Times of London, 9 Dec 09: Deep in the Lubyanka, headquarters of Russia’s secret police, a fragment of Hitler’s jaw is preserved as a trophy of the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany. A fragment of skull with a bullet hole lies in the State Archive.
So when American academics claimed that DNA tests showed the skull to be that of a woman, they challenged a long-cherished tale of the hunt for Hitler’s remains. Yesterday the chief archivist of the Federal Security Service (FSB) insisted that the bones were genuine and told of how the KGB destroyed almost all traces of the dictator’s corpse.
Lieutenant-General Vasily Khristoforov said that the remains had been incinerated in 1970 and the ashes thrown into a river in East Germany.
Agents under orders from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, had dug up a grave containing Hitler, his wife Eva Braun and the family of his henchman Joseph Goebbels. The officers had removed the remains from a burial ground in a Soviet base at Magdeburg, Andropov having written to Soviet party chiefs recommending that the bodies be destroyed after it was decided to pass the base to East Germany. . . . .
TC Palm, FL, 8 Dec 09: A decade-old legal battle launched by members of a once-close Palm City family torn apart by million-dollar financial disputes, arson and industrial espionage is back in court with a new jury seated Monday to pick up where a 2004 jury left off.
Five years ago, a Martin jury found that in 1998, Port St. Lucie plastics manufacturer Premiere Lab Supply stole a machine and its design — considered trade secrets — from Chemplex Industries, a rival Palm City business founded by Monte Solazzi that uses a thin plastic film to make medical and industrial sample cups and containers.
This jury will determine damages owed to Chemplex.
The machine thief, court records show, was Solazzi’s son-in-law, Anthony Norelli, who worked for Chemplex until Solazzi in 1998 terminated him and sales manager Donato Pompa.
According to court records, Norelli and Pompa established Premiere in part by using the production machine stolen from Chemplex, and soon after began luring away hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from Chemplex. . . . .
FSM/Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, US Army (Ret), 8 Dec 09: In war, military strategy is tailored to meet the enemy’s threat, to persuade those who might fight not to fight, and when necessary, to win and achieve Victory in the shortest possible time. In the War against Radical Islam and its network of enablers, America’s top leadership achieves the opposite outcome. . . . .
. . . . In war, for generals to succeed, they must be men of character and integrity, accepting risk and uncertainty as the unchanging features of war. They must also demonstrate a willingness to stand up and be counted, to put country before career and, if necessary to resign. Generals also must be students of their profession and of their enemies especially now with a thorough understanding of the Caliphate, Sharia and the goals of Radical Islam. . . . .
Dallas Morning News, 8 Dec 09: A man who pleaded guilty last year to lying to FBI agents about his fundraising activities for the Holy Land Foundation in the 1990s is being sentenced in Arizona federal court this week.
Akram Musa Abdallah, 55, a U.S. citizen from Jordan, faces up to eight years in prison for lying to federal agents about his involvement with Holy Land. In 2007, before the first trial of five Holy Land organizers on charges that they raised millions of dollars in the U.S. for Hamas, FBI agents went to Abdallah, who was not accused of any crimes at the time, and sought his testimony in the Holy Land case. Abdallah denied that he had ever raised money for the Muslim charity.
After the trial ended in a hung jury in late 2007, Abdallah pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents, and admitted that he raised money in Arizona for the charity from 1994 to 1997. He did not testify in the second HLF trial, which resulted in across-the-board convictions and proved that HLF was the chief funding source for Hamas until it was shuttered in 2001.
Now we have a clue as to why he wasn’t called as a witness for the second trial. In recently-filed court documents, Abdallah says that he never knew that Holy Land was a front for Hamas when he was raising money for it.
To counter this, prosecutors plan to have a Dallas FBI agent fly out for Abdallah’s sentencing Friday in Arizona to testify about the Holy Land investigation and where Abdallah fit into it. . . .
Reuters, 8 Dec 09: Corruption, whether in the form of crooked officials, financial fraudsters or even philandering sports stars, is tearing at the fabric of U.S. society and is the country’s No. 1 criminal threat, a senior FBI agent said on Tuesday.
Addressing businessmen in Florida, where financial fraud cases jumped by 42 percent in the last year, FBI Miami Division Special Agent in Charge John Gillies said failures in personal ethics and integrity sowed the initial poisonous seeds of corruption in a society. . . .
. . . . Gillies, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, called corruption in all its multiple forms, whether in law enforcement or in the judicial system, or involving tax cheats and fraudsters, “our number one criminal threat” in the United States. “It really gets at the soul and fabric of the United States when people are out there corrupting … it all starts with simple ethics violations,” Gillies said.
He said public corruption investigations by the FBI were “huge” and had increased by more than 20 percent in the last five years, while financial scams — from securities and hedge fund frauds to Ponzi schemes — had jumped by more than 25 percent nationwide in the last year alone. These cases involved hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. . . .
. . . . For those frustrated by diminished earnings eroded by the crisis the FBI veteran offered the following caveat against temptation: “The worst day at work is still better than the best day in jail.”
