Beached Great White Saved In Massachusetts

Mike Bartel

A juvenile great white shark beached itself while trying to catch seagulls off Chatham, Massachusetts, according to a video posted on YouTube by Mike Bartel.

People on the beach kept it wet until the harbor master pulled it into the water and into the ocean.

The 7-foot-long male was found on the South Beach area of Chatham in Cape Cod, according to WFSB, writes The Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post states that beach-goers kept the shark wet until rescuers arrived to pull it into the water and release it back into the ocean.

Witnesses told the station that the young shark beached itself chasing after a seagull.

Great white sharks are listed as “vulnerable” (one step better than endangered) by the World Wildlife Fund, according to The Huffington Post. Humans hunt them for food and sport.

(Updated tags, categories)

http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/29538149/photos-great-white-shark-stranded-on-chatham-beach

Did Romneycare Save Obamacare In The Recent Supreme Court Decision?

Chief Justice John Roberts cited Massachusetts’ own Romneycare law extensively throughout his opinion explaining the court’s 6-3 decision to uphold Obamacare’s subsidies.  The Affordable Care Act (the ACA, aka Obamacare) relied on a similar framework to Romneycare, writes MSNBC.

Legal scholars say the 2006 Massachusetts law, which Romney supported and signed as governor, played a key role in bolstering the White House’s case that the ACA always intended to provide subsidies to federal and state exchanges, despite a clause that referred only to “an exchange established by the state.”

Democrats have Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care law to thank as inspiration for the Affordable Care Act, which relied on a similar framework. Now they can credit the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney with helping to save it from an existential legal threat in King v. Burwell, writes MSNBC. 

(Updated posting)

Read the Supreme Court decision here:

Click to access 14-114_qol1.pdf

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-mitt-romney-saved-obamacare

Gang Rapists On Trial

The second of four Pittsfield defendants – Justin A. King – charged with gang raping a University of Massachusetts student is scheduled to start today following a last-minute slate of motions argued in Hampshire Superior Court last week.

Defendant Emmanuel Bile was tried and convicted in March and has begun serving an 8- to 10-year state prison sentence.  Adam T. Liccardi and Caleb Womack are due to be tried in that order after King.

King, 21, Liccardi, 20, Bile, 21, and Caleb Womack, 20, were each charged with raping the student in Pierpont Dormitory on Oct. 13, 2012, according to masslive.com.

The judge in the King rape trial told the lawyers for both sides Friday that she will question the jury. On Friday, Hampshire Superior Court Judge Bertha D. Josephson told defense lawyer Terrence Dunphy and prosecutor Jenifer Suhl that she would conduct a “voir dire” of the jurors as they are seated.

The additional questioning is made possible by an order of the Massachusetts Superior Court handed down in February. The ruling allows lawyers to gather more information from prospective jurors, but judges still have the discretion to question the jurors themselves during the enrolling of a jury, writes masslive.com.

(Updated article)

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/06/primer_on_justin_king_rape_tri.html

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/06/hampshire_superior_court_judge_9.html

Massachusetts School Bus Driver Arrested On Drunk Driving Charge

State police in Massachusetts arrested a Cape Cod school bus driver on a drunken driving charge after a student called her mother to say he was driving unsafely.

According to The Boston Herald, the sixty-two-year-old driver was arrested Friday and charged. He is to be arraigned Monday on charges of drunken driving and child endangerment. It’s not immediately known if he has a lawyer to comment.

Police said the high school student told her mother she was getting off the bus at the next stop because of the man’s driving.

Her mother called police. Troopers found the bus at a Burger King parking lot on Route 6. Police said about five students still were aboard.

Mother And Daughter Found Hanged In Massachusetts

A Massachusetts woman and her 9-year-old daughter were found hanged Friday in the basement of their home by police officers who later discovered what authorities called “written information” that’s being reviewed to see it if sheds light on what happened.

The bodies of Ariana Rosa-Soares, 32, and her daughter, Marley Soares, were found shortly before 10 a.m. in their home in Brockton, Massachusetts about 25 miles south of Boston, after a concerned family friend called police asking for assistance at the house, Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz said.

Cruz didn’t disclose the contents of the written information found at the scene and said it was too early to say whether the deaths were murders or a murder-suicide. He said the girl’s father was interviewed by state police.

A homicide investigation is under way, according to Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, but officials had not confirmed by Friday evening how the mother and daughter died.

Rosa-Soares recently divorced Marley’s father, Octavio Soares, according to friends and family members. The couple shared custody and Rosa-Soares worked two jobs – as a certified nursing assistant and a personal care assistant – “just to maintain food in the house,” said a friend of the family.

http://www.enterprisenews.com/article/20150206/NEWS/150207614#sthash.XmHsVYSg.dpuf

Boston Bombing Jury To Exclude People Opposed To Death Penalty

Jury selection is underway for the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who faces 30 charges including use of a weapon of mass destruction and bombing of a public place.

As explained by MSNBC’s Ron Mott, the federal court is looking for jurors who are not opposed to the death penalty.

The state of Massachusetts does not have the death penalty. However, because it is a federal case and not a state case, the defender could still end up with the death penalty.

MSNBC

Feds Charge Massachusetts Meningitis Lab For 25 Deaths

In the biggest criminal case ever brought in the U.S. over contaminated medicine, 14 owners or employees of New England Compounding Pharmacy of Framingham, a Massachusetts pharmacy, were charged Wednesday in connection with a 2012 meningitis outbreak that eventually killed 64 people.

Federal prosecutors accuse a founder and pharmacist of killing 25 people and spreading a scourge of meningitis across the United States in 2012, according to a scathing indictment.

Barry Cadden, a co-founder of the business, and Glenn Adam Chin, a pharmacist who was in charge of the sterile room, were hit with the most serious charges, accused in a federal racketeering indictment of causing deaths of patients in several states by “acting in wanton and willful disregard of the likelihood” of death or great bodily harm.

Cadden, Chin and others were accused of using expired ingredients in drugs, failing to properly sterilize drugs and failing to test drugs to make sure they were sterile.

More:

http://www.turnto10.com/story/27648604/pharmacy-owners-arrested-in-12-meningitis-outbreak

Study: Massachusetts’ Romneycare Saves Lives

Obamacare is similar to Massachusetts’ own Romneycare in its structure, implementation, and effectiveness.

A study came out in the New England Journal Of Medicine that shows Romneycare saves lives.

This raises the question:

How many people will die if the Supreme Court strikes down (parts of) Obamacare and takes away insurance from some people?

Would that decision (supposed to occur next year) kill people?

Majority Report video.

More:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117650/nejm-massachusetts-health-reform-saved-lives-so-may-obamacare

Where Will Scott Brown Go Next?

Where will Scott Brown, who was a senator in Massachusetts prior to running in New Hampshire, run next?

Sam Seder discusses it.

New England: Tens Of Thousands Without Power

According to AccuWeather.com, tens of thousands are without power in New England due to a storm.

The storm battered New England on Wednesday night as widespread damage was reported. Tens of thousands of customers were without power across Connecticut, New York, Maine and Massachusetts.

The worst part of the storm will continue into early Thursday in New England and into Thursday night in the maritime provinces of Canada, and it will strengthen while moving up the Atlantic coast into Friday.