New York, NY – Continental Airlines Inc., the fourth-biggest U.S. carrier, expects to collect $350 million in checked bag fees this year.

Continental Chief Executive Officer Jeff Smisek disclosed the figure during remarks today at a J.P. Morgan aviation conference in New York.

Houston-based Continental is working on “many, many” additional products and services that it may begin charging for, Smisek said.

News Source:  Bloomberg LP

Starke, FL – Martin Grossman was declared dead at 6:17 p.m. at the Florida state prison in Starke, 15 minutes after the start of his execution by lethal injection.

In a final statement, Grossman expressed remorse to the family of Peggy Park, the Florida wildlife officer he beat and shot to death more than 25 years ago.

“I would like to extend my heartfelt remorse to the victim’s family,” Grossman said. “I fully regret everything that happened that night, everything that was done, whether I remember everything or not. I accept responsibility.”

“I would like to say a prayer,” the 45-year-old man added, then, lying on a gurney, hands strapped to arm boards and with needles in both arms, he began reciting a Jewish prayer called the Schma.

It is the most sacred prayer in Judaism and the first prayer that Jewish children learn. Among its verses: “The Lord is our God, God is one.”

Park’s brother, sister and mother were among the 20 witnesses to the execution. They were seated directly in front of Grossman, who was visible through a window.

The Vatican, Jewish leaders as far away as Israel, and thousands of petitioners called for a stop to the execution on several grounds, including questions about whether the slaying was premeditated, Grossman’s diminished IQ and his remorse for the crime.

Grossman’s religious adviser, Rabbi Menachem Katz, was with him in his cell throughout the day.

Grossman took a shower and dressed at 4 p.m. He ordered no special last meal, just food from the prison cantina – a fried chicken sandwich, fruit punch, and banana cookies, said Gretl Plessinger, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.

“He is calm, compliant and resolved to the fact his execution is going to happen,” Plessinger said before he was walked to the death chamber.

Grossman’s final visit was 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. today with his aunt, Rosal Melton, and two female friends, Sharon Lion and Francine Whitehouse. The first two hours, a visitors window separated them and the last hour was a contact visit.

Earlier Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused today to block Grossman’s execution.

He was sentenced to death for murdering Park on Dec. 13, 1984, as she patrolled a wooded area of Pinellas County now known as the Brooker Creek Preserve.

She came across Grossman, then a 19-year-old high school dropout, and a 17-year-old accomplice. They had a stolen gun. Grossman had already been to prison for grand theft and breaking-and-entering. He didn’t want to go back. They beat Park with a flashlight and shot her with her service revolver.

Last-minute efforts to spare Grossman’s life extended to the Vatican, which sent a letter to Gov. Charlie Crist saying “the prisoner has repented and is now a changed person.” The letter was sent in response to a request from Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, chief Rabbi of Haifa, Israel.

Grossman is the 69th person executed in Florida since the death penalty was reinstated in 1979, and the 25th by lethal injection. He was the fifth inmate executed under Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who has been in office for three years.

Crist signed Grossman’s death warrant Jan. 12. Since that time, his office has received about 49,000 letters, telephone calls or e-mails, according to a spokesman.

Below is a statement from Agudath Israel on the execution of Martin Grossman

An Orthodox Jewish organization that had been among several urging Florida Governor Charlie Crist to spare the life of Martin Grossman, and pursuing possible legal avenues to stay implementation of the death penalty, expressed “deep anguish” over his execution this evening.

Mr. Grossman was convicted of killing Ms. Margaret Parks, a Florida Wildlife Officer, in 1984, when he was 19 years old. In advocating for his life to be spared, the Jewish groups acknowledged the horror of his crime and expressed their deepest sympathy for the family of his victim. At the same time, they called attention to the fact that the murder was an act of panic, not premeditation; that Mr. Grossman’s low IQ and impaired mental state were not given proper recognition in his death sentence; and that Mr. Grossman has not only conducted himself as a model prisoner since his incarceration some 25 years ago but showed profound remorse and regret for his actions.

“The tragic news out of Florida,” said Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, Agudath Israel of America’s executive vice president, “leaves us feeling deep anguish and sorrow.

“Mr. Grossman’s execution has hit our community very hard. He was a fellow Jew and so we saw him as a brother. Countless members of our community had telephoned, e-mailed and faxed the Governor’s office pleading that Mr. Grossman’s sentence be commuted to life in prison. Unfortunately, our hopes were dashed.

“There are many lessons one might draw from this terrible tragedy, but in the end we acknowledge ‘Boruch Dayan Ha’emes’ – ‘Blessed be the true Judge’.”

News Source: AP News CH. 8

Miami, FL – Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said Tuesday that his office was the target of “almost an outcry” of nearly 50,000 e-mails, phone calls and letters from people urging him to spare Martin Grossman’s life. “We’ve been swamped,” Crist said.

“I’m getting calls from people who are asking me to stay this execution,” Crist said, “and then once I inquired, ‘Do you know what the facts are?’ I find that they unfortunately do not . . . Sometimes the story can almost get ahead of the facts.”

Crist said he was standing on a Miami International Airport runway tarmac Tuesday afternoon when a close friend of his wife called his cell phone and asked him to halt the execution. Crist said she changed her mind after he described how the killing occurred. The woman, whom Crist declined to identify, said, according to the governor: “I’m glad you shared what the real facts are. I’m sorry to have taken your time.”

Crist said a group of rabbis and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz were among those urging the execution be stopped. “The sincerity of their message is without question,” Crist said. “I’ve reached the conclusion that justice must be done.”

In a speech to small business owners that was mostly about the state of Florida’s economy, Crist, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, went into great detail on the circumstances of the case, including describing the killer as “blowing her brains out.”

The governor said he spoke Monday with former Gov. Bob Martinez, who signed Grossman’s initial death warrant two decades ago. “I was just seeking his advice, because it’s always a good idea,” Crist said.

A spokesman for the governor said that by Friday night the office had received more than 9,443 e-mails and more than 7,849 phone calls about the Grossman case.

“Signing a death warrant is a responsibility that Governor Crist takes very seriously,” spokesman Sterling Ivey wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times, “and the warrant for Martin Grossman was signed after a careful review …”

Grossman is the first inmate Florida has put to death for killing a law enforcement officer since the September 2006 execution of Clarence Hill. The Alabama man was executed at the age of 48 for ambushing two Pensacola police officers after a bank robbery on Oct. 19, 1982. He shot and killed Officer Stephen Taylor and wounded another officer as they tried to arrest Hill’s accomplice.

Grossman, of Pasco County, was 19 when he killed Park as she tried to arrest him and 17-year-old Thayne Nathan Taylor in what is now the Brooker Creek Preserve in Tarpon Springs.

Grossman has spent the latter half of his life in prison for the murder. He is the first Florida execution of 2010 and the 69th since the death penalty was restored in 1976.

Park, a Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission officer, found a stolen Luger pistol in the van Grossman and Taylor were in and tried to report it.

But Grossman, fearing that the offense would violate his probation and land him back in prison, attacked the officer with her own flashlight as she used her radio.

“I’m hit,” Park yelled over the radio.

Grossman called for Taylor to help him subdue the officer. Park managed to draw her .357 Magnum and fire off a wild shot inside her patrol vehicle. Then she kicked Taylor in the groin.

But Grossman, 6 feet 4 and 225 pounds, overpowered the 5-foot-5, 115-pound officer. He broke her fingers wrenching the .357 away from Park and shot her in the back of the head.

The two men escaped but were arrested 11 days later. Grossman was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death a year to the day of the murder. Taylor was convicted of third-degree murder and served two years of his seven-year sentence.

Park had grown up in Columbus, Ohio, and quickly developed an affinity for the outdoors. She camped with park rangers in Ontario and especially enjoyed the sounds of wolves howling.

She graduated from Ohio State University and came to Florida to become a wildlife officer. She quickly took to the law enforcement side of her new post, though it often required her to patrol alone.

“I decided when I was 12 that I wanted to be a park ranger,” she told the St. Petersburg Times in an interview before her death. “It will never be a job.”

After her service, Park’s ashes were scattered by helicopter over the eagles’ nests she helped care for as a wildlife officer.

In 2007, a stone marker was placed in the Brooker Creek Preserve in East Lake to honor “an officer fallen in the cause of conservation.”

Park’s brother, sister and mother, Peggy, 79, planned to attend the execution. The mother came from Ohio despite a cardiologist’s order not to travel.

News Source:  SP Times

Starke, FL – During the rather antiseptic execution of Martin Grossman for killing Wildlife Officer Peggy Park in 1984 in North Pinellas County, Park’s mother stared at her daughter’s killer who was just 10 feet away. Afterwards, Margaret Park said she was thinking of the children of Haiti who were buried under concrete and died a horrible, scary death. Park says she thinks Grossman had it easy.

Park’s sister Betsy says 25 years is an excruciating long time to have to wait and have the way her sister died brought up over and over. Betsy Park was sad her father didn’t live to see the day the killer died.

Park says she was upset with some opponents of the execution including the Pope for stepping in and some Jewish groups which she said went too far. According to Park the family was harassed over the past week and she thinks it is reprehensible.

However Park says she is glad that Grossman took responsibility, but says it was long overdue.

Having covered some of the Peggy Park murder, and now being a witness at the execution of her killer, it seems as if Park’s death was more traumatizing. She was beaten over the head more than 20 times with her flashlight and then shot in the head with her service revolver. And while the execution brings some closure, it will never end for the Park family.

Margaret Park says you don’t forget, but you go on.

And they will go on knowing the man who killed their daughter has finally been served justice, even if it took a quarter of a century for that to happen.

News Source:  WTSP

Brooklyn, NY – She survived the Holocaust. But  a tenacious life story wasn’t enough for 92-year old Eta Eckstein to keep her Brooklyn landlord at bay.

While out of her apartment in a rehab facility, the grandmother got evicted.

“It’s unspeakable,” says Eta’s grandson, Idan. “They just threw her belongings onto the street.” Eta’s family got no explanation from the landlord, Morris Piller.

They believe he wants her out of the $600-a-month rent-controlled apartment on Bay Parkway in Bay Ridge, where she’s lived for 40 years.

The landlord’s attorney declined comment when contacted by nbcnewyork.com

News Source:  WNBC New York