Eideard

Preet Bharara and Ray Kelly
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Five active and three retired officers of the New York Police Department are among 12 people charged Tuesday with conspiring to transport and distribute firearms and stolen goods…

“A group of crime fighters took to moonlighting as criminals,” Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference.

The defendants are charged in an alleged conspiracy to transport and distribute untraceable firearms across state lines. and conspiracy to transport supposedly stolen and counterfeit goods including cigarettes from Virginia and slot machines from Atlantic City, New Jersey…

The current or former NYPD officers charged are William Masso, Eddie Goris, Ali Oklu, Gary Oritz, and John Mahony, all active-duty officers in Brooklyn; Joseph Trischitta and Marco Venezia, who were active-duty NYPD officers at the time of the alleged crimes but are now retired; and Richard Melnik, a retired NYPD officer. Also charged, federal authorities said, are Anthony Santiago, a New York City Department of Sanitation police officer; David Kanwisher, a New Jersey corrections officer; and Michael Gee and Eric Gomer, who court documents list as “associates” of Santiago…

Prosecutors said that while the defendants all believed the items they transported were stolen; they had in fact been provided by the FBI. The firearms were never a danger to the public, authorities said, as they had been rendered inoperable.

“These crimes are without question, reprehensible — particularly conspiring to import untraceable guns and assault rifles into New York,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York division. “The public trusts the police not only to enforce the law, but to obey it. These crimes, as alleged in the complaint, do nothing but undermine public trust and confidence in law enforcement.”

You got that right.

We’re fortunate to have someone like Preet Bharara operating in New York, nowadays. Seems like I get to note his name in a crime-busting case every couple of months.

Mordechai Nagari, one of the signatories of the letter

A letter signed by 50 state-appointed rabbis telling Jews not to rent or sell property to non-Jews prompted widespread condemnation Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and human rights groups. The letter warned that those who defied the religious ruling should be “ostracized.”

“In answer to many questions, we reply that it is prohibited by the Torah to sell a house or field in Israel to a gentile,” the letter reads.

The letter is to be published in religious newspapers and distributed in synagogues across the country later this week, according to the Israeli news website Ynet.

It contends that “those who sell or rent out in an area which Jews live cause great damage to his neighbors. … For their way of life is different to Jews.

A spokeswoman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel expressed…harsh words to CNN over the letter, saying the group is horrified by the level of racism expressed.

“We are particularly troubled by the fact that most of the people who signed the letter are civil servants who work for the state as rabbis,” spokeswoman Ronit Sela said. “And we think that as civil servants they have an obligation to be servants of the entire population of Israel, which includes Arabs who live in the city.”

Nearly 1.5 million Arab residents live inside Israel, making up 23% of the population.

And, many of those Arabs are denied the right to vote in this “democratic” state.

A Florida woman was charged with trying to sell her infant son in order to pay for a new car…

The baby’s grandmother brokered the deal and initially demanded $75,000 but agreed to cut the price to $30,000 when told the prospective buyer could not get a bank loan, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) said.

The mother of the eight-week-old boy, Stephanie Bigbee Fleming, 22, of Bradenton, Florida, was to receive $9,000 of the proceeds, the FDLE said.

“Fleming planned to purchase a new vehicle from the money received,” an FDLE spokeswoman said.

Fleming also needed money to pay court costs for an unrelated probation violation, the arrest documents said.

Fleming was arrested Tuesday. The grandmother, Patty Bigbee, 45, was arrested last week…

The baby remains in state custody.

The rest of the family should remain in state custody. For a long, long time.

The diminutive grandmother accused of selling her 8-week-old grandbaby in a Daytona Beach parking lot is also a convicted armed robber who spent eight years locked up in a Michigan prison, records show.

Patty Sharree Bigbee, 45, was still in a Volusia County Branch Jail cell Saturday night on $100,000 bail set after her first appearance before a judge early in the day, jail officials said.

Bigbee, listed in prison records as a mere 4 feet, 11 inches tall and 125 pounds, was imprisoned from February 1999 to February 2007 for a 1998 armed robbery in Eaton County, Mich., according to the Michigan Department of Corrections.

She had no criminal record in Florida until she was charged Friday afternoon with selling her grandson for $30,000 to a police informant in a Best Buy parking lot on International Speedway Boulevard.

Bigbee’s boyfriend and accused accomplice in the deal, 42-year-old Lawrence Works, saw his bail rise from $1,500 to $50,000 after his own first appearance before a judge Saturday morning. He also remained in custody Saturday night.

Both declined interview requests from their jail cells…

Investigators watched over several days as the buyer negotiated the price down from $75,000 and arranged to buy the little boy in Daytona Beach. Agents waited for the deal to be complete before they rushed in to arrest Bigbee and Works, said Wayne Ivey, FDLE’s resident agent in charge.

Ivey said there was no written receipt or bill of sale for the deal.

My goodness. Not even a warranty or service contract?

Shimon Peres, now president of Israel, and P W Botha of apartheid South Africa

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.

The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted…

RTFA. Once again, the truth will out.

Israel’s willingness to support one of the most violent, racist governments since Hitler’s Germany is something that most scholars of international policy already know about. It’s only our government that lies about the fact – and the gullible who believe the lies.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The US government is preparing to sell its 27% stake in Citigroup, in what would be one of the largest share sales in history.

Some 7.7 billion shares in the bailed-out bank will be sold in tranches throughout 2010, the US Treasury said. It will mark another stage in Wall Street’s recovery, and could make the US taxpayer $8bn in profit…

The bank has received a total of $45bn in bail-out money from the Treasury’s $700bn Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp). It was the largest amount given to a bank (and was equal to the sum given to Bank of America).

Citigroup was given $25bn in return for 7.7 billion in shares, and was loaned another $20bn in two tranches. This $20bn was repaid in December…

Citi follows other Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, who have repaid the government investment.

Not that most will ever recognize [a] which administration initiated the loans and purchases; [b] which administration sorted it out and started the repayments rolling; [c] what went to banks and what went to insurance companies and car companies. Nor do I expect any admission of the matching segments of the programmatic stimulus and healthcare contributing to the process of recovery.

After all – that would require some knowledge and understanding of history and economics – in addition to the more common populist skills like hollering and obscene gestures.

I have to chuckle over how many supposedly knowledgeable pundits from the geek world think this is something unheard of. Remind me to ignore their stock tips.

Google won approval from U.S. energy regulators to act as a power marketer, which will make it easier for the Internet search giant to obtain renewable energy to run its huge data centers…

In its approval order, FERC pointed out that Google does not own or control any facilities that generate electricity to sell in the wholesale markets.

Google says the extent of its electric generation ownership is to provide power solely to the company’s facilities and for emergency backup power.

Other companies that consume a lot of electricity have been given similar power marketing authority by FERC to help control their energy costs.

The agency lists on its website about 1,500 companies that have subsidiaries with the same market-based rate authority, including Alcoa, the Safeway grocery store chain and Walmart.

There has to be at least a couple of paranoid vegan Google-panic geeks who will now fear being electrocuted if they use the Chrome browser.

You get the idea…

They have heard of people tunneling under it, scaling it and, on the Mexican side, defacing it. But it is not often, law enforcement authorities say, that people try to rip apart the border fence to sell it.

That appears to be the motive that led to the arrest this week in Tijuana, Mexico, of six people who, the authorities there say, were caught shearing off chunks of the metal plate fence to sell as scrap.

The case began Monday afternoon when United States Border Patrol agents spotted a group tampering with the fence on the Mexican side just over a mile west of the San Ysidro port of entry, in an area where smuggling of drugs and people is common, said Mark Endicott, a Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego…

The next afternoon, another group in the same area could be seen next to the fence “attempting to dismantle it,” Mr. Endicott said. Again, they were approached, again rocks sailed over the fence, and again the Mexican police were called. The Border Patrol later learned that six people were apprehended…

Tijuana police told local reporters there that the men were planning to sell the torn-off fence parts. The police said the men had used a soldering tool to cut off parts of the fence, which perhaps unknown to the culprits, is itself scrap. That part of the fence is made of recycled steel landing mats from the Vietnam War era, Mr. Endicott said.

I always wondered if the wall might be stolen as soon as we install it?

Perhaps not since John F. Kennedy, whose dusty portraits can still be seen in kitchens and barbershops and alongside the antique beer cans at bars like Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, has a presidency so fanned the flames of painterly ardor among hobbyist and professional artists.

Mr. Obama’s campaign was well known for inspiring art, including Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous “Hope” poster, a version of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Months after the election, with the glow of the administration’s first 100 days dimming, it might have been expected that enthusiasm for Obama art would be dimming, too…

The phenomenon has been a boon to the near-anonymous painting factories crowded together in the suburbs of Shenzhen, China, famous for cranking out copies of masterpieces, along with landscapes and semitasteful nudes. Another one, seemingly based in Germany, offers stately Obamas amid air-brushy likenesses of Tupac Shakur, Bruce Lee and Al Pacino (in his “Scarface” role), advertised as “real hand-embellished” paintings on canvas.

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Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd, Japan’s second-biggest tire maker, plans to start selling in Japan tires that include no petrochemical materials by 2013, a company spokesman said on Tuesday.

The company has set a medium-term strategy to fight climate change by introducing a tire which uses as little raw material made from oil as possible and at the same time that spins more smoothly to save more fuel than a conventional tire.

In June, Sumitomo Rubber launched in Japan tires in which petrochemicals account for 3 percent of raw materials, compared with 56 percent of its ordinary tires. The remaining 97 percent consists of oil-free materials such as steel wires, vegetable oil, fibers from plant cellulose and natural rubber.

[Currently] Its price is more than 30 percent higher than that of an ordinary tire.

“How to produce the remaining 3-percent part from other natural resources but oil is now under development,” the spokesman Ryota Senshu said. The remaining additives currently made from petrochemical materials are used to protect tires from aging and for other purposes, he said.

I’d buy ‘em. I also spent enough time representing Japanese tire manufacturers to know they’ll keep that “bonus” price high as long as they can.

Let’s hope that competing brands get the smarts together to start mass production asap. This ain’t rocket science, folks.