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LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Annual May Day marches are scheduled to take place Thursday in downtown Los Angeles. The demonstrations are a show of support for immigrants who aren’t in the United States legally. Marchers plan to urge Congress to pass legislation overhauling the immigration system by putting an end to deportations that divide families. The event typically causes a major traffic tie-up throughout downtown. The march itself will begin at 10 a.m. starting at the Chinatown Gateway, winding through the downtown area and ending at the Metropolitan Detention Center at 535 N. Alameda St., where a rally will be...

China Seizes An Insane $14.5 Billion Worth Of Assets From Family Of Former Security Official Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard, Reuters Mar. 30, 2014, 8:38 AM BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members and associates of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang, who is at the center of China's biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said. More than 300 of Zhou's relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources, who...

Link only - Angry Residents Wave Pitchforks, Torches In Protest Of Mayor's Crackdown On Homelessness

**SNIP** Baker quite likely started to sense that maybe his time was up in Cincinnati. Maybe that’s why he said what he said. “The last couple weeks, I’ve been getting a rash of hate mail, racial mail,” he said. “Maybe it is time to go.” “This is really ugly,” he said. “There are all sorts of references to Barack Obama. So now I know where they are coming from. I don’t know, maybe people are mad at him, so they don’t like the idea of blacks in authority.”

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget. The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community... The summary...

Big Labor bosses are considering opening their unions to non-members in an effort to create “an omnibus organization” of both union and non-union members, according to a liberal journalist. “The AFL-CIO is preparing for a national convention in September at which it will consider opening its ranks to workers who aren’t members of or represented by unions, or (sic) creating an omnibus organization of both union members and non-members,” wrote Harold Meyerson in an American Prospect article last week....

In 2012, the parents of Ted Kremer attended a fundraiser and won a silent auction for their son to be a bat boy at a Cincinnati Reds game. Even though the prize was supposed to be for someone aged 15-19, the Reds made an exception in part because Ted — 29 years old at the time — also happens to have Down syndrome. The Kremers expected it to be a token appearance. It was anything but. Ted Kremer's enthusiastic turn as bat boy on Aug. 17 might have been the highlight of the Reds' season (aside from making the playoffs)....

It can't be good when you see an indoor shooting range surrounded by cop cars all lit up, and yellow tape.

The Cincinnati Reds held their annual "Redsfest" over the weekend and the biggest happening — other than Bronson Arroyo's Goo Goo Dolls cover or Mat Latos' Justin Bieber impression — was the introduction of the team's new alternate jersey. That's it to the right here. The Reds will wear the "Los Rojos" tops on select dates this season as they follow other teams into the world of Spanish-themed jerseys.

For decades, it was one of the enduring disputes of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Was Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, really a secret Communist, as the white-only government of the time alleged? Or, as he claimed during the infamous 1963 trial that saw him jailed for life, was it simply a smear to discredit him in a world riven by Cold War tensions? Now, nearly half a century after the court case that made him the world’s best-known prisoner of conscience, a new book claims that whatever the wider injustice perpetrated, the apartheid-era prosecutors were indeed...

Popular Christian talk radio host Frank Pastore remains in a coma one week after a motorcycle crash, but showed signs of improvement on Monday while in stable but serious condition, his wife said. In talking about her husband's inspirational impact on people even while he is in intensive care, Gina Pastore told The Christian Post that during his radio show on the same night of the accident he discussed the topic of death and the human soul.

Right now at the bottom of the South Pacific, a lot of people email me and they say, look, if Obama gets back in again, can we come and live in New Zealand? And I say, look, it’s a wonderful country, you’ll enjoy it, but really there is no where to run now. Just 1500 miles to the north of my country lie the beautiful Fijian Islands – great tourist destination, but they now have a Marxist government. The Chinese are training the Fijian military, building big hydro-electric dams on the islands. Fiji is basically now a Chinese client state....

San Francisco beats Cincinnati 6-3; first team to lose two games at home, then win three in a row in the opposing park to take a 5-game series. Some great baseball today. Wonder if the A's will make it a Bay Area two-fer tonight?

Can it all be coincidence? By Don Fredrick web posted October 8, 2012 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...

Reds' Bailey throws no-hitter against Pirates

Peter Schiff speaks to mainstream DNC delegates who want to see a cap or ban on corporate profits.

The newspaper clips are yellowed and crinkly with the passage of two decades. They've survived moves from Cincinnati to Denver to the Philadelphia suburbs, not to mention the great sump pump disaster of 2004 and the residual basement dust from a kitchen remodeling in 2011. The Barry Larkin who stares back at me now from those old Cincinnati Post sports sections is lithe, athletic and capable of energizing a crowd with a flick of a switch. He can drive the ball over the fence or shoot it the opposite way on a hit-and-run. He'll steal a base when it matters...

CINCINNATI -- Former reliever Pedro Borbon, the Reds' all-time leader in appearances and a member of two World Series championship teams, died on Monday. Borbon was 65 years old. Borbon was a key figure in the Reds' bullpen from 1970-79 -- when he appeared in more games than any pitcher in the NL. He broke into the Majors in 1969 with the Angels and spent the final two seasons of his career with the Giants and Cardinals. Over his 10 seasons in Cincinnati, the right-handed Borbon was 62-33 with a 3.32 ERA and 76 saves in a club-record 531 games....

Pittsburgh detectives questioned a woman for nearly 12 hours about a bizarre robbery in the Downtown hotel room of a Cincinnati Reds pitcher, in part because she changed her story. Claudia Manrique, 26, of Silver Spring, Md., initially said she was attacked late Tuesday by a stranger posing as a maintenance man at the Omni William Penn who tied her up and made off with valuables belonging to pitcher Aroldis Chapman.

Politics: The left had a fit of the vapors after GOP Rep. Allen West of Florida insinuated that there were boatloads of communists in Congress among Democrats. Well, maybe not, but where there's smoke, there's fire. Speaking before a town hall in Jensen Beach, Fla., the popular congressman said: "I believe there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the communist party." A staffer later explained that he was referring to the far-left congressional Progressive Caucus, all of whose members have truly radical pasts. West's statement ignited a firestorm. How dare he suggest that...