Also on today’s menu:
A Move To Reveal Confidential Emails
Biden Calls For Assault Weapons Ban
Oregon Governor Commutes Death Row Sentences
The nonprofit Communities for Alcohol and Drug-Free Youth, based in Plymouth, has received a grant to open an office in Bristol to help curtail drug use among students in the Newfound Area School District, a place that Superintendent Pierre Couture describes as “the epicenter” of the problem in Central New Hampshire.
Couture said the district also has revitalized its Wellness Committee which has discussed how to reach parents, including facilitating a Parenting A Second Time Around support group.
Newfound Regional High School Principal Paul Hoiriis said use of a structured day also may be a way of dealing with students caught vaping: “You show up five minutes before the school day starts, you hand over your phone, you wait for the bell until everyone goes to class, and then you go to class. And then at lunchtime, you eat lunch in the assistant principal’s office. At the end of the day, kind of like the same thing, you wait when the bell rings, everyone leaves, and you leave after people leave. And then, if there’s flex time during the day, you spend it in the assistant principal’s office, basically eliminating all those unsupervised times — the places where you could make mistakes and [experience] peer pressure.”
A Move To Reveal Confidential Emails
The Belknap County Convention tabled a motion to ask the legal firm of Cleveland, Waters & Bass to “put together a packet of all communications related to Gunstock [Mountain Resort] with the bill for the legal matters,” proposed by Representative Travis O’Hara during the “other business” portion of its December 12 meeting. The delegation has been left in the dark about the communications between the two-person “control group” — representatives Michael Sylvia and Norm Silber — who ran up a legal bill exceeding $50,000 when the delegation had approved spending only $20,000 in its defense of a lawsuit filed by the Gunstock Area Commission. Silber said releasing the communications to the full delegation would make them subject to the Right-To-Know law which would make them public. In offering his motion, O’Hara said having access to the communications would allow the delegation to “make a decision on how we handle communications going forward.”
Because the motion came during the “other business” portion of the meeting without advance notice of what it would be, the delegation tabled it, but Chair Harry Bean said he supported the concept. “There’s a lot of people out there that want to know what we spent that $50,000 on,” Bean said. “We can’t tell them unless we get that information.”
The Gunstock Area Commission’s lawsuit ultimately was withdrawn. Referring to the information obtained about Gunstock’s management, Bean said, “We were told [by Sylvia and Silber] that we were going to see the smoking gun. There was no smoking gun ... and now it looks like we spent $50,000 on nothing.”
Biden Calls For Assault Weapons Ban
President Joe Biden Jr. has used today’s tenth anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, to call for a ban on “assault weapons and high-capacity magazines like those used at Sandy Hook and countless other mass shootings in America.”
“We should have societal guilt for taking too long to deal with this problem,” he said. “We have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again. We owe it to the courageous, young survivors and to the families who lost part of their soul ten years ago to turn their pain into purpose.”
Noting that he previously signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law, reining in so-called ghost guns which have no serial numbers and are harder to trace, Biden said the country also has cracked down on gun trafficking and provided more rsources for the prevention of violence. Still, he said, “we must do more. ... We must eliminate these weapons that have no purpose other than to kill people in large numbers. It is within our power to do this — for the sake of not only the lives of the innocents lost, but for the survivors who still hope.”
Oregon Governor Commutes Death Row Sentences
Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed an executive order that will commute the sentences of the state’s 17 death row prisoners to life in prison without chance of parole, saying it is not because the prisoners have been rehabilitated but because the death penalty is immoral. Oregon is one of 27 states that allows the death penalty, but it has not executed a prisoner since 1997.
“It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably,” she said.
Capital punishment is written into Oregon’s constitution, meaning another governor can choose to resume the practice in the future. However, Tina Kotek, another Democrat who will succeed Brown next month, has said she opposes the death penalty because of her religious beliefs.
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