Morning News Brief

It’s been confirmed that a tornado classified EF-2 touched down for about 15 minutes in Wyoming county on Thursday morning.  The twister came down in Java and went across country to Gainesville along rt 78 blowing down several barns and ripping up hundreds of trees and bushes.  Although apparently a dog in his doghouse was transported across a street and a barn full of cattle was reduced to just one board, no injuries were reported in either people or animals.  Meteorologists stated that this tornado was unusually strong for this area of the country.  An alert was sent out 3 minutes before the funnel touched down.  Wind speeds were roughly 115 miles per hour and the tornado was over 1500 feet wide.  

On Thursday, New York State Health Commissioner Mary Bassett declared monkeypox to be an “imminent threat to public health”. The declaration will allow the state to access more resources to fight the outbreak.  New York State is leading the nation with monkeypox infections, most contained to New York City.  Monroe County has six confirmed cases as of Thursday.  The state and county have been rolling out monkeypox vaccines, available now to men who have sex with men, the demographic health officials say have been most affected by the outbreak so far.  Health officials say that, while most of the people who have contracted the disease are in the LGBT+ community, since it is spread by close prolonged physical contact, technically anyone could get it.

The man who arranged for and then kidnapped his children from a foster care facility in Rochester in January 2021 has been sentenced to 115 years to life in prison.  The judge, Victoria Argento, called Dimitri Cash a “pathetic excuse for a human being,” and said that “I hope you never see the light of day.”  Cash and his cousin Joenathan broke into the foster home and duct taped residents to chairs before kidnapping the children that were there because Dimitri was physically abusing them at home.  The children were recovered in the state of Alabama days later.  Their foster mother said in court Thursday that they still relive the trauma of that night.  The two perpetrators were also accused of planning to kill the family court judge overseeing their case.  Joenathan was sentenced to 3 consecutive 25 year sentences.  The children are being adopted by their foster parents.

Despite calls to stop the tour from coming to Batavia and fears of extremists and radicals coming to the ReAwaken America tour featuring retired General Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, and Eric Trump among dozens of other national names as speakers, the Genesee County Legislators say their concerns are mostly about traffic and not about any disturbances.  County Manager Matt Landers said that the Sheriffs Office has reached out to other places that hosted the event and found that no “disruptions, any kind of fights, any kind of lawlessness. None of those have occurred in the research done by the Sheriff’s office.”

The Lawsuit brought by former State Senator George Maziarz against Western Region Off Track Betting has been voluntarily dropped.  In May, Maziarz, who represented Niagara County in the State Senate from 1995-2014, took legal action against WROTB and its leadership, following up on a state Comptroller’s Office report that officials of the public benefit company misused tickets to sporting events and concerts and provided gold-plated health insurance policies to appointed board members.  Maziarz was suing to have funds returned to WROTB’s 17 member municipalities, including Genesee County.  Maziarz stated to the Batavian, “My lawsuit against Western Regional Off-Track Betting has been voluntarily withdrawn at the request of a law enforcement agency.” He had no further comment.