Thứ Sáu, 21 tháng 12, 2012
Rape Case Unfolds Online and Divides Steubenville
Football at Steubenville High School is an everyday topic. But rape charges against two players have some residents questioning the culture of football in the Ohio community.
Bloomberg Vows Stiffer Fight to Overhaul U.S. Gun Laws
The message is inevitably the same: A police officer has been shot on the streets of New York. “I just gag,” Mr. Bloomberg said, recalling his feeling of dread. “Chances are I’m out of bed, into the bathroom, get some clothes on and off to a hospital.” He races to get there, determined to arrive ahead of the family, he said, “so I can tell them that their son or daughter is not coming home.” Ask Mr. Bloomberg about firearms, and his usual stoic facade falls away, revealing anger and exasperation born of years of witnessing the blood and tears that can flow from gun violence. Now, furious at the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and frustrated by inaction in Congress, Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview this week that he would ratchet up his fight to overhaul gun laws, drawing on his considerable political and finance resources to bring about change. One of the world’s wealthiest men, Mr. Bloomberg plans to spend millions of dollars over the next two years to aid political candidates willing to oppose the gun lobby. He said he would not wait until 2014: the mayor’s “super PAC” is already looking at special elections next year, including governor’s races and an open House seat in Illinois. Within days of the Newtown shootings, Mr. Bloomberg was on the phone with conservative senators, urging them to change their views. To his surprise, he said, some were willing to consider it. “You could hear in their voice, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” he said. The mayor plans an advertising campaign featuring Hollywood stars. And he has spoken with the White House, conferring with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. about the presidential task force on gun policy that Mr. Biden will lead. “I’m in the enviable position of knowing there’s a need and having the wherewithal to do things, and the credibility to get other people to do it, as well,” Mr. Bloomberg said. Even so, the mayor is looking to move fast, aware that public outrage can fade quickly. “Whether this lasts or not, I don’t know,” he conceded, referring to the mood for change. “Some of my friends say, ‘You’re not going to get this done.’ ” The latest chapter in the mayor’s gun crusade began a few minutes before 11 a.m. last Friday, when Mr. Bloomberg, leaving a meeting with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in Manhattan, glanced at his iPhone. A CNN news alert flashed across the screen: Students at an elementary school in Connecticut had been shot. “Another disaster,” Mr. Bloomberg remembered thinking. Three miles downtown, at City Hall, the mayor’s advisers began drafting a statement, but decided to delay its release until after President Obama had spoken. Mr. Bloomberg, aides said, wanted to see if the president would call for action — and to criticize him if he did not. The mayor’s statement, issued just after 4 p.m., was blunt. “President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote, adding, “What we have not seen is leadership — not from the White House and not from Congress.” The goal was to put immediate pressure on Washington for change. “The Democrats were unwilling to do it, and the Republicans didn’t want to,” said Howard Wolfson, the mayor’s chief communications strategist. Mr. Bloomberg, meanwhile, took to the phones, calling members of Congress to urge the passage of an assault-weapons ban. To prepare his pitch, he instructed aides to find out how many Americans had been killed by guns since the Arizona shootings in 2011, when Mr. Obama last promised changes in the firearm laws. By Saturday, the mayor was on his private jet to Washington to push his case in an interview on “Meet the Press.” It was a hectic weekend, and the culmination of six years of work by Mr. Bloomberg, who founded his national coalition, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in 2006, galvanized by a series of grisly police shootings in New York. In 2005, weeks after being elected to a second term, the mayor found himself waiting for hours in an emergency room as doctors tried in vain to save the life of a police officer, Dillon Stewart, who had been shot in a car chase in Brooklyn. Officer Stewart had been wearing a gun-resistant vest, but the bullet pierced his skin a few millimeters from the armor. At the hospital, detectives examined the vest in front of the mayor; when they pressed the vest with their hands, Mr. Bloomberg could see blood rise to the surface. The mayor was angry that New York’s gun laws, among the strictest in the country, did little to protect against the use of guns bought illegally in other states. In his inaugural speech on New Year’s Day 2006, he pledged to curb “these instruments of death,” although, at the time, the gun-control movement was at a standstill. “Virtually nothing was being said in Congress by some of the strongest allies; they basically had walked away from the issue,” said Robert Walker, who served as president of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the forerunner to the Brady Center, in the late 1990s. Mr. Bloomberg, he said, “filled the void at a time when it really needed to be filled.”
Bridging the Generation Gap, One Meal at a Time
Can food, so often portrayed this time of year as the glue that binds a family together, also be the wedge that drives us apart?
At Queens High Rise, Fear, Death and Myth Collided
The action she captured played out by flashlight beam, illuminating elderly men and women swaddled in coats, robes, sweaters, hats and scarves in their apartments. “It’s cold, so cold,” one gray-haired man said in Russian, sounding short of breath. The privately owned high rise had been without heat, water or working elevators since the evening of the storm. In the lobby, Rodney Duff, a burly resident in a black sweatshirt, made a grim prediction. “Two hundred seniors that can’t move up and down these stairs,” Mr. Duff said. “One of them is going to die in this building tonight.” Those scenes inside the complex, known as the Sand Castle, soon appeared in a disturbing five-minute video on YouTube, telling what has become a familiar story in the storm’s aftermath. Like thousands of other vulnerable city residents, the tenants endured hunger, cold and fear for days, deprived of assistance and, in some cases, vital medicines. Almost everyone — the residents, their families, the building owners, city officials and aid workers — was poorly prepared for the magnitude of need caused by power failures that persisted long after the hurricane had passed. But the video produced by Ms. Balandina, who was volunteering aid and pulled out her camera because she was horrified at what she was seeing, made this story all its own. After YouTube viewers witnessed the desperation at the Far Rockaway complex, some sprang into action. Aid convoys rumbled in from out of state. People as far away as Britain called City Hall, pleading that officials help the Sand Castle. Ambulances were summoned there by residents of Pennsylvania. Facebook reports and blog posts, some by people who had not visited the buildings, even circulated accounts of multiple bodies being removed from the complex when the power was out. Those reports were not borne out by the police, medical examiner and health department records, but they contributed to the making of a myth, a social-media tale that seemed believable amid so much misery. After the lights came on nearly two weeks after the storm, Danny Sanchez, an assistant superintendent, used a master key to enter Apartment C on the 13th floor of Building B, where no one had answered the door on repeated visits. There, he found Thomas S. Anderson, 89, who had lived alone, face up on the floor beside his bed. His was the sole death at the Sand Castle, where no one in the days after the storm could claim to understand the full story of what was happening and what it meant. The New York City medical examiner’s office classified Mr. Anderson’s death as natural after consulting with his doctor. A World War II veteran, he was buried the next week with military honors at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. Without an autopsy, the specific factors that preceded his death and the possible ways the post-hurricane conditions might have contributed to it — A fall in his unlighted studio? Heart disease worsened by stress? — will never be known. But what can be said for certain is that Mr. Anderson spent his last days largely alone in the dark, trapped high above the ground without heat, dependent on the haphazard good will of others for his survival. Perpetually Cool Mr. Anderson projected cool well into his 80s, a tattooed, earring-wearing great-grandfather with a white Van Dyke mustache that curved into a goatee. He wore glasses and rarely left his apartment without a baseball cap or beanie and his clip-on, yellow-tinted shades. Before retiring, Mr. Anderson, a native of North Carolina, had worked in a post office and as a supervisor at Marboro Books in Lower Manhattan, a chain acquired by Barnes & Noble. He once took tailoring classes to learn to make his own suits, and loved baseball — he had played with an old-timers club in Harlem called The Unknowns and watched or attended nearly every Mets game. In his early 20s, he was an Army infantryman who served in the Pacific during World War II and earned several decorations, his daughter, Jannette Elliott, said.
Alain Delaquérière, Lisa Schwartz and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
Follow Sheri Fink on Twitter: @SheriFink
Doomsday Prophecy Prompts Rumors of Violence in Schools
Predictions of doomsday have come and gone repeatedly without coming true. But the latest prophecy, tethered to the Mayan calendar and forecasting that the world will self-destruct on Friday, has prompted many rumors of violence, with a particular focus on school shootings or bomb threats. With students and parents already jittery after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., last week, rampant posts on Facebook and Twitter have fed the hysteria, and police departments across the country have been inundated with calls. Overwhelmed with the task of responding to threats and unconfirmed reports, districts in Bend, Ore., Stafford County, Va., Wake County, N.C., and Oak Creek, Wis., have sent out letters to parents trying to tamp down the panic. In three counties in Michigan, Genesee, Lapeer and Sanilac, administrators were spending so much time dealing with reports of planned violence that the superintendents decided to send 80,000 students on their winter holiday break two days early. “We hate canceling school more than anything,” said Matt Wandrie, the superintendent of the Lapeer Community Schools, north of Detroit. “We’re not doing this because we think there’s an imminent threat to our students. We’re doing this because we’ve been doing nothing but policing.” Mr. Wandrie said that students and parents were passing on rumors they had picked up online — “It was like ‘my niece’s neighbor’s daughter says there’s going to be gun violence at school on Friday,’ ” he said — and added that students were overheard in the hallways saying things like “Let’s go out with a bang on Friday.” “If you’ve got students who are disenfranchised or unstable or members of a community who really believe this end of the world stuff,” he said, “whether I think it’s credible or not, as a fairly logical person and human being, I’m not going to take that risk.” Similar rumors prompted about 50 parents to call the police department in Oak Creek, the town in Wisconsin where a gunman shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in August. Chief John Edwards said his department investigated every call but found that they seemed to be repeating a version of the same rumor that had gone viral online. He said that there was “no credible evidence” of a real threat. On Wednesday morning, Chief Edwards visited Oak Creek High School to talk to faculty and students over the public address system, advising them that police officers stationed on campus would practice a “zero tolerance” policy for anyone making a threat. “So if anyone makes comments about violence, you will be arrested,” he said. “There will be no warnings.” Randy Bridges, the superintendent of the Stafford County Public Schools in Virginia, posted a letter to parents on the district’s Web site telling parents that the rumors of violence accompanying the end of the world were “reportedly unfounded and national in scope.” “I ask that each of you help stop the rumors spreading throughout our community by refusing to share these rumors with others,” Mr. Bridges wrote. He offered links to a source on “How to Talk to Kids about the World Ending in 2012 Rumors” and NASA’s Web site, which promises that Friday “won’t be the end of the world as we know.” Officials said that previous prognostications of the end of the world, including a prediction of what was called the rapture in May 2011, have not generated the same kind of frenzy in schools. “I’ve been an officer 19 years, and never have I seen the climate in our area the way it is right now,” said Sgt. Scott Theede of the Grand Blanc Township Police Department in Michigan. “I believe students and parents and everybody are a little bit more on edge as a direct result of what happened last week.” Contributing to the worry in Grand Blanc was an incident on Wednesday, when a 15-year-old high school student sent a text message to his mother that he had heard shots at school and was hiding in a closet. After the mother called 911, the police responded and found that the boy was playing what he called “a joke.” The police are considering pressing criminal charges against the boy. But Chief Steven Solomon said that what most surprised him after the police had investigated the call on Wednesday was that students seemed more occupied with their cellphones than with their lessons. “Twitter was lit up,” he said, “and there were so many texts flowing freely among parents, friends and family members during the school day.”
Daniel Inouye, Hawaii’s Quiet Voice of Conscience in Senate, Dies at 88
Senator Daniel Inouye served Hawaii in Congress since 1959 and was the first Japanese-American elected to both the House and the Senate.
Bangladesh Finds Gross Negligence in Factory Fire
A government inquiry says criminal charges should be brought against the owner of the Tazreen Fashions factory, where a Nov. 24 fire killed 112 people.
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