Community Corner

Beached Whale In Top State News

A weekly look at news in New Jersey.

The texts and Tweets, emails and phone calls started to fly early on Monday afternoon—a dead whale had at Seventh Street in Ocean City. Within an hour, crowds started to form on the beach and boardwalk on a rainy January afternoon with more and more people arriving to catch a glimpse of the unfortunate visitor.

***

A majority of New Jerseyans prefer to pump fists, not gas. According to latest statewide poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind, 63% of voters said they that an attendant must pump gas.

***

Ticketmaster said its website was attacked by scalpers using sophisticated computer programs that generated 2.5 times the traffic it had seen for any major sale on Friday. The attack on Ticketmaster.com interfered with the sale of tickets to the April 3 and April 4 Bruce Springsteen concerts at Izod and the May 2 show at the Prudential Center in Newark, part of the first leg of Springsteen's upcoming "Wrecking Ball" tour. [NJ.com]

***

Newark officals must related to the $100 million donation Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave to city schools, an Essex County Superior Court judge ordered on Friday. Judge Rachel N. Davidson also opposed the city's motion to dismiss a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ), which filed a lawsuit against Newark on behalf of a local organization, the Secondary Parent Council (SPC), according to the order.

***

Retailers in New Jersey are pushing the latest high-definition televisions for the Super Bowl, hoping the year's most widely watched broadcast gives them a sales jolt, now that the holiday shopping season is over. They stand to be busy. [Asbury Park Press]

***

After seeing their sponsored bills aiming to protect accident victims' privacy fail in committee in both houses of the state legislature last session, the delegates for New Jersey's 9th District are again pushing to for emergency workers to photograph those involved in crashes. Republican state Sen. Christopher J. Connors and Assembly members Brian E. Rumpf and Dianne C. Gove have put the bill forward in the Senate and the Assembly, and this time hope to see it signed into law.

***

Governor Chris Christie told a group of business leaders that Democrats in the Legislature may jeopardize New Jerseys' economic recovery by putting social issues ahead of job creation and tax cuts. Debating same-sex marriage and other concerns may hinder progress in improving New Jersey's economy, the first-term Republican said Thursday night in a 25-minute speech to the state Chamber of Commerce during its annual trip to Washington. [Bloomberg]

***

Vowing to take on "corporate pirates" who leave behind contaminated industrial sites, state Sen. President Stephen Sweeney fired a shot at Sunoco, among others, from their own front yard, announcing Wednesday his sponsorship of new legislation that would mandate tax appeal windfalls go first to at closed industrial sites. With the rusting towers, spidery pipelines and discolored storage tanks of the Sunoco Eagle Point refinery behind him, a visibly angry Sweeney repeatedly blasted Sunoco, which bought the plant in 2004 and shut it down for good in 2010, for what he said was an obvious attempt to grab as much as they could in tax appeals before cutting ties with bost West Deptford and Gloucester County.

 


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here