6:05 AM Fri, Oct 23, 2009 | Permalink
Thomas J. Morgan  Email
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On the local front:
A year ago today:
The University of Rhode Island police are asked to probe what the school's provost calls "insensitive, inappropriate and degrading messages relating to the race/ethnicity" of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that were left on two public-access computers on campus. "This type of behavior will not be tolerated in our community," Donald H. DeHayes, provost and vice president for academic affairs, declared in a three-paragraph e-mail sent Wednesday to the university community. DeHayes would not provide the exact contents of the messages, which he said were found on a computer in the Memorial Union, the student life building, and at Swan Hall. He would say only that they were a "characterization" of Obama.
5 years ago today:
Four young men are arrested, accused of causing two mercury spills -- one of which forced residents of two Pleasant Street apartment buildings to evacuate their homes. The suspects were charged with breaking and entering a shed belonging to the New England Gas Co., as well as misdemeanor larceny. They are accused of stealing a liter of mercury, a highly toxic heavy metal. Police said the suspects entered a locked shed belonging to the gas company, where an unknown amount of mercury had been stored after being removed from natural-gas regulators. According to the police, the four, unaware that the substance was poisonous, spilled about 10 pounds of it at the so-called Tidewater site and then brought roughly another 10 pounds to the Pleasant Street complex, where they allegedly spilled it on the driveway.
25 years ago today:
A structural problem on a bridge connecting Rhode Island and Connecticut - serious enough for officials to close the span - was discovered by accident, a state transportation official say. A consultant hired by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation discovered the main support of the White Rock Bridge to be seriously deteriorated, DOT bridge engineer Richard Kalunian said. But the engineering consultant was hired to conduct a "rating and structure inventory" of 50 bridges in southern Rhode Island, Kalunian said, not safety inspections. The towns of Westerly and Stonington, Conn., are responsible for maintaining the bridge, but the states are responsible for safety inspections, he said. The bridge, on Bridge Road in the Westerly village of White Rock, spans the Pawcatuck River.
On the international front:
On this day in 1983, suicide attackers blow up U.S. Marine headquarters building at Beirut Airport, Lebanon, and nearby French headquarters with bomb-laden trucks, killing 241 U.S. Marines and 58 Frenchmen.
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