Tag: philly news

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia police have asked the public for help finding a missing endangered person. 

Jacques Rice, 67, lives on the unit block of East Baltimore Avenue in Media. He suffers from Schizophrenia.

Police say he was last seen Wednesday afternoon with a group, visiting from Media on the 700 block of Arch Street.

He is 6 feet tall, 180 lbs. He has brown eyes, black hair and was last seen wearing a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, tan pants, a blue walking boot on his left foot and a black shoe on his right foot.

If anyone has information, they are asked to Central Detectives at 215-686-3093 or call 911. 

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PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — It’s National Pollinator Week, a time to focus on the creatures that do some heavy lifting and help plants reproduce. They’re in trouble and need our help.

Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation says that without pollinators, a lot of our favorite things would vanish.

“Something like one out of every three mouthfuls of food and drink that we consume, we get thanks to a pollinator,” Shepherd said. 

The job of moving pollen within and between flowers is done by flies, butterflies, beetles, bats, birds, even lizards. And of course, bees. Not just honey and bumble bees, but flashy little native ones, too.

“There are these amazing bright metallic green sweat bees, they’re just this glimmering emerald flying around. I just love them, because not only are they beautiful, but they just challenge everybody’s image of what a bee should look like,” he added. 

Human activity is rapidly shrinking the pollinator population, with pesticide and herbicide use, habitat destruction, and climate change all playing a part. 

But Shepherd says you can help pollinators survive and thrive, no matter where you live. A square foot of flowers is better than none.

“If all you’ve got room for is space to grow a couple of plants, then that’s great. That’s two more plants that weren’t there, and some insects and some pollinators will find those and benefit from them,” he said. 

For more information, click here.

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(AP) — If drug interdiction can be compared to a giant game of whack-a-mole, federal law enforcement officials delivered one mighty wallop this week when they raided a container ship at Philadelphia’s port and discovered a staggering amount of cocaine.

Hidden inside seven shipping containers were 33,000 pounds (15,000 kilograms) of the illicit drug, one of the largest caches ever intercepted on U.S. shores and a quantity that’s almost “beyond comprehension,” as Patrick Trainor, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Philadelphia, put it Wednesday. Federal officials estimated the seized drugs had a street value of more than $1 billion.

The feds’ find was another sign that traffickers are turning to East Coast seaports as a result of increased law enforcement pressure along the country’s southwest border, a development cited by the drug enforcement agency in its latest national threat assessment. It was at least the third major bust in Philadelphia and New York since February.

“As soon as interdiction puts pressure on one place, it just pops up somewhere else. We’ve continually seen that,” said Nicholas Magliocca, a University of Alabama researcher who studies how traffickers adapt to interdiction. “As long as the demand is there, and there’s money to be made, traffickers are going to find a way.”

Cocaine use and overdose deaths are on the rise in the U.S. after years of decline as production has surged to record levels in Colombia, the source of about 90% of the U.S. supply.

Related: Feds seize $1B worth of cocaine docked at Philly port

Agents were doing another sweep Wednesday through thousands of containers on MSC Gayane, a cargo ship owned by Swiss firm MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co., but had not found any cocaine since their initial search on Monday, according to Stephen Sapp of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Philadelphia.

Two crew members have been charged and both men confessed to hiding the bundles on the ship.

Homeland Security agents say Ivan Durasevic, the ship’s second mate, told them he personally operated the crane to load the drugs after departing Peru.

The first mate allegedly asked Durasevic to pluck nets full of sealed packages from the ocean. Durasevic says he loaded even more packages from boats driven by men in ski masks that pulled alongside the tanker in the middle of the night near Panama.

Fonofaave Tiasaga is also charged. He told federal agents he helped conceal the drugs within other merchandise on the ship, and he was expecting to be paid $50,000 for helping each of the first mate, second mate, the electrician and engineer cadet – $200,000 total. 

He says all of them allegedly coordinated their own individual load of coke.

Authorities say this wasn’t their first time doing a drug run.

So far, none of the other crew members have been charged. 

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KYW Newsradio’s Mike Dougherty contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Thousands of school administrators, police and first responders from up and down the East Coast were at Neumann University in Delaware County for a school safety program hosted by the United States Secret Service. 

A primary goal of the Secret Service’s Safe Schools Initiative is to prevent a school shooting or attack by identifying a potential threat beforehand.

“And that’s something the Secret Service is always interested in. Obviously it’s directly correlated to our protective mission. We want to prevent an attack certainly on anybody in our protection,” said James Henry, special agent in charge of the Philadelphia office. 

He says the Secret Service has been studying targeted school violence for 20 years since they partnered with the Department of Education after the Columbine shooting.

The Secret Service says their research finds there’s no profile of a student attacker. They could be male or female, a loner or popular, so it’s important to have a climate where other students are comfortable coming forward with concerns.

Bill Gleason is the safety and security program administrator for the Berks County Intermediate Unit. 

“Oh, it’s spot on. I think there’s too much emphasis on the response to school shooting with target hardening or run-hide-fight training. Not that it’s not important, but you assume something is taking place in the building when this type of training shows you just about all of that can be prevented if you have certain measures in place,” Gleason said.  

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PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross confirmed 72 police officers have been placed on desk duty as officials continue to investigate racist Facebook posts allegedly made by those officers in question.

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Ross said he is “equally disgusted” by the racist posts, and he plans to implement additional training measures from outside experts, like the Anti-Defamation League, who will come in this fall to go through additional anti-bias and anti-racist training. 

Phila Commissioner says Internal Affairs has put 72 officers on desk duty as Internal Affairs investigates. Ballard Spahr has reviewed each case & will continue… @phillypolice @KYWNewsradio pic.twitter.com/9yJn1m7PlR

— Kristen Johanson (@KristenJohanson) June 19, 2019

Because of the acts of a few, Ross noted this has deeply impacted and tarnished their relationship with the community, but he said they will work tirelessly to improve it. 

City officials and an outside law firm — reported to be Ballard Spahr — are reviewing each post on a case-by-case basis to determine if the posts were made by those alleged officers and verify their identities.

The posts were first brought to light by watchdog research group The Plain View Project. It compiled the comments in a database, which includes thousands of posts from police officers, active and retired, in eight cities. About 320 Philly officers posted problematic content, according to authorities.

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This is a developing story. Stay with KYW Newsradio for updates.

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PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is closely monitoring a spotted lanternfly quarantine that covers the entire Delaware Valley and parts of New Jersey and Delaware. 

State agriculture secretary Russell Redding says the quarantine has grown as the spotted lanternfly expands its territory.  

“We’ve gone from a municipality to a county to three, nine, to, this year, 14 counties.” Redding said. 

That includes Philadelphia and all surrounding counties.

Here’s how it works: any business that moves products within and out of a quarantine zone must have a permit.  

Redding says the state has issued about 800,000 permits so far.  

“We have authority to ask business, ‘have you done the permitting, are you moving product across state lines, were you moving it with the appropriate sort of oversight,'” he added. 

The lanternfly has a tendency to latch onto vehicles, so people living in or traveling to quarantine zones (that would be most of us) are supposed to inspect their cars, trucks and trailers and kill any lanternflies they find. 

Related:

The department offers a checklist for residents to go through before heading out that includes recreational or outdoor items such as balls, backpacks and tents; outdoor household items like firewood, propane tanks and shutters; building materials, yard and garden items and children’s playthings. 

The spotted lanternfly has caused a lot of damage since migrating to Pennsylvania from Asia around five years ago. It goes after a variety of plants and trees but poses a major threat to vineyards, fruit trees and lumber.     

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PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Travelers between New York state and Philadelphia were stop-and-go Wednesday morning, as Amtrak reported suspended service over nearly a three-hour span along the Northeast Corridor.

According to Amtrak, overhead power line issues in North Jersey disrupted its trains for several hours. It has since restored service, but thousands of commuters at 30th Street Station were forced to endure long delays — some longer than the train ride itself.

Passengers like Rebecca Rampp from Wilkes-Barre simply had to wait it out.

“I’m not super stressed out about it,” she admitted. “But I do have my son here, who’s not the most patient person. He’s 14, but he’s a little bit cranky about it.”

Power was restored and trains were rolling again by 12:30 p.m. — but not before Californian Leslie Falbo scrapped her trip to New York.

“I was just talking to my bosses and letting them know that unfortunately I probably won’t make it to the conference,” she said, “because by he time I get up there, I’ll miss half of it, and it’s just not really worth it. I actually just called my mom and I asked her to come and pick me up.”

Commuters at 30th St wait as Amtrak power outage causes 1-hr-plus delays to trains between Phila And NY pic.twitter.com/zZYPLa0unL

— Mike DeNardo (@_MikeDeNardo) June 19, 2019

The car rental office at 30th St is busy, as travelers bail on their delayed @Amtrak trains. pic.twitter.com/esCgu8e6cN

— Mike DeNardo (@_MikeDeNardo) June 19, 2019

Others like Laura McKeever from Conshohocken were scrambling for alternatives.

“I haven’t come up with a plan B yet,” she said. “I might be driving myself down to Virginia tonight.”

McKeever had to get to Alexandria to lead a publishing conference. “We’ll see. I have to get there some way,” she added. “I take Amtrak about once a month and it’s generally pretty reliable. So this, to me, is kind of an unusual situation.”

The outage also disrupted Regional Rail trains on SEPTA’s Trenton Line on and off for some time, as well as NJ Transit service.

There’s no word yet on what caused the disruption in the first place.

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