The Eagles have released Tim Tebow, ending the former Heisman Trophy winner’s bid to win the No. 3 quarterback job for Chip Kelly in Philadelphia.
Tebow was one of 22 players released Saturday by the Eagles, who also cut veteran offensive lineman John Moffitt and rookie running back Raheem Mostart.
The move leaves Kelly and the Eagles with just two quarterbacks on their current roster. Tebow, 28, and Barkley had been competing for the Eagles’ No. 3 quarterback job behind Sam Bradford, who has a lengthy injury history, and Mark Sanchez.
It is not clear whether Philadelphia plans to acquire another quarterback.
Although he did not start in Philadelphia’s preseason finale, Tebow played well Thursday against the New York Jets, completing 11 of 17 passes for 189 yards and two touchdowns.
Tebow won the 2007 Heisman Trophy and helped Florida win two national championships during his college career but has not appeared in an NFL regular-season game since December 2012.
Seems like a pretty good guy but there simply is not enough talent there for the NFL…….
More than two months after calling a special session to address California’s transportation funding backlog, Gov. Jerry Brown has begun circulating a list of administration proposals on how to pay for it, including a $65 annual fee for drivers and increases in the diesel and gas taxes tied to inflation.
A one-page “transportation package” released Thursday calls for $3.6 billion a year for repairs to California’s crumbling transportation infrastructure. The $65 charge would generate $2 billion a year, while $500 million would come from fees charged to polluters and $100 million from so-called “efficiencies” at Caltrans, which the independent state legislative analyst has said is overstaffed.
While transportation, business and transit advocacy groups responded enthusiastically to the proposal, the Democratic governor did not appear to have secured the votes needed for a two-thirds majority in each house of the state Legislature, even from Democrats. Still, advocates urged lawmakers to reach a compromise before the Legislature is set to leave Sacramento on Sept. 11.
“The conditions are getting so bad that if Californians don’t commit to prioritizing funding to fix them, we will be facing the failure of a large portion of our bridges, streets and roads,” said Chris McKenzie, executive director of the League of California Cities, in a statement. “It is well past time for the Legislature to act.”
A coalition of labor unions, local government groups and influential business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, had previously outlined a plan that called for $6 billion a year in spending for 10 years.
Brown spokesman Gareth Lacy said in an email that the administration offered its proposal Thursday after numerous meetings with Democrats and Republicans.
“It includes sensible reforms and sufficient revenue to improve our roads, bridges, public transit and trade corridors – all vital to boosting quality-of-life and economic competitiveness,” Lacy said.
The Democratic governor called a special session on transportation funding in June but until Thursday there was little indication of a concrete proposal backed by the administration for how to pay for an estimated $59 billion backlog in repairs.
Brown’s plan includes concessions sought by Republicans such as requiring regular updates on progress toward highway improvements, streamlined environmental reviews for infrastructure repairs and extending public-private partnerships for construction. But Republicans were quick to reject it.
Sen. Bob Huff, R-San Dimas, who proposed his own transportation financing package earlier this year by ending the diversion of taxes meant for road repairs, said Brown deserves credit “for finally getting seriously engaged in the discussion of how we fix our roads.”
“Voters know they already pay some of the highest transportation tax rates in the nation and they want this money to be used to fix our roads, not siphoned off to other areas of the state budget,” he said in a statement.
Lawmakers in both parties believe the state’s transportation tax structure is out of date. They also agree the state can’t keep relying on a gas tax that hasn’t been increased in 20 years and lets thousands of electric car drivers off the hook for maintaining the roads they drive on.
The current gas tax rises and falls each year based on state projections. Brown’s proposal would set it at a fixed rate based on a 5-year average then add index increases to the consumer price index. It also calls for an 11-cent-per-gallon increase on diesel fuel.
Some fellow Democrats remained skeptical. Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, who introduced his own transportation funding package earlier this year, called Brown’s plan a discussion being floated, rather than a proposal, and said it is being reviewed “to determine its fiscal competence.”
“It would create additional revenue but not enough,” he said.
Brown’s outline also includes:
– $1.6 billion annually for state highway improvements;
– $1.15 billion annually for local streets and roads, including $100 million for environmentally friendly improvements such as bike lanes and sidewalks; and
– $400 million a year in grants to local governments for transit.
Where has all the current taxes being paid gone? Every time we buy a gallon of gas there is a large tax already attached, where has that money gone? Where does the liberals stop and say this is enough out of the working man, time to put a stop to these leaches.
A sticky-fingered Kennedy Airport TSA agent has been busted in the theft of a passenger’s $7,000 watch — and is accused of then destroying it in an attempt to avoid getting caught, authorities said Friday.
Tranportation Security Administration screener Margo Louree-Grant was caught on security camera swiping the men’s luxury watch about 3 p.m. Aug. 26.
The watch, completely covered in white diamonds, had been placed in a plastic bin for screening by passenger Bindoo Ahluwalia.
When Ahluwalia walked away without the watch after passing through security at Terminal 7, Louree-Grant snatched it and took it to a bathroom, prosecutors said.
But she became nervous when she returned to her post and found co-workers searching for the timepiece. She left her post again and claims to have destroyed the watch, officials said. She quit her job soon afterward.
Louree-Grant, of Brooklyn, was arrested Wednesday night and charged with grand larceny and official misconduct. She faces up to seven years in prison if convicted, officials said.
“This kind of thievery will not be tolerated at our airports,” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Friday.
Louree-Grant was arraigned in Queens Criminal Court Thursday night and released without bail, officials said
More than 2,000 cases could be overturned in Baltimore as the first motion for a retrial is filed accusing the state’s attorney’s office and the police of “deliberate and willful misrepresentation” of the use of the secret surveillance equipment known as Stingrays.
The motion, which was filed on behalf of defendant Shemar Taylor by attorney Josh Insley in the Baltimore city circuit court on Friday, says the State’s Attorney’s office colluded with the police department to withhold “discovery” material from the defendants and the courts about the use of the Stingray device. Taylor was convicted of assault, robbery and firearm possession.
Manufactured by the Harris corporation and around the size of a briefcase, Stingrays are one of a class of surveillance devices known as “cell-site simulators,” which pretend to be cellphone towers in order to extract metadata, location information, and in some cases content from phones that connect to it.
Prosecutors are required to reveal the evidence against defendants in the “discovery” phase of a criminal trial.
However, a Guardian investigation in April revealed a non-disclosure agreement that local police and prosecutors were forced to sign with the FBI before using the Stingray devices, which mandated them to withdraw or even drop cases rather than risk revealing Stingray use.
“It shocks the conscience that a police commissioner and an elected State’s Attorney would conspire to commit obstruction of justice unless the FBI told them they could disclose,” Insley told the Guardian.
In the motion, Insley cited part of a specific 2011 agreement similar to the one revealed by the Guardian, between then-state’s attorney Gregg Bernstein and then-police commissioner Frederick Bealefeld which stated that their offices “shall not, in any civil or criminal proceeding, use or provide any information concerning the Harris corporation wireless collection equipment/technology” without permission from the FBI.
The motion also stated that in Taylor’s original trial in November 2014, attorneys for the state told defense counsel that “the device” was not used in the investigation. But a USA Today investigation which unearthed a log of cases in which the device was used showed that a Stingray was in fact used in Taylor’s case.
“This was clearly a deliberate and willful misrepresentation to the court to conceal the use of extrajudicial clandestine surveillance by the Baltimore City Police Department,” the motion stated, adding later that the State’s Attorney had demonstrated “an intentional wanton disregard of the Rules of Evidence.”
The Baltimore public defender’s office has also begun re-examining more than 2,000 cases in which police secretly used Stingrays.
The move also follows a change in federal policy on Thursday in which the US Department of Justice said that agencies under its aegis would have to obtain a specific warrant to use Stingrays. But this change in policy does not affect local police forces or state-level agencies, where the use of cell-site simulators and other devices is still shrouded in secrecy, and requires only a low-level court order called a PEN register, or “trap-and-trace” order, to grant police permission for its use.
Defense attorneys and civil liberties activists told the Guardian that prosecutors and police departments go to extraordinary lengths to avoid being forced to reveal their use of these devices. They do this by using Stingrays in the first instance, then reverse-engineering a case which they can safely bring to trial without mentioning the surveillance equipment.
In other instances, according to Nate Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s speech, privacy and technology project, police would present “inscrutable euphemisms” to courts.
“Terms like ‘we located this phone using information from a confidential source’, which sounds a whole lot like they had an informant; it doesn’t sound like they were using a sophisticated electronic device forcing all phones in the area to report back,” Wessler told the Guardian. “Those efforts to hide what the police were doing are very difficult to smoke out.”
“It’s really very frightening,” Natalie Finegar, the deputy public defender for Baltimore city, told the Guardian. She said that her office was starting the process of going through their clients’ cases to see if the police and prosecutors had committed a “discovery violation” in not disclosing the use of Stingray devices — starting with currently incarcerated clients.
Finegar said that it was “too early to tell” how many cases might be affected. “We know there’s 2,000 potential cases,” she told the Guardian, “but there may be more.”
Why have this device and continually deny it and just dismiss cases? If you are not doing anything wrong you do not need to lie about it.
