Wednesday, Dec 03rd
Last update08:29:24 AM GMT
A veteran firefighter refused to respond to last month's deadly shooting spree that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wounded because he had different political views than his colleagues and "did not want to be part of it," according to internal city memos.
Mark Ekstrum's insubordination may have delayed his unit's response because firefighters had to stop at another station to pick up a replacement for him, the Arizona Daily Star reported.
The U.S. vetoed a draft resolution in the United Nations Security Council that would have declared Israel’s settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be illegal and demanded a halt to such activity.
The U.S., while “rejecting in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” voted against the measure out of concern for the impact on the future of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Ambassador Susan Rice said.
It appears that US dealings with the Palestinians have entered a new phase: Bullying.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama telephoned Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to urge him to block a UN Security Council resolution condemning settlements. Obama pressed very hard during the 50 minute call, so hard that Abbas felt constrained to agree to take Obama’s request to the PLO executive committee (which, not surprisingly, agreed that Abbas should not accede to Obama’s request).
But what a request it is!
An obscure cybersecurity firm from Sacramento has been swept up in a bizarre scandal involving an affiliated company and an alleged plot to discredit liberal critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As the controversy intensified, the Sacramento company abruptly withdrew from a high-profile cybersecurity convention being held this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The conference ends today.
America is rapidly turning into a horrible Big Brother police state and most of our politicians are fully supporting this transformation. In fact, the U.S. House of Representatives gave us quite a Valentine's Day gift the other day when it voted to once again extend provisions of the Patriot Act that allow for domestic surveillance of American citizens, wire tapping of American citizens and warrantless searches of the homes of American citizens.
The Philadelphia archdiocese has suspended three priests named as child molestation suspects in a scathing grand jury report issued last week and has pledged to reopen complaints made against 34 others still on the job.
Joseph Gallagher, Stephen Perzan and Joseph DiGregorio have been removed from ministry while their cases are reviewed.
There is no other place in the occupied territories where injustice is so blatant; visits by schoolchildren to Hebron, while ignoring what Israel and the settlers have done there, is anti-educational.
Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar's announcement that starting in the upcoming school year, his ministry will make student trips to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron part of a new curriculum is cause for serious concern. In his decision to bring schoolchildren to the heart of the most violent and problematic settlement in the territories, the education minister took a controversial political step - not a pedagogic one.
More than half the states are not complying with a post-Virginia Tech law that requires them to share the names of mentally ill people with the national background-check system to prevent them from buying guns, an Associated Press review has found.
The deadline for complying with the three-year-old law was last month. But nine states haven't supplied any names to the database. Seventeen others have sent in fewer than 25, meaning gun dealers around the U.S. could be running names of would-be buyers against a woefully incomplete list.
Physicists have built the world's first device that can cancel out a laser beam - a so-called anti-laser. The device, created by a team from Yale University, is capable of absorbing an incoming laser beam entirely.
But this is not intended as a defence against high-power laser weapons, the researchers said. Instead they think it could be used in next-generation supercomputers which will be built with components that use light rather than electrons.
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