
American consumers can't ignore the recent series of food recalls. Over the past few months, an uptick in recalls of food products has been circulating news sites, grocery stores, and home refrigerators. From , , and cheeses to a to , American food products have been increasingly infecting customers; predicating a series of product recalls. As in other industries, recalls in the food industry are common — but not at this level. Darin Detwiler, a food safety expert and professor at Northeastern University, reported food-related recalls rose by 20% between 2020 and 2023 (via ). Evidently, the trend has not ended — nor subsided — this year. Detwiler attributes the increase in recalls to a combination of working factors. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is undergoing a shift in organization and attempting to streamline its processes of assessing and ensuring food safety and this reworking of the FDA may be causing temporary mishaps in its workflow. Another contributing factor is that the food industry is still grappling with the wake of COVID-19, when manufacturers loosened their safety regulations. Detwiler said these factors' simultaneous effects on the food industry has caused the recalls and unveiled areas for improvement. "Together, these elements have led to a surge in recalls," he said. "While it's unclear if one particular issue is driving the trend, the combination suggests that there are vulnerabilities within the food regulatory system that need to be addressed to restore consumer confidence." There are positives to be gleaned from the recalls While a continual surge of recalls should sound alarms, some positive advancements may be gleaned from the recent food recall increase. The food industry has experienced improved pathogen-detection technology. New technologies are more accurate in being able to spot the presence of harmful bacteria, and they're able to do it sooner. These technological developments may further inform food safety officials in their efforts to enact updated regulations. Though living amid multiple widespread foodborne illness outbreaks is cautionary, there are certain measures consumers can take to mitigate their own risk of consuming contaminated foods. The FDA and USDA routinely update their websites about information regarding food-related recalls. Avoiding recalled food or products related to foods subject to a recall will limit your chances of infection. It is crucial to be responsible with your own cooking and cleaning — make sure your food is prepared to the proper doneness to avoid exposing yourself to illness. Recommended$700B Industry Shake-Up: Rhuna x Plume Transforming Events for 2M+ Attendees & 200M+ Blockchain Transactions!By Dan Diamond, Olivia George and Annie GowenWashington Post BALTIMORE – Luigi Mangione was a young prince of this city, his family’s name emblazoned on the walls of buildings and civic institutions. Teachers at his elite prep school described him as a student leader, on his way to an Ivy League education. Classmates called the valedictorian, athlete and budding engineer an inspiration, someone focused on society’s future. More accolades followed at college in Philadelphia. Then came worsening back pain, time abroad and a period of discontent. Friends said they lost track of the 26-year-old this year, struggling to confirm his participation in a wedding; his mother filed a missing-person report. As Mangione’s once-charmed life seemed to be crumbling, Brian Thompson’s fortunes appeared to be climbing. The 50-year-old executive, from a small town in Iowa, was entering his fourth year as CEO of the nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare, where he was well-liked by employees and respected in the industry – even as some patients complained about the company’s practice of denying care. “I feel really good,” Thompson told investors on a January call. “Very optimistic about UnitedHealthcare ... a lot to look forward to here in the year.” The two men’s paths collided on a Manhattan sidewalk early the morning of Dec. 4, according to police charging documents, with Mangione accused of standing in wait for Thompson in what authorities are calling a targeted shooting. Police who arrested Mangione on Monday in Pennsylvania found a handwritten manifesto that blamed “parasites” and that reportedly railed against UnitedHealth Group – the parent organization of UnitedHealthcare and the nation’s largest health-care company. Mangione appeared in court Tuesday as prosecutors sought to extradite him to New York to face five charges, including second-degree murder, in connection with Thompson’s death. Separately, he faces five counts in Pennsylvania, including presenting false identification to the police officers who arrested him. Ahead of Tuesday’s court hearing, Mangione appeared to struggle with officers and seemed to shout toward a throng of journalists about “an insult to the intelligence of the American people.” Mangione was denied bail. The extradition process to New York, which he is fighting, could take weeks. The developments have staggered people who watched Mangione’s early rise and are trying to reconcile the promising high school and college student with the man now sitting in a Pennsylvania prison cell. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being publicly linked to Mangione or the shooting of Thompson. “That’s not the boy I know,” said one of Mangione’s former teachers at Gilman School, the all-boys private school in Baltimore where Mangione was the top graduate in 2016. Other teachers and students at Gilman discussed his humility, kindness and affability; classmates from the University of Pennsylvania similarly described a well-liked engineering student and fraternity brother who graduated from the school in 2020. What radicalized Mangione and fixated him on the health insurance industry is not fully known, though clues exist in his personal health history and in a trail he appears to have left online. Friends said Mangione struggled with years-long back problems, worsening his quality of life; he moved to Hawaii after college in pursuit of getting healthy. An X-ray he posted on social media appears to depict a person suffering from spondylolisthesis, a spinal condition in which a vertebra slips out of place and can cause chronic pain, physicians said. “When my spondy went bad on me last year (23M), it was completely devastating as a young athletic person,” read a post left by a Reddit account that had previously linked to Mangione’s personal programming site and offered personal details that match Mangione’s. Reddit declined to confirm whether the account, which was deactivated this week, belonged to Mangione. Friends said the pain hampered Mangione’s social life and culminated in major surgery last year. The X-ray posted by Mangione shows a “lumbar spine with posterior spinal instrumentation, possible fusion” – a procedure that involves screws or rods to stabilize the spine, said Zeeshan Sardar, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Columbia University Medical Center who reviewed the post at the request of The Washington Post. While patients are warned that spinal surgeries may worsen a person’s condition, the Reddit account linked to Mangione last year described the surgery as a success. Mangione also was long focused on what he saw as societal decay, posting commentary online that sometimes summarized his reading, including on the popular review website Goodreads. In his 2021 review of the Unabomber’s manifesto – written by an anonymous killer terrorizing the United States from the 1970s into the 1990s with meticulously crafted pipe bombs – Mangione awarded it four stars and shared a comment he attributed to another person: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.” Selections he made for a book club he started in Hawaii in 2023 began to alarm others, said Sarah Nehemiah, a 27-year-old producer and researcher who met Mangione the prior year and moved into his co-living space after Mangione had left. “Several members left due to discomfort in his book choices,” she said. “The Unabomber manifesto is what really pushed people over the edge.” Investigators are trying to piece together what led Mangione to allegedly fixate on Thompson. UnitedHealthcare, which provides coverage to roughly 1 in 7 Americans, declined to comment on whether Mangione or his family were customers of the health insurance company. UnitedHealth Group has been the focus of congressional oversight, watchdog groups and patient complaints that say the sprawling company’s subsidiaries have wrongly denied patients’ claims, sometimes by using artificial intelligence. The company and its largest subsidiary, UnitedHealthcare, have become proxies for many Americans’ broader complaints about health care, a phenomenon crystallized by the outpouring of complaints and mockery since Thompson’s shooting. UnitedHealth Group has defended its practices. In Baltimore on Tuesday, as fog blanketed the city, residents said they were still wrestling with the revelation that Thompson’s alleged killer is a member of the well-respected Mangione family, which is prominent in the region and has long-standing ties to Little Italy, the neighborhood just east of the Inner Harbor. The family owns Lorien Health Systems, a network of skilled nursing and assisted-living facilities, where Luigi Mangione volunteered in high school, and has founded or acquired golf and country clubs that attract top local players. A Baltimore art museum, university and a now-defunct opera company have been among the civic institutions that have benefited from Mangione philanthropy. Greater Baltimore Medical Center, a hospital long affiliated with the Mangione family, boasts a “Mangione Family Center” in the soaring atrium where obstetrics patients enter the building; a placard in another part of the hospital thanks the Mangione Family Foundation for donating more than $1 million. “You would not truly think that a member of the Mangione family would be accused of this,” said Thomas J. Maronick Jr., a criminal-defense attorney in Maryland who knows several of the suspect’s relatives. The family released a statement Monday night saying they were “shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest.” “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved. We are devastated by this news,” the Mangione family said in its statement. – – – A star student and engineer The Luigi Mangione whom teachers saw growing up was a builder. A video posted by Gilman in 2016 shows him at the center of a robotics competition, manipulating a robot and helping lead the school’s team to success in a tournament. The prep school charges nearly $38,000 for a year of high school tuition, according to its website, and many students come from some degree of wealth. But far from bragging about his family’s local prominence, Mangione was viewed as self-effacing and accessible – a volunteer who coached other students on their essays in the school’s writing center. Then came Penn, the Ivy League university, where again Mangione found himself in leadership roles, such as helping to found a video game development club. A Penn-affiliated news outlet in December 2018 reported that the club had grown to 60 members. “Passion is what we’re looking for,” Mangione said in an interview, adding that the club didn’t turn away people who lacked programming experience. Mangione graduated from Penn with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years. He went to work as an engineer for TrueCar, a web platform for people to shop for automobiles. The company, which instituted broad layoffs in 2023, has said Mangione has not been employed by it since that year. Mangione spent early 2022 at Surfbreak HNL, a shared living space tucked along Oahu’s south shore and about a mile from Waikiki Beach, a former resident told The Post. Mangione arrived in January 2022 and left by mid-April, said Nehemiah, who has remained close with other residents, some of whom were hesitant to speak publicly about their interactions with Mangione but authorized her to speak on their behalf. Surfbreak, which sits on the 40th floor of a Honolulu high-rise, boasts floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the water and bills itself as the “the first co-living and co-working penthouse for remote workers in Hawaii” on its website. Monthly rent for a twin bedroom starts at $1,605, while “king corner” rooms command up to $3,305, according to the Surfbreak website. Nehemiah and her friends at Surfbreak believed Mangione had left “due to a lifelong back injury that was exacerbated by surfing and hiking,” she told The Post. “To our knowledge, nearly all members of Surfbreak from his tenure lost contact with him after he left.” Posts circulating on social media and conversations with those who knew him indicate Mangione withdrew and dropped out of touch with friends this year. In since-deleted posts this July on X, one person tagged an account that appears to be Mangione’s and said he hadn’t heard from Mangione in months. “Hey man I need you to call me ... [You] made commitments to me for my wedding and if you can’t honor them I need to know so I can plan accordingly,” the person wrote. In another post from the same account, posted in November, just two weeks before Mangione was taken into custody, the person wrote: “Thinking of you and prayers every day in your name. Know you are missed and loved.” It appears that Mangione spent time in Japan this year. In a post Monday on X, Japanese professional poker player Jun Obara recounted a chance encounter with him in a Tokyo restaurant after a photo of them posted to the platform in February circulated online. Former classmates said they couldn’t square this new, darker portrait of Mangione with the person who was once so optimistic. “I can’t help but feel sorry for Luigi and really the American people – that he had so much to offer, to innovate and create for the world and wound up so damaged that he did the unthinkable instead,” said a former Gilman student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “As I knew him, he was a creator, not a taker of life.” On social media, Mangione in 2022 posted excerpts from a speech he delivered to high school classmates – part of a tradition in which Gilman seniors have long been allowed to deliver a speech to the assembled high school on any topic of their choosing. Mangione chose to discuss the arc of human progress, warning that the audience might think he was “crazy.” “We may have been born into one of the most exciting times on earth,” Mangione said in his prepared remarks, talking about the arrival of artificial intelligence and other technological breakthroughs that could even lead to immortality. “We might not recognize it in our day-to-day lives, but the world is changing fast.”Nike at ComplexCon: Three notable new designs
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As I saying elsewhere (post #387), I'd recommend Cat Jarman's River Kings . The book throws up all kinds of revisions of what has generally been accepted as orthodoxy on the Vikings. Every contemporary archaeologist has to be 'balanced' on gender. So Jarman (pages 154-5) drops the f-bomb: One issue is the major bias in the archaeological record in that there seem to be far more male burials than female in Scandinavia. This was first discovered in the 1980s, when the search for Viking women started in earnest. Looking at the statistics of male versus female graves, it was discovered that in some areas of Norway male graves outnumbered female by a staggering seven to one. Over the years this has been taken very literally to suggest that there were more men than women around in the Viking Age. Click to expand... Which is both incredible and impossible. At that point, I'd recommend hunting for separate female burial sites, and speculating about gendered religious and funeral practices. But Jarman, to curdle the mother's milk, runs through alternative explanations: The most likely explanation for the difference in Scandinavia, it has been argued, is that selective female infanticide was carried out. Click to expand... That one she dismisses: we don’t have the evidence either to prove or disprove this claim, rendering it mere speculation. It’s almost impossible to prove that infanticide took place on a large scale: infant burials rarely survive, and even if they do, determining the sex of an infant skeleton has only been possible with recently developed DNA techniques. Click to expand... She nods at later saga literature (five centuries later), and a single mention of a girl child being less valuable than a boy; but qualifies it by other mentions of infanticide happening to both sexes. Then she adds extra spice: The implications are serious, because it has been proposed that the lack of women in Scandinavia was one of the main drivers of the start of the Viking Age in the first place. The first time this was suggested was in the Middle Ages, when Dudo of Saint- Quentin , a French historian who wrote a History of the Normans sometime in the late tenth or early eleventh century, proposed that the Viking raids had started because of an excess of unmarried young men. Click to expand... Again Jarman cavils, and suggests reasons: the need to provide bridewealth (reverse dowry for buying a wife, with the implication the better the bridewealth the better choice of mate); or polygyny, i.e. the taking of more than one wife, leaving fewer women available to marry. Those are not exclusives, surely. All the evidence that I recall suggests marriage (in almost all Germanic cultures of that time) was free-and-easy, especially for powerful males. Finally, on this topic, she comes to a reasonable conclusion and suggests the essential fault is identifying the gender of burials: In many cases the sex of a burial in a grave will have been determined solely on the basis of grave goods, at least if the bones are not well enough preserved for this to be done osteologically. That means that the grave goods are assumed to reflect a specific gender: this is typically done by taking weapons and tools to represent men and textile-working equipment to indicate women, though sometimes it’s more specifically about dress, like women being buried with certain types of brooches, which might be more reliable than the former items. So if a grave where the bones are either poorly preserved or lacking altogether contains a single sword, for example, it is taken to be the grave of a man. Click to expand... Moreover, What about when there are no grave goods, or when grave goods can’t be associated with a particular gender, such as a single knife? This was actually quite common, and such graves are typically not included in the statistics. If it was common for women to be buried without any grave goods whatsoever, that would significantly skew the results. Click to expand... In short, that gender-discrepancy is one of poor methodology and interpretation. If so, we have a lot of re-appraisal to do — and not just with Viking burials. The idea of Viking woman-hunters seems to make sense. Ireland in those times was hardly wealthy in material terms . Probably it was slaving which attracted vikings here, and young women were probably the most valuable. No doubt Irish women were sold into the slave markets of Europe and Muslim Spain. Malcolm Redfellow said: As I saying elsewhere (post #387), I'd recommend Cat Jarman's River Kings . The book throws up all kinds of revisions of what has generally been accepted as orthodoxy on the Vikings. Every contemporary archaeologist has to be 'balanced' on gender. So Jarman (pages 154-5) drops the f-bomb: Which is both incredible and impossible. At that point, I'd recommend hunting for separate female burial sites, and speculating about gendered religious and funeral practices. But Jarman, to curdle the mother's milk, runs through alternative explanations: That one she dismisses: She nods at later saga literature (five centuries later), and a single mention of a girl child being less valuable than a boy; but qualifies it by other mentions of infanticide happening to both sexes. Then she adds extra spice: Again Jarman cavils, and suggests reasons: the need to provide bridewealth (reverse dowry for buying a wife, with the implication the better the bridewealth the better choice of mate); or polygyny, i.e. the taking of more than one wife, leaving fewer women available to marry. Those are not exclusives, surely. All the evidence that I recall suggests marriage (in almost all Germanic cultures of that time) was free-and-easy, especially for powerful males. Finally, on this topic, she comes to a reasonable conclusion and suggests the essential fault is identifying the gender of burials: Moreover, In short, that gender-discrepancy is one of poor methodology and interpretation. If so, we have a lot of re-appraisal to do — and not just with Viking burials. Click to expand... The men Vikings ate the females when they died, It was how they ingested all that toxicity which over a no of centuries evolved into Toxic masculinity. As most of the vikings were blond this was also the start of white male toxic masculinity. See all explained I've seen the "female infanticide" claim made before, in relation relation to viking era Scandinavia, but with no evidence to back it up. Is the leadership class over-represented in surviving graves (if it is we could expect more men than women)? Were ordinary people buried in a fashion that lend us, in the 21st century, fewer remains? There is no great consistency in burial practices for this era and there is evidence that inhumation was still in practice, as was cremation. Weren't the early Viking raids on monasteries because that was where the gold was? Which means the Vikings knew the monasteries better than our Irish Government since 2011 on that score. But there wouldn't have been a lot of women around the monasteries, what with them being Satan's handmaidens etc and so forth. Thinking also that the oldest parliament in the world is the Althing, which according to the Norse, was kicked off by a female leader of a Norse expedition to Iceland. If memory serves she is said to have been 'Ugga the Wise' which would counter claims that women were devalued in that culture. Edit the name is 'Unn' rather than 'Ugga'. Lumpy Talbot said: Weren't the early Viking raids on monasteries because that was where the gold was? Which means the Vikings knew the monasteries better than our Irish Government since 2011 on that score. But there wouldn't have been a lot of women around the monasteries, what with them being Satan's handmaidens etc and so forth. Click to expand... There are many, many theories as to why the Vikings began raiding and why they targeted monasteries, all of them are probably correct to some degree. 1. It was a macro-sectarian response to attacks on the pagan Saxons, in Northern Germany, by Charlamagne - this is plausible but requires us to believe that Scandanavians knew about, and cared about, the plight of their pagan brethren in Saxony and saw the conflict in grand terms (us vs them, pagans vs Christians). 2. Climate and overpopulation - this one is obvious and always seems to be relied upon by historians to explain why hordes of barbarians suddenly emerged from location X (huns, mongols ect). 3. Polygamy and wealth - Scandanavians had been raiding the Baltic area prior to the "Viking era" proper. They had begun accumulating wealth which was making its way into the hands of chieftains/kings. The wealthy 5% began to accumulate more wives for themselves leaving more men wifeless. If you want to see the societal effect this has, go to parts of Canada and America where polygamous Mormons are still operating and see the huge numbers of seriously pissed off young men. 4. Technological innovation - Again, historians like to say that certain military inventions allowed groups to win wars against their opponents, a lot of the time this relates to the stirrup or the saddle. In the case of the initial Viking raids this theory rings true, new ship designs meant that places like Iona were much easier to get to and get out of. This being said, the Vikings must have had local knowledge helping them out! parentheses said: The idea of Viking woman-hunters seems to make sense. Ireland in those times was hardly wealthy in material terms . Probably it was slaving which attracted vikings here, and young women were probably the most valuable. No doubt Irish women were sold into the slave markets of Europe and Muslim Spain. Click to expand... No doubt. With evidence. In Ireland Viking slave-taking seems to have changed as the ninth century wound on. The Annals between AD821 and AD1032 record twenty-three occasions of mass slave-taking (that and what follows is from Poul Holm ). Holm's interpretation is the earlier events were, in effect, hostage-making — a kind of kidnapping for ransom. In AD855 Olaf broke with the king of Leinster and the Uí Néill, raided into Meath, killed the bishop of Slane, and plundered Lusk — an event which seems to have impressed his fellow Dublin Vikings. An alliance of the Dublin Vikings and the Northern Uí Néill seems to have generated a few years of forced peace — not a good environment for Vikings on the make. In AD866 Olaf went profitably a-viking into Pictland, while Grim and Colphin were making hay in Munster. While the cat's away, Aed of the Uí Néill took advantage and cleared out the Viking nest on Lough Foyle. Olaf re-asserted his authority (apparently by taking out any opposition in Dublin), but ran into Aed on the war-path, who descended on Dublin and killed Olaf's son, Karl. Olaf's response was a full-on assault into Uí Néill territory, burning Armagh (AD869), and (say the Annals — but an event significant enough to be recorded in Frankish chronicles) nabbing a thousand prisoners. These would be the early goods on sale through the Dublin slave-market. Those early railings were, it seems, profitable and as much for bravado and prestige as anything else. By the tenth century there was a different motivation: the Viking settlements across the northern Atlantic needed servile labour and concubines. The Dublin market would provide both. Alfred P Smyth was where I first came upon the trade between (as I recall, vaguely) mainly Viking Cork And Wexford with Al-Andalus (and the tour-guides of Lagos will point out the re-built Mercado de Escravos , though that dates from half-a-millenium later) — is that parentheses ' source? Allow me to refer back to Cath Jarman (page 52): In 2005 a DNA study looked at ancestry among men and women in Iceland and the northern isles of Britain, using modern DNA samples obtained from the existing populations. The study investigated two different types of ancestry: the male lineage via Y-DNA, and the female via mtDNA, which traces female ancestry as specific markers are only passed down from mother to child. The results showed that while the majority of Icelandic men (75 per cent of those analysed) had Scandinavian ancestry, a majority of women (62 per cent) appeared to have originated in the British Isles — including Scotland and Ireland. This was very different from what the researchers found on other, smaller islands in the North Atlantic, such as Shetland and Orkney, where Scandinavian ancestry was more equal among men and women. In other words, the study suggested that in Iceland in particular, women of Celtic origin had ended up interbreeding with Scandinavian men. Click to expand... She insists this doesn't prove slave-trading out of Ireland and Pictland; but I don't see many alternatives to that enforced concubinage. Not an expert on burials, but my impression is that a typical funeral back in the day was a big bonfire (pyre) Burying somebody under a huge mound was a huge amount of unnecessary work. Burying them in a boat under a huge mound, with a bunch of valuable swords etc would have been a shocking waste of resources. Just what the rich have always loved. It stands to reason that the vast, vast majority of burials will never be discovered, being just a bit of ash, which rapidly got recycled into the local vegetation. So what we are looking at in these burials is high status individuals. Given the times, its not surprising that most of these would be males. Out of curiosity I just googled 2022 "rich list" and I see the 7;1 ratio hasn't changed much. Also of note is the "power couple" phenomenon. Behind every great man is a great woman, or vice versa. This again is something that crops up in ancient high status graves - the king and the queen buried alongside each other, not always having died contemporaneously. The Sunday Times Rich List 2022 Rich List 2022 is our definitive guide to the wealth of the UK’s richest people. Read profiles and interviews, and see all the facts and figures for 2022 www.thetimes.co.uk Brenny said: I've seen the "female infanticide" claim made before, in relation relation to viking era Scandinavia, but with no evidence to back it up. Is the leadership class over-represented in surviving graves (if it is we could expect more men than women)? Were ordinary people buried in a fashion that lend us, in the 21st century, fewer remains? There is no great consistency in burial practices for this era and there is evidence that inhumation was still in practice, as was cremation. Click to expand... Maybe these male graves do not only contain people of male gender in spite of the biological and forensic evidence . Perhaps they also contain trans men/ women?? who identified as women and are thus women and as there may have been female infanticide this transitioning would have compensated for the dearth of biological females . In addition those male homophobic Vikings would have avoided accusation of being LGBTAQ+++ by bonking the biologically male trans men/women who are in gender identity parlance women. Confused??? I vunder waht a pronouns they used? oordaburdee yodaburda, Could also mean that Viking women were tough buggers and caused a much higher casualty rate in domestics than is the case these days. Is there a suspicious amount of ancient frying pans discovered near the male bodies, I wonder... How much photo evidence is available to review the earlier assignations of gender? No doubt variable. In any case, I would be looking to gender and status-based burial practices before venturing into theories of femicide. BTW I watched The Dig recently and found it fascinating on many levels, not least of which was the depth of soil at the burial site (filmed apparently in Surrey). As a Canadian on very rocky ground, I couldn’t help glancing enviously behind the actors at the wall of wonderful brown earth behind them. Ardillaun said: How much photo evidence is available to review the earlier assignations of gender? No doubt variable. In any case, I would be looking to gender and status-based burial practices before venturing into theories of femicide. Click to expand... Exactly! Ardillaun said: BTW I watched The Dig recently and found it fascinating on many levels, not least of which was the depth of soil at the burial site (filmed apparently in Surrey). As a Canadian on very rocky ground, I couldn’t help glancing enviously behind the actors at the wall of wonderful brown earth behind them. Click to expand... There would be serious problems recreating the 1939 dig at or near Sutto Hoo itself. The site is 'national heritage'. I haven't checked, but I recall the location is alluvium and former peat-bog, next to the tidal River Deben: What doesn't get mentioned so often are the near-by burials . They imply a sombre, even gruesome story: evidence of judicial executions, carried out not as part of pagan ceremonies, but, more likely, by Christian kings. Click to expand... The idea of systematic viking infanticide of females could be plausible. It would have meant a larger number of males being born, which would swell Viking raiding parties when they grew up. Females could then be imported into Viking communities from the Christian lands to provide wives and concubines for them. parentheses said: The idea of systematic viking infanticide of females could be plausible. It would have meant a larger number of males being born, which would swell Viking raiding parties when they grew up. Females could then be imported into Viking communities from the Christian lands to provide wives and concubines for them. Click to expand... I don't think that is the explanation at all Most likely is that females just did not get a high status burial very often - because they were not seeing a having a very high status in the 1st place. It's because they never die. Catapulta said: I don't think that is the explanation at all Most likely is that females just did not get a high status burial very often - because they were not seeing a having a very high status in the 1st place. Click to expand... Killing the females would have given a "sex-ratio" very much in favor of male babies. These would grow into young warriors who could go raiding. Seems a logical supposition to me. parentheses said: Killing the females would have given a "sex-ratio" very much in favor of male babies. These would grow into young warriors who could go raiding. Seems a logical supposition to me. Click to expand... It's slightly weighted in favour of female births I think - just slightly, so maybe they killed off a few during a crisis, such as a food shortage, or some other calamity. I think that was quite common among pagan peoples? Livy recorded that the Romans sacrified a celt and a few virgins (buried them alive) when Hannibal was ad portas. I think post #15 gets it right. They just weren't seen as worthy of the honour. Catapulta said: I don't think that is the explanation at all Most likely is that females just did not get a high status burial very often - because they were not seeing a having a very high status in the 1st place. Click to expand... Well, the Vikings punched well above their weight in terms of military capabilities for quite a long time. There has to be some explanation for that. parentheses said: Killing the females would have given a "sex-ratio" very much in favor of male babies. These would grow into young warriors who could go raiding. Seems a logical supposition to me. Click to expand... Its women who give birth to babies - not men. That's biology not theology BTW.
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General Motors Scraps Funding for Cruise Robotaxi VehicleFresh off its biggest win of the season, Penn State plays its first true road game Tuesday when it visits Rutgers in Piscataway, N.J. Aces will be wild for the Nittany Lions (8-1, 1-0 Big Ten) and the Scarlet Knights (5-4, 0-1) as Penn State's Ace Baldwin Jr. will square off against Ace Bailey of Rutgers. Baldwin is the Nittany Lions' leading scorer at 15.1 points per game and dishes out 8.1 assists -- fourth in the nation entering Monday's action. He registered 17 points and six assists Thursday in an 81-70 victory over then-No. 8 Purdue in a game where Penn State led by as many as 27. Freddie Dilione V chipped in 14 points for the Nittany Lions, who had not defeated a Top 10 team since 2019. "A win like that's a statement win," Dilione said. "I just think it's going to put everybody on notice. We're just a walkover team. We're always going be the underdogs, and that's our mentality. We've just got to come in every game and just punch everybody in the mouth." Penn State must be careful not to suffer a letdown against a talented Rutgers squad led by freshmen Dylan Harper (23.1 points per game) and Bailey (17.9). The duo combined for 30 points in the Scarlet Knights' last game -- an 80-66 setback at Ohio State. The defeat was the fourth in the last five games for Rutgers, which plays seven of its next eight in New Jersey. "We've got to get better," Scarlet Knights coach Steve Pikiell said. "We got to get some more consistency out of a lot of things, especially our defense. Can't give up 80 points on the road and expect to win in this league." In last season's meeting with Penn State, it was offense that was Rutgers' biggest issue. The Scarlet Knights shot just 1-of-17 from 3-point range and 34 percent overall in a 61-46 home defeat. "(It's about) finding ways of how to bounce back as a team and staying together," Harper said. "Even though we lose, we're still going to find a way." --Field Level Media