http://www.buffalonews.com Latest stories from The Buffalo News en-us Sat, 18 May 2013 09:05:31 -0400 Sat, 18 May 2013 09:05:31 -0400 http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130517/CITYANDREGION/130519126/1192
Joseph Kozakiewicz Sr., of Blasdell, was checked out by his doctors at Mercy earlier this spring and given the thumbs-up to imbibe a little “caffeine joe,” if he wanted. He did. So Joe Sr. sent his son, Joe Jr., to purchase a small cup of java from the Tim Hortons café in the hospital lobby.

Before Junior left to retrieve it, his mom, Kathy, suggested he buy a medium instead. That way they’d get a chance to win a prize in Tim Hortons’ “RRRoll Up the Rim to Win Contest.”

Once Joe Sr. had sipped his beverage down to the last drop, daughter Jennifer rolled up the rim of the cup, but was unclear as to whether her dad had won another cup of coffee or a new car.

Before leaving the hospital, the family members returned to the café and consulted with the staff, who apprised them that Joe Sr. had indeed won a car.

Following a ceremony Monday outside the main entrance of the hospital, the Kozakiewicz family pulled away in the new 2013 Toyota RAV4.

That’s how they roll now.This week’s Skyway forum, intended to brainstorm the future of the 10-story highway and its valuable sliver of waterfront, attracted politicians, a call for a formal study – and poetry.

The iconic stretch above the horizon has fans. And archenemies.

State Sen. Tim Kennedy, a South Buffalo resident, thinks it should come down and free up its 27.5 acres for waterfront development. County Legislator Lynne Dixon, of Hamburg, insists commuters need its speed: “What would we do with the 40-50,000 people that use it every day?”

Buffalo booster Marti Gorman would turn it into an up-in-the-air park, like Manhattan’s “High Line” greenway on a railroad.

But it was one man’s poetic advocacy that struck a chord: “The Skyway very gracefully lifts itself up into the wild blue yonder, in the flow of a ballerina’s Giselle-like move ... ,” said Lou Marconi, a Kenmore man in the audience at the Pierce Arrow Museum on Wednesday.

This impressed the visiting Senate Transportation Committee chairman: “I have never heard a more eloquent description of a roadway, sir,” said Long Island’s Sen. Charles Fuschillo.

In the end, despite highway as art, pragmatism, may win. Those cars have to go somewhere. “It’s a major roadway,” he said. “You need to take all that into consideration.”The spectre of some 1,500 Buffalonians converging on the Big Apple last week for a performance of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall was singled out by editors of New York magazine.

As documented in the “Approval Matrix,” a regular feature in the magazine, offering what it calls a “deliberately oversimplified guide to the taste hierarchies” of its editors, the magazine noted how the BPO had bused in “a whole herd of Buffalonians.” It appears the magazine was impressed, rating the event as not only highbrow, but brilliant. Directly opposite on the matrix was an item about 14 hairless cats that look like Vladimir Putin. It too was rated highbrow, but despicable as well.

Were we allowed, we might have rated it just plain weird.It was published on the front page of The Buffalo Evening News 100 years ago on Saturday, May 10, 1913, and it caught our eye: “Washington Woman Says Both Sexes Will be Wearing Trousers in 2013” was the headline for a prediction from a D.C. socialite and suffragist from the era.

“Skirts will be discarded by the time the year 2013 rolls around, and both sexes will parade in Oriental trousers,” according to Mrs. Christian Hemmick. Women have been wearing pants for decades, of course, but what are Oriental trousers, and who would wear them?



By Harold McNeil, with a contribution from Michelle Kearns email: offmain@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 20:12:44 -0400 http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130516/CITYANDREGION/130519294/1192
In a frontal assault on logic and common sense, the public agency that provides housing for the poor actually hired a public relations firm.

The flacks cost the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority more than $90,000. The revelation this week in The Buffalo News was a black eye for the BMHA. Talk about not getting your PR money’s worth.

Correction: Make that not getting our money’s worth. Those are taxpayer dollars that went into the pockets of PR types, including one spinmeister whose hourly rate – $325 – puts plenty of doctors and lawyers to shame. It is also, not incidentally, more than many people who live in public housing make in a week.

Eric Mower & Associates was handed a no-bid contract to media-manage the discovery of asbestos during the decades-overdue demolition of Kensington Heights towers. It stayed on for 16 months, tapping out news releases and fielding routine questions from reporters.

To state what should be self-evident: It is ridiculous for the public housing agency in America’s third-poorest city to spend a dime, much less more than $90,000, for the image-polishing commonly sought by spouse-straying politicians and rehab-bound Hollywood stars. Which raises the question: Who’s running the place – Groucho, Harpo or Chico?

Actually, the buck for this $325-an-hour fiasco stops with the BMHA’s executive director, Dawn Sanders-Garrett, who signed up the PR types without running it past the BMHA board. The BMHA board is controlled by the mayor. The board six years ago hired Sanders-Garrett, whose track record was less than stellar even before this duh-level blunder.

Jimmy Ruffin lives at the downtown Perry Projects with his wife and 14-year-old son.

“It’s just not fair, $325 an hour,” he told me Wednesday. “I’m still dealing with an old wall sink, no cabinet. … I tried to start a Boy Scout troop, to give kids here something to do.”

Monique Russell has lived at Perry Projects for five years. She said that many older tenants “are secluded in their rooms. … They have nowhere to go. They need activities, social events, so they can meet one another.”

The response of BMHA officials to the fiasco bespeaks further cluelessness. Instead of grasping the concept that a public housing agency should not be wasting tax dollars on spin doctors, they decided, in the future, to bid out the PR work. If this kind of thinking passes for inspired at the BMHA, it would not surprise me if some top-tier official believes that the Housing Authority needs a PR firm to put a positive spin on the bad PR that came from hiring a PR firm. It’s a vicious cycle.

Let me repeat: The larger problem isn’t the no-bid PR contract. It’s the notion that hiring a PR firm is a good way to serve your tenants and to spend our money. For her $97,000-a-year salary, Sanders-Garrett should be able to explain how and why the BMHA does things and to find a secretary to fax the occasional news release. That’s how public housing authorities in other upstate cities do things. If Sanders-Garrett can’t manage that, the BMHA needs to find someone who can.

Sanders-Garrett could have spared herself and the BMHA a heap of embarrassment if she had first run the PR idea past a few tenants. The dozen or so Perry Projects residents I spoke with Wednesday all thought of better ways for their landlord to spend $90,000. Suggestions included picnic tables for the public areas, field trips to the zoo and to Fantasy Island for kids, better security lighting, community-bonding bingo nights, senior citizen activities and shopping trips for carless tenants. A unanimous complaint: the notorious months-long delay before an apartment is ready.

“It took us six months to get into a bigger apartment,” Virginia Harrington, who works at a nursing home, told me after picking up her two kids at the bus stop. “Why couldn’t they spend that money on something that helps us?”

Shanta, a nursing home technician, declined to give her last name, fearing BMHA blowback.

“I have three electric sockets out,” she told me. “You call in a work order, it takes about a month before they get here.”

Not even a $325-an-hour image-adjuster could put a shiny glow on that.

I have an idea: The next time the lights go out, tenants should call the BMHA’s PR firm. At those prices, fixing leaky faucets and busted electrical circuits ought to be part of the deal.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 01:14:18 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130515/CITYANDREGION/130519381/1192
The Democratic primary in this majority-white city features two big-name African-Americans, while the Republican hoping to face the winner is Hispanic.

It’s a rainbow ballot as incumbent Byron Brown parries former FBI honcho Bernard Tolbert, with the GOP’s Sergio Rodriguez in the wings.

Anyone mindful of our new tourism slogan and the city’s history as among the nation’s most segregated might marvel at so many candidates of color and think, “Buffalo? For real?”

But before we get too carried away patting ourselves on the back, it’s worth asking what it means. Does it really stamp Buffalo as a forward-looking place where race and ethnicity no longer matter?

The answer will come during the campaign, when we see whether these three will go where others facing similar demographics – from President Obama on down – dare not tread: into socioeconomic inequity.

The real measure of racial and ethnic progress in Buffalo is not who’s running; it’s what they’ll run on.

The disparities here are stark.

According to the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey, the unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanics in Buffalo – 10.2 percent for each – is nearly double the jobless rate for whites.

The same data shows that the average household income for whites – $53,368 – is 61 percent higher than for blacks and nearly double that of Hispanic households. The patterns repeat when looking at per-capita income.

Such data reflects why the Urban Institute last year ranked Buffalo Niagara 98th out of 100 metropolitan areas when it comes to equity between blacks and whites, and 89th out of 100 when comparing whites and Latinos.

The reality is that we have a two-tiered region, separate and unequal, with Buffalo at its core. Those gaps didn’t arise by happenstance and won’t be closed simply by “lifting all boats.”

But which candidate is willing to say that to an electorate that’s still slightly more than 50 percent white? And does that electorate recognize that a city can’t thrive with nearly half its population left behind?

That’s not to dismiss the fact that Buffalo twice elected Brown. That says something.

But it also says something that he was pilloried a few years ago over a Jefferson and Fillmore avenues facade-improvement program that would have been praised in any other part of town.

Being willing to vote for a black or Hispanic candidate who doesn’t talk about blacks or Hispanics is one thing; being willing to vote for a candidate who openly wants to lift blacks and Hispanics to parity is quite another.

All of which makes me wonder how aggressively these candidates will campaign on making Genesee Street look like Hertel Avenue, putting East Side schools on a par with Hutch-Tech, or addressing residents’ complaints of seeing very few blacks and Hispanics on construction sites.

And if they don’t – or feel they can’t – how much progress have we really made, despite the color of the faces in the race?



email: rwatson@buffnews.com ]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 18:13:07 -0400 Rod Watson
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130512/CITYANDREGION/130519740/1192
Back when the Seneca Gaming Corp. still filed earnings reports, it explained away a drop in quarterly gambling revenue at its Niagara Falls casino in early 2005 with a variety of reasons.

Two new casinos – its own Seneca Allegany Casino and the Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort in Ontario – had siphoned off customers. One patron had walked away with an unusually large win. The winter weather had been bad.

And finally: It wasn't a leap year.

When your business is raking in millions of dollars a day, every one counts. And one fewer day means one fewer opportunity to collect a dollar from a customer.

But it's not just calendar quirks that can turn the luck of casinos. There are reports of gambling halls across the country that have seen business erode as the number of casinos has mushroomed.

Now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is chasing those same gambling dollars as he pushes the state toward a vote later this year to expand the number of casinos in New York. He's positioned the proposal as an economic development plan for tired upstate towns. “We need jobs in upstate New York and economic activity in upstate New York like we need oxygen,” he told reporters last week.

But the plan is just as much about the dollars those casinos would bring to a state budget already reliant on gambling revenue. And New York is just the latest state craving more cash.

Pennsylvania and Ohio have drawn dollars from Indiana and New Jersey. Massachusetts is moving forward with casino plans, and Maryland and Rhode Island have approved more gambling as they try to keep bettors in state.

Once states get a taste, it's hard to let go as gambling revenue drops. In New Jersey, where the number of visitors to Atlantic City has steadily declined since 2005 as Pennsylvania drew customers away and the recession hit, the state has now legalized online gambling in an attempt to make up the lost dollars.

Moody's Investors Service in December painted a dreary picture of the increased competition in the industry, noting it would “only further deluge regional and local gaming markets.”

“As a result, U.S. gaming operators will have to rely even more heavily on coaxing existing customers to visit more frequently and to spend more during each visit in order to grow earnings by a meaningful amount,” analysts wrote.

Niagara Falls, Ont., Mayor Jim Diodati sees the competition coming. Talk is under way of a mega casino in the Toronto area, one that could draw customers away from the two casinos that have made their mark in his city.

“Before, it was 'build it and they would come,' and that was enough,” Diodati said. “That's not enough today.”

He's already looking to the future with hopes of repositioning casinos in Niagara Falls, Ont., with high-end entertainment acts that would draw new customers and lure back those who have left. To do that, he wants to see a 7,000-seat venue built in his city.

“You have to reinvent yourself,” Diodati said of today's casinos. “You have to be creative with your marketing, and you have to be creative with your competition.”

There might be a short-term windfall for New York if it builds new casinos; but as in other states, it won't take long for that winner's high to rub off. Then what will be the state's next get-rich-quick scheme?



email: djgee@buffnews.com ]]> Sun, 12 May 2013 22:47:48 -0400 Denise Jewell Gee
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130511/CITYANDREGION/130519816/1192 They are not hulking eyesores. They are concrete canvases.

They are not embarrassing remnants of bygone prosperity. They are stepping stones to our future.

The mantra: Light them, and they will come.

Light them, and people – here, there and everywhere – will look at Buffalo differently.

In the latest leap forward on our downtown waterfront, state officials last week OK’d an idea for a year-round, kinetic light show on a Canalside grain elevator and nearby structures.

The only thing more astounding to me than using the monoliths of the past to illuminate our future is the source of the idea’s approval.

A few years ago, members of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. – the state agency that oversees waterfront development – were fast-tracking civic suicide. Their plan for a big-box retailer for the downtown waterfront would have yoked us to arguably the lowest and worst use of prime property.

Not only have some of the board’s faces since changed, its philosophy has done an about-face.

The canal development agency was clueless and adrift after Bass Pro’s 2010 rejection ended the “magic bullet” pursuit. Thankfully, informed citizens stepped in to fill the vision void. Civic activist Mark Goldman brought in New York City urban planner Fred Kent. His “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” philosophy has largely shaped our post-Bass Pro waterfront. The impact is obvious.

Next to the historic Commercial Slip, excavated after another state versus public battle in the late 1990s, is a lovely waterfront park – site of concerts and daily summer events – along with the commercial buds of a sandwich stand and a sit-down restaurant. Instead of massive subsidies for a big-box retailer, we are cementing the harbor’s historic identity by re-tracing the Erie Canal at the old Aud site. The project uses public dollars the right way – for infrastructure that paves the path for private investment, instead of to “bribe” reluctant retailers.

The kinetic light show strikes me as our equivalent of Christo’s 2005 flowing-fabric installation in Central Park – different and inventive enough to catch the nation’s eye. Erie Canal Harbor: from big box, to – pardon the cliche – outside of the box.

The post-Bass Pro course was shaped by informed citizens in public workshops and committees. It is where the grain elevator idea was hatched. Committee members were kicking around ways to celebrate the concrete behemoths. Lynda Schneekloth, a UB professor, was involved in a small, simple lighting of a local grain elevator eight years ago.

“Someone mentioned painting the grain elevators, but it didn’t seem feasible,” Schneekloth recalled. “This is a lighter touch, with shifting images.”

A project was born.

The canal development agency, to its credit, has opened its collective eyes and ears to bright, creative citizens who care about the community where they live – and whose tax dollars pay the bills. Not only is it about time, but it leads to better projects – and avoids the community-deflating, hand-to-hand combat that had become our trademark.

“The reality [state officials] had to face was public opposition to this authoritarian, top-down approach,” said preservationist and urban designer Tim Tielman, who spearheaded both the ’90s fight to recover the historic slip and the anti-big box battle. “I think they realized that they needed to open up the [decision] process, listen to what people wanted and acknowledge the power of good ideas.”

Right. Even if those ideas came from people whom agency members – typically, corporate power brokers – do not run into at the Buffalo Club or see at $2,500-a-plate political fundraisers.

That is the beauty of the grain-elevator light show. It makes use of two long-ignored resources: the concrete behemoths on the waterfront and the people who live in this community. It strikes me as positively democratic.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Sat, 11 May 2013 16:59:21 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130510/CITYANDREGION/130519866/1192
Now, public-radio listeners are clued in, after “The Splendid Table,” which airs locally on WBFO 88.7 FM, included a segment on Eckl’s this week.

Jane and Michael Stern, who write the Road Food blog, talked to host Lynne Rossetto Kasper about their experience at Eckl’s. Kasper asked them to explain what beef on weck is.

“Probably a hundred people in the United States know what we’re talking about,” Jane said.

“Oh, everyone in Buffalo knows what we’re talking about,” Michael added.

He lovingly described the kummelweck roll, au jus, horseradish – and expertly, artistically carved beef.

Jane went on to rave about the German potato salad and the whiskey sour, which had real fruit in the mix.

“Oh, God, it is so good,” she said.

“I’m drooling, literally,” Kasper saidYou’ve got to hand it to Jack Quinn.

The Erie Community College president won’t pass up an opportunity to raise cash for his school.

The college this week announced the largest gift in its history – $1.1 million – which was bequeathed to ECC by a man in California who had ties to a founder of AM&A’s department store.

Quinn recounted that he was in California at a meeting with the donor’s attorney, who was also in the man’s will.

Hearing this, Quinn went into his best sales pitch and started talking up ECC, when the attorney cut him short.

“Mr. Quinn,” the attorney said, “I have three daughters. I’m not giving ECC any money.”

You can’t blame a guy for trying.It was hardly a piece of cake to get a photo of the Buffalo History Museum’s prized piece of confectionery to the New York Times, but the ending was sweet.

In late April, Times writer Eve M. Kahn called the museum’s Constance Caldwell, director of communications and community engagement, to ask if the slice of wedding cake from President Grover Cleveland’s 1886 wedding to Frances Folsom was still on display.

As it happened, Caldwell was about to announce that the 150th-anniverary “Ever After” display, which includes the fragment of cake in a decorated Tiffany box, was to be extended until July 4.

“We didn’t have a photo of it except in the closed box,” Caldwell said.

Although the confection itself was stabilized with resin a few years ago, the cake and its delicate paper-lace-trimmed box are still 127 years old and fragile. Caldwell and white-gloved curators eventually found “one square foot” of good light; a piece of velvet was draped; the cake box lid was opened and placed just so; and she aimed with her point-and-shoot camera. The result, a crisp, black-and-white photo, accompanied Kahn’s Friday “Antiques” article.

“It’s terribly exciting,” said Caldwell. “It’s kind of a big coup.” And it may be the only point-and-shoot photo in the Times.State Sen. Tim Kennedy was in Cheektowaga recently to promote legislation meant to keep banks from dragging out the foreclosure process.

He started: “Big banks are letting hundreds of local homes fall into disrepair, which causes blight in otherwise well-kept neighborhoods and brings potential dangers to children like – ”

The Buffalo Democrat stopped to wave at a young bicyclist who lingered nearby, aide John Mackowiak Jr. reported. Kennedy asked the girl her name, and she responded, “Kennedy.”

“Kennedy?” he asked. “I should have established that before we got started.”

As the crowd’s laughter died down, the state senator joked: “I guess the fix is in today with my friend Kennedy here.”

The legislator later introduced Assemblyman Sean Ryan.

“Before we get rolling,” Ryan said, “I’d like to know: Are there any young children named Ryan here?”

More laughter.

“Kennedy’s always one step ahead of me – this time, bringing in kids,” Ryan quipped.



By Stephen T. Watson, with contributions from Jay Rey and Anne Neville.

email: offmain@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 10 May 2013 18:47:12 -0400 Off Main Street
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130509/CITYANDREGION/130509182/1192
Candace Croff Cartagena was charged Wednesday with killing her 8-year-old daughter. The news was as welcome as it was overdue. The girl was found, asphyxiated, in November 2010 under a blanket in the bedroom of the Amherst house where her mother lived alone. Cartagena was discovered in the backyard garden shed, semiconscious and supposedly suicidal.

The finger of suspicion always had pointed at Cartagena. There was no other obvious explanation for the healthy girl’s death while in her care. It took risk-averse District Attorney Frank Sedita III too long to make the case. But the wheels of justice have finally turned.

Buffalo now has its own version of Casey Anthony. The details of the cases are different, but they are similar at the core: Irresponsible young mother is accused of killing her daughter, based on largely circumstantial evidence.

What looks to me like the probable narrative is as simple as it is sad: A mentally unhinged woman was losing control of her life, and of the people in it. In a moment of desperation, Cartagena – in a final display of fading power and control – killed the daughter who was becoming increasingly distant from her.

The details sketch the bigger picture. Cartagena’s husband, Ruben Cartagena, had left her. Their daughter, Bianca, had months earlier left to live with her maternal grandparents after his ex-wife failed to pick her up after a weekend at the grandparents’ house, according to Ruben Cartagena. Living alone in the two-story house in Amherst, Candace Cartagena – who no longer worked due to “stress” – had taken to selling off parts of the house and property. Everything from the backyard fence to a toilet was bartered to cover bills and what the ex-husband called her “upscale” lifestyle.

Defense attorney John Nuchereno on Wednesday proclaimed his client’s innocence. Among those not buying it is Ruben Cartagena – Bianca’s father.

“She obviously killed Bianca,” the ex-husband told me. “I believe that; her own family believes that. We thought she should have been charged immediately.”

Better late than never.

I’m not sure what prompted Sedita to finally take this to a grand jury. Plenty of cops criticize the district attorney, with some justification, for failing to bring charges in homicide cases that are not sure things. He often seems unwilling, presumably for political reasons, to risk lowering his conviction “batting average” by going to court without overwhelming evidence.

Sedita objects to that notion. While not speaking specifically about this case, he said he brings charges any time he feels he has enough evidence. “I don’t need everything wrapped in a bow, or whatever pithy colloquialism people use to criticize me,” he said. “What you may think or believe is irrelevant; all that matters is what you can prove in court.”

Whatever the case, Sedita finally is swinging for the fences on this one. It’s nice to see him step up on a case whose outcome is anything but certain.

For all of the neon signs flashing “Candace,” convincing 12 jurors that a mother could kill her own child is no slam dunk. Look no further than Anthony, the Florida woman who – against all logic – beat a murder rap in her daughter’s death.

In this case, there is no independent witness, no confession, and the county medical examiner did not definitively call the girl’s death a homicide.

It was no surprise, then, to see the prosecutorial “A-team” of Thomas Finnerty and Kristin St. Mary in court Wednesday. Clearly, Sedita is not taking anything for granted.

Although there is no “smoking gun” – or, in this case, no smothering pillow – the case against Candace Cartagena has plenty of backing from both sides of the family. Ruben Cartagena believes that a deadly meltdown by his ex-wife was triggered by the girl’s planned trip with him and her cousins to Disney World the next day.

“I think it enraged Candace, that she would not be the first to take [Bianca] to Disney,” Ruben Cartagena told me. “We all went a year earlier, but Candace wouldn’t let [Bianca] go.”

It may have been the final push, for a woman who was losing her grip.

This case was begging to be tried. Bianca Cartagena did not have much of a chance in life. Now, from beyond the grave, she will finally get a chance at justice.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 9 May 2013 23:35:19 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130508/CITYANDREGION/130509272/1192 Yes, the sky is falling – and that could, possibly, maybe be good. After a campaign in which his most vociferous critics stooped to tactics even he wouldn't adopt, Carl Paladino is riding a bandwagon to the Buffalo Board of Education alongside at least three other new and incumbent reformers.

To listen to his critics, that will be ruinous.

But after the most disgusting local campaign in recent memory, Paladino now has more credibility than the teacher unions suspected of trying to anonymously smear him and any other candidate not professing fealty to the status quo. He also brings racial baggage not easy to ignore in a largely African-American and Hispanic district. Yet those are the very students victimized by district unions that never met a change they liked.

If Paladino is smarter than he publicly lets on, he'll drop his “sisterhood” attacks on black female board members and a black superintendent who hasn't even been here a year and focus on the targets the entire community can rally around: union contracts and state laws that make change virtually impossible.

The 2010 gubernatorial nominee is perfect for that task if he can focus half his ire, clout and money on the Buffalo Teachers Federation and the other half on Albany, which he beat in 2006 in ridding the Niagara Thruway of tolls.

One of the best things he could do for students, for instance, is target the Triborough Amendment that lets unions put a stranglehold on the district. That ridiculous law lets the terms of expired contracts – including the “step” pay increases that Buffalo teachers enjoy – remain in effect into perpetuity, removing any incentive for teachers to bargain unless a district is rich enough to buy contract changes.

While teachers feel no pain, students suffer under outdated provisions in their and other union contracts that outrage parents, including terms that:

• Prevent the district from saving millions on transportation, as suburban schools do, by staggering bus runs because Buffalo teachers can veto any change in school starting times.

• Prevent Buffalo's athletes from benefiting from the best coaching around because teachers have the right of first refusal for any coaching job – even if a Bob Lanier or a former Buffalo Bills player wanted to step in.

• Make it cost-prohibitive to turn schools into after-hours community centers because engineers have to be paid extra to open the buildings, and principals and teachers have to be paid to be there if there's any kind of academic offering.

Such provisions tie the district's hands, which is one reason parents have taken on the unions and murmured about a district control board.

Regardless of how he feels about students of color – and his language and the racist emails he forwarded make that an open question – a Paladino war on the unions and Albany could make those kids collateral beneficiaries. He might even find an ally in Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has also pushed reform.

There's no doubt Paladino will wreck the district's china shop. The only question is whether it will be creative destruction, or destruction that forces the board into factions that stymie one another and get nothing done. Students can only hope he's smart enough to come up with the right answer.



email: rwatson@buffnews.com
]]> Thu, 9 May 2013 01:22:54 -0400 Rod Watson
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130505/CITYANDREGION/130509560/1192
It’s just that, like so many consumers, she feels nearly powerless when it comes to the conditions in which her clothes are made. And she’s learned not to expect to find clothes made in the United States at the big chain stores.

“I know that there’s no way that, probably, it’s financially feasible to request that of them,” said James, 25, a business student at SUNY Buffalo State. “Obviously, their big thing would be to keep customers coming and to have as cheap a product as possible.”

We’re living in the age of conscious consuming – where owning a hybrid and shopping at the farmers’ market can say as much about you as the SUV you used to cruise through the drive-thru.

It’s easy to find bananas and coffee that are fairly traded. We’ve learned to worry about where our ground beef comes from and to carry canvas bags to the market.

But want to find out whether the people who made your tank top had safe and fair working conditions? Good luck. Women’s clothing, where neon might be in today and out tomorrow, is even tougher.

This age of shopper sensibility has made us aware of everything from vegetable seed patents to chemicals in plastics. But, in the world of clothing, we’re still largely in the dark.

That became tragically clear in recent weeks as the death toll climbed above 600 people in a collapsed building in Bangladesh that housed clothing factories that made products sold in the United States. Companies that contracted with suppliers in the building have been slow to come forward, and Benetton was an embarrassment after it first denied it had links to the building only to have photographs surface of its clothes in the rubble.

With many retailers unwilling to reveal details of how clothing is made, shoppers are given an easy excuse to trade better standards for bargains.

Labels might opaquely tell us where a shirt is made, but we’re left to wonder whether that factory is helping to pull workers to better living standards or simply putting lives at risk by taking advantage of cheap labor.

There is guidance out there, like the Good Guide app that ranks products on social impact. But in a global economy, where companies can simply shift manufacturing to cheaper countries, how do shoppers ensure executives are living up to their promises?

Dinash Lal is well aware of the dilemma socially savvy shoppers face. He was dressed in a fitted gray polo, khakis and Kenneth Cole sunglasses as he pushed his son down Elmwood Avenue in a stroller last week.

There’s no doubt, he acknowledged, that his shirt was likely made in conditions he wouldn’t like. He thinks about trimming his wardrobe to a few hand-tailored suits. But he also realizes that, in an intertwined economy, even the best individual intentions can make little progress.

“You can even go as far as making your own clothing, but say you have a retirement plan, it’s very likely that some of the companies that you’re invested in are those that you don’t necessarily agree with their business practices because of moral or ethical reasons,” Lal said.

Hundreds dead in a factory collapse; 112 perished in a garment factory fire in November. How many more deaths will it take before consumer consciousness catches up?



email: djgee@buffnews.com ]]> Mon, 6 May 2013 06:28:05 -0400 Denise Jewell Gee
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130504/CITYANDREGION/130509586/1192
I am not too sentimental, but I cannot help but mark your imminent passing. Even though I have neglected – indeed, all but forgotten – you in recent years, when I suddenly needed you this week, there you were. In return for a mere 50 cents, wounds were healed, our bond renewed. No apologies, no regrets. If only all relationships were so tidy.

I can imagine how you feel these days. Once you were everywhere, needed and depended upon. Now you are scarce and ignored, used so infrequently that you essentially hide in plain sight. Like the last of the dinosaurs, you are nearly extinct. It was no Ice Age that tolled your bell, but the merciless blast of wireless technology. Once a street-corner anchor, now an anachronism. It is a sorry fate, to be robbed of purpose. It is the same with people. Age and time take a toll. Everything eventually gets replaced. Something better comes along. The cellphone is seemingly as indispensable today as shoes. Even your stay-at-home cousin, the stalwart landline, is on borrowed time.

Yes I know, back in the day you were part of the action at every bar, restaurant, bus station and building lobby. Lovers used you to whisper fevered promises, street-corner Samaritans called on you for help. Vows were made, hearts broken, bets placed, meetings arranged and deals sealed for the drop of a coin. Now you sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the endangered-species list with the cassette deck, phone book and road map. Once indispensable, now replaceable. Fate will soon lead your kind to a landfill.

Your passing will largely go unmourned, except by streetwalkers, drug dealers, heavy-breathers and anonymous tipsters, all of whom were drawn to your untraceable nature. The rest of us had trouble seeing past your coin-eating, germ-transmitting, frequently malfunctioning flaws. Although once upon a time it was tough to imagine life without you.

Those days came back to me last week, when a sudden flat tire stranded me downtown with a dead cellphone. I had dinner plans to delay. Hesitant to ask a stranger for his cell, I recalled that one of your kind once stood on a nearby street corner. To my relief, I discovered you were still there, at the intersection of Elmwood and Allen.

Your receiver was sticky with an unidentified substance and your face was scarred with graffiti. Nonetheless you accepted my 50 cents and put through a call. No hard feelings, no guilt trip. It was like stepping back into the past, a reminder of how useful and even necessary you had once been. Once.

I asked your neighbors about you.

“Hardly anyone uses that phone,” said Amber Reid, who works the counter at the restaurant across Allen Street. “Maybe a couple of times a day, that’s all.”

As I suspected. Time passes, marked not just on the calendar, but in objects that fade from familiar to forgotten, from useful to barely used. Everyone and everything has a shelf life. You were there when I needed you, and I appreciate that. I just don’t need you much anymore. Thanks for the memories. But I think it’s over between us.

email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Sun, 5 May 2013 07:23:06 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130503/CITYANDREGION/130509665/1192
The Warriors are wounded veterans who have overcome the loss of limbs and other body parts to pursue their love of hockey.

During the game, a vet asked if he might have a word with Higgins.

“You’ll insult us if you pull back and let us win,” the veteran said.

“With all due respect, sergeant,” Higgins earnestly answered, “you are getting my all.”

The lawmakers won, 5-3.

But we all know who played the heroic game.A wire story in Friday’s News about a spike in suicides among middle-aged Americans made a reference to the departed as baby boomers.

That is, folks born between 1946 and 1964.

Really?

Is this large cohort – whose members at the top of the hierarchy qualify for Social Security – middle age?

The older members of Generation X, those born in 1965, might reasonably argue they are middle age.

But even the youngest baby boomers, those who are 49, would have to live to just shy of 100 years to say they are middle age.

The good news is this could be an issue for some baby boomers to debate a few more decades, if they’re willing to work for it on the treadmill.

A recent study from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., reported people who exercise on a regular basis up to age 80 have the aerobic capacity of someone half their age. The study looked at longtime athletes who exercised four to six times a week, averaging 3,700 more steps per day than the non-exercisers, according to the study’s lead author, Scott Trappe.

“In this case, 80 is the new 40,” he said.News outlets across the nation followed The News’ recent story of Paul Marinaccio, the Clarence man with a frog phobia who won $1.6 million in damages after the developer of a nearby subdivision diverted water runoff and turned his property into a wetland.

Most played it straight. A few went for the easy puns, calling him “hopping mad.”

Bill O’Reilly called it the story of the day during his segment with Dennis Miller.

“Immediately I filed suit against The Turtles – not the amphibians, the rock group,” the O’Reilly Factor host said.

He said the lyrics, “Elenore, gee I think you’re swell” frighten him.

“I have a shot here in New York,” he said.The revival of cow bingo as a fundraiser for the parent group at West Street Elementary School in Sanborn succeeded last weekend despite a problem with the one seemingly crucial factor.

For two hours, the cow failed to deposit the obligatory pie during the festivities.

Grass by the jungle gym had been spray painted for the occasion. Some 115 spectators watched the cow eat and roam the bingo grid with numbers corresponding to the 329 tickets sold for $5 each.

But what of the unblemished bingo board?

It didn’t matter. A winning number was drawn from a tub. The bingo raised $12,000 to pay for extras like art tables and computer programs, according to organizer Jeff Haseley.

“Everyone said it was a treat and joy just to watch the cow,” he said.

The feelings seemed mutual. The cow, who deposited three pies in the truck during the half-mile ride from the farm to the school, let children pet her.

As for next year, Haseley will add a precaution.

“I might actually use two cows,” he said.

By Patrick Lakamp, with contributions from Michelle Kearns and Lou Michel

offmain@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 3 May 2013 19:51:13 -0400 http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130502/CITYANDREGION/130509798/1192
She remembers how people pointed at her and her then-partner, now spouse, walking hand in hand at the mall. She remembers the last time, a couple of years ago, when she and Cheryle Rudd were followed into a parking lot, called “dyke” and worse by a guy who – for whatever indefensible reason – felt threatened by their love and appalled by their honesty.

There is not much in common physically between a roundish, graying 55-year-old white woman and a 7-foot, 34-year-old black pro basketball player. But Lambert, whose union with Rudd on July 24, 2011, was the first legal gay marriage in New York State, and Jason Collins, the National Basketball Association player who came out this week, are soul mates of a pioneering sort.

Lambert appreciates how tough this was for Collins. She knows that life just got easier for countless gay athletes. She celebrates the freeing of a man’s being.

“You can’t be happy unless you are honest about who you are,” she told me. “It takes a huge weight off of your back.”

I met with Lambert and Rudd – who let her spouse do most of the talking – Wednesday at a downtown restaurant. Like Collins, Lambert – who once had a husband – for years hid her true self.

“You have to pre-think everything you say,” she said. “You have to pretend your lover is just somebody you know. … It’s exhausting, lying about who you are.”

Time passes, fences fall. Collins’ coming-out – he’s the first active player in the four major pro sports to do so – does not hit with the seismic force of, say, Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier. But it’s huge in its own way, an assault on the Neanderthal culture of the male sports locker room – pro, college and high school – and all of its suppositions and stereotypes.

It is a macho, testosterone-fueled culture beset with wrongheaded notions. Perhaps the worst is the presumption that guys who are gay will “prey” on straight teammates. It ignores the fact that gay athletes have showered and dressed with straight guys in high school, college and pro locker rooms since the days of peach-basket buckets and leather helmets. Self-control is second nature.

“His being gay does not affect anyone else in the world, or in a locker room, unless that person is interested in him,” Lambert said. “He’s been showering with other guys all of his life.”

Make no mistake, Collins’ coming-out is a big deal. If it was not, someone would have done it long ago. Even as Collins sheds a lie, dozens of other gay pro football, basketball, baseball and hockey players stay silent, locked within themselves. And those are adult males. Think about how tough it must be for a gay high school jock.

“This is a beginning,” Lambert said. “He’s a brave guy, being the first.”

Collins did more than free himself. His honesty gives aid and comfort to every pro, college and high school gay athlete who lives a lie because he fears the consequences of the truth. Lambert knows what that is like.

“I guarantee you, a lot of young [gay] athletes went to bed the other night feeling proud about who they are,” Lambert said. “Their futures look a lot less bleak.”

Role models matter. Lambert remembers how monumental it was for her when mainstream entertainer Ellen DeGeneres came out. “I was watching on TV in a restaurant filled with gays,” Lambert recalled. “When she took the microphone, the place erupted. It was like the earth moved beneath our feet.”

Collins’ step is a similar giant leap. By freeing himself from a lie, he helps the rest of us see the truth.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 2 May 2013 22:22:53 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130502/CITYANDREGION/130509869/1192
Take the one about the disappearing black males, the men who are never around to provide guidance and serve as role models. Don’t believe it.

Instead, watch what’s happening at Futures Academy, School 37, where black men are volunteering to mentor eighth-grade boys in one of the city’s “turnaround” schools that got a new principal last year and a staff overhaul.

The initiative pairing more than a dozen men and boys is an outgrowth of the Schools of Wisdom program that the Rev. Gene Coplin has run for years at Futures and other schools as part of his Project LEE – Learning and Earning Experiences – that drives home to students the importance of deportment, attitude and grades to be successful.

This spring, he recruited African-American men to work one-on-one with the boys. He also provided another dimension: teaching what it means to be a gentleman, a term that seems quaint in an age when music companies make money showing black boys how to act like thugs, demean women and “dis” authority.

Coplin has been fighting that trend for years, teaching kids the importance of good decision-making. Now he’s getting help from other men.

The role models met the students for the first time this week at the Carlton Street school on the near East Side. The men come from all walks of life, recruited in venues ranging from colleges to black churches. They have one thing in common: a desire to give back by preparing the next generation.

“It starts at home, but if we can get the children to focus when they are under supervision, they will begin to look at the world as a different place,” said Andrew Scott, 25, a SUNY Buffalo State psychology major. “I think they’ll have a sense of direction coming out of this program.”

Archie Galloway, 56, a retired state Department of Transportation supervisor, already raised his son as a single father. Now he wants to help other boys.

“I want to try to show a positive image to them,” said Galloway, who responded to Coplin’s pitch at Zion Dominion Church on Sunday.

“If I can show him what a man is supposed to be, if he hasn’t had that in his life already, that’s what I want to do.”

Many haven’t had that example. But even those who have – a couple of fathers were on hand at Futures – “need the extra reinforcement,” said Coplin, himself a School 37 graduate who has been working in schools since the 1990s.

His group mentoring already has improved attendance and cut “behavioral infractions with the young men,” said Principal Tonja Williams.

Now the one-on-one help is preparing the boys for a “gentlemen’s day” when they will demonstrate their new social graces by opening doors and carrying books for girls in the school, which uses single-gender classes and is partnering with a variety of education consultants to improve achievement.

But the effort won’t end with gentlemen’s day. Coplin said the mentors will work with the boys through high school to prepare them for Say Yes to Education’s offer of a free college education.

In the process of helping kids, Coplin and the mentors are also answering all of the critics who wonder why strong black men are nowhere to be found.

If you can’t find them, you’re searching in the wrong places. Try looking for them in the lives of School 37’s kids.



email: rwatson@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 2 May 2013 01:22:27 -0400 Rod Watson
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130428/CITYANDREGION/130429149/1192
Main Streets have been linked to the river. Businesses that outfit tourists have proliferated. Hotels have prospered, and this year, the Hudson Valley landed on National Geographic’s list of 20 best trips, along with Marseille, the Great Bear Rainforest and Malawi.

“Promoting the Hudson River as a recreational resource has tremendous impact on the region’s tourism economy,” said Mark Castiglione, who heads the Hudson River Valley Greenway. “It’s not just about outfitters, but it’s about the people who are coming here for that experience, and that helps hotels, it helps restaurants, and it helps all those kinds of businesses that support tourism in our region.”

So imagine what could happen here, where internationally known waterfalls already draw millions to the Niagara River and where $9 million a year has been dedicated to greenway projects for the next 44 years.

The Hudson River Valley has been able to transform itself, not because it had millions of dollars for the greenway, as we have here, but by creating incentives for dozens of communities to work together toward similar goals.

“Many of those communities that border the Hudson River have now – not taken and turned their backs on the river – but they’re using the river as the front door to economic development,” said Carmella Mantello, former Hudson River Greenway executive director.

Here, in Erie and Niagara counties, a $450 million dedicated funding stream from a settlement with the Niagara Power Project gives us a leg up on what the Hudson River Valley had when it first set out on the greenway path.

But we’re on the verge of wasting that tremendous opportunity.

The money could have the power to transform the communities along the Niagara River. Or we can squander it on narrow thinking and parochial projects.

More than $46 million has been allocated in the six years since the money started flowing to create the Niagara River Greenway, but a recent review by the Partnership for the Public Good found that little more than half of the projects live up to the original vision of creating a system of linked “parks, trails and conservation areas” along the Niagara River.

A few projects have been deemed “inconsistent” with that vision but still got funded.

It’s the same old mentality: Don’t tell us what to do with our money.

The “fractured system” for approving projects and spending money, the report found, has impeded efforts to develop the Niagara River Greenway “as a unified system rather than a miscellaneous collection of projects.”

Mantello, who led the Hudson River Valley Greenway, attributes its success to the willingness of dozens of communities in 14 counties to work together.

“If those regional partnerships aren’t happening, not just at the local level, but at the state and local level, then the whole concept of the greenway goes out the door,” Mantello said.

Rarely have we had the right mix of money and opportunity to bring major change to the region. If only a few communities weren’t so intent on hacking away at their own isolated trail.



email: djgee@buffnews.com ]]> Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:30:25 -0400 Denise Jewell Gee
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130427/CITYANDREGION/130429212/1192
It is such tough, physical work, pounding one’s fingers on a keyboard. It is so demeaning, calling a congressman or a corporate executive and having to wait seconds – sometimes minutes – for him or her to come to the phone. It is intensely dreary, doing a job that opens doors into fascinating peoples’ lives, from all walks of life.

What a drag it is, gathering information and weaving it into a story that may help readers to better understand the community in which they live and the people who live in it. I can’t stand it, having the privilege and the power – as H.L. Mencken famously overstated – to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

But seriously: Here I was, thinking I am the luckiest guy in the world. Only to find out that I, and my journalistic brethren, labor at the worst job in America. If I hadn’t read it on CareerCast.com, I would never have believed it.

The job-search site just released its annual ratings of 200 careers. Weighing salary, stress and job prospects, its analysts came to the conclusion that “newspaper reporter” comes in dead last – behind such worthy but uncoveted professions as lumberjack and oil rig worker.

I am not sure about lumberjack. But having logged time back in the day driving a cab, pumping gas and stocking store shelves, I can confidently state that writing a newspaper column runs laps around any of them.

OK, I get it. These are trying times for journalists. Unlike in the pre-Internet age, there are plenty of ways for people to get information other than the daily newspaper. There have been cutbacks, and some have raised doubts about print journalism’s future. Reporters routinely double as videographers, bloggers and tweeters, with not a pay raise in sight.

As a columnist, I generally do not – unlike reporters – fret about getting beaten on a story or labor to unearth information about ethically challenged politicians. In that sense, journalistic life is easier for columnists. Plus we get to dispense unsolicited advice on a variety of subjects and have the power and the platform to shame public officials who act contrary to the public good. Nice work, if you can get it.

The specific challenge for any columnist is regularly writing stuff that – to varying degrees – is entertaining, enlightening, witty, heart-tugging, thought-provoking and provocative. No pressure there, particularly when an identifiable photo conveniently runs with every piece. This allows readers the opportunity to convey their constructive criticism not just through cyberspace, but at parties, on supermarket lines or during other chance encounters. Or, more happily, to share some positive reinforcement. Either way, it comes with the territory.

Having said that, I would not trade what I do for anything.

Truth is, there is no “best” or “worst” job, merely a job that works for you. A physical guy who loves the outdoors will likely enjoy life as a lumberjack, No. 9 on the “10 Worst” list.

Me, I’ll take journalist. Times may be tough, but it is, was and – to my mind – ever will be a great gig. No matter what CareerCast.com says.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:09:44 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130426/CITYANDREGION/130429282/1192
Transit Police Chief George Gast told Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority commissioners this week that after a blind woman reported a cellphone theft at the downtown bus station, witnesses told transit officers the thief might be boarding a Metro Rail train at Seneca Street.

So the officers halted the train, boarded the suspected car and promptly called the cellphone number. And when the stolen phone began ringing in the crotch of the suspect’s pants, the jig was up.

“In our business,” Gast said, “that’s called a clue.”In between questions about Metallica, New Yorker magazine cartoonists and plant-eating dinosaurs, participants in the Buffalo’s Smartest Company trivia contest – a Cradle Beach fundraiser held Wednesday in Salvatore’s Italian Gardens – had the chance to win cool raffle prizes.

Emcee Todd Callen, a local recruiter and radio announcer who does games for the Bisons and Niagara University men’s basketball broadcasts, rattled off the items one by one before calling out the name of each lucky contestant.

Most raffle winners snagged restaurant gift certificates or bags of swag, but one prize stood out when Callen announced it: a Jason Pominville jersey, donated by BlueCross BlueShield.

The one-time Buffalo Sabres star, of course, was traded to the Minnesota Wild earlier this month, relegating anything with his name on it to the discount rack at a sporting goods store.

As people in the crowd chuckled and made jokes about the jersey, Callen quipped, “It’s already a throwback.”Psychics can’t predict everything.

Prominent psychic Sylvia Browne was scheduled to appear tonight in the Seneca Niagara Casino, but she became sick and had to postpone her performance until July 13.

We laughed when we read the casino’s news release, which blamed the rescheduling on, ahem, “an unforeseen illness.”

Tony Astran, a public-relations rep for the casino, said this phrase came from Browne’s camp. But he understands why it raised a few eyebrows.

“A lot of friends in the media chimed in after I sent that out,” Astran told us.Booking the members of the rock-and-roll senior tour, as Artpark does each summer for its Tuesday night concert series, can be a risky business.

George Osborne, Artpark president, this week announced an expensive lineup of bands that were huge during the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations.

Counting the costs of putting on the shows, Artpark is investing more than $2 million in groups such as Chicago, Bad Company and Blue Oyster Cult.

Some of the bands will pull down more than $100,000 for their one night in the Lewiston amphitheater.

But Osborne acknowledged that he takes care to make sure the performers can still bring the heat.

“I won’t hire any band that I haven’t seen live myself, or on a YouTube performance in the past year, to make sure they still sound good,” Osborne said. “You don’t want to find out the lead singer croaked, or they’re playing soundtracks half the night.”Over in Lockport, the talk at Wednesday’s Common Council work session also turned to classic rock, as Mayor Michael W. Tucker told the Council he can’t comment yet on this year’s lineup for the city’s Friday night concert.

But Tucker said he knows one band that won’t be booked for the series: the CRS Band, a cover band led by 1st Ward Alderman John Lombardi III.

The name stands for “Classic Rock Songs,” although some locals say it stands for “Conservative Republican Singers,” “Can’t Really Sing” or other phrases too rude to print.



By Stephen T. Watson, with contributions from Robert J. McCarthy and Thomas J. Prohaska.

email: offmain@buffnews.com ]]> Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:54:00 -0400 Off Main Street
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130426/CITYANDREGION/130429388/1192
In the 11 days since the bombings at the Boston Marathon, I am more convinced than ever that these kinds of attacks will never bring America down – much less change the way we live.

Terrorism is psychological warfare. It is intended as much to inject fear as it is to inflict casualties. Terrorists want us to think twice about boarding a bus, going to a ballgame or gathering at a street festival. The only way they can “beat” us is if we let that happen.

I don’t see it. Not after what happened the past 11 days. Not after what I have seen in the 11-plus years since 9/11. Even if there are more “Bostons” across the country this decade, I don’t think our collective knees will buckle. I think we will only stand taller.

Look at what happened in the days after the bombs burst in Boston. Instead of cowering in fear, 17,565 people went to the Bruins-Sabres hockey game – with the suspects still on the loose. Days later, 35,152 went to Fenway Park. The spectator-sung anthem at TD Garden was no less than a collectively upraised digit to terrorism.

Residents provided cops with leads and willingly opened their homes to police searches. Across America, people went about their business. Prime suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have thought the bombings would leave us quivering like Jell-O. If anything, I think the attack stiffened our spines.

“The whole tenor of reaction in Boston was, ‘No way are we allowing this to happen,’” said retired FBI Special Agent John Culhane. “When was the last time masses of citizens routinely allowed cops to search their homes?”

Now an instructor at Hilbert College, Culhane specialized in counterintelligence while with the Buffalo FBI office.

“As a country, we tend to come together in a crisis,” he told me. “Intimidated? Not even close.”

Despite their Boston “success,” make no mistake: Terrorists are taking a beating. Since 9/11, America has become a far tougher target. This was the first Islamic-related terrorist bombing on U.S. soil since planes toppled the Twin Towers – and it was of vastly lesser proportion. They cannot shake our nerve if they cannot hit us, hard and often. I don’t see it happening.

Culhane said thousands of counter-intelligence officials track everything from cellphone use of suspected terrorists to suspicious bank transactions. The CIA reportedly had Tamerlan Tsarnaev added to a U.S. counterterrorism watchlist 18 months ago – but he apparently was not listed on the FBI’s main database.

“We are not perfect,” granted Culhane. “But we are a lot better than [pre-9/11] at the border, and we get a lot of cooperation from other countries. We can thwart things overseas, before they even get here.”

And when a homegrown threat like the Tsarnaevs slip through the cracks, it merely opens our eyes wider.

“It’s not like people will be looking over their shoulders [in fear],” said Culhane. “It’s more like they will be looking for a bag that shouldn’t be there. The next Turkey Trot, even more people will have an eye out.”

America, on guard. In Boston, in Buffalo, across the country.

Are we concerned? Sure. Afraid? Never.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:18:12 -0400 Donn Esmonde
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130424/CITYANDREGION/130429492/1192
The city that can’t get out of its own way while squandering a natural wonder was at it again.

No one blames Falls police for stopping what turned out to be two innocent kids driving a car with Massachusetts plates while the nation was still looking for the Boston Marathon bombers.

No one blames police for calling in backup after spotting backpacks in the car, resulting in a phalanx of cops from every conceivable agency descending on the frightened young tourists.

No one even blames police for using a bomb detection robot and a trooper in bomb-protection gear to examine the car and the backpacks.

But then giving the kids traffic tickets? You’ve got to be kidding.

But that seems to be par for the course for a city that goes out of its way to make itself look like a joke.

The brothers – a 20-year-old college student and his 17-year-old high school sibling – had come to check out Rochester Institute of Technology and made a side trip to see the famous falls. That’s where they aroused the suspicions of an Air National Guardsman dressed for work. He followed them while calling police, who said the tourists stoked further suspicion by doing the perfectly normal thing – not making eye contact with their stalker and trying to get away.

That’s how their five-hour ordeal began. It ended not with a bang – or an escort to the waterfalls and a free souvenir – but with the tickets.

Police Superintendent Bryan DalPorto played it by the book, defending his officers and seeing nothing wrong with the galling lack of judgment.

“The traffic infractions occurred,” DalPorto said when asked why the tickets for allegedly failing to stop at a sign or use a turn signal were issued after what the brothers already had been through. Pressed, DalPorto stuck to the script.

“The officers observed it,” he said.

Rolling stops? Failure to use a blinker?

They occur at every intersection in every city all day long – and that’s by drivers not scared and trying to escape someone following them. Police could spend their entire shifts giving tickers for that.

Obviously, they don’t. They use discretion – except in this case.

Maybe it’s something in the water in Niagara Falls. This, after all, is the broke city where a Council majority turned down financial help last month because it came from a Buffalo foundation. One of the sane Council members said it best in calling that episode “embarrassing.”

Now the city that watches its rival across the river attract more tourists has embarrassed itself again, this time with the world watching.

It’s doubtful the brothers will return to contest the charges. In fact, it’s doubtful they’d ever come to Niagara Falls again for any reason. And neither will their friends or anybody else who can understand the initial police response, but not why they city had to pile on by ticketing young men already put through a nightmare.

In the interest of justice – and the city’s tattered reputation – a judge should toss the tickets. Then city officers should get remedial training – not in police tactics, but in common sense.



email: rwatson@buffnews.com ]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:28:05 -0400 Rod Watson
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130421/CITYANDREGION/130429812/1192 Buy life insurance. Save for retirement. Organize the sock drawer.

So many nagging things to do.

Add to the list: Plan for the afterlife with a Google will.

No, really. Now that we've all amassed reams of digital data floating out there somewhere beyond our control, Google's got a solution – “inactive account manager,” aka, your Google death plan.

Google's announcement of its newfound end-of-life compassion sounded more saccharine than a cemetery ad.

“We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife – in a way that protects your privacy and security – and make life easier for your loved ones after you're gone,” Google Product Manager Andreas Tuerk wrote in a post about the change.

Personally, I was hoping for an afterlife free from the burden of passwords and spam.

Google's got other plans, and they're really quite simple. If you use one of Google's services, such as Gmail, Picasa or YouTube, you tell it what to do with your data once your account has been inactive for, say, three to 12 months. You can have it automatically deleted or passed on to “trusted contacts.”

Don't worry, it will check with you via text message to make sure you're really dead before it hands over all your old email, photographs and Google+ updates.

The best part is that Google assumes that if you haven't been using its products for a few months, you must be dead, rather than just having moved on to better technology or found peaceful bliss outside the online world.

There may be people with treasure troves of interesting emails to sort through once they're dead. But mine? Judging by the last month, you'll find little more than the mundane about taxes and work. Remember when email was a place where heartfelt messages landed and long-lost friends reunited? My email these days is chock full of news that the last season of “Mad Men” is now streaming on Netflix and that bok choy was “just a buck a pound” at the co-op.

Plenty there to save for posterity.

Regardless of the banality of email these days, I actually do like the idea of having some control over what happens to all this stuff once I'm gone. I just wish we could get more control over all that other data Google's got – like about that strange rash you Googled or the number of cat videos you've actually watched.

But that's the kind of stuff that makes us valuable commodities that can be bought and sold to advertisers in the time it takes to pull up a website. Why would they let us weigh in on decisions about that?

There is a solution: Simply opt out. But you might as well suggest someone take a vow of silence for six months.

Our lives have become so entrenched in the digital realm, it's nearly impossible to extricate ourselves from the Web. There's hardly anything you can sign up for these days that doesn't require a password and agreeing in blood to share your email, phone number and all the digital crumbs you spill all over the Internet.

In fact, I've used Google and Gmail more than two dozen times since starting this column. It's a love-hate relationship. As in, I love to hate it, but I just keep coming back.

Guess they've got me 'til “death do us part.”



email: djgee@buffnews.com
]]> Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:45:01 -0400 Denise Jewell Gee
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Two off-the-rails brothers with a couple of homemade bombs shook the psyche of America.

This is why they call it terrorism.

As awful as what happened in Boston was, the impact on our collective peace of mind looms nearly as large as the human toll.

This is why they call it terrorism. Root word: terror. Aim: to inject fear, trepidation and unease into our hearts and minds.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not bring down a building. They did not, like the 9/11 terrorists, inflict mass fatalities. But they succeeded in what they set out to do: explode bombs whose percussive effect was felt psychologically across America.

That is, unfortunately, the nature of the terrorism beast. Anyone who does not care about dying can cause a lot of damage. Even if it is, like in Boston, a crude assault with homemade bombs encased in kitchen pots. Compared with the precision and planning of the 9/11 attack, this was amateur hour. These guys had no exit strategy and were reduced to carjacking – a monumentally dumb move for America’s most wanted fugitives.

Yet they were capable of killing four people, injuring more than 170, bringing Greater Boston to a standstill and punching a hole in America’s collective peace of mind.

Welcome to the 21st century.

The people who want to harm America have no standing army that can invade our shores. They have no conventional weapons that can reach our cities. They merely have the means to strike at innocent people, in primitive and relatively limited ways, with an impact that extends far beyond any body count or injury report.

This is why they call it terrorism.

If 9/11 showed the brute force with which terrorists could strike at an unprepared America, Boston showed the guerrilla-warfare toll that a pair of “lone wolves” can exact on a vigilant nation. Though Boston’s casualty count does not, thankfully, compare with 9/11’s, the psychological ripples reverberated in 300 million hearts and minds. The ability to invoke widespread fear is a power unto itself.

“That’s the [terrorists’] purpose, to get people to look over their shoulders,” retired FBI special agent Pete Ahearn told me. “To be afraid to get on the subway or go to something like the Boston Marathon.”

That is, ultimately, how the terrorists “win.” They place the demon of anxiety on our shoulders. They prompt us to change the way we live. They force fear into our hearts. And that, ultimately, is how and why I think the Tsarnaevs – and anyone like them – will lose. It will not happen. Not here. Not in America. We are too big. We are too strong. We are too resolute.

Ahearn, former head of the Buffalo FBI office, was instrumental in the Lackawanna Six investigation. He is now a law enforcement consultant in Washington, D.C.

“In Israel, people walk out of the house and wonder, ‘Am I coming home tonight?’ ” he said. “We are fortunate that we are not at that level in this country.”

Given the variety of nuts, zealots and absolutists out there – and the ease by which firearms are acquired and Boston-style bombs can be built – it is astounding to me that such attacks do not happen more often. On any given day across America, there are thousands of “windows of opportunity” for terrorists. Any crowded ballgame, parade, race, rally or festival is a potential “target” in a terrorist’s mind. Yet there have been countless such public events since 9/11 in our country that came and went without incident.

Until now.

“This is the worst nightmare of the FBI, the ‘lone wolf,’ ” said Ahearn. “There was [likely] no directive from on high, no [traceable] cellphone call telling these guys, ‘Do the Boston Marathon.’ It was just an [American-based] terrorist determined to do whatever he can do.”

I think there is a somewhat reassuring, broader-perspective view: We have, post-9/11, battened down our hatches, guarded our flanks, protected our borders, increased our vigilance, cut off avenues of assault and otherwise shielded ourselves as capably and admirably as I think is possible in a free society.

From citizen-wielded cellphone cameras to airport checkpoints, from security cameras that capture much of our urban landscape to our heightened awareness of threats, from watchful local police to anti-terrorist task forces, America has tightened up and hunkered down.

Though a gathering like the Boston Marathon is all but indefensible, technology aided in nailing the terrorists. Surveillance cameras captured images of the Tsarnaev brothers. They were quickly identified after the FBI released the pictures.

Despite widespread fear in the months after 9/11, no terrorist has poisoned a water supply, released biochemical agents into the air or carried out an attack with mass fatalities on U.S. soil. Some of the attempts at mayhem bordered on pathetic. The attempted Times Square bombing three years ago, by an al-Qaida disciple, was thwarted when the crude device left in a vehicle started belching telltale smoke.

“If they could do something more spectacular, they would,” noted Ahearn. “I think we have done a great job of preventing an attack.”

I don’t know if what happened in Boston changes that. I don’t know if the Tsarnaevs’ “success” – killings, casualties, a city paralyzed – will embolden other homegrown terrorists. Maybe it will. Maybe others will “succeed.” But they will not, ultimately, win. America is too big, too strong, too resolute. Two crazies armed with kitchen-pot bombs – or others who might follow – will not take us down.

The Tsarnaev brothers ended four peoples’ lives, badly injured dozens of others and for five days had America holding its collective breath. But they will not, and cannot, change the way we live.



email: desmonde@buffnews.com ]]> Sun, 21 Apr 2013 07:49:13 -0400 Donn Esmonde
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