Sheldon G. Adelson, “chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, who ranks sixth on the Forbes Magazine list of the world’s billionaires,” as reported in today’s edition of The New York Times, in an article titled “Big Coffers and Rising Voice at Freedom’s Watch.”

Adelson is a creator of Freedom’s Watch, founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives. This group’s core members include besides Adelson Mel Sembler, a shopping center magnate based in St. Petersburg, Fla., headquarters of the Raymond James investment firm that underwrote the Northampton County, Pennsylvania (of which the city of Easton is the seat) illegal fiscal year 2001 $111 million general-obligation (meaning the county’s taxpayers pick up the tab) for courthouse, prison expansion, and “economic development.”

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In a special to The Morning Call, a newspaper circulated in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the so-called “Lehigh Valley,” writer Angel R. Ackerman reports the “pull back” by Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, developer Louis Pektor, president of Ashley Development Company,  of  two projects, one in  the  city of Easton’s neighoring borough of Wilson and the other, called the “Majestic,” in Easton itself.

Pektor attributes the “pull back” to the declining market demand for luxury condominiums.

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I call attention to two articles appearing in today’s Morning Call:

First,, “Easton mayor is LVEDC finalist,” reports that Mayor Phil Mitman is a finalist in the competition to become the next full-time executive director of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation.

The LVEDC is the granddaddy of the tax-exempt non-profit organizations like Lehigh Valley Industrial Parks (LVIP) that I exposed in my last post as “shadow governments.”

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Yesterday’s (Sep. 10, 2007) edition of The Express-Times published an article by its City of bethlehem-beat reporter Kurt Bresswein titled “Saving Steel history online” (Steel meaning the defunct  Bethlehem Steel Corporation that was operated and headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania).
Regrettable, and ironically, I can’t link the reader to Bresswein’s article because it was not published online.

According to the article, this history will be documented on a website created by Lehigh University located in Bethlehem, Lehigh Valley Industrial Park, Inc., the Lehigh Valley Industrial Park Coalition, the National Museum of Industrial History, a division of the Smithsonian Institute, and the Sands BethWorks Casino featuring slot-machine gambling

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Museum trying to get back on track, according to the September 4, 2007, edition of The Express-Times.

The museum reporter Sara Satulla refers to is the New Jersey Railroad and Transportation Museum, a subject about which the www.billybytes.blog/com/ blog has written extensively.

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