SPOTLIGHT: Teen wants Illinois stalking awareness

Chicago casino could be last big Mayor Daley project
In a Chicago Tribune/WGN poll released yesterday, it reported that nearly half of the respondents support a land-based casino in Chicago.  The actual tally was 47 percent for versus 41 percent against.  This is important because it supports the Illinois State Senate’s approval of a major state-wide gambling expansion bill earlier this month that would include that provision.  This issue has been debated throughout Richard M. Daley’s mayoral administration and may be th...

Runaway girl's call leads to molestation charges against man
Five days after she ran away from her South Side home, an 11-year-old girl called her uncle after hearing his impassioned plea on a local Radio Station for her to contact him. Within an hour of her phone call, frantic efforts to find the girl by her family, a community Activist and Chicago police ended when she was found just blocks from her parent's home in the apartment of a man now charged with sexually assaulting her. "She was crying because I was crying," the girl's uncle said after a bon...

WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange's 'stalker-style' emails to 19-year-old girl exposed
He's the Whistleblower who has exposed the secrets of governments across the world. But Wikileaks boss Julian Assange has some embarrassing documents in his own past he would rather the world didn't know about. A series of emails detailing his 'stalkery courtship' of a teenager are revealed - two years before he founded his notorious website. Under the headline 'The creepy, lovesick emails of Julian Assange' the gossip website Gawker reproduces emails to the teenager in his pre-WikiLeaks days. G...

Protecting Prostitutes, United Nations Style
— Flickr/United States Mission Geneva In November 2003, 54-year-old Gary Ridgway admitted at his trial for first-degree Murder that he was indeed the Green River killer, the long-sought culprit behind the murders of 48 women, mostly street Prostitutes. Nearly all his Victims were strangled in Seattle, Washington, from 1982 to 1984. His unapologetic statement to the court read, "I picked prostitutes as Victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would...

Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Boss
A former FBI agent pleaded guilty on Wednesday to plotting to kill his boss, the Dallas Morning News reported. In May, Carlos Ortiz Jr. , 49,was suspended without pay by Dallas FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert Casey Jr. after Ortiz’s wife, an analyst in the Dallas FBI office, accused him of Domestic Violence. Ortiz filed for Divorce in 2009 after eight years of marriage. On Aug. 19 and 20, Ortiz made several phone calls to a former Law Enforcement officer and licensed Firearms dealer, th...

Dream Act Headed for Senate Vote
Source: New York Times Latino leaders have turned up the pressure on senators facing a vote on Saturday on a bill that would grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of Illegal Immigrant Students, saying support of the measure will be used as a litmus test by Latino voters in the 2012 Elections. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Majority Leader, scheduled the vote on the student measure, which is known as the DREAM Act late on Thursday. The Senate will vote on a version of the bill that passe...

Dream Act Headed for Senate Vote
Source: New York Times Latino leaders have turned up the pressure on senators facing a vote on Saturday on a bill that would grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of Illegal Immigrant Students, saying support of the measure will be used as a litmus test by Latino voters in the 2012 Elections. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Majority Leader, scheduled the vote on the student measure, which is known as the DREAM Act late on Thursday. The Senate will vote on a version of the bill that passe...

How Ileana Ros-Lehtinen killed the bill to prevent forced child marriages
Incoming House Foreign Affairs chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) defeated a bill Thursday evening that would have committed the United States to combating forced Child Marriages abroad, by invoking concerns about the Legislation's cost and that funds could be uses to finance Abortions. The episode highlights the tough road that the Obama Administration will face in advancing its women's rights and foreign aid agenda during the next Congressional session. Non-governmental organizations, w...

House Republicans Block Child Marriage Prevention Act
WASHINGTON -- On Thursday, the House took up the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010. The bill would ensure that child marriage is recognized as a Human Rights violation, and develop comprehensive strategies to prevent such marriages around the world. The Legislation seemed likely to garner strong Bipartisan support in Congress, and in the Senate, it did. But last night, the bill was voted down in the House by Republicans who argued the bill is too costly an...

Gutierrez: Senate filibuster will likely kill DREAM Act legislation
With the Senate poised to vote Saturday on Legislation offering Illegal Immigrant Students a chance to remain in the country lawfully, one of Capitol Hill's leading advocates for the DREAM Act doesn't like its chances. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said Friday that, while supporters have picked up "a few Republicans" in the Senate, a GOP Filibuster will likely sink the bill. "It would pass if we would just let Democracy work," Gutierrez said, indicating the proposal will win support from a maj...

SOTT FOCUS: Extra, Extra! Yahoo is Censoring the SOTT E-mail Edition
Starting yesterday, 16 December 2010, Yahoo decided to return all 276 E-mail Editions sent to our subscribers who signed up with a Yahoo e-mail address. In the past, we would receive returned messages because we are part of Yahoo's "spam feedback loop". This means that if someone labeled the E-mail Edition as junk, we would be notified. We would then promptly remove their e-mail address from the mailing list. In addition, we received other detailed error messages from Yahoo explaining the re...

UN considers panel of governments to set policies for policing the Internet
Stumble This! A United Nations Task Force formed last week said it was considering the creation of a new inter-governmental working group to help further international cooperation on policies to police the Internet. The discussion was undertaken to "enhance" and extend the work of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a UN-sponsored organization that makes recommendations on how governments should deal with the Internet. The IGF's mandate is due to expire soon, so members of the UN's Commission ...

David Isenberg: Will the Real Hillary Clinton Please Step Forward?
It appears that the old Hillary Clinton, the one who ran for president of the United States has managed to travel forward in time and merge with the current Hillary Clinton, the one who is Secretary of State. For those who don't remember, the old Clinton vowed to ban the use of private security contractors. As perennial PMC critic Jeremy Scahill of The Nation reported back in July, ""These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq," Clinton said i...

Illinois Republicans block Gitmo prisoner transfers
WASHINGTON — Illinois Republicans were successful Friday in stripping a provision from a House defense bill that would have given permission for the transfer to the U.S. of Detainees in the Guantanamo Bay Military Prison. The issue is of special importance to Illinois GOP lawmakers because earlier this year the Obama Administration moved to buy an underutilized state prison in Thomson, Ill., in part to house Guantanamo detainees. Closing Guantanamo was a central Obama pledge that the pre...

WABC-TV Meteorologist: I Never Told Police I Was Raped
NEW YORK (CBS 2/1010 WINS/AP) — A Channel 7 Meteorologist accused of filing a phony Police Report about being stalked and assaulted in Central Park says she never told police she was the Victim of a Rape or an attempted rape. Heidi Jones was arrested Saturday and ordered to appear in county court on a false reporting charge after police said she made up her claims. Police say she admitted fabricating the claims after they investigated. A lawyer for Jones said Friday the Meteorologist never...

Village Voice Media under fire for sex trafficking (Daily Caller)
The organization that brought down craigslist’s “erotic services” section is targeting another alleged online under-aged sex traffic enabler — Village Voice Media’s Backpage.com. According to The Rebecca Project for Human Rights, Backpage.com has been negligent at best, complicit at worst, in allowing sex traffickers to advertise and pimp under-aged girls on its website. Aiming to shutter another outlet for sexual deviants, the Rebecca Project has teamed up with a...

911 calls released in Deputy Brandon Coates shooting death | Listen to the calls
The Orange County Sheriff's Office today released audio from 911 calls made by concerned residents the night Deputy Brandon Coates was shot and killed during a Traffic Stop. Also released was a recording of Coates' radio transmission, during which he called in the fateful Traffic Stop. In what would become his final transmission, Coates called in the stop like any other: "45th and Nash, Florida Tag 4-0-8-Yankee-Tango-Delta, white Chevy Silverado, unknown," he said. After a response, sheriff's ...

Kate Harding on the Assange Accusations
This is a Swedish twitter topic #prataomdet which means #talkaboutit. It defends Assange's accusers, discusses Rape and Sexual Harassment in general and even talks about the "gray areas" in sex. Some of the posts have been translated into English under #talkaboutit. The idea is to talk about sexual violence more from the point of view of the Victims. Revolutionary. I have felt for some time that the discussion on Internet about what "sex by surprise" might be and all that should be balanced by ...

The Wave Of Bullying Victims Hits Arkansas
Sad news tonight. Experts say Bullying has reached epidemic proportions, and if you don’t think it can affect your child think again.  Just days before Christmas a Parkview High Student takes his own life, and his mother is speaking out pleading for the Bullying to end so no other family has to go through the tragedy her family is dealing with now.  Chandler Barnwell was just 16 years old. CJ, as he was called by those closest to him, was a ninth grader at Little Rock’...

Ex-Pagans leader won't fight extradition to Phila.
Former Pagans motorcycle gang leader Steven "Gorilla" Mondevergine waived his right to a hearing Friday and agreed to be extradited from New Jersey to Philadelphia, where he faces attempted Murder and assault charges. "I just want to get back to Philly," Mondevergine told Judge Walter Marshall during a brief hearing in Gloucester County Superior Court. Marshall ordered that Mondevergine be turned over to Philadelphia authorities within the next 10 days. Mondevergine has been ...

Question of the day
* What do you think Gov. Pat Quinn asked Santa for this year? Snark heavily encouraged, of course. Comments composed as actual letters to Santa win extra points. ...

Illinois State Sen. Duffy fights the red-light cameras after receiving tickets
Duffy has been trying to do away with the red-light cameras in the suburbs, but they remain.  Though the tickets are a financial Windfall for municipalities as they account for 90 percent of tickets given out at $100 an infraction, this politician has experienced the unfairness of the lights.  Earlier this year, Gov. Pat Quinn approved some changes to the laws related to the cameras by eliminating tickets being issued to drivers for not coming to a complete stop before the white line ...

Henry Henderson: Asian Carp: Not quite the action we were looking for...
The Asian Carp Coordinating Committee put out their updated “control strategy framework” this afternoon. It is basically the playbook from which the Army Corps of Engineers, USEPA, and other governmental stakeholders are supposed to be attacking the advance of invasive species into the Great Lakes. We were not particularly pleased with what we saw in the original version that came out earlier this year, but held out hope that the updated version for 2011 would include some new, sma...

Fleur De Lis Film Studios Calls for Correction of Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act
Anyone who reviews the shamefully lopsided track record of the MSPB will conclude that the vast majority of cases will be summarily dismissed without Whistleblowers ever getting their day in court. Since the creation of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 the Federal Circuit has rejected numerous requests from the Executive Branch for a judicial creation of the authority to dismiss cases summarily. Section 118 of S. 372 will largely extinguish any hope of legal recourse for most whistleblower...

2 sides of Haiti detainee
A Jekyll and Hyde portrait emerged yesterday of a Nantucket carpenter-turned-relief-worker locked up in Haiti’s violent National Penitentiary and variously described by friends as a warmhearted humanitarian and by Court Records as a violent con. “Paul had this difficult life and had his own demons, and when he came to Haiti, he found what he was meant to do,” said Nanci K. Murdock, director of the relief agency Paul Waggoner co-founded. “He is unjustly in Prison.” W...