Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Monday's Plate

I let it get cold:

"Boston police resume using license plate readers after accidental release of data" by Shawn Musgrave Globe Correspondent   May 06, 2018

The Boston Police Department has resumed using license plate readers, which can scan thousands of passing vehicles per minute, after it accidentally released a database of scanned vehicles in 2013 and then stopped the practice, according to documents obtained through a public records request.

The technology, which is used by law enforcement across the country to find wanted felons, missing persons, or even get unpaid tickets resolved, has been a point of contention between police and civil liberties groups, who say collected data can invade privacy and potentially chill free speech.

Soon after halting the license plate scanner program, Police Commissioner William B. Evans told the City Council that the “license plate readers, obviously, weren’t being used the way that we had committed to use them.”

“We were collecting so much data that we weren’t even sure what we were collecting, honestly,” Evans said at a City Council meeting in April 2014.

The new policy prohibits using license plate readers to harass or target people based on race, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic, or to infringe on First Amendment rights, according to the documents.

“We really limit it, and it’s just not an overly broad capture of data,” Evans said in a telephone interview with the Globe last week.

Is that why he retired? The lying?

The head of a technology program at the ACLU of Massachusetts said the organization was glad to see the data retention period shortened, but would like to see several of its other proposals incorporated into the new policy, including a ban on sharing data with other law enforcement for noncriminal investigations and an independent audit process. The organization also expected police to consult more with the community, said Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program for the local ACLU.

“We were under the impression that before BPD restarted its license plate readers, there would be some kind of public announcement or communication to the City Council and the press,” said Crockford in an e-mail last week.

Well, you were under the wrong impression and if they hadn't screwed up..... you still wouldn't know.

And they wonder why they have lost the trust?

A spokeswoman for Mayor Martin J. Walsh said the Police Department did not consult his office before relaunching the scanners last fall, but it was not required to.

City Councilor Andrea Campbell, who has advocated for the council to play a more significant role in overseeing police surveillance technology, was also unaware of the new use of the scanners.

“We are not always looped into Administration decisions, especially where we have no direct oversight,” said Campbell in an e-mail.

Boston police are now using three license plate readers in areas with high crime rates or that might be potential terrorist targets, such as Copley Square and the Financial District. The commissioner said he has no plans to use additional plate readers.

The technology is being challenged around the country.

Last month, the top court in Virginia allowed a lawsuit to proceed challenging police storage of license plate reader data.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky ruled in February that the scanners do not violate motorists’ privacy rights. And a handful of other states have passed legislation regarding license plate readers.

Evans declined to provide local examples of cases in which the license plate readers have proved useful, saying that many such investigations might still be ongoing given the short period during which the readers have been operational, but, he said, the department is open to providing reports about how the readers have proved useful in solving criminal investigations, another of the ACLU’s recommendations.

“I’ll gladly give reports,” Evans said. “We have nothing to hide.”

Uh-huh! 

How about telling us before using them again, you liar!

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Sit down to eat and the phone rings:

"Feds still fighting smartphone lock-down" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff  May 06, 2018

In a federal building in downtown Boston is a crime lab where agents perform autopsies on smartphones.

Cyber investigators at the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force take locked iPhones and other devices seized in a criminal case, and plug them into a black box called the Universal Forensic Extraction Device. The UFED tries multiple hacking techniques to unlock a phone, and, if successful, copies the contents without tainting potential evidence.

“There’s no iPhone we can’t get into,” bragged Jim Grady, chief executive of Cellebrite, the Israeli company that makes the UFED box.

I think we have discovered the lead suspects in all the hacking cases.

Not quite. Two-and-half years after the federal government was unable to persuade Apple to unlock the iPhone of the husband-and-wife San Bernardino shooters, law enforcement agencies say they still have no surefire way of accessing smartphones they suspect contain evidence of a crime.

You might want to take a second look at that.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it could not access about 7,800 phones in 2017. And despite the claims of their manufacturers, devices such as the UFED, and one called GrayKey that the Massachusetts State Police uses, are no match for the security features of many phones.

“We’re running into a lot of phones that are locked, that we can’t get access to,” said Timothy Laham, a Boston police detective assigned to the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force, a federal office staffed by agents from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.

In April, members of the US House of Representatives asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to back up his claim that thousands of phones remain uncrackable by the latest technologies.

Or you can destroy them like the Clinton campaign.

Cellebrite and Grayshift, which makes GrayKey, don’t reveal details of how their devices work. The techniques might include exploiting flaws in the phone’s security software, or bombarding the phone with thousands of possible passwords, but the encryption techniques used by phone makers are advancing at a rapid pace. Grady said that his company’s UFED could be rendered useless overnight, by an update to Apple or Android software.

OMG!

So the $oftware $ecurity indu$try is a $elf-$erving cul-de$ac, and the he U.S. government has already forced phone makers to install secret trap door access to all their devices. 

Fred Mitchell, a US Secret Service agent assigned to the lab, said police can easily search a suspect’s home once they get a warrant, but because of smartphone encryption, “they’ve actually now built a house that we can’t exercise a warrant on.” 

Can you live in your phone? 

Where is the kitchen?

The crime lab of the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force has none of the glamour of those on TV shows like “NCIS.’’ It’s just a large, plain room with long tables and tall shelves stocked with bulky computer servers and heavy-duty plastic tool cases. The servers are customized to sop up data from confiscated computers, without altering the contents of the copied data in any way. The copy is then digitally signed to certify its integrity.

The task force inspects digital evidence in all its forms: from illicit transactions recorded on a desktop computer to electronic “skimmers” that are secretly installed on bank cash machines or gas pumps to steal credit card data.

During a recent tour provided by Boston police officials, one server was pulling video from a digital recorder connected to the security cameras at a local retailer. “Gone are the days of VHS tape,” quipped Mitchell.

All that money wasted.

Another agent was examining the contents of a suspect’s computer he had copied. Using virtualization software, the task force can replicate the contents exactly as it appeared on the suspect’s computer, which helps in displaying evidence to judges and jurors during trial, but since so many suspects use smartphones, they get lots of attention in the lab. Examiners take extraordinary care to protect phone data: each one is plugged into a special container called a “Ramsey box” that shields the phone from outside radio signals that might alter or corrupt its contents.

If they’re unable to get into a locked phone, agents have a last-ditch option: They open the phone, extract its memory chips and solder them onto an external circuit board, from which they try to copy and read the data.

Thus the Bleach Bit.

Meanwhile the law enforcement community and cellphone companies remain at an impasse over whether all smartphones should have a “back door” that allows police to view their contents.

“We haven’t made progress,” said Nathan Wessler, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Various parties on this issue have continued to maintain their positions.”

Wessler said the locked-phone conundrum is a rare exception to a “golden age of surveillancefor law enforcement. With a warrant or subpoena, investigators are able to access logs of personal data stored on remote networks, including phone calls, Internet search histories, even locations that people visit. Data stored inside personal devices appear to be the last stronghold of digital privacy, often out of reach of even the most tech-savvy investigators.

OMG! 

It's a "GOLDEN AGE of $URVEILLANCE!"

One of the technology industry’s most respected voices, software guru Ray Ozzie, has proposed a system that would grant emergency access to encrypted digital devices, while still preserving their security protections.

“I believe that we need to talk frankly about these policy issues, but we’re being distracted by a war between technologists and government,” Ozzie said. “I want to take the technology issues off the table so we can talk not about ‘can we,’ but ‘should we.’ ”

Turns out they are one in the same.

Under Ozzie’s plan, which he calls “Clear,” phone makers would adopt a system that could generate a unique decryption key for each device upon request. The key would be made available to investigators only if they presented a warrant, and they would have to have physical possession of the phone to use it.

Ozzie, a Massachusetts resident, is best known as one of the lead developers of the Lotus Notes program and is former chief software architect for Microsoft Corp. Ozzie has been shopping his idea around to technology groups, and it’s already come under ferocious fire. Some computer scientists predict hackers will find ways to steal the Clear keys and break into phones.

Ozzie admits his scheme isn’t foolproof. And since he suspects phone makers would not embrace the idea, Ozzie reluctantly believes it would have to be imposed by federal law.

“I think it’s a sad statement that we have such little trust in our government,” said Ozzie, “but that’s the way it is.”

They did it themselves with the decades of lying us into wars and selfishly looting this nation.

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Related:

“With one click you can manipulate hundreds of thousands or millions of people, whether you know their names or not,” said Birgit Sippel, a European Parliament member from Germany who ePrivacy legislation. “That is why protecting privacy is becoming more important, especially in the digital environment,” a contentious issue central to the post-Cambridge Analytica online economy: whether data-driven digital services represent more of a boon to consumers or the kind of surveillance that can threaten democracy.” 

Tell it to the guy on the train working for the ad company.

The CA scandal has gone away, and rightly so. When Obama did the same thing, the pre$$ was crowing about his campaign's genius in using the new technologies, and was claimed as the difference in beating Romney.

And cui bono?

"At Everbridge, tracking bad news is good business" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff  July 08, 2018

It doesn’t print a newspaper or run a TV network, yet a Burlington company called Everbridge Inc. has quietly become one of the world’s leading bearers of bad news: Everbridge monitors disasters and conflicts around the world, from tornadoes to terrorists, as well as more mundane nuisances like airport closings and political protests. Then it sends warning texts, e-mail, or automated calls to corporate executives, government agencies, and other clients to steer clear of the hot zone.

Like pulling up the drawbridge!

The company counts some 3,800 customers, half of which are corporations that need instant notification of critical events, including most of the nation’s largest banks, carmakers, and health care companies. The triggering incident could range from a natural disaster such as a smoky forest fire to a hacking attack on corporate networks. Everbridge’s warnings typically trigger a response plan by the client, such as rerouting executives away from an urban center paralyzed by a street demonstration. 

California must be keeping them busy.

“Everbridge is definitely one of the market leaders, if not the primary leader,” particularly for large corporate accounts, said Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst who tracks the emergency notification market for Forrester Research in Cambridge.

Hundreds of US municipalities, from small towns to Boston to the largest cities, also rely on Everbridge to provide residents with emergency alerts. “Every day, we’ll get a notification from a city or a parent or a family in Oklahoma that says ‘You saved us,’ ” said Everbridge’s chief executive, Jaime Ellertson.

At the global operations center in Burlington, one wall is covered with large video monitors that project streams of news about potential hot spots: flight delays in Charlotte, N.C., for instance, or a double shooting in Chicago, or an immigration protest in Washington.

With each report, a map displayed the locations of Everbridge customers who might be affected. For instance, a package delivery company in the nation’s capital could be alerted to the location of the protest, giving it plenty of time to reroute its trucks.

The service also tracks historical data.

Because Everbridge has customers around the world, its operations center in Washington, D.C., is staffed with monitors who are fluent in about 10 languages. “We’ve got everything from Chinese to Arabic to French to Farsi,” said chief technology officer Imad Mouline.

Everbridge was founded about 15 years ago by Los Angeles entrepreneurs who were dismayed by the poor performance of emergency communication systems during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The company built a reputation for its mass-notification systems, capable of pinging out weather warnings and missing-persons alerts to entire cities at the touch of a button.

That false flag inside job was a trea$ure of wealth for so many!

For now, Everbridge is sacrificing profitability in its quest for growth. Investors aren’t complaining. The stock had quadrupled since going public nearly two years ago, closing Friday at $49.42, with a market cap of $1.4 billion. Either they’re confident about Everbridge’s future, or convinced there’s plenty of trouble ahead in the world. Or both.....

I hate to burn bridges but......

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"New trial sought for man jailed in Mattapan deaths" by Maria Cramer Globe staff  June 10, 2018

The case against the man convicted of killing four people — including a 2-year-old boy — on a Mattapan street in 2010 rested largely on the word of a drug dealer, whose credibility was so questionable prosecutors relied heavily on cellphone records to buttress his version of events.

Now lawyers for Dwayne Moore, who was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the cold-blooded killings, are asserting that new cellphone records, along with a closer examination of those presented at trial, indicate that the prosecution’s star witness, Kimani Washington, lied to the jury and suggest that Moore was not even on Woolson Street at the time of the murders.

No!

“This case is a classic example of the danger in building a first-degree murder case on the credibility of a professional criminal,” Moore’s lawyers, Chauncey B. Wood and Eva G. Jellison, wrote in an 87-page motion that seeks a new trial for Moore and lists myriad pieces of evidence they say point to his innocence.

Yeah? 

Not impression given by media.

Chief among them are: two inmates who met Washington in jail after the killings and said he told them he lied about Moore’s role in the crime, cellphone records that purportedly show one of the victims received a call from Moore at the same time Moore was believed to be robbing him, and newly revealed evidence Moore’s lawyers say strongly suggests Washington was part of a dangerous Dorchester gang, notorious for robbing drug dealers at gunpoint.

“It becomes overwhelmingly clear that justice was not done,” the lawyers wrote.

Welcome to AmeriKa, where you been?

The appeal revisits the disputed circumstances of the killings, sets forth a new theory of the crime, and asserts that the same phone records that helped convict Moore now cast doubt on his guilt.

“It was a very painful case for the city of Boston,” said Michael Doolin, a Dorchester criminal defense attorney who watched the trials closely. “But the litigation isn’t done once there is a guilty verdict that gets rendered. The defendant’s rights are paramount in that things often come out after trial that were not known at the time that may show justice wasn’t done.”

What, in America? 

Of course, a lot of times we have been finding out later that the police and prosecutors are not turning over exculpatory evidence (would mean they would actually have to work and unloved cases don't look good on a report).

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I don't remember the trial,  and why are they holding him in Nevada?

Related: 

"More than 35 years after Kevin O’Loughlin was convicted of raping an 11-year-old girl in Framingham, a jury on Tuesday found the gourmet food salesman did not commit the crime and awarded him $5 million in damages (despite the $5 million verdict, O’Loughlin will be getting far less). The 14-member jury determined that O’Loughlin was innocent by “clear and convincing” evidence after an emotional weeklong trial in Suffolk Superior Court that pitted the divorced father of two against the rape victim, now in her 40s, who still maintains she identified the right man....."

Where is the apology?


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Wanna get something to eat?

"For more Boston restaurants, staying in business means being an open book" by Janelle Nanos Globe Staff  June 08, 2018

Operating a restaurant in Boston is an incredibly tough business: Margins are tight, labor is scarce, and the stakes are only getting higher as more eateries open across the city.

And even more close (like Les Sablons and Smith & Wollensky).

Add to that a possible minimum wage increase, which many owners fear could upend their business model, and the risk is perhaps more daunting than ever, but more area restaurateurs are embracing the challenges with a novel solution: sharing their financial information with their workers and teaching each employee — from the head chef to the dishwasher — to become an efficiency expert. Workers are then empowered to find ways to help the restaurant succeed and even share some of the gains.

In a private dining room at Trade in the Financial District last month, staff members being trained in this “open book” approach to management considered the cost of a ham sandwich.

As Joe Grafton, a consultant with ReThink Restaurants, passed the ingredients list around the table, he asked the workers in Spanish how best to tweak the recipe to help cut costs. The Trade team, which included dishwashers and line cooks from Colombia and Guatemala, looked over a price list for each teaspoon of mayo and slice of bread, then came up with a way to reconstruct a sandwich while saving 80 cents per serving. 

I'm not even going to ask if they are undocumented.

Trade isn’t actually in the ham sandwich game — it’s known for its flatbread pizzas and such dishes as duck rigatoni — but it’s one of several restaurants deploying the open book management technique.

“We’ve learned throughout these courses how to cost things and what it costs to buy the ingredients that go into making the plates,” said Juan Franco, a line cook from Colombia, speaking through an interpreter. “It’s very important that they have invested in us, because we are a family here at Trade. It makes me really proud to work here.”

Originally implemented in manufacturing plants, open book management was eventually adopted by the founders of Zingerman’s Delicatessen, in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Zingerman’s team is often credited with introducing the concept to the food service industry, and for good reason: Zingerman’s now operates a dozen interrelated — and highly profitable — food businesses, including a ZingTrain, a program offering open book training to small businesses. Trade chef and owner Jody Adams and her partners recently made a pilgrimage to Ann Arbor to enroll in a course.

“We came back from Zingerman’s totally inspired,” said Eric Papachristos, one of Adams’s partners. “But changing a management structure from the top down is a very big challenge.”

What a ZINGER, huh?!

So Trade enlisted the help of Henry Patterson, a former owner of six restaurants who has made a second career out of teaching open book management. Over the last several years, his consultancy, ReThink Restaurants, has slowly begun rolling out open book programs in about a dozen restaurants in and around Boston, including Bar Mezzana in the South End and the Chinese-American restaurant Mei Mei in the Fenway. In some cases, state workforce development grants help cover the cost of providing training in both English and Spanish.

Patterson compares restaurants to baseball teams, where players are taught to field and hit the ball but are never told how to actually win the game. Most operate as “adhocracies,” a term ReThink defines as an “organization characterized by lack of planning, responding to problems as they emerge rather than anticipating and avoiding them.”

Is that what the owner of the paper and Red Sox thinks?

It’s an apt description for the first few years at Mei Mei, said Irene Li, who started the business with her siblings in 2012 as a food truck and opened the restaurant a year later. From the outset, Li said, she struggled to pay her employees fair wages while also ensuring the business would stay afloat. “You never want to feel like it’s the good of the company versus the good of your employees,” she said.

But when it comes down to it those are the “economic realities.” 

Every penny matters to workers in the restaurant industry, noted Susan Crandall, director of the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and servers are three times more likely than other workers to fall under the federal poverty line.

Open book management is a “rare initiative that immediately benefits employers as well as employees and also gives them a chance to develop skills on the job,” she said. Workers at companies that offer profit sharing or employee ownership perform better, show reductions in turnover, and have more loyalty and an increased willingness to work hard, Crandall said.....

Yeah, it's a win-win all around as those types of arrangements vanish and the wealth inequality gap yawns into a chasm by the second.

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Also see:

"Over 200 protesters gathered near the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s detention center on Bradston Street in Boston on Sunday to hold a Father’s Day vigil to honor undocumented fathers in detention. The protest was organized by a number of groups, including Progressive Needham, Massachusetts Communities in Action, Temple Hillel B’nai Torah, the Paulist Center, and the Massachusetts Poor People’s Campaign....."

"A waitress at a Chelsea restaurant was slashed in the neck Monday night when she chased a patron who failed to pay his bill outside the restaurant and confronted him at his car, according to the city’s police chief. The woman, who is in her 30s, was working at Las Pupusas Del Chino restaurant on Washington Avenue around 11 p.m. when the incident took place, Chief Brian Kyes wrote in an e-mail. “A male party skipped out on his bill and she chased him outside,’’ he wrote....."

RelatedSuspect in stabbing of waitress in Chelsea identified

He was found after being shot in Worcester.

"As volunteers at a youth shelter in Harvard Square, Tony Shu and Connor Schoen saw firsthand how homeless people can struggle to find work, trapping them in a vicious cycle..... In the past 15 months, Dr. Jessie Gaeta has lost count of how many people have overdosed on opioids in the public bathrooms of her South End clinic for the homeless, but none of the victims died, Gaeta said. For that she credits a new piece of technology: an anti-motion detector linked to an alarm system that alerts staff if bathroom occupants are motionless. “It’s practically an everyday occurrence,” said Gaeta, the chief medical officer of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, across the street from Boston Medical Center. “The solution has been a godsend, really.”

What do you mean the hospital is running out of medicine?

Now for the reviews:

"For the last four years, teacher Taryn Snyder has used her personal Yelp.com account to post restaurant reviews written by her third-grade students as part of a class project. The vast collection of evaluations, which are meant to hone their opinion-writing skills, is charming, to say the least, with each restaurant racking up four to five stars per critique, but sadly for these budding critics, the practice of writing and sharing their food reviews online is coming to an end — at least on Yelp’s platform. Boston magazine first wrote about Snyder’s project in February. It was also picked up nationally, by ABC News....."

She's “bummed about it.”

"Activists decry meat industry in march through Boston" by Lucas Phillips Globe Correspondent  June 10, 2018

About 100 red-shirted animal rights activists marched from Boston Common to the door of a Kenmore Square McDonald’s Sunday afternoon, passing sausage stands in the park and diners on the sunny patios of Boylston Street.

“It’s not food,” they chanted, “it’s violence.”

The Boston branch of the international “March to Close Down All Slaughterhouses” took to the streets Sunday to decry animal cruelty and promote veganism, according to Laura Ray, an animal rights activist from Boston who organized the event.

“If you did to dogs and cats what is done to animals in the food industry, you’d be arrested,” said Ray, 59, in an interview before the march.

They then cheering Bourdain being dead?

As the group marched through Boston Public Garden, Shlomy Goldman, 35, said he believes everyone shares a natural compassion toward animals.

“I don’t think that in my heart I’m morally superior to anyone who is not vegan,” said Goldman, a Messianic Jew who carried a homemade sign with quotes from the Bible on one side and from Russian author Leo Tolstoy on the other.

“You don’t have to teach the public to be compassionate; you just have to teach them what they’re doing when they eat meat,” said Goldman, a Montessori teacher who lives in Brighton.

(Blog editor just shakes his head at the self-centered supremacism in jew$paper every day. Just serving their dwindling readership, I guess, and providing entertainment with their agenda-pushing by controlled opposition)

The roughly two-hour march ended with a “die-in” at McDonald’s, accompanied by what organizers said were recordings of animals being slaughtered.

How do you feel about the slaughter in Yemen?

On the way there, the protesters chanted their way past patrons in outdoor cafes, many of them enjoying meat dishes.

One 45-year-old father, standing in the doorway of a Copley Square restaurant, defended his young daughter and her mostly eaten hamburger.

“She doesn’t have to hide it because it’s her right [to eat] if she wants,” said Daran from West Newbury, who declined to give his last name. “She shouldn’t be ashamed. Why should she?”

Because her diet is politically incorrect.

Libby Frattaroli, 67, said she was around the same age, growing up in an Italian family in East Boston in the 1950s, when she first became concerned about where the meat she ate came from.

You do not want to know, and are you sure that is cow?

She said she heard chickens “cry as their throat was cut” at a butcher shop in Maverick Square and told her mother she would never eat chicken again.

“She started yelling at me in Italian,” Frattaroli remembered, laughing. “I still think about that today,” she said.

Frattaroli carried a sign depicting cruelty to chickens in the march, holding it up for restaurant patrons to read. Did she ruin someone’s lunch on Sunday?

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope so.”

C'mon, let's go over to Wahlburgers.

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It's a Holocaust™!

"New England Holocaust Memorial rededicated in event recalling last summer’s vandalism" by Jeremy C. Fox Globe Correspondent  June 10, 2018

Nearly a year after the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized in two incidents, the monument was rededicated Sunday in a ceremony that compared that violence with Kristallnacht — “the Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis and their supporters smashed windows in Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues in Germany 80 years ago. 

I hope neither Rocky nor Dov were involved.

“Two stones, shattering not only two glass panels on the memorial, but also in an instant shattering our complacency as a community, our very sense of community and acceptance that, truth be told, we had come to take for granted,” Rick Mann, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston’s Holocaust Commemoration Committee said to about 300 who had gathered inside Faneuil Hall.

They gathered where, and why no uproar?


Doesn't seem to be a concern with the kids, either.

Rabbi Alan Turetz, spiritual leader of Temple Emeth in Chestnut Hill, decried not only the vandalism, but also the wider wave of anti-Semitic and racist incidents across the nation and the growth of right-wing political movements that have sought to minimize the Holocaust.

In these “fractured and perilous times,” said Turetz, people must stand up and bear witness in “a world alight with virulent hatred” about the killing of 6 million Jewish children, women, and men in the Holocaust.

Tired of the guilt trip I had nothing to do with and one that is now ancient history, never mind the dispute over the numbers and all the other rigamarole that comes with it -- especially when the 21st-century Nazis are occupying sand berms across from Gaza.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh praised the strength of the Jewish community and that of Boston’s residents from all faiths and backgrounds.

“We talk a lot about resiliency these days in governments, but our deepest resilience is actually in our people,” he said. “Our city’s people have come from all parts of the earth. They and their ancestors have been through untold hardships. Their resilience is our city’s strength.” 

Just doing what they all must, and that's bow to Jewi$h power.

Several speakers shared stories of family members lost and those who survived the genocide.

Janet Stein Calm, president of the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors & Descendants of Greater Boston, said her father had survived to find himself utterly alone.

“No one that he knew before the war was alive after the war,” she said. “His entire family had been killed. Every child he went to school with and every person he had ever known were all gone.”

Speaker Esther Adler witnessed Kristallnacht and rising Nazism as she grew up in a Jewish family in the German city of Breslau, which is now within the borders of Poland.

She recalled going to bed as a girl on Nov. 9, 1938, and being awakened by a clamor.

“Suddenly, sounds of breaking glass pierced the silence of the night, followed by a chorus of shouting voices,” Adler said.

Her family rushed to their living room window to see “groups of men, some in uniform, others not, were raiding the shop windows of the large hardware store, whose owners were Jewish.”

She escaped Germany and lived in what is now Israel before coming to the United States. She taught for many years at a Hebrew school in New York, published a book of poems and a novel, and now lives in a Jewish retirement community in Canton.

They segregate themselves and no fuss.

In 2015, she returned to Breslau, now known as Wrocław, Poland, to film a documentary and to speak about the Holocaust with German and Polish teens who showed her that the next generation can learn from the past, she said.

And yet somehow we still allow governments and jew$papers to lie us into wars.

“Their desire to learn from us, their struggle to accept the deeds of grandparents, of their grandparents’ generation, was evident,” she said. “These youngsters . . . give me hope for the future of mankind.”

As Israeli soldiers snipe!

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Yeah, they are all such good kids:

"Randolph man charged with trying to take money from his grandmother’s bank account" by Danny McDonald Globe Staff  May 01, 2018

A Randolph man allegedly tried to take money out of his grandmother’s bank account before leading police on a highway chase with his grandmother in the car Tuesday afternoon, authorities said.

Patrick Laubenstein, 27, was arrested in Milton and now faces multiple charges, including uttering a forged instrument, abuse/neglect of an elderly person, operating to endanger, and failure to stop for police, Randolph police said in a statement.

He is expected to be arraigned in Quincy District Court on Wednesday.

Randolph police received a report that Laubenstein was in the drive-through of the Envision Bank at 129 North Main St. around 1:30 p.m. He was trying to take money from his grandmother’s bank account, according to Randolph police.

The bank refused his request, and he fled before police arrived, authorities said.

Police found his car a short distance from the bank and tried to pull him over. Laubenstein refused, according to police, leading officers on a chase through Randolph, onto Route 24, and then onto Interstate 93 northbound.

During the chase, police learned that Laubenstein had picked up his 81-year-old grandmother from a Milford nursing home earlier in the day and driven her to Envision Bank in an attempt to have her take money out of her account, police said.

Upon learning the woman was inside the fleeing car, police ended the chase, according to authorities.

Probably a good idea these days.

Through an investigation, authorities discovered Laubenstein drove to a house on Hilltop Road in Milton. With the help of Milton police and State Police, Laubenstein was arrested. His grandmother was found unharmed outside of the Milton home, authorities said.

There were multiple outstanding warrants for Laubenstein’s arrest, police said.

But he's a good boy!

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"Randolph man charged with taking cancer-stricken grandma for ride to withdraw cash" by Emily Sweeney Globe Staff  May 02, 2018

QUINCY — A Randolph man allegedly showed up at a Milford nursing home during a hospice meeting and took his cancer-stricken 81-year-old grandmother for a ride to the South Shore because he wanted her to withdraw $1,000 from her savings account for him, police said.

What drug habit was he trying to fill?

Little did he know, her family had alerted the Randolph bank. The man then led police on a high-speed chase with his grandmother sitting in the back seat, authorities said.

(Blog editor is aghast that the grandmother was along for the ride)

That’s what ultimately led to the arrest of Patrick Laubenstein, a jobless 27-year-old who “suffers from substance-abuse issues,” according to a police report filed in Quincy District Court. His grandmother was recently diagnosed with cancer, the report states.

Poor fella! Forget the grandmother with the cancer!

Laubenstein was later apprehended in Milton and faces multiple charges, including abuse/mistreatment of an elderly person, operating recklessly, operating without a license, and failing to stop for police.

At his arraignment Wednesday in Quincy District Court, he pleaded not guilty to the charges and was ordered held on $7,500 cash bail.

The judge said if he posted bail, he would have to stay away from his grandmother, her residence, and the rehab facility where she is staying. He must also be monitored by GPS.

Laubenstein appeared in court wearing a black T-shirt, an unkempt beard, and handcuffs. He stood silently and held his head up during the proceedings, occasionally looking around the courtroom or leaning over to confer with his attorney.

Laubenstein’s lawyer, Neil Madden, said Laubenstein’s grandmother was not abused or neglected in any way during the incident, and that she went with her grandson voluntarily and was aware that he was withdrawing money from her bank account.

Talking to reporters after the arraignment, Madden said: “This is a traffic violation.”

When asked why his client fled from police, Madden replied: “Maybe he got scared.”

Why did the family call the bank?

According to police reports filed in court, on Tuesday afternoon Randolph police responded to a report that Laubenstein was in the drive-through of the Envision Bank at 129 North Main St. requesting to take money from his grandmother’s bank account.

The police report states that Laubenstein had tried to withdraw $1,000 from the same bank the previous day and was unsuccessful, and Tuesday he went to his grandmother’s rehab facility in Milford and drove her to the bank so he could make the withdrawal from her account.

After Laubenstein left the nursing home, Laubenstein’s family called the bank and gave the branch manager the heads up that he was on his way there. When Laubenstein arrived, he went to the bank’s drive-through and rang the buzzer for service several times. The teller delayed waiting on him so police could respond, according to the police report.

Police were dispatched to the bank and saw Laubenstein driving a gray Toyota Camry with his grandmother in the back seat. Laubenstein then allegedly sped off down School Street and then made an abrupt turn on Moulton Street. The officer activated his blue lights and siren and pursued the Camry as it made several unsafe turns and reached speeds of 50 miles per hour while driving through thickly settled areas, the police report states.

“While traveling on Warren Street he crossed the double yellow line several times at a high rate of speed,” the report says. “As a result of the traffic [from a construction crew] the operator of the vehicle being pursued then went up on the sidewalk and continued straight,” striking two vehicles.

He is lucky he didn't kill anyone!

Laubenstein later got on the ramp to Route 24 north, and police gave up the chase, according to the police report. He was eventually arrested in Milton.

After speaking with the family, police reported that it appeared that the grandmother “has been enabling Patrick for a long time,” the report states.

The report states that when a detective asked the grandmother whether she knew her grandson was fleeing from the police, “she stated her vision is poor and was not aware that the police were chasing Patrick.”

Laubenstein’s next court date is June 11.

Globe never bothered to follow up on it.

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