Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Attorney General John Ashcroft has fired a federal bankruptcy trustee who has had a prominent role on behalf of consumers affected by California's power crisis last year. U.S. Trustee Linda Stanley, the public watchdog for more than 70,000 bankruptcy cases in Northern California and Nevada, said Tuesday she was notified of her dismissal last week. Her last day is July 2. Stanley said she does not know why she lost the job she has held for eight years. She was appointed by former Attorney General Janet Reno and is in the middle of her second five-year...

Gun Store Operator Shot to Death Email story to a friend A south Jackson gun shop operator has been shot to death. It happened at about 11:45 Tuesday morning in the armed robbery of Gun Works, Incorporated, at 1016 Raymond Road. A customer found the victim, 30 year old Paul Robinson, with two gunshots to the back. The customer was also robbed. Eyewitnesses say two young black males went in the store about 11:45 a.m. Shortly after, shots rang out, and the men took off running behind the store and escaped. Robinson, the store operator, was shot two times in...

<p>We have contenders for the second annual "More-Gall-than-Bladder Award" (AKA the "Gallstone"). Last year, you may recall, the honor went to the guy in south St. Louis who tried to rob a drive-up bank. Think about the logistical challenges of that operation: If you use the pneumatic container to send the pistol and a sack into the bank, do you include a note instructing the teller to point the gun at her head while robbing herself?</p>

Martha probes widen Prosecutors look into possible obstruction of justice and false statements, reports say. June 26, 2002: 8:43 AM EDT NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Prosecutors have widened their investigation into Martha Stewart's sale of ImClone Systems stock to include possible obstruction of justice and making false statements in addition to insider trading allegations, newspapers reported Wednesday. Douglas Faneuil, the sales assistant to Stewart's broker, also has changed his account of what occurred with the sale of the stock, according to the Wall Street Journal. Faneuil initially backed up the explanation Stewart and Merrill Lynch broker Peter Bacanovic gave for...

City Leaders Take Back the Streets Melissa Ellefson It's a done deal. Monday night, Duluth City Councilors gave the go-ahead to a pair of ordinances designed to keep traffic on streets and sidewalks to a minimum. It's a problem many downtown business owners say they've battled for years, clusters of people gathering around their storefronts to socialize and hang out. Some are teens, some are transients, and some say they just don't have anywhere else to go. "Teenagers, I'm kinda used to them, they're everywhere, but when you have a nice place like the Holiday Inn, and people coming out...

SAN FRANCISCO- Attorney General John Ashcroft has fired a federal bankruptcy trustee who has had a prominent role on behalf of consumers affected by California's power crisis last year. U.S. Trustee Linda Stanley, the public watchdog for more than 70,000 bankruptcy cases in Northern California and Nevada, said Tuesday she was notified of her dismissal last week. Her last day is July 2. Stanley said she does not know why she lost the job she has held for eight years. She was appointed by former Attorney General Janet Reno and is in the middle of her second five-year term. "I...

Changes on the way for immigrant driver's licenses Tuesday, 06/25/02 (St Paul-AP) - - The head of Minnesota's Department of Public Safety expects to move ahead quickly with cahnges to immigrant driver's licenses. That's following an administrative law judges ruling. Chief Judge Kenneth Nickolai's ruling appears to give Public Safety Commissioner Charlie Weaver permission to note on Minnesota licenses when an immigrant's visa will expire. Weaver praises the ruling as a significant step against the threat of terrorism and he intends to implement it in about two weeks. Weaver has been seeking tighter requirements for licenses issued to foreigners, but...

Arthur Andersen might still be in business if it had simply stuck to a policy of shredding its nonessential records all along--and that's got corporate America's attention. "From the day the Enron story broke, we started getting more calls from companies asking for help managing the retention and destruction of documents," says Joan Feldman, president of Seattle-based Computer Forensics, a records management firm. "Executives are changing things, like how long their companies keep their backup tapes. Others are just thinking about this for the first time." It's not that these companies are out to destroy incriminating evidence. "Most companies will...

WASHINGTON- Pinch-hitting for the boss, Vice President Dick Cheney awarded medallions Tuesday to 141 Presidential Scholars from high schools across the nation and saluted the students as post-Sept. 11 symbols of American pride. Cheney presided over the medal ceremony at the Daughters of the American Revolution auditorium after President Bush bowed out in order to fly to Arizona and survey wildfire damage. Being vice president, "is not that bad a job" - except that "it takes a while to get used to being a character on 'Saturday Night Live,'" Cheney quipped to the students. They were selected by the Education...

Life lessons from losers 06/25/2002 By MICHAEL PRECKER / The Dallas Morning News Go ahead and laugh at the offbeat stories that lighten up our daily news: the thief who gets caught in the air vent, the helicopter patrol that stops for doughnuts, the man who treats his head lice with gasoline, then dries his hair in front of a wood stove. But can we learn from them? Pat Reeder thinks so. In a decade of making a living by chronicling humankind's folly, the Dallas comedy writer has become something of an expert on screw-ups big and small. That insight...

Seven killed, 31 injured in botched illegal immigration ploy SAN DIEGO (June 25, 2002 1:19 p.m. EDT) - A van carrying 33 illegal immigrants smashed head-on into two other vehicles as it went the wrong way on an interstate with its headlights off, apparently in an attempt by the driver to avoid an immigration checkpoint. Seven people were killed and 31 injured. Loaded with immigrants from Mexico and Brazil, the Dodge van sideswiped two cars and then collided with a Ford Explorer about 15 miles north of the Mexican border Monday night, the California Highway patrol said. The Explorer flew...

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - U.S. warplanes bombed an air defense site in northern Iraq on Wednesday after coming under attack from Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery, the U.S. military said. The attack in Ain Zalah, close to Iraq's border with Syria, came during a routine patrol of the zone, the Stuttgart, Germany-based U.S. European Command said in a statement. The planes, based at Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, left the area safely. U.S. and British warplanes have been monitoring "no fly" zones over southern and northern Iraq since shortly after the 1991 Gulf War to protect the Kurdish minority and Shiite...

<p>Nearly all of us know that law enforcement, and specifically the intelligence community, failed in their mission to prevent the tragedies of September 11 last year. Congress and the attorney general were right to respond quickly to that failure. The question remains if the changes we are making are the right ones. Conservatives must be prudent in that whatever tools we give the administration now may be used against us in the future. When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced changes to the Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations ("Domestic Guidelines") for the Federal Bureau of Investigation on May 30, he lauded its 94-year-old history as "the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans." That history may have come to an end. The foreign intelligence guidelines, which cover investigations of international terrorist organizations such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda (operating here or abroad), are classified but reportedly have not changed. The Domestic Guidelines govern investigations of domestic groups operating entirely within the United States. Had the Domestic Guidelines changes been in place previously, they would have done nothing to prevent last year's airline highjackings. The general principles of the old Reagan-era Domestic Guidelines for FBI investigations began as follows: "Preliminary inquiries and investigations governed by these guidelines are conducted for the purpose of preventing, detecting, or prosecuting violations of federal law. They shall be conducted with as little intrusion into the privacy of individuals as the needs of the situation permit." The new guidelines struck the second sentence, replacing it with "The FBI shall fully utilize the methods authorized by these guidelines to maximize the realization of these objectives." Translation of the new attitude: Forget about concerns of privacy, and go run roughshod over civil rights and civil liberties of American citizens. Aside from possible problems related to the specifics of the guidelines changes, the greatest problem appears to be that the attorney general is being mislead. The sooner he can get trusted advisers in place the better. Enough already with the red herrings about FBI agents not being allowed to surf the Internet and the shell game of changing Domestic Guidelines when the FBI failed under the foreign ones. While ostensibly aimed at preventing terrorism, the Domestic Guidelines broadly define "terrorist activity" so that the term appears to cover the use of force to block an abortion mill, thus triggering authority to spy on pro-life demonstrators without evidence of crime. Under the Domestic Guidelines, a terrorist enterprise is a group of at least two persons engaged in an enterprise for the purpose of "furthering political or social goals wholly or in part through activities that involve force or violence and a violation of federal criminal law." An abortion protest that includes blocking an abortion clinic in violation of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) of 1994 appears to fall within this definition. The new Domestic Guidelines differ dramatically from the previous ones in place for more than two decades in that any "public" meeting can be the subject of surveillance without any evidence of crime. FBI undercover agents would have the authority to spy at any public meetings of abortion protesters "for the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities" even if the FBI had no evidence whatsoever that a crime would actually be discussed. Moreover, the undercover FBI agent could retain any information that he thinks "relates" to any potential criminal activity, not just to terrorism. Information gathering about who attended and what they said, combined with the new data-mining rules, engender the kind of spying without cause that can chill legitimate exercise of First Amendment freedoms. A better focus would be on analysis and verifying the information used rather than profiling people using dubious data, as the old guidelines permitted. Amazingly, Mr. Ashcroft cites the case of National Organization for Women vs. Scheidler (1994) to justify changing the Domestic Guidelines so that they do not require that these terrorism enterprise investigations be limited to enterprises that have a profit as opposed to a social goal. In that case, the Supreme Court determined that the federal racketeering statute could be used against pro-life demonstrators even though they were motivated by religious and political goals, as opposed to profit. Should we really target pro-life demonstrators under the new FBI Domestic Guidelines with the extreme measures under the USA Patriot Act aimed at Osama bin Laden and company? What might a future Attorney General Hillary Clinton do under the new guidelines?</p>

I understand that wild fires are basically caused by lack of forest management techniques now prohibited by the Leftist environmental wackos. So now that our forests are ticking time bombs waiting for a match to drop, could they be being set by terrorists of some kind?The fires destroy communities, property, and lives. They disrupt our way of life. They necessitate massive reassignment of fire and safety crews to focus on the "site". We need to protect ourselves from this possibility. We need Congress to pass forest management legislation which will allow for roads, logging, and other techniques designed to prevent...

Dear President Bush, Could I ask you for a little favor? Since you're already going to the trouble of ensuring the right of self-determination for Palestinians, could you please let the South in on the same deal? Here are the things you said in Monday's speech that you're going to do for the Palestinians. I've provided some helpful little comments beside your remarks that will make clear what we Southerners would like: "The Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body. Local officials and government ministers need authority of their own and the independence to govern effectively."...

In the war on drugs, the news is almost never good. A Canadian university criminologist recently released a report detailing a striking 222 percent increase in marijuana-growing operations in British Columbia between 1997 and 2000. Needless to say, it has officials on both sides of the border voicing concern. Drug Czar John Walters made known his displeasure with Canadian drug laws at the international meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, but Canadian marijuana should be the least of our worries when it comes to drugs in America.The Partnership For a Drug-Free America recently reported that teenage...

Messmer teacher sentenced in sex caseBy DAVID DOEGEof the Journal Sentinel staffLast Updated: June 26, 2002A former Messmer High School music teacher who had repeated sexual contact with a 16-year-old student after school was sentenced Tuesday to one year in prison followed by three years of community supervision.Melissa A. Bittner came to court Tuesday hoping she would be placed on probation without jail time so she and her husband could start life anew in another state, according to her attorney.But Milwaukee County Circuit Judge John J. DiMotto surprised her and her attorney, Gerald Boyle, by concluding that her crime called...

SAN DIEGO, CA - A traffic collision left two people dead and two others injured Monday night. According to the California Highway Patrol, the cars were drag racing just prior to the crash. It happened around 11:30pm on SR-52 near Convoy Street.

G.W. Bush claims to be pro-life. Because of this, he has enjoyed undying support from most pro-life organizations and grassroots Christian activists. When it comes to talking pro-life, Bush does it just about as well as anyone. When it comes to walking the walk, however, Bush is found seriously wanting. World Net Daily and Human Events recently reported, "The White House lobbied last week to kill a Senate Republican effort to effectively stop commercial human cloning in the United States, Senate sources (said)." Such effort is contrary to Bush's public statements that he supports a complete ban on human cloning....

ISRA: Gun Control Makes Cities Dangerous Places to Live To: City and State Desk Contact: Richard Pearson of the Illinois State Rifle Association, 815-635-3198; http://www.isra.org CHICAGO, June 25 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following was released today by the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA): Crime statistics released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) suggest strongly that tough gun control laws do little to curb violent crime. According to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the U.S. murder rate jumped 3.1 percent while forcible rapes inched up 0.2 percent. Overall, the U.S. crime rate climbed 2 percent. Interestingly enough, cities...