By Posted: Friday, October 25, 2013 11:00 am
Whether it's an allergic reaction to a bee sting, an intruder or inclement weather, Karen Evans says the Richardson Technology Systems' security program can handle it.
Evans designed the technology the Floyd County Board of Education is looking to implement in the near future. On Thursday at Pepperell Elementary, Evans demonstrated how the security system works and said a pilot program would be fully installed at the school soon.
The work would be funded through an education local option sales tax, or ELOST, if voters approve it on Nov. 5.
Floyd County Schools' share of the tax would be $46.5 million with $3,295,000 allocated for security upgrades. The bulk of the proposed sales tax would build a new Coosa High School for an estimated $32 million.
Evans explained that with the push of a button from a computer, a smartphone or any device that can tap into their software, a school can be placed in lockdown and communication can begin between school officials, teachers, officers and as many others as the Floyd County Schools need.
"It's real time information at your fingertips instantly," she said.
A teacher can quickly provide updates concerning what's happening in the classroom, Evans said.
For example, a teacher with a problem can make the status of the classroom switch from green for okay to red for a serious problem on a computer screen. That information is instantly accessible to resource officers, school administration, and anyone else who needs to be alerted.
Sam Sprewell, Floyd County Schools chief of operations, said this system would allow Floyd County Schools to identify a problem and control who comes in and out of the school.
"This gives us the ability to do everything we want to do," he said. "This is a comprehensive plan."
Marcus Roberts, the resource officer for all Pepperell schools, said he IS interested in the new technology, noting the map system, which allows him to see where and what is going on from his phone.
"I think it's a pretty good system," he said. "It would be nice to know where a problem is before I get there."
- Discuss
Posted in Education, Local on Friday, October 25, 2013 11:00 am. | Tags: Security System
- Malaysia says search to shift to smaller area
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Malaysia said Tuesday that it has narrowed the search for a downed jetliner to an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma in the southern Indian Ocean, while Australia said improved weather would allow the hunt for possible debris from the plane to resume.
The comments from Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein came a day after the country's prime minister announced that a new analysis of satellite data confirmed the plane had crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 aboard.
But the searchers will face a daunting task of combing a vast expanse of choppy seas for suspected remnants of the aircraft sighted earlier.
"We're not searching for a needle in a haystack - we're still trying to define where the haystack is," Australia's deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in Perth, Australia, as idled planes stood behind him.
There had been two corridors - based on rough satellite data - for the search. Hishammuddin said operations had been halted in the northern corridor that swept up from Malaysia toward Central Asia, as well as in the northern section of the southern corridor that arches down from Malaysia toward Antarctica.
That still leaves a large area of 1.6 million square kilometers (622,000 square miles), but just 20 percent of the area that was previously being searched.
In remarks to the Malaysian Parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Najib Razak cautioned that the search will take a long time and "we will have to face unexpected and extraordinary challenges."
Late Monday, Najib announced that the Boeing 777 had gone down in the sea with no survivors. That's all that investigators and the Malaysian government have been able to say with certainty about Flight 370's fate since it disappeared on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
Left unanswered are many troubling questions about why it was so far off course. Experts piecing together radar and satellite data believe the plane back-tracked over Malaysia and then traveled in the opposite direction to the Indian Ocean.
Investigators will be looking at various possibilities including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.
"We do not know why. We do not know how. We do not know how the terrible tragedy happened," the airline's chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, told reporters.
Najib's announcement set off a storm of anguish and anger among the families of the passengers and crew - two-thirds of them Chinese.
Nearly 100 relatives and their supporters marched to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing, where they threw plastic water bottles, tried to rush the gate and chanted, "Liars!"
Many wore white T-shirts that read "Let's pray for MH370" as they held banners and shouted, "Tell the truth! Return our relatives!"
President Xi Jinping ordered a special envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, to Kuala Lumpur to deal with the case, and Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia's ambassador that China wanted to know exactly what led Najib to announce that the plane had been lost, a statement on the ministry's website said.
Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof said at a news conference Tuesday that it may take time for further answers to become clear.
"This has been an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response," he said. "The investigation still underway may yet prove to be even longer and more complex than it has been since March 8th."
He added that even though no wreckage has been found, there was no doubt it had crashed.
"This by the evidence given to us, and by rational deduction, we could only arrive at that conclusion: That is, for Malaysia Airlines to declare that it has lost its plane, and by extension, the people in the plane," he said.
The conclusions were based on a thorough analysis of the brief signals the plane sent every hour to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat, a British company, even after other communication systems on the jetliner shut down for unknown reasons.
The latest satellite information does not provide an exact location but just a rough estimate of where the jet crashed into the sea.
Hishammuddin said the data is still being analyzed "to attempt to determine the final position of the aircraft" and that an international working group of satellite and aircraft performance experts had been set up. He did not give any details.
Although there have been an increasing number of apparent leads, there has been no confirmed identification of any debris.
"A visual search will resume tomorrow when the weather is expected to improve after gale force winds and heavy swells resulted in the suspension of the search operation on Tuesday," said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is overseeing the search out of Perth, Australia.
There is a race against the clock to find any trace of the plane that could lead searchers to the black boxes, whose battery-powered "pinger" could stop sending signals within two more weeks. The batteries are designed to last at least a month.
Several countries have begun moving specialized equipment into the area to prepare for a search for the plane and its black boxes, the common name for the cockpit voice and data recorders, needed to help determine what happened to the jetliner.
Hishammuddin said a U.S. Navy deep-sea black box locator was on its way to Australia and would be installed on an Australian navy support vessel, the Ocean Shield, that is expected to arrive in several days. It is not expected to reach the search area until April 5.
There are 26 countries involved the search, and Hishammudin said the problems now facing the hunt to recover Flight 370 are not diplomatic "but technical and logistical."
The U.S. Navy has also sent an unmanned underwater vehicle to Perth that could be used if debris is located, said Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he had spoken to Najib to offer help with the ongoing search and investigation.
"What up until now has been a search, moves into a recovery and investigation phase," Abbott said. "I have offered Malaysia, as the country legally responsible for this, every assistance and cooperation from Australia."
The search for the wreckage and the plane's recorders could take years because the ocean is up to 7,000 meters (23,000 feet) deep in some parts. It took two years to find the black box from an Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, and searchers knew within days where the crash site was.
"We've got to get lucky," said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. "It's a race to get to the area in time to catch the black box pinger while it's still working."
___
Associated Press writers Todd Pitman in Kuala Lumpur; Christopher Bodeen, Ian Mader, Aritz Parra and Didi Tang in Beijing; Cassandra Vinograd in London; Darlene Superville in Washington; and Kristen Gelineau in Sydney and Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, contributed to this report.
EILEEN NG, Associated Press SCOTT McDONALD, Associated Press
Posted: March 25, 2014
- US stocks open higher after a two-day slump
NEW YORK (AP) - Stocks are opening higher on Wall Street as the market shrugs off a two-day decline.
Posted: March 25, 2014
- US stocks open higher after a two-day slump
NEW YORK (AP) - Stocks are opening higher on Wall Street as the market shrugs off a two-day decline.
Posted: March 25, 2014
- 'It's gone.' Community copes with deadly mudslide
OSO, Wash. (AP) - First there was a "whoosh." Elaine Young said she thought it might be a chimney fire, a rush of air that lasted about 45 seconds. But when she stepped outside there was ominous silence. Something felt very, very wrong.
And then she saw it. Behind the house, a suffocating wall of heavy mud had crashed through the neighborhood.
Dark and sticky, the mile-long flow Saturday heaved houses off their foundations, toppled trees and left a gaping cavity on what had been a tree-covered hillside. In the frantic rescue, searchers spotted mud-covered survivors by the whites of their waving palms.
Now, days into the search, the scale of the mudslide's devastation in a rural village north of Seattle is becoming apparent. At least 14 people are confirmed dead, dozens more are thought to be unaccounted for or missing, and about 30 homes are destroyed.
"We found a guy right here," shouted a rescuer Monday afternoon behind Young's home, after a golden retriever search dog found a corpse pinned under a pile of fallen trees. Searchers put a bag over the body, tied an orange ribbon on a branch to mark the site, and the crew moved on.
It had been stormy for weeks, but warm sunshine offered a false sense of peace Saturday morning as weekend visitors settled into their vacation homes and locals slept in. Then came "a giant slump," said David Montgomery, an earth and space sciences professor at the University of Washington, describing the deep-seated slide resulting from long-term, heavy rainfall.
A scientist who documented the landslide conditions on the hillside that buckled had warned in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of "the potential for a large catastrophic failure," The Seattle Times reported late Monday.
That report was written by geomorphologist Daniel J. Miller and his wife, Lynne Rodgers Miller, The Times said (http://is.gd/yodBQx). "We've known it would happen at some point," Daniel Miller told the newspaper.
Snohomish County Executive John Lovick and Public Works Director Steve Thomsen said Monday night they were not aware of the 1999 report. "A slide of this magnitude is very difficult to predict," Thomsen told The Times. "There was no indication, no indication at all."
Within hours of the mudslide, emergency crews were searching for life in a post-apocalyptic scene, dodging chunks of splintered birch trunks, half-buried pickup trucks and growing pools of water from the now-blocked Stillaguamish River.
Ed Hrivnak, who was co-piloting an aircraft that was first to arrive at the scene, said a lot of the houses weren't buried. When they got hit, "the houses exploded." He said cars were crushed into little pieces, their tires the only signs that they had been vehicles.
He said he saw people so thoroughly covered in mud that searchers could only spot them by the whites of their waving palms. His helicopter rescued eight people, including a 4-year-old boy, who was up to his knees in concretelike compressed mud.
The mud was so sticky, the rescuers were worried about getting stuck so the helicopter hovered about a foot away and the crew chief tried to pull him out. "He was suctioned in that mud so much that his pants came off," Hrivnak said.
The boy was taken to a hospital and was reunited with his mom. Hrivnak said the boy's father and three siblings are still missing.
Friends and families immediately launched their own rescue missions.
Elaine and her husband, Don Young, picking their way through the devastation, heard tapping, a steady beat. They got closer and realized it was coming from their neighbors' buckled home.
Trapped in an air pocket, Gary "Mac" McPherson, 78, was banging away for help with a loose stick. The Youngs managed to pull him out, but family members said his wife, Linda McPherson, 69, a former librarian and school board member, did not survive.
Rescuers racing in fire trucks and ambulances screeched to a stop at the edge of the mile-square wasteland. Somewhere, someone was crying for help. When a team of firefighters waded chest-deep into the mud, they had to be rescued themselves, and the ground search was suspended overnight Saturday, with the death toll at three.
On Sunday, after geologists deemed the area stable enough to re-enter, another five bodies were found. By Monday, when another six corpses were located, exhaustion and despair were overtaking the early adrenaline and alarm.
Nichole Webb Rivera frantically texted her two adult sons, her daughter and her daughter's fiance in the area to make sure they were OK. She heard back from her sons, but nothing from the other two.
And no one has been able to reach Rivera's parents, who live in a house along the Stillaguamish River, smack in the middle of where the slide came crashing down. Relatives called around, but the somber reality soon set in.
"We've lost four," said Rivera, who grew up in Darrington, a logging town of about 1,400 people just to the east of the landslide.
Rivera has had no official confirmation from authorities. But when she saw an aerial photograph of Saturday's landslide, she knew her parents, Thom and Marcy Satterlee, and her daughter, 20-year-old Delaney Webb, and Webb's fiance didn't make it out.
"It sounds terribly morbid, but looking at it, I'm resigned," said Rivera, 39.
An American flag, salvaged unstained from the wreckage, had been draped over a buckled shed. "The situation is very grim," said Fire Chief Travis Hots, unshaven and with dark circles around his eyes. "We have not found anyone alive on this pile since Saturday."
Chain saws buzzed as friends and families cut toppled houses open on Monday. Buddy, a large chocolate Labrador, was pulled muddy and cut from under the ruins Sunday after a house was cut open. His owner has not been found.
McPherson, still hospitalized, abruptly a widower, asked his nephew Cory Kuntz to see if he could pull anything out of his home.
A box of slides, some photos, files and his deceased aunt's wallet piled up. Kuntz glanced at the gap in the roof that his uncle was yanked through. Then he looked out at the confusion of muddy detritus that included the smashed remains of his own home as well.
"When you look at it you just kind of go in shock and you kind of go numb," Kuntz said.
Gail Moffett, a retired firefighter who lives in Oso and works at the hardware store in Arlington, said she knows about 25 people who are missing. Among them, Moffett said, were entire families, including people with young children.
Moffett said some of the people who are missing were working in the area Saturday morning.
"There's so much pain going on in the community right now," she said.
Darlene Elrod stood above the wreckage, scratching her head and just looking and staring in disbelief as she tried to orient herself and point out an entire neighborhood.
"It's gone," she said.
___
Mendoza reported from San Jose, Calif. Associated Press writers Phuong Le and Donna Gordon Blankinship in Seattle and Lisa Baumann in Arlington, Wash., contributed to this report.
MARTHA MENDOZA, Associated Press P. SOLOMON BANDA, Associated Press
Posted: March 25, 2014
- 10 Things to Know for Today
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:
1. CHINA WANTS ANSWERS ON FLIGHT 370
China is demanding that Malaysia turn over the satellite data used to declare that a Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing everyone on board.
2. U.S., ALLIES SEEK TO ISOLATE RUSSIA OVER CRIMEA
Obama and some of his closest allies cut Putin out indefinitely from the G-8 and mull additional sanctions.
3. OBAMA TO PROPOSE ENDING NSA'S PHONE CALL SWEEP
The White House wants the National Security Agency to stop sweeping up and storing vast amounts of data on Americans' phone calls.
4. SUPREME COURT TACKLES BIRTH CONTROL COVERAGE
Justices will weigh whether corporations have religious rights that exempt them from part of the new health care law that requires coverage of contraceptives for employees at no extra charge.
5. 'MIRACLE' NO DEATHS IN CHICAGO TRAIN CRASH
Experts say the crash of a commuter train that derailed and plowed up an escalator at O'Hare International Airport would have been worse had it not happened in the early morning hours.
6. WHAT AN 'OPERATING ROOM OF THE FUTURE' MAY LOOK LIKE
By increasing communication and the use of apps, a Los Angeles hospital is aiming to speed up treatment for trauma victims.
7. 'YOU JUST KIND OF GO IN SHOCK'
That's how volunteer searcher Cory Kuntz describes the Washington state mudslide that killed at least 14 people and left scores unaccounted for.
8. GIRL SCOUT COOKIE RECORD CRUMBLES
Sixth-grader Katie Francis of Oklahoma City has sold 18,107 boxes this season, besting the previous mark of 18,000 boxes.
9. WHAT A FORMER PRESIDENT IS SAYING ABOUT UKRAINE
On the "Late Show with David Letterman," Jimmy Carter says the Crimean annexation was "inevitable" because Russia considers it to be part of its territory.
10. SKIDDING SIXERS NEAR DUBIOUS MARK
The Philadelphia 76ers, losers of 25 straight, are two losses shy of tying Cleveland for the most consecutive defeats in NBA history.
The Associated Press
Posted: March 25, 2014
- Millions on the sidelines for big health care push
WASHINGTON (AP) - Alan Thacker wants health coverage, but he can't get help in his home state of Georgia. Mary Moscarello Gutierrez no longer can afford insurance in New Jersey. Justin Thompson of Utah refuses to be forced into the president's health law.
Millions of people in the United States will remain uninsured despite this week's final, frenzied push to sign them up under the health law. Their reasons are all over the map.
Across the country, many of the uninsured just don't know much about the health overhaul and its March 31 deadline for enrolling in plans that can yield big discounts, researchers say.
An Associated Press-GfK poll found that only one-fourth of the uninsured had tried to sign up through the state or federal insurance marketplaces, also known as exchanges, by late January. If they don't enroll in time, many will face a fine and be locked out of the subsidized plans until next year.
President Barack Obama and a phalanx of advocacy groups, insurance companies and volunteers are scrambling to spread the word about HealthCare.gov as the deadline dangles.
But the complexities of the Affordable Care Act can stymie even the well-informed.
New York tap dancer Jessica Wilt just missed being one of them.
She lost her health coverage last summer when she was laid off as education director of a small dance company. It wasn't easy being uninsured - when Wilt slashed her fingertip slicing lemons one night, she avoided an emergency room bill by sealing the cut herself with a super glue.
Wilt, 37, was eager to enroll in a marketplace plan but found the premiums too costly for a freelancer doing arts-related jobs. That would have been the end of it, if the accountant doing her income taxes last week hadn't prodded Wilt to try again. She went online, realized she had erred in projecting her 2014 earnings and qualified for a much bigger subsidy.
"I'm feeling a little embarrassed that I interpreted things the wrong way the first time," said Wilt, who signed up Friday for a midlevel "silver" plan for $150 per month, a price that reflects a $224 tax credit. "It just goes to show how confusing all this is."
There's a story for everyone who will remain on the sidelines of Obama's big enrollment push.
These are some of them:
___
THEY CAN'T GET IN
Richard Kelleher, long-term unemployed and uninsured, spent five months sorting through the confusion in Phoenix. He tried to sign up for a marketplace plan and then the state's newly expanded Medicaid program, getting shutdown online, at state offices and by phone. At the same time, he was piling up employment rejections.
Kelleher, 64, felt invisible.
On Friday he got a letter accepting him into Medicaid - and an entry-level job offer the same day.
That puts his insurance situation in limbo for now. He thinks his earnings will end his Medicaid eligibility. But Kelleher says he's grateful for "an opportunity to at least be somewhere every day."
In Thomaston, Ga., it took Alan Thacker two weeks to get his answer online. It wasn't the one he wanted.
"I don't know how many expletives I hurled at the computer - 'Why are they doing it this way? Morons!' and other choice words," he recalled.
Thacker, 43, works for $7.55 an hour at Burger King, not enough to qualify for a discount plan for himself and his wife through the federal marketplace. People who don't earn enough for the marketplaces plans were supposed to be eligible for expanded Medicaid.
But because Georgia declined to enlarge its Medicaid program, the Thackers can't get help there, either.
Thacker said he likes the law, only wishing it could reach everyone in need.
"It's a great law, and it's doing good stuff for people," Thacker said. "It's not doing anything for me."
___
IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE
In theory, Rebecca Carlson has access to health insurance through her job. The marketplaces are mostly for people who don't.
A single mother in Asheville, N.C., she earns $11.50 an hour, around $23,000 a year, doing office work at a nonprofit agency that helps people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse. She makes too much to qualify for the aid programs that support many of her agency's clients.
Covering Carlson and her 14-year-old son under her workplace plan would cost close to $5,000 per year. That's out of reach on her squeeze-every-nickel budget.
Depending on details of her workplace's offering, it's possible Carlson, 43, might qualify for an exception that would open the door to a marketplace subsidy. But she had so much trouble getting through online and by phone that she gave up trying; it seemed unlikely to help.
"They could offer me health care for $20 a month and I wouldn't be able to do it," Carlson said. "I have other responsibilities. I can't tell the power company that I can't pay the bill."
In New Jersey, Mary Moscarello Gutierrez, 44, could barely afford her catastrophic insurance plan before the Affordable Care Act.
Now she has no coverage.
She and her husband, Jorge, used to be insured through their small business: PatriaPet, a website that sells dog and cat collars decorated with world flags. They were falling behind on their $400 monthly payments and their insurance agent advised them not to bother catching up because their type of mom-and-pop business policy wouldn't be allowed under the new federal rules.
With her salary from various freelance writing jobs, the couple earns too much to qualify for a marketplace subsidy. She's priced bare bones policies at $900 to $1,200 per month, more than they can pay. Luckily, they can keep their 12-year-old daughter in an affordable state-run plan.
For now, the Gutierrezes are uninsured and facing a year-end penalty of about $800, or 1 percent of their earnings.
"If I need some kind of major surgery, if I get hit by a crosstown bus, my family is sunk," she said. "It's scary."
___
THEY DON'T WANT IT
"I love paying taxes," declares Justin Thompson of Provo, Utah. "I think it's the most patriotic thing I can do."
And he's pleased to help others through substantial gifts to his church and charities.
But buy insurance to prop up the law? No way.
"It is an injustice that our president can tell us to do something like this," Thompson said. "It's everything our Founding Fathers fought against."
Thompson thinks going uninsured is a reasonable risk for him. After all, he says, he's 28 years old, healthy and financially secure, making about $250,000 selling home automation and security systems last year.
Living on the central Florida coast, Jim Culberson, 63, has weathered heart attacks and cancer and says he barely scrapes by selling military histories and collectibles.
He would like health insurance if he could afford it, Culberson says. Just not through Obama's law.
He has no plans to look into the subsidies in Obama's law or its promise of coverage for pre-existing conditions.
"To me it looks like a load of hogwash," said Culberson, whose younger brother, John, is a Texas congressman pushing for repeal of the health care law. He adds: "I don't believe a whole lot the government says."
Culberson says he'll pay the uninsured penalty until he can enroll in Medicare in two years.
___
MAYBE NEXT YEAR
Need a 12-foot-long, flower-bedecked model plane for a wedding reception? Jose Espaillat will get it done.
He likes the challenge of setting up concerts, fashion shows and other flashy events in Miami, but it's part-time, seasonal work that doesn't come with a health plan. Espaillat, 26, hasn't seen a doctor in five years.
He found HealthCare.gov easy to use, but the $150 to $250 monthly premiums seemed too high. A cheaper option covering only major emergencies wasn't appealing. He decided to wait until next year.
"This year I'm just trying to get rid of as much debt as possible, student loans and stuff," Espaillat said.
Svetlana Pryjmak of Dade City, Fla., has been uninsured for about eight years, which she acknowledges "is really strange - because I'm a licensed insurance agent."
Companies that offer multiple insurance options hire Pryjmak to help workers understand their choices. She weighed her own options and decided to save the $70 or so a month she would pay for a heavily subsidized policy. The early troubles with the enrollment websites weren't encouraging, she said.
But Pryjmak, 47, expects to sign up someday.
"Next year I'll probably get in on one of the exchanges," she said, "if the problems are ironed out."
___
CONNIE CASS, Associated Press
Posted: March 25, 2014
|
distributed by
|
