My old plan was as bare-bones as they came, so I assumed that even though the new plan would cost more, my coverage would improve under Obamacare, at least marginally.
It did not.
Under my old plan, my maximum out-of-pocket expense was $4,900. Under the new plan, I’m on the hook for up to $6,350. Copays for my doctor visits will double. For urgent-care visits, they will quadruple. Though slightly cheaper plans exist if I decide to shop around on the exchange, I will lose my dental coverage should I switch.
Needless to say, I am not pleased.
Most young, middle-class Americans I know are happy that millions of previously uninsured people will receive free or heavily subsidized insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
We just didn’t realize that, unless we had health insurance at work, we’d be the ones paying for it.
Where is Casey Stengel when we need him? In 1962, as the manager of the brand new and determinedly hapless New York Mets — 40 wins, 120 losses — he looked up and down his bench one dismal day and wondered, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” That phrase kept coming at me recently as I watched the impressively inept performance of the Obama administration in both foreign and domestic policy. On a given day, this administration makes the ’62 Mets look good.
This is a surprise — at least to me. If Barack Obama has an image, it is of the infinitely cool, cerebral leader. The man can give a rousing speech, but he is, at heart, a planner and a plodder. Both of his presidential campaigns were exercises in micromanagement — digital all the way. Obama was the better candidate, but he had, by far, the better organization.
Yet this same man has lately so mishandled both domestic and foreign policy that he is in mortal peril of altering his image. This unsettling and uncharacteristic incompetence became shockingly clear when Obama failed to come to grips with the Syrian civil war. I did not agree with the president’s do-nothing policy, but at least it was both a policy and intellectually coherent. What followed, though, was both intellectually incoherent and pathetically inconsistent — a “red line” that came out of nowhere and then mysteriously evaporated and a missile strike that was threatened and then abandoned. It was a policy so wavering that if Obama were driving, he would be forced to take a breathalyzer.
The debacle of the Affordable Care Act’s Web site raised similar questions about confidence. This was supposed to be Obama’s Big Deal. The president has other accomplishments — navigating out of the Great Recession was no minor feat — but restoring the status quo does not get your face on Mount Rushmore. It takes achievement, a program — something new and wonderful. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to be it.
Conservatives are expressing shock and outrage that the Obama administration knew that many people in the individual insurance market would not be able to keep their plans once the Affordable Care Act took effect. Such shock is not surprising; overblown outrage is the stock and trade of conservative politics these days.
But here's what conservatives won't tell you, lest it undermine their theatrics: Many insurance plans are shutting down because they don't meet the higher bar of quality benefits required under Obamacare, and of those people who lose access to their plans, many will pay less and all will have better and more comprehensive options.
Experts say that young, healthy people must enroll in ObamaCare’s health exchanges to cover the cost of insuring sicker, older people. It’s a simple math equation: Charge everyone roughly the same rate for access to basically the same product. The people who use it less will subsidize the people who use it more.
The problem with this plan is that it hoses young, relatively poor people like me right when we least need high bills for services they’re not using. And it helps older, relatively rich people who should be able to afford the care they need. If America’s downtrodden and struggling young people are smart, they’ll opt out. Then it’ll be up to the federal government to fine them enough to make up for the shortfall.
First, let’s look at the math. As Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy have pointed out for Reason magazine, the concept of today’s older generation as impoverished is simply wrong.
In fact, today’s seniors are far wealthier than today’s young adults.
Looking at rates of homeownership, 83% of elderly households own a home. Meanwhile, 36% of millennials are still living under their parents’ roof. Those over 65 years of age have much lower poverty rates than most other demographic groups. Households headed by people 65 or older have 22 times the wealth of households headed by people under 35.
CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.
In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.
A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed.
In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter.
A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates that the August raid allowed law enforcement to search for firearms inside her home.
When Sean Hannity called the Obamacare hotline, not only did he not get the answer he wanted, but he also got a woman fired. Luckily for her, Hannity had the money to help her out.
The Fox News and radio host called the hotline on Monday and spoke on-air with employee Erling Davis about promised improvements to the Obamacare website. Hannity brought Davis back onto the show on Thursday, and she revealed that she had been let go after their conversation.
As the Friday deadline approaches for Senate and House committees to determine if staffers will be swept into Obamacare like personal office aides of members, sources tell Secrets that several Democratic staffs will likely be kept out of the troubled health care system.More.....
Such a move to shield thousands of aides would be a blow to efforts to have all of Capitol Hill enrolled into the system the president and congressional Democrats created.
Said a top Senate GOP staffer: “If Obamacare is so awesome, why the hell aren't Democratic committee chairmen giving their staff the gift of losing the insurance they have and be dumped into Obamacare like the rest of us?”
Under the rules governing Obamacare, the personal office staffs of House and Senate members have to shift from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to Obamacare. They will continue receiving their federal contribution so that out of pocket expenses won't surge, though there is an effort to take that away.
Two soldiers have been shot and one suspect following a rampage at a Navy base in Millington, Tenn., according to multiple reports.
The U.S. Navy tweeted the following:
#BREAKING: #USNavy can confirm shooting on Navy property; Naval Support Activity Midsouth in #Millington on lock-down.
Moments later, the Navy again tweeted: #USNavy confirms #Millington suspect in custody. 2 Soldiers injured - not life threatening.
The base remains on lockdown as a precaution, Navy officials said.
The Associated Press reported that a Navy recruiter who had been relieved of duty was quickly taken into custody following the shooting.
Naval Support Activity Mid-South has more than 7,500 military, civilian and contract personnel working on the base, according to the facility’s official website.
“The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don't work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place,”
The Affordable Care Act was signed by President Obama in 2010 and since then he has repeated one reassuring phrase: "If you like your insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn't happened yet. It won't happen in the future."
But it is happening. The president's health care law raises the standards for insurance policies, which many consider to be a good thing. But hundreds of thousands of Americans whose policies don't meet the new standards are being told that their health plans are being cancelled.
Natalie Willes is a sleep consultant who helps parents in Los Angeles train their newborns to sleep. She buys her own health insurance.
"I was completely happy with the insurance I had before," Willes said.
So she was surprised when she tried to renew her policy. What did she find out?
"That my insurance was going to be completely different, and they were going to be replaced with 10 new plans that were going to fall under the regulations of the Affordable Care Act," she said.
Her insurer, Kaiser Permanente, is terminating policies for 160,000 people in California and presenting them with new plans that comply with the healthcare law.
University students in America have been told not to wear "offensive" halloween costumes including cowboys, indians and anything involving a sombrero.
Students at the University of Colorado Boulder have also been told to avoid "white trash" costumes and anything that portrays a particular culture as "over-sexualised"- which the university says includes dressing up as a geisha or a "squaw" (indigenous woman).
They are also asked not to host parties with offensive themes including those with “ghetto” or "hillbilly" themes or those associated with "crime or sex work."In the letter sent by a university official students are asked to consider the impact that their costumes could have.
Christina Gonzales, the dean of students, wrote: "Making the choice to dress up as someone from another culture, either with the intention of being humorous or without the intention of being disrespectful, can lead to inaccurate and hurtful portrayals of other people's cultures.
Responding to widespread criticism regarding its health care website, the federal government today unveiled its new, improved Obamacare program, which allows Americans to purchase health insurance after installing a software bundle contained on 35 floppy disks. “I have heard the complaints about the existing website, and I can assure you that with this revised system, finding the right health care option for you and your family is as easy as loading 35 floppy disks sequentially into your disk drive and following the onscreen prompts,” President Obama told reporters this morning, explaining that the nearly three dozen 3.5-inch diskettes contain all the data needed for individuals to enroll in the Health Insurance Marketplace, while noting that the updated Obamacare software is mouse-compatible and requires a 386 Pentium processor with at least 8 MB of system RAM to function properly.
Throughout the government shutdown, Democrats, who knew Republicans wouldn’t be able to delay Obamacare, routinely said, “It’s settled law.” President Obama was re-elected, they say – though he said almost nothing about Obamacare during the campaign, and what he did say amounted to platitudes he knew were false. And the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional.
The debate was over, progressives crowed. It was going to happen. Soon they will be eating crow, and Republicans have to position themselves smartly and strategically now to make sure that crow is served up to them on a silver platter.
The roll out of Obamacare has been a disaster that makes “New Coke” look like the iPad. The website rarely works, and when it does, it sends incorrect information to insurers. And when young and healthy people do sign up, they discover they’re going to be paying exponentially more for insurance to subsidize premiums for wealthy retirees.
That last one should stick in the craw of everyone under 35. They will be paying thousands of dollars per year more so retirees who technically have no income but own their homes and are living off savings and investments – which don’t count as income when it comes to subsidies for the “poor.” And they will be paying for this until they reach 65 and go on Medicare, at which point still younger people will be subsidizing them.
In short: Obamacare is a massive wealth “spreading” from the young and struggling to the old and well off.
But he adds that "I did not think it would be nutty to tie entitlements to the debt ceiling because there's a massive long-term problem. And this president, despite what he says, has shown time and time again that he needs a gun at his head to negotiate in good faith. All this talk about, 'I won't negotiate with a gun at my head.' OK, you've been president for five years."
His voice rising now, Mr. Druckenmiller pounds his fist on the conference table. "Show me, President Obama, when the period was when you initiated budget discussions without a gun at your head."
Which brings him back to his thieving generation. For three decades until 2010, Mr. Druckenmiller ran the hedge fund he founded, Duquesne Capital. Now retired from managing other people's money, he looks after his own assets, which Forbes magazine recently estimated at $2.9 billion. And he wonders why in five years the massively indebted U.S. government will begin sending him a Social Security check for $3,500 each month. Because he earned it?
"I didn't earn it," he responds, while pointing to a bar chart that is part of his college presentation. Drawing on research by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, it shows the generational wealth transfer that benefits oldsters at the expense of the young.
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations.
That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
One of the great ironies of the Obama presidency is that it has been a disaster for the young people who form the core of his political coalition. High unemployment is paired with exploding debt that they will have to finance whenever they eventually find jobs.
Are the kids finally figuring out that the Obama economy is a lousy deal for them? "No, I don't sense that," says Mr. Druckenmiller, who is a registered independent. "But one of my points is neither party should own your vote. And once they know they own your vote, you're not going to get any action on this particular issue."
I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension.
But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party. All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the “paper” (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).
I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.
One day before Thomas Piccard used an assault rifle and a handgun to pepper Wheeling's Federal Building with more than 20 rounds Wednesday, the retired Wheeling police officer told a neighbor he had been diagnosed with cancer.
Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger identified 55-year-old Piccard as the man who opened fire on the Federal Building at 2:43 p.m. Wednesday, striking and shattering multiple windows before a responding city officer shot and killed him. A motive for the shooting remains unclear.
Robert Orgovan has lived across the street from Piccard at Presidential Estates in Bridgeport since Piccard moved into a mobile home there about a year ago. Orgovan first met him a few years ago, when Piccard was living at Booker T. Washington Apartment on Chapline Street in Wheeling.
PBS host Tavis Smiley isn’t a thrill-up-his-leg cheerleader of President Obama — he’s criticized Obama in the past.But in a chat with Sean Hannity, Smiley doesn’t hold back when asked if black Americans are doing better financially five years into the Obama presidency:“Let me answer your question very forthrightly,” Smiley responds during Thursday’s show. “No, they are not. The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”
California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.
As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.
At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.
Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.
Some of these trends can be found nationwide, but they have become pronounced and are metastasizing more quickly in the Golden State. As late as the 80s, the state was about as egalitarian as the rest of the country. Now, for the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
People like Marilynn Gray-Raine.
The 64-year-old Danville artist, who survived breast cancer, has purchased health insurance for herself for decades. She watched her Anthem Blue Cross monthly premiums rise from $317 in 2005 to $1,298 in 2013. But she found out last week from the Covered California site that her payments will drop to about $795 a month.
But people with no pre-existing conditions like Vinson, a 60-year-old retired teacher, and Waschura, a 52-year-old self-employed engineer, are making up the difference.
"I was laughing at Boehner -- until the mail came today,"
Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
"I really don't like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family's pocket each year, that's otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy."
Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level -- the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn't realize they would rise so much.
"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."
Bob Geldof has claimed that the Earth as we know it could end by 2030 thanks to the ravages of climate change.
The campaigner and former Boomtown Rats singer said the human race could soon be extinct at the One Young World summit in Johannesburg.
"The world can decide in a fit of madness to kill itself," he said, according to the Telegraph. "Sometimes progress may not be possible."
"We're in a very fraught time," he continued, warning the 8,000 international delegates: "There will be a mass extinction event. That could happen on your watch. The signs are that it will happen and soon."
The conference – a networking and debate event for young people from 190 countries – featured speeches from high profile 'counsellors'. Former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan and business mogul Richard Branson also took to the stage, but none appeared to match Mr Geldof for urgency.
Wilmington police today arrested and charged a Pennsylvania man with assault, saying a store’s surveillance video showed him punching a former Marine who was running in the city Wednesday on a cross-country run to draw attention to veterans' issues.
Police confirmed the assault was made “suddenly and without provocation,” offering no motive for the attack on the charity runner.
J. Brendan O’Toole, 26, of Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday night told The News Journal he was running about 3:40 p.m. that day in the area of Sixth and Market streets, greeting those he passed, when he suddenly was slugged in the face and knocked to the ground.
Within hours, the safety ambassadors found a man matching that description sleeping in a doorway in the 100 block of N. Market St., Ivey said.
They contacted police, who took the suspect into custody without incident, he said.
Garry Beauford, 21, of Chester, was charged with second-degree assault and remains in custody tonight at Wilmington Police Headquarters awaiting arraignment, Ivey said.
Wilmington Police Chief Christine Dunning issued a statement praising the officers’ swift investigative action and crediting the cooperative effort of the business community.
“Violence on our streets is unacceptable,” she said. “When we work together, we send the message that it will not be tolerated.”
A high-ranking federal Environmental Protection Agency official who admitted to cheating the government out of nearly $1 million by pretending to be a secret agent, smugly refused to answer questions from lawmakers Tuesday, invoking the Fifth Amendment – even though he’s already pleaded guilty.
John Beale, who got himself a cushy four-day workweek for years by telling his bosses he had a one-day-per-week gig at the CIA, refused to answer even the most basic questions from Rep. Darryl Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Although Issa said his committee hauled Beale, 64, in not to “ridicule” him, but to ensure that the fraud he committed wasn’t being duplicated by other government employees, Beale calmly refused.
“I will be asserting my Fifth Amendment privilege this morning,” Beale, who also lied to superiors about serving in Vietnam, told a visibly frustrated Issa.
Beale’s trickery, which began more than a decade ago, cost taxpayers an estimated $886,000, much of it in the form of unearned pay over some 13 years. Under his plea agreement, he must pay that money back, as well as an additional $507,000, and serve 30-37 months in prison. His lawyer told the panel that his plea agreement did not require him to cooperate with lawmakers, though Issa said he would seek to make it a condition of acceptance of the plea and sentencing by U.S. District Judge Ellen Segel Huvelle.
Greece's jobless rate rose to 27.9 percent in June from 27.6 percent in May, reflecting the impact of a six-year, austerity-fuelled recession, the country's statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday.
The reading was more than twice the euro zone's average of 12.1 percent in July, and the highest since ELSTAT began publishing jobless data in 2006.
Two alleged home burglars picked the wrong Gwinnett County house to break into Thursday morning. Not only was the homeowner inside, but he was armed with a gun, police said.
Around 11 a.m., the homeowner, whose name was not released, called 911 to report that two suspects were attempting to break into his home, according to Cpl. Jake Smith with Gwinnett police. Moments later, while the homeowner was still on the phone with 911, one of the suspects forced his way into the home through a window, Smith said.
“The homeowner retrieved a handgun and fired at the suspect, striking him,” Smith said in an emailed statement. “Both suspects retreated to a black passenger car and fled the scene.”
By the time officers arrived, the two suspects were gone. But around 11:30 a.m., officials at the Gwinnett Medical Center, Duluth campus, told police a man matching the description of a suspect had entered the hospital wounded, Smith said.
The injured suspect, Tajh Guillont, 22, was taken to surgery in serious condition. His condition was not known late Thursday.
For better or worse, a truism of American politics is that voters vote their pocketbooks. Yet according to a new report on median household incomes by Sentier Research, in 2012 millions of American voters apparently cast ballots contrary to their economic self-interest.
Each month the consultants at Sentier analyze the numbers from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and estimate the trend in median annual household income adjusted for inflation. On Aug. 21, Sentier released "Household Income on the Fourth Anniversary of the Economic Recovery: June 2009 to June 2013." The finding that grabbed headlines was that real median household income "has fallen by 4.4 percent since the 'economic recovery' began in June 2009." In dollar terms, median household income fell to $52,098 from $54,478, a loss of $2,380.
What was largely overlooked, however, is that those who were most likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 were members of demographic groups most likely to have suffered the steepest income declines. Mr. Obama was re-elected with 51% of the vote. Five demographic groups were crucial to his victory: young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics. He cleaned up with 60% of the youth vote, 67% of single women, 93% of blacks, 71% of Hispanics, and 64% of those without a high-school diploma, according to exit polls.
According to the Sentier research, households headed by single women, with and without children present, saw their incomes fall by roughly 7%. Those under age 25 experienced an income decline of 9.6%. Black heads of households saw their income tumble by 10.9%, while Hispanic heads-of-households' income fell 4.5%, slightly more than the national average. The incomes of workers with a high-school diploma or less fell by about 8% (-6.9% for those with less than a high-school diploma and -9.3% for those with only a high-school diploma).
North Carolina Republican lawmakers cracking down on voter fraud have been getting the Texas-treatment lately from liberal mouthpieces who see racism under their beds at night, but an election case out of the college town of Winston-Salem puts things in a different light.
A city council race is spurring complaints that a Democrat candidate is getting help from a professor and college students at a historically black university who are casting votes without being legal residents.
Is Rachel Maddow crying racism here?
Is The Nation putting it on its cover?
No.
The griping is coming from black Democrats, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
According to complaints filed with Winston-Salem State University, political science professor Larry Little let a candidate for re-election to the Winston-Salem City Council speak to his class last week, then let students out of class so they could go to an early voting site to cast Democrat primary votes, in transportation arranged by the councilman
That councilman was a former student, who won his first term in 2009 when the professor was his campaign manager. The pair defeated a long-time Democrat councilwoman in a low-turnout primary where student votes made the difference.
All that sounds too chummy even for other Winston-Salem Democrats, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
The historically black university has appointed a committee to investigate Little’s behavior, but the fact that its three members includes the university’s director of public relations tells you this is being treated more as a black eye to the campus than a case of the kind of electoral fraud North Carolina Republicans say they’re trying to stamp out.
Some students toted lunchboxes to the first day of school in Boston this week, but district administrators are expecting that could become a more unusual sight as parents learn about a federal program that is now providing all public school students in the city with free breakfast and lunch.
The nation's oldest school system has joined a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that has spread to 10 states and the District of Columbia that offers students two free meals every school day, whether or not their families can afford them.
"It's one less weight and one less burden for parents," said Joshua Rivera, whose son is a second-grader at the Maurice J. Tobin School in Boston's Roxbury section.
Known as Community Eligibility Option, the program is part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. For schools to qualify, federal officials said, more than 40 percent of students have to be getting food stamps or aid through certain other federal assistance programs.
Besides easing hunger, school officials said, the program eliminates the expense and time of handling paperwork for students who qualify for reduced or free meals and also helps erase a stigma that plagued some students from poor families.
There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.
In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.
A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.
If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after it was predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013.
Despite the original forecasts, major climate research centres now accept that there has been a “pause” in global warming since 1997.
The streak is still alive.
The city of Newark continued its awe-inspiring murder streak Thursday evening with its tenth homicide in as many days. A 14-year old boy, Ali Rajohn Eric Henderson, was gunned down in the courtyard area of Riverview Terrace Housing Complex. Heroin and weapons were reportedly found in Henderson’s bedroom.
It looked like a close call Thursday as to whether Newark would be able to continue its recent streak of nine murders in nine days or would drop below its 1.0 per day murder rate for the ten-day period, but the city, as always, rose to the occasion, hitting double-digits.
The NYPD says thugs are beating and mugging bike riders on a popular Manhattan bike path.
The victim of one attack recently came forward to tell fellow riders to be on guard, CBS 2’s Don Champion reported Tuesday.
The bike path along the Hudson River is popular with New Jersey bikers who take the route and cross the George Washington Bridge to get home at night in the dark.
One victim told Champion he’s always on guard, but was not expecting what he got when he turned one corner.
“It’s a little surreal,” said Keith Cho, who had one eye swollen shut. “It was very traumatic. I’ve never been jumped before.”
A rope mark burned into his neck detailed the reason behind Cho’s newfound sense of insecurity.
