Free Republic

A former Chicago police commander once considered a rising star in the department was spared federal prison Tuesday for pocketing more than $360,000 in Social Security payments intended for his mother that he continued to collect for nearly 25 years after her death. U.S. District Judge Manish Shah sentenced Kenneth Johnson to two years of probation and ordered him to serve the first six months in community confinement, likely at the Salvation Army. . In handing down the sentence, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah said Johnson’s decision to betray the public’s trust was “infuriating.” “How many times (as a police...

SU honors 16 student protesters By SCOTT DYER sdyer@theadvocate.com Capitol news bureau Forty-four years after expelling them for protesting three racially segregated restaurants in Baton Rouge, Southern University honored 16 former students as heroes Friday. "Sixteen of our young people had the courage to sit at segregated lunch counters and to dare the laws of this state," Southern University Chancellor Ed Jackson said at Friday's commencement. "Some of them went to jail, and all of them, unfortunately, were expelled from the university," Jackson said. The Baton Rouge protests laid the legal groundwork for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that desegregated...

They arrived as Saddam apologists willing to die for the despot—but they left Iraq weeks later with changed hearts and a determination that Saddam must go.  Many of the human shields who had arrived with much fanfare to “stop” the United States and Britain were swayed by the strongest supporters of Saddam’s ouster: the Iraqi people.  Particularly powerful is the story of an American group from the Assyrian Church of the East, who went with a Japanese human shield delegation and recently crossed over into Jordan with 14 hours of uncensored video footage.  Out of the presence of Iraqi secret police,...