Twitter Acquires TweetDeck

Twitter Acquires TweetDeck: "Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, an application for organizing the display of tweets, for more than $40 million in a mix of cash and stock, according to sources close to the deal."

Dallas and Beyond | First call for sponsorship of THE A.M.N MOVEMENT

Dallas and Beyond | First call for sponsorship of THE A.M.N MOVEMENT: "Dallas and Beyond | First call for sponsorship of THE A.M.N MOVEMENT: '

Brandon Reed
A.M.N. Global Media
breed@thedailyphalanx.com

(214)-702-1508

P.O. Box 823554
Dallas
Texas - 75382

Date: 8th December 2010
RE: Bowie County Phalanx


To whomever it may concern,

A.M.N. Global Media, is an organization dedicated to keeping the people informed on breaking and local news. We are a small company in which we specialize in blogging, small town newspapers, canvassing, and flyers. Based in Dallas, Texas, our website has been up and running for 15 months. There is subsequent amount of traffic on our website; on an average we calculate the amount of traffic to our website from 500 to 1,000 clicks per day.

We are seeking sponsors who may be interested in having ads posted on our website. You will have great exposure from the amount of people that are reached daily by our mixture of social media, blogging, blog talk radio, and print media. If you do a Google search of Brandon P. Reed, Bowie County Phalanx, The Daily Phalanx, you will see that we are in the top five search engine. As a sponsor, your organization is sure to receive exposure from newspapers, media campaigns, website, print media, blog talk radio etc. You will also gain exposure from audiences attending our events. As a company dedicated to transparency and accountability, you are definitely an ideal partner for us in this venture.

We have several different packages for sponsorship, which we can email those out. You can choose how you would want to participate in the sponsorship of our organization and how you would like to help make the community we live in safer and more accountable.

We are looking forward to hearing from you. In case you have any inquiries you can contact us at the information given above. Thank you for taking the time to look over this information hopefully we will hear from you soon.

Yours sincerely,
Brandon P. Reed
President/CEO

A.M.N. Global Media

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When the police knock down your door: more on the Richardson Raid

When the police knock down your door: more on the Richardson Raid: "

Vergil and Mark Richardson

By Alan Bean

Friends of Justice was first to bring you the troubling story of Mark and Vergil Richardson, but we certainly aren’t the last. First we had Wade Goodwyn’s excellent story for NPR’s All Things Considered, and now Jordan Smith of the Austin Chronicle is using the Richardson story as an entre into the strange world of no-knock searches for The Crime Report. Radley Balko, one of the experts interviewed for Smith’s story, reports that “the number of SWAT call-outs averaged 3,000 annual between the 1980s and 2005. Now the annual figure is roughly 50,000.”

When Police Break Down Your Door

Jordan Smith

December 15, 2010

An increase in the use of ‘no-knock’ warrants around the country has alarmed civil liberties advocates.

On Nov. 17, 2007, Vergil Richardson was sitting at a table in the house he owns in the small northeast Texas town of Clarksville, playing dominoes with several relatives, including his half-brother Kevin Calloway, when the front door exploded inward and the living room was flooded with police.

“They just broke into the house,” Vergil recalled recently. “They had guns on us and threw me down on the floor.”

Vergil asked Red River County Sheriff Terry Reed, who was present at the raid―and who was standing alongside the county’s elected prosecutor Val Varley, who was also wearing a flak jacket and carrying a large caliber rifle―to see a search warrant.

The sheriff pulled out a piece of paper, no larger than a Walmart receipt, flashed it toward Vergil’s face, then swiftly tucked it back in his pocket.

Outside the home, Vergil’s older brother, Mark was sitting in a car with a friend, talking. Looking out the window just before 10:30 that night, Mark saw the police coming. They swarmed past the car and up the walk, onto the porch of the house and then went through the door.

“They were dressed like a SWAT team” with black clothes and body armor, he recalled, and carried assault rifles and riot shields.

For some reason, Mark says, the cops didn’t realize anyone was actually sitting in the car. His friend was scared and did not want to get out, but he convinced her to get out of the car with him. At that moment, an officer standing nearby yelled at them to get down on the ground.

Inside the house, Vergil was panicking. He remembered thinking, “what is this?”

It didn’t take long for the answer to surface. A half-hour after the raid began, Vergil Richardson, then 38, Mark Richardson, 40, and Kevin Calloway, then 25, were taken to jail, where each was charged with manufacture of a controlled substance, intent to deliver drugs and organized crime.

Six hours earlier, an undercover policeman had allegedly purchased $200 worth of marijuana from Calloway. With that information, police had prepared a search warrant for the house in Clarksville where, police said, they found small amounts of cocaine and marijuana in the course of the night raid.

Charges Denied

Vergil at the time was the head coach of a high school basketball team in Texarkana, and was no longer living at the Clarksville house. He and Mark vociferously denied any involvement with drugs. And Calloway, who was renting the place from Vergil while going to school in nearby Paris, Texas, backed them up.

Calloway told police that neither of his half-brothers had any idea that he kept drugs in a storage shed behind the house. But the charges against Vergil and Mark were not withdrawn.

It took “three years of hell,” as Vergil and Mark would later describe it, for the charges to be finally dismissed.

But in the process, the case exposed what their lawyer would claim was an abuse of police search and seizure powers, under the so-called “no-knock warrant” procedure.

No-knock warrants are supposed to be reserved for potentially volatile situations where the element of surprise is essential to containing that potential violence. But, the incidence of no-knock warrants, often executed by Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams or SWAT-style narcotics squads – and often with very dangerous, and sometimes deadly, results—has also risen. Since the early 1980s, for example, 40 innocent bystanders have been killed during warrant executions. And according to 2006 research from the CATO Institute, over the previous 15 years there were roughly 200 instances where the raiding party hit the wrong house.

That has paralleled the rise in SWAT raids nationwide. According to CATO Institute Media Fellow Radley Balko, the number of SWAT call-outs averaged 3,000 annual between the 1980s and 2005. Now the annual figure is roughly 50,000.

When are searches legal?

Attorney Mark Lesher, who represented Mark Richardson on the state criminal charges, now represents both brothers in a federal civil rights suit against members of the Clarksville Police Department, the Red River Sheriff’s Office and County Attorney Val Varley.

In a recent interview with The Crime Report., he highlighted two serious problems with the 2007 raid at the Clarksville home.

First, and most striking, is that apparently neither the police nor the prosecutor had a valid search warrant at the time of the raid. According to court filings, the warrant was not issued until nearly 20 minutes after the raid began – which, he said, would explain why no one could produce a valid warrant when Vergil asked to see one.

Lesher said searching the house without a warrant was inexcusable. “You have the county attorney…the sheriff, the police chief” all present at the house, he said. “All three of the top policy-makers for law enforcement in the county are at that house, at that time. All three of them should (have known) that you need to show a search warrant when you get there.”

Prosecutor Varley did not respond to a request for an interview for this story.

Equally troubling, said Lesher, was that even if the warrant had been issued in a timely manner, it was still “defective as a matter of law,” he said.

[ED NOTE: for details of the warrants issued in the Clarksville raid, please click here and here.]

Complicated Law

“The area of search-and-seizure [law] is complicated, but you have to be able to specify articulable facts, from credible folks who are giving reliable information in order to legally justify the search,” Lesher continued, adding that in this case, the earlier pot buy from Calloway had not occurred at the Clarksville house, nor was there any information – credible or otherwise – to suggest that there were additional drugs to be found at the house, or that Calloway was a violent person.

Nonetheless, Lesher says, the county’s justice-of-the-peace signed off on a no-knock warrant, allowing the SWAT-style, heavily-armed coterie of local police to burst into the house without announcing their presence.



Similar questions have arisen in connection with other search-and-seizure raids elsewhere in the country―sometimes with deadly results. In November 2006, an Atlanta Police narcotics squad executing a no-knock warrant shot and killed 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her home.

Johnston, startled by the unannounced entry, had armed herself with a revolver, shooting several of the officers before she was shot in turn. (Each of the officers recovered from their injuries.)

Police claimed that that a confidential informant told them a drug dealer lived at the house. But the informant later came forward to say the police version of the story wasn’t true, and added that they had only contacted him after the shooting in order to justify their botched raid. The city of Atlanta this summer settled a federal lawsuit with Johnston’s family for $4.9 million.

More recently, in July 2008, Prince Georges County, Md., police shot and killed two family dogs inside the home of Berwyn Heights, Md., Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, during a no-knock raid at the couple’s home. Police thought the couple had someone send 32-pounds of marijuana to their home through the mail.

As it turned out, a delivery person in Arizona was responsible for the smuggling operation, which mailed pot to random addresses in Maryland to be picked up by members of the drug-dealing conspiracy.

Given the hit-and-miss success of SWAT-executed no-knock raids, the Cato Institute’s Balko, who is also a senior editor at Reason, a libertarian leaning monthly magazine, said it was lucky that no one inside the Clarksville home the night of the raid was killed,

“Imagine if they’d had a gun in the house for protection and someone was in the back of the house, heard the commotion, [didn't know what was going on] and came out with a gun,” he says. “He’d be dead.”

The Rubber-Stamp Warrant

Unfortunately, says Lesher, the Richardson case was not the first time he’s seen defective no-knock warrants in Red River County. At present, he has “about 10-12 other search warrant affidavits that are” equally as defective as the one in the Richardson case. It happens “all the time,” he says. “It’s called rubber-stamp.”

Despite the serious legal questions surrounding the raid, it took nearly three years for the charges against Vergil and Mark Richardson to be dismissed. Lesher was successful in having Varley recused from trying the case, but even after special appointed prosecutors from the Texas Office of Attorney General recommended that the charges against the brothers be dropped, District Judge John Miller refused to do so.

Lesher claims that Miller tried to make a deal with the attorneys: if they would drop the federal civil rights suit that Lesher had filed against the county and city officials―in which the brothers are seeking at least $2 million in compensation―Miller would then dismiss the state charges. The lawyers refused and Miller set a trial date. Miller did not respond to a request for an interview for this story.

It wasn’t until this October that Lesher and fellow attorney Clyde Lee (who was handling Vergil’s criminal case) were successful in having the charges dismissed. The attorneys had Judge Miller. The new judge, Robert Mohoney, swiftly approved the dismissals.

It was too late to save Vergil’s job, however. A week after the charges made local headlines, he says, his school district fired him. Since then he hasn’t been able to find a job.

“He’s been blackballed,” Lesher says. “Who’s going to have somebody accused of dealing dope [be] a coach for kids?”

All things considered, says Vergil, his half-brother Calloway got off fairly easy. While he and Mark were still trying to have the charges against them dismissed, Calloway was sentenced to 10 years probation. He went to drug rehab and has so far been successful on probation.

The experience has taken a psychological toll as well. Mark says he’s nervous ever time he sees a cop in his rearview mirror, and Vergil says he’s been battling with bouts of depression. Still, the brothers are adamant about pressing forward with their civil rights suit, hoping to stop the local law enforcers from doing the same thing to others.

Vergil says his half-brother Calloway’s involvement with drugs was wrong, “but what they did was wrong also.”

When innocent people become the victims of over-zealous law enforcement, he declares, “How can [the authorities responsible] not face the consequences?”

Jordan Smith is a staff writer for The Austin Chronicle, and a winner of the 2010 John Jay/HF Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Journalism.

"

Northeast Houston residents protest HOA management

Northeast Houston residents protest HOA management: "A group of northeast Houston residents say they are holding a rally to protest the mismanagement of their neighborhood’s homeowners association."

Le Marque | Mayor calls for federal probe of city's books

Mayor calls for federal probe of city's books

By Hayley Kappes and T.J. Aulds

The Daily News

Published November 24, 2010

LA MARQUE — Activist Quanell X joined Mayor Geraldine Sam in calling for a federal investigation into the city’s finances.

City Manager Eric Gage’s authorization of spending more than $77,000 on a series of fact-finding investigations of the fire and police departments is at the center of Sam’s charge.

Gage said he welcomed anyone to review his actions, noting that he called for the investigations after three fire department employees came to him with allegations of racial and sexual harassment.

Tuesday’s gathering with Quanell X, leader of the New Black Panther Nation and New Black Muslim Movement in America, and a group of local ministers at city hall was meant to bring attention to problems in La Marque’s government, Sam said.

“It would be best if the Department of Justice gets involved with what’s happening with the city’s finances,” Quanell X said. “Nobody wants to answer the legitimate questions of what’s going on with the city’s finances.”

The council had not approved spending any amount on the investigations, Sam said.

Gage, who admitted the investigations “cost too much,” said the investigations found the workers who complained were working in a hostile work environment. He turned over the results of that investigation to Police Chief Randall Aragon, who, in his capacity as public safety director, is reviewing the findings and will make recommendations to Gage about what actions to take.

The city manager in turn argued that the mayor would rush off from meetings when he would try to explain to her the details of the investigations.

Sam said Gage withheld the costs and findings of the fire department investigations from her even when she had attorney general opinions that said the information should be released. She has since been given the records requested, but only after an attorney general’s opinion supporting Sam’s contention that as the presiding officer of the city she had every right to know the details of the investigations.

Gage has denied withholding information from Sam and any council member.

Sam and Mayor Pro Tem Keith Bell couldn’t take action on Monday’s council meeting agenda items, which included firing Gage, the city attorney and city clerk.

Councilwoman Connie Trube declined to attend the meeting, preventing the council from establishing a quorum.

Trube’s continued absence would prevent the council from calling an election to fill vacancies left by the recalled Deanie Barrett and Larry Mann, Sam said.

“There are some questions that need to be answered, and Mrs. Trube doesn’t want to be here to answer those questions,” Sam said. “If she doesn’t want to be here, then she’s holding the city of La Marque hostage.”

Trube said Sunday night that it was Sam who was holding the city hostage by taking advantage of the recent recall elections that ousted Barrett and Mann from the council. Trube said Sam’s agenda was “vengeful” and did not move the city forward.

Sam accused Gage of racism, saying he called black city employees “uneducated and unintelligent.”

Gage denied the allegations.

“That comes from a meeting between me, (Barrett) and the mayor several months ago,” Gage said. “I said that given that we found the firemen were acting like animals and that I had been fighting for people in the water department (to get raises) because they had been passed over for raises and promotions because many were uneducated.”

Gage denied his comments were racist and said he was speaking in general terms why water department employees had lost out on pay increases.

Quanell X and ministers at the gathering called personal attacks against the mayor acts of racism.

“I’ve witnessed her treated with disrespect, and that just should not be,” the Rev. James E. Daniels of Rising Star Baptist Church said. “The African-American community has always tried to work in unison with our white counterparts ... Some of the things I’ve seen on (online forums) about her are degrading and downright sinful. I admonish them.”

In particular, Sam complained about Mann’s comments in The Daily News’ online forums referring to her as “Queen Sam.”

“I have never showed him disrespect and have always referred to him as Mr. Mann,” the mayor said Monday night. “My name is not Queen Sam. It is Geraldine Sam, and it is disrespectful to call me that. He might as well have used the N-word.”

Mann said his comments were meant to reflect his opinion that Sam was trying to run the city as a monarch.

“If she wants to think like that, fine; she can’t help herself,” Mann said. “My advice to her is to look up the word ‘Queen’ in the dictionary and if she thinks that is racist? There is no validity in that.

“There is no racism there. Never has been — never will be.”

Man shot in head; police search for shooter

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Repairs underway on Ike-damaged seawall

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Ike stormed ashore on Sept. 13, 2008, leaving behind sinkholes in the sidewalk atop the tourist-popular..."