JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Accused cop killer and one of the FBI's most wanted fugitivesEric Frein has been captured alive after a six-week manhunt, sources told ABC News tonight.
Both a federal law enforcement source and a Pennsylvania law enforcement source confirmed that Frein, 31, is in custody.
It has been "a very good day," the Pennsylvania law enforcement source said.
Frein was captured by U.S. Marshals in an unused hanger at the Pocono Mountain Municipal Airport, sources said. Frein was armed but no shots were fired. The airport is two miles northwest of Mount Pocono, in Monroe County, near Tannersville.
Frein had eluded authorities since Sept. 12, when he allegedly killed one Pennsylvania state trooper and injured another during an ambush of the Blooming Grove police barracks. At times, 1,000 officers searched the rugged mountains for Frein, who police said had planned his attack and hiding for years. The lives of residents in the area were disrupted by the manhunt, including school closings and event cancellations.
View photo
FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Eric Frein Captured Alive (ABC News)
Police believed Frein, a self-trained survivalist from nearby Canadensis, had previously hidden supplies in the woods that he could draw from. They found two pipe bombs, an AK-47, ammunition and various food and supplies they believe belong to the suspect.
On Tuesday, police investigated a possible sighting of Frein made by a resident in Barrett Township, said Trooper Connie Devens, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Police. It was one of several such sightings.
Earlier this week, a giant helium balloon sent to Pennsylvania to aid in the manhunt was returned after just one day, police said. The unmanned balloon came from Ohio and was supposed to be quieter than a helicopter and provide similar technology to aviation equipment being used in the search, but at a lower cost, police said. But it was returned just a day later, police said today.
"Due to the tree canopy and rugged terrain of our search area the balloon was not as helpful as everyone hoped it would be," said Trooper Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police.
A Pennsylvania town had banned trick-or-treating this year while hundreds of cops search nearby woods for Frein. Barrett Township said its annual Halloween parade and 5K Scarecrow Race were canceled indefinitely, and trick-or-treating was banned this year.
Notes found in the woods, allegedly penned by Frein, offered a "cold-blooded" and "chilling" account of how he shot and killed the trooper last month before escaping into the forest, authorities said.
JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in the midst of the toughest race of his career, still isn’t quite sure how he wants to present himself to voters. On the one hand, the longtime Republican senator is proud to be the nation’s top obstructionist, helping create the most dysfunctional Congress in modern history. On the other hand, McConnell wants the public to see him as the consummate dealmaker. To help prove the latter point, the GOP incumbent cited an interesting example last week.
Though he hasn’t mentioned it much on the campaign trail over the past year, McConnell specifically touted his effort to push President George W. Bush’s plans to reform Social Security in 2005, which would have set up private accounts for retirees.
“After Bush was re-elected in 2004 he wanted us to try to fix Social Security,” said McConnell. “I spent a year trying to get any Democrat in the Senate – even those most reasonable Democrat of all, Joe Lieberman – to help us.”
We now know, of course, that Democrats weren’t interested in privatizing Social Security. Neither was the American mainstream, which hated the Bush/Cheney idea. But the fact that McConnell brought this up, unprompted, was a clumsy error from a senator who’s usually more disciplined.
With time running out in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell decided to remind the state that he wanted to effectively eliminate the popular and effective Social Security system. Indeed, it’s been part of McConnell’s governing vision for many, many years.
When local reporter Joe Sonka asked McConnell whether voters should expect the senator to push Social Security privatization after the midterms, McConnell replied, “I’m not announcing what the agenda would be in advance.”
Wait, he’s not?
I’m starting to think Republicans have collectively forgotten the point of a political campaign. Last week, Scott Brown told voters in New Hampshire, “I’m not going to talk about whether we’re going to do something in the future.” Around the same time, McConnell said he’ll only announce Senate Republicans’ agenda after the election.
This is a little nutty, even by 2014 standards. Call me old fashioned, but in a democracy, candidates are supposed to tell voters what they’d do if elected. Then, after the election, the winning candidates are supposed to pursue the agenda endorsed by the electorate.
When McConnell says “I’m not announcing what the agenda would be in advance,” he’s getting democracy backwards. The longtime incumbent is asking voters to give him control of the Senate first, at which point he’ll tell everyone what he intends to do with his power.
It’s an odd pitch. Either McConnell still intends to eliminate Social Security, replacing it with private accounts, or he doesn’t. The senator brought this up as an example of his bipartisan outreach, so it’s not unreasonable to ask whether he still intends to pursue an anti-Social Security agenda if McConnell gets a promotion.
This probably isn’t the issue McConnell wanted to deal with in the campaign’s final week, but he opened the door, and shouldn’t be too surprised when others walk through it.
There was an emergency in the North Carolina football program in the summer 2009.
Deborah Crowder, architect of a
massive and long-lasting academic sham, was retiring. Before she left
the school, the Tar Heels needed her for one more round of bailouts.
As a member of the academic
support staff urgently emailed a director of football operations: "Ms.
Crowder is retiring at the end of July . . . if the guys papers are not
in . . . I would expect D's or C's at best. Most need better than that .
. . ALL WORK FROM THE AFAM DEPT. MUST BE DONE AND TURNED IN ON THE LAST
DAY OF CLASS."
View gallery
.(AP/Gerry Broome)
The players in question needed
A's and B's from Crowder in African and Afro-American Studies classes in
order to be eligible to play for the Tar Heels. And that's what she was
there to provide in exchange for little or no work – year after year,
player after player, for football and basketball and other sports as
well. Regular students also benefited from a scheme that disgraces a
once-proud university, but athletes flocked to her no-show classes in
disproportionate numbers.
That email was part of a 131-page report spearheaded by independent
investigator Kenneth Wainstein that was released by UNC on Wednesday.
The report laid bare North Carolina's abdication of academic integrity
in order to serve up easy grades that kept athletes eligible and on
track to graduate.
For years, as the revelations
accumulated and no fewer than six other reports were filed, North
Carolina refused to look honestly at itself and acknowledge what it saw.
Today, the school can squirm away
from the truth no more. Wainstein's report provided a devastating house
of mirrors for UNC to gaze into. The loud-and-proud claims to being a
special place, capable of both athletic and academic success without
cutting corners, are now hollow.
North Carolina spent many years operating like a
lowest-common-denominator football/basketball factory. Regardless of
whatever else comes from this thorough and painstaking investigation,
that label sticks.
The level of academic fraud
exposed is staggering: 3,100 students benefitted from the AFAM class
scam; of that number, more than 47 percent were athletes –
disproportionately high for the student population as a whole. And of
that 47 percent, more than half were football players. Men's basketball
made up 12 percent of the athlete population that was given gift grades.
The report finds it believable
that neither basketball coach Roy Williams nor then-football coach Butch
Davis knew the extent of the AFAM scam – specifically, that players
were getting gift grades. However, Davis was said to be present during a
2009 power-point presentation by academic support staff to the football
staff that included a slide saying that players had been enrolled in
classes which featured the following perks: "they didn't go to class;
didn't take notes, have to stay awake; they didn't have to meet with
professors; they didn't have to pay attention or necessarily engage with
the material." (Butch told investigators that he didn't recall seeing
that slide. If the current ESPN analyst ever works in college coaching
again, someone please shut down the university that hires him.)
Should a coach know what classes
his players are taking? I don't know. My son is a student-athlete at
Missouri and I'd bet his coaches know his major, but not his specific
course load. Then again, he's not an eligibility risk, nor is he vital
to a coach maintaining a seven-figure salary. The star football and
basketball players are.
But the deniability of Williams
and Davis is largely immaterial. Their programs thrived thanks to
athletes who couldn't or wouldn't do the work of most normal students.
If those Tar Heels who were winning national titles in basketball and
going to bowl games in football took anything educational away from
their time in Chapel Hill, chances are decent that it was an "A" in a
Swahili class that never met. That's something to be proud of.
As UNC wallows in the shame of
this scandal, the next question is whether Wainstein has given the NCAA
enough ammunition to aim and fire at the school.
The governing body of college
sports took its sweet time launching its own investigation of UNC, to
the frustration of many. For years, the stated reason for inaction was
that the academic benefits enjoyed by the athletes also was perfectly
available to the student body as a whole, and thus not a violation of
NCAA rules.
View gallery . North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams talks to media during a press conference. (AP)
It's
true that more than 1,500 regular students did benefit from no-show
classes, per the report. But if nearly an equal number of athletes were
involved in flagrant academic fraud that resulted in a clear competitive
advantage – stars were eligible to play, and to beat the pants off
opposing teams – then this would seem to be a case where the NCAA should
intercede.
If the association's baroque and
bewildering rules manual prevents it, well, shame on the NCAA. It would
be one more example of why it is a failed investigative force.
We can wait and see what results
come from Indianapolis, but don't hold your breath in anticipation of a
deathblow for Carolina – especially Carolina basketball.
If anything, the school should react on its own to this report. Don't wait for the NCAA to step in, do something yourself.
Now that UNC knows the
independently reported facts, it can act. For years, its championship
basketball teams were populated by players who benefitted from academic
fraud – the 2005 national title team alone had 10 AFAM majors. If those
titles were won with players who wouldn't have been eligible without
sham grades, take down the banners yourself. Take the hardware out of
the trophy cases. Wear your shame.
For a school that long proclaimed to be a special place, that would be a start on restoring its integrity.
JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
An Egyptian jihadist group released a video Sunday showing the execution of four men, including three being beheaded, accused of spying for the army and for Israel's Mossad intelligence service.
It is the second time such gruesome footage has been released by Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), the deadliest militant group based in Egypt's insurgency-hit Sinai region.
A similar video of beheadings was released by the group on August 28, showing the decapitation of four men also accused of being "Israeli informants".
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis says it supports the Islamic State (IS) group which has seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, but has not pledged formal allegiance to it.
Sunday's video, released on Twitter, features parts of a September speech by IS spokesman Abu Mohamed al-Adnani directed at Sinai jihadists, urging them to kill Egyptian security personnel.
The footage then shows the execution of four men after their recorded "confessions".
One was shot dead after saying he worked with the Egyptian army, while the other three were beheaded after saying they worked for Mossad.
Before being killed, the men called on other "spies" to repent publicly, saying the militants knew who they were and that they would not be spared.
The footage also shows jihadists manning checkpoints and searching for "spies".
Egypt's Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel has seen fighting between militants and security forces after the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July last year.
Militants have killed scores of security personnel, saying the attacks are in retaliation for a brutal government crackdown since Morsi 's ouster.
The authorities have launched a sweeping crackdown on his supporters which has left at least 1,400 people dead and more than 15,000 jailed.
