Free Republic

Raleigh, N.C. — A highway contractor pleaded guilty Thursday in a scheme to supply defective components to bridges in North Carolina, authorities said. Joel De La Torre, 33, of Chicago, pleaded guilty to federal charges of making false statements concerning highway projects and aggravated identity theft. He will be sentenced in July, when he faces up to seven years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Defects were found in October 2011 in elastomeric bridge bearings – slabs of rubber reinforced with multiple layers of steel and placed underneath bridges to absorb shock – that had been shipped to 25 highway...

WASHINGTON - Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years, property deeds show. ADVERTISEMENT In the process, Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company, according to records and interviews. The Nevada Democrat's deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in...

Head of U.N. Program in Iraq Accused of Improperly Accepting Purchasing Rights. UNITED NATIONS -- Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein's government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials. Sevan said that such an assessment would prove too costly and that U.N. member governments bore primary responsibility for policing the program, according to senior U.N. officials...