QUOTE OF THE DAY
”There’s been bad blood between those two for years. Hindsight’s 20/20, but knowing these two guys I ain’t surprised.”
James Moore, the prosecuting attorney for Lee County in Mississippi, on two men embroiled in a case involving poisoned letters sent to President Barack Obama and others Article, 1A
Russians recorded Tsarnaev jihad talk
WASHINGTON - U.S. officials said Russian authorities secretly recorded a conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother.
A second call was recorded between the suspects’ mother and a man under FBI investigation living in southern Russia, according to the officials.
The Russians shared this intelligence with the U.S. in the past few days, they said.
Had the conversations been revealed earlier, there might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the suspects’ family, the officials said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is accused of joining his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now dead, in setting off two bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260. The brothers are ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago with their parents.
American authorities have acknowledged that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, were under investigation before the bombing.
9/11 landing-gear site to be examined
NEW YORK - The medical examiner’s office plans to search for human remains in an alley behind a mosque near the World Trade Center where a landing gear was discovered last week.
The landing gear is believed to be from one of the planes involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed thousands of people.
The chief medical examiner’s spokesman, Ellen Borakove, said the area first will be tested as part of a standard health and safety evaluation for possible toxicity. She said sifting for human remains is to begin Tuesday morning.
Retired Fire Department Deputy Chief Jim Riches, who lost his son in the terrorist attack, visited the site Saturday.
“The finding of this landing gear,” he said, “just goes to show that we need federal people in here to do a comprehensive, full search of lower Manhattan to make sure that we don’t get any more surprises,” as happened in 2007 when body parts were discovered in nearby sewers and manhole covers.
Of the nearly 3,000 victims, Riches noted, about 1,000 families have never recovered any remains.
U.S. argues bin Laden relevant to trial
NEW YORK - Osama bin Laden’s name should not be banned from the terrorism trial of an Egyptian Islamic preacher despite claims by defense lawyers that it would be prejudicial toward their client, the government has told a federal judge.
Federal prosecutors said in court papers filed in U.S. District Court that references to the deceased founder of al-Qaida will not be prejudicial or inflammatory as defense lawyers argued and are important to explaining the case against Mustafa Kamel Mustafa to the jury.
They noted that Mustafa is charged with conspiring to provide or providing material support to al-Qaida and said the fact that bin Laden was the leader of the group at the time “is plainly relevant.”
Mustafa was extradited to the U.S. from Great Britain in October to face charges that he conspired with Seattle men to set up a terrorist training camp at a ranch in Bly, Ore. He also is charged with helping to abduct two American tourists and 14 other people in Yemen in 1998. He has pleaded innocent.
Overseas accounts bring billions to IRS
WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service has recouped more than $5.5 billion under a series of programs that offered reduced penalties and no jail time to people who voluntarily disclosed assets they were hiding overseas, government investigators said.
In all, more than 39,000 tax cheats have come clean under the programs.
But government investigators suspect that thousands of other taxpayers have quietly started reporting foreign accounts without paying any penalties or interest. The number of people reporting foreign accounts to the IRS nearly doubled from 2007 to 2010, to 516,000 accounts, a report by the Government Accountability Office said.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 04/28/2013