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Thanks, Mr. Justin
 Madoff and his “posse”
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Bernard Madoff has hired a veteran prison consultant to help him to find the best possible jail in which to serve his 150-year sentence for Wall Street’s biggest fraud. After his sentencing this week Madoff, now Prisoner No 1727-054, met Herb Hoelter, of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, whose previous clients include the jailed Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and the financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.
The draconian maximum sentence imposed by the judge means that Madoff, 71, will be assigned to a tougher category of prison than most white-collar criminals. He could be forced to mingle with murderers, rapists, drug-dealers and white supremacist gangs with a hatred of Jews. Madoff is Jewish. He could even find himself incarcerated with terrorists in the infamous “Supermax” jail in Florence, Colorado.
“He was incredibly disappointed. He knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison. I don’t think that was ever an issue,” Hoelter told The Times. “But it’s patently unfair to cast him as a symbol of all evil.” Federal convicts are assigned to minimum, low, medium, high-security prison, or even the sole Supermax facility, by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons using a score-card known as Form BP-337 to calculate an inmate’s “Security Point Total”. A first-time non-violent white-collar criminal convicted in a U.S. federal court would normally qualify for incarceration at a minimum-security “prison camp” with easygoing rules and no perimeter fence.
“He could cause a lot of problems because it’s a very high-profile case. People may react very badly to him,” Mr Bales said. “He is going to have white supremacists who do not like the Jewish population. He has got some enemies he is going to have to face.” It is even possible that Madoff could be upgraded for his own safety to the only Supermax facility, where inmates are locked up for 23 hours a day and never get to mix with the general prison population.
John Webster, of National Prison and Sentencing Consultants, said: “Next to being a sex offender, people who are perceived as stealing from the elderly are not perceived as very popular folk in prison. Everyone has a mother. I think there is going to be some form of retaliation.”
Um….draconian maximum sentence?!?! You’re breaking my heart! At this point I’d like to believe Madoff doesn’t have enough money for a pack of smokes, much less hiring a consultant.
PHOENIX — Cynthia Mary Roberson is an unemployed mother who police say led her 12- and 14-year-old sons and their friends to commit at least 20 armed robberies and assaults, including the beating of a teenage boy who had nothing more than an orange lollipop.
Her motivation was purely financial — police said she needed money to pay rent and the loan on her gold Chevrolet. In every case, the mother drove the getaway car and once coached a kid during a robbery because he was having trouble stealing a cellphone from a victim, police said.
At the time of her arrest in late May, the 51-year-old Roberson lived in what police described as a filthy Phoenix apartment with her two sons, ages 12 and 14, and five other young boys and men between 14 and 20 years old. Phoenix police say Roberson had recently lost her job and persuaded her sons and the others living with her to commit robberies to help pay for rent and her car loan. Phoenix police Sgt. Phil Roberts described Roberson as the ringleader, driving the youngsters to robberies in parks and along streets in Phoenix.“I think she absolutely had a lot of influence,” Roberts said. “She’s driving them out, telling them how to do it — basically saying, ‘Let’s go out and let’s commit a robbery tonight,’ and then instructing some of the suspects on how to do the robbery and how the robbery should go down.” Phoenix police believe Roberson and the youngsters committed at least 20 robberies involving assaults on victims between the age of 13 and 20. One 13-year-old was beaten and forced to empty his pockets — which contained only a lollipop. One victim suffered a concussion.
A family that preys together…
He was the ultimate Renaissance man – studying anatomy, designing a rudimentary helicopter and creating some of the most admired paintings of the age. But could Leonardo Da Vinci also have perpetrated history’s greatest art forgery? That’s the suggestion of one expert, who claims that Leonardo was responsible for faking the Turin Shroud.
The relic has inspired generations of pilgrims who have flocked to see what they believe is the face of the crucified Jesus. But it has also provoked bitter controversy after scientists carbon-dated it to the Middle Ages.
Now a US artist has entered the fray, putting forward her own theory about its origin. Lillian Schwartz, a graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York, claims that the image is a self-portrait of Leonardo, which was made using a crude photographic technique. Using computer scans she found that the face on the Turin Shroud and a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci share the same dimensions. In the 1980s Miss Schwartz made detailed measurements of the Mona Lisa and a Leonardo self-portrait. To her amazement, the two faces lined up perfectly, leading her to suggest that he used a self-portrait as a model for the painting. Earlier this year she used the same technique to compare another Leonardo self-portrait with the Turin Shroud. “It matched. I’m excited about this,” she said.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the proportions that Leonardo wrote about were used in creating this Shroud’s face.”
A television documentary broadcast in Britain this week showed how Leonardo scorched his facial features on to the linen of the shroud using a sculpture of his face and an early photographic device called a camera obscura.
A former hospital employee may have exposed hundreds, or even thousands, of surgical patients to hepatitis C after taking their fentanyl injections and replacing them with used syringes filled with saline solution.
Kristen Diane Parker, who worked at Rose Medical Center in Denver, has admitted to secretly injecting herself in a bathroom and using unclean syringes as replacements for patients, investigators said.
She had hepatitis C, which she believes she contracted through using heroin and sharing dirty needles while she lived in New Jersey in 2008…
Nine patients who had surgery there during that time have tested positive for hepatitis C. Investigators are looking into whether they contracted the virus from Parker.
According to an affidavit filed by an investigator with the Food and Drug Administration, Rose Medical Center knew Parker tested positive for hepatitis C. She was counseled on how to limit her exposure to patients.
Parker quit after she was found to be in an operating room where she was not allowed to be. She subsequently tested positive for fentanyl. Hospital officials then contacted the DEA.
There are occupations where random drug tests are legit. Hospitals are one.
Consistent inventory control might also be useful. Along with checking to see if medications prescribed are having any effect, eh?
More like a psychotic child wanting attention.
North Korea’s test-firing of seven mid-range missiles on Saturday, America’s birthday, again demonstrated the ability of the country’s authoritarian regime to grab headlines and defy penalties imposed on it by the United Nations, the U.S. and other countries for its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea tests short- and mid-range missiles several times a year and signaled last month that it was preparing new tests by issuing warnings to domestic vessels to avoid certain areas in the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, through July 10.
[…]
Defense analysts in several countries, including the U.S. and South Korea, will take several weeks to determine whether Saturday’s tests showed that North Korea is advancing its ability to carry nuclear warheads on those missiles.North Korea fired the missiles into the Sea of Japan from military posts along its east coast. Last Thursday, North Korea test-fired four short-range missiles from the same locations.
[…]
North Korea’s leaders are able to push forward their weapons program because they show little regard for the impact of weapons-related economic penalties on the country’s people. Moreover, they have South Korea and Japan pinned down militarily by hundreds of missiles and artillery rockets and they have China fearful that their ouster and resulting instability would send many North Koreans into northeastern Chinese provinces.
SC’s idiot governor, Sanford, his escapades and constantly talking about them is trivial compared to the fear in this town of who’s going to die next. I saw a video piece on CBS about how practically every resident has armed themselves.
A 15-year-old South Carolina girl who was shot earlier this week by a man authorities say fits the description of a serial killer has died, police said Saturday.
Abby Tyler died at 11:25 a.m. Saturday at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center, said Chief Rick Turner of the Gaffney Police Department.
Her father, Stephen Tyler, 48, was pronounced dead at the scene of the shooting Thursday in the family-run furniture and appliance store, Tyler Home Center, in Gaffney.
On Friday, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office released a second sketch of a man believed to have fatally shot five people in less than a week.
“Let me say that under the FBI’s definition of a serial killer, yes, we have a serial killer,” Sheriff Bill Blanton said in Gaffney, a town in the county of about 54,000 residents 50 miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina.
He would not detail what has led investigators to conclude the shootings are linked or how they received the description of the suspect that has led to the two sketches. In addition, he said he did not know whether the shooter knew his victims or whether he may have chosen them at random.
[…]
But he cautioned against taking that too far. “Our concern is that people are going to start shooting at shadows,” he said.
Is Bicycling Bad for Your Bones? – NYTimes.com — I knew it, I knew it!
In his study, the bone density of 32 male, competitive bike riders, most in their late 20s and early 30s, was compared to that of age-matched controls, men who were active but not competitive athletes. Bone scans showed that almost all of the cyclists had significantly less bone density in the spine than the control group. Some of the racers, young men in their 20s, had osteopenia in their spines, a medical condition only one step below full-blown osteoporosis. “To find guys in their twenties with osteopenia was surprising and pretty disturbing,” Smathers says.
Ezra Klein – In Case You Were Insufficiently Depressed About the Job Numbers — Snookered by Goldman, Sachs.
In April, a “mere” 322,000 people lost their jobs. That was part of the whole “bad news, good trend” thing that had everyone talking about green shoots. In May, economists predicted a pretty similar result: 350,000 lost jobs. They got it wrong. We lost 467,000 jobs in May. The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent. And that actually underplays the problems. It’s always worth remembering that the unemployment rate is, at best, a partial indicator of people who are unhappily unemployed. Tim Fernholz explains:
“Keep in mind that when we say 9.5 percent, we’re talking about people who have lost their job and are looking for a new one. But when you factor in people who “currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past” “plus total employed part time for economic reasons,” and you get a rate of 16.5 percent unemployment — nearly one in five potential workers has lost significant wages and work in the current economic environment”
Found by John Ligums.
The suddenness of her announcement raises the question about whether Palin resigned to avert a major scandal. One logical place to start looking is the affair that has Alaska political circles buzzing: an alleged scandal centered around a building contractor, Spenard Building Supplies, with close ties to Palin and her husband, Todd.
Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide-open state.
SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004.
Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett’s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits—thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.
Just months before Palin left city hall to campaign for lieutenant governor, she awarded a contract to SBS to help build the $13 million Wasilla Sports Complex. The most expensive building project in Wasilla history, the complex cost the city an additional $1.3 million in legal fees and threw it into severe long-term debt. For SBS, however, the bloated and bungled project was a cash cow.
Here’s another source for some of this. And then there’s the possible embezzlement/IRS issue that seems to be the talk of Alaska.
UPDATE: Looks like at least some of this may be crap put out by an Alaskan blogger, Shannyn Moore, and picked up by a number of outlets. Or so says Palin through her personal friend, Fox’s Greta Van Susteren.
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
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Former NFL quarterback Steve McNair was killed in a shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, say authorities.
Police said they found McNair and a woman shot to death in a Nashville residence after receiving a phone call about an injured person.
The woman has been tentatively identified, but her name is not being released, authorities said. A law enforcement source close to the investigation said the woman is McNair’s girlfriend and that the residence is her condominium in downtown Nashville.
Witnesses said he was a frequent visitor there…
McNair, 36, spent 13 seasons in the NFL, the majority with the Tennessee Titans, before announcing his retirement in April 2008. He spent his last two seasons with Baltimore Ravens and he was the NFL’s co-MVP in 2003.
Shocking stuff. No details at all – yet.
This video of the 2008 Alaskan Independence Party (which wants to pull Alaska out of the USA and contends it was fraudulently made a state) outlines some plans and discusses the fact that Palin was a long time member. Todd was too. The video just surfaced recently.
  Click pic to embiggen |
The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down this past week by its current owner, AOL. The service, which provided its users with addresses such as 73402,3633 and was the first major online service, had seen the number of users dwindle in recent years. At its height, the service boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line. Many innovations we now take for granted, from online travel (Eaasy Sabre), online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts, just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s.
CompuServe users will be able to use their existing CompuServe Classic (as the service was renamed) addresses at no charge via a new e-mail system, but the software that the service was built on, along with all the features supported by that software, from forums for virtually every topic and profession known to man to members’ Ourworld Web pages, has been shut down. Indeed, the current version of the service’s client software, CompuServe for Windows NT 4.0.2, dates back to 1999.
Technology sites and Apple forums have been indundated with comments about the new model overheating and becoming discoloured since it was launched on June 19. Some iPhone users have complained that the device has become too hot to hold to the ear during long calls while others have noticed that the white 32GB model has turned pink after overheating.
In a warning posted on one of the California computer maker’s support knowledge base sites, Apple says that users should not leave their phones in a car where temperatures can exceed the -20C to 45C range that the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS models were designed to function in. Apple says in the support article that “if the interior temperature of the device exceeds normal operating temperatures, you may experience the following as it attempts to regulate its temperature: the device stops charging, display dims, and/or weak cellular signal”.
In its message, Apple says that the iPhone has a safety feature which warns users that the device is becoming too hot. As well as leaving the handset in a car, it says that the phone may overheat when left in direct sunlight for prolonged periods, when GPS tracking is used in a car on a hot day or when its iPod function is used in direct sunlight.
If the warning appears, Apple says that users of the iPhone should turn the device off and allow it to cool before using it.
iPhone 3GS users on Mac forums complain, however, that the handset becomes hot when it is not being used in a car. In a posting on the macrumors.com forum, one user complained that using the new device’s video recording feature had caused it to overheat while another complained that after carrying his phone in a backpack, it got so hot that the plastic case became distorted with tiny bumps.
Well not really, but I think Smartalix said it best in a previous post. When you cram too many functions into a device this small, you have to expect some overheating.
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