An Arkansas man has been arrested on suspicion of capital murder after he told police he stabbed his wife to death for changing the television channel.
Tony Thomas, 58, of Carlisle, went outside to smoke and noticed the channel had been changed from the football game he had been watching.
Thomas asked his wife, Elke, what the score was before things escalated into an argument, according to a court document obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Thomas reportedly told police that his wife started the argument by yelling at him before he grabbed a knife and stabbed her, court documents state.
“He claimed he’d blacked out and when he ‘came to,’ he was over her with a knife in his hands,” according to an affidavit from the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office.
Court documents state that the 58-year-old suspect called the sheriff’s office and requested the dispatcher bring a “meat wagon and police” because he stabbed his wife.
One witness said she “heard glass break” and “saw Tony stabbing Elke” when she walked into the living room.
Deputies say they found Elke’s body covered in a blanket and tarp in the couple’s backyard and a knife near the body.
“He admitted to dragging her outside and calling the sheriff’s office,” Anthony Counts, a detective with the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office, wrote in the affidavit.
Chuck Graham, the Lonoke County prosecuting attorney, said that Thomas was charged as a habitual offender because of his rap sheet of felony crimes.
Thomas is being held on a $1 million bond in the Lonoke County jail, according to Fox News. It is not clear whether Thomas has retained an attorney. He is scheduled to appear in court January 22.
These people all need to be locked up for even talking about DACA.
By Erin Coates
A memo circulated by the Center for American Progress Action Fund revealed what Democrats really think about “Dreamers” protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
According to the memo, protecting illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. at a young age is critical for the Democratic Party to retain what power it still has, according to The Daily Caller.
“The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success,” the memo read.
Ryan Saavedra
✔
@RealSaavedra
LEAKED MEMO: The Center For American Progress (CAP) Action Fund admits that “DREAMers” are a “critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”
The memo was co-authored by Jennifer Palmieri, former White House director of communications and the director of communications for the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, and sent to Democrat allies.
It asserted that “saying you support Dreamers just isn’t enough” anymore.
“This time, Democrats need to stand with Dreamers and do whatever it takes to ensure they remain in this country,” it said. “Democrats should refuse to offer any votes for Republican spending bills that do not offer a fix for Dreamers and instead appropriate funds to deport them.”
As the memo revealed, the Democrats need the votes of people previously protected by DACA.
“Latinos are a critical part of the progressive coalition and progressive leaders have to step up and fight for them,” it read. “If Democrats can’t even stand up to Trump and Republicans in defense of Dreamers … they will leave a lot of progressives wondering who the Democrats will fight for.”
The Trump administration announced in September it was ending the DACA program, which was initiated under former President Barack Obama in 2012.
President Donald Trump gave Congress six months to address the legal status of the approximately 800,000 individuals registered in the program.
In December, Trump made it clear that any deal concerning those protected by the DACA will also involve building a border wall.
@realDonaldTrump
The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc. We must protect our Country at all cost!
Protecting DACA is imperative for future Democratic Party success, according to the memo.
“If Democrats don’t try to do everything in their power to defend Dreamers, that will jeopardize Democrats’ electoral chances in 2018 and beyond,” it read. “In short, the next few weeks will tell us a lot about the Democratic Party and its long-term electoral prospects.”
Disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer threatened to knife a patron in the privates at a posh Midtown eatery for praising his longtime foe, philanthropist Kenneth Langone, according to the allegedly aggrieved diner.
Jamie Antolini said he was with potential business partners at Avra Madison Estiatorio on E. 60th St, near 5th Ave, when he spied Spitzer, who resigned as governor in 2008 after he was outed as the high-priced prostitution patron “Client 9.”
“Spitzer lost his mind,” Antolini told the Daily News.
“I’m going to f–king stab you with a f–king knife in the c–k,” the 48-year-old recalled Spitzer spewing during the Jan. 2 flap.
Spitzer was walking by Antolini’s table when he heard the diner lauding Langone — the billionaire who helped launch Home Depot — as an “amazing guy,” Antolini said.
“All I said was, ‘Ken Langone would have been the best President ever,’” Antolini recalled.
He didn’t dare turn to look at Spitzer as the heated spat dragged on for 20 minutes, in Antolini’s account. Security eventually escorted Spitzer out of the upscale Greek restaurant, he said.
“I never left my seat. When the video tapes come out, it will show I sat in my chair with a glass of wine in my hand,” said Antolini.
Jamie Antolini said he encountered Spitzer at a Manhattan restaurant on Jan. 2 during a business meal.
(ASTRID STAWIARZ/GETTY IMAGES)
Antolini, who said he never saw a blade, did not file a police report, and the NYPD had no record of the counter.
“This guy’s got issues, real problems,” Antolini quipped.
But Lisa Linden, a spokeswoman for Spitzer, blamed the brouhaha on Antolini and said Spitzer was simply there to celebrate his mother’s 90th birthday.
“The patron persisted in making aggressive remarks, which Mr. Spitzer initially ignored. An argument ensued, but at no time did he make any threats,” she said in a statement.
An employee who answered the phone at the restaurant where the fracas took place declined to comment.
Spitzer was accused of attacking and threatening Russian bombshell Svetlana Travis Zakharova in her Plaza Hotel room after she told him she was returning to her homeland.
Zakharova, 27, was arrested later that year on charges that she blackmailed Spitzer out of nearly $400,000 and threatened to reveal their relationship to the media and his family. On Friday, she gave NYPD detectives an 18-second recording of what her lawyer said is the Spitzer berating and threatening her during a February 2016 phone call.
If Donald Trump signs this that means he lied about putting America First.
The president said lawmakers should “put country before party” in push to tighten border-control laws in exchange for providing legal status to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
WASHNGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump declared Tuesday he wants Congress to pass a “bill of love” to protect younger undocumented immigrants from deportation, but he reiterated his demands for a border wall and cuts to legal immigration that Democrats have opposed.
Ahead of a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers at the White House, Trump challenged them to “put country before party” in his push to tighten border-control laws in exchange for providing legal status to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, a group known as “dreamers.”
“I really do believe Democrat and Republican, the people sitting in this room, really want to get something done,” Trump said.
WASHNGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump declared Tuesday he wants Congress to pass a “bill of love” to protect younger undocumented immigrants from deportation, but he reiterated his demands for a border wall and cuts to legal immigration that Democrats have opposed.
Ahead of a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers at the White House, Trump challenged them to “put country before party” in his push to tighten border-control laws in exchange for providing legal status to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, a group known as “dreamers.”
“I really do believe Democrat and Republican, the people sitting in this room, really want to get something done,” Trump said.
This is what liberals do. They waste taxpayers damn money.
DeWitt, N.Y. — In 2014, the development arm of SUNY Polytechnic Institute agreed to build, with $90 million in state money, a factory in DeWitt for an LED light bulb manufacturer.
The company, California-based Soraa, agreed to create 250 full-time, high-tech jobs at Collamer Crossing Business Park and to encourage Soraa contractors and suppliers to create another 170 jobs in Central New York.
In return, the company would be allowed to lease the factory for $1 a month for 10 years.
But the deal with SUNY Poly’s Fort Schuyler Management Corp. did not require Soraa to spend any of its own money to build or equip the factory. And it contained no penalties if the company did not occupy the building or create the promised jobs. The company never even signed a lease.
So when Soraa recently said it no longer needed the factory and pulled out of the deal just as the state was completing construction of the 82,000-square-foot building, there was nothing the state could do about it.
The state was left with a factory, nearly fully equipped, but no company to use it.
One expert said using state money to custom-build a factory for a specific tenant is bad policy.
Obama did the same thing with Solyndra and liberals said nothing. Look at the beautiful facility that Socialist liberals built for nothing.
“You have a situation where the state could potentially wind up with a white elephant,” said John Bacheller, former head of policy and research for the state’s economic development office, Empire State Development. “I think it’s too much risk. When you provide a grant, the risk is limited to the amount of the grant.”
The state has found another company, but taxpayers will have to spend up to another $15 million to properly equip the building for the new company.
This time, state officials say they won’t repeat the mistake made in DeWitt again.
Empire State Development, a state economic development agency, took over the project from SUNY Poly a year ago after the college’s president, Alain Kaloyeros, was arrested on corruption charges and resigned from the university. ESD said a deal with a new tenant will include financial penalties if the company fails to meet its job commitments.
Alain Kaloyeros, seen here during a visit to Syracuse Media Group in 2015, was president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute when the college agreed to build a $90 million factory in DeWitt for Soraa, a California-based LED lighting manufacturer. He resigned in 2016 after he was arrested on corruption charges. (Ellen M. Blalock | syracuse.com)
Jason Conwall, a spokesman for ESD, said the penalties, or “clawbacks,” will be included in a grant disbursement agreement with NexGen Power Systems, a California start-up. ESD’s board of directors voted Dec. 21 to approve a grant of up to $15 million to NexGen for tooling and equipment for the factory.
In return, the company has pledged to create 290 full-time, high-tech jobs for the production of semiconductors at the facility and agreed to invest $40 million of its own money into the building. It will pay rent of $1 the first year and increasing amounts up to full market value in the 10th year, ESD officials said.
Conwall said the grant will be contingent on the company meeting its job commitments. Details of the grant’s terms will not be available until the grant disbursement agreement is executed later this month, but they will follow ESD’s standard practice of requiring companies to return a grant, or portions of it, if they fail to meet hiring milestones, he said.
ESD’s agreements generally require a company to meet a certain minimum amount of their job commitments within a specified period or be required to return a grant. In some cases, a company is required to return only a portion of the money if it falls just a little short of its hiring commitments.
ESD officials said no such “clawbacks” were put into SUNY Poly’s deal with Soraa because none of the $90 million in state grants used to build the factory went directly to Soraa. All of the money went into the building, which is still owned by the state, so there was no money to take back from the company, they said.
Former state budget director Robert Megna, who was appointed president of the non-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corp. in February 2017 following Kaloyeros’s departure, said the fact that Fort Schuyler retained ownership of the building was a good thing.
“While we can’t speak to the reasoning behind all the terms of the agreement with Soraa, which were made by the previous leadership, the facility was constructed to accommodate Soraa’s gallium nitride lighting business and no funding was provided to Soraa,” he said in a statement.
“All state funds were provided to the not-for-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corporation, and the building and the equipment are all owned by FSMC on behalf of New York State,” he said. “This model enabled the state to quickly adjust to changes in a very dynamic industry and make the facility available to NexGen for its production of gallium nitride semiconductor devices, modules and systems.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at the Central New York Hub for Emerging Nano Technologies in DeWitt on Oct. 29, 2015, during his announcement LED lighting manufacturer Soraa would operate a state-built, $90 million factory in DeWitt. (Stephen D. Cannerelli | syracuse.com)
Conwall said Empire State Development takes a much different approach. It provides grants to assist companies with the cost of building facilities in the state, but it does not go the riskier route of building entire factories for them, he said.
He said ESD was fortunate to have found a new tenant to go into the DeWitt building. NexGen plans to make semiconductor power devices from gallium nitride, the same material that Soraa uses to make LED lighting. That means that NexGen can use much of the equipment already installed in the factory.
“It worked out because we owned the facility and found another tenant quickly that aligned really well,” the ESD spokesman said.
Though ESD has agreed to provide up to $15 million to NexGen for the purchase of tools and equipment, some of the $7 million not yet spent from the original $90 million in grants for the building could be used toward that $15 million commitment, he said. (The state had spent about $83 million of the $90 million on the factory and equipment by the time Soraa pulled out, officials said.)
NexGen was formed in California last year to make semiconductors for the electronics industry. It does not yet manufacture anything. The DeWitt facility will be its first manufacturing operation.
Dinesh Ramanathan, NexGen’s president and CEO and one of its founders, also was CEO of Avogy Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that planned to make power sources for electronic devices such as computers.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in 2016 that Avogy had committed to moving from California to a state-owned cleanroom facility in Rochester that the state agreed to upgrade with a $35 million investment of state money. The state never made the investment, however, and Avogy never made the move.
Avogy went out of business later in 2016. NexGen bought its technology and is starting up with new money from investors, according to Ramanathan.
NexGen has not publicly disclosed who its investors are.
Prior to Avogy, Ramanathan served as the executive vice president at Cypress Semiconductor for almost nine years, where he managed the company’s Programmable Systems Division and its Data Communications Division, according to NexGen’s website.
Prior to joining Cypress, Ramanathan held senior marketing and engineering positions at Raza Microelectronics; Raza Foundries, described as an “incubating venture capital company”; and Forte Design Systems, an electronic design automation company, according to the website.
ESD officials said they are confident that NexGen will succeed in DeWitt.
“NexGen is led by a management team and investors with a proven record and decades of combined experience building and operating high-tech businesses,” Empire State Development President, CEO and Commissioner Howard Zemsky said in a statement. “This gives us the confidence that the company will meet its commitment to bring hundreds of new, good-paying jobs to Central New York.”
The state may be fortunate in this case if NexGen is able to use the factory constructed for Soraa. But custom-built factories can be hard to sell or lease if a tenant walks away, Bacheller said.
The state should always require companies to invest more money into a project than the state does so they have a strong motivation to stick around and make the development work, he said.
“You always want the company to have skin in the game,” he said.
He said SUNY Poly may also have made a mistake constructing a factory for an LED light bulb maker, given the fact that LED light bulb production is increasingly dominated by low-cost Chinese manufacturers who have brought the price of LED bulbs almost down to that of incandescents.
“Unless you’re in a niche that the Chinese aren’t in, it’s the kind of business that is very risky,” he said.
NexGen says its semiconductor devices can be used in a wide array of applications such as LED power supplies, solar inverters, data centers and automotive applications.
The company will be getting the use of a building with up to $105 million in state money invested in it. NexGen’s capital investment will be far less by comparison – $40 million.
Bacheller said the state appears to be taking a substantial risk with NexGen, given that the company is a start-up with no manufacturing or sales track record of its own. However, he said Empire State Development may be making the best deal it could after inheriting a bad situation from SUNY Poly.
“They’ve already got a building up and they’re stuck with it,” he said.
Soraa walks away from $90M factory that NY built; $15M more brings new tenant
Soraa said they would not come without “tens of millions” in additional money from NY state.
Liberals are the most racist and violent in the country.
Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, canceled a speaking engagement at a major technology industry event days before it was scheduled to place because of death threats, according to a report Thursday.
Two unnamed agency sources told Recode why Pai pulled the appearance at the annual Consumer Electronics Show Las Vegas on Jan. 9 one day after it was reported he had canceled.
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The report said that federal law enforcement had looked into the situation and other FCC offices would be briefed.
While the FBI did not immediately respond to Recode, a spokesperson for the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the event, declined to comment, and an FCC spokesman for Pai said the agency does “not comment on security measures or concerns.”
The nature of the threats are unclear, but it is the second time in recent weeks Pai has dealt with imminent security concerns.
The FCC briefly halted its meeting in December and evacuated the room in response to a security scare as the commissioners were about to vote to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality rules.
Within minutes the meeting reconvened and the agency successfully killed the Internet regulations on a party-line vote, despite a great deal of opposition from Democrats, consumers, and technology giants.
Pai, who spearheaded the repeal effort, also received death threats during the public comment period.
