Fifteen St. Louis Cops Punished for Giving World Series Tickets Seized From Scalpers to Family, Friends
Thursday, April 05, 2007

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ST. LOUIS — Fifteen members of the St. Louis police department were disciplined Wednesday, after officers seized World Series tickets from scalpers and gave them to friends and family.

St. Louis Police Chief Joe Mokwa suspended eight officers without pay for two weeks for giving away the Cardinals tickets, which should have been stored as evidence. He recommended their rank be reduced for at least a year. They could lose up to $20,000 each in pay.

A lieutenant and three sergeants also await punishment for failure to supervise. Another three officers will be disciplined for violating an internal procedure.

The names of those involved were not made public. Mokwa says the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's office will review the matter to recommend if any criminal charges should be filed.

The department said its internal affairs division started investigating last November after receiving a complaint.

"This is a very emotional time for the Department and for me because families and careers are impacted by this disciplinary action," Mokwa said in a statement.

Mokwa's recommendations will be made to the Police Board on the grounds that the officers violated ethical standards and evidence handling procedures.

The president of the St. Louis Police Officers' Association, Sgt. Kevin Ahlbrand, said the association is satisfied the punishment is in line with the offense.

Tickets are no longer torn at Busch Stadium but are electronically scanned. The tickets were stored as evidence after they were used but should have been stored immediately after being confiscated, police have said.

Face value of World Series tickets at Busch Stadium ranged from $50 to $250 each. The Cardinals hosted three games during their World Series win over Detroit last October.

Oh, I forgot, we also lost our balls along with our freedom somewhere down the road...oh well I guess I'll just go back to sleep then.

Putin Tightens Internet Controls Before Presidential Election

By Henry Meyer

April 10 (Bloomberg) -- President Vladimir Putin has already brought Russian newspapers and television to heel. Now he's turning his attention to the Internet.

As the Kremlin gears up for the election of Putin's successor next March, Soviet-style controls are being extended to online news after a presidential decree last month set up a new agency to supervise both mass media and the Web.

``It's worrying that this happened ahead of the presidential campaign,'' Roman Bodanin, political editor of Gazeta.ru, Russia's most prominent online news site, said in a telephone interview. ``The Internet is the freest medium of communication today because TV is almost totally under government control, and print media largely so.''

All three national TV stations are state-controlled, and the state gas monopoly, OAO Gazprom, has been taking over major newspapers; self-censorship is routine. That has left the Internet as the main remaining platform for political debate, and Web sites that test the boundaries of free speech are already coming under pressure.

In December, a court in the Siberian region of Khakassia shut down the Internet news site Novy Fokus for not registering as a media outlet. The site, known for its critical reporting, reopened in late March after it agreed to register and accept stricter supervision.

Plug Pulled

Anticompromat.ru, which wrote about Putin's pre-presidential business interests, had to find a U.S. Web server after a Russian service provider pulled the plug March 28, saying it had been warned by officials to stop hosting the site.

Last year, the authorities shut down a Web site called Kursiv in the city of Ivanovo, northeast of Moscow, that lampooned Putin as a ``phallic symbol of Russia'' for his drive to boost the birthrate.

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Russia isn't restricting media freedom and that the new agency isn't aimed at policing the Web.

``If you watch TV, even federal TV channels, you'll hear lots of criticism of the government,'' Peskov said in an interview. ``This new agency will be in charge of licensing. It's not about controlling the Internet.''

Putin, 54, isn't allowed to run for re-election in 2008 under Russia's two-term constitutional limit. Instead, he is promoting two potential successors: First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a 41-year-old lawyer, and Sergei Ivanov, 54, a KGB colleague of Putin who oversees much of Russian industry, including transport and nuclear power. The two, who both come from Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg, have become fixtures on state-controlled television.

Gorbachev's Complaint

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policy of glasnost, or openness, ushered in media freedom in the late 1980s after decades of Soviet censorship, has condemned the state propaganda on the airwaves.

``The one thing I can say is that it's pointless today to watch television,'' Gorbachev, 76, said on the 20th anniversary of the launch of ``perestroika,'' his drive to allow more political and economic freedom that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While most Russians rely on television for news, increasing numbers are turning to the Internet. Around a quarter of the adult population -- 28 million people -- are regular Internet users, according to the Public Opinion Foundation, a Moscow-based research organization. In 2002, only 8 percent fell into that category.

A Mass Medium

``When the Internet becomes more of a mass medium, then governments start getting worried, and they start treating it like the mass media,'' said Esther Dyson, who helped establish the Internet's system of domain names and addresses, and has consulted extensively in Russia.

``You can't control the Internet, but you can control people,'' she said in a telephone interview during a visit to Moscow.

Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations in Moscow, predicted in a telephone interview that ``pressure on the media is going to worsen'' as the presidential succession draws nearer.

Reporters who write critically about government policies are subjected to intimidation, arrests, attacks and other forms of pressure, the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights said March 27 in its annual report.

Facing Prison

Viktor Shmakov, editor of the newspaper Provintsialny Vesti in the oil-rich Bashkortostan republic, is facing up to 10 years in prison. Prosecutors charged him with inciting mass disturbances after his weekly urged readers to attend an opposition rally last year.

Russia is the second most dangerous country for journalists after Iraq, with 88 killed in the past 10 years, according to the Brussels-based International News Safety Institute.

Last October, Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent reporter and Kremlin critic who uncovered human-rights abuses by security forces in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya, was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow.

A journalist for the Kommersant daily, Ivan Safronov, who was investigating Russian weapons sales to Iran and Syria, fell to his death from a window in his Moscow apartment March 2.

The government, meanwhile, has been expanding Gazprom's media role. The company already took control of independent channel NTV in 2001 and bought long-established Russian daily Izvestia in 2005.

Last year, Kommersant, once owned by tycoon and exiled Kremlin critic Boris Berezovsky, was sold to Alisher Usmanov, a steel magnate who is head of a Gazprom subsidiary. And Gazprom said in November it will acquire Russia's biggest-selling daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda, which has a circulation of 800,000.

Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor of the Web site that lost its Russian server after mocking Putin, said the Web crackdown is part of the final phase of a campaign to stifle free speech.

``Thank God the Internet is difficult to close down, but I think they will go after journalists who write things they don't like,'' he said.

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Registry would treat gun owners like criminals

The Morning Call | April 11, 2007
Christian Berg

If someone told you he had been forced to provide the Pennsylvania State Police with their fingerprints, photograph, Social Security number and a host of other personal information, you'd probably assume they were arrested and charged with a crime.

Well, that kind of police ''booking'' process could be in store for Pennsylvania's roughly 3 million firearms owners if gun-control advocates in Harrisburg have their way.

Last month, a group of six state lawmakers introduced legislation that would require the annual registration of virtually every privately-owned firearm in the state. Those who would refuse to register their guns would become criminals, and those denied registration certificates for any reason would have their guns confiscated by the government.

''There's nothing more slanderous to our Second Amendment rights,'' said Melody Zullinger, executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs. ''It's scary, and it should be a wake-up call to sportsmen.''

The gun registration proposal, known as House Bill 760, is co-sponsored by Reps. Lisa Bennington, D-Allegheny; Angel Cruz, D-Philadelphia; Lawrence H. Curry, D-Montgomery and Philadelphia; Cherelle L. Parker, D-Philadelphia; Jake Wheatley, D-Allegheny; and Rosita C. Youngblood, D-Philadelphia.

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In addition to providing the information mentioned above, gun owners would be required to undergo an annual criminal background check and provide police with the make, model, caliber and serial number for every gun they own -- along with a $10-per-year, per-gun registration fee.

Private gun owners whose applications are approved would receive registration certificates for each firearm. The certificates, which would include the gun owner's name, address, date of birth, photograph and other information, would have to be carried with the associated gun at all times and presented to police on demand.

It gets worse.

Gun owners also would be required to notify state police within 48 hours of any gun that is lost, stolen or destroyed. And gun owners could not sell or give a firearm to anyone else without notifying state police at least 48 hours in advance.

Finally -- and this one is really the icing on the cake -- gun owners would be required to keep all firearms unloaded and disassembled (or bound by a trigger lock or gun safe) unless the firearm is in the owner's immediate control and possession at the owner's residence or business or while being used for legal recreation.

So, the government would not only decide whether you deserve to own guns, but also how and where you could store and use them. Hard to believe that's what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they declared ''…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.''

Naturally, there is an exemption for law enforcement officers, corrections officers and for any guns owned or under direct control of the federal, state or local governments. Collectible firearms, along with flintlock, match-lock and percussion firearms manufactured before 1898 (including replicas) also would be excluded.

The rules I mentioned so far are only for those whose registration applications are approved. If your registration application is rejected for any reason, and your appeal is denied, you have three days to turn over all your guns to the state police.

So, if the government screws up and denies your application because of its mistake, you lose your guns. There's nothing in the bill addressing what happens to seized guns or when, if ever, you can get them back.

Needless to say, House Bill 760 hasn't exactly been embraced by rank-and-file gun owners or gun rights organizations such as the National Rifle Association, which issued a statement calling the proposal ''misguided.'' A gun-owning colleague here at the paper said the proposal reminded him a lot of the Big Brother government in George Orwell's ''1984.''

Before I go any further, it's important to point out that House Bill 760 doesn't appear to have anywhere near enough support to win approval in the General Assembly. Still, the mere fact that six House members are proposing it serves as evidence that gun control is an issue alive and well in the halls of state government.

It's also no surprise all six of the lawmakers pushing for gun registration represent either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Both those cities struggle with more than their fair share of violent crime -- many of them involving the illegal use of firearms.

While I sympathize with the crime victims, and the lawmakers' desire to address the problem, a statewide gun registry simply is not the answer.

You can bet your bottom dollar that criminals will not register their guns. In fact, the NRA noted the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that since felons are prohibited from owning firearms, compelling them to register them would violate their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Firearms registries also happen to be terribly expensive.

Canada's national gun registration program, in place for more than a decade, was initally projected to cost $119 million to set up. However, it ended up costing more than $1 billion and is widely considered a boondoggle by Canadian citizens. Some political leaders are pushing a plan to eliminate hunting rifles and shotguns -- which were added to the registry program five years ago -- to slash costs.

A recent spate of high-profile shootings in Canada also is causing renewed debate over the effectiveness of the program, with groups on both sides of the gun-control debate offering reports and statistics to support their point of view. Depending on which ''expert'' you ask, the Canadian registry has either been a colossal success or a colossal waste of time.

At best, Pennsylvania's proposed registration system is a duplication of government oversight already in place. For example, instant criminal background checks already are required every time a person buys a gun. And existing gun owners who lose their right to own firearms because of a felony or domestic violence conviction have their guns seized through the court system.

At worst, the registration proposal is an overbearing, unconstitutional invasion of privacy. You have to ask yourself, why does the government need a list of guns owned by honest, law-abiding citzens anyway?

I can think of several reasons, but none that make me feel more secure -- either in terms of my personal safety or my Second Amendment rights.