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Orthodox activist organizes Congressional push to free kidnapped bishops in Syria

Written by Ann Rodgers on .


Charles Ajalat, an Eastern Orthodox activist from California who helped to start the FOCUS social service agency in the Hill District, is trying to get Congress to apply pressure regarding the kidnapping of two Syrian Orthodox bishops on April 22, 2013.
It’s unclear who is holding them: both the government of Syria and the rebels fighting them have blamed each other. Some accounts claim that Chechen militants who have come to Syria to support the rebels are to blame. Although the kidnapping of Christian clergy for ransom has become common during the civil war, no demand for ransom has been made public. At the time they were abducted the two bishops were returning from a failed attempt to negotiate the release of two priests -- one Orthodox and one Armenian Catholic -- who had been kidnapped nearly three months earlier.
One of the kidnapped prelates, Bishop Paul Yazigi, is Greek Orthodox, while Bishop John Ibrahim is Syriac. Bishop Ibrahim has life-threatening high blood pressure and diabetes, and is said to be in dire need of medication. The case has drawn

strong ecumenical support. Pope Francis has called for their release and on May 11 a large group of Eastern Catholics held a special Mass in Rome to pray for both the captive bishops and the priests they tried to free.

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Montour Trail working to fill a gap

Written by Jon Schmitz on .

mont

The Montour Trail Council is making great progress on a project that will eventually eliminate a 600- to 700-foot gap in the trail near Route 19 in Peters. A contractor has completed construction of abutments for the first of two bridges that are needed to span the gap and expects to place the 100-foot bridge structure on Wednesday or Thursday.

That bridge will be part of a westward extension (shown in red) from the Arrowhead Trail to a point directly across Valley Brook Road from where the trail resumes. When it is complete this summer, users will no longer have to travel along Valley Brook -- they’ll only have to cross it.

A bridge over Valley Brook to complete the connection is a longer-term goal.

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More happy trails: Work to resurface the Three Rivers Heritage Trail on the North Shore is progressing well, according to Scott Baxter, executive director of Friends of the Riverfront. Chronic drainage issues have been corrected and reclaimed asphalt is being put down. If the weather holds, the first of two top layers will go in Wednesday, the second on Thursday. Meanwhile, that section of trail, from 660 River Ave. to the Three Rivers Rowing Association, remains closed this week. Mr. Baxter offered thanks to the Laurel Foundation, Hillman Family Foundations and They Working Fund at The Pittsburgh Foundation for underwriting the project.

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There are all sorts of online calculators for determining how much alcohol puts you over the DUI limit, currently 0.08 but if the National Transportation Safety Board has its way, reduced to 0.05. According to the calculator of Progressive Insurance, a 180-pound male passes the lower limit with three 12-ounce beers in an hour. A 120-pound female goes well past 0.05 with two drinks in an hour. Even if she nurses those two cocktails for two hours, our hypothetical female is right at the proposed limit. A 220-pound guy doesn’t go over the proposed line until the fourth drink in one hour.

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Yellow Cab announced that military personnel in uniform will get free cab service from Pittsburgh International Airport to anywhere in Allegheny County through the end of this year and possibly beyond. “With Memorial Day approaching, we thought this was the ideal time to introduce the program,” said Jamie Campolongo, CEO of Pittsburgh Transportation Group.

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roadworkaheadSquirrel Hill Tunnel reminder No. 656: Closed outbound this weekend from 10 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Monday.

Water line work will cause alternating one-way traffic on Scrubgrass Road in Scott from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays through late June, with some weekend work possible. The site is at a culvert at Scrubgrass Run.
 
Repairs to concrete median barriers will cause left-lane closures in both directions on the Parkway East in Oakland starting two hours after the Penguins game ends tonight, and in both directions from Penn Hills to Monroeville starting at 10 p.m. Wednesday. Work concludes by 5 a.m.

Here's another map of the Route 837 project we talked about in Monday's post, this one not drawn by an amateur. Details of the closures and restrictions are in the prior post.

rt837

 

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Is all urban space worth saving?

Written by Diana Nelson Jones on .

detroitgraphic 
The transition of Detroit's income taxes. Source: The Daily Beast
 
 
On my visits to various neighborhoods, some strike me as too far gone to save. It’s painful to think and to share this message, but back-to-nature seems to be a smart option for many parts of outlying neighborhoods given that the population growth we are seeing citywide is still too modest. Will enough people move to Pittsburgh in time to save vacant houses that are falling apart right now?  And that question presumes that newcomers would choose to move into (and save) them.
  
While riding around Wilkinsburg recently, where entire blocks of houses are empty -- or one or two households shy of being empty -- it struck me and my tour guide that local costs will continue to drastically outgrow local populations, and as they do, so will blight.
 
Why not draw circles around areas that have almost no occupants and inform the remaining people that they live in a zone that will be released to nature? They can stay, but they will get minimal service and no improvements, and when they move or die, that area will no longer be the responsibility of the municipality to maintain except as a habitat for wildlife.
 
The hue and cry would be piteous. People are tied to their places. But, as Megan McArdle points out in an article in The Daily Beast, “when a business runs into this sort of problem, we know what to do: liquidate and sell off the non-performing assets.”
 
Her article “Saving Detroit: When a Big City Stops Being Big,” is well worth reading.
 
Like Pittsburgh, Detroit has lost 60 percent of its population since its peak years. Our good news is that we are growing... a little. How do we plan for the continued growth we anticipate? How should we plan?
 
Here are some excerpts from her report: 
 
“The problem is that the old infrastructure is still there, and still needs to be maintained.  Detroit might have the makings of a nice 50 square mile city within its population.  But it has to maintain 139 square miles of water and sewer, electric, police and fire coverage, transportation, and so forth.  It also needs to maintain legacy pension costs that were incurred when the city was more prosperous.  For the last five or six years, Detroit has made up the mismatch between taxes and spending by borrowing money and deferring its pension contributions.  But this only means bigger bills in the future, when Detroit may be even less able to pay.  
 
Radical action is needed.  But what sort of radical action is feasible?  You can imagine a sensible plan that would essentially condemn all the houses in the outer rings of Detroit, arranging land swaps to bigger and nicer houses closer in, in order to compress the city into a manageable size.  But you can’t actually imagine it being implemented. The politicians whose districts would go away would freak out.  So would many of the home and business owners.  The downsized public service departments would also be none too pleased.”
 
Can anyone within the sound of my voice imagine enough Pittsburgh and Allegheny County politicians manning up to even have a discussion about bringing the functioning assets of the city in closer to the core and abandoning the rest? It's hard enough to get people in an auditorium to cluster near the speaker. But it may be important to the financial survival of cities like Pittsburgh.
 
 

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Pokin' along in a sea of pink

Written by Diana Nelson Jones on .

 pink walk
 
Some weeks back, my friend Kat said, “Let’s do the Koman walk.” I had done it with my mother way back when it was new and so horribly organized that I swore I would never do it again.
 
But 21 years is a long time. Remember? The Pirates had a winning season. Cell phones were the size of bricks. Things change. Plus I enjoy Kat; she’s fun. 
 
So I said yes and paid my $25 to register and got my T-shirt and number in the mail a few days before the race, which was yesterday. Kat drove us to Oakland, where we found a parking space almost as far from the starting line on Flagstaff Hill as the length of the walk itself. We had expected that. The P-G reported today that 25,000 people participated.
 
That’s all? I would have expected to learn that every possible stroller in the metropolitan area was on that course, along with stroller pushers who do not consider this walk a chance to exercise.
 
Kat has made this a yearly routine; she even did the one the day before with her mother in Washington, D.C. I admire her comitment. As we walked, trying to pass people who were walking five and 10 abreast , I read the backs of T-shirts, the names of people being celebrated and memorialized, friends and family of walkers who had had the big C.
 
As we walked, I thought of all my friends who have had breast cancer and survived — all of them. I thought of my grandmother, who survived it and died of a heart attack. I wish I had worn a T-shirt that named he and all my friends whom I celebrate, both as friends and as survivors. 
pink tutu 
As we walked, I thought about how I don’t do pink. Except in my garden, I recoil at so much pink. Is it the color of breast cancer awareness because girls are still pink and boys are still blue? Even though men can get breast cancer? Really?  
 
I glanced at the seemingly endless ribbon of people behind us and at the seemingly endless ribbon of people in front and I thought about all the other kinds of cancer.
 
I wish there were 25,000 people turning out to celebrate the survivors and memorialize the victims of and raise money for the "cure" of at least some of those. Science has been good for breast and prostate cancer.
 
For a lot of other types, it's been a little, well, pokey on the course.
 
Quickly, I returned to a better mindset because after all, it was Mother’s Day. Without mothers and their healthy breasts, where would we be?
 

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