The Obama Administration has responded critically to the decision from an Israeli court to give an Israeli border police officer just community service for his entirely unjustified attack on an American teenager. Tariq Khdeir, 15, a Palestinian-American, was beaten by the officer, whose name has been withheld by the courts to avoid any further repercussions for him or his family. The beating was filmed after the officer caught the teenager near a riot in East Jerusalem in July 2014. Despite this evidence (and no evidence of just cause) the Israeli court gave the officer just 45 days of community service and a suspended prison term of four months.
We have long discussed our close alliance with Saudi Arabia despite that country’s denial of the most fundamental human rights for women, non-Muslims, journalists, and political dissidents. While the State Department continues to vaguely reference “reforms” in the Kingdom, the Saudi Sharia courts and religious police continue to generate shocking medieval cases where people are flogged or executed for exercising free thought or associations. The latest outrage is the death sentence given Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s contemporary art scene. He has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam, being an atheist (which he denies) and insulting Saudi Arabia. Many view his real offense as being his embarrassment of the infamous religious police (mutaween) in Abha after he posted a video of their lashing a man in public. As is often the case in the pseudo, “courts” of Saudi Arabia, he was denied counsel and any real opportunity to present a defense.
By Cara L. Gallagher, weekend contributor/holiday survivalist
Gaming the table talk at Thanksgiving when the participants include long-lost, rarely seen family members and friends requires much the same strategies as one’s approach to eating that day: Take control of the situation. Go in with a plan. Never attack. Take it one bite at a time and digest a bit before going farther.
Talk of the Republican candidates, the debates, and/or Hillary’s emails are the assumed political traps this Thursday. If those are the topics your turkey table is doomed to dwell on, consider switching the conversation to the no-less controversial but more scholarly topics: Supreme Court and its new term. Continue reading “Thanksgiving follies: Go ahead, talk politics at the dinner table.”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
An inmate who previously escaped from a detention facility in Chicago filed a lawsuit against the government demanding ten million dollars in damages resulting from his escape caper failed to convince the Seventh Circuit of his claim’s merit, but the court at least acknowledged his lawsuit “gets credit for chutzpah.”
The jailbreak occurred in 2012 when plaintiff Jose Banks and a cellmate rappelled down seventeen stories down a high-rise corrections center using a rope constructed of sheets and dental floss. He managed to hail a cab and evade law enforcement for several days before recapture.
Banks claimed among other things that he suffered emotional injury from the trauma of fearing for his life as he dangled from the makeshift rope used in his escape.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
It is a truly blasphemous concept to a pescetarian–genetically modified, farm raised salmon. But, the United States Food and Drug Administration voted Thursday to allow for the marketing, and just as worrisome, the exemption from food labeling as such, of genetically altered fish that reportedly grows twice as fast as natural salmon. It once again shows how consumers cannot rely on politicians and the U.S. Government for informed choices on what we eat.
The producer of the fish, AquaBounty Technologies, received clearance to manufacture their AquAdvantage(R) Salmon after the FDA “determined that they have met the regulatory requirements for approval, including that food from the fish is safe to eat,” according to Bernadette Dunham director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. This culminates in a two decade effort for the company to gain approval to sell the fish to producers.
AquAdvantage is the first genetically modified animal to win approval from the FDA to sell to consumers. It is now up to these consumers to do their homework to determine if food products contain frankenfish, since labeling is not required. In a conference call to reporters, the FDA advised consumers wishing to avoid GMO fish will need to purchase Wild-Caught since the term Farm Raised will encompass natural and altered genome types.
Continue reading “Genetically Modified Salmon Coming To A Store Near You”
Princeton University has agreed to explore the removal of the name and images of former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from buildings and school programs under a deal signed with protesters who objected to Wilson’s support of segregation, which was legal at the time. This action occurs as Harvard Law students have demanded the dropping of the school seal due to a connection to a slaveholder.
Harvard Law students have started a campaign to drop the historic seal of Harvard because it is tied to an 18th-century slaveholder. The students organization, Royall Must Fall, have held campus demonstrations demanding the removal of the seal. The three sheaves of wheat on the seal come from the Royall family crest (which raises the compromise possibility of just replacing that portion of the seal attributed to the Royall family). Third-year law student Alexander Clayborne insists that the effort is part of “[o]ur larger goals include decolonization of the law school in general and decolonization of the law school curriculum.”
A student at Georgia Southern University has triggered a controversy that has led to her being fired from her job and charges that she has engaged in hate speech after criticizing protesters at the University of Missouri. Emily Faz, a senior, was critical of social media postings where Missouri protesters objected that the terrorist attacks in Paris were taken too much media attention away from their story.
We recently discussed the allegations of a conservative college newspaper at Dartmouth that “Black Lives Matter” protesters burst into the Baker-Berry Library on the university’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire and yelled racial epithets and prevented students from studying. The incident was partially caught on videotape and showed protesters abusing students. At the time, I questioned why the university seemed so silent and reticent about allegations of racist statements and even physical threats reported by other students. According to some reports, the university has now acted . . . to apologize to the students who burst into the library, prevented other students from studying, and allegedly yelled racial epithets.
We have previously discussed the curious pattern of people with past crimes seeking employment in law enforcement . . . only to end up as a defendant rather than an applicant. The latest to join this ignoble group is John Wesley Rose, 25, who applied for a job at a Michigan sheriff’s department despite an outstanding warrant in Kentucky on sexual assault charges.
It appears that the Obama Administrations is not alone in pursuing journalists in the search for whistleblowers and leakers. Emiliano Fittipaldi has revealed that he has been interrogated and faces charges from Holy See prosecutors. He was given a Vatican summons to appear to answer questions about his recently published book “Avarice.”
Usually moments of silence are solemn and dignified events that can help heal wounds left in the aftermath of tragedies. Two such occasions this week however show how they can leave troubled feelings in their wake. The first blown event was G-20 Moment of Silence for the victims in Paris. The problem is that it turned out to be a G-19 Moment of Silence because President Obama walked in late. While one would hope that this deeply symbolic moment would be sufficiently important to get the President there on time, problems can occur. Yet, this President has been criticized for years for being consistently late to events, which shows a lack of respect as well as organization. This is one of the worst such failures in a long line of delayed arrivals. The second incident was far more disturbing in Turkey.
A Florida Appellate Court has ruled in favor of Patrick Neptune, a man who was barred under a clearly unconstitutional ruling from criticizing a local police officer on the Internet. Neptune accused Miramar Police Department Officer Philip Lanoue of first cutting him off in traffic and then following him home and giving him a ticket. After Lanoue sought a stalking injunction, a court issued an order including a bar on his criticizing the officer on the Internet.
San Francisco police and prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation following the posting of videotape in the Mission District showing two Alameda County sheriff’s deputies beating 29-year-old Stanislav Petrov. Petrov is still recovering from his injuries and the incident is being compared to the Rodney King beating. The video shown below is quite disturbing.
Karen Keller of Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary on Bainbridge Island, Washington has a rather controversial approach to eradicating gender inequality in her kindergarten class: she reportedly bars boys from playing with Legos. A local paper below quotes Keller as saying that she wants to combat lower spatial and math skills among girls. While she says that girls want to play with dolls while boys want to play with Legos, she refuses to give boys permission to play with the Legos to try to reverse the trend. For many of us, Keller’s approach is not simply discriminatory but completely irrational and abusive. Yet, she clearly feels comfortable in adopting such discriminatory rules and speaking about them publicly. The issue is not the practices at Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary but the rise in such discriminatory practices — something that I have criticized through the years.