Free Republic

In class action lawsuits a big piece of the attorneys’ fees often are generated by billing out tempory lawyers from staffing agencies at substantially higher rates than they are paid for their typically perfunctory document review work. However, this billing practice no longer may serve as a profit center for the plaintiffs’ bar to the rich extent it once did. A federal judge has slashed a $100 million fee request by trial lawyers who negotiated a $590 million settlement in a securities action against Citigroup after citing, among other things, “significantly inflated” hourly rates for contract attorneys and “waste and...

<p>The niece of Vice President Joe Biden is in police custody in New York City.</p>

The tragic mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard has brought out the opportunistic ghouls from the sick left including Senator Diane Feinstein who are standing on the victims' corpses as bully pulpits from which to preach their anti-gun agenda as reported by Ben Wolfgang for The Washington Times: "Popular conservative blogger and former CNN commentator Erick Erickson admonished the rush to politicize the shooting, saying 'seriously people, grow up. I would not dare step in the way of America's national pastime of bitching about the politics of everything on Twitter, but there has to be a better time for...

A book by Tribune-Review state Capitol writer Brad Bumsted, due for release on Sept. 9, chronicles decades of indictable escapades by some of the state's most powerful, compelling and flawed politicians. In “Keystone Corruption: A Pennsylvania Insider's View of a State Gone Wrong,” published by Camino Books Inc., Bumsted pulls back the curtain on scandals from the Capitol's graft-ridden construction at the turn of the 20th century to the recent reigns of former House Speakers Bill DeWeese and John Perzel, now state inmates KN1888 and KM4619.

[F]ollowing three weeks of trial, a federal jury in Central Islip, New York returned a verdict convicting MS-13 street gang member Adalberto Ariel Guzman, also known as “Gringo,” on federal criminal charges, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and firearms offenses, in connection with the execution-style murders of a mother and her two year-old son. * * * At trial, the government proved that the defendant Adalberto Ariel Guzman carried out the execution-style murders of Vanessa Argueta, a 19 year-old woman, and Diego Torres, her two year-old son, in Central Islip, New York, on February 5, 2010. The bodies of...

ICE agents have charged a TSA agent for allegedly allowing Brazilian nationals to illegally enter the United States by not questioning them at a security checkpoint as reported by The Washington Free Beacon. The greatest vulnerabily in American security involves corrupt officials on the take from drug cartels and other crime groups, and law enforcement has ramped up investigations to root out the dirty players. For example, in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection more than 100 agents have been charged in recent years and another 600 are under investigation as reported by Bob Reynolds for Al Jazeera. And many...

To address a $700 million shortfall in its operating budget from sequestration cuts the FBI "will shut down its headquarters and offices across the country for roughly 10 weekdays over the next year" as reported by Michael S. Schmidt for The New York Times. Perhaps Congress should consider an incentivised model by which the Bureau could fill its budget gap by recovering funds stolen from the entitlement programs. For example, about $1.3 billion in social security disability payments was lost to potential fraud in a recent two-year period according to a Government Accountability Office report as reported by Fox News....

Forget about The Beach Boys and their surfer music. The California beaches now are about the Mexican cartels and their panga boats. State authorities busted 18 people and seized one ton of baled pot after their smuggling boat landed at a Santa Barbara County beach as reported by Samantha Tata for KNBC: "there have 10 panga boat busts – involving drug and human smuggling – in Santa Barbara County since October 2012, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security." Last December the narco terrorists intentionally rammed their panga boat against an approaching Coast Guard inflatable which resulted in...

A federal judge in Manhattan has denied a bid to force the U.S. government to unseal photographs of a Saudi national widely believed to the intended “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Several performers have alter egos who bring out the best of their energy on stage, but Lady Gaga says her real persona, Stefani Germanotta, is the one she stays away from. "I am - Stefani is - a perpetually tortured artist," she says in Elle magazine's October issue. "That's why I changed my name. I can't be her in public. She would be a mess!"

Suspected hitman Michele Morelli from the Sacra Corona Unita or Puglian Mafia ran out of bullets before finishing off his intended victim Michele Di Bari all of which was captured on CCTV video as reported by Metro: "Morelli aimed the gun at Di Bari's head and pulled the trigger several times before realising he had no rounds left, causing him to flee from the scene" although "Morelli was arrested several days later."

The FDA wants to exercise its nanny power by banning menthol cigarettes in another futile bid to protect people from themselves but law enforcement warns that "prohibition will spur smuggling, counterfeit cigs and other organized crime" as reported by Dan Mangan for CNBC. Paul Carey III, chief of enforcement for the Northern Virginia Cigarette Tax Board, says "the contraband market would thrive under a ban, and would increase criminal activity, including activities by organized crime and terrorist groups." The profit margin for organized crime from contraband tobacco has surpassed the drug trade according to a recent report by the Virginia...

Anthony Weiner’s political career may be over, but his wife, Huma Abedin, has returned to her position as director of Hillary Clinton’s transition office.

A number of current and former top-ranking law enforcement officials from the tobacco-producing South have blasted a potential menthol cigarette ban as the Food and Drug Administration weighs restrictions on those products, contending that prohibition will spur smuggling, counterfeit cigs and other organized crime.

A former U.S. Army sergeant who fought in Iraq is suing the state of Michigan for denying his request to have a vanity license plate that says “infidel.” Michael Matwyuk in his lawsuit says he meant no offense by the license plate, saying he was only “reappropriating” a word used by insurgents to describe American soldiers. He said in the lawsuit that he and his fellow veterans “proudly refer to themselves as ‘infidels’ as a reminder of the bond they share as survivors of a bloody war in a hostile part of the world.”

Joseph A. Ferriero, the former chairman of the Bergen County Democratic Organization, was indicted today by a federal grand jury with running an extensive racketeering scheme during which he allegedly took kickbacks, solicited and accepted bribes as a party official and extorted others, authorities said.

Class actions often serve as little more than litigation platforms by which the trial lawyers get rich through court-approved attorneys' fees, and the injured consumers get only peanuts in the settlements as reported by Mitch Lipka for The Boston Globe: "consumers can benefit from some class action cases" but "settlements of these cases,of course, are written by lawyers, who are usually the biggest beneficiaries." For years class action settlements often were rubber-stamped by the courts but increasingly consumer advocates such as attorney Ted Frank who founded the Center for Class Action Fairness and Professor Lester Brickman who authored Lawyer Barons...

The federal courts in New York are perilously close to a "constitutional crisis" due to sequestration and other cuts which has reduced their operating budgets to 2008 levels according to a report by the New York County Lawyers' Association: "Two years ago, NYCLA warned that cuts to the federal judicial budget threatened judicial independence and the rule of law. Despite our warnings and those of other bar associations, public interest groups, judges, attorneys and journalists, the budget cuts have continued and the situation has become increasingly perilous. The administration of justice has been seriously damaged by past budget cuts. As...

John McCain was rightly heckled by many constituents last week in Phoenix, AZ over the blowhard senator's misguided call for bloody war in Syria as reported by Jason Howerton for The Blaze. The warmongering windbag should just resign. The old fool has done more damage to the national security of the United States than perhaps any other ignorant politician with his repeated support for military intervention and other American meddling in the Middle East. Exactly what has the United States gotten for all of its spent lives and treasure in that God forsaken region of the world? Indeed, if the...

Florida Congresswoman and DNC clown Debbie Wasserman Schultz is cheaply invoking the Holocaust to support President Obama's military strike against Syria as reported by Marc A. Caputo for the Miami Herald: "'as a Jew,' she said, 'the concept of 'never again' has to mean something.'" Except there's a flaw in her call for war. Syrian President Bashar Assad is not engaged in ethnic cleansing. Although civilians including children have died in the government's horrific use of chemical weapons against rebels and terrorists who seek to overthow it, none of the innocent souls were intended targets based on their religious identity;...