Update Tuesday, 9:50 a.m.: I have no idea how this type of mix-up could happen at a medical examiner's office, but I don't think anyone's going to be complaining (this morning, at least). The Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office now says that the confirmed death toll has been revised down to 24. "We have got good news," Reuters quotes Amy Elliott, the office's chief administrative officer, as saying this morning. "The number right now is 24." She added, in an apparent explanation for the confusion, that "there was a lot of chaos," and that earlier figures may have included double-reporting of some casualties.

Chan’s study is the latest to show how easy it is to disrupt our memories, and supplant what we think we know with misinformation. In this case, he and colleague Jessica LaPaglia from Iowa State University showed volunteers the pilot episode of 24 and then selectively rewrote some of their memories of the show’s events. For example, some of the volunteers came to believe that an assassin (Mandy!) knocked out a flight attendant with a stun gun, when she actually used a hypodermic syringe.

It wasn’t just a simple matter of saying Mandy used a stun gun. That wouldn’t have worked. Instead, Chan and LaPaglia fed their volunteers with false information immediately after they had actively remembered what they had seen. Then, and only then, did the new memories overwrite their old ones.

The trick relies on a quirk of memory that has come to light in recent years. I’ve written about it before:

Every time we bring back an old memory, we run the risk of changing it. It’s more like opening a document on a computer – the old information enters a surprisingly vulnerable state when it can be edited, overwritten, or even deleted. It takes a while for the memory to become strengthened anew, through a process called reconsolidation. Memories aren’t just written once, but every time we remember them.

This means, somewhat ironically, that the remembering something creates a critical window in which memories can be erased or manipulated. Many scientists have done this in rodents and humans using drugs or conflicting information. But these experiments usually manipulate single simple memories, such as a drug craving or a fearful association between a colour and an electric shock.

The tornado touched down at 2:56 p.m., 16 minutes after the first warning went out, and traveled for 20 miles, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla. It was on the ground for 40 minutes, she said. It struck the town of Newcastle and traveled about 10 miles to Moore, a populous suburb of Oklahoma City.

Ms. Pirtle said preliminary data suggested that it was a Category 4 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures tornado strength on a scale of 0 to 5. A definitive assessment will not be available until Tuesday, she said.

Moore was the scene of another huge tornado, in May 1999, in which winds reached record speeds of 302 m.p.h., and experts said severe weather was common in the region this time of year.

But the region has rarely had a tornado as big and as powerful as the one on Monday.

Television on Monday showed destruction spread over a vast area, with blocks upon blocks of homes and businesses destroyed. Residents, some partly clothed and apparently caught by surprise, were shown picking through rubble. Several structures were on fire, and cars had been tossed around, flipped over and stacked on top of each other. Kelcy Trowbridge, her husband and their three young children piled into their neighbor’s cellar just outside of Moore and huddled together for about five minutes, wrapped under a blanket as the tornado screamed above them, debris smashing against the cellar door.

They emerged to find their home flattened and the family car resting upside down a few houses away. Ms. Trowbridge’s husband rushed toward what was left of their home and began sifting through the debris, then stopped, and told her to call the police.

He had found the body of a little girl, about 2 or 3 years old, she said.

One Irish subsidiary -- Apple Operations International, or AOI -- has no employees or presence in Ireland, holding its board meetings and keeping its bank accounts in the U.S., the senators said. AOI reported $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, but its management structure allowed Apple to exploit a gap between U.S. and Irish law and avoid paying taxes in either country, the report claims.

Another Apple subsidiary in Ireland, Apple Sales International, booked $74 billion in revenue between 2009 and 2012 but paid taxes only on "a tiny fraction" of that sum, the report says, generating an effective 2011 tax rate of just five hundredths of one percent. The company also ducked taxes on $44 billion in income by transferring the rights to its intellectual property though cost-sharing agreements with its subsidiaries, the senators alleged.

"A company that found remarkable success by harnessing American ingenuity and the opportunities afforded by the U.S. economy should not be shifting its profits overseas to avoid the payment of U.S. tax, purposefully depriving the American people of revenue," McCain said in a statement Monday. The senators did not weigh in on the legality of Apple's tactics.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will take questions from McCain, Levin and other members of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at a hearing Tuesday morning alongside Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Head of Tax Operations Phillip Bullock.

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity.

“I could not believe what I was reading,” Ms. Roberts, a professor of French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalled of the moment she came across the citizen complaints in an obscure archive in Le Havre. “I took out my little camera and began photographing the pages. I did not go to the bathroom for eight hours.”
. . .
Sex was certainly on the liberators’ minds. The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it. (Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”)

On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.)
. . .
“White soldiers got a pass because of their combat status,” said William I. Hitchcock, author of “The Bitter Road to Freedom” (2008), a history of the liberation of Western Europe from the perspective of often traumatized local civilians. “The Army wasn’t interested in prosecuting a battle-scarred sergeant.”
. . .

Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) won the Republican nomination to replace Ken Cuccinelli as the state's attorney general this weekend. As Think Progress reported Monday, Obenshain once introduced a bill that would charge women with a Class 1 misdemeanor if they failed to report a miscarriage to police.

The bill, introduced in 2009, stated that if a miscarriage occured without medical attendance, the woman would be required to report the "fetal death, location of the remains, and the identity of the mother" to the local or state police department. If she failed to do this within 24 hours, the bill would find the woman guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. As Think Progress notes, a Class 1 misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500” in Virginia.

This week’s Retro Report video on “crack babies” (infants born to addicted mothers) lays out how limited scientific studies in the 1980s led to predictions that a generation of children would be damaged for life. Those predictions turned out to be wrong. This supposed epidemic — one television reporter talks of a 500 percent increase in damaged babies — was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion. And the shocking symptoms — like tremors and low birth weight — are not particular to cocaine-exposed babies, pediatric researchers say; they can be seen in many premature newborns.

The worrisome extrapolations made by researchers — including the one who first published disturbing findings about prenatal cocaine use — were only part of the problem. Major newspapers and magazines, including Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times, ran articles and columns that went beyond the research. Network TV stars of that era, including Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, also bear responsibility for broadcasting uncritical reports.

A much more serious problem, it turns out, is infants who are born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

Retro Report tells the story of the epidemic that wasn’t through firsthand accounts by some of those at the center of things: the researcher who put out the alarm, a pediatric expert who originally cast doubt on his findings and one of the original cocaine-exposed research subjects, a young woman whose life helped disprove the myth of what these infants would become.
. . .

In the class action filed in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday, some staffers claim that despite billing some venues a 22 % service charge, bartenders and servers never saw that tip money, reports the New York Post.

The attorney for two of the named plaintiffs says the company owes all employees who worked private events hundreds of thousands in gratuities, going back to 2008.

Those two, a waitress and a bartender, say they were paid between $10 and $18 per hour for events, and didn’t get money for up to 30 hours overtime, allege the court papers.

“Any charge for ‘service’ or ‘food service,’ is a charge purported to be a gratuity and therefore must be paid over to service employees,” the lawsuit says, claiming that billing customers for a “service charge ” and then not passing that money along to servers violates state and federal law.

The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

MCKINNEY — Page Price and Carolyn Compton have been together for almost three years, but a Collin County judge is forcing them apart.

Judge John Roach Jr., a Republican who presides over the 296th District Court, enforced the “morality clause” in Compton’s divorce papers on Tuesday, May 7. Under the clause, someone who has a “dating or intimate relationship” with the person or is not related “by blood or marriage” is not allowed after 9 p.m. when the children are present. Price was given 30 days to move out of the home because the children live with the couple.

Price posted about the judge’s ruling on Facebook last week, writing that the judge placed the clause in the divorce papers because he didn’t like Compton’s “lifestyle.”

“Our children are all happy and well adjusted. By his enforcement, being that we cannot marry in this state, I have been ordered to move out of my home,” Price wrote.

Price also mentions that Compton’s ex-husband rarely sees their two children and was once charged with stalking Compton. She said he also hired a private investigator in order to bring the case before the judge. Court records show the ex-husband, Joshua Compton, was charged with third-degree felony stalking in 2011 but pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespassing.

Price declined an interview until her lawyers figure out the next step.

Dubai is being promoted as a luxury high-class paradise in the desert, but the reality is brutally different, as Australian Alicia Gali discovered. Gali took a job in the UAE with one of the world’s biggest hotel chains, Starwood. What happened next makes this story a must-watch for every Australian planning on travelling through the region.

Gali was using her laptop in the hotel’s staff bar when her drink was spiked. She awoke to a nightmare beyond belief: she had been savagely raped by three of her colleagues. Alone and frightened, she took herself to hospital. What Alicia didn’t know is that under the UAE’s strict sharia laws, if the perpetrator does not confess, a rape cannot be convicted without four adult Muslim male witnesses. She was charged with having illicit sex outside marriage, and thrown in a filthy jail cell for eight months.