Looks like someone is trying to smear Erin Cox, the North Andover High School student who was suspended from the volleyball team and lost her captain’s position after she said she went to a party in order to drive home a friend who was drunk. Here’s the lead of a story now online at The Valley Patriot:
The Valley Patriot published a story this morning citing Law enforcement sources in North Andover who claimed High School student Erin Cox was to appear in court on charges of possession of alcohol.
The Valley Patriot has since learned that this information was false.
If you click to read the whole story, you’ll see that it only gets worse. Keep in mind that one of the few on-the-record accounts we have is from a police officer, Brian Neeley, who absolved Cox in a statement that was originally reported by The North Andover Citizen:
Erin did not have the slightest odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from her person. She was polite, articulate, steady on her feet, and very remorseful for her decision to go into the residence but was only helping a friend out that had called her for a ride.
Keep an eye on this one. There’s more to come, I’m sure.
Wednesday morning update: There is a lot of clarifying detail in this story in today’s Eagle-Tribune. The key takeaway is that Cox’s parents say Officer Neeley told everyone at the scene that they would be charged being as minors in possession of alcohol — even if they weren’t, you know, in possession of alcohol. That strikes me as the key fact that would explain Tuesday’s attempted smear.
Dartmouth College political scientist and media critic Brendan Nyhan spoke at Northeastern on Monday evening about “The Politics of Scandal.” I live-tweeted his talk and put together a Storify, which you can view by clicking here.
The chaos that has broken out over the split between Suffolk Downs and Caesars Entertainment is good news for casino opponents. At the very least, it increases the likelihood that East Boston residents will vote no on Nov. 5. At most, we may be able to look forward to delays and lawsuits for years to come.
I was particularly struck by the accusation — reported by Mark Arsenault in The Boston Globe — that Caesars separated one wealthy gambler from his money by keeping him liquored up and plying him with painkillers. I know nothing about the details of that accusation. But it actually fits well with the business model for casinos.
I’ve flagged this before, and it’s worth flagging again: according to Michael Jonas of CommonWealth Magazine, casinos could not survive if it weren’t for the problem gamblers who provide a disproportionate share of the revenues. Jonas explains it this way:
Just how much of the revenue casinos bring in is from the losses of those with gambling problems? One of the most thorough studies of this issue was done in 2004 in Ontario, where researchers had a sample of residents maintain diaries logging their gambling expenditures. The study, prepared for the government-supported Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre, estimated that 35 percent of Ontario casino revenues were derived from moderate to severe problem gamblers. Such gamblers accounted for 30 percent of revenue from casino table games and a whopping 62 percent of revenue from slot machines.
I remain appalled that Gov. Deval Patrick and the Legislature legalized casinos and slots, which are associated with higher rates of crime, divorce and suicide. But I’m optimistic that these social parasites can be stopped one at a time.
EAST BOSTON, Mass. — Oct. 19, 2013 — For more than a year, No Eastie Casino has pushed the City of Boston and Suffolk Downs to share more information about Suffolk Downs’ proposed Caesars Entertainment Resort. After ignoring repeated calls for greater transparency and concerns about Caesars’ solvency raised by East Boston residents, on Friday Suffolk Downs dropped the operations partner it chose in 2011 to run a casino in East Boston, Caesars Entertainment, only after state investigators informed them that Suffolk Downs likely would not pass the background check if Caesars stayed on. The Boston Globe reported that a number of concerns were brought to Suffolk Downs’ attention, including Caesars’ alleged business ties to organized crime.
But East Boston casino opponents say the stunning news late Friday demonstrates that residents cannot trust Suffolk Downs when it comes to whom they choose to bring into the neighborhood, said No Eastie Casino co-chair Celeste Myers.
“As recently as two months ago, Suffolk Downs owner Joe O’Donnell stated that Caesars was ‘as professional as they come,'” Myers said, pointing out Suffolk Downs’ frequent assertion that it shares Caesars’ values. “Clearly, they did not do due diligence in vetting Caesars — a company with which they have had a relationship since 2011 — and only ended the relationship when forced to do so.”
She added that Suffolk Downs has now picked two corporations, Caesars and Vornado Realty Trust, that have been unable or unwilling to pass background checks. In March, Vornado put its 19 percent stake in the casino plan into a blind trust after the majority of its executive team refused the state’s mandatory background checks. To our knowledge, Vornado has not divested completely from the casino partnership and voters remain in the dark about who will pick up its nearly one-fifth share in the project.
Caesars’ sudden departure also raises serious questions about the value of the City’s and Suffolk Downs’ host community agreement and shows that the promises in the mitigation agreement were made to be broken. Many key elements of the mitigation agreement-including key components of the jobs and small business plans-were tied to Caesars’ employee practices and Total Rewards programs. (Download our 16-page mitigation analysis here.)
No Eastie Casino leaders on Saturday formally called on Suffolk Downs to withdraw its casino application, in light of the information that emerged late Friday, and to share full details about their casino plans — including what they knew about Caesars and when they knew it — with the community at large.
“Now, more than ever, our neighbors and voters are seeing the glaring problems in the Suffolk Downs casino plans and the flaws in transparency that have plagued this fight from the start,” Myers said. “We hope Suffolk Downs and the City of Boston do the right thing and withdraw their support of this project. Until they do, our campaign will continue to reach out to and educate voters until we are victorious on Nov. 5.”
It was 5-0. I was giving serious consideration to throwing in the towel. I started dozing on the couch. If the cat hadn’t been sitting next to me, I’m sure I would have gone horizontal and achieved complete unconsciousness — and thus I would have missed one of the great comebacks in Red Sox history.
There were many heroes (none bigger than David Ortiz, of course) and goats in this one. But how amazing is it that the Sox might not have won if Jose Iglesias hadn’t made that error in the ninth? Yes, Prince Fielder should have snagged it, but Iglesias shouldn’t have thrown it in the first place.
Before the series I had picked Detroit in six, mainly on the strength of their overwhelming starting pitching. By the seventh inning I was starting to wonder about a sweep. Now? Go Sox!
Here is what I’m going to miss about the Hilltop Steak House, which announced this week that it will soon be closing its doors: driving past it during the holidays and looking at the fiberglass cattle wearing Santa hats. And — well, that’s it.
The demise of an icon is always sad. Once the country’s appetite for huge cuts of steak started to diminish, the Hilltop’s enormous size no doubt worked against it. Maybe it could have continued indefinitely if it had occupied a much smaller, cheaper space.
But unlike another Boston icon, Legal Sea Foods, the Hilltop never made any concessions to the 21st century. Legal has long since moved past broiled schrod and fried shrimp. Its menu is thoroughly modern and up to date. But at the Hilltop it is still the same old thing — salad, baked potato and a large, fresh but rather flavorless slab-o-meat.
The last time I went to the Hilltop was maybe 10 years ago. I brought my son because I thought he’d enjoy the experience; I hadn’t been in ages myself. Neither of us was impressed. My tastes had moved on, and his had never developed in that direction.
My wife and I enjoyed an occasional trip to the Hilltop in the 1980s, when you’d stand in line for a half-hour to an hour before being herded into one of its gigantic, Western-theme dining rooms.
But that was a long time ago.
Photo (cc) by splityard and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams delivered the Richard S. Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press on Thursday evening at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. And it was something of a surprise.
Rather than railing against the evils of government censorship, Abrams instead chose to focus on situations in which he believes the media have abused their freedoms. He was especially criticial of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks — not a new stance for him, but nevertheless counterintuitive given Abrams’ fierce defense of the First Amendment.
I put together a Storify about Abrams’ talk, which you can view by clicking here.
What is the point of this pointless speculation in an otherwise straightforward piece on U.S. raids in Libya and Somalia, New York Times?
With President Obama locked in a standoff with Congressional Republicans and his leadership criticized for a policy reversal in Syria, the raids could fuel accusations among his critics that the administration was eager for a showy foreign policy victory.
No sourcing. But if anyone in the Republican Party were to go there, it might be House Speaker John Boehner. Well, here’s Boehner on ABC’s “This Week”:
I’m very confident that both of these efforts were successful. I’m going to congratulate all of those in the U.S. intelligence operations, our troops, FBI, all those who were involved.
Listen, the threat of al Qaeda and their affiliates remains. And America has continued to be vigilant. And this is a great example of our dedicated forces on the security side, intelligence side, and our military and their capability to track these people down.
What was the Times thinking? Or to put it another way: Why weren’t they thinking?
News site comments can be toxic. Yet, properly managed, they can be a tool for building media literacy, civic engagement and, ultimately, a news organization’s audience.
The following presentation incorporates some lessons I’ve learned over the years, many of them from researching my book about online community journalism, “The Wired City.”
I delivered a lecture based on this presentation earlier today in Professor Steve Burgard’s Journalism Ethics and Issues class at Northeastern.
Looking east on Elliot Street in downtown Brattleboro, Vt., toward Wantastiquet Mountain late Saturday afternoon. Shot with an iPhone 4 — fuzziness caused by digital zoom.
