You’ve all heard those stories about people selling swamp land and so on …
Well rather than sell some sucker a bridge, a California man - Steven Ferguson - made off with $5 million dollars when he sold off a waste treatment plant in New Jersey.
the smooth talker promised huge returns on the investments that his soon to be victims thought was going to be a waste treatment plant.
He has since been sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay $6 million in fines.
Officials in N.J. has warned squirrel hunters, who live and hunt near a toxic waste dump, about consuming the pesky rodents because they could be contaminated with lead.
This is the one and only time the State has cautioned Ringwood residents, many of whom are members of the Ramapough Mountain Indian tribe who hunt and fish in the area.
Two months ago a lead contaminated squirrel was found in the area which prompted the agency, along with the state department of Environmental Protection to send out letters advising that adults eat squirrel no more than twice a week, and less for children and pregnant women.
Lead is harmful even in small amounts. It can damage the nervous system, red blood cell production and the kidneys.
“We’ve known for a long time something was wrong here, we just didn’t know what it was,” resident Myrtle Van Dunk said.
Residents and many environmental activists believe the lead comes from toxic waste, including paint sludge, dumped in the area by the Ford Motor Co. during the 1960s and early 1970s, from its now-closed car manufacturing plant in Mahwah.
Ford is removing thousands of tons of waste from a 500-acre former mining property in the Ringwood area. The site was recently relisted on the federal Superfund list, a ranking of the country’s worst environmental dump sites, after multiple cleanups failed to remove all the sludge.
Does anyone else besides me think it’s odd that in this day and age that so many people are eating squirrel on a regular basis that a warning like this had to be made?
After shooting video undercover in 10 Army recruiting offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, ABC News released in November an episode of recruiters telling a prospect that no one is going to Iraq anymore. “No, we’re bringing people back,” he said, and his partner followed with, “We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago.”
In a separate on-camera interview, Col. Robert Manning, who is in charge of Army recruiting in the Northeast, generously told ABC News that he disagreed with the recruiters. “We are a nation and Army at war still.”
Instead of selling 300 letters to God that he found floating in the Atlantic ocean, a U.S. man said on Friday he will donate them to a church. The letters which had been sent to a deceased Baptist clergyman, ended up in a sealed plastic shopping bag near a beach in Atlantic City, N.J.
Bill Lacovara found the bag while on a fishing trip last week. The letters inside the bag were addressed to Rev. Grady Cooper of Jersey City, New Jersey, who died in 2004. The letters included one from a teen-age girl asking God to forgive her for having an abortion, one from a man who wanted God’s help winning the lottery, and one from a prisoner who said he was innocent and wanted to be at home with his family.
The letters could have been auctioned off on eBay for up to $15,000, and says Lacovara, he would have given the money to charity. He has withdrawn the letters from the online auction because he said the move offended some religious people.
“There were a lot of religious fanatics that were very insulted,” he told Reuters. “They said they were disappointed in me, and I didn’t want to do something that’s going to create bad vibes.” He was urged to burn the letters by some or even to throw them back in the ocean or give them to a church.
Lacovara said about a dozen clergymen have offered to take the letters, and he is evaluating the requests to make sure the letters don’t fall into the wrong hands.
