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Bombs dropped on Great Barrier Reef marine park during massive joint US-Australian war games


The Guardian
Sun, 21 Jul 2013 08:19 UTC
Image
© Grant V Faint/Getty
The US military said four unarmed bombs were dropped in the Great Barrier Reef marine park.
Senator asks 'have we gone mad?' after US planes jettison four unarmed bombs in training exercise gone wrong.

Two American fighter jets dropped four unarmed bombs into Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park last week, when a training exercise went wrong, the US Navy said, angering environmentalists.

The two AV-8B Harrier jets, launched from the aircraft carrier USS Bonhomme Richard, each jettisoned an inert practice bomb and an unarmed laser-guided explosive bomb into the World Heritage-listed marine park off the coast of Queensland state on Tuesday, the US 7th Fleet said in a statement on Saturday. The four bombs, weighing a total 1.8 metric tons (4,000 pounds), were dropped into more than 50 meters (164ft) of water, away from coral, to minimize possible damage to the reef, the statement said. None exploded.

The jets, from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, had intended to drop the ordnances on the Townshend Island bombing range, but aborted the mission when controllers reported the area was not clear of hazards. The pilots conducted the emergency jettison because they were low on fuel and could not land with their bomb load, the Navy said.

The emergency happened on the second day of the biennial joint training exercise Talisman Saber, which brings together 28,000 US and Australian military personnel over three weeks. The US Navy and Marine Corps were working with Australian authorities to investigate the incident, the Navy said.
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Bomb

At least 46 killed, over 150 wounded in Baghdad blasts


RIA Novosti
Sun, 21 Jul 2013 07:40 UTC
Image
© RIA Novosti. Igor Mikhalev
Baghdad
At least 46 people were killed and over 150 wounded after a series of blasts that ripped through commercial streets of Baghdad on Saturday late night, Al Jazeera reported.

All blasts were caused by explosive-laden cars that were timed to go off after the breaking of daily Ramadan fest, when many people were outside in the commercial streets relaxing in coffee shops or shopping.
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Bizarro Earth

'Nobody understands' spills at Alberta oil sands operation

Emma Pullman and Martin Lukacs
The Star
Fri, 19 Jul 2013 21:38 UTC
Cold Lake, Alta.

Photos provided by a government scientist show the site of an oil spill in Cold Lake, Alta. The company that runs the operation says it is effectively managing the cleanup.
Oil spills at an oil sands operation in Cold Lake, Alberta have been going on for weeks with no end in sight, according to a government scientist.

Oil spills at a major oil sands operation in Alberta have been ongoing for at least six weeks and have cast doubts on the safety of underground extraction methods, according to documents obtained by the Star and a government scientist who has been on site.

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has been unable to stop an underground oil blowout that has killed numerous animals and contaminated a lake, forest, and muskeg at its operations in Cold Lake, Alta.

The documents indicate that, since cleanup started in May, some 26,000 barrels of bitumen mixed with surface water have been removed, including more than 4,500 barrels of bitumen.
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Bad Guys

The FBI's nearly unbelievable record of "justified" shootings

Josh Voorhees
Source
Sat, 20 Jul 2013 13:40 UTC
Image
© Orange County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images
In this booking photo provided by the Orange County Sheriff's Office, Ibragim Todashev poses for his mug shot after being arrested for aggravated battery May 4, 2013 in Orlando, Florida.
We're still waiting for the FBI to finish its internal investigation into exactly what happened in an Orlando apartment last month, when an FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a Chechan man who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Since the shooting, unnamed officials have painted a number of different pictures of the scene in the room in the moments before the agent opened fire. Among them, that Todashev was unarmed, that he was brandishing a knife, and that he was carrying a pipe or maybe a broomstick.

For all the current uncertainty surrounding exactly what led the agent to shoot and kill Todashev, the bureau's next step appears almost a foregone conclusion: Based on recent history, the FBI's final report is all but certain to conclude that the shooting was justified. The New York Times with the agency's eye-raising track record:
[F]rom 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 "subjects" and wounded about 80 others - and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings. ...

Out of 289 deliberate shootings covered by the documents, many of which left no one wounded, five were deemed to be "bad shoots," in agents' parlance - encounters that did not comply with the bureau's policy, which allows deadly force if agents fear that their lives or those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical punishment involved adding letters of censure to agents' files. But in none of the five cases did a bullet hit anyone.
Depending on how you read those numbers - more than 150 shootings that wounded or killed a subject in the past 20 years, all justified; 284 deliberate shootings in all, 279 justified - that's either an extraordinary track record, or an unbelievable one. Regardless, it raises some obvious red flags about the fairness and validity of those internal reviews. Perhaps as troubling, as the Times explains, is that in most of those cases the FBI internal investigation was the only inquiry into the shooting, as it currently is in the Orlando incident.
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Gear

Noam Chomsky is in denial about 9/11

Mark H Gaffney
Information Clearing House
Fri, 19 Jul 2013 09:12 UTC
During a recent interview on Democracy Now, Noam Chomsky stated that he believes Osama bin Laden was probably behind the attacks of September 11, 2001.i The statement was curious because in earlier interviews Chomsky described the evidence against bin Laden as thin to nonexistent,ii which was accurate and, no doubt, explains why the US Department of Justice never indicted bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

Nor has any new evidence against bin Laden come to light; on the contrary. A compelling body of evidence now points in a very different direction, toward the unthinkable.

Three years ago (in July 2010) I attempted to engage Professor Chomsky in a conversation about this new evidence. Chomsky, however, showed no interest in the subject. After responding in a way that can only be described as incomprehensible, Chomsky repeated what he had stated in an earlier email: that skeptics of the official story should pursue the usual pathways to advance their ideas. In other words, they should publish their work.
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Eye 2

Ranting man in wheelchair 'blows himself up' in arrivals hall at Beijing Airport


The Daily Mail, UK
Sat, 20 Jul 2013 08:12 UTC
Reports of explosion in Terminal 3 at busy airport in Chinese capital

Pictures posted online show man in wheelchair brandishing an object

Believed to be a packet of gunpowder used to make firecrackers

Another photo shows a wheelchair on its side in smoke-filled terminal

State media says man was hospitalised and nobody else injured

A man in a wheelchair set off a home-made bomb in the arrivals hall at Beijing Airport today.

The man was initially suspected to to have died in the blast in Terminal 3 at around 6.24pm local time, but Chinese state media has now said he survived and was taken to hospital.

A photograph emerged online in the wake of the explosion showing a man in a wheelchair brandishing something in the air, along with another showing an empty wheelchair on its side in the smoke-filled arrivals hall.
Image

Explosion: Photographs emerged online in the wake of the blast of a man in a wheelchair waving his arms in the air at Beijing Airport

Image

Panic: Clouds of smoke filled the arrivals hall today after the man set off a home-made bomb in the busy airport
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Cult

Indiana's anti-Howard Zinn witch-hunt

Bill Bigelow
zinnedproject.org
Sat, 20 Jul 2013 06:40 UTC
Image
Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, one of the country's most widely read history books, died on January 27, 2010. Shortly after, then-Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels got on his computer and fired off an email to the state's top education officials: "This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away."

But Gov. Daniels, now president of Purdue University, was not content merely to celebrate Howard Zinn's passing. He demanded that Zinn's work be hunted down in Indiana schools and suppressed: "The obits and commentaries mentioned his book 'A People's History of the United States' is the 'textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.' It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"
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Black Magic

Canadian Government still withholding documents concerning widespread torture of native children

Dave Dean
Vice.com
Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
In the early 1990s an affiliation of Cochrane, Kapuskasing and James Bay's OPP detectives were assigned to investigate one of the largest claims of sexual and physical abuse against children in Canadian history. The testimony they amassed by talking to hundreds of survivors of St. Anne's Residential School in Fort Albany Ontario was horrifying. Residential Schools were a form of genocide - and the OPP's special investigation into St. Anne's provided 7,000 pages of stories that wouldn't be out of place in memoirs of concentration camp survivors, or of individuals trapped in a country where ethnic cleansing is a government policy.

The accounts of physical and sexual abuse are brutal and numerous - hetero and homosexual child rape, children being stropped and beaten with rudimentary whips, forced ingestion of noxious substances (rotten porridge that children would throw up, then subsequently be forced to eat), sexual fondling, and forced masturbation... the list goes on and on. But one of the most appalling and debasing examples of the indignity and the abuse suffered by children at St. Anne's is that of being strapped down and tortured in a homemade electric chair - sometimes as a form of punishment - but other times just as a form the amusement for the missionaries, who, while committing these acts, were supposedly the ones "civilizing" the "Indians".

Comment: This was not limited to St. Anne's in Ontario. It took place across Canada over several centuries.

Further reading: (Rev.) Kevin Annett, The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada.

Political Ponerology by Andrew Lobaczewski, for understanding the mindset of those who could and do commit these acts, as well as the governments or corporate organisations they operate in.

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Document

The Texas Clemency memos: how Gonzales and Bush nonchalantly executed 152 people in six years

Alan Berlow
The Atlantic
Sat, 19 Jul 2003 22:20 UTC
death penalty
As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales - now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee - prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand

On the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate's plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush's signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Washington's death was barely noted by the media, and the governor's office issued no statement about it. But the execution and the three-page memo that sealed Washington's fate - along with dozens of similar memoranda prepared for Bush - speak volumes about the way the clemency process was approached both by Bush and by Gonzales, the man most often mentioned as the President's choice for the next available seat on the Supreme Court.

During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas - a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who went on to become the Texas secretary of state and a justice on the Texas supreme court. He is now the White House counsel.
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Pistol

Yes, America, we have executed an innocent man

Andrew Cohen
The Atlantic
Mon, 14 May 2012 21:31 UTC
Carlos DeLuna was put to death in December 1989 for a murder in Corpus Christi. But he didn't commit the crime. Today, his case reminds us of the glaring flaws of capital punishment.

The Judge

Carlos DeLuna
© Corpus Christi Police Department
Carlos DeLuna
Even for Justice Antonin Scalia, the crassest of the current United States Supreme Court justices, it was a particularly callous piece of writing. In 2006, in a case styled Kansas v. Marsh, the Court's five conservatives had just upheld a portion of Kansas' capital punishment law. The statute was interpreted to direct a sentence of death even if a jury found the "aggravating" and "mitigating" sentencing factors in equilibrium -- "equipoise," the Court lyrically called it. A tie, in other words, would mean death, not life.

For the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas had bent over backward to overturn a ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that had declared the law unconstitutional. The High Court's four liberal justices had voted to uphold the Kansas ruling. Justice John Paul Stevens, the Ford appointee, chastised Thomas for reaching out so aggressively to overturn a state court on a matter of state law. And Justice David Souter, the Bush I appointee, wrote about how such "equipoise" necessarily precluded a death sentence.
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