[Daily Caller] U.S. Marshals Director Stacia Hylton said that allegations of improper hiring and misuse of funds in her agency had nothing to do with her resignation Tuesday, but the day after she announced that resignation more allegations poured in from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Grassley sent a letter Wednesday to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates inquiring about additional allegations that senior executives misused funds in the Asset Forfeiture Fund for private gain.
Whistleblowers allege that three senior executives needed help with job applications so they enlisted government contractors and government employees to draft the applications. Then, the executives told the contractors charge the government for the time.
"The AFF also allegedly pays for the travel of certain USMS employees to AFD headquarters in Arlington, Va., to participate in an 'Asset Forfeiture Leadership Council,' according to multiple whistleblowers," Grassley said in the letter. "Those council meetings allegedly are 'a waste of time' that produce not 'one positive benefit' and 'never accomplish anything.' Nevertheless, AFF monies pay for these employees to fly across the country twice a year."
Allegations also came in that the AFF money, which by law is required to be used only for asset forfeiture activities, is actually being used to fund employees who devote a majority of their time to other work.
"The agency's apparent failure to accurately track and measure the use of AFF monies to support AF work significantly impairs oversight and accountability for USMS' use of the fund," Grassley said in the letter. "This type of lax accounting encourages and perpetuates a culture of impunity for waste and mismanagement."
[CHRON] Officer Terry Smith, 47, was listed in stable, pH balanced condition late Tuesday after surgery at Memorial Hermann Hospital in the Texas Medical Center. He is expected to survive. File under "Blue Lives Matter."
Smith, an HPD cycle of violence officer, was shot in the back about 6 p.m. following a traffic stop in the 4200 block of Main, near Richmond, authorities said.
Police said they don't know who shot the 20-year HPD veteran or why.
"It's unclear right now what the actual circumstances are. We really need the public's help on this one," said Victor Senties, an HPD front man.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/11/2015 00:00 ||
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#1
Stopped a car in rush hour traffic on Main at Richmond? Was he run over after he was shot?
(sarcasm, sort of)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
06/11/2015 7:20 Comments ||
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[Breitbart] Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. Preparatory High School in Chicago, IL, First Lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address for the graduating class telling them because of the "struggles" that come with growing up on the south side of Chicago, "you have more scars than they do."
"Instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed," she said.
The first lady referenced teenager Hadiya Pendleton, who would have been graduating with the class but was was fatally shot in January 2013 on her way home, and said, "I know that many of you are thinking about Hadiya right now, and feeling the hole she has left in your hearts. So maybe you have been tested a lot more and a lot earlier in life then many other young people. Maybe you have more scars than they do. Maybe you have days when you feel more tired than someone your age should ever feel. But graduates tonight I want you to understand that every scar is a reminder not just that you got hurt but that you survived." More in an endless stream of 'us and them' cult of victimization drivel.
Eleanor Hawkins, 24, arrested after posing for naked photo on top of a sacred mountain, faces up to three months in prison or a native court fine of ten buffalos' heads
#4
“Around 7am, while the group were on their way back from the summit, they started to strip off their clothes – ignoring their guide,” said the official complaint, obtained by The Telegraph. “The guide warned them not to do so, but they replied: 'Stupid man, go to hell.’
Ah the ugly Canadian. The whole article is pure gold. Must read.
Posted by: regular joe ||
06/11/2015 8:51 Comments ||
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The guide should have left them there.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
06/11/2015 9:19 Comments ||
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#6
I'd be more sympathetic if only I could find my femto-violin...
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/11/2015 20:23 Comments ||
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Zimbabweans will start exchanging 'quadrillions' of local dollars for a few U.S. dollars next week, as President Robert Mugabe's government discards its virtually worthless national currency, the central bank said on Thursday.
The southern African country started using foreign currencies like the U.S. dollar and South African rand in 2009 after the Zimbabwean dollar was ruined by hyper-inflation, which hit 500 billion percent in 2008
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/11/2015 13:07 ||
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It appears Zim has avoided the toilet paper shortage of Venezuela.
#2
A model for Greece and the European market. This may be the kickoff for currency stabilization across the continent. We could be seeing the birth of the 'Afro'.
[Bloomberg] The U.S. has taken Russia's crown as the biggest oil and natural-gas producer in a demonstration of the seismic shifts in the world energy landscape emanating from America's shale fields.
U.S. oil production rose to a record last year, gaining 1.6 million barrels a day, according to BP Plc's Statistical Review of World Energy released on Wednesday. Gas output also climbed, putting America ahead of Russia as a producer of the hydrocarbons combined.
The data showing the U.S.'s emergence as the top driller confirms a trend that's helped the world's largest economy reduce imports, caused a slump in global energy prices and shifted the country's foreign policy priorities.
"We are truly witnessing a changing of the guard of global energy suppliers," BP Chief Economist Spencer Dale said in a presentation. "The implications of the shale revolution for the U.S. are profound."
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] McDonald's has named former White House press secretary Former Minister of Truth Robert Washington Bob Gibbs as its global chief communications officer, as the fast-food giant looks to improve its image.
The world's biggest hamburger chain said Tuesday that Gibbs will manage the company's communications and government affairs and help to improve its well-known brand. He replaces Bridget Coffing, who announced her retirement earlier this year.
Gibbs served as President B.O.'s first White House press secretary and as a senior adviser during the president's re-election campaign. He then co-founded The Incite Agency, a strategic communications advisory firm.
McDonald's Corp.'s CEO, Steve Easterbrook, said in a company statement that both Gibbs and new Chief Marketing Officer Silvia Lagnado will offer a wealth of experience and outside perspective "as we build a more modern, progressive burger company." "Progressive" means they're gonna be very PC, perhaps instructing their Burgererros to chat us up about race relations or LGBT issues or something distasteful like that. "Modern" means they're gonna be more "upscale," which means they'e given up on their original approach of selling tasty burgers available in no time at low prices. "Fast, tasty, and cheap" is just so 1955-ish.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/11/2015 00:00 ||
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[NEWS.INVESTORS] Does it get any phonier when a famous liar is called on to call Chevron a liar? Chevron, remember, won a huge court victory in 2013 when it was able to painstakingly prove to a skeptical federal judge that the environmental left's two-decade collection of claims about the oil giant's supposed environmental pollution in the rain forests of Ecuador was nothing but a shakedown and fraud.
After that, the angry judge tossed the $19 billion lawsuit, ending 22 years of legal fighting. Chevron's victory, in fact, exposed the whole scheme as nothing but a shakedown, with judicial payoffs, sleazy film directing and out-takes, invented damage numbers, and a string of washed-up movie stars such as Mia Farrow, Danny Glover and Daryl Hannah, some taking cash to support the phony claims.
The picture of the corruption was so grotesque, it was sold this year as movie rights to Brad Pitt, who may well make a big-name film, which is something that terrifies the left.
With the left's credibility just another wreckage in the jungle, there probably isn't anyone out there who would stand up for the environmental case against Chevron and retain any credibility.
Oh wait, there's one: indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchu, whose lifetime achievement has been to fool generations of schoolchildren -- and a Nobel Prize committee -- with lies about her tough childhood in Guatemala.
Now Menchu is being trotted out to call Chevron a liar and prop up the environmental left's flailing fortunes. Only someone as shameless as Menchu would be willing to pull it off.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/11/2015 00:00 ||
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Ankara -- The choice of venue seemed to say it all.
Straying from his vast new $500 million palace, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan hosted a senior opposition lawmaker at his more modest Ankara residence on Wednesday and appeared, so the lawmaker said, to be in a mood for compromise.
Believe it when you see it...
The AK Party Erdogan founded more than a decade ago lost its parliamentary majority in weekend polls, ending more than a decade of single-party rule and dealing a blow to ambitions for a powerful US-style presidency. For Turkey, a political uncertainty not seen since the 1990s beckoned.
Forced to find a coalition partner for the first time in its history or risk an unstable minority government, the conservative, the AKP’s top brass held a third day of meetings on Wednesday to consider their options. Erdogan, yet to appear in public since Sunday’s election, held a two-hour meeting with Deniz Baykal, parliament’s oldest deputy and the head, until 2010, of the secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
As the elder of the house, Baykal will lead parliament’s first session following the election and he was officially meeting Erdogan to discuss the reopening. During the talks, the president sounded ready for any compromise. “I observed that Mr President has an understanding that a government should be formed as soon as possible and has a positive attitude on the issue,” Baykal told reporters after the meeting.
“I got the impression that he is open to all coalition solutions”, including a partnership which would exclude the ruling party that he founded. “That would be quite a climb-down for a man who has in the past cast his political rivals as terrorists and traitors. Hopes of a more conciliatory stance from the Turkish strong man reassured nervous financial markets, with the stock market ticking up on Baykal’s comments.
Champion of the conservative, pious masses, Erdogan views Baykal’s CHP, the party of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, as the bastion of secularists whose elitist mentality he blames for much that is wrong with the country.
There is also little love lost with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), ideologically a more likely coalition partner, whose leader Devlet Bahceli has criticised Erdogan’s ambitions for an executive presidency and warned him to “remain within his constitutional limits”.
But some of those around Erdogan say he has been chastened by the election outcome and forced to accept compromise.
“He is the founding leader of the AKP and our president, but we have entered a new period with different dynamics,” a senior AKP official involved in coalition discussions said. “I think Erdogan is reflecting on the election results and taking some steps accordingly ... Time will tell how permanent this will be.”
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/11/2015 00:00 ||
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Too much I supposed to wish for that he goes and disappears.
[DAWN] Aftab Bahadur Masih was executed on Wednesday morning in Lahore's Kot Lakhpat Jail, prison officials said.
According to rights groups, Masih was tortured into confessing to a murder committed more than two decades ago, when he was still a minor.
"Aftab Bahadur Masih, a Christian man, was hanged in Kot Lakhpat prison of Lahore Wednesday morning," an official at the jail told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The execution comes just days after Shafqat Hussain ─ also convicted for a crime reportedly committed as a child ─ was granted a last-minute reprieve.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/11/2015 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] Members of a UN peacekeeping mission engaged in “transactional sex” with more than 225 Haitian women who said they needed to do so to obtain things like food and medication, a sign that sexual exploitation remains significantly underreported in such missions, according to a new report obtained by The Associated Press.
The draft by the Office of Internal Oversight Services looks at the way UN peacekeeping, which has about 125,000 people in some of the world's most troubled areas, deals with the persistent problem of sexual abuse and exploitation.
The report, expected to be released this month, says major challenges remain a decade after a groundbreaking UN report first tackled the issue. Among its findings: About a third of alleged sexual abuse involves minors under 18. Assistance to victims is “severely deficient.”
The average investigation by OIOS, which says it prioritises cases involving minors or rape, takes more than a year. And widespread confusion remains on the ground about consensual sex and exploitation. To help demonstrate that, investigators headed to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/11/2015 00:00 ||
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I suspect at least in part the intent of the original massive purchase -- and the news about it -- was to upset the domestic bullet market and drive people to give up their guns in the face of impossible expenses. But capitalism did its usual thing and compensated, as badanov has documented with his "This Week in Guns" column every Saturday. But to dump $1 billion of bullets on the market all at once would a) like before not have a permanent impact on the market (I bet a great many bullet makers would happily give their overworked employees a week or two of vacation), and b) result in an awful lot of people storing an awful lot of extra bullets under their beds until they were used up at the range, precisely not what the executive branch would like to achieve.
#4
Something sounds fishy here... because unless something has drastically changed, the US Army is in charge of buying small arms ammo for the entire DOD. They figure out the requirements, order it, and then store it for WHEN IT'S ORDERED BY ANOTHER SERVICE. That was the way it was done when I was in, at least ('78-'98).
I'm going to suggest something else - this stuff may have been bad for one reason or another, and this is how they're hiding it. Somebody got a crony contract for ammo, and we ended up buying something more dangerous to our guys than the enemy.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
06/11/2015 18:30 Comments ||
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Our whole defense industry process is broken.
Not broken. Deliberately sabotaged. And we will pay dearly for it too.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Daily Caller] U.S. Marshals Director Stacia Hylton said that allegations of improper hiring and misuse of funds in her agency had nothing to do with her resignation Tuesday, but the day after she announced that resignation more allegations poured in from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
[Breitbart] Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. Preparatory High School in Chicago, IL, First Lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address for the graduating class telling them because of the "struggles" that come with growing up on the south side of Chicago, "you have more scars than they do."
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[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] McDonald's has named former White House press secretary 
Ankara -- The choice of venue seemed to say it all.
