If Santa Claus had been portrayed as a woman the image would look something like Ella Green. She's a white-haired, elfin little figure, an 83-year-old with a melodic German accent that offers kind words for everyone, delivered with a twinkle in her one good eye. She lost the other one 10 years ago - or was it 20? She hasn't kept track. ...more

December 5, 2009

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four co-conspirators will be tried in a Manhattan federal courthouse, the Justice Department announced Friday, the most concrete demonstration yet of the Obama administration's desire to reassert the primacy of the criminal justice system in responding to terrorist acts. ...more

November 14, 2009

A Guantanamo prisoner who claims he was tortured at a covert CIA site in Morocco returned to Britain a free man today after nearly seven years in U.S. captivity - the first inmate from the U.S. prison camp freed since President Barack Obama took office. ...more

February 23, 2009

President Obama ordered the detention facility at Guantanamo closed within a year. Prior to the announcement a terrorist known as Said Ali al-Shihri who was released after spending six years inside the U.S. prison camp and is now the number 2 of Yemen's al-Qaeda branch according to a purported internet terror network statement. Although al-Shiri was released in Nov. 2007 and transferred to his homeland, he ended up in Yemen and is now reported to be working for al-Qaeda again. ...more

February 15, 2009

The stage is set. The curtain rises in just 48 hours on a drama that's the four-year, perhaps eight-year, administration of President Barack Hussein Obama. ...more

January 18, 2009

Steve Raymond told me about a year ago that he never expected to live this long, by at least a half century. ...more

September 10, 2008

Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, has died. She was 93. ...more

August 20, 2008

Former Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne, once the county's most powerful politician, was sentenced Friday to a year and a day in prison after pleading guilty to federal corruption charges. ...more

November 17, 2007

A construction official convicted of accepting a kickback is asking a judge to let him 'pay for my mistake in a constructive manner' by serving his 18-month federal prison sentence working on an Indian reservation in Georgia. ...more

October 31, 2007

TAMPA - A construction official convicted of accepting a kickback is asking a judge to let him "pay for my mistake in a constructive manner" by serving his 18-month federal prison sentence working on an Indian reservation in Georgia. Joel R. Velasco, who accepted a $63,000 kickback as manager of a $20 million project at the James A. Haley VA Medical Center, wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday asking that his sentence be modified to allow him to work on the reservation. ...more

October 30, 2007