Few people would mourn the passing of radical U.S. cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi. However, his reported death from a U.S. air strike raises the long-standing question over President Obama’s insistence that he can unilaterally label a citizen as a terrorist and order his killing. It is one of the policies (of many) that Obama continued from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and was one of the subjects of my column yesterday in the Los Angeles Times.
Category: International
Saudi King Abdullah has again taken a step toward modernity. Yesterday, he revoked a sentence of 10 lashes imposed on a woman who drove a car. This follows his earlier decision to allow women to vote. The problem is that there is no law criminalizing driving by women. It is a religious edict which continues to apply to citizens with the same force of the law.
Continue reading “Saudi King Revokes Flogging Punishment For Female Driver”
Below is today’s column in The Los Angeles Times on the record of Barack Obama on civil liberties and his impact on the civil liberties movement in the United States.
Continue reading “Obama and the Decline of the American Civil Liberties Movement”
German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble left little question about his view of the wisdom of the economic policies of the Obama Administration. Schauble called the U.S. plan to pour trillions of dollars into the bailout fund “stupid” and said it would destroy the AAA ratings for the members — precisely what occurred to the U.S. this year. There is rising criticism of the economic views of Timothy Geithner, who some view as steering the U.S. into massive and unproductive spending.
Continue reading “Germany Calls U.S. Plan To Save Euro “Stupid””
Just after we ran a rare congratulatory piece on the Saudi King giving the right to vote to woman, the Saudi courts gave a chilling reminder of the plight of women in the Kingdom by sentencing Shaima Ghassaniya to be flogged for driving.
Continue reading “Saudi Arabian Court Orders Woman Flogged For Driving”
Just when you thought flying could not get more stressful . . . ABC has learned of a secret White House report alerting U.S. officials of the theft of an estimated 20,000 portable, heat-seeking missiles from an Army warehouse in Libya.
Continue reading “20,000 Heat-Seeking Missiles Disappear From Libyan Warehouse”
Now this is a takings case. Last week saw the last bullfight in Barcelona, Spain. This week there is talk of a lawsuit by bullfighting companies who want compensation for the ban on killing bulls slowly in a ring for the enjoyment of thousands of fans of the blood sport.
Continue reading “Toro Taking? Bullfighting Promoters Sue Over Ban in Barcelona”
Let no one say that criminal lawyers and their clients are not romantic. This picture is a staged death scene by a hired killer, Carlos Roberto de Jesus, who fell in love with his target in Brazil. Presumably, Sylvester Stallone is taking Spanish in preparation for the film.
Continue reading “De Jesus Loves You: Hit Man Stages Killing After Falling In Love With Target”
A Canadian police officer is the focus of an inquiry after a citizen filmed him shooting a Taser in the face of a teenager involved in a street brawl. While the 17-year-old is recovering, he took a surgery to remove the prong from his ear.
Continue reading “Police Taser Teenager in Face To Stop Fight With Another Teenager”
A Kuwaiti court on Sunday sentenced a Sunni Islamist activist to three months in jail for tweeting comments that were deemed derogatory to Shiite Muslims. I have previously written about the increase in such blasphemy prosecutions, including a trend in the West, as well as President Obama’s decision to support a U.N. resolution embracing the concept of blasphemy prosecutions – an abandonment of our long opposition to such laws. As previously discussed in a column and a line of blog stories (here and here and here and here), various Western governments have been curtailing free speech by prosecuting blasphemy and speech against various groups. In this case, Mubarak al-Bathali was convicted over his use of Twitter. It appears that you can blaspheme in 140 words or less.
Continue reading “U R BdBy: Kuwait Jails Blogger For Tweet Critical of Shiites”
We often criticize Saudi Arabia for its treatment of women and religious minorities under its extreme religious laws. Accordingly, we should also not hesitate to praise the country when it moves toward giving greater freedoms or embracing tolerance for minority groups. On Sunday, Saudi King Abdullah announced on Sunday he was giving women the right to vote and run in municipal elections.
Continue reading “Saudi Women Given The Right To Vote”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
To my mind the greatest movie satire on the idiocy of the Cold War and the fear it inspired in humanity, was Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, released in 1964. The plot in brief was, “An insane general starts a process to nuclear holocaust that a war room of politicians and generals frantically try to stop”. For those unfamiliar with one of the best American movies of all time check this link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/
Rent the movie if you haven’t seen it, for it will bring you dark laughter and present you with much to ponder. At the time of its release, some disparaged the movie as being un-credible in its characterizations and not believable in it premises. I hadn’t thought of the movie in years until I came across this article at the website Buzzflash.com titled “The Theology of Armageddon” by Robert Koehler. http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13024 . The article is relatively brief, but well worth your time.
The article deals with a course titled “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” at Vandenberg Air Force Base, given under Air Force auspices. As the Robert Koehler states:
“(I)t turns out that the point of the mandatory course, which was recently canceled by the Air Force after officers of numerous faiths complained to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation about it and Truthout published an exposé in July, was to give officers in the first week of missile-launch training a Bible-verse-studded indoctrination in faux-Just War Theory (cynically known in the ranks as the “Jesus Loves Nukes” training)”.
What got me thinking of the movie Dr. Strangelove was a quote in the article from Dr. Wehrner Von Braun, which makes credible the satiric reality of the movies title character, Dr. Strangelove, hysterically portrayed as a heavily accented former NAZI, by Peter Sellers. Seller’s character was widely denounced as being unfair to Von Braun, at the time, but seeing this quote from him makes me wonder:
“We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation . . . we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else,” von Braun is quoted as saying. “We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”
To me this is post facto justification by von Braun of his choice of the comfort of an honored life in the U.S. mirroring his NAZI lifestyle and providing a sop to detract from the truth that he was an enthusiastic war criminal. Von Braun had developed the V (I & II) guided missiles for the NAZI’s and became the head of the United States Ballistic Missile Program. Von Braun was a NAZI Party member of distinction and it seems dedication. His missiles fell upon Great Britain in the closing days of WW II as an attempt to cause terror within the British people and were random in their destruction. That he then became an honored man in the U.S., rather than a defendant at Nuremburg, is a tribute to our own hypocrisy in prosecuting the Cold War. A similar mindset seems to have infected some in our Air Force as I will show. Continue reading “As We Careen Towards a Dream of Armageddon”
It turns out that Einstein was a bit slow after all. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has made a subatomic particle go faster than the speed of light for the first time — something that shattered one assumption of Einstein’s theories. The scientists used neutrinos, which were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second).
Continue reading “Fast Little Neutrino: Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity Challenged By Test Showing Particle Traveling Faster Than Speed of Light”
Ken Anderson, 47, is understandably confused. As a teenager, he was abandoned by his mother, Shirley Anderson, 73, and had to live with other families, quit school, and raise himself. Now his elderly mother has filed in British Columbia for parental support.
Continue reading “Mother Dearest: Man Abandoned By Mother As A Teen Is Sued By Mother For Parental Support”
In a shocking story below, police have investigated the introduction of children as young as eight into cage fighting events. The children fight as adults cheer while drinking beer and egging them on. The police investigated and found no violations or crimes in such events.
Continue reading “Gladiator Games: Police Investigate Cage Fighting For Kids But Find No Legal Violations”