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Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday postponed the start of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s prison sentence pending appeal on his conviction on corruption charges. […] Olmert, 68, was convicted in March in a wide-ranging case that accused him of accepting bribes to promote a controversial real-estate project in Jerusalem. He was charged for acts while he was mayor of Jerusalem and national trade minister, years before he became prime minister. …

PUEBLO, Colo. - Black Hills executives heard another earful from its customers during a hearing on its proposed rate increase. "I'm mad as hell about these rate increases," said Frank Soudek. "Reasonably priced power. That's what we're asking for," said Lee Gladney. Black Hills wants to increase utility rates by 4 percent starting next year to make up for the construction cost of a wind farm in Huerfano County.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) found that over $33,700 in campaign flights were inappropriately charged to her official account in an internal review of her finances released Friday. The report is sure to draw added scrutiny to her use of charter planes just as her main opponent, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), is set to introduce a resolution meant to highlight such spending, which he calls a "waste of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars." The review , which was released four days after her self-imposed deadline of Sept. 8, found that the senator took 43 trips, which amounted to 136 campaign functions, that...

Yet another indication of the endemic corruption that infests the Obama administration, their Democrat colleagues and a willfully somnambulant mainstream media In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

IRS: An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can. We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the "special scrutiny" that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal....

Melvin E. Lowe, a New York political consultant, was found guilty yesterday of conspiring with State Senator John Sampson of Brooklyn (in photo) to defraud the New York Senate Campaign Committee out of $100,000. Sampson is under indictment on unrelated charges of embezzlement, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. He allegedly embezzled $440,000 from escrow accounts on foreclosed properties. Sampson and Lowe were caught up in an investigation prompted by NLPC's exposé of former State Senator Shirley Huntley, who was jailed for looting a nonprofit organization she founded, for which political allies had arranged to...

Unsettling new Foxtel drama makes for tough watching as it unflinchingly faces child sex abuse within the Catholic church. You’ve read reports about how the Catholic church covered up evidence involving paedophile priests. You’ve followed the hearings of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, established by Julia Gillard in 2012 following the shocking allegations of a cover-up in NSW. But nothing can prepare you for watching the grooming and abuse of an innocent 12-year-old boy by a respected school chaplain as it plays out dramatically in front of you.

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

From the former North Catholic High School in Pittsburgh's Troy Hill to Australia, 157 victims have accused 31 members of the Marianist order of sexual abuse, records show. Watchdog groups, victims and their attorneys say officials with the religious order failed to stop the abuse or to adequately supervise those accused. Experts say such abuse went on for decades in part because of a culture that granted members of religious groups more credibility than children. A spokeswoman for the St. Louis-based Marianist Province of the United States did not respond to questions about how many members have been accused of...

The recent bribery convictions of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife are only the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of convictions of government officials. A little item on the Internet featured government officials in prison, either currently or in recent times. Among them were a mayor of New Orleans, a mayor of Detroit and a mayor of Washington; a governor of Connecticut, a governor of Louisiana, two governors of Illinois and four members of Congress. However much these and other government officials may have richly deserved being behind bars, the country does not deserve to have its...

Dublin (AFP) - Cardinal Sean Brady, who was criticised over his handling of abuse scandals, stepped down as leader of the Irish Catholic Church on Monday with an emotional plea for forgiveness. "I too need to say sorry and to ask forgiveness and I do so again today," Brady told the faithful at a mass in Armagh in Northern Ireland. Brady, who played a key role in the peace process after being appointed in 1996, had tendered his resignation to the Vatican last month after turning 75, the normal retirement age for senior clergy

Head of Marshals Service in Chicago reassigned AP , Associated Press Sep. 9, 2014 4:02 AM ET CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service has announced it has replaced the head of its Chicago office for the past four years in a re-organization, appointing an interim chief for its high-profile northern Illinois district. Darryl McPherson, who was named to the top Chicago post by President Barack Obama in 2010, was recently reassigned to the same office's judicial security division, said Drew Wade, an agency spokesman in Washington. Wade, however, declined to discuss why the 17-year Marshals Service veteran was moved...

According to the bureau of labor statistics people who the government consider unemployed are twice as likely to go shopping as they are to look for a job. Keep in mind the government under counts the unemployed by shifting millions out of unemployment by declaring they’ve simply given up looking for work. As it stands today, job growth is barely keeping up with population growth. The country has millions of people who are unemployed, many of whom consider shopping more important than looking for a job. Unemployment and other welfare benefits are making life unemployed too easy. It isn’t just...

A former U.S. ambassador is being investigated for laundering, according to papers found in a garbage container in Vienna. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, is being investigated for money laundering, and several of his wife's bank accounts have been frozen in connection with the probe. The Justice Department investigation only became public on Sunday, when a blogger found relevant documents in a garbage container used by a state prosecutor's office in Vienna and posted them online. A day later, Austrian magazine Profil reported on the case.

In Odessa activists of the «Right Sector» executed a "lustration" of an official of the Social Insurance Fund for temporary loss of working capacity, who is accused of stealing funds, which were designated for refugee children from the ATO zone, reports publication «Otkat«. The corrupt official was greeted when he was going to his office and after a short exchange of words was thrown in a rubbish bin. According to the Security Services of Ukraine the official demanded "pay-offs" from directors of resorts, where the refugee children were sent. He intended to earn 10 million UAH in such a way....

Video at link: The former mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, shuffled off Monday to serve a 10-year federal prison term on corruption convictions stemming from the city’s years-long recovery of Hurricane Katrina devastations. Mr. Nagin is serving out his sentence in Texarkana, Texas, Reuters reported.

The agreement signed last year by the Norway Ministry of Foreign Affairs was explicit: For $5 million, Norway’s partner in Washington would push top officials at the White House, at the Treasury Department and in Congress to double spending on a United States foreign aid program. But the recipient of the cash was not one of the many Beltway lobbying firms that work every year on behalf of foreign governments. It was the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research organization, or think tank, one of many such groups in Washington that lawmakers, government officials and the news media have...

The argument against liberals ever being in charge of our lives can be reduced to a single word: Detroit. Detroit has fallen from its position as one of the greatest cities in America at the beginning of the 1950s to a perfect reminder of what liberal Democrats will do when given enough power and enough time to show who they really are. “The Motor City” had an unbroken succession of liberal Democrat mayors for more than 40 years and each of these men has contributed to the steady decline of their city. Acting in concert with greedy unions these mayors...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

Gazprombank GPB (OJSC), a Russian bank targeted with sanctions by President Obama over the Ukraine crisis, has hired two former U.S. senators to lobby against those sanctions, according to a new disclosure filed with the Senate. Gazprombank is controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom, the country’s largest gas producer; it supplies about a third of Europe’s natural gas. In a filing submitted Friday and effective that day, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Senator John Breaux, D-La., are listed as the main lobbyists under the Gazprombank account for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, lobbying on “banking...