Free Republic

Fiction crime-writer Patricia Cornwell is used to writing about a heroic medical examiner investigating complex mysteries, but now she is in the middle of a drama of her own, claiming her former financial management firm cost her tens of millions of dollars in lost money over four years. Cornwell, 56, and her partner, Staci Gruber, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, have lived in the Boston area for the last six years. In October 2009, she filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts against her former accounting firm and business manager, Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP and its...

By almost anybody's standards, Joshua Allan Jackson is bad news. A felon with a lengthy history of violence against women, Jackson was sentenced to 10 years in prison April 13 for sexually abusing an 18-year-old woman and holding her against her will for days inside a cheap South Seattle motel last year. The woman told investigators Jackson forced her to audition for a porn film and at one point choked her so hard she almost lost consciousness. As part of the case, Jackson also admitted to criminal impersonation on various occasions when he told the victim and seven other people...

This week, the Globe and Mail asked General Lewis McKenzie (Retired) to write the obituary of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. It was a good idea. The two men had crossed paths more than once on the global stage of the Great Game. McKenzie declined. Holbrooke had just died and the general knew that what he had to say would hardly produce the standard panegyric. When I caught up with McKenzie, he was shoveling snow after a spell away from home. I asked for an interview and to my surprise, he agreed. “I’m just going to tell you what I thought...

The problem with much of the opinion surrounding the Greek financial crisis is that few writers actually have any experience in Greece, in dealing with its politicians, its bankers, its systems, its cultural proclivities and its people. I personally have such experience, as between 2003 and 2008 as chief executive of a startup airline we invested €20-million ($26.7-million) in the country to develop seaplane operations between isolated islands. This was an essential service that was important to the economics, health and safety of its people and state. This project gave me and my partners direct access to all ministers of...

The fast-moving international case against a Pakistani-Canadian businessman charged with plotting a terror attack in Denmark and suspected of others in India moved into Pakistan on Monday night with news of the capture of another suspect.Illyas Kashmiri, a former Pakistani military officer and now a reputed commander of the Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) militant group, is believed to have been detained by Pakistan at the behest of the FBI, according to an unconfirmed report in The Times of India.It's not clear when and where Kashmiri may have been taken into custody or if he is among as many as five people...

Prosecutors have expanded their investigation of prominent New York attorney Marc Dreier, uncovering hundreds of millions more of missing funds in what they characterize as an "extraordinary" fraud played out over two years. A federal magistrate judge ordered Dreier to remain behind bars Thursday, denying bail because of the "enormous risk of flight." Dreier was arrested in New York Sunday evening and has been charged with fraud in an alleged brazen scheme to bilk sophisticated hedge funds.Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Streeter said in court Thursday the loss from the alleged fraud is $380 million, well more than the $113 million...

Since it's AP I will provide the link and summarize the story myself.Uranium shipped to Montreal from Iraq in top secret mission 550 tons of yellowcake, which is partly refined uranium ore, have arrived in Montreal from Iraq. The yellowcake will be consumed in electricity-generating nuclear reactors in southern Ontario. Canadian-designed nuclear reactors can use uranium that has not been enriched; this is different from the usual situation of light water reactors that use enriched uranium. According to the story, all 550 tons come from Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. They have been under close guard (ya think?) since 2003. This...

A former aide to James E. McGreevey said today that he had three-way sexual trysts with the former governor and his wife before he took office, challenging Dina Matos McGreevey's assertion that she was naive about her husband's sexual exploits.

Bali diary Fortnight Of The Undead By Christopher Monckton in Nusa Dua, Bali Down the Poxy, our local fleapit late on a Saturday night, voodoo flicks like Night Of The Undead were always popular when I was a lad. To shrieks of scornful merriment from the teenage audience, mindless zombies would totter aimless across the clumsily-constructed sets with lugubrious expressions frozen on their messily-made-up death-masks until the hero, with the lurv interest wrenched screeching from the clutches of the late Baron Samedi and draped admiringly on her rescuer’s extravagantly-muscled arm, triumphantly saved the day. Thus it was in Bali during...

A former Arlington County youth sports coach and civil rights lawyer who once headed Virginia's American Civil Liberties Union chapter was sentenced today to seven years in federal prison for buying child pornography that prosecutors labeled sadistic and masochistic. Charles Rust-Tierney, 51, pleaded guilty in June to downloading hundreds of pornographic images of children as young as 4. Authorities said Rust-Tierney used a computer in his 11-year-old son's bedroom to view the files, which included a six-minute video that depicted sexual torture of children, set to a song by the rock band Nine Inch Nails.

Posted on Thu, Apr. 05, 2007 Powerful, unchecked clan surges in Gaza By Dion Nissenbaum and Ahmed Abu HamdanMcClatchy Newspapers(MCT)GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Along the southern stretches of Gaza City, in a stronghold surrounded by concrete barriers and patrolled by armed guards, a powerful clan has evolved into a force that the Palestinian Authority is afraid to confront.Palestinian officials suspect Mumtaz Dagmoush and his extended family of 15,000 of involvement in every major recent crisis in Gaza, from the capture of an Israeli soldier last summer to the unresolved kidnapping of a BBC correspondent last month.Israel's security establishment...

Former Gov. James McGreevey, who resigned from office after revealing that he was gay and had an affair with a male staffer, is seeking custody of his 5-year-old daughter and child support from his estranged wife. The revised divorce lawsuit by McGreevey, who resigned in November 2004, does not mention the "matrimonial settlement agreement" that McGreevey originally said had resolved all custody and support issues concerning his daughter, Jacqueline. McGreevey's wife, Dina Matos, has 35 days to respond to the revised filing. The papers filed last month in Union County Superior Court ask the judge to assign McGreevey custody, to...

Firemen and police usually stand united as fellow civil servants. Not in Paris, where a stand-off between thousands of fire fighters and their police counterparts resulted in injury, property damage and chaos in the French capital.A demonstration of firefighters in Paris turned violent on Tuesday. And vulgar. Police say fifteen officers were wounded and two are in serious condition after protesters hurled flares, street signs and other heavy objects at them. A police vehicle, another car and several trash cans were also set ablaze. Thirty-five firemen have been taken into custody.

WEST ORANGE, New Jersey -- The park is green and quiet. Pathways curve around lawns bordered by rosebushes, daisies and boxwood. Dogwoods shade the grass. A nice place, you think, for a Sunday picnic or an afternoon's stroll. And the view is spectacular, well worth the hour-long drive from New York City. From Lookout Point atop Eagle Rock Reservation, you can see New York City 25 kilometres away, the spiky skyline stretching across the horizon. On a clear day, you can make out the Empire State Building. You can see why George Washington set up an observation post here to monitor...

In the shadow of Sept. 11, it is time to confront the unsettling truth that radical multiculturalism creates tribes that could destroy the society that produced it.The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world.-- Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, speaking on Palestinian Authority TV, May 13, 2005It is a still a surprising sight on a North American street: A woman covered head to toe in a chaddor, with only her eyes showing above a black veil. Even here, in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, where many recently...

Part One: I remember the anger I felt watching the endlessly repeated images of the towers collapsing. But there's another kind of anger -- a more cerebral one toward the intellectuals of our time who contributed to all that destruction through their hostility toward the mores and traditions of western civilization.Robert Sibley, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Saturday, September 09, 2006 NEW YORK - I still see bodies falling. Standing at my hotel window, overlooking Ground Zero, it's not hard to visualize the flaming towers and the bird-like figures of human bodies plummeting through the air. I especially remember a couple...

Candidate says criminal past not his Tuesday, June 13, 2006CAROL ROBINSON and ROBERT K. GORDONNews staff writers Ronald Wayne Blankenship, a candidate in the runoff for the Democratic nomination for Jefferson County sheriff, says it's coincidence that a man with a criminal past shares his name and birthdate. It's strange but true, he says, that both he and a man who faked his own death in 1990 are married to women named Judy Ruth Green Stonecipher Blankenship. Blankenship calls himself an underdog. The Bessemer shoe shop owner received 12,218 votes or 25.9 percent in the June 6 primary last...

City of Vancouver Search Help        CITY OF VANCOUVER     About Vancouver Urban Search and Rescue USAR contact info Vancouver Fire & Rescue Services How you can help Public Comments     Vancouver Urban Search and Rescue Vancouver's Urban Search and Rescue Team is currently in Louisiana to assist in the search and rescue efforts in the areas of the state ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The team was deployed on August 31 and is working with the Louisiana State Troopers and the U.S. National Guard. Senior team members will be calling in with reports on the situation and...

Workers at a landfill in Orange County, Calif. - as if tamping down the contents of a wastebasket - regularly pile one million cubic yards of dirt atop a football field-size section of the giant dump. Six months later, the workers scrape the dirt aside and the dump's surface has fallen 30 to 40 feet, making space for yet more trash. "It's just amazing," said Mike Giancola, deputy director of the county's waste agency. Orange County's method is part of a remarkable productivity story playing out in the trash business, quietly saving consumers, businesses and municipalities billions of dollars a...

BERKELEY, CA – A new nationwide study released today by the nonpartisan Bay Area Center for Voting Research (BACVR) ranks the political leanings of every American city and finds that Detroit, Michigan is the most liberal and Provo, Utah the most conservative. In all, the BACVR researchers examined voting patterns of 237 American cities with populations of over 100,000 and ranked them each on liberal and conservative scales. The list of America’s most liberal cities is dominated by cities with large African American populations that are concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest and California. Conversely, the study found that the staunchest...