Judge issues ultimatum for Mt. Airy horse owner
by MICHAEL J. MISHAK
After nearly 18 months of protracted litigation in civil court, a common pleas judge last week ordered a Mt. Airy resident, who has kept as many as six horses on his one-acre Phil-Ellena Street property, to comply with a court order or pay a $25,000 fine. Earl V. Ross, 42, stood in violation of a permanent injunction that was issued in July.
For many of Ross' neighbors, the ruling brought closure to a 12-year battle they say has been characterized by bureaucratic sidesteps and government inaction. After reporting a series of zoning violations to no avail, neighbors say their quality of life slowly declined as Ross parked commercial vehicles and ultimately stabled horses in a residential neighborhood. Letters and phone calls to elected officials failed to elicit enforcement from various city...
Three men and a 9-year-old girl were wounded on Oct. 6 when a gunman opened fire at the corner of Ross and Montana streets in East Mt. Airy. The shooter unloaded at least five rounds from a semiautomatic handgun shortly before 8:30 p.m., police said.
The girl, who was treated and released from Chestnut Hill Hospital after a bullet grazed her back, was across the street from a group of men playing a game of dice at the time of the shooting, police said.
Two men were treated at and released from Albert Einstein Medical Center. The third was initially treated at Chestnut Hill Hospital for gunshot wounds to the arm and back, then transferred to Temple University Hospital.
The shooter fled in a dark sedan with tinted windows, police said last week.
Representatives from the Police Department's Public Affairs Unit, 14th District and Northwest Detectives could not be reached for further comment at press time.
Vernon Price, 22nd Ward Leader and administrative aide to Councilwoman Donna...
Speaker offers advice on sifting political fact from fiction
by DENISE MAHER
Not all fact is created equal. That is, at least, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the foremost expert on politics and journalism, and dean of the Annenberg School of Communication and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jamieson visited La Salle University’s Hayman Center on Thursday as part of the semester of civic engagement at the school and spoke about filtering fact from fiction in political discourse, with members of the audience coming from as far as Camden Catholic High School in New Jersey and Archbishop Ryan High School in Northeast Philadelphia.
Imagine you were Dick Cheney last week during the vice presidential debate. After a stinging Halliburton comment from Democratic rival John Edwards, Cheney asked the watching audience to go to the University of Pennsylvania’s factcheck.com to find out the truth.
The truth was, Cheney got his facts mixed up. The site he meant to propose was factcheck.org, and the small independent Web site owners of factcheck.com, knowing a site crash was imminent, re-routed the Internet traffic to George Soros’s — a leading critic of President Bush’s — site, where anti-Bush articles were the first thing...