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FORT COLLINS, Colo. — The 6-year-old Colorado boy thought to have floated off in a homemade balloon has raised questions whether it might have been a family stunt. During a live interview on CNN, Falcon Heene said he heard his family calling his name as he hid in the rafters of their garage. At the time, there was a frantic effort to bring down the balloon safely. Falcon's father asked, "Why didn't you come out?" The boy answered, "You had said we did this for a show." After the CNN interview, the father said he didn't know what his son...

A Muslim community leader who claimed he had been kidnapped at knifepoint after a BNP hate campaign has been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Noor Ramjanally, 36, of Valley Hill, alleged in August that he was abducted by two men, bundled into a car boot, driven to Epping Forest in Essex and told to stop his religious work. The BNP had been accused of whipping up racial tensions in the area after it issued an inflammatory leaflet about Mr Ramjanally's Islamic community group, the first in Loughton. His alleged ordeal became a cause célèbre among the...

A 24-year-old arrested this morning on suspicion of smashing 11 windows at Colorado Democratic Party headquarters tried to conceal his identity while allegedly committing the crime, according to police descriptions. Maurice Schwenkler wore a shirt over his face, a hooded sweat shirt and latex gloves before he and another man fled the scene on bicycles, police said. Schwenkler was apprehended after a short chase. The other suspect remains at large. While Schwenkler does not appear in the state's voter registration database, a person by that name in November 2008 received $500 from a political 527 committee called Colorado Citizens Coalition...

NEW ORLEANS — An African-American man from Mississippi admits posing as a white supremacist to send a death threat across state lines by Facebook.

A black man who pretended to be a white supremacist on the Internet has entered a guilty plea to charges that he issued death threats. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten says 20-year old Dyron Hart pled guilty in federal court to "communicating threats in interstate commerce." "According to court documents, Hart... admitted that he created a fictitious name and used the photograph of a white supremacist to communicated a threat. He then purported to be a person outraged by the election of President Barack Obama," Letten said in a news release. Letten says that Hart sent the threat to an African...

A Pennsylvania woman who called 911 to report that she and her daughter had been abducted was charged with making a false report and identity theft after police found the pair at a Disney resort in Florida, authorities said Wednesday. Bonnie Sweeten, 38, told authorities Tuesday afternoon that she and 9-year-old Julia Rakoczy were kidnapped after two men in a Cadillac rear-ended her sport-utility vehicle in Upper Southampton, north of Philadelphia. They were being held in the trunk of the Cadillac, she claimed. Sweeten was arrested late Wednesday at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort in Orlando, Florida, said Michelle Henry, district...

CUMMING, Ga. (AP) - A woman who claimed her house was set on fire because she supported President Barack Obama and her boyfriend have been charged with first-degree arson. Forsyth County Chief Investigator Steve Anderson said Friday that 47-year-old Pamela Graf and her boyfriend, 46-year-old Steve Strobel, are being held in different jails. Graf is in Forsyth County and Strobel in Barrow County, where he was charged with obstruction of justice in the case earlier this week. Graf's home burned on Jan. 18 while she was in Washington, D.C., to attend the inauguration. Officials found spray-painted graffiti that included a...

We see it all the time, that many Muslims look to play the victim card to get people to back off on criticizing Islam. Well this woman took it too far and made up two stories of being the victim of anti-Muslim hate crimes. This con woman was even allowed to give an interfaith speech after the first false report, but her lies have all come out. She is the one facing charges now.

“If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a ‘pre-emptive strike.’” The manual said this should be done by placing stories in mainstream and specialty press “in which minority leadership expresses concern about the threat of intimidation tactics” and “prime minority leadership to discuss the issue in the media; provide talking points.”

OK so a lot of people, including myself and even the McCain campaign itself, were punked by Ashley Todd. Not good. And yes we've had a lot of posts on this subject, but let me add one more and trust me, there is a payoff at the end: From the Post-Gazette: Once she had told the story to police, "she told lie after lie and the situation compounded to where we are right now," said Lt. Kraus. He added that Ms. Todd showed no remorse for her actions but was angry with the media, saying they blew the story out...

<p>A McCain campaign volunteer made up a story of being robbed, pinned to the ground and having the letter "B" scratched on her face in a politically inspired attack, police said Friday.</p> <p>Ashley Todd, 20-year-old college student from College Station, Texas, admitted Friday that the story was false and was being charged with making a false report to police, said Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department's investigations division. Police doubted her story from the start, Bryant said.</p>

A Pittsburgh police commander says a volunteer for the McCain campaign who reported being robbed and attacked near a bank ATM in Bloomfield has confessed to making up the story. Police say charges will be filed. More details to follow.

A Muslim student who said a masked gunman assaulted her after he wrote anti-Islamic slurs in a women's restroom at Elmhurst College was arrested Friday after an investigation concluded the attack never happened. A week after the case roiled the small college, Elmhurst Police Chief Steven Neubauer said Safia Jilani, 19, of Oak Brook had been booked on a felony charge of filing a false police report, which is punishable by 1 to 3 years in prison.

<p>ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35, Orlando) -- The Orlando Police Department found dozens of city owned vehicles vandalized Saturday.</p> <p>The vandal or vandals appear to have political intentions; most of the vehicles were spray painted with anti Obama sayings, with ‘Obama’ misspelled several times. Some of their vehicles had their gas caps removed.</p>

Ardmore, OK — An Ardmore man who told authorities last week he was the victim of an attempted lynching near Milo, has admitted the story was a hoax. Sheriff Ken Grace said Glynis Davis made the admissions Monday in a formal statement that the lynching incident he had described was untrue. “His wife was with him when he made the statement and corroborated the statement,” Grace said. Davis’ admissions came when the Carter County Sheriff’s Department and FBI investigation into his May 28 report that four white men tried to lynch him indicated the story was not factual. “The injuries...

The FBI (web) and Carter County Sheriff's Department are investigating a claim by a black Ardmore man who says a group of men tried to lynch him in southern Oklahoma. The man's name hasn't been released. Deputies say he told them he was traveling to Milo in northwestern Carter County on May 25th when he stopped to help a farmer round up stray cattle from the road. He says as helped move the cattle four white men appeared and accused him of stealing the and began trying to lynch him. The man says another man then drove up in a...

SUBOTICA -- A Bosniak man in northern Serbia is under arrest for staging and then reporting incidents made to look like hate crime. Serbian police (MUP) in Subotica say they yesterday detained Samir K., 35, on suspicion that he threw a Molotov cocktail at his own house, in addition to spraying nationalist graffiti, and then reported this. The suspect was further found in illegal possession of firearms and explosives, and will be charged with causing ethnic, racial and religious hatred and intolerance, as well as with attempted murder in an unrelated incident. His claims started to unravel when the suspect...

GENEVA (Reuters) - A special U.N. human rights investigator will visit the United States this month to probe racism, an issue that has forced its way into the race to secure the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. The United Nations said Doudou Diene would meet federal and local officials, as well as lawmakers and judicial authorities during the May 19-June 6 visit."The special rapporteur will...gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance," a U.N. statement said on Friday.His three-week visit, at U.S. government invitation, will cover eight cities -- Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Omaha,...

A weekend rally for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was supposed to leave a hopeful tone in Longview, Texas. Instead, it left a sour note as vandals spray-painted racial slurs outside the campaign headquarters. "I don't even know why anyone would do this except ignorance you know, total ignorance, " said installation technician Lonzell Johnson. It was a sight that "Towles Phone Center" technicians never wanted to see. The phrase "a racist" was spray painted on the hood and the sides of two of their company vans. "I saw it, It hurt my feelings. You know what I'm saying? Off...

Manhattan grand jury has subpoenaed the university records of the controversial black Columbia Teachers College professor who found a noose hanging from her office door - signaling that the investigation is broadening to examine possible links between the teacher, her closest friends and the racially charged incident, The Post has learned. According to sources, the subpoenas obtained recently by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force and prosecutors demanded the college hand over a laundry list of records pertaining to embattled professor Madonna Constantine, whose colleague found a 4-foot hangman's noose on her office doorknob last October. The incident happened at...

A message posted January 20, 2008 on the Islamist forum Al-Hesbah (hosted by NOC4Hosts Inc. in Florida, USA), by a member calling himself Al-Jawfi, suggests stirring up racial tension between African-Americans and whites in the U.S. by spreading inflammatory materials on the Internet. In the discussion thread, other members proposed posting racist materials against African-Americans (such as insulting jokes and pictures) on sites frequented by African-Americans, in order to arouse anger and bitterness in their community. Another suggestion was to post, on white supremacist sites, materials that present African-Americans as a threat to American society. The following are excerpts from...

Francisco Nava '09 has admitted to fabricating an alleged assault on him that he said occurred Friday evening and also to sending threatening emails to himself, other members of the Anscombe Society and prominent conservative politics professor Robert George, Princeton Township Police said today. "He fabricated the story," Det. Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said. Nava was released to Public Safety and charges "have not been filed pending further investigation," according to a statement from Township Police. — More to come.

Last May, firefighters at a Baltimore, Md., fire station came under scrutiny for displaying a deer with an afro wig, gold tooth, gold chain and a cigarette hanging from its mouth. Marvin "Doc" Cheatham, president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, went ballistic, charging, "There is now and has been a culture of racism and white supremacy within the Baltimore City Fire Department." As it turns out, it was a black fireman who dressed up the critter. Cheatham refused to apologize for his accusations of fire department racism, maintaining "there is now and has been a culture of racism...

A black firefighter admitted he placed a knotted rope and threatening note with a drawing of a noose in an East Baltimore fire station last month.The firefighter has since been suspended for other performance-related issues, but will also likely face additional punishment for his act, officials said. City officials said the man admitted to the hoax and will not face criminal charges.Officials identified the man as Donald Maynard, a firefighter-paramedic apprentice who is black. The incident sparked outrage and led to a federal investigation into charges of racism. It was also the latest in a series of other incidents over...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) -- Twenty years after her allegations of a racially charged rape became a national flash point, Tawana Brawley's mother and stepfather want to reopen the case, a newspaper reported Sunday.</p> <p>Glenda Brawley and Ralph King want to press New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to re-examine the November 1987 incident, which a state grand jury ultimately concluded was a hoax, the Daily News reported.</p>

A student at George Washington University recently complained that swastikas were scrawled on her dormitory door. Thanks to cameras hidden by university police, they have a suspect: The student who filed the complaint. I was shocked but not surprised, just as I am shocked but not surprised when, with thousands of cars on the road, some get into accidents. Similarly with the recent upsurge in national attention to swastikas, nooses and other racial vandalism in public places, I am shocked but not surprised that at least one case of racial-ethnic vandalism turns out to be phony. The young woman's sad...

A George Washington University student who told school officials that someone had drawn swastikas on her dormitory room door was responsible for the incidents, a university spokeswoman said yesterday.

(R)acial hoaxes can cut both ways. The flurry of hanging nooses around the country may be a case in point. Hate crime experts and civil rights leaders say, and the media spin is, that the nooses are a white racist backlash to the firestorm of black protest over the Jena 6 case involving black teens in Louisiana accused of battering a white student. Others go further and issue dire a warning that that the nooses are a grim sign of a new racist hate upsurge in America. A hanging noose found dangling on the office door of Madonna Constantine, a...

In her book, the Color of Crime, University of Florida professor Katheryn Russell-Brown, found that blacks perpetrate one in six racial hoaxes. The reasons the blacks commit hoaxes aren't totally different than those of white hoaxers. Both are angry, resentful and play hard on stereotypes and fears--that whites are racist, and violent, and that blacks are menacing and violent. The hoaxes encase the worst of black and white fears about each other. [ snip ] The flurry of hanging nooses around the country may be a case in point. Hate crime experts and civil rights leaders say, and the media...

Most of us have heard about the black professor at Columbia who claims a noose was hung on her office door. Well, for some reason Columbia won't give the NYPD the videotape that could crack the case without a court order. These kind of things gets the imagination rolling. Did the black professor hang the noose on her own door and scream racism for attention? College professors have faked hate crimes before. Liberal students posing as conservatives have faked hate crimes. Was the person who hung the noose a relative of a dean or a star field hockey player? Did...

Madonna Constantine, the Columbia University professor who found a noose on her office door Tuesday morning, said she felt not only angry but embarrassed when she saw the noose. "I know I don't really have a reason to be embarrassed about it because this was the work of someone who, you know, is not a secure person at some level, but it felt as though it was directed toward me," Constantine said in an exclusive interview today on "Good Morning America." "It felt very personal and very degrading," she said. New York police are treating the incident as a hate...

NEW YORK, (AP) -- Columbia University has refused to turn over security videotape that could help identify who hung a noose on a black professor's office door, police said Thursday. Investigators began asking on Wednesday for tapes from cameras in the building, but have been rebuffed by administrators, said Paul Browne, the New York Police Department's top spokesman. He said police will have to get a court order to force the school to provide video they believe could crack the case. "It's unfortunate because it adds a time-consuming step to the investigation," Browne said. A Columbia spokesman did not immediately...

TuesdayÂ’s Metro section of The Washington Post covered a controversy at D.C.Â’s George Washington University, where posted appeared on campus blaring "HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!" Post reporter Susan Kinzie mentioned that the GWU chapter of the conservative Young AmericaÂ’s Foundation denied the posters were theirs, and Kinzie noted that it was probably a prank, since the fine print at the bottom had the words "'Brought to you by Students for Conservativo-Fascism Awareness' -- and a postscript recommending a BBC video on the politics of fear." But while WednesdayÂ’s article in Metro confirmed that it was a prank "produced by...

  Who's Behind the Censorship of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week?   By Ben JohnsonFrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, October 10, 2007 CALL IT THE LEFT’S VERSION OF PREEMPTIVE WAR. The three co-equal branches of the Unholy Alliance – Islamic radicals, far-Left activists, and academics – have returned to their usual level of discourse – intimidation, slander, ad hominem attacks – in an attempt to ban Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week from college campuses before it ever occurs. National “Muslim and Arab rights” organizations are pressuring college administrators to prevent students from holding the peaceful, educational seminars. Conservative students have been accused of “hate speech”...

CBS 2 learned early Saturday that the National Action Network has increased the Rev. Al Sharpton's security due to increased death threats in the wake of the firing of radio host Don Imus by MSNBC and CBS Radio. Beefed up security will also be in place at the National Action Network's headquarters in Harlem. “We have no way of knowing the seriousness of these threats, but they have intensified greatly in the last two days as Rev. Sharpton was figured prominently in the firing of Don Imus," Attorney Charlie King said in an statement early Saturday morning. "Since Rev. Sharpton...

EDINBORO, Pa. -- A black student at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania illegally accessed another student's e-mail account to send racist and threatening messages to about 20 other black students, university police said. Douglas A. Spadey, 18, of Philadelphia, was arraigned yesterday on charges of unlawful use of a computer, harassment by communication and terroristic threats, Cpl. Robert Burns said. The messages were sent Monday and Mr. Spadey admitted sending them, Cpl. Burns said. "This individual was trying to call attention to himself . . . (and) it blew up in his face," police Chief Tom Nelson said. "He didn't understand...

DURHAM - A Durham police detective investigating the Duke University lacrosse case arrested an alibi witness Wednesday on a 2 1/2-year-old misdemeanor warrant. Taxi driver Moezeldin Elmostafa said Investigator R.D. Clayton and another officer asked whether he had anything new to tell them about the rape case before driving him to the Durham County jail. He said no and was held for five hours, until a friend posted his bail on a shoplifting charge. Ernest Conner, a Greenville lawyer who represents defendant Reade Seligmann, said the cabbie's arrest amounted to intimidation. "It appears to me they are trying to pressure...

(Ansonia-WTNH, Apr. 8, 2006 11:20 PM) _ An Ansonia 12-year-old is in some trouble tonight after he claims he was abducted and assaulted by White men in robes. The boy claimed that he was attacked because of the color of his skin. Now, it turns out that Ansonia police have determined the boy's story is a lie. Ansonia police told us earlier today they were investigating a claim of an assault to a child. His mother originally told us her child told her he was the target of racism. In fact, she was so scared she, and the NAACP asked...

The prophetess of women's liberation has been revealed as a liar and spouse abuser. If the personal is political – as feminists have long contended – what are the implications of this for feminism? Friedan accused her ex-husband Carl Friedan of beating up on her, in her recent memoir Life So Far. The media ran with the story. Now Mr. Friedan has responded with a website, carlfriedan.com, in which he charges that his ex-wife was mentally disturbed and given to fits of violent rage. It was she who abused him, says Mr. Friedan, not the other way around. The ex-Mrs....

You've probably heard about the UMass student who claimed that Department of Homeland Security agents visited him after he checked out Mao's Little Red Book from the library. Well, he has now admitted that he made the story up.

It seems as though the [insert most vile metaphor you can think of here] that I blogged about here couldn't stand the heat and/or didn't drum up quite the following that he envisioned. According the Marine Corps Times, it appears that this individual faked his own death, supposedly at the hands of pro-military folks. That fits nicely with his MO, but strangely enough, local law enforcement has no report of it. Of course, since the guy also owns the "Forsake The Police" web domain, I'm thinking that any criminal activity involving his demise might not get the attention that a...

Should you read Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005, an annual report issued last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), you’ll learn how the Muslim experience in America is worsening. Specifically, the number of “anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States” has gone up dramatically: from 42 cases in 2002, to 93 cases in 2003, to 141 in 2004. This news prompted headlines in the mainstream media. “Muslims Report 50% Increase in Bias Crimes,” announced the New York Times; “Crimes, Complaints Involving Muslims Rise,” broadcast the Washington Post; and “Muslims Cite...

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. -- Police said a 22-year-old man was charged with filing a false report about a hate crime. Floyd Elliott Floyd Elliott, of Independence, told police that on Dec. 14, two subjects attacked him in the parking lot of his apartment complex. He said the attackers cut him in the stomach, branded him with a hot knife, and attempted to carve the word "Fag" on his forehead. Investigators were suspicious about the report because the head carving was backwards, as if done while looking into a mirror.Later, Elliott admitted to police that the injuries were self-inflicted. He said...