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Former Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday on charges of money laundering, bribery and fraud. Fattah, 60, resigned from the House in June after being convicted on more than 20 counts of corruption. He'll have to report to prison by Jan. 25, 2017, to begin his sentence. Prosecutors had called for Fattah to receive 17 to 22 years in prison. Fattah had already lost the Democratic primary for the Philadelphia-area seat he represented for 22 years. His successor, Rep. Dwight Evans (D), was sworn in on Nov. 14 to finish the remaining weeks...

Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Full title: Mayor of Oakland warns against ‘scapegoating’ lavishly paid city employees who failed to inspect deathtrap warehouse in 30 years. The Ghost Ship warehouse/artists’ colony fire makes for a compelling drama. And everyone knows that for a drama, you need villains, especially when a tragedy is as vivid as the horrible deaths of 36 mostly young adult creative explorers. The mainstream media found a ready made figure in Derick Almena, the man who rented the warehouse and set up the colony, whose solipsistic tweets focused on his own suffering not the fire victims. His appearance on the Today Show...

The professional left is really trying hard to embed a narrative about the need for divergent political opinion to be labeled as “fake news”. Cue the creepy jackboot marching music in 3… 2… 1….

Sen. Harry Reid warned his colleagues not to abuse the filibuster, asked for a return to pork-barrel spending and begged them to find a way to limit the power of interest groups to spend money in elections, saying Thursday that the fate of American democracy depends on it. The Nevada Democrat who led his party to political heights of a 60-vote majority, then watched as it slipped away over the last six years, delivered a pair of swan song speeches, regretting nothing from his hard-nosed approach to politics, while doling out advice to all who would listen. He is retiring...

Two years before the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire, the Alameda County civil grand jury sounded the alarm about deficiencies in the Oakland Fire Department’s inspection bureau — saying the city wasn’t even trying to check a third of the 12,000 commercial properties that were supposed to be examined every year.

Any Brazilian interested in politics has developed a new morning habit: checking to see which politicians were arrested in the earliest hours of the day. Such arrests have become common lately. This very morning, there was a police raid on two former big kahunas who are being investigated for taking bribes and disrupting investigations on the mega-company Petrobrás. On the evening of the same day, I left my gym to find that the president of the Senate has been ousted by order of the Supreme Court. Because he is standing trial for corruption, he can´t legally be in the succession...

Again, how bizarre that colleges audit high-school diplomas by giving college-entrance tests (their theory being that straight A’s from Selma High school in California’s Central Valley are not comparable to straight A’s at the Menlo School in the Silicon Valley), but the schools themselves are not audited. Surely higher education would not object to a national college-exit exam as a requirement for receiving a bachelor’s degree. Call it a smaller version of the bar exam, or perhaps a reverse SAT or ACT test. Passing an exit exam would help ensure education consumers that tens of thousands of dollars in borrowed...

News Media Organizations Also on Record Supporting Public Release (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced it filed a motion that seeks to unseal the audiovisual recordings of the depositions of top Clinton aides and State Department officials. The depositions come in connection with a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to former Secretary Clinton ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). Judicial Watch argues that “even though the election is over, the news media and the public continue to...

WND Exclusive Only 4 states can stop vote fraud 'No systematic oversight of the system' exists The raging debate about voter fraud has been hijacked by the left, says a leading expert on the issue, and the left is driving the narrative in a false direction using slick deception. The question is: What will President-elect Donald Trump do about it? When people think about “voter fraud,” they tend to think about the dead voting, people voting in multiple precincts or party machines paying homeless people to cast ballots. While those are all legitimate concerns, the mass fraud happens long before...

Full title: Oakland warehouse was a cluttered ‘death trap’ filled with pianos, RVs, but no fire sprinklers, former residents say Excerpt: The Oakland warehouse where at least nine people were killed at a late-night concert was a deadly blaze waiting to happen. People who previously lived there recalled a building that lacked fire sprinklers and had a staircase partly made of wooden pallets. Partygoers recalled a rabbit warren of rooms crammed with belongings — pianos, organs, antique furniture, doors and half-finished sculptures.

President Barack Obama cares deeply about his legacy. So will he dare pardon Hillary Clinton? Before there's any more talk of carving out a chunk of Mt. Rushmore for him, or more talk of statues or temples in his name, there is that Hillary Clinton pardon issue. Would Obama give his former secretary of state a preemptory get-out-of-jail card before he leaves office and turns the White House over to Donald Trump? [Snip] Now they [Democrats] wouldn't mind if Hillary were allowed to fly to some fantasy island or a mountaintop and stay out of the news so Democrats can...

JW Asks Court to Find Government Misconduct in Clinton Email Scandal Trump Administration Should Investigate Clinton ScandalsNew Documents Show Clinton Conflicts of InterestTune In! — The First 100 Days: The Anti-Corruption Agenda JW Asks Court to Find Government Misconduct in Clinton Email Scandal The Clinton email scandal is more than about the conduct of Hillary Clinton. It is about the lawlessness of the Obama administration, especially the State Department. That’s why our Judicial Watch attorneys recently asked a federal court, on the grounds that the documents relate to government misconduct, to reject the State Department’s secrecy claims over certain...

Do Illegal Votes Decide Elections? There’s no way to know. But the evidence suggests that significant numbers of noncitizens cast ballots. By Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund Donald Trump’s claim that illegal voting may have cost him a popular-vote majority has touched off outrage. Widespread voter fraud, the media consensus suggests, isn’t possible. But there is a real chance that significant numbers of noncitizens and others are indeed voting illegally, perhaps enough to make up the margin in some elections. There’s no way of knowing for sure. The voter-registration process in almost all states runs on the honor system....

Requiring employees in the United States to speak a foreign language is not discriminatory but forcing them to speak English violates federal law under a sweeping order issued by the Obama administration to crack down on “national origin discrimination” in the workplace. The government’s new enforcement guidelines state that bilingual requirements don’t meet discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act but English-only rules do because they’re restrictive language policies. The administration asserts that the new rules, which cover a broad range of scenarios that could get employers in trouble, were created because the American workforce is “increasingly...

TAMPA (FOX 13) - A mob of brazen burglars stole dozens of weapons from a Tampa gun shop Tuesday morning, after breaking in by driving through the front of the store. Surveillance cameras inside Tampa Arms Co. recorded the crime at about 3 a.m. The video shows a truck driving into the front of the business and, moments later, a swarm of thieves -- wearing masks and dressed alike -- running into the store, stealing about 40 weapons and taking off. "It seemed to be well-calculated," said Richard Smith, the store's owner, adding he got a call notifying him of...

A Beltway lobbying firm with close connections to Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that it failed to disclose work it did for the Indian government in 2014 and 2015. The Podesta Group disclosed the lobbying activities in an amended filing submitted to the Justice Department earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Monday. The documents lists five separate contacts that Podesta Group chairman Tony Podesta, a prolific Hillary Clinton campaign donor, made with his brother and former business partner, John Podesta, to discuss U.S.-India relations in 2014 and 2015. During that period, John Podesta, who co-founded the Podesta Group...

The state of New York is spending $750 million on the Buffalo plant as part of an economic revitalization project called the Buffalo Billion initiative spearheaded by Governor Andrew Cuomo. SolarCity pledged $150 million toward the plant... Tesla and Panasonic will manufacture and produce solar cells at the Buffalo plant as part of Tesla's new solar aspirations since it acquired SolarCity on November 17 in a deal worth roughly $2 billion. Initial production at the plant will center around Tesla's solar roof product. Louis Ciminelli, CEO of LPCiminelli, is known as a generous supporter of Cuomo. Ciminelli, along with his...

Vote Fraud Monitoring Group Says Three Million Noncitizens Voted in Presidential Election Written by Warren Mass Monday, 14 November 2016 Vote Fraud Monitoring Group Says Three Million Noncitizens Voted in Presidential Election An organization formed back in 1996 to publicize computerized vote fraud, and which continues to monitor election results to detect vote fraud, has issued a statement that it has uncovered evidence of more than three million people who are not U.S. citizens casting votes in this past presidential election. Gregg Phillips, spokesman for the VoteFraud.org organization, recently tweeted that after completing an analysis of a database of 180...

Hillary did her best to rake Trump over the coals over his charities, but she is the one Americans should have been asking questions about all along. Not only is the amount of money actually sent out minuscule, the Clinton Foundation has been lying about the care it supposedly provides to the poor in the form of prescription medicine, via ProudCons.com. While Hillary and company claim to provide much needed drugs to third-world countries, that duty is actually handled by a separate charity, the Clinton Health Access Initiative. But, as always, Hillary likes to twist the facts just to draw...