By BJ Austin, KERA News & Wire Services
Dallas, TX – Fort Worth is expected to pay nearly half a million dollars to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who suffered a severe head injury in a gay bar raid.
The City Council is to vote next week on the $400,000 settlement with Chad Gibson. He claims excessive force was used during the Rainbow Lounge raid in 2009.
The agenda item says the settlement's approval should not be considered as admission of the city's liability. It says it will avoid time-consuming and costly litigation.
Three Fort Worth police officers were suspended, and two Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents and a supervisor were later fired. But both agencies' investigations determined no excessive forced was used.
The city later dropped all charges against Gibson and three others who'd been arrested that night.
Tarrant County Residents Not Living Healthier
A new report on the health of Tarrant County residents shows 12% in poor or fair health.
Doug Fabio with Tarrant County Public Health says the "Behavioral Risk Factor Survey" is done every four or five years. The last one was in 2004. Fabio says Tarrant County is NOT getting healthier.
Fabio: Heart disease remains the leading cause of mortality in Tarrant County, and then cancer, stroke and diabetes. And that we haven't really had a measurable improvement with those. The prevalences are still relatively the same.
The new survey also shows that 37 percent of Tarrant County residents are overweight. And 23% don't have health insurance.
The Behavioral Risk Factor report will be posted soon on Tarrant County Health's website.
Super Moon Saturday Night
There's a "supermoon" Saturday night.
Linda Krouse, with Fort Worth's Noble Planetarium, says the moon will be full and closer to the earth.
Krouse: The orbit of the moon around the earth is not a perfect circle. It's an elipse. And so, from time to time, the moon is closer than at other times. It's not an unusual happening, it's just that it doesn't occur very often. So when it does come around, we all want to go out and look because the moon looks prettier. It really does look beautiful.
Krouse says the moon will be closer by about 20 thousand miles.
NASA says it'll look about 14% bigger and 30% brighter. The last time this happened was 1993. The next time will be 2029.
Hacker Gets Stiff Sentence
A former security guard who hacked into a Dallas hospital's computer system is going to federal prison for nine years.
Jesse McGraw, also known as "Ghost Exodus" pleaded guilty to installing "bots" or malicious codes into several computer systems at North Central Medical Plaza. His downfall was a YouTube video.
In it, the 26 year old McGraw explained how the Electronik Tribulation Army intended to use the "bots" to launch so-called "denial of service" attacks on the websites of rival hacker groups - including "Anonymous".
That's the hacker group currently claiming responsibility for attacks in support of Wikileaks.
Judge Jane Boyle told McGraw that hackers need to understand the potentially devastating consequences of their actions. She said NINE years should be a deterrent to others.