Detention centre castigated over death of elderly man

Terminally ill Canadian man, 84, was kept in handcuffs by staff at Harmondsworth removal centre until after his heart stopped

The chief inspector of prisons has accused the privately run immigration detention centre at Heathrow of a shocking loss of humanity after a terminally ill Canadian man was kept in handcuffs as he died in hospital.

Staff ignored a doctor's report declaring the 84-year-old unfit for detention or deportation and in need of social care.

The chief inspector, Nick Hardwick, said that on at least two occasions staff at the Geo-run Harmondsworth immigration removal centre have needlessly handcuffed elderly, vulnerable and incapacitated detainees in what he called "an excessive and shocking manner". He said that the two men were so ill that one died shortly after his handcuffs were removed and the other, the 84-year-old, who has been named as Alois Dvorzac, died while still restrained.

Hardwick said the security procedures at the immigration removal centre, which can hold more than 600 male detainees, lacked proportionality: "Segregation was being used excessively and was not in line with the detention centre rules. Disturbingly, a lack of intelligent individual risk assessment has meant that most detainees were handcuffed on escort."

A devastating 250-page dossier, detailing allegations of beatings, electrocution, mock executions and sexual assault, has been presented to the International Criminal Court, and could result in some of Britain's leading defence figures facing prosecution for "systematic" war crimes.

General Sir Peter Wall, the head of the British Army; former defence secretary Geoff Hoon; and former defence minister Adam Ingram are among those named in the report, entitled "The Responsibility of UK Officials for War Crimes Involving Systematic Detainee Abuse in Iraq from 2003-2008".

The damning dossier draws on cases of more than 400 Iraqis, representing "thousands of allegations of mistreatment amounting to war crimes of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".

They range from "hooding" prisoners to burning, electric shocks, threats to kill and "cultural and religious humiliation". Other forms of alleged abuse include sexual assault, mock executions, threats of rape, death, and torture.

The formal complaint to the ICC, lodged yesterday, is the cumulation of several years' work by Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). It calls for an investigation into the alleged war crimes, under Article 15 of the Rome Statute.

Controversy resolved after additional meetings with nearby First Nation

A Saskatchewan student was told not to wear a sweatshirt in school that has the words "Got Land? Thank an Indian" on it, although officials have since relented.

Tenelle Starr, 13, is in Grade 8 and goes to school in Balcarres, about 90 kilometres northeast of Regina. She is a member of the nearby Star Blanket First Nation.

"It supports our treaty and land rights ... It's important." Starr told CBC News Tuesday, as the issue over the message on her shirt reverberated at her school and online through her Facebook page.

A woman who was shown on camera tumbling out of a moving LAPD squad car last year said she fell out of the vehicle to avoid being sexually assaulted by her arresting officer.

KCAL9′s Stacey Butler spoke to the woman's attorney, Arnoldo Cassillas.

The alleged victim, Kim Nguyen, a 27-year-old pharmacist, says she was handcuffed in the back of a squad car when an officer began to sexually assault her in the early morning hours of March 17, 2013. Nguyen said the officer's negligence also caused her to tumble out of the vehicle.

A man caught speeding with 48 bombs in his car also had a remote detonating device, guns, and military base schematics and was on an 85 mph b-line toward a U.S. Navy SEALs training facility, Police tell Laura Arenschield of the Columbus Dispatch.

Andrew Scott Boguslawski, 43, was in a 70 mph zone and law enforcement caught up with him on New Years Eve, pulled him over, and eventually arrested him. Now Boguslawski, who works as a trainer at the Indiana training facility for Navy SEALs, is under suspicion for potential terrorist aspirations.

"I think there is a significant risk to the public," Assistant Madison County Prosecutor Nick Adkins told reporters, explaining the million dollar bond. "Until we can sort through the facts of this case and what we have here and what his intent was, it is necessary to keep the public safe."

Defense attorney Henry Stoever meekly approached the bench of Presiding Judge Ardie Bland Dec. 13, complaining that security had refused to let him bring certain pieces of evidence into the courthouse: a full-sized wooden door with a banner proclaiming, "Open the door to a nuclear weapons free world!", as well as an array of picket signs.

Stoever was representing eight nuclear protesters on this unlucky trial date, and Bland, who had sentenced other nuclear activists to jail just two years prior, was the inauspicious icing on the cake.

Bland's eyebrows rose at Stoever's odd request and the packed courthouse tensed for the inevitable ridicule.

"Well, I permit it!" Bland said.

With that statement, Bland set the tone for the next three hours, as protest songs, jokes about national security and even the elderly reveries of Oblate Fr. Carl Kabat, 80, and Franciscan Fr. Jerome Zawada, 76, were permitted in the Kansas City municipal courtroom.

The eight activists were pleading not guilty to charges of trespassing onto the relocated National Nuclear Security Administration's Kansas City Plant July 13. Since 1949, the plant has produced or acquired "about 85 percent of the components that go into a typical nuclear weapon," according to the Government Accountability Office. It took a year to move the nearly 3 million-square-foot facility 8 miles, and the relocation alone cost $80 million, according to a plant press release.

In the lead-up to the 12th anniversary of 9/11, we did a radio show in which we discussed 'the day that changed the world forever', looking back at what really happened that fateful day, discussing the most likely conspirators, and trying to understand the attacks in the context of all that has transpired on our planet since then.

The event, we're told, was the work of 19 vengeful Muslim Arabs hijacking four commercial airplanes with box cutters and flying them into major U.S. landmarks. It spurred the U.S. government to herald a new regime - the 'endless War on Terror' - to protect Americans - and 'freedom-loving peoples everywhere' - from the terrorists who "hate us for our freedoms," freedoms that were subsequently dismantled in systematic fashion by those same legislators, not the alleged terrorists. But the effects of 9/11 extend way beyond the evisceration of civil liberties.

An 'Axis of Evil Regimes that harbor terrorists' was declared; whole countries and millions of people were wiped off the map. A global 'Big Brother' surveillance infrastructure came into being, rapidly transforming the 'free West' into an ubiquitous totalitarian regime (with the rest of the world following suit to one degree or another). Rampant plundering of economies by elite-owned banks and corporations caused a global financial crisis in which ordinary people were left holding the bill.

As shocking as 9/11 was, the underlying motif of a 'self-inflicted wound' to institute a larger, covert agenda is one that repeats in history. Hitler had his 9/11 with the Reichstag Fire. The Catilinarian Conspiracies were the product of Cicero's devious imagination in the tumultuous period that saw Rome transition from Republic to Empire...

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• Motorists initially mistook the victim for a doll but called police

• The upper body was protruding from the smashed glass

• Jose Adil Simioni, 58, was led staggering from his Fiat in handcuffs

• Tragic Marco Aurelio Dlovski was pronounced dead at the scene

A Brazilian drink driver drove five miles with a dying cyclist he had knocked over trapped inside his broken windscreen.

Motorists mistook the victim for a doll but called police after stopping the car and discovering the upper body protruding from the smashed glass and draped over the top of the vehicle was human.

Stunned onlookers gathered round to take photos while they waited for an ambulance to arrive.

Facebook has 1.3 billion users. If it were a country, it would be the second-largest in the world. Every twenty minutes, its users share 1 million links, write 3 million messages, and attempt to make 2 million new friends.

"Content" is the Internet's anesthetizing term for everything it publishes, from articles to listicles, videos to slideshows. In the digital economy, form (or infrastructure) is valued more than content - we pay engineers, not oversharers.

Facebook is worth more than $140 billion (though many argue that it's far overvalued), and while the company pays its designers and marketing specialists, the 1.3 billion writers, photographers, link-bait generators and filmmakers who spend, on average, more than fifteen hours per month on the site are seen as "users," not contributors.

Laurel Ptak, a curator and professor at the New School, recently published a manifesto, "Wages for Facebook." Written in all-caps and with theatrical swagger ("Our fingertips have become distorted from so much liking, our feelings have gotten lost from so many friendships"),Ptak insists that Facebook's "content generators" ought - MUST! - be paid for what they bring to the site.

The text of the manifesto scrolls automatically so it can be read on a mobile device with both hands at ease. Ptak appears to want clearer lines between participation and consumption, and scrolling - one of many gestures that have been patented by technology companies - turns the reader's body into a kind of "on" switch.

Audrey Silk, founder of smokers' rights group NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (C.L.A.S.H.), protests by lighting cigarette inside City Hall.