Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Acquittal for Met officer.

Metropolitan Police Sergeant Delroy Smellie was acquitted of attacking animal rights activist Nicola Fisher during the G20 demonstrations last April.

The 47-year-old allegedly clashed with the protester outside the Bank of England in central London.

The incident had attracted worldwide attention when amateur video footage of it was posted on the YouTube website.

Pretty ugly pictures at the link.

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I’m not sure that this qualifies as ‘supernatural’.

Common toads appear to be able to sense an impending earthquake and will flee their colony days before the seismic activity strikes.

The evidence comes from a population of toads which left their breeding colony three days before an earthquake that struck L’Aquila in Italy in 2009.

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Perhaps too much money in today’s game.

Is European football experiencing an epidemic of match-fixing that is beyond the power of the authorities to control?

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So much for freedom of religion and expression in Belgium.

A Belgian parliamentary committee has voted to ban face-covering Islamic veils from being worn in public.

The home affairs committee voted unanimously to endorse the move, which must be approved by parliament for it to become law.
Such a vote could be held within weeks, correspondents say, meaning that Belgium could become the first European country to implement a ban.

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How long can we keep this up?

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This has been getting a lot of press.

Since the rise of Islamic militancy, many Muslims - both ordinary worshippers and religious scholars - have wondered just how their scriptures could be so misconstrued, misunderstood and misused that they could justify terrorist murder.

The latest attacks - twin subway bombings in Moscow believed to be by “black widows,” extremist Muslims from the Caucasus area of Russia - bring to nearly 1,000 the number of dead in attacks in Moscow by these fanatics in the last 10 years.

Meanwhile, the arrests Monday of militia members in Michigan illustrates that this perplexing distortion of religious teachings is not restricted to Islam.

It appears that the warning issued a while back was accurate. (At least according to this story.)

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And you thought that ‘tanning’ would be covered by health care reform.

From breast pumping to adoption tax credits, the leviathan known as the U.S. health care bill is loaded with little goodies.

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Wonder if the press will cover this as much as the Tea Party protests.

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Not encouraging.

A new Census report on state and local pension plans shows they lost $179 billion even before stock, bond and real estate markets crashed. State and local pension plans lost $178.8 billion in value in the last full year of accounting before markets crashed and the recession hit, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.


That apparently represents a $498 billion drop in total receipts and a negative earnings swing of $510 billion in one year, when most plans assume growth of 7-8 percent.

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Dodging a bullet?

Azerbaijan said on Monday it had detained eight people including a Chechen man on suspicion of planning “terrorist acts” against a school and kindergarten in the capital of the oil-producing Caucasus state.

Secular authorities in mainly Muslim Azerbaijan, a tightly controlled former Soviet republic, are concerned over what they say is the rising influence of radical Islam and the threat posed to the country’s oil-fuelled economic growth.

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Maybe Madagascar will get the right of free speech.

Several hundred opposition supporters booed President Andry Rajoelina on Monday when Madagascar’s strongman laid a wreath marking the anniversary of a nationalist uprising in 1947.

“It falls on deaf ears, but don’t despair, we will never accept him,” said Louisa, 32, who was among women demonstrators mainly dressed in white during the protest against Rajoelina.

Hundreds of supporters of his regime also turned out, so a large contingent of security forces was deployed to keep the rival camps apart in a tense atmosphere.

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Global-warming Alarmism Dying a Slow Death

I think the key word there is ‘alarmism’.

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The gift that just keeps on giving.

The ‘oil for food’ scandal.

UN investigation lists Enemalta bidder B.B. Energy among oil companies that paid ‘surcharge’ to Saddam regime to get $37 million contract through UN’s oil-for-food programme

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What! And lose all those grants?

I think not.

After being rocked by a series of high-profile scandals, ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is disbanding as its funding has vanished and debts have climbed. It is reportedly closing April 1.

The group, which was one of the longest running and most active community organizations focused on poor and working class families, became the center of controversy last summer when conservative activists secretly recorded ACORN employees appearing to give advice on skirting tax laws.

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Kidnapped in Iran

Iran said Tuesday that its intelligence agents had rescued an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Pakistan in 2008 and returned him to the Islamic Republic.

Unidentified gunmen kidnapped Heshmatollah Attarzadeh Niyaki, the commercial attache at Iran’s consulate in Peshawar, on November 13, 2008 on his way to the consulate from his home, shooting dead a policeman guarding him.

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