One in three recent Atlanta Police Academy graduates have criminal records

ajc.com

Keovongsa Siharath was arrested in Henry County on charges he punched his stepfather.

Jeffrey Churchill was charged with assault in an altercation with a woman in a mall parking lot.

Calvin Thomas was taken into custody in DeKalb County on a concealed weapons charge.

All three are now officers with the Atlanta Police Department.

More than one-third of recent Atlanta Police Academy graduates have been arrested or cited for a crime, according to a review of their job applications. The arrests ranged from minor offenses such as shoplifting to violent charges including assault. More than one-third of the officers had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies, and more than half of the recruits admitted using marijuana

Sacred Intentions: Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies

alternet.org

This isn't a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl's first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the "psilocybin room." She's taking part in the first study of its kind since the early '70s -- a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.

"And then ... we enter the archetypal realm. Visions of Christ, or Buddha, or Greek gods ... imagery from the Book of Revelation, that sort of thing. What's fascinating is that they often experience things far outside of their life histories, Christians seeing the Buddha, or someone seeing Egyptian or Hindu or other unfamiliar iconography. Certainly not the stuff they learned in Sunday school. It's fascinating -- almost as if there's a universal cache of knowledge they're tapping into."

Army developing 'synthetic telepathy'

MSNBC

Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought.

The idea of communicating by thought alone is not a new one. In the 1960s, a researcher strapped an EEG to his head and, with some training, could stop and start his brain's alpha waves to compose Morse code messages.

One of the first areas for thought-based communication is in the gaming world, said Paul Sajda of Columbia University. Commercial EEG headsets already exist that allow wearers to manipulate virtual objects by thought alone, noted Sajda, but thinking "move rock" is easier than, say, "Have everyone meet at Starbucks at 5:30."

IRS Comissioner evades question about which law requires you to pay income tax

Ronald Reagan: B Film Actor, Ladies’ Man and FBI Snitch

Portland IndyMedia

If you are a Hollywood film buff and a political junkie, too, as I am, you will just love Marc Eliot's latest book, "Reagan: The Hollywood Years." The author touches on Ronald Reagan's early days in Dixon, Illinois, but mainly focuses on his film career in which he was cast in one bad B movie after another. The main expose in this absorbing tome is that during the days of the "Red Scare," late 40s through the 50s, Reagan was a snitch for the FBI! The author writes that Reagan became a "secret informant, code name 'T-10,' for J. Edgar Hoover's red-baiting FBI." He regularly met with them in LaLaLand and "handed over names of Screen Actor Guild (SAG) members who 'might' be Communist sympathizers." Reagan would also contact his brother, Neil, "from a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard to pass along information" to the FBI. (2)

What brought Reagan, who served as President of SAG, (1947-52), and again in 1959, to do such a terrible thing? I think he was mostly a hollow type of man, vain, insecure and highly self- righteous. The record shows that to protect his rear end, he had become "a commie hunter;" he also carried a gun. The exact number of colleagues on whom Reagan ratted, will probably never be known. Once tagged as a Red "sympathizer," no matter how scanty the evidence, an individual was subjected to being "blacklisted" and barred from working in the Hollywood Industry. The fact that one's political beliefs were protected by the First Amendment didn't stop the witch hunts. Some victims of the blacklisting process were so scarred, that they committed suicide. Mr. Eliot mentions two: Philip Loeb and Barry Crum. (3)

Crimes by air marshals raise questions about hiring

USA Today

Shawn Nguyen bragged that he could sneak anything past airport security using his top-secret clearance as a federal air marshal. And for months, he smuggled cocaine and drug money onto flights across the country, boasting to an FBI informant that he was "the man with the golden badge."

Michael McGowan used his position as an air marshal to lure a young boy to his hotel room, where he showed him child porn, took pictures of him naked and sexually abused him.

And when Brian "Cooter" Phelps wanted his ex-wife to disappear, he called a fellow air marshal and tried to hire a hit man nicknamed "the Crucifixer."

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism organization, has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.

FBI finds most Terror Threat Reports Baseless

Reuters

The FBI tracked about 108,000 potential terrorism threats or suspicious incidents from mid-2004 to November 2007, but most were found groundless, a Justice Department review found on Friday.

“The FBI determined that the overwhelming majority of the threat information documented in Guardian had no nexus to terrorism. However, as a result of information reported in Guardian the FBI initiated over 600 criminal and terrorism-related investigations from October 2006 to December 2007,” the inspector general’s report said.

7 Year Old Boy Removed from Father and Placed in State Custody Over mistaken Order of Hard Lemonade

Don'tTaseMeBlog.com

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he's more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching "Dancing with the Stars" -- or even the History Channel, for that matter.

Undercover Denver Cops staged Violent Confrontation with Police at DNC

Denver Post

Now the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is questioning whether that staged confrontation by police pretending to be violent inflamed other protesters or officers during the most intense night of the four-day event.

According to a use-of-force police report obtained by the ACLU, undercover Denver detectives staged a struggle with a police commander to get pulled out of the crowd without blowing their cover. The commander knew they were working undercover, and the plan was to pull them out of the crowd and pretend they were under arrest so protesters would be none the wiser.

Denver police have said they were trying to control the crowd moving from Civic Center. The officers testified in court that they had intelligence that anarchists planned to gather in the park, then move toward the 16th Street Mall to wreak havoc at delegate hotels and other businesses. The activists had posted that plan on a publicly available website.