Frank Salvador Solorza, 46, of Redwood City, CA, was convicted this week of conspiracy, impersonating an immigration officer and attempted extortion. What makes the case particularly heinous is that the victims were members of his own family. What makes it particularly hilarious is that he was dressed as a clown and riding a tiny bicycle when he committed the crime.
Stern NYC schoolmarm-in-chief Mike Bloomberg is trying to crack down on the practice of NYPD officers making tickets disappear as a favor to friends. Clearly, this is an outrageous assault on the police. Why does Mike Bloomberg hate courtesy?
If there's one issue related to factory farming that our nation's legislators need to address, it's the extreme perils of... people filming what's going on at factory farms, and showing the public. Iowa will put a stop to this!
John Thompson (pictured) was convicted of a 1984 armed robbery, and later of murder. He spent 18 years in prison, including 14 years on death row. Problem: the prosecutors who sent him to jail withheld some evidence—including eyewitness reports describing a perpetrator who looked nothing like Thompson, and a blood test that proved Thompson's innocence.
Bloomberg reports today that the Justice Department is exploring manslaughter charges against BP managers over the deaths of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig last year. According to the report, invesitgators want "to determine whether [BP managers'] testimony was at odds with what they knew." In other words, they want to know if Tony Hayward and his pals were lying through their teeth to congress during testimony last summer.
Remember Specialist Jeremy Morlock, the 22-year-old Alaskan who took horrifying photos of his own war crimes? He's now pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and has been sentenced to 24 years in jail; in exchange, essentially, for not getting a life sentence, he'll testify against the four other soldiers also accused of murdering Afghan civilians "for sport." He apologized in court to his victims' families and "the people of Afghanistan themselves." [NYT]
Ophadell Williams was the driver of the Chinatown bus that crashed on its way back to New York from Mohegan Sun Casino last weekend, killing 15 people. Any one of us could be Ophadell Williams.
On Monday, a jury in Tucson found former beautician Shawna Forde guilty of killing nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father Raul in a bizarre paramilitary raid on the Flores home in 2009. Forde, the leader of a group called "Minutemen American Defense," is what you might call an anti-immigration activist, if you include murdering fourth-graders under your definition of "activism"; two years ago, she and two of her fellow "minutemen" burst into the home of the Flores family, apparently looking for drugs that they planned on using to fund their creepy military games, and shot Raul, Brisenia, and Brisineia's mother Gina. Gina survived by playing dead and later testified against Forde.
We've long known that the gap in wealth and earnings between the haves and the have-nots has the potential to undermine the very foundation of American society. We're referring, of course, exclusively to attorneys. The young bottom-of-the-food-chain document reviewers toiling for a meager pittance can scarcely behold the salaries of their superiors. And it's getting worse; the WSJ reports that "traditional notions of pay equity are falling by the wayside."
Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has commuted the life sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two sisters who were convicted of armed robbery in 1994. With one small condition.
