Briefs

Local and VCU

City Stadium meeting draws crowd

Residents worried that development of City Stadiummeans more traffic, big delivery trucks at all hours, high-rise apartments and vacant stores when tenants fail to materialize packed a meeting Saturday hosted by a group hoping to put a mixed-use housing-retail project on the site.

Others were more welcoming, liking the prospect of jobs and retail to boost the city’s tax base.

“It’s a very passionate group,” said resident Mary Beth Nolan, who compared the fuss to something you’d expect to see over oceanfront property. She has lived in the area around the stadium since 2000.

The site is off the Powhite Parkway, between the Windsor Farms and Carillon neighborhoods, and just blocks from the bustling Carytown retail corridor.

Developer Fulton Hill Partnership provided coffee and bagels at the morning meeting, held at the Carillon off Blanton Avenue in Byrd Park.

Residents listened to partnership representatives describe their vision of the project and then entertain questions for the next two hours. They still ran out of time before everyone with a raised hand had been addressed. Margaret Freund, managing partner of the group and owner and president of Richmond-basedFulton Hill Properties, fielded many of the questions.

A similar community meeting is planned for 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Carillon.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Vitale banner a hot commodity in Richmond

A banner showing ESPN basketball analyst Dick Vitale, beaming over a plate of crow, now adorns the South Garage at Richmond International Airport and greets visitors with a boisterous “Eat crow, baby!”

Next stop? The Diamond for opening night of the Richmond Flying Squirrels baseball season April 7. Then it heads to Richmond International Raceway in Henrico County for NASCAR weekend in late April.

At some point, expect to see the massive banner on the Greater Richmond Convention Center on East Broad Street in downtown Richmond before it lands in the archives at Valentine Richmond History Center.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” said Jack Berry, executive director of Venture Richmond, which ordered the banner late Monday afternoon for a community pep rally less than 48 hours later.

The banner, 30 feet tall and 20 feet across, takes square aim at Vitale for his nationally televised denunciation of the NCAA’s selection of Virginia Commonwealth University for its men’s basketball tournament.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Judge M. Blane Michael of 4th U.S. Circuit dies at 68

Judge M. Blane Michael, a member of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from Charleston, W.Va., died Friday. He was 68.

Michael was appointed in August 1993 to fill a vacancy on the appeals court and was confirmed by Congress several months later.

He was viewed as one of the more liberal judges on the 4th Circuit, which is considered one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts. But an anonymous lawyer’s account in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary described Michael as “right down the middle. He is not liberal. He is not conservative. He is fair.”

Michael was among four dissenting judges in a 1996 decision by the 4th Circuit that rejected a challenge to the Clinton administration’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The challenge came from a former naval officer whose 10-year military career ended after he disclosed he was gay.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

National and International

I-95 cameras snap speeders, spark controversy

As Interstate 95 sweeps past this small town along South Carolina’s coastal plain, motorists encounter cameras that catch speeding cars, the only such devices on the open interstate for almost 2,000 miles from Canada to Miami.

The cameras have nabbed thousands of motorists, won accolades from highway safety advocates, attracted heated opposition from state lawmakers and sparked a federal court challenge.

Ridgeland Mayor Gary Hodges said the cameras in his town about 20 miles north of the Georgia line do what they are designed to do: slow people down, reduce accidents and, most importantly, save lives.

But lawmakers who want to unplug them argue the system is just a money-maker and amounts to unconstitutional selective law enforcement.

“We’re absolutely shutting it down,” said state Sen. Larry Grooms, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

Brief by The Associated Press

Burt’s Bees founder wants to donate national park

Maine sportsmen were outraged when Roxanne Quimby, the conservation-minded founder of Burt’s Bees cosmetics, bought up tens of thousands of acres of Maine’s fabled North Woods — and had the audacity to forbid hunters, loggers, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles on the expanses.

Quimby confronted the hornet’s nest she’d stirred up head-on — calling one of her sharpest critics, George Smith, then-executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. Smith couldn’t believe his ears. The back-to-the-earth advocate who made millions with her eco-friendly line of personal care products was calling him at home, on a Saturday morning?

“I thought someone was playing a joke on me when she called,” Smith recalls. “She said, ‘Hi, this is Roxanne Quimby. I said, ‘Oh yeah, sure.'”

That call in 2006 opened a face-to-face dialogue with some of her biggest critics over the land she’s bought — more than 120,000 acres of woodlands.

Quimby wants to give more than 70,000 wild acres next to Maine’s cherished Baxter State Park to the federal government, hoping to create a Maine Woods National Park. She envisions a visitor center dedicated to Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist who made three trips to Maine in the 1800s.

The park would be nearly twice the size of Maine’s Acadia National Park.

Brief by The Associated Press

Yemen’s leader drops offer to leave by year’s end

Yemen’s president, clinging to power despite weeks of protests, scrapped an offer to step down by year’s end on Sunday, as Islamic militants taking advantage of the deteriorating security took control of another southern town.

Opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh — a group that started with university students and has expanded to include defecting military commanders, politicians, diplomats and Saleh’s own tribe — had immediately rejected his offer a week ago to leave by the end of this year. Its formal withdrawal by the president indicates an attempt by both sides to negotiate a transfer of power to end the crisis has failed.

In a sign of what is at stake in Yemen if security further unwinds, Islamic militants seized control of a small weapons factory, a strategic mountain and a nearby town in the southern province of Abyan, said a witness and security officials.

A day earlier, militants believed to belong to Yemen’s active al-Qaida offshoot swept into another small town in the area called Jaar. In both cases, militants moved in with no resistance because police had withdrawn weeks earlier — as they did in several other parts of the country — in the face of challenges by anti-government protesters.

Saleh is a key ally of the United States in battling al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which the Obama administration considers the top terrorist threat to the U.S.

Washington is concerned the cooperation could be imperiled if Saleh departs, and U.S. diplomats sat in on the political talks last week that failed to make progress on a possible transition of power.

Brief by The Associated Press

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply