Kushner Cos. fined $210K by New York for false documents
NEW YORK — The Kushner family real estate company has been fined $210,000 by New York City regulators following an Associated Press investigation that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds.
The city buildings department on Monday fined the Kushner Cos. for filing 42 false applications for construction work on more than a dozen buildings when presidential adviser Jared Kushner ran the business.
The false documents allowed the company to escape extra scrutiny during construction that watchdog group Housing Rights Initiative has said led to harassment of low-paying, rent-regulated tenants to get them to leave.
The Kushner Cos. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ungodly espionage: Russian hackers targeted Orthodox clergy
LONDON — The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor last month have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world’s most senior Orthodox Christian figures, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine.
The targets included top aides to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who often is described as the first among equals of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Christian leaders.
The Istanbul-based patriarch is currently mulling whether to accept a Ukrainian bid to tear that country’s church from its association with Russia, a potential split fueled by the armed conflict between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The AP’s evidence comes from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied last year by Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.
The AP has been mining the data for months, uncovering how a group of Russian hackers widely known as Fancy Bear tried to break into the emails of U.S. Democrats , defense contractors , intelligence workers , international journalists and even American military wives . In July, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, a U.S. grand jury identified 12 Russian intelligence agents as being behind the group’s hack-and-leak assault against Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Judge blocks online plans for printing untraceable 3-D guns
A U.S. judge in Seattle blocked the Trump administration Monday from allowing a Texas company to post online plans for making untraceable 3D guns, agreeing with 19 states and the District of Columbia that such access to the plastic guns would pose a security risk.
The states sued to stop an agreement that the government had reached with Austin, Texas-based Defense Distributed, saying guidelines on how to print undetectable plastic guns could be acquired by felons or terrorists.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik extended a temporary restraining order, and his new decision will last until the case is resolved. He said Cody Wilson, owner of Defense Distributed, wanted to post the plans online so that citizens can arm themselves without having to deal with licenses, serial numbers and registrations.
Wilson has said that “governments should live in fear of their citizenry.”
“It is the untraceable and undetectable nature of these small firearms that poses a unique danger,” Lasnik said. “Promising to detect the undetectable while at the same time removing a significant regulatory hurdle to the proliferation of these weapons — both domestically and internationally — rings hollow and in no way ameliorates, much less avoids, the harms that are likely to befall the states if an injunction is not issued.”
Judge in 9/11 case at Guantanamo retires from military
MIAMI — The slow-moving Sept. 11 war-crimes case at Guantanamo has outlasted the judge.
Army Col. James Pohl announced his retirement from the military on Monday, ending a career that culminated with his presiding over the military commission trial of five prisoners at the U.S. base in Cuba accused of planning and aiding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Pohl has presided over the case since the May 2012 arraignment and the ensuing years of pre-trial hearings. No trial date has been set in the death-penalty case.
He was also the judge in an earlier version of the commission under President George W. Bush that was halted before trial as well as other major military cases, including the courts-martial resulting from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.
The Guantanamo military commission is considered one of the most complex criminal proceedings in U.S. history, set in a courtroom encased in sound-proof glass that is designed to prevent inadvertent disclosures of classified evidence with a 40-second delay of sound.
Official: Fireworks, cigarettes may have caused deadly blaze
CHICAGO — Investigators seeking the cause of Chicago’s deadliest fire in well over a decade were searching the porch area where the blaze started for evidence of fireworks, cigarettes or other smoking materials, a fire official said Monday.
Fire department spokesman Larry Langford said children had been known to have set off fireworks from the porch of the Southwest Side apartment that caught fire before dawn on Sunday, killing six children and two adults and leaving a boy and a man in “very” critical condition. People had also used the spot to smoke cigarettes, he said.
Although investigators haven’t determined what caused the fire, they don’t think it was deliberately set and they have ruled out any problems with the building’s electrical wiring, Langford said. He also it quickly became clear that the lack of any working smoke detectors turned the fire deadly.
“Because of where it started, (on the rear porch of a rear building), if they had at least one smoke detector, they would have woken up and walked out the front door,” Langford said. “They could have grabbed everyone and made it out a stairway and outside (because) they had a clear shot at the front door.”
Investigators believe some of the kids who were killed in the fire were at the home for a sleepover, he said.
