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POPSJudges With Guts Rule! :) "The concept of preemptive imprisonment, like that of preemptive war, should have no place in an open society."
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POPS YOU JUST GOT SCREWED and Nobody Will tell you! URGENT!! Made the Digg front page in less than 3 hrs. Thank goodness some people still care what is happening in this country! Meanwhile, last year, Freddie Mac paid chairman and CEO Richard Syron nearly $19.8 million in compensation, Fannie Mae pres. and CEO Daniel Mudd recieved $12.2 million, including a $2.2 million bonus!
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POPSCensorship in American Universities: Harvard But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on EU bank accounts, property, and compensation for labour expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-EU was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defence of slavery in the mid-19th. ...Harvard Crimson
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POPSThe Pirate Bay to sue anti-piracy agencies? The Pirate Bay showed that emails leaked from media defenders servers clearly showed that the company had launched illegal denial of service attack on the pirate bay’s servers, engaged in illegal hacking and repeatedly flooded them with spam. Funny ???
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POPSSorry We Shot Your Kid, Here's $500 Then there's this example: "Claimant's son and a friend were fishing, in a small boat, 15 kilometers north of Tikrit on the Tigres river at 2200 hours on 31 March 2005. The claimant and his son had fished the Tigres many nights recently, but the father did not join his son this night. U.S. Forces helicopters were flying overhead, like they usually did and there were no problems. "A U.S. Forces HMMWV patrol pulled up to the beach near where they were fishing. The patrol had spotted and destroyed a boat earlier in the evening that had an RPG in it. They set off an illumination round and then opened fre. The claimant's only son was shot and killed. His friend was injured, but managed to get the boat to the other side of the river. At the small village across the river they received medical help and were taken to the hospital. But, it was too late for the claimant's son.
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POPSWhen Rape is OK: Female Contractors in Iraq
Women like -- as you may remember -- Jamie Leigh Jones, 23, a former employee of military contractor KBR who has been unable to get her charges of gang rape heard in court; women like Mary Beth Kineston, who was fired after complained about harassment and groping incidents. "I felt safer on the convoys with the Army than I ever did working for KBR," Kineston told the Times. "At least if you got in trouble on a convoy, you could radio the Army and they would come and help you out. But when I complained to KBR, they didn't do anything. I still have nightmares. They changed my life forever, and they got away with it." Jones testified in Congress in December -- and yesterday -- in order to draw attention to such cases and urge lawmakers to change regulations governing private arbitration. Emboldened by Jones, more women have begun to step forward, talking about mysteriously disappearing complaints and about being given, for their grievances, an 800 number and a pat on the head.
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POPSIraq: Another Dirty Secret - South African Mercenaries, former White Apartheid era Veterans
More: The root of that distrust dates to the mid-1990s, when thousands of white officers left South Africa's security agencies during the transition from apartheid to majority black rule. Unemployed soldiers and police joined private security companies that got embroiled in African wars from Angola to Sierra Leone. A wheelchair-bound man who owns an SUV with vanity plates that proclaim "Baghdad," Brink lost a leg and fingers in 2005 to a mine that exploded under his armored vehicle in Baqouba, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency. Since returning to South Africa, he has been encouraging wounded colleagues to apply for U.S. worker's compensation under the U.S. Defense Base Act, which applies to all workers, American or foreign, who are subcontracted in war zones by Washington Brink was advising them on how to file for U.S. worker's compensation. I'll buy a farm if I can collect on my claim, said Gouws, 45, But I don't recommend this method of getting a farm to anyone else
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POPSVultures in Europe 'attacking humans for the first time' For centuries, the Pyrenean farmers of Spain lived in symbiotic harmony with Gyps fulvus, the magnificent griffon vulture. Wheeling over their flocks and fields, the birds were seen as neither a threat nor even a nuisance, but as a vital part of the ecosystem. For when farmers had to dispose of an animal carcass, they simply took it to one of the hundreds of "maladares", carcass dumps, scattered across the mountains. There, the vultures would gather to do their work. It was a system that benefited both man and bird. But, prompted largely by the BSE crisis in the late Nineties, the eurocrats of Brussels decided to ban this age-old system. This has caused a crisis for the vultures, which are flying to new areas in search of food. So far, they have got as far as northern mainland Europe - indeed, as far as Finland. It is unlikely they will come here, says Grahame Madge, as they hate flying over large bodies of water.
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POPSBush praises McCain for GI Bill McCain opposed McCain vehemently opposed this (Webb) bill, yet here's Bush thanking him for helping pass it! What is with these guys? McCain offered a skimpier version, insisting that paying college for Iraq vets would encourage them to leave the service when they could (better to offer them worse benefits so they'll stay, I guess, is the old soldier's plan). 32 Second video at link.
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POPSWounded troops overwhelm care This problem has always amazed me. Their can be only a couple of explanations. One would be that the idiots who got us unto this actually believed it would be over by now, which would also suggest that they totally disregarded any advice to the contrary. Or they didn't think anyone would get wounded or maybe they just didn't think it was important enough. The bottom line, why would you not prepare?
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POPSWhy Israel fits in with the West
"It is possible that war is the only way out of the situation created by Zionism. I leave it to others to find cause for rejoicing in this. But if there is any chance of some day seeing a peaceful solution, it will not be achieved by telling the Arabs that it is their duty to applaud their conquerors because they are Europeans or are in the process of becoming Europeanized, because they are 'advanced,' because they are revolutionary or (almost) socialist and, even less, simply because they are Jews! The most that can be asked of the Arabs is that they resign themselves to a disagreeable situation, and that in resigning themselves they make the best of their resignation. It is not easy to get a conquered person to resign himself to defeat, and it is not made any easier by loudly proclaiming how right it was that he was soundly beaten. It is generally wiser to offer him compensation. And those who have not suffered from the fight can (and, I believe, even must) recommend forgiveness ...
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POPSUsual Whitewash of IDF coloured this time. When Israel first investigated the incident in March 2005 it concluded there was insufficient evidence to press criminal charges. The commander of the unit faced disciplinary proceedings but was exonerated. The usual whitewash didn't work this time.
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POPSNo man is an island Chongqing, China, March 21, 2007—No man is an island. But developers in China have made one couple face an unusual type of island living after the homeowners refused to sell. Wu Ping and her husband were the only family of 281 to reject a 2004 offer of a new house or financial compensation for their property. So the developer initiated construction around the building, leaving an island of land amid the excavation, as seen in this photo taken on Wednesday. A deadline to move out set by a local district court ran out on Thursday, and authorities are not sure what steps they will take next. The conflict coincides with new laws adopted this week in China that grant legal protections for private land ownership for the first time since the Communist Party nationalized land in 1949. "I'm not stubborn or unruly, I'm just trying to protect my personal rights as a citizen. I will continue to the end," Wu reportedly told the state-run newspaper Legal Daily.
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POPSBush fortune "built on the bones" of holocaust victims And Grampa Prescott Bush subsidized a coup attempt designed to bring fascism to America. Two holocaust survivors suing Bush family, claiming Gpa Bush benefited materially from Auschwitz slave labor. So let's not have this talk of Democrats being like appeasers.