A Nanuet, N.Y., man has been arrested on terroristic threat and weapons charges after allegedly posting death threats on Facebook against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (R), Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), several Democratic Congressional leaders and the Congressional Black Caucus. Police searching the home of Lawrence Mulqueen, 49, found two rifles, bayonets, ammunition, body armor, a sword and a knuckle knife, police said. He's a convicted felon prohibited from owning the weapons, said Clarkstown police Sgt. Glenn Cummings. Mulqueen used a pseudonym on the Facebook posts, Cummings said.
The identity of dozens of residents who participated in a Santa Fe, N.M., gun buyback program accidentally were released to the public -- along with their address, phone number and the weapons they sold. The information was put by mistake into a packet for the City Council. "It shouldn't have happened, but it did," said Santa Fe Police Chief Raymond Rael. "I apologize on behalf of the city, I don't think that information should've been out there."
Mohsin Hamed: On Monday, my mother's and sister's eye doctor was assassinated. He was a Shiite. He was shot six times while driving to drop his son off at school. His son, age 12, was executed with a single shot to the head. Tuesday, I attended a protest in front of the Governor's House in Lahore demanding that more be done to protect Pakistan's Shiites from sectarian extremists. These extremists are responsible for increasingly frequent attacks, including bombings this year that killed more than 200 people, most of them Hazara Shiites, in the city of Quetta. read more
Last week, New Yorker writer Amy Davidson was moderating a live chat on drone warfare when she asked two expert participants this question: "Doesn't a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime -- thus committing a crime -- that will provoke retribution or a break with allies -- endangering Americans -- fit this definition of a target?" Author Michael Walzer said no. Professor Jeff McMahan said maybe: "If the release of classified information really would seriously endanger the lives of innocent people and the only way to prevent the release of the information was to kill the journalist, then the journalist would be liable to attack. But the evidential standards in such a case would be very high and would be unlikely to be satisfiable in practice." read more
With its violent crimes, high unemployment, dwindling population and financial crisis, Detroit was named by Forbes magazine on Thursday as the most miserable city in the United States. It toppled Miami, which held the title last year, and surpassed Flint, Mich.; Rockford, Ill.; Chicago and Modesto, Calif. in the top five. "Detroit's problems are hardly news. It has been in a four-decade decline paralleling the slide in the U.S. auto industry," writes Forbes. read more
Next week, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan will be in Rome as part of the conclave that will choose the next pope. But first, Dolan was deposed for three hours yesterday about sexual abuse at the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which he led from 2002 to 2009, where 575 people have filed claims against the church. As the archdiocese attempts to file bankruptcy, lawyers for the victims want to know what Dolan knew and when. A representative for the victims' group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests argued that Dolan "did a lot of creative maneuvering of priest sex offenders and creative accounting of church money," as previously reported, without punishing those responsible.
Jacoba Urist, The Atlantic: Guns, troubled young men, and violent video games. Together, they form a tragically familiar background story to America's recent shooting massacres in Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown. But the Constitution protects guns, and mental health is expensive and complicated to treat. So some lawmakers are responding to the latest tragedy by going after the third -- and possibly least consequential -- variable in this murky equation. There is a new push to tax violent video games. read more
Retort: Fake humor stories are occasionally posted here by users from The Onion and other sites. Onion stories usually have "Onion" in the headline to indicate the source, but others are often presented as if they were real news. Recently, I began labeling these as "Satire," but I'll let users decide how to handle them. Take this poll to vote.
A new Reuters/Ipos poll shows that more than half of U.S. citizens want "most or all" of the country's illegal immigrants deported. Reuters reports that the results point to the hurdles lawmakers face in the ongoing reform of the country's immigration laws. Thirty percent of those polled think that most illegal immigrants, with some exceptions, should be deported, while 23 percent believe all illegal immigrants should be deported. Only 5 percent believe all illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States legally, and 31 percent want most illegal immigrants to stay.
Confidential internal disciplinary reports obtained by CNN reveal that the FBI has been dealing with employees who engaged in sexting -- sending sexually oriented photos and messages -- on their official Blackberry phones. "When you are given an FBI BlackBerry, it's for official use. It's not to text the woman in another office who you found attractive or to send a picture of yourself in a state of undress."
Mitt Romney is speaking next month at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an event where he won the presidential straw poll multiple times in past years. "I look forward to saying thank you to the many friends and supporters who were instrumental in helping my campaign," Romney said in a CPAC press release. He's expected to talk about his future plans, which may include a gig on Fox News, the site Mediaite reported.
A New York mother has been charged with five counts of endangering the welfare of a child after she allegedly hired two strippers to perform lap dances on the guests at her son's 16th birthday party. Judy Viger, 33, hired the women from a company called Tops in Bottoms and arranged for them to perform in a private room at the Spare Time Bowling Center in South Glens Falls on Nov. 3.
Michael Gerson: Out of the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican [writes conservative pundit Michael Gerson]. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats' 113. This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious. read more
On Wednesday, 150 federal and state agents raided The Scooter Store headquarters in New Braunfels, Texas. Last year, former employees told CBS News the company's main goal is not to help patients -- it's to pressure doctors into writing prescriptions to boost profits. Once a doctor has written a prescription, Medicare rarely verifies whether the chairs are actually necessary. Former employee Brian Setzer described the process this way: "Bulldoze and get them to get the paperwork done." read more
A homeless Kansas City man found a $4,000 diamond ring and returned it to the woman who lost it. The ring fell by accident into the donation cup of Billy Ray Harris. He returned it to Sarah Darling and her husband Bill Krejci. "My grandfather was a reverend. He raised me from the time I was 6 months old, and thank the good lord. It's a blessing, but I do still have some character," Harris said. An online campaign to donate money to Harris for the gesture has raised $68,000 as of Friday morning. "The idea was maybe to come up with a couple hundred dollars, something nice for him," Krejci said. "But now we're talking about an amount that could really make a difference."
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