A French judge has ordered a magazine off newsstands for publishing a photo of a Jewish man Ilan Halimi, who was allegedly tortured to death. The alleged culprits are facing trial. Judge Phillipe Jean-Draeher based his decision on the “exceptional” attack by Choc magazine on the feelings of Halimi’s mother and sisters.
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Category: International
Pirates being tried in the Netherlands are announced that they want to stay in the country — citing such things as the toilets in their cell as just one of the great things about the country. One Dutch professor has suggested that the promise of a better life in the West might be a good incentive for pirates to surrender.
There was an interesting scene at the Belgian bodybuilding championship when all of the competitors reportedly fled at the appearance of a lab nerd with an anti-doping testing kit. Note: neither of the bodybuilders shown here are accused of doping, but the standards have clearly changed in a few decades.
For all of the economic and social pressure of this time, lawyers in the United States still have much to be thankful for. In moments of doubt, they need only consider the plight of lawyers in other countries like Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was killed recently. Rosenburg predicted his own murder in an amazing video (below) after alleging high level corruption in the government.
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In past blogs, we have been keeping track of the horrible fate of children and women in Nigeria and other parts of Africa accused of witchcraft. Belief in witches is common in Africa and shown recently with disclosures about one of Gov. Sarah Palin’s favorite preachers. Now, these children are protesting to try to get the world to pay attention to their plight and to get the government to act.
Continue reading “Bewitching Protest: Accused Nigerian Child Witches Protest Abuse”
GQ has an array of daily briefing booklet sent by Donald Rumsfeld to George W. Bush on the Iraq war and the war on terror that featured Biblical sayings. This is the reading prepared for a president who called the war on terror a “crusade.” Such Biblical inspirational sayings as “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death” were coupled with triumphant pictures for the President’s daily briefings. The covers read like a Sunday school workbook for an adolescent student.
Bela Kosoian, 38, is a handrail felon. The mother of two was taking an escalator down to the Montreal subway on her way to Université du Québec à Montreal, where she studies international law. She ended up handcuffed and held in a small cell for not holding the handrail on the escalator.
Continue reading “Descent Into Crime: Montreal Woman Handcuffed and Thrown into Cell for Failing To Hold Escalator Handrail”
CIA Director Leon Panetta struck back at Speaker Nancy Pelosi today in a memorandum to CIA employees saying that she was fully and truthfully briefed in 2002. He indirectly accuses Pelosi of “making hay out” of the CIA and misrepresenting her briefing for political purposes. I discussed the Pelosi story last night on this segment of Countdown.
Continue reading “Haymaker: Panetta Contradicts Pelosi and Says That She Was Fully Briefed”
President Barack Obama continued his replication of the Bush policies today with the disclosure that he will now restart the controversial Bush tribunal system — now to be called the Obama tribunal system. This follows Obama’s adoption of an even more extreme theory of executive privilege in court, the reversal of the decision to comply with a court order and turn over abuse photographs, the continuing effort to extinguish dozens of public interest lawsuits on privacy violations, and the proposed adoption of the Bush policy of holding detainees indefinitely without trial, here. In the meantime, he and Attorney General Eric Holder continue to block the appointment of a special prosecutor despite mounting evidence of war crimes committed by the prior administration. I will be discussing these recent developments tonight on Countdown.
Continue reading “Bush 2.0: Obama To Continue Military Tribunals”
A former high-ranking state department official has come forward with the explosive report that then Vice President Dick Cheney called for the torture of an Iraqi prisoner to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq in the midst of the political controversy over the misrepresentations that led to the Iraq invasion. Cheney was one of the main figures pushing this justification, which was found based on false intelligence. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, adds yet another piece of evidence that the torture program was not based on a “ticking bomb” justification and was not based on the faux legal opinions of lawyers like Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo.
The former head of the Milwaukee archdiocese, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, 82, is about to publish a memoir on his gay lifestyle as a Catholic priest and sexual scandal. “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop” will be released in June.
One of the wealthiest Americans has been fined after his enormous yacht was found loaded with dead exotic and endangered animals and animal parts. Tamir Saphir’s yacht was something out of Dr. Moreau’s island — loaded with stuffed dead animals and skins and carved ivory.
Continue reading “Ship of Fool: Billionaire Tamir Saphir’s Yacht Seized While Loaded With Endangered and Exotic Animal Parts”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has continued her effort to explain past statements on torture and her failure to act to stop a war crime after she was briefed on the torture program. After being contradicted by both documents and one of her aides, Pelosi has now accused CIA officials misleading her in 2002.
Continue reading “Pelosi Now Claims That She Was Misled By CIA”
The Obama administration has already adopted extreme executive privilege arguments that dwarfed the arguments of George Bush. It has moved to kill dozens of citizens lawsuits to uncover criminal acts of the government. This week, it refused (despite a court ruling) to release embarrassing photos of detainee abuse. Now, in the continue morphing with the prior Administration, Barack Obama is considering a continuation of the Bush policy of indefinitely detaining suspects without trial. I will be discussing this and other issues today on the Ed Beck Show on MSNBC.
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There has been a long controversy over the ability of the religious right to justify most any position of the GOP on the environment or civil liberties in terms of religious faith. However, the recent Republican effort to embrace and justify torture presented a bit of a problem for the faithful, particularly Christians who worship a man who was tortured to death on a cross. That presented no problem for Gary Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate and leader of the religious right, who has announced that it would have been immoral for the Bush administration not to torture people.