New Hampshire
Mass. men charged with drug possession in N.H.
More hepatitis cases found in New Hampshire
Woman faces charges of robbing Conway bank
Brewery examines fatal keg accident
Group gives New Hampshire technology sector a boost
Police tranquilize bear wandering city streets
New Jersey
"N.J. judge says woman who was texting driver at time of crash is not liable" Associated Press, May 26, 2012
MORRISTOWN, N.J. - A woman who texted her boyfriend while he was driving cannot be held liable for a car crash he caused while responding, seriously injuring a motorcycling couple, a judge ruled Friday in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.
A lawyer for the injured couple argued that text messages from Shannon Colonna to Kyle Best played a role in the September 2009 wreck in Mine Hill. But Colonna’s lawyer said she had no control over when or how Best would read and respond to the message.
State Superior Court Judge David Rand sided with
Colonna’s lawyer, dismissing claims against the woman in a lawsuit filed
by crash victims David and Linda Kubert, who are also suing Best. David
Kubert had his left leg torn off above the knee, while his wife
eventually had her left leg amputated.
But Colonna testified at a deposition she didn’t know whether Best was driving at the time.
Best has pleaded guilty to distracted driving, admitting he was using his cellphone and acknowledging a series of text messages he exchanged with Colonna around the time of the accident; the content of the messages is unknown. Records show Best responded to a text from Colonna seconds before dialing 911.
--more--"
Related: Haverhill teen convicted in texting-while-driving case
Also see: Former Rutgers student apologizes over webcam spying
The Bullies of New Jersey
New Mexico
"Drought provides fuel as N.M. wildfire becomes largest in state’s history" Associated Press, May 31, 2012
About 1,200 firefighters have been battling the ever-growing blaze in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico (US Forest Service via Associated Press).
ALBUQUERQUE - A massive wildfire that has burned more than 265 square miles in the Gila National Forest has become the largest fire in New Mexico history, officials confirmed Wednesday.
The erratic blaze grew to more than 170,000 acres - an area larger than the city of Chicago - surpassing a blaze last year that burned 156,593 acres in Los Conchas and threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation’s premier nuclear facility.
Related: Los Alamos Fire Fading Out
The
Gila forest fire also is the largest burning in the country. It formed
last week when two lightning-sparked blazes merged in an isolated
mountainous area in southwestern New Mexico....
--more--"
ALBUQUERQUE - A massive wildfire that has burned more than 265 square miles in the Gila National Forest has become the largest fire in New Mexico history, officials confirmed Wednesday.
The erratic blaze grew to more than 170,000 acres - an area larger than the city of Chicago - surpassing a blaze last year that burned 156,593 acres in Los Conchas and threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation’s premier nuclear facility.
Related: Los Alamos Fire Fading Out
And specialists says the mammoth fire may be just a preview of what
is to come in part of the western United States after months of drought
and dry conditions.
--more--"
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Pennsylvania Coal Fire
I was told they were getting it under control.
"Residents and business owners will be allowed to return to the small, privately run ghost town of Mogollon on Monday as fire crews battling the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history continued to make progress....
I'm sorry, readers, the smokescreen has gotten to me.
--more--"
Also see: New Mexico's Smart Tech Ghost Town
For more on the latest New Mexico fire go here.
And nothing in today's printed Globe on the Florida floods.
Next Day Update:
"Massive wildfires in drought-parched Colorado and New Mexico tested the resources of state and federal crews Monday and underscored the need to replenish an aging US aerial firefighting fleet needed to combat a year-round fire season....
Well, if we hadn't spent the last 10 years spending trillions of dollars on wars based on lies, shoveling trillions more to bailout Wall Street criminals, and moved billions more to Israel during the same period (driving us into deep debt), maybe the AmeriKan firefighting fleet could have been adequately attended to when it came to upkeep.
Of course, I'm expected to offer a solution rather than being negative by pointing out such inconvenient facts. Of course, my solution -- ending the empire, dissolving the private banking cartel -- are unacceptable -- and thus I have no solution. It's too f***ing late now.
--more--"
And the Globe did get to the floods:
"Flood warnings extended along the Gulf Coast from Florida’s Panhandle into Mississippi as heavy rain Monday threatened a repeat of weekend downpours and storms that damaged houses, blacked out a jail, and spun off at least one tornado in Alabama. More than 600 inmates at the Escambia County Jail in Florida were without power and air conditioning after the rains left more than 5 feet of water in the bottom floor....
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New York
"Muslims sue to halt surveillance by NYPD; N.J. group calls it unconstitutional" by Eileen Sullivan | Associated Press, June 07, 2012
WASHINGTON - Eight Muslims filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday in New Jersey to force the New York Police Department to end its surveillance and other intelligence-gathering practices targeting Muslims in the years after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The lawsuit charged that the police activities were unconstitutional because they focused on people’s religion, national origin, and race.
It is the first lawsuit to directly challenge the NYPD’s surveillance programs, the subject of an investigative series by the Associated Press since last year.
Related: NYPD Steps in Shi'ite
NYPD Tracks Shi'ite Into School
Based on internal NYPD reports and interviews with officials involved in the programs, it was reported that the NYPD conducted wholesale surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling daily life, including where people ate, prayed, and got their hair cut. Police infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds more....
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said his department is obligated to do this type of surveillance in order to protect New York from another 9/11. Kelly has said the 2001 attacks proved that New Yorkers could not rely solely on the federal government for protection, and the NYPD needed to enhance its efforts.
Well, I AGREE with THAT seeing as THEY HAVE a HAND in the FALSE FLAG ATTACKS, yeah! FBI actually got angry at them over Zazi, but WHAT POLICE FORCE wants a "TERRORIST" ATTACK in their city?
Syed Farhaj Hassan, one of the plaintiffs and an Army reservist from a small town outside of New Brunswick, N.J., said he served in Iraq in 2003 to stop the atrocities of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s secret police.
“I didn’t know they had one across the Hudson,’’ he said, referring to the NYPD intelligence division.
Muslim Advocates, a civil rights organization in California that meets regularly with representatives of the Obama administration, is representing the plaintiffs in the case for free....
I'm surprised it hasn't become a Republican campaign cudgel yet.
New Jersey lawmakers were outraged earlier this year when they learned of the surveillance. But after a three-month review, the state’s attorney general concluded that the NYPD did not violate any state laws when it spied on Muslim neighborhoods and organizations.
The attorney general found no recourse for the state of New Jersey to stop the NYPD from infiltrating Muslim student groups, videotaping mosque-goers, or collecting their license plate numbers as they prayed.
Actually, the massive surveillance control grid in place and being expanded is to do that to all of us, tracking wherever we go at all times.
No court has ruled that the NYPD programs were illegal, but Congress believes the NYPD is not part of its jurisdiction even though the police department receives billions in federal funding each year....
Contrast that with the way they feel about, say, abortion.
Related: NYPD Now a National Police Force
Muslims shouldn't take it personally:
"Red Scare records ordered released; N.Y. court still excludes some" Associated Press, June 06, 2012
ALBANY, N.Y. - New York’s top court on Tuesday ordered the release of more names and records to a writer whose parents were targeted by anticommunist investigators in the New York City school system 57 years ago.
The Court of Appeals, however, is still excluding informants who were promised confidentiality. The seven judges unanimously said history may at some point overtake those promises and more completely peel back the veil of secrecy from that chapter in America’s Red Scare.
“The story of the Anti-Communist Investigations, like any
other that is a significant part of our past, should be told as fully
and as accurately as possible, and historians are better equipped to do
so when they can work from uncensored records,’’ Judge Robert Smith
wrote. “Perhaps there will be a time when the promise made . . . is so
ancient that its enforcement would be pointless, but that time is not
yet.’’
****************************
Historians say the probes happened for decades across the nation at every level of government on a much larger scale than the well-known Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954....
Americans, you have NOT BEEN TOLD the TRUTH about YOUR OWN HISTORY in SO MANY WAYS! What you have been fed has been a Zionist distillation and distortion.
--more--"
Yeah, that's one of their prisms.
"Police recruit fired over beard, he says
NEW YORK - An Orthodox Jewish man who was weeks away from becoming a police officer says he has been kicked out of the police academy for refusing to trim his beard. Former recruit Fishel Litzman said he was fired Friday over the length of his whiskers. Litzman believes that cutting his beard is forbidden by God. New York Police Department rules usually require officers to be clean-shaven but allow religious exemptions if the beards do not exceed 1 millimeter of growth."
I sense a lawsuit soon, and citing God doesn't help his cause. Next thing you know they will citing the reason to steal land from people.
Also see: Tribal Troublemakers
NYC cops getting a little frisky, are they?
Related: NYPD issues new stop and frisk rules
N.Y. officials, Justice Dept. meet on frisking
Also see: US Quiet on Kent State Killing
I'm sure the Justice Department will straighten out NYC.
Time to head upstate:
"Uncle allegedly poisoned boys’ milk" Associated Press, May 26, 2012
SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Authorities say an upstate New York man angry over getting tossed out of his brother’s home poisoned his sibling’s two toddlers by pouring bleach in their milk.
Syracuse police said Friday that Aaron Hickman, 20, had been living with his brother but got into an argument with him Wednesday night and was told to leave.
Before doing so, officials say, Hickman poured bleach into a container of milk in the refrigerator.
The boys were treated at a hospital.
Hickman is charged with assault and endangering the welfare of a child.
He was arraigned Friday in Syracuse City Court.
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"An upstate New York woman who faked having cancer so donors would pay for her wedding and Caribbean honeymoon was sentenced Wednesday to the nearly two months she has already served in jail for duping individuals and businesses out of more than $13,000....
--more--"
"Son’s cigarette caused fatal fire, police say" Associated Press, June 08, 2012
CARMEL, N.Y. - A young man’s flicked cigarette ash probably sparked an accidental house fire last month that killed his parents and two teenage sisters, leaving him the only survivor, police said Thursday.
How current were they on the mortgage?
“It is not considered to be suspicious in nature and it was not intentionally set,’’ Carmel police Chief Michael Johnson said at a news conference.
The house, located in a neighborhood of large homes 60 miles of New York City, was quickly consumed in a fireball after spreading to plastic lattice and the wooden porch, police said. The blaze melted the siding of two nearby homes and plastic and paint on cars....
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They must be smoking something over there in Albany:
"N.Y. leaders back easing of marijuana law" New York Times, June 05, 2012
ALBANY, N.Y. - New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Monday he would support a proposal by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo to significantly curb the number of people who could be arrested for marijuana possession as a result of police stops.
Cuomo plans to urge lawmakers to change state law to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana in public view, an offense that critics say leads to unfair charges against thousands of people who are ordered to empty their pockets during police stops that have proliferated under the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk practice.
Really has the FEEL of FASCISM, doesn't it?
Bloomberg, whose administration had previously defended low-level
marijuana arrests as a way to deter more serious crime, said in a
statement the governor’s proposal “strikes the right balance’’ in part
because it would still allow the police to arrest people who were
smoking marijuana in public.
The governor said he would seek to downgrade the possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana in public view from a misdemeanor to a violation, with a maximum fine of $100 for first-time offenders.
Raymond W. Kelly, New York City police commissioner, attended the news conference as a way of demonstrating the city’s support for Cuomo’s proposal.
Must be costing the city and state too much money.
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Time to get on the bus and head home:
"US orders 30 passenger buses off road" June 01, 2012|Ashley Halsey III, Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Some of those sleek, modern buses that pass between East Coast cities may be operated by sleepy, untrained drivers and running on bad tires and worn-out brakes, federal officials said Thursday as they ordered about 30 of the vehicles off the road.
The crackdown targeted three companies that operate under some two dozen names, carrying about 1,800 passengers a day along the Interstate 95 corridor between New York and Florida.
Authorities said the companies have evaded past federal efforts by playing a common trick: the shell game. Whenever they were shut down, the companies resumed business under another name.
“They’ve slapped another name on the side of the bus and started driving again,’’ said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “These buses are not on the road today, and we’re going to focus like a laser beam in making sure they don’t get back on the road.’’
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"Driver fatigue blamed in deadly bus crash; Safety board also cites N.Y. firm’s lack of oversight" by Joan Lowy | Associated Press, June 06, 2012
WASHINGTON - A tour bus crash last year that claimed 15 lives was caused by a driver suffering from too little sleep and a bus company that provided too little safety oversight, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.
Related: Chinatown Casino Bus Crash
The five-member board, in a unanimous vote, said the driver, Ophadell Williams, had almost no sleep in the three days leading up to the March 12, 2011, accident except for naps he took on the bus while passengers were inside a Connecticut casino gambling.
The bus was traveling at 78 miles per hour in a 50-mile-per-hour zone
of Interstate 95 while returning to New York’s Chinatown when it ran
off the road, clattered along a highway guard rail, toppled over, and
crashed into the support pole for a highway sign. The pole knifed
through the bus front to back along the window line, peeling the roof
off all the way to the back tires. Besides those killed, 17 other
passengers were injured, some severely.
Williams has pleaded not guilty in New York to charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Williams’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
“For years, speed has been a factor in accidents,’’ said Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “And, we’ve seen in investigation after investigation the tragic results of the degraded performance from fatigue. Together, fatigue and speed are an especially lethal combination.’’
The circumstances of the New York accident were a perfect storm for creating driver fatigue, said Jana Price, an agency specialist on human performance.
Williams worked mostly overnight shifts, driving to the casino before midnight and returning in the morning. On his days off, he would switch to a nighttime sleep schedule, a transition that creates a feeling of fatigue similar to jet lag, Price said.
Bus lag.
During the three days prior to the accident, Williams’s cellphone and rental car were in almost continuous use during the daytime hours when he had said he was sleeping, investigators said.
Federal regulators shut down the bus operator, World Wide Tours of Greater New York, after the accident for safety violations. Williams had not turned in any driver’s logs while working for the company as required by federal safety regulations, yet World Wide took no action, investigators said. He had been fired by two previous employers and had 18 suspensions of his driving privileges over two decades when he was hired by World Wide.
No background check or call to references?
After World Wide was shut down, the company’s employees, buses, and other assets were transferred to a closely related company with similar ownership, Great Escapes, investigators said. That company continues to operate, they said....
The New York accident, and other fatal accidents in New Jersey and Virginia last spring, sparked an investigation by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration into the safety of curbside bus operators. Last week, government safety officials shut down more than two dozen curbside bus operations that mostly ferry passengers in the busy East Coast transportation corridor between New York and Florida.
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Also see: Overnight Bus Trip in New York
Boston Globe Travels New York by Bus, Buggy, and Cart
Don't Get on the Bus
I better just drive myself in the car.
