News
Corrections
A town column in Friday’s Gazette characterized Peter and Cora Weiss as friends of the father of President Obama in the early 1960s. Mrs. Weiss was the executive director of the African American Students Foundation from 1959-63 which brought students from East Africa to the U.S. The President’s father, Barack Obama, came to the University of Hawaii independently, though the foundation awarded him three modest grants to help him buy books, pay for his tuition and personal needs.
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Hardest hit among the six Island towns by the recession, Oak Bluffs ended the fiscal year two months ago with a deficit of approximately $300,000, and is already facing a projected shortfall for the current fiscal year of at least $500,000.
Town leaders met last week to discuss the severe budget shortfalls and the need to schedule a special town meeting in order to address them. The new fiscal year began July 1.
No date has been set for the meeting yet.
But employee layoffs are now considered a certainty.
Vases wrapped with Xeroxed photographs of a muscled, smiling young man sat on the counter of Island Star convenience store in Edgartown yesterday, accepting contributions for the widow of Elton Barbosa, a 26-year-old Oak Bluffs resident who died on Friday of H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu.
Mr. Barbosa had no known underlying health conditions, officials said. Most swine flu-related deaths have involved other health factors, such as an existing immune deficiency or other medical ailment.
They come for the fun and festivities or they come to claim a first place prize. No matter the motivation, they come — throngs of people eager to turn the turnstiles onto the grounds of the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Show and Fair.
Starting Thursday, Island residents and visitors alike will swarm the 148th Annual Agricultural Fair for four days and nights, to hear thrumming tractors and bands of banjos, stain their lips and tongues with blue and red sno-cone juice and dizzy themselves on the chutes of the sky-high carnival slide.
The man who will set the pay for top executives at the seven largest firms rescued by federal bailout money spoke about the power of his position at a talk at the Grange Hall Sunday night, as he prepared to review pay plans from his West Tisbury home.
Andrew Young never formally studied economics. But he learned early in his time as a civil rights leader what a powerful tool for good it could be.
“Young people look back now and think the civil rights movement was about marching, getting beat up and bit by dogs, but the whole civil rights movement was really about the economy,” he said yesterday.
“The economic withdrawal campaign was what really changed the South.”