Sunday, January 19, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day



Hoboken, N.J., mayor claims Chris Christie camp held Sandy money hostage --NBC

By NBC News staff


Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned that Hoboken, N.J., would be starved of Hurricane Sandy relief funds unless the mayor approved a redevelopment project favored by the governor, according to the city official and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc.

In an exclusive interview Saturday with “Up, with Steve Kornacki,” Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer said the warning came from Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Richard Constable, Christie’s community affairs commissioner.

Zimmer, a Democrat who hasn’t approved the project favored by Christie, said she requested $127 million in hurricane relief for her city, but has so far received only $142,000 to defray the cost of a single back-up generator, plus an additional $200,000 in recovery grants.

"It's not fair for the governor to hold Sandy funds hostage for the city of Hoboken because he wants me to give back to one private developer," she said.

Constable and Christie both denied Zimmer’s claims. Christie spokesman Colin Reed, in a statement provided to NBC News on Saturday afternoon, dismissed the report as the result of "partisan politics" and charged that the msnbc cable network "has been openly hostile to Governor Christie and almost gleeful in their efforts attacking him."

The statement went on to say that Hoboken has been "approved for nearly $70 million dollars in federal aid and is targeted to get even more when the Obama Administration approves the next rounds of funding."

Lisa M. Ryan, spokeswoman for Constable, said in a statement: “Mayor Zimmer’s allegation that on May 16, 2013, Commissioner Constable conditioned Hoboken’s receipt of Sandy aid on her moving forward with a development project is categorically false.”
Zimmer shot back: “I’d be more than willing to testify under oath and – and answer any questions and provide any documents, take a lie detector test. And, you know, my question back to them is, ‘Would all of you? Would all of you be willing do that same thing, to testify under oath, to take a lie detector test?’”

The developer of the project, the New York City-based Rockefeller Group, said in a statement to msnbc: “We have no knowledge of any information pertaining to this allegation. If it turns out to be true it would be deplorable.”
Zimmer’s allegations of pressure tactics from Christie’s administration come on the heels of “Bridgegate” – a scandal that erupted on Jan. 8 when emails surfaced showing that Christie aides ordered lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in apparent retaliation for the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., endorsing the governor’s opponent in last year’s election.  

Christie, the early front-runner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, has denied any knowledge of the lane closures, and fired a top aide who sent one of the emails.
A new charge of political retribution against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie from Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer.

The Hoboken project at the center of Zimmer's accusation was a 2008 deal that would have awarded the Rockefeller Group the right to redevelop a stretch of Hoboken. The project would have been eligible for tax incentives and it would have given the Rockefeller Group a free hand to build whatever they wanted while asking for millions in subsidies, msnbc reported.

Zimmer said she wasn’t against the deal but wanted a professional study done and felt that it should wait until her city was on sounder financial footing. The dispute became public and the Christie administration stepped in, according to Zimmer.
In 2010, the Christie administration connected Zimmer to the Port Authority – the same jointly run New Jersey-New York agency that operates the George Washington Bridge – which approved a $75,000 grant for the study.The Port Authority selected Clarke Caton Hintz to carry out the redevelopment study in February 2011.
Finally, in January 2013, the firm — which was tasked with evaluating a 19-block area — concluded that only the three blocks in which the Rockefeller Group had an ownership stake were fit for redevelopment.

Zimmer’s team was concerned and the landowners for the other 16 blocks were angry, msnbc reported. The owners hired a lawyer who called the study “curious, disturbing and suspect to the say the least,” it said.

After a series of back and forths, the Hoboken Planning Board voted 4-3 against the project on May 8 of last year, finding “insufficient evidence” to designate those three blocks for redevelopment. Instead, the board declared the entire 19-block area “in need of rehabilitation.” 

As the redevelopment dispute was unfolding, Zimmer was simultaneously applying for funding from the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, money overseen by Christie to help communities hit hard by Sandy prepare themselves for the next storm. Hoboken officials submitted seven letters of intent for around $100 million, money that it intended to spend on storm surge coastal protection, buying properties to be used as open space and for backup generators.

As New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie works to raise money for his party, Democrats remain critical of the recent scandal involving lane closures on the George Washington Bridge. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reports, with an interview with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

But Zimmer said the city received less than 1 percent of what it had sought. With $250 million to disburse statewide, the Christie administration gave $142,000 to Hoboken — enough to help defray the cost of one backup generator to power a flood pump. Out of another pool of money for recovery grants — $1.8 billion in all — Hoboken received $200,000.

 “Please governor,” Zimmer wrote in a letter following the decisions, “we need your help. I have tried to assure Hoboken residents that we would be treated fairly because you have always treated Hoboken fairly in the past.”

There was no response to that letter, dated May 8 of last year, the same day the Hoboken Planning Board did not adopt the redevelopment recommendation for the Rockefeller property, msnbc said.

In the statement given to NBC News, Reed, Christie's spokesman, said that Zimmer's request for $100 million from the program amounted to a third of the available funding.

"To put that in perspective, the city of Hoboken is 2 square miles, and there were $14 billion worth of requests for aid up and down New Jersey for that same pot of money," Reed said. "Since then, Hoboken has received approval for nearly $70 million dollars worth of funding, and has been identified … as  a pilot community to receive comprehensive future resiliency measures to prevent flooding – one of only four projects in New Jersey selected by the Obama Administration."




Zimmer's story of Christie officials warning her recently that her Sandy funds would be withheld unless she supported the Rockefeller Group project needs to be proven. She has said that she would take a lie detector test and would testify under oath. Unfortunately, according to the television news, the threat was issued verbally in a parking lot and without witnesses. She may not have a case. I wonder if there are other Mayors who have been intimidated by Christie's administration in similar ways. If Christie's people have been deeply into bullying tactics, there may be more stories emerging. I will look for more about these kinds of events.





Police: Children Killed as Part of Exorcism – NBC
Second Woman Charged with Murder, Attempted Murder


A second woman has been arrested in the stabbing deaths of two young children in Germantown, Md., in what investigators say was an attempted exorcism.
Montgomery County police arrested Monifa Denise Sanford, 21, of Germantown, Saturday afternoon after she was released from the hospital. Sanford was injured during a violent incident Friday morning where two children were killed and two others were hurt.

Sanford is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder. She is being held without bond.
Sanford is the second person to be charged in this incident. Police have also charged Zakieya Latrice Avery, 28, of Germantown, with the same counts. Avery is the mother of the children.

The deceased children are identified as Norell N. Harris, 1, and Zyana Z. Harris, 2. The other two children are still hospitalized. They are identified as Taniya Harris, 5, and Martello Harris, 8.

Investigators learned Avery and Sanford believed they were performing an exorcism. Police have not released any further details and the investigation continues.
 


Belief in very dark religion still exists in the US. People who espouse the supernatural need to be careful that their beliefs are positive and not closer to black magic than the teachings of Jesus. This story is like something from the 1600's witch hunts, when 28 people were put to death and around two hundred were accused of witchcraft. People who take the Bible literally and act on their beliefs can do things that are against the law and without mercy.

The cases in the Bible when Jesus cast out demons were people who in modern times would be considered ill, either having convulsions or mentally disturbed. The Bible was written two thousand years ago by and for people whose beliefs included many primitive myths and practices. Modern readers need to sort out the helpful philosophy from the magical lore. We don't need exorcisms – we need mental health and medical intervention.




House Intelligence chairman hints at Russian help in Snowden leaks – NBC
By Tom Curry, NBC News national affairs writer


A leading House Republican is raising questions about Russia's involvement in the largest security leak in recent U.S. history.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has leaked details of the NSA’s surveillance operations, “was a thief who we believe had some help.”

In an interview to be aired Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rogers said that rather Snowden being a crusader for Americans’ privacy, “the vast majority” of what Snowden stole “had nothing to do with privacy. Our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines have been incredibly harmed by the data that he has taken with him and we believe now is in the hands of nation states.”

The Michigan Republican added that there are still “certain questions that we have to get answered” about who helped Snowden remove data from the NSA and later make it public in newspapers in the United States and Britain.

“He was stealing information that had to do with how we operate overseas to collect information to keep Americans safe…. And some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities” -- a fact which Rogers said “raises more questions. How he arranged travel before he left. How he was ready to go, he had a go bag, if you will.”
Rogers added that he believes “there's a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB (Russian security service) agent in Moscow. I don't think that's a coincidence….I don't think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the FSB.”

It was mostly in response to Snowden’s disclosures that President Barack Obama announced Friday some restrictions on how the NSA will collect data and conduct surveillance.

Separately, Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former CIA official, said Friday that one key question now in the Snowden affair is “Is it really Edward Snowden who is doing this, or is there a larger apparatus? I know that many people in the intelligence community… now no longer regard Edward Snowden as a thief or a traitor…. They regard him as a defector” who has gone over to a foreign intelligence agency.



There will undoubtedly be more about this as time goes on, and I will try to collect those articles. This one makes accusations but doesn't offer any proof. “.... some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities....” According to Snowden in the first articles that appeared about his actions, top secret information was more easily accessed by someone of his status than it should have been. Hackers are self-taught and able to do a great deal on a computer. I don't see why Snowden wouldn't have been able to do some of those things. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if Russian sources had been involved. I will be interested to see if any proof of their involvement emerges. International relations is complex even with our closest allies, and Russia is not exactly an ally even in this age of greater cooperation.





Rediscovered pelvis traced to King Alfred the Great ... or his son – NBC
Michael Holden Reuters


WINCHESTER, England — Archaeologists say they might have found part of the remains of King Alfred the Great, a ninth-century monarch who was one of the best-known and most important figures of early English history. 

Tests have shown that a pelvic bone found in a museum box is likely to have been either that of Alfred — the only English king to have the moniker "Great" — or his son King Edward the Elder. 

The bone was found among remains dug up at a medieval abbey in the southwest English city of Winchester, the capital of Alfred's kingdom. 

The remains were initially discovered in an excavation 15 years ago but were not tested at the time. Instead, they were stored in a box at Winchester Museum. Archaeologists took a second look at them after their failed bid to find traces of Alfred elsewhere. 

Human remains, including bones that may have been part of a royal pelvis, were exhumed from this unmarked grave at St. Bartholomew's Church in Winchester.
"The bone is likely to be one of them, I wouldn't like to say which one," Kate Tucker, a researcher in human osteology from the University of Winchester, told reporters on Friday. 

The discovery comes less than a year after British archaeologists discovered the missing bones of King Richard III, the last English king to die in battle in 1485, under a parking lot in the central English city of Leicester. 

It was the worldwide interest in Richard's discovery last February that fueled the search for Alfred the Great. The king ruled the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, an area that covered much of southern England, from 871 until his death in 899.
Famed for military victories against ferocious Vikings who had invaded much of the north of the country, Alfred was buried at the Anglo-Saxon cathedral in Winchester — but his remains and those of other royals were moved in 1100 by monks, ending up at the newly built Hyde Abbey. 

The abbey was dissolved in 1536, and the whereabouts of Alfred's remains and those of other members of his royal family thereafter became unclear.

Bones thrown about
Prisoners building a jail on the site in 1788 are thought to have come across the royal coffins, pillaged them, emptied out the remains and thrown the bones about. 
A month after the Richard III find, a local historical group called Hyde900 decided to exhume an unmarked grave at St. Bartholomew's Church. The church is located on the same site as the abbey, where a 19th-century antiquarian believed the bones had ended up. However, tests on the remains of six skeletons inside the grave revealed that they dated from a much later period. 

Despite the disappointment, Tucker carried out further research and came upon promising remains at the museum. The remains had been discovered in a previous dig near the location of the high altar at Hyde Abbey between 1995 and 1999. 

Tests concluded that the bone, amounting to about a third of a male pelvis, dated to between 895 and 1017 and belonged to a man aged between 26 and 45. 
As there were no other burials at the site in the Anglo-Saxon period, archaeologists concluded that it had to belong to a member of the royal house of Wessex — and due to the age, it was most probably either Alfred or his son. 

"Who else could it be," Tucker said.

'The Power Pelvis'
Rose Burns from Hyde900 said her group was thrilled by the discovery of what it called "the power pelvis" — although she admitted it was not as dramatic as the Richard III discovery. 
"It was disappointing that the remains in the unmarked coffin weren't the full package," she told Reuters. 

She said the find should pave the way for further exploration of the site and the prospect that more bones could be found. 

DNA from Richard III's remains were matched with descendants, but Tucker said it might be hard to do the same with Alfred. 
"We have had quite a number of individuals who have actually contacted us ... saying they are descendants of Alfred," Tucker said. "There's the potential that might be worth pursuing, but it is a very long way to try and go back. We're talking an extra 500 years further back than with Richard III." 

British children know Alfred for a legendary story that, preoccupied with his kingdom's problems following a battle, he burnt some cakes he was supposed to be watching while being sheltered by a peasant woman. Unaware of his identity, the woman scolded him for his laziness. 

However, more significantly, Alfred is regarded as laying the foundations for a unified England, and his passion for education and learning are seen a crucial in the development of the English language. 

"King Alfred's significance in the history of this country cannot be underestimated," said Professor Joy Carter, vice-chancellor at the University of Winchester.



This is a complex chain of events leading to the conclusion that the bone must be from King Alfred, with the bones being moved around at least twice before being found in 1999 at a museum at St. Bartholomew's Church. The dating of the bone does put it in the right time period, though, and according to this article it was thought that only royals from Wessex were buried there during the Anglo-Saxon period.

This does remind me of some of the conclusions drawn by Bible-related digs in the Middle East about the well that Abraham used or other such specific Bible references. The finding is usually too conveniently linked to a Biblical verse for proof over such a long period of time to substantiate. Secular archaeologists don't usually make such specific claims about their findings, choosing to use more caution. Of course, the archaeologists will have to publish their finding and undergo criticism and questioning by their peers. It is an exciting possibility, however that turns out.




­ Congress Vows To Step Up To Surveillance Policy Challenge – NPR
by Frank James
­
If there was a consensus emanating from Congress Friday after President Obama's NSA reform speech, it was — not surprisingly — that Congress itself has a major role to play in the ultimate fix.

Whether from strong NSA supporters or agency critics, the reactions sounded similar: Congress intends to do much of the steering in the drive to overhaul the NSA's gathering of certain non-public information, especially consumer phone records, in the nation's counterterrorism efforts.

Even so, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of politics in some of the reaction.
For instance, Speaker John Boehner issued a statement suggesting that much of the controversy over former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations of the agency's spying practices was due to Obama's failures as a communicator. The Speaker warned the president against letting politics trump national security.

"Because the president has failed to adequately explain the necessity of these programs, the privacy concerns of some Americans are understandable," Boehner's statement said. "When considering any reforms, however, keeping Americans safe must remain our top priority. When lives are stake, the president must not allow politics to cloud his judgment."

Then there was Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a fierce libertarian opponent of the NSA's current efforts. With a nod toward Obama's broken health care promise, he skewered the president on CNN immediately after the speech.

"Well, what I think I heard was that if you like your privacy, you can keep it. But in the meantime, we're going to keep collecting your phone records, your emails, your text messages and likely, your credit card information."

Much of the congressional reaction, however, lacked any noticeable partisan jabs. New York GOP Rep. Pete King, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a national security hawk, tweeted after the speech: "Pres Obama NSA speech better than expected. Most programs left intact. But concerned about extending US citizen privacy rights to foreigners."

What was clear was that some lawmakers expected that they — not the president — would ultimately have to resolve the NSA's controversial practices.

"Essentially, the president was stronger on principle than he was on prescription," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., in an interview with All Things Considered co-host Audie Cornish. "But Congress is going to have to fill in a lot of the blanks. Congress is going to have to resolve the question of whether this collection should continue and who is going to keep the data and resolve these issues and try to strike a balance, obviously."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., suggested that venerable Washington response to complicated controversies: a special congressional panel.
"The vital issues at stake here are complex, broad and cut across many areas of jurisdiction of established congressional committees, including national security, intelligence, technology, commerce, foreign affairs, and privacy. That is why I will introduce legislation to establish a Senate Select Committee to examine all of these important issues and questions," McCain said in a statement.

All of this suggests we could be headed for a big, politically-tinged separation-of-powers fight, as Obama strives to protect the executive branch's national-security prerogatives while Congress exerts its oversight powers, all during a midterm election year.



It seems to me that Senator McCain is right in saying that we need a Senate oversight committee, rather than an executive decision over what happens with the massive data file and the future of our collection and storage of such data. I will look for articles on this as events unfold and collect them.