Breaking News Events

[Kobi]

Alan Turing, a genius codebreaker who helped the Allies defeat the Nazis only to be chemically castrated by his own country for homosexuality, will be posthumously pardoned by the UK, almost 50 years after he took his own life.

Turing, considered one of the fathers of computer science, was instrumental in cracking the German ciphers and helping the Allies listen in on German communications. After being found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to chemical castration, Turing committed suicide only two years after his sentence was carried out.

The government has up until this point refused to pardon Turing.

Liberal Democrat Lord Sharkey has rallied on behalf of Turing to get the government to change its mind. "The government knows that Turing was a hero and a very great man," he said, announcing the pardon. "They acknowledge that he was cruelly treated. They must have seen the esteem in which he is held here and around the world."

Over 49,000 gay men, all of them now dead, were convicted under Britain's 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Many of them were chemically castrated. Last year, the government refused to pardon any of them.


http://gawker.com/genius-who-helped-...y-uk-862795188

[UofMfan]

MLB prepared to ban A-Rod for life, suspend eight others

[Wolfsong]

Originally Posted by UofMfan

MLB prepared to ban A-Rod for life, suspend eight others

As a former A-Rod fan I completely support this......additionally I believe that the home run record should be rescinded and returned to the guy that it belongs to......Roger Maris. I believe this would be the first genuine gesture that MLB can provide the fans that they acknowledge the problem, have culpability in it, and are committed to fixing it. Anything else is really just lip service.

[girl_dee]

i agree.. Not just because i can't stand A-rod but i feel it's cheating!!

If that record was mine and it was broken by someo e doped up on performance drugs i wouldbe pissed!

[Wolfsong]

Originally Posted by girl_dee

i agree.. Not just because i can't stand A-rod but i feel it's cheating!!

If that record was mine and it was broken by someo e doped up on performance drugs i wouldbe pissed!

It IS cheating.....and Mark McGwire fondling Maris's 61* home run bat and getting fake teary-eyed talking about how much it meant to him, hugging Mari's wife and kids makes me ill as a baseball fan. Maris hit 61 home runs smoking about 2 packs of cigarettes a day with most Yankee fans wanting him off the team and gone. They hated him. So much so that he got hate mail regularly suggesting that he go kill himself before someone did it for him. Maris didn't drink, run around on his wife, or do anything really but play some really good baseball. In all that he endured he still broke Babe Ruth's record fair and square.

[Kobi]

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ...

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. Among those agencies: the FBI and Homeland Security.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update, 3:40 p.m.: It is still not clear which agency knocked on Catalano's door. The Guardian reported this morning that an FBI spokesperson said that "she was visited by Nassau County police department … working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department." (Catalano apparently lives on Long Island, most likely in Nassau County.)

Detective Garcia of the Nassau County Police, however, told The Atlantic Wire by phone that his department was "not involved in any way." Similarly, FBI spokesperson Peter Donald confirmed with The Atlantic Wire that his agency wasn't involved in the visit. He also stated that he could not answer whether or not the agency provided information that led to the visit, as he didn't know.

Local and state authorities work jointly with federal officials on terror investigations similar to the one Catalano describes. Both Suffolk and Nassau County's police departments are members of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), Donald confirmed. Suffolk County is also home to a "fusion center," a regionally located locus for terror investigations associated with the Department of Homeland Security. It wasn't the JTTF that led to the visit at Catalano's house, Donald told us. The task force deputizes local authorities as federal marshals, including some in Suffolk and Nassau, who can then act on its behalf. But, Donald said, "officers, agents, or other representatives of the JTTF did not visit that location."

Calls asking for a response from the Suffolk Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security have not been returned.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ever since details of the NSA's surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans' internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for?

It's possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that "no more than two other people" ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who'd done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government's database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.

It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point.

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online.

But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen to you.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/natio...earches/67864/

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Postal Service takes pictures of every piece of mail processed in the United States — 160 billion last year — and keeps them on hand for up to a month.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said the photos of the exterior of mail pieces are used primarily for the sorting process, but they are available for law enforcement, if requested.

The photos have been used "a couple of times" by to trace letters in criminal cases, Donahoe told the AP on Thursday, most recently involving ricin-laced letters sent to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"We don't snoop on customers," said Donahoe, adding that there's no big database of the images because they are kept on nearly 200 machines at processing facilities across the country. Each machine retains only the images of the mail it processes.

"It's done by machine, so there's no central area where any of this information would be," he said. "It's extremely expensive to keep pictures of billions of pieces of mail. So there's no need for us to do that."

The images are generally stored for between a week and 30 days and then disposed of, he said. Keeping the images for those periods may be necessary to ensure delivery accuracy, for forwarding mail or making sure that the proper postage was paid, he said.

"Law enforcement has requested a couple of times if there's any way we could figure out where something came from," he said. "And we've done a little bit of that in the ricin attacks."

The automated mail tracking program was created after the deadly anthrax attacks in 2001 so the Postal Service could more easily track hazardous substances and keep people safe, Donahoe said.

"We've got a process in place that pretty much outlines, in any specific facility, the path that mail goes through," he said. "So if anything ever happens, God forbid, we would be able very quickly to track back to see what building it was in, what machines it was on, that type of thing. That's the intent of the whole program."

Processing machines take photographs so software can read the images to create a barcode that is stamped on the mail to show where and when it was processed, and where it will be delivered, Donahoe said.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was cited by the FBI on June 7 in an affidavit that was part of the investigation into who was behind threatening, ricin-tainted letters sent to Obama and Bloomberg. The program "photographs and captures an image of every piece of mail that is processed," the affidavit by an FBI agent said.

Mail from the same mailbox tends to get clumped together in the same batch, so that can help investigators track where a particular item was mailed from to possibly identify the sender.

"We've used (the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program) to sort the mail for years," Donahoe said, "and when law enforcement asked us, 'Hey, is there any way you can figure out where this came from?' we were able to use that imaging."

http://news.yahoo.com/ap-interview-u...072949079.html

----------------

Interesting.

[Cin]

I don’t know if this is a breaking news event or not but it is happening currently and it is news, so in that way I guess it’s breaking news. I doubt if large numbers of people will be as fascinated with the story as I am, but it fully captured my attention. I just can’t get my head around it. I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp.

Here is an excerpt:

“Only one of the six students that a university committee or administrator found guilty of nonconsensual sex was suspended, according to a semi-annual report on Yale sexual misconduct. That student was excluded from Yale for two semesters and was placed on probation for the remainder of his time at Yale. Four students who were found guilty of nonconsensual sex were given written reprimands, with one required to attend gender sensitivity training. One student received probation.”

HELP!

WTF is nonconsensual sex? Isn’t that rape?

It’s like saying that murder is nonconsensual death. Instead of charging people with murder they can charge them with causing nonconsensual death in someone else. I doubt that would never be acceptable. But rape as nonconsensual sex, sure.

I mean here we are again with rape being called sex. Rape is not a form of sex, even if you add nonconsensual in front of it. It is violence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3690100.html

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

I don’t know if this is a breaking news event or not but it is happening currently and it is news, so in that way I guess it’s breaking news. I doubt if large numbers of people will be as fascinated with the story as I am, but it fully captured my attention. I just can’t get my head around it. I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp.

Here is an excerpt:

“Only one of the six students that a university committee or administrator found guilty of nonconsensual sex was suspended, according to a semi-annual report on Yale sexual misconduct. That student was excluded from Yale for two semesters and was placed on probation for the remainder of his time at Yale. Four students who were found guilty of nonconsensual sex were given written reprimands, with one required to attend gender sensitivity training. One student received probation.”

HELP!

WTF is nonconsensual sex? Isn’t that rape?

It’s like saying that murder is nonconsensual death. Instead of charging people with murder they can charge them with causing nonconsensual death in someone else. I doubt that would never be acceptable. But rape as nonconsensual sex, sure.

I mean here we are again with rape being called sex. Rape is not a form of sex, even if you add nonconsensual in front of it. It is violence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3690100.html

Another twilight zone moment.

Nonconsensual sex is rape. Rape is about power. Sexism and misogyny run rampant in the halls of higher education.

I was particularly struck by:


One result of this commitment to confidentiality is that the descriptions in the report do not fully capture the diversity and complexity of the circumstances associated with the complaints or the factors that determined the outcomes and sanctions," Peart said. "Nonetheless, the range of penalties described in the semi-annual report reflects our readiness to impose harsh sanctions when the findings warrant them."


According to my Indiana Jones decoder ring, that means there are degrees of rape i.e. acceptable rape, unacceptable rape, and a host of other things along the way.

SMH.

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Kobi

I was particularly struck by:


One result of this commitment to confidentiality is that the descriptions in the report do not fully capture the diversity and complexity of the circumstances associated with the complaints or the factors that determined the outcomes and sanctions," Peart said. "Nonetheless, the range of penalties described in the semi-annual report reflects our readiness to impose harsh sanctions when the findings warrant them."


According to my Indiana Jones decoder ring, that means there are degrees of rape i.e. acceptable rape, unacceptable rape, and a host of other things along the way.
SMH.

Well considering the relatively non existent penalties, I am hard pressed and frankly a little scared to imagine just what kind of diverse and complex circumstance would need to occur for harsh sanctions to be warranted.

Nonconsensual sex, really, the games people play with language is amazing. It is interesting how much power you can remove from something by changing the language. Rape is a charged word and they succeeded in defusing it. The question that needs to be asked and the answer that needs to be examined is WHY. What are the short and long term payoffs.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Well considering the relatively non existent penalties, I am hard pressed and frankly a little scared to imagine just what kind of diverse and complex circumstance would need to occur for harsh sanctions to be warranted.

Nonconsensual sex, really, the games people play with language is amazing. It is interesting how much power you can remove from something by changing the language. Rape is a charged word and they succeeded in defusing it. The question that needs to be asked and the answer that needs to be examined is WHY. What are the short and long term payoffs.

It is about what is it has always been about. Misogyny, sexism, power and privilege. Now, new and improved, with the added power adding marketing concepts and image make overs thru reconceptualization.

It is about gaslighting i.e. making women ( and the general public) question their perceptions and truth about what they experienced. It is about blaming the victim. It is about perpetuating the boys will be boys mentality. It is about casting reasonable doubt by the use of mitigating circumstances i.e. alcohol/drug use. It is about avoiding responsibility for ones actions.

So much for my well controlled blood pressure.

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by Kobi

It is about what is it has always been about. Misogyny, sexism, power and privilege. Now, new and improved, with the added power adding marketing concepts and image make overs thru reconceptualization.

It is about gaslighting i.e. making women ( and the general public) question their perceptions and truth about what they experienced. It is about blaming the victim. It is about perpetuating the boys will be boys mentality. It is about casting reasonable doubt by the use of mitigating circumstances i.e. alcohol/drug use. It is about avoiding responsibility for ones actions.

So much for my well controlled blood pressure.

Sign the Credo petition.

http://act.credoaction.com/sign/rape...zHWg-&rd=1&t=1

[Andrea]

Reuters: Drug Enforcement Agency Using Domestic Spying to Launch Secretive Criminal Investigations

https://www.ijreview.com/2013/08/70825-reuters-drug-enforcement-agency-using-domestic-spying-to-launch-secretive-criminal-investigations/

Wasn't the spying to be about terrorism only?

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Andrea

Reuters: Drug Enforcement Agency Using Domestic Spying to Launch Secretive Criminal Investigations

https://www.ijreview.com/2013/08/70825-reuters-drug-enforcement-agency-using-domestic-spying-to-launch-secretive-criminal-investigations/

Wasn't the spying to be about terrorism only?

From the article:
"In other words, “national security” as such is not being used as the justification for such practices. This shows that NSA spying programs like PRISM and XKeyscore are ostensibly being used for other reasons than defending the nation from terrorism. The implications of this revelation undergird the belief of 57% of Americans that NSA spying can be used for political purposes."


It may not be being used as the justification for such practices (they don’t need to justify when they lie about it and obscure the trail “federal documents describe a common police practice known as 'parallel construction,' which is used to mask the true origination of criminal investigations and prosecutions”) but it was used as the justification for getting said practices and programs into the system in the first place. People consistently buy into the idea that freedom is a currency that can be traded to purchase safety. Then when they read articles like this explaining the misuse of government power procured originally under the guise of national security many decide it doesn’t matter because it only effects criminals and who cares about druggies and their rights. If you break the law you pay the price. The problems with that line of thinking are numerous and complex (the most glaring being they don't mostly use it against criminals, they use their ill gotten power mostly against everyday people) this isn’t the thread for it for sure. But let me say this about that, it may sound like a different issue but I think the fact that the US, as of 2008, has approximately one in every 31 adults (7.3 million) behind bars, or on parole or probation, makes this type of the end justifies the means justice everyone’s problem. Make a deal with the devil and you can pack your winter clothes away for good.

[Cin]

I really wish the government would stop declaring war on inanimate objects, various nouns or the fiscal condition of certain groups of people. It’s just dumb. But anyway in keeping with what Andrea posted, here is an article about ways the war on terror has changed our lives.

“From having your phone and internet data collected to the militarization of the police, the war on terror is having a major affect on American lives.”

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...-impacting-you

[Cin]

10 Reasons Lawyers Say Florida's Law Enforcement Threw Away George Zimmerman's Case
A growing chorus of attorneys and analysts say Zimmerman didn't face anything like a serious trial.
August 6, 2013 |

Florida law enforcement, from the local police to the special prosecutor overseeing the Trayvon Martin case, did not want to see George Zimmerman convicted of murder and deliberately threw away the case, allowing their prosecution to crumble. A growing chorus of attorneys and analysts who know jury trials and courtroom procedure say this is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the parade of otherwise incoherent missteps by George Zimmerman’s prosecutors.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...mans-case-away

[Cin]

HELP END THE WAR ON DRUGS


Edgy New “Breaking Bad” Video Reveals the Truth About the Drug War

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/edgy-n...out-drug-war-0

[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

10 Reasons Lawyers Say Florida's Law Enforcement Threw Away George Zimmerman's Case
A growing chorus of attorneys and analysts say Zimmerman didn't face anything like a serious trial.
August 6, 2013 |

Florida law enforcement, from the local police to the special prosecutor overseeing the Trayvon Martin case, did not want to see George Zimmerman convicted of murder and deliberately threw away the case, allowing their prosecution to crumble. A growing chorus of attorneys and analysts who know jury trials and courtroom procedure say this is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the parade of otherwise incoherent missteps by George Zimmerman’s prosecutors.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...mans-case-away

Thank you Miss Tick for supplying the article written by Steven Rosenfeld.

As I read the article, I kept nodding my head in unison with the logic presented in how the case was a huge miscarriage of justice.

So here's what crossed my mind after reading that article: How long will it be before justice is served - not only in the case of Trayvon Martin but for countless other miscarriages of justice in cases such as the Martin Case? I can't help but wonder what Thurgood Marshall would do. Obviously, I believe Thurgood Marshall would take that case in a heartbeat and make sure justice for all could be served. I'm hoping that the "chorus of attorneys" grows to a mighty fevered pitch that of Thurgood Marshall, so that egregious miscarriages of justice will end.

[LeftWriteFemme]

Stephen Fry calls for Olympics ban over Russia's anti-gay laws


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23603870

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Andrea

Reuters: Drug Enforcement Agency Using Domestic Spying to Launch Secretive Criminal Investigations

https://www.ijreview.com/2013/08/70825-reuters-drug-enforcement-agency-using-domestic-spying-to-launch-secretive-criminal-investigations/

Wasn't the spying to be about terrorism only?

More on this.

The NSA-DEA police state tango
This week's DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our justice system

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...e_state_tango/
Excepts:
…this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor who spent 18 years as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds the DEA story more troubling than anything in Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. It’s the first clear evidence that the “special rules” and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have crept into the domestic criminal justice system on a significant scale. “It sounds like they are phonying up investigations,” she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel construction.

Millions of people have been sent to prison on drug-war convictions over the last 20 years. Most of those people have been poor and black. We will never know how many of those cases resulted from secret evidence collected by spy agencies, but it might not be a small number. One of the Reuters articles that broke this story quotes DEA officials as saying that the “parallel construction” tactic had been used by the agency “virtually every day since the 1990s.” Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the recent bestseller “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” sent me an email from her family vacation to say that these revelations “certainly lead one reasonably to wonder how many people — especially poor people of color, who have been the primary targets in the drug war — have been spied on by the DEA in the name of national security.” Michelle Alexander’s book depicts the mass imprisonment of African Americans as a new system of racial control that is more efficient than the old one precisely because it is veiled by official colorblindness. In the recent documentary “How to Make Money Selling Drugs,” David Simon of “The Wire” and “Treme” describes the United States as a society that “hunts down and incarcerates poor people.”

From the outset, there have been moral, philosophical and technological connections between the war on drugs and the war on terror. Both campaigns involve the unprecedented expansion of executive power and the use of high-tech paramilitary policing. Both involve “adjusting” our supposedly cherished constitutional rights and privileges in the name of protecting us from evil. Both involve targets that are easy to demonize and marginalize, and both embody troubling questions about race, class and power. Most important of all, both conflicts are immensely expensive and shockingly self-destructive. If these parallel wars had been designed to fail – designed to create a state of permanent crisis, empower and enrich a caste of warrior-bureaucrats and undercut constitutional democracy – they could hardly have been designed more perfectly.

All this underscores, of course, that while drug-war prosecutions are supposed to be just like other kinds of criminal cases, in practice they have a special status and are treated differently. But one may still ask, given that this administration and the last one (and quite likely the one before that) have repeatedly misled the public about the existence, extent and scope of surveillance programs, whether there is any reason to believe that the pipeline of secret data and the manipulation of the justice system is limited to drug cases. Should we be confident that NSA intercepts and foreign-intelligence wiretaps and “parallel construction” will never be used to build criminal cases against hackers, leakers, Occupy activists, investigative journalists, unfriendly pundits and any other dissidents on the left or the right whom the government decides to persecute?

In theory, the DEA disclosures could and should have outraged Americans across the political spectrum, especially when added to all the other bad things we’ve learned about our government this year. Except that blind partisan loyalty now trumps everything in national politics, and almost nothing about our country’s slide toward soft police state still shocks anybody. Conservatives only care about civil liberties when they affect rich and/or rural white folks, and support any degree of tyranny when it comes to conducting the drug war and locking up poor people. As Bruce A. Dixon of Black Agenda Report notes, liberals of all races would have howled about this stuff under Bush-Cheney, but with a black Democrat in the White House they make excuses or pretend it isn’t happening.

Maybe we’re all just dazed by the tide of NSA revelations, distracted by celebrity sex scandals and the idiotic infighting of Washington, and insulated by the techno-workaholic bubble of ordinary life, in which America still seems like a calm and normal place. If I had to break it down, I would guess that half the population clings to the optimistic belief that reasonable people are in charge and things will work out for the best, while the other half has become entirely cynical. I mean, who still thinks that drug dealers have rights? That’s so 20th century!