Free Republic

The Mr. Ding-A-Ling truck hadn't been rolling through the streets here for more than a week before Joshua Malatino made his message clear: There ain't enough Fudgsicles in this city for the both of us. Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Cops-Snow-Cone-Joe-stalked-Mr-Ding-A-Ling-in-4479911.php#ixzz2SMcToNAd

Nearly two dozen defendants were arraigned last Friday in a Manhattan federal court for their alleged roles in a gambling ring for the fabulous people but missing from the crowd was reputed Russian mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov who remains a fugitive as reported by Richard Behar for Forbes: "The feds call him a 'major figure in international Eurasian Organized Crime' who has been involved in 'drug distribution, illegal arms sales and trafficking in stolen vehicles.' In the current gambling case, he's accused of using his status as a thief-in-law (or vory v zakone) -- a select group of the highest-level criminals...

<p>The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has posted mug shots of 35 educators booked for allegedly colluding to raise standardized test scores.</p> <p>A 73-year-old principal, a middle school secretary, elementary school teachers, and other school workers are accused of being behind the nation's biggest cheating scandal.</p>

Suspicion in the slayings of a Texas district attorney and his wife shifted Monday to a violent white supremacist prison gang that was the focus of a December law enforcement bulletin warning that its members might try to attack police or prosecutors. The weekend deaths of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, who were found fatally shot in their home, were especially jarring because they happened just a couple of months after one of the county's assistant district attorneys, Mark Hasse, was killed near his courthouse office. And less than two weeks ago, Colorado's prison chief was...

Kathleen O’Leary, Presiding Judge of the 4th District Court of Appeal reinstated the Appeal Taitz v Obama et al filed by the candidate for the U.S. Senate Attorney Orly Taitz. Appeal at hand involves Senator Diane Feinstein and Barack Obama as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency.

No halftime show at Super Bowl 2014? That’s the word, according to planners who say the weather may prevent appearances at matchup XLVIII, set for New Jersey. “It’s because of the cold weather,” said one involved with next year’s Super Bowl planning, in a New York Post report. “It’s not only the acts and the singers, but also the crews that have to put the stage together. … You just can’t assemble the stage and break it down fast enough in the cold.”

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; George C. Venizelos, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); and George N. Longworth, the Commissioner of the Westchester County Police Department, today announced the unsealing of charges against 32 individuals as part of a multi-year investigation into organized crime’s alleged continuing control of large aspects of the commercial waste-hauling industry in the greater New York City metropolitan area and in parts of New Jersey. The main indictment charges 12 defendants under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt...

Former FBI agent missing in Iran photographed in Guantánamo jumpsuit By Barney Henderson 8:44PM GMT 08 Jan 2013 The family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007, have released pictures of him dressed in an orange jumpsuit like a Guantánamo Bay prisoner, as they continue to hold hope that he is still alive.

The media immediately accused the accuser, defaming me and supported the union thugs in intimidating/stifling free speech. This unedited footage REMOVES ALL DOUBT as to what happened that day. Please share to shine a light!

Game Changer? The federal government paid nearly $40 million dollars to Claire McCaskill’s husband’s businesses her first five years in office as Missouri Senator. During that time McCaskill has had influence over federal policy that has directly affected her family’s income. Missouri royalty - The rest of the country has suffered but Claire McCaskill and her husband Joseph Shepard have done very well these past five years. There are renewed calls for Democrat McCaskill to release her tax returns. ABC3040 reported: Businesses affiliated with the husband of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill have received almost $40 million in federal subsidies for...

As I noted in the introduction to my book, The Obama Timeline, a jury at a murder trial will often find the accumulated circumstantial evidence so overwhelming that a guilty verdict is obvious—even though there may be no witness to the crime. “The jurors in the Scott Peterson trial believed the collection of evidence more than they believed Scott Peterson. Among other things, the jury thought that being arrested with $15,000 in cash, recently-dyed hair, a newly-grown goatee, four cell phones, camping equipment, a map to a new girlfriend’s house, a gun, and his brother’s driver’s license certainly did not...

The four areas where organized crime reigns in America -- New York City, Dirty Jersey, Chicagoland and South Florida -- also account for the lion's share of corruption convictions by federal prosecutors against local officials as reported by Joe Palazzolo for The Wall Street Journal Law Blog. The U.S. Department of Justice has released the number of corruption convictions its prosecutors have won against public servants over the last ten years across the 93 federal judicial districts into which the country is divided, and at the top of the list is New Jersey with 429 convictions. Third on the list...

Meyer Harris Cohen was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia, immigrated with his family to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and reached Los Angeles’ Jewish point of entry in Boyle Heights in 1915. Up to this point, the spare details of his biography are unremarkable. But Meyer was later nicknamed “Mickey,” and his name still echoes with the larger-than-life reputation he acquired on the mean streets of Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. “By the end of the 1930s, the view from the top of Hollywood Hills seemed unlimited,” Tere Tereba writes in her rich,...

The Yassine family of Austin, Texas is apparently quite the enterprising group. Led by Hussein “Mike” Yassine, the Yassines were quite diversified. They own 8 bars. According to law enforcement authorities they are also a one-family crime wave. They are involved in murder, money laundering, drug dealing–and they have a brother back in Lebanon who is part of Hezbollah.

ROME -- A British lawyer says he invented accusations that Silvio Berlusconi paid him $600,000 to lie on the stand to protect the former Italian premier's business interests. David Mills' testimony Thursday at Berlusconi's corruption trial in Milan undercuts prosecutors' case against the politician.

A total of four Democratic officials and political operatives have now pleaded guilty to voter fraud-related felony charges in an alleged scheme to steal a New York election. The latest guilty pleas expose the ease with which political insiders can apparently manipulate the electoral system and throw an election their way, by the forging of signatures of unsuspecting voters that are then cast as real votes. "The phrase they use is: 'making sure they vote the right way,'" said a source close to the case, which is unfolding in Troy, N.Y. "It is not a Democratic or Republican thing. ......

The Mexican military has recently broken up several secret telecommunications networks that were built and controlled by drug cartels so they could coordinate drug shipments, monitor their rivals and orchestrate attacks on the security forces. A network that was dismantled just last week provided cartel members with cellphone and radio communications across four northeastern states. The network had coverage along almost 500 miles of the Texas border and extended nearly another 500 miles into Mexico's interior. Soldiers seized 167 antennas, more than 150 repeaters and thousands of cellphones and radios that operated on the system. Some of the remote antennas...

ROME (AP) — Italy's Catholic Church has shifted gears and shown a willingness to revisit its tax-exempt status amid renewed criticism that much of its vast real estate holdings isn't subject to local property taxes. The criticism has grown recently following Premier Mario Monti's proposal to restore a property tax on first and second homes as part of his sweeping austerity measures to help reign in Italy's massive debt. With ordinary Italians being asked to make sacrifices, the church is coming under fire to do its part and give up what some consider an unfair privilege. Critics, most prominently Italy's...

Italy will continue its efforts within the UN to issue a new Security Council resolution "explaining for everyone the mechanism of economic pressure on the (Syrian) regime, Terzi said during a meeting of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), headed by Burhan Ghalyoun. Italy is determined to impose stricter sanctions against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and his aides," he said. Opening a humanitarian passage in Syria "is a complicated problem in front of the force deployed by the regime," added Terzi. Terzi, meanwhile, noted possibility of deploying Arab League observers in Syria to pave way for stability in some tense...

ROME — The director of a Rome office of Italy’s tax collection agency was wounded in the hands and eyes on Friday after opening a letter bomb, Italian police said. The man was hospitalized but the extent of his injuries were not immediately known. The police were investigating what they said was a stapled package mailed through the Italian postal system. Prosecutors in Rome have opened an investigation into whether the letter bomb’s senders had terrorist aims, the ANSA news agency reported. The explosion in Italy comes a day after German authorities intercepted and defused a package bomb mailed to...

NOTE The following text SNIPPET is a quote: newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/nyfo082410.htm Two Additional Arrests Made of Members of Violent International Organized Crime Group Albanian Government Aide Arrested; Newly Unsealed Indictment Charges 17 Defendants with Murder, Kidnapping, and Other Racketeering Offenses PREET BHARARA, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, JANICE K. FEDARCYK, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), and RAYMOND W. KELLY, the Police Commissioner of the City of New York, announced the arrests of FLORIAN VESHI and ALMIR RRAPO for their roles in a racketeering enterprise that engaged...

Many Greeks are draining their savings accounts because they are out of work, face rising taxes or are afraid the country will be forced to leave the euro zone. By withdrawing money, they are forcing banks to scale back their lending -- and are inadvertently making the recession even worse. Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the central bank of Greece, is a man of statistics, and they speak a clear language. "In September and October, savings and time deposits fell by a further 13 to 14 billion euros. In the first 10 days of November the decline continued on a...

Job-killing bank regulations threaten to wipe out all the gains in private-sector employment since the recovery began, the industry warns. Washington, however, is hiring thousands more bureaucrats to enforce the rules. Signed into law last year, the Dodd-Frank Act is the biggest rewrite of financial regulations since the New Deal. It was intended to rein in Wall Street "excesses." But the banking industry says burdensome red tape is hurting economic growth and jobs in a still-sluggish labor market. "The level of real GDP could be 2.7% less by the year 2015 than would otherwise be the case for the United...

COMMENTARY | Former New York congressman Guy Molinari has a few things to say about former Speaker of the House and current presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich -- none of them nice. He speaks from experience, having worked with the presidential candidate in the 80s, a few years prior to the Gingrich becoming Speaker of the House. And Molinari bluntly states that Gingrich is "evil" and a liar, according to CNN. "Evil is a tough word, but frankly I can't think of a better word that describes what he is all about," said Molinari, who now works as an adviser to...

APPLETON, Wis. - An Appleton native is the creator of the iconic "blue fist" graphic in the shape of Wisconsin used in spring protests at the state Capitol. Graphic artist Carrie Worthen graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She now lives and works in Los Angeles, but she kept in touch with members of the AFL-CIO and, in February, the union asked her to take the germ of the fist idea and make it stand out. "To me it needed to be bold and clear and loud and simple," Worthen told Wisconsin Public Radio.

A Kansas teenager is in trouble after mocking Gov. Sam Brownback during a mock legislative assembly for high school students. Emma Sullivan, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, was in Topeka on Monday as part of Kansas Youth in Government, a program for students interested in politics and government. During the session, in which Brownback addressed the group, Sullivan posted on her personal Twitter page: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot” On Tuesday, Sullivan was called to her principal’s office and told that the tweet had...

ROME (AP) — A week into his new job, Premier Mario Monti is running out of time to reassure nervous investors that his government has a strategy to deal with Italy's crippling debts. The nation's borrowing rates skyrocketed Friday after a grim set of bond auctions, with a new auction looming Tuesday. Another borrowing debacle could ratchet up fears that Italy has entered a debt spiral driving it toward bankruptcy and the 17-nation eurozone into its most acute crisis yet.

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Mario Monti formed a government of bankers, diplomats and business executives Wednesday, saying the absence of politicians in his Cabinet will spare political parties the "embarrassment" of taking the tough decisions needed to steer the country from financial disaster. The 68-year-old former European Union competition commissioner and his Cabinet were sworn in at a solemn ceremony at the presidential palace that formally ended Silvio Berlusconi's 3 1/2-year-old government and the media mogul's 17-year-long political dominance. Monti faces his first major hurdle Thursday when he presents his legislative agenda to parliament and subjects his government to...

Not on even a Sunday is the headline barrage over: MARIO MONTI ASKED TO FORM NEW ITALIAN GOVERNMENT MONTI TO MAKE COMMENTS AFTER ACCEPTING OFFER TO LEAD ITALY MARIO MONTI THANKS NAPOLITANO FOR OFFER TO FORM GOVERNMENT MARIO MONTI SAYS ITALY MUST BE PROTAGONIST IN EUROPE MARIO MONTI SAYS HE'LL ACT TO SAVE ITALY FROM CRISIS And so the international advisor to Goldman Sachs drones on. In the meantime, the €300 billion in BTP sales is set to resume in just over 13 hours. Yet the reason why the EURUSD is less than jubilant on the news is that Silvio...

Dear Friend, In this video commentary, I discuss Italy’s current financial crisis. Italy is facing almost inevitable default. It’s too big to rescue. And the implications will be felt right at our kitchen tables. Tune in!

A Kansas judge ordered some of the 107 charges filed against Planned Parenthood for engaging in illegal abortions and covering up those cases thanks to the destruction of records that took place during the Sebelius administration.The case with 107 charges against Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri came about when former state attorney general Phill Kline brought the charges after obtaining evidence in patient records showing Planned Parenthood committed illegal late-term abortions and then manufactured documents to cover up their crimes. The charges allege the abortion business potentially engaged in illegal abortions and violated state record-keeping laws. Kline, as the...

He is the man with the mustache who takes a rebellious drag on a cigarette in the Herman Cain Internet ad gone viral. "We've run a campaign like nobody's ever seen," he says before taking a puff. "But then America's never seen a candidate like Herman Cain." Meet Mark Block, Cain's unorthodox campaign manager. Perhaps no one is more responsible for the Georgia businessman's meteoric rise in the presidential polls than Block, a Republican strategist and tea party leader who's left a trail of questionable campaign work behind him. Block has been accused of voter suppression and was banned from...

The SEC alleges that Citigroup Global Markets structured and marketed a CDO called Class V Funding III and exercised significant influence over the selection of $500 million of the assets included in the CDO portfolio. Citigroup then took a proprietary short position against those mortgage-related assets from which it would profit if the assets declined in value. Citigroup did not disclose to investors its role in the asset selection process or that it took a short position against the assets it helped select. Citigroup has agreed to settle the SEC’s charges by paying a total of $285 million, which will...

JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) — By all accounts, Mark Lindquist is a hero, an underpaid social worker who nearly gave his life trying to save three developmentally disabled adults from the Joplin tornado. Both houses of the Missouri legislature honored Lindquist, the Senate resolution calling him "a true hero and inspiration to others." But heroism doesn't pay the bills. The tornado's 200 mph winds tossed Lindquist nearly a block, broke every rib, obliterated his shoulder, knocked out most of his teeth and put him in a coma for about two months. Lindquist, 51, ran up medical expenses that exceed $2.5 million,...

“it’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing fine. It’s the public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

A schoolgirl was brutally gang raped after rigid school rules meant she was kept late and missed her bus home, it has been reported. The 13-year-old's parents are suing Mount Hope Middle School in West Virginia, claiming the horrendous sexual assault would not have happened were it not for the actions of staff at the school. The girl was allegedly set upon by a group of athletes at the school while waiting outside for a ride home. She had missed her bus after being made to collect uniforms for the cheerleading squad by Linda Nevi, the coach. When the girl,...

ATLANTA -- Police in Atlanta are hunting several suspects who posed as FBI agents Saturday to rob and shoot a man, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The unidentified victim was leaving his Atlanta apartment with a woman at around 10:30am local time when he was approached by several men in the building's parking lot, police said.

The Solyndra scandal cost at least a half-billion public dollars. It is plaguing President Barack Obama. And it's being billed as a Washington story. But back in Obama's political hometown, those of us familiar with the Chicago Way can see something else in Solyndra — something that the Washington crowd calls "optics." In fact, it's not just a Washington saga — it has all the elements of a Chicago City Hall story, except with more zeros. So forget optics. What about smell? It smells bad, and it's going to smell worse. Or, did you really believe it when the White...

The FBI on Thursday said it had stopped a training session that called the Prophet Muhammad a “cult leader,” said mainstream Muslims were likely to support violent extremism and described the Islamic principal of charity as a “funding mechanism for combat.” The content of the training session set off a wave of concern among Muslims across the nation who had been trying to help authorities battle homegrown terrorism. An FBI spokesman confirmed on Thursday that the agency did host one training session six months ago that described Muslims as more likely to be violent as they increased in devotion to...

Various Chiefs of Police and other law enforcement representatives have gone on a public tour with the Governor proclaiming how important the “Duty to Retreat” is to New Hampshire’s self defense law as it applies to honest citizens under RSA 627:4. Given that they feel that way, we propose adding it to the self defense requirements for law enforcement found under RSA 627:5. (Note that this applies only to a law enforcement officer's self defense, not to making an arrest.) We have taken the exact language that they support and just modified it to fit law enforcement. Here is how...

Sarah Palin is taking to her Facebook page to slam Jim Hoffa, the Teamsters president, for his call to "take these son-of-a-bitches out" in reference to the Tea Party

Verizon Communications Inc. reported a dozen cases of sabotaged cable lines and warned of delays in repairs and customer service on the second day of a strike involving about 45,000 employees. The telecommunications company said there have been 12 acts of sabotage to telephone lines and to Internet and television services in Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York since the strike began. Fiber-optic lines were intentionally cut in Tewksbury and several other municipalities on the East Coast, the company said.

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.... A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

My buddy was just in a focus group with Steve Wynn, where Steve told the group he is running as a independent, announcing Monday.

DOZENS OF West Philly boys - ranging in age from 11 to 19 - stormed a Sears store in Upper Darby on Thursday as part of a "flash mob" and made off with thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise, police said. Upper Darby police released this surveillance image that they said was recorded during the invasion of the store by dozens of youths. Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said he believed that the group organized the mass theft through social networking, although the exact networking site was not yet clear. He said that the kids traveled together on public...

When the feds busted a syndicate of Russian-speaking nightclub owners and their so-called Bar Girls, it seemed like just another titillating tale from South Beach. But the April bust showed that the FBI is taking the Eastern European mob a lot more seriously these days than the Italian Mafia. La Cosa Nostra is no longer the bureau’s Public Enemy No. 1 when it comes to organized crime in South Florida. “Eurasian organized crime is our No. 1 priority,” said FBI supervisory special agent Rick Brodsky of the Miami office. In April, six reputed members of an Eastern European network —...

Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now suing individual message-board posters, not just website operators... ..An attorney for Righthaven on Wednesday said those notices (DCMA) don't apply to individual website users who violate copyrights by posting material online without authorization.

Volunteers download attack tool, organizers recruit hacker botnets, say researchers Computerworld - The retaliatory attacks by pro-WikiLeaks activists are growing in strength as hackers add botnets and thousands of people download an open-source attack tool, security researchers said today. In recent days, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been launched against several sites, including those belonging to Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal and the Swiss payment transaction firm PostFinance, after each terminated WikiLeaks accounts or pulled the plug on services. As of Thursday, WikiLeaks had posted the full text of more than 1,200 leaked U.S. State Department cables from its trove of over...

A just-released biography of King Carl Gustaf – The Unwilling Monarach – claims that he "frequently visited Mafia-run nightclubs to partake in wild orgies when he was a younger man" as reported by Gavin Reilly for The Journal. Good thing no U.S. politicians ever subjected themselves to black mail by attending Mafia-linked sex clubs, right? Although, in 1975 the NYDA and NYPD initiated an investigation dubbed Operation Together which, among other things, was looking into mob control over gay bars, several murders of gay club owners, drug trafficking at gay bars, and underage boy sex rings, and just as law...

The entire police force in a small Mexican town abruptly resigned Tuesday after its new headquarters was viciously attacked by suspected drug cartel gunmen. All 14 police officers in Los Ramones, a rural town in northern Mexico, fled the force in terror after gunmen fired more than 1,000 bullets and flung six grenades at their headquarters on Monday night. No one was injured in the attack. Mayor Santos Salinas Garza told local media that the officers resigned because of the incident. The gunmen’s 20-minute shooting spree destroyed six police vehicles and left the white and orange police station pocked with...