Tuesday, Oct 14th
Last update07:57:12 AM GMT
Ministers are facing demands for an official apology to at least 80 Asian women who were subjected to "virginity tests'' by immigration staff when they tried to come to Britain in the late 1970s.
The demands follow the disclosure of confidential Home Office files that show that intimate examinations – used to "check the marital status" of Indian and Pakistani women coming to Britain to marry – were on a far wider scale than was previously known.
In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe — one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment — when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through.
The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.
The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.
Most of the people in our society are sheep. We may be in the most violent times in history but, [in America,] violence is still remarkable rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.
I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without it's hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, citizens still need warriors to protect them from predators.
It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”
The FBI has seized control of a Russian cybercrime enterprise, but to kill it completely, officials may ask to rip some malware out of your computer. US diplomatic secrets could be at stake. The FBI might be asking your permission soon to reach into your computer and rip something out. And you don’t know it’s there.
In a first for US law enforcement efforts to make the Internet more secure, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized control of a Russian cybercrime enterprise that has enslaved millions of personal computers and may have gained access to US diplomatic, military, and law enforcement computer systems.
No stranger to controversy — the cliché fits Tony Kushner, whose groundbreaking play cycle Angels in America (subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) was one of the major flashpoints in the modern culture war. (It is still a sore subject in some places, as Studio 360 reported in 2009.) Now Kushner's views are once again subject of debate, this time from an unexpected quarter.
Kushner was to receive an honorary award from the City University of New York's John Jay College. In an unprecedented move, according to the New York Times report on the events, CUNY's board of trustees voted to deny the award, after a trustee attacked Kushner's views on Israel. Kushner asserts that his views are shared by Jews and supporters of Israel inside that country and in the US — he responded to CUNY in a letter posted in The Jewish Week.
Pentagon officials said an unmanned aircraft bombed a remote compound Thursday, targeting the U.S.-born al-Awlaki, The New York Times reported Saturday.
There were casualties, but al-Awlaki was not among them, unidentified military officials told the Times. Since locating and killing bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday, the U.S. intelligence community's concern has been to identify the apparent heir to the leadership of the Muslim terrorist group.
House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other top House Republicans are warning President Barack Obama not to issue a proposed executive order requiring disclosure of political donations by federal contractors, calling it "a blatant attempt to intimidate, and potentially silence, certain speakers who are engaged in their constitutionally protected right to free speech."
The proposal, which has not been formally introduced by Obama yet, would require big federal contractors and their top corporate officers and directors, to disclose their political donations, even to outside groups involved in "independent expenditure" campaigns. Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already infuriated by the move, and GOP congressional leaders in both chambers have come out against the initiative.
Imagine that the more than 700 Guantanamo files released two weeks ago by WikiLeaks contained information explaining how interrogators obtained "intelligence" from "war on terror" detainees captured or sold to US forces after 9/11, such as this firsthand account:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.
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