OCTOBER 2012 NEWS ARCHIVE
License readers aid police, raise privacy concerns
If you’ve driven anywhere around the region in the past year or so, chances are your license plate has been recorded by state or local police using an electronic reader. The readers are designed to record license-plate numbers faster than a police offi cer ever could with pen and paper. But where that information ends up, how long it’s stored and who has access to it depends on where you were driving when your plate was recorded. That worries privacy watchdogs. read more
EPA under fire from all sides on Housatonic cleanup
It’s no surprise that in its yet-to-be-released draft form, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup plan for the Housatonic River south of Pittsfi eld has been the subject of intense scrutiny and lobbying, especially from General Electric Co., the company that will foot the bill for the project. But some of the strongest criticism of the EPA’s draft has come from agency offi cials themselves. read more
Local meats, local butcher shop
The Meat Market, which opened a little over a year ago in Great Barrington, is a first for the region: a butcher shop dedicated to locally raised meats. The market’s owner, Jeremy Stanton, set out to create a central location in the southern Berkshires where consumers could buy meat and poultry from area farms. read more
Lecture to detail regionʼs forgotten role in slave trade
Most Northerners assume slavery was a Southern issue, and that the main role of people in upstate New York and New England was to help slaves fl ee to freedom in Canada and to muster troops to fi ght the Confederacy in the Civil War. But that widely accepted version of history isn’t true, says Ralph Brill, an artist with a gallery at the former Eclipse Mill in North Adams. The reality, he says, is that in the years leading up to the Civil War, the owners of cotton mills in the Berkshires controlled more than a quarter of the South’s 4 million slaves.read more
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