Since the Coast Guard quietly announced plans to create 34 live-fire zones — all at least 5 miles offshore — in the Federal Register Aug. 1, boaters, environmentalists and politicians have been in an uproar.
That led to an extension for public comment from Aug. 31 to Nov. 13 and nine Coast Guard hearings around the lakes, attended by about 1,000 people. More than 880 submitted formal comments.
“This has really created tension between U.S. and Canadian mayors,” said George Heartwell, mayor of Grand Rapids. “They look at us like gun slinging cowboys south of the border.”
Heartwell and the mayors of a number of cities, including Chicago, Toledo, Duluth, Windsor, Toronto and Montreal, oppose the plan and say the training should be done on land or on simulators.
“Police don’t practice shooting on city streets,” said Windsor Mayor Eddie Francis. “We’ve been working hard to restore and preserve the Great Lakes. This is a step backwards.”
Coast Guard cutters are now armed with machine guns in case of possible terrorist attacks. Canadian boats are not armed.
How many terrorist attack have we had on South Bass Islaand exactly? Are they after the Commodore Perry monument? Or just a bucket of beer at the Round House?
The Coast Guard needs machine guns about as much as Rudy Guiliani needs to name a Secretary of Defense for his ‘09 Presidential term. One attack on US soil a century people. One! Oooh, scary. When they catch up with Bud Light in deaths call me, ’til then quit blowing whatever you’re smoking up my petticoats…fear-mongering retards…
Rapper Snoop Dogg was arrested Tuesday for investigation of illegally possessing a handgun and drugs as he left NBC Studios after performing on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” police said.
The 35-year-old rapper, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, and two members of his entourage were arrested around 6 p.m. after a search of his Diamond Bar home and car, Sgt. Kevin Grandalski said.
Police seized a handgun and some illegal drugs, Grandalski said. He did not have details.
Some parts of the Sept. 24, 2001 order tagging 27 groups and individuals as “specially designated global terrorists” were too vague and could impinge on First Amendment rights of free association, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins said.
The order gave the president “unfettered discretion” to label groups without giving them a way to challenge the designations, she said in a Nov. 21 ruling that was made public Tuesday.
The judge, who two years ago invalidated portions of the U.S. Patriot Act, rejected several sections of Bush’s Executive Order 13224 and enjoined the government from blocking the assets of two foreign groups.
However, she let stand sections that would penalize those who provide “services” to designated terrorist groups.
She said such services would include the humanitarian aid and rights training proposed by the plaintiffs.
The ruling was praised by David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented the plaintiff Humanitarian Law Project.
It “says that even in fighting terrorism the president cannot be given a blank check to blacklist anyone he considers a bad guy or a bad group and you can’t imply guilt by association,” Cole said.
He said the Humanitarian Law Project will appeal those portions of the executive order which were allowed to stand.
One of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s closest advisers said yesterday that he will resign at the end of the year, depriving her of a key sounding board at a time when she is still searching for a new deputy and faces difficult challenges in the Middle East.
Philip D. Zelikow, 52, holds the unassuming title of “counselor,” but in many ways he is Rice’s intellectual soul mate, and he plays a critical role in formulating policy at the State Department. In his resignation letter, he cited professional and personal obligations, including a need to return to an endowed chair that the University of Virginia has held vacant for four years and to pay “some truly riveting obligations to college bursars” for his children’s education.
Unofficial results announced by Franklin County, the last to finish counting absentee and provisional ballots in central Ohio’s 15th District, showed Pryce led Democratic challenger Mary Jo Kilroy by 1,055 votes.
Pryce lost Franklin County, the district’s most populous, but she retained her lead thanks to votes she picked up in two other counties that announced results last week, Madison and Union.
Pryce ended up with 50.2 percent of the vote, compared with 49.8 percent for Kilroy in the unofficial totals.
An automatic recount is triggered if the difference between the two candidates is less than one-half of one percent.
Pryce spokesman George Rasley was confident of the ultimate result despite the recount.
“We don’t have any concerns at all that this is going to change significantly,” he said.
Don McTigue, a lawyer for Kilroy, said the final numbers confirmed his own estimates. “I was hoping for just psychological reasons to be just under 1,000, but this is still under the free recount category so I’m very happy about that,” he said.
The Franklin County elections board reviewed just under 21,000 provisional ballots, throwing out about 2,600 of them. Most of the uncounted provisionals were cast by people who weren’t registered to vote or voted in the wrong precinct, elections director Matt Damschroder said.
Pryce, a seven-term incumbent and until recently the No. 4 Republican in Congress, had seen her lead in the campaign turn sharply amid the scandal over U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) and GOP leaders’ handling of lurid messages he had been sending for years to male congressional pages. Pryce had publicly named Foley as one of her best friends in Washington.
It’s been an eventful 25 years for Laura Spencer since marrying Luke in a fairy-tale wedding seen on television by 30 million people.
She died, and was brought back to life. She killed her stepfather. She gave birth to a son by an adulterous affair, and now Nikolas is a single dad after the baby’s mother died of a virus. Her other son, Lucky, is addicted to painkillers. Her daughter, Lulu, recently aborted a child after being impregnated by a stepbrother.
Oh, and Spencer spent the last four years in a catatonic state — waking up just in time to marry Luke again this Thursday on “General Hospital,” 25 years to the day after their first wedding.
American Journalism Review Editor Rem Rieder calls it “a crushing loss” for The Washington Post and “a dramatic manifestation of the ongoing shift from old media to new.” Washingtonian’s Harry Jaffe says a bit breathlessly that the paper “barely can field a team in the political arena.”
Media circles are buzzing over last week’s decision by John Harris, The Post’s political editor, and Jim VandeHei, a top political reporter, to jump to a multimedia venture being launched by Allbritton Communications. “This was the chance to do something from scratch,” says Harris, who will become editor in chief of a new Hill newspaper, the Capitol Leader, and launch a new politics Web site, both in January. VandeHei will be a “player/coach” and executive managing editor of the paper, says Fred Ryan, Allbritton’s president.
Ryan says they will “transcend various forms of media” by also appearing on Allbritton’s WJLA-TV and NewsChannel8, and on such programs as “Face the Nation” through an alliance with CBS News.
Harris sees the Web site as having “a more conversational style, more transparency about how news gets created and gets covered.” He says his compensation reflects the “risk” of joining a startup but that it is “not a huge, eye-popping salary.”
His departure is being misinterpreted, says Harris, as a vote of no confidence in print journalism or The Post. “I was eager to try something outside the walls of the institution,” he says.
Some bloggers have poked fun at VandeHei for telling the New York Observer that the new venture will be better than The Post or New York Times and that prominent journalists are “begging” him for jobs.
Meanwhile, former Style editor David Von Drehle, who was to become the section’s top political writer, is joining Time as a national correspondent. Turnover is hardly unusual at big papers, but these and other recent defections by political writers — Mike Allen to Time, Mark Leibovich to the New York Times — leave The Post with some holes to fill.
Plant-derived drugs are hardly new: aspirin, for example, is a synthetic version of a natural substance found in willow bark, and the heart medication digitalis is made from the foxglove plant.
Humans may not be the only creatures that use Aframomum to treat inflammation and infection, said primatologist Michael Huffman of Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan. He said studies have shown that Western lowland gorillas in Africa prefer Aframomum shoots and seedpods to other foods.
In zoos, the absence of Aframomum and other African plants in the feed given to captive Western lowland gorillas may be a factor in an unexplained heart condition many have developed, say Ellen Dierenfeld, staff nutritionist of the St. Louis Zoo, and Melissa Remis, a primatologist at Purdue University.
“Western lowland gorillas in captivity aren’t fed African plants,” Dierenfeld said. “We need to look very closely at this aspect of their health to see if there’s a link among diet, inflammation or infection, and heart disease.”
For humans afflicted with inflammatory diseases, scientists are taking their cue from native African healers, who have used Aframomum for centuries to treat infections of all kinds, said biochemist Christopher Okunji of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“In the West African culture in which I was raised,” Okunji said, “Aframomum is an important part of daily life. For example, when a visitor arrives at someone’s home, no discussion begins until all partake of Aframomum seeds. People far back in African history likely knew that Aframomum was a good thing to eat if you didn’t want to get sick.”
In the history of U.S. foreign policy, there’s been nothing like it: a panel outside government trying to bail the United States out of a prolonged and messy war.
The innocuously titled Iraq Study Group, which has evolved into a parallel policy establishment over the past eight months, is also unique in the way it operates. For one thing, it’s even more secretive than the Bush administration.
****
“Unfortunately, our deliberations have been degenerating lately into petty squabbling over picayune issues of tactics, and I’m afraid I show that I have lost my patience a little bit here,” wrote former CIA analyst Ray Close in an e-mail about the experts’ deliberations. “Some of our most obstinate neocon diehards are still trying to fashion a strategy that is no more than an ersatz version of ’stay the course until victory.’ They have been wasting our time, in my view.”
The only hint of a possible outcome came during an ad hoc vote. On Sept. 18, experts assembled to present two options to the panel: “Stability First,” to stabilize Baghdad and make intense reconciliation efforts with insurgents, and “Redeploy and Contain,” to gradually withdraw troops while containing terrorist threats.
The chairmen then called for a quick vote by the experts. Accounts vary, though most agree that the “Stability First” option won — by a large margin, some said.
In a reflection of shifting U.S. sentiments on the war, the chairmen called for a second vote at their last meeting with the experts in October. This time, participants said, the vote was almost evenly divided between stability and gradual withdrawal. Sticking around to stabilize Iraq won by only a tiny margin.
Bush and his crack staff of losers and liars have made this war unwinnable, staying just makes it worse. Anything less than an additional two to three hundred thousand troops is stupidity. (See Powell Doctrine)
It’s over. Re-deploy to the border, let the A-10’s discourage major ethnic cleansings and bring our guys home. It about time the Repugs grew up and took responsibility for all the death they’ve caused by their secrecy and lies.
“The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: “Make sure this is accomplished”,” she told Saturday’s El Pais.
“The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation … playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably … Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques.”
The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer “no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion” to secure information.
“Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind,” the document states.
Rumsfeld also authorized the army to break the Geneva Conventions by not registering all prisoners, Karpinski said, explaining how she raised the case of one unregistered inmate with an aide to former U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.
“We received a message from the Pentagon, from the Defense Secretary, ordering us to hold the prisoner without registering him. I now know this happened on various occasions.”
Karpinski said last week she was ready to testify against Rumsfeld, if a suit filed by civil rights groups in Germany over Abu Ghraib led to a full investigation.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad’s main Shiite district.
Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in Friday’s assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighborhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.
Most of the thousands of dead bodies that have been found dumped across Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq in recent months have been of victims who were tortured and then shot to death, according to police. The suspected militia killers often have used electric drills on their captives’ bodies before killing them. The bodies are frequently decapitated.
But burning victims alive introduced a new method of brutality that was likely to be reciprocated by the other sect as the Shiites and Sunnis continue killing one another in unprecedented numbers. The gruesome attack, which came despite a curfew in Baghdad, capped a day in which at least 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq.
Asked to comment President Bush said “We call that a West Texas Barbecue back home , but we only do it to queer boys”. The White House later issued a denial that Bush had said anything to anyone, then wandered away muttering darkly about Wild Turkey shooters…
ORLANDO, Fla. - The Reverend elected to take over as president of the Christian Coalition of America said he will not assume the role because of differences in philosophy.
The Rev. Joel Hunter, of Longwood’s Northland, A Church Distributed, said Wednesday that the national group would not let him expand the organization’s agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage.
This is the latest setback for the group founded in 1989 by religious broadcaster the Rev. Pat Robertson. Four states - Georgia, Alabama, Iowa and Ohio - have decided to split from the group over concerns it’s changing direction on issues like the minimum wage, the environment and Internet law instead of core issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Hunter, who was scheduled to take over the socially conservative political group Jan. 1, said he had hoped to focus on issues such as poverty and the environment.
“These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about,” Hunter said.
He resigned Tuesday during an organization board meeting. Hunter said he was not asked to leave.
“They pretty much said, ‘These issues are fine, but they’re not our issues, that’s not our base,’” Hunter said.
A statement issued by the coalition said Hunter resigned because of “differences in philosophy and vision.” The board accepted his decision “unanimously,” it states.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the “Christian” Coalition of fear mongering bigots and power mad Republican hucksters…
The Global Orgasm for Peace was conceived by Donna Sheehan, 76, and Paul Reffell, 55, whose immodest goal is for everyone in the world to have an orgasm Dec. 22 while focusing on world peace.
‘’The dream is to have everyone in the world (take part),'’ Reffell said. ‘’And if that means laying down your gun for a few minutes, then hey, all the better.'’
“We as health ministry officials have become a target,” said Hakim Zamili.
Two of Mr Zamili’s bodyguards were killed in the attack in Baghdad’s central al-Fadil district.
Reports say more than 100 people have been killed in Iraq the last 24 hours, piling pressure on the government to solve the spiral of sectarian violence.
On Sunday, Ammar al-Saffar, who holds the same rank as Mr Zamili, was kidnapped on Sunday from his home in Baghdad’s Sunni district of Adhamiya.
The health ministry is headed by a group loyal to the Shia cleric, Moqtada Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia is accused of involvement in sectarian attacks by Iraq’s Sunni Muslim community.
Meanwhile, the American military says two members of its forces have been killed - one in Anbar province, in western Iraq, and one in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad.
Killing Health ministry officials is probably a good idea about now. Al-Sadr has turned the coutries hospital into armed camps where Sunnis are killed and tortured. Just like they did with the Interior Ministry before we cleand up that high profile disaster by putting Al-Sadr loyalists in charge of the Health Ministry instead. What are they gonna do with hospitals and clinics right?
“One of the tenets of the Constitution is that you do not put the rights of a minority up for a popularity contest,” said Marc Solomon, campaign director for Mass Equality, which supports same-sex marriage. “It is one of the very principles this country was founded upon.”
