This Halloween season, the three big Monster Cereals will be joined by Frute Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy, which haven't been on the market in decades.
Dan Pashman
This Halloween season, the three big Monster Cereals will be joined by Frute Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy, which haven't been on the market in decades.
Dan Pashman
This Halloween season, the cereal monsters are on the loose. Count Chocula, Boo Berry and Franken Berry have consumers in their grasp — for a limited time only.
General Mills' line of "Monster Cereals" originally hit the market in the early '70s, but the company decided in 2010 they would only be available during the Halloween season.
"That was bad news for some people," says Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful food podcast.
Cereal fans found ways to get by. One of Pashmn's podcast listeners turned her sister in Tuscan, Ariz., into a "Boo Berry mule" by making her cross the border into Mexico to get the cereal.
YouTube
A General Mills Monster Cereal commercial from the 1970s.
"This artificial scarcity has kind of galvanized a cult following around this time of year for these cereals," Pashman tells Weekend Edition host Rachel Martin.
This year, Frute Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy are also making a comeback. Frute Brute (formerly "Fruit Brute") went off the market in 1982; Yummy Mummy was pulled in '92.
The boxes aren't collectors' items — consumers do actually eat them. "But not all at once," Pashman says. In fact, he says, cereal hoarders are always checking the expiration dates to see how long the cereal will last.
Pashman himself recently purchased a Boo Berry that's doesn't expire until September 2014. "I'm gonna hang on to that 'til supplies are low," he says, "and then that's my nest egg right there."
Sweetness aside, the Monster Cereals seem to have made a powerful imprint on parents.
"There really is something about these particular artificial flavors that tap into a very specific sense memory," Pashman says.
Sporkful podcast listener Rachel Gonzales told Pashman: "It still reminds me of that Saturday morning special treat that you could only eat every once in a while, and it's something now that I get to share with my own daughter ... It's really kind nostalgic and exciting to me."
WASHINGTON (AP) — Last week, President Barack Obama gathered some of his top advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the problem-plagued rollout of his health care legislation. He told his team the administration had to own up to the fact that there were no excuses for not having the health care website ready to operate on Day One.
The admonition from a frustrated president came amid the embarrassing start to sign-ups for the health care insurance exchanges. The president is expected to address the cascade of computer problems Monday during an event at the White House.
Administration officials say more than 476,000 health insurance applications have been filed through federal and state exchanges. The figures mark the most detailed measure yet of the problem-plagued rollout of the insurance market place.
However, the officials continue to refuse to say how many people have actually enrolled in the insurance markets. And without enrollment figures, it's unclear whether the program is on track to reach the 7 million people projected by the Congressional Budget Office to gain coverage during the six-month sign-up period.
The first three weeks of sign-ups have been marred by a cascade of computer problems, which the administration says it is working around the clock to correct. The rough rollout has been a black eye for Obama, who invested significant time and political capital in getting the law passed during his first term.
The officials said technology experts from inside and outside the government are being brought in to work on the glitches, though they did not say how many workers were being added.
Officials did say staffing has been increased at call centers by about 50 percent. As problems persist on the federally run website, the administration is encouraging more people to sign up for insurance over the phone.
The officials would not discuss the health insurance rollout by name and were granted anonymity.
Despite the widespread problems, the White House has yet to fully explain what went wrong with the online system consumers were supposed to use to sign up for coverage.
Administration officials initially blamed a high volume of interest from ordinary Americans for the frozen screens that many people encountered. Since then, they have also acknowledged problems with software and some elements of the system's design.
Interest in the insurance markets appears to continue to be high. Officials said about 19 million people have visited HealthCare.gov as of Friday night.
Of the 476,000 applications that have been started, just over half have been from the 36 states where the federal government is taking the lead in running the markets. The rest of the applications have come from the 14 states running their own markets, along with Washington, D.C.
Americans seeking health coverage through the Affordable Care Act must fill out applications before selecting a specific plan. The forms require personal information, including income figures that are used to calculate any subsidies the applicant may qualify for. More than one person can be included on an application.
The White House says it plans to release the first enrollment totals from both the federal and state-run markets in mid-November.
Obama will directly address the technical problems with the health care websites Monday morning during an event in the Rose Garden, according to the White House. Officials said the president finds the glitches unacceptable and will outline for the public steps the administration is taking to address the troubles.
Obama will be joined during the event by people who have already enrolled in insurance programs through the new exchanges. The administration has not said how many people have enrolled during the first three weeks of sign-ups.
The Health and Human Services Department reported Sunday that it "is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to .... help improve HealthCare.gov. We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them."
An internal memo obtained by The Associated Press showed that the administration projected nearly a half million people would enroll for the insurance markets during the first month.
Officials say they expect enrollments to be heavier toward the end of the six-month sign up window.
Problems with the rollout were largely overshadowed by Republican efforts to force changes to the health care law in exchange for funding the government. That effort failed and the government reopened last week with "Obamacare" intact.
Some Republicans are now calling for the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The White House says it has complete confidence in her. House Republicans have scheduled a hearing next week to look into the rollout problems.
White House allies say they're confident the problems are being addressed.
"There's no question the marketplace website needs some improvement," said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the architects of the law. "The administration needs to fix the computer bugs and I'm confident that they're working around the clock to fix the problems."
___
Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.
Devoid of nuance and filled to the brim with corny attempts to stir emotions, the biopic of a real-life hard-edged cop becomes a propaganda feast.
Director
Ning Ying
Cast
Wang Jingchun, Chen Weihan, Sun Liang, HouYansong, Bai Bo
Ning Ying's last film, the 2005 chamber drama Perpetual Motion, was lauded for being audacious enough to have women speaking about their sex lives on screen. Whether that was to be her career pinnacle remains debatable, but her latest film unquestionably sees the filmmaker plummeting to despairing creative depths.
Based on an official feted, allegedly incorruptible police chief in one of the fastest developing regions in China, To Live and Die in Ordos is a piece of unflinching, visually banal hagiography which harks back to the oft-appearing state-backed films about nearly flawless men of iron who place their work before their families and their own well-beings.
The film's original Chinese title was Police Diary – which is the English title still appearing in the opening credits of the print shown at its world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival on Oct. 19. With its backers including state and provincial-level propaganda departments, To Live and Die in Ordos hardly shares anything with WilliamFriedkin's Los Angeles-set namesake; while also focusing on a law enforcement officer obsessed with getting the job done, Ning never really takes her film to a new level by probing the circumstances in which toiling protagonist is forced to work in.
Instead, the film's titular city – which has made headlines for the misguidedly lavish infrastructural projects built with the flush of its coal-fuelled wealth in the past decade – is basically spared from scrutiny, with even its sleazy businessmen shown as having recoiled from excess in awe of the just heroics of the leading character.
The Ordos authorities, who was credited as offering much help to the film's production, are likely very pleased, along with a dairy product manufacturer who has its new production line on parade, and its name shown on screen and referenced in the dialogue. (This is the same company who managed to have a character chugging from a carton of its product in the Chinese version of Iron Man 3.)
Tiring they could be, but it's not as if propaganda or product placements can't be given an aesthetic pleasing touch: the problem is that To Live and Die in Ordos simply doesn't work well in the multiple genres it purports to straddle. It's too linear as a biopic, too simplistic as a detective thriller, and too corny as a piece of human drama. It's questionable whether the film will connect with its domestic audiences, not to say of the chance of further festival appearances after its shows at Tokyo and then Vienna next month.
Hao Wanzhong (Wang Jingchun) is simple too devoid of nuance as a central character, with his transformation from middle-school chemistry teacher to ruthless cop never really properly addressed except from the wafer-thin testaments from his kin and associates. Given the wish to shape him as a super-detective, the modus operandiwith which he solves his cases are laughable (this is someone who would drive overnight to a village to catch an important fugitive in an age of helicopters), and the depictions of crimes and crime scenes are unconvincing (a murdered girl was still clutching a sweet, despite having been beaten, hacked and then drowned to death in a bathtub).
To Live and Die is most grating with its over-the-top attempts to stir emotions: the candy-girl image was just one in a litany of scenes aimed to remind Hao (and the viewer) of the harrowing challenges he confronts in the land of psychotic felons – the smalltime robbers and killers, mind you, and not the corrupt corporate nouveau riche of course, who are seen simply as crude men easily guided to the light by Hao's intervention.
Mistaking bombast as the essential key to move audiences, the film actually begins with a straight-faced, pompous rendition of Hao's funeral during which his son delivers – in a dramatic tone belying his young age – a stirring eulogy. Thus begins the reconstruction of the hero's life, shaped in the work of a cynical investigative journalist Hua Wei (Sun Liang) as he researches and interviews people for a feature article on Hao.
Hua started off declining the assignment, telling his superior that he has avoided writing about such heroes because of past experiences of having his subjects being later revealed as villains by diligent netizens. But as he roams the land talking to Hao's family and friends – his wearing of a vest emblazoned with the name of China's official news agency probably speaks volumes about what is to follow – he is converted: no one has a bad word to say about Hao, and the fact that Sun relies heavily on only official documents and Hao's 68-volume diaries probably offers some kind of foregone conclusion of his change of heart.
The only flaw allowed on screen is how Hao, the great get-things-done fellow that he is, once bellowed about how journalists should all be thrown into jail for raising doubts about how the system works – and of course this is quickly resolved as an law-graduate aide convinces him, in a little speech resembling an official policy dictum, about the importance of rule of law. It's too convenient a way to explain away probably the dark side of Hao's good-cop persona – an approach which is more suited to teledrama, which the film actually sometimes resembles with its hackneyed use of slow-motion, whiteflash cuts and freeze-frames.
It's perhaps a shame that Ning, whose Perpetual Motion has indeed given women more of a voice and presence in addressing taboo issues, would have Hao's wife, the schoolteacher Meng Wenjuan (Chen Weihan) as possibly the main hindrance for Hao's pursuit of spreading peace and justice in his realm. She is depicted as someone unsympathetic to Hao's (admittedly warped sense of) professionalism, yelling at him on the street, on the phone and resorting to emotional blackmail of sorts so as to get him to come home to dinner or spend more time with his son. Inevitably, like everyone, she would repent and admit – through a letter stored in Hao's near-empty safe at the office – that she understands him after all. Whether anyone else off screen would empathize with the artifice on show, however, is probably another issue – a matter which, given the film's treatment, is hardly one rivaling the importance of life and death.
Venue: Competition, Tokyo International Film Festival
Production Company: Inner Mongolia Blue Hometown Film, in a presentation with Inner Mongolia Film Group Corporation and Ordos Radio and Television Media
Director: Ning Ying
Cast: Wang Jingchun, Chen Weihan, Sun Liang, Hou Yansong, Bai Bo
NYU-Poly professors win Google Faculty Research Awards
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
16-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Juliana Freire and Thanasis Korakis recognized for work in big data, improving home wireless performance
Brooklyn, New York Two faculty members from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are among the latest recipients of the Google Faculty Research Awardsone-year grants supporting cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering.
Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering, and Thanasis Korakis, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are among the 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe recognized by the web search giant.
Freire's research tackles one aspect of a major hurdle facing urban planners and policymakers at a time when more people than ever are living in cities: how to analyze extremely complex data sets to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. In this project, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York Citytaxi cab ridesas a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data.
With information provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Freire used data from more than 540 million taxi cab rides over a three-year period to create a prototype visual exploration system that enables scientists and lay people to analyze data involving time and location on a scale that is currently impossible. Taxi rides are a rich source of information about urban life, providing insight into many aspects of New York City, including identifying areas that are most popular at certain times of day, neighborhoods underserved by taxis, and traffic patterns. These can in turn be used to better understand economic activity, human behavior, and mobility patterns.
"Tremendous amounts of data are available, but making sense of it is very challenging," Freire explained. "Social scientists and decision-makers are limited by the current tools for analysis, which can't handle large data sets. They can analyze slices of data, but it's much harder to appreciate the full picture," she said.
Freire's model will unify data selection and visual analysis to allow even lay users to explore large data sets through visual queries; for example, a user could explore taxi service in different neighborhoods at a certain time of day by selecting the regions and time frame on a map. The query results would present highly complex information in a simple visual format. Freire and her collaborators also plan to incorporate other data sets, including data from New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike.
Thanasis Korakis is developing a solution for a problem nearly every computer user has faced: slow broadband performance. As broadband access has become ubiquitous and wi-fi technology has been widely adopted, home wireless local networks (WLAN) have soared in popularity. The result, especially in densely populated urban areas, is extreme network congestion resulting in poor quality of service that is nearly impossible for users to address or solve on their own.
"Most home computer users don't have the expertise to diagnose and resolve local network issues, and they end up blaming their Internet service or content provider," said Korakis.
His fix, currently in development, is an app-based method to diagnose the cause of poor home WLAN performance, as well as a tool that can implement these diagnostics. Currently, there are several consumer products to aid troubleshooting of wired networks, but in the wireless space, detecting and remedying connectivity issues is considerably more complex.
Korakis will create extensive simulations of scenarios that can result in wireless access delay, and gauge the specific impact of each on quality of service. These include traffic congestion, overlapping channels, competition from older wi-fi-enabled devices, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Along with his students and collaborators, Korakis will devise classifications of so-called "wireless pathologies" based on the symptoms they create, ultimately arriving at a diagnostic tool that can determine the cause of WLAN problems. A complementary tool will then offer suggestions for home WLAN users to solve the problem through simple configuration changes.
As part of their grants, both Freire and Korakis will plan visits to Google to present their findings to the company's research teams.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NYU-Poly professors win Google Faculty Research Awards
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
16-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Juliana Freire and Thanasis Korakis recognized for work in big data, improving home wireless performance
Brooklyn, New York Two faculty members from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are among the latest recipients of the Google Faculty Research Awardsone-year grants supporting cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering.
Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering, and Thanasis Korakis, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are among the 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe recognized by the web search giant.
Freire's research tackles one aspect of a major hurdle facing urban planners and policymakers at a time when more people than ever are living in cities: how to analyze extremely complex data sets to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. In this project, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York Citytaxi cab ridesas a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data.
With information provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Freire used data from more than 540 million taxi cab rides over a three-year period to create a prototype visual exploration system that enables scientists and lay people to analyze data involving time and location on a scale that is currently impossible. Taxi rides are a rich source of information about urban life, providing insight into many aspects of New York City, including identifying areas that are most popular at certain times of day, neighborhoods underserved by taxis, and traffic patterns. These can in turn be used to better understand economic activity, human behavior, and mobility patterns.
"Tremendous amounts of data are available, but making sense of it is very challenging," Freire explained. "Social scientists and decision-makers are limited by the current tools for analysis, which can't handle large data sets. They can analyze slices of data, but it's much harder to appreciate the full picture," she said.
Freire's model will unify data selection and visual analysis to allow even lay users to explore large data sets through visual queries; for example, a user could explore taxi service in different neighborhoods at a certain time of day by selecting the regions and time frame on a map. The query results would present highly complex information in a simple visual format. Freire and her collaborators also plan to incorporate other data sets, including data from New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike.
Thanasis Korakis is developing a solution for a problem nearly every computer user has faced: slow broadband performance. As broadband access has become ubiquitous and wi-fi technology has been widely adopted, home wireless local networks (WLAN) have soared in popularity. The result, especially in densely populated urban areas, is extreme network congestion resulting in poor quality of service that is nearly impossible for users to address or solve on their own.
"Most home computer users don't have the expertise to diagnose and resolve local network issues, and they end up blaming their Internet service or content provider," said Korakis.
His fix, currently in development, is an app-based method to diagnose the cause of poor home WLAN performance, as well as a tool that can implement these diagnostics. Currently, there are several consumer products to aid troubleshooting of wired networks, but in the wireless space, detecting and remedying connectivity issues is considerably more complex.
Korakis will create extensive simulations of scenarios that can result in wireless access delay, and gauge the specific impact of each on quality of service. These include traffic congestion, overlapping channels, competition from older wi-fi-enabled devices, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Along with his students and collaborators, Korakis will devise classifications of so-called "wireless pathologies" based on the symptoms they create, ultimately arriving at a diagnostic tool that can determine the cause of WLAN problems. A complementary tool will then offer suggestions for home WLAN users to solve the problem through simple configuration changes.
As part of their grants, both Freire and Korakis will plan visits to Google to present their findings to the company's research teams.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
With malicious hackers and malware infesting nearly every enterprise network these days, "jump boxes" have become very popular. A jump box is a specially secured computer that administrators must (or should) log on to in order to gain access to other computers and administrate them. The hope is that these jump boxes are specially secured -- and are less likely to get exploited by hackers or malware.
Jump boxes can decrease risk, but you need to implement their special protections properly. Many enterprises start with the best of intentions, but when I audit jump boxes, I often see a jumble of weak security policies and high-risk behaviors that make them just as insecure as a regular user's PC.
In the computer security world, a basic premise underlies setting up a "secure environment": Systems of lower trust should never be able to modify or control systems of higher trust or importance. Most jump boxes tend to break this basic rule because the computers people use to connect to jump boxes are less trustworthy than the jump boxes themselves.
Often, PCs that connect to jump boxes are open to the Internet all day long and can be as infected and exploited as any other computer in your environment. What good is a jump box if the computer connecting to it has a keylogging Trojan copying every password or smartcard token you use? Your jump box and the computer linking to it -- let's call it the "originating computer" for this discussion -- should both be highly secure systems.
Here are the protective measures you should take for jump boxes and the systems that connect to them.
Security hardened Most of today's operating systems and applications come fairly well secured. Don't mess it up. Consider configuring the originating computer and jump server with the "high security" settings if they exist. You want to enforce only the best and most secure protocols and options.
Strong authentication If you use regular passwords, they should be long and complex (15 characters or more). Try to require smartcards or other two-factor authentication methods for all elevated users. If you're managing multiple environments (that is, different forests), make sure logon credentials are not shared among environments. If you use smartcards, key fobs, or other two-factor authentication, make sure those aren't shared, either. Yes, it'll be harder to administrate multiple environments. But if you share that stuff, why have different environments in the first place?
No browsing the Internet If I check your jump box and see it has a browser installed or can browse to the Internet unhindered, then you've failed the audit. Browsing the Internet is a high-risk activity that should not be allowed either on the jump box or the originating computer. I know many of you probably use your regular workstation to connect to jump boxes. This is a bad idea. Use a separate computer (or VM) to connect to your jump box. That originating computer should not be able to browse the Internet to any site; if you allow it to connect only to vendor sites and legitimate driver download sites, that's OK.
TNT has renewed Franklin & Bash for a fourth season.
The summer drama, which wrapped its third season in August, will be back with another run of original episodes as part of the Turner-owned network's summer lineup.
The legal dramedy, which stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Breckin Meyer as young, unconventional attorneys, will join fellow summer scripted originals including Falling Skies, Perception, Rizzoli & Isles and Major Crimes. In its Wednesdays at 9 p.m. slot, the series closed its third season with 2.2 million total viewers, up 200,000 compared with its season premiere. Of the network's summer lineup, only King & Maxwell failed to get the renewal.
The renewal for the former bubble series comes as TNT is ramping up its original fare in a bid for year-round scripted programming. TNT next will launch FrankDarabont's Mob City in December and has The Last Ship and Legends due next year.
PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — With two convicted killers back in police custody, authorities have shifted attention to finding out who made the phony court documents that led to the mistaken inmate releases that rocked Florida's judicial system.
Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker, both 34, were captured Saturday night without incident at the Coconut Grove Motor Inn in Panama City Beach, a touristy area of putt-putt courses and go-kart tracks. Hours earlier, their families had held a news conference in Orlando — some 300 miles away — urging them to surrender.
"Now that we have them in custody, we're hoping to get something from the interviews with them," Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey said. "We seized printers from the prisons, now we're going to be able to throw a lot of resources at this part of the investigation. We're already working it."
A woman who answered the phone at the motel said she saw police coming and they went into room 227. After authorities left, the parking lot of the two-story motel next to Big Willy's Swimwear was mostly empty. Authorities think the men had been in the area since Wednesday.
Jenkins and Walker were both serving life sentences at the Franklin Correctional Facility in the Panhandle before they walked free without anyone realizing the paperwork, complete with case numbers and a judge's forged signature, was bogus. The documents seemingly reduced their life sentences to 15 years.
Jenkins was released first on Sept. 27. His uncle and father figure, Henry Pearson, said when prison officials called him in Orlando he jumped in the car with fresh clothes for Jenkins and picked him up from prison.
He drove him to see his mother and grandmother. Jenkins hung around Pearson's home for some days and registered as a felon Sept. 30 at an Orlando jail, as he was required by law. He filled out paperwork, had his photograph taken and his fingerprints were checked against a database to make sure he didn't have any outstanding warrants for his arrest.
The Orange County jail official who interacted with him had no idea he was supposed to be locked up, Sheriff Jerry Demings said.
Pearson planned a birthday party for Jenkins on Oct. 1, but he didn't show. Pearson thought little of it because Jenkins had friends in the area, and after all, he had been locked up since the 1998 killing and botched robbery of Roscoe Pugh, an Orlando man.
About a week later, on Oct. 8, Walker was let out of the same prison when similar legitimate-looking documents duped prison officials. His mother, Lillie Danzy, said the family thought their prayers had been answered when she got a call saying her son was being released. She called prison officials back to make sure it was actually happening.
There wasn't time to pick him up, so prison officials took him to a bus station, gave him a ticket — as they would any other ex-inmate — and sent him along.
Walker had been in prison since his conviction of second-degree murder in the 1999 Orange County slaying of 23-year-old Cedric Slater. Like Jenkins, he registered at the Orange County jail three days after his release without raising any alarms.
He knocked around town and went to church last Sunday. But at some point, he and Jenkins went underground.
On Tuesday, one of Pugh's relatives contacted the state attorney's office to let them know Jenkins had been let out. Pugh's family had been notified by mail, which is typical for families of violent crime victims.
Prosecutors reviewed Jenkins' case file and quickly discovered the forged paperwork, including motions from prosecutors to correct "illegal" sentences, accompanied by orders allegedly filed by Judge Belvin Perry within the last couple of months. The orders granted a 15-year sentence.
They soon discovered Walker's paperwork also was falsified, and a manhunt was launched for both men.
At this point, Jenkins had been free for more than two weeks. Walker had been out for a week. Had Pugh's family not contacted prosecutors, it's not clear how long they may have been out unnoticed.
For the past four days, authorities believe the men were in the Panama City area, said Frank Chiumento, a chief inspector with the U.S. Marshals Service.
Bailey said authorities were able to track down the men through interviews with people who visited them at the prison, called them there or made deposits into their canteen account. Those people included relatives, ex-girlfriends and others, he said.
"The key piece of this was an individual or individuals that had made deposits into their canteen accounts at the prison," Bailey said.
The men weren't planning on staying in Panama City Beach very long, he said. Someone from Atlanta was coming to pick them up and take them somewhere else, Bailey said.
In light of the falsified documents, the Corrections Department changed the way it verifies early releases and prison officials will now verify with judges — not just court clerks — before releasing prisoners early.
Pearson said he was shocked to learn earlier this week that his nephew was not supposed to be out of prison. He said it took him a day or two to process events.
On Saturday night, he heard about the captures while watching TV. Soon after, a law enforcement agent called his home unexpectedly and let Jenkins talk to his wife.
"He just said that he was OK and that he loved us," Pearson said. "We have a great sense of relief because we did not know how this would end up."
___
Farrington reported from Tallahassee. Associated Press photographer John Raoux in Orlando and reporter Jonathan Drew in Atlanta also contributed to this report.
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