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The top job at Oregon State Police has gone to Casey Codding, one of two state police troopers who fatally shot a leader of the armed Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in January 2016, Gov. Tina Kotek announced Monday. Codding, a 27-year veteran of Oregon State Police, shot Robert ‘LaVoy’ Finicum in the back after Finicum sped his truck toward a roadblock of state SWAT police and FBI agents. State police withheld the names of the two officers who fired at Finicum, but a witness let Codding’s name slip during subsequent court hearings about the shooting. Now superintendent, Codding started...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Oregon State Police troopers responding to the ongoing protest-related unrest in Portland have been federally deputized, state police confirm. State police tell KOIN 6 News they’re working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to review arrests made by troopers assigned to Portland for potential prosecution. The troopers assigned to Portland have been cross-deputized by the U.S. Marshals. The Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt previously announced his office would presumptively decline to prosecute certain misdemeanor charges stemming from the protests, a move which resulted in criticism from law enforcement agencies, including state police in mid-August. “OSP is...

ROME - The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday. Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman. She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials...

D.C. Exports School Choice Bethany Stotts, November 3, 2009 This week Virginia Walden-Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, will be traveling to Kentucky to a rally supporting state legislation for charter schools. “Ford brings her message the ‘parents deserve a choice so kids can have a chance’ to Louisville this Friday,” states the Bluegrass Institute press release. “She will speak at a rally on Friday at 7p.m. in the multipurpose facility at Midwest Church of Christ, 2115 Garland Ave…..” Walden-Ford has fought hard for the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provided vouchers for underprivileged students attending the...

Education and Taxation (video at link) by: Sarah Carlsruh, October 02, 2009 This week’s Conservative Bloggers Briefing at the Heritage Foundation highlighted two hot topics: school choice and taxes. Virginia Walden-Ford, executive director of the D.C. Black Alliance for Educational Options, spoke to bloggers this Tuesday about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which, she insinuated, the Obama administration would like to end. This scholarship program, argued Walden-Ford, provides kids the chance to escape the violence at D.C. public schools, adding that “These families come from some of the worst schools in D.C.” Walden-Ford told bloggers that President Barack Obama...

Unsafe at D.C. Schools by: Bethany Stotts, September 18, 2009 Heritage Foundation scholars recently received data on the number of police-notified incidents at District of Columbia public schools. Taking a more systematic look at “crime-related incidents reported to the [D.C. Metropolitan Police Department] MPD during the 2007–2008 school year, excluding the summer months,” an August 28 analysis by David V. Mulhausen, Don Soifer and Dan Lips (Mulhausen et al.) added to the body of knowledge demonstrating how unsafe D.C. schools really are. “During the 2007– 2008 school year, 3,500 incidences of crime were reported to the Metropolitan Police Department from...

Community Organizes for Vouchers by: Anthony Kang, August 25, 2009 On August 20th, dozens of elementary students and parents gathered in front of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) in a daytime vigil organized by D.C. Parents for School Choice as part of their SaveThe216 campaign to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). The D.C. OSP is part of a three-sector education initiative for public schools, charters schools, and OSP participants. The program, which provides low-income children with scholarships of up to $7,500 allowing parents to choose the education they believe is best for their children, was passed...

The Foreign Office mounted a fightback yesterday against allegations that Jack Straw and Colin Powell had expressed serious doubts about whether Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction before the start of the Iraq war. As Tony Blair faced allegations from a former Cabinet colleague that he had "duped" the British people over Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities, the Foreign Office issued a detailed rebuttal of allegations, made in the Guardian newspaper, that were seized on by news media around the world. The paper said Mr Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Mr Powell, his United States counterpart, had privately expressed serious doubts...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

One of the biggest names of the conference never even uttered a word. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer is the military intelligence operative who recently went public with a controversial claim that a year before September 11, his top-secret task force "Able Danger" was able to identify the man who later turned out to be the lead hijacker as being connected to al Qaeda. Shaffer is a veteran of top-secret operations against terrorists, including some in Afghanistan, and several of his DIA colleagues have come out publicly to confirm that they remember Mohamed Atta being identified in 2000 as part of...

Not Bush. And That Might Be a Problem While it is almost certainly more crucial to America's future than, say, immigration, the question of what will happen between the United States and Iran in the next year or so is of surprisingly little public concern. Pollwatcher Stu Rothenberg tells me it's a complete nonissue in this year's midterm congressional elections. As for 2008's presidential race, well, what might be seen as the bellicosity of the Bush administration's Vulcans is drowned out by the mighty bellowing against Iran of prospective Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Sadly but not surprisingly, the American people,...

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...

ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- Federal health officials warned Friday of kidney failure associated with certain products used to cleanse the bowel before colonoscopies and other procedures. The Food and Drug Administration said in an alert to doctors and patients that it has documented 22 cases of acute phosphate nephropathy, a rare but serious form of kidney failure associated with the use of oral sodium phosphates. The products cleanse the bowel by causing patients to loose large amounts of fluid through bowel movements. Of the cases, 21 involved patients given solutions such as Fleet Phospho-soda or Fleet Accu-Prep. One patient had...

Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

On May 13, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy berated Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Senate Armed Services Committee, condemning "disaster after disaster" in U.S. Iraq policy. Well before the Abu Ghraib revelations, Kennedy has sought to transform Iraqi freedom from a philosophical and strategic issue into a partisan debate, without regard either to reality or result. On April 6, Kennedy called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam." On March 5, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, took the president to task for allegedly exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq: "The evidence so far leads to...

Officials Confirm Details of Bush's Plan for Sending Humans Back to the Moon, on to Mars By Lon Rains and Brian Berger, Space News Staff Writers And Leonard David, Senior Space Writer posted: 12:30 am ET, 10 January 2004 WASHINGTON – U.S. President George Bush on Wednesday will unveil a bold new plan for the future of NASA that will give the agency the green light to start developing the hardware required to return to the Moon and eventually journey on to Mars, government officials told SPACE.com Friday. This ambitious new plan will require Congress to approve billions of...

The field of likely bidders to build the Orbital Space Plane is about to shrink from three to two, according to industry sources. Northrop Grumman is dropping plans to bid for the Orbital Space Plane prime contract and has entered discussions with Lockheed Martin Corp. about a teaming arrangement on the program, industry sources said. Such a move essentially would pit the Lockheed Martin-Northrop Grumman team against Boeing Co. for the multibillion-dollar contract. What this would mean for Northrop Grumman’s current Orbital Space Plane partner, Orbital Sciences Corp., is not immediately clear. Orbital Sciences spokesman Barron Beneski could not be...

There's little doubt that NASA can get its space shuttles flying again, but seven months after the deadly Columbia accident, there are plenty of doubts about whether it should. With no clear vision for why the United States is pursuing human space flight, a tight national budget and a scathing critique of the U.S. space agency's "broken safety culture" coloring the debate, some in Congress wonder if sending humans into space at this point is worth the risk. "We're putting American men and women at great risk for their lives, flying orbiters that are 30 years old that cannot be...

DAYTON, Ohio -- NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe has instructed the agency to accelerate development of the Orbital Space Plane and to have a vehicle ready to send to the international space station by 2008 to serve as a crew rescue vehicle. "In light of Columbia, the administrator has asked us to accelerate by two years," said Daniel Dumbacher, manager of the second generation reusable launch vehicle program office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He said O’Keefe requested the new schedule about two weeks ago.