[NYPOST] A "one man scourge" with a lengthy rap sheet was busted this week in connection to nearly 20 heists across Manhattan — all allegedly committed in the few months since he was released from prison on parole, sources said.
Tony Scott, 38, got out of state lockup in September after serving around six years for several burglary convictions — but apparently couldn’t give up his old, bad ways, authorities said.
Scott allegedly launched into his new robbery spree just over a month later — going on to steal electronics and other loot from 19 businesses all on the southern end of the borough, according to police and law-enforcement sources.
"He was a one man scourge — he was hitting every neighborhood in lower Manhattan — the Village, Financial District, Chinatown, Gramercy Park, Midtown," a Manhattan cop told The Post. "Every precinct was looking for him."
He is also a suspect in several other burglaries, sources said.
It came despite a warrant for Scott’s arrest being issued Nov. 8 by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, a front man said.
The warrant was issued after it was determined that Scott had absconded from "community supervision" — an offense which usually entails failure to stay in touch with a parole officer or notify them of a change of address, the rep said.
Scott was granted parole and released on Sept. 30 from state prison, where he had been held since August of 2018 in connection to seven burglaries, according to the sources and public records.
He also served time for five burglaries in 2012, sources said.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/25/2025 00:00 ||
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[BBC] Train stations were once the centrepieces of many US cities. After decades of neglect, many places are now reviving them in new, creative ways.
The trains don't stop at Union Pacific Depot anymore. So a hotel, the Asher Adams, was built within the former train station in Salt Lake City, Utah, and opened in October 2024. Refreshed with white and gilt detailing and long wooden benches interspersed with plush seats, the resulting space pulls a bit of a mind trick: are you lingering in a lobby or waiting for a train to arrive?
The Asher Adams is just one of a spate of recently restored train stations across the US that are being reclaimed as hotels, restaurants, museums and more.
From the late 1800s through the 1920s, many of the US's railway barons built grand train stations. These palaces not only testify to the "golden age of American railroading", but serve as a reminder of how the rapid growth of rail travel following the US Civil War helped settle the US West and transform the once-largely rural nation to a coast-to-coast collection of cities. As automobiles and, later, planes became more fashionable than trains, many of these railways consolidated or stopped running, leaving these once-bustling centrepieces of urban life empty.
#1
Too bad. Civilized nations have trains. Trains are far more comfortable than airplanes, especially if you only have a couple hundred miles to go. You get to breathe real air instead of recycled airplane air that is full of unhealthy germs. Ordinary seats on just about any train are bigger and more comfortable than airplane seats. You get to watch the scenery from the windows. You don't have the stress that is always found at airports.
Sure, if you're going from LA to New York, you want an airplane. But if you're only going from LA to San Francisco or LA to Las Vegas, a train would be a lot better...if only we had such a train.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/25/2025 12:59 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Civilized nations have trains
And when they brought them to the third world, the delivers were damned as 'Colonialist'.
[FoxNews] When many were fleeing the California wildfires, Randy Savvy jumped into action and drove into the fires to save endangered horses.
Savvy, founder of the youth advocacy nonprofit group, the Compton Cowboys, has been pivotal in rescuing horses as the California wildfires continue to ravage the state. The organization, whose motto is "Streets raised us. Horses saved us," has been part of a growing coalition to rescue forgotten livestock amid the devastation.
"My first instinct was ‘how do I help?’" he told Fox News Digital. "It's how I am and how I was raised."
He shared that, shortly after offering to help, his phone began to "blow up like crazy." People needed help, and Savvy was there to offer it.
"I rescued six horses the first night," he shared. "The horse community got active so fast to protect those horses."
Savvy drove into a restricted area in Calabasas after a woman called for a helping hand to retrieve her horse.
"All you could see was orange," Savvy said. "I came from Compton to Calabasas, and it took about an hour and a half to get there, and she was ready. And we got those horses loaded up.
"She was so emotional. And I will never forget this."
[X] NEW: Border Czar Tom Homan responds to Catholic outcry over Trump’s deportation operation, calls out the Pope for living behind massive 30 foot walls.
Homan told the Pope to fix the Catholic church before he starts criticizing the United States.
"They have a wall around the Vatican. And if you illegally enter the Vatican, the crime is serious. You'll be charged with a serious crime. Be jailed."
"So he can protect the Vatican where he lives. He can build a wall where he lives, but American people are not allowed that."
"The Pope ought to stick to the Catholic church and fix that. That's a mess."
[Bureau of Investigative Journalism] Journalists including a TBIJ reporter have won an appeal to name the judges who oversaw the family court proceedings relating to the care of Sara Sharif before she was murdered.
Bottom line is a habitually violent Pakistani father, a mentally disabled mother, a girl child with learning disabilities who had been physically and mentally abused and/or neglected her entire ten years of life, and a child services system that took her and her older brother from their mother and gave them to the father despite his record. Many reports that the girl was abused over the years, but she was left in the home where Dad ended up murdering her with the help of his current wife.
The landmark ruling, handed down by three court of appeal judges, represents a defence of open justice and a recognition of the media’s role in scrutinising decisions made by the courts.
It comes ahead of new transparency rules being rolled out across family courts in England and Wales after the success of a two-year reporting pilot.
The ban on naming the judges was imposed by Mr Justice Williams at a high court hearing in December. The judge permitted the release of dozens of documents relating to the welfare of 10-year-old Sara, who was placed in the care of her father and stepmother. They were jailed for her murder last month.
However, he also said the media could not name three circuit judges who had overseen the family proceedings — as well as other third parties including social workers guardians — due to the risk of harm from a "virtual lynch mob".
At an appeal hearing earlier this month, it was argued that this "unprecedented" order could not be justified.
On Friday, the court of appeal ruled that anonymising the judges was "misguided" and that Williams made the order without any legal basis.
In a judgment, master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos wrote: "In the circumstances of this case, the judge had no jurisdiction to anonymise the historic judges either on 9 December 2024 or thereafter. He was wrong to do so."
The ban will be lifted in seven days, giving the judges time to prepare themselves and for any protective measures to be put in place.
[Zero] The Trump State Department on Friday halted spending on almost all foreign aid grants for 90 days, which also appears to apply to funding for military assistance to Ukraine, Politico reports.
The guidance, issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was sent to all diplomatic and consular posts, and orders all department staffers to issue "stop-work orders" on nearly all "existing foreign assistance awards."
It appears to go further than President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which instructed the department to pause foreign aid grants for 90 days pending review by the secretary. It had not been clear from the president’s order if it would affect already appropriated funds or Ukraine aid.
The new guidance means no further actions will be taken to disperse aid funding to programs already approved by the U.S. government, according to three current and two former officials familiar with the new guidance. -Politico
Rubio also outlined the Trump administration's stance on spending, saying "Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions," Rubio wrote. The questions: Does the action make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous?
The new order reportedly shocked State Department officials.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate confirmed Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary on Saturday, putting the South Dakota governor in charge of a sprawling agency that is essential to national security and President Donald Trump's plans to clamp down on illegal immigration.
Republicans kept the Senate working Saturday to install the latest member of Trump's national security team. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was confirmed in a dramatic tie-breaking vote Friday night, joining Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The Senate will next vote Monday evening on Scott Bessent's confirmation as treasury secretary.
Noem, a Trump ally who is in her second term as governor, received some support from Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when it voted 13-2 to advance her nomination earlier in the week. Republicans, who already hold the votes necessary to confirm her, have also expressed confidence in her determination to lead border security and immigration enforcement.
"Fixing this crisis and restoring respect for the rule of law is one of President Trump and Republicans' top priorities," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Friday. "And it's going to require a decisive and committed leader at the Department of Homeland Security. I believe Kristi has everything it takes to undertake this task."
[IsraelTimes] US President Donald Trump’s administration fires the independent inspectors general of more than a dozen major government agencies, US media reports.
The agencies include the departments of defense, state, transportation, veterans affairs, housing and urban development, interior, and energy, Washington Post says, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The New York Times says the purge affected 17 agencies but spared the Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
The Post says the firings “appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire the inspectors general.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the reports.
An inspector general is an independent position that conducts audits, investigations and inspectors into allegations of waste, fraud and abuse. They can be removed by the president or the agency head, depending on who nominated or appointed them.
Most of those dismissed were appointees from Trump’s 2017-2021 first term, the Post reporting, saying those affected had been notified by emails from the White House personnel director that they had been terminated effective immediately.
For example, Michael Missal, the inspector general at the Veterans Affairs Department, oversaw multiple investigations of how the Biden administration handled the agency’s troubled effort to build a massive electronic health records system for veterans’ medical information. Among other conclusions, the reports showed that veterans had been put at risk as their prescriptions were lost in the system. The project has been paused for months.
Mark Greenblatt, a Trump appointee at the Interior Department who was fired Friday, released a lengthy investigation in 2021 concluding that when the U.S. Park Police led law enforcement officers into a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters outside Lafayette Square during the first Trump administration, they did so as part of a plan made days earlier to build a fence around the park to protect officers — not to facilitate the visit minutes later by the president to a nearby church.
...
Among those apparently spared Friday was Joseph V. Cuffari Jr., the embattled inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. A Trump appointee, Cuffari was found in October by an independent panel of watchdogs to have misled the Senate during his nomination process and committed other misconduct during his five years in office.
[BBC] World leaders, the bosses of the world's biggest companies and a sprinkling of celebrities gathered in the small Swiss mountain town of Davos for the annual World Economic Forum this week.
On the other side of the Atlantic, President Donald Trump was starting his political comeback as the new US president.
"Nothing will stand in our way", he declared, as he vowed to end America's "decline".
Towards the end of the gathering, President Trump was beamed in straight from the White House webcam to deliver his message of world domination directly to the global elite.
While he charmed, almost seduced the audience with a credible picture of a booming US economy about to scale new technological heights, he simultaneously menaced with threats of tariffs to those who did not choose to shift their factories into the US.
Trillions of dollars of tariffs for the US Treasury for those businesses exporting into the US market from foreign factories.
"Your prerogative" he said, with a smile not out of place in a Godfather movie. And then for one of his own, the Bank of America chief Brian Moynihan, a remarkable public lashing accusing the lending giant of "debanking" many of his conservative supporters.
He awkwardly mumbled about sponsoring the World Cup.
In this first week of his second term, most people at Davos were nodding along, as they cannot think what else to do, just yet.
Two worlds colliding, as the 'America First' President was beamed in like a 30-foot interplanetary emperor, into the beating heart of the rules-based international economic order.
It is one thing suggesting that trade deficits are a problem with your domestic electorate. It is quite another to suggest at an internationalist forum that a G7 ally, Canada, become a state of your nation, eliciting gasps in the audience, and not just from Canadians.
The address was, by design, charming and offensive. There was carrot and stick for the rest of the world.
As delegates absorbed the mix of threats, invites and on occasion, praise, many appeared to be trying to decide just how much Trump might damage the global trading system, whilst assessing just how far ahead his America is getting in this tech driven AI boom.
Davos has been for this first week the alternative pole of the Trump second term.
There was a coherence to his agenda to use every means to drive down energy prices including by pressurising the Saudis on oil.
This he said would not just help to lower inflation, but also drain Russia's war coffers of oil dollars to help end the Ukraine war, by economic means. The ceasefire in the Middle East has already bought Trump some geopolitical credibility in these circles.
Christine Lagarde, David Miliband, and John Kerry shuffled into the hall. Various bank chiefs assembled on stage to praise and then lightly question the President.
The bottom line was this: Is president Trump serious about what sounded like campaign trail threats to the world economic system? The answer will reverberate for the next four years and beyond.
The answer sounded like a most definitely, yes. However, this does not mean it is going to work.
Some leading US CEOs told me that they were preparing for tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs to be applied to their exports. Their assumption was that the President's love of a rising stock market would restrict his deployment of tariffs.
But no one really knows. In any event, much is up for grabs. He has already withdrawn from the World Health Organisation.
In the promenades the whisper was of his Project 2025 allies suggesting US withdrawal from the IMF and the World Bank too.
The rest of the world does have some counter leverage, once it decides to get back up after the Trump whirlwind.
The Canadians are now briefing on their retaliatory tariffs. In conversations with both the British business secretary and EU trade minister, Jonathan Reynolds and European Union trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, I detected a desire for calm dialogue.
Both are making similar arguments to try to dissuade Trump from wider tariffs.
Mr Reynolds told me that as the US does not have a goods trade deficit with the UK, there is no need for tariffs.
Mr Sefcovic said that the US should really think about its services surplus too.
But do they not consider the threats to G7 and Nato allies Canada and Denmark (over Greenland) to be straightforwardly unacceptable and as absurd as France claiming back Louisiana? Sefcovic did not want to whip anything up.
Diplomats are making lists of US goods that Europe can now purchase to demonstrate "wins" for President Trump, from arms to gas to the magnets in wind turbines.
It might make some sense for the rest of the G7 to work in unison on retaliation against the tariffs, in order to concentrate the minds of Congress, and the competing factions inside the court of Trump.
There is no sign of that happening.
The US tech supremacy story epitomised by the broligarchy – including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple leader Tim Cook, and Google chief Sundar Pichar - had top seats at the inauguration this week.
While the US is streets ahead of Europe, its standing against China is more uncertain.
One of the talks of Davos was DeepSeek's high performing, much cheaper AI model, made in China. The prediction that the tech bros would be tearing strips out of each other in the court of Trump began to come true within hours, rather than months.
Meanwhile, while most, though not all, here in Davos sounded rather seduced by Trump's tech-fuelled optimism, some in Europe also see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attract top researchers who may be rather less than enamoured with the direction of US politics. It was openly suggested by the European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde.
Others sought solace in the fact that Europe no longer has to face Biden's massive green subsidies, creating a more level playing field again for Europe.
President Trump is changing the terms of world trade. The response of the rest of the world to this is as important as what the Trump administration itself decides.
The move risks cutting off billions of dollars of life-saving assistance. The United States is the largest single donor of aid globally - in fiscal year 2023, it disbursed $72 billion in assistance.
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.
