Tennessee | October 26, 2021
Preschool park in South Nashville overtaken by homeless: ‘This is a drug-use issue’
Tennessee | October 26, 2021
A beautiful, state-of-the art park for preschoolers in one of the poorest parts of Nashville has been dramatically altered because homeless people and drug users were taking over the park.
Azafrán Park on Nolensville Pike is a case study in how the city of Nashville is struggling with a growing homeless problem.
The park is a public private partnership. $1.5 million in fundraising, another half million from Metro Parks and you had the prettiest little pre-school park in low-income South Nashville.
Then the homeless discovered it and trouble followed.
“Some people were living under the pavilion and they were using the water splash for their own bathroom needs and then we all together took action to see how we could bring the park back to safety. Many people of course felt unsafe,” said Marta Silva, Interim Executive Director of Conexion Americas…. (Excerpts from Fox 17 Nashville)
Tennessee | July 9, 2021
Tennessee Attorney General Joins Lawsuit Against Google
Tennessee | July 9, 2021
Tennessee will be the 37th state to join a massive anti-trust lawsuit against tech giant Google.
Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III announced Wednesday that Tennessee will band together with the other states in the lawsuit in an attempt to combat what they see as anti-competitive trade practices.
“Google’s ‘Play’ was the long game-enticing manufacturers and operators to adopt Android by promising to remain open,” Slatery said. “Now that digital doorway is closed – if you want in, you’ve got to do it Google’s way. You essentially have to use its app store, use its payment processing system, and pay its unreasonable commissions for digital purchases. All of this harms consumers, limits competition and reduces innovation. Tennessee and 36 other states are no longer on the sidelines.”
The Google Play store is Google’s version of the Apple App Store, where Android users go to download applications to their phones.
The attorneys general who is a party to the suit says that Google’s practices violate federal and state antitrust laws.
Some of the claims against the tech titan include it “buying off” other application distributors, that the company’s “contractual requirements foreclose competition by mandating that the Play Store and many other Google apps be ‘pre-loaded’ on essentially all devices designed to run on the Android OS, and that they be given the most prominent placement on device home screens,” and that “app developers and app users alike to use Google’s payment processing service, Google Play Billing, to process payments for in-app purchases of content consumed within the app.”..
(Excerpts from the Tennesse Star)