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Former NYPD Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik pleaded guilty today in a federal court in a case accusing him of criminal conspiracy, tax fraud, making a host of false statements to both federal agents and New York City investigators, and lying on a loan application for his New York City apartment.  According to his plea agreement, Kerik could get from 27 to 33 months in federal prison under sentencing guidelines.

The disgraced former N.Y.C. top cop was accused of making multiple false statements to White House and other federal officials when he applied for an advisor position to former President Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council and in connection with his nomination to be Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security.

He was also charged with illegally receiving $255,000 in renovation work to his apartment from a contractor who wanted to do business with the City government, falsely telling regulators that the company did not have ties to organized crime, and failing to disclose these six-figure benefits in his financial disclosure forms.

Read Kerik's plea agreement here:

Accusing Silicon Valley's Intel (NYSE: INTC) of "bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market," New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed an antitrust lawsuit against the chip-making giant.

How serious were the threats? Cuomo's lawsuit says that a February 2004 Dell internal e-mail charged that Intel executives, then CEO and Chairman Craig Barrett, and current CEO Paul Ottelini (inset, left to right) "are prepared for jihad if Dell joins the AMD exodus."

A 24-year-old Illinois man already facing a host of criminal charges flipped off a judge during his court arraignment, earning himself six months in county jail for contempt of court.

McHenry County Circuit Court Judge G. Martin Zopp reportedly gave Kane Kellet (see below) a cussing freebee at his initial court hearing Saturday morning. According to State's Attorney Louis Bianchi, Judge Zopp asked Kellet. "'Sir, do you have an attorney?" to which the suspect replied "F--- no.'"

So what prompted him to give the judge the finger?

Today the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of James Ford Seale, the ex-Ku Klu Klan member, former Mississippi policeman and sheriff's deputy who was indicted and convicted for his role in the kidnappings and brutal murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in the summer of 1964.

According to a report in the Jackson Free Press, "the FBI investigation of the Dee-Moore case yielded more than 1,000 pages of files, including informant accounts." In November 1964, then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson's Special Assistant Bill Moyers, that Seale and fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards ""willfully, unlawfully, feloniously and with malice aforethought [for] killing" Dee and Moore.

Seale was never charged until more than forty years later. 

A federal appeals court ruled that private Mississippi Gulf Coast residents and private landowners can sue an oil company and other defendants for global warming-related damages to their property.

Alleging a chain of causation between the defendants' substantial emissions and injury to their property, they maintain that the companies used their property so as to produce massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, which then injured both plaintiffs and the general public by contributing to global warming, caused the sea level rise and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina.

Luqman Ameen Abdullah, the reputed head of the Masjid al-Haqq mosque in Detroit, Michigan, was killed in a firefight with FBI agents yesterday after federal law enforcement officials converged upon a warehouse to arrest Abdullah and his followers on criminal conspiracy charges following a two-year long investigation

According to the criminal complaint in the case (see below), Abdullah and his "group of mostly African-American converts to Islam [sought] to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States."

The criminal charges against Abdullah, a previously convicted felon, charged that he discussed an attack on SuperBowl XL, blowing himself up if confronted by law enforcement, and dealt in stolen merchandise. "Abdullah and his followers have trained regularly in the use of firearms and continue to train in martial arts and sword fighting," an FBI agent alleged after receiving information from at least three (3) FBI informants during the investigation.