GLOVERSVILLE N.Y. (WRGB) - The Ambulance Service of Fulton County shut down on Friday night.

The Ambulance Service of Fulton County is literally boarded up. Its fleet of emergency vehicles idle. Its employees done with what turned out to be their final shift. “The business model is not sustainable,” said Alan Mendelsohn, the service's vice president.

Mendelsohn says the money problem centers on Medicaid calls, which make up a large amount of their work. Mendelshon says the money they get from it just isn’t enough. “We figure it cost us $550 every time one of our ambulances leaves the building. And when you’re only being reimbursed $220 on a large percentage of our calls, and then many other calls we don’t get anything,” he said.

Mendelsohn says the low payout for these calls, coupled with no financial support from towns or the state, just couldn’t be sustained.

...In New York state, police and fire departments are considered essential services, but EMS isn’t.

...The service responded to more than 8,400 hundred calls in 2017.

https://cbs6albany.com/news/local/ambulance-service-of-fulton-county-shutting-down

Closer Mariano Rivera, designated hitter Edgar Martinez and starting pitchers Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina will be the newest members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rivera became the first player to be unanimously voted into the Hall.

The four were voted into the hall by the Baseball Writers Association of America on Tuesday. Of the four, Halladay and Mussina were first-round picks, though only Mussina was touted for stardom from the start of his career.

Before Rivera, the highest vote percentage belonged to Ken Griffey Jr. in 2016, when he received 99.3 percent (named on 437 of 440) ballots. Martinez, in his final year on the ballot, received 85.4 percent, culminating a late surge of support. He received just 27 percent four years ago, when his election felt like a futile possibility. Halladay, who died in 2017 when the plane he was piloting crashed into the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, also received 85.4 percent of the vote, joining Rivera as a first-ballot inductee. Mussina received 76.7 percent of the vote, clearing the 75 percent threshold by seven votes.

"Amazing. ... It was a beautiful, long career," Rivera told MLB Network.

More at http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25826814/mariano-rivera-edgar-martinez-roy-halladay-mike-mussina-elected-baseball-hall-fame

The line to get into the final event of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s weekend tour of Iowa began forming 2½ hours in advance. Standing at the very front were Kristin Wesner and her daughter Alaina. Arriving for the Sunday morning forum extra-early was Alaina’s idea. Despite the January chill, the 9-year-old wanted to be absolutely sure she would get a prime spot to see the all-but-announced Democratic presidential candidate.

Her mom, Kristin, a psychology professor, is hoping Warren can do what Hillary Clinton, whom she supported in 2016, could not: be the first woman to make it all the way to the White House. Though there may be upward of two dozen presidential contenders coming through Iowa over the 13 months between now and its first-in-the-nation caucuses, “she’s at the top of my list right now,” Kristin said.

The political-insider chatter is already suggesting that Warren might have a “likability” problem, just like the one that supposedly was Clinton’s downfall. And if two or three other women join the race, which appears likely, they will no doubt hear that as well. As a headline on the humorous McSweeney’s website put it: “I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren.”

Judging by the packed houses at Warren’s events over the weekend, however, insiders may be selling Democratic voters short. “People decided 20 years ago whether they liked Hillary Clinton, back when her husband was president,” Kristin said. On the other hand, she sees Warren offering a fresher appeal: “Her message is consistent, and she’s looking out for the middle class.”

...Warren represents a stark contrast from Clinton in a more fundamental way. While Clinton had a 20-point plan ready for every question, she failed to weave it all together into anything that resembled a coherent rationale for her candidacy. At one point, her campaign, floundering to articulate what she stood for, put together a document of 84 ideas for slogans. By the end, her message seemed to be only that Trump was not fit to be president.

Warren, on the other hand, diagnoses virtually every issue — from student debt to climate change, gun control to retirement security — with the same blunt prescription. “The answer is corruption, pure and simple. We have a government that works for those at the top,” she says. “When we get organized, when we push back, we can make some real change.” It is noticeable that Trump’s name rarely crosses her lips, a sign she believes this message can connect with some of the same frustrated middle-class voters who flocked to him in 2016.

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-is-no-hillary-clinton/2019/01/07/f15f9f70-11f7-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?utm_term=.e181c86371c5

A black 9-year-old girl in Alabama allegedly took her own life after facing relentless bullying and racism in class, according to reports.

McKenzie Adams’ relatives said she hanged herself Dec. 3 in her home in Linden, about 100 miles west of Montgomery, and was discovered by her grandmother, according to the Tuscaloosa News.

Since the start of the school year, the fourth-grader had been the target of bullying at US Jones Elementary School, where she was teased over her friendship with a white male classmate, according to her family.

Her aunt, Eddwina Harris, said the group of students taunted McKenzie by telling her to commit suicide.

“She was being bullied the entire school year, with words such as ‘kill yourself,’ ‘you think you’re white because you ride with that white boy,’ ‘you ugly,’ ‘black bitch,’ ‘just die,’” Harris told the newspaper.

Harris said she’s speaking out about her niece’s death because she wants to promote anti-bullying...

https://nypost.com/2018/12/10/9-year-old-committed-suicide-after-classmates-taunted-kill-yourself-family/

Bernard Glassman, an acclaimed American Buddhist teacher known for his social activism, died on Nov. 4 at a hospital in Greenfield, Mass., near his home. He was 79.

The cause was sepsis, his wife, Eve Marko, said.

Contrary to the stereotype of a Zen practitioner lost in meditation, Mr. Glassman was deeply active in the world and in trying to address its ills. His activism was as much a product of his Buddhist spiritualism as it was of the liberal Jewish tradition into which he was born; the two remained inseparable throughout his life.

Mr. Glassman “was one of the most important figures in ‘Engaged Buddhism,’ which applies Buddhist teachings to what many Jews call tikkun olam, the project of ‘repairing’ the brokenness in the world,” Jay Michaelson wrote in a tribute in The Forward after Mr. Glassman’s death.

Mr. Michaelson called Mr. Glassman “a Zen mensch.”

Mr. Glassman broke into pop culture, sort of, when he got together with the actor Jeff Bridges, a friend, to write a slim volume called “The Dude and the Zen Master,” published in 2013. Mr. Bridges played Jeffrey Lebowski, a California slacker known as “The Dude,” in Joel and Ethan Coen’s cult movie “The Big Lebowski” (1998).

When Mr. Glassman told Mr. Bridges that some Buddhists considered his character a Zen master, based in part on his enigmatic utterances (“The Dude abides,” “The Dude is not in”), Mr. Bridges agreed to collaborate with him on a book about the movie’s Zen lessons.

“Not being in — not being attached to Jeff or Bernie or whoever you are — is the essence of Zen,” Mr. Glassman explains in the book. “When we’re not attached to our identity, it allows all the messages of the world to come in and be heard. When we’re not in, creation can happen.”

...In 1982 he opened the Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, initially as a way to provide jobs for Zen students. He eventually hired anyone who wanted a job, regardless of employment history or arrest record.

The bakery was soon making brownies and supplying them to ice cream makers, supermarkets and restaurants; today its food processing plant turns out 35,000 pounds of brownies a day. Its slogan is “We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.”

Mr. Glassman (whose first marriage ended in divorce) and his second wife, Sandra Holmes, founded the Greyston Foundation, sometimes called Greyston Mandala, in 1989 to address community needs in Yonkers. Its programs provide day care, job training, produce-growing gardens, medical care and housing for about 5,000 people a year.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/obituaries/bernard-glassman-dead.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) is all but announcing her intention to run for House speaker against Nancy Pelosi, testing the waters Thursday by slamming Pelosi and putting race at the forefront of her campaign.

While she stopped short of officially throwing her hat in the ring during a sit-down interview with HuffPost, Fudge said she’s been “overwhelmed” by the number of people reaching out to support her potential speaker bid. She thinks the the opposition to Pelosi in the caucus is much greater than the 17 Democrats who have signed a letter saying they won’t support Pelosi to be speaker, and Fudge said if the vote were held today, Pelosi would be well short of the numbers.

“I don’t hate Nancy. I think Nancy has been a very good leader,” Fudge told HuffPost. “I just think it’s time for a new one.”

...Fudge pointed to Pelosi’s refusal to endorse in the race for Majority Whip, a race between current No. 3 Democrat ― and CBC stalwart ― Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), and Dianna DeGette (D-Colo.).

“But she wants our endorsements?” Fudge said of Pelosi. “Who has she endorsed?”

“We’re not feeling the love,” Fudge added.

...Fudge offered that one of the reasons people don’t like Pelosi is because “they see her as an elitist.”

“And I think to some degree she is,” Fudge continued. “She’s a very wealthy person, she raises a lot of money from a lot of other wealthy people.”

“Everybody wants to give her such big credit for winning back the House, and she should be here because she won. She didn’t win it by herself,” Fudge said.

“If we’re going to give her credit for the wins, why is she not responsible for all the losses,” Fudge asked, specifically pointing to the 63 seats Democrats lost in 2010 and the large majorities Republicans held in 2012, 2014, and 2016.

...Fudge also said she would be more bottom-up in her procedural approach than Pelosi. “Just think about what happened,” Fudge said. “One day after we win back the House, leadership comes out and starts talking about what’s going to be our first bill, what we’re going to do first. Did they talk to anybody?”

“Team means doing ‘What I want you to do,’” she said.

She offered that the top priority of Democrats might be protections for people with pre-existing conditions, it might be student debt, or infrastructure, or job creation. “But nobody, none of the doors I knocked on, none of the people’s hands I shook, said, ’You should make campaign finance reform your No. 1 issue,” she said.

More at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marcia-fudge-speaker_us_5bed9033e4b03af89267a979