Reporters Without Borders today condemned the Iraqi government’s decision yesterday to close down two privately-owned TV stations for “inciting violence and murder” by screening footage of protests against former President Saddam Hussein’s death sentence. The main daily newspapers have also been suspended for three days beginning yesterday under a curfew decreed prior to the verdict.
“As well as the growing violence against journalists in the ... (more)
From the Guardian: The Sandinista leader and former Marxist revolutionary Daniel Ortega appeared to have mounted a spectacular political comeback last night after preliminary results showed he had won Nicaragua's presidential election in the first round. Mr Ortega led by a margin which seemed wide enough to avoid a run-off and to deliver a stinging rebuke to Washington, which had openly campaigned against him..
People who repeatedly flout anti-social behaviour laws should be housed in "sin bins" where they will be subjected to curfews and a tough set of rules governing how they live, according to the Government's anti-social behaviour chief.
Louise Casey, who heads the Respect taskforce, wants to extend family intervention projects to single people who have extremely "chaotic" lifestyles.
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Ms Casey sai... (more)
A new Official Secrets Act to stop whistle-blowers is to be included in the Queen's Speech.
John Reid, the Home Secretary, is to launch a Bill increasing the severity of gagging orders on Government insiders and employees who leak confidential information.
Plans for the clampdown were revealed by this newspaper in July. According to a leaked schedule of legislation planned for the next session of Parliament, there will be at least five major Ho... (more)
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Tyler Stoken was a well-behaved fourth grader who enjoyed school, earned A's and B's and performed well on standardized tests.
In May 2005, he'd completed five of the six days of the Washington State Assessment of Student Learning exam, called WASL, part of the state's No Child Left Behind test.
Then Tyler came upon this question: ``While looking out the window one day at school, you notice the principal flying in the air. In several pa... (more)
A few blocks off Pennsylvania Avenue, the FBI's eight-story Washington field office exudes all the charm of a maximum-security prison. Its curved roof is made of thick stainless steel, the bottom three floors are wrapped in granite and limestone, hydraulic bollards protect the ramp to the four-floor garage, and bulletproof security booths guard the entrance to the narrow lobby. On the fourth floor, like a tomb within a tomb, lies the most secret ro... (more)
American commanders in Iraq have privately told the President that additional troops will be needed in Iraq to maintain the current policy.
Plans are secretly underway for a suprise new call up of National Guard and Reserves to be announced sometime after the election.
The Washington Post has now reported that plamning that is now classified, being kept secret from voters and military families until the election is over, could well include what the Post calls a pol... (more)
Here is some collapse footage shown by the BBC in a programme ‘9/11:The Twin Towers’, broadcast in the UK on 7 September 2006. I hadn't seen it before, so thought I'd post it in case others hadn't seen it as well. Notice how the second building flares up du... (more)
NEW YORK - November 3 - The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) joined attorneys in filing a brief yesterday in Al Odah v. United States of America, together with Boumediene v. Bush the two cases representing men held at Guantánamo Bay that have reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The briefs were the first written arguments to challenge the Military Commissions Act (MCA) in court and argue that either the retroactive suspension of the detainees' right of habeas corp... (more)
CHINA—Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy said that police in Pengshui County, Chongqing City, China, recently arrested 25 people caught sending text messages, using their cell phones, that expressed their dissatisfaction with the Chinese Communist regime and local authorities. On August 25, Qin Zhongfei, a staff member of the Education Committee in Pengshui County sent a 120-word message to his friend that ridiculed the way a Pengshui... (more)
I hold no brief for Saddam Hussein. He is a gruesome dictator who is much better out of power, and a dangerous man who is much better in captivity. I am nonetheless sorry he will be murdered by the State. Iraq has seen quite enough death already, and like so many of the others, this will merely engender more. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died already due to the Bush/Blair invasion. The vast majority of them were totally innocent. If you kill hundreds of thousands ... (more)
This week, it was made available to the public via the internet for the first time in 11 years.
Miriam Oren of Ramat Gan was the director of a department in the Na'amat women's movement. She was on stage with Prime Minister Rabin during the Tel Aviv demonstration and escorted him to his car where convicted assassin Yigal Amir waited.
She emphatically stated again and again to Israel TV that Rabin was not hit:
THE Princess Diana inquiry is in danger of stalling after French spy chiefs blocked British detectives’ attempts to establish the final hours of driver Henri Paul.
The team led by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens has been trying to obtain the "agent handling" files on the chauffeur, who was working for several secret service agencies.
The detectives are desperate to find out what Paul, deputy head of security at the Ritz in ... (more)
If you want to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell, just look at the New York Times editorial pages of November 1, 2006. Amazingly enough, the Times ran a full op-ed column by a top official of the Hamas party, Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Yousef repeated the same offer Hamas has been making for years. In Arabic it's called a "hudna."
As Yousef explained, a hudna is "a period of nonwar but only partial resolutio... (more)
Many adults in the United States believe their federal administration should alter its tactics in Iraq, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 61 per cent of respondents believe the U.S. should change its military strategy.
In addition, 27 per cent of respondents think the U.S. should remove all of its troops from Iraq, and eight per cent believe the current military strategy is correct.
The coalition effort against Saddam Hussein's regim... (more)
A WESTERN Australian senator has written to federal MPs warning that medical advances from stem cell research are years away and consequences could include designer humans.
Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston, a medical doctor who entered politics in 1996, said politicians were being rushed into enacting laws before there had been enough time to fully appreciate the implications.
His warning comes ahead of next week's debate and conscience vote on private member's legis... (more)
NEW YORK The White House is dismissing fresh calls for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ouster, calling an editorial in leading newspapers for the military "a shabby piece of work."
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Saturday the president has shrugged off an editorial by the Military Times Media Group, which publishes the Army Times, Marine Times, Air Force Times and Navy Times, calling for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Bushs feels it is merely "grandstanding... (more)
A cabal of Pakistani military officials with access to President Pervez Musharraf's innermost security circle has been arrested after trying to assassinate him in a rocket attack.
The strike, aimed at the president's high-security personal residence-office in Rawalpindi, took place shortly after he returned from Britain and the US in late September.
Although the president was not hurt, the attempt demonstrates the political instability engulfi... (more)
Not’ Testify Before Congress, Even If Subpoenaed This morning on ABC, George Stephanopoulos asked Vice President Cheney if he would testify before Congress if he was subpoenaed. Cheney said “probably not in the sense at that vice president and president and constitutional officers don’t appear before the Congress.”
Stephanopoulos noted that President Gerald Ford testified before Congress. Watch it:
According to the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, the unitary decider “administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the ‘alternative interrogation methods’ that their captors used to get them to talk.”
According to the government, these “alternative interrogation methods,&rd... (more)
Last Wednesday's melancholy defeat of the vote to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the Iraq war produced a brief roll of honour from the Labour benches. They are Harry Cohen, Jeremy Corbyn, Mark Fisher, Glenda Jackson, Roger Godsiff, John McDonnell, Alan Simpson, Peter Soulsby, Bob Marshall Andrews, Gavin Strang, Robert Wareing and Mike Wood.
They are the few. They voted against their party, but for parliament and democracy.
Race watchdogs are to investigate the national DNA database over revelations that up to three quarters of young black men will soon have their profiles stored.
Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), vowed to examine whether the database breached race relations laws following the findings by The Sunday Telegraph. "This is tantamount to criminalising a generation of young black men," he said.
At least half of English households face huge council tax increases under a nationwide reassessment of property values by a 'Big Brother', computer.
The Government has tried to play down the effects of the survey of 21million homes, but The Mail on Sunday has learned it will add hundreds of pounds to most bills.
The American company which designs the system the Government will use to update propert... (more)
Tony Blair will use his monthly press conference today to confirm his commitment to the introduction of identity cards and take on opponents of the controversial scheme.
The prime minister is expected to counter criticism that the project is too expensive and could infringe civil liberties by saying that it will help authorities to tackle crime, illegal immigration, terrorism and identity fraud.
He is also likely to challenge doubts over the... (more)
Richard Perle -- a controversial conservative considered among the architects of the Iraq invasion -- has rushed to criticize a new Vanity Fair piece in which he is quoted as saying he regrets advocating for invading Iraq. Perle claims that he was promised the article would not be published before the Nov. 7 Congressional elections.
"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen ... (more)
