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| "Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies: knock me your lobes." - Lord Buckley. Good Monday Morning, Now that we've all had a taste of winter perhaps it's time to take sealing up and sprucing up your home a little more seriously. As well, it's firewood time and before the price skyrockets come November, perchance it's best to put your order in now. Supporting our sponsors is a good thing for you - and them. If you think Domestic Violence is only about physical abuse and that the many signs of abusive relationships are known...think again. There's a candlelight vigil at the County Courthouse this evening at 7PM to raise awareness. This event will offer resources and remember victims who have died due to DV. Be a Part of the Solution to Educate others, Be inspired by survivors, and help Stop the cycle of Abuse. Prevention is knowledge and you will be impacted by what you see, and what you hear. Be there. Contact Michele Renee for more information. Or, if you're on Facebook, look here.The movie theater in the Shoprite Plaza has closed, temporarily. It's the economy, we're told. A new owner is in the wings, we're told. How about the place was never that good, film and sound quality left something to be desired, the people who worked there were rude and so people stopped going? The Sheriff's department is investigating the Carmel Assessors office - but probably for the wrong reasons.  Dead bodies are turning up in Carmel. Nothing to do with the Assessor's office though.A Sonic Burger has opened in Wappingers Falls. A throwback to a time when pretty girls (carhops) came out to your car to take and deliver your order. Burgers. Chicken. Corn Dogs. breakfast all day. A heart attack delivered right to your driver's side window! I can remember not all that long ago when communities and schools across the nation were banning Halloween celebrations because of their alleged link to satanic rituals and observances. Now it's the second largest holiday (if measured by store sales) behind Christmas. What happened? California would like it's residents to remember murdered San Francisco councilman Harvey Milk come May 22. Randy Thomasson, who runs a 'pro-family' group called Save California said, "Fathers and mothers are angry about Harvey Milk Day pushing this extreme, perverse role model upon their kids," and is urging parents to boycott schools on that day in order to save them, apparently, from hellfire and damnation. A guy out in Colorado reported that his son had been taken away by a balloon and the nation paid attention. Every news network covered the story and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of police time were spent in an attempt to rescue the boy. In the end it turned out the story was a hoax and now the guy faces serious criminal charges. Okay, he was clearly wrong. But I'm wondering if the national outrage wasn't more of a case of "we got caught believing such crap and now we're embarrassed" as much as it was anything else? Several times a week I'll get an email from someone claiming this or that or something else incredible:Bank of America reports a $1,000,000,000 loss for the last quarter. A recipient of $25,000,000,000 in TARP funds I can only assume they're not charging enough $35 over-draft and $3.00 ATM fees to their customers. That'll soon change. Cartoonist and film maker Emily Breer lives in Garrison and updates her website twice weekly. Here's one of her creations below and a click on it will bring you to her website, http://emilybreer.net/  And now, The News:
A Resident OutragedOne afternoon six years ago, Debra Hall learned the water in her Hopewell Junction home was toxic. The quest she has embarked on since that day has transformed her and her entire neighborhoodBy: Greg Ryan Debra Hall’s two-floor, raised-ranch home is tucked into a quiet residential stretch of Hopewell Junction, a suburban hamlet of about 2,800 people in the town of East Fishkill, but it could easily be in any of a hundred identical communities in the Hudson Valley. The front lawns of Creamery Road, the tree-lined street on which Hall and her husband David live, are scattered with the hula hoops, basketballs, and other debris that clutter a neighborhood full of children. David has two sons from a previous marriage who stay with him every other weekend. He and Debra married in 1998, and moved from Patterson to their current home in Hopewell in 2001. Both David, 42, and Debra, 48, grew up in more crowded environs — he on Long Island, she in Queens (her “New Yawk” accent still rings true) — so the couple relishes Creamery Road’s quiet nights and expansive space. They bought the house with the intention of growing old together in its bucolic embrace. While David commutes to and from the city every day for his job as an electrician, Debra spends most of her time alone at home. In 1996, she suffered a debilitating back injury while working. (At the time, she too was employed as an electrician.) Since then, she has been unable to work. Some days, the pain is so excruciating Hall can barely move around the house. She has visited 14 doctors and undergone three surgeries to implant spinal cord stimulators, but still needs to use a cane. “Every day I wake up and just have to hope for the best,” Hall says. For the first few years she lived on Creamery Road, she passed the time by cross-stitching, reading, and watching television. “I didn’t even know my neighbors,” she says. “I would wave to them, and that would be it. I hadn’t learned a name or anything.” Read More New state park named for Scenic Hudson leader Franny ReeseHIGHLAND – Franny Reese was known as “the mother of the modern environmental movement.”The state and Scenic Hudson named a new 250 acre park in her memory Friday. The park, in the Town of Lloyd, offers expansive views and opportunities for hiking, mountain biking, cross-country skiing, picnicking and birding, said Scenic Hudson President Ned Sullivan. “The park is a beautiful piece of land that stretches from the west side of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge, that’s the Mid-Hudson Bridge, and it extends almost a mile down river and has extensive hiking trails and provides extraordinary views of the Mid-Hudson Bridge, of the Walkway Over the Hudson that recently opened as a new state park, and of other landscapes around Poughkeepsie and Ulster County areas,” he said. Read More Shale and Our WaterNew York State’s environmental regulators have proposed rules to govern drilling in the Marcellus Shale — a subterranean layer of rock curving northward from West Virginia through Ohio and Pennsylvania to New York’s southern tier. The shale contains enormous deposits of natural gas that could add to the region’s energy supplies and lift New York’s upstate economy. If done carefully — and in carefully selected places — drilling should cause minimal environmental harm.But regulators must amend the rules to bar drilling in the New York City watershed: a million acres of forests and farmlands whose streams supply the reservoirs that send drinking water to eight million people. Accidental leaks could threaten public health and require a filtration system the city can ill afford. Natural gas is vital to the nation’s energy needs and can be an important bridge between dirty coal and renewable alternatives. The process of extracting it, however, is not risk-free. Known as hydraulic fracturing, it involves shooting a mix of water, sand and chemicals — many of them highly toxic — into the ground at very high pressure to break down the rock formations and free the gas. Read More
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| Copyright © 2009 News That Matters | ||
Monday, October 19, 2009
News That Matters - October 19, 2009
Meetings of government ministers can sometimes be a dry affair. That certainly was not the case during the latest gathering of the Cabinet of the Maldives.
