Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The Boston Globe's Concrete Galoshes

The images that flash through your mind as you go down:

"200 observe work stoppage at World Trade Center site" August 03, 2011|Associated Press

NEW YORK - About 200 laborers stood down from their jobs for a second day yesterday at the World Trade Center site....

The Concrete Workers District Council, whose members have been without a contract since July 1, declined to comment. But some of the workers who stood or sat in a large group around a plaza agreed to discuss their concerns.

“We were willing to take a freeze but we are not going to take a 20 percent pay cut,’’ said concrete worker Lorenzo Mineo....

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What does the WTC remind you of?

Yeah, how could all that concrete turn to dust because of jet fuel fires?

"Case against concrete test firm in N.Y. raises industry fraud concerns" August 05, 2011|By Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press

NEW YORK - A New York concrete-testing laboratory faked results for a La Guardia Airport control tower, the new Yankee Stadium, the Lincoln Tunnel, and more than a dozen other projects around the city, creating thousands of phony reports for tests designed to make sure concrete was strong enough, prosecutors said yesterday.  

Oh, that's how. 

The mind manipulation and the strategic seeding of topics and images is a wonder to behold as much as those three skyscrapers free-falling into their own footprint.

American Standard Testing and Consulting Laboratories Inc. president Alan Fortich and five staffers pleaded not guilty to racketeering and other charges in the latest of a string of cases the Manhattan district attorney’s office has brought against concrete-testing labs.

Fortich and the company “vehemently deny the allegations in the indictment, and we shall fight this case,’’ said their lawyer, Richard R. Leff.

Prosecutors said they believed any safety concerns had been addressed by retesting....  

Yeah, nothing to worry about (sigh).

But the case spotlighted the stubborn presence of concerns about fraud in an industry important to the safety of a city of skyscrapers and subways, especially since prosecutors said the firm’s 12 years of fraud continued even after another major lab was indicted and city officials tightened oversight of concrete testing in the past three years.

“The volume of fabricated tests was egregious’’ in the American Standard case, netting the company millions of dollars for results “that were no more than worthless pieces of paper,’’ District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said. 

Why did mortgage-backed securities just come to mind?

Related: Maid to Order Dismissal For Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Some D.A.

American Standard, Fortich, and the accused engineers, lab directors, and inspector “regularly skipped vital safety tests and created false reports to create the impression that the tests were performed,’’ an indictment said.

The buildings included Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Javits Center convention venue, a Columbia University science building, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, the forthcoming Second Avenue subway line and office and apartment buildings, according to the indictment....

After earlier cases against other labs, the stadium and certain other projects around the city were retested and found safe, city officials said.  

Any surprise? Think about the reaction if it were the opposite?

Engineers generally design buildings to make sure they will be safe even if there are problems with some materials....   

Except for the terribly designed(?) WTC towers?

The firm is also accused of falsifying credentials to get city licenses and to qualify for programs that give small and minority-owned businesses a leg up in bidding on big government projects. Fortich paid tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks to another company to serve as a front for such work, prosecutors said, declining to name the other company....  

Only one reason to not name the other company.

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The official 9/11 version is sinking just as fast:

"Obama, Bush plan to attend 9/11 event" by Associated Press / July 31, 2011

NEW YORK - The ceremony at the World Trade Center site marking the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks will be a solemn event and a chance for victims’ families to view the names of loved ones etched into the memorial, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. President Obama and Bloomberg will be joined by past and present leaders, including President George W. Bush."  

To have that inside job criminal Bush attend is a real in-your-face act, and Obama gobbling up all the lies has been a big disappointment. 

As it turns out that Muslims were not behind 9/11; Israel and its US agents and assets were.

Of course, Jews could never do such things, right?

"Suspect in boy’s death found competent" August 05, 2011|Associated Press

NEW YORK - Lawyers for the man accused in the kidnapping and dismemberment killing of an 8-year-old New York City boy learned yesterday that a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation had found him competent for trial.

Levi Aron’s lawyers - who claim he has complained of hearing voices - said they still plan to conduct their own exams to determine whether to pursue an insanity defense.

According to court papers made public yesterday, Aron told detectives his victim put up a struggle and that afterward he was hearing voices telling him “to take his own life for what he did.’’

Police said Aron made the remarks last month about the time he directed them to a trash bin where he allegedly dumped a red suitcase containing body parts. As the interrogation wore on, Aron told them, “I’m famous,’’ the papers say.

The 35-year-old defendant also was asked if he knew anything about past sex crimes against children.

The papers say he recounted how a man groped him on a subway train when he was a teenager.

That's no excuse.

“But I never did that to a child because I don’t swing that way,’’ he said.  

He's a homophobe, too?

Leiby Kletzky got lost on his walk home from a religious day camp July 11 and asked Aron, whom he met on the street, for help, prosecutors said.

It was the first time the little boy was allowed to walk alone.

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I wouldn't mind that guy getting dropped into the East River with cement shoes.

Those who escaped:

"A tour bus carrying Polish tourists was going too fast during a downpour when it crashed and flipped over on an upstate New York highway, injuring all 30 people aboard, authorities said....

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"Columbia theft suspect caught in Lawrence" August 04, 2011|By Mark Arsenault, Globe Staff

A fugitive captured in Lawrence last week is back in New York, facing charges he helped embezzle nearly $6 million from elite Columbia University.

Jeremy Dieudonne of New York City, 46, pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday to accusations that he took part in intercepting electronic payments from Columbia’s medical school that were intended for the university’s affiliated hospital, according to the office of the New York County district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

Dieudonne is accused of conspiring with two other men, George Castro of the Bronx, 49, and Walter Stephens of Jersey City, N.J., 65, to trick the Ivy League school into sending $5.7 million over two months to their company, IT & Securities Solutions LLC, instead of to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where the payments were supposed to go....
 
There are no conspiracies except 19 Arabs from the caves of Afghanistan.

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"Ex-N.Y. officer to go to prison; Cleared of rape, guilty of deceit" by Jennifer Pelz, Associated Press / August 9, 2011

NEW YORK - A former police officer was sentenced yesterday to a year in prison for keeping dispatchers and supervisors in the dark as he returned three times to a drunk woman’s apartment after helping her get home.

Related: Globe States Its Case

Kenneth Moreno was cleared of the most serious charge against him - that he raped the semiconscious woman.

With Moreno’s accuser and about a score of women’s advocates looking on in a tense courtroom, the judge decried Moreno’s version of events as self-serving lies.... “lies you told on the stand . . . .’’

That's perjury.

And why did Zelikow just come to mind?

***********************

Former partner Franklin Mata’s sentencing was postponed to tomorrow because his lawyer was enmeshed in a trial elsewhere. He had been accused of standing watch while Moreno was with the woman, who had been out celebrating a job promotion.

The two met their accuser in December 2008 after a taxi driver called for help getting her out of his cab. She told authorities she passed out and awoke to being raped in her bed, saying she acutely remembered being violated despite being unclear on significant stretches of the night and early morning.

And she secretly recorded a conversation days later in which Moreno alternately denied they had sex but said “yes’’ twice when she asked whether he had used a condom. Moreno told jurors he was trying to mollify her.  

How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot, fascist?

The former officers acknowledged returning to her apartment three times within four hours of the initial call, while saying they were elsewhere - the genesis of their misconduct convictions.  

And one just has to ask WHY the LIES? 

Moreno admitted he even placed a phony 911 call about a sleeping vagrant to provide a pretext for one of the visits....  

You know, PNAC provided a pretext.

The officers said the woman had asked them to come back and check on her, and Moreno said he felt impelled to give her advice about drinking and to comfort her.  

Is that what you call it now?

He said that she made advances and he ultimately ended up cuddling with the barely dressed woman in her bed, but that they didn’t have sex.  

She said, he said.

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Also see: Queens housekeeper says Buddhist monk enslaved her