A Show of Force at Penn Station; Judge Rejects One Bid for Park Protest, One Suit Undecided; Winner and Still Spam Champion: U.S. Tops Spam List

A Show of Force at Penn Station

The New York City Police Department ramped up its presence at Pennsylvania Station yesterday, flooding the area with officers in preparation for the Republican National Convention next week, reports The New York Times. According to a police spokesman, 10,000 police officers will be dedicated to convention security. Bomb-sniffing dogs and plainclothes officers will also be part of the security plan, Paul J. Browne, police spokesman, told the Times.

For more details, read the full article in The New York Times.

Judge Rejects One Bid for Park Protest, One Suit Undecided

A federal judge in Manhattan yesterday refused to force New York City officials to allow some 75,000 protestors to rally on the Great Lawn in Central Park. The request, brought by the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, sought to use the Great Lawn as the site for the rally because it offered an “unconfined, family-friendly mass rally venue whose histroric tradition is devoid of confrontation and conflict,” according to The New York Times. However, security concerns and the city’s fear that a large rally would damage the turf, which cost more than $18 million to replace in the 1990s, won the favor of U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III. Protestors and the city will need to come up with an alternative quickly. The convention begins next week. A separate case involving protestors’ use of Central Park during the convention is in New York State Supreme Court.

For more details, read the full article in The New York Times.

Winner and Still Spam Champion: U.S. Tops Spam List

Apparently the anti-spam laws passed by Congress are having little effect on the spam problem. BBC News Online reports that almost 43 percent of all unwanted e-mails originated from the United States in July, according to anti-virus firm Sophos. The next most egregious spammer was South Korea, accounting for 15 percent of all junk e-mails.

For more details, read the full article at BBC Online.