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California Proposes Sales Tax Hike To Fund Transport, Government Services July 18, 2008 11:32 a.m. ESTVittorio Hernandez - AHN News WriterSacramento, CA (AHN) - To close California's $17.2 billion budget deficit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger considered on Thursday hiking the state sales tax and using funds intended for transportation and government services.State legislators proposed the two measures, which the governor initially described as bad ideas, but he did not rule out adopting the measures to avoid a cash crisis in California.The lawmakers plan to close the budget gap by collecting $5.6 billion income tax increase on the rich and borrowing $1.1...

NASHVILLE -- A federal court jury convicted former state senator John Ford of all six charges in connection with his $850,000 in consulting work for two major TennCare contractors. Ford, 66, is already serving a 5 1/2 year sentence for a separate conviction on federal bribery charges in Memphis. He faces up to 20 years in the Nashville case but sentencing will not occur for several weeks, possibly months. The middle Tennessee jury deliberated a total of eight hours -- six on Thursday -- before returning to the courtroom where it sat since the trial began on July 1. The...

the first steps have been taken to file a lawsuit against Ontario County and its district attorney. It stems from a case involving a Greece engineer who was acquitted of putting in faulty septic systems and Walter Casper, who is now serving time for his wife's murder. “I know the DA's office in Ontario County didn't present all the information that was out there and available.” Defense attorney Mark Young has piles and piles of paperwork from that case. His client, engineer Dave Simpson of Greece, was charged with six counts of filing a false instrument. Young was determined to...

North Charleston Police busted an elaborate auto theft ring, and a Lowcountry pastor is one of their main suspects. Hason "Tory" Fields, a pastor at Union Baptist Church downtown, has been arrested and charged with four counts of possession of a stolen vehicle. But Fields told Live 5 News Wednesday he's completely innocent. "I have never stolen a car in my life," Fields said. Fields is out of jail after he says he posted roughly $7,500 in bond. After a month-long investigation involving North Charleston Police and five other agencies Fields is one of five people arrested so far in...

Yesterday was finally the end of the days this year when you were working to pay the government its exorbitant fees. That's right, July 16 was Cost of Government Day for the average American. Grover Norquist , author of the recent book "Leave Us Alone," has once again crunched the numbers and determined how long it takes most of us to finally pay off our own personal bloated government debt and begin, at last, to make money for ourselves. This year Americans have worked until today, July 16, to pay for the total costs of federal, state and local government....

REYNOSA -- Two Rio Grande Valley residents remained in a Reynosa jail Wednesday, accused of kidnapping a local businessman, Mexican authorities said. Police arrested the two Valley residents along with a Reynosa resident Tuesday after the trio retrieved a $50,000 ransom for the man, whom police suspect they kidnapped July 9 in Reynosa. The ransom was left at a mall on the city's south side. Authorities declined to identify the victim but said he was a Reynosa resident. Once in police custody, the three suspects led investigators to the hostage, who appeared badly beaten and malnourished, said Ernesto Eduardo Saenz...

Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, says he plans to file an ethics complaint — against himself. The move comes after a Washington Post reporter wrote a story raising questions about the New York Democrat’s efforts to raise money for an academic facility in Harlem that will bear his name. The story suggested that Rangel violated House rules by sending out letters bearing an official congressional letterhead seeking funds for the Rangel Center, to be located at the City College of New York, from Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals. At a press conference...

When he got caught accepting improper VIP mortgages from Countrywide Financial as part of its CEO's effort to keep his firm's Senate Banking Committee skids well lubricated, Sen. Christopher Dodd declared indignantly, "I don't believe I did anything wrong." No doubt he sincerely believes that. He believes he is entitled to cut-rate loans because he's Chris Dodd, born into a political culture where the rules of decent society and the law passed for ordinary Americans do not apply. And after 34 years of full immersion in that warped world, right and wrong are entirely foreign concepts, particularly when incumbency and...

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, called on the House ethics committee to investigate his role in raising funds for the "Rangel Center" at City College in New York. In a combative press conference this morning, Rangel went after the Washington Post for reporting that he was sending out letters on official congressional letterhead soliciting funds for the center from corporations and wealthy individuals with business before his panel. "The review should be done as soon as possible so as to clear up any misunderstandings regarding my efforts to cnnvene meeting to discuss partnerships between...

Federal authorities have launched an investigation into New Jersey's largest state worker union, and of Gov. John Corzine's ex-girlfriend, Carla Katz, who until recently was its head, ABC News has learned. As first reported by the Star-Ledger, investigators served document and record subpoenas yesterday on the Communications Workers of America in Washington, D.C. The investigators are looking into allegations that Katz misappropriated union funds, sources confirmed for ABC News. These allegations were first raised in the union's own probe into Katz' management of Local 1034, sources confirmed to ABC News. They were made public last week when the organization's governing...

HARRISBURG - The tentacles of the Bonusgate scandal have spread to past presidential politics. Buried deep in the grand jury report, released last week, that led to the indictment of 12 people are details of what is described as a "massive" effort by House Democrats to oust the independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader from the ballot in 2004. * * * In light of the grand jury revelations of political work conducted with taxpayers' money, the candidates and reform advocates want a federal investigation into the ballot challenges, which they now think were the result of the criminal conspiracy that...

Mexican authorities arrested two Rio Grande Valley residents for their alleged involvement in a kidnapping ring that terrorized the border city of Reynosa. Tamaulipas State Police told Action 4 News that three suspects were arrested in a kidnapping case on Tuesday evening. Police recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars, jewelry and other valuables. The group was allegedly arrested following an investigation into the July 9 kidnapping of a Reynosa businessman. The suspects were identified as: Agustín Edmundo Torres Flores (San Juan, Texas) Cantalicia Cantú (McAllen, Texas) Francisca Dianey Martínez Hernández (Reynosa, Tamaulipas) Action 4 News reporter Victor Castillo will have...

  Private jets, Bugatti cars, a shark-filled aquarium and enough bank accounts to paper the new luxury yacht - the extraordinary capacity of some African leaders and their families for apparent self-enrichment has been laid bare in a French lawsuit over allegedly stolen state money. Following an inquiry last year by the French fraud body OCRGDF, an anti-corruption campaign group has accused a string of African politicians of plundering vast sums from the often struggling economies of their countries. (edit)The richest parts of France are teeming with homes, cars, boats and other expensive baubles belonging - in practice, at...

MONTERREY, Mexico - Suspected drug gang hitmen shot dead a senior police commander in the violent Mexican state of Sinaloa on Wednesday, despite the arrival of hundreds of police reinforcements as killings surge. Gunmen shot dead Sinaloa's state police commander Salomon Diaz as he drove through a suburb of Culiacan, the state's capital and home to one of the country's main trafficking cartels. "He was shot in the stomach by gunmen with AK-47s," said a police spokesman who declined to be named. President Felipe Calderon has sent some 25,000 troops across Mexico to fight drug gangs but it has failed...

A man who was found with his head severed by a chainsaw was fighting to stay in a block of 70 flats in Hampshire cleared for redevelopment. David Phyall, 50, was the last tenant at the Atlantic Housing Ltd housing association flats in Eastleigh. His body was found by police on 5 July, who said his death was not suspicious. Post-mortem tests showed he died of a "complete transection of the neck". An inquest was opened and adjourned at Winchester Coroner's Court on Friday. A spokesman for the coroner said: "As far as we know nobody else was involved. "There's...

A few days ago I posted a story on a recent article in the New York Sun by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, that focused on how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had not fully funded the pension plan of their rank and file members while they had over funded the pension plan of the Union's chief officers. Well, today at noon (CT) I was included as part of a conference call on the pending release of the full study upon which that earlier article in the Sun was based, written by by Diana Furchtgott-Roth. This...

Recent attacks are a troubling sign innocents aren't off-limits MEXICO CITY — Many Mexicans have long shrugged off the violence shaking their country by telling themselves it only affects those involved in the narcotics trade and corrupt law enforcement officers. But innocent civilians, once considered largely off-limits, now find themselves increasingly targeted. In the past five days, two attacks in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa claimed the lives of perhaps more than a dozen people with no apparent connection to the drug trade — including at least four teens, a 12-year-old girl and a father-and-son team of university accounting...

Toll road opponents today will ask the Sunset Advisory Committee of the Texas Legislature to abolish the Texas Department of Transportation, saying the agency has become too corrupt and too dysfunctional to fix, 1200 WOAI news reports. "We want to see elected leadership at the helm of Tex-DOT," says long time toll road opponent Terri Hall, the founder of the citizen action group Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom. "We are done with this unelected beaurocracy that is just an arm of private road building companies and the lackeys of this governor." The idea of eliminating TexDOT and establishing a...

WASHINGTON - A former vice president of imaging and printing services at the Hewlett Packard Company (HP) pleaded guilty today to stealing trade secrets, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello for the Northern District of California. Atul Malhotra, 42, of Santa Barbara, Calif., was charged on June 27, 2007, in a one count information with theft of trade secrets. According to court documents, from Nov. 17, 1997, to April 28, 2006, Malhotra was employed by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) as director of sales and business development in output...

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel is soliciting donations from corporations with business interests before his panel, hoping to raise $30 million for a new academic center that will house his papers when he retires. ... ...a project that caused controversy last year when he won a $1.9 million congressional earmark to help start it. Republican critics dubbed the project Rangel's "Monument to Me." ... The congressman has corralled more federal money as well, securing two Department of Housing and Urban Development grants totaling $690,500 to help renovate the college-owned Harlem brownstone that will house the center.

EXCLUSIVE: NEW YORK — NBA referee Tim Donaghy made repeated phone calls to a second referee at the same time he provided inside information to professional gamblers during the course of the 2006-2007 season, according to court documents and phone records obtained by FOXNews.com. The records show Donaghy placed 134 calls to referee Scott Foster — more than the 126 calls Donaghy made to his bookie — between October 2006 and April 2007, the period during which he has confessed to either betting on games or passing on game information to gamblers. The majority of the phone calls lasted no...

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) has remained largely unhurt by the controversy over his “sweetheart” deal with mortgage lender Countrywide. But CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla finally bucked the media trend of ignoring the scandal and brought the loan up in an interview with the former Democratic presidential hopeful July 14. Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in the wake of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s July 13 announcement that the federal government would take actions to prevent the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) from failing. “Squawk Box” co-host Quintanilla asked Dodd...

Todd Stuart McGuire, a longtime Jefferson County Democratic Party supporter, was charged July 2 with voter fraud. He's accused of either repeating a vote or impersonating his wife, Rebekah, by casting her ballot in a Feb. 6, 2007, special election. Both charges are Class C felonies and carry a maximum penalty of five years in jail and/or a $10,000 fine, according to charging documents. Neither the McGuires nor Todd McGuire's attorney Ben Critchlow could be reached for comment last week or Monday. Todd McGuire is scheduled to appear in Jefferson County Superior Court at 8:30 a.m. Friday, July 18. The...

HARRISBURG -- If the grand jury is correct, the 12 people indicted in a sprawling political corruption case aren't just the center of a court battle. They're the opening shots of a cultural conflict. The grand jury empanelled by state Attorney General Tom Corbett portrayed Suite 626 in the state Capitol as the center of a taxpayer-financed political machine aimed at helping former Rep. Mike Veon and other House Democrats get re-elected. Allegations in the 90-page report, anticipated for more than a year by state lawmakers and their employees, are "a symbolic event of a much larger picture," said...

Those ever-vigilant, ever-principled, non-partisan politicos known as Democrats were caught with their hands in the cookie jar in Pennsylvania. Twelve of them, to be exact. Philly Daily News: A SORDID TANGLE of corruption, cash and sex rocked the Statehouse yesterday in a political scandal that left one current and one former legislator and 10 current and former staff members facing criminal charges. Among the accusations leveled by two state grand juries: Former top legislative staffer Mike Manzo got his lover, a twenty-something former rural beauty queen, a $29,000 job and $7,000 bonus mostly for doing her schoolwork. State Attorney General...

It's the top story in Pennsylvania. Twelve Democrat state leaders facing corruption charges in a massive scandal dubbed "Bonusgate." If it were twelve Republican state leaders, I guarantee you would have heard all about it by now. Via the Philly Daily News: A SORDID TANGLE of corruption, cash and sex rocked the Statehouse yesterday in a political scandal that left one current and one former legislator and 10 current and former staff members facing criminal charges. Among the accusations leveled by two state grand juries: Former top legislative staffer Mike Manzo got his lover, a twenty-something former rural beauty queen,...

It seemed an ideal marriage, a scientific partnership that would attack mental illness from all sides. Psychiatrists would bring to the union their expertise and clinical experience, drug makers would provide their products and the money to run rigorous studies, and patients would get better medications, faster... --snip-- An analysis of Minnesota data by The New York Times last year found that on average, psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from makers of newer-generation antipsychotic drugs appear to have written three times as many prescriptions to children for the drugs as psychiatrists who received less money or none. The drugs...

Obama's Liberal Shock Troops By JOHN FUND July 12, 2008 While he is a skilled candidate, Barack Obama's ability to surprise, stun and sweep over the vaunted Clinton Machine to capture the Democratic nomination was rooted in his background as a community organizer. He's now turning those skills to the general election. But liberals aren't just on the march on the presidential level. This year, liberal activists are spending parts of the fortunes of their wealthy donors to transform politics at the state and local level. In 2005, billionaire investor George Soros convened a group of 70 super-rich liberal donors...

IN PRINCE GEORGE'S County, it's an open secret that one of the quickest shortcuts to easy money is to be a friend of County Executive Jack B. Johnson (D). Through relentless investigating over the past several years...Post reporters have detailed the multifarious ways in which FOJs have benefited: by fat "consulting" contracts for which they do precious little work; by "charity" grants bestowed according to no known criteria; by county jobs for which they seem modestly qualified. Mr. Johnson's relaxed ways with taxpayers' money have made Prince George's a byword for lax ethical standards. Now Ms. Thompson and Mary Pat...

Rep. Charles Rangel defiantly defended having four rent-stabilized apartments Friday as Republicans, critics and constituents railed against what they called a sweetheart deal. "I don't see anything unfair about it, and I didn't even know it was a deal," said Rangel, 78, who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and is the dean of the New York congressional delegation. "I did not negotiate or ask for a lower price, and I'm paying the legal rent." [Snip] Nellie Bailey, director of the Harlem Tenants Council, accused Rangel of "the height of hypocrisy." She said he has failed to help...

As a state senator from the South Side, Barack Obama once arranged for a $200,000 state grant to jump-start an urban venture capital fund for a non-profit group run by Rev. Jesse Jackson. The grant was the very sort of faith-based initiative now at the center of an uncomfortable rift between Jackson and Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The money was spent, but the promised investment pool for job-poor neighborhoods never materialized, an example of the mixed record for Obama and other officials in getting results from such programs. Obama's embrace of this approach, championed by President George W....

He vowed to 'work tirelessly' to build an oasis for Englewood. It never happened. As a state senator, Barack Obama gave $100,000 in state money to a campaign volunteer who failed to deliver on a plan to create a botanic garden in one of Chicago's most blighted neighborhoods. Obama -- who was running for Congress when he announced the project in 2000 -- said the green space in Englewood would build ''a sense of neighborhood pride." Instead, what was supposed to be a six-block stretch of trees and paths is now a field of unfulfilled dreams, strewn with weeds, garbage...

At a time when many Los Angeles County residents are grappling with the squeeze of an economic downturn, dozens of top county government officials are tooling around in "unjustified luxury vehicles" costing taxpayers as much as $50,000 each. More than 1,400 county workers are given take-home cars, even though some don't have official authorization to drive them, and at least 30 employees aren't paying the required taxes on the vehicles. Meanwhile, county employees were involved in 1,852 accidents in their take-home vehicles over the past few years - with 830 accidents in 2005-06 alone that cost taxpayers $6.7 million. The...

Getting an apartment in New York City can be an expensive affair — unless the renter is a Congressman apparently. Charles Rangel (D-NY) has four rent-controlled apartments in one building in Harlem, even though rent control should only apply to a primary residence. Rangel uses one of the rent-controlled apartments as a campaign office, which calls into question whether he has broken gift-acceptance and electoral regulations: While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in...

MEXICO - Gunmen killed 16 people, including a police chief, in a spate of separate shootouts across Mexico, which is grappling with a spike in drug-related violence, local officials said Thursday. Six of the murder victims in Culiacan were inside a car repair shop, while three others were killed outside, the state attorney's office said. Reporters said the three victims outside the shop were police officers who rushed to the scene of the gunfire. At practically the same time and also in Culiacan, one police officer was shot and killed at the wheel of his pickup truck. Another officer was...

Updated, 5 p.m. | Representative Charles B. Rangel held a 20-minute news conference on Friday afternoon after The New York Times reported that he had four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem at a time when the city is experiencing an affordable housing crisis. At one point angry residents accosted the congressman, the dean of Harlem politics, in an unusual sidewalk confrontation, as Mr. Rangel faced questions from reporters. Mr. Rangel, who is the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said his living arrangements were fair and legal and that he was paying the maximum rent allowed on all...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of fraud on Friday and said a probe into alleged bribe-taking had been widened to look at whether he made duplicate claims for travel expenses. Police and prosecutors said they asked the Israeli leader during questioning on Friday to "give his account about suspicions of serious fraud and other offences", which involved him billing different public bodies for the same trips abroad. Police questioned Olmert for the third time on Friday as part of an investigation into allegations he took bribes from American businessman Morris Talansky.

Could Charles Rangel be in trouble with the law again? Here he is after being arrested at a protest at the Sudanese Embassy in 2004. * * * * *It's good to be the king, or a powerful congressman. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel (D-New York) has been living high off the hog, the New York Times reports. While ordinary New Yorkers struggle with sky-high rents, the archliberal Democratic lawmaker, the scourge of landlords, has not one, not two, not three, but FOUR rent-controlled apartments in New York City. And apparently his behavior is illegal. An excerpt...

A SORDID TANGLE of corruption, cash and sex rocked the Statehouse yesterday in a political scandal that left one current and one former legislator and 10 current and former staff members facing criminal charges. Among the accusations leveled by two state grand juries: Former top legislative staffer Mike Manzo got his lover, a twenty-something former rural beauty queen, a $29,000 job and $7,000 bonus mostly for doing her schoolwork. State Attorney General Tom Corbett announced the charges against the 12, all Democrats, in a news conference in Harrisburg. "It's a very sad day in Pennsylvania," Corbett said. The long-running investigation...

How much you want to bet if this story involved Republicans the story would be all over the national nightly news? Scandal in the statehouse: 12 Democrats face corruption charges A SORDID TANGLE of corruption, cash and sex rocked the Statehouse yesterday in a political scandal that left one current and one former legislator and 10 current and former staff members facing criminal charges. Among the accusations leveled by two state grand juries: Former top legislative staffer Mike Manzo got his lover, a twenty-something former rural beauty queen, a $29,000 job and $7,000 bonus mostly for doing her schoolwork. State...

In my last enduring image of Fanchon Stinger, she was flat on her back. It was last week and the perky FOX2 Morning co-anchor was tightening her abs on camera with a fitness expert, one of those fluffy, get-bikini-ready-for-summer feature segments that separate morning newscasts from the somber evening reports. Turns out the vision was symbolic, since Stinger is now truly down, and could be out. The most flamboyantly named news personality in our market has herself been stung: suspended indefinitely by Detroit's FOX affiliate due to her alleged association with developer Rayford Jackson, a central figure in the latest...

Chris Dodd is trying desperately to change the subject, but it isn't working. After a year on the presidential campaign trail, he returned to his Senate duties this year only to find his approval rating had fallen to 51 percent. So he did something uncharacteristic: He made several appearance in the state so the soiled masses might get close, but not too close, to him again. Confident he was back in their good graces, he returned to the Capitol to close the sale of his office to subprime lenders. After ignoring the mortgage meltdown for months, he filed legislation to...

There's nothing better than being propelled into the weekend on a laugh, and Rep. John Conyers from Michigan is in a giving mood. Conyers has a piece at the Huffington Post entitled "Karl Rove, the White House, and the Rule of Law." The rule of law?That's right; a Conyers is actually pointing the finger at somebody else's ethics. Some members of Congress have no shame. The only way this could be topped would be for Amy Winehouse to write a HuffPo piece chastising Courtney Love's drug habit. John Conyers, with the two staffers who accused him of using taxpayer money...

HARRISBURG -- Citizen activist Gene Stilp said it doesn't make him happy to find out his suspicions were well-founded. Mr. Stilp, head of Taxpayers and Ratepayers United, asked Attorney General Tom Corbett in late January 2007 to investigate whether nearly $4 million in taxpayer funds were paid out in 2005 and 2006 as "illegal bonuses for political campaign work.'' After 17 months of investigation, Mr. Corbett yesterday filed criminal charges against 12 people, including former House Democratic Whip Mike Veon of Beaver County and current Rep. Sean Ramaley, D-Beaver, alleging that funds that Mr. Veon paid out and Mr. Ramaley...

HARRISBURG - As part of an ongoing public corruption investigation, agents from the Attorney General's Office today filed numerous theft charges, as well as criminal conspiracy and conflict of interest charges, against 12 suspects, including a state representative from Beaver County, a former House Democratic Minority Whip and four current House Democratic staffers. The investigation has uncovered the illegal use of millions of dollars in taxpayers' funds, resources and state employees for political campaign purposes. Attorney General Tom Corbett said the charges are part of an ongoing grand jury probe into bonuses paid to employees of the Pennsylvania Legislature along...

HARRISBURG -- Grand jurors here and in Pittsburgh cataloged what they described as a culture of corruption that allowed former state Rep. Michael Veon, current Rep. Sean Ramaley and 10 current and former Democratic staffers to divert millions of dollars in state resources, including more than $1 million in illegal pay bonuses. The jurors said Mr. Veon and the staff members conspired to arrange hefty year-end pay bonuses to House employees who worked on political campaigns over a three-year period, while Mr. Ramaley is accused of working full-time on his 2004 House campaign in Beaver County while drawing a taxpayer...

Israel Police investigators conducted a third interrogation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Thursday in relation to mounting evidence that he accepted bribes during his time as mayor of Jerusalem and later as minister of industry and trade under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The investigation marks the sixth corruption scandal Olmert has been involved in since becoming prime minister. This time round, police officials cited by the Israeli media say the evidence is extremely damning, and that if Olmert were not prime minister he would already have been arrested.

Yet another Ohioans For Concealed Carry member experienced harassment from police ignorant of the laws in Ohio regarding open carry. OFCC member Edwin Farbrother took his eighteen-year-old daughter out for ice cream on her birthday in the evening of Saturday, July 5th, 2008 in the City of Northwood. After being there for approximately ten minutes, a police car roared up and skidded to a stop. The officer approached a man later identified as an off duty police officer (department unknown at this time) who pointed Farbrother out to him. Farbrother knew immediately that the officer was there because he was...

SACRAMENTO - The Legislature's majority Democrats promised Wednesday to push a vote on a spending proposal containing several billion dollars in tax increases despite Republican opposition.

While aggressive evictions are making rent-stabilized apartments increasingly scarce in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent apartments in a sprawling penthouse overlooking Upper Manhattan, courtesy of one of New York’s premier real estate developers. ... Mr. Rangel is not the only prominent resident with a rent-stabilized apartment at Lenox Terrace. Gov. David A. Paterson told The New York Sun in May that he pays $1,250 for a rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment in the complex that rents for $2,600 or more at market rates. ...