John Edwards judge refuses to dismiss charges
A federal judge today rejected defense lawyers’ arguments that the case against John Edwards should be thrown out because there “was not one ounce of evidence” that the former presidential candidate broke the law by using nearly $1 million in donations to hide his mistress.
Instead, Edwards’ lawyer Abbe Lowell said the disgraced former senator was simply trying to extricate his family from indignity.”
U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Eagles ruled that the case would continue, ordering the defense to ready witnesses for testimony on Monday.
The judge did not buy Edwards’ lawyers argument that the case should be dismissed because the government failed to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt… that Edwards with knowledge… violated campaign finance laws.”
Edwards is accused of using nearly $1 million from wealthy donors to hide his affair with mistress Rielle Hunter and to keep secret that she gave birth to his baby during his bid for the 2008 presidential nomination.
Edwards, however, contends the donations were personal gifts meant to be used at his discretion, including keeping the affair a secret from his wife.
The prosecution wrapped its case on Thursday after 14 days of testimony. Edwards is charged with six counts of violating the federal campaign finance law. He could be sentenced to a maximum of 30 years in prison and more than $1 million in fines if convicted.
Lowell said Edwards had admittedly lied about an affair with Hunter and fathering a child with her, but the government’s argument that “John Edwards lied about the affair so he lied [about the money]?is too much of an inference.”
“What ounce of proof is there that this money was a campaign contribution?” Lowell asked the judge.
But Eagles recounted testimony from witness John Davis, an Edwards aide, who said he overheard donor Fred Baron telling Edwards on a plane that Hunter was being secreted away in numerous safe houses.
“Isn’t that evidence that John Edwards knew?” the judge asked, signaling she believed that government had enough of a case to continue with the trial.
In arguing to dismiss the case, Edwards’ lawyers previewed the argument they will make in the weeks ahead.
Lowell said the money was not donated to advance Edwards’ presidential campaign but rather to help support his illegitimate child and protect his family from the painful truth.
“Mr. Edwards would have expenses for a baby he fathered, whether there was a campaign or not,” Lowell said.
In 14 days of testimony, the prosecution presented a parade of aides who helped funnel the money from two wealthy donors: Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, a 101-year-old Virginia heiress, and Baron, a trial lawyer who served for a time as Edwards’ campaign treasurer.
Mellon was deemed too old to testify and Baron died in 2008, leaving the prosecution to rely on their confidantes and Edwards’ inner circle of advisers to outline the money’s circuitous trail.
The chief witness for the prosecution was Andrew Young, Edwards’ closest aide, who testified that he solicited money from Mellon, which he used to hide Hunter and her baby in safe houses and upscale hotels across the country, all at Edwards’ bequest.
Edwards’ defense lawyers tried to depict Young as a duplicitous schemer, acting on his own volition, skimming a $1 million for himself, and collecting information, including a sex tape, with which to blackmail his boss.
Young, Lowell said, was a liar “who claimed to talk to [former Secretary of State] Warren Christopher about John Edwards being vice president and that he (Young) was ‘an adviser on Iraq.’”
The government argued that Edwards knew Young and his wife were soliciting donations on his behalf.
“Mr. Edwards knew full well that what he was asking Andrew and Cheri Young to do was against the law,” prosecutors said.
Article source: http://gma.yahoo.com/john-edwards-judge-refuses-dismiss-case-161751927.html
Girls rescued from kidnapper Adam Mayes unharmed
The two Tennessee sisters who were rescued from the man who murdered their mother and older sister have been released from the hospital and will soon undergo questioning by police to find out what happened to them during the past two weeks, according to the FBI.
Alexandria, 12, and Kyliyah Bain, 8, were rescued by the Mississippi Highway Patrol in a densely wooded area Thursday night. Police tracked the girls and his kidnapper, Adam Mayes, 35, to his hideout near the suspect’s Guntown, Miss., home.
In a dramatic confrontation, police repeatedly ordered Mayes to surrender. Instead, he fatally shoot himself in the head.
The girls were then taken to a hospital as a precaution and released today. Police said they were hungry, dehydrated and had poison ivy when they were found.
“The girls were found alive and appear to be unharmed,” Daniel McMullen, the FBI special agent in charge for the state of Mississippi, told reporters. “Officers also apprehended top-10 fugitive Adam Mayes. Preliminary reports indicate Mayes shot himself in the head and was later pronounced dead in an area hospital.”
Mayes is suspected of killing the girls’ mother, JoAnn Bain, and sister, Adrienne Bain, at their Tennessee home on April 27 in order to kidnap the younger girls, whom he thought were his biological children. The girls had been living with JoAnn and her husband, Gary Bain, and were planning to move as a family to Arizona at the end of the school year.
Police and the FBI had been chasing Mayes through Tennessee and Mississippi since the kidnapping, rushing him to their Top 10 Most Wanted fugitives list. Now, authorities will interview the two girls to find out where they have been for the past two weeks and to determine if anyone was helping Mayes hide from police.
During the investigation, police arrested Mayes’ wife, Teresa, and mother, Mary Mayes, in connection with the murder and kidnapping. According to the warrants, Teresa Mayes told police she witnessed Adam kill JoAnn Bain in the garage of the Bain’s home, and then kill Adrienne Bain in the home itself.
Adam and Teresa Mayes then took the dead bodies and two young girls to the Mayes’ home in Mississippi, where Adam Mayes buried the two bodies, the documents state.
The bodies were found earlier this week in the backyard of the home Mayes shares Teresa and his mother and father.
Mayes’ mother-in-law, Josie Tate, earlier said she believed Mayes believed the girls were his own children.
“The reasons they were arguing so much was because there were two little girls that he was absolutely obsessed with. He was claiming those two children were his,” Tate told ABC News affiliate WTVC
Neighbors told a similar story, that Mayes was a close family friend of the Bain family and told people that he was the father of the two youngest girls.
“He made us all think that was his kids,” Andrea Miller, a neighbor and friend of Adam Mayes, told WTVC.
Article source: http://gma.yahoo.com/girls-rescued-kidnapper-released-140828033--abc-news-topstories.html
Student loans and the interest rate debate
Senate Republicans blocked a vote Tuesday on a bill that would have extended the current low 3.4 percent interest rate on Stafford student loans, taking issue with how the Democratic bill would fund the extension. If Congress fails to pass such an extension by July, the rates will double.
Some experts worry that there is a student loan bubble that will collapse when many of those who borrowed money for education cannot find work, causing default rates to skyrocket. The default rate jumped nearly 2 percentage points between fiscal years 2008 and 2009, though the problem wasn’t isolated to student debt; credit card defaults spiked even more, according to the SP/Experian Consumer Credit Default Indices. As Reuters’ Felix Salmon has written, not everyone can agree on how much total debt presently exists, however. Many reports place the figure at over $1 trillion, while the New York Fed, using a sample of data from Equifax, pins the number at $867 billion.
The following infographics present the most important facts and figures for the student loan debate as well as a few examples of what education costs and what sort of salary you can expect with various degrees. Mouse over the bars to see the precise value.
Mortgaging the farm to fund your education is not a blind risk. The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps data on the expected salary of hundreds of different professions and the education required to break into the field, while the Department of Education has tabs on the cost of undergraduate and post-graduate degrees. Below are three handpicked examples. (For master’s and law degrees, one has to factor in the cost of an undergraduate degree as well, of course.)
Education costs and benefits
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/numbers-student-loans-interest-rate-debate-infographic-211152141.html
Obama to discuss his ‘evolving’ view on gay marriage
President Obama will discuss same-sex marriage in an exclusive interview today with “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts. With his “evolving” position in the spotlight, here’s a look back at the various positions he has held on the issue: from appearing to support the unions as a young state senate candidate, opposing them outright as a matter of faith in 2004, to suggesting a shift in line with public opinion:
FEBRUARY 1996: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” reads a typed, signed statement from then-Illinois state senate candidate Obama in response to a questionnaire by the Chicago LGBT newspaper “Outlines.” White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer later publicly disavowed the statement, claiming in June 2011 that the questionnaire was “actually filled out by someone else.”
OCTOBER 2004: ” What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman … What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing something before God, and it’s not simply the two persons who are meeting,” then-U.S. Senate candidate Obama said in an interview with WTTW Chicago public television.
“That doesn’t mean that that necessarily translates into a position on public policy or with respect to civil unions. What it does mean is that we have a set of traditions in place that, I think, need to be preserved, but I also think we need to make sure that gays and lesbians have the same set of basic rights that are in place.
“I don’t think marriage is a civil right,” Obama said when asked whether there’s an inherent right to marry.
OCTOBER 2010: ” I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” President Obama said during an interview with liberal bloggers. “But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships.”
DECEMBER 2010: ” My feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have,” Obama said in response to a question from ABC’s Jake Tapper at a White House press conference.
“I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward,” he said.
JUNE 2011: ” The president has never favored same-sex marriage. He is against it. The country is evolving on this, and he is evolving on it,” Pfeiffer told progressive activists at the Net Roots Nation conference.
JUNE 2011: ” I think it’s important for us to work through these issues because each community is going to be different, each state is going to be different,” Obama said when asked during a White House press conference about New York becoming the latest state to legalize same-sex marriage.
“I think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they’ve got to be treated like every other American,” he said. “And I think that principle will win out. It’s not going to be perfectly smooth, and it turns out that the President – I’ve discovered since I’ve been in this office – can’t dictate precisely how this process moves.”
OCTOBER 2011: “I’m still working on it,” Obama said when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos whether he would move from supporting civil unions for same-sex couples to supporting gay marriage.
“I probably won’t make news right now, George. But I think that there’s no doubt that as I see friends, families children of gay couples who are thriving, you know, that has an impact on how I think about these issues.”
Article source: http://gma.yahoo.com/timeline-obamas-evolving-same-sex-marriage-162626930--abc-news-politics.html
BURGLAR CAUGHT ON TAPE
Ok, so as we were just watching TV a burglar is there and only takes Oreos? Either way we were scared and the burglar still hasn’t been caught!
Edwards trial: blatant lies, sly evasions over affair
John Edwards tried to hide his affair with Rielle Hunter with outright denials but also with sly comments meant to convince his staff that he was not sleeping with the woman while seeking the White House.
Edwards’ lawyers, defending him from charges he broke federal campaign finance laws by using donations to hide his mistress, haven’t contested the fact that he lied. But so many people have testified that he misled them that the lawyers have indicated they will object if the government calls more political staffers to testify about his lies.
Early in his secret romance with Hunter in 2006, Edwards dispatched scheduler Matthew Nelson to pick up Hunter and bring her to Edwards’ home under the pretext that he was going to interview her for a job.
Although Edwards and Hunter had been intimate for a while at this point, the presidential hopeful feigned ignorance of who Hunter was, asking Nelson in a “whispered tone… who the woman is in the neighboring room,” Nelson told the court last week.
John Davis was an Edwards aide who was let in on his boss’ secret on Feb. 5, 2007 when he spotted Hunter in a hotel after she had been dismissed as Edwards’ videographer. A short time later Hunter came to Davis’ room to tell him that “she and John Edwards were very much in love.”
A couple days after that, Edwards also confided in Davis. He said that Hunter had come to see him because she was going on Inside Edition or Access Hollywood to talk about her work on the campaign.
“He told me she was crazy and to make sure she didn’t contact him,” Davis testified. Edwards added without being asked that he was not having an affair with Hunter.
Edwards remained adamant in his denials even after the National Enquirer reported that Hunter had become pregnant.
In a conversation with his campaign’s national spokesman Mark Kornblau, Edwards tried to shift the blame for Hunter’s pregnancy to yet another aide, Andrew Young.
“He told me it was not physically possible that he was the father,” Kornblau testified. He added, “I have a vague recollection of him saying, ‘Do you think it could be Andrew’s child?’”
At times Edwards lies were blatant, denying outright that he was having an affair with Hunter. He was caught in a couple of whoppers when dealing with one of his main benefactors, according to court testimony.
After Edwards’ presidential run was clearly over, he talked about starting a foundation to fight poverty and would seek financial help from Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, several former aides testified.
Mellon was 97 at the time and enamored of Edwards. She had already given him $725,000 for his hush fund and $6 million to his political action committee and a non-profit organization. Young asked Mellon for $40 million to $50 million for the foundation and suggested she could mortgage her home to get the money.
When Mellon made it clear that she was hurt by the financial demands, Edwards called her to apologize. According to Mellon’s confidante Bryan Huffman, Edwards told the woman he was unaware of any plans for a foundation or Young’s request for money.
Huffman also told the court, however, that Edwards had called him and offered Huffman a seat on the foundation’s board of directors.
When Mellon’s lawyer Alex Forger discovered all the checks that were funnelled to Edwards through Huffman, the lawyer confronted Edwards and asked him if he knew Huffman. Edwards said, no, never heard of him.
Edwards later conceded to Forger the money was meant for his personal use.
Article source: http://gma.yahoo.com/john-edwards-blatant-lies-sly-evasions-over-secret-170158930--abc-news-topstories.html
A wounded veteran gets a chance at high-tech help
After being wounded in Iraq and losing his hand, Kyle found his prosthesis useless. ABC News Chief Health and Medical Editor Dr. Richard Besser takes Kyle to Hanger Clinic in New York, to look at the latest in prosthetic technology, to see if Kyle may change his mind. Follow Dr. Besser on Twitter for more health news and tips.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/episode-9--a-high-tech-hand-for-kyle-.html