The Jewish Home
October 3, 2013
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The Week sure and entertainment.
Another 17% was spent on transportation, 7% on healthcare, and another 11% on other types of insurance. When looking at the pie chart one can’t help but notice a huge void… where’s the huge piece of pie spent on tuitions??
Lack of Communication in Arizona Forest Fire that Claimed 19 Lives After a three-month investigation into the deaths of 19 hotshot firefighters killed in Arizona while fighting a forest fire, it was revealed that there was poor communication between the men and support staff. The 19 men were a part of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. All but one member of the crew died while at battle with a blaze on June 30 while protecting the small former gold rush town of Yarnell, about 80 miles northwest of Phoenix, from an erratic lightning-sparked wildfire. The investigation also revealed that an airtanker carrying flame retardant was hovering overhead as the men died. The 120-page report was released on Saturday to the men’s families ahead of a news conference in Prescott, Arizona. The report found improperly programmed radios, vague updates, and a 30-minute communication blackout right before the flames overwhelmed the brave men. Otherwise, the report noted that all procedures were followed properly. The fire destroyed more than 100 homes and burned 13 square miles; it was not fully contained until July 10. This is being regarded as the worst firefighting tragedy since September 11, 2001. “Nobody will ever know how the crew actually saw their situation, the op-
tions they considered or what motivated their actions,” the report said.
For some family members the investigation served as a sense of closure from the tragic experience but others say it did nothing to ease their deep pain. “No matter what the report says, it won’t bring him back,” Colleen Turbyfill said of her son, Travis. “I miss him, and it’s unbearable pain. It doesn’t go away. Sometimes I can’t breathe, but this report isn’t going to help that one way or another.”
Forbes’ Richest Americans List It’s that time of year again…Time for Forbes to rank America’s richest. It’s no shock that Bill Gates is America’s richest man for the 20th year in a row. With a net worth of $72 billion, he reclaimed the crown of world’s richest from Mexico’s Carlos Slim. In second place was Warren Buffet who added another $12.5 billion to his wealth this year. In a big comeback, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it to the top 20 this year after not making the cut last year. The biggest percentage earner was Workday’s David Duffield, whose fortune more than tripled to $6.4 billion. The combined worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans is a record $20.2 trillion. The average net worth of list members is a staggering $5 billion. There are 20 newcomers to the list and only 30 people were knocked off the list from last year.
If you’re wondering what it takes to make the cut…the minimum net worth needed to make the Forbes 400 list was $1.3 billion. The last time it was that high was in 2008, right before the finan-
In News cial crisis began to unravel. The 10 richest people in America are: 1. Bill Gates ($72B) 2. Warren Buffet ($58.5B) 3. Larry Ellison ($41B) 4. Charles Koch ($36B) 5. David Koch ($36B) 6. Christy Walton & Family ($35.4B) 7. David Walton ($33.8B) 8. Jim Walton ($33.8B) 9. Alice Walton ($33.4B) 10. Michael Bloomberg ($31B)
Smoke Jumping Exercise Ends Tragically In a tragic accident, Mark Urban, 40, of Boise, Idaho, a veteran smokejumper for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, has died. Smokejumpers are trained to jump out of airplanes and parachute into wild terrain in order to fight wildfires.
It was unclear if an equipment flaw, medical emergency or weather conditions caused the death on Friday, said Bureau of Land Management spokesman Ken Frederick. It is the first fatality in 13 years for the smokejumpers. Urban was one of a team of highly skilled federal firefighters jumping from a plane about 45 miles east of Boise in an exercise designed to maintain their parachuting proficiency. He was the second firefighter to jump out of the aircraft during the practice “when something – we don’t know what – went wrong,” an official said. An investigation of the incident by U.S. fire managers is underway. This incident is the thirty-third death of U.S. wild land firefighters this year. Urban was a 10-year veteran and trainer based in Boise with roughly 80 other smokejumpers. The 450 smokejumpers with the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service are seasonally required to parachute from planes at least once every two weeks to hone their skills. Urban had tallied 324 jumps, including 102 into fires, since joining the Great Basin Smokejumpers in 2003. “It’s tragic. He was a very popular and
well-respected member of the crew and everyone has been hit hard by his death,” Frederick said.
Malala Yousafzai Honored by Harvard University Harvard University’s Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Award has been given to a Pakistani girl who survived a Taliban assassination attempt. Malala Yousafzai, an outspoken proponent for girls’ education, was at Harvard on Friday to accept the award. Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said she was pleased to welcome Malala because of their shared interest in education.
Malala was shot in the head last October. Militants said she was attacked because she criticized the Taliban, not because of her views on education. The 16-year-old spoke nostalgically about her home region, the Swat Valley, and said she hopes to return someday. She called it a “paradise” but described a dangerous area where militants blew up dozens of schools and sought to discourage girls from going to school by snatching pens from their hands. Students, she said, reacted by hiding their books under their shawls so people wouldn’t know they were going to school. “The so-called Taliban were afraid of women’s power and were afraid of the power of education,” she told hundreds of students, faculty members and well-wishers who packed the Sanders Theater for the award ceremony. Malala highlighted the fact that very few people spoke out against what was happening in her home region. “Although few people spoke, the voice for peace and education was powerful,” she said. Malala said she hopes to become a politician because politicians can have influence on a broad scale.