Alexander Lee

News Editor

Hello Westford Academy!

This is another addition of “News you NEED to know,”,spring addition. In this series, I chronicle essential news tidbits of the season- not necessarily the news dubbed important by CNN but news considered pivotal by the Westford Academy student body. So without further ado, let’s begin:

5. Jose Bautista record-breaking power

In 2010, left fielder Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays hit fifty-four homeruns. Not only was this shocking due to the fact that no player had hit over fifty homeruns since AROD and Fielder did in 2007 but it was also unprecedented due to the fact that in Bautista’s previous six years in the MLB he had only hit a combined seventy-four homeruns.

As a result, Jose Bautista was one of the biggest surprises to the 2010 baseball season. Despite his extraordinary performance, Bautista still had his doubters; no player in the MLB was more defamed than Jose Bautista coming into the 2011 season.
Analysts predicted Bautista to hit anywhere from twenty five to forty homeruns, but no one expected even close to a repeat.

However, Jose Bautista is proving them direly wrong thus far into the 2011 baseball season. He currently stands at nineteen homeruns in only forty games and is batting an astounding .343. Even more so, Bautista is currently on pace for seventy-four homeruns, twenty more than his previous total.
Jose Bautista has now permanently shut down his doubters and is a early runner for the American League MVP.

4. Pokerstars, Full-tilt Poker, Absolute Poker US indictment

On April 15th, known to the Poker community as “Black Friday,” the US federal government shut down the three largest online poker sites in the world: Pokerstars, Full-tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker.

Their website domains were seized and major leaders of each company were arrested. The legal grounds by which they were indicted have been hazy to say the least. Established as a clause in Bush Doctrine, the law stated that it was illegal for banks to knowingly transfer money to online poker websites.
Operating since the early 2000s, the businesses had been booming, reporting huge profits each year, and for the most part the US government had not seemed too interest despite the potential criminal activity.

However, in April of 2011 Daniel Tzvetkoff brought up charges against these three websites, and as a result the FBI took action. Now, the state of online poker seems precarious.

3. Dominique Straus Kahn

It seems as though in our society, political scandals are a run-of-the-mill ordeal. Last year, it was John Hancock who unexpectedly fled to Texas with his Latin-American Lover. The year before it was Rod Blagojevich who corruptly sold state positions for money.
This year it was the French Politician Dominquez Straus Kahn who on May 14th of this year is alleged to have sexually assaulted a maid in the Sofitel New York Hotel.

Reportedly, Straus Kahn exited a bathroom naked when the maid was in his room, and tried to force her to have sex with him. He then hurriedly fled the hotel only to be arrested boarding his plane back to France
Straus Kahn, who had been a very successful businessman in France, had actually posted a higher approval rating than current President Nicolas Sarkozy and was expected to defeat the incumbent in this year’s coming election.
Instead, Straus Kahn may receive up to twenty years of jail-time.

2. Rapture was a bust
Over the past twenty years, some Christians have been proposing that on May 21 of 2011, the apocalypse was set to begin. A day dubbed as “Rapture”, on this day God and Jesus were supposed to come down to the earth and save those people truly devout to them.
There was also supposed to be five earthquakes to ravage the earth, ultimately culminating in the destruction of the world in 2012.

However, as May 21 came and went nothing happened; in fact, it was quite the beautiful day in Westford.
Family Radio and its leader Harold Camping, the people who most strongly  professed this theory, are left with nothing to show.

1. Bin Laden

However, the most significant bit of news occurred on May 2, 2011. That day marked the killing of Osama bin Laden.
He was killed in a military raid called “Operation Neptune Spear”. A team of twelve navy seals rode in helicopters to a Pakistani mansion where Bin Laden had supposedly been living for several years.

Bin Laden and his family, over sixty people, had been tracked by satellite and high-tech cameras for three years after the CIA had received a tip.

When president Barack Obama came onto CNN that night to give the American People the celebrated news, the sincere elation of the masses spoke for themselves.

It was a great day for America and democracy itself.