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University of Massachusetts President William M. Bulger asked FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. more than 20 years ago to keep his gangster brother James J. ``Whitey'' Bulger ``out of trouble,'' a Winter Hill Gang hit man told a federal jury yesterday during shocking testimony also linking the retired agent to two mob murders. John Martorano, a remorseless killer of 20 men, claimed Whitey Bulger told him the Bulgers had a friend at the FBI after William helped Connolly escape poverty and the siren song of crime in their South Boston neighborhood. ``He said he was told that Connolly owed...

John “Zip” Connolly is apparently one of those hoodlums who cares what his obituary says about him after he’s dead and gone. At age 82, the infamous ex-FBI agent seems obsessed with clearing at least one indelible stain off his remarkably squalid (even by Boston G-man standards) underworld career. He’d prefer not to have “Mob hitman” in the first sentence of his death notice. There’s not much he can do about the racketeering conviction, or all his tawdry connections to the Bulger Crime Family. But “Mob hitman” is a bit much. Sadly, Zip has failed yet again to remove “assassin”...

MIAMI — A Florida appeals court has overturned the murder conviction for a former FBI agent linked to mobster Whitey Bulger. The 3rd District Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that former agent John Connolly was improperly convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1982 slaying of a gambling executive. A hit man testified that he killed World Jai-Alai President John Callahan after ex-agent Connolly tipped Bulger and others that the executive would implicate them in another death. In the court's new ruling, a panel of judges determined in a 2-1 vote that Connolly's second-degree...

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) -- A former CIA officer pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in Honolulu on Friday to conspiring to gather and deliver national defense information for China. Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, was arrested in 2020 https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/08/17/former-cia-operative-arrested-honolulu-charged-with-helping-china-spy-us/ on charges of spying and selling state secrets to China. Prosecutors say Ma admitted that he and a relative provided Chinese intelligence officers with a “large volume of classified U.S. national defense” matierals at a Hong Kong hotel room. In exchange, they were handed $50,000 in cash. Ma worked for the CIA from 1982 to 1989. He subsequently served as a linguist...

Call it pinko talent development, but we can still learn from it When Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbot proposed legislation making particular radical tactics crimes — many of them felonies — carrying mandatory jail time, much commentary, positive and negative, focused on DeSantis’ proposal (previously made by other jurisdictions) that a driver fleeing from safety from a mob should not be liable for injury or death caused by hitting someone with his car. That proposal was especially popular with those who, beyond supporting the right to physical safety and self-defense, fantasize about breaking radical Lefty movements...

Joe Biden's National Park Service under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will remove the statue of William Penn from the park erected in 1982 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his founding of the colony of Pennsylvania. The park is on the site of his original home in Philadelphia. The park, located in Philadelphia near the Delaware River at Sansom and Second Streets, will be "rehabilitated" and that proposal will include an "expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia." The plan was "developed in consultations with the representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware...

FULL TITLE: Seattle's Green River killer confesses to slaying nearly DOUBLE the 49 women he's convicted of killing in first ever interview A Seattle-area truck painter who was unmasked as the Green River serial killer has claimed he murdered up to 80 women over two decades - nearly double the number he was convicted of killing. Gary Ridgway is currently serving 49 consecutive life sentences in a Washington state prison. But in a series of interviews conducted over the past five months, he is now claiming there are significantly more victims and he says he is coming clean to help...

Letter From A Serial Killer SEATTLE - Green River killer Gary Leon Ridgway sent a bizarre anonymous letter to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer nearly 20 years ago in what the newspaper said Friday was a "brazen attempt to throw off investigators." Authorities at the time wrongly concluded it wasn't from the real killer, the paper said. Now, police say Ridgway admitted writing the letter when he began confessing this summer to killing 48 women. The paper said it had turned the letter over to investigators in 1984 and never reported on it, in part because of doubts about its authenticity....

Stephen Gerard Kelly and Garry Keane’s documentary In The Shadow of Beirut has been submitted as Ireland‘s entry for the 2024 Oscar International Feature Film race. The film, which is executive produced by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Siobhan Sinnerton of HiddenLight Productions, was selected Thursday by the Irish Film & Television Academy, which last year selected The Quiet Girl for its submission. That film, directed by Colm Bairéad, became the first Irish film to be nominated in the category. For The Shadow of Beirut, first-time filmmaker Kelly spent five years living among the film’s four featured families in the...

This was originally posted at the Washington Post on February 27, 2004. By David Hoffman In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a memoir by a Reagan White House official. .... Snip.... Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold...

The Greek musician-composer's unexpected Hot 100 topper (and sports soundtrack staple) was one of the final instrumental No. 1s of the 20th century.Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Vangelis with a flashback to his lone Hot 100-topper, the perennially rousing and graceful early-’80s athletics anthem “Chariots of Fire.” A...

Consumer price inflation in December, at 7%, was last this high in the summer of 1982. That’s about all the two periods have in common. Today, the inflation rate is on the rise. Back then, it was falling. It had peaked at 14.8% in 1980, while Jimmy Carter was still president and the Iranian revolution had pushed up oil prices. Core inflation that year reached 13.6%.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation jumped in December at its fastest year-over-year pace in nearly four decades, surging 7% and raising costs for consumers, offsetting recent wage gains and heightening pressure on President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve to address what is increasingly Americans’ central economic concern. Prices have spiked during the recovery from the pandemic recession as Americans have ramped up spending on goods such as cars, furniture and appliances. Those increased purchases have clogged ports and warehouses and exacerbated supply shortages of semiconductors and other parts. Gas prices, while declining a bit from November to December, have surged...

Tucker Carlson had economist Peter Schiff on his show to discuss the current state of Biden’s economy.Trending Politics reported:Tucker leads the conversation by noting that CPI rose by nearly 7% year over year in November, the highest inflation in decades. While that’s bad enough, Schiff responded by noting that CPI probably isn’t even the right measure of inflation, with the true inflation number being far, far higher. In his words:In fact, one of the ways the Fed has been able to justify creating more inflation is because they claimed we didn’t have enough of it. But the only reason we...

The Labor Department reported Friday the U.S. consumer price index rose 0.8% in November, compared to October. The increase marks a 6.8% increase over the previous year, the department also reported, marking the highest annual inflation rate since June 1982. Wall Street expected the month-to-month index to reflect a 0.7% gain for November, according to CNBC. Under the Biden administration, the CPI increased 0.9% in October, compared to the previous month. The index report from the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics gauges inflation by measuring the cost of dozens of items from such everyday goods as gasoline and food to...

An ID card belonging a Massachusetts teen last seen nearly four decades ago has been recovered from a river, along with unidentified human remains, authorities said. Judith Chartier, of Chelmsford, 17, was last seen on June 5, 1982, after leaving a party in Billerica. Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said “significant portions” of the teen’s 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger were located by divers Tuesday in the Concord River in Billerica, marking a crucial development in the decades-old cold case. Investigators recovered human remains and a work ID of Chartier’s in the same river Wednesday near Tuesday’s find — about 50...

Missing Persons perform "Walking In L.A." live at the US Festival

"Waiting for a Girl Like You" wouldn't have happened if Foreigner hadn't gone from a six-member to a four-piece band. They could take their foot off the proverbial pedal, leveraging the new space in their songs. "The part I liked was that it wasn't really that slow," former singer Lou Gramm told the Canton Repository in 2016. "It had a semi-slow beat to it and had a lot of dynamics. I think that being the first ballad that got any attention, we saw it as a big plus." It also wouldn't have happened if founding guitarist Mick Jones didn't experience...

The last time Americans were this unhappy about prices of big-ticket purchases was 1982, when the Federal Reserve was fighting a war against double-digit inflation. The University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment showed U.S. consumers more concerned with higher prices of appliances, houses, and cars than anytime in 39 years, according to the survey’s chief economist Richard Curtin.

Explanation: If you could stand on Venus -- what would you see? Pictured is the view from Venera 14, a robotic Soviet lander which parachuted and air-braked down through the thick Venusian atmosphere in March of 1982. The desolate landscape it saw included flat rocks, vast empty terrain, and a featureless sky above Phoebe Regio near Venus' equator. On the lower left is the spacecraft's penetrometer used to make scientific measurements, while the light piece on the right is part of an ejected lens-cap. Enduring temperatures near 450 degrees Celsius and pressures 75 times that on Earth, the hardened Venera...