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David Siegel, the founder and CEO of real estate company Westgate Resorts on Monday threatened to fire some employees if Barack Obama is reelected and carries out his plan to raise taxes on the so-called rich.
"If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company I will be forced to cut back. This means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.
If you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the "1%"; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country."
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A school district in Texas came under fire earlier this year when it announced that it would require students to wear microchip-embedded ID cards at all times. Now students who refuse to be monitored say they are feeling the repercussions.
Since October 1, students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonia, Texas have been asked to attend class clasping onto photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification chips to keep track of each and every pupil’s personal location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to relax the rampant truancy rates devastating the state’s school and the subsequent funding they are failing to receive as a result, and pending the program’s success the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.
Some pupils say they are already seeing the impact, though, and it’s not one they are very anxious to experience. Students who refuse to walk the schoolhouse halls with a location-sensitive sensor in their pocket or around their neck are being tormented by instructors and being barred from participating in certain school-wide functions, with some saying they are even being turned away from common areas like cafeterias and libraries.
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Drawing the ire of the gun lobby, Cook County Board President Preckwinkle is eyeing a violence tax on guns and ammunition sold in the city and suburbs. The idea is to curb the number of guns in circulation, he said, citing a report issued last summer showing that nearly one-third of the guns recovered on Chicago’s streets were purchased in suburban gun shops. Other statistics are more dire: Murders in Chicago are up 25 percent this year, according to recent police statistics, and the county jail is filling up — with 9,000-plus inmates, nearing the 10,155 capacity.
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Report finds that in-between bouts of feeling you up and stealing your stuff, TSA screeners are slacking off.
Transportation Security Administration screeners routinely failed to check bags for explosives at Honolulu International Airport, a government report said.
The report, issued by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, found "a lack of effective and consistent supervision of TSA screeners by their managers, as well as inconsistent adherence to operating procedures."
Screeners routinely opened bags and inserted TSA luggage screening notifications without actually looking through the bags, and then allowed them to be loaded onto flights carrying hundreds of passengers to destinations all over Asia and the Americas.
ABC noted the instances in which luggage screeners stole items from passengers' bags. Pythias Brown, a former TSA screener who was sentenced to three years in prison, estimated he'd stolen $800,000 in cash and other items while employed as a luggage screener before he was caught.
Brown said the practice was commonplace.
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Two pranksters stole a goat from a petting zoo in Pacific Beach and later returned it after giving it a pedicure.
The entire incident, which occurred at about 2 a.m. Sunday, was caught on surveillance video.
On the video, a woman is seen hopping over a fence at the PB Pumpkin Patch in Pacific Beach to steal a goat.
The video shows the woman scooping up the goat, unlocking the fence and running away. An accomplice is seen in the background.
The next day, the thieves dropped the goat off unharmed. After they dropped off the goat, they left immediately. However, they did dress him up a bit for another day on display with pink painted nails.
Though the owner does not want to press charges, police said they would still like to ask the thieves a few questions.
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