A federal arbitrator ruled in March that an employer had, for years, "willfully" violated the Fair Labor Standards Act in exploiting workers by failing to pay overtime. The guilty employer: the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Justice Run Amok
Extreme Behavior
Army Sgt. Erik Roberts, 25, was injured in Baghdad in 2006 by a roadside bomb, and his leg required 12 surgeries before supposedly healing, but last year a life-threatening infection was discovered in the leg. Roberts underwent a 13th surgery that was covered by his private health insurance, but a costly, rigorous antibiotics regimen was subject to a $3,000 co-pay, which Roberts asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to take care of, but the agency repeatedly refused, in that Roberts had gone outside the "system" to save his war-ravaged leg. Only when a CNN reporter called the matter to the attention of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown in March did the agency relent.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that a March meeting of the Medina, Ohio, City Council required a recess when all members engaged in serial giggling over one person's flatulence.
Bad Decisions: Chrysler Corp. may be on its last legs as a stand-alone company, but that did not stop its representatives from disrupting a funeral proceeding in Cranbury, N.J., in March to subpoena the corpse (which the company said is relevant to a pending lawsuit over mesothelioma).
Retired rogue New York City police detectives Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito, who were convicted in 2006 of assisting the Mafia for many years (including with assassinations), were sentenced to life in prison plus 80 to 100 additional years. However, because the men retired from the force before they had been charged with crimes, they are entitled by law to their lifetime pensions of $5,313 a month and $3,896 a month, respectively.
It is not just that the secretary of the Treasury owed back taxes for years, or that two other presidential cabinet-level nominees owed back taxes. In January, federal prosecutors revealed that District of Columbia Council member Marion Barry, who was already on probation after a 2005 conviction for failing to file tax returns for the years 1999 through 2004, and subsequently almost tauntingly failed to file a return for 2006, has now doubled-down the taunt by failing to file for 2007. And in March, a Georgia state senator proposed punishment for the 22 members of the legislature who either owed back taxes or had failed to file returns for at least one year since 2002. The 22 were not identified, in compliance with privacy laws, but the Senate's Democratic leader, Robert Brown, outed himself as one of the 22 in the course of calling his scolding colleague a "bloodsucker."
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Operation Repo
The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest
Inside American Jail
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