City, Cubs push $500 million Wrigley renovation

FILE - In this April 4, 2012 file photo, Chicago Cubs players work out at Wrigley Field in Chicago, the day before their home-opener baseball game. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations between the Ricketts family that owns the Cubs and the city say the two are near an agreement on a $500 million project at Wrigley Field. The people spoke Friday, April 5, 2013, on condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet finished and they are not authorized to publicly discuss it. The deal calls for $300 million in renovations at Wrigley and a $200 million hotel nearby. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

FILE - In this April 4, 2012 file photo, Chicago Cubs players work out at Wrigley Field in Chicago, the day before their home-opener baseball game. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations between the Ricketts family that owns the Cubs and the city say the two are near an agreement on a $500 million project at Wrigley Field. The people spoke Friday, April 5, 2013, on condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet finished and they are not authorized to publicly discuss it. The deal calls for $300 million in renovations at Wrigley and a $200 million hotel nearby. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

FILE - In this April 4, 2012 file photo, people walk outside Wrigley Field in Chicago. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations between the Ricketts family that owns the Chicago Cubs and the city say the two are near an agreement on a $500 million project at Wrigley Field. The people spoke Friday, April 5, 2013, on condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet finished and they are not authorized to publicly discuss it. The deal calls for $300 million in renovations at Wrigley and a $200 million hotel nearby. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 30, 2010 file photo, baseball fans sit in one of the many rooftop venues outside Wrigley Field in Chicago to watch a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and Pittsburgh Pirates. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations between the Ricketts family that owns the Cubs and the city say the two are near an agreement on a $500 million project at Wrigley Field. The people spoke Friday, April 5, 2013, on condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet finished and they are not authorized to publicly discuss it. A group of owners of the famed rooftops across the street where fans flock to watch the games threaten legal action if the renovations does anything to obstruct their views. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2011 file photo, Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts smiles near the statue of Ron Santo outside Wrigley Field in Chicago. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations between the Ricketts family that owns the Cubs and the city say the two are near an agreement on a $500 million project at Wrigley Field. The people spoke Friday, April 5, 2013, on condition of anonymity because the deal was not yet finished and they are not authorized to publicly discuss it. The deal calls for $300 million in renovations at Wrigley and a $200 million hotel nearby. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)

CHICAGO (AP) ? The historic home of the Chicago Cubs will get a $500 million facelift, including its first electronic outfield video board, as part of a hard-fought agreement announced Sunday night between the City of Chicago and the ball team.

Wrigley Field also will host an expanded number of night games under the announced pact, as part of Cubs owner Tom Ricketts' plans to renovate the second-oldest ballpark in the major leagues, boost business and make baseball's most infamous losers competitive again.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel hailed what the two sides called a "framework" agreement in a joint statement issued Sunday night, noting that it includes no taxpayer funding. That had been one of the original requests of the Ricketts family in a long-running renovation dispute that at times involved everything from cranky ballpark neighbors to ward politics and even the re-election campaign of President Barack Obama.

"This framework allows the Cubs to restore the Friendly Confines (of Wrigley) and pursue their economic goals, while respecting the rights and quality of life of its neighbors," Emanuel said in a news release sent to The Associated Press.

Still uncertain was how the agreement will sit with owners of buildings across the street from Wrigley who provide rooftop views of the ball games under an agreement with the Cubs that goes back years. This month they threatened to sue if the renovations obstruct their views, which they claimed would drive them out of business. Messages left late Sunday with a spokesman for the rooftop owners was not immediately returned.

The statement from Emanuel's office says a "video board" is planned for left field and a second sign would be erected in right field patterned on an existing Toyota sign in left field. The statement does not indicate how large the video screen or second sign would be, saying only that "the Cubs will work with the city on placement of both ... to minimize impact on nearby rooftops to the extent consistent with the team's needs."

The city and ball club said they hoped that the agreement would allow the Cubs to obtain necessary city approvals for the work by the end of the current baseball season.

The Ricketts family, which bought the Cubs in 2009 for $845 million, initially sought tax funding for renovation plans. With that out in the new agreement, the owners will seek to open new revenue streams outside the stadium. Under the agreement, the Ricketts family would be allowed to build a 175-room hotel, a plaza, and an office building with retail space and a health club.

Also included in the agreement are plans for 40 night games, four yearly concerts and easing of restrictions on smaller events. Currently the team plays about 30 night games. The plan also addresses chronic complaints about parking in the densely populated Wrigleyville neighborhood, including the addition of 1,000 "remote" parking spots that will be free and come with shuttle service.

"We are anxious to work with our community as we seek the approvals required to move the project forward," Ricketts said in the statement.

The site of Babe Ruth's "called shot" home run in the 1932 World Series and more heartbreak than Cubs fans would like to remember, the 99-year-old Wrigley is only younger than Boston's Fenway Park. It has long been a treasured showplace for baseball purists ? night games were only added in 1988 ? but team officials for years have desperately wanted a true upgrade, saying it costs as much as $15 million a year just to keep up with basic repairs.

The ballpark has also played no small part in the lore of the team, as fans were reminded April 10 when someone delivered a goat's head in a box addressed to team chairman Tom Ricketts. Neither the team nor the Chicago Police Department have talked about a possible motive for the strange delivery, but as every fan knows it was in the 1945 World Series when a tavern owner arrived at the park with his pet goat ? which had a ticket. According to legend, the owner was told that the goat smelled and was denied entry. The angry tavern owner then put the "Curse of the Billy Goat" on the Cubs and, this is the part the fans know the best, the team has not been back to the World Series ever since.

Getting to an agreement hasn't been easy. After failing to reach an agreement when Mayor Richard Daley was in office, the family kept talking after Emanuel took office in 2011. Emanuel the next year said city officials and the Ricketts family were in the "final stages" of talks on a renovation plan that could include public help.

But even presidential politics presented an obstacle for the plans at one point.

During the 2012 election, the patriarch of the Ricketts family, which created the TD Ameritrade brokerage firm, was considering a $10 million campaign against President Obama that would refer to the racially incendiary sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright at a Chicago church Obama once attended. J. Joseph Ricketts dropped the proposal, but the episode brought a huge dose of unwanted bad press.

The news especially angered Emanuel, Obama's former White House chief of staff. Emanuel, staffers said, was so livid he refused to take phone calls from Tom Ricketts.

In recent weeks, fans also had to deal with the unlikely specter of the Cubs leaving Chicago. With the talks bogged down, the mayor of nearby Rosemont piped up, saying the village located near O'Hare International Airport would be willing to let the Cubs have 25 acres free of charge to build a replica of Wrigley Field.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-15-Cubs-Wrigley/id-d2f94064a4ff44c89b7533875fbc5b53

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1 dead, 1 missing after avalanches hit Washington state

By Elaine Porterfield

SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) - A woman died and a man was missing and presumed dead after two avalanches struck mountains in Washington state at the weekend, authorities said on Sunday.

The avalanches struck within a few miles of each other at noon on Saturday in an area popular for winter sports about an hour east of Seattle. Both victims were snowshoeing when hit, officers at the King County Sheriff's Office said.

The conditions were extreme enough on Sunday that rescuers were forced to call off the search for a 60-year-old man, who was swept away with two companions near Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascade Mountains,

The companions suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the 50-mph avalanche, which ran for more than a quarter mile, the sheriff's office said.

King County Sheriff's Sergeant Cindy West said she had few details about the missing man except that he was an experienced outdoorsman.

In the other incident, near the Alpental Ski Area, a woman who later died was buried under six feet of snow for about 45 minutes, the sheriff's office said.

The woman, who has not been publicly identified, was alive but suffering from hypothermia and other possible injuries when rescuers arrived the scene more than two hours later. Near white-out conditions prevented the use of a helicopter, and rescuers were forced to bring the woman out by sled, the sheriff's office said.

The woman was declared dead at around midnight. The King County Medical Examiner's office has yet to announce the exact cause of death.

Another snowshoer from the group suffered hypothermia and was helped off the mountain by rescuers, authorities said.

(Editing by Edith Honan and David Brunnstrom)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/woman-dead-man-missing-avalanches-hit-washington-state-005617476.html

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Bronze warship ram reveals secrets

Apr. 4, 2013 ? Analysis of a bronze battering ram from a 2000 year-old warship sheds light on how such an object would have been made in ancient times.

Known as the Belgammel Ram, the 20kg artefact was discovered by a group of British divers off the coast of Libya near Tobruk in 1964. The ram is from a small Greek or Roman warship -- a "tesseraria." These ships were equipped with massive bronze rams on the bow at the waterline and were used for ramming the side timbers of enemy ships. At 65cm long, the Belgammel Ram is smaller in size and would have been sited on the upper level on the bow. This second ram is known as a proembolion, which strengthened the bow and also served to break the oars of an enemy ship.

Leading marine archaeologist, Dr Nic Flemming a visiting fellow of the National Oceanography Centre, co-ordinated a team of specialists from five institutes to analyse the artefact before it was returned to the National Museum in Tripoli in May 2010. Their results have been published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

Dr Flemming said: "Casting a large alloy object weighing more than 20kg is not easy. To find out how it was done we needed specialists who could analyse the mix of metals in the alloys; experts who could study the internal crystal structure and the distribution of gas bubbles; and scholars who could examine the classical literature and other known examples of bronze castings.

"Although the Belgammel Ram was probably the first one ever found, other rams have since been found off the coast of Israel and off western Sicily. We have built a body of expertise and techniques that will help with future studies of these objects and improve the accuracy of past analysis."

Dr Chris Hunt and Annita Antoniadou of Queen's University Belfast used radiocarbon dating of burnt wood found inside the ram to date it to between 100 BC to 100 AD. This date is consistent with the decorative style of the tridents and bird motive on the top of the ram, which were revealed in detail by laser-scanned images taken by archaeologist Dr Jon Adams of the University of Southampton.

It is possible that during its early history the bronze would have been remelted and mixed with other bronze on one or more occasions, perhaps when a warship was repaired or maybe captured.

The X-ray team produced a 3-D image of the ram's internal structure using a machine capable of generating X-rays of 10 mevs to shine through 15cm of solid bronze. By rotating the ram on a turntable and making 360 images they created a complete 3-D replica of the ram similar to a medical CT scan. An animation of the X-rays has been put together by Dr Richard Boardman of m-VIS (mu-VIS), a dedicated centre for computed tomography (CT) at the University of Southampton.

Further analysis was carried out by geochemists Professor Ian Croudace, Dr Rex Taylor and Dr Richard Pearce at the University of Southampton Ocean and Earth Science (based at the National Oceanography Centre). Micro-drilled samples show that the composition of the bronze was 87 per cent copper, 6 per cent tin and 7 per cent lead. The concentrations of the different metals vary throughout the casting. Scanning Electron Microscopy, SEM, reveals that the lead was not dissolved with the other metals to make a composite alloy but that it had separated out into segregated intergranular blobs within the alloy as the metal cooled.

These results indicate the likelihood that the Belgammel Ram was cast in one piece and cooled as a single object. The thicker parts cooled more slowly than the thin parts so that the crystal structure and number of bubbles trapped in the metal varies from place to place.

The isotope characterisation of the lead component found in the bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) can be used as a fingerprint to reveal the origin of the lead ore used in making the metal alloy. Up until now, this approach has only provided a general location in the Mediterranean. But recent advances in the analysis technique means that the location can be identified with higher accuracy. The result shows that the lead component of the metal could have come from a district of Attica in Greece called Lavrion. An outcome of this improved technique means that the method can now be applied to other ancient metal artefacts to discover where the ore was sourced.

Micro-X-Ray fluorescence of the surface showed that corrosion by seawater had dissolved out some of the copper leaving it richer in tin and lead. It is significant that when comparing photographs from 1964 and 2008 there is no indication of change in the surface texture. This implies that the metal is stable and is not suffering from "Bronze Disease," a corrosion process that can destroy bronze artefacts.

The Belgammel Ram was found by a group of three British service sports divers off the coast of Libya at the mouth of a valley called Waddi Belgammel, near Tobruk. Using a rubber dinghy and rope they dragged it 25 metres to the surface. It was brought home to the UK as a souvenir but when the divers discovered that it was a rare antiquity, the ram was loaned to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Ken Oliver is the only surviving member of that group of three and the effective owner. He decided in 2007 that is should be returned to a museum in Libya. With the help of the British Society for Libyan Studies this was arranged in 2010. During the intervening period Dr Nic Flemming invited experts to undertake scientific investigations prior to its return to Libya. These services were offered freely and would have cost many tens of thousands of pounds if conducted commercially. The team's objective was to understand how such a large bronze was cast, the history and composition of the alloy, its strength, how it was used in naval warfare, and how it survived 2000 years under the sea.

Since the Belgammel Ram was discovered, other rams have been found, some off the coast of Israel near Athlit, and more recently, off western Sicily. The latter finds look to be the remains of a battle site. On the 8^th April there is a one-day colloquium hosted by the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, to discuss the finds of the Egadi Islands Project.

Nic Flemming continued: "We have learned such a huge amount from the Belgammel Ram and have developed new techniques which will help us unpick future mysteries.

"We will never know why the Belgammel Ram was on the seabed near Tobruk. There may have been a battle in the area, a skirmish with pirates. It could be that it was cargo from an ancient commercial vessel, about to be sold as salvage. The fragments of wood inside the ram show signs of fire, and we now know that partsof the bronze had been heated to a high temperature since it was cast which caused the crystal structure to change. The ship may have caught fire and the ram fell into the sea as the flames licked towards it. Some things will always remain a mystery. But we are pleased that we have gleaned so many details from this study that will help future work."

The Libyan uprising of 2011 resulted in many battles in the area around the museum. Fortunately the museum suffered no damage. The Belgammel Ram is safe.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK).

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jonathan R. Adams, Annita Antoniadou, Chistopher O. Hunt, Paul Bennett, Ian W. Croudace, Rex N. Taylor, Richard B. Pearce, Graeme P. Earl, Nicholas C. Flemming, John Moggeridge, Timothy Whiteside, Kenneth Oliver, Anthony J. Parker. The Belgammel Ram, a Hellenistic-Roman BronzeProembolionFound off the Coast of Libya: test analysis of function, date and metallurgy, with a digital reference archive. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2013; 42 (1): 60 DOI: 10.1111/1095-9270.12001

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/SKbhmFPlIS0/130404122455.htm

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