Getting rid of the intentional foul in basketball

The NBA basketball championship playoffs are currently underway. Even though the Cleveland home team the Cavaliers are the defending champions, I am not a basketball fan and have not watched any of the games so far. Part of the problem is that it is a very fast moving game (when it is not stopped for timeouts and the like which are the bane of American sports but allow for plenty of commercials) and I do not know the finer points of tactics and strategy to fully appreciate what is going on.
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Why are people so afraid?

The first time I heard about what later became known as the case of the elderly man who was randomly selected and shot dead on the street and whose killer posted it on Facebook was when my wife got a telephone alert from the university where she teaches telling people that a shooter was on the loose and asking people not on campus to stay away and those on campus to get into lockdown mode. The puzzling thing was that the message mentioned the location of the shooting and it was several miles away from the university and there was no indication that it had anything to do with the university nor that the shooter was heading towards it. So why the warning?
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The bold and strange dialogue of Mary Worth

I have written about my love affair with newspaper comics before. From my childhood I have read the comics pages in the newspapers and continue to do so in my local newspaper the Plain Dealer. I used to read every single comic in it but after some time I stopped reading some of them because they were not simply not funny (Marmaduke for example) or because I was not interested in the dramatic ones that had long storylines like Spiderman or Judge Parker.
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Bump-and-run car thefts

If one is involved in a minor fender-bender accident, the natural instinct is to get out of the car and survey the damage. But it turns out that car thieves are exploiting this tendency to deliberately rear-end people’s vehicles and then taking the car keys and stealing the car from them when they exit the vehicle. Cleveland has seen such incidents and as result, the local police in my suburb have put out guidelines as to what to do if you are rear-ended.
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The astonishing story of how women got to run in the Boston Marathon

70-year old Kathrine Switzer ran and completed the Boston Marathon yesterday. Nowadays it is not unusual for women and older people to achieve such things but this is significant because 50 years ago, Switzer became the first woman to run in this race and what happened when she did so makes for an astonishing story that I wrote about two years ago and you can listen to her tell her story now in this video clip.
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Cleveland’s dubious claims to fame

The city of Cleveland has many desirable features. But these tend to be overshadowed by the many macabre criminal stories that have become associated with it that have garnered national and international attention. There were the so-called headless torso serial killings involving at least twelve victims back in the 1930s. Elliot Ness, who later became famous as an FBI investigator was police chief at the time. Then there was the Sam Sheppard case in 1954 that was reportedly the basis of the hit TV series and film The Fugitive.
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Wahoo under fire

The racist image of Chief Wahoo that adorns all kinds of merchandise for the Cleveland Indians has long been a flashpoint for controversy. Despite the protests against it, the team has kept it on, citing that hoary old excuse of ‘tradition’ when the likely reason is that many fans love it and are willing to find excuses, however weak, for keeping it on, and the team owners don’t want to offend them. The fact that the Indians went to the championship finals last year has brought more national attention to the image, and the reviews were not good.
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It gets even worse for United Airlines

Pretty much everyone is now aware of the incident in which airline security personnel forcibly ejected a 69-year year old passenger off a United Airlines flight after he refused to accept their cash offer to give up his seat to allow airline personnel to travel on that flight. The videos of the bloodied passenger being dragged off the plane have gone viral big-time. (If you are one of the few people who are not aware of this and have not seen the videos, see my earlier post.)
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Yet another reason to hate United Airlines

The behavior of United Airlines in assaulting a passenger who refused to be kicked off a flight to accommodate United employees was disgusting. Instead of increasing the incentives to take another flight, they resorted to beating up the man and carrying him off the plane. Astonishingly, the man appeared on the plane again later looking bloody, dazed, and confused.
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