Friday, Jul 25th
Last update02:22:45 PM GMT
In 2001, Sean Erez, now 38, pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy in Brooklyn, N.Y., after admitting to running an ecstasy distribution network that used young Orthodox Jews to smuggle the "hug drug" out of Amsterdam and into the U.S.
"The recruiters believed that these couriers would not attract the attention of customs inspectors because of their conservative background and their religious dress and appearance," said a press release issued by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York.
Depleted uranium is highly valued by the military, who use it in the tips of armour-piercing weapons. The material's high density and self-sharpening properties help it to penetrate the armour of enemy tanks and bunkers. Its use in conflicts has risen sharply in recent years. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that shells containing 1700 tonnes of the material were fired during the 2003 Iraq war.
Some researchers and campaigners are convinced that depleted uranium left in the environment by spent munitions causes cancer, birth defects and other ill effects in people exposed to it. Governments and the military disagree, and point out that there is no conclusive epidemiological evidence for this. And while they acknowledge that the material is weakly radioactive, they say this effect is too small to explain the genetic damage at the levels seen in war veterans and civilians.
TVNL Comment: And when it comes to health we sould all take the word of governments and the military (whose job is it to kill people), over the scientific community.
If an auto mechanic accidentally breaks your windshield while trying to repair the engine, he would never get away with billing you for fixing his mistake. On Wednesday, Medicare will start applying that logic to American medicine on a broad scale when it stops paying hospitals for the added cost of treating patients who are injured in their care.
Halliburton Co. said on Tuesday a federal judge has denied class-action status to the lead plaintiff in a six-year-old case about securities law violations.
With the Sept. 29 decision, lead plaintiff Archdiocese of Milwaukee Supporting Fund will have to pursue on its own the lawsuit, which claims Halliburton defrauded investors through questionable accounting practices from 1998 to 2001.
TVNL Comment: Note that US Vice President Richard Cheney was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000.
Gov. Sarah Palin cites vigilance against Russian warplanes coming into U.S. airspace over Alaska as one of her foreign policy credentials. But the U.S. military command in charge says that hasn't happened in her 21 months in office.
The spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign, Maria Comella, clarified in an e-mail to The Associated Press that when "Russian incursions near Alaskan airspace and inside the air defense identification zone have occurred ... U.S. Air Force fighters have been scrambled repeatedly."
However, no Russian military planes have been flying even into that zone, said Maj. Allen Herritage, a spokesman for the Alaska region of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, at Elmendorf Air Force Base.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.
He also dismissed as "megalomania" any thought that Israel should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.
'Fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East'
by Robert Fisk
What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa against the majority black population? What if we had lauded the South African white leadership as "hard-line warriors" rather than racists? What if we had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at Sharpeville as an understandable "security crackdown" by the South African police. And described black children shot by the police as an act of "child sacrifice" by their parents? What if we had called upon the "terrorist" ANC leadership to "control their own people".
Almost every day that is exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the Israelis, no matter how many murders – by either side – and no matter how bloody the reputation of the Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African whites against the blacks. No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily supported the apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the blacks of the shanty towns. But there's not much difference between Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there's not much difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied territories and that of the South African police. The apartheid regime had death squads, just as Israel has today. Yet even they did not use helicopter gunships and missiles.
A new high-tech aerial photography system that can spot an illegal porch from 5,000 feet is being marketed to tax assessors as a way to grow revenue.
Pictometry International Corp. says it offers tax assessors 12 different views of every square foot of building or land in a jurisdiction that buys their system. They call it "sophisticated visual intelligence."
State Sen. Jeff Van Drew has another name for it.
"It's Big Brother," said Van Drew, D-Cape May, Cumberland, Atlantic.
"We're not supposed to be spying on people. When it gets to the point where we're doing aerial spying on people's lives, I've had enough," Van Drew said.
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