Skydiver Luke Aikins has become the first person to successfully jump without a parachute

 

 

Luke Aikins

6:10 p.m.

Skydiver Luke Aikins has become the first person to jump from a plane into a net on the ground without the benefit of a parachute. Aikins hit the 100-by-100-foot net perfectly, quickly climbed out of it and walked over to hug his wife, who had been watching with other family members.
Just before climbing into a plane to make the jump, Aikins said he had been ordered to wear a parachute but indicated he wouldn't open it.
As the plane was climbing to 25,000 feet above the drop zone he said the requirement had been lifted and he took off the chute.
He fell for about two minutes, then flipped onto his back at the last second and landed perfectly to cheers from those gathered to watch.
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5:45 p.m.

Skydiver Luke Aikins says he learned just hours before his planned attempt to skydive from a plane into a net on the ground that he'd have to wear a parachute in order to do it.
He says he put it on but hinted strongly that he wouldn't open it.
In a live broadcast from the plane he'll jump from Aikins says wearing a parachute will make the jump more dangerous because he'll have its canister on his back when he hits the net at about 120 mph.
Aikins says he heard from the Screen Actors Guild that the jump couldn't go on unless he wore a parachute.
The jump is being broadcast live on the Fox network.
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5:30 p.m.

Skydiver Luke Aikins says he'll be wearing a parachute when he tries to become the first person to land in a net without using one.
Aikins revealed about an hour before his scheduled jump Saturday in Simi Valley, California, that the Screen Actors Guild told him the jump can't be done unless he wears a parachute.
He didn't elaborate but the jump is being broadcast on Fox television as part of a one-hour TV special.
Aikins says he is disappointed because wearing a chute will actually make it harder for him to properly put himself over the 100-foot-by-100-foot net.
He didn't say if he plans to actually open the parachute at any point.
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7 a.m.

Skydiver Luke Aikins figures his next leap into thin air will start pretty much like the thousands that preceded it, only with one small but significant difference.
This time when he steps out of a plane at 25,000 feet he won't take his parachute with him.
If all goes according to plan, he will land two minutes later in a trawler-like fishing net 20 stories above the ground and about a third the size of a football field.
His jump is being broadcast live on Fox TV at 8 p.m. EDT Saturday.
The 42-year-old daredevil has made 18,000 jumps.
He's done stunts for "Ironman 3" and other movies and trained elite skydivers.
But on Saturday he'll become the first skydiver to go from plane to planet Earth without a parachute.

Net imprint 1 hr after landing

                               Luke Aikins with his son Logan 

 Fox network will broadcast live Saturday night as Luke Aikins aims to land in a 20-story high net in California without crashing through or bouncing out.

He’s made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world’s most elite skydivers, done some of the stunts for Ironman 3. But the plunge Luke Aikins knows he’ll be remembered for is the one he’s making without a parachute. Or a wingsuit.
Or anything, really, other than the clothes he’ll be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at 25,000 feet this weekend, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net.
The Fox network will broadcast the two-minute jump live at 8pm ET (5pm PT) Saturday as part of an hour-long TV special called Heaven Sent.
And, no, you don’t have to tell Aikins it sounds crazy. He knows that. 
“If I wasn’t nervous I would be stupid,” the compact, muscular athlete says with a grin as he sits under a canopy near Saturday’s drop zone.
“We’re talking about jumping without a parachute, and I take that very seriously. It’s not a joke,” he adds.
Nearby, a pair of huge cranes define the boundaries where the net in which Aikins expects to land is being erected. It will be about one-third the size of a football field and 20 stories high, providing enough space to cushion his fall, he says, without allowing him to bounce out of it. The landing target, which has been described as similar to a fishing trawler net, has been tested repeatedly using dummies.
One of those 200-pound (91-kilogram) dummies didn’t bounce out. It crashed right through.
“That was not a good thing to see,” recalled Jimmy Smith, the veteran Hollywood public relations man who, with his partner Bobby Ware, came up with the idea of having someone skydive without a parachute.
Chris Talley, who had worked with Aikins on other projects and helped train him for this one, recommended the skydiver to the two Amusement Park Entertainment executives. He told them Aikins was arguably the only guy not only good enough but also smart enough and careful enough to survive this.
Smith recalled how the three men gazed at each other with a look of foreboding after that dummy crashed through the net. Then they looked over at Aikins.
“Luke just said: ‘No biggie, that’s why we test.’”
Fox has had little to say about the stunt other than it will be broadcast on a tape delay, as is the case with all its live broadcasts, says network spokesman Les Eisner. It contains a warning not to try this at home.
That would seemingly be difficult, as Smith and Ware had to scour a good part of the world, from Arizona Indian land to Dubai real estate, before they found what everyone agreed was the best place for Aikins to land.
He’ll come down in a dry, dusty, desolate-looking section of an old movie ranch north of Los Angeles, where not that long ago Shia LaBeouf was battling Transformers.
The drop zone, surrounded by rolling hills, presents some challenges, Aikins said, noting he’ll be constantly fighting shifting winds as he falls at 120 mph (193 kph).
Other skydivers have jumped from planes without parachutes and had someone hand them one in midair. But Aikins won’t even have that.
Why?
“To me, I’m proving that we can do stuff that we don’t think we can do if we approach it the right way,” he answers.
“I’ve got 18,000 jumps with a parachute, so why not wear one this time?” he muses almost to himself. “But I’m trying to show that it can be done.”

 

The Black Pearl

The best music of all times

 

                     

US-backed Syrian rebels beheaded a child

No any difference exists between the Syrian rebels and Assad regime, between the so called moderate rebels and Daesh. All they are the bloody butchers, criminals against humanity. Difference between them only in that that Assad is profitable for Putin but the 'moderate' rebels are profitable for USA.

And these are the 'good guys'! Sickening video shows US-backed Syrian rebels taunting and then brutally beheading a young boy because he was a 'spy'

Fighters from a US-backed Syrian militant group have been filmed brutally beheading a child as young as 11. 

The video captures Nour al-Din al-Zenki fighters in the back of a truck with a child they claim is an al-Quds soldier supporting Assad's Syrian forces.

One of the fighters shouts 'Allahu Akbar' meaning 'God is great' after taking a small knife to the boy's throat and cutting off his head in the Palesinian refugee Handarat Camp in Northern Aleppo. 

 The child, who is clearly under the age of 12, was arrested by the Islamist militants for allegedly being Palestinian Liwaa Al Quds, al-Quds Brigade fighter.

Sickening footage shot immediately before the boy is slaughtered shows him in ragged clothes surrounded by bearded militants in the back of a pick-up truck. 

One of them holds him by the hair and slaps him in the face. 

Judging by his ragged clothes and the marks on his arms, it appears the boy was impoverished and may have been tortured before he was murdered in the video, seen by MailOnline. 

The boy is placed face-down in the back of the truck with his arms tied behind his back when the executioner is handed a small knife by a fellow fighter. 

He then cuts the boy's throat before shouting 'Allahu Akbar' and holds his head aloft.

Before the video ends, he places the head on the boy's back before jumping down from the SUV.  

The video captures Nour al-Din al-Zenki fighters in the back of a truck with a child they claim is an al-Quds soldier on the Handarat front

Sickening footage shows the young boy - under the age of 12 - being killed in the back of a pick-up truck

Syria conflict: Boy beheaded by rebels 'was not fighter'

A Palestinian boy who was filmed being beheaded by Syrian rebels on Tuesday was not a fighter, a pro-government Palestinian militia has said.

The Liwa al-Quds (Jerusalem Brigade) said Abdullah Issa was just a 12-year-old from a poor refugee family who lived in a rebel-held area of Aleppo.
Members of the Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement are accused of killing him.
Some woman calling herself "a sister" of the boy filmed being beheaded by Syrian rebels has disputed a claim by a pro-government Palestinian militia that he was not a fighter. She later said on Facebook that he was a Syrian from Homs who went to "fight and defend his country".
Two short videos emerged online on Tuesday morning showing a boy being taunted and then beheaded by a group of Syrian rebels.
The first shows the frightened child, who could be as young as 10, sitting in the back of a pick-up truck, surrounded by five men.
One of the men grips him by the hair as they accuse him of being a member of Liwa al-Quds, a Palestinian militia that fights in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and was involved in clashes with rebels on Tuesday in Handarat, to the north of Aleppo.
The second video shows the boy's murder.
Liwa al-Quds issued a statement on Facebook saying that its investigation had found he was a 12-year-old Palestinian named Abdullah Issa, who lived in Mashhad with his family.
It also said he had apparently been receiving medical treatment before being seized, noting that one photograph showed an intravenous drip in his arm.
Liwa al-Quds accused the rebels of killing the child simply because he was Palestinian, in order to take "cheap and despicable revenge" for battlefield losses.

Female fakes

Women with cosmetics and without

 
  

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

Turkey's last hope dies

By Ralph Peters 

Friday night’s failed coup was Turkey’s last hope to stop the Islamization of its government and the degradation of its society.

 Reflexively, Western leaders rushed to condemn a coup attempt they refused to understand. Their reward will be a toxic Islamist regime at the gates of Europe.
Our leaders no longer do their basic homework.The media relies on experts-by-Wikipedia. Except for PC platitudes, our schools ignore the world beyond our shores. Deluged with unreliable information, citizens succumb to the new superstitions of the digital age.
So a great country is destroyed by Islamist hardliners before our eyes—and our president praises its “democracy.”
That tragically failed coup was a forlorn hope, not an attempt to take over a country. Turkey is not a banana republic in which the military grasps the reins for its own profit.  For almost a century, the Turkish armed forces have been the guardians of the country’s secular constitution. Most recently, coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 (with “non-coup” pressure in 1997) saw the military intervene to prevent the country’s collapse. 
 
Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.

Each time, the military returned the government to civilian rule as soon as that proved practical.  My own first experience of Turkey came just before the 1980 coup. Turkey was broke and broken. The economy was in such a shambles that you could not buy a cup of Turkish coffee in Istanbul. I walked because taxis and public transportation had no fuel.  Murderous political violence raged. Reluctantly, the generals stepped in and saved their country.
Friday night, mid-grade officers led a desperate effort to rescue their country again. They failed. The West cheered. Soon enough, we’ll mourn.
The coup leaders made disastrous mistakes, the worst of which was to imagine that the absence of President Erdogan from Ankara, the capital, presented the perfect opportunity.  Wrong.  In a coup, the key is to seize the leaders you mean to overthrow (as well as control of the media).  Instead of fleeing into exile, Erdogan was able to return in triumph.
So who is the man our own president rushed to support because he was “democratically elected?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan is openly Islamist and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Obama appears to believe represents the best hope for the Middle East. But the difference between ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t one of purpose, but merely of manners:  Muslim Brothers wash the blood off their hands before they sit down to dinner with their dupes.
With barely a murmured “Tut-tut!” from Western leaders, Erdogan has dismantled Turkey’s secular constitution (which the military is duty-bound to protect).  His “democracy” resembles Putin’s, not ours.  Key opposition figures have been driven into exile or banned.  Opposition parties have been suppressed.  Recent elections have not been held so much as staged.  And Erdogan has torn the fresh scab from the Kurdish wound, fostering civil war in Turkey’s southeast for his own political advantage.
Erdogan has packed Turkey’s courts with Islamists.  He appointed pliant, pro-Islamist generals and admirals, while staging show trials of those of whom he wished to rid the country.  He has de facto, if not yet de jure, curtailed women’s freedoms.  He dissolved the wall between mosque and state (Friday night, he used mosques’ loudspeakers to call his supporters into the streets).  Not least, he had long allowed foreign fighters to transit Turkey to join ISIS and has aggressively backed other extremists whom he believed he could manage.
And his diplomatic extortion racket has degraded our own military efforts against ISIS.
That’s the man President Obama supports.
And the leaders of the ill-fated coup? What did they stand for?  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy and a secular constitution.  One of the great men of the last century, Ataturk (an innovative general by background) pulled Turkey from the wreckage of World War One, abolished the caliphate, suppressed fanatical religious orders, gave women legal rights and social protections, banned the veil, promoted secular education for all citizens of Turkey, strongly advocated Westernization and modernization…and promoted a democratic future.
The officers who led the collapsed coup stood for all those things. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry opposed them.
By Saturday morning, it was clear that the mullahs and mobs behind Erdogan had won. Erdogan will use the coup as an excuse to accelerate the Islamization of his country and to lead Turkey deeper into the darkness engulfing the Muslim world. His vision is one of a neo-Ottoman megalomaniac.
NATO, which operates by consensus, will find itself embracing a poisonous snake.  New crises will reawaken old fears in southeastern Europe, which western European states will dismiss condescendingly, further crippling the badly limping European Union.  Syria will continue to bleed.  And educated, secular Turks will find themselves in a situation like unto that of German liberals in the 1930s.  We may see new and unexpected wars.
A desperate, ill-planned coup has failed in Turkey. Here comes the darkness.

This good lad, bull Lorenzo destroyed at last such an abominable flayer, matador Victor Barrio

 

Matador Victor Barrio killed by bull in Spain


   Dog fighting, cock fighting - so many vestiges from dark barbarous times are remained in many so called civilized countries.
   The essence of all these entertainments is the same - making dirty immoral money and savage cruelty towards innocent living creatures.
   Indulging the vile instincts of the dirty black ass Spanish crowd, the flayers-matadors in gorgeous garments for a long time with impunity tormented defenseless animals.
   And at last some kind of just retribution came - this good lad, bull Lorenzo, destroyed one of these abominable flayers, butcher Victor Barrio.
   You are surely a good lad, bull Lorenzo!

  

   

  The just retribution came

The flayer, loser Victor Barrio

From Wikipedia

Bullfighting is now banned in many countries; people taking part in such activity would be liable for terms of imprisonment for animal cruelty. "Bloodless" variations, though, are permitted and have attracted a following in California, Texas, and France. In southern France, however, the traditional form of the corrida still exists and it is protected by French law. However, in June 2015 The Paris Court of Appeals removed bullfighting/"le corrida" from France's cultural heritage list. While it is not very popular in Texas, bullfighting is legal (the only U.S. state to allow it), and both bloodless and pure forms of bullfighting occur at rodeos in small Texas towns.
In 1991, the Canary Islands became the first Spanish Autonomous Community to ban bullfighting, when they legislated to ban bullfights and other spectacles that involve cruelty to animals, with the exception of cockfighting, which is traditional in some towns in the Islands. In the rest of Spain, national laws against cruelty to animals have abolished most blood sports, but specifically exempt bullfighting.
Several cities around the world (especially in Catalonia) have symbolically declared themselves to be Anti-Bullfighting Cities, including Barcelona in 2006. This was symbolic, as the city did not have the power to stop it. However, on 1 January 2012, it became prohibited in Catalonia (including Barcelona, the capital of this region) after a ban passed in the Regional Government in July 2010 came into effect in 2012.

The secrets of girls' flirt and actress play

The novel "Wives and Daughters" of Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 21.
The action takes place in England in the early 19th century.
One of the novel's characters, Cynthia is a very beautiful and graceful girl educated and polished in some French school.
The other character, Roger is a graduate of Cambridge University, the son of a big landowner. 

"The grave eyes that the latter (Cynthia) raised when she had to be presented to Roger had a sort of child-like innocence and wonder about them, which did not quite belong to Cynthia’s character. She put on her armour of magic that evening - involuntarily as she always did; but, on the other side, she could not help trying her power on strangers."
"...the animated tête-à-tête going on between Roger and Cynthia. Or rather, it would be more correct to say that Roger was talking in a most animated manner to  Cynthia, whose sweet eyes were fixed upon his face with a look of great interest in all he was saying, while it was only now and then she made her low replies."
(After the party) "When they got home Mr and Mrs Gibson (her parents) were sitting in the drawing-room, quite ready to be amused by any details of the evening.
Cynthia began,: ‘Oh! it wasn’t very entertaining. One didn’t expect that,’ and she yawned wearily.                 
(about Roger) ‘Oh! he’s nothing like so handsome as his brother; nor so polished; nor so easy to talk to. He entertained me for more than an hour with a long account of some examination or other; but there’s something one likes about him' "