NO CHARGES FILED in the Green Room bust last week. At least, not yet.
Prosecutor Matt Wiese says he still needs to review a report on what the UPSET officers came up with in the bust which, strangely, has drawn virtually no attention from other media in town.
The Green Room, on West Washington, was apparently operating as a medical marijuana dispensary–which is illegal by Michigan law–before officers moved in.
Wiese said his primary motivation in signing the search warrant to allow the bust was to shut the place down.
That has now happened. The owners closed up shop and took the sign down immediately afterwards.
THURSDAY’S THE DAY when the staff at the North Wind is expecting to receive the administrators’ emails requested in the controversial FOIA.
The questions on the mind of the staff are…Will the emails be “sanitized?” Will they contain redactions? Will some be missing?
The students are hoping to determine whether administrators, behind the scenes, were discussing possible intimidation of a couple of North Wind journalists who’d made previous FOIA requests of NMU’s administration.
One of the journalists, who chooses to remain unnamed, claims an administrator suggested that she might be denied good recommendations from her professors if the newspaper continued pursuing FOIA’s.
The other student, North Wind editor Emma Finkbeiner, says an administrator threatened to pull funding for the newspaper if the FOIA’s continued.
Publicity about the FOIA flap drew national attention, including interest from both the ACLU and a libertarian group. Offers to pay for the FOIA search ($300, as determined by the administration) came in from more than a dozen people.
NMU President Fritz Erickson wisely put a stop to the barrage of bad publicity by finally waiving the fees and insisting that the administration would be forthcoming with the emails.
Now we’ll find out what’s in the emails of the six administrators, and whether they’ve been edited in any fashion.
MARQUETTE AREA PUBLIC Schools (MAPS) says there was no problem, and the YMCA says there was no problem.
That’s a relief, but still you gotta wonder what MAPS was thinking last month when it went in to YMCA preschool classroom at Vandenboom School and began drilling holes in the ceiling to install a router.
1) The drilling occurred while the kids were in the classroom, according to the YMCA.
2) Vandenboom’s ceiling contains asbestos. That’s apparently well-known.
Someone didn’t have his thinking cap on.
The preschool teacher raised questions about the drilling and the residue that was falling to the floor, but the concerns were dismissed until TriMedia Environmental and Engineering Services came five days later to test the room, and sure enough determined that there were trace amounts of asbestos scattered about.
The room was shut down immediately, some personal items were thrown away.
Again, it was determined that the asbestos levels were minuscule, likely harmless. Good for the toddlers, good for their parents, good for everybody.
But why did it have to happen in the first place? MAPS superintendent Bill Saunders concedes mistakes were made.
ABC 10 HAS something to toot their horn about.
No, not TV ratings. Those are tiny, when compared to TV6’s. Not total website page views, although they’re climbing, and their website presence is much greater than their on-air presence.
No, what ABC 10 can boast about is social media “engagement.” Things like comments, shares and likes on Facebook.
During a couple of recent weeks, ABC 10 actually had more “engagement” than the ratings monster TV6.
Pretty remarkable, although things have now settled down a bit with TV6 back on top in the “engagement” numbers.
What does it all mean? It means that ABC 10, despite being undermanned, is working social media really hard.
Does it mean more money for the station? Uhhh, no. Maybe in the future, it might, but right now, no.
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