There were probably plenty of government officials in Columbia bummed out about this crazy car wreck. Millions of dollars in coke going down the drain, maybe literally.

In Colombia, Bogota, truck overturned when it cornered a turn too fast, spilling almost a ton of cocaine on the highway. I wonder how many millions of bucks a ton of cocaine is actually worth.

The truck was wrecked, the driver was not hurt in the crash (but may be badly hurt once his boss finds out he lost a ton of cocaine), was arrested. go figure.

Talk about having a really bad day.

ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDING ME??? Here we go with our “Protect and Serve” peeps. They are getting drunk, while answering 911 calls, and just barely admitting that they did anything wrong. If someone would have died due to the neglect of one of these officers do you think they would have been charged with murder?? No, the would have said that “they are just human”, and embarrassed at this “isolated” incident! You people sleigh me, no really, cops are a real riot! I’m sure this is the type of thing that happens when Cops are just “trying to have a good time”!

No 911 calls were ”mishandled” during a bawdy holiday gift exchange in which Montgomery County employees posed for photos with sex toys and bottles of alcohol at the county’s emergency dispatch center, county officials say.

County Public Safety Director Tom Sullivan said at a Board of Commissioners meeting Thursday that his internal investigation revealed all 952 of the calls received the night of Dec. 23 were answered in a timely fashion.

”There were no problems, delays or lack of attention to duty,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan made that determination after reviewing the evening’s audio logs and interviewing all employees who were on duty that night.

County commissioners two weeks ago fired platoon supervisor Shaun P. Brown from his $47,298-a-year job for posing in what officials called ”embarrassing” photos.

The photos, which are rumored to have been displayed on an employee’s MySpace page, included one in which a smiling dispatcher posed with another employee wearing a ball gag, a sphere-shaped piece of rubber attached to a strap that is often used in sadomasochistic play.

Other photos showed employees grinning while holding up bottles of rum and one shows a woman, who is wearing her dispatch headphones, leaning back in a chair with an empty beer box on her lap.

County officials have not yet determined what disciplinary action will be taken against other employees who participated in the gift exchange and photo-taking. They have said that about a half-dozen other employees were involved.

”It’s an ongoing investigation in terms of disciplinary action,” assistant county solicitor Maureen Coggins said. Her probe revealed that no one consumed alcohol that evening but that employees violated county code by having alcohol on county property. They also violated the county’s code of ethics by engaging in inappropriate behavior, she said.

Meanwhile, Sullivan on Thursday revealed additional problems related to the 911 center.

He said county dispatchers were unable to answer 911 calls on two occasions during the last few days.

Dispatchers were unable to receive 14 calls on Thursday and 39 calls on Sunday because of a cable being cut during an excavation project in Plymouth Township, Sullivan said. Fortunately, none of the calls were emergencies, Sullivan said.

”This could have been serious,” Sullivan said.

He and other county officials voiced concern about the incidents.

Sullivan said he’s unsatisfied with how Verizon, the county’s phone service provider, handled the outage. He said it seemed as though Verizon was not monitoring the system very closely.

Officers patrolling the Oceanside Inn on South Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach Shores heard a loud explosion early Friday morning. Several witnesses said the explosion came from the sun deck, located on the second floor of the hotel.When officers first arrived, they found three safety windows had been shattered, along with a metal light pole that had been destroyed. They also noticed metal and glass debris scattered across a 100-foot area.”The wife, she grabbed the kids and took ‘em to the bathroom and I hit the deck and looked out the window to see where it was coming from,” said vacationer Terry Morris.The Morris family, from Kansas, thought maybe someone was shooting at them as glass shattered inside their hotel room.”At this point, I had no clue what was going on,” said vacationer Dustin Morris.

Slideshow of Purps

Police said unreleased surveillance video from the hotel showed three hotel guests running from the scene. The guests, three college students, were identified as 21-year-old Timothy Bechtel of La Grange, Illinois, 21-year-old Christopher Romano of Dayton, Ohio, and 21-year-old Michael Bolt, also from La Grange. When officers contacted Bechtel, he was found to have a cut on his arm and he admitted to being involved in the incident.Bechtel told police Romano had detonated a partial stick of dynamite while he and Bolt acted as lookouts. A search of the room the three were staying in found no other explosives.”They’re really nice guys, they were just really drunk yesterday,” said spring breaker Dan McDonough. “We saw ‘em before dark and they were so wasted that I don’t think they remember doing that.”The three were charged with discharging a destructive device causing injury and property damage, a first-degree felony. Bond was set at $20,000.”A child could’ve been killed. People could’ve been injured, including the people who set this off,” said Daytona Beach Shores Police Chief Stephan Dembinsky.Damages to the hotel were estimated at $2,000 and guests from two hotel rooms had to be relocated as a result. Oceanside Inn told police it would not be able to rent the rooms for a month, resulting in a loss of $8,000 to $10,000 in revenue. The hotel also told Eyewitness News they’re getting calls from worried guests from across the country who have reservations and are now concerned about their safety.

AB 1940 would grant privileges to late-term pregnant women

SACRAMENTO — Give birth, get a parking pass? California lawmakers are considering granting special parking privileges to women in the final three months of pregnancy and the first two months after birth.

The legislation would apply to more than a half-million women who give birth every year in California.

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore’s bill would qualify pregnant women for “temporarily disabled” parking placards from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

“Let’s be reasonable here: There are challenges, physical challenges, that arise as a natural part of life,” DeVore said of pregnancy.

The Irvine Republican said it makes little sense to force a pregnant woman who has trouble getting out of her car, and might have a toddler in tow, to park in the outer reaches of a parking lot.

“It certainly makes you realize that for that very short period of time in their pregnancy, they are certainly by any practical definition (impaired),” he said.

DeVore is wading into a thicket abandoned four years ago by a colleague, then-Assemblyman Tony Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks, who proposed similar legislation, then shelved it amid a hail of controversy.

Opponents of the new proposal, Assembly Bill 1940, say pregnant women should be exercising as much as possible and that the legislation could reduce parking for motorists with more serious disabilities.

“We really want pregnant women to be active, to be moving, to be walking,” said Shannon Smith-Crowley of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ California chapter, which opposes the bill. A woman with complications from pregnancy that severely impair walking, or cause other serious health problems, can qualify for a temporary parking placard under existing law, she said.

“If she truly needs it, she can already get it,” Smith-Crowley said.

Helen Grieco, executive director of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women, said the bill inadvertently could send the wrong societal message.

“It’s very much a normal part of a woman’s life — we have children,” Grieco said. “So we’ve always been troubled by framing pregnancy as a disability.”

The bill would allow pregnant women to park in spaces reserved for those with disabilities, park for free beside meters, and park for unlimited lengths of time beside green curbs.

To qualify for a temporary placard, women would have to produce a note from a doctor, nurse, midwife or other health care professional stating that they are in the final three months of pregnancy.

Frances Gracechild, executive director of Resources for Independent Living, which assists people with disabilities, said she had not yet read AB 1940.

“But reasonable people might say that if you decide to pass it, it would have to have a commensurate increase in parking spaces (for people with disabilities),” Gracechild said.

AB 1940 faces its first legislative hearing Monday in the Assembly Transportation Committee.

More than 2.6 million Californians, roughly 11 percent of the state’s motorists, possess special parking privileges because of disabilities, DMV records show.

Statistics are not kept on how many temporary parking placards have been granted under existing law due to complications from pregnancy.

Strickland, whose 2004 effort failed, said he still supports easing the strain on pregnant women. “Look, I’ve never had to carry around a 10-pound baby in my belly and walk every day,” he said.

MARCH 21–Meet Kelly Sweet. The eighth grade teacher, 26, is facing a felony rap for an alleged sexual encounter with a 14-year-old boy in her Milwaukee apartment earlier this month.

As noted in a Circuit Court criminal complaint, the Deer Creek Intermediate School teacher was watching a movie with the boy on March 9 when she initiated illicit contact while the pair was seated on her couch (Sweet had been resting her head on the boy’s lap). The charged assault involved Sweet allegedly “grinding her pubic mound” against the victim. The educator, pictured below in a Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office mug shot, was named in a March 20 criminal information charging her with sexual assault of a child. If convicted, Sweet could face a maximum of 40 years behind bars.

Kelly Sweets’ Court Papers

CompStat might not count a February 29th murder, but the neighborhood does

March 18th, 2008 12:00 AM

The NYPD has become so obsessed with trying to show an ever-lower crime rate that it erased February 29, 2008.

That day, however, was particularly bloody in the Ninth Precinct. Outside the East Village Key Food supermarket, a makeshift memorial still stands, weeks after a Leap Day slaying of one of the store’s employees.

On February 29, inside the market at Avenue A and 4th Street, James Gonzalez, a 42-year-old ex-con known to store workers as “Crazy Jimmy,” allegedly repeatedly stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Tina Negron, to death with a butcher’s knife. Both worked at the market. Negron would have turned 25 years old on March 16.

It was the Ninth Precinct’s first homicide of the year. But according to NYPD stats, it didn’t happen.

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WASHINGTON – Sophisticated submarine-like boats are the latest tool drug runners are using to bring cocaine north from Colombia, U.S. officials say.

Semi-submersible boats used to smuggle drugs are gaining in quality, the Coast Guard says.

Although the vessels were once viewed as a quirky sideshow in the drug war, they are becoming faster, more seaworthy, and capable of carrying bigger loads of drugs than earlier models, according to those charged with catching them.

“They tend to be one of a kind,” U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen said. “They cost up to a million dollars to produce. Sometimes they are put together in pieces and then reassembled in other locations. They’re very difficult to locate.”

The boats are built in the Colombian jungle. They sail largely beneath the surface of the water but cannot submerge completely like a true submarine.

But they are the latest escalation of a tactical race between smugglers and the U.S. Coast Guard.

In the past three months the Coast Guard has learned of more semi-submersible vessels smuggling drugs than it did in the previous six years, when there were 23 cases, officials said.

U.S. Coast Guard intelligence officers predict 85 cases this year and 120 next year.

In some instances, the semi-subs are towed behind other vessels and are scuttled if they are detected, Allen said. Authorities are investigating reports that some semi-subs are unmanned and are operated remotely, he said.

Diplomatic agreements give the U.S. Coast Guard drug-interdiction jurisdiction in partner countries’ waters.

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The accountancy firm that looks after children’s entertainers the Wiggles is not an obvious place to search for the Holy Grail, but that’s where the trail led last night. It started with a simple quest - what on earth is a large advertisment headlined “The Ancient & Noble Order of The Knights Templar” doing in the Daily Telegraph? - and it led your intrepid investigator to the wilds of west London and then all the way back to the 12th century.

It was around 1118 when the order of the Knights Templar was founded in the Holy Land by Hughes de Payens and eight other French knights to protect pilgrims and defend Jerusalem, which had been captured by the Crusaders in 1099. Over almost two centuries, the order grew into one of the most rich and powerful institutions of the era. It all came crashing down when the Pope burnt the Templars’ last grand master at the stake in Paris in 1314. The order seemed to have disappeared - until yesterday, when this tantalising advertisement appeared.

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With a six-week breather before the next primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton turned her attention to Pennsylvania and beyond to counter the latest in a string of victories by Barack Obama in Southern states with large black voting blocs. Obama won roughly 90 percent of the black vote in Mississippi on Tuesday, but only about one-quarter of the white vote. That was similar to the breakdown that helped him win South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana before losing to Clinton in Texas and Ohio, which has similar voter demographics to neighboring Pennsylvania.Clinton was attending a presidential forum in Washington on Wednesday. Obama planned to be in his hometown of Chicago.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, Obama had 61 percent to 37 percent for Clinton.

Republican Sen. John McCain, who has already won enough delegates to claim the GOP nomination, rolled up 79 percent of the vote in Mississippi.

Obama picked up at least 17 of Mississippi’s 33 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, with five more to be awarded. He hoped for a win sizable enough to erase most if not all of Clinton’s 11-delegate gain from last week, when she won three primaries.

The Illinois senator had 1,596 delegates to 1,484 for Clinton. It takes 2,025 to win the nomination. With neither appearing able to win enough delegates through primaries and caucuses to claim the nomination, the importance of nearly 800 elected officials and party leaders who will attend the national convention as unelected superdelegates is increasing.

Obama leads Clinton among pledged delegates, 1,385-1,237 in The Associated Press count, while the former first lady has an advantage among superdelegates, 247-211.

Blacks, who also supported Obama in overwhelming numbers in earlier primaries, accounted for roughly half the ballots cast in Mississippi, according to interviews with voters leaving polling places. About one in six Democratic primary voters were independents, and Clinton and Obama split their support. Another 10 percent of voters were Republican, and they preferred Clinton by a margin of 3-1.

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Obama Spiritual Leaders

The following are excerpts of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s telephone interview Thursday with Tribune-Review reporter David. M. Brown.

Q: Gov. (Ed) Rendell and (Philadelphia) Mayor (Michael) Nutter held a conference call and did their best to say you are minimizing Pennsylvania and essentially your campaign is trying to paint Pennsylvania as not that important.

A: I don’t think there is any denying that we are an underdog there, and it’s important for us to remember that there are 10 other states. The irony of this, of course, is it’s the Clinton campaign that’s been trying to cherry-pick and decide which states are important. There are a whole slew of states that she’s dismissed. We’ve competed actively in every single state, and we’re going to compete actively in Pennsylvania.

Q: I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s all over the wire today (from an ABC News story), a statement that your pastor (the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side) made in a sermon in 2003 that instead of singing “God Bless America,” black people should sing a song essentially saying “God Damn America.”

A: I haven’t seen the line. This is a pastor who is on the brink of retirement who in the past has made some controversial statements. I profoundly disagree with some of these statements.

Q: What about this particular statement?A: Obviously, I disagree with that. Here is what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a 40-year career as a pastor. There are times when people say things that are just wrong. But I think it’s important to judge me on what I’ve said in the past and what I believe.Q: What about the big vote today in the Senate for a moratorium on congressional earmarks — items inserted into legislation to fund lawmakers’ pet projects — also called “pork barrel spending?”A: I’m a supporter of the idea of pausing a year so that we can make sure they are more transparent and more accountable.

Q: How do you differ from Sen. Clinton on the issue of gun control?

A: I think our positions are fairly similar. I’d let her characterize her own position. I certainly believe in the Second Amendment right, that people have the right to bear arms. But I also believe it is important to have some common-sense gun laws in place to make sure that straw purchasers aren’t being used to fill up our streets with illegal firearms, and that we have stronger background checks so we keep firearms out of the hands of people with mental health problems or young people or those who have committed crimes. I think it is important for us to strengthen our ability to trace guns that have been used in crimes to gun dealers to make sure they are not operating in an illegal way. I think it’s possible to reconcile the tradition of gun ownership, and the rights of sportsmen, hunters and those who want to protect their families, with keeping handguns that are used in crime off the streets. You can protect the rights of gun owners and at the same time keep guns out of the hands of criminals.