Michael David Barrett, the accused stalker and criminal voyeur of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews will be arraigned in federal court on Monday, November 23, 2009.

The latest in a series of sordid charges against the 48-year-old Chicago-area Combined Insurance employee suggests that the nude videos Barrett secretly record of Andrews in hotel rooms where not simply a one-time occurrence,

Rather, it now appears that Barrett relentlessly stalked Andrews for more than a year.

Wanda Barzee, a co-defendant in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case, pleaded guilty to several criminal charges in federal court today in exchange for a reduced prison sentence recommendation and her cooperation with prosecutors in the kidnapping, sexual assault, and violence case when Smart was 14-years-old.

Instead of life in prison, Barzee will receive a 15-year (180-month) federal prison sentence, and plead guilty to Utah state kidnapping charges.

Here is what Barzee admitted to in U.S. District Court:

The US Senate is scheduled to vote on cloture today for the nomination of U.S. District Judge David F. Hamilton to a seat on the Seventh Circuit.  Leading Republicans have so far filibustered the nomination in response to what they see as Hamilton's liberal social agenda, and have vowed to keep the filibuster going as long as possible.

Never mind the fact that Hamilton has been lauded as a moderate by both Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar - a Republican from Hamilton's home state - and the president of Indiana's chapter of the conservative Federalist Society.  Lugar plans to cross party lines and vote for a motion that will allow a final vote on Hamilton's nomination.

Also disregard the fact that the GOP condemned the Democrats' use of the filibuster to block several of George Bush's judicial nominees, even going so far as to call it unconstitutional and threatening to remove the use of filibusters from the judicial confirmation process altogether.

A federal judge in Utah ruled that a defendant accused of tampering and falsely bidding upon oil and gas leases offered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management cannot present a 'necessity defense' a/k/a 'lesser of two evils defense' at trial.

Timothy DeChristopher sought to argue that his submission of winning auction bids on BLM federal oil and gas leases that he never intended to honor was justified because, he maintained, extracting oil and gas from federal lands would exacerbate global warming and climate change.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ('KSM'), the reputed al Qaeda plotter of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be put on trial in federal court in Manhattan, one site of the Sept. 11th attacks, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced this morning.

Four other Guantanamo Bay detainees -- Walid Muhammed Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi -- will also be tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Not only will KSM still face prosecution in the SDNY for his reputed role in the 9/11 attacks, but he is likely to also face outstanding charges in a secret 1996 indictment for his alleged role in the 1994 'Bojinka' plot -- described by the 9/11 Commission as "the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jumbo jets over the Pacific during a two-day span."

Prosecutors are likely to face defense challenges over KSM's waterboarding while he is was in U.S. Custody. But according to National Public Radio's Dina Temple-Raston, "he actually admitted before being tortured that he was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks."

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."

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.