Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com Bernard Tolbert, the former head of the FBI office in Buffalo, is entering the mayoral race as a Democrat and will take incumbent Byron Brown, the Buffalo News reports. Tolbert, 64, is expected to soon file his paperwork for a campaign finance committee. A Buffalo native and FBI veteran, Tolbert has been…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com When Ed Hanko took over as special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia office, he prominently displayed a photo of his father standing with about 60 other helmeted coal miners at a plant in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The weathered black-and-white photo on his bookshelf reminds Hanko of how hard…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com ICE agents along the Arizona border became aware that ATF was allowing illegal guns to cross the border as part of the bungled Fast & Furious investigation, the Washington Guardian reports. But ICE agents, who were concerned and talked to local ATF officials about the unusual probe, never took the complaints to…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com A division of the Department of Homeland Security spied and kept records on the Occupy Wall Street protests, even when they were peaceful the Huffington Post reports. More than 250 records obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund show the federal government was keeping close tabs on protesters. “Taken together, the…
By Allan Lengel and Bill McGraw Deadline Detroit DETROIT — The man suspected of shooting and wounding two Detroit police officers on Tuesday evening following a car chase on the city’s west side, had been on parole since last October after serving time for armed robbery, according to a law enforcement official and public records. Matthew…
By Tim Shorrock The Nation In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a…
By Ross Parker ticklethewire.com Cyber information is not the only thing the Chinese are stealing from the United States. A new generation of synthetic designer drugs is robbing the physical and mental health of thousands of American teenagers. In the last two years enterprising rogue Chinese chemists have introduced hundreds of these new chemical combinations…
By Theodoric Meyer and Christie Thompson ProPublica In 1991, an unemployed printer named David Ranta was convicted of killing a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn. Last week, Ranta was released from the maximum-security prison in which he’d spent nearly 22 years, after almost every piece of evidence used to convict him fell away. The New York…
