Northeast
Plea to President Trump: Tell Cuba to hand over terrorist killers it is harboring
They gathered for a moment of silence at 1:19 pm, the moment the bomb exploded.
The attack 50 years ago today was aimed at the heart of American liberty.
It targeted a place where our nation was forged during the revolution and where George Washington took his leave knowing the future of his new nation was secured.
On December 4, 1783, nine days after the British evacuated New York City, Washington held a banquet at Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan to bid farewell to his troops.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, DECEMBER 4, 1783, WASHINGTON BIDS FAREWELL TO HIS TROOPS AT FRAUNCES TAVERN IN NYC
On January 24, 1975, the Puerto Rican separatist group, the FALN, planted a bomb that ripped through the historic site at lunchtime, killing four and wounding more than 50 others in lower Manhattan. Sixty-six-year-old banker Harold Sherburne, 28-year-old businessmen Alex Berger and 32-year-old James Gezork were killed.
“They were really attacking the American people,” says Joe Connor, whose father, Frank, was a 33-year-old banker who was killed in the terrorist attack.
“They attacked Fraunces Tavern because that’s where George Washington bade farewell to his officers after the Revolutionary War, where the Sons of Liberty met and was a symbol of American liberty and justice and freedom, and they couldn’t abide by that.”
A bomb explodes at Fraunces Tavern. Four people were killed and more than 50 were injured. The FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group, claimed responsibility. (New York Daily News via Getty Images)
Joe was 9 years old the day his father was killed, and in the decades since, he has dedicated his life to bringing justice for his father and the other victims. He is the author of “Shattered Lives: Overcoming the Fraunces Tavern Terror,” which is also now a documentary. Connor has, with other families, elected officials and law enforcement, waged a mission to hold the terrorists to account.
No one has ever been charged in the attack, but the man believed to be the terrorist group’s chief bomb maker, Willie Morales, escaped to Cuba, where he has lived along with an estimated 50 other U.S. fugitives. A bill in Congress named for Joe’s father and New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, who was killed by Black Liberation Army militant Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, who also is on the lam in Cuba, demands Havana return the fugitives.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, OCTOBER 25, 1944, FIRST KAMIKAZE SUICIDE PILOTS ATTACK US NAVY IN WORLD WAR II
“It’s a very concise, clear bill demanding the return,” says Connor. “There has been a mystique about the Castro regime and Che Guevara, of some fanciful romantic view of these people. But they were nothing but Marxist thugs and were waging their own war on the United States for many, many years.”
In his final days in office, former President Joe Biden removed Cuba from the State Department list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.
President Donald Trump immediately put Havana back on the list, and in his first term also vowed to put pressure on Cuba to return Morales and the other fugitives.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., attends a campaign rally for former President Donald Trump at Trump National Doral Golf Club July 9, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
During his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for Cuba to cough up the criminals who remain on the lam.
“There are fugitives of American justice, including cop killers and others who are actively hosted in Cuba and protected from the long arm of American justice by the Cuban regime. So, there is no doubt in my mind that they meet all the qualifications for being a state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio said.
Over the last two decades, FALN members have been granted clemency, as if the years that passed lessened their crimes. President Barack Obama commuted the 70-year sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and charged with other crimes. President Bill Clinton offered clemency to the terrorist group’s imprisoned members, which eleven accepted in 1999.
NYPD SAYS ‘NOT A TERRORIST ATTACK’ AFTER 10 SHOT OUTSIDE NYC EVENT SPACE ON NEW YEAR’S DAY
At a ceremony marking the bombing, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the bombing “was terrorism in its purest form, meant to frighten, intimidate, to injure, maim and kill in order to achieve their political purpose.
“For 50 years, no one has been held accountable for this attack, which remains an open investigation by the NYPD and the Joint Terrorism Taskforce,” Tisch said. “Our department never forgets.”
Jessica Tisch speaks after being sworn in as the next commissioner of the New York Police Department during a ceremony at One Police Plaza Nov. 25, 2024, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Before the ceremony marking the bombing, there was an emotional luncheon attended by family members, dozens of former FBI agents, survivors of the bombing and others.
Joe Connor’s son, Frank, named for his grandfather and who is studying to be a priest, gave the benediction.
“We remember the four men who were killed 50 years ago today in this very place, and all of those whose lives were cut short by terrorism.”
Joe noted how the gathering was being held by the door where the bomb, which consisted of ten pounds of dynamite, was placed inside an unassuming briefcase.
“Cuba has to eventually turn these people over, and the only way that will happen is by keeping them on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list and by keeping the pressure on Cuba,” he says. “This is the moment to do it.”
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An 85-year-old priest has died after he crashed his car into a tree in West Hartford on Wednesday afternoon, police said.
Police received a report that a car went into the woods near Simsbury Road and Tumblebrook Lane around 2:41 p.m. The West Hartford Police Department responded, along with the West Hartford Fire Department and AMR medical personnel.
The driver, later identified as 85-year-old Terence Kristofak, of West Hartford, was the car’s only occupant. Firefighters extricated him from the car before he was taken to a hospital with serious, life-threatening injuries, police said. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Kristofak served as a Passionist priest at the Holy Family Passionist Retreat Center, according to a Facebook post from the church.
“Father Terry had been visiting family and was on his way home at the time of the accident,” the church wrote. “We are filled with grief at the loss of such a kind, loving, and faithful friend. His presence touched the lives of so many, and his passing is a tremendous loss to our community.”
Simsbury Road was closed in both directions between King Edward Road and North Main Street while crews responded. The road has since reopened.
West Hartford police’s traffic division is investigating the crash.
The scene of the crash.
Anyone with information about the crash is asked to contact the West Hartford Police Department at 860-523-5203 or submit an anonymous tip by calling 860-570-8969 or emailing whpdtips@westhartfordct.gov.
Maine’s highest court weighed Wednesday whether the state can reject petition signatures collected by out-of-state circulators who did not check a box consenting to Maine’s jurisdiction, a legal dispute that could determine whether Mainers vote on transgender inclusion in sports this November.
The group called “Protect Girls Sports” initially submitted enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, proposing an initiative that would restrict what school sports teams, bathrooms and facilities trans students can access. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows later determined that the campaign had failed to qualify, after thousands of signatures were invalidated. That ruling was upheld by a Superior Court judge in June and the campaign appealed that decision to the Supreme Judicial Court.
More than 1,500 of the invalidated signatures were collected by four out-of-state circulators who had not checked a box on the form agreeing to Maine’s jurisdiction. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court must now decide whether those signatures were properly invalidated. The initiative is short 500 signatures to qualify.
The Maine Constitution prohibits out-of-state circulators from submitting petitions, but that ban was declared unenforceable by a federal appeals court in 2022, since it likely violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In response to a lawsuit, Maine then entered into a consent agreement, which all citizen-led initiatives still rely on to hire out-of-state circulators to collect signatures. However, they must consent to the state’s jurisdiction.
Attorney Tim Woodcock, who represented Protect Girls Sports, argued that out-of-state circulators should be treated the same as Maine residents who collect petition signatures, since the consent agreement requires the state to allow them to work on campaigns. Woodcock said the consequences of not reversing the ruling would be dire.
“If this is upheld, it’s essentially a petition that has been pulled off the ballot with 1,520 otherwise valid ballot signatures,” Woodcock said in the Augusta courtroom. “That would be a remarkable result of these circumstances.”
The same argument was made after the May hearing before the Secretary of State’s Office as well as before the Superior Court, but neither accepted it.
Protect Girls Sports has not pushed back on any other findings showing a pattern of negligence in the signature collecting process, with circulators leaving forms unattended, adding ditto signs on some columns, and other infractions. Rather, Woodcock challenged the secretary’s authority to impose what he said was an unfair burden on out-of-state signature collectors by requiring them to check an additional box to consent to Maine’s jurisdiction.
Attorney Christopher Dodge from Elias Law Group, the national law firm representing the three Maine residents who initially challenged the petition signatures, said, “We are here today because Protect Girls Sports has essentially reached the bottom of the barrel for its last few arguments to try and dislodge the secretary’s well-reasoned and well-supported findings.”
“And each of those arguments basically concedes that the initiative violated … Maine law.”
Since the vast majority of the 120 out-of-state circulators complied with the requirements, Dodge said Woodcock could not make a convincing case that the rules were a burden.
“The burden here is they have to complete the circulator affidavit … and they have to check the box, that’s it,” he said. “And most of the non-resident circulators have absolutely no problem complying with it.”
One circulator, Cairo, had initially left the box blank but later checked the box through a corrected affidavit in May, three months after the petition was submitted for validation. Woodcock has previously argued that her signatures should be considered valid because of her corrected form.
However, her decision to intentionally leave the box blank was a “substantive lack of agreement” to Maine’s jurisdiction, Superior Court Justice Deborah Cashman said in her opinion validating Bellows’ decision on June 11.
Woodcock said in court Wednesday that the “consent agreement says nothing in it about when an out-of-state circulator must consent to jurisdiction,” and that those rules were being imposed by the Secretary of State’s office.
The Supreme Judicial Court is expected to rule on the appeal before mid-August, before the deadline for the secretary’s office to put a question on the ballot.
This story was first published by Maine Morning Star and is republished here under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Massachusetts
Improving Long-Term Care for Seniors in Massachusetts – Center for Retirement Research
In recent years, Massachusetts has taken significant steps to improve care for seniors, most notably the Act to Improve Quality and Oversight of Long-Term Care. In a recent Risking Old Age in America podcast, Rep. Thomas M. Stanley, Co-chair of the Elder Affairs Committee, describes this initiative as well as further steps in the works. These include creating a family caregiver commission, licensing home health agencies, and working towards universal long-term care insurance.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation:
Senior Living Facilities
Risking Old Age in America (ROA): You have been working [to make improvements] across the whole continuum of care from nursing homes [to] assisted living facilities to home healthcare. Please talk about the legislature’s initiatives in these areas.
Rep. Thomas M. Stanley: In 2024, the governor signed the long-term care reform bill into law. This was the first major legislative update of nursing homes and assisted living residences in over 25 years.
It increases transparency and oversight of nursing homes through new suitability standards for owners and operators. It requires a review of the civil and criminal litigation history of owners and operators; and we put in place tools for the Department of Public Health to monitor and take punitive action against facilities, including increased fines and creating the ability to appoint a temporary manager to oversee a struggling facility.
It expands the suitability reviews of management companies including any [firm] with at least a 5-percent stake in a nursing facility. The law also establishes the long-term care workforce and capital fund to help address the workforce crisis in nursing homes. Money from the fund can be used for Certified Nursing Assistant training grants, career ladder grants for Licensed Practical Nurses, and also leadership training.
The law gives assisted living facilities the ability to offer basic health services, like wound care, eye drops, and medication distribution to their residents.
ROA: The Dignity Alliance [a senior advocacy group]…[has said] state supervision and enforcement of nursing facilities is…not tough enough, that there might be fines and other penalties on the books, but nobody’s applying them to nursing homes that don’t meet their obligations. It sounds like the ability to put them into receivership under the new legislation may be the remedy that’s needed.
Stanley: That’s correct. Under the old rules you would end up in the situation of really punishing or fining a nursing home and end up having it going to foreclosure. In that case, where are the residents going to go? The new law allows the Department of Public Health (DPH) to get in earlier and work with them so that they understand what the DPH is looking for in terms of quality of care and so forth. They can take care of the facility and all the residents so they don’t go astray.
ROA: So the DPH might have felt that it was between a rock and a hard place because if they enforced the regulations, they might lose the nursing home.
Stanley: [Yes]…and the nursing homes, by and large, were not letting them know that they were having certain problems. So this allows the DPH to get in earlier, understand what’s going on and help them make adjustments so that they can right the ship.
Long-Term Care Insurance
Stanley: The state of Washington is really in the forefront of looking down the road to provide for some type of revenue stream…for folks to be able to afford their home care or [other] long-term care needs. So we’re modeling our program after theirs and we’re learning from their mistakes and successes.
ROA: That’s the Washington Cares Fund?
Stanley: Yes, exactly. Last session Senator Jehlen and I worked together to get $500,000 in the state budget for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services to hire an independent firm to conduct the actuary study of various public, private and public-private long-term support service financing options. They hired Milliman to conduct the study. [The full study is available here.]
How it would work in a nutshell is that a public…insurance program would be funded via a payroll tax. After individuals pay into the program for a certain number of years, a vesting period, they would become eligible. And as they age and require long-term support services, they can apply for benefits under the program. There are countless ways to design the program, increasing or decreasing the benefit amount or…the vesting period, determining what the benefit can be used for – home care, assisted living or even paying family caregivers. We have filed legislation to establish a commission to discuss the results of the actuary study and the feasibility of a public long-term care financing program in Massachusetts and potentially recommending a model that works.
ROA: It sounds like this would help a lot, but one question I have about it is that if there’s a vesting period where you have to pay in for a number of years before you can become eligible for the benefit, would it only be available for people who are continuing to work during that time?
Stanley: That’s definitely something that has to be discussed by the commission, but everyone has to contribute and the 10-year vesting period is necessary to get enough money into the program to make it sustainable.
Listen to our entire conversation here.
For more from Harry Margolis, check out his Risking Old Age in America blog and podcast. He also answers consumer estate planning questions at AskHarry.info. To stay current on the Squared Away blog, join our free email list.
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