The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced.
“CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,” Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff. Remaining sites would be decommissioned, he said. The “black sites” were used to detain terrorism suspects, some of whom were subjected to interrogation methods described by many as torture.
President Obama vowed to shut down the facilities shortly after taking office.
The Bush administration allowed the CIA to operate secret prisons on the territory of allied countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
During his first week as president, Mr Obama ordered the closure of the black sites, as well as the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, as part of an overhaul of US detainee policy.
A Houston man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stabbing a friend while staying at the Clarion Motel in Waco.
According to Waco Police, Juan Antonio Salano Castellano and four other individuals were all staying in the same room when Castellano was cut in the leg and stabbed in the chest by Jose Braule Ramirez.
Castellano told officers that he and Ramirez were inside the hotel room eating while one of the roommates were showering and the others were outside the room talking on their cell phones. Castellano experienced flatulence which upset Ramirez to the point he picked up a large knife and threw it at Castellano striking him in his leg. Ramirez then came across the room, picked up the knife and stabbed Castellano in the left side of his chest.
The other roommates came into the hotel room and saw that Castellano had been stabbed and immediately took him to one of their private vehicles to take him to the hospital. When the roommates realized they didn’t know where the hospital was an ambulance and police were called to the hotel.
Officers found Ramirez still inside the hotel room where he was arrested without incident. Ramirez was transported to the McLennan County Jail where he was charged with Aggravated Assault.
Har! Must have been some ferocious take-out.
Thanks to KD Martin on Cage Match for the find

All The Sex, None of The Nagging!
Are you tired of wondering if she’s cheating on you? Do you love to leave the toilet seat up? Want to enjoy freedom on the weekend and watch a little football with your buddies, rather than work on your “honey do” list? Well, now you don’t have to worry any of that with the latest craze in adult dating, dating and marrying inmates for conjugal visits. With a conjugal marriage, you will finally have a wife with the perfect amount of freedoms and rights, and more importantly, you will finally start enjoying your own.
Browse our inmates and find a little of your own conjugal happiness today!
Here’s a sample of one of the lovelies.
Name: Teardrop
Age: 18
State: Mississippi
Convictions: Murder but it wasn’t like that i got setup by my pimp and his frenz.
Hobbies and Interests: I collect flowers from the yard but they mostly weeds. Sometimes I press them or do love me nots with them but then I just end up tearing them apart cuz they don’t love me back.
Why I Deserve Another Chance: My celly doesn’t get me and she won’t take a walk on the pink side for me. I’m too young to be alone and I got years of street experience that means I’d be the hottest hour a month of your life till death do us parts.
Ha!
- Will Scott McNealey take over the reins at Sun?
- Microsoft steals patent loses a $388M lawsuit.
- 3 strikes law against pirates rejected by the French.
- Nintendo DSi is a great product!
- Honda has a car for dogs.
- Will Wright quitting Electronic Arts to go to the Stupid Fun Club.
- MSFT says Apple machines are expensive. What? Who knew?
- AP goes after people using their videos even though they encourage it on You Tube.
- This show is sponsored by Squarespace.com code word TECH.
![]() Click image to go to No Agenda. |
John and Adam discuss the news of the day from an international perspective
Queue / cue / Q the closing credits — We hope you enjoy the show!
No Agenda
Running time: approx. 90 mins.
The Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles turned down a request from a vegan driver to display ILVTOFU on a set of personalized license plates because the phrase could be construed as obscene, Tom McGee reports in The Denver Post. “”We don’t allow FU because some people could read that as street language for sex,” Department of Revenue spokesman Mark Couch told the Post. Turns out state plate arbiters forbid hundreds of letter combinations deemed too controversial or offensive, including ARS, SIN and PIG. The department occasionally convenes a committee to add to the verboten list “so that plates stay free of letters that abbreviate gang slang, drug terms or obscene phrases made popular in text messaging,” McGee reports.
That was news to Kelley Coffman-Lee, the 36-year-old Centennial woman who simply wanted to promote her love of soybean curd while tooling around town in her Suzuki. “My whole family is vegan so tofu is like a staple for us,” she told the Post. “I was just going to have a cool license plate and the DMV misinterpreted my message.”
Whether or not the DMV did the misinterpreting — after all, who doesn’t LV TOFU? — the civil servants say their mission is to keep the streets clean. “Standard common practices are: any combination of letters or numbers that carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency, are misleading, offensive to the general public, or represent gang, drug, sex, racial terms,” another Department of Revenue spokesman, Maren Rubino, told the Rocky Mountain News last summer when the list grew to include common text message shorthand, such as LOL, OMG and WTF.
So LOL is offensive? Play the Colorado license plate approval game here.
![]() Newspapers added the dark bits |
Twelve men have been arrested in the north west of England after Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer sparked a security alert.
Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick said he “deeply regretted” revealing a secret document to photographers when he arrived for a briefing at No 10. The document, clearly marked “secret”, carried an outline briefing on an ongoing counter-terrorism operation.
The 12 suspects were later arrested at locations across north-west England.
Opposition MPs criticised Mr Quick, with the Liberal Democrats describing him as “accident prone” and the Conservatives condemning his “very alarming” lapse of judgement.
But former Labour Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said it would be wrong for such an experienced officer to resign “for holding a piece of paper the wrong way”.
I don’t agree. He probably knows the right way to hold his toilet paper. Learned at an early age, I hope.
UPDATE: He resigned, this morning.

BEING fat is fine for men in the business world, but it might just weigh down women’s prospects for promotion, research suggested yesterday.
A study found that being overweight further reinforced the glass ceiling faced by women trying to reach the top.
But for men, a larger waistline seemed to enhance their chances of entering the boardroom.
[…]
“The results suggest that while being obese limits the career opportunities of both women and men, being ‘merely overweight’ harms only female executives – and may actually benefit male executives.”The results echo previous research showing that among white, middle-class communities, women faced “harsher weight standards” than men, Prof Roehling said.
The economy isn’t helping fatties of either sex.
“There are now so many people going for the same job because so many have been laid off,” he said.
“Unless an overweight candidate is particularly well qualified for the job, it is more likely to go to the slimmer, more attractive candidate. It is an employers’ market at the moment.”

Here is another great moment in A.P. history. In its quest to become the RIAA of the newspaper industry, the A.P.’s executives and lawyers are beginning to match their counterparts in the music industry for cluelessness. A country radio station in Tennessee, WTNQ-FM, received a cease-and-desist letter from an A.P. vice president of affiliate relations for posting videos from the A.P.’s official Youtube channel on its Website.
You cannot make this stuff up. Forget for a moment that WTNQ is itself an A.P. affiliate and that the A.P. shouldn’t be harassing its own members. Apparently, nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos.
[…]
[TV station employee,] Strovel: And we’re an A.P. affiliate for crying out loud! I stumped him on that one. . . . What is really shocking is that they were shocked that they’ve got a YouTube channel that people are embedding on their Websites. He seemed shocked by that. ‘Oh, I am going to have to look into that” is what he told me.Grantham: What an idiot!
Strovel: I know, I know.
In other, vaguely related newspaper news, it’s Google against the publishing world, according to newspapers, etc. More cluelessness abounds.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort. Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.
Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.
The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.” Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide—the chief human-caused greenhouse gas—out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said.
Great. So who creates the best air pollution on the planet? Can we outsource this job to China?
NEW YORK (AP) – The Fox network is making a reality show out of the troubled economy. An upcoming series titled, “Someone’s Gotta Go,” lets employees of a small business decide which one of their colleagues will be laid off.
Fox says it has no air date yet for the series, which is being developed by the company behind “Big Brother” and “Deal or No Deal.” Each week, a different company lays off an employee. Fox also wouldn’t reveal the show’s host, which it says is a business consultant who will offer advice to participating companies.
I have no doubt this will be a huge hit. So will they follow this up with “Someone’s Gotta Go, Revenge of the Fired”?

WASHINGTON (AP) – The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.
John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.
“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”
Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”







BEING fat is fine for men in the business world, but it might just weigh down women’s prospects for promotion, research suggested yesterday.
“There are now so many people going for the same job because so many have been laid off,” he said.













