Also on today’s menu:
Time To Write A Book
Queen City Jumper Killed On Tuesday
Yes, Big Brother Is Watching
A month after questions had been raised about the Winnisquam Regional School Board’s decision to take no action on a bid by a charter school to purchase the closed Union-Sanborn Elementary School, Chair Sean Goodwin responded by reading the answers into the record during the board’s Oct. 17 meeting.
Voters had authorized the sale of the school at the March 2022 school district meeting, but Goodwin said the school board’s goal is to sell the property for the best possible price. “It has only been on the market for three months, two of which are the slowest for commercial property sales,” Goodwin said. “It makes sense to continue to list the property and work with our real estate agent in developing competitive offers.”
That answer could have been provided when an upset public turned out to question the school board on September 19, but the Winnisquam board’s policy is to listen and not respond until the entire board has a chance to get together and develop an answer to questions. In September, they provided answers to questions the Northfield Selectmen had asked in August. Yet some board members said they had not been consulted and were only aware of the selectmen’s questions a few days before the meeting.
Time To Write A Book
The Book of Maps, a fictional retelling of the cross-country adventure Ernest Thompson had with his then-10-year-old son two decades ago, is scheduled for release on October 25. It is Thompson’s first novel; he is known for his plays and screenplays, most notably “On Golden Pond.”
In the novel, a 52-year-old screenwriter and filmmaker named Brendan, whose career is going downhill, embarks on an epic road trip with his 10-year-old son, guided by a yellowing atlas published in 1937 called “The Book of Maps.”
Written during the pandemic, Thompson said, “I don’t like sitting still for very long, so I started writing this book. I wrote it in the spring, summer, and fall of 2020,” based largely on his own road trip through 16 states, including visits to Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Great Salt Lake, and Mount Rushmore.
Queen City Jumper Killed On Tuesday
An unidentified person died Tuesday night after jumping from the Queen City Bridge in Manchester onto the northbound lane of Interstate 293 and being struck by several vehicles.
State police called the fatal injuries “self-inflicted.”
The incident occurred around 6:30 p.m. and Interstate 293 North was closed at Exit 4 for about two hours as state police and first responders were working at the scene.
Yes, Big Brother Is Watching
Government agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups, and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal.
The tool, at a cost of almost $10,000 per year, enables law enforcement officers to see “patterns of life” — where and when people work and live, with whom they associate, and what places they visit. The tool’s maker, Fog Data Science, claims to have billions of data points from more than 250 million U.S. mobile devices.
Fog Reveal came to light when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization that advocates for online civil liberties, was investigating location data brokers and uncovered the program through a Freedom of Information Act request. EFF’s investigation found that Fog Reveal enables law enforcement and private companies to identify and track people and monitor specific places and events, like rallies, protests, places of worship, and health care clinics. The Associated Press found that nearly two dozen government agencies across the country have contracted with Fog Data Science to use the tool.
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