I have moved into a condo, and will be hiring a woman to come in once or twice a month to do the things I am no longer able to do. What do I do while she is cleaning? In warm weather I can sit outside, unless in case of rain. Do I move from room to room to keep out of her way?
GENTLE READER: One of our charms as Americans is our discomfort with being waited upon. Showing respect for one’s employees includes allowing them to go on with doing their jobs.
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
There is also a practical reason not to stand on the area of carpet you want vacuumed. This will require some movement on your part, but Miss Manners will leave the specifics to her Gentle Reader, who is more familiar than she with her own mobility and square footage.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: I received a delivery of a gift box of fruit. The following day, I penned a thank-you note and placed it in the mail. A day or two later, the sender texted to ask if I had received the gift. I texted my thanks, and apologized for the postal service having not yet delivered my thank-you note.
Several days after that, I received a text from the donor, which included a photo of my thank-you note, indicating he had received it and appreciated the handwritten thanks. This odd (to me) gesture of sending me a photo of the thank-you note I had written indicated to me that the donor must have expected an immediate text of thanks, with a photo of the fruit, upon my receipt of the gift.
Burkina Faso’s former president Blaise Compaoré has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of complicity in the 1987 murder of his predecessor Thomas Sankara, concluding a landmark trial and a decades-long quest for justice.
Sankara, a Marxist icon of pan-Africanism hailed across Africa and beyond, was gunned down along with 12 colleagues in the west African nation’s capital, Ouagadougou, at the age of 37, four years after he took power in a coup.
The massacre coincided with another coup that took Sankara’s erstwhile comrade and friend Compaoré to power.
Compaoré, who lives in Ivory Coast, was tried in absentia along with his former head of security Hyacinthe Kafando and Gilbert Diendéré, one of the army commanders during the 1987 coup, already imprisoned in Burkina Faso for his role in an attempted coup in 2015.
Fourteen people were charged in total for Sankara’s killing in the trial, which began in October. Eight other people were found guilty of a range of charges including giving false testimonies and complicity in undermining state security. Three were found not guilty including the doctor accused of forging Sankara’s death certificate to say he died of natural causes.
There were gasps in the packed courtroom when the verdict of life imprisonment for Compaoré was announced, with Sankara’s supporters shaking hands, pumping fists in the air and chanting.
Seated near the front, Sankara’s widow Mariam Sankara said justice had been served. “The judges have done their jobs and I am satisfied. Of course, I wished the main suspects would be here before the judges,” she told the Associated Press. “It is not good that people kill other people and stop the process of development of a country without being punished.”
Throughout his 27-year reign, Compaoré shut down attempts to investigate the circumstances of Sankara’s death, including persistent calls for his remains to be exhumed, fuelling speculation of his role in the murder.
Steve Wilson will continue to serve as Trenton’s police director following a close vote by the city council Tuesday evening that followed numerous members of the public pledging support for the former officer who’s been director for just nine months.
“I am so grateful for the support of the community,” Wilson said Wednesday. “It was overwhelming.”
The council was scheduled to discuss Wilson’s job after serving him a disciplinary notice, called a Rice notice, and had a resolution prepared to terminate his employment.
However, East Ward Councilman Joe Harrison motioned for public comments to occur at the beginning of the meeting, which passed, so residents could be heard about the effort to remove Wilson. Public input after discussing action against Wilson would be a “meaningless gesture,” Harrison argued.
What followed was more than an hour of commentary by about a dozen speakers, of which a majority wanted Wilson to stay put, saying it was just too early to judge his performance, that he’s already served the city for over 25 years as officer, and should be afforded more time to continue his plans for the police force.
After the comments, which Wilson heard while in a City Hall conference room surrounded by supporters, At-large Councilman Santiago Rodriguez put forth a motion to table the action against Wilson indefinitely. The motion passed 4-3, with Rodriguez, Harrison, South Ward Councilman George Muschal and North Ward Councilwoman Marge Wilson-Caldwell voting for it.
Council President Kathy McBride and West Ward Councilwoman Robin Vaughn, who had both publicly called for Wilson to resign, were joined by At-large Councilwoman Sonya Wilkins in voting against tabling the action.
McBride and Vaughn have been critical of Wilson handing the police shooting of Jajuan Henderson in February, and his overall approach to reducing crime and gun violence in the state’s capital city.
New Jersey has set some new records recently, but not the sort we like to see. Early last month, the state broke a record for the highest average gas prices ever, when the price of a gallon of unleaded first edged over $4.08.
Since then, energy prices have mainly gone up. A gallon reached more than $4.30, with many predicting that the worst is yet to come. These recent price increases followed a year of ill-considered energy policies from Washington that pushed gas prices up more than $1 per gallon in 2021.
Some politicians see these prices and call for investigations into price gouging. But that’s blaming the wrong parties. Americans are seeing higher gas prices today because politicians have adopted policies to reduce energy production and lower the supply of domestic energy.
Decisions to block the Keystone XL pipeline, pause offshore drilling, or halt new leasing and permitting of oil and natural gas production on public lands all contributed to a degree to the sky-high gas prices we are seeing today.
Sal Bonaccurso finally admitted that it was his voice spewing racist garbage on a whistleblower’s recording, which ends five days of zero doubt and no debate, and now he really needs to leave.
There is no real gray area here, as the mayor of Clark Township seems desperate to convey, with a statement Tuesday that did not conceal his feeble attempt to keep a job he’s held for six terms.
Already exposed as a bigot, he acknowledged that he used the N-word and other vile terms in reference to Blacks and used phrases such as “that’s where we hang the spooks,” and the fact that it was four years ago changes nothing.