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He said the process of deciding who would be president would follow the same pattern as in the run-up to the last election, when Putin effectively called all the shots and picked Medvedev as his successor. An election took place, but the result was a foregone conclusion.

“Was there any competition in 2007? No. Then we won’t have this in 2012,” Putin said. Smiling broadly, he added: “We will agree because we are people of one stamp. We will take all these things into account and then decide.”

Putin even sought to use Britain as a defence of the Russian example of a ruling elite deciding over the head of the people who should lead the state.

“Look at Great Britain, when a friend of mine [Tony Blair] retired and automatically promoted Gordon Brown to the post of prime minister. Did the people of Great Britain participate in this? There was a change in leadership in the country and they just decided. Whereas when my term expired I supported Dmitry Medvedev because I thought he was the best person to be leader, and I was right.”

The Cook County medical examiner’s office today confirmed that Christopher Kelly of Burr Ridge was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital at 10:46 a.m. The office said Kelly died of salicylate intoxication. According to medical reference guides, salicylates are used in anti-inflammatory and pain relief medications.

Kelly was found in a lumber yard near 173rd Street and Cicero Avenue in Country Club Hills late Friday, said the town’s mayor, Dwight Welch. Kelly arrived at Oak Forest Hospital at 11:15 p.m. Friday, said Marcel Bright, a Stroger Hospital spokesman.

At Oak Forest, he was treated and stabilized and doctors determined he needed additional treatment at Stroger, so he was transferred there by private ambulance, Bright said. Kelly arrived at Stroger at 5:15 a.m.

Kely was treated by doctors and pronounced dead at 10:46 a.m., said hospital spokesman Marcel Bright.

Chicago Police are conducting a death investigation along with Country Club Hills police.

Oak Forest Hospital officials alerted authorities of Kelly’s whereabouts about 3 a.m., Welch said. Police found vomit in the lumber yard parking lot, Welch said.

“We are treating this as a death investigation–it’s a possible homicide or suicide, but it’s a high-profile case so we have a homicide level investigation,” Welch said.

Illinois State Police crime scene investigators called in by Country Club Hills continued to look for evidence in the empty lumber yard parking lot tonight. The remote spot, opposite cicada-filled corn fields near Interstates 57 and 80, was taped off as officers used flashlights to search on hands and knees.

Mayor Welch, who visited the lumber yard today, said detectives were looking for cigarette butts or anything else that might be traced back to potential witnesses or suspects.
An autopsy is scheduled for Sunday, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Earlier today, two sources with knowledge of the situation told the Tribune they have been notified that Kelly died. Kelly is a former confidant and top fundraiser for Blagojevich, who was accused of using his office to leverage campaign donations and benefits for himself and his family.

Blagojevich, who is out of state on his book tour, released a statement through his publicist offering condolences.

“I am deeply saddened to hear that Chris has died. My heart goes out to his wife, Carmen, his three daughters, Grace, Jacqueline, and Claire and his entire family. They are in our prayers,” the statement read.

Kelly’s attorney, Michael Monico, declined to comment today when reached by a Tribune reporter.
Kelly, who was indicted alongside Blagojevich in April, pleaded guilty this week in a separate federal case.

On Tuesday, in a surprise move just a day before his scheduled trial, Kelly, owner of a roofing business, pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud as part of a kickback scheme to illegally obtain $8.5 million in work at O’Hare International Airport.

At the time, Kelly, 51, said he was under pressure from federal prosecutors to cooperate in their investigation of Blagojevich, but he refused.

The device was stationed by San Diego County Sheriff deputies at a recent town hall forum hosted by Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego) in Spring Valley and at a subsequent town hall with Congressman Darrell Issa (R-San Diego). The Davis Rally drew an estimated 1,300-1,500 people, including vocal conservative and liberal protest groups.

A public records search conducted by East County Magazine has confirmed that the device is an LRAD 500-x manufactured by San Diego-based American Technology Corporation (ATC). Capable of use as an effective loudspeaker, the LRAD also has the ability to emit a deafening tone aimed at incapacitating and dispersing a crowd without use of lethal force.

“It’s very concerning,” Kevin Keenan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “ It is fine for the Sheriff’s Department to have new less-than-lethal weapons, but for their interactions with individuals these still-dangerous weapons need to be used only as substitutes for firearms. They can’t be used as just another tool on the tool belt. As we’ve seen with tasers and pepper spray, these types of weapons are being used to subdue people even though they pose the risk of serious physical harm.”

He added, “Even more concerning is having these weapons for public order policing. I can imagine no situation, or am not aware of any situation that’s ever happened in San Diego County or is likely to happen that would justify using these weapons for public order policing to control a crowd. The main effect of having those weapons at public events is to chill people and chill free speech and free association.”

MB Financial Bank, which has more than 80 branches in the Chicago area, agreed to pay a premium of 0.2 percent for the deposits, according to a statement released today by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Corus was seized by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC was named receiver.

…

Regulators are shutting U.S. banks at the fastest pace in 17 years, with 92 failing so far this year. A total of 416 are on the FDIC’s “problem bank” list after failing tests for asset quality, liquidity and earnings in the second quarter, the most since June 1994.

Corus Assets

MB Financial will assume about $3 billion of Corus’s $7 billion in assets, the FDIC said. The deal may cost the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund about $1.7 billion, the agency said.

…

Brickwell Community Bank of Woodbury, Minnesota, was also seized today. CorTrust Bank of Mitchell, South Dakota, will pay a premium for the $63 million in deposits, the FDIC said. Brickwell’s sole branch will open tomorrow as an office of CorTrust. The FDIC and CorTrust entered into a loss-sharing agreement on $65 million of assets, the regulator said.

Prosecutors say the records, once kept at Stanford’s security office in Fort Lauderdale, were hauled away in a 95-gallon bin in February after a federal judge ordered that no company paperwork be destroyed.

The 61-year-old former DEA chief said he was prepared to turn himself over to federal agents Friday on charges of conspiracy and obstruction.

“No one is sorrier than me that it came to this — after spending 32 1/2 years working for the government,” he told The Miami Herald. “But I’m prepared to fight this. I still believe in the system.”

The indictment of the highly decorated former agent is the latest in a series of charges against Stanford and top lieutenants accused of stealing more than $7 billion from investors in a spectacular Ponzi scheme.

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release September 10, 2009

NOTICE
– – – – – – –
CONTINUATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY WITH RESPECT

TO CERTAIN TERRORIST ATTACKS

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2009. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency the former President declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

BARACK OBAMA

Among the Glock-related material the IRS allegedly is examining: boxes of invoices and memos provided by the company’s former senior executive in the U.S., Paul F. Jannuzzo. Once one of the most prominent gun industry executives in America, Jannuzzo said in a federal complaint he filed last year that Gaston Glock used his companies’ complicated structure to conceal profits from American tax authorities. “[Glock] has organized an elaborate scheme to both skim money from gross sales and to launder those funds through various foreign entities,” Jannuzzo alleged in the sealed May 12, 2008, IRS filing, which BusinessWeek has reviewed. “The skim is approximately $20.00 per firearm sold,” according to the complaint. Glock’s U.S. unit, which generates the bulk of the company’s sales, has sold about 5 million pistols since the late 1980s, Jannuzzo estimates in an interview.

A burly man with a staccato delivery, Jannuzzo has several potential motives for airing these allegations. As a whistleblower, he is seeking a percentage of any federal tax recovery. He is also fighting embezzlement charges by his former employer. Since 2007, the company has been providing information about Jannuzzo to authorities in Cobb County, Ga., where Glock’s American subsidiary is based. The Cobb County District Attorney’s Office is prosecuting Jannuzzo—who once represented the company at a White House Rose Garden ceremony and on CBS’ (CBS) 60 Minutes—for siphoning corporate money into a Cayman Islands account. Jannuzzo, who left the company in 2003, claims he’s the victim of a vendetta.

Speaking on behalf of the company and Gaston Glock, Carlos Guevara, the general counsel of Glock Inc. in the U.S., said in a written statement: “Glock has acted lawfully and properly throughout its history. Unfortunately, Glock was victimized by several former employees and fiduciaries,” including Ewert and Jannuzzo. “The Glock companies are exceptionally well-run and managed. Glock’s tax filings and reporting are accurate.”

Still, eyebrow-raising goings-on appear to have been standard at Glock. After the attempt on Gaston Glock’s life, an internal investigation conducted at his instruction turned up documents apparently showing that a Glock affiliate in Panama helped in 1995 to start a bank called Unibank Offshore in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Unibank’s co-founder was an alleged money launderer named Hakki Yaman Namli.

In the U.S., Jannuzzo and another former Glock executive, Peter S. Manown, have claimed that for years they distributed company funds to their wives and Glock employees with the understanding that the money would be donated to congressional candidates—an apparent violation of U.S. election law. The ex-executives, who say they acted with Gaston Glock’s approval, have estimated the total amount in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Buttressing this allegation are ledger entries and cancelled checks. Guevara, the company lawyer, said: “Glock has never authorized, and would never authorize, any act that would violate U.S. campaign finance laws.”

Glock’s political and public relations activities in the U.S. sometimes have tended toward strangeness. Internal records show payments of thousands of dollars a month over several years to a gun industry lobbyist named Richard Feldman. In interviews, Feldman says that at Gaston Glock’s request he spent some of the money in 1999 and 2000 to arrange U.S. appearances by Jörg Haider, then the leader of Austria’s anti-immigrant, far-right Freedom Party. Glock has been described in Austria as a political supporter of Haider, although the arms maker has sued both an Austrian newspaper and a politician there for making that claim. The arrangements Feldman says he worked on included Haider’s attendance at a January 2000 banquet in New York honoring the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The King dinner, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, received media coverage because Hillary Clinton criticized her then-rival for a New York Senate seat, Rudolph Giuliani, for attending the celebration Haider present.

Before he died in a car accident last year, Haider stirred controversy, according to media reports, for praising the “character” of elite Nazi SS troops and the “employment policy” of Adolph Hitler. “Glock urged me to help Haider overcome some of the [image] problems,” says Feldman. The lobbyist says he thoroughly researched the situation to satisfy himself that neither Glock nor Haider ever supported the Nazi cause. “There were loose statements [by Haider] that were blown out of proportion,” he says.

Glock’s Guevara did not respond to questions about the company’s or Gaston Glock’s relationship with Haider.

…

In recent years, the gun company’s U.S. operation has been rattled by scandal. Local authorities in Georgia have prosecuted Jannuzzo and fellow former executive Peter Manown at the behest of their former employer. On Oct. 18, 2007, Manown, an attorney who handled many of Gaston Glock’s personal matters in the U.S., testified that he and Jannuzzo had embezzled company funds and funneled the money to accounts in the Cayman Islands. He said the pair also skimmed money from Glock real estate transactions. And Manown said he and Jannuzzo had withdrawn more than $500,000 from Glock accounts for political campaign contributions from 1993 to at least 2003. The executives put some of that cash in their own pockets, he testified. “There was so much money flying around in this company,” Manown said. “It was like Monopoly money.” He recounted confessing his transgressions privately to Gaston Glock back in 2003 and repaying some of the stolen money. The former Glock executive pled guilty in 2008 to theft and received a suspended 10-year sentence.

In connection with the campaign contributions, Manown testified that Gaston Glock knew what his underlings were doing: “This was all done with Mr. Glock’s blessing.” Manown said he and Jannuzzo would withdraw cash for political contributions from a Glock account at the since-closed Summit Bank (SBGA) in Atlanta. Sometimes the Glock executives withdrew “$9,000 so it would stay under the reporting radar of the bank,” Manown said. He was referring to the federal anti-money laundering rule that requires banks to report to the Treasury Dept. any cash withdrawal of $10,000 or more. Purposely evading the requirement is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.