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Sunday, November 08, 2009 

Category: News and Politics
Germany celebrates memory of Berlin Wall falling




By MATT MOORE, Associated Press Writer Matt Moore, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 13 mins ago


BERLIN – Twenty years ago Monday, they danced atop the Berlin Wall, feet thudding on the cold concrete, arms raised in victory, hands clasped in friendship and giddy hope.
On that cold night, years of separation and anxiety melted into the unbelievable reality of freedom and a future without border guards, secret police, informers and rigid communist control.

This weekend, Germans celebrate with concerts boasting Beethoven and Bon Jovi; a memorial service for the 136 people killed trying to cross over from 1961 to 1989; candle lightings and 1,000 towering plastic foam dominoes to be placed along the wall's route and tipped over.

On Nov. 9, 1989, East Germans came in droves, riding their sputtering Trabants, motorcycles and rickety bicycles. Hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands crossed over the following days.

Stores in West Berlin stayed open late and banks gave out 100 Deutschemarks in "welcome money," then worth about $50, to each East German visitor.

The party lasted four days and by Nov. 12 more than 3 million of East Germany's 16.6 million people had visited, nearly a third of them to West Berlin, the rest through gates opening up along the rest of the fenced, mined frontier that cut their country in two.
Sections of the nearly 155 kilometers (100 miles) of wall were pulled down and knocked over. Tourists chiseled off chunks to keep as souvenirs. Tearful families reunited. Bars gave out free drinks. Strangers kissed and toasted each other with champagne.

Klaus-Hubert Fugger, a student at the Free University in West Berlin, was having drinks at a pub when people began coming "who looked a bit different."

Customers bought the visitors round after round. By midnight, instead of going home, Fugger and three others took a taxi to the Brandenburg Gate, long a no man's land, and scaled the 12-foot (nearly four meter) wall with hundreds of others.

"There were really like a lot of scenes, like people crying, because they couldn't get the situation," said Fugger, now 43. "A lot of people came with bottles" of champagne and sweet German sparkling wine.

Fugger spent the next night on the wall, too. A newsmagazine photo shows him wrapped in a scarf.

"Then the wall was crowded all over, thousands of people, and you couldn't move ... you had to push through the masses of the people," he said.

Angela Merkel, Germany's first chancellor from the former communist East, recalled the euphoria in an address last week to the U.S. Congress.

"Where there was once only a dark wall, a door suddenly opened and we all walked through it: onto the streets, into the churches, across the borders," Merkel said. "Everyone was given the chance to build something new, to make a difference, to venture a new beginning."

The wall the communists built at the height of the Cold War and which stood for 28 years is mostly gone. Some parts still stand, at an outdoor art gallery or as part of an open-air museum. Its route through the city is now streets, shopping centers, apartment houses. The only reminder of it are a series of inlaid bricks that trace its path.
Checkpoint Charlie, the prefab that was long the symbol of the Allied presence and of Cold War tension, has been moved to a museum in western Berlin.

Potsdamer Platz, the vibrant square that was destroyed during World War II and became a no man's land during the Cold War, is full of upscale shops selling everything from iPods to grilled bratwursts.

At a ceremony in Berlin Oct. 31, Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who presided over the opening of the wall, stood side by side with the superpower presidents of the time, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.

After the decades of shame that followed the Nazi era, Kohl suggested, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of their country 11 months later gave Germans pride.

"We don't have many reasons in our history to be proud," said Kohl, now 79. But as
chancellor, "I have nothing better, nothing to be more proud of, than German reunification."

In an interview in Moscow with Associated Press Television News, Gorbachev said it was a catalyst for peace.

"No matter how hard it was, we worked, we found mutual understanding and we moved forward. We started cutting down nuclear weapons, scaling down the armed forces in Europe and resolving other issues," he said.

It all began with a routine late afternoon news conference.
On Nov. 9, 1989, Guenter Schabowski, a member of East Germany's ruling Politburo, casually declared that East Germans would be free to travel to the West immediately.
Later, he tried to clarify his comments and said the new rules would take hold at midnight, but events moved faster as the word spread.

At a remote crossing in Berlin's south, Annemarie Reffert and her 15-year-old daughter made history by becoming the first East Germans to cross the border.
Reffert, now 66, remembers the East German soldiers being at a loss when she tried to cross the border.

"I argued that Schabowski said we were allowed to go over," she said. The border soldiers relented. A customs official was astonished that she had no luggage.
"All we wanted was to see if we really could travel," Reffert said.

Years later, Schabowski told a TV interviewer that he had gotten mixed up. It was not a decision but a draft law that the Politburo was set to discuss. He thought it was a decision that had already been approved.

That night, around midnight, border guards swung open the gates. Through Checkpoint Charlie, down the Invalidenstrasse, across the Glienicke Bridge, scores of people streamed into West Berlin, unabated, unfettered, eyes agog.


link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091108/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_after_the_wall
6:39 PM 
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Monday, October 05, 2009 

Category: News and Politics
Is SNL right that Obama's accomplished 'nothing'?
This weekend "Saturday Night Live" opened with Fred Armisen as President Obama, delivering an address from the Oval Office. Noting up front that he'd failed to secure the 2016 Olympic Games for Chicago, Armisen's Obama said it was just further proof that his detractors' fears are unfounded: How could he transform the country into something resembling the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany when he's failed to accomplish anything at all? "When you look at my record," he said, "it's very clear what I've done so far, and that is nothing."

But are SNL's accusations of Obama being a do-nothing president accurate? Let's run down the list of the nine promises SNL lampooned President Obama for doing "nothing" on to see where he actually stands.
1. Close the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay: In one of his first acts as president, said that he was "hopeful" that the White House would meet that deadline. Several legal and logistical questions remained to be answered, however, including the fate of the remaining detainees.

2. Pull all troops out of Iraq: In February, a large number of troops were pulled out of the country, a move that was understated here in the U.S., but was met by dancing in the streets in some parts of Iraq. At the time of the withdrawal, a recent interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," General Stanley McChrystal, America's top commander in Afghanistan, said that things had become "a little worse" than he had originally anticipated in Afghanistan, adding that "the breadth of the violence, the geographic spread of violence, is a little more than I would have gathered." Wednesday marks the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, and last Sunday saw the deadliest single battle for American soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001. The administration is currently divided over how to change course in Afghanistan, weighing McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops against other options.

4. Reform the nation's health care system: This year's health care reform debate has been one of the more contentious debates in American history. Originally, the Senate Finance Committee finally released its mammoth health care bill, setting the stage for an even more intense national debate with a floor vote potentially coming as early as the middle of this week.

5. Cut down on global warming: Prior to the onset of the raucous health care reform debate, the centerpiece of the Administration's efforts to stem the increase of global warming, the Cap and Trade bill, was on the legislative fast-track. However, over the weekend Carol Browner, Obama's global warming czar, said that announced that he would have an immigration bill in Congress by the end of the year, though it likely wouldn't be voted on until 2010. Saying that "demagogues" who "suggest that any form of pathway for legalization for those who are already in the United States is unacceptable" would attempt to obstruct his efforts, the president added, "Am I going to be able to snap my fingers and get this done? No."

7. Changing the military's policies on gay soldiers: In his first week in the Oval Office, James Jones reiterated Obama's commitment to fulfilling this campaign promise, but added that the president has "a lot on his plate" and would get around to addressing the issue at the "right time."

8. Placing limits on executive powers: In the early days of his presidency, Salon's Glenn Greenwald noting in April that the White House had "explicitly claimed to possess the very presidential powers that Bush critics spent years condemning as radical, lawless and authoritarian."

9. Prosecute those who facilitate torture: In April, President Obama announced that his Administration announcing the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether or not the interrogations of suspected terrorists broke any laws.

So, taking all of this into consideration, are SNL's satirical criticisms of President Obama's do-nothingness valid? Probably not, mainly because, as illustrated by the old adage about how one shouldn't watch sausage or legislation get made, the process of "change" and getting anything done in Washington is a long and messy one, and Obama is merely nine months into his term as president. But that doesn't mean that Saturday's SNL skit was humorless, which, for once, it most definitely was not.

-- Brett Michael Dykes is a contributor to the Yahoo! News Blog.

link:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_pl942
10:34 PM 
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Monday, September 21, 2009 
Report: CIA interrogations informed by bad science

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 20 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Prolonged stress from the CIA's harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.
The methods could even have caused the suspects to create — and believe — false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.
"Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or enhanced interrogation," according to the paper published Monday in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
In the paper, Shane O'Mara, a professor at Ireland's Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, wrote that the severe interrogation techniques appear based on "folk psychology" — a layman's idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function.
O'Mara told The Associated Press on Monday he reviewed the scientific literature about the effect of stress on memory and brain function after reading descriptions of the CIA's Bush-era interrogation methods. The methods were detailed in previously classified legal memos released in April.
O'Mara did not examine or interview any of those interrogated by the CIA, a fact noted by the agency in commenting on his work.
"The CIA's former interrogation program was conducted pursuant to legal guidance from the Department of Justice. It produced intelligence on which our government acted to disrupt terrorist operations. Those are facts. The author of this study did not, to my knowledge, have direct contact with individuals who had been part of the agency's high-value detainee program," said CIA spokesman George Little.
O'Mara said that in general, "The assumption is that the (methods) are without effect on memory, or indeed facilitate the retrieval of information from memory."
But overwhelmingly, scientific literature shows the opposite: Chronic stress and trauma — the likely result of the CIA's methods, particularly for long-term prisoners, according to O'Mara — can damage the hippocampus, the part of the brain that integrates memory.
The list of techniques the CIA used included prolonged sleep deprivation — six days in at least one instance — being chained in painful positions, exploitation of prisoners' phobias, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that President Barack Obama has called torture. Three CIA prisoners were waterboarded, two of them extensively.
Those methods cause the brain to release stress hormones that, if their release is repeated and prolonged, may result in compromised brain function and even tissue loss, O'Mara wrote.
He warned that this could lead to brain lobe disorders, making the prisoners vulnerable to confabulation — in this case, the pathological production of false memories based on suggestions from an interrogator. Those false memories mix with true information in the interrogation, making it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated.
Waterboarding is especially stressful "with the potential to cause widespread stress-induced changes in the brain, especially when these are repeated frequently and intensively," O'Mara wrote.
"The fact that the detrimental effects of these techniques on the brain are not visible to the naked eye makes them no less real," he wrote.
The paper also asserted that forcibly exposing prisoners to what they are afraid of — the CIA got approval to use a suspect's fear of insects against him — is actually a method used to cure phobias. The insects were never used, according to the government.
A 2006 Intelligence Science Board report on interrogation also noted possible negative effects of certain methods. For example, isolating suspects can be beneficial to interrogation because it shakes prisoners' confidence and expectations, but extended isolation can significantly and negatively affect the ability of the source to recall information accurately, according to the report.
The board, created in 2002, provides independent advice to senior intelligence officials on emerging scientific and technical issues of special importance to intelligence work.


lnk: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090921/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_cia_interrogation_study
9:16 PM 
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Monday, August 31, 2009 

Category: News and Politics
Hamas leader denies Nazi genocide of Jews

By DIAA HADID,
Associated Press Writer Diaa Hadid
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – A Hamas spiritual leader on Monday called teaching Palestinian children about the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews a "war crime," rejecting a suggestion that the U.N. might include the Holocaust in Gaza's school curriculum.
A senior Israeli official said such statements should make the West think twice about ending its boycott of Hamas, in place since the group seized Gaza by force in 2007. Israeli officials called the comments as "obscene" and said they place Hamas in a pariah club of Holocaust deniers that includes Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Hamas spiritual leader Younis al-Astal lashed out after hearing that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. body aiding Palestinian refugees, planned to introduce lessons about the Holocaust to Gaza students.
Adding the Holocaust to the curriculum would amount to "marketing a lie and spreading it," al-Astal wrote in a statement.
"I do not exaggerate when I say this issue is a war crime, because of how it serves the Zionist colonizers and deals with their hypocrisy and lies," he wrote.
A U.N. official said no decision has been made about introducing Holocaust education in Gaza.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to acknowledge Jewish suffering, fearing it might diminish their own. Attitudes toward the Holocaust range from outright denial to challenging its scope.
Hamas has been making overtures to the West, hoping to end a stifling blockade of Gaza. And the statements about the Holocaust by senior Hamas officials could undermine the group's attempt to present itself as pragmatic. The U.S. and Europe list Hamas as a terror group, but there have been growing calls, particularly in Europe, to talk to the militants. Hamas control of Gaza is seen as a key obstacle to any Mideast peace deal.
Three teachers at U.N. schools said that according to the new program, basic information about the Holocaust was expected to be taught to eighth grade students as part of human rights classes.
Two of the teachers said they were told about the lesson plan by colleagues involved in the new syllabus. Another teacher said he attended a recent meeting with education officials where he was told to try to teach the new syllabus without offending parents' sensibilities.
All three said they had not received the syllabus for the human rights classes yet, even though the school year began in late August. They requested anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to reporters.
UNRWA provides education, health care and welfare services to more than half of Gaza's 1.4 million people. Spokesman Chris Gunness said a final decision has not been made about the Holocaust course for Gaza schools.
"While the Holocaust is currently not included on the basis of age appropriateness, all elements (of the curriculum) remain under review and under evolution," he said.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also objected to including what he referred to as the "so-called Holocaust" in the lesson plan. "We think it's more important to teach Palestinians the crimes of the Israeli occupation," he said.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said countries contemplating ending their boycott of Hamas must "seriously reconsider" after the Hamas statements, which he described as "obscene."
The Holocaust is not taught in West Bank schools, said an education ministry official in Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas' government.
Israelis have long complained that Palestinian textbooks present Israel only as an enemy, despite a series of interim peace deals. Also, they charge that maps in the books do not show Israel at all.
Palestinians make similar charges about Israeli education. Recently Israel's education minister ordered a halt to using the accepted Arabic term "nakba," or catastrophe, to describe the results of the two-year war that followed Israel's creation, when about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.
The U.N. runs 221 schools in Gaza for more than 200,000 students and is the largest independent agency in the territory, controlled by Hamas since a violent takeover in 2007. The West Bank, the other territory that is supposed to comprise a future Palestinian state, is controlled by Hamas' Western-backed rivals of the Fatah movement, led by President Mahmoud Abbas.
Some 6 million Jews were killed in the Nazi campaign to wipe out European Jewry, and the urgent need to find a sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of survivors contributed to the creation of Israel after World War II.
Many Palestinians are reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the Holocaust because they feel it provided legitimacy for Israel's establishment. A majority of Gaza's 1.4 million people are Palestinian refugees or their descendants.
 
Some parents opposed the idea of their children learning about the Holocaust. "I don't want them teaching my children Jewish lies," Mohammed Silmi, 33, said Monday, after driving his son to a U.N. school in Gaza City on the back of a motorbike. "It will just be Zionist propaganda."
Hamas' founding charter calls for Israel's destruction, though senior Hamas officials have recently said they would accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel as an interim stage to full Islamic control of the region.
Hamas is frequently at loggerheads with the U.N. refugee agency, which it considers the only serious challenge to its control of Gaza. Over the summer, Hamas accused the U.N. of spreading "immorality" in summer camps for children, because it offered activities such as folk dancing and crafts.

link:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090831/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_hamas_holocaust
9:28 PM 
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009 

Category: News and Politics

Spam costs $3 billion a year in wasted electricity alone

My previous blog post on the hidden costs of computing -- which pointed to a study that said that leaving computers on overnight wasted $2.8 billion of electricity a year -- was hotly contested by readers, many of whom felt the time spent rebooting their computer every morning was a far greater waste of money.
That remains open for debate, but here's a statistic that I think everyone can get behind: Spam wastes even more electricity than leaving your computer running 24/7, costing roughly $3 billion a year in wasted power alone.
McAfee calculated that sending, routing, and otherwise dealing with spam eats up a total of 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. As The Guardian notes, that's enough to power 2.4 million American homes and, by my math (as the average kw-hr costs about a dime), a total cost of over $3 billion.
And that doesn't even take into account money spent on spam filtering software, the loss of productivity due to users spending time deleting spam messages and finding false positives, and losses from people who get caught up in spam-based scams, either purchasing useless or undelivered products or being the victims of a spam-based crime.
The additional insights in McAfee's Carbon Footprint of Spam Report (registration required) suggest that spam transmission creates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline each year. That's shocking.
But all is not lost: The good news is that McAfee notes that current levels of spam filtering save 135 billion killowatt-hours of electricity that would otherwise be wasted if all users and computers went unprotected from spam.
link:
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/139377 

9:35 PM 
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009 

Category: News and Politics


 
Terrorist attack on the White House

That would "amaze" the world?

By ISHTIAQ MAHSUD, Associated ....
Press Writer Ishtiaq Mahsud, ....
Associated Press Writer – 49 mins ago

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, ....Pakistan.... – The commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Tuesday for a deadly assault on a Pakistani police academy and said the group was planning a terrorist attack on the White House that would "amaze" the world.


Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million bounty on his head from the ..U.S..., said Monday's attack on the outskirts of the eastern city of ..Lahore.. was retaliation for ....U.S..... missile strikes against militants along the Afghan border.


"Soon we will launch an attack in ....Washington.... that will amaze everyone in the world," Mehsud told The Associated Press by phone. He provided no details.....

Mehsud has never been directly linked to any attacks outside ....Pakistan...., but attacks blamed on his network of fighters have widened in scope and ambition in recent years. The threat comes days after President Barack Obama warned that al-Qaida is actively planning attacks on the ..United States.. from secret havens in ....Pakistan........


Pakistan....'s former government and the CIA named Mehsud as the prime suspect behind the December 2007 killing of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Pakistani officials accuse him of harboring foreign fighters, including Central Asians linked to al-Qaida, and of training suicide bombers.


In his latest comments, Mehsud identified the White House as one of the targets in an interview with local Dewa Radio, a copy of which was obtained by the AP.....



FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said the bureau was not aware of any imminent or specific threat to the ....U.S....., despite what the Pakistani Taliban leader said.....



"He has made similar threats to the ....U.S..... in the past," said Kolko.


Mehsud also claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing that killed four soldiers Monday in Bannu district and a suicide attack targeting a police station in ....Islamabad.... last week that killed one officer.


Such attacks pose a major test for the weak, year-old civilian administration of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari that has been gripped with political turmoil in recent weeks.


A senior police investigator in the ....Lahore.... case, Zulfikar Hameed, said some of the men arrested in Monday's attack corroborated Mehsud's claim.


"We have got some important leads from them regarding their origin, their network, their local facilitators and things like that," he told Dawn News TV, declining to elaborate.


The gunmen who attacked the police academy killed seven police and two civilians, holding security forces at bay for about eight hours before being overpowered by Pakistani commandos. Some of the attackers wore police uniforms, and they took hostages and tossed grenades during the assault.


Earlier Tuesday, a spokesman from a little-known militant group linked to the Pakistani Taliban also claimed responsibility for the attack and a similar ambush-style attack against the Sri Lankan cricket team earlier this month in ....Lahore..... It was not immediately possible to reconcile the two claims.


Omar Farooq, who said he is the spokesman for Fedayeen al-Islam, said the group would carry out more attacks unless Pakistani troops withdraw from tribal areas near the Afghan border and the ....U.S..... stops its drone strikes. The group previously said it was behind the deadly September bombing of the Marriott hotel in ....Islamabad.... that killed 54 people.


Mehsud declined to comment on Fedayeen al-Islam's claim that it carried out the attack or to say whether the group is linked to his own. The Pakistani Taliban leader also said he was not deterred by the ....U.S..... bounty on his head: "I wish to die and embrace martyrdom."


The AP has spoken to Mehsud several times in the past and recognized his voice, and a request for an interview with Mehsud was submitted through his aide. The militant leader also granted phone interviews to other media organizations.....



The Pakistani Taliban has links with al-Qaida and Afghan Taliban militants who have launched attacks against ..U.S... and NATO forces in ....Afghanistan.... from a base in the border region between the two countries.


 

..Pakistan.. faces tremendous ....U.S..... pressure to eradicate militants from its soil and has launched several military operations in the Afghan border region. ....



The ....U.S..... has stepped up drone attacks against militants in the area, causing tension with Pakistani officials who protest they are a violation of the country's sovereignty and kill innocent civilians.


Monday's highly coordinated attack highlighted that militants in the country pose a threat far outside the border region. It prompted Interior Ministry chief ....Rehman Malik.., ..Pakistan....'s top civilian security official, to say that militant groups were "destabilizing the country."


After gunmen stormed the academy, masses of security forces surrounded the compound, exchanging fire in televised scenes reminiscent of the militant siege in the Indian city of ..Mumbai.. in November and the attack on ....Sri Lanka....'s cricket team. ....



Officials Tuesday were still trying to sort out how many attackers were involved, giving varying accounts to the media.


A senior ....Lahore.... police investigator, Zulfikar Hameed, told the AP that three of the attackers blew themselves up when commandos retook the police academy and one was shot by security forces. Hameed said it was difficult to say precisely how many militants carried out the attack and some may have escaped. ....



Tasneem Qureshi, a top official at the Interior Ministry, told an Express News TV that four attackers were in custody and "one, who was wounded, managed to escape."


Punjab police chief, Khawaja Khalid Farooq, said one of the captured militants had provided useful information and that about 50 other people in ....Lahore.... were detained overnight for questioning.



.... 



___ ....



Associated Press writers Asif Shahzad and Munir Ahmad in ..Islamabad.., Zarar Khan and Babar Dogar in ..Lahore.., and Foster Klug in ....Washington.... contributed to this report.

 

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090331/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan’


 

My own thoughts about this matter:

It makes me wonder, in what way they (terrorists) are going to shock the world, again? I believe 9/11 is the most shocking event in recoding history and nothing can top it. Or can it?    

9:03 PM 
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Friday, March 13, 2009 

Category: News and Politics

US drops 'enemy combatant' term


In a break from Bush administration policy, the US
will no longer hold terror suspects as "enemy combatants", the Justice
Department has announced.
Detainees will instead be held according to legal standards set by the international laws of war.
Under the new definition, only those who provided "substantial"
support to al-Qaeda or the Taleban will be considered detainable,
officials said.
President Barack Obama has ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
..President George W Bush had argued that his status
as commander-in-chief allowed him to hold detainees unilaterally as
"enemy combatants".
The Obama administration will, by contrast, hold prisoners
under the authority granted by Congress, when it approved the
Authorisation for the Use of Military Force "against nations,
organisations, or persons the president determines planned, authorised,
committed, or aided the September 11 attacks, or harboured such
organisations or persons" in September 2001.


..
link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7943114.stm


8:13 PM 
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Thursday, March 12, 2009 

Doubt over German gunman warning


German police are investigating reports that an
internet warning said to be from a youth who later carried out a school
gun attack may have been fake.
The message was originally believed to have been posted by
gunman Tim Kretschmer six hours before he killed 15 people in the town
of Winnenden.
But police told the BBC they had been contacted by internet users and officials who doubted its origins.
They have filed a request for access to the website's US-based server.
..Local police spokesman Klaus Hinderer told the BBC
they had been alerted to a possible problem with the message by
internet users and official sources on Thursday afternoon.
Had enough'





..

..



..



FROM THE BBC WORLD SERVICE






..

..







..

..








..
More from BBC World Service
..


..






At a news conference earlier on Thursday, Baden-Wurttemberg's Interior Minister Heribert Rech had read out the message.
"I've had enough. I'm fed up with this horrid life... Always the same," it read.
"People are laughing at me... No-one sees my potential... I am
scared, I have weapons here, and I will go to my former school tomorrow
and then I will really do a grilling."
The message then continued: "Possibly I get away, so keep your
ears open, you will hear from me tomorrow. Just remember the name of
the place, Winnenden."
Mr Rech said a German man alerted police about the internet warning after the school shooting.
The man said his teenage son told him about the warning only
after seeing the news reports. He had not previously taken the threat
seriously, responding to Kretschmer's post with "LOL", the chatroom
shorthand for "laugh out loud".
TributesFlags were flying at half-mast across Germany on Thursday as a mark of respect for the victims of the shootings.
Students and local people have also been gathering at the
Albertville secondary school, where nine students and three teachers
were killed.
Many laid flowers, candles, CDs or letters as tributes to those who died.
One man held a sign saying: "God, where were you?"
"I don't know if I can stay at this school," said student Christin Pluengel. "Every time you enter, the memories come back."
A counselling centre has been set up near to school to help people come to terms with the killings.
Officials said Kretschmer fired more than 100 shots during Wednesday's attack on his former school.
Germany's Bild newspaper reported students as saying he had gone into one classroom three times, asking: "Aren't you all dead?"
Hans-Dieter Wagner, police director for the Esslingen area, told the news conference Kretschmer had fled the school on foot.
In the three hours after the school shooting, Kretschmer injured a passerby and shot dead an employee at a psychiatric clinic.
He then shot and killed an employee and a customer at a car showroom in a nearby town.
Officials say he still had more than 130 rounds of ammunition left when he was cornered by police and shot himself.
link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7939528.stm



8:53 PM 
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Thursday, March 05, 2009 

Category: Music
3:53 AM 
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Friday, February 20, 2009 

Category: News and Politics

 

NY Post cartoon seems to link Obama to dead chimp

By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – The New York Post is standing behind a cartoon that some have interpreted as comparing President Barack Obama to a violent chimpanzee gunned down by police.
The cartoon in Wednesday's Post by Sean Delonas shows two police officers standing over the body of a bullet-riddled chimp. One of the officers says the other, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton called the cartoon "troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys."
But Sharpton said the Post should clarify the point it was trying to make with the cartoon, which was playing off Monday's rampage by a pet chimpanzee in Stamford, Conn., that left a woman severely mauled. Police ended up killing the chimp.
In a statement, Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan said: "The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."
A story about the cartoon on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post Web site drew hundreds of reader responses, many calling the cartoon racist and insensitive.
Sam Stein, a columnist for the site, wrote that "at its most benign, the cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it. Most provocatively, it compares the president to a rabid chimp. Either way, the incorporation of violence and (on a darker level) race into politics is bound to be controversial."

6:50 PM 
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The Talented Mr. Martinez



Last Updated: 11/19/2009

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Gender: Male
Age: 26
City: Los Angeles
State: California

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