31. Minnesota-born Thomas Warziniack is detained for weeks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they mistakenly believe he’s an illegal Russian immigrant. I know, I know, mistakes are made, all in the name of national security.
32. An air traveler passes through security at Reagan National Airport with a loaded gun, goes back to report it, and now faces criminal charges.
33. Friday is Robert Burns Night, but Scottish-Americans will have to celebrate the poet’s birthday without the traditional haggis: the U. S. government has banned imports of the dish since the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain.
34. An “aggressive young” Nebraska sheriff’s deputy seizes $69,000 during a traffic stop in which the driver wasn’t even ticketed. Money quote (from Kimball County Sheriff Tim Hanson): “The big thing is he grabbed 69 (thousand dollars) and took it away from them [the suspected drug dealers]. That’s going right straight to the heart of the matter.”
35. The judge in the Jose Padilla terrorism trial “questioned the range and impact of the conspiracy, saying that there was no evidence linking the men to specific acts of terrorism anywhere or that their actions had resulted in death or injury to anyone.” She then sentenced Padilla to 17 years in prison.
36. The Federal Election Commission rules that a free-speech advocacy group must register as a “political committee” and thus be subject to Federal campaign regulations, restricting the amount of individual donations it can accept. More here.
37. An Ohio woman is freed from prison after serving 16 months of a 10-year prison sentence for a drug crime she didn’t commit. Her conviction was based on fraudulent testimony from a DEA informant and a rogue agent–who put 15 other people in prison as a result of the same investigation.
38. To better serve its 3,300 citizens, the town of Verona, Mississippi will get its own SWAT team.
39. The MPAA is pushing Congress to link Federal college funding to adopting stricter anti-piracy measures on college campus networks.
40. Police in Alaska arrest a 13-year-old girl for sexual assault after two boys accused her of touching them “over their clothing”, although they are tight-lipped over where the boys were touched.
41. The ACLU are representing a New Mexico man in a lawsuit against county law enforcement for seizing his state-licensed medical marijuana plants and equipment. His pot was turned over to the DEA, although he has not been charged with a Federal crime.
42. Awww, poor babies: some former DEA agents are suing NBC Universal, owners of the studio that produced American Gangsters, for defamation, saying the movie “has ruined and impugned the reputations of these honest and courageous public servants in the eyes of millions of people”. You mean the millions who haven’t yet been put in prison on trumped-up drug charges?