New Hampshire
Bomb risk awaits bidders on tax militants’ land
CONORD, N.H. – Federal officials preparing to sell the New Hampshire compound of a tax-evading couple convicted of amassing an arsenal of weapons can’t guarantee that explosives and other booby traps aren’t hidden on the 103-acre spread.
In fact, they will openly warn bidders that land mines might be planted throughout Ed and Elaine Brown’s bucolic property in the small town of Plainfield. And they say prospective buyers won’t be allowed on the grounds until they submit a winning bid that frees the government of liability for dismemberment or death.
“It’s going to be a very interesting sale,” said Chief U.S. Deputy Marshal Brenda Mikelson, who’s in charge of the auction.
The Browns, who do not recognize the federal government’s authority to tax its citizens, were in a nine-month standoff with authorities in 2007 after they were sentenced to five years in prison for tax evasion. U.S. marshals posing as supporters arrested them peacefully.
They were convicted in 2009 of amassing weapons, explosives and booby traps and of plotting to kill federal agents who came to arrest them.
Ed and Elaine Brown, now in their 70s, are serving sentences of 37 and 35 years respectively.
Texas
Woman’s roller-coaster death at Six Flags investigated
ARLINGTON, Texas – Investigators will try to determine if a woman who died while riding a roller coaster at a Six Flags amusement park in North Texas fell from the ride after some witnesses said she wasn’t properly secured.
The accident happened just after 6:30 p.m. Friday at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington. Park spokeswoman Sharon Parker confirmed that a woman died while riding the Texas Giant roller coaster – dubbed the tallest steel-hybrid coaster in the world – but did not specify how she was killed. Witnesses told area media outlets the woman fell.
Six Flags said the ride will be closed as the investigation continues, and a concert scheduled for Saturday was canceled.
The Texas Giant is 14 stories high, and has a drop of 79 degrees and a bank of 95 degrees. It can carry up to 24 riders. It first opened in 1990 as an all-wooden coaster but underwent a $10 million renovation to install steel-hybrid rails and reopened in 2011.
Massachusetts
Scrapbooks give peek inside Hemingway’s early life
BOSTON – Long before Ernest Hemingway first wrote a story, his mother was busy writing about him.
Grace Hall Hemingway started a series of scrapbooks documenting the childhood of the future Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner by describing how the sun shone and robins sang on the day in July 1899 when he was born.
Starting today, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston will make the content of five Hemingway scrapbooks available online (www.jfklibrary.org) for the first time, giving fans and scholars the chance to follow the life of one of the 20th century’s literary greats from diapers to high school degree.
Hemingway Collection curator Susan Wrynn said much of the content hasn’t been made available to the public before and only a few researchers have seen it in its entirety. The fragile leather-bound volumes have been kept in a dark vault for about four decades to keep them from falling apart.
The release of these records from the archive, home to 90 percent of existing Hemingway manuscript materials, will come on what would have been the scribe’s 114th birthday.
Associated Press
