Article 1
Advanced stages of CTE found in Aaron Hernandez's brain
BOSTON -- Former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez had a severe case of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, researchers said on Thursday. His lawyer announced a lawsuit against the NFL and the team, accusing them of hiding the true dangers of the sport.
Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the CTE Center at Boston University, said Hernandez had stage 3 (out of 4) of the disease, which can cause violent mood swings, depression and other cognitive disorders.
"We're told it was the most severe case they had ever seen for someone of Aaron's age," attorney Jose Baez said.
Hernandez was 27 when he killed himself in April in the prison cell where he was serving a life-without-parole sentence for murder. Baez said Hernandez had shown signs of memory loss, impulsivity and aggression that could be attributed to CTE.
"When hindsight is 20-20, you look back and there are things you might have noticed," he said. "But you don't know."
CTE, which can be diagnosed only in an autopsy, has been found in former members of the military, football players, boxers and others who have been subjected to repeated head trauma. A recent study found signs of the disease in 110 of 111 NFL players whose brains were inspected.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court claimed that the league and the Patriots failed to protect their players' safety, leading to the disease that deprived Hernandez's 4-year-old daughter, Avielle, of her father's companionship.
"Defendants were fully aware of the dangers of exposing NFL players, such as Aaron, to repeated traumatic head impacts," the lawsuit said. "Yet, defendants concealed and misrepresented the risks of repeated traumatic head impacts."
On a conference call with reporters on Friday morning, NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said the league will "vigorously" defend itself against the lawsuit.
A Patriots spokesman did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The league recently agreed to pay $1 billion to retired players who claimed it misled them about the dangers of playing football.
The "loss of consortium" lawsuit filed on Thursday is independent of the class-action suit that began making payments this summer. Baez said it was the first of its kind.
"If we have to be groundbreakers in this area, it's something we're prepared to do," he said.
Hernandez committed suicide just hours before his former teammates visited the White House to celebrate their latest Super Bowl victory and a week after he was acquitted in the 2012 drive-by shootings of two men in Boston.
Prosecutors had argued that Hernandez gunned the two men down after one accidentally spilled a drink on him in a nightclub, and then got a tattoo of a handgun and the words "God Forgives" to commemorate the crime.
Hernandez did not raise CTE in his defense at either trial because he claimed actual innocence.
Article 2
Did Gladiators Always Fight to the Death?
Hollywood portrays Roman gladiatorial contests as brutal, unruly duels that ended when one of the combatants killed the other. But in reality, gladiators didn’t always fight to the death. These ancient Roman athletes were highly trained professionals who made their living fighting, not dying. And since gladiators were expensive to prepare and maintain, killing off mass numbers of them would have been a bad business decision for the lanistae who owned and trained them. Occasionally, sponsors would pay extra to stage a fight to the death, compensating the lanista for any lost gladiators. But more commonly, gladiatorial bouts simply had to have a decisive outcome, meaning that one of the contestants was wounded or his endurance gave out.
Successful gladiators could become major stars of the Roman world, and those who were slaves could sometimes be freed after winning a certain number of matches. Some surviving gladiators became trainers themselves after their fighting days were over. In 2007 scientists discovered an 1,800-year-old graveyard at the Roman city of Ephesus, Turkey, containing thousands of bones and tombstones identifying the remains as those of gladiators. Some of the skeletons showed evidence of healed wounds, suggesting that gladiators received medical treatment, and one seemed to belong to a retired fighter. Not surprisingly, other skeletons showed signs of violent deaths, including blows from weapons such as tridents, hammers and foot-long swords. (Hammers, though not used in the arena, were used to deliver offstage death blows to fighters who were too seriously injured to survive.) There is no question that gladiatorial combat was a dangerous business, but contrary to popular myth, it did not always end in death.