crime

America’s real criminal element: lead

by News Sources 01.06.2013

Kevin Drum writes: When I started research for this story, I worked my way through a pair of thick criminology tomes. One chapter regaled me with the “exciting possibility” that it’s mostly a matter of economics: Crime goes down when the economy is booming and goes up when it’s in a slump. Unfortunately, the theory [...]

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Crime pays for prison operators

by News Sources 01.09.2012

James Kilgore writes: Private corrections company The GEO Group celebrated the holiday season by opening a new 1,500 bed prison in Milledgeville, Georgia on December 12th. The $80 million facility is expected to generate approximately $28.0 million in annual revenues. Though GEO (formerly Wackenhut) is hardly a household name, they are a major player in [...]

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Predator drones employed by U.S. police

by News Sources 12.12.2011

The Los Angeles Times reports: Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern [...]

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Mother of two gets jail for food-stamp fraud; Wall Street fraudsters get bailouts

by News Sources 11.17.2011

Matt Taibbi writes: Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps. Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States [...]

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Finally, a judge stands up to Wall Street

by News Sources 11.14.2011

Matt Taibbi writes: Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured [...]

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How American police get away with crime against the people they are sworn to protect

by News Sources 09.28.2011
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A little house of secrets on the Great Plains

by News Sources 06.28.2011

Reuters reports: The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming. At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn’t a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It’s a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a [...]

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Brother of Afghan leader is said to be on CIA payroll

by Paul Woodward 10.28.2009

Brother of Afghan leader is said to be on CIA payroll By Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, New York Times, October 28, 2009 Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has [...]

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NEWS: White House cover-up

by Paul Woodward 01.19.2008

White House missing CIA, Iraq e-mails AP, January 19, 2008 Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures. The gaps — 473 days over [...]

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NEWS: Blackwater might evade justice; signs of Iraq’s economic progress turn out to be baseless

by Paul Woodward 01.16.2008

Blackwater case faces obstacles, Justice Dept. says By James Risen and David Johnston, New York Times, January 16, 2008 Justice Department officials have told Congress that they face serious legal difficulties in pursuing criminal prosecutions of Blackwater security guards involved in a September shooting that left at least 17 Iraqis dead. In a private briefing [...]

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FEATURE: Fighting over there, then killing back here

by Paul Woodward 01.13.2008

Across America, deadly echoes of foreign battles By Deborah Sontage and Lizette Alvarez, New York Times, January 13, 2008 Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets [...]

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NEWS: Gang-rape cover-up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

by Paul Woodward 12.11.2007

Gang-rape cover-up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR By Brian Ross, Maddy Sauer and Justin Rood, ABC News, December 10, 2007 A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident. Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by [...]

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NEWS: War profiteer hauled off in handcuffs

by Paul Woodward 10.28.2007

One down: Obscenely decadent war profiteer hauled off in handcuffs By Sarah Anderson, AlterNet, October 26, 2007 America’s most ostentatious war profiteer is no longer a free man. In a long-anticipated move, FBI agents arrested bulletproof vest maker David H. Brooks in his Manhattan apartment at dawn on Thursday. In the tradition of Al Capone, [...]

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NEWS: How the Bush administration is soft on crime

by Paul Woodward 10.17.2007

Justice Dept.’s focus has shifted By Dan Eggen and John Solomon, Washington Post, October 17, 2007 From 2000 to 2006… there were large drops in the number of defendants related to environmental offenses (down 12 percent), organized crime (38 percent), white-collar crime (10 percent), bank robbery (18 percent) and bankruptcy fraud (46 percent), according to [...]

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