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29 Dec 2010 21:53

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U.S.: Michael Bloomberg: Sorry about NYC’s crappy 911 service, guys

  • My heart really does go out to those who experienced trauma and tragedy during the storm. We take our emergency life-saving responsibilities very seriously and I’m extremely dissatisfied with the way our emergency-response systems performed.
  • New York mayor Michael Bloomberg • Expressing remorse about the crappy 911 service in NYC over the last couple of days due to the snow, which is leaving quite the mark on his reign. Multiple people died due to lacking and downright unavailable service, and over 1,700 911 calls went unanswered on Monday night and were stuck in a massive backlog. But the call volume itself was something else on Monday – 49,400 calls, the sixth-highest volume the emergency line has received in New York history. What happened, Mikey? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

19 Dec 2010 12:10

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Politics: Kirsten Gillibrand: 9/11 first responders’ health bill still on table

  • We have the votes we need. We have indications from several Republicans that they very much want to vote for this bill.
  • Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand • Revealing her hopes of resurrecting the 9/11 first responders’ health care bill before Christmas – this time with GOP support. If this does in fact happen (Gillibrand suggests that they’ve found ways to pay for the bill, which was the main sticking point for the GOP), we think that it will be to Jon Stewart’s credit that this happened, because his cheerleading of this bill kept it on the front-burner even when it looked like it was relegated to the back-burner. Fingers crossed that the $7.4 billion bill passes. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

24 Nov 2010 00:13

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U.S.: FCC chairman agrees with texters: “911 IS A JOKE LOL WTF”

  • The Virginia Tech campus shootings in 2007 are a tragic, real-life reminder of the technological limitations that 911 is now saddled with. Some students and witnesses tried to text 911 during that emergency and as we know, those messages never went through and were never received by local 911 dispatchers.
  • Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski • Evoking the 2007 Virginia Tech school shooting to explain why 911 needs a texting function. 911, a system around in its current form since 1968. And it’s one that hasn’t kept up with the fast pace of technology, either with mobile phones (which are now the primary source of 911 calls) or broadband technology: “Many 911 call centers don’t even have broadband, and some are in communities where broadband isn’t even available,” Genachowski said. “That is unacceptable.” All this stuff is on the list for things to improve thanks to the stimulus plan, by the way. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 Sep 2010 20:27

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World: Three crazy things Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at the UN today

  • one9/11 took place in part “to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime.”
  • twoAhmadinejad says “The majority of the American people as well as most nations and politicians around the world agree with this view.”
  • three“It was carried out by a terrorist group but that the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.” source
  • » The craziest part?: Ahmadinejad said these things one right after the other, in succession. For understandable reasons, the U.S. and a few other countries walked out on him. What a tactless scumbag, what with his conspiracy theories and all.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 3 Comments • Permalink

11 Sep 2010 10:44

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U.S.: Nine years later: Politics kept out of 9/11 remembrance ceremony

Suggestion to everybody: Keep the politics out of it today, just like they did. Nobody wants to hear about it. We’re personally collectively sick of it. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

17 Aug 2010 11:00

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U.S.: Desk cleanout find: Government misses 9/11 interrogation tape

  • no The CIA has claimed that they didn’t have any interrogation tapes of 9/11 plotters, and that they were destroyed.
  • but Apparently, that’s not true; they managed to find one just hanging out under some bureaucrat’s desk. Heckuva job. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Jun 2010 20:52

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Tech: The root of Google’s new Caffeine engine: 9/11. No, really

  • The onslaught of news readers that day made them emphasize immediacy. Remember September 11, 2001? We still had the Internet, yeah, but our search engines were super-primitive back then. So when people looked up news on Google, stories weren’t updated. Eventually, Google started caching sites like CNN to offset this, but it taught them a long-term lesson. “That was a real wake-up call, where we said we have to pay a lot of attention to freshness,” said Matt Cutts of Google’s spam team. “We knew that before, but we thought 30 days was pretty good.” Which led the the development of Google News, and later, Caffeine. Now, what was once updated monthly is now thrown up immediately. Neat, huh? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

14 Apr 2010 11:00

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U.S.: Most building materials don’t have homecomings. This steel is different.

  • 1969 Large amounts of steel leave a Pennsylvania factory, to be used in a massive New York City building.
  • 2010 Those chunks of steel, remnants of the World Trade Center, return to the factory today. Sigh. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Mar 2010 20:42

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U.S.: Thousands of Ground Zero cleanup workers get insurance settlement

  • 10k number of defendants in the World Trade Center cleanup case; they claimed the cleanup damaged their health
  • $657M the amount defendants will get in a settlement;
    the money will come
    from a $1.1 billion
    insurance fund
  • $65k the amount that sum means for each defendant (not counting lawyer fees and other costs, of course) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Mar 2010 23:38

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Biz: 911 cell phone caller: “HELP! MY PRIUS WON’T STOP!”

  • Police had to help them stop their vehicle. Everyone’s favorite barrel fish to shoot, the broken Toyota accelerator, reared its ugly head again tonight when someone in one of the hybrids could not stop their vehicle, at one point going as fast as 94 miles an hour. While the Prius in the past hasn’t suffered from the sticking pedal problems that Toyota’s other cars do, it does suffer from braking system issues (the 2010 model), along with a gas pedal that can get caught in the floor mat (the 2004-2009 models). source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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