Ryan444123 dot Com

As many as 200 people were stranded when the Seattle Center Monorail red train became stuck in its tracks Saturday afternoon.

“It just stopped,” said Milan Milosevic, 39, from Vancouver, B.C.

No one was hurt and by 5:20 p.m., around 90 minutes after the train first came to a halt, all passengers had been safely evacuated, Seattle fire spokeswoman Dana Vander Houwen said.

Seattle firefighters were dispatched to the elevated tracks along 5th Avenue between Lenora and Blanchard streets just past 4 p.m.

Deputy Chief Steve Oleson estimated there were between 150 to 200 passengers aboard at the time. Firefighters used two ladder trucks to bring passengers down to street level.

“We’re just going to take our time, taking people down nice and easy,” he said.

The monorail’s second train, the blue train, is undergoing a $4.5 million renovation, but was pressed into service to help with the evacuation, pulling up alongside the red car about an hour after it stalled.

A metal plank was placed between the two trains and about 20 passengers at a time were evacuated, Vander Houwen said.

Milosevic, with his wife and two children, said they were en route to downtown when the train stopped, and then things got hot inside.

“The heat was unbearable,” he said.

Catherine Long, 76, a tourist from Tennessee, said the heat quickly took a toll on the passengers inside.

“That was the worst thing,” she said, after being safely evacuated from the train.

After about 20 minutes, Milosevic said, he and some of the other passengers opened an emergency door.

By then, firefighters were arriving and setting up their aerial ladders to reach the passengers.

Long, who was travelling with her husband, was placed in the front seat of a battalion chief’s vehicle to recover while she waited to be evaluated by a paramedic.

“I’m just shaken,” she said. “It’s a little nerve wracking.”

Firefighters were passing bottled water around to the other passengers and Metro Transit dispatched buses to help transport the people. More water was placed in baskets, sent to the passengers still waiting to be rescued.

Jann Wagner, of Los Angeles, was with her husband, two sons and a niece when the train broke down.

“Getting on the ladder was a little scary,” she said.

Afterward, she and her family posed with firefighters for pictures.

The monorail was taken out of service earlier this month due to electrical problems that sapped one set of drive motors of full power. At the time, officials with Seattle Monorail Services said the malfunction could result in sluggish speeds for the monorail, or leave it stranded.

It is unclear what caused the monorail to stop in its tracks Saturday. Representatives of Seattle Monorail Services at the scene declined to comment.

The two monorail trains, a red and blue train, carry about 2 million passengers annually between Seattle Center and Westlake Center. While the red train has suffered from mechanical problems, the blue train has also been out of service undergoing a $4.5 million renovation.

The red train is to be renovated later.

In 2005, fire broke out aboard one of the trains and, later, the two trains collided on the tracks.

WEIRTON, W.Va. – Weirton officials have enlisted the federal government’s help in figuring out what to do about at least 70 wild chickens that are roaming a city neighborhood.

City Council approved a contract this week for a study that will be conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Services.

Weirton Police Chief Bruce Marshall says the federal agency will conduct a preliminary site investigation and then design a plan for the birds’ possible removal.

Marshall says an estimated 70 to 100 wild chickens live in the Kings Creek Bowl area.

Resident Christina Foley has said the chickens are running free in the neighborhood, hiding in trees, roaming the streets and generally ruling the roost.

A girl’s e-mailed cry for help and her photos of rising flood waters saved 40 neighbors trapped in a submerged mobile home park.  Tiffany Monk, 16, stood outside her Melbourne trailer during Tropical Storm Fay on Thursday and noticed floodwaters slowly overtaking her community on Eau Gallie Boulevard.  <img src=’http://2716.btrll.com/info/2716/560/300×250.411/no+iframe;6205617′ width=0 height=0 /><a href=’http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/3726/3/0/%2a/n%3B206977207%3B0-0%3B0%3B12654586%3B4307-300/250%3B27905682/27923561/1%3B%3B%7Eokv%3D%3Bkw%3Dnews+square+17277174+C05503_10415+C05503_10396%3Bcomp%3D205064058%3Bad%3Dtrue%3Bpgtype%3Ddetail%3Btile%3D3%3Bsz%3D300×250%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/2/3a50/0%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://2716.btrll.com/clk/2716/560/300×250.411/none/;CtP;6205617′><img src=’http://2716.btrll.com/img/2716/560/300×250.411;CtP;6205617′ width=300 height=250 border=’0′ alt=” /></a>

“There were people trapped in their home,” Monk said. “Water was rising and there was no way out. (There were) people with oxygen tanks and wheelchairs and there was no way out. They needed help.”Monk snapped photos of Groveland Mobile Home Park and then sent e-mails.”You really have to see this,” she said in e-mails she sent along with photos of tires floating by in her road. “We are trapped in. Literally, there is no way out.”"Finally, I e-mailed the radio station 107.1 and I was like, ‘Nobody seems to be coming in here to help us,’” Monk said. “We need help and we are trapped in. And then 20 minutes after that, news people started showing up here.”Emergency personnel realized the severity of the situation and sent large trucks to pull out the elderly and disabled people who had a few feet of standing water inside their trailers.Many were taken to the shelter at Sherwood Elementary School in Melbourne. Police then took some people back into their homes to save personal items.”I was just trying to help out the best I could,” Monk said. “I’ve learned that if you actually take action then someone might listen to you.”"She was worried about the elderly down there and nobody was doing anything,” Monk’s mother, Connie said. “So, she decided to get on the computer and see what I can get done.”

WASHINGTON – It took seven years, but Charles Ulrich did something many people dream about, but few succeed at: He beat the IRS in a tax dispute.

Not only that, but tax experts say potentially millions of other taxpayers could benefit from his victory.

The accountant from Baxter, Minn., challenged the method the IRS has used for more than 20 years to tax shares and cash distributed by mutual life insurance firms to their policyholders when they reorganize as public companies.

A federal court recently agreed with his interpretation.

“There’s a tremendous amount of money at stake,” said Robert Willens, a New York City-based tax analyst at Robert Willens LLC. “Tens of thousands of people could be in line for a refund.”

Don Alexander, an IRS commissioner in the 1970s and now a tax attorney in Washington, said while it’s not unusual for individuals to take on the agency, “most of them lose.”

Alexander called it “quite a significant case.”

The dispute arose when more than 30 mutual life insurance companies became publicly traded corporations in the late 1990s and earlier this decade, in a process known as “demutualization.”

Mutual companies are owned by their policyholders, so the companies provided stock and cash to compensate them for the loss of their ownership interests when they went public.

All told, roughly 30 million policyholders received distributions, Ulrich estimates. MetLife Inc. provided over $7 billion of stock to about 11 million policyholders when it went public in 2000, while Prudential distributed $12.5 billion in stock to another 11 million.

The IRS held that the recipients hadn’t paid anything for the shares and owed taxes on the full amount when the shares were sold. Cash distributions also were fully taxable, the IRS said.

That didn’t sound right to Ulrich, 72, an accountant for 49 years. He began researching the issue in 2001, when he received shares from two companies, Prudential and Indianapolis Life.

Ulrich concluded that policyholders had paid for their ownership rights through their premiums so the distributions should have been tax-free.

That could make a significant difference in what a taxpayer owes. If a company distributed shares worth $30 and a recipient subsequently sold them at $32, under the IRS’ view they would pay taxes on all $32. Under Ulrich’s interpretation, they would owe taxes only on the $2 per share gain.

In 2003, Ulrich publicized his views by contacting tax and insurance experts and setting up a Web site.

“Largely I was regarded as a lunatic,” he said, who “would never prevail against the IRS.”

Still, some people who’d paid taxes contacted Ulrich and asked him to file refund requests, which he did, for a fee. Some of those refunds were granted, he said. Tax experts say the IRS doesn’t always closely scrutinize small refunds.

One of his clients, Jean Prevost and her husband, Jim, who live near Minneapolis, received a refund of almost $1,500 in federal and state taxes in 2003.

“It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it was ours,” she said.

But the IRS wasn’t pleased with Ulrich, accusing him of promoting abusive tax shelters and demanding the names of his clients, which he said he refused to provide.

The agency backed off in 2004 with help from the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate office, Ulrich said.

IRS spokesman Bruce Friedland said the agency is prohibited from commenting on its interactions with taxpayers.

One of Ulrich’s clients, Eugene Fisher, a trustee for a Baltimore, Md.-based trust, sued the IRS in February 2004 after being denied a refund.

Judge Francis Allegra of the Court of Federal Claims in Washington sided with Fisher and called the IRS’ view “illogical” in an Aug. 6 decision. He ordered the agency to refund $5,725 in taxes plus interest to the trust overseen by Fisher.

It’s not clear how many people could benefit from the ruling. Many of the 30 million policyholders are probably too late to seek refunds, since claims must be filed within three years of the April 15 tax deadline. That means the statute of limitations for taxes paid for 2004 ran out April 15, 2008.

Many individual taxpayers may not have enough at stake to go to the trouble, said Burgess Raby, a Tempe, Ariz.-based attorney who represented Fisher. Still, millions of policyholders could benefit from the court’s ruling, he said.

Raby credits Ulrich with being the driving force behind the issue.

“The genesis for this was Chuck’s real feeling that this was an unfair position” by the IRS, Raby said.

The government could appeal the ruling and likely will fight future refund claims, perhaps hoping for a different outcome in a separate court, tax experts said.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the government hasn’t yet decided whether to appeal.

Still, taxpayers should request refunds if they’re eligible, the tax experts said, because even if the IRS rejects the claim, doing so extends the deadline for a potential refund for two more years.

Ulrich will prepare refund requests for interested taxpayers, for a fee, and has posted additional information at his Web site, http://www.demutualization.biz. But he said the principle is more important to him.

“I think it’s important that taxpayers’ rights be protected,” he said. “We should have had a Boston Tea Party over this.”

EASTON, Md. - For only the third time in five years, Easton police have ticketed someone for going topless in public. Sean Cephus, 18, was cited June 4 when police say he was spotted without a shirt on South Street near Hanson Street. He was also cited for failing to obey a lawful order to stop for police.

A town ordinance adopted in 1974 forbids anyone from going topless in public buildings or on public streets and sidewalks. Possible penalties are a fine of up to $100 and up to 10 days in jail.

Easton Police Lt. Gregory Wright said people without shirts are considered a public nuisance. He said three citations have been issued since 2003.

“We are seeing a historic hydrological event taking place with unprecedented river levels occurring,” said Brian Pierce, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Davenport. “We’re in uncharted territory — this is an event beyond what anybody could even imagine.”

Gov. Chet Culver has declared 55 of the state’s 99 counties as state disaster areas.

No deaths or serious injuries were reported in Iowa, but one man was killed in southern Minnesota after his car plunged from a washed-out road into floodwaters. Another person was rescued from a nearby vehicle in the town of Albert Lea.

In Des Moines, officials said they were urging residents to evacuate more than 200 homes north of downtown because of concerns that the Des Moines River would top a nearby levee. Some residents also were ordered to evacuate homes along rivers in Iowa City and Coralville.

In Cedar Rapids, a city of about 124,000, flood waters downtown neared the top of stop signs and cars were nearly covered in water. It wasn’t clear just how high the river had risen because a flood gauge was swept away by the swirling water.

“It’s going door to door to make sure people don’t need to be rescued, cause right now they can’t get out on their own,” said Dave Koch, a spokesman for the Cedar Rapids Fire Department. “It’s just too deep.”

The surging river caused part of a railroad bridge and about 20 hopper cars loaded with rocks to collapse into the river. The cars had been positioned on the bridge in hopes of weighing it down against the rising water.

Joe Childers, an official at a U.S. Bank in downtown Cedar Rapids, was in jeans and tennis shoes as he worked to move documents and other items upstairs or out of the building.

“We’re trying to keep water out of as many places as we can,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing. I don’t think anyone really expected it this far.”

Prisoners had to be moved from the Linn County jail, including some inmates who had been transferred from the Benton County jail in Vinton because of flooding. The sheriff’s office also was under water, Zeller said.

“We’ve had to move our operations out of the area and to our alternate emergency site,” Zeller said. “We are just trying to regroup. When you don’t have all of your equipment and you don’t have all your facilities to operate out of — we’re at a little bit of a disadvantage … but we’re carrying on as normal.”

Several emergency shelters were opened, and the city had closed all but one of its bridges over the Cedar River.

“I believe that this is God’s way of doing things, and I’ve got insurance, so I’m not worried about it,” said Tim Grimm, who was forced to leave his home in the city’s Czech Village area.

In Austin, Minn., the Cedar River was expected to crest Thursday night at 22 feet, 7 feet above flood stage. The river reached 25 feet in a 2004 flood that caused major damage in the city.

Some businesses and offices were closed because of the flooding, including a Hormel Foods corporate office and its Spam Museum. The city of Austin, however, has bought many properties in the flood plain since the 2004 flood and tore structures down.

“The city has been very proactive and that’s going to save them some problems this time,” said Mike Welvaert, a weather service meteorologist.

Flooding this week also caused damage across southern Wisconsin, where thunderstorms continued pounding the area on Thursday.

A funnel cloud was reported in Grant County in southwestern Wisconsin, said Chris Kuhlman, a weather service meteorologist. The weather service also said flash floods in the county closed two highways and required rescues, though a sheriff’s office dispatcher did not immediately have those details.

Just southeast of Grand Rapids, Mich., crews pulled the body of a motorist from a car found drifting in the swollen Thornapple River. State police said they believe the 57-year-old man called on his cell phone but didn’t say what happened or where he was; they found him using global positioning equipment.

People in several northern Missouri communities, meanwhile, were piling up sandbags to prepare for flooding in the Missouri River, expected to crest over the weekend, and a more significant rise in the Mississippi River expected Wednesday.

On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Oceanside Unified Schools Superintendent Larry Perondi discusses the DUI program as a student looks on.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego, California, suburb are defending themselves against allegations that they went too far.

At school assemblies, some students held posters that read, “Death is real. Don’t play with our emotions.”

Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.

“They got the shock they wanted,” she said.

Some of her classmates became extremely upset, prompting the teacher to tell them immediately that it was all staged.

“People started yelling at the teacher,” she said. “It was pretty hectic.”

Others, including many who heard the news of the 26 deaths between classes, were left in the dark until the missing students reappeared hours later.

“You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust,” said 15-year-old Carolyn Magos. “But then I felt selfish for feeling that way, because, I mean, if it saves one life, it’s worth it.”

Officials at the 3,100-student school defended the program.

“They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized,” said guidance counselor Lori Tauber, who helped organize the shocking exercise and got dozens of students to participate. “That’s how they get the message.”

The plan was to tell the truth to the students at an assembly later in the day. But word that it was all a hoax began to spread before the gathering. Tauber said some counselors and administrators revealed the truth to calm some students who had become upset.

Oceanside Schools Superintendent Larry Perondi said he fielded only a few calls from parents, and the PTA chapter said it had not heard any complaints. Perondi said the program would be revised, but he would not say how. And he said he was glad that students seemed to have gotten the message.

“We did this in earnest,” he said. “This was not done to be a prankster.”

Big-city mayors told Congress on Thursday that they are overwhelmed by the infrastructure needs of their regions and cannot maintain well-functioning water systems, roads and rail networks without more federal help.

On July 19, 2007, an underground steam pipe exploded in New York, sending residents running for cover.

“We’re having a quiet collapse of prosperity,” said Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Mark Funkhouser, one of four mayors to testify before the Senate Banking Committee about the state of the nation’s infrastructure, which they agreed was poor and getting worse.

They blamed much of the decay on shortsighted thinking by local, state and federal officials.

The issue of the country’s deteriorating transportation systems came under scrutiny last year with the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota that killed 13 people. Although experts believe that a poor design led to that collapse, the mayors sounded an alarm about decay throughout the system and its long-term effects on the U.S economy.

Senators on the panel were largely supportive of the mayors’ complaints, but one, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Delaware, reminded them, “at the end of the day, we’ve got to figure out how to pay for this stuff.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg urged Congress to abandon the tradition of earmark spending, in which individual lawmakers often deliver dollops of taxpayer money to small local projects that don’t provide much help for the long-term needs of their districts.

“We’re as guilty as anybody,” Bloomberg admitted. “We ask for money for things that are totally local, and why the federal government does it, I don’t know. They shouldn’t be doing it, although we will continue to ask as long as they are giving it out. Our senators have the obligation to bring home the bacon like everybody else does. … Seems to me the Senate should get together and say together, ‘We’re not going to do it anymore.’ ”

The American Society of Engineers estimates that bringing the nation’s transportation and resources networks up to a properly functional level would require $1.6 trillion and five years of work. Still, the mayors say, even that wouldn’t accommodate the new strains placed on roads in coming years.

Funkhouser said municipalities like Kansas City are unable to meet infrastructure needs on their own. Kansas City has a $6 billion backlog of needed improvements to roads, highways and the city’s outdated sewer system. The scale of massive projects such as expanding access to the Interstate 435 and I-70 interchange or linking the downtown “loop” with the urban Crossroads neighborhood to the south requires more help from the federal government, he said.

John Peyton, the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, said that a bigger port under construction in his city will add a half-million trucks to surrounding roads, which aren’t ready for them.

“Our existing level of transportation infrastructure simply cannot handle this kind of shift in trade from the West Coast to the East Coast as it is today. We will need new roads and rail,” Peyton said.

Atlanta, Georgia, Mayor Shirley Franklin said she is still struggling to fix her city’s water and sewer systems after decades of neglect by her predecessors. The issue became more urgent as the South suffers from a long-running drought pitting state against state in battles for water supplies.

To answer such demands, Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, and Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, are pushing a bill to create a National Infrastructure Bank that would raise money for major national projects by issuing up to $60 billion in tax credit bonds, which could then be leveraged into greater funding.

Dodd, the committee’s chairman, said he would bring the bill before the panel next month, but it’s unclear whether it would get a vote on the Senate floor this year.

Funkhouser called the bill a good concept for funding large construction projects.

“With this proposed legislation, the federal government can begin to address infrastructure not as a budgetary cost but as an investment,” he said

MADISON TWP., Mich. - An Adrian man is being sought on suspicion of stealing gasoline.

According to a report released Friday by the Lenawee County Sheriff’s Department, at about 2:54 p.m. on May 19, a passerby observed a man placing black electrical tape over the license plate of a 1998 Chevrolet in the parking lot of Meijer and then driving away.

When the responding officer arrived, the witness told him the vehicle had pulled into the Murphy Oil station in the 1500 block of East U.S. Highway 223.

The officer pulled in behind the man, who was in the process of pumping gas into the vehicle, and noticed the license plate on the vehicle was obscured with black tape. Determining the evidence suggested a crime was in progress, the officer approached the man with his duty weapon drawn. The man was identified as William B. Webb, 23, of Adrian. Webb was released after being detained, as the investigation continued.
Lt. Cletus Smith of the Lenawee County Sheriff’s Department said “a massive amount of gas” is being stolen because of the recent increase in fuel prices. If a person’s vehicle is involved in a crime, Smith said, “we have the right to confiscate it to pay for what was stolen.”

Smith acknowledged the citizen who alerted police to the suspicious behavior. “We commend her for taking note of what was going on in the parking lot and reporting it,” he said.

Maggie Lyn Bailey, 19, of Adrian, who owns the vehicle, is not being charged with any crime, Smith said. The seized car was sold back to her.

One felony and two misdemeanor warrants have been issued for Webb on suspicion of larceny of gas, forging or altering a license plate and driving on a suspended license, second offense.

PITTSFORD — Even in his sleep, the Hillsdale County sheriff is on duty.

WCSR-AM in Hillsdale reports Sheriff Stan Burchardt captured a breaking-and-entering suspect at an automotive-related business after being awakened about 1:15 a.m. Friday by noise outside his Pittsford home.

The sheriff’s department says Burchardt went outside to investigate and saw a person run up to the front of Pittsford Gas & Tire, smash a window and go inside.

Burchardt followed the person inside and spotted him filling a backpack with cigarettes and other items.

Burchardt ordered the suspect to get on the floor and called for backup. Deputies arrived within minutes.

The suspect is a 17-year-old from Montgomery and was being held at the county jail pending arraignment.