Free Republic

A mother is mourning the death of her 18-year-old son, who was fatally shot Friday in Alexandria, Virginia, after police say he and three other teens tried to carjack a man at a gas station and the man opened fire. Jordan Poteat was a student at Suitland High School in Maryland, his mother, Kelly Poteat Stubblefield, said Wednesday as she grappled with the loss. “He wasn’t thinking, and it led to him losing his life,” she said. Poteat, 18-year-old Mikell Morris and two 15-year-old boys tried to carjack a man at an Exxon station in the 2300 block of Richmond...

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — Protesters repeatedly shouted "shame" as a northern Virginia county board Saturday unanimously approved a $23 million incentives package for Amazon to build a new headquarters there. The Arlington County Board's 5-0 vote came after hours of heated public testimony, news outlets reported. Supporters said Amazon's plan to build a massive facility in Crystal City will lead to tens of thousands of good jobs and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. Opponents, however, said the tech giant neither needs nor deserves public subsidies. They also said lower-income residents would be driven out by...

The rumored announcement has emboldened Amazon’s army of critics. Did the world’s smartest company really need 13 months, and applications from 238 cities, to reach the striking conclusion that it should invest in New York and D.C.? The former is America’s heart of capital, and the latter is America’s literal capital, where chief executive Jeff Bezos already owns a house and a newspaper. Was this national auction nothing more than a scripted drama to raise the value of the inevitable winning bid? And did the retailer miss an opportunity to revitalize a midwestern city by choosing to enrich the already-rich...

While Brennan’s recklessness is obviously of no interest to the media, it is provoking increasing concern among government investigators, who are looking at a range of his abuses — from leaks to perjury to the outsourcing of spying on Trump to foreigners under the guise of “intelligence-sharing.” A member of the intelligence community tells TAS that he was approached by FBI investigators inquiring about Brennan’s improprieties at the CIA. He was startled to hear them venting aloud about Brennan’s practice of using British intelligence officials to spy on the Trump campaign, including American contractors hired by the British who were...

Almost every top official in a remote South Texas city was arrested on Thursday under a detailed federal indictment that accuses them of taking bribes from contractors and sending city workers to help an illegal gambling operator nicknamed Mr T. Crystal City's mayor, city manager, mayor pro tempore, one of three current councilmen and a former councilman were all arrested under an indictment obtained by the U.S. attorney's office in San Antonio, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney said. A second councilman is already charged in a separate case with smuggling Mexican immigrants. That leaves just one councilman not facing...

The next few city council meetings in Crystal City, TX are going to be pretty quiet. On Thursday, FBI agents arrested a majority of the town's top officials, including the mayor, mayor pro tempore, city manager, and a current city council member, as well as a former council member, The Washington Post reports. FBI agents also arrested Ngoc Tri Nguyen, an alleged gambling operator, nicknamed "Mr. T." A federal indictment (PDF) accused the town officials of taking thousands of dollars in bribes, and of helping Nguyen run the illegal gambling operation. Ricardo Lopez, Crystal City's mayor, was accused of accepting...

Federal prosecutors announced Wednesday that a grand jury has indicted five men on kidnapping conspiracy charges related to a January incident involving cross-border drug trafficking and torture. Charged in the indictment, and each facing life in prison if convicted, were Crystal City residents Heriberto Macias Diaz, David Perez and William Davalos, and San Antonio residents Leroy Guerra Garcia and Mark Anthony Jiminez. The men are accused of conspiring to kidnap a Pearsall tow truck driver and taking him to Piedras Negras, where he was tortured and threatened with death, all to find the location of missing drug money, according to...

Posted: 02/23/2005 12:00 AM CST John MacCormack Express-News Staff Writer CRYSTAL CITY — On Valentine's Day, lawyer Jesse Gamez sent City Manager Diana Palacios two dozen long-stem red roses as a tender tribute to their long-term relationship. That same day, Palacios was sworn in as a juror in a multimillion-dollar product liability suit against Ford Motor Co. over a wreck two years ago that killed two people. It was something that everyone in the county but the Ford lawyers knew: Juror No. 17 was the main squeeze of one of the plaintiff's lawyers. Like all small town secrets, this one...

Leaders of Iraq's interim Governing Council joined U.S. officials and Middle Eastern immigrants at a memorial service in Northern Virginia last night that reflected rising demands by Iraqis for a quicker turnover of power by U.S. occupation authorities. "We need to build our own security and our own government. We will work with the coalition . . . but they need to hurry," said the council's temporary president, Ahmed Chalabi, speaking in Arabic to an audience that included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. His comments were translated into English for a reporter. The service was in honor of Ayatollah...