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Boston Globe
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
When and where to celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month 2025 in New Hampshire
Thursday, June 5: Keene Pride's Sunday, June 8: Friday, June 13: Lebanon Opera House's Pride Saturday, June 14: Advertisement Sunday, June 15: New London's Tuesday, June 17: Saturday, June 21: Saturday, June 28: Open to celebrating later this year? This article first appeared in Globe NH | Morning Report, our free newsletter focused on the news you need to know about New Hampshire, including great coverage from the Boston Globe and links to interesting articles from other places. If you'd like to receive it via e-mail Monday through Friday, Advertisement Steven Porter can be reached at
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Boy who overcame traumatic lawnmower injury graduates high school
NEW LONDON, Wis. (WFRV) – A traumatic lawnmower injury couldn't stop Brandon Rudie from persevering and accomplishing amazing things. On Wednesday night, he walked the stage at New London High School graduating with his classmates. His parents said it was very emotional seeing him graduate given all he's been through during his life. 'There are no words,' said Brandon's father Scott. 'He never stops amazing me. His resilience and will to succeed.' When Brandon was two years old his parents said he was riding in a cart behind a lawnmower. They said he accidentally fell off landing underneath the blade of the mower. He suffered major injuries to the left side of his face that required 31 surgeries across 10 years. United States Department of Education opens disability discrimination investigation into Green Bay Area Public School District Brandon said he doesn't have any recollection of the accident. 'Every time he bounced back, no problem,' Scott said. 'It was like this kid is something else I couldn't believe it. It is very humbling as a parent to see your child so strong. Perseverance, he gives it new meaning.' When Brandon was 13, his parents said they were surprised when he approached them wanting to start his own business. After a trial period when he tested things out and showed he could handle the workload, he launched his own lawn care, landscaping, and snow removal business. He named it 'Brandon and Scott Services LLC.' Local 5 meteorologists celebrate Weather Day at the Ballpark with Fond du Lac Dock Spiders 'Well I knew I wanted to make some money and that I didn't want to work a typical nine to five,' Brandon told Local 5 News. 'I wanted to do something I was good at. I used to cut the lawn back in Dale (when his family used to live there) so I decided to start cutting people's lawns.' Brandon has turned the machine that caused him so much pain as a young child into something that has helped him build his career. He said he looks forward to the days after graduation when he can focus solely on his business instead of balancing that with homework and school Brandon continues to accomplish big things demonstrating the power of resilience. 'You got to be able to persevere, if you give up the world doesn't meet you halfway,' he told Local 5 News. 'You're going to have your good times and your bad times and when you have the bad times you got to keep going.' 'It's going to be emotional (seeing him cross the stage at graduation) because like I said we could have lost him that evening when he got hurt,' Scott told Local 5 News. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CTV News
23-05-2025
- Sport
- CTV News
Trump's Harvard visa threat could wipe out several of the school's sports teams
Members of Yale crew, left, and Harvard crew, right, greet one another after the four-mile course along the Thames River for the 146th Harvard-Yale Regatta, in New London, Conn., Saturday, May 28, 2011. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Judge Orders Rhode Island Town To Return Secretly Seized Land to Affordable Housing Developer
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's stories include: The federal government is trying one last time to weasel out of paying landlords for its illegal eviction moratorium. The U.S. Supreme Court decides not to take up another eminent domain case out of New York that could have overturned the infamous Kelo v. New London. The Arizona and Texas senates pass starter home bills. But first, our lead item on a Rhode Island town being told to give back land it had stealthily seized from an affordable housing developer. Last Tuesday, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order requiring the town of Johnston to return the title of a 31-acre property it had quietly seized to its original owners, two LLCs collectively owned by the Santoro family. The temporary restraining order also blocks the town, its mayor, and the town council from taking any action to take control of the property or prevent the Santoro family from accessing it. As this newsletter covered last week, the town government has been attempting to seize the Santoro family's property ever since they filed an application to build a 254-unit affordable housing project on the land. Beginning in January, the town has passed a series of resolutions asserting that it needs the land for a new "municipal campus" that would replace Johnston's existing, dilapidated town hall and police and fire stations. The Santoro family challenged the seizure in federal court, arguing that the town's "municipal campus" is a sham project invented to stop the family from proceeding with their planned development. The family's unsubsidized project was made possible by a state law that allows developers to override local density restrictions when building low- and moderate-income housing. Shortly after the family filed their federal lawsuit, the town quietly transferred the property over to themselves—without notifying the owners or their lawyers. The family only learned of the seizure after the mayor tweeted about it and the town's lawyer sent them a letter ordering them to vacate the property or risk a citation for trespassing. "In 40 years, I've seen some pretty outrageous exercises of eminent domain powers. Never anything like this," Robert Thomas, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), who is representing the Santoro family, told Reason last week. The Tuesday-issued retaining order blocks the attempted seizure of the Santoro family's land until the judge has had time to consider the family's request for a preliminary injunction. The federal government is making one last-ditch effort to avoid paying out potentially billions of dollars to cover the damage caused by its illegal pandemic-era eviction moratorium. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to consider whether an eviction moratorium first issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in September 2020 constituted a taking of landlords' property requiring compensation from the federal government. With that request, the DOJ is hoping to overturn an August 2024 decision made by a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit, which found that the federal government, by banning landlords from removing tenants for non-payment of rent, had physically taken their property and was liable for the damages. That decision came in the case of Darby Development Co. v. United States, a class action lawsuit first brought by landlords back in July 2021. A month after the Darby case was first filed, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the CDC's moratorium, saying that the agency had acted well outside its authority when issuing the eviction ban. With its August 2024 ruling, the three-judge panel sent the Darby case back down to the Federal Claims Court to tally up the damages, which will be substantial. The plaintiffs in Darby are asking for $23 billion. "If you break it, you pay for it. They caused enormous harm," says John McDermott, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Darby case. While the deadline to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court has passed, the DOJ is hoping that the full Federal Circuit might overturn the panel's decision and remove the massive liability facing the federal government. The DOJ finds itself in an awkward position vis-à-vis the rental housing industry. Back in January, at the same time it was asking the Federal Circuit to hear the Darby case, it also added six large property management companies as co-defendants in its ongoing antitrust lawsuit against real estate software provider RealPage. The government alleges that RealPage's rent recommendation software, which uses proprietary data from landlords to recommend profit-maximizing rental rates, was facilitating an illegal price-setting cartel among rental property owners. (Read the economic case against this idea here.) The DOJ's decision to also sue RealPage's larger customers means that all its customers, and even its competitors' customers, could also be sued for anti-trust violations. In effect, the government could end up owing the rental property industry billions of dollars in the Darby case while reclaiming a much smaller amount from the industry from its antitrust litigation. (The largest fine the DOJ's Antitrust Division lists having recovered on its website is $925 million.) McDermott says it would make sense for the federal government to resolve both cases by reaching some sort of grand settlement with the rental property industry. But apparent chaos within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is preventing the federal government from coming to the table. He says that his counterpart in the DOJ's Civil Division, which is defending the government in the Darby case, expressed total ignorance of the RealPage case, which is being prosecuted by the DOJ's Antitrust Division. "Within the Justice Department, no one is talking to each other. They're either scrambling to keep their jobs or they are so overwhelmed by litigation" challenging President Donald Trump's executive orders, he tells Reason. Plaintiffs in the Darby have until April 11 to file a response to the government's request for the full Federal Circuit to hear the case. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a new eminent domain case out of New York. In Bowers Development, LLC v. Oneida County Industrial Development Agency (OCIDA), two developers in Utica, New York, challenged the county agency's seizure of a property where they'd planned to build a medical office building. In their lawsuit, the developers argued the county's reason for seizing their land—to give it to an existing medical office next door to use as a parking lot—didn't meet the constitutional requirement that the government only seize land for a "public use." In their petition to the Supreme Court, the developers were asking the court to reconsider their infamous 2005 decision in Kelo v. New London, in which a narrow 5–4 majority found forcibly transferring property from one private party to another for the purposes of economic development satisfied that public use requirement. The decision was hugely controversial at the time. It sparked an anti-eminent domain backlash that saw states pass laws and update their constitutions to limit Kelo-like economic development seizures. Nevertheless, the Kelo decision is still on the books and still leaving property owners exposed in states like New York, which never did put their own limits on economic development seizures. "The Court declined this opportunity to restore some basic protections for American property rights, but it will have to confront this question eventually," said Robert McNamara, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which represented the developers in the Bowers case (and which had also challenged the government's seizure in the Kelo case). "Eminent domain abuse continues to run rampant in New York and some other states that have refused to change their laws, and it will not stop until federal courts return to enforcing the Constitution." The Texas and Arizona senates have both passed similar bills aimed at making new small-lot "starter homes" easier to build. On Wednesday, the Texas Senate voted 29–2 to pass Senate Bill 15, which prevents local governments from requiring homes in new single-family subdivisions of five acres or more to sit on lots larger than 1,400 square feet. Additionally, the bill prevents local governments from requiring more than one parking space per home on "small lots" of 4,000 square feet or less. The bill would only apply to municipalities with a population of 150,000 or more in counties with a population of 300,000 or more. Proponents say S.B. 15 will ease Texas' growth pressures by enabling more affordable greenfield townhome development in larger communities. People are making similar arguments in favor of Arizona's Senate Bill 1229, which passed out of that state's Senate via a narrower 16–13 vote in early March. Like the Texas bill, S.B. 1229 would cap the minimum lot sizes local governments could require in new five-acre single-family subdivisions. The original version of Arizona's S.B. 1229 would have preempted local minimum lot sizes of 1,500 square feet. A successful amendment authored by Sen. Shawnna Bolick (R–Phoenix), the bill's primary sponsor, weakened this provision to preempt minimum lot sizes of 3,000 square feet or more. Unlike the Texas bill, S.B. 1229 also bars local governments from regulating the aesthetic design of new homes or requiring shared amenities that might necessitate a homeowner's association. Both the Texas and Arizona bills have created unusual bipartisan coalitions. In Texas, S.B. 15 was labeled a priority bill by conservative Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has called out local regulation for "stifling our housing supply, rendering our communities unable to meet present and future growth." It also received support from almost all of the chamber's 11 Democrats. While Arizona's S.B. 1229 prime sponsor is Bolick, its co-sponsors include Sen. Analise Ortiz (D–Glendale), a progressive Democrat, who has aggressively championed the bill. Having passed their respective senates, both the Texas and Arizona bills will now be considered by their Houses of Representatives. The New Hampshire Senate passed a less ambitious minimum lot size reform bill that caps single-family minimum lot size requirements at 88,000 square feet, or 22,000 square feet if serviced by community sewer infrastructure. The New York Times has a new piece on the bipartisan backlash against the California Coastal Commission's awesome development-stopping powers. The Times story frames this as a class warfare story, writing that "by design, the [Coastal Commission] rejects the desires of some of the world's wealthiest and most influential people." Maybe so, but it also frequently rejects the desires of much less well-off people trying to build basically anything near the seashore. City Journal has a new article on Maui's snail-paced rebuilding effort following 2023's deadly wildfires and some of the local political dynamics that make speeding things up exceedingly difficult. Read Reason's coverage of the island's rebuilding efforts from January. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has waived city requirements that demolished "protected units" (i.e. rent-controlled units, deed-restricted affordable housing, and homes occupied by low-income tenants within the past five years) be rebuilt as low-income housing for wildfire rebuild projects. Bass' order mirrors Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order waiving near-identical state-level unit replacement requirements in Los Angeles. Developers had expressed concern that requiring burned-down units to be rebuilt as below-market-rate units would be a huge tax on rebuilding efforts. As Reason reported back in February, Newsom's waiver was toothless so long as the city's near-identical rules remained in effect. Bass has now added the needed teeth by waving the city rules too. Speaking of Los Angeles, the city has issued the first home rebuilding permits some three months after January's devastating fires. The post Judge Orders Rhode Island Town To Return Secretly Seized Land to Affordable Housing Developer appeared first on
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity To Correct Its Kelo Eminent Domain Error
One of the U.S. Supreme Court may soon overturn one of its worst decisions in recent memory—a ruling that justified government stealing property from its owners to pass it to better-connected private parties. On Friday, the court will decide whether to consider a New York case that could upset the precedents set by Kelo v. New London, an eminent domain battle that prompted books, a movie, and state-level legal reforms. While Kelo was a loss for anybody who wants to set boundaries around government power, the court could take the opportunity this week to set things right with Bowers v. Oneida County Industrial Development Agency. In dissenting to the majority's 2005 decision in Kelo allowing the taking of a house owned by Susette Kelo by the city government of New London, Connecticut to transfer it to a favored developer, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor quoted Calder v. Bull (1798): "[A] law that takes property from A. and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it." "Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power," O'Connor added. "Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded—i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public—in the process." That dissent was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Also agreeing with the dissenters were a great many Americans horrified that the Supreme Court had signed off on the confiscation of private property so long as a potential new owner could show spiffy plans for the confiscated parcels and promise greater tax revenue. It wouldn't even have to be a fulfilled promise—Susette Kelo's house remained undeveloped when financing for the project fell through. The response to Kelo included books, a movie—Little Pink House—and a wave of state-level court decisions and legislative efforts intended to rein-in the abuse of eminent domain. "Since Kelo v. New London, 47 states have strengthened their protections against eminent domain abuse, either through legislation or state supreme court decisions," notes the Institute for Justice (I.J.). Of course, not all the reforms were created equal. I.J. grades the various efforts, with states like Florida getting an "A" grade and Connecticut—where the Kelo case occurred—lagging with a "D." A 2009 study found that "states with more economic freedom, greater value of new housing construction, and less racial and income inequality are more likely to have enacted stronger restrictions, and sooner" on eminent domain. And then there's New York. I.J. gives that state an "F" because it failed to even attempt reform. In 2009, that state's highest court conceded "it may be that the bar has now been set too low" as it approved seizure of private property for redevelopment. "But any such limitation upon the sovereign power of eminent domain as it has come to be defined in the urban renewal context is a matter for the Legislature, not the courts." The legislature never acted. So, it's no surprise that Bowers v. Oneida County Industrial Development Agency comes from the Empire State. Nor is it a surprise that the circumstances seem so familiar. "Bryan Bowers and his business partner Mike Licata purchased property across the street from a new hospital in Utica, New York," according to Andrew Wimer of I.J., which represents the plaintiffs in the case. "The property was taken through eminent domain by the Oneida County Industrial Development Agency (OCIDA) and given to their potential competitors to be used for parking." That is, local officials used eminent domain to favor one private party over another in a raw case of crony capitalism that violated private property rights and free market principles. In arguing for the Supreme Court to take the case, Bowers and I.J. point out that "lower courts disagree about how to implement Kelo's caveats about development plans and identified private beneficiaries. The result…is a patchwork of conflicting rules." In particular, they say, New York applies minimal scrutiny to eminent domain cases even when the grounds for seizing property are obviously bogus. "New York's courts have long held that evidence of pretext is legally irrelevant in takings cases." Bowers and company also urge the court to "consider whether Kelo should be overturned" given that four justices have publicly called for reconsidering or overturning that decision. In an amicus brief filed in support of Bowers, the Cato Institute and Ilya Somin of George Mason University explicitly argue that the Supreme Court "should overrule Kelo because it is deeply at odds with the text and original meaning of the Public Use Clause and is also marred by other errors." Emphasizing America's strong history of respect for private property, they argue that "an interpretation of the Public Use Clause that gives government a near-blank check to take property for transfer to private parties is deeply at odds with this commitment to the protection of property rights." Ironically, while establishment defenders of the powers-that-be cheered the Kelo decision—The New York Times editorialized that it was "a welcome vindication of cities' ability to act in the public interest"—it so shocked Americans that it breathed new life into efforts to restrain government's ability to seize homes, businesses, and land. Far from the "setback to the 'property rights' movement" that the Times' editorial board celebrated in 2005, it reignited interest in protecting private property. That revived interest resulted in reforms to eminent domain in many states and localities. It alerted the public that takings of private property are often corrupt, performed by politicians to reward friends and allies. And it reminded us that property rights are inextricable from other protections for our liberty. "The Court has elsewhere recognized 'the overriding respect for the sanctity of the home that has been embedded in our traditions since the origins of the Republic,'" Justice Thomas commented in his own dissent to Kelo. "Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not." On Friday, March 21, the Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether to hear Bowers' case—and potentially to reconsider the mistake it made with Kelo. The post The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity To Correct Its Kelo Eminent Domain Error appeared first on
