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Separate Bomb Blasts Rock Nigeria's Newspapers, at Least Six Killed

Ibrahim Garba
The Christian Monitor
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Olamikan/The Associated Press
People gather front of the bombed office of ThisDay, an influential daily newspaper in Abuja, Nigeria, Thursday, April 26, 2012.
Kano, Nigeria - Separate bomb blasts went off today at the offices of Nigeria's major national newspapers in two cities, killing at least six and injuring at least 25 others, in what appears to be coordinated attacks.

The explosion at the Abuja office of Thisday, an influential daily newspaper, occurred at about 11:45 a.m. local time. Around the same time as the Abuja blast, an explosion rocked the building that houses offices for the Daily Sun, The Moment, and Thisday in the northern city of Kaduna.

"NEMA officials are on the ground. They are trying to move those injured to the hospitals, but we don't have any information on casualties yet," said NEMA spokesperson, Yushau Shuaib.

While no one has taken credit for the blasts at the time of publication, the methods used in the attacks on the newspaper offices mirror those used by Boko Haram, the Islamist fundamentalist group, responsible for waging deadly attacks against the Nigerian government, United Nations offices, and against Christian churches and parishioners in the past two years.
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Eagle

Judge Refuses to Combine Charges in WikiLeaks Case

David Dishneau
The Associated Press
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Mark Wilson/Getty Images file
Army Pvt. Bradley Manning is escorted away from a hearing in February at Fort Meade, Md.
US: Fort Meade, Maryland - A military judge rejected defense motions Thursday to consolidate some of the 22 charges against an Army private accused in the biggest leak of government secrets in U.S. history.

Col. Denise Lind said she would rule late in the afternoon on a defense motion to dismiss the most serious charge against Pfc. Bradley Manning - aiding the enemy - which carries a maximum life sentence.

Lind opened Thursday's session of pretrial proceedings by rejecting the defense's argument that the government had piled on duplicative charges to increase Manning's potential punishment. For example, the defense had argued that Manning's alleged theft of 380,000 Iraq war logs from a military database and his alleged transmission of those files to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks should have been charged as one offense, not two.

Lind said a theft can occur whether or not the stolen material is transmitted. She said the 10-year penalty for each of those offenses wasn't unreasonable given the "voluminous government records" involved. And she said that if the government had truly wanted to pile on charges, it could have alleged numerous aiding-the-enemy violations.

Lind said the defense could raise the consolidation motion again for sentencing purposes if Manning is convicted.

She denied another defense motion seeking to dismiss a count on the grounds that it was improperly charged. That count alleges that Manning wrongfully and wantonly caused intelligence to be published on the Internet, knowing it would be accessible to the enemy.

Comment: Bradley Manning's treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules
Bradley Manning Nobel Peace Prize Nomination 2012

Hasn't Manning already served a life sentence, hasn't some part of him already been killed? Perhaps a photo will give us a clue.
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Need we say more?


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Black Cat

'Polite' Burglar Offers to Trade Items with People He Robbed

Eric Pfeiffer
The Sideshow
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© KIROTV.com
Travis Foreman discusses the "polite burglar" who broke into his home
US - Hours after breaking into a Washington State home, a burglar dialed up the victimized homeowners' cousin, asking if he could stop by swap some of the stolen items in exchange for a few personal items he'd left behind.

KOMO News reports that the only thing the alleged burglar asked in return from the homeowners was that they not call the police to report the actual crime.

"It's very unusual," Sgt. Kevin Crane of the Bremerton Police Department told KOMO. "I've never seen this happen before where a burglar contacts the victim trying to make a deal to exchange things he left behind for some of the items he stole from the victims."

Earlier on Tuesday, the burglar had fled the scene of the crime after he broke into the residence only to find one of the occupants, a former Marine, was at home and holding a gun. "Get out! I have a gun!" Travis Forman allegedly said, according to KIRO TV.
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Stormtrooper

Shot in the back: Paris police demonstrate after officer charged with homicide


Agence France-Presse
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:16 UTC
Paris police demo
© AFP / Bertrand Langlois
Hundreds of angry policemen demonstrated on the Champs-Elysees in Paris late Wednesday to protest charges laid against a colleague who had shot dead a serial offender in the capital's suburbs.

As the policemen, some of them in cars with sirens blaring, paraded on the French capital's best-known avenue and in the suburb of Bobigny where the drama occurred, Interior Minister Claude Gueant said he "understands their emotion."
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Stop

State of North Carolina Threatens to Shut Down Nutrition Blogger

Sara Burrows
Carolina Journal
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:04 UTC
Food Police
© Unknown
Nutrition board says he needs a license to advocate dietary approaches

Charlotte - The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to "practice dietetics or nutrition" without a license. According to the law, "practicing" nutrition includes "assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups" and "providing nutrition counseling."

Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.

When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the "caveman" or "hunter-gatherer" diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.
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Briefcase

Half of College Grads Find Either No Work or No Degree-Related Work

Bob Aledmann
The New American
Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:49 UTC
barista
© Petteri Sulonen - flickr
More than half of college students graduating this June can expect to find either no work, or work that doesn't utilize their freshly minted skills, according to the Associated Press.

Of the 1.5 million bachelor's degree holders under age 25, more are likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders, or food-service helpers than as engineers, chemists, physicists, or mathematicians. More of them are working in office-related jobs such as receptionists or payroll clerks that in all computer-related jobs put together. Said the AP:
[O]nly three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position - teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers...

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.
Michael Bledsoe, 23, graduated in 2010 with a degree in creative writing and now works as a "barista" or coffee server in a Seattle, Washington, coffeehouse. When he first graduated, he sent out three or four résumés every day, but those who responded said he lacked any real-world experience and some questioned the practical value of his degree. Bledsoe said, "I don't even know what I'm looking for. There isn't much out there."
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Arrow Down

Epic Fail: Operation Kony 2012 fails to move from the internet to the streets

Rory Carroll
The Guardian
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:24 UTC
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Few heed campaign's call to cover cities across the world with posters and murals of wanted Ugandan warlord

The Kony 2012 Cover the Night campaign woke up to awkward questions on Saturday after activists failed to blanket cities with posters of the wanted Ugandan warlord, Joseph Kony.

The movement's phenomenal success in mobilising young people online, following last month's launch of a 29-minute documentary which went viral, flopped in trying to turn that into real world actions.

The campaign aimed to plaster "every city, on every block" around the world with posters, stickers and murals of Kony to pressure governments into hunting down the guerrilla leader, who has waged a brutal, decades-long insurgency in central Africa.

But paltry turnouts on Friday at locations across north America, Europe and Australia left cities largely unplastered and the movement's credibility damaged. "What happened to all the fuss about Kony?" said one typical tweet. "Kony is so last month," said another.
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Better Earth

True purpose of economic austerity measures is to stabilise population growth and cut consumption

John Vidal
The Guardian
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:35 UTC
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© Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
World population will reach 9 billion by 2050.
World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries rapidly reduced to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills", warns a major report from the Royal Society.

Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday, which was chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston.

The assessment of humanity's prospects in the next 100 years, which has taken 21 months to complete, argues strongly that to achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must be pushed to the top of political and economic agendas. Both issues have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years, the report says.

Comment: A great place to start would be compulsory vaccination/sterilisation programs for the super-rich banking psychopathic elite. But this won't happen because they own the government structures that are in a position to do anything about Big Problems. So as usual it will be left to Nature to sort out our problems for us.

Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!

In the meantime, the elite's solution is to engineer economic crises and force through austerity measures, which amount to little more than "Starve them all, God will know his own". Their 'god ' recognises his own to be those who become exceedingly rich from the same austerity measures they place on the normal human population.

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Eye 2

Confessed Norway Killer Says Insane Diagnosis Based on 'Fabrications'


Fox News
Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Anders Behring Breivik
© The Associated Press
Accused Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik gestures between his defence team Vibeke Hein Baera, left, and Odd Ivar Groen, at the courtroom, in Oslo, Norway.
Oslo, Norway - Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik on Wednesday slammed a psychiatric report that declared him insane as based on "evil fabrications" meant to portray him as irrational and unintelligent.

"It is not me who is described in that report," the right-wing extremist, who admitted killing 77 people in bomb and shooting attacks on July 22, said in court.

A second psychiatric examination found Breivik sane. The five-judge panel trying Breivik on terror charges for the attacks will consider both reports.

Breivik admits to the bombing of Oslo's government district that killed eight people and a subsequent shooting massacre at a Labor Party youth camp that left 69 people dead, most of them teenagers. He claims the attacks were "necessary" and that the victims had betrayed Norway by embracing immigration.

If found guilty, Breivik would face 21 years in prison, though he can be held longer if deemed a danger to society. If declared insane, he would be committed to compulsory psychiatric care.

After listening to testimony describing the horrific injuries of the bombing victims, Breivik showed no remorse, saying if anyone should apologize it was the governing Labor Party.

He said he had hoped they would change policy on immigration after his attacks.
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Eagle

Supreme Court Examines Tough Arizona Immigration Law

Mark Sherman
Detroit Free Press
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© Charles Dharapak/The Associated Press
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer speaks Wednesday outside the Supreme Court after the court heard arguments about the tough Arizona immigration law. Paul Clement, who argued Arizona's case, is at right.
Washington - The U.S. Supreme Court seemed to find little trouble Wednesday with major parts of Arizona's tough immigration laws that require police to check the legal status of people they stop for other reasons.

But the fate of other provisions that make state crimes out of immigration violations was unclear in the court's final argument of the term.

The latest clash between states and the Obama administration turns on the extent of individual states' roles in dealing with the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants. Immigration policy is essentially under the federal government's control, but a half-dozen Republican-dominated states have passed their own restrictions out of frustration with what they call Washington's inaction to combat a flood of illegal immigrants.

Parts of laws adopted by Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Utah are on hold pending the court's decision.

Civil rights groups say the Arizona law and those in some other states encourage racial profiling and ethnic stereotyping, and debate over such laws could have an impact on this fall's elections. More than 200 protesters gathered outside the court, most of them opposed to the Arizona law.

However, Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear at the outset of the administration's argument Wednesday that the court was looking only at state-versus-federal power, not the civil rights concerns that already are the subject of other lawsuits. "This is not a case about ethnic profiling," Roberts said.
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