A former Fox News reporter who is refusingto divulge her sources could be held in contempt of court

ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER
Mon, November 13, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a case with potentially far-reaching press freedom implications, a federal judge in Washington is weighing whether to hold in contempt a veteran journalist who has refused to identify her sources for stories about a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged.

The judge previously ordered former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge to be interviewed under oath about her sources for a series of stories about Yanping Chen, who was investigated for years on suspicions she may have lied on immigration forms related to work on a Chinese astronaut program. Chen has sued the government, saying details about the probe were leaked to damage her reputation.

But after Herridge refused to divulge to Chen’s lawyers how she acquired her information, the scientist’s attorneys are asking U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to hold the reporter in contempt — a sanction that could result in steep monetary fines until she complies.

The long-running lawsuit, now nearing a crucial decision point, represents the collision of competing interests: a journalist’s professional obligation to protect sources and an individual’s right to pursue compensation over perceived privacy violations by the government. It’s being closely watched by media advocates, who say forcing journalists to betray a promise of confidentiality could make sources think twice before providing information to reporters that could expose government wrongdoing.

“Allowing confidential sources to be ordered revealed means that the public will have less information. The more significant the story, the more significant topic, the greater the loss to the public in not knowing the truth about what’s going on,” said longtime First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams. Abrams represented New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail after being held in contempt for refusing to divulge a source in an investigation of leaks about an undercover CIA agent.

The judge acknowledged the stakes in an August decision that forced Herridge to be interviewed, writing, “The Court recognizes both the vital importance of a free press and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” who now works at CBS.

But Cooper said that “Chen’s need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”

The stories by Herridge were published and aired by Fox News in 2017, one year after the Justice Department told Chen she would not face any charges in its yearslong investigation into whether she may have concealed her former membership in the Chinese military on U.S. immigration forms.

The reports examined Chen's former alleged ties to the Chinese military and whether she had used a professional school she founded in Virginia to help the Chinese government get information about American servicemembers. They relied on what her lawyers contend was items leaked from the probe, including snippets of an FBI document summarizing an interview, personal photographs, and information taken from her immigration and naturalization forms and from an internal FBI PowerPoint presentation.

Herridge was interviewed under oath in September by a lawyer for Chen, but declined dozens of times to answer questions about her sources, saying at one point: “My understanding is that the courts have ruled that in order to seek further judicial review in this case, I must now decline the order, and respectfully I am invoking my First Amendment rights in declining to answer the question.”

Herridge’s attorney, Patrick Philbin, who served as deputy White House counsel during the Trump administration, said that forcing the journalist to turn over her source or sources would destroy her credibility and hurt her career.

“The First Amendment interest in protecting journalists’ sources is at its highest in cases, like this, involving reporting on national security,” Philbin wrote in court papers. “And confidentiality is critical for government sources who may face punishment for speaking to the press.”

In a statement, Fox News said that “sanctioning a journalist for protecting a confidential source is not only against the First Amendment but would have a chilling effect on journalism across the country as the ability to hold truth to power is essential in a democracy.”

The network said it fully supports Herridge’s position. CBS News said it does as well, asserting in its own statement that the motion for contempt “should be concerning to all Americans who value the role of the free press in our democracy and understand that reliance on confidential sources is critical to the mission of journalism.”

Legal fights over whether journalists should have to divulge a source are rare, though they’ve arisen several times in the last couple decades in Privacy Act cases like the one filed by Chen. Some lawsuits have ended with a hefty Justice Department settlement in place of a journalist being forced to reveal a source, an outcome that remains possible in Herridge’s case.

In 2008, for instance, the Justice Department agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle a lawsuit by Army scientist Steven Hatfill, who was falsely identified as a person of interest in the 2001 Anthrax attacks. That settlement resulted in a contempt order being vacated against a journalist who was being asked to name her sources.

In Herridge’s case, the scientist’s lawyers say they’re seeking a fine that would increase over time until she identifies her source. Unlike in Miller’s situation, it’s a private plaintiff demanding to know the identity of the source rather than representatives of the Justice Department.

Courts have recognized that journalists have a limited privilege to keep confidential their sources, allowing reporters to block subpoenas in the past. But judges in some cases, like Herridge’s, have found that privilege can be outweighed by the need for the information if the person seeking the source has failed to find it through other means.

Many states have reporter shields, which offer various protections from subpoenas and the forced disclosure of sources, but there is no such protection in federal law. Gabe Rottman, of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Herridge’s case is a stark illustration of the need for a federal shield law.

“If sources can’t be given credible assurances of confidentiality, they won’t come forward,” said Rottman, director of the group's Technology and Press Freedom Project. “And that chills the free flow of information to the public and it limits journalists' ability to do their jobs.”

___

Richer reported from Boston.

Who's getting evicted in America? The latest data shows a grim reality for millions of US adults — and kids — facing eviction as the housing crisis worsens for renters


Serah Louis
Mon, November 13, 2023

Propelled by rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing, eviction filings are skyrocketing across the country — leaving many Americans scrambling to cover costs, find a new place or face the risk of homelessness.

The rental crisis was already worrying before the pandemic: Roughly 7.6 million Americans faced eviction each year from 2007 to 2016, according to a recent report from The Eviction Lab and U.S. Census Bureau tallying for the first time the number of individuals, not just households, under threat.

Fast forward to today, and eviction filings are more than 50% higher than the pre-pandemic average in multiple cities.

Eviction Lab researchers are tracking eviction filings in 34 cities across 10 states, and the data provides a grim snapshot of the risks facing a growing number of American renters right now.

Here’s what is pushing the rental crisis to new heights — and the disturbing truth about who is most at risk.

The typical rent in the U.S. now sits at $2,011 — 3.2% higher compared to last year and up slightly from September — according to a November report from Zillow.

And the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) notes a full-time worker would need to earn $28.58 an hour on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental — far higher than the national minimum wage of $7.25.

This puts low-income Americans at major risk of losing out on housing — and facing homelessness.

While monthly rent growth is slowly cooling ahead of the winter months, more low-income workers are rent-burdened, as they struggle with wages that aren’t keeping pace with inflation and no more pandemic programs to help keep them afloat.

To compound this issue, the U.S. is facing a shortfall of 7.3 million rental homes that are affordable to renters with extremely low incomes (incomes at or below either the federal poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income), reports the NLIHC.

Read more: Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now use $100 to cash in on prime real estate — without the headache of being a landlord. Here's how

Who is at greatest risk of eviction?

Just over half of the 7.6 million individuals highlighted in the newest Eviction Lab report lived in a household that received an eviction judgment.

But aside from spotlighting how many people face eviction, the report points to a surprising group most at risk for removal from a rental property: Children.

Each year, 2.9 million children under 18 are threatened with eviction, while 1.5 million are evicted — representing 2 in 5 of the entire population that face eviction each year.

“When I started writing about these issues, I kind of thought kids would shield families from eviction,” said Matthew Desmond, principal investigator at The Eviction Lab, in an interview with The New York Times. “But they expose families to eviction.”

The eviction filing rate for adults living with a child was 10.4%, over double the risk for those without children. This increased risk could be due to additional financial costs — like higher grocery and child-care costs — reduced working hours or even discrimination from landlords who might not want to deal with potential noise and damage.

There are significant racial disparities as well. While less than one in five renters in the U.S. is Black, over half of all eviction notices are filed against Black renters and about one in 10 are evicted each year.

In comparison, only one in 24 white renters are threatened with eviction and one in 40 are evicted annually.

“The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods,” Desmond told The Atlantic back in 2016, noting that about one in five African American women who rent report being evicted at some point in their lives.

Eviction risk generally decreases with age and income, although the study notes this is far from just a young person’s problem, with nearly 830,000 renters over 50 facing the threat of eviction each year.

What needs to change?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government introduced emergency rental assistance programs that prevented eviction filings from spiraling out of control as many Americans lost their jobs or faced reduced working hours, leaving them unable to afford their monthly rent.

In fact, The Eviction Lab reported earlier this year that COVID-era policies slashed eviction filings by more than half, compared to pre-pandemic times.

Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the NLIHC, says these protections need to come back.

“We absolutely should make this program permanent and permanently funded, keep this infrastructure that we built throughout the country, build off of these lessons that we learned, and continue to keep people stably housed into the future,” Yentel told PBS News in June.

She believes the housing crisis can be resolved with short-term emergency rental assistance programs and longer-term rental assistance. She also emphasizes the importance of preserving and building more apartments that are affordable to folks with extremely low incomes, as well as robust tenant protections.

“But it's going to require increased political will at all levels to be able to get the solutions at the scale needed to truly address this challenge,” she said.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden proposed a new budget to lower housing costs, expand supply, improve access to affordable rental options and increase efforts to end homelessness and prevent housing discrimination.

But with the government narrowly avoiding a shutdown and Congress in disarray after Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker, the Biden Administration is facing an uphill battle to move forward with any legislation in the Republican-controlled House.

A Breakthrough Clue May Untangle the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Michael Natale
Mon, November 13, 2023 

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Die?Bettmann - Getty Images

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

Edgar Allan Poe, the man who invented the detective story, saved his most unsolvable mystery for last: the cause of his own untimely death.

It’s been more than two centuries since Poe first entered this world, and despite dying only 40 years after doing so, he’s never truly left us. But Poe’s immortality is not through reincarnation, as it was for his “Morella” or “Ligeia.” Nor is it a resurrection, like in his famous “The Fall of the House of Usher” or his satirical “Some Words with a Mummy.”

If any Edgar Allan Poe work anticipated how the author would find life after his mysterious death, it is the fate of the young bride in “The Oval Portrait”: a body withered away in neglect, the visage preserved forever in a work of art, even if the creation of that very art led to the subject's death.

Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” wherein an artist is so absorbed in painting a portrait of his beautiful young bride that he fails to notice that she’s passed away while posing for him.

Culture Club - Getty Images

After all, Poe himself is still very present in the popular culture. In 2023, Mike Flanagan’s Poe-meets-Succession miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher rose to the top of the Netflix charts, and Austria’s official submission to the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest—“Who the Hell Is Edgar?”—is about singers Teya and Salena feeling like they’re possessed by the ghost of Poe.

But though Edgar Allan Poe is often viewed as the pre-imminent horror author of American letters, he’s also vibrantly present in the DNA of two other popular sub-genres of literature. For it’s through his invention of detective C. Auguste Dupin and his crime-solving technique of “ratiocination” in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” that we get the groundwork for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the entire thriving genre of detective fiction.

Likewise, it’s through the puzzling circumstances of Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious death that we get an early taste of the “true crime” craze, as real-world amateur sleuths across two centuries have tried their hand at unravelling a mystery buried under layers of myth-making, medical quandaries, and possibly even political corruption.

Edgar Allan Poe’s grave marker, erected in 1875 in Baltimore.

drnadig - Getty Images

The latest would-be Dupin to take a swing at the mystery of what, and perhaps who, killed Edgar Allan Poe is author Mark Dawidziak. In his 2023 book, A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Dawidziak posits a breakthrough new theory that incorporates a deadly illness that had previously claimed the life of both Poe’s mother and wife, and a fiendish and criminal act of the era called “cooping.”

But even Dawidziak acknowledges in his book that, though he has his theory, nobody knows anything for sure:

“Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him during the missing days between his last sighting in Richmond on the evening of September 26 and his reappearance outside an Election Day polling place in Baltimore on the damp, chilly afternoon of October 3. Nobody has ever solved the identity of the person, Reynolds, for whom Poe supposedly called out for hours before he died at the Washington University Hospital of Baltimore. Nobody has ever produced conclusive evidence, or so much as a first cousin to it, regarding the cause of the delirium generally described as “congestion of the brain,” “cerebral inflammation,” or “brain fever.” Even the melodramatic and rather pat last words attributed to him—“Lord help my poor soul!”—have been called into question.”

But just how, exactly, could there be such a mystery around the death of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most celebrated authors? Let’s take a look at the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe, as one simply can’t discuss one without the other. After all, as Poe himself put it in “The Premature Burial’: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

A 19th century etching of Edgar Allan Poe.

powerofforever - Getty Images

While virtually every major city along the U.S.’s East Coast now wishes to lay some sort of claim to the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, only one can hold the title of his birthplace: Boston. Though, as The New England Grimpendium notes, neither the house in which he was born, nor even the street upon which the house could have been found, still exist in Boston today, wiped away by robust urban renewal efforts and perhaps a then-lack of public interest.

After all, while cities from Richmond, Virginia to New York City all now proudly boast a piece of Poe, it was not as though any of these cities, or anyone in them, had much interest in claiming the author in his early years. And that includes his own parents.

As Biography notes, “Edgar never really knew his biological parents: Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actor, and David Poe Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore.” An alcoholic, reportedly frustrated with being seen as the lesser stage performer in his family when compared to his wife (as is suggested in Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance), David “left the family early in Edgar’s life.”

Which, it should be noted, is only the second worst thing an alcoholic stage actor frustrated at being viewed as the lesser performer in their family did in the 19th century.

Hulton Archive - Getty Images

For her part, Elizabeth appears to have tried to tend to her children (Edgar had an older brother, William, and a younger sister, Rosalie), but died from tuberculosis when Edgar was only two years old.

“Separated from his brother, William, and sister, Rosalie,” Biography continues, “Poe went to live with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia.” John Allan was in the tobacco business, and made no bones about wishing for Edgar to continue in his footsteps. Poe, however, had ambitions to become a poet, and at a young age began to write with feverish inspiration he attributed to his muse and fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster.

But if John Allan was the first person of many in a position to help Poe achieve his ambitions, he was also the first person of many to decline to do so. His lack of support extended to the financial, and though Poe was reportedly an excellent student when he attended the University of Virginia, his academic life was cut short when John Allan refused to fund his studies. So, too, was his romance with Royster, who “had become engaged to someone else” in Poe’s absence.

And so, dejected and searching for a path forward, young Edgar Allan Poe returned to Boston.

The dilapidated cellar of Poe’s Philadelphia home, now maintained by the National Parks Service to appear as it did when the author resided there.

Michael Natale

Thus would begin a lifetime of odd jobs, low finances, and moving from place to place. Poe was briefly in the Army, briefly a cadet at West Point, and briefly employed by the Southern Literary Messenger. He resided in Boston, Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.

As a writer, Edgar Allan Poe penned poetry, literary criticisms (his reviews were so scathing they earned him the nickname “Tomahawk Man” and the ire of none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), a novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket), an essay on cosmology (Eureka: A Prose Poem), treatises critiquing the contemporary style of home decor (“The Philosophy of Furniture”), articles debunking hoaxes (“Maelzel’s Chess Player”), and even created some hoaxes of his own (“The Balloon-Hoax”).

In 1836, a 27-year-old Poe married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. While we naturally cannot know what occurred behind closed doors, it’s been suggested by several Poe scholars that theirs was a chaste marriage, one that was more a legal matter than one of carnal intentions. When Poe wrote of Virginia, he employed the term “maiden.” While this could have been simple literary flourish, it also could be used to indicate the virginal status of Virginia throughout their marriage. Virginia would, however, provide emotional support for the struggling author.

Indeed, acclaim largely eluded Poe until the publication of his poem “The Raven” in 1845, just four years before his death. Easily his most enduring and iconic composition, “The Raven” has permeated the American cultural lexicon as few poems have, and unlike so much of Poe’s work, it was recognized as exceptional by his peers at the time.

An 1869 label for Raven brand tobacco, which depicts a scene from Poe’s story. Check out Biography for more on how Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” has permeated pop culture across the years.

Transcendental Graphics - Getty Images

But the glow of literary recognition would only shine unencumbered for Edgar Allan Poe for two years after “The Raven” was published. As Biography notes, “In 1847, at the age of 24—the same age when Poe’s mother and brother also died—Virginia passed away from tuberculosis.” Poe was “overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in 1849.”

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Die?

MizC - Getty Images

Which brings us to those fateful few days in 1849.

As Biography frames it, “...things were looking up for Poe in October 1849.” But of course, that’s only what we can infer from the material aspects of his life at the time, as well as the posthumous stories relayed by people close to him, who weren’t always reliable. It is true that Poe was “...a star author who commanded great audiences for his readings, and he was about to marry his first love, Elmira Royster Shelton.”

However, one of the pitfalls of history, especially when it comes to the lives of artists, is the creation of a narrative. The earliest iteration of a “Poe narrative” came at the hands of a former rival-turned-executor of his literary estate, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who opted to portray Poe, in the first official biography of the late author, as “a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer.”

We’ve come to view Poe as the typical “tortured genius,” but more accurate assessments of Poe, coming from those close to him, would attempt to correct the record, particularly when it came to the writer’s drinking. (He was reportedly not much for alcohol, and was a lightweight on the occasions he did imbibe.)

But these recollections also fed into another irresistible narrative: that of the artist whose life was “just starting to come together” when it was tragically snuffed out. Remember that, especially around this time, the literary world was enthralled by stories of young poets dying well before their time.

The early 1820s had seen the untimely deaths of the Romantics John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, both before the age of 30. By this time, the late Robert Burns (who died at 37 in 1796) was seeing a growing posthumous fanbase elevate him to such an echelon that, by 1880, he would have a statue erected in New York’s Central Park alongside Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare. And 11 years after that statue was erected, Arthur Rimbaud, author of the modernist prose poem A Season In Hell and agonized lover of fellow poet Paul Verlaine, would be snuffed out by cancer at age 37 and solidify the public’s idea of the tortured poet who died tragically young (for pop culture obsessives, think of this in much the same way we’ve sanctified the "27 Club"in rock music).

In the absence of facts, when it comes to the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe, it’s easy to be tempted to fill in the blanks with the narrative of your choice (tortured genius or tragic dreamer). But much like the witnesses probed in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” who mistake the shrieks of an orangutan for a foreign tongue because they’re manufacturing logic in the absence of fact, we also must avoid missing clues for the sake of forming a satisfying conclusion.

A lobby card for the 1932 Universal film Murders in the Rue Morgue starring Bela Lugosi. Though it shares its title with the Poe story, the film departs drastically from the original mystery tale to be near unrecognizable.LMPC - Getty Images

What Do We Actually Know About Edgar Allan Poe’s Death?

Hulton Archive - Getty Images

Here’s what we know happened for certain: On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe set out from Richmond to Philadelphia, with the intention of then heading to his cottage in The Bronx, New York. Next, on October 3, a printer named Joseph Walker recognized Poe, in what was described as a “delirious state,” outside of a tavern called Gunner’s Hall in Baltimore. It should be noted that the tavern, also known as Ryan’s Tavern, was at the time host to vote collectors for the 1849 election. It was common at the time for taverns to serve as polling places, and for men to be provided a drink upon casting their vote.

When Walker asked the distressed Poe if there was anyone he could contact for him, Poe named an editor he knew, Joseph Snodgrass. Walker wrote to Snodgrass:

"Dear Sir,
There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.
Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass."

Poe would be taken to Washington College Hospital, and what happened in his time there isn’t much clearer than what occurred before Walker discovered him outside the tavern—though in this case, the reason is a little more nefarious than poor record keeping. We know Poe was kept “alone in a windowless room with only one attendant physician, Dr. John Moran.” And we know that on October 7, without seemingly ever having explained the missing days, Poe died at the age of 40.

Edgar Allan Poe’s cause of death was recorded as “succumbing to phrenitis,” or congestion of the brain, which was also often employed to suggest a drug- or alcohol-related death. It isn’t clear how doctors made that determination. It has also been suggested that Poe uttered the final words, “Lord, help my poor soul,” but the reliability of this reporting has been called into question.

Poe was laid to rest in Baltimore. The author who had neither city nor family to permanently call home, spent his final days, and remains interred, in the very same city in which the father he never knew had been born.
What Are the Theories About Edgar Allan Poe’s Death?

The first theory proposed for what caused the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe came courtesy of Joseph Snodgrass, who blamed Poe’s demise on excessive alcohol consumption. It was a tidy explanation for Snodgrass; the doctor was an ardent advocate for temperance, and used every podium and paper he could find to blame Poe’s demise on alcohol consumption.

That Poe had opted to eschew alcohol altogether at the advice of his doctor, and had even joined the Sons of Temperance himself the year of his death, seemed to matter little to Snodgrass’s convenient conclusion.

Others have intimated everything from foul play and madness to rabies contracted from a pet cat. Poe did, indeed, love cats, and reportedly had expressed a reluctance to drink water in his final days, which Dr. R. Michael Benitez pointed to in 1996 to make the case for rabies as the author’s ultimate undoing. Had the man behind "The Gold-Bug" really gone the way of Old Yeller?

A piece of decor in the otherwise purposefully sparse home at Philadelphia’s Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site depicts an ever-present cat on the author’s writing desk.

Michael Natale

Mark Dawidziak suggests what is, at first blush, the simplest solution: tuberculosis. As Biography notes, there was “an explosion in tuberculosis cases in the United States at the time,” to say nothing of the fact that the disease had claimed Poe’s wife, Virginia, just two years prior, so Poe had surely been exposed to it. And his symptoms, “like fever and delusions,” fit the diagnosis.

But Dawidziak also points to a more sinister element to explain Poe’s disappearance: the practice of cooping.

In the run-up to the so-called Gilded Age, the U.S. was rife with political machines that would bribe, bargain, and sometimes outright bully their way into positions of power. A common practice of the time was the act of rounding up vagrants and other powerless and unassuming men, trapping them in a confined space (hence “cooping”) and sending them out to various polling places under false names in order to cast fraudulent votes. The theory goes that Edgar Allan Poe was swept up in a cooping, subjected to the various mental and at times physical abuses that came with that, which caused both his absence and his subsequent strange behavior upon his discovery by Walker.

After all, Poe was discovered outside a polling place. And even if the notably “lightweight” man had eschewed alcohol personally, being forced to accept a drink at every tavern where he cast a fraudulent vote could explain a state of intoxication.

Some might balk at the suggestion that a “celebrity” could go unrecognized during all of this, but it’s important to remember that Edgar Allan Poe was merely a literary celebrity, with his image at best appearing as an etching in some newspapers and literary publications. The men actually orchestrating the coopings were often only a few poor choices away from being cooped themselves, usually the poverty-stricken or immigrants willing to do what they had to to survive.

Since we will never know for sure, and no C. Auguste Dupin has yet arrived to offer a conclusive explanation, we’re forced to choose which “story” we want to believe. For those who choose to believe the cooping story, there’s an extra bit of bitter irony to it all.

Maryland Senator David StewartWikimedia Commons

We don’t have records of the down-ballot races a cooped Poe may have been forced to vote in to try and sway things, but we do know the two men that Maryland elected to the Senate during that 1849 election. One was James Alfred Pearce, who was the incumbent, and held the seat from 1843 all the way through to 1862, so it’s safe to safe that there needn’t have been much effort to corruptly sway the vote to save him. But the other was David Stewart, a Democrat running for a Senate seat that had previously been occupied by the Whig party member Reverdy Johnson, who had vacated the seat to serve in the cabinet of President Zachary Taylor. (Who had his own death under questionable circumstances, though that’s a story for another time.)

Stewart would indeed win his Senate race, striking a blow to the Whig dominance of Baltimore... for a single year. Just one year later, in 1850, Stewart would lose his Senate seat to the Whig party’s Thomas Pratt, who would occupy it for seven years thereafter. So if the cooping plot that may have captured Poe had been to sway the vote for the Democrat Stewart, then one of America’s most celebrated literary minds was snuffed out for a single year of a single Senate seat.
Why Do We Still Care About Edgar Allan Poe Today?

Michael Natale

As one of the most prominent authors of the American cultural lexicon, it’s not surprising that many of the cities Edgar Allan Poe occupied now not only lay claim to the author, but have also preserved or erected buildings devoted to the man. And as for whether the mystery of Poe’s death still transfixes the public, you need only see the patient exhaustion on the faces of the tour guides within the walls of any of these museums as yet another group of curious tourists press them for the “answer.” How much these institutions embrace the mystery can vary.

In Baltimore, whose NFL team takes its name from Poe’s most famous poem, you can board a “Bus Tour of Edgar Allan Poe’s Life and Death in Baltimore,” which will take you past the hospital where he died, and his two grave sites.

Pay a visit to the Poe Museum in Richmond and you can take part in a tribute to the author, which can include delivering a eulogy and searching for “Death Clues” to solve the mystery.

And at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, the National Parks Department opts to not harp on Poe’s death, but rather, the time Poe spent in the still-preserved and sparsely decorated home (save for a charming reading room in the visitor’s center), and the stories he wrote therein. Though you can press a Park Ranger for their take on Poe’s death if you’re so inclined.

Michael Natale

In New York City, Poe’s footprint is a fair bit smaller than elsewhere, his proverbial ghost given less ground to haunt. In Manhattan, West 84th Street is also named Edgar Allan Poe Street, and a plaque on the side of a building suggests on that spot is where Poe composed “The Raven” (though other sites have claimed the same). While up in The Bronx, in a small patch of green known as Poe Park, the modest cottage in which the author resided still stands, though you can only get inside through a privately arranged tour through the Bronx Historical Society. Until September 2023, the cottage reportedly held an exhibit on the tragic deaths of both Virginia and Edgar Allan Poe for those fortunate enough to get inside to see it.

Adjacent to the cottage within the park is the Poe Park Visitor’s Center, operated by the City of New York. This particular facility isn’t focused on the history, or the mystery, of the author. Rather, it exists as a venue to showcase the artwork of current members of the community. It exists to create a space to encourage local artists in a manner Poe himself never had in life.

Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage behind a gate in Poe Park in The BronxMichael Natale

The greatest 10 cultural works which celebrate the (BRITISH WHITE) working class

Neil McCormick
Mon, 13 November 2023

Working class heroes


A working-class hero is something to be, sung John Lennon in 1970. This proclamation came after a decade which saw class boundaries dissolve like never before: it was a time when cinema and theatre in Britain was dominated by kitchen sink drama and British pop music not only ruled the world but also brought working-class culture unapologetically into the mainstream.

Yet these days, the notion of class, particularly when it comes to art and culture, is more diffuse, more slippery. The idea of social mobility, once something to be cheered, now has its naysayers and, in fact, a new book The Working Classroom by Matt Bromley and Andy Griffith suggests that lifting working-class kids from their roots is not the be all and end all that where they came from should be celebrated.

The book goes on to recommend a selection of books, music and films from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens to Ghost Town by The Specials that pupils should study. It’s a difficult path – much work, for example the films of Mike Leigh, tends to patronise the working class rather than be celebratory. So with this in mind, the Telegraph critics share their own cultural highlights which walk that line adroitly.

The Darling Buds of May (1958)

The cast of The Darling Buds of May - ITV/Shutterstock

The son of an illegitimate factory worker, HE Bates wrote five novels about Pop Larkin, scrap dealer and nominal farmer, and his enormous brood. Where most working-class folk in fiction lead miserable circumscribed lives, the Larkins live high on the hog, blessed with the cunning to outwit the tax inspectors and bureaucrats trying to put a dent in their income; and instead of submitting to middle-class values, they defy their prudish times to enjoy vigorous and varied sex lives. It’s a bucolic fantasy world, but at least it shows that not every non-posh character in fiction need be downtrodden.

Billy Liar (1959)

Yes, read the novels of the Angry Young Men – Sillitoe, Barstow, Braine – and nod along with the authors’ outrage at the stacking of the system against their working-men protagonists. Or perhaps read Billy Liar, by their contemporary Keith Waterhouse, and have a laugh.

Based on Waterhouse’s own teenage experiences as an undertaker’s clerk, the novel details the daydreams and pranks which make 19-year-old Billy Fisher’s trammeled existence bearable. There’s an undercurrent of sadness at Billy’s unfulfillable ambitions, but Waterhouse refuses to make a martyr of him, instead conferring on working-class life the dignity of being a fit subject for comedy.

By Jake Kerridge

Jerusalem (2009)

Mark Rylance in Jerusalem - Simon Annand

When Jerusalem arrived in 2009 with the force of an instant classic much was made of Jez Butterworth’s unfashionable interest in rural life. And there was inevitable admiration too for Mark Rylance’s rip-roaring turn as ne’er-do-well, drug-peddling Johnny Rooster Byron. Less celebrated was how the play struck a blow for those on the margins, battling the steam-roller of (middle-class) progress with a mix of hedonistic escapism and obdurate communality, with Byron their mobile-home dwelling focal-point. Modelled on a hard-living former builder, the character’s astounding complexity, what with his braggart wit, fierce individualism and mystical aura, made him a folk-hero and figure of self-ennobled authority: a V-sign flicked at the usual stale, male, pale order.

Beautiful Thing (1993)

Jonathan Harvey’s name-making, era-defining 1993 play (later a film) felt like a riposte to the 1980s vogue for upper-echelon homosexual confusions – such as Another Country and Maurice. Instead, Harvey took us inside the sprawling Thamesmead estate in south-east London and detailed the tender same-sex attraction of two lads living tough lives in neighbouring flats, one of whom faces domestic violence at home. The age of consent at the time was 21, but politics – and the horror of the Aids epidemic – were kept at bay in a feel-good, almost fairytale evening that celebrated the sweetly exuberant resilience of these archetypal under-dogs.

By Dominic Cavendish

Ian Dury: New Boots and Panties!! (Stiff Records) 1977


This was a glorious debut album from one of British pop’s great wordsmiths. The wit, pliancy and sheer exuberance inherent in Dury’s dazzling use of language offers a joyful vision of pride in his East End London roots. It is a world populated by amusingly sketched characters including the outrageously cheeky Billericay Dickie, the tongue tied Clever Trevor and sweary Plaistow Patricia. Dury’s unapologetically unreconstructed Cockney accent is artfully set against the limber sophistication of The Blockheads’ punk funk. Everything about this album is life affirming and romantic, brimming with an earthy sense of love for the people and surroundings, and touched by pathos on a tenderly understated account of his father’s life, My Old Man.

Madness: The Rise & Fall (Stiff Records) 1982

The much loved nutty boys have always celebrated their working class origins with joy and affection rather than punky rage. There is a spirit of life being lived to the full inherent in their ska energy and Music Hall humour. The Rise and Fall was conceived as a concept album about their childhoods in Camden, north London. It is rambunctious, mischievous fun, centred around a knees up pop masterpiece of ordinary family life, Our House. Playing it on top of Buckingham Palace at the Diamond Jubilee Concert in 2012 cemented its status as an unofficial alternative national anthem.

By Neil McCormick

My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985)

My Beautiful Laundrette - AJ Pics / Alamy Stock Photo

Against a backdrop of Neo-Nazi violence in Thatcher’s South London, this deft social comedy from the pen of then-little-known Hanif Kureishi forged a redemptive glow. Little does anybody know that business partners Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (a peroxide-quiffed Daniel Day-Lewis), who step up to run the business of Omar’s uncle, are also paramours. In this collision of the Pakistani and punk worlds, they get away with a furtive relationship because no one could have dreamed it likely. Boundary-pushing in all sorts of ways, Stephen Frears’s breakout hit thrives on compassion, and a bruised optimism, for its star-crossed lovers.

Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966)

Right after Zulu and The Ipcress File, Michael Caine reached a new echelon of fame as the womanising Cockney hero of Bill Naughton’s 1963 play. As charming as he is callous, he famously shoots the breeze straight to camera while swanning around on the make. Lewis Gilbert’s comfort with the working class, and consistently progressive casting, made him the ideal director for the job. It perfectly caught both the swinging zeitgeist and seedy underbelly of 1960s London for a global audience, and was a box office sensation, nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Caine.

By Tim Robey

Brookside (1982-2003)

Brookside - Television Stills

In terms of TV drama, soap operas set the template for how working-class lies are depicted. In 1960, Tony Warren created Coronation Street, looking at the turbulent lives of the residents in Greater Manchester, yet for all its popularity, its quaintness and cast list of eccentrics has sometimes felt less than authentic. Brookside, on the other hand, was the real deal. Created by Phil Redmond for the then-brand new Channel 4, this slice of Liverpudlian life pulled no punches and was determinedly unsentimental (at least in its first decade). The fact that it was filmed in a real close with echoey walls gave a sense of cinema verite which has never been rivalled since.

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983-2004)

Ever since Steptoe and Son took existential angst to new levels, the British sitcom has always been socially diverse. But this series, written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, broke new ground. Following the lives of seven construction workers who travel to Düsseldorf to seek employment, it never gave you the sense that these were a bunch of thespians finding their motivation. Rather, you often got the impression that the cast had walked off nearest construction site. Jimmy Nail who played Oz had worked in a glass factory and got his “surname” when a six-inch spike went through his foot. It could be downbeat, but ultimately the show was underpinned by a sense of optimism.

By Ben Lawrence

MISSED THIS CLASSIC FROM 1959

What to Expect During SpaceX’s Second Starship Test Flight

George Dvorsky
Mon, November 13, 2023

Starship during its inaugural test on April 20, 2023.


Later this week, SpaceX is poised for a highly anticipated, and undoubtedly exciting, second test flight of its Starship megarocket—provided it receives the final regulatory approvals. Here’s what you need to know about this critically important test.

The Elon Musk-led company is targeting Friday, November 17 for the second test flight of its Starship megarocket—pending the final go-ahead from regulatory bodies. The upcoming flight follows the first test on April 20, which ended with the rocket’s destruction over the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, SpaceX has undertaken 63 corrective actions as mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).


Starship during its maiden flight.

The newly implemented water deluge system is being scrutinized by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the FAA for potential environmental impacts; this represents the final regulatory hurdle for SpaceX. The fact that SpaceX has chosen November 17 as the tentative launch date implies that the company expects to receive the necessary launch license soon. Or it could be a way to pressure the regulators into issuing the license.

Another area of focus is the rocket’s self-destruct mechanism. During the first test, the rocket failed to respond immediately to the self-destruct command, leading to a dangerous delay. SpaceX has since refined this system to ensure a more rapid response.

A crucial technical advancement for the upcoming flight is the implementation of a hot-stage separation system. This system involves igniting the Starship upper stage prior to the separation from the lower stage, ensuring a smoother transition during ascent (stage separation did not go as planned during the inaugural flight, contributing to the rocket entering into a fatal tumble). Additionally, a new electronic Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system has been implemented for the Super Heavy Raptor engines.
Countdown and flight test timeline

The process of loading the propellants—liquid oxygen and liquid methane—will commence 1 hour and 37 minutes prior to launch. As the countdown progresses at the south Texas Starbase facility, the Raptor engines on both the Super Heavy booster and Starship will undergo a pre-launch procedure known as an engine chill, commencing at T-minus 19 minutes and 40 seconds. This process is crucial for conditioning the engines to handle the super-cold propellants during ignition and flight.

The flame deflector will kick in at T-minus 10 seconds, with the Raptor ignition sequence beginning at T-minus 3 seconds—a modification from the previous T-minus 8 seconds. This change aims to minimize potential damage to the launch infrastructure caused by the engines’ intense power.

Two seconds after the mission begins, the rocket will lift off the pad, marking the start of its ascent. Max Q, the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure, is expected to occur 52 seconds into the mission. This phase challenges the structural integrity of the rocket as it travels through the atmosphere at increasing speeds.

The mission profile.

At 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the flight, an event termed MECO, or Most Engines Cut Off, will occur. This is a variation of the traditional Main Engine Cut Off, signifying the point when, presumably, a majority of the Raptor engines will shut down. Following this, at 2 minutes and 53 seconds, the booster will initiate its boostback burn startup. This maneuver involves a flip of the booster, setting it up for a rapid descent back to Earth. As part of this test flight, the booster will simulate a landing in the Gulf of Mexico, which is expected to happen around the seven-minute mark. This procedure is a precursor to future tests in which the booster will return to the Boca Chica site for vertical landings. The two-stage Starship is meant to be a fully reusable rocket.

Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage will continue along its journey, performing an engine cut-off at 8 minutes and 33 seconds into the mission. Its path will take it over the Caribbean, southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, and New Guinea, before making a planned splashdown in the Pacific near Hawaii. A critical phase of this journey will be the reentry maneuver at 1 hour and 17 minutes, followed by a simulated ocean landing at the 90-minute mark. It’s important to note that Starship will not complete a full orbit of Earth during this mission.

The success of each of these phases and stages, especially the hot staging and the reentry maneuvers, will be closely monitored, as they are crucial for the overall objectives of the test flight. Key questions include whether the 16 million pounds of thrust produced by the Raptor engines will damage the launch mount despite the water deluge system, if all 33 Raptor engines will ignite successfully, whether SpaceX will achieve hot staging on its first attempt, and if Starship can survive reentry.

SpaceX will take whatever happens with its second mission, learn from it, and use those lessons to improve the third. The idea that problems will arise is practically a certainty, given the company’s devotion to “rapid iterative development,” an approach that’s “been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements, including Falcon, Dragon, and Starlink,” according to the company.

The second Starship mission may or may not succeed, but one thing is for certain: It will not be a dull affair, for better or worse.

Gizmodo

NASA Built a 'Tire Assault Vehicle' From an RC Tank to Explode Space Shuttle Tires

James Gilboy
Mon, November 13, 2023 

CR-990 Tire Assault Vehicle in action


Outside of baseball and apple pie, there are two things we as Americans all consider a part of our national identity: Going to space, and redneck engineering. Normally, those two things don't overlap at all, but they did for a moment under NASA's Space Shuttle program. That's how we got the CR-990 Tire Assault Vehicle, which was built to blow up Space Shuttle tires that were too dangerous for a human to touch.

The TAV's story begins in 1993, when NASA was upgrading the Space Shuttle's landing gear. After gliding down through the atmosphere, the 240,000-pound Space Shuttles would land at speeds up to 288 mph, placing enormous stress on their tires. They had to endure triple the load of a Boeing 747 tire, so they weighed 230 pounds apiece according to Michelin, and were nitrogen-filled to as high as 373 psi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyfV3u4KKYo

That'll make anyone who has worked with truck tires shudder—semi tires can kill you when they blow out. Bigger, more pressurized Shuttle tires were even more dangerous, bursting with force equivalent to 2.5 sticks of dynamite, according to NASA. That's enough to injure people as far as 50 feet away, or deafen you from 100 feet. NASA's test process of landing a modified airliner on one of the tires could make them pop on landing, but the ones that didn't were more dangerous. Apparently, even a person's touch could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak.

NASA tried multiple ways of popping dangerous tires, notably a bomb disposal robot, but it was imperfect. The bot was expensive, too bulky to drive easily under the test plane, and it wasn't always available. At some point though, a NASA radio contractor by the name of David Carrott had an idea—presumably while browsing a toy catalog.

Tamiya 1/16-scale Tiger II remote controlled tank. Tamiya

Carrott proposed using a homemade contraption he called the CR-990 Tire Assault Vehicle, or TAV. The Online Tank Museum indicates it was built from a 1/16 scale Tamiya remote-control Tiger II tank (seen above), using the kit's lower hull, suspension, tracks, and rear plate. But 75 percent of it was custom: The sides and roof of the hull, side skirts, and upper glacis (front armor) were all custom-fabricated from metal.

In place of its turret, he installed a small camera next to a DeWalt drill motor with a 3/8-inch bit. It drew power from a Black and Decker battery that also powered drill motors on the treads, and transmitted a video signal to a portable black-and-white TV. In all, the doohickey cost less than $3,000 to build, where NASA's previous bomb disposal bot used for deflation duty apparently cost $100,000.


CR-990 Tire Assault Vehicle in action. Dennis Taylor via NASA

Though the TAV arrived toward the end of the tire test program, it managed to successfully detonate nine dangerous tires in service of NASA. That a modified model tank survived one of the blasts, much less several, is impressive in its own right. In fact, the TAV still exists today: It's on display at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Space travel may be an expensive endeavor, but there are times when the simplest, cheapest solution is the best one. Especially if it's as funny as a kitbashed RC tank with a drill on top.

https://twitter.com/DutchSpace/status/963923603916980224

Got a tip or question for the author? You can reach them here: james@thedrive.com

US Supreme Court liberals dissent in 'unusually severe' solitary confinement case

John Kruzel and Andrew Chung
Mon, November 13, 2023 


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court's three liberal justices on Monday sharply objected to the court's refusal to hear an appeal by a former Illinois inmate who was kept in solitary confinement in a state prison and virtually deprived of any exercise for about three years.

The court takes up appeals when at least four of its nine justices agree to hear a case. None of the six conservative justices joined with the liberal justices to provide the fourth vote needed to hear former inmate Michael Johnson's appeal of a lower court's ruling rejecting his 2016 civil rights lawsuit accusing prison officials of violating the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishment.

Johnson was incarcerated after being convicted of home invasion and subsequently was convicted while in prison of two instances of aggravated battery against a peace officer.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in an eight-page dissent joined by fellow liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said the lower court applied the wrong legal test to determine whether Johnson's treatment violated the Eighth Amendment.

Jackson described Johnson's solitary confinement as "unusually severe," noting that "prison officials completely deprived Johnson of exercise for nearly all of his incarceration" at Pontiac Correctional Center.

"The cramped confines of Johnson's cell prevented him from exercising there," Jackson wrote. "Thus, for three years, Johnson had no opportunity at all to stretch his limbs or breathe fresh air."

Illinois Democratic Attorney General Kwame Raoul had urged the justices to reject the appeal.

Johnson, 42, is currently released on parole, according to his lawyer Daniel Greenfield. Johnson has a history of mental illness, including depression and bipolar disorder, and suicide attempts, according to his lawyers.

During his roughly 3-1/2 years at the Pontiac facility, Johnson was found to have committed 46 violations of prison rules arising from 30 incidents, with 16 of those incidents resulting in "yard restrictions," limiting an inmate to one hour of outdoor yard access per month, Illinois officials said in court papers.

He has claimed that on multiple occasions he was denied his monthly one hour of yard access, and that from June 2015 to June 2016 he was not permitted a single hour of exercise.

The deprivation compromised his physical and mental health, according to his lawsuit.

"His muscles withered, he repeatedly smeared feces on his body, endured hallucinations and compulsively picked at his own flesh, and he required 'suicide watch' time and again," his lawyers said in court papers.

Johnson sought monetary damages, medical treatment and other relief in the lawsuit accusing prison officials of violating the Eighth Amendment by denying him exercise for a prolonged period. A federal judge rejected his claims, finding that Johnson "cannot show that he suffered adverse health consequences as a result of the denial of access to the yard."

The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge's decision in 2022, concluding that yard privilege denials as punishment for prisoner misconduct are legal unless meted out for "some utterly trivial infraction" of prison rules. Despite the lengthy deprivation, Johnson's infractions, "including spitting on inmates or guards and throwing urine and feces," were serious, the 7th Circuit concluded.

Jackson faulted the 7th Circuit's analysis, saying that instead of assessing the triviality of Johnson's prison infractions, it should have applied the Supreme Court's test assessing whether prison officials have acted with "deliberate indifference" toward an inmate's health or safety.

There was "more than enough evidence to support a reasonable jury finding that the overall three-year deprivation of yard time that Johnson was subjected to was the result of unconstitutional deliberate indifference," Jackson wrote.

Johnson's lawyer commended the liberal justices for recognizing the 7th Circuit's "indisputable legal error," but expressed regret that "imposing such cruelty - let alone on a person known to suffer from mental illness - is acceptable to any federal judge."

(Reporting by John Kruzel in Washington and Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

Liberal justices object as Supreme Court rejects prisoner's exercise claim

Lawrence Hurley
Mon, November 13, 2023 


WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to weigh under what circumstances prisoners in solitary confinement have a constitutional right to exercise, turning away an Illinois inmate's claim that he was denied the opportunity for three years.

The court's three liberal justices disagreed with the decision not to take up the case, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing a lengthy dissenting opinion in which she called the inmate's treatment "unusually severe." The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

Michael Johnson, who initially represented himself in legal proceedings, was barred from the normal one hour of exercise in an outdoor yard, typically available five days a week, between 2013 and 2016, his lawyers said in court papers.

Under prison rules, exercise privileges can be withdrawn temporarily for violations. Johnson, who has mental health issues, was cited more than 70 times between 2008 and August 2016 for his conduct.

Johnson, 42, claims that the refusal to allow him to exercise as a result of his repeatedly disobeying prison rules violated his right not to be inflicted with cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution's 8th Amendment.

He appealed to the Supreme Court after the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state in March 2022 and subsequently declined to reconsider the case, with the judges split 5-5.

In an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Jackson said Johnson should have been allowed to pursue his claim that officials were deliberately indifferent to his health needs.

"The consequences of such a prolonged period of exercise deprivation were predictable severe. Most notably, Johnson's mental state deteriorated rapidly," Jackson wrote.

Lower courts, she added, failed to "consider the impact of cumulative exercise deprivation on Johnson's physical and mental health, or what was known to prison officials about the risks of such deprivation."

Daniel Greenfield, one of Johnson's lawyers, said that while he was grateful for Jackson's opinion, "we are saddened to live in an era where imposing such cruelty — let alone on a person known to suffer from mental illness — is acceptable to any federal judge."

The actions of prison officials served to exacerbate Johnson's mental health issues, his lawyers said in court papers.

"His muscles withered, he repeatedly smeared feces on his body, endured hallucinations, and compulsively picked at his own flesh, and he required 'suicide watch' time and again," they wrote.

Illinois Solicitor General Jane Notz, representing the state, said in a court filing that the appeals court ruling followed precedent, saying that yard restrictions do not violate the Constitution as long as they are supported by valid prison management policies.

Johnson has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and severe depression. He was eventually moved to a mental health unit in 2016.

After serving his sentence, Johnson was released in 2019, but after being convicted of battery he was until last month serving a new sentence in a facility that provides psychiatric care.

Ancient settlement hidden under French city had warehouses and pipe systems.

Moira Ritter
Mon, November 13, 2023 

During the 19th century, as the wine trade industry in France developed, an intricate commercial district was constructed on the outskirts of Narbonne.

Now, archaeologists are learning that ancient people had the same idea for the area more than a millennium earlier.

Experts were conducting preventative excavations in the area ahead of a construction project when they discovered the ruins of an older city dating to sometime between the first and fifth centuries, according to an Oct. 31 news release from the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (INRAP). The ancient ruins indicate the site was also a commercial site for an older city.

Archaeologists said some of the buildings had crawl spaces created by horizontal jugs.


The ancient district was composed of several blocks cut by two streets and an alley, officials said. The blocks were equipped with an advanced hydraulic system, including pipes for the removal of rain and waste water.

Numerous pipelines for removing rain and waste water were discovered, officials said.

Intersecting pipelines indicate modifications to the system, according to archaeologists.

At the site, archaeologists have partially uncovered at least three warehouses during three excavations, INRAP said. There were likely homes and shops surrounding the warehouses.

The remains of several walls, some made of stones, indicate the presence of building with earth or concrete floors, according to experts. Some of the buildings have crawl spaces created by amphorae, or large jars, placed horizontally.

One especially large building, including a crawl space, appeared to have been built for the storage of various goods, archaeologists said in the release. The upper floor of the building likely served as an office or home, which was evidenced by mud brick walls covered with paintings. The walls appear to have collapsed in a fire.

Experts believe the large building collapsed following a fire.

Collapsed wall paintings indicated that the large building contained an office or home, experts said.

Researchers said the discovery indicates the presence of a river port located along the Robine, which runs through southeast France.