Free Republic

The captain of a motorboat that capsized in New York Harbor and killed a mom and her baby was not licensed to operate the vessel – and was actually hired as a limo driver, new court documents reveal. Manuel Hernandez, 46, was allegedly running an illegal charter operation when he overloaded the 21-foot boat with 13 passengers on Saturday night, and lacked required safety standards that included child or infant-sized life jackets, federal prosecutors said. Sara Sanchez, 27, and her 5-month-old daughter, Antonella Garcia, drowned shortly before 10:30 p.m. when the boat was struck by a swell while making a...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Two Iranian nationals seen by a New York police officer photographing city landmarks were just tourists nearing the end of their stay in the United States, Iran's mission to the United Nations said on Friday."It was these two guys on Saturday, June 22, taking pictures of themselves in Battery Park" at the southern end of Manhattan, said Mohammad Hossein Nosrat, mission spokesman. The two, who work as security guards at the mission and do not have diplomatic immunity, took 1 minute 40 seconds of videotape of the park and environs, Nosrat said. At that point, a...

Human Waste Continues to Pour into NY Harbor After Sandy...

Death, disease and injury were the fate of thousands held at sea More Americans died in British prison ships in New York Harbor than in all the battles of the Revolutionary War. There were at least 16 of these floating prisons anchored in Wallabout Bay on the East River for most of the war, and they were sinkholes of filth, vermin, infectious disease and despair. The ships were uniformly wretched, but the most notorious was the Jersey. Following the Battle of Long Island in August, 1776, and the fall of New York City soon after, the British found thousands of...