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CEDAR RAPIDS — Corporate officers of Midamar Corp. and Islamic Services of America in Cedar Rapids were indicted on 92 federal charges Friday, involving mislabeling of Halal beef products and falsifying documents. Jalel Aossey, 40 and brother William “Yahya” Aossey, 44, both of Cedar Rapids, and each of the businesses are charged with one count of conspiracy to make and use materially false statements and documents; sell misbranded meat; and commit wire fraud. Their father William Aossey, 73, founder of Midamar, was charged with 19 similar counts last month. His trial was just reset to March 9. According to the...

Lost in the hubbub following President Obama’s climate agreement with China was a smaller bit of surprising environmental news Wednesday: the Department of Energy’s loan program is expected to make money for taxpayers. Most people are familiar with the program because of Solyndra, a solar-panel manufacturer that went bankrupt in 2011 after borrowing $528 million from the federal government. […] You can’t avoid defaults when you lend money, though, and on balance, the loans are being repaid. A report released in the next several days will give the department’s first estimates of how the program is performing financially: the loans...

This week the New York Post [1] reported that Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has emerged as a leading contender for the top spot at DOJ. The race to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has included the controversial Labor Secretary Tom Perez, and like Perez, MayorkasÂ’ tenure in the federal government is filled with a considerable amount of ethics-defying shadiness.Prior to taking his current position as the number two man at DHS, Mayorkas was head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is mandated to administer the biggest immigration system in the world...

Ron Klain, the newly appointed White House Ebola response coordinator, was one of the senior White House officials who advised that President Obama should visit solar power company Solyndra in 2011, despite an auditor raising red flags about the company’s finances. According to The Washington Post, Klain was one of the “key players” in the scandal while he worked for Vice President Joe Biden: “Ron Klain, then Biden’s chief of staff, dismissed auditor’s concerns about Solyndra’s solvency, reasoning that all innovative companies come with risk.”

A former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan was being investigated by U.S. authorities for suspected money laundering through his wife's bank account. The suspicions center on Zalmay Khalilzad's alleged transfer of $1.5 million in May 2013 to an account in Vienna owned by Cheryl Benard.

Money launderers will increasingly move away from the US dollar to the renminbi as US authorities continue to crack down on international banks’ AML systems [says] Freddie McMahon, director of strategy & innovation at Anomaly42, a specialist in AML and terrorist financing. “The dollar is becoming increasingly high risk and it’s a level of risk money launderers are proving less willing to take...the renminbi is off the beaten track and affords a new level of camouflage for criminal transactions." “The irony is that proactively countering the money launderers represents an unprecedented opportunity for the Chinese authorities to make the renminbi...

THE ROTHSCHILDS One of the African leaders at the forefront of President Barack Obama’s Africa summit headed a bank that was fined eight figures for violating money-laundering regulations and is closely associated with the foundations of liberal billionaire George Soros and the Clinton family. Nigerian Tony Elumelu—a “banking titan” and one of Africa’s richest men—is acting as a spokesperson for the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit this week. He penned an op-ed last week in the Wall Street Journal calling the event a “defining moment” for both the African continent and “for the United States as it formally recognizes the strategic importance...

Show trial of Swiss whistleblower Elmer now in 9th year "Ex-Swiss Banker Charged With Giving Data to WikiLeaks" (prohibited Bloomberg article, find in Search) …a Swiss court fought back against efforts by the United States to tackle criminal activity and tax its wealthy citizens properly. As Worldwide Tax Daily reports:“A Swiss court on January 6 held that Switzerland’s Federal Tax Administration (FTA) “unlawfully granted” a U.S. request for client data from private banking group Julius Baer, saying it did not meet the requirements for an administrative assistance request under the Switzerland-U.S. income tax treaty.”This is the latest episode in a...

Hillary Clinton on Friday defended her six-figure speaking fees, saying she's donated all the money earned from colleges over the past year to her family's foundation. “All of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work. So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation,” she told ABC News on Friday. The former secretary of State and potential 2016 presidential contender reportedly charges about $200,000 for speaking engagements. Clinton recently drew fire from University of Nevada Las Vegas students who threatened to protest an upcoming fundraiser she's...

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin will have to pay the government more than $501,000 as a result of his conviction on bribery and other charges, a federal judge said Tuesday. Nagin was convicted in February on 20 counts including bribery, fraud, money laundering and conspiracy during his two terms as mayor. The Democrat served from 2002 to 2010 and was known his impassioned pleas for help for the city after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. …

The Sinaloa Cartel, headquartered on Mexico's northern Pacific Coast, is constantly exploring new ways to launder its gargantuan profits. The State Department reports that Mexican trafficking organizations earn between $19 and $29 billion every year from selling marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines on the streets of American cities. And Sinaloa is reportedly the richest, most powerful of them all, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The capture last month of the Mexican druglord Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman has cast a spotlight on the smuggling empire he built. One key to the Sinaloa Cartel's success has been to use the global banking...

Funding ‘snapshot’ details nearly $40 million in Alliance support for 20 groups this year A secretive dark money group backed by George Soros and other liberal mega-donors is looking to steer nearly $40 million to left-wing groups in 2014 to support high-profile political and policy efforts, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The documents reveal for the first time the Democracy Alliance’s full portfolio of supported organizations, a large network of powerful liberal groups looking to win key electoral and legislative victories. The Democracy Alliance connects major Democratic donors with some of the largest and most influential...

CHICAGO — The daughter of President Barack Obama's former pastor was convicted on Friday of laundering thousands of dollars from a state grant for a Chicago-area job-training program, federal prosecutors said. A federal jury took less than two hours to find Jeri Wright, 48, the daughter of Jeremiah Wright, guilty on all counts for her part in a fraud scheme led by a former suburban police chief and the chief's husband, according to the U.S. Attorney's office for the Central District of Illinois in Springfield. The $1.25 million state grant was for a not-for-profit work and education program called We...

SHAMOKIN DAN — The plant in Shamokin Dam once produced enough electricity to power a city three times the size of Scranton. It is 65 years old, but few here thought the facility known as the Sunbury Steam Plant would be forced into retirement. “It’s sad to see it close down,” said Robert Hoffman of Sunbury. “The plant`s been there since I can remember. As a matter of fact when i was in high school we toured that plant.” “Since they put stack reclaimers on it, its been a fairly clean plant,” added Ed Quiggle of Shamokin Dam Sunbury Generation...

An effort by Washington to build housing for Haitians in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake has fallen short and exceeded costs, a U.S. government report said Tuesday. The audit by the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Agency for International Development said the project to build 4,000 houses outside Haiti's capital resulted in the construction of only 816. The U.S. plan also sought to provide "home sites" on which others would pay for the construction of houses. This, too, fell short, with USAID completing engineering and design services for only 2,300 home sites out of a projected...

Former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino (D) — he stepped down a couple of weeks ago — has pleaded guilty today to federal charges of money laundering, according to the McAllen Monitor. Just 17 days after stepping down as sheriff and three days after his former chief of staff entered a related plea, Treviño stood before U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez and pleaded guilty for his part in laundering campaign contributions that were tied to a convicted drug trafficker. Testimony in court this morning suggested that the amount of money laundered could be anywhere between $70,000 and $120,000. Treviño was...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience in New York that the news media has a “double standard” against women in powerful position, and offered advice to younger women on how to overcome it. “There is a double standard,” Clinton said, according to Politico. “We have all experienced it.” Clinton was speaking on a panel at the “Women in the World” conference in New York Thursday, along with International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde and moderated by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “The double standard is alive and well, and I think in many respects the media...

IG report reveals incomplete, lost contract files worth $6B The State Department misplaced and lost some $6 billion due to the improper filing of contracts during the past six years, mainly during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, according to a newly released Inspector General report. The $6 billion in unaccounted funds poses a “significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” according to the report. The alert, originally sent on March 20 and just released this week, warns that the missing contracting funds “could expose the department to substantial...

<p>The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.</p>

During the “polar vortex,” some of us taunted frostbitten global warming alarmists who snapped back that isolated extreme weather events don’t indicate long-term trends. Good. Because if they can remember that during heat waves and storms, we can actually look at long-term trends. Really long. Geologically long. Back to when simple animals appeared in the “Cambrian explosion” about 542 million years ago. Google it and you’ll find a chart of global temperature and carbon dioxide in the air from which two things will jump out at you right away. First, atmospheric CO2 does not drive temperature. It hit 7000 ppm...