getting off lightly

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Jail terms for Ghana drug girls
Two British girls convicted of trying to smuggle cocaine from Ghana to the UK have been jailed for one year each. Yasemin Vatansever and Yatunde Diya, both 16 and from north London, were arrested at Accra international airport on 2 July 2007. They denied trying to smuggle 6kg (13lbs) of the drug to London.
They were lucky! 12 months for 6 kilos of Charlie (worth around £350k on the street) - I've known people get longer for 6 GRAMS!


Yeah, right!

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How a large glass of wine turned us into a nation of big drinkers
People from professional and high-income households are the heaviest drinkers in Britain, and Scots drink less than people in England, figures revealed yesterday.
A report by the Office for National Statistics found that, on average, men drank 18.7 units a week during 2006, compared with nine units for women. But this rose to 22.9 units a week for men and 12.5 for women in the top socio- economic households.

By contrast, households described as routine and manual got through an average 11.6 units per person per week – 16.7 for men and 7.1 for women.

Yesterday's report, based on the 2006 General Household Survey, also suggested Scots drank less than people in England and Wales, even though rates of alcohol-related death in Scotland are more than double those in England.
Lies, damned lies etc... Those bloody middle-class wine drinkers, pissing and puking everywhere and making it impossible to walk through the city centre at night. Obviously the price of Shiraz is much too low and bars should be forced to serve wine in thimbles. Thank goodness I live in Scotland, where you never see anyone suffering from the effects of alcohol consumption.


BBC propaganda machine for Israel

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Palestine: Collectively Punished by Israel and Collectively Punished by the media By William Bowles
One BBC story, ‘Gaza’s rocket threat to Israel’ goes into great detail describing the Quassam rocket...but there’s not single reference to what kinds of weapons and their effects that the IOF is using, nor the vast disparity between casualties, with Palestinians getting murdered virtually every day, the vast majority of them defenceless civilians. By contrast, if a single Israeli is killed it makes the headlines (a total of eleven Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets according to the BBC compared to the hundreds of Palestinians whose deaths rarely get a mention). I wait in vain for a BBC story headed ‘Israel’s rocket threat to the Occupied Territories’.

What explains this indifference to the lives of Palestinians by the BBC? How is it possible for those who ‘report’ events in the Occupied Territories to ignore the reality of the situation? Of course the inbuilt racism of Western journalism explains in part this indifference but far more important is the necessity for the BBC to rationalise the British governmentís unconditional support of a racist and murderous settler regime which can only be accomplished by dehumanising Palestinian lives, which in turn makes international law simply not applicable to them. They are, it seems, beyond the Pale.


Call that a 'binge'?

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Amy Winehouse | Caught on film | Smoking crack pipe | The Sun
WILD AMY WINEHOUSE was filmed blitzed out of her skull and struggling to talk after sucking in crack fumes from a glass pipe. The tormented singing sensation took hit after hit of the deadly drug after a 19-minute binge in which she snorted powdered ECSTASY and COCAINE.
A nineteen minute binge?

Nineteen minutes?!!

Fucking lightweight!


A vigil of artificial air...

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Blackouts - Layla Anwar


..A boy not older than 12, paralyzed and totally dependent on a breathing machine. The machine has stopped. No electricity. A total blackout. The whole family takes turns pumping air manually to keep him alive. A vigil of artificial air. Hospitals in total darkness. Children, adults, the elderly, anyone relying on a life saving machine is right now, as am typing this, in his/her agonizing moments... The place – Gaza. The people – The Palestinians (...) A few politicians appear, they talk the usual nonsense. They say "the Arab governments have to intervene in this humanitarian crisis." Excuse me? Did the Arab governments intervene when 500,000 Iraqi children died due to 13 years of the most brutal sanctions ever? Did the Arab governments intervene when Iraq was bombed senseless and left with no electricity and no water for over 5 years now? Did anyone apart from a few voices here and there, utter anything against the squeezing into death of the Iraqi population?...Did anyone ask after the thousands of Iraqis young and old dying in hospitals with no electricity? Did anyone care about the kidney patient relying on dialysis, or the crippled relying on a breathing machine? NO ONE gave a fuck. And NO ONE gives a fuck today. Because today was like yesterday and is like tomorrow. What happened to Iraq is happening to Gaza and to the whole of the Palestinian cause...

Jerusalem Post:

Israeli officials claimed that the Gaza blackout was deliberately instigated by Hamas, in a bid to present the appearance of a humanitarian crisis.