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”
Category: International
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”
The use of informers by police have always been criticized, particularly jail house snitches who will implicate anyone for a better deal. Scotland Yard has used 158 “supergrasses” used since 2006, including Gary Eaton, 51, who is now the center of a scandal over such procured testimony. Called a “pathological liar” by two courts, the Metropolitan Police still used Eaton to the trial of various people of murder. While records show the police were aware of his prior record, pathological lying, and mental instability, Scotland Yard has announced that no officers or prosecutors will be punished for his use as the star witness in two murder trials.
The New York Times is reporting that the U.S. has fallen to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds. Feel not for the future, however, we are still one spot ahead of Romania. Take that Bucharest cyber cafes!
Continue reading “U.S. Now 25th In The World in Internet Speed — Just Ahead of Romania”
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty(Rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
I admit that I get a headache when I read any news about former Bush administration officials, but it seems that former Vice President Dick Cheney is in the news again and I am left scrambling for my migraine medicine. He has written a book detailing all the wonderful things he accomplished as Vice President under George W. Bush. Unfortunately for Mr. Cheney, in his efforts to explain his work as Vice President under George W. Bush, he may have provided an admission of some of the alleged lies that critics claim were being spread by Cheney and the Bush administration in the lead up to war in Iraq. Continue reading “Recent American History According to Cheney”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, gave a speech at Harvard Law School entitled “Strengthening our Security by Adhering to our Values and Laws.” According to Marty Lederman, “it is the most comprehensive single statement of the Obama Administration’s policies and practices with respect to al Qaeda and other terrorist threats.”
Here is our picture of the week from our erstwhile colleague in the City of Light, Eric Tenin.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Most people who regularly visit this blog know that I am Jewish. While I am not what one would call a pious Jew, being a Deist in outlook, I have always been very proud of my ethnicity and of the religion, which plays a central part in it. From their infancy, my children were immersed in Judaism both through education and by our family regularly taking part in Jewish Rituals, including regular Synagogue attendance. Where I part personally from normative Judaism is that I view the Torah, The Five Books of Moses, as primarily allegory with some real history thrown in. To me it is a work of some wise and some not so wise men, not the writings of God. I believe and have seen demonstrated in many families though, that the Torah and its 613 Commandments can serve as blueprint for living a fulfilling life.
The issue becomes complicated when it comes to my feelings about Israel. To me the existence ofI srael is a necessity for Jews to have a future in this world and if it comes to it, a final haven to make our last stand. I am an American first, so I would not willingly emigrate away from the country of my birth, unless those who hate Jews come to power. Contrary to the opinion of many, Jews are far from being a homogeneous ethnicity/religion. One cannot for instance refer to being an Orthodox Jew with any precision of description since that movement is in itself splintered on many details of interpretation. This is true of the other main branches of Judaism: Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionism. Perhaps it is because there is no central Jewish religious authority speaking for all Jews, as much as organizations like ADL, AIPAC, et. al. would claim to, that the range of Jewish opinion is so wide on so many subjects.
This brings me to an article I read at the PublicEye.org titled: “The New Christian Zionism and the Jews”. Its’ thesis is that many Jewish supporters of Israel and the current Israeli government have allied themselves with Christian Fundamentalists whose “love” for Israel and Jews come from the wish to fulfill the prophecies of The Book of Revelations, where in fact Jews not willing to accept Jesus, will die in a horrid holocaust. This trend has been one disturbing me for a long time. I have watched Jews and Israeli’s embrace Fundamentalist Christian support, in what to me is a shortsighted and irrational policy. This could be justified by saying that a country takes its allies where one can get them. Sometimes what seems an example of realpolitik is merely an instance of dangerously narrow opportunism, as I will elaborate. Continue reading “The Christian Zionist Movement and Jewish Confusion”