Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn announces that 49-year-old Thomas E. Netter of Oakfield, N.Y. was arraigned this morning before Buffalo City Court Judge Shannon M. Heneghan on one count of Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree (Class “A” misdemeanor).
It is alleged that on January 29, 2021, at approximately 12:21 p.m., the defendant sent a threatening message via Facebook messenger to the Erie County Executive. The alleged threat, which placed the victim in reasonable fear of their physical safety, was related to COVID-19 mandates.
Netter is scheduled to return on Friday, October 1, 2021 at 9:30 a.m. for further proceedings. He was released on his own recognizance as the charge is non-qualifying for bail.
If convicted of the charge, Netter faces a maximum of one year in jail.
Judge Heneghan issued a No Contact Order of Protection on behalf of the victim.
A measles outbreak in West Texas had sickened at least 198 people as of March 7. It began with Texas residents, but the origin of the outbreak is unknown, state health officials said.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's request to keep billions in congressionally approved foreign aid frozen, but that fight isn't over.
The court did not set a timeline for when the money should be released, allowing the White House to continue to dispute the matter in lower courts, where U.S. District judge Amir Ali ruled last month that much of the money cut off by the administration should continue flowing while he reviewed the case, reported CNN.
"When you step back and look at what's happening in this order right here, it's 5-4," reported CNN's Katelyn Polantz, "and the four dissenters of what is being done right now for Donald Trump, those people are all the the conservative justices and what they are saying is, we can't believe that this Supreme Court is going to override what the executive wants to do here and just give this lower-court trial judge Ali in Washington, D.C., on the district court the power to figure this out right now, so a big struggle between the court system and Trump."
The administration had frozen billions in aid from the State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and several nonprofit groups that rely on that money filed lawsuits challenging the order as unconstitutional.
Ali had set a deadline for Wednesday to allow the funding to flow, but the administration rushed an emergency appeal and chief justice John Roberts unilaterally issued an stay that paused the case.
The government argued they're making “substantial efforts” to review payment requests to comply with Ali's order, but the plaintiffs were unsatisfied with that explanation.
“The government has not taken ‘any meaningful steps’ to come into compliance,” the groups said a Supreme Court filing last week.
Washington Post opinion columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus has resigned over the decision by publisher Will Lewis not to publish her column about Jeff Bezos’s overhaul of the newspaper’s editorial section. Marcus’s departure was first reported on Monday by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, who also acquired her resignation letter. In it, Marcus wrote: […]
