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The sheriff of Houston's Harris County has adopted a sweeping policy designed to protect and guarantee equal treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inmates, including allowing transgender individuals to be housed based on the gender they identify with instead of their biological sex. The new policy, which Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia's office believes to be one of the most comprehensive in the country, states "discrimination or harassment of any kind based on sexual orientation or gender identity is strictly prohibited," and outlines how such inmates will be searched, booked and housed, according to a copy of the policy...

CHICAGO — A federal judge rejected an impassioned plea from a television pitchman for his freedom on Tuesday, ordering U.S. Marshals to lock up Kevin Trudeau for failing to pay a $37 million civil judgment. The visibly exasperated judge had already ordered that Trudeau be jailed during a hearing in Chicago when Trudeau stood up and asked if he could address the court. The Federal Trade Commission won the judgment after accusing Trudeau of hoodwinking viewers about his weight-loss books. "There are no more assets to turn over, your honor," the 50-year-old Trudeau insisted during a 10-minute plea, at times...

I was listening to Attorney Joe DiGenova this morning on WMAL and he pointed out how the DOJ had recently sent a letter to universities telling them they could ignore the June ruling by the Supreme Court on using race in admissions. The Supreme Court, in a nearly unanimous ruling, said that universities could use race in admissions but not as a dominant factor. But in this letter the DOJ is instructing universities to continue with the same racial preferences that the Supreme Court had just barred them from using: WSJ – Obama Administration regulators have made a specialty of...

FULL TITLE: Afghan minicab driver tied up his pregnant mistress and aborted 19-week-old foetus using tablets he bought online An Afghani minicab driver who tied his pregnant mistress up then forced poisonous pills into her womb in order to abort his unwanted child has been jailed for six years. Ahmed Raofi, 29, became enraged when lover Irene Santos refused to terminate their unborn child, so he hatched a plan to kill the foetus without her consent. After hours of internet research, Raofi bought packets Misoprostol online and invited Ms Santos to his flat in Edgware, northwest London, on April 9,...

Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) is consulting with former prosecutors in the House and having statutes examined for ways for the House to indict administration officials in the IRS, Benghazi, reporter spying, NSA spying and other scandals in the Obama admnistration, because it's obvious that Eric Holder is not willing to punish offenders. Speaking during a radio interview on Wednesday, Marino said that he is investigating ways in which the House can file criminal and civil charges against members of the administration, "up to and including the president."

If Syria were to surrender its chemical weapons to international control, it would be "an important step" toward avoiding military consequences, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday. Following a meeting with President Barack Obama, Clinton suggested that the situation in Syria was "fluid," nodding to an offer by Russian diplomats to organize the handover of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons to an international governing body. “If the regime immediately surrendered its stockpiles to international control, as was suggested by Secretary Kerry and the Russians, that would be an important step. But this cannot be another excuse for delay...

Washington is weighing expanding support for Syrian rebels by having the Pentagon take charge of arming the opposition instead of a clandestine effort by the CIA, officials said Wednesday. "It's under consideration," said a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If and how (it would be done) are both questions being discussed," the official told AFP.

David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist who broke stories of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency, has accused Britain of a "total abuse of power" for interrogating him for almost nine hours at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act. In his first interview since returning to his home in Rio de Janeiro early on Monday, Miranda said the authorities in the UK had pandered to the US in trying to intimidate him and force him to reveal the passwords to his computer and mobile phone. "They were threatening me all the time and saying I would be...

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The Justice Department has agreed to pay $4.1 million to a California college student left in a Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell last year, according to two people familiar with the case. Daniel Chong was detained in an April 2012 drug raid in San Diego and left in a windowless holding cell for four days without food or water. He says he drank his own urine to stay alive. The people familiar with the case spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the settlement before it is officially announced. His attorney filed a $20 million claim against the government...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown is making one final bid to delay a federal court order requiring the state to release nearly 10,000 inmates by year's end to improve conditions in California prisons. The administration on Wednesday asked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to delay the order forcing the state to immediately take steps to further reduce its prison population. If he refuses to intervene, the state has said it will begin freeing inmates to comply with the lower court order, which is intended to improve care for sick and mentally ill inmates. Kennedy oversees appeals from...

The NSA has a “brand new” technology that enables one billion cell phone calls a day to be redirected into its data hoards and stored, according to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who said that a new leak of Snowden’s documents was ‘coming soon.’ Calling it part of a “globalized system to destroy all privacy,” and the enduring creation of a climate of fear, Greenwald outlined the capabilities of the NSA to store every single call while having“the capability to listen to them at any time,” while speaking via Skype to the Socialism Conference in Chicago, on Friday. Greenwald was the...

Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old man who is being prosecuted for scrawling anti-megabank messages on sidewalks in water-soluble chalk last year now faces a 13-year jail sentence. A judge has barred his attorney from mentioning freedom of speech during trial. According to the San Diego Reader, which reported on Tuesday that a judge had opted to prevent Olson’s attorney from "mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial,” Olson must now stand trial for on 13 counts of vandalism. In addition to possibly spending years in jail, Olson will also be...

Asians were accused of practicing witchcraft on their employersA Saudi court sentenced two Asian housemaids to 10 years in jail and ordered their lashed 1,000 times each after they were found guilty of indulging in sorcery at their employers’ houses in the Gulf Kingdom, a newspaper reported on Monday. Their Saudi employers reported the two maids to the Gulf country’s feared religious police, saying they had discovered that their families had been harmed because of sorcery practiced by the maids against them. Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who searched the two houses...

When you get right down to it,the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the Tea Party. Rick Santelli,one of the Tea Party founders and my CNBC colleague,was the first to make this point. I’ve taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the Tea Party out of play for the 2012 election,as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another Tea Party landslide.… But there can be only one reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business....

FULL TITLE: Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. has been sentenced to almost three decades in jail after conspiring with private prisons to trade kids for cash. n the private prison industry, longer sentences earn more money from the state. Since 2003, Ciavarella received millions of dollars in bribes for condemning minors to maximum prison sentences. In one case, Ciavarella sentenced a 10-year-old to two years in a detention facility for accidentally bottoming out his mother’s car. According to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, over 5,000 young men and women were unjustly sentenced to prison and denied their constitutional rights. Many of...

The Justice Department’s secret subpoena for AP phone records included the seizure of records for five reporters' cellphones and three home phones as well as two fax lines, a lawyer for the news organization tells NBC News. David Schulz, the chief lawyer for the AP, said the subpoenas also covered the records for 21 phone lines in five AP office lines -- including one for a dead phone line at office in Washington that had been shut down six years ago. The phone lines at four other offices – where 100 reporters worked — were also covered by the subpoenas,...

Senior White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer is set to perform the 'full Ginsburg' on Sunday, appearing on all five major Sunday morning news shows in the latest sign that the Obama administration is determined to fight for control of the news cycle following an explosion of major scandals in the past several days. Pfeiffer will appear on CNN's State of the Union, ABC's This Week, CBS's Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press, and Fox News' Fox News Sunday. The White House began suffering unusual setbacks in the media following the revelation that its edits to "talking points" on the...

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Lois Lerner, the IRS official now at the center of a scandal involving tax agents who selectively targeted conservative groups, is scheduled to receive an award and give the commencement address at Western New England University School of Law. A spokesperson for the school said the university was aware of the controversy, but would still honor Lerner, who directs the agency’s exempt organizations division. “Our plans have not changed at this time,” said David Stawasz, a spokesperson for the university, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Ms. Werner has apologized for the actions of certain IRS employees....