Today’s BILLYPENNGRAM
 Outdoor date night in the Art Museum sculpture garden (photo by @billy_penn) Want to see your photo here? Tag #billypenngram on Instagram |
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Bordentown purchases Divine Word property; Partners with Green Acres, D&R Greenway
By KRISTIN ANTONELLO, TapIntoBordentown
BORDENTOWN CITY, NJ—The Bordentown City Commissioners unanimously approved a sales agreement to purchase the Divine Word Missionaries property on Park Street on Monday night, in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres Program and the Delaware and Raritan Greenway Land Trust.
The property is being sold for $4.6 million dollars, with the City paying $1,655,000 for its portion of the land.
The City will be acquiring 5.44 acres of the property, including the existing main seminary, dormitory and gym buildings. The City will be repurposing those structures and moving the Municipal Building and Police Department to the buildings.
Mayor Jim Lynch said that the deal was “no easy lift,” as the sale of the property attracted intense interest from other parties, such as those wanting to build warehouses and over 1,000 high-density apartments on the property.
Calling the acquisition of the property a “great benefit to the City and its residents,” Mayor Lynch expressed his gratitude to Divine Word and Father Pool, who is overseeing the transition.
“Our relationship with Divine Word was more than just money, it was a partnership,” he said. “It would have been so easy to sell this property to the warehouse developer, and they chose to work with the state of New Jersey and the City of Bordentown and D & R Greenway.”
Daniel Kennedy, Chair of the City Planning and Zoning Board, said that had this sale had not taken place, the open space would have been converted into something else that would not be nearly as favorable to the City. Noting that the space will now be part of a large lot of continuously preserved land and trail region, he hopes that the property will become a draw for visitors to the City, and that the open space will lend itself to events and programming for not just the City, but also state and county activities.
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Liverpool slams revelers; Northern Ireland shuts schools
Revelers in Liverpool, the first city in England to be placed under the government’s toughest Tier 3 restrictions amid soaring rates of coronavirus infection, poured into the streets to dance and taunt police as pubs closed ahead of the restrictions that could keep them shuttered for months.
Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson wrote on Twitter: “These pictures shame our city, attacking our brave police officers is unacceptable. Our health service is creaking, 300 in hospital and 30 people dead in week. Ignoring these facts is why we are in Tier 3 measures.”
The new three-tier system forces pubs and bars that don’t serve meals to close. In addition, indoor social gatherings with people from other homes are banned and residents are advised not to travel outside the area.
Northern Ireland on Wednesday introduced the tightest COVID-19 restrictions in the United Kingdom, closing schools, pubs and restaurants to slow the spread of the virus.
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PA coronavirus update: Cases top 1,300 again, hospitalizations increase
By DANIEL PATRICK SHEEHAN, THE MORNING CALL
Pennsylvania recorded another 1,342 cases of COVID-19, the state Health Department reported Tuesday, bringing the total to 174,646.
Another 16 deaths brought the toll to 8,384 since the first cases of the pandemic coronavirus were reported in early March.
The Lehigh Valley reported no deaths, but Lehigh County had 18 new cases and Northampton County had 19.
Statewide, the number of hospitalizations grew by 39 to 773. The number of people on ventilators, indicating critical illness, declined by nine to 83.
Last week, newly reported coronavirus cases topped 1,300 four days in a row, including 1,742 on Saturday.
The 7-day moving average of newly reported cases was 1,156 on Tuesday, up significantly from 897 a week ago.
US Covid-19 latest: 10:00 PT / 13:00 ET on Tuesday 13 October (19:00 CEST)
Latest figures published by Johns Hopkins University.
Worldwide
Cases: 37,955,113
Deaths: 1,082,928
Recoveries: 26,332,156
US
Cases: 7,817,863
Deaths: 215,355
Recoveries: 3,106,728
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Much of America has stopped celebrating Columbus Day, but the explorer remains revered in Italy
By Stefano Pitrelli, Washington Post
ROME — While many Christopher Columbus statues were toppled this year in the United States — dragged into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, beheaded in Boston — the towering marble monument to the explorer in his hometown, Genoa, Italy, is disturbed only by pigeons.
As Americans feud over whether Columbus Day should remain a federal holiday — or whether the man who first charted the transatlantic route in 1492 should be remembered as a colonial oppressor — in Italy, Columbus is still held in high esteem. Italians tend to think of him as the sum of their best qualities: ingenuity, courage and resilience.
“Columbus represents genocide,” protesters wrote in Richmond after throwing a Columbus statue into a lake. In Italy, that’s just not the case.
The disconnect might have to do with a lack of knowledge among Italians about the more objectionable aspects of Columbus’s life and legacy. But scholars say there’s also a national defensiveness that has gotten in the way of further understanding.
Editor’s note: Columbus Day is a federal holiday in 2020 and also a state holiday in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, but not in Delaware.
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Judge throws out Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania lawsuit
A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday threw out a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s campaign, dismissing its challenges to the battleground state’s poll-watching law and its efforts to limit how mail-in ballots can be collected and which of them can be counted.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan — who was appointed by Trump — in Pittsburgh also poured cold water on Trump’s claims of election fraud.Judge rejects Trump lawsuit over ‘bad things’ happen in Philadelphia »
Trump’s campaign said it would appeal at least one element of the decision, with barely three weeks to go until Election Day in a state hotly contested by Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The lawsuit was opposed by the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, the state Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP’s Pennsylvania office and other allied groups.
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