Power was restored to the Seventh Avenue-53rd Street station several hours after an outage crippled it during the morning commute.
The track juice went out at about 7:25 a.m., causing the MTA to suspend the line from end to end.
power was restored to the station at 12:36 p.m., MTA officials said.
The express train rumbles from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn up to Bedford Park in the Bronx.
On top of forgetting my headphones and there not being any f- B train service. I just hate today, one annoyed commuter tweeted.
The agency also rerouted D, E and M service, and told riders to expect delays on the A, B, C, D, E, F, J, M, N, Q and R trains in both directions.
Riders were frustrated by what they say are increasingly common subway delays.
[The MTA] needs someone newmaybe fresh eyes to look over what could be implemented in this situation, said rider Judy D, 36. We shouldnt have to deal with this.
Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others -- "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
What a tease. "Deliverance," a six-track EP of previously unreleased Prince songs, surfaced a few days ago and then was quickly removed from several major digital music sites, including iTunes, after a lawsuit was filed in federal court by Prince"s estate. The tracks were assembled and released by one of the late singer"s former studio engineers, Ian Boxhill, apparently without the estate"s authorization. Boxhill co-wrote and co-produced the tracks, which were recorded in 2006-08, according to Rogue Music Alliance, a Washington-based record company.
The now-you-hear-it, now-you-don"t EP marks a new litigious chapter in what is sure to be a protracted struggle over Prince"s extensive musical archives. Despite releasing 39 studio albums in his lifetime and dozens of other projects, Prince left behind a trove of music at his Paisley Park studio. As evidenced by the outpouring of posthumous recordings that have extended the careers of artists ranging from Jimi Hendrix and Tupac Shukar sometimes for the worse the Prince archive seems ripe for exploring and exploiting.
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Quality control is another matter entirely. The title song from "deliverance" is grade-a late-period prince, 3-plus-minutes of piano-organ interplay and sanctified backing vocals that impart an anthemic gospel feel. "Who got the blues?" Prince cries in the buildup to a fierce guitar solo. The song"s healing message "Because time"s so hard to deal with, now understand your deliverance is at hand" gains poignancy on the first anniversary of his death.
But the remainder of the EP isn"t quite as strong. It consists of five linked tracks, including two versions of "I Am," the grittiest and spunkiest of the bunch. The remaining songs/snippets flirt with camp ("Touch Me," "Sunrise Sunset") and vampy erotica ("No One Else").
The inconsistency should come as no surprise. Prince spent the last 20 years of his career releasing hit-and-miss recordings. But who, if anyone, will be charged with finding gems on par with a track like "Deliverance"? And will that music be released in a way that expands and enhances our understanding of how Prince spent his time in Paisley Park? Don"t count on it.
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
greg@gregkot.com
Twitter @gregkot
"Deliverance"
Prince
2 stars (out of four)
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The offseason before the 2014-2015 season, the New York Rangers generously gave Derek Stepan anaverage annual salaryof $6.5 million. At the time, it made sense because he had a great regular season and even stronger playoff performance in 2015.
His most important contribution that season was his game seven overtime winner against the Capitals to complete a 3-1 series comeback and send the Rangers to the Eastern Conference Finals for the second year in a row. But that isnt indicative of how hes playing now.
Over the course of games one through four of this first round series against the Canadiens, Stepan has been nearly nonexistent. He has only posted one assist in game two, which the Rangers didnt even win. And his +/- rating has been even except in gamethree, which was also a loss.
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Even his faceoff percentage has dramatically decreased, going from 47% in the regular season to 38% in the postseason. the rangers are now relying on other players such as Mika Zibanejad, Oscar Lindberg, and Kevin Hayes to win draws.
Stepan is averaging about 30 shifts per game and 21 minutes of ice time, so its not a matter of him not being played. Simply put, he needs to start playing better with the opportunities he gets.
Currently, he is on a line with Chris Kreider and Mats Zuccarello, so lack of talent isnt the problem either. Zuccarello is capable of making great passes, and Kreider has incredible speed. Stepan needs to start making the magic happen with this line, but he must start with himself.
One of the only good things hes done so far this series is not take many penalty minutes (2). However, this shows that hes also not getting that involved in the post-whistle action or hitting during the games.
Come game six, Stepan should try to get open more, hit more, and take more shots on goal. There is no doubt he is capable of this style of play, which is whyhe needs to get back on track. Starting now.
Flying saucers carrying mysterious visitors are one of the classic sci-fi motifs. But there are visitors and there are visitors. Some aliens, like Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), land their saucer on the Mall in Washington, D.C., then walk right out backed up by his badass robot Gort and sternly tell the human race to clean up our act.
Then there are visitors of the sort we see in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), who pilot the death-ray-vomiting crafts of the title, and eventually lay waste to Washington D.C.
But then there are the sort of visitors who prefer to keep on the down-low, the sort whose saucers are only witnessed accidentally, out in the boondocks, where, as Jay Leno used to put it, Bob Bookey and his Cousin Weenie are fishing. Lenos theory was that these visits were bathroom breaks: If youre traveling the universe, coming to Earth is like stopping at Stuckeys.
Anyway, movies and TV shows in this category are the true UFO movies, heavy on the U. They exploit not only the thrill of an encounter with otherworldly beings, but also the isolation of being disbelieved, or the paranoid terror of being at odds with a government cover-up.
A new entry in this UFO genre opens this weekend: Phoenix Forgotten, a found-footage chiller inspired by the famous Phoenix Lights phenomenon of March 13, 1997 sort of a sci-fi spin on The Blair Witch Project. So to welcome it, lets take a look at some of its more memorable predecessors.
The Flying SaucerThe term flying saucer was popularized in the wake of pilot Kenneth Arnolds reported sightings in 1947, and gradually came to be applicable to any UFOs, even if they werent actually saucer-shaped. This low-budget 1950 melodrama was probably the first to cash in on the craze, but spoiler alert! the vehicle in question turns out to be of earthly origin: a secret experimental aircraft developed by a scientist, and coveted by Commie agents. It is, however, a pretty cool retro-looking saucer, sort of like a metallic horseshoe crab. Producer-director-star Mikel Conrad, who also concocted the story, added a note in the credits suggesting the film was showing something classified: We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of those in authority who made the release of the Flying Saucer film possible at this time.
Invasion of the Saucer MenPaul Fairmans short story The Cosmic Frame was about aliens who frame a guy for a hit-and-run in order to discredit his account of their presence on Earth.This tongue-in-cheek 1957 screen adaptation features iconic, bulbous-brained, irritable-faced little aliens creations of the great 50s-era monster designer Paul Blaisdell shooting their witnesses up with alcohol from their pointy fingers, thus either killing them or rendering them too drunk to believe.
The Bamboo SaucerThe title craft isnt made of bamboo, but its hidden in a remote temple in China, so, you know, bamboo. It could as well have been titled The Kung Pao Saucer. Even though it is an alien spaceship in this 1967 effort, the conflict still derives from the Cold War. The aliens who brought it to Earth are already dead, and American and Soviet scientific-military teams are competing to get their hands on it. Theres a thawing of international relations as the two sides team up, and the studly U.S. pilot (John Ericson) and the hottie Soviet scientist (Lois Nettleton) fall in love. The highlight of the dialogue comes when the scientist, having activated the saucers gravitational field, cries out Ve vill be skvooshed, like bugs!
The InvadersThis TV series (ABC, 1967-1968), created by Larry Cohen for Quinn Martin Productions, had a particularly seamless conspiracy-theory premise: In the first episode, hero David Vincent, lost on a lonely country road, sees a flying saucer land near an abandoned diner. It turns out be part of a fleet belonging to the title aliens, refugees from a dying planet who have taken human form to infiltrate human society, in order to take over Earth. Whenever an individual invader was killed, its body would vaporize, thus destroying the evidence. Vincent thus becomes an itinerant hero, a la David Janssen in The Fugitive, traveling from one set of guest stars to the next every episode, now and then convincing a few people that hes right. The Invaders are imperfect human knockoffs, however. Most of them have a tell: their pinky fingers are rigid! Theres something marvelous about the idea that the aliens have perfected not only interplanetary travel but human duplication, yet they find it tricky to bend the pinky finger.
UFO: Target EarthShot in Georgia, this 1974 low-budgeter features a young researcher (Nick Plakias) who makes contact with a spaceship submerged in a remote lake. The pure-energy aliens therein are depicted via electronic special effects reminiscent those near the end of Kubricks 2001, though more primitive many of them now look like Spirograph designs. Also like Kier Dullea in 2001, our hero here ages rapidly under the influence of the aliens, ultimately looking very peaked indeed. Make no mistake, this is a terrible, slow-moving film, but having seen it at a theater when I was 12, I can attest that it has a strange, creepy atmosphere that can stick in your head. For decades. Maybe it has to do with the spooky, pretty Mystic-Tides-ish theme song, Between the Attic and the Moon.
Liquid SkyIts pretty likely that no UFO movie has ever had quite as much hipster cred as this 1982 indie, a hilarious but also harrowing take on the drug-fueled 80s New York club-fashion scene from Russian expat director Slava Tsukerman. The dinner-plate-sized flying saucer that lands on the roof of a Manhattan apartment building contains an alien represented by electronic effects similar to those in UFO: Target Earth attracted to areas with lots of heroin. The alien pilot starts observing a resplendent club model (Anne Carlisle) and feeding on the opiate-like brain secretions of her lovers during o****m, causing the orgasmic person to die of a crystal spike to the head. After this their bodies disintegrate, like in The Invaders. o*****s are dangerous, concludes one observer.
The Search for SimonThe searcher is David, a fortyish, unemployed ufologist. Simon is the younger brother, absent since they were kids, who David is convinced has been abducted by aliens. Davids spent his whole adult life, and most of a substantial lottery windfall, traveling the world to supposed UFO hotspots from Denmark to Utah, or paying shady-seeming contacts for supposed leads to Simons whereabouts. Hes tried repeatedly, without success, to get into Area 51. His few friends, hopeless geeks themselves, are sick of his fixation, as is his careworn mum. David is played, well, by Martin Gooch, who also co-wrote and directed this low-budget Brit comedy of 2013. Gooch freely mixes a Monty Python/Douglas Adams/Simon Pegg style of silliness with a poignant backstory. The poignancy wins here, partly because the variable quality of some of the acting dulls the edge of the comic timing in the ensemble scenes, but also because spoiler alert! said backstory is really quite sad. Python alumna Carol Cleveland, playing Davids mother, is given full-on tragic exposition to deliver, and does a creditably touching job of it. But the seriousness of this side of the material gives an uneasy tinge to the jolly side.
THE BEGUILED - Official Trailer [HD] - In Theaters June 23
A short teaser has been released prior to the full trailer for Sofia Coppolas The Beguiled, which you can see here. The film is a Gothic thriller set during the Civil War and is based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan.
The Beguiled stars Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Emma Howard, and Addison Riecke. It will hit limited theaters on June 23rd and then expands to more locations on the 30th.
Synopsis:At a girls school in Virginia during the Civil War, where the young women have been sheltered from the outside world, a wounded Union soldier is taken in. soon the house is taken over with sexual tension, rivalries, and an unexpected turn of events.
Arkansas Court Frees Life of Two Convicted People As Innocent | USA Breaking News
More than two decades after he was found guilty in the slaying of a Jacksonville woman, Ledell Lee died by lethal injection Thursday night amid his protestations of innocence and last-ditch efforts for court-ordered DNA tests.
Lee, who also was serving prison time after two rape convictions, was sent to death row primarily on eyewitness testimony, a shoe imprint and the serial number of a $100 bill he was accused of lifting from 26-year-old Debra Reese. Police arrested Lee on Feb. 9, 1993, within hours of finding Reese bludgeoned and strangled in her Jacksonville home.
After the arrest, investigators drew Lee"s blood and linked his DNA to four unsolved cases -- three sexual assaults and one homicide -- in the central Arkansas city.
The second homicide charge and one of the rape cases were ultimately dropped, but Lee faced all five criminal cases -- simultaneously but separately -- before three different Pulaski County judges. Two public defenders represented him, and in the Reese case, they quickly requested a mental examination, court records show.
"I can"t see any daylight in fighting these charges," Lee told a state psychiatrist nearly one year to the day after Reese"s death. "I"m frustrated, irritated, troubled, all at the same time."
Twenty-three years later, the state executed Lee. His team of attorneys -- including from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Innocence Project -- in court filings sought to highlight problems with Lee"s previous legal counsel, his present-day competency and the lack of forensic evidence brought in the Reese trial.
Lee did not get a reprieve.
Lee"s younger brother, Howard Young, called it a "travesty" that courts declined Lee"s request for additional DNA testing.
Aside from his murder conviction, juries convicted Lee in the 1991 rape of a Jacksonville woman and the 1990 rape of a Jacksonville teenager. His s***n was found on the woman"s jeans and the teenager"s body, medical experts testified at the trials. He was convicted on one rape charge before the murder trial, but all three rape cases were disclosed during the sentencing part of the Reese-case trial.
Holly Lodge Meyer, the lead prosecutor on all five Lee cases, profiled him then as a "hunter" whose prey were the women of the Sunnydale neighborhood in Jacksonville.
"I think what makes Ledell Lee particularly deserving -- and no other penalty but the death penalty would be proportional to the crimes that he has committed -- would be this pattern of being a serial rapist and a killer," Meyer said in a telephone interview.
Born in Blytheville, Lee grew up mostly fatherless and in poverty, Young said. Lee and his three brothers shared one of their home"s three bedrooms and their clothes -- even frequently exchanging the same pair of pants on the same day, young said.
lee held a series of jobs working with fiberglass and boat construction, including at one factory in Sherwood, he told the psychiatrist. At the time of Reese"s murder, in early 1993, he had a 2-year-old daughter, according to the report.
A jury convicted Lee of striking Reese three dozen times with a tire thumper -- a tool similar to a baseball bat designed to be whacked against tires to gauge their inflation -- after invading her Jacksonville home.
Reese was a newlywed with a 7-year-old child from a previous marriage. A housewife who formerly worked at a baby boutique store and at a cleaner"s office, she visited her parents" home daily, according to her father, Stephen Williams.
Often, Reese and her mom spent their days together watching television or shopping before Reese went to get her son from school.
"They were best friends," Williams said.
Reese talked to her mom by phone minutes before her death, telling her she would be over soon. She said she was spooked after a man she didn"t know knocked on her door and asked to borrow tools to fix his car, Williams said.
Later, a shoe print, matching a pair of 10 Converse sneakers Lee owned, was found in the bedroom where she was killed. So was a hair strand, but it was not forensically linked to Lee. The state Crime Laboratory confirmed that Lee"s sneakers contained drops of human blood, but the sample was not large enough to test for a match with Reese"s DNA at the time, said Meyer, the prosecutor.
Lee"s recent bid was to have DNA tests conducted on the hair and the shoes.
The serial number of a $100 bill recovered from a Rent-A-Center in Jacksonville was within one digit of a $100 bill in Williams" possession, according to court testimony. Williams said he had given $300 to his daughter from a larger sum in sequential bills he received from a credit union after cashing a vacation check.
Company records showed Lee paid a debt on the day of Reese"s killing, according to testimony, though Young said prosecutors couldn"t prove definitively that his brother used the bill in question.
Reese"s neighbor testified that he tailed Lee on the day of Reese"s murder after becoming suspicious when he barged into Reese"s home and left while repeatedly looking over his shoulder. The neighbor, Andy Gomez, also testified that he lost sight of Lee for a few minutes while following him but that he was certain that Lee was the guy he saw leave Reese"s home.
A second neighbor of Reese"s testified that Lee knocked on his door and asked for tools. The neighbor loaned Lee tools, which were never recovered, according to Meyer, who posited that Lee knocked on doors to scout whether women were home alone.
Reese"s parents told her son that she had been killed on the same day it happened. The 7-year-old was deeply unsettled and could not be persuaded to stop playing a Nintendo video game even late into the night, Williams recalled. For several weeks, Williams slept with his grandson on a mattress on the floor.
"I"ll give you two words for "cruel and unusual,"" Williams said, referring to terms used by inmates to describe the manner of their planned execution. "Ledell Lee."
A Section on 04/21/2017
At a glance
THE INMATE
Ledell Lee
Age: 51
From: Jacksonville.
Sentenced: Oct. 16, 1995, in Pulaski County.
Police arrested Lee within hours of the 1993 beating death of Debra Reese, 26, in Jacksonville, after he was linked to the crime by eyewitness testimony from a neighbor. He maintains his innocence.
THE VICTIM
Debra Reese
Age: 26
Hometown: Jacksonville
How it happened: Reese was bludgeoned to death and strangled during a home invasion Feb. 9, 1993.
