Pennsylvania Gunman Feuded With Officials for Almost Two Decades Over Land

A video report from Ross Township in northeastern Pennsylvania where a 59-year-old man shot and killed three people at a municipal meeting over a land dispute.

Angry that town officials in northeastern Pennsylvania took over his junk-strewn, wooded property at a sheriff’s sale last month, Rockne Newell opened fire at a township supervisors meeting on Monday night, killing three people and wounding two others before he was wrestled to the ground by two men, state police officials said on Tuesday.

When asked at his arraignment on three counts of murder whether he owned property, Mr. Newell, 59, told the judge: “No, they stole it from me. That’s what started all this.”

In an interview last August with the Pocono Record, Mr. Newell described his two-decade-long battle with township officials over the property in Saylorsburg, which he had lost in court. A judge agreed with town officials that he had to vacate and clean up the property because he did not have, among other things, a sewage or dwelling permit.

“Looks like I’m gonna be homeless because I have nowhere to go,” he told the Pocono Record reporter who described Mr. Newell’s voice as rising in outrage as he walked among tires, cinder blocks, piles of lumber and other items on his unmown property. “Applying for a sewage permit means I have to get a soil test done, which costs $40,000, which I don’t have.”

He also described why he had gathered so many different things in his yard. “I’m a collector from a family of collectors,” he explained. “I use most of what I collect, like part of a playground slide to pour concrete for cinder blocks and wood to fence my yard from people driving by and throwing beer bottles. This saves me hundreds of dollars. I scrap and sell what I can’t use.”

Mr. Newell, who said he was disabled and living on $600 a month, tried unsuccessfully to raise money last fall on an online crowdfunding platform to keep the property.

I need to clean up and I need a lawyer, I have no place to go and my two rescue dogs will be put to sleep because no one else will take them.
Ross Township took me to court and the court ruled that I have to vacate my home of 20 years and remove the bridge that FEMA gave me. $5,000 to put in as well as clean up my land. I live on S.S.I. which comes to $600 a month. I have no money to clean up and it is insane to make me remove a bridge that FEMA gave the money to put in! I have no place to go I need a lawyer but have no money!

Mr. Newell failed to receive any donations to his cause on the platform, Give Forward, which is used primarily for people seeking to raise money for medical and health reasons.

State police said that 15 to 18 people, including two officials, were at the Ross Township board of supervisors meeting at 7:20 p.m. Monday when Mr. Newell first fired shots from a .223 rifle through a window, piercing the walls where the meeting was taking place. He then retrieved a .44 Magnum revolver from his car and walked into the room through a side door, shooting at least five people.

David Fleetwood, 62, a zoning codes enforcement officer for the city of Saylorsburg and two other residents, Gerard Kozic, 53, and James LaGuardia, 64, were killed according the coroner’s office. Two others, Frank Piraino, Jr. and Mr. Kozic’s wife, Linda, were wounded.

As he fired rounds, Mr. Newell was tackled by two men, Bernie Kozen and Mark Kresh, as he continued to fire his weapon, shooting himself once in the leg. State police officials praised the men for their courage in tackling Mr. Newell while he was shooting.

On Facebook, Mr. Newell discussed his politics and views on guns, writing about how he voted for President Obama but was unhappy with the administration.

In March, he shared his thoughts on Facebook about the impact of gun control on reducing violence:

We can change the way we interact with each other! And this will do more to reduce violence than gun control i.e. the overwhelming percentage of rape is strong arm, the Sam is true of other crime! Gun control is not crime control! Gun control will not reduce violent crime! Murder even mass murder existed long before guns!

Chris Reber was covering his first Ross Township board meeting for the Pocono Record Monday night when he looked up and saw plaster exploding from the wall.

I heard more than 10 shots, he told his editors.

It was automatic, like a string of firecrackers. That’s what everyone said.

There were real heroes here. People who did not consider their own lives in protecting others.

I crawled out to a hallway and then got outside. There is nothing in reality you can compare it to. It just was not in reality. All I could think was: It wasn’t happening to me.

Pennsylvania Gunman Feuded With Officials for Almost Two Decades Over Land

A video report from Ross Township in northeastern Pennsylvania where a 59-year-old man shot and killed three people at a municipal meeting over a land dispute.

Angry that town officials in northeastern Pennsylvania took over his junk-strewn, wooded property at a sheriff’s sale last month, Rockne Newell opened fire at a township supervisors meeting on Monday night, killing three people and wounding two others before he was wrestled to the ground by two men, state police officials said on Tuesday.

When asked at his arraignment on three counts of murder whether he owned property, Mr. Newell, 59, told the judge: “No, they stole it from me. That’s what started all this.”

In an interview last August with the Pocono Record, Mr. Newell described his two-decade-long battle with township officials over the property in Saylorsburg, which he had lost in court. A judge agreed with town officials that he had to vacate and clean up the property because he did not have, among other things, a sewage or dwelling permit.

“Looks like I’m gonna be homeless because I have nowhere to go,” he told the Pocono Record reporter who described Mr. Newell’s voice as rising in outrage as he walked among tires, cinder blocks, piles of lumber and other items on his unmown property. “Applying for a sewage permit means I have to get a soil test done, which costs $40,000, which I don’t have.”

He also described why he had gathered so many different things in his yard. “I’m a collector from a family of collectors,” he explained. “I use most of what I collect, like part of a playground slide to pour concrete for cinder blocks and wood to fence my yard from people driving by and throwing beer bottles. This saves me hundreds of dollars. I scrap and sell what I can’t use.”

Mr. Newell, who said he was disabled and living on $600 a month, tried unsuccessfully to raise money last fall on an online crowdfunding platform to keep the property.

I need to clean up and I need a lawyer, I have no place to go and my two rescue dogs will be put to sleep because no one else will take them.
Ross Township took me to court and the court ruled that I have to vacate my home of 20 years and remove the bridge that FEMA gave me. $5,000 to put in as well as clean up my land. I live on S.S.I. which comes to $600 a month. I have no money to clean up and it is insane to make me remove a bridge that FEMA gave the money to put in! I have no place to go I need a lawyer but have no money!

Mr. Newell failed to receive any donations to his cause on the platform, Give Forward, which is used primarily for people seeking to raise money for medical and health reasons.

State police said that 15 to 18 people, including two officials, were at the Ross Township board of supervisors meeting at 7:20 p.m. Monday when Mr. Newell first fired shots from a .223 rifle through a window, piercing the walls where the meeting was taking place. He then retrieved a .44 Magnum revolver from his car and walked into the room through a side door, shooting at least five people.

David Fleetwood, 62, a zoning codes enforcement officer for the city of Saylorsburg and two other residents, Gerard Kozic, 53, and James LaGuardia, 64, were killed according the coroner’s office. Two others, Frank Piraino, Jr. and Mr. Kozic’s wife, Linda, were wounded.

As he fired rounds, Mr. Newell was tackled by two men, Bernie Kozen and Mark Kresh, as he continued to fire his weapon, shooting himself once in the leg. State police officials praised the men for their courage in tackling Mr. Newell while he was shooting.

On Facebook, Mr. Newell discussed his politics and views on guns, writing about how he voted for President Obama but was unhappy with the administration.

In March, he shared his thoughts on Facebook about the impact of gun control on reducing violence:

We can change the way we interact with each other! And this will do more to reduce violence than gun control i.e. the overwhelming percentage of rape is strong arm, the Sam is true of other crime! Gun control is not crime control! Gun control will not reduce violent crime! Murder even mass murder existed long before guns!

Chris Reber was covering his first Ross Township board meeting for the Pocono Record Monday night when he looked up and saw plaster exploding from the wall.

I heard more than 10 shots, he told his editors.

It was automatic, like a string of firecrackers. That’s what everyone said.

There were real heroes here. People who did not consider their own lives in protecting others.

I crawled out to a hallway and then got outside. There is nothing in reality you can compare it to. It just was not in reality. All I could think was: It wasn’t happening to me.

Facebook Adjusts Its News Feed to Bump Up Older Posts

The Facebook news feed is getting slightly less mysterious â€" and perhaps more relevant, too.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the company explained some of the mysteries of the news feed, which is the flow of status updates and other posts on a user’s home page or screen.

On any given visit to Facebook, the average user could potentially see about 1,500 items, the company said, from wedding photos posted by a close friend to a mundane notice that an acquaintance is now friends with someone else.

Since no one has time to scroll through that many Facebook posts, items in the feed are ranked to put the most recent and relevant posts near the top. How does the system define relevance? The formula is still a bit of a black box, but it includes how often you interact with the person or page posting the item, your relationship to the poster and whether you’ve like or hidden posts in the past from that source.

Now, the world’s largest network is making a couple of changes to improve the relevance of the items. And it says it will also regularly disclose more information about the workings of the news feed on its Facebook for Business blog.

The first change, which is already live on the Web version of Facebook and will come soon to mobile versions, goes through recent but older stories that you never looked at and pulls the best ones forward. So the feed will now be a mix of new items and golden oldies.

The second change, which is coming soon, will look at the last 50 interactions you’ve had on your news feed â€" such as likes and comments â€" and rank future posts from those people and pages more highly. (The current system does look at recent interactions, but puts less weight on them in the rankings.)

“We wanted to capture your current state of mind,” said Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager for news feed ranking, at a meeting with journalists.

The overall goal is to get people to spend more time on the news feed and interact with more items â€" which, not coincidentally, exposes people to more ads. According to the company, changing the feed to bump up important older posts that were missed increased likes, comments and shares by 5 percent to 8 percent among users in a test group.

However, none of the changes are likely to satisfy Facebook users, who routinely complain that their news feeds don’t deliver quite what they want to see. (Two easy tips to get more relevant items in your news feed: press the like button on items you find interesting, but also hit the hide button on things you don’t like.)

Calibrating the never-ending flow of information is a constant challenge for Facebook and every other social network. But going back to the early days of showing posts in reverse chronological order, without judging their importance, isn’t a realistic option for most people, the company says (although you can click a button to view your feed that way, if you prefer that).

“Our ranking isn’t perfect, but in our tests, when we stop ranking and instead show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read and the likes and comments they make decrease,” the company wrote in its blog post.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Riding an Uber Boat and the Origin of ‘O.K., Glass’

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »

Drawing the Line on Altering Human Minds

In my column this week, “Computer-Brain Interfaces Making Big Leaps,” I noted that a number of researchers and scientists were coming closer to technology usually reserved for science fiction: hacking our brains to remove unwanted and sad memories.

Although the idea of deleting a memory might sound appealing to some â€" who doesn’t want to forget that first heartbreak? â€" it might have disastrous consequences for our brains. It’s one thing to digitally enhance our memories with gadgets like iPhones and Google Glass, it’s something entirely different to delete or change past memories using technology.

Some readers asked if this was taking technology too far, saying such advancements cross a moral or ethical line that science should not pass.

“The human brain is intricate and a lot of damage can occur,” warned Jolan from Brooklyn in a comment on the column.

“If science wants to play with people’s thinking, then they ought to first decide about moral and ethical values of who they work for and the consequences of their actions,” wrote Mr. Magoo 5 from North Carolina.

Given today’s surveillance society, where the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and countless foreign governments monitor communications, connecting our brains and thoughts to the Internet might be asking for even more government trouble.

“What a mess that would be. Can you imagine N.S.A. hoovering up your thoughts from the Internet?” wrote Maurie Beck, from Encino, Calif. “You would need encryption software, but that might not be any different from software used today.”

“A hacker’s dream?” wrote another commentator. These types of hacks could start to resemble the government surveillance under “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s famous book “1984.”

But beyond the surveillance and ethical implications of hacking our brains and our memories, the biggest outcry from readers came in the form of philosophical worry.

“Forgetting your mistakes can be fatal,” wrote John B, a reader from Virginia.

“If our brains are wired, like computers are then, our minds will no longer have privacy,” wrote an anonymous reader. “The person I just met will be able to enter my head and know what I am thinking, possibly without me knowing. My joys and phobias would be public domain. That would make life very, very unpleasant for everyone.”

“A pacemaker is one thing. A cochlear implant sounds useful,” wrote SRSwain from Costa Rica. ”A spinal cord bypass to operate prosthetic limbs, or superacute hearing and vision, but magical transformation of memories and sensoria: No thanks.”

The Tech Sector’s Mixed Response to Bezos’s Purchase of The Post

For Jeffrey P. Bezos, Washington has been a place of software engineers and Starbucks coffee, not power suits and politics. But, from his tech frontier in Seattle where the company he founded, Amazon.com, is, Mr. Bezos has bridged those far-flung worlds, Nick Wingfield and David Streitfeld write.

On Monday, The Washington Post Company announced that it had been sold to Mr. Bezos for $250 million. It is, in many regards, a pittance for a man who ranked 19th on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires â€"  a man who rose to prominence by seizing upon an Internet zeitgeist to first disrupt the book business, and then make his company become nearly synonymous with the e-commerce industry as a whole.

So, why would we want to buy a newspaper?

It’s a question that puzzled many in the corridors of the technology industry, including Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, an online data storage company.

Others noted the sale price, which paled in comparison to the valuations of recently purchased or public start-ups.

Others dismissed the purchase as the flashy act of a rich man, the same man that invested in a rocket company and is paying for the creation of a clock buried in a mountain in West Texas that will tick once a year for the next 10,000 years. Mr. Bezos even drew a comparison to the character in “Citizen Kane” inspired by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

For a man who has become known not only for his eccentric expenditures but also for his calculated investments, the surprise announcement Monday was also met with optimism.

It led others to wonder why the billionaire might have wanted the publishing company and what he will do with it now that he’s the owner.

Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital suggested that clues could be found in Mr. Bezos’ letters to shareholders, which contained messages over the years about “building an astonishing company.”

The purchase of The Post came more than a year after Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, bought The New Republic magazine. So the deal also prompted speculations about which tech entrepreneur or company would be next to buy an old-media rag.

The Tech Sector’s Mixed Response to Bezos’s Purchase of The Post

For Jeffrey P. Bezos, Washington has been a place of software engineers and Starbucks coffee, not power suits and politics. But, from his tech frontier in Seattle where the company he founded, Amazon.com, is, Mr. Bezos has bridged those far-flung worlds, Nick Wingfield and David Streitfeld write.

On Monday, The Washington Post Company announced that it had been sold to Mr. Bezos for $250 million. It is, in many regards, a pittance for a man who ranked 19th on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires â€"  a man who rose to prominence by seizing upon an Internet zeitgeist to first disrupt the book business, and then make his company become nearly synonymous with the e-commerce industry as a whole.

So, why would we want to buy a newspaper?

It’s a question that puzzled many in the corridors of the technology industry, including Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, an online data storage company.

Others noted the sale price, which paled in comparison to the valuations of recently purchased or public start-ups.

Others dismissed the purchase as the flashy act of a rich man, the same man that invested in a rocket company and is paying for the creation of a clock buried in a mountain in West Texas that will tick once a year for the next 10,000 years. Mr. Bezos even drew a comparison to the character in “Citizen Kane” inspired by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

For a man who has become known not only for his eccentric expenditures but also for his calculated investments, the surprise announcement Monday was also met with optimism.

It led others to wonder why the billionaire might have wanted the publishing company and what he will do with it now that he’s the owner.

Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital suggested that clues could be found in Mr. Bezos’ letters to shareholders, which contained messages over the years about “building an astonishing company.”

The purchase of The Post came more than a year after Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, bought The New Republic magazine. So the deal also prompted speculations about which tech entrepreneur or company would be next to buy an old-media rag.

Daily Report: Tech Mogul in Deal for a Landmark in the Capital

Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will purchase The Washington Post, in a deal that took the newspaper industry by surprise, Nick Wingfield and David Streitfeld report.

The purchase price of $250 million is a pittance for a man who ranked 19th on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $25 billion. But the deal was still an astonishing move for a magnate who has kept a low profile in politics and has said almost nothing about his interest in newspapers, except that he reads them.

Nonetheless, Mr. Bezos will now have a microphone as powerful as anyone in Washington and outside the West Wing. He brings with him a sort of libertarian bent, having supported gay marriage in the state of Washington and fought higher income taxes on wealthy people.

“Of the businesspeople I know, he and Bill Gates are the two most intellectually curious people I know,” said Rob Glaser, the founder of another Seattle technology company, RealNetworks, who has known Mr. Bezos since the 1990s. “It doesn’t surprise me that Jeff would find something with the intellectual depth of The Post an intriguing, compelling thing to be involved with.”

Daily Report: Tech Mogul in Deal for a Landmark in the Capital

Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will purchase The Washington Post, in a deal that took the newspaper industry by surprise, Nick Wingfield and David Streitfeld report.

The purchase price of $250 million is a pittance for a man who ranked 19th on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $25 billion. But the deal was still an astonishing move for a magnate who has kept a low profile in politics and has said almost nothing about his interest in newspapers, except that he reads them.

Nonetheless, Mr. Bezos will now have a microphone as powerful as anyone in Washington and outside the West Wing. He brings with him a sort of libertarian bent, having supported gay marriage in the state of Washington and fought higher income taxes on wealthy people.

“Of the businesspeople I know, he and Bill Gates are the two most intellectually curious people I know,” said Rob Glaser, the founder of another Seattle technology company, RealNetworks, who has known Mr. Bezos since the 1990s. “It doesn’t surprise me that Jeff would find something with the intellectual depth of The Post an intriguing, compelling thing to be involved with.”