TAMPA — Despite a less-than-perfect investigation, jurors found DeAndre Jamal Wallace guilty Thursday of shooting Hillsborough sheriff’s Detective Christopher Baumann after an undercover training session turned violent.

Wallace, 19, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for the attempted first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer when he is sentenced May 8.

“It’s very difficult for a jury to overcome the fact that a police officer got shot,” defense attorney Ronald Kurpiers II said after the verdict. Read more »

There is a great amount of interest in this year’s presidential elections, as everybody seems to recognize that our next president has to be a lot better than George Bush. The Democrats are riding high with two groundbreaking candidates — a woman and an African-American — while the conservative Republicans are in a quandary about their party’s nod to a quasi-liberal maverick, John McCain.

Each candidate is carefully pandering to a smorgasbord of special-interest groups, ranging from gay, lesbian and transgender people to children of illegal immigrants to working mothers to evangelical Christians.

There is one group no one has recognized, and it is the group that will decide the election: the Angry White Man. The Angry White Man comes from all economic backgrounds, from dirt-poor to filthy rich. He represents all geographic areas in America, from urban sophisticate to rural redneck, deep South to mountain West, left Coast to Eastern Seaboard.

His common traits are that he isn’t looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field. In many cases, he is an independent businessman and employs several people. He pays more than his share of taxes and works hard. Read more »

OCALA, Fla. — A federal jury returned a mixed verdict against the actor Wesley Snipes on Friday, acquitting him of the most serious tax charges he faced, but convicting him on three of six lesser charges. The case was the most prominent tax prosecution since the billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley was convicted of tax fraud in 1989.

Mr. Snipes, who has built a worldwide following acting in films like the “Blade” vampire trilogy, must pay up to $17 million in back taxes plus penalties and interest. Read more »

A Howard County judge rejected a plea agreement yesterday that called for a sentence of up to eight years for a 26-year-old man accused of killing a Marine and his date in a drunken-driving accident on Thanksgiving night in 2006.

Circuit Court Judge Lenore Gelfman did not explain her opposition to the prosecution’s agreement with Eduardo Raul Morales-Soriano, an illegal immigrant whose blood-alcohol level, authorities say, was four times the legal limit on the night of the crash. Read more »

INDIANAPOLIS — Four suspects plotted to steal drugs from a house knowing the only adults inside were two women, who were gunned down along with the young children they held in their arms, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Prosecutors also requested additional time to file formal charges against the four men arrested in the slaying. Read more »

TULSA, Okla. (Jan. 29) - Former NFL player Alonzo Spellman was arrested Tuesday after Tulsa police fired pepper-spray pellets into his car following a nearly 20-minute chase.
Spellman was booked into the Tulsa County Jail on complaints of eluding, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, resisting arrest and driving without a license, jail records show. His bond was set at $10,700 and Spellman remained jailed early Tuesday evening. Read more »

Security screening for arriving passengers has been stepped up yet again at American airports with the implementation of 10 finger fingerprint scans.

Last week, Logan airport, in Boston, became the third US airport to install the 10-finger scanners. Dulles airport, which serves Washington, DC, began using the devices in November and Atlanta airport began this month. By the end of the year, the devices will be installed at every international airport in the USA, as well as at seaports and border crossings. Read more »

One of the first calls Sundeep Bhatia received Monday was from the principal at Dorsey High, a few blocks from his South Los Angeles 7-Eleven store.

Bhatia is the store owner I wrote about Saturday after his 7-Eleven was hit by a group of rowdy kids last week on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Bhatia was disgusted that the teenagers — most of them black — would act so disrespectfully on what he called a “sacred” day. Read more »

He gets 40 years for a murder for hire plot and firearm.
TAMPA - A federal jury didn’t believe Robert Covington when he testified at trial that wanting to hire someone to kill his ex-girlfriend was just a joke.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge James Whittemore told Covington that he didn’t believe lots of things the 36-year-old Tampa man said before, during or after his November trial. Read more »

BRATTLEBORO — Brattleboro residents will vote at town meeting on whether President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should be indicted and arrested for war crimes, perjury or obstruction of justice if they ever step foot in Vermont.
The Brattleboro Select Board voted 3-2 Friday to put the controversial item on the Town Meeting Day warning.
According to Town Clerk Annette Cappy, organizers of the Bush-Cheney issue gathered enough signatures, and it was up to the Select Board whether Brattleboro voters would consider the issue in March. Read more »

BERLIN — Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.

On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust. Read more »

NEW YORK — Authorities arrested a man they say had an arsenal in his apartment and was charged with spray-painting swastikas and spreading fliers reading “Kill All Jews” and “US hates you” around his Brooklyn neighborhood in September.
At a news conference on Sunday, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes said the man, Ivaylo Ivanov, had been indicted on more than 100 counts of criminal mischief as hate crimes and illegal possession of explosives and weapons. Read more »

Virginia Episcopalians tangled over immigration yesterday, finally passing a resolution committing the 86,000-member diocese to resisting the “criminalization of persons providing humanitarian assistance to migrants.”

Meeting at the Reston Hyatt for their annual council meeting, Episcopalians passionately debated whether they should “resist legislation and actions that violate our fundamental beliefs as Christians.” Read more »

JERUSALEM — Israel’s Holocaust memorial launched an Arabic version of its Web site Thursday, including vivid photos of Nazi atrocities and video of survivors’ testimony, to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim world.

Among those featured on the Yad Vashem site is Dina Beitler, a survivor of the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews in World War II. Beitler, who was shot and left for dead in a pit of bodies in 1941, recalls her story on the site, with Arabic subtitles.

“Holocaust denial in various countries exists, and so it is important that people see us, the Holocaust survivors, that they’ll listen to our testimonies, and learn the legacy of the Holocaust _ also in Arabic,” Beitler, 73, said at Yad Vashem. Read more »

Jewish identity is “locked into the holocaust experience,” which Jews “overplay . .

The grandson of Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi resigned yesterday as president of the board of a conflict resolution institute after writing an online essay on a Washington Post blog calling Jews and Israel “the biggest players” in a global culture of violence.

In his resignation letter to the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, founder Arun Gandhi wrote that his Jan. 7 essay “was couched in language that was hurtful and contrary to the principles of nonviolence. My intention was to generate a healthy discussion on the proliferation of violence. Clearly I did not achieve my goal. Instead, unintentionally, my words have resulted in pain, anger, confusion and embarrassment.” Read more »

It is an enduring legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, repeated by Hollywood, presidents and by the pioneering black pilots themselves:
They never lost a bomber they escorted in air-to-air combat during World War II.
In 2004, a black Navy veteran, history buff and longtime Tuskegee fan stood before the group and uttered the unforgiveable.
He called the record a myth. Read more »

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is willing to send a small number of U.S. combat troops to Pakistan to help fight the insurgency there if Pakistani authorities ask for such help, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

“We remain ready, willing and able to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them to provide additional training, to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so,” Gates told a news conference. Read more »

Police say he shot the owner of Boyett’s Grove twice in the chest on April 25.
SPRING LAKE - With police hard on his heels, Elijah Montgomery ran through an Orlando neighborhood in June, dropping a pistol and his driver’s license. When officers finally caught up with him, the evidence he tossed aside helped solve a mystery nearly 70 miles away in rural Hernando County.
Montgomery, a 23-year-old Orlando man with an extensive criminal history, is accused of being one of three robbers who hit the Boyett’s Grove and Citrus Attraction on April 25.
Montgomery, police say, is the triggerman who shot owner Jim Oleson twice in the chest with a large-caliber handgun, the same pistol that police picked up on that Orlando street. Read more »

TAMPA - A former Hillsborough County tax collector employee will spend two years and three months in federal prison for selling drivers’ licenses to people without proper documentation, a judge ordered Tuesday.

Deisy Oropesa, 31, of Tampa, whose last name also shows up in court records as Oropesa-Hernandez, admitted to the crime in November when she signed an agreement to plead guilty. Read more »

MIAMI, Jan. 22 — Jose Padilla, the former Chicago gang member originally accused of plotting with al-Qaeda to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” on U.S. soil, was sentenced on Tuesday to 17 years in prison on less dramatic charges. Read more »

A brazen swindle in Wheaton last week in which a man walked into a BB&T bank dressed as an armored truck courier and walked out with $574,500 in cash has been linked to a similar bank job the next day in Washington, authorities in Montgomery County said yesterday.

Assistant State’s Attorney Marybeth Ayres named Elizabeth K. Tarke, a teller at the BB&T branch, as a possible ringleader. Detectives have linked Tarke with Thursday’s theft at a Wachovia branch in the District, Ayres said. Read more »

A Maryland state prison inmate was convicted of first-degree murder and other crimes yesterday in the slaying of a correctional officer during an escape two years ago at a hospital in Hagerstown.

The verdict raises the possibility that Brandon T. Morris, 22, could be sentenced to death for killing Jeffrey A. Wroten, 44, who was the state’s first correctional officer to be killed in the line of duty since 1984. Read more »

Prosecutor Action Is Issue, Not Mental Status of Defendant
YORKTOWN, Va., Jan. 17 — More than five years after his case made legal history with a U.S. Supreme Court ban on executions of the mentally retarded, Daryl Atkins was spared his own long-held place on Virginia’s death row when a judge commuted his sentence to life in prison Thursday.

The reprieve came for reasons that few would have guessed during the ever twisting, nearly 12-year course of the case, which had focused largely on Atkins’s mental limitations. Instead, it came because of a Hampton lawyer’s allegation of evidence suppression by prosecutors as they prepared for Atkins’s murder trial in 1998. Read more »

FBI wiretaps used in undercover investigations, including those aimed at deterring terrorist attacks and foreign intelligence threats, have been cut off by telephone companies because of the bureau’s repeated failure to pay its phone bills on time, a government audit said Jan. 10.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General said a review of 990 telecommunication surveillance payments made by five FBI field divisions found that more than half of them were not made on time, and that late payments resulted in the phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI being disconnected. Read more »

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Secret Service presence has increased for Sen. Barack Obama since his dramatic win in Iowa, amid fears over the safety of the man seeking to become America’s first black president.
The Illinois senator’s security now rivals that of President Bush, with a dozen Secret Service agents wearing dark suits and earpieces leading bomb-sniffing dogs through event venues, sweeping all equipment brought by journalists and flanking the candidate as he plunges into crowds of supporters. Read more »

ST. PETERSBURG - William Walker and a friend had stopped at the Kmart on U.S. 19 after spending Wednesday enjoying a Scottish heritage event at a library.
As they were about to drive off in Walker’s 2007 silver Chevrolet Impala, a teenager jumped out. He had a rifle.

Walker, 80, is a World War II veteran and the son of Scottish immigrants. He was with his friend Katharine Manson, 87.
The teenager pointed the sawed-off .22-caliber rifle at Walker’s chest and said: “Give me the keys. And step back now.” Read more »

SEFFNER, FL - Four burglary suspects were in custody and - after about three hours of searching for the fifth - the helicopters had been called off. Officers began to pack their cars.
That’s when Matt Tankersley and Willie Smith saw a kid dart through the trees.
“He’s over there,” Tankersley, 21, hollered to police. “He’s running through the back yards.” Read more »

TUESDAY, Jan. 15 (HealthDay News) — One Sunday after church, Rich Miller headed to a local Chi-Chi’s restaurant in Beaver, Pa., where he dipped into the house salsa that came with the meal.

That simple act in 2003 changed his life forever. What Miller didn’t know was that imported Mexican green onions in the salsa carried a deadly passenger: hepatitis A. Read more »

No one was ever prosecuted for a killing during a drug deal in 1996.
ST. PETERSBURG, FL- Some people get away with murder. Some would say Robert Mann was one of them.

Back in 1996, he sold crack cocaine to a sometime roofer named Anthony Small. Instead of paying, Small stuffed a few pieces in his mouth and started pedaling away on a bicycle.

Mann did what dope slingers sometimes do when deals go sour. He pulled out a gun and opened fire, police said. Small, a 48-year-old man who family members say tried his best to stay out of trouble, was killed. Read more »

Many newer (White) and older (black) residents have different approaches to crime and code issues.
ST. PETERSBURG, FL - The young black men walking down Julie Richey’s street called her “Cracker” as she tended the front yard of her new Bartlett Park home.

She was robbed within her first year in the predominantly black neighborhood. She has grown accustomed to the sound of gunshots. Read more »

A prisoner serving a life sentence overpowered four guards at Laurel Regional Hospital yesterday, then went on a rampage, shooting a motorist, stealing vehicles and taking hostages before being killed in a shootout with police. Read more »

From my party position during New Years Eve, I was basically between the north side of St Petersburg and the south side of St Petersburg. The north of St Pete is predominatley white (but not for long, I am sure) and the south side is predominately black (always will be). The south side is where the St Pete ghettos are located with black gang shootings nightly and crack sales on every corner. I listened, to the north, I could hear the shrill whistle and “POP” of minor bottle rockets and other type legal ordinance. As I listened to the south, automatic gun fire. I wondered how many people were hit, hence this article…

So far the New Year’s stray bullet count is 16, and two bullets actually struck people.
ST. PETERSBURG, FL - This city is no Kabul. Or Baghdad.

Still, many gun owners in St. Petersburg celebrated the New Year the same way as their Kalashnikov-wielding counterparts in war-torn regions of the world: They fired bullets into the air. Read more »

COLUMBIA, S.C. –Leaders of the South Carolina NAACP will re-ignite their effort to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds this month and hope the presence of two Democratic presidential front-runners adds weight to the annual rally.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are scheduled to attend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday march and rally Jan. 21, just days before Democrats in this early primary state go to the polls. The NAACP hopes the candidates, and the national attention they’ll bring, will spotlight the divisive flag that now flutters alongside one of the city’s busiest streets. Read more »

For years he had numbed his pain and fear with drugs, alcohol and anonymous sex. But in a flash of clarity one day, when the crystal meth was wearing off, Javier Arriola dragged himself to a clinic to get an H.I.V. test, years after he stopped using condoms.

He had planned to have a party for his 30th birthday. Instead he was thinking of hanging himself in his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Read more »

Jump in Gun Crime Accompanies 2007 Death Toll of 181

Gun violence rose sharply in the District in 2007, with the number of homicides jumping 7 percent after several years of decline.

The city had recorded 181 killings as of late yesterday, an increase that police officials attributed in part to escalating violence in the drug trade and fighting among neighborhood gangs. Nonfatal shootings and other gun crimes were also up, preliminary police data show. Read more »

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