Ramblings and Opinons of an old man!
Simple site to log thoughts on current events and activity. Please feel free to give your comments.
South Korea's busy capital Seoul faced an added complication on Wednesday when six elephants escaped from an amusement park, causing chaos.
KUWAIT CITY (AP) - In a major step toward granting political rights to women in Kuwait, lawmakers agreed Tuesday to permit them to vote and run in local council elections, although the measure requires more legislative action before it becomes law.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the United States charged in connection with the September 11 terrorist attacks, says he plans to plead guilty, The Washington Post reported.
If a judge finds Moussaoui mentally competent, he could enter the plea as early as this week, the Post reported in Tuesday's editions, citing sources familiar with the case.
The government accused Moussaoui of participating in an al Qaeda conspiracy to commit terrorism that included the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
For the Foxidation process to work, it isn't necessary to convince Americans that the verbal ruffians who give FNC its crackle have a corner on the truth -- only that all of us in the news business are grinding our partisan axes all the time and that none of us deserves to be taken seriously as seekers of truth.
This is huge. As a friend remarked recently, time was when if you found it in the New York Times, that settled the bar bet and the other guy paid off. But if the Times and The Post or any other mainstream news outlet -- including the major networks -- come to be seen as the left-of-center counterparts of Fox News Channel, why would anyone accept them as authoritative sources of truth?
What is at risk is not a reputation for infallibility; everyone knows that even the best newspapers and most careful broadcasters make mistakes. But it has been generally accepted that the mainstream media at least try to get it right -- even when they too grudgingly acknowledge their errors after the fact.
LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- An aspiring physicist was sentenced Monday to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million for his role in a spree of arson and vandalism that targeted gas-guzzling Hummers and other sports utility vehicles.
The Homeland Security Department arrested 57 illegal immigrants last month working at airports and other risk-sensitive facilities around the country, underscoring concerns that lax employment background checks are leaving a security breach for terrorists to exploit.
In one example, a Peruvian was hired as an airplane mechanic in Greensboro, N.C., using a fake Social Security card he bought for $70 on a soccer field, according to court documents. In another, a Florida power plant was alerted to a Mexican working at its nuclear facility only after being tipped off by labor union employees, company officials said.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea said Monday it believes a reactor at North Korea's main nuclear complex has been shut down, a possible sign the communist state could be moving to harvest more weapons-grade plutonium.
Kim Sook, director-general of North American affairs at South Korea's Foreign Ministry, told KBS Radio that a shutdown of a nuclear reactor at the North's main Yongbyon nuclear complex had been confirmed.
Yongbyon houses a 5-megawatt reactor that generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium, but they must be removed and reprocessed to extract the plutonium for use in an atomic weapon. They can be removed only if the reactor has been shut down.
I think we need to talk about abortion differently,' Dean said. 'Republicans have painted us into a corner where they have forced us to defend abortion. I don't know anybody who's for abortion.If not "for abortion" then you are "against abortion" -- if you are "against abortion", what choice is there to argue about? As I said -- Dean makes no sense.
[...]
"We can make common ground with folks," he said. "The issue we need to debate is not whether abortion is a good thing. The issue we need to debate is whether a woman gets to make up her own mind about her health care or whether Tom DeLay gets to make up her mind."
Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, died Saturday in the blast, which also killed an Iraqi and another foreigner, officials said. She had been in Iraq conducting door-to-door surveys trying to determine the number of civilian casualties in the country.Want to know more about Marla Ruzicka? Read here.
Ruzicka, 28, founded CIVIC in 2003 to 'mitigate the impact of the conflict and its aftermath on the people of Iraq by ensuring that timely and effective life-saving assistance is provided to those in need,' according to the group's Web site.
RUSKIN, Florida (CNN) -- A convicted sex offender has confessed to killing 13-year-old Sarah Michelle Lunde, Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee announced Sunday.
What the FBI found was much more troubling: a hidden stash of loaded weapons and ammunition clips, $34,000 in cash, two pictures of Mawlawi shouldering a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a gruesome videotape of war casualties with Arabic text and voiceover, and more than 20 passports to Morocco, Syria, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries.Remeber this story
The agents were members of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. As outlined by prosecutors and agents in a federal courtroom last week, what they found could be evidence of a possible terrorist link in Memphis or something less sinister, as has proven to be the case in other investigations of Middle Easterners caught up in our legal system. The FBI investigation is ongoing.
'Mr. Mawlawi was a danger to the community,' assistant U.S. attorney Fred Godwin told U.S. magistrate Tu Pham during the hearing last week to decide whether Mawlawi should be jailed or released on bond.
By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans’ health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.Well Mr. Cochran; I asked, as did my father, uncle, and cousins -- all veterans, do we count?
Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, sought to add $1.9 billion to the $80.6 billion wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill to cover costs of treating returning combat veterans for war-related injuries and to cover shortfalls in funding for VA programs.
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The amendment was blocked by a parliamentary motion from Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, who said the funding is not really an emergency need. The Senate voted in support of Cochran’s position, and then voted again when Murray tried to get the amendment approved even if the funding was not characterized as an emergency. The outcome was the same, with 54 senators voting to block funding and 46 voting to provide it.
“The administration has not asked for these funds,” Cochran said in explaining the rejection of the amendment. [read entire article here]
ATLANTA - A defiant Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty Wednesday to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks, saying he picked the Summer Games to embarrass the U.S. government in front of the world - for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- An Indiana businessman whose firm works in Iraq was shown Wednesday in an insurgent video, surrounded by masked militants as he asked his family and friends to urge the United States to negotiate with the 'Iraqi national resistance.'
FORT BRAGG, N.C. - An Army sergeant charged with a grenade attack that killed two U.S. officers in Kuwait went on trial Monday, with his lawyer trying to stave off a possible death sentence by arguing that his client suffered from mental illness.
But a military prosecutor said Sgt. Hasan Akbar knew exactly what he was doing, pointing to his detailed diary entries before the March 2003 attack and the fact that he stole the grenades and cut power to his camp just before striking.
Premeditation is the central issue in the court-martial of the 33-year-old Akbar, who confessed several times and allegedly told investigators he carried out the attack in the opening days of the Iraq war because he was worried that U.S. forces would harm fellow Muslims.
BOSTON, April 10 (AP) - Many voters in last year's election were denied access to the polls through trickery and intimidation, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts told a voters' group on Sunday.
'Last year, too many people were denied their right to vote; too many who tried to vote were intimidated,' Mr. Kerry said at an event sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.
He cited examples of trickery. 'Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday,' Mr. Kerry said. 'People are told in telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote."
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Thousands of supporters of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr marched in Baghdad on Saturday to denounce the U.S. presence in Iraq and call for a speedy trial of Saddam Hussein on the second anniversary of the former dictator's overthrow.
Chanting “No, no to the occupiers”, thousands of young and old men gathered in the poor Shiite district of Sadr City to begin a planned peaceful march to Firdos Square, the central Baghdad spot where Saddam’s statue was torn down two years ago.
LAS VEGAS - The woman who claims she bit into a human finger while eating chili at a Wendy's restaurant has a history of filing lawsuits - including a claim against another fast-food restaurant in Nevada.
Anna Ayala, who hired a San Jose, Calif., attorney to represent her in the Wendy's case, has been involved in at least half a dozen legal battles in the San Francisco
Bay area, according to more than a decade of court records.
SAN FRANCISCO -- For the second time in as many days, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a Pasco soldier's challenge to the military's 'stop-loss' policy that extends enlistments during war.
The entire panel of the San Francisco-based court yesterday declined to hear a motion for an injunction by Sgt. Emiliano Santiago to keep him from being sent to Afghanistan. On Wednesday, a three-member court panel in Seattle denied his appeal seeking release from the Army.