| NY state senator charged with fraud
NEW YORK — A New York state senator was charged with defrauding a nonprofit organization to pay for baseball tickets, college tuition and other personal expenses, according to a federal indictment. Sen. Efrain Gonzalez Jr., 58, a Democrat from the Bronx, pleaded not guilty Friday to mail fraud and was released on $25,000 bond. If convicted, he could receive up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. .
AOL Shifts Strategy With Free Offerings
Stepping up the chase for online advertising dollars, AOL will give away e-mail accounts and software now available only to its paying customers in a strategy shift likely to accelerate the decline in its core Internet access business. The decision, announced Wednesday by AOL parent Time Warner Inc., removes the few remaining reasons for AOL subscribers to keep paying when they already have high-speed Internet access through a cable or phone company. "We've listened to our customers, and many of them want to keep using these AOL products when they migrate to broadband - but not pay extra for them," said Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's president and chief operating officer. AOL will still offer its dial-up accounts at $26 a month for unlimited use, but the company no longer will aggressively market it.
Check out the garden in the back of Elm Street
At the east end of Elm Street on the south side of the street, there is a business called Prufrock Floral and Botanical Designs. This very unique and creative florist designer team is composed of owners Randy McKinley and Sam McGee. This summer, McGee expanded life beyond their beautiful store offerings by planting an "allotment" garden behind the row of Elm Street shops. The land here is owned by The Fell Company who gave McGee permission to "go at it." McGee's garden contains string beans, lima beans, cucumbers, sunflowers for their seeds, three kinds of eggplant (little Italian and Japanese heirloom), 10 varieties of tomato plants for a total of 18 plants, beets, sweet onions, sweet and hot peppers, Swiss chard, escarole, herbs (thyme, dill, rosemary, parsley), patty-pan squash, and escarole.
Cheap checks can cost you
If you buy your bank checks directly from a discount printer instead of purchasing them through your bank, you'd better hope they don't rip or tear during processing. If they do, you might be charged a fee. Some banks are charging $2 or $3 per rejected check, and at least one bank is smacking customers with a $5 fee. The fees seem to apply only to mail-order checks or checks printed by individuals, even though checks ordered directly from banks are also sometimes rejected during processing and many mail-order checks come from the same companies that print checks for banks. By just about everyone's estimation, the number of checks rejected for quality reasons is quite small, maybe 1 percent of the more than 40 billion checks processed annually. That includes checks that were stapled, folded too many times or mangled in some fashion.
|