Israel controls the United States of America

A Pakistani man has been jailed by a US court for broadcasting Hezbollah's television channel and selling it to customers in the US.

Javed Iqbal was sentenced to more than five and a half years in prison for broadcasting Al Manar channel, run by Hezbollah, an armed Lebanese group branded a terrorist organisation by the US.

"I did not make a profit of broadcasting Al Manar and it cost me my life," Iqbal's lawyer, Joshua Dratel, read from a prepared statement on behalf of his client.

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Congresswoman Jane Harman accused after National Security Agency bugged phone of unidentified Israeli agent

A prominent Democratic Congresswoman was embroiled tonight in a growing scandal involving government wiretaps and her relationship with two alleged Israeli spies.

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A White House spokesman said Friday that President Barack Obama has full confidence in Steven Rattner, leader of the administration's auto task force, who was involved in payments under scrutiny in an alleged kickback scheme at New York state's pension fund.

Mr. Rattner's former private-equity firm, Quadrangle Group, is one of about 20 investment firms allegedly involved in a long-running pay-to-play investigation. The New York state attorney general's office and the Securities and Exchange Commission allege that investment firms made payments in exchange for investments from the $122 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund.

Mr. Rattner wasn't named in the SEC's complaint, but a person familiar with the matter said he was the senior Quadrangle executive the complaint identifies as meeting with a politically connected consultant about a finder's fee, which Quadrangle later paid after receiving an investment from the New York fund.

Neither Mr. Rattner nor Quadrangle has been accused of wrongdoing.
Earlier

Some General Motors Corp. executives on Friday said they worried about the news about Mr. Rattner. They have been working closely with him and his Treasury colleagues, and wouldn't want to start from scratch with a new government official, given the strict time constraints to turn around the auto maker, they said.

While investment firms are expected to receive greater attention in the months ahead, they have not been the main focus of the case so far. A political adviser and New York's former deputy comptroller, among others, have been charged.

The main legal issue for the investment firms turns on whether they knew, or should have known, that fees they paid to certain entities for access to the New York fund were legitimate or whether they were improper kickbacks, and whether they were properly disclosed, according to people familiar with the matter.

Industry experts, without commenting on the specifics of the case, say it is routine for senior private-equity executives to have high-level meetings with people who control or influence pension-fund purse strings.

"The firms bring them to answer questions about the formation of the firm, about its culture," says Sanjay Mansukhani, head of private-markets manager research at the consulting firm Watson Wyatt. To impress clients, he added, "they like to bring in the big guns."

In addition to Mr. Rattner, another high-profile executive not mentioned by name in the complaint is Stephen Berger, the head of a New York buyout firm who used to run the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, according to people with knowledge of the probe.

Mr. Berger, chairman of Odyssey Investment Partners, is the person that the SEC complaint refers to as an Odyssey "managing director," these people said. Odyssey is a successor firm to Odyssey Partners, a pioneering investment fund. Mr. Berger currently serves as chairman of a New York State commission on health-care facilities.

Neither Odyssey nor Mr. Berger has been charged with wrongdoing. Odyssey did not make Mr. Berger available for comment. An Odyssey spokesman said the firm is cooperating with the investigations and was never a target of the investigation.

The SEC and the New York attorney general declined to comment.

The SEC alleges that in 2004, a person who helped private-equity firms get investments from the New York fund told an Odyssey managing director that investment firms needed to hire a certain "placement" agent firm to get money from the pension fund.

Although Odyssey was already working with another placement agent, the Odyssey executive agreed that it would also pay the agent on any investment Odyssey received from the New York fund, according to the complaint.

An 18-year-old high school student caught with his 48-year-old math teacher in her bedroom was stabbed to death by her boyfriend, who was himself a former student of hers, police said Tuesday.

Chandler police said 20-year-old Sixto Balbuena told them he never meant to kill Samuel Valdivia. He allegedly told police "the blade went in like going into butter" and that he just wanted to show Valdivia how much he hurt him by sleeping with Tamara Hofmann.

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The U.S. Department of Labor has subpoenaed Tribune Co. in an investigation connected to the media company's employee stock-ownership plan, a key but controversial feature of real-estate mogul Sam Zell's 2007 deal to take Tribune private.

Tribune disclosed the investigation in a bankruptcy court filing on Thursday. The company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times newspapers and owns a string of local television stations, sought bankruptcy protection in December under the weight of $13 billion in debt related to Mr. Zell's buyout of Tribune.

Tribune on March 31 turned over materials in response to the subpoena for an "extensive range of documents," the court filing said. The probe concerns Tribune's employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP.

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Lindsay Lohan tried converting to Judaism to save her relationship with Samantha Ronson. No surprise, says Andy Borowitz: her movies are filled with subtle but rich Talmudic themes.

Just when we were getting used to the idea that Lindsay Lohan was a lesbian, now comes word that she may become a Jew.According to Page Six (?? ?? in Hebrew), Lindsay is converting to Judaism to show her commitment to her beloved, DJ Samantha Ronson If Lindsay had announced her lesbianism without announcing her Judaism, it would have been enough—or as members of Lindsay’s new tribe like to say, “Dayenu.” But with the big Lindsay shocker dropping just a week before Passover, the youngest child at the Seder table may be tempted to ditch the traditional Haggadah and ask a new version of the Four Questions: 1) Will Lindsay change her name to Lohanstein?; 2) On Passover, does Lindsay smoke a different herb than she usually smokes?;3) Do Lindsay and Sam play “Hide the matzoh”?; and, most crucially, 4) Why is this dyke different from all other dykes?

Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, was paid about $5.2 million by hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the past year, financial disclosure forms released by the White House showed on Friday.

Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary and Harvard University president, also was paid $2.7 million in speaking fees by a range of organizations and companies, including several troubled Wall Street financial firms, they showed.

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A federal judge on Friday ordered Iran to pay $25 million plus interest to the family of Israeli soldier Nachshon Wachsman, who was kidnapped and executed by Hamas in 1994.

Wachsman was a 19-year-old U.S. citizen and Israeli army corporal when he was taken by four members of Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States. His abduction damaged Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at the time, as he pleaded on videotape for his life.

Wachsman's mother and six brothers filed the lawsuit in 2006 against Iran and its ministry of information and security, saying Tehran was responsible for the death because it provided training and support to Hamas. Iran has refused to respond to the lawsuit, resulting in a default judgment in favor of Wachsman's family.

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A former Nazi concentration camp guard who was living in Wisconsin has been deported to Austria, Justice Department officials said Thursday.

Prosecutors said 83-year-old Josias Kumpf (yoh-SEE'-uhs KOOMF) served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen (ZAHK'-zen-how-zen) concentration camp in Germany and the Trawniki (trafh-NEE'-kee) labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and at slave labor sites in occupied France.

U.S. investigators found he participated in a 1943 mass shooting in Poland in which 8,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in pits at Trawniki in a single day.

"Josias Kumpf, by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot any surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS massacre that left thousands of Jews dead," Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita Glavin said in a statement.

Peter Rogers, Kumpf's attorney, didn't immediately return a message Thursday.

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Isrealis control the justice system in the USA and use that control to ensure their fellow Israelis have it easy in the legal system.

This story is about an Israeli judge who contacts Israeli lawyers to work for free for an Israeli defendent who is in the judges court.

I bet lots of defendents wish the judge worked for them.

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While the bizarre antics and odd courtroom proceedings of The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden have dominated news recently, another high-profile file-sharing case on this side of the Atlantic has generated plenty of recent craziness, too. And this is craziness of a special breed—how many federal trials involve a defense attorney who previously represented the judge, appeals to the Department of Justice to intervene, a lengthy hearing about whether a trial can be webcast to the world, and a judicial admonition to lawyers about taping each other's conversations?

Graduate student Joel Tenenbaum faces nearly a million dollars in possible fines after being sued by the RIAA. After first defending himself, federal judge Nancy Gertner hooked Tenenbaum up with Professor Charles (Rothwell) Nesson of Harvard Law School. Nesson then deputized his law students to do most of the work in the case (see our in-depth profile of them). This was all atypical enough, but the case quickly got much weirder.
Taping the lawyers

Earlier this week, Judge Gertner issued a ruling (PDF) in which various scheduling matters were addressed. At the end of the document came these curious lines:

"An issue has arisen with respect to the recording of counsel communications. The parties are advised that any such recording without permission of the participants, as well as the broadcast of such communications, runs afoul of Mass. Gen. L. c. 272 § 99."

The judge also isn't happy with Tenenbaum's legal team over their apparent failure to follow the rules.

Say what? Upon hearing the news, we suspected that this was directed at Nesson. He had, for instance, already recorded Tenenbaum's entire deposition and placed it on the Web. Listening to it a few weeks ago, I was struck by the apparent annoyance of the music industry lawyers when they asked Nesson if he was taping the proceedings, and he said he was.

Copyright lawyer Ben Sheffner did some digging of his own and confirmed the suspicion. Nesson had been asking permission to tape each interaction with RIAA lawyers; when they objected, he refused to participate in certain meetings.

The judge also isn't happy with Tenenbaum's legal team over their apparent failure to follow the rules. "For the period from August 7, 2007 until September 22, 2008, defendant Joel Tenenbaum was not represented by counsel," she wrote. "The Court understands that a pro se litigant may not be familiar with the Court's Rules and, during that time, took this into account in construing his submissions. Tenenbaum, however, is now represented by counsel—accordingly, familiarity with the both the Federal Rules and the Local Rules of the District of Massachusetts is presumed and expected."

Back on February 13, Nesson wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, asking it to intervene in the case. Nesson didn't claim his client was innocent—indeed, he appears to admit Tenenbaum's guilt when it comes to downloading music. Instead, he argues that the statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song are so outrageous as to be unconstitutional.

"We ask you to intervene in Joel's case on behalf of the people of the United States of America," says the letter, "to save the constitutionality of Section 504(c) by interpreting its damage provision for willful infringement to apply only to commercial infringers. If applied to such individuals as Joel, who has made no commercial use of plaintiffs' copyrights, the statute violates the Constitution."

The letter was addressed to Ed Kneedler, the Acting Solicitor General, but the filename is actually "letter-to-elena-1.pdf," a reference to Obama's new pick for Solicitor General, Elena Kagan. Kagan is awaiting Senate confirmation to the post, and her previous job was as a dean... of Harvard Law School.
Who defended whom?

Then there's the issue of whether Nesson has actually served as a lawyer for Judge Gertner. The judge raised the issue back in January, noting that the two had both been involved in the same case 25 years ago but saying that Nesson had not defended her (as a defense lawyer at the time, Gertner was subpoenaed by the prosecution; she objected and fought the subpoena attempt).

But Sheffner has also turned up evidence that Nesson did represent Gertner in that case. Given the length of time that has passed, he doesn't believe it will now be an issue in the case. We checked with the RIAA, which had no comment on how it would proceed.

The arrangement could prove potentially problematic. As we noted in our profile of the Harvard Law students defending Tenenbaum, Judge Gertner has issued some astonishing statements form the bench. She actually put Tenenbaum in touch with Nesson, and during a later hearing in her courtroom told the music industry lawyers that they were "basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it."
That courtroom webcast

Finally, there's the webcast issue. Nesson and his students have pushed hard to have the entire trial streamed online. Gertner said she would allow it for one hearing and consider it for the whole trial. The RIAA appealed, and the appeals court agreed to look into the matter.

Gertner had previously indicated that she had the discretion to allow recording under First Circuit rules, and neither Nesson nor the RIAA suggested that the First Circuit had ruled differently (the RIAA didn't believe she should allow the webcast, but for different reasons). So it seems fairly embarrassing to all parties when the appeals court recently issued a terse statement (PDF) saying that "no party has yet addressed" a 1996 resolution passed by the Judicial Council of the First Circuit.

That resolution states clearly that judges in the First Circuit should "continue to bar the taking of photographs and radio and television coverage of proceedings in the United States district courts within the circuit, except as otherwise provided for ceremonial occasions."

This, in other words, was the statement which Gertner believed not to exist, and which nobody else appeared to dig up, either. Whoops.

The webcast issue remains on hold pending the appeals court's ruling, but the delay has already pushed back the start of Tenenbaum's trial from March into June, at the earliest. Before then, we'll find out if Nesson will be sanctioned by the judge for his own attempt to depose one of the music industry lawyers in the case, and to hold the deposition in a large Harvard hall.