Nation is seeing in their analysis?
Since this is an election year, e-democracy was the focus of the Washington, D.C. One Web Day team (including PBS Engage), which created a Time Capsule of the best political engagement tools made online in the past year. This features projects like Sunlight Foundation's Open Secrets, American Public Media's Budget Hero game, and a list of e-Democracy heroes, like Patricia Aufderheide and Wendy Seltzer.
Sunlight Foundation co-founder Ellen Miller showed a new tool called Capitol Words, which shows the most frequently said words on the Hill on any given day, and Public Markup, which just today posted the financial bailout bill and gave people the chance to comment on it.
"Access to technology is predictor of whether people 'make it' ," Sen. Barack Obama's technology policy advisor Alec Ross said at the Time Capsule event in Washington.
Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., added that "Democracy requires lots of communication from various resources and shouldn't be restrained by government. It's important for us to have a framework that doesn't constrain participation."
One Web Day includes events around the country and the world - from a public housing broadband project in San Francisco to a concert in Chicago, Ramadan e-cards in Tunisia, and a blogging contest in Bangalore.
As the campaigns turn more and more negative, and attacks on specific issues hit the airwaves, getting the real story can be a major challenge. Luckily, technology is coming to the rescue.
Google's Audio Indexing service allows users to find specific audio clips within videos uploaded to YouTube. The project is focusing on election-related content.
A search for "health" within a video of VP candidate Joe
Biden speaking in
PRX's Raw Audio project is indexing speeches and interviews
from the campaign trail by using bookmarks and tagging. Want to find all the
latest audio about health care from around public media? The raw audio list on health care brings up everything from the latest NPR
produced piece to the audio of John McCain speaking at the Livestrong Summit in
All this listening has me ready to relive one of the most creative uses of political campaigns' audio tracks -- Saturday Night Live's TV FunHouse skits used raw audio to skewer everyone from Ross Perot to George Bush to Jesse Jackson.
What do political polls really mean? Are they more valid in aggregate than the daily ups and downs of the campaigns would have us believe? If you're only looking at the number, you might not be getting the full story of this election.
While the most recent numbers may make headlines, and publications like poll aggregator Real Clear Politics give some sense what's going on in the country's psyche, it's interesting to look beneath the numbers and focus on trends.
A search in Yahoo! Buzz index shows searches for Obama are nearly 20 percentage points above searches for McCain.
And on Google's Zeitgeist index, there's a similar search effect happening. But if we trusted search numbers to tell us the answer, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton would be far ahead of any politician.
To make some sense of what polls really tell us, this Bill Moyers report from 2002 with Daniel Yankelovich, an expert on on American values and public opinion, explains the need to be careful when reading poll results.
"I think that if I had to make one single suggestion it would be to ask yourself the question, when you look at the poll results, is this an issue where people have made up their minds? You may not know, but if you see inconsistencies, if the wording of the question changes the response," Yankelovich said.
Polls' wording may still be tricky, but some concerns that lingered in 2002 seem to be clearing up in 2008. A reader of Vote 2008 wrote in this week asking about whether cell phone numbers are included in polls, and if they aren't, whether that precludes polls' accuracy because the demographics of those surveyed would be different.
For more best practices on polling, NOW on PBS provides a comprehensive check list for making a good poll and how to spot fallacies and misinformation.
But enough with the nitpicking. Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni reports that the spat isn't having much of an effect on some key voter blocks. In the Boom Towns and Monied Burbs, the pressing issue isn't Sarah Palin's choice in eyewear, but the mortgage crisis and how many people are at risk for losing their homes.
"Today, I looked at the mortgage bailout. It actually could have some real impacts on the election. If all those people with ARM mortgages can refinance now (some are forecasting 30-year fixed rates at under 6%) that could make them feel a bit better about themselves financially. And the mortgage crisis is biggest in to key community types -- "Boom Towns" and "Monied Burbs". They've seen some of the biggest effects from the foreclosures an they are both battleground community types where the vote was split in 2004.
Of course, weighing against that is the fact that a bailout was needed in the first place, which speaks to the shakiness of the housing market in general and probably helps Obama.
Bloggers agree that the ad attacks are taking attention away from the issues about which voters are most concerned.One other odd thing, McCain and Palin have come out blasting the bailout. Not sure that's a smart move."
In a post that PRX project Ballotvox found from Black Men for McCain, one blogger speaks out on the lipstick attacks:
"I have never in my life been so embarrassed to be a Republican. Conservatives and Christians alike, I beg of you, take a stand. We are better than this. Only months ago, we had agreed to campaign on the issues. What happened?"
What are the key issues in your area? Are the candidates spending enough time talking about real things that affect communities?
The theme of service has been apparent throughout the campaigns and particularly at the conventions, creating some of the most poignant moments, and also sparking the most controversy.
The most moving part of McCain's address to the Republican National Convention was his story of survival as a POW in Vietnam.
"The good man in the cell next door, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me. Through taps on a wall he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for our country and for the men I had the honor to serve with. Because every day they fought for me."
And in a Q&A with Newsweek a former Obama supervisor addressed the GOP's attacks on community organizers.
"He had to change the power dynamics between business, government interests and the community. It's very challenging sort of work."
But to relive a community coming together, spend a few moments thinking about the events of 9/11 and what's happened in the years since. WNET's New York Voices has a collection of stories about 9/11 survivors, the reconstruction of Ground Zero, and a look at the year in the life of Brooklyn's Poly Prep school, which lost 13 members of its community in the attacks.
Then share how you''ll commemorate the 9/11 anniversary. Do you think the campaigns are putting the right kind of emphasis on service?
By the numbers, over 38.9 million people watched Sen. John McCain's speech last week, and 38.4 million watched Sen. Barack Obama's address from Invesco Field. Add to that another 2.7 million for McCain's speech and 3.2 million for Obama's to include PBS' viewership estimates. At the start of the RNC, hurricane coverage took precedence and now that the candidates are back on the trail, the media covering the media have already shifted focus. After all, football season just started.
But in the stories and responses from viewers, we found an engaged, excited audience, both about the candidates and about the media coverage.
Sharon Christiansen wrote about McCain's candidacy:
"As a McCain supporter in 2000 primary, I am now extremely disillusioned with McCain. He appears to have sold out to the Bush clique and/or RNC machine. Very disappointing considering how the Bush camp smeared his war record in 2000."
Jake Witt wrote about cable news' limited time devoted to the conventions:
"Real people speaking first hand about the disgraceful condition this Republican Administration has left our country. But did MSNBC/CNN show it??? No, they had a commercial, followed by mindless pundits, mindlessly spewing shallow pontification and advertising for their own network.
PBS is actually SHOWING the convention."
And Daniel and Jill
Pitterle shared their thoughts on a changing
"Come in off the
coasts, we are having a great time here in
What did you think about the convention coverage? How did you get your news last week?
Read more feedback from viewers on PBS Engage and share your thoughts below!
So let's take the few moments to look at stories that delved into some of the issues that the Republican National Convention raised about the party, and how the McCain-Palin ticket may handle these questions in the weeks ahead.
How can the GOP capture the Youth Vote? NewsHour's Ray Suarez spoke with the chair of the College Republicans.
Tavis Smiley's Young Voices blog looked at where African-Americans stand in the Republican party, and why there were so few of them on the convention floor.
NOW on PBS asks if the Republican moderates are ready for the right-wing Palin pick, and talks to journalist Amy Goodman about her arrest at the RNC protests.
Slate explains why and how candidates are vetted.
And to relive the week in St. Paul, just take a look back at the Twitter search for all live updates about the RNC
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has a habit of including Sen. John McCain's middle initial, 'S' when she refers to the presidential candidate.
"And I accept the privilege of serving with a man who has come through much harder missions ... and met far graver challenges ... and knows how tough fights are won - the next president of the United States, John S. McCain."
Could this be a not-so-subtle comparison to another presidential 'S'?
Harry S Truman's legacy has much in common with the Republican nominee. While he was a Democrat raised in the tradition of the Midwest party machine, he was also a combat veteran and his military experience played a large role in his campaign. Others like David Colburn in the Chicago Tribune, have pointed out further similarities.
"But like Truman, McCain does not hesitate to speak his mind. He has also been accused of being impatient and having a temper, much like Truman," Colburn wrote.
McCain's remarkable service is everywhere in this campaign, on both sides of the aisle - Sen. Barack Obama paid homage to him at the Democratic convention in Denver last week, and the RNC's 'Service' and 'Country First' signs leave little to the imagination.
To get a larger sense of how presidents' military experience influenced their campaigns, check out this clip from American Experience. Did it matter that Harry Truman was a combat veteran? Will McCain's experience in Vietnam make a difference in 2008?
There's only one story here in St. Paul, and that's Sen. McCain's vice presidential pick, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
While the delegates and GOP leaders are clearly staying on message about the surprising pick, there's much speculation happening in the halls beyond the Xcel Center floor. Does the resounding chorus of excitement inside the Xcel Center extend beyond the convention? How is the Palin pick playing in communities across the U.S.?
Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni reports that he's seeing a change in the communities the project covers and how they feel about the GOP pick.
"I'm seeing real polarization in our places from Palin. People are falling into their traditional voting patterns -- defending or detracting. That said the "battleground" community types -- Monied Burbs and Service Workers in particular -- are confused and don't seem to understand the pick.
Chinni added that "One of my folks in Los Alamos thinks that Sarah has actually united Hillary supporters somewhat ... behind Obama."
Back in St. Paul, women leaders from the business world and the Republican party challenged that notion, likening Palin to Clinton and slamming the media for their "sexist" portrayal of Palin.
"Clinton highly tuned women's ears to objectionable, sexist attacks," Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and McCain adviser Carly Fiorina said. And ex-Mass. Governor Jane Swift had strong words for the media, calling the Palin coverage an "outrageous smear campaign."
Will Palin's speech to the convention create an image for her beyond the brief glimpse we got last weekend and update the image that party representatives and the media have created ahead of time?
Now that Gustav has subsided and the Republican convention is back on schedule, there are only two things buzzing around the newsroom and convention hall floors.
The first is the continuing gossip and speculation around VP pick Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The other is the counter-convention being hosted across the river in Minneapolis by GOP Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul.
While Palin has yet to make an appearance at the convention, she's everywhere as far as what people are talking about.
For a look at how social conservatives are reacting to Palin, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly's Kim Lawton reports that delegates are "excited" despite the news that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant.
Back in June, a Real Clear Politics opinion piece laid forth just what's being talked about today - Palin as a savvy choice that shouldn't have come as such a shock to the political world.
But is Bristol Palin the first nominee's daughter to be pregnant during a campaign? We may never know, but Slate does the math on some former candidates' kids.
And as for that other convention, Ron Paul's supporters have been out in force, with a huge lineup of celebrities and politicians touting their cause. It's even being broadcast live on the campaign's website. Looking more like a concert tailgate than a political convention, NewsHour's audio slideshow gives an inside look at what it's like at the Campaign for Liberty events.
Between the Palin buzz, the protests yesterday, and the counter-convention, there are certainly stark differences between this week's RNC and last week's Democratic convention in Denver. Congressional Quarterly has a fun chart looking at the causes celebres in both places, from favorite accessories to Daily Show correspondents.
How will the speeches and order of the convention play against the side stories that have kept the media occupied before the real conventioneering begins?
While the convention celebrations took on a subdued note upon Hurricane Gustav's approach to the Gulf Coast, the anti-war protests in downtown St. Paul had a swirl of energy that was lacking on the convention floor.
Minnesota Public Radio reported that police had fired tear gas at protesters and that some had been arrested outside of the official march route. Earlier in the day, things seemed calmer, but there were thousands of protesters touting various issues on the streets. Here are some scenes that I shot along the march route.
Inside the convention hall, Laura Bush and Cindy McCain urged delegates to visit CauseGreater, listing official state organizations that are donating to hurricane relief. For a more comprehensive list of organizations by topic, the Network For Good site compiles a large list of organizations in the Gulf that take donations for assistance in hurricane-stricken areas.
What do you think of the RNC's decision to scale back? Should the protesters have held off until after the hurricane subsided to hold their protest as well?


The truth is still emerging about the mass murder of more than 100 California-bound emigrants in Utah in 1857, and about the role of leaders of the Mormon Church in the atrocity.
On August 3, 1999, a backhoe operator powered his shovel into a hard-packed mound of earth at a remote site in the southwestern corner of Utah, and to the shock of those watching, the bucket emerged with more than 30 pounds of human skeletons. The excavation, part of a renovation of a crumbling monument, had not only uncovered an old burial site but also exposed anew one of the enduring controversies in American history.
Nearly a century and a half before in that spot, as many as 140 men, women, and children, traveling in one of the richest California-bound wagon trains ever assembled, had been attacked, besieged for five days, persuaded to surrender under a flag of truce and a pledge of safe passage, and then murdered. According to contemporaneous accounts, including the evidence presented at the trial of the one figure held legally responsible for the murders, John Doyle Lee, the attack on the train and the ensuing killings were carried out by a combined force of Paiute Indians and members of a local militia of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons. Lee was an adopted son and longtime intimate and military commander of the Mormons’ leader, Brigham Young, and the atrocity he was part of, known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre after the pastoral valley where the murders took place, was the worst in the annals of the West. Now, as then, however, the full story of what happened on September 11,1857—who was responsible, and why, how the tragedy unfolded, and, not least, its restless legacy embroiling one of the richest and fastestgrowing religious movements in the world—has remained one of history’s most stubborn mysteries.
Before the backhoe incident took place, the Mountain Meadows Association, a group the Salt Lake Tribune has described as “an unusual mix of historians and descendants of massacre victims and perpetrators,” had expressed concern about “the deplorable condition of the site” and appealed to the owners of the land, the Mormon Church, to rebuild an old memorial rock cairn. LDS officials had agreed in 1998 to restore the gravesite. The church hired Shane Baker, an archeologist from Brigham Young University, to examine the area before any earthmoving equipment was sent in. “There are a million different stories about how many victims there were and where their bodies are buried,” Christopher Smith, a Tribune journalist, later explained, “and the last thing the church wanted was to dig up any bones and set off a public controversy.” Most experts believe the cairn marked the burial site of only some of the victims; the remains of the rest have never been located, nor, strangely, has any physical evidence of the event itself, such as bullets or wagon parts.
In 1999 scientists working on behalf of the church used aerial photographs, metal detectors, core soil sampling, and ground-penetrating radar for a noninvasive study of the location. Forensic geologists and geophysicists searched for anomalies in the soil pattern: chemical concentrations of calcium, for instance, that would indicate where burials had taken place. All the while, church leaders went to great lengths to keep the renovation secret from public and press. Then, on August 3, church officials announced that the digging could go ahead without disturbance. Baker had found that “the archaeological evidence was 100 percent negative,” as he told a reporter, so the excavation began.
On making their grim discovery, the men at the backhoe that August morning were first inclined, one of them admitted later, to dump the shovel’s load right back in the hole and swear one another to secrecy. But discovering that there were specific state laws about handling excavated remains, they eventually decided to call Washington County Sheriff Kirk Smith, who drove out to the cairn. “It was a very humbling, spiritual experience,” Sheriff Smith recalled. “I saw buttons, some pottery, and bones of adults and children. But the children—that was what really hit me hard.”
After a flurry of meetings, discussions, and phone conversations, the Utah state archeologist, Kevin Jones, explained that state law required that any unidentified human remains found on private property be forensically examined and that failure to comply would be a criminal felony. Jones issued a permit to allow scientists to determine the age, sex, race, stature, health condition, and cause of death of those whose remains had been found, and to segregate them for individual and proper reburial. Utah’s governor, Mike Leavitt, who happened to be a descendant of a participant in the massacre, was in the discussions and asked that the bones be quickly reburied, ordering state officials to find administrative or other means to do so.
Teams of anthropologists, archeologists, and other scientists around Utah began working long hours poring over the remains as fast as possible. They were intrigued by the discovery and well aware of what one newspaper editor called Utah’s “unique church-state tango.” “This [kind of work] is giving the dead a chance to speak,” said Shannon Novak, a University of Utah forensic anthropologist whose analysis of a mass grave in Croatia had helped lead to the prosecution of Serbian war criminals. But neither Novak nor her colleagues were prepared for what they would find among the victims at Mountain Meadows.
Reconstructing some 18 different skulls from 2,605 pieces of bone from 28 victims, including women and children, the scientists produced the first physical evidence in a long and disputed history. The investigation “suggests the killing of women and children may have been more complicated than [in previous] accounts,” Dr. Novak wrote in her final study, presented last October to the Midwest Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Association. Among other revelations, the examinations disclosed that some of the victims, including several women and at least one child, had been killed while facing their executioners head-on, by point-blank gunshots between their eyes, rather than by being shot in the back while fleeing, as earlier accounts had claimed.
Further, it became evident that the murders had been committed by white men rather than by the Paiute Indians commonly blamed for all the attacks on the women and children. And it was especially clear that John D. Lee, the one man ever held accountable for the crime, could not possibly have acted alone in a mass murder of this magnitude. Paiute leaders say the new forensic evidence supports their own oral histories that the tribe has been wrongfully blamed.
Novak’s examination was still not completed in crucial aspects, including DNA testing, when the bones were reburied, under orders from Governor Leavitt. Marian Jacklin, a U.S. Forest Service archeologist, was one of the many who fought the state’s decision to halt the inquiry. “Those bones could tell the story and this was their one opportunity,” she said. “I would allow my own mother’s bones to be studied in a respectful way if it would benefit medicine or history.”
The brief episode of revelation and suppression sparked heated charges and countercharges. Hundreds of victims’ relatives around the country petitioned the state of Utah to retrieve the remains of their ancestors; some demanded DNA testing. More than 28,000 hits were recorded on a once obscure Internet Web site about the massacre. The governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, speaking for descendants living in his state, requested federal stewardship of the site, which would remove it from church control. “It’s like having Lee Harvey Oswald in charge of JFK’s tomb,” said Scott Fancher, a descendant of one of the leaders of the wagon train.
The contemporary conflict is only the latest episode in the often stormy 144-year aftermath of the massacre. It all comes down to a still-unfinished search for meaning and responsibility. Bvt. Maj. James H. Carleton summed up the problem in a special report to Congress in 1859: “In pursuing the bloody thread which runs throughout this picture of sad realities, the question how this crime, that for hellish atrocity has no parallel in our history, can be adequately punished often comes up and seeks in vain for an answer.”
Carleton, commanding a troop of U.S. dragoons from California, had been among the first federal officers to investigate the incident, two years after it happened. According to his official report, his men found 34 exposed skeletons and buried them in a grave marked with a rough stone cairn. They placed a 24-foot cedar cross on top with the defiant inscription “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Carleton’s epithet set off a checkered history of monuments. When the Mormon Church leader Brigham Young visited the site two years later, he pronounced his own imprecation: “Vengeance is mine, and I have taken a little.” He then lifted his right arm, according to Mormon histories of the event, and a band of Mormon men, including Governor Leavitt’s ancestor, destroyed the cairn and the cross and scattered the rocks. U.S. Army soldiers rebuilt the monument a year later, and once more Mormons tore it down. In 1932. the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association erected a nearly inaccessible stone marker two miles off the highway and atop a steep climb; it survived until 1990, though the church removed every road sign indicating it.
In the late 1980s, a group of John D. Lee’s descendants, including former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, began working to clear their ancestor’s name. Simultaneously, descendants of the Fanchers and Bakers—two of the families on the wagon train—began pressing the federal government for a new memorial. Responding to the descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators, the state of Utah built a granite wall on Dan Sill Hill, overlooking the site and bearing the etched names of 120 of the slaughtered pioneers and an inscription that read: “In Memoriam: In the valley below, between September 7 and 11, 1857, a company of more than 120 Arkansas emigrants led by Capt. John T. Baker and Capt. Alexander Fancher was attacked while en route to California. This event is known in history as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.”
The wall soon fell into disrepair, and within a decade descendants were once again pushing for a new monument. When plans for one got under way, they led to the accidental uncovering of the bones in the summer of 1999. Those examined bones were reburied just a little more than a month later, on September 10, 1999, near yet another plaque installed by the church, which reads in part: “In the early morning hours of September 7,  a party of local Mormon settlers and Indians attacked and laid siege to the encampment. For reasons not fully understood, a contingent of territorial militia joined the attackers. This Iron County Militia consisted of local Latter-day Saints acting on orders from their local religious leaders and military commanders headquartered thirty-five miles to the northeast in Cedar City.”
Through every successive version of the monument, the church has denied any responsibility for the massacre on the part of any of its headquarters authorities in Salt Lake City, including Brigham Young. The original official church version of the incident was that local Paiutes, provoked by depredations by members of the wagon train, had led the attack and carried out the executions. Mormon historians eventually included renegade zealots operating outside the control of the church as participants with the Paiutes, attributing their fanaticism to Utah’s pioneer theocratic distrust of government and fear of an impending invasion by American forces. “That which we the church have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment on the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day,” President Hinckley declared at the dedication of the 1999 marker.
Explanatory inscriptions have always tended to be cast in a vague passive voice, avoiding any indication of who attacked the train, who did the killings, or what came before or after. “The difficulty,” according to the Utah historian Will Bagley, “is how to tell the truth about it without it becoming a divisive and inflammatory issue.” The current monument, he says, “perpetuates an injustice by saying nothing of how these people died.” The New York Times correspondent Timothy Egan has called it “the most cryptic historical marker in the West.” In his 1999 book about the West, Lasso the Wind , Egan observed: “The most pedestrian of roadside historical markers in Utah is crammed with numbing detail about a simple crossing of a river, a first planting of a peach orchard…. But here, site of what was the worst carnage ever inflicted on a single band of overland emigrants in the entire nineteenth century expansion of the West, the stone has nothing to satisfy these questions.” For its part, the state of Utah “is not going to pursue any more interpretation of the site,” according to a State Parks official. “We’re not interested in stirring the pot.”
What really happened? “There is no politically correct way,” a Salt Lake Tribune reporter wrote in 1998, “… to spin historical fact to hide the ugly truth that God-fearing Utah Mormon pioneers, pitched into a religious and military frenzy, posed as rescuers of the wagon train only to summarily execute the emigrants….” As most versions agree, it was the worst butchery of white pioneers by other white pioneers in the whole colonization of America, and it was by definition an elaborate criminal conspiracy of planners, participants, and protectors. The murders were carried out with a grisly swiftness and precision that foreshadowed European and African atrocities of the next century. One of the participants, Nephi Johnson, remembered that the slaughter took no more than five minutes.
To comprehend what happened in those few minutes, one must understand something of the extraordinary emergence of the Mormons. Mormonism, born with one man’s vision and fueled by passions of persecution, was unlike any other creed in the United States. The religion’s founder was Joseph Smith, a farmer from Palmyra, New York, who was 21 when he began writing the Book of Mormon in 1827. His texts were derived, he said, from golden plates he had unearthed by angelic inspiration. In the early-nineteenth-century fervor of evangelical revivals, such supernatural visions were not unusual. According to his, Smith had been designated by God to lead the world’s “only true church,” which he called the Church of Jesus Christ, soon appending “of Latter-day Saints.” His followers became known as Mormons, and Smith himself as a “Prophet.”
“Joseph Smith’s was no mere dissenting sect,” the historian Fawn Brodie writes. “It was a real religious creation, one intended to be to Christianity as Christianity was to Judaism….” Prophet Smith would lead the “chosen people” with direct and continual revelations from God; they would follow with a highly disciplined and unquestioning submission. The movement’s clannishness and radical theology were both its strength and curse, drawing the Mormons into a prosperous and cohesive community while arousing the political, economic, and social fears and resentments of those they called “Gentiles.” When Smith’s followers still numbered only 40, an angry mob destroyed his baptism pool near Palmyra, prompting Smith to set his sights on the Western frontier. By the summer of 1831, his missionaries had converted 2,000 souls and migrated to Kirtland, Ohio. There, he was tarred and feathered, so they moved on to western Missouri—the original site, according to the Prophet, of the Garden of Eden—where they were met by a settlement of Mormon missionaries and converts and took on thousands more new converts, as well as the recurring enmity of local settlers. In October of 1838, Gov. Lilburn Boggs called for the Mormons’ extermination, prompting Smith and his followers to move in a mass migration to Nauvoo, Illinois.
Adding polygamy to their controversial doctrine, the Mormons fared little better with their new Illinois neighbors. The church now claimed to have as many as 200,000 members, with Smith the general of a 4,000-man army and commander of an elite military unit. As a presidential candidate in 1844, he advocated the polemical policies of abolishing slavery and putting the entire nation under theocratic rule. In June of that year, he was shot to death by anti-Mormon militiamen in Carthage, Illinois. The atmosphere of persecution and insularity, piety and spiritual supremacy, zealotry and vengeance that Smith’s death and martyrdom heated up would culminate in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Brigham Young, an uneducated but charismatic New York carpenter, succeeded Smith as the new Prophet and led the growing congregation for the next three decades. George Bernard Shaw called Young the American Moses; his exodus ended in July 1847 in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Young and his followers waged over the next decades a bitter struggle with the U.S. government to establish a theocracy apart from the rest of the nation.
With the 1849 California gold rush, Salt Lake City became a busy stopping-off point for wagon trains heading west. Utah’s Mormons at first welcomed the migrants, trading livestock and provisions for coveted household furnishings and other luxuries. But as the traffic thickened, in the early 1850s, the frictions between the Mormons and the “Gentile” world, especially the U.S. government, grew steadily.
President Zachary Taylor, the Mexican War hero elected in 1848, was avowedly hostile to the Mormons as both religious fanatics and a rival power center in the West. But after he died in 1850, his successor, Millard Fillmore, legitimized the Mormon theocracy, naming Young governor of the new Utah Territory. Following Fillmore, Franklin Pierce’s administration let the Mormon regime fasten its hold still tighter on Utah politics and society. By the time James Buchanan was elected, in 1856, the Mormons were defying every federal authority, from judges and U.S. marshals to Indian agents. Territorial officers were fleeing Utah. There followed increasing reports of Mormon clashes with emigrant parties headed to California, as well as with the government surveyor Capt. John W. Gunnison, who, along with members of his party, was massacred in south-central Utah while mapping a route for the transcontinental railroad. Church militia—“blue-eyed, white-faced Indians”—were said to be masquerading as Utah Paiutes in these confrontations. As the attacks became widespread, pressure mounted in Washington to take some action. At the same time, the emerging Republican party designated Mormon polygamy a “relic of barbarism” it would equate with slavery in its first national platform.
But perhaps even more relevant to the later events at Mountain Meadows was the role of a church doctrine more secret, sacred, and controversial than polygamy. The belief in “blood atonement”—that there are certain sins that can be forgiven only when the sinner’s own blood spills on the ground—was a reality not even the most sympathetic chroniclers of the church have been able to deny. “It would be bad history to pretend that there were no holy murders in Utah,” Wallace Stegner wrote gingerly but candidly in his classic book Mormon Country , “…that there was no saving of the souls of sinners by the shedding of their blood during the ‘blood atonement’ revival of 1856, that there were no mysterious disappearances of apostates and offensive Gentiles.”
By the winter of 1856–1857, Young was tormented by defections in his ranks. Responding with his “Mormon Reformation,” he had his church elders sweep through the communities of the territory “in an orgy of recrimination and rebaptism.” He instructed that backsliders were to be “hewn down.” His enforcement arm, called the Danites, for Sons of Dan, and commonly referred to as the Avenging Angels, gained especial notoriety.
By the spring of 1857, Young was flaunting his secessionist leanings, often whipping his audiences into an antigovernment frenzy as fervid as anything in the pre-Civil War South. Only a few months after taking office, Buchanan responded to the mass exodus of government agents—the “runaway officials,” as Washington called them—by ordering a punitive expedition to enforce the federal writ in Utah. By late that summer, troops under the command of U.S. Bvt. Brig. Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston were marching from Fort Leavenworth toward the remnants of Fort Bridger near the Wyoming-Utah border, a post the Mormon militia had burned down. Young prepared his followers for what was being called the Utah War. “We are invaded by a hostile force who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction,” he declared in a broadside proclamation on August 5, 1857.
“Into this cauldron of suspicion,” a historian later wrote, “came the unfortunate Fancher party en route from Arkansas to California.” A few on the train were affluent, some even wealthy—“livestock growers, drovers, and traders,” as one descendant described them. Others were cattlemen and thoroughbred-horse breeders from northwestern Arkansas. Most of the party were members of large families, the Bakers and Fanchers, heading to join relatives who had migrated the previous year to California’s Central Valley, where the range was free and land grants were available for men with prior military service. Most were newly married young couples; several had newborn infants and toddlers, and some wives were pregnant and destined to give birth on the trail. There were also many unmarried young men and women in their twenties, mostly cousins and childhood friends, and adults in their thirties with older children, along with a handful of aunts and uncles in their late forties. Accompanying them for security were at least 20 hired riflemen. Most of those not related by blood were old friends and longtime neighbors.
The company’s thoroughbred mare, One Eyed Blaze, was conspicuous. Another, a “black satin stallion,” as one account described him, was worth almost a million dollars in today’s value. The families were famous for their livestock, the best of which they were bringing with them: a thousand prize beef cattle, dairy cows providing fresh cream, butter, and milk along the way, and a choice herd of Kentucky racehorses. Among the valuables hidden in the floorboards of the wagons or in the ticking of the feather beds was as much as $100,000 in gold coins and other currency. The group carried quality weapons, mostly Kentucky muzzleloaders, and a stockpile of expensive ammunition and had along three elegant carriages, emblazoned with stag’s heads, for women to ride in.
Leading the train was Capt. Alexander Fancher, born the second of three boys in 1812. His elder brother, John, had moved from Arkansas to California in 1856 and urged Alexander and the younger brother, Richard, to join him. While Richard declined, Alexander eagerly prepared to take his wife, Eliza, and their nine children, four boys and five girls ranging in age from 18 months to 19 years. John and Alexander Fancher persuaded their friend John T. Baker, the 52-year-old patriarch of a close-knit clan of around 25, to join them. Baker’s eldest son, Jack, was a superior horseman who would play a key role in leading the train. Joining the Bakers and Fanchers would be the Dunlaps from Marion County: Jesse and his wife, Mary, and their six children, and Lorenzo and Nancy and their five children. One man, William Eaton, joined the group as a friend, with no blood relations. Among the many mysteries of the event are the identities of the dozens of others who left Arkansas with the Bakers, Fanchers, and Dunlaps. There was said to be a sheriff, a Methodist minister who performed services each morning and evening, a physician, two dozen horsemen who handled the livestock, some 50 marksmen, and at least three other families. It was to be Captain Fancher’s third trip to the coast, where he had already staked out a ranch for himself and where he expected to make a 500 percent profit on the cattle he trailed across the Plains, as he had done before.
On March 29, 1857, some 40 wagons carrying approximately 50 men, 40 women, and 50 children rolled out of Arkansas with their 1,000 cattle and 200 horses. They planned to rest their livestock and stock up on provisions in Salt Lake City. The party got there on August 3 and set up camp. But although the fields were obviously brimming, the Mormons refused to sell them any food.
A Mormon emissary approached them, urged them to turn the train south, where there was good pasture and food along the way. The train’s leaders discussed the routes and fell into a disagreement, after which the families in four wagons split off to head west along the well-mapped northern route. The rest of the party pulled out of Salt Lake City on August 5. Eaton, the Fanchers’ Arkansas friend, wrote a cheerful letter to his wife in Indiana before leaving the Utah capital. It would be the last communication from the group.
Seeing bountiful crops under cultivation, the emigrants sought to buy supplies in the town of Lehi. Again, all the farmers refused to sell to them. Later evidence revealed that church leaders had issued orders to the Mormons living in the small communities along the trail not to sell grain to the outfit. They were rebuffed again in the larger city of Provo. They passed through the communities of Springville, Spanish Fork, Payson, Nephi, Buttermilk Fort, and Fillmore, meeting the same refusal at every stop. Finally, at Corn Creek, some Native Americans sold them feed for their cattle. They set off from Corn Creek around August 25 and arrived two days later at the walled city of Parowan, where they would meet up with the Spanish Trail.
Parowan had been built with a Mormon fort against Indian attacks early in the settlement of the territory. But Young had since embraced the natives as fellow persecuted people who had been driven out of their homelands by the despised U.S. government, and by now the Mormons had made peace with them, even baptizing their famous chiefs, Wa-kara and Kanosh.
On Friday, September 4, just before sunset, the Fancher train entered Mountain Meadows, a five-mile-long valley surrounded by piñon-dotted foothills. Opening from a narrow entrance on the east and expanding into an oasis of creeks and cottonwoods, the meadow closed with a bottleneck exit into the rugged Beaver Mountains to the west. The travelers apparently thought the location was safe from Indian attacks, for they did not circle their wagons at night, as they had done throughout the journey.
On Sunday, September 6, the emigrants held a Sabbath service in a big tent they had faithfully transported across the country. Late that night, according to subsequent trial testimony, John D. Lee and his accomplices, some of them Indians, painted their faces and hid in the low hills surrounding the campsite. They took up strategic positions to prevent escapes, controlling access to the meadow from all sides. At dawn on Monday, the emigrants awakened and began their morning routines. Suddenly they heard shots. In the barrage that followed, 6 or 7 men from the wagon train were killed, 15 more wounded, and the other side suffered an unknown number of casualties. The pioneers had driven the enemy back, and they now dragged their wagons into a circular barricade. Apparently assuming they had been attacked by Paiutes, they dug a rifle pit while awaiting help from the neighboring Mormons.
The next day seemed to be a standoff, and the emigrants burrowed in further. Each time they ventured to the stream for water, they were turned back by bullets. On the fifth day of the siege, Friday, September n, Lee and a fellow Danite came into the camp carrying a white flag. They were greeted with cheers. Lee told the party that he had learned of the ambush, hastily recruited Mormons to come to the rescue, and gotten the Paiutes to agree to a truce. “When I entered the corral, I found the emigrants engaged in burying two men of note,” Lee would later write. “The men, women and children gathered around me in wild consternation. Some felt that the time of their happy deliverance had come … my position was painful, trying and awful, my brain seemed to be on fire.” If they relinquished their arms to the Mormons, he told them, they would be escorted safely out of the meadow.
The desperate emigrants agreed. All the children under eight—the age of “innocence,” according to Mormon doctrine —were placed in one wagon. The wounded men were placed in a second wagon, and both wagons rolled north out of the campsite. All the women followed, some carrying infants, and all the children over eight, who walked a few hundred feet, smiling and waving, as they caught a glimpse of the militia they thought had come to save them. Then came the men in single file, spaced several feet apart, each accompanied by an armed Mormon.
Suddenly, on a hill overlooking the site, another Danite raised his hand and shouted: “Halt! Do your duty!” At that command, each Mormon shot the man beside him, as others, including Indians, hiding in the embankment ahead, butchered the women and children.
The 18 surviving children, ranging in age from 18 months to 8 years, were weak from thirst, their skin and clothing smeared with the blood of their parents, brothers, and sisters. The killers spared these few and distributed them to local families. Over the next 75 years, some of them would tell the story often, even testifying in detail, but what they had seen always seemed unbelievable. Federal authorities rescued 17 of them in 1859, two years after they had been captured, and returned them to relatives in Arkansas.
By maneuvering politically with the backstage help of a figure who would be the Mormons’ most important defender, Young managed to stave off a federal investigation of the massacre for years. Thomas Leiper Kane, a wealthy Pennsylvanian who had met the Mormons during their exodus from Illinois, was Young’s lobbyist and veritable secret agent in Washington both before and after the Civil War. Kane first negotiated personally with General Johnston and ultimately concluded a deal with the Buchanan administration that forestalled any further federal invasion or punishment of past Mormon crimes in return for Young’s stepping down as territorial governor.
By 1859, stories about the massacre had been published in California and in underground Utah papers, covering Major Carleton’s discovery of skeletons, his initial investigation and report, and the rescue of the children. As the early accounts proliferated, the evidence of Mormon culpability grew, including eyewitness testimony from older surviving children, who had watched as white men washed off war paint in a stream, and reports of the rich spoils dispersed among local farmers or sent to Salt Lake City. This gathering evidence triggered a new wave of outrage and anti-Mormon sentiment throughout the country, but the atrocity was soon eclipsed by the tumult of Lincoln’s election and the outbreak of war.
In the post-Civil War period, the now-aging issue of the massacre surfaced again, during a renewed push for statehood. To appease antistatehood forces in Congress demanding some acknowledgment of and punishment for the incident, John D. Lee was the single Mountain Meadows culprit arrested. He went through two trials. At the first, in 1875,the jury of eight Mormons and four Gentiles predictably deadlocked, with all the Mormons voting for acquittal. Following a public outcry, Lee stood trial again the next year. Previously unavailable Mormon witnesses appeared with vivid testimony that marked him and absolved all higher church officials. He was convicted by an all-Mormon jury and ordered executed.
On the cold, windy morning of March 23, 1877, the condemned man wore a hat, coat, and muffler to the place of his execution, not far from the ground where he had given the order to execute his victims. Overgrazing and torrential floods in 1861 and again in 1873 had ravaged the rich emerald grass, but the slope and bend of the valley were much the same as when Lee and his men had ridden in nearly two decades before. Now he sat patiently on his coffin and waited as a photographer set up his equipment for the official pictures of the scene.
When the camera was ready and the five-man firing squad in place, anonymous behind covered wagons, Lee rose. “I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner,” he said. His accusers hoped that to spare himself in the final moment, he would at last incriminate Young, who government prosecutors believed had ordered him to commit the atrocity. Instead, Lee shook hands with a few men standing nearby and methodically removed his hat, coat, and muffler. Blindfolded, he gave the riflemen a final order: “Center my heart, boys. Don’t mangle my body.”
At the volley he fell back silently onto the rough-hewn coffin, his blood spilling into the ground in symbolism all Mormons understood. Two of his 64 children, by 18 wives, took his body to nearby Panguitch, with his temple robes under his corpse. Of the dozens, if not hundreds, of men complicitous in the massacre at Mountain Meadows, Lee was the only one ever brought to justice.
The story, it would seem, had been laid to rest. The markers at the site remained obscure and hard to reach, the history texts vague and exonerating of the Mormons. Despite all the agitation over the last 144 years, despite the volatility of the issues, and despite the connection with a religion of 11 million adherents, amazingly little has been written on the subject, and the event has been dealt with literarily mainly in fiction and in a handful of nineteenth-century anti-Mormon screeds. The original 1871 edition of Mark Twain’s Roughing It contained an appendix about the massacre that was deleted from most later editions. A few authors wrote of the “Avenging Angels,” most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet , but without mention of the massacre.
In 1945 the historian Fawn Brodie wrote a controversial biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History , for which she was excommunicated, and it encouraged Juanita Brooks to write her benchmark 1950 book, Mountain Meadows Massacre . That volume was an original attempt at exposing the massacre and its cover-up and resulted in the 1961 reinstatement of Lee into the Mormon Church. But only last year was it revealed that Brooks, herself a descendant of one of the participants, had admitted to burning crucial historical documents because “they were just too incriminating” of the church. The last critical study of the event was publishe a little-known nonfiction book written by a chill William Wise.
—by Stewart Udall, great-grandson of John D. Lee.Read at the reinterment in 1999.
What happened here that will not die? The Mountain Meadows Massacre is an American tragedy in a West full of atrocities. If the bones found in 1999 have been reinterred by official fiat, and most of the relics of the massacre remain undiscovered, the valley is still littered with the debris of unsettled history. For all the reconstructions of the scene, the precise site of the massacre has never been established. Nor do we know, except for the first fragments of evidence assembled by the scientists in 1999, exactly how the victims were killed and where more than a hundred bodies were disposed of.
This is an American mystery, and inextricably tied to that mystery is the question of Brigham Young’s part. Whatever other motives or circumstances shaped the terrible events of that September week, the extermination of the Fancher train was undeniably an act of religious fanaticism unparalleled by any other event in the country’s history. At the new millennium, the tragedy at Mountain Meadows was as hotly debated on the Internet and in e-mailed letters to the editor as it had been by telegraph and post during previous centuries. Today, as before, the conflict centers on the role of the religion’s revered Prophet Young, whose own reputation is in many ways indistinguishable from the institutional legitimacy of Mormonism. Brooks’s history leaves no doubt as to Young’s participation in the cover-up, but whether or not he officially ordered the deaths remains uncertain.
As a “Prophet, Priest, and Revelator” of the church, Young is deified and therefore considered not subject to the scrutiny or judgment of other mortals. “There has been no realistic handling of Young by Mormon scholars,” says the historian Will Bagley, himself a Mormon. “To continue to blame it on the Paiutes is disgraceful.” At stake is not only the esteem of the church within its own ranks of 11 million souls and as a $25 billion financial empire, but how it is seen by an outside world with which it has fashioned a respectable truce since overcoming the fears and suspicions of the nineteenth century.
Oddly enough, the most significant new contribution to the literature of the episode is the oldest published record. In the spring of 2000, the Western historian R. Kent Fielding compiled and edited all the Salt Lake Tribune ’s reports on the trials of John D. Lee, a comprehensive collection that presents an unmistakable portrait of Lee as a scapegoat and of Brigham Young as an active and impassioned participant camouflaging his own role in the massacre. The newspaper’s contemporaneous summaries of the trial transcripts show the involvement of dozens of Mormon leaders—from Philip Klingonsmith to William H. Dame, Isaac C. Haight, John M. Higbee, and many others—to have constituted an unbroken chain from church officials to their Prophet in Salt Lake City. The official concealment and subterfuge began, according to Lee’s later confession, the day after the massacre: The “brethren involved were sworn not to talk of it among themselves, and each one swore to help kill all who proved traitors to the Church or the people. … It was then agreed that Brigham Young should be informed of the whole matter.”
Fielding’s work, on the heels of a similarly revealing history of the massacre of Captain Gunnison and his party, establishes conclusively Brigham Young’s role in many depredations of the era, including Mountain Meadows, albeit most conclusively after the fact. The transcripts make clear that “the cause of justice in the Lee trials,” as Fielding wrote, “had been manipulated.”
Will Bagley takes it further. After a painstaking re-evaluation of original nineteenth-century sources and a fresh examination of supporting evidence in church documents, he contends that Young participated in the earliest decisions to slaughter everyone on the train. “He not only engineered the cover-up but gave orders to the Paiutes prior to the massacre about the distribution of the wagon train’s livestock,” Bagley concludes in his forthcoming work, The Blood of the Prophets , to be published next year by the University of Oklahoma Press. “Young was operating with a political purpose. He was in a terribly weak position with the U.S. government and had a ragtag militia and a ragtag group of Indians. His only hope against the federal government was to close the overland road to California.”
These events occurred at a time in history when instructions by cautious leaders were almost always oral. But it was also a time when an extraordinary amount of evidence was committed to writing. Young rarely met alone with any of his followers, and church records detailed every meeting with meticulous exactitude. “If the LDS church really wants to ‘heal,’ it will throw open its archives,” a dissident Mormon historian recently said. Such candor seems unlikely, however.
The backhoe incident, as the Tribune described it in a probing three-part series in March 2000, was “another sad chapter in the massacre’s legacy of bitterness, denial, and suspicion.” That series of articles prompted what The New York Times described last January as a “formal dressing-down” of the paper’s publisher by the church president Gordon Hinckley and has been cited as a primary reason behind the church’s intervention in a convoluted business transaction in which the rambunctious Tribune was sold to a company expected to be more congenial to church interests. Founded in 1871 by dissident Mormons who were then excommunicated by Brigham Young, the Tribune has been the independent voice of Utah’s non-Mormon minority for more than a century. But like the reburied remains, that voice just might be stifled as well.


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Victory At Last…Oil Billionaire, Benedict Peters, No Longer on Wanted List
The oil business world is like a perilous coast mired in storms. Through its turbulence, several men sail like desperate pirates, plundering across the seas for buried pearls and floating treasures. But the founder of Aiteo Group, Benedict Peters is one of Nigeria’s most industrious business icons, and very few men navigate the coasts like sea-hardened sailors. Armed with mulish resolve and steadfast spirit, they persevere through the ocean’s wildest tempests, holding course and clinging to starboard, till they chanced on the proverbial pliant course.
These are the risk-taking individuals that struck out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success, to prosper themselves and their society. Benny is one of the few people that would be sent to Mars and still treat it as a stepping stone to Saturn – the quality of constant invention and self-improvement that has earned him worldwide acclaim and prosperity.
Benny has survived several tempests that would have sunk a whole clan. For an ordinary businessman, that would have been the very end. But Benny is no ordinary man. And he re-laced his boots for the journey ahead. Today, he has good news to tell.
However, Peters is now a free man and can formally return to Nigeria at his convenience following the removal of his name from the list of wanted persons by the Nigerian government and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, who had previously declared him wanted on multiple alleged infractions.
Peters and his company, Aiteo Group had recorded victories in court against the EFCC, including getting a judicial order to get his name off the agency’s wanted list as the African billionaire fought doggedly to purge himself of the alleged infractions, accusing the anti-graft agency of a witchhunt and bias in its bid to present him as a business front for former Petroleum Resources Minister, Allison Madueke.
According to information doing the rounds, Peters’ is no longer on the government’s wanted list and is free to return to Nigeria without fear of being harassed or intimidated. The EFCC has also delisted his name from its most wanted persons’ list on its website, two years after the African billionaire was listed.
Interestingly, Justice Othman Musa, had in his March 22, 2018 ruling in the suit filed by Peters challenging his declaration as a wanted person, voided the action of the agency and subsequently ordered the EFCC to delist his name from its website.
However, like the proverbial fairy Prince, Peters makes magic; he achieves great feats far across the seas and international boundaries - a reality too many of his peers and associates readily attest to. Just recently, he was awarded mining licence in Congo with a company called Bravura. Findings revealed that he relocated to Ghana and now Congo, to experience fresh challenges and make even more exciting conquests. Now, he is reaping immensely from his quest.


Hip Hop Radio–
Stations with Genre Hip Hop
Hip Hop - Hot beats and rhymes for the ages
The New York borough of the Bronx witnessed, in a nondescript basement community room, a new musical genre that would conquer the world just two decades later. That's right, we're talking about hip-hop. Born out of necessity, from a lack of real instruments or other technology, hip-hop was the brainchild of deejays Kool Herc and Afrika Bambataa, who soon became its biggest names. As rappers finally took the stage and block parties rocked, the musical ingredients of world domination came together.
Run DMC achieved the first international breakthrough, followed by LL Cool J and Public Enemy. The '90s shook world culture with a wave of records and events. With NWA, Dr. Dre brought the West Coast to the forefront, while Tupac and Biggie Smalls (a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G.) made hip-hop headlines. Their feud resulted in two tragic deaths that have yet to be solved. In the meantime, the heirs to their legends claim chart supremacy. Jay-Z, Eminem and Kanye West take turns at the number-one spot. Whether your thing is old school or new school, conscious or crunk, techno rap or hardcore battle rap, radio.net has the right station for every hip-hop genre.


Other Rare Breeds
Didn't find a breed in the list that you were looking for? Let us know what we are missing by contacting us via email: email@example.com
This project is slowly adding breeds as we locate breeders wanting to participate. The list of the sheep we are anticipating to include can be found here . Let us know if you know of a breed that meets the following:
- is a "breed" (be homogenous in appearance; have characteristics that distinguish it from others of the same species and when bred together pass on these predictable traits to their offspring) not just a one off;
- exists in Australia; and
- is rare in Australia or considered at risk overseas.


1 box of chocolate cake mix (plus ingredients called for on the box, i.e. eggs, oil & water)
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
3 teaspoons of vanilla extract
4 cups confectioners’ sugar
4 tablespoons milk
Cadbury Crème Eggs (1 per cupcake)
Food coloring (optional)
Prepare cake batter according to box instructions.
Fill cupcake liners ⅓ full and place a Cadbury Egg (thick side first) down inside the batter
Bake cupcakes according to box instructions. Allow to cool in pans 15 minutes before frosting.
To make frosting: use an electric mixer to beat butter until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in confectioners’ sugar until fully incorporated. Beat in vanilla frosting. Pour in milk and beat for an additional 3 minutes.
Add food coloring (optional) to create desired color.
Recipe by Crazy About My Baybah at http://www.crazyaboutmybaybah.com/cadbury-egg-filled-easter-cupcakes-recipe/