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400 geese euthanized in Brooklyn
Questions of student Web use rise after allegations
Paint shortage
Authorities thinning birds’ numbers after plane crash in Hudson By Isolde Raftery New York Times News Service
NEW YORK — They have been a familiar sight around the lake in Prospect Park in Brooklyn: Canada geese, scores of them. To some residents, the birds and their fuzzy offspring are charming hints of wildlife amid the bricks of the city. Recently, when one was found with an arrow through its neck, park rangers tried to corral it to administer first aid. But then, over the past few days, parkgoers noticed something strange. The geese were gone. All 400 of them. On Monday, the answer emerged. Wildlife biologists and technicians had descended on the park last Thursday morning and herded the birds into a fenced area. The biologists, working with the federal Agriculture Department, then packed the geese two or three to a crate and took them to a nearby building where they were gassed with lethal doses of carbon dioxide, Carol Bannerman, a spokeswoman, said. Bannerman said the measure was necessary.
How should schools regulate what kids see? By Sheila G. Miller The Bulletin
Last school year, Aaron Chriss lost his school Internet privileges for two months because of questionable websites he allegedly visited during the school day at Summit High School. Aaron’s mom, Susan Chriss, has questioned the high school’s decision to suspend the privileges, whether the sites were inappropriate and whether her son was even at school the day pornography was allegedly accessed on a library computer. Her questions point to one of the great challenges facing schools today: As districts try to embrace technology, they also must find a way to allow access to the Internet while preventing students from wading through its often inappropriate morass. District officials said they’re doing the best they can but face an ever-changing foe in the form of millions of websites and constantly improving technology. See Internet / A4
Believe in gravity? Better think again
Aviation safety “The thing to always remember in this New York situation is that we are talking about aviation and passenger and property safety,” she said. “In New York City, from 1981 to 1999, the population increase was sevenfold.” The authorities have been thinning the region’s ranks of geese since some of them flew into the engines of US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009, forcing it to ditch in the Hudson River. Last summer, 1,235 were rounded up and killed at 17 sites around the city. But the Prospect Park culling appears to be among the biggest, and its scope mortified some residents. See Geese / A5
Dean Guernsey / The Bulletin
Mark Cloyd with Specialized Pavement Marking Inc. of Portland places a marker near a freshly painted stripe on Colorado Avenue in Bend.
End of the line? National shortfall of road paint leaves roads without guides By Nick Grube The Bulletin
TOP NEWS INSIDE UGANDA: World Cup bombings shine spotlight on terror cell, Page A3
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If you’ve driven along the recently resurfaced section of Galveston Avenue between 14th and 17th Streets in northwest Bend in the past several days, you might have noticed something was missing. The once-prominent bike lanes were virtually nonexistent — denoted only by intermittent streaks of white spray paint — and instead of double yellow lines dividing the eastand westbound traffic, two rows of reflective tabs served as the barrier
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Vol. 107, No. 194, 44 pages, 7 sections
MON-SAT
It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams. But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality? So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases. “For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms. See Gravity / A4
Beyond guns: NRA expands political agenda By Eric Lichtblau New York Times News Service
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partment has already run out of pavement paint, and Hanson estimates that after the three blocks of Galveston are striped, the city will need an additional 8,000 gallons to complete marking roads that are scheduled to be worked on during the summer construction season. Both agencies are expecting to receive more paint in the coming months, but the delays have officials worried that roads might not be properly striped before winter weather arrives. See Paint / A5
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between passing motorists. While the City of Bend intends to re-stripe the roadway this week, an industry-wide shortage of pavement-marking paint is putting the pinch on local jurisdictions and could make Galveston’s temporary traffic boundaries a common sight throughout parts of Central Oregon this summer. “It’s going to be hard to find lines,” Bend Street Division Manager Hardy Hanson said Monday. “A lot of places will not have very good markings.” The Deschutes County Road De-
By Dennis Overbye
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WASHINGTON — Fresh off a string of victories in the courts and Congress, the National Rifle Association is flexing political muscle outside its normal domain, with both Democrats and Republicans courting its favor and avoiding its wrath on issues that sometimes seem to have little to do with guns. The NRA, long a powerful lobby on gun rights issues, has in recent months also weighed in on such varied issues as health care, campaign finance, credit
card regulations and Supreme Court nominees. In the health care debate earlier this year, for instance, the NRA’s lobbyists worked with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to include a little-noticed provision banning insurance companies from charging higher premiums for people with a gun in their home. The NRA worked out a deal last month exempting itself from a proposal requiring groups active in political spending to disclose their financial donors. Its push this spring for tougher gun
rights in the District of Columbia served to effectively kill a measure — once seemingly assured of passage — to give the district a voting seat in Congress.
Credit cards and guns With a push from the NRA, a popular bill last year restricting credit card lenders came with an odd add-on: It also allowed people to carry loaded guns in national parks. And the gun lobby put potential supporters of the Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on notice this
month that a vote for her will be remembered at the ballot boxes in November. The NRA’s burgeoning portfolio is an outgrowth of its success in the courts, congressional officials and political analysts said. With the Supreme Court ruling last month for the second time since 2008 that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to have a gun, the NRA now finds that its defining battle is a matter of settled law, and it has the resources to expand into other areas. See NRA / A5
“What you’re seeing is a recognition that support for the Second Amendment is a not only a very powerful voting bloc but a very powerful political force.” — Chris Cox, chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association