Washington, DC, workers to get 16 weeks paid leave under city hall plan that taxes businesses

Washington, D.C., is poised to give workers in the city the most generous family-leave benefits in the country -- a plan that is backed by the Obama administration and would side-step Congress on such issues.

If approved, the legislation would give essentially every part- and full-time employee in the nation’s capital as much as 16 weeks of paid leave for such family matters as newborn care, illness or a sick relative.

The plan would be funded by an employer tax and was introduced last week with support from seven City Council members, enough to pass in the 13-person panel, in one of the most liberal cities in the country.

The Obama administration and other supporters argue lower-paid employees cannot afford to take off work for family matters and that 43 million U.S. private-sector workers have no employer-paid sick days.

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Armed Robbery In Salisbury

Ofcs responding to armed robbery of Eagle Express Mart, 1 susp, w/mask &gun, no injuries...inv cont...

— Salisbury Police (@SalisburyPD) October 18, 2015

Yes, the US government really is bankrupt. Here’s proof:

I’ve long-stated that the government of the United States is completely insolvent.

And that is 100% true statement.

The government’s own numbers show that official liabilities, including debt held by the public and federal retirement benefits, total $20.7 trillion.

Yet the government’s assets, including the value of the entire federal highway system, the national parks, cash balances, etc. totals just over $3 trillion.

In total, their ‘net worth’ is NEGATIVE $17.7 TRILLION… a level that completely dwarfs the housing crisis.

If you include the government’s own estimates of the Social Security shortfall, this number declines to NEGATIVE $60 TRILLION.

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More troubles for Rosie O'Donnell, now she's being sued for defamation

Rosie O’Donnell is being accused of making false and defamatory statements about an ex-producer of “The View” in a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court.

Jennifer Shepard-Brookman, who worked as producer and senior producer of “The View” from 2001 to 2015, claims that O’Donnell falsely accused her of betraying professional and personal confidences and leaking information to the media. She contends that O’Donnell “was solely motivated by and exhibited personal spite and ill will” against her.

The lawsuit claims that O’Donnell, after returning to the show last year, attempted to assert control of the show and clashed with Whoopi Goldberg, and sought to take coverage of news stories away from her.

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Quota Club Christmas Gift & Craft Show Raises Funds for Local Community Needs

Salisbury, MD – The 29th Annual Christmas Gift & Craft Show sponsored by Quota International of Salisbury will return to the Wicomico Youth & Civic Center this fall. A new preview sale will kick the weekend off on Friday from 5 – 9 p.m. with $1 admission.* The Expo will open on Saturday, Oct. 24 from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 25 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $5 per day on Saturday and Sunday. Children under 12 are admitted free throughout the weekend.

The fair features 150 crafters and local vendors with a variety of items for sale including wooden toys, ceramics, hats, scarves, candles, wreaths and flower arrangements, baskets and jewelry. Santa Claus will make a special appearance on Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Children visiting during this time can also take home a free book as a part of the Quota Club’s Cops 'N Kids Program, which is held in partnership with the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office and Salisbury City Police.

The Christmas Gift and Craft Show serves as the Quota International of Salisbury’s annual fundraiser. Proceeds from the event are used to serve the local community, with a focus on the deaf, hearing impaired, speech impaired as well as disadvantaged women and children. The Quota Club has launched several programs to improve local literacy levels in partnership with area police and schools. Through their ‘Court Kids Program,’ children in the local foster system are given basic necessities as well as items of comfort such as blankets, toys and stuffed animals. On an annual basis, four Wicomico County high school graduates receive scholarships from the Quota Club and one student is given a 2-year scholarship for Wor-Wic Community College. In addition to these programs, the Quota Club grants financial support to over 20 local non-profits including Coastal Hospice, the Salvation Army and the United Way.

For more information about the Christmas Gift & Craft Show or the work of Quota International of Salisbury, please visit www.WicomicoCivicCenter.org.

*Not all vendors will be set up for the Friday preview sale.

Local Maryland bartender’s Concoction Becomes A Business

BERLIN, Md. – His company started in a small restaurant on a side street of this tiny Maryland town, but now it’s coming to grocery stores around the region.

Before starting his business, Greg David, CEO and president of George’s Bloody Mary Mix, was a bartender at The Globe Restaurant and Bar in Berlin. On the weekends, he made his own secret recipe for Bloody Mary mixes and would have customers try his concoction.

Now George’s Bloody Mary Mix, the name a tribute to his late father, has quadrupled in the past year, according to David.

David couldn’t imagine the success his business would have. After his two business partners, Theda Bakis and Alex Bakis, convinced him to sell his famous Bloody Mary mix, he started to realize the demand for his product.

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Indiana Sheriff to Obama: I Won't Register Guns

Sheriff Brad Rogers, the top-ranking law enforcement official for Elkhart County, Indiana, said during a panel appearance on WNIT’s “Politically Speaking” segment, that he wouldn’t abide government orders to register weapons from private citizens within his jurisdiction, no matter what President Obama presses.

“We’ve always had this conversation that we need more reasonable gun control put in place,” Rogers said, Infowars reported. “Well, we have what is reasonable, in my opinion, and in fact it’s probably overdone.”

He then said he actually tells residents under his jurisdiction they shouldn’t register their firearms.

“I’m from the government, and I don’t think the government has any place in gun registration,” Rogers said. “The government shouldn’t know who’s got weapons … we’ve seen in other countries what could happen when the government knows who has what guns.”

And he went on, saying citizens should always resist the idea of registrations for firearms.

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Texas student puts super glue in freshman girl's hair

She was mortified. Humiliation still sets in as she walks into school each day.

"It's horrific. I can't describe how awful it is going to school after that," said Hannah Combs, a freshman at Harker Heights High School.

What she describes as a nightmare began on September 14.

Before the first bell rang, Hannah was hanging out with a group of friends when she saw two other students playing with super glue. "I should havepaid attention more. I guess that was my first mistake," she said.

She says what happened next was painful. One of the boys put super glue on her head."My head immediately lit up on fire," she said. Hannah was picked up from school and taken to urgent care where they spent half an hour trying to remove the glue from her scalp.

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Another Anti-gay Hate Crime Deemed a Hoax

Police in Grand Forks, North Dakota, determined that a man who claimed to have been the victim of a vicious anti-gay attack at a University of North Dakota fraternity made up the entire story.

Haakon Gisvold is accused of lying to police in August about a brutal assault and robbery at the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He claimed that fraternity members shouted anti-gay slurs as they beat him, choked him, stripped him down to his underwear and robbed him. He said he hid in a bush until someone brought him clothes, The Daily Caller reported.

Upon hearing the story, Lambda Chi Alpha’s national headquarters in Indianapolis restricted UND’s Epsilon-Zeta chapter from all formal activities. University of North Dakota President Robert O. Kelley also sent an email to students expressing his disappointment in the fraternity’s actions, the Daily Caller said.

But during a month-long investigation, which included identifying 150 potential witnesses, police determined that Mr. Gisvold concocted the entire story. There was a physical altercation, but police determined that Mr. Gisvold instigated it.

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Correctional Officers intercept contraband intended for prisons

 

TOWSON, MD – Correctional officers staffing an entrance to the Jessup Correctional Institution (JCI) intercepted a delivery truck this week with boxes attached to the vehicle containing contraband cell phones and drug paraphernalia. The contraband was discovered during normal search procedures of vehicles entering Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services correctional facilities.

As a result of the initial vehicle search and seizure, inspections were performed on additional vehicles operated by the delivery company which services 10 central Maryland prisons. The inspections revealed three more trucks to be carrying phones and drug paraphernalia believed to be intended for the institutions.

The initial discovery of the contraband occurred when a correctional officer doing a routine inspection of a vehicle noticed what appeared to be two black boxes affixed to the bottom of the truck cabin. The boxes were identified as electrical junction boxes with several magnets affixed to the bottom side.

Physicist Dyson: Obama 'Chose the Wrong Side' on Climate Change

Noted theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson says he votes for Democrats, but is disappointed with the position President Barack Obama has taken on climate change.

Dyson worked on climate change before his retirement as professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994, and said in an interview with the U.K. Register that scientists are ignoring their own data that show climate change isn't happening as quickly as their models are predicting.

Climate change, he said, "is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?"

"It's clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn't so clear 10 years ago. I can't say if they'll always be wrong, but the observations are improving and so the models are becoming more verifiable."

Carbon dioxide isn't as bad for the environment as claimed, he said, and actually does more good than harm.

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Ocean City pension expenses decline for fiscal year ‘15

The city will be looking at a considerable amount of budget headroom for the current fiscal year, with 2015 pension contributions having come in significantly less expensive than anticipated.

However, Finance Administrator Martha Bennett urged the city council this week to hold off of appropriating any of the budget surplus to other projects, given that next year’s pension contribution may not come in as low.

“Remember that our pension valuations are April-to-April. This report gives you a snapshot of what our plans looked like in April 2015. In the last six months, the markets have not done as well,” Bennett noted.

The city contribution to its pension plans is determined each year by an actuarial study, which looks at the town’s employee base and estimates what the cost will be to support that group after they retire. The difference between what the city currently has in its trust funds, and what the estimated future liability comes out to be, is paid off with contributions over several years.

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The Armed Citizen: Fight Crime By Fighting Back

Commission Sends Text Amendment Back To Council With 36-Unit Cap On Buildings

BERLIN – A text amendment to allow the apartments proposed for Seahawk Road to move forward as planned will again return to the town council following a favorable recommendation from the Berlin Planning Commission.

On Wednesday, the planning commission agreed to forward the proposed amendment, which will allow the apartment complex to include buildings larger than those currently permitted, on to the council with a favorable recommendation. While the commission had already done so once, at the request of the council the text amendment was changed to include a limit — 36 units — on a building’s potential size. Attorney Mark Cropper, who proposed the amendment on behalf of developer Blair Rinnier, said the change would simply allow the developer to construct buildings of 24 and 36 units as opposed to the 12-unit buildings currently allowed by town code.

“In his opinion, he can do a nicer, more attractive project if he can exceed 12 units,” Cropper said.

Rinnier has presented plans to build a 700-plus unit apartment complex on Seahawk Road. Site plan approval for the first, 150-unit phase of the project was granted but was contingent on the town council’s passage of a text amendment that would enable Rinnier to build the 24- and 36-unit buildings shown in the plan. The amendment stated that when “public necessity, convenience, general welfare and good zoning practice” will be better served by buildings with more than 12 units, the planning commission “may allow a multi-family building to consist of any number of dwelling units as determined on a case by case basis.”

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Insurrection Erupts at the Democratic National Committee

Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz's autocratic ways in limiting the number of primary debates alienated many of her colleagues.

Before things went awry, Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii had been planning to be in Las Vegas for her party’s first presidential debate. Gabbard is one of five vice chairs of the Democratic National Committee; of course she would be there. But instead of talking up her party’s prospects on the Strip earlier this week, Gabbard was in Honolulu. Her presence in Sin City was strictly virtual, and anything but boosterish: She spent debate day giving cable-news interviews via satellite, claiming that, as retribution for loudly calling for more Democratic debates than the DNC currently envisions, she was deemed unwelcome in Vegas by the committee’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz—who Gabbard suggested is an enemy of free speech, as well as a liar.

For most debate viewers and Democratic voters, the Gabbard flap, if it registered at all, was little more than a sideshow. But among Democratic officials and strategists, the dust-up was an embarrassing public spectacle—a boiling-over of long-simmering frustrations and resentments within the party hierarchy at a highly inopportune moment.

Of two dozen Democratic insiders with whom I spoke this week, including several DNC vice chairs, not one defended Wasserman Schultz’s treatment of Gabbard. Most called it ridiculous, outrageous, or worse. Many argued, further, that the debate plan enacted by the chairwoman is badly flawed—an assessment shared by many party activists, left-bent supporters of Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, and those candidates themselves, all of whom see it as a naked effort to aid and comfort Hillary Clinton. And they maintained that the plan was a clear reflection of Wasserman Schultz’s management style, which many of them see as endangering Democratic prospects in 2016 and beyond.

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Popularity of skin-bleaching skyrockets in Africa

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Aaliyah Kouman brags about her daily skin care regimen, one the 29-year-old has followed since she was a teenager.

“Every night I use a bedtime oil called Body White,” she explained, proud of her pallid skin tone. “And in the mornings I mix cocoa butter with a whitening lotion.

“If the products ever begin to bother my skin, then I’ll stop,” she added. “If not, then I’ll continue to use them every day.”

Ms. Kouman isn’t alone. In fact, she’s part of a large and growing population of “tchatchos,” an untranslatable Ivory Coast term for people who bleach their skin using products with names like Fair and White, Glow and Nature White despite a ban on them passed by the Ivorian government earlier this year.

It’s a ban widely ignored despite what the government says are the good intentions behind it.

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Worcester County Sheriff's Office Press Release 10-17-15

Nanny State of the Week: County can use same lawn treatments it banned residents from using

A county government in Maryland has determined some chemicals used in common lawn-care products are unsafe.

The kicker? Even the Environmental Protection Agency — one of the greatest bureaucratic nanny states in this nation of ours — has deemed the chemicals perfectly safe when used in small doses, such as the amount the average person would use on his lawn.

The second kicker? The county exempted its own golf courses and parks from the new ban, so it can continue to use those same, supposedly dangerous, lawn-care products.

We’ve said it before and we’ll surely say it again: Logic, common sense and empirical data have no place in the nanny state.

This week’s winner is Montgomery County, Maryland, where the County Council voted, 6-3, last week to impose the ban. The new rules make lawn care products such as Scott’s Miracle Grow and Monsanto’s Round-Up illicit substances.

As we noted when we covered this same topic in June, when the ban was first proposed the idea was to save county residents from potential cancer-causing chemicals in the weed-killing sprays and spreads.

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Police/ Courts 10/16/15

Rape suspect caught

Ocean City police detectives arrested Steven Grinder, 33, of Ocean City for second-degree rape and assault for an incident that occurred in July.

On July 27, police were called to Dorchester Street and Baltimore Avenue where it is alleged that Grinder sexually assaulted a woman in his apartment, according to reports.

The Maryland District Court issued a warrant for Grinder Oct. 7 and he was arrested later that evening at his residence.

He was seen by a Maryland District Court commissioner and transferred to the Worcester County Jail without bond.

Heroin hidden

Jason Burchick, 42, of Berlin and Lillyanne Horner, 19, of Milton, Del. were arrested Oct. 9 for possession and distribution of heroin.

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Saudi Arabia: How the kingdom treats the people it is going to execute

Prisoners who have been sentenced to death can spend years kept in communal cells alongside other inmates

According to research by Amnesty International, the conservative kingdom put to death at least 102 people in the first six months of 2015 alone. Adultery, armed robbery, apostasy, drug-related offences, rape, “witchcraft” and “sorcery” all carry the death penalty.

There is no “death row” in Saudi Arabia, with prisoners who have been sentenced to death kept in communal cells alongside other inmates. Some spend years in jail without knowing the date of their execution, before suddenly being informed 24 hours before it takes place.

According to Sevag Kechichian, Amnesty’s Saudi Arabia researcher, the decision on when to execute a prisoner is made “arbitrarily”, based on whether a local governor feels the death rate in their area should be increased, or as a deterrent if there has been a spike in a certain type of offence such as drug smuggling.

Prisoners awaiting execution are moved to solitary confinement and spend their last night alone. In 95 per cent of cases beheading is the preferred method, but some death sentences are also carried out by firing squad. The executions typically take place in the public square of a town or city, with security forces laying a plastic sheet on the ground before announcing what is about to take place and carrying out the beheading.

If the prisoner has been sentenced to death followed by crucifixion, the spectacle does not end here. “After the beheading, they put the head in a bag, tie it to the headless body and then pull the body up with a crane and suspend it at a high altitude,” Mr Kechichian said. “It could be there for hours…the logic is that it’s a deterrent for everybody passing by.”

Some wings of the country’s larger prisons have been newly renovated so they are clean and modern, while there is also evidence that “high profile” prisoners such as activists are treated relatively well, he added. Conditions in more remote, rural prisons are very difficult to monitor but can be “horrible”. For most ordinary Saudi Arabians, he said, prisons are “degrading” and guards have “complete impunity” to mistreat them however they like.

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