A convenience store clerk who volunteered to work on Christmas Day so the store owners could spend the holiday with their family is one of three people killed by gunfire in Surrey, B.C. over the Christmas weekend.

Two of the victims - both men in their 20s - were identified by police on Monday.

Alok Gupta, 27, was found unresponsive and suffering from an apparent gunshot wound when police arrived at the convenience store in north Surrey late Sunday afternoon.

Sgt. Jennifer Pound of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team said Gupta was transported to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Bradley McPherson, 28, was the victim of an early morning shooting outside a house party on Dec. 24.

Pound said the shootings were not gang related or linked to each other in any way, and police do not yet have any suspects.

Meantime, a 54-year-old woman who suffered a gunshot wound to the chest at a north-end apartment early Sunday morning has not been identified by police.

Congress attacks the constitution

The US Congress has ended the year 2011 by assaulting the constitution. The attack came in the form of the 2012 National Defence Appropriations Act (NDAA), which passed both the House of Representatives (14 December) and the Senate (15 December) by large margins despite having an attached provision (the "Homeland Battlefield Bill") that allows the United States military to take into custody and hold indefinitely without trial any American citizen designated a "terrorist suspect".
　
As if to make sure that everyone knew just what they were voting for, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina who supports the legislation, said on the Senate floor: "The statement of authority to detain does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as a battlefield, including the homeland." That means US citizens designated terrorist suspects are stripped of their protections under the constitution. They simply fall into a judicial black hole. Ironically, Congress did this to the country on the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.

At first it seemed that President Barack Obama was prepared to veto the bill so as to prevent this attack on citizen rights. But this proved to be untrue. What Obama was really interested in was language that prevents the military from interfering with the work of the FBI in cases of suspected terrorism. Actually, this should add to our worries because the FBI has a disturbing record of manufacturing terrorists out of poor and disgruntled US citizens. Given the numerous scams and entrapment scenarios the bureau runs, we will probably see a macabre two-step dance where the FBI makes the terrorists and the military takes them away, never to be seen again outside of Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo Bay has become Washington's version of Devil's Island.

Clashes erupted on Monday between police and several hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews from a town near Jerusalem who are campaigning for men and women to be segregated, an AFP journalist said.

Israeli police had stepped up their patrols in Beit Shemesh following unrest sparked by discrimination against women imposed by a radical fringe of the town's religious Jews.

Several demonstrators were taken in for questioning after police, and journalists were roughed up and insulted by ultra-Orthodox men telling them to "clear off," the journalist said.

There were also shouting matches between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews.

Each day around this nation, and indeed the world, one can find endless stories of horrific animal cruelty---torture and murder so vile it defies imagination---conceived of and carried out by kids as young as 3 years old. There appears to be a proliferation of fresh-faced psychopaths, spawning faster than the poisonous spores of a Frankenstenian experiment gone awry. Why and how does such evil take root?

The problem is pervasive and multifaceted, but the most obvious cause for such blatant disregard for life is a lack of compassion and empathy passed on from parent to child. Generations of individuals perpetuating cruelty toward non-humans based on a multitude of flawed and erroneous notions, including the following:

• Religious bias -- The mainstream and exceedingly rancorous belief that animals were put here to [ab]use, objectify, murder and consume based on twisted religious doctrines which purportedly give mankind "permission" to do so predicated on his so-called "superiority."
• Tradition --- The mindless argument that because generation upon generation have perpetuated acts of barbarism, these acts are somehow justified, and therefore should be unquestioningly accepted and permanently sanctified.

This holiday season, as you walk through a public area (any mall, grocery, or restaurant will do), start counting the people you see. Look in their faces, listen to their conversations, and try to appreciate each of them not just as strangers, but as fellow human beings. When you get to 40 (making sure to include at least 29 women and children), consider that this is the minimum number of civilians whose lives were brought to violent ends by U.S./NATO bombs during the recent military intervention in Libya, according to The New York Times.

Keep counting until you get to "perhaps more than 70" and consider that these 30-plus people represent the margin of error in the Times analysis; this uncertainty about even the number of completely innocent people we have killed is a reality of "humanitarian" war, in which we drop hundreds of thousands of pounds of high explosives from the skies upon the people we are "helping" below.

Of course, this estimated civilian death toll doesn't take into account the innocent people killed by other forces in the Libyan conflict, which was an inevitable result of turning an entire country into a war zone. Nor does it reflect the deaths of the actual combatants, who should be neither ignored nor forgotten; just ask the parents of any American soldier killed in one of our many wars. In fact, ask any parent, period.

Chicago / New York - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.

"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.

Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."

Two stores, on Staten Island and in Chinatown, have agreed to stop selling roll-your-own cigarettes after New York City accused them of being fronts for evading cigarette taxes.

The owners of the stores, both called Island Smokes, agreed to close them by February as part of a consent decree filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, according to the city's Law Department. They also agreed that no one associated with the businesses would operate a similar enterprise in New York City; stores had already been planned for the East Village and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The stores, which sell loose tobacco and rolling papers and have machines to help customers make their cigarettes, had appeared to operate in a legal gray area. The owners had argued that because they sold loose tobacco, they should not be subject to full state and city cigarette taxes, which can nearly double the price of a pack of cigarettes.

Slouched in woe beside the Christmas tree, a lot of Americans missed the point of 2011: Santa Claus had already emptied his goodie sack before the night of wonders and miracles arrived and was back at the North Pole checking the balance sheet to see if he could raise a little cash selling some remaining assets off to the Blackstone Group or maybe work a leveraged buyout deal with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. A few elves would have to join the unemployment line, but they could probably get by on half-rations of food stamps. Or maybe Henry Kravis could feed them reindeer steaks... at a discount, as long as they last.

It's remarkable how the year's great mega-holiday blowout suspends time and circumstance. I didn't see how the European banks were going to make it to December 25, but then, heading into the shopping frenzy home-stretch, swap lines opened up between the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank and around $600-odd billion in ZIRP loans flowed to over 200 Euro banks. Maybe that will cover the next two weeks of aggregate debt rollovers, and then what? They can't even look forward to President's Day over there - unless we rented out the George Washington and Abe Lincoln brands to them.

Who is still not impressed with the ability of these central banks, and their owner-operators, to keep re-circulating immense loads of notional money? Alas, every wash-rinse repeat cycle leaves the certificates a little paler and thinner, and it won't be long before they just appear to be blank paper. But rackets as grand and insolent as these would not be possible, except in a culture so estranged from truth that anything goes over without notice. I wonder about that scene around the American Christmas tree, though - the empty space between the floor and the lowest boughs where the gaily-wrapped presents used to appear.

Grapevine, Texas - Six members of a Texas family apparently opened Christmas presents just before a relative dressed as Santa Claus showed up, opened fire and killed them before killing himself, police said Monday.

Grapevine police spokesman Sgt. Robert Eberling said the shooter showed up in the Santa outfit shortly before gunfire erupted and was a member of the family. The identity of the shooter and the victims will be released after autopsies are conducted Monday, he said.

Terrified sales shoppers looked on in horror today as a man was stabbed to death amid crowds of Boxing Day bargain hunters.

The victim was fatally attacked outside a branch of Foot Locker in Oxford Street, at the heart of London's West End shopping district.

Witnesses said the black man, aged in his late twenties or early thirties, was involved in a clash with a group of other young men.