When Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley proudly announced on Thursday that two men had been arraigned as a result of the guerrilla marketing campaign in Boston, what she didn't say was how weak the legal charges seem to be. The charges against Sean Stevens, 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27, according to the attorney general's press release stem from a state law making it a crime to place a hoax device in public. But a closer read of the Massachusetts statute shows that it actually uses the term "infernal machine." (We are not making this up.) For the hapless duo to be convicted under this statute, prosecutors must prove each of four things: (1) Stevens and Berdovsky were the ones who placed the Aqua Teen Hunger Force devices (2) "with the intent to cause anxiety, unrest, fear or personal discomfort." (3) A person must "reasonably" believe that it's (4) a "device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire or explosion."...
http://news.com.com
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Editor - 12:51:00 02-02-07
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 Iraq report pessimistic over US role |
The situation in Iraq will continue to deteriorate with Iraqi armed forces struggling to assume a greater security role, a long-awaited US intelligence report said today.In a bleak assessment of Iraq, the National Intelligence Estimate said Iraq's growing polarisation, the persistent weakness of its security forces and the ready recourse to violence are driving an increase in communal strife and political extremism. "Unless efforts to reverse these conditions show measurable progress during the term of this estimate, the coming 12-18 months, we assess the overall security situation will continue to deteriorate at rates comparable to the latter of 2006," the report said. A nine-page version of the intelligence estimate was made public today, after the 90-page classified NIE was presented to the US president, George Bush, yesterday. ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2004630,00.html
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Editor - 11:56:00 02-02-07
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| AN END TO GREEN ROMANTICISM Environmental Guru Lovelock Urges Expansion of Nuclear Energy |
James Lovelock is attracting attention again with his provocative ideas. The former hero of the environmental movement has called for an end to "green romanticism." The only way to delay climate catastrophe, says the environmental guru, is through the massive expansion of nuclear energy. A few days ago, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking gave a speech in London in which he said that nuclear war no longer poses the only threat to humanity's very existence. According to Hawking, the dangers posed by climate change are now almost equally as great, and we must do everything that is humanly possible if we are to have any hope of averting them. When James Lovelock heard about Hawkings' lecture, three hundred and fifty kilometers away at his remote estate near Cornwall, he exclaimed loudly: "Hawking is underestimating the danger."...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,463367,00.html
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Editor - 11:53:00 02-02-07
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| Army officer court-martial tests free speech |
A U.S. Army officer, whose public refusal to go fight in Iraq made him a champion of the anti-war movement, faces a court-martial next week when a military panel could determine the limits of free-speech rights for officers. First Lt. Ehren Watada faces up to four years in prison if convicted on a charge of missing movements and two charges of conduct unbecoming an officer when his court-martial starts on Monday at Fort Lewis, an Army base near Seattle. Watada, a 28-year-old artillery officer, refused to deploy with his brigade to Iraq last summer and called the war illegal and immoral. He refused conscientious-objector status, saying he would fight in Afghanistan but not Iraq. The court-martial gets under way at a time of waning public support for the war in Iraq in the face of President George W. Bush's proposal to send 21,500 more troops to war. Supporters of Watada say he is the first Army officer to publicly refuse to fight in Iraq and refuse conscientious objector status....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070202/ts_nm/usa_iraq_officer_dc
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Editor - 10:44:00 02-02-07
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| Care for U.S. veterans could cost $662 bln: study |
Medical costs for U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could range from $350 billion to $662 billion over the next 40 years, as soldiers survive injuries that would have killed them in past conflicts, according to a Harvard University study. Due to improvements in battlefield medicine and equipment, there are now about 16 "nonmortally wounded" soldiers for every death, far more than the 2.6 soldiers wounded per death in Vietnam, the study said, citing Department of Veterans' Affairs data. The author of the study, Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, presented her findings at an academic conference in January. They were released publicly by the university this week. The potential costs include medical care, disability payments and other benefits paid to injured veterans and assume that 44 percent of veterans eventually claim disability. That was the percentage of claims from the first Gulf War. Bilmes' calculations assume that by ...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070202/ts_nm/iraq_usa_veterans_dc
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Editor - 10:41:00 02-02-07
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| Porn Studio Puts City in a Kink |
It takes a lot to make San Franciscans blush, but a video porn company has managed to do it. A studio that makes S&M movies recently took over a historic building that once housed the National Guard, unleashing a rare public debate about decency in a city famous for sexual permissiveness. Kink.com, which distributes its videos on X-rated Web sites with names such as Hogtied and Men in Pain, bought the old State Armory in the Mission District for $14.5 million, saying the vacant building's dark Moorish architecture would make a perfect backdrop for fetish films. ``The basements in particular have a creepy, dungeony feel that is quite appropriate,'' said Kink.com founder Peter Acworth, who planned the first leather-clad shoot this week in the building where troops trained for six decades. ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6389457,00.html
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Editor - 10:33:00 02-02-07
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