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Arlington police have arrested the Oak Ridge police chief Wednesday, charging him with solicitation of a prostitute under the age of 18.
The Arlington Police Department’s Crimes Against Children Unit launched an investigation into an outcry made by a juvenile, police say, and based on the investigation results, arrested Oak Ridge Police Chief Thomas Peoples, 55.
Police say the investigation is still ongoing and detectives are still pursuing investigative leads.
Oak Ridge Mayor Al Rudin confirmed Peoples was fired based on his arrest yesterday.
Jonathan Skolnick was sentenced today to 15 years in prison for enticing minor children to send him nude and sexually explicit photographs and videos of themselves over the Internet. On April 5, 2022, Skolnick pled guilty.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “For approximately seven years, Jonathan Skolnick abused his position of trust as an associate principal and teacher in New York City schools by posing as a teenage girl online and successfully enticing minor victims, including his own students, to send him child pornography. This lengthy prison sentence holds Skolnick accountable for his horrific crimes and the extraordinary harm and trauma he caused to many minor victims and their families.”
The United States will rename nine military bases that honor Confederate officers after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed off on the move, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced on Oct. 6.
In a press release, the DOD said the bases will be renamed by no later than January 2024.
The decision comes after the Naming Commission, established by Congress last year to plan for the removal of Confederate-linked “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America, completed its analysis on Sept. 19.
The commission is made up of eight volunteers selected by Congress and the defense secretary.
Following 18 months of work, which included “extensive consultations with experts, historians, and the communities rooted in the bases in question,” it found nine Army bases that were named in commemoration of the Confederacy and its leaders.
“The installations and facilities that our Department operates are more than vital national security assets. They are also powerful public symbols of our military, and of course, they are the places where our Service members and their families work and live,” Austin wrote in a memo on the decision on Thursday.

A pile of gold teeth, which Ukraine alleged had been pulled from civilians by Russian troops to torture them, actually belonged to a local dentist, Bild reported on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry posted a picture on Twitter of what it called “a torture chamber” in Peski Radkovskiye, a town in Kharkov Region. The photo depicted a gas mask, which, according to the ministry, was used to torture the local population, and a box of gold dental crowns lying on the grass.
“How many more will be found in occupied Ukraine?” it asked, hinting that it was Russian troops who had committed the atrocities.
However, according to Bild, the teeth apparently belonged to patients of a local dentist, not to Ukrainian torture victims.
“These teeth look like those stolen from my collection,” Sergey, 60, told the outlet when he was shown the photo distributed by the Ukrainian authorities. “I’m the only dentist here. So if they were found here, they must have come from me.”
When asked if the teeth could have come from dead people, the dentist categorically dismissed the notion. “Oh God, no! They belonged to the people I’ve treated all these years. I pulled out these teeth because they were bad,” he explained.
Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.
In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.
Things are about to get even dicier for those who believe in fully exercising their right to political expression.
Indeed, the government’s seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, and several of his associates for their alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots puts the entire concept of anti-government political expression on trial.
Enacted during the Civil War to prosecute secessionists, seditious conspiracy makes it a crime for two or more individuals to conspire to “‘overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force’ the U.S. government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”
It’s a hard charge to prove, and the government’s track record hasn’t been the greatest.
ACalifornia man arrested with what authorities described as an “astonishing” amount of child pornography – including over 1,000 DVDs with content showing children being raped – will spend less than a year in jail.
The light sentence was issued by Fresno County Superior Court Judge Leanne Le Mon, a self-identified Democrat and judicial appointee of Governor Gavin Newsom.
On Tuesday, 57-year-old Michael Wayne Martin of Fresno was officially sentenced to 180 days in jail and two years of formal probation, according to court documents.
The sentence follows Martin’s arrest in May of 2021, where investigators with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office found over 1,000 DVDs that contained videos of children being raped at his home.
“His closet was stuffed full of DVDs, the majority contained video and images of children being raped. Disgusting material,” said Tony Botti with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office in response to Martin’s arrest.
Officials described their findings, which also included electronic devices and books containing explicit photos and videos of children, as “one of the largest collections of child pornography they have ever come across in an investigation.” No evidence suggested that Martin engaged in physical contact with children.

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