nbaoffseason:

In Case You Missed It…

Jeremy Lin is currently on the cover of Sports Illustrated. 

1:41 pm  •  14 February 2012  •  343 notes

Leatherface - How Lonely 

(Source: youtube.com)

8:48 am  •  14 February 2012  •  10 notes

“One in eight active registrations is invalid or inaccurate. At the same time, one in four people who are eligible to vote — at least 51 million potential voters — are not registered. The report found that there are about 1.8 million dead people listed as active voters. Some 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state. And 12 million registrations have errors serious enough to make it unlikely that mailings based on them will reach voters.”

— U.S. Voter Registration Rolls Are in Disarray, Pew Report Finds - NYTimes.com

12:40 am  •  14 February 2012  •  7 notes

“The study found that some hospitals did not provide financial aid applications at all, and that many made impermissible demands for irrelevant documents or failed to supply key information, like eligibility rules for big discounts required by state law in 2007. Data reported to the state was obviously faulty, it found. Yet even hospitals that reported they had spent nothing on financial aid, or had filed hundreds of liens against patients’ homes, were allowed to collect without questions from the charity care pool, which distributes more than $1 billion a year.”

— Study Finds New York Hospitals Flout Charity Rules - NYTimes.com

9:07 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  1 note

A former manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pleaded guilty Monday to bribery and money laundering conspiracy charges in a scheme that allegedly involved more than $20 million in bribes and kickbacks, and the planned steering of a $780 million contract.

Michael Alexander, of Woodbridge, Va., also agreed to participate in an ongoing government investigation. Alexander admitted to carrying out a bribery scheme with others. The scheme, according to the Justice Department, involved two contracts that went by the acronyms of TIGER and CORES.

“Today’s bribery and money laundering pleas relate to one of the largest procurement fraud scandals in our nation’s history,” said U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr., in a statement.

Alexander faces up to 15 years in prison for the bribery count and 20 years for the money laundering conspiracy count. No sentencing date has been set.

6:48 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  1 note

It’s budget day at the White House, and the proposal put out by the Justice Department reiterates the administration’s commitment to fighting transnational organized crime.

A week after officials from the Treasury and the Justice Department appeared on Capitol Hill to underscore the importance of fighting transnational organized crime, the Justice Department’s Fiscal 2013 budget request established a new line-item to pay for investigators to fight it.

The Transnational Organized Crime Investigations decision unit would receive $3 million in its first year. It would include allocations for the International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center, a multi-agency intelligence center created in 2009 “whose mission is to significantly disrupt and dismantle those international criminal organizations posing the greatest threat to the United States.”

Multiple agencies participate in the operations center and its related investigations, the request said.

5:13 pm  •  13 February 2012

shortformblog:

HOLY CRAP OF THE DAY: Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer apparently was robbed at knifepoint while vacation in the Caribbean. Hearing word it was a machete. More info as we get it. EDIT:  From NPR: “Justice Breyer, his wife Joanna and a friend were at the Breyer home on Nevis last Thursday when a man armed with a machete broke in, took about $1,000 in cash and fled.”

4:27 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  31 notes

breakingnews:

Gov. Chris Gregoire has signed into law a bill that legalizes gay marriage in Washington state, making it the nation’s seventh to allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.

KIRO 7

3:20 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  574 notes

sportsnetny:

Click the pic

3:19 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  23 notes

Prosecutors probing whether U.S. executives at Avon Products Inc. broke foreign-bribery laws have presented evidence to a grand jury, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday on its front page, citing people familiar with the matter.

Three sources told the Journal that authorities are focused on a 2005 internal audit report that said Avon employees in China may have been bribing officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Avon has said it first learned of the allegations in 2008.

The audit found several hundred thousand dollars in questionable payments to Chinese officials and third-party consultants in 2005, one Journal source said. Avon was pursuing a license to conduct door-to-door sales in China, and it was awarded the country’s first such license in 2006. Some of the payments were recorded on invoices as gifts for government officials, the Journal source said.

2:25 pm  •  13 February 2012

journalofajournalist:

This. Important. I didn’t write it but you should read it.

1:23 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  6 notes

oakleyandallen:

The Daily feat. Jeremy & The Lakers

Song: Mountain Brothers “Paperchase”

(via sbnation)

12:35 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  27 notes

inothernews:

Who says there are no more great public works projects?  Here’s the new, 1,200-foot-long subway station of the 7 line extension beneath West 34th Street in Manhattan.  Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin got an awesome sneak peek which you simply must see now.

12:31 pm  •  13 February 2012  •  132 notes

U.K. authorities made more arrests over the weekend of employees of News Corp.’s The Sun, and they said the investigation into alleged payments for information stretched to other government officials beyond the police.

Of the eight people arrested Saturday on suspicion of corruption, five of them were Sun employees. The others detained were a police officer, a defense ministry employee and a serving member of the armed forces. All of them were released on bail without being charged.

News Corp. publishes this blog. The arrests were reported in The Wall Street Journal, and there’s more here, here and here.

None of the Sun employees named in the Journal report could be reached for comment, nor could the police department for which the officer is employed. A Defense Ministry spokeswoman declined to comment to the Journal.

The arrests are the latest turn in a phone-hacking and bribery scandal that engulfed and led to the closure of weekly tabloid News of the World. It has spread to The Sun, which is the most widely read newspaper in the U.K. with a daily circulation of 2.7 million.

10:15 am  •  13 February 2012  •  1 note

“According to the center, most of the violence against the women was meted out by their husbands, another family member or an acquaintance. Eighty percent of those who asked for help said they had been attacked by their husbands, with 21 percent of these reporting sexual assault by their husbands. Sixty percent of those complaining of sexual assault said they had been under 25 when the violence occurred. Sixteen percent of the reports were by women saying they had been sexually harassed at work.”

— Israeli Arab women’s reports of physical and sexual violence increase by 20% - Haaretz

11:27 pm  •  12 February 2012  •  61 notes