Comment

Comment by Dallas (on hiatus) on February 22, 2013 at 11:45pm

Yeah, in Alaska they only get to shoot wolves. 

Comment by Adriana on February 22, 2013 at 8:12pm

The deserves to be in The Onion, Dallas!

Comment by Dallas (on hiatus) on February 22, 2013 at 6:36pm

Who knew this was legal in the first place? 

Texas bans shooting immigrants from helicopters

Texas! Texas! Texas! *shakes head*

Comment by Chris on December 27, 2012 at 2:47pm

Maybe I should have posted this on Michel's Internet group since it's showing the power of the internet.

Blogger's death stirs political hornet's nest in Iran

By Babak Dehghanpisheh

BEIRUT | Wed Dec 26, 2012 4:06am EST

(Reuters) - There was little about Sattar Beheshti that made him stand out in a working-class suburb south of Tehran called Robat Karim.

Like many of his peers, the 35-year-old laborer was devout and lived at home with his mother. But his life changed when he started a blog called "My Life for Iran" last year.

His entries often focused on the struggles of the working class as well as the political restrictions in Iran, sometimes mixed with personal anecdotes from Beheshti's daily life.

As months passed, the tone on the blog became sharper and more political, with unveiled criticism of the establishment and even the Supreme Leader, a red line in the Islamic Republic.

In one recent post, Beheshti criticized a speech made by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran with the title "You presented a bunch of lies instead of a speech" superimposed over a picture of the cleric.

Other posts faulted Iran's unwavering support for Hezbollah in Lebanon or highlighted the plight of human rights activists.

Retaliation quickly followed.

"Yesterday they threatened me and told me your mother will soon be wearing black," Beheshti wrote in a post on October 29.

The next day security agents from Iran's cyber police, known by the acronym FATA, arrested him. His bruised and battered body was handed to his family a week later, his death the result of torture, according to a smuggled letter from fellow prisoners.

More here

Comment by Chris on November 28, 2012 at 3:14pm

In Mississippi Kids Go To Jail For Being Late?

By Julianne Hing, Color Lines

28 November 12

edrico Green can't exactly remember how many times he went back and forth to juvenile. When asked to venture a guess he says, "Maybe 30." He was put on probation by a youth court judge for getting into a fight when he was in eighth grade. Thereafter, any of Green's school-based infractions, from being a few minutes late for class to breaking the school dress code by wearing the wrong color socks, counted as violations of his probation and led to his immediate suspension and incarceration in the local juvenile detention center.

But Green wasn't alone. A bracing Department of Justice lawsuit filed last month against Meridian, Miss., where Green lives and is set to graduate from high school this coming year, argues that the city's juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice system, and violates young people's due process rights along the way.

In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal's office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The police department's policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency.

Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations...

...This practice has also appeared to target black students. Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, is 61 percent African-American. But over a five-year period, Owens said, "There was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for."

Among the infractions that landed Green, who is black, in juvenile detention were talking back to a teacher, wearing long socks and coming to school without wearing a belt. He was behind bars for stretches of time as long as two weeks, and the real rub, his mother Gloria said, is that weekends didn't count as days served. A 10-day suspension stretched to 14 actual days; time for Meridian juvenile justice officials apparently stopped on weekends. All that back and forth out of school and in juvenile took a real toll on Green's education, and he was held back from the eighth grade...

...A 2010 study by Russell Skiba, a professor of education policy at Indiana University, looked at four decades of data from 9,000 of the nation's 16,000 middle schools. It found that black boys were three times as likely to be suspended as white boys and that black girls were four times as likely to be suspended as white girls. It is a serious, endemic issue.

more here

I would be interesting to know what financial incentives the principal has in placing his students in juvenile hall.

Comment by doone on November 20, 2012 at 2:36pm

Marriage Equality Update

The Economist maps global marriage laws:

Same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide in 11 countries, including Argentina and South Africa, as well as in parts of a further two. In Mexico it is allowed in the capital. In America nine states and the District of Columbia have legalised it, including three which, for the first time, did so by popular vote on November 6th, ending a succession of electoral defeats for the measure in 32 states. In Catholic France the new Socialist government has just approved a bill to permit same-sex marriage. That said, in 78 countries—mostly in the Muslim world, Africa and other developing states—gay sex is still a crime, punishable by long prison terms and even death.

One more striking development in the US: Michigan residents now favor marriage equality by a double digit margin in new polling.

Sometimes I think the whole world is really a version of America's red and blue - but with the red much redder elsewhere (think Pakistan) and much bluer too (think Paris or Barcelona). Globally, we are witnessing an evolutionary shift about sex and marriage, men and women, gays and straights, blacks and whites and all the nuances in between. In the past, such shifts occurred gradually, as tradition reinvented itself in coherent societies. Today, with new media and a global economy, the conflicts and shifts that might be resolved gradually and peacefully in various societies at various stages of evolution, are unmissable and graphic everywhere at once. So you have both Victorian homophobia in Africa alongside the emergence of a gay rights movement in that continent. You have the web uniting the teens of Iran and Tunisia - but polarizing their own societies into modernists and fundamentalists (where the fundamentalists have the majority).

In some ways, this last election settled the red-blue issue in America, by rendering it a bluer shade of purple in several states. Here, we now know the fundamentalists, even when allied with others, are, in fact, a minority. And so the next phase of integration can begin. Elsewhere? The wars will rage on - prematurely on the ground, and far too late on the web. It;s this aspect of the web that is often over-looked; it can break societal mores very easily; but it does not yet have the resources or reach in more traditional areas to rebuild them.

Comment by Chris on October 3, 2012 at 3:26pm

What Is Happening to Muslims Will Happen to the Rest of Us

Posted on Oct 1, 2012

By Chris Hedges

The decision by the European Court of Human Rights last week to refuse to block the extradition of the radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and four others to the United States on terrorism charges removes one of the last external checks on our emerging gulag state.

Masri and the four others, all held in British jails, will soon join hundreds of other Muslims tried in Article III federal courtsin the United States over the last decade. Fair trials are unlikely. A disturbing pattern of gross infringements on basic civil liberties, put in place in the name of national security, has poisoned our legal system. These infringements include intrusive surveillance, vague material support charges, the use of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement, classified evidence that the accused cannot review, and the use of political activities, normally protected under the First Amendment, to demonstrate mind-set and intent. Muslims caught up in the Article III courts are denied the opportunity to confront their accusers and to have their religious and political associations protected, and they rarely find a judge courageous enough to protect their rights. These violations of fundamental civil liberties will not, in the end, be reserved exclusively for Muslims once the corporate state feels under siege. What is happening to them will happen to the rest of us. 

More Here

Comment by Neal on September 24, 2012 at 8:47am

I don't know why, but this story makes me laugh. =)

Comment by doone on September 20, 2012 at 10:09pm

Iranian Woman beats the Crap Out of Cleric

Ich bin kein Freund von Gewalt, aber hier kann ich nicht anders. This chick got some serious balls:

“I politely [told] her to cover herself up,” said Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti, an Iranian cleric in the city of Shamirzad in Semnan Province, describing a recent encounter with a woman he believed was improperly veiled. “She responded to me by saying: ‘You [should] close your eyes.’” The cleric, who spoke to the semi-official Mehr news agency, said he repeated his warning to the “bad hijab” woman, which is a way of describing women who do not fully observe the Islamic dress code that became compulsory following the 1979 revolution.

“Not only didn’t she cover herself up, but she also insulted me. I asked her not to insult me anymore, but she started shouting and threatening me,” Beheshti said. “She pushed me and I fell to the ground on my back. From that point on, I don’t know what happened. I was just feeling the kicks of the woman who was beating me up and insulting me.”

He said he was hospitalized for three days following the attack.

Cleric Beaten Up By ‘Badly Veiled’ Woman (via Gawker)

Comment by Adriana on September 17, 2012 at 3:27pm

Sign petition: Please free Alber Saber, Egyptian atheist arrested. 

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 25
• Next ›
• Page