OXON HILL, Md. — Under the shady trees near the barbecue line at the annual spellers’ picnic, one contestant in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was inducted into The Order of the Squushy Carrots.
Kate Miller and Katharine Wang asked Sriram Hathwar a couple of nonsensical questions, then Kate held her thumbs and forefingers up to Sriram’s forehead and said, “Ding!” Kate and Katherine sang, in two-part harmony, the group’s theme song: “The Order Of The Squushy Carrots; at least we don’t have hair like parrots. Every day we walk the earth forever alone; no one in the Order plays the sousaphone.”
The Order came into being several years ago — it even has its own logo — and has become one of the more popular social media groups that helps spellers stay in touch during the 51 weeks of the year when they aren’t at the Bee. Kate and Katharine, both at the nationals for the third time, have become best buds even though Kate, 14, lives in Abilene, Texas, and Katharine, 12, now lives in Morristown, New Jersey, after representing China the last two years.
They are among 281 contestants age 8 to 15 vying this week for the title of top speller in the English language. The Bee began Tuesday morning with a computerized spelling and vocabulary test, with onstage rounds starting Wednesday on the way to Thursday’s prime-time finals.
The competition is an invaluable social experience, and groups like the Squushy Carrots help make those relationships last.
“The smart kids, when we go home, we don’t always have a place where we’re with our own kind,” Kate said, “and so this is a place where we can really connect and stay in touch, and rejoice through happy times and help each other in the hard times.”
Another group is the “Ghetto-pens” — whose name is “something only spelling geeks would get,” said member Jae Canetti of Reston, Virginia. It’s actually a play on “guetapens” (pronounced GEHT’-uh-pahns), the winning word from the 2012 Bee. There are only about seven in the group, and they keep in touch about school, friends, family — and sometimes about spelling.
“Funny enough, the main topic that spellers try to avoid when they’re just casually talking to each other is spelling,” said 12-year-old Jae, making his third Bee appearance. “Just like professional athletes — they don’t wear their team jersey around.”
Kate and Katharine also belong to a Google Group with dozens of spellers. They stress that social hierarchy doesn’t exist among the members — there’s enough of that in life already.
“We’re not a clique at all,” Kate said. “I want to make that very clear.”
In the spirit of inclusiveness, the groups include spellers who are serious contenders along with those who would be happy to make it out of the preliminaries. Sriram, a 14-year-old eighth-grader from Corning, New York, placed third last year and is back for his fifth and final time. Twelve-year-old Vanya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kansas, tied for fifth last year and is vying to become the second half of the first sibling tandem of champions. (Her sister Kavya won in 2009.) Vanya, a spelling social butterfly, is both a Ghetto-pen and a Squushy Carrot.
“It’s just really fun meeting all the people who are there,” Vanya said, “and just having fun with your friends.”
After inducting Sriram, Kate and Katharine wondered aloud what the public would think of the Squushy Carrots.
“Other people will think we’re nerdy and weird,” Kate said.
“I mean, we’re in the Spelling Bee,” Katharine replied, laughing. “We are nerdy and weird.”
CORPUS CHRISTI — Officials say four people have died in a three-vehicle wreck after an SUV hydroplaned near Refugio.
Department of Public Safety spokesman Cpl. Charlie Ramirez said a Chevrolet Suburban traveling south on U.S. Highway 77 skidded on the wet highway, going into the northbound lane, where it struck a Ford Mustang early Monday evening. A Nissan Altima then struck the Mustang.
He said there were 12 people total in the three vehicles. Other passengers suffered injuries that were not considered life threatening.
Ramirez said the Suburban was traveling to the Rio Grande Valley. The other cars were headed to the Houston area.
Refugio is about 40 miles northeast of Corpus Christi.
George W. Bush recoups from partial knee replacement
DALLAS — Former President George W. Bush has successfully had a partial knee replacement in Chicago.
Bush spokesman Freddy Ford said Bush had the procedure Saturday and returned home to Dallas on Monday. Ford wrote in an email Tuesday that Bush was “doing great” and was able to “get up, walk around and go up and down stairs just a couple hours after the procedure.”
Ford said he would not release further details.
Bush is known as a fitness buff. Since leaving the White House, the 67-year-old has hosted an annual 100-kilometer mountain bike ride in which he rides along with those injured in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He participated in the ride earlier this month at his Crawford ranch.
He had a heart procedure to ease a blocked artery in August.
Nebraska woman eats two 72-ounce steaks in less than 15 minutes
AMARILLO — A competitive eater from Nebraska has set a record by devouring a 72-ounce steak at an Amarillo steakhouse, and then decided to chase it down with another 72 ounces.
She then took a more pedestrian time of 9:59 to finish the second.
The restaurant rewards diners with a free meal if they eat not just the 72-ounce steak, but also a baked potato, shrimp, a salad and a bread roll in less than an hour.
The previous record was 8:52.
In February, Schuyler, a 5-foot-7, 125-pound mother from Bellevue, Nebraska, ate 363 chicken wings in 30 minutes to set a record in Philadelphia.
Wayland Baptist plans groundbreaking for Jimmy Dean Museum
PLAINVIEW — A museum dedicated to Jimmy Dean, the country singer and sausage mogul, plans to break ground next month.
Wayland Baptist University and the Museum of the Llano Estacado will break ground June 24 on the Jimmy Dean Museum addition to the museum on the Wayland campus in Plainview, the hometown of Dean.
The Dean family contributed $1 million to the university in 2008 in what is the largest cash gift in school history. The museum will cost about $5 million to complete and will house memorabilia from Jimmy Dean’s personal collection. It will depict Dean’s life from his childhood in northeastern Plainview to his career in music, television and business.
A bronze statue of Dean will be delivered this week and moved to the museum entrance.
An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the steak that Molly Schuyler ate. She ate a 4 1/2-pound steak, not a 40-pound steak.
A tornado hit a workers’ camp near Watford City, North Dakota Monday, May 26, 2014. The oil boom has attracted thousands to the area. Workers now live in trailer parks and prefabricated homes which provide little protection. The storm injured nine people and damaged more than a dozen trailers. (Dan Yorgason/ Associated Press)
JOSH WOOD Associated Press
WATFORD CITY, N.D. — A rare North Dakota tornado that critically injured a 15-year-old girl and hurt eight other people at a workers’ camp in the heart of the state’s booming oil patch packed winds that peaked at 120 mph, the National Weather Service said Tuesday.
The twister touched down Monday night at a camp just south of Watford City, about 50 miles southeast of Williston, and damaged or destroyed 15 trailers. The 15-year-old, who was from out of state and visiting an aunt and uncle, was flown to a hospital in Minot. She was in an intensive-care unit with a head injury but expected to survive, McKenzie County Emergency Manager Jerry Samuelson said Tuesday.
Samuelson did not release the girl’s name or the community where she lives.
Eight other people were treated at a Watford City hospital for less serious injuries. The American Red Cross said eight residents spent the night at a shelter at Watford City’s Civic Center and that several families were among those displaced.
Tornadoes are rarely reported in McKenzie County, with only 14 since 1950, with no fatalities, according to weather service data. Monday’s tornado, which hit about 7:50 p.m., was an EF-2 in strength on the 0-to-5 enhanced Fujita or EF scale, the weather service said Tuesday afternoon.
Preliminary information suggests the winds of the twister peaked at 120 mph, the weather service said. A second brief tornado possibly occurred in the area based on eyewitness accounts, it said.
National Weather Service meteorologist Todd Hamilton said two meteorologists and an emergency response specialist left Bismarck at daybreak Tuesday to survey the damage at the camp.
Plywood and other debris were scattered across several hundred square feet at the site. Four trailers and a couple of other prefabricated buildings were still standing.
A heavily damaged truck was flipped over on the highway and several other abandoned vehicles were nearby. Road signs were flattened and tumbleweeds pushed up against some electrical wires.
Don Dailey lives in a camp about 200 yards from the one that was hit. He said workers got a weather service tornado alert on their cellphones about the same time they saw the funnel coming down to the ground. He and others took cover behind a large piece of excavating equipment.
Samuelson said all those injured had been inside their trailers when the tornado struck.
The oil boom has brought tens of thousands of people into the area looking for work. Many live in hastily assembled trailer parks, known as man camps, housing prefabricated structures that resemble military barracks. Some companies rent blocks of hotel rooms for employees, and some workers sleep in their cars or in tents.
The camp hit by the tornado was relatively small. Samuelson said some camps in McKenzie County have hundreds of trailers and that the possibility of injuries or damage would have been much higher if one of those had been hit.
It was not immediately known who owned the camp that was hit.
Target Logistics is the largest crew camp operator in the oil patch, with more than 5,000 workers in nine facilities. Company regional vice president Travis Kelley said a weather radio is monitored by staff at each facility. If a tornado is reported in the area, workers are “encouraged to come to common areas such as recreation or dining areas, which are fairly well protected right in the middle of the facility,” he said.
Meteorologist Ken Simosko said the growth of temporary housing means there is more of a chance for death, injury and destruction from tornadoes.
“People living in trailers creates a very dangerous situation because there is no protection,” Simosko said.
Dan Yorgason, who lives in a neighboring camp, filmed the tornado from inside his truck.
“There was literally nowhere to go,” he said. “The tornado was coming down the hill along our only escape route. There was nowhere for us to go. It was crazy.”
Associated Press writers Blake Nicholson, James MacPherson and Kevin Burbach in Bismarck; and Carson Walker in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, contributed to this report.
DALLAS — Swaths of Central and Southeast Texas continue under a flash flood watch as thunderstorms move across the state.
A flash flood warning is in effect for Austin and surrounding counties until mid-morning today after nearly two inches of rain fell early Tuesday.
National Weather Service forecaster Brian Kyle said storms in the Houston area generated winds from 35 to 50 mph and half an inch to one inch of rain over the Houston metro area.
Kyle said preliminary reports following a tornado warning in eastern Harris County indicated downed trees and power lines.
Drought-stricken Lubbock got more than five inches of rain during the weekend, putting it slightly ahead of normal rainfall for the year.
The head of a typical large public company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study. (The Associated Press).
KEN SWEET Associated Press
NEW YORK — They’re the $10 million men and women.
Propelled by a soaring stock market, the median pay package for a CEO rose to more than eight figures for the first time last year. The head of a typical large public company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study.
Last year was the fourth straight year that CEO compensation increased, following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch. A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker’s salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.
The best-paid CEO last year led an oilfield-services company. The highest-paid female CEO was Carol Meyrowitz of discount retail giant TJX, owner of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. And the head of Monster Beverage Corporation got a monster of a raise.
Over the last several years, companies’ boards of directors have tweaked executive compensation to answer critics’ calls for CEO pay to be more attuned to performance. They’ve cut back on stock options and cash bonuses, which were criticized for rewarding executives even when a company did poorly. Boards of directors have placed more emphasis on paying CEOs in stock instead of cash and stock options.
The change became a boon for CEOs last year because of a surge in stocks that drove the Standard & Poor’s 500 index up 30 percent. The stock component of pay packages rose 17 percent to $4.5 million, according to the study.
“Companies have been happy with their CEOs’ performance, and the stock market has provided a big boost,” said Gary Hewitt, head of research at GMI Ratings, a corporate governance research firm. “But we are still dealing with a situation where CEO compensation has spun out of control and CEOs are being paid extraordinary levels for their work.”
The highest paid CEO was Anthony Petrello of oilfield-services company Nabors Industries. Petrello made $68.3 million in 2013. Petrello’s pay ballooned as a result of a $60 million lump sum that the company paid him to buy out his old contract.
Nabors Industries did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Petrello was one of a handful of chief executives who received a one-time boost in pay because boards of directors decided to re-negotiate CEO contracts under pressure from shareholders. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold CEO Richard Adkerson also received a one-time payment of $36.7 million to renegotiate his contract. His total pay, $55.3 million, made him the third-highest paid CEO last year.
The second-highest paid CEO among companies in the S&P 500 was Leslie Moonves of CBS. Moonves’ total compensation rose 9 percent to $65.6 million in 2013, a year when the company’s stock rose nearly 70 percent.
“CBS’s share appreciation was not only the highest among major media companies, it was near the top of the entire S&P 500,” CBS said in a statement. “Mr. Moonves’ compensation is reflective of his continued strong leadership.”
Media industry CEOs were, once again, paid handsomely. Viacom’s Philippe Dauman made $37.2 million while Walt Disney’s Robert Iger made $34.3 million. Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes earned $32.5 million.
The industry with the biggest pay bump was banking. The median pay of a Wall Street CEO rose by 22 percent last year, on top of a 22 percent increase the year before. BlackRock chief Larry Fink made the most: $22.9 million. Kenneth Chenault of American Express ranked second with earnings of $21.7 million.
Like stock compensation, performance cash bonuses jumped last year as a result of the surging stock market and higher corporate profits. Earnings per share of the S&P 500 rose 5.3 percent in 2013, according to FactSet, a financial data company. That resulted in an average cash bonus of $1.9 million, a jump of 12.6 percent from the prior year.
More than two-thirds of CEOs at S&P 500 companies received a raise last year, according to the AP/Equilar study, because of the bigger profits and higher stock prices.
CEO pay remains a divisive issue in the U.S.
Large investors and boards of directors argue that they need to offer big pay packages to attract talented men and women who can run multibillion-dollar businesses.
“If you have a good CEO at a company, the wealth he might generate for shareholders could be in the billions,” said Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It might be worth paying these guys millions for doing this type of work.”
CEOs are still getting much bigger raises than the average U.S. worker.
The 8.8 percent increase in total pay that CEOs got last year dwarfed the average raise U.S. workers received. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said average weekly wages for U.S. workers rose 1.3 percent in 2013. At that rate, an employee would have to work 257 years to make what a typical S&P 500 CEO makes in a year.
“There’s this unbalanced approach, where there’s all this energy put into how to reward executives, but little energy being put into ensuring the rest of the workforce is engaged, productive and paid appropriately,” said Richard Clayton, research director at Change to Win investment group, which works with labor union-affiliated pension funds.
Investors have become increasingly vocal about executive pay since the recession. This has led to an increasing number of public spats between boards of directors, who propose pay packages, and shareholders, who own the company. These fights become public during “say on pay” votes, in which shareholders have an opportunity to show they approve or do not approve of pay packages. Votes are non-binding, but companies sometimes act when there is clear disapproval from shareholders.
Petrello was the best-paid CEO largely because Nabors Industries’ board of directors wanted to end his previous contract. Under that contract, Petrello could have been owed huge cash bonuses, and the company could have paid out tens of millions of dollars if he were to die or become disabled. The board changed his contract following “say on pay” votes in 2012 and 2013 that showed shareholders were unhappy with how Nabors paid its executives.
There have been other signs of shareholder concern about CEO pay. This month, 75 percent of Chipotle Mexican Grill shareholders voted against a proposed pay package for co-CEOs Steve Ells and Montgomery Moran. Ells earned $25.1 million in 2013 while Moran earned $24.3 million, a 27 percent rise in compensation for each. Chipotle spent $49.5 million on CEO pay last year, the fourth highest in the S&P 500.
“Companies are now taking the time to think through their pay practices and are talking more with shareholders,” said Hewitt of GMI Ratings. “There’s still a long way to go, but pay practices are getting better.”
To calculate a CEO’s pay package, the AP and Equilar looked at salary as well as perks, bonuses and stock and option awards, using the regulatory filings that companies submit each year. Equilar looked at data from 337 companies that had filed their proxies by April 30. The report includes CEOs who have been at the company for two years.
One prominent name not included in the data was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is typically one of the best-paid CEOs in the country.
Oracle files its salary paperwork later in the year, so Ellison was excluded in the 2013 survey data. He was awarded $76.9 million in stock options for Oracle’s fiscal year ending May 2013, according to proxy filings.
Among other findings:
— Female CEOs had a median pay package worth more than their male counterparts: $11.7 million versus $10.5 million for males. However, there were only 12 female CEOs in the AP/Equilar study compared with 325 male CEOs that were polled. TJX’s Meyrowitz was the best-paid female CEO in the AP/Equilar study. She earned $20.7 million last year.
— The CEO who got the biggest bump in compensation from 2012 to 2013 was Rodney Sacks, the CEO of Monster Beverage. Sacks earned $6.22 million last year, an increase of 679 percent. Monster’s board of directors awarded Sacks $5.3 million in stock options to supplement his $550,000 salary and $300,000 cash bonus.
Starting this hurricane season, forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami will begin dropping small drones into extreme weather systems to study how storms strengthen and better predict a storm’s intensity. With the season’s official start just days away, here are five other things to know about hurricanes:
1. SLOW SEASON EXPECTED
Federal forecasters are expecting a slower-than-usual Atlantic hurricane season, with eight to 13 tropical storms and three to six hurricanes. There’s no way to tell whether any of those predicted storms will strike the U.S. coastline during the six-month season that starts June 1.
2. EL NINO
The weather phenomenon known as El Nino, which warms part of the Pacific every few years and changes rain and temperature patterns around the world, is expected to suppress the number and intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes this year. Cooler temperatures on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean compared with recent years will also lower the probability of hurricane formation.
3. WHEN DOES IT GET A NAME?
Forecasters name tropical storms when top winds reach 39 mph; hurricanes have minimum winds of at least 74 mph. The first storm name on the list this year is Arthur, followed by Bertha, Cristobal and Dolly.
4. STORM SURGE
Storm surge — the dangerous water rise created by tropical storms — is one of the deadliest and most damaging tropical storm hazards. This year, the National Hurricane Center will post color-coded maps to show coastal residents how far from the shoreline the water will spread and how high that water will rise.
5. A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY
It’s been 10 years since the historic 2004 hurricane season, when four hurricanes hit Florida for the first time since record keeping began: Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. There were 15 named storms that season, nine of which were hurricanes. But those four Florida hurricanes remain among the top 15 costliest hurricanes to strike the U.S.
Joe Cione, a hurricane researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration holds a drone he hopes to use this hurricane season for research on the storms’ intensity. He hopes to find more information about how warm water, which fuels a hurricane, transfers energy to tropical storms. ( J. Pat Carter/The Associated Press).
JENNIFER KAY Associated Press
MIAMI — The point where the roiling ocean meets the fury of a hurricane’s winds may hold the key to improving storm intensity forecasts, but it’s nearly impossible for scientists to see.
That may change this summer, thanks to post-Hurricane Sandy federal funding and winged drones that can spend hours spiraling in a hurricane’s dark places, transmitting data that could help forecasters understand what makes some storms fizzle while others strengthen into monsters. Knowing that information while a storm is still far offshore could help emergency managers better plan for evacuations or storm surge risks.
A hurricane is like an engine, and warm ocean water is its fuel. One secret, scientists say, is getting a better understanding of how the warm water transfers energy to tropical storms.
“We really need to get a better idea of what’s going on down there before we even look to improve our intensity forecast,” said Joe Cione, who studies how storms interact with the ocean at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division in Miami.
Current hurricane hunter aircraft typically don’t fly below 5,000 feet and can’t descend beneath 1,500 feet, and real-time radar doesn’t provide information about the thermodynamics at work inside a storm’s cloudy core. Canisters stuffed with electronics dropped from planes transmit data about a storm’s pressure, temperature, winds and moisture as they fall to the ocean. They remain airborne for only a few minutes.
The kind of drone that Cione plans to launch will spend hours descending slowly, cruising on the air currents spinning through a storm and possibly even orbiting a hurricane’s eyewall. The amount of data the 3-foot, 7-pound drone — the Coyote, shaped like a thin missile with retractable wings — could collect in the lowest parts of a hurricane would give researchers a movie compared to the snapshots sent back by the canisters, Cione said.
The drones have propellers and are controlled by someone in the hurricane hunter aircraft, but they are designed to float on air currents, not fly against strong winds. The small drones are disposable — once they hit the water, they won’t be recovered.
Hurricane forecasters have gotten good at predicting where a storm will hit, and the so-called cone of uncertainty that shows a storm’s likely path will shrink again this year. Improvements in predicting changes in the intensity of storms, though, have lagged.
Several factors can alter a storm’s intensity, such as cold water from the ocean’s depths mixing with warm water at the surface, wind shear, the cyclical rebuilding of the wall of clouds that ring a hurricane’s eye or a change in the energy a storm is pulling from the ocean. That last variable is what Cione calls a data void region, and it’s where the drones will aim.
“There’s a reason you don’t have hurricanes over land — they need the water, they need that evaporation and condensation, which is the source of their energy. So, how does that happen?” Cione said. “If we can’t sample this region very well, very accurately, all the time, we could have the potential to miss how much energy is coming out of the ocean by a third or a half.”
Cione plans to test five or six drones in the peak of hurricane season, and possibly next year, to see how well they communicate data in real time. The $1.25 million project is among other National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hurricane research funded by last year’s Sandy supplemental appropriations bill that authorized $50.7 billion for disaster relief agencies.
The potential for the data collected by the drones is priceless, Cione said.
“A lot of people talk about first responders, and I have the utmost respect for that, but we’re sort of like pre-first-responders,” Cione said. “Imagine these type of things out there 12 hours before landfall, and it’s a category higher than we think. Maybe that’s the difference between evacuating people and not evacuating people.”
It’s the kind of information forecasters would have liked to have had when Hurricane Charley suddenly strengthened to a Category 4 storm as it sped into southwest Florida in 2004.
Forecasters knew where it was going, and they warned coastal residents to prepare for a possibly major hurricane. But they couldn’t see that it would intensify into a monster even as it approached land — forecasters still can’t explain what’s behind that rapid intensification process.
“At the 11th hour, having the intensity information is good, yes. It helps me to tell people, ‘Stay where you are, don’t go outside because you’re now putting yourself at far greater risk of injury from flying debris,’” said Wayne Sallade, the emergency management director of Charlotte County on Florida’s Gulf Coast, who is still chief almost a decade after Charley’s landfall.
However, it would be even more helpful to know more about whether a hurricane might continue strengthening when it’s 36 hours or more from landfall, Sallade said. That would help determine the risk of storm surge, the dangerous water rise created by tropical storms.
Intensity forecasts may just need a little tweaking, not a complete overhaul, to improve dramatically, said Florida International University hurricane expert Hugh Willoughby, who led National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division from 1995 until 2002.
“I think the problem is we’re not getting enough of the details right,” Willoughby said. “It’s not something where there’s going to be a huge breakthrough.”
