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(excerpted) Authorities had been collecting marijuana plants on Round Mountain at the end of Rabbit Lane, according to a sheriff's report. "We could hear the rounds pass by and hit," Fontes said. Officers initially thought the shots came from the growers, Fontes said, but later discovered it was Speyrer who lived in a nearby home. According to the report, when officers noticed Spreyer in the area, they approached her and ordered her to get on the ground. Here's what the report states happened next: "Why do I have to get on the ground," the senior asked. "You shot at us,"...

Multiple sources have confirmed the fact that all three individuals arrested – James Stewart, Victoria Bloch and Sharon Palmer – are being charged with ‘conspiracy’ related to the sell of unpasteurized raw milk products. This reportedly includes sections of the California Penal Code Section 182a. Additional charges may also be pending, including a charge of ‘mislabeling cheese’ for Sharon Palmer, was arrested during a raid of Healthy Family Farms. As video of the raid on Rawesome Foods (also raided in 2010) demonstrates, Feds not only seized cash and raw milk supplies (much of which was also dumped out) but also...

ATF field agents working in Mexico broke ranks with their supervisors Tuesday during a rancorous five-hour House committee hearing, saying they were kept in the dark about a controversial undercover operation in which hundreds of guns ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent Carlos Canino, the ATF acting attache to Mexico; Darren Gil, former attache; and Jose Wall, senior agent in Tijuana, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee they had serious concerns about the alarming rate of guns found in violent crimes in Mexico whose source was “Operation...

In the wake of the recent memo from the Obama administration which announced “prosecutorial discretion” in dealing with illegal aliens, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents across the country have been speaking out what many of them are calling a “backdoor amnesty.” On Wednesday, ICE Union president Chris Crane told PRNewswire: “Any American concerned about immigration needs to brace themselves for what's coming. This is just one of many new ICE policies in queue aimed at stopping the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in the United States. Unable to pass its immigration agenda through legislation, the Administration is now implementing it...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and his fellow agents were not under orders to refrain from using lethal force in the gunbattle that led to Agent Terry’s death in December. Testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Miss Napolitano said agents are allowed to use lethal force “if you are under threat of serious injury or death.” She said she herself has asked if the agents involved in the December shootout with bandits on the border in Arizona had their hands tied by orders, and she said the answer is “absolutely not.

The United States will discuss the idea of US armed agents operating inside Mexico, which is being rocked by deadly drug violence, when President Barack Obama meets his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderon, a senior US official said Wednesday. Obama welcomes Calderon to the White House on Thursday. "It's a top priority for the US government to ensure that measures are being taken to protect our personnel," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told journalists in a phone briefing. "That will continue to be a topic of conversation between both governments and will undoubtedly be a topic that gets discussed...

Americans A-OK with TSA? Don’t bet on it December 1, 2010 BY JACOB SULLUM jsullum@reason.com According to the Transportation Security Administration, Americans have no problem with the new airport screening procedures. So they should stop complaining. That self-contradictory reassurance, which would be unnecessary if it were true, seemed slightly more plausible after chaos failed to ensue from protests by Thanksgiving travelers who refused to walk through the TSA’s full-body scanners last week. But there are reasons to question the TSA’s portrait of placid passengers happily baring all for the sake of homeland security. First of all, the TSA’s numbers are...

Amidst all of the criticism of the Transportation Security Administration over its implementation of President Obama's plans for invasive image scanners or pat-down procedures that involve touching airline passengers' private parts an inspector general's report has been released blasting the training procedures for the agents. "At one airport. TSA officials allow TSOs to bypass the use of the Online Learning Center and provided little time for training because of staffing challenges," said the newly released report. "One lead TSO indicated that he had not accssed the Online Learning Center since 2005." The report, dated October 2010 and released just a...

As nearly 2 million holiday travellers pack Bay Area airports starting Friday, local prosecutors have a warning for overzealous security agents performing the new federal pat-down: touch passengers the wrong way, and we’ll throw you in jail. Although authorities in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties said they have not received any criminal complaints since the pat-downs began this month, the searches can involve touching of the genital and breast areas, which critics say is akin to sexual assault. The Transportation Security Administration says the pat-downs are rare and most commonly used when travellers opt not to travel through the...

SAN MATEO COUNTY, Calif. (KGO) -- The San Mateo district attorney's office has a warning for all TSA personnel at SFO -- anyone inappropriately touching a passenger during a security pat down will be prosecuted.

Chapter 1Chapter 2Prepare yourself for a surprise ending. Do that now to avoid confusion later. Around 1990, I met with an industrial engineering professor who had been working for years with artificial intelligence technology. We had a long chat about the possibility of completely automated factories. This was still a decade before frequent online purchasing and customer management systems. But it seemed reasonable to contemplate a future in which everything from initial customer contact, sales, accounting, instructions to the factory floor, robotic manufacturing on demand, packaging, right out to the shipping dock would be fully automated. Even if you've never...

The importance of issue #1. Configuration Files and Processing should not be underestimated. The configuration system is used to attach application components to the generic HLL processing system. It makes sense to create a powerful configuration system that is easy for application developers to use and quite flexible so that it does not impede creative development. And when the project begins building tools to further simplify the development process, they will (in part) simplify the construction of configuration files that, in effect, define HLL applications. A powerful configuration processing system will facilitate powerful but easy to use tools. (For...

Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner was convicted today in a federal court in Boston on charges that he pocketed a $1,000 bribe in his district office in 2007 and later lied about it to federal agents who were interviewing him. A US District Court jury delivered its verdict this afternoon, just a few hours into its first full day of deliberations, finding Turner guilty of attempted extortion and providing false statements to FBI agents.

I will never forget the first time I paid a player. There are moments you will always remember, like your first kiss or your first home run or the day you met your wife. For me, the first time I broke an NCAA rule to try to land a client is just as indelible. It was before the 1990 football season, and I flew from Los Angeles to Denver and drove to the University of Colorado to try to meet with Kanavis McGhee. He was a big, pass-rushing linebacker who was expected to be a high pick in the 1991...

Today in Rabbis Say the Darndest Things, Ari Schvat ruled that female Mossad agents may engage in “honey-pot sex”—I had never heard the phrase before either—as part of their missions. Which is to say, they can sleep with men as part of their espionage. Among other things, Schvat cited Biblical precedent: Esther slept with the Persian king to save the Jews (though weren’t they married anyway?), and apparently Yael slept with the enemy of her husband in order to tire him out so that his head could be more easily chopped off (Book of Judges, yo).

INTERNAL REVENUE AGENT GS-0512-GS-5/7/9/11

Wouldn't it be nice if a comment on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) would attract a lot of attention (for my blog, I'm thinking)? Thousands of people googling 'SOA' come right to my site and find out more about HLL. I can't expect that, because I'm provoked on this occasion to comment in response to a discussion that started in January of last year. VP and Research Director of The Burton Group, Anne Thomas Manes wrote an article entitled, SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. Burton Group surveys IT R&D and provides business consulting services. They have a particular interest...

IntroductionAn application programmer spends six months perfecting a set of components commonly needed in the large company that employs him. Some of the components were particularly tricky and key pieces required very high quality, reliable and complex exception handling. It has all been tuned to run quickly and efficiently. Thorough testing has demonstrated his success. Part of his idea of “perfection” was to build in a way that the software, even many of the individual components, could easily be reused. But it is surprisingly likely that no one outside of a small group within the project will ever hear of...

Four (4) North Koreans attempted to sneak into the USA from Mexico our southern border, but were apprehended. The four necessarily are intelligence operatives, for NO North Korean citizens travel freely or without the sanction and close watch and instruction of the Korean Workers Party and the intelligence apparatus of North Korea; only diplomats and those under control of the KWP are allowed overseas travel, passports (in this case to get to Mexico), etc..North Korean refugees fleeing Kimilsungist Communism are processed through normal diplomatic and refugee channels.Why has this not been a top issue? What were they attempting to...

I’ve been trying to figure this out … The 14th Amendment declares that anyone born in the US and under its jurisdiction is a citizen. But what about the children of the Russian spies, are they citizens? Those that claim that they are citizens say that the 14th Amendment declares it so and that the only exceptions to U.S. jurisdiction are the children of ambassadors and children of enemies. But these children’s parents did not fall under those exceptions. They were not ambassadors [or have diplomatic immunity], nor is Russia a declared enemy of the U.S. They just did not...