Sandy Hook

A luxury "superyacht" was reported to have exploded Monday afternoon 17½ miles off the coast of Sandy Hook, N.J., critically injuring at least nine passengers, according to Coast Guard officials. Monday night, however, the Associated Press reported that the Coast Guard said the explosion might have been a hoax and that it could find no signs of distress in the water. A caller said all 21 people aboard the 161-foot vessel, known as the Blind Date, escaped on life rafts and were accounted for following the 4:20 p.m. explosion, Coast Guard Lt. Joe Klinker told the AP. The Coast Guard declared a "mass-casualty incident" and requested the aid of additional authorities and helicopters.

SANDY HOOK, N.J. - In a room lit by a few red bulbs, dozens of black sea bass approach the glass of a massive tank, their protruding eyes watching two scientists who stare back at them. It's February, but the fish are acting as though it's May. The males, larger and darker, dart at one another, protecting harems of females that hover near the sandy bottom. Researchers have manipulated temperature and light to shorten the weeks and change the season so the 60 fish inside will reproduce, yielding eggs the scientists will use to examine how climate change affects the species.

IT WAS fascinating to listen to the passion of Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey last week. He wondered, after the Sandy Hook school shootings, why we, as a country, can't find the wisdom to craft a solution to what has become an epidemic. He was speaking as a father of young children. He could have been speaking for all of us. What was especially impressive about Kelsey is that in our politically correct environment, he had something to lose. Yet, he chose to speak from the heart, anyway.

Fumes from a cooking grill being used to provide heat killed three Pennsylvania men sleeping in their tents on an island in the Sandy Hook recreation area, authorities said yesterday. State Marine Police found the bodies of the Easton, Pa., men in a tent on Skeleton Hill Island, a few hundred yards from Sandy Hook, Chief Ranger Bruce Lane said. They were identified as Xuong Giang, 27, An Le, 37, and Huy Nguyen, 34. A fourth man, Van Duoc Nguyen, 28, was found incoherent outside the tent but was conscious and speaking by yesterday afternoon at Monmouth Medical Center, Lane said.

My friend Aaron Nelson and his family were visiting from Boston for Thanksgiving, and it was one of those damp, 35-degree days that make that little voice in your brain repeat, "Aruba, Aruba, Aruba. . . . " Aaron's mind, too, was elsewhere, so far away that I was certain I wasn't hearing him right. "I want to bike the Jersey Shore, and you're going to do it with me," he said. Now, Aaron is not exactly your vision of a speed demon in biking shorts. He's built like an NFL linebacker, smokes irregularly, eats passionately and seems awfully well-adjusted for a psychologist.

Environmentalists, longshoremen and residents of beach communities will get two more chances to comment on a plan to take mud dredged from New York and dump it off the Jersey Shore. The forums - including a congressional hearing - will continue the debate on the three-year permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The permit allows the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to dredge up to 280,000 cubic yards of sediment from the Brooklyn Marine Terminal and deposit it at Old Mud Dump, six miles off Sandy Hook.

Rescue crews came to the aid Saturday of a person whose sailboat capsized in waters off Sandy Hook, N.J. No injuries were reported. Authorities told the Asbury Park Press that the person, whose name was not disclosed, was alone aboard the 24-foot sailboat when it overturned about 2:30 p.m. The boat was in the Roman Shoals/Ambrose Channel area, about three miles off Sandy Hook, when it capsized. A Coast Guard crew and New Jersey State Police and New York City marine police units responded.

SANDY HOOK, N.J. - One of New Jersey's most popular swimming and fishing areas is back in business little more than six months after sustaining serious damage from Hurricane Sandy. The Gateway National Recreation Area at Sandy Hook opened Wednesday morning to accommodate anglers. Sandy Hook is a prime spot for bluefish and striped bass in the spring, and fishermen landed several large bass on Wednesday. Students from Lacey Township were in the first group to see the park after it reopened.

MONROE, Conn. - On a tour Wednesday of his daughter's new school, Vinny Alvarez took a moment to thank her third-grade teacher, who protected the class from a rampaging gunman by locking her classroom door and keeping the children in a corner. Alvarez was one of many Sandy Hook Elementary School parents expressing gratitude to the teachers during an open house at their school in the neighboring town of Monroe, where their children are resuming classes Thursday for the first time since the Dec. 14 shooting that left 20 children and six educators dead.

  NEWTOWN, Conn. – It was freezing outside the diner just off I-84, but Cole Depuy, wearing a Santa Claus hat and wrapped in a bright blue scarf, wasn't complaining. A large coffee can sat on the folding table in front of him, half-full with $10s and $20s and more than a few $50s - all, Depuy said, heading for families of the 26 people killed at his former elementary school Friday morning. "It's not much, but people want to help. You've got to give them an outlet," he said.

SANDY HOOK, N.J. - One of New Jersey's most popular swimming and fishing areas is back in business little more than six months after sustaining serious damage from Hurricane Sandy. The Gateway National Recreation Area at Sandy Hook opened Wednesday morning to accommodate anglers. Sandy Hook is a prime spot for bluefish and striped bass in the spring, and fishermen landed several large bass on Wednesday. Students from Lacey Township were in the first group to see the park after it reopened.

Jim Price, 55, of Moorestown, who ran the Boston Marathon on Monday in 2 hours, 54 minutes, loves the big-city races precisely because of the energy he feels from the crowds. He wonders if Monday's terrorist attack at the finish, killing three and injuring more than 170, will discourage spectators from coming to races such as next month's Broad Street Run. "If this has an impact on those fans, it's really going to hurt those events," he said. "I've viewed . . . 26 miles as hard enough, and I don't have a desire to run that far along empty streets.

The heroic role played by the families of the Sandy Hook massacre's victims should not be used to create what would be a dangerously misleading narrative about how they changed the politics of guns. The importance of last Thursday's 68-31 vote in the Senate to proceed with debate on a bill to curb gun violence cannot be understated, and the testimonies from the citizens of Newtown were vital to that victory. To say this is not to deny that many fights loom ahead. This was a vote to debate, not to pass, a bill - and the House could prove an even larger obstacle to change than the Senate.

NEWINGTON, Conn. - Customers packed gun stores around Connecticut on Tuesday ahead of a vote expected to bring sweeping changes to the state's gun-control laws. Among the changes would be a ban on the sale of large-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown shooting and a new classification for more than 100 types of guns as banned assault weapons. Lawmakers have touted the legislation, expected to pass the General Assembly on Wednesday, as the toughest in the country.

Apparently, there will be no ban on assault weapons. Never mind that Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault-type rifle to rip apart the bodies of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Forget the fact that James E. Holmes, the alleged Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooter, fired, among other weapons, an AR-15. Nor does it seem to make any difference that Jared Loughner - the man who shot Gabby Giffords and killed six others, including a 9-year-old girl - used a high-capacity magazine that the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban rendered illegal.

Deaths from gun violence in America produce "a Sandy Hook-plus" every day, Vice President Biden said Monday after meeting in Philadelphia with regional law enforcement and elected officials at a gun policy roundtable. The reference was to the 20 children and six educators killed Dec. 14 in the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Biden, in town to promote the Obama administration's gun proposals, had it about right: At roughly 11,000 homicides by firearm a year nationwide, the carnage works out to about 30 deaths a day. He said Monday morning's breaking news - a double homicide in a courthouse in Biden's home state of Delaware - underscored what he called the "urgent" need for "commonsense" regulation of gun sales.

New Jerseyans' concern about gun violence has fallen slightly as the two-month anniversary of the shooting in Newtown, Conn., approaches next week, according to the latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll. The number of respondents who were "very concerned" about the amount of gun violence in the United States fell to 69 percent, from 77 percent in a similar December poll. Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics surveyed adults in New Jersey by phone from Jan. 30 to Feb. 3. The results of the new poll, which had 796 respondents, have a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

SO MANY New Yorkers are migrating to Philadelphia that our town has affectionately become known as the city's sixth borough. And in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, there have been moments in which we'd love to make it official so that Mario Cuomo could be our governor, instead of Tom Corbett. Last week, Cuomo responded to the assassination of 20 children and six adults in Sandy Hook by making a passionate speech and signing into law the toughest gun measures in the country.

Philadelphia's pension board voted unanimously Thursday to ask all the gun manufacturers, distributors, and retailers with which it has invested $15 million in city pension money to adopt a set of eight "Sandy Hook Principles" designed to reduce gun violence. The board established procedures to track compliance, and committed the pension system to dump gun-related investments within 15 months if the companies fail to comply. Among other items, the city wants the companies to support a federal system requiring background checks on all gun and ammunition sales and transfers; sales and possession restrictions to keep guns away from children, criminals and those with mental health issues; and a pledge to "reevaluate policies on sale, production, design or conversion of military-style assault weapons for use by civilians.

School shootings have nearly become an American commonplace - always awful but no longer remarkable. Commentators labeled the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., unimaginable, but history tells us such brutality has become quite conceivable. In one infamously similar instance, a milk-truck driver bound and shot 10 Amish girls, killing five, in the one-room West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster County on Oct. 2, 2006. Carl Charles Roberts IV then killed himself (as did Adam Lanza in Newtown)