Dude, the cops will never smell it

Taking a toke by the police station demonstrates that it may be time to lay off the weed:

Lakehurst police didn't have to go far to make a marijuana arrest. An officer heading home early Saturday smelled pot burning in the police station parking lot.

U.S. Diplomat Killed in Sudan

Terrorism?

An American diplomat in Sudan was shot and killed early Tuesday as he was coming home from a New Year’s Eve party in Khartoum, the capital.

In Washington, the United States Agency for International Development identified the victim as one of its officials, John Granville, 33, originally of Buffalo, N.Y. American officials said it was “too early to tell” if the shooting was random or planned, but Sudanese officials said the circumstances were suspicious, especially because gun crime is rare in Khartoum, considered one of the safest cities in Africa.

The United Nations had recently warned its staff in Sudan that there was credible evidence that a terrorist cell was in the country and planning to attack foreigners.

According to Western officials, Mr. Granville left a New Year’s Eve party at the British Embassy around 2:30 a.m. and headed to his home in an upscale neighborhood in central Khartoum. Shortly before he arrived, a car pulled up next to him and 17 shots were fired, Sudanese officials said. Mr. Granville’s driver, a Sudanese employee of the American Embassy, was killed instantly, and he was shot in the neck and chest. He was rushed to the hospital and died several hours later. A Sudanese government official said the attack appeared well-planned and involved two gunmen who exited their car together, with one of them shooting Mr. Granville and the other shooting the driver. Walter Braunohler, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Khartoum, said he could not comment on the circumstances because the shooting was under investigation.

Teenager arrested for stealing Jesus outfitted with a GPS

Maybe this will put a stop to this annoying Christmas tradition.

At 6:45 a.m. Thursday, a village employee noticed that the statue was missing. Building maintenance supervisor Gus Arnold logged on to the monitoring system and saw that it was taken from the manger at 10 p.m. Wednesday.

Arnold homed in on Jesus' location and called the sheriff's office to get it back.

Jesus was in a home on Suellen Circle, in a neighborhood across the street from the Nativity scene.

Deputies knocked on the door Thursday morning. When a woman answered, they saw the statue face-down on the living room floor.

The woman's son directed the deputies to the alleged culprit.

The simple spur-of-the-moment prank landed an 18-year-old suburban Lake Worth woman in jail, charged with a felony. Danielle Santino told deputies she took the statue and dropped it at a friend's house, then left.

[...]

Santino's friend, 18-year-old Fernando Silva, was initially arrested but cooperated with deputies and was released. Santino turned herself in and was booked into Palm Beach County Jail with bail set at $3,500. She is charged with a felony for taking an item valued at $800, plus $400 for the GPS system.

(via)

Woman stabbed husband over Christmas present

Some people can't handle the stress of Christmas:

A woman stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife following an argument that began when she accused him of opening a Christmas present early, authorities said Friday.

(via)

Satanists turn in youth who threatened to kill his grandparents

OK, this is what the atheists get for being funny or ironic or whatever. How was this kid to know that the Church of Satan was actually an atheist front? Their church is named after the "father of lies," a "murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44) and evil personified, how was the kid to know that they would turn him in for an action that would have been acceptable to the evil one?

A teenager was arrested after a leader of the Church of Satan turned over to the FBI an e-mail the high school student had written to the sect in which he threatened to kill his grandparents, authorities said.

Andrew Culver, 18, told police the e-mail detailing his intention to kill his grandparents and steal their money and car was a joke, said Bazetta Township Police Chief Charles Sayers.

According to police, Culver wrote he had access to an arsenal of weapons and wanted to "kill in the name of our unholy lord Satan."

[...]

Gilmore said members of his group are atheists who believe Satan is a symbol of freedom, not evil. "To the Satanist, he is his own God," reads a statement on the group's Web site from Gilmore.

If they only knew how right they are.

4 killed in church and mission attacks

This is really strange. There were gunmen in two different locations but there appears to be a link between the killings:

A gunman shot four staff members at a missionary training center near Denver early Sunday, killing two, after being told he couldn't spend the night. About 12 hours later and 65 miles away, a gunman fatally shot a parishioner at a megachurch and wounded four other people before a guard killed him, police said.

The police chief in Arvada, a suburb about 15 miles west of Denver where the mission workers were shot, said the shootings may be related to those at the Colorado Springs church but declined to elaborate. Arvada authorities said no one had been captured in the shootings there.

The gunman at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs was shot and killed by a church security guard after entering the church's main foyer with high-powered rifle shortly before 1 p.m. and opening fire, Colorado Springs Police Chief Richard Myers said. Four others were wounded, Myers said.

The church's 11 a.m. service had recently ended, and hundreds of people were milling about when the gunman opened fire. Nearby were parents picking up their children from the nursery.

Police arrived to find that the gunman had been killed by a member of the church's armed security staff, Myers said.


[...]

The mission training program in Arvada has a small office at the church's World Prayer Center on the New Life campus.

About 7,000 people were on the Colorado Springs campus at the time of the shooting, Boyd said. Security at the church had been beefed up after the early morning shootings in Arvada, he said.

[...]

Arvada Police Chief Bob Wick, asked whether he believed there was reason to think the shootings are related, responded, "Yes, there is reason to believe that."

Thank the Lord that more people weren't killed!

92 year old stopped mugger by telling him "Jesus was in the car"

She reminds me of my 90 year old grandma! This sounds like something she would have done.

(via)

Shooting at an Omaha Mall

What at terrible time of the year to lose loved ones! Prayers for the families and friends who lost loved ones in this terrible act of violence.

A man with a rifle opened fire at a busy department store Wednesday, killing eight people before taking his own life, in an attack that made holiday shoppers run screaming through a mall and barricade themselves in dressing rooms. Five more people were wounded, two critically.

Witnesses said the gunman fired down on shoppers from a third-floor balcony of the Von Maur store.

The gunman was found dead on the third floor with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and his victims were discovered on the second and third floors, police said.

A Gratifying NY Jets Win

It has been a great day for New York Football!

First of all, Gang Green beats the Miami Dolphins; 40-13!!

The NY Jets are the Rodney Dangerfield's of the NFL. I'm mean seriously, they get no respect. They get no respect in the NFL, ever. Mostly ignored on t.v. by the talking sports heads and the NY press is always negative about them.

Here they are, with the better record, albeit a 2-9 record-not exactly noteworthy, but at least better than Miami, who are win-less this season at 0-12. And what team is picked as the underdogs?

The Jets. By a one-point spread. But as Curtis Sliwa always says "You couldn't be more wrong". Today I think the Jets earned some respect in creaming the Dolphins. I know that they have some problems on both sides of the ball, I'm not in la-la land here, but they have potential on the roster, so I am always optimistic.

It was a very gratifying win.

Secondly, the NY Giants beat the Chicago Bears in the last minutes of the game, they won 21-16. Good to see Eli lead the team to victory after last week's painful loss.

Since I'm on the subject of the NFL, in case you haven't read this column yet written by Jason Whitlock about the death of the Washington Redskins pro-bowl safety, Sean Taylor, read it. Takes all kinds of courage to speak this truth about black on black crimes. Turns out he was right. Two of the suspects had done yard work for Sean and they were surprised to find him at home while they tried to rob him. Very sad.

AP has become Clinton's PR firm

So much for objectivity. Further proof (as if you need any more) the press is biased:

When the hostages had been released and their alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of calm in the face of crisis.

The image, broadcast just as the network news began, conveyed the message a thousand town hall meetings and campaign commercials strive for — namely, that the Democratic presidential contender can face disorder in a most orderly manner.

“I am very grateful that this difficult day has ended so well,” she declared as she stood alone at the microphone.

[...]

Along with taking charge while giving the professionals free rein, Clinton offered up a third dimension to her crisis character: humanity. She said she felt "grave concern" when she first heard the news of the hostage-taking.

"It affected me not only because they were my staff members and volunteers, but as a mother, it was just a horrible sense of bewilderment, confusion, outrage, frustration, anger, everything at the same time," Clinton said.

It was a thawing moment for a stoic figure who once snapped that she opted for professional life instead of staying home to bake cookies.

(via)

Isn't there a campaign law that this is violating?

I agree with Rick Morran, this guy is definitely in the running to be White House spokesman during the Clinton presidency.

And this is pretty smarmy:

It was a vintage example of a candidate taking a negative and turning it into a positive. And coming just six weeks before the presidential voting begins, the timing could hardly have been more beneficial to someone hoping to stave off a loss in the Iowa caucuses and secure a win in the New Hampshire primary.

Isn't it great timing that the captor (alleged seems silly when whole thing has been caught on tape) terrorized the campaign staff before the voting started? It is beyond belief that an AP reporter would write this (I just checked to make sure this wasn't an opinion piece because it certainly reads like one).

BTW, the AP photog or photog editor is not on board.

Only 35 homicides in NYC were committed by strangers!

In a city of over 8 million people, that is absolutely amazing!

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963.

But within the city’s official crime statistics is a figure that may be even more striking: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of more than 8.2 million.

If that trend holds up, fewer than 100 homicide victims in New York City this year will have been strangers to their assailants. The vast majority died in disputes with friends or acquaintances, with rival drug gang members or — to a far lesser degree — with romantic partners, spouses, parents and others.

The low number of killings by strangers belies the common imagery that New Yorkers are vulnerable to arbitrary attacks on the streets, or die in robberies that turn fatal.

In the eyes of some criminologists, the police will be hard pressed to drive the killing rate much lower, since most killings occur now within the four walls of an apartment or the confines of close relationships.

(via)

Judge has filed preliminary embezzlement charges against Chirac

Yeah! Remember when everyone that his opinion of us mattered?

Alleged wrongdoing in Jacques Chirac's past came back Wednesday to trouble his retirement, when a judge took the unprecedented step of filing preliminary embezzlement charges against the former two-term president of France.

Chirac insisted he had committed no wrongdoing. Political opinion was divided on whether the judge had scored a victory for French justice or merely underscored its impotence — because only since he left office in May have judges been able to pursue Chirac.

Since he lost his presidential immunity, Chirac has now been questioned by two different judges looking into suspected misuse of public money and other alleged wrongdoing in his 18-year tenure as mayor of Paris, which served as one of his springboards for the presidency in 1995.

The judge that summoned him to her office Wednesday, Xaviere Simeoni, is investigating whether people in Chirac's circle were given sham jobs as advisers, paid by Paris City Hall even though they weren't working for it.

(via)

Craig’s List is a haven for prostitutes

Internet prostitution:

The world's oldest profession is going high-tech and prostitutes are now soliciting their customers over the internet. A DeKalb County prosecutor said that this new method is making it tougher to make arrests.

Solicitor Robert James said the problem is spiraling out of control, in part, because the website content is federally protected.

[...]

James said many of the online call girls are bypassing pimps and inviting potential customers to meet them at a location selected by the prostitute.

Pimps being put out of business? That's a plus as far as I'm concerned. Why can't they just set up an appointment to meet the women and then arrest them when they are solicited?

(via)

Tags: Craig's List

Station Owner Kills Rival in Gas Price Fight

A Marathon station owner shot the owner of the rival BP station in a dispute over a gas price cut. The BP owner went to the Marathon owner to see how he could afford to cut the price as much as he did, the discussion escalated into a fight which ended in the death of the BP owner:

The discussion quickly escalated into a fight with two more people from the BP station brawling with rivals at Marathon. One man was hit with a baseball bat in the melee. And then, police say, the 51-year-old owner of the Marathon station pulled out a gun and shot the owner of the BP, a 45-year-old father of five children.

In a wild post-script, it appears the BP station is taking advantage of the shooting. While police are still swarming the Marathon station, the BP has jacked up its prices. WXYZ's Bill Proctor reports that as soon as the owner's body was taken away, workers at BP changed the price-per-gallon of unleaded from $2.96 to $3.09.

(via)

Amazing! The owner is killed and they take it out on the consumer?

Want to commit the perfect murder?

Do it in Japan where you probably won't get caught:

Photos of the teenager's corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette.

But police in Japan's Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was "heart disease," police declared.

As is common in Japan, Aichi police reached their verdict on how Saito died without an autopsy. No need for a coroner, they said. No crime involved. Only 6.3% of the unnatural deaths in Aichi are investigated by a medical examiner, a minuscule rate even by nationwide standards in Japan, where an autopsy is performed in 11.2% of cases.

Forensic scientists say there are many reasons for the low rate, including inadequate budgets and a desperate shortage of pathologists outside the biggest urban areas. There is also a cultural resistance in Japan to handling the dead, with families often reluctant to insist upon a procedure that invades the body of a loved one.

But Saito's case has given credence to complaints by a group of frustrated doctors, former pathologists and ex-cops who argue that Japan's police culture is the main obstacle.

Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher homicide rate in their jurisdiction, and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, the group alleges. Odds are, it says, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the lowest per capita homicide rates in the world.

(via)

So, next time you hear that Japan has a low murder rate you can stop pinning away for their society. They're probably in the same boat as we are but lying to themselves about it.

School squanders $50,000 contribution

Corruption and no accountability, I certainly wouldn't send funds to this school:

As Coolidge High slashed its budget for teachers and supplies in spring 2003, the struggling school received a welcome infusion of cash from one of its biggest benefactors. The AOL Time Warner Foundation sent a check for $50,000 to hire a technology expert who would ensure that students had working computers.

The money went into Coolidge's student activity account, which enabled school administrators to use it to stage a gospel fundraiser. Fewer than 50 people attended.

Within months, almost all the money from the foundation was gone. School auditors later determined that Coolidge officials "misused and/or misappropriated" almost $47,000 of the grant.

Coolidge has a history of losing charitable contributions.

Science teacher Terry Nostrand raised $20,610 from the Tony Hawk Foundation and Project Learning Tree in 2003 to build a skateboarding park at the high school. She deposited the money into the student activity fund. When she tried to retrieve the money the following year, she "kept getting one story after another," Nostrand recalled. "Runaround, runaround, runaround."

Nostrand never did get answers about whether the money was stolen or lost to bad accounting. Auditors attempted to trace the money within the student account but declared the records "unauditable." The city had to repay the donors, and the skatepark eventually was built elsewhere.

AOL had been trying to help Coolidge students since 1998. The foundation had donated money for scholarships, equipped most of the classrooms with computers and printers and sent several large checks, records show.

[...]

In September 2004, school auditors asked the D.C. inspector general to investigate. Investigators confirmed the auditor's findings but closed the case without referring it to federal prosecutors. They reported that AOL "does not wish to operate in a punitive mode."

And I bet the kids still don't have a computer teacher. When you hear of schools not having enough money, you might want to remember this story.

The government's compassion for the poor

When the Christian left exhort Christians to make one of their election criteria the poor, I cringe because I believe that caring for the poor should be something the church looks to itself to do. It used to be that the church was happy to minister to those in need, now we want to shift that burden to the government. But does the government have the compassion to really care for the poor? Well, you be the judge:

Los Angeles County's child welfare workers spent thousands of dollars in gift cards and entertainment tickets earmarked for foster children to buy themselves meals and attend musical events, according to an audit released Tuesday.

Among the most serious problems cited by auditors, county workers bought 160 tickets in July to see the hit musical "Wicked." County officials said the purchase was part of a gala event for foster children and their mentors, yet only 53 children and roughly the same number of mentors were given tickets.

The remaining seats went to employees of the Department of Children and Family Services and their relatives and guests, along with unidentified potential mentors and a number of not-for-profit organization employees, auditors wrote. The event cost $14,000.

The audit of the department also faulted employees for using gift cards -- bought with county money to supply food and clothing to foster children -- to pay for staff luncheons.

[...]

Auditors said one worker attempted to hide extra gift cards the department received by asking the business that supplied the cards for false invoices. Another told auditors he or she no longer had any gift cards but actually had $23,000 worth of gift cards or certificates, the audit said.

And will these workers lose their jobs over taking what was meant for the poor? Of course not:

"I think that several employees embarrassed the rest of the department with their extremely poor judgment," said L.A. County Auditor-Controller J. Tyler McCauley. "They should be disciplined accordingly."

The audit was prompted by a similar review earlier this year that criticized the county's child welfare agency for wasting more than $1 million on unnecessary or overpriced equipment and failing to better oversee the use of gift cards meant for foster children.

This will continue to happen because they're getting away with it.

(via)

Price of illegal drugs continues to increase

Hmmm...it must be inflation. Maybe the transportation cost of the drugs have risen due to the cost of gasoline:

Prices for cocaine and methamphetamine have risen for the fourth quarter in a row, a trend law enforcement officials say indicates supply has dropped.

The price for a pure gram of cocaine increased 47% since October 2006. The price of a pure gram of methamphetamine jumped 84%, says a report out today by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

13 year-old who ran off with his teacher was an illegal alien

It's amazing that this has turned into an illegal immigration story. I bet this kid regrets running off with his teacher because he is now unable to return to America:

A 13-year-old student with whom a middle school teacher is accused of fleeing to create a romantic life in the boy's native Mexico may be required to stay there.

An illegal immigrant while residing in the United States, 13-year-old Fernando Rodriguez may not be able to return to the rural Nebraska town where he was an eighth-grader.

Kelsey Peterson, 25, and Rodriguez were taken into custody without incident after the boy's relatives told police he had called home asking for money, leading investigators to a shopping mall in the border city of Mexicali on Friday.

Peterson, a sixth-grade math teacher and basketball coach at Lexington Middle School, fled with the boy after police began investigating whether the pair had an intimate relationship, authorities said. Court documents said the boy was last seen Oct. 26.

[...]

Peterson was turned over to the FBI early Saturday. The boy was turned over to relatives in Mexicali because he was an illegal immigrant in the United States and was not allowed to return, Arenas said.

Related Post:
Sixth-Grade Teacher on the Run with 13-Year-Old Student

A tasar proof jacket?

Evidently, someone has sought a patent for a jacket that would resist shocks like a taser. Do you think they'll call it "Don't tase me, bro?"

Gregory Russell Schultz apparently empathizes with this demographic, and has filed a patent for an "energy weapon protection device" -- essentially a jacket embedded with alternating layers of conductive and non-conductive panels that complete an electrical circuit and leave the wearer impervious to the shocks of what would likely be a very surprised officer of the law.

I don't think this will be very effective, they'll probably just tase you in the tushie.