Courtesy AP
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Now that Obama wants to close Gitmo, how long will this trial take?
Five men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks mock U.S. authorities and proclaim themselves “terrorists to the bone” in a war crimes court filing released Tuesday.
The five Guantanamo prisoners use the six-page document to try to justify the killing of nearly 3,000 people, portraying the attack as a response to U.S. actions in Israel, Iraq and elsewhere that is supported by their Muslim faith.
All five were charged with murder and other crimes at the Guantanamo war crimes court, which was suspended by President Barack Obama in January while his administration considers new strategies for prosecuting terrorists.
They criticize the U.S. for fighting “from behind roadblocks, trenches and warplanes” rather than face-to-face and describe Islam as “a religion of fear” for Jews, Christians and pagans.
Obama has ordered the closure of Guantanamo, so if and when the trials resume, they will be held somewhere else and most likely under a different legal system than the widely criticized military commissions created by Congress and President George W. Bush.
If they want to plead guilty, why not let them?
Mustachioed and graying, dressed in the uniform of a full-time job he once had, Gonzalo Garcia is out in front of The Home Depot on Lake Worth Road most mornings, and it doesn’t take much to catch his eye.A braking pickup or the wave of a driver’s hand will send him and several other Hispanic day laborers rushing to the departing vehicle, their eyes bright with the possibility of a day’s work.
Garcia, at 49 a father of four, says he tends to hang back as the younger workers push forward. But his counterparts often run, hoping to be chosen to paint, rip out drywall or lay bricks. The onslaught, a symptom of the voracious competition for dwindling numbers of day jobs, can be surprising to the unsuspecting, and even frightening. In recent years, the Hispanic day laborers have become as much a part of the scenery at The Home Depot west of Lake Worth as the fence and hedges, and as more lose full-time jobs in construction or landscaping, their numbers seem to have grown.
The Home Depot is not pleased. Blaming the job seekers for causing accidents and driving away customers, the world’s largest home improvement retailer has been working to discourage them from rushing vehicles in the driveways and trespassing in the parking lot. But the need for work keeps pushing the men forward, and the result has been an entrenched standoff. Garcia, an undocumented Guatemalan national who had a regular job in construction until being laid off late last year, said he and the others only want to work and have no other way to find steady pay.
Wise County, Texas. is going high-tech on truants.
To keep tabs on students who are habitually absent, Justice of the Peace Terri Johnson can now place a GPS ankle monitor on them for 30 days. “I’m not looking to convict students but to help them,” said Johnson, who presides over Precinct 2 in Decatur. “We want to help them go to school, and 30 days can do a lot to change up their behavior.”
No students have been sanctioned with the monitor yet, but doing so would allow Johnson to know where they are at all times.
The monitors, which are more commonly used to keep track of convicted felons on probation, are the latest move in stepped-up efforts across North Texas to curb truancy and help turn around climbing dropout rates…
Johnson said she saw about 320 truancy cases last year.
Oftentimes, students will correct their behavior if they are held more accountable, Johnson said. She said students who have already appeared before her court and are cited again for truancy could be candidates to use the new system.
Har!
A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house.
According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, troubles for the woman, Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, began last year when a member of the religious police entered her house in the city of Al-Chamli and found her with two unrelated men, “Fahd” and “Hadian.”
Fahd told the policeman that he had the right to be there, because Sawadi had breast-fed him as a baby and was therefore considered to be a son to her in Islam, according to Al-Watan. Fahd, 24, added that his friend Hadian was escorting him as he delivered bread for the elderly woman. The policeman then arrested both men…
The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, feared by many Saudis, is made up of several thousand religious policemen charged with duties such as enforcing dress codes, prayer times and segregation of the sexes. Under Saudi law, women face many restrictions, including a strict dress code and a ban on driving. Women also need to have a man’s permission to travel…
The problem recurs with theocracies. This is their preferred method of ruling the superstitious and ignorant.
I guess if you follow the Vatican’s no-contraception policy, you REALLY need the washing machine to keep up with the mountain of clothes the mountain of children you’ll have and to give you more free time to create more babies.
To mark International Women’s Day, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, has graciously commented on women’s lib for us. Its editorial decrees that the washing machine has contributed more to the emancipation of western women than the pill, or the legalisation of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. But it would, wouldn’t it? Abortion and pills aren’t allowed over there. Washing machines are.
What a bizarre world L’Osservatore describes, with its “image of the superwoman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house”. It’s more than half a century ago, back in 1953, that the automatic washing machine took off and women apparently went mad in the suburbs, turning to drink and sex. Only I didn’t notice my mother and her chums being radiant and smiling. They may have got rid of their heavy mangles and twin-tubs, but it was still a fairly bleak life, stuck at home fiddling with these new machines. And it’s still a bore today; we’re still trying our best to perk up doing the housework (not so long ago, the Daily Mail discovered a new social phenomenon: “Countless British women … doing housework in the nude …”)
“Put in the powder, close the lid and relax,” reads L’Osservatore’s headline – but it isn’t that simple, Vatican, honestly it isn’t. Have you ever tried it? I thought everyone knew that the more time these new appliances saved us, the more tasks we found to fill that time.
Kim Jong Il was unanimously re-elected to North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament, state media said Monday, in elections closely watched for signs of a political shift or hints the autocratic leader is grooming a successor. Turnout Sunday was 99.98 percent, with all voters backing the sole candidate running in their constituency, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
Observers will be analyzing the list of legislators for clues as to how Kim and the ruling elite will govern the Communist nation over the next five years, and any signs he is grooming a successor. Kim’s third son, Kim Jong Un, reportedly ran for a seat Sunday in what analysts say would be a strong sign he is poised to inherit power. The 26-year-old is the youngest of the leader’s three known sons and is said to be his father’s favorite.
Kim, 67, reportedly suffered a stroke last August, around the time the elections were due to be held. North Korea denies he was ill and did not provide a reason for the delay to March.
So who was the brave soul who voted against him? Or better yet, in what Gulag might he reside?
Courtesy The Guardian
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The DVDs won’t play? At least Bush paid the Brits more respect.
The Obamas, Barack and Michelle both, pretty much diplomatically botched the recent visit of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife. Oddly enough, the U.S. Old Media seems uninterested in the story that is a hot topic in England, a story that’s left many Brits a bit miffed.
As the visit of the national leader of our closest ally began, the President informed the Brits that he wouldn’t be attending the joint press conference that was planned to be held once PM Brown’s plane touched down. This threw the visiting delegation into a tizzy leaving them scrambling to explain the sudden change in plans to the folks back home.
For his part, PM Brown gave two symbolic gifts and one that expressed national pride. Brown came bearing a pen holder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of that which gave the wood to create the famous “Resolute Desk,” the desk that has been in America’s charge since 1880. He also gave Obama the framed commission for that famous ship, the HMS Resolute. His third gift was a seven-volume biography of one of England’s greatest leaders, Winston Churchill.
In return, Michelle apparently had a staffer run down to the White House gift shop and grab two toy Marine One helicopter models for the Brown’s boys.
So, what did President Obama give the British PM? 25 movies on DVD. Yeah, that’s it. Brown gives a symbolic gift like the pen holder fashioned from a famous British warship and Obama responds by sending a staffer to WalMart to pick up a few quick movies.
All of this is on top of the snub of the Brits that Obama tossed off immediately upon entering office. One of his first official acts was to summarily return to the Brits the generous gift of the most famous bust of Winston Churchill that has sat in the Oval Office since the attacks on 9/11.
Oh, boy, DVD’s (Region 1) and toy helicopters! I wonder if they were gift wrapped. Some of this was earlier reported by John and mentioned on No Agenda. Why did Obama snub the Brits so? And now a few days later, there is still just a hint of this on the “nightly news.” Why not a gift subscription to Netflix?
YouTube, said it will block all music videos to British users – sort of about now – after it was unable to reach a rights deal with the main songwriters’ collection society.
The world’s largest video sharing site said PRS for Music, a British collection society that collects royalties on behalf of nearly 50,000 composers, was asking it to pay “many, many times” more than the previous licensing agreement that has expired.
“The costs are simply prohibitive for us — under PRS’s proposed terms, we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback,” the company said in a blog on Monday.
The move is the latest sign of the tension between YouTube and the music industry and also indicates the video site’s resolve to keep operating costs under control as it strives to generate meaningful profits for Google…
But PRS disputed YouTube’s version of events and said: “We were shocked and disappointed…blah, blah…”
I don’t know if this will ever get interesting – other than suits vs. suits. Meanwhile, YouTube/music fans in the UK get screwed.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Five Chinese ships have maneuvered dangerously close to an unarmed US navy vessel in the South China Sea, the US government has said. US officials said the incident came after days of “increasingly aggressive” acts by Chinese ships.
These violated international law on respecting other users of the seas, a Pentagon spokesman said. A protest was expected to be delivered to the Chinese military attache at the Pentagon on Monday. The incident happened on Sunday as the USNS Impeccable was on routine operations in international waters 75 miles (120km) south of Hainan island, a US statement said. The ships had “aggressively maneuvered” around the Impeccable “in an apparent co-ordinated effort to harass the US ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters”, according to the Pentagon. The US ship sprayed one Chinese vessel with water from fire hoses to try to force it away, it said.
But it said the Chinese crew stripped to their underwear and carried on approaching to within 25ft (8m). When the Impeccable radioed requesting a safe path to leave the area, two Chinese vessels dropped pieces of wood in its path, forcing the US ship to make an emergency stop, the Pentagon said.
Do “unarmed” US Naval Ships actually exist? I’ll bet there is more to this story that will never be told.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) – A state lawmaker is proposing a bill to drug test unemployed Floridians collecting unemployment benefits. “Let’s make sure it’s going to people who truly are ready, able, and willing to work. People who can’t pass a random drug test really probably shouldn’t be collecting our unemployment money,” said bill sponsor Senator Mike Bennett, a Republican from Sarasota.
Last month the state of Florida paid out $117-million in unemployment benefits.
Bennett’s bill calls for 10 percent of those who file an unemployment claim to undergo random testing. Also, 10 percent of people already receiving unemployment benefits would be tested. Mary Ann Aiken of Wesley Chapel is unemployed and unopposed to the proposal. “If they’re getting these benefits and let’s say for instance they are a substance abuser, then that money could be actually be going to support their habit.” “We’re taking everyone who happens to be in this situation of not having a job, which are a lot of people right now, and we’re treating them as if they are potential drug abusers,” said Courtenay Strickland with the ACLU.
Leaving the unemployment office, Dorothy Odie explained how these days “the unemployed” includes “the hard-working” and people who’ve worked their whole lives. “These people that’s coming here, they’re working people that have been on their jobs. One man I met today, he’d been on his job 30 years. So, you’re labeling people,” she said.
My suspicious nature tells me this just might be designed to avoid paying unemployment benefits.
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