All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Drunk Driver Who Killed Brooklyn Pedestrian Gets No Jail Time, $500 Fine: Gothamist

A drunk driver who fatally struck a 27-year-old woman in Brooklyn last July was issued a six-month license suspension, a $500 fine and three years probation, after pleading guilty to operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. He was not charged with manslaughter.

According to Streetsblog, 26-year-old Eric Nesmith was handed the nominal sentence yesterday. The sentencing came just over nine months after Nesmith struck and killed 27-year-old Roxana Gomez while she was walking at St. Mark’s and Flatbush Ave in Park Slope on the night of July 5th. Though FDNY first responders noted he was speeding at the time, and the NYPD reported he had a blood alcohol level of .126, Nesmith was not charged with manslaughter following Gomez’s death. Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson told Streetsblog in January “that alcohol was not a contributing factor in the death of the pedestrian in this case.”

via Drunk Driver Who Killed Brooklyn Pedestrian Gets No Jail Time, $500 Fine: Gothamist.

News from The Associated Press – Heartbleed 99% Spin

If hackers had been taking advantage of it for two years – we’d all be broke now and three guys – instead of the 10 guys – would have all the money in the world. Beware of cyber-security experts trying to sell you stuff you don’t need and of news outlets using scare headlines to sell their services!

Security researchers who uncovered the threat, known as “Heartbleed,” are particularly worried about the vulnerability because it went undetected for more than two years. They fear the possibility that computer hackers may have been secretly exploiting the problem before its discovery.

via News from The Associated Press.

 

If hackers had been taking advantage of it for two years – we’d all be broke now and three guys – instead of the 10 guys – would have all the money in the world. Beware of cyber-security experts trying to sell you stuff you don’t need and of news outlets using scare headlines to sell their services!

Polluting of Lake Okeechobee Must End, Court Rules | Earthjustice

Why you should not trust Big Ag about anything but their desire for big profits!

Our case was 11 years in the making—we first filed it in 2002 to challenge the practice of “backpumping.” Backpumping works like this: South Florida sugar and vegetable growers pump the public’s waters out of Lake Okeechobee to irrigate fields. They wash the water over their industrial-sized crops, where it gets contaminated with fertilizers and other pollutants. Then, the agribusinesses get taxpayers in the South Florida Water Management District to pay to pump the contaminated water—along with some polluted run-off from industrial areas and city streets—back into Lake Okeechobee, where it pollutes public drinking water supplies for West Palm Beach, Fort Myers and the entire Lower East Coast metropolitan area.

via Polluting of Lake Okeechobee Must End, Court Rules | Earthjustice.

Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future — Medium

In 2009, three New York physicians cared for a sixty-seven-year-old man who had major surgery and then picked up a hospital infection that was “pan-resistant” — that is, responsive to no antibiotics at all. He died fourteen days later. When his doctors related his case in a medical journal months afterward, they still sounded stunned. “It is a rarity for a physician in the developed world to have a patient die of an overwhelming infection for which there are no therapeutic options,” they said, calling the man’s death “the first instance in our clinical experience in which we had no effective treatment to offer.”

via Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future — Medium.

Starving Artists Fed Up; Seek To Establish Industry Standards With Teamsters Local 705 (Chicago, IL)

ArtLeaks

Art School Graduates Seek a Teamster Local 705 Contract at Mana Terry Dowd 

Chicago— 04/08/14 Teamsters and artists may seem like an unlikely combination, but professional artists at Chicago’s Mana Terry Dowd fine art packers and movers are organizing in an effort to begin to establish income and benefit standards in their profession. The artists are set to vote on April 25 in an election administered by the National Labor Relations Board. Upon graduating with a degree in art, professional artists are faced with few employment options. Even after receiving debt-burdening advanced degrees, these highly talented and skilled artists vie for a professorship or to make it big in the art scene. In the meantime, postgraduate artist are typically faced with two remaining low-wage choices; to work as an assistant at an art gallery, or to become an art handler as with Mana Terry Dowd. These jobs often pay…

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Starving Artists Fed Up; Seek To Establish Industry Standards With Teamsters Local 705 (Chicago, IL) | ArtLeaks

Mana Terry Dowd is opposing the Teamsters’ efforts to help professional art handlers in making their job one they can thrive in. Mana Terry Dowd is suspected of including managers and supervisors as eligible voters in the upcoming election in an effort to undermine the art handlers’ organizing efforts. Teamsters Local 705 plans to challenge Mana Terry Dowd’s actions at the National Labor Relations Board, but often even that doesn’t stop Mana Terry Dowd and companies like them from dealing dirty with their professional art handlers.

via Starving Artists Fed Up; Seek To Establish Industry Standards With Teamsters Local 705 (Chicago, IL) | ArtLeaks.

Congressman Busted on First Base Asks for FBI Review of Video – The Wire

No shame and wannabe Teflon Religious Representative has similar supporters and one of the no-shamers is a local minister!

To help McAllister try to change focus from his indiscretion to the identity of the leaker, a local pastor came forward to the News-Star to say that he knows who the leaker was: McAllister’s current office manager. Christian Life Church pastor Danny Chance also claimed that there’s a “conspiracy” to remove McAllister from office:

“I’m not taking up for the congressman; what he did was wrong…But I just feel like there is a conspiracy to bring Vance down and destroy him. For someone on his staff to do that is wrong.”

Although the staffer in question didn’t speak to the paper, Terry did tell the News-Star that he was aware of the allegation and has spoken to the staffer. She denied involvement, he added, and she remained employed by the congressman as of Tuesday.

via Congressman Busted on First Base Asks for FBI Review of Video – The Wire.

Soldiers stand by as Israeli settlers attack Palestinian school girls | Maan News Agency

Israeli settlers on Wednesday assaulted Palestinian school children in the southern West Bank, a school official said.

A school principal told Ma’an that a group of extremist Israeli settlers hurled stones at school girls in the village of al-Tuwani, leaving them bruised.

Israeli soldiers stood by and watched without taking action as the settlers threw rocks, the principal said.

The girls who sustained injuries were identified as Kifah Omar Abu Jundiyya and Dalal Awad Zein, both seventh graders.

In al-Tuwani and other areas in the southern Hebron district, school children on a daily basis wait at checkpoints for Israeli soldiers to let them through locked gates.

Regardless of Israeli military presence, settler attacks on children en route to and from school remain commonplace, the principal said.

via Soldiers stand by as Israeli settlers attack Palestinian school girls | Maan News Agency.

To amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to require periodic review of listings of endangered species and threatened species under that Act, to support protection and conservation measures for endangered or threatened species under that Act and to alleviate the need to list a species as an endangered or threatened species, to convey small parcels of National Forest System land and Department of the Interior land to generate revenues for such protection and conservation measures, and for other purposes. (H.R. 4419) – GovTrack.us

Teddy Roosevelt turning over in grave – GOP Rep. wants to sell off National Forests to pay for less species protection while pretending to be doing a good thing!

H.R. 4419: To amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to require periodic review of listings of endangered species and threatened …

… species under that Act, to support protection and conservation measures for endangered or threatened species under that Act and to alleviate the need to list a species as an endangered or threatened species, to convey small parcels of National Forest System land and Department of the Interior land to generate revenues for such protection and conservation measures, and for other purposes.

via To amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to require periodic review of listings of endangered species and threatened species under that Act, to support protection and conservation measures for endangered or threatened species under that Act and to alleviate the need to list a species as an endangered or threatened species, to convey small parcels of National Forest System land and Department of the Interior land to generate revenues for such protection and conservation measures, and for other purposes. (H.R. 4419) – GovTrack.us.

NeverEnding Story: Cool Announcement: Language and Silence by Svetlana Marisova, Free on Kindle for the NEXT 4 DAYS!

Svetlana Marisova (March 17, 1990 – September 7, 2011) was born the only child of a family who knew social and religious persecution in post-Soviet Russia. The family moved to New Zealand in 2004. In her later teens she responded to a perceived call to the cloistered life of contemplative prayer. A diagnosis of terminal brain cancer in late 2009 curtailed the way she was able to live out this vocation. Over the remaining two years of her life she wrapped her past and present in even greater cloistered mystery while she tried to come to terms with her future. Fascinated by language as much as she was by the interior silence of contemplation, she gravitated to the combination of both that she could find in writing haiku. In a similar paradoxical manner she hid herself from the world while she reached out to it through the anonymity of human interaction via the social networking complexities of the internet. In cyber-companionship with Ted van Zutphen she worked out her identity as girl/woman, nun/social butterfly, contemplative/wordsmith as together they wrote and studied haiku via digital communications. Her work has appeared in a number of online and print journals, anthologies and books.

via NeverEnding Story: Cool Announcement: Language and Silence by Svetlana Marisova, Free on Kindle for the NEXT 4 DAYS!.