Jose C Cabanillas

A judge shut down a bid last week from GOP provocateur Roger Stone for a retrial, only revealing the convicted Trump ally’s request in a public order on Wednesday.

Stone moved for a new trial under seal, purportedly claiming that the jury pool in the case had been tainted by publicity.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson revealed Stone’s request in a Feb. 5 order denying it, her first appearance on the docket since the entire prosecutorial team resigned on Tuesday. That came after DOJ leadership intervened in the case to recommend a lighter sentence than the 7-9 term of imprisonment that prosecutors had proposed.

From the order, Stone apparently demanded a new trial on the grounds that one juror worked for the IRS.

Though Stone’s motion remains redacted, Berman Jackson retold Stone’s argument in her order dismissing it.

Stone purportedly argued that the juror’s work as an attorney for the IRS meant that Berman Jackson should have “removed [the juror] for bias.” During the trial, Stone’s attorneys raised the issue and attempted to have the juror removed from the pool.

Berman Jackson denied that request, the filing states.

Stone also argued that the same juror was contaminated after the person admitted during the jury selection process to having been shown an article in the Wall Street Journal about the trial.

In her rejection of the retrial demand, Berman Jackson said that Stone’s attorneys had the opportunity to flag these concerns during the jury selection process and failed to do so. She noted that the defense lawyers had successfully sought to strike several potential jurors, including some who they flagged for their government jobs.

The juror that Stone’s lawyers focused on was not among the jurors they sought to strike during the jury selection process, Berman Jackson wrote.

“There was no evidence that the juror took any steps on [redacted] initiative to defy the Court’s instructions, and [redacted] limited exposure to a single piece in the newspaper was of minimal significance,” the judge said. She added that Stone failed to present grounds for a new trial.

This story has been corrected to reflect that the order, not the request, was issued on Feb. 5.

Read the filing here:

I have over 5,000 songs in my iTunes library -- and that number grows every week. What's more, some of the songs and albums are pretty obscure stuff. That's why I find TuneUp from TuneUp Media a handy tool.

It's a plug-in for iTunes that analyzes your iTunes library to tell you how clean or dirty it is. And by that I'm not referring to those songs with explicit lyrics. No, "dirty" tunes in TuneUp parlance are "mislabeled" tunes. In other words, those vague Track 01, Track 02, etc. items you probably have in your song collection.

TuneUp's Clean feature lets you repair your mislabeled song info. You can do it by hand, but that's the long, laborious and hair-pulling inducing way to do it. 

With TuneUp you click the spray bottle icon. Select mislabeled tracks from iTunes and drag and drop them into TuneUp.

Check your matches. If you don't like the results, you can customize your Preferences. Then save the matches by clicking the floppy disk icon or "Save All." 

If you then notice you've made a mistake, not to worry. There's an Undo button. 

Once the process is completed, you'll have no unnamed artists or artists with two different, or slightly different names (such as Beyonce or Beyoncé). You'll also be blessed with consistent track numbers and other helpful info, such as the year a song and/or album was released.

How does it work? TuneUp identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. It looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony's Gracenote. In addition to replacing missing metadata, TuneUp also displays information on each artist from Wikipedia, music videos from YouTube and concert information through retail ticket outfits like TicketMaster and StubHub.

TuneUp is thorough. I dragged an obscure Elton John track called "Snow Queen" onto the spray bottle icon, and TuneUp correctly matched it with a compilation album called "Flip It Over." I played another Elton John track, "Talking Old Soldiers," and TuneUp pulled up a bio of Elton John and some links to a couple of videos of him performing the song.

The Cover Art feature automatically fills in missing album artwork. Launch it by clicking on the album cover icon, and TuneUp will immediately scan your entire music collection for missing artwork. The software looks at the Artist and Album fields to find cover art for your music, so make sure your music has been Cleaned first.

Cover Art shows you the album art it's found. Hover over each result to view the image resolution. Select your preferred album cover and click Save. Select "Save All" to apply the first album cover result for all albums. Again, TuneUp was very adept at its job. There was no missing album art it didn't find.

TuneUp's Share lets you send the latest stats about your music collection to your social network. Launch Share by clicking the megaphone icon and TuneUp will gather the latest stats about your music library. You can share any of your stats with your Facebook friends by clicking Share (you might need to log in and grant permission first). I find that I use this feature a bit more than Tuniverse, as I am on Facebook occasionally.

TuneUp's  analyzing and cleaning aspects make it a valuable iTunes plug-in for me. Unless you have a perfectly organized iTunes library, you may find it very useful as well.

One note: if you have a Massive iTunes library, it may take TuneUp a while to do its job. The folks at TuneUp Media suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time; it takes about 2-3 seconds to "clean" a song. You can do more, but you might want to let TuneUp do its work overnight or while you go to a movie.

There are two ways to buy TuneUp. The best way is the US$49.95 one-time purchase. There's also a $39.95 "annual subscription" version. The annual subscription license is valid for one year, but can be renewed. The one-time purchase license doesn't have an expiration date. Both licenses are issued per-computer and can be transferred up to five times. A demo is available for download. 

TuneUp requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later and works with iTunes 10.7 and higher.

Just last month Republicans seemed bitter that the State of the Union Address wasn't some elaborate tip-of-the-hat by Obama to the power and glory of the Republican Party's success in the midterm elections. Now the GOP's new position is beginning to look a lot less formidable that one might have imagined. At the Plum Line, Paul Waldman sums it up succinctly:

Ironically, the Republicans had a lot more power when they were in the minority than they do now. With a Democratic Congress, the administration set out an ambitious legislative agenda, which Republicans were able to obstruct and subvert as long as they stayed unified, which they did very well. But once they took control, the administration all but gave up on legislating (apart from unavoidable tasks like passing budgets to keep the government open), which leaves Republicans with no fights to wage apart from the meaningless ones they manage to concoct on their own. And they can’t even figure out how to win those. Winning Congress has put Republicans in a position where they have little choice other than to make things worse.

No wonder these elephants with no memory want to believe the midterms represented some sort of unstoppable trend that will manifest itself again in 2016--you know, just like the 2010 elections. What they are experiencing now is like spoiled fruit.

The real life castaway that miraculously washed up recently on a Marshall Islands atoll after more than a year adrift in his small fishing boat has returned to his native El Salvador.

The castaway, who has since been identified as Jose Salvador Alvarenga, arrived Monday night at El Salvador’s capital of San Salvador after a flight from Los Angeles. Alvarenga, who first appeared to the public with a thick beard and long hair, was greeted by a swarm of reporters looking weak but clean-shaven and, more importantly, alive.

As the story goes, Alvarenga was on a one day fishing trip from the Mexican city of Tapachula when sudden strong winds swept his 24-foot fiberglass fishing boat out to sea. He then spent about 13 months adrift in the Pacific Ocean, surviving by eating fish and birds he caught with his bare hands and drinking turtle blood when rain water ran out. Tragically his fishing partner, a teenage boy, died sometime into the journey after refusing to eat.

It’s an amazing story, so amazing in fact that is has led many to question its authenticity.

The first photos of Alvarenga showed a heavily bearded, relatively healthy-looking man with a plump, well-fed face. Not exactly your typically guy (sans beard) who has been stuck on a small boat with no food or shade for the past year.

But experts maintain that his story adds up, with doctors claiming that his puffy appearance was not atypical of a man whose vital organs were slowly but surely failing.

Curious about his story ourselves, we reached out to Bouyweather.com Chief Meteorologist, Mark Willis, who explained that an infamous and fairly common wind phenomenon known as the “Tehuantepecer” may very well have did him in.

“Simply put, a “Tehuantepecer” is one of the most amazing displays of wind in the world,” Willis explained. “The term is used to describe a phenomenon that brings a narrow area of strong northerly winds to the Gulf of Tehuantepec [where Alvarenga set off from].

“The “gap flow” associated with a Tehuantepecer typically produces around 12 gale force (greater than or equal to 34kts) wind events in the Gulf of Tehuantepec each cold season, most of which occur between November and March. In addition, there are typically around 6 storm force (greater than or equal to 50kts) events each year.”

SEE: Castaway Jose Salvador: Blame the Tehuantepecer?

Looking into Alvarenga’s story, Willis dug into the weather archives for the date the pair claims to have set off, December 21, 2012:

“Archived weather charts during [December 21] revealed an even stronger “Tehuantepecer” event associated with a strong area of high pressure (~1033mb) that built over South Texas behind a cold front that pushed through the Gulf of Mexico. While satellite observations were not readily available in this region on the 21st, Bouyweather chart archives suggested that an area of strong gale to low end storm force winds (40-50kt) were blowing through the Gulf of Tehuantepec during this time. In addition, the National Hurricane Center’s Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch had a Storm Warning in effect on the 21st.”

So did a “Tehuantepecer” lead to Jose Salvador’s Mayday? Willis explains:

“Well, we don’t know for sure and we may never know the answer to that question. However, we are fairly confident that there were potentially very dangerous “Tehuantepecer” North wind events that occurred on both November 17-19, 2012 and December 21, 2012. These events are enough to impact any mariner, especially the storm force event on the 21st.”

Alvarenga has now been repatriated to El Salvador, where he grew up but has not been in more than eight years.