Black(water) day for justice

US judge dismisses Blackwater massacre charges

Good to see US justice alive and well. The prosecutors had used statements made by the murderous Blackwater employees themselves immediately after the incident.

"In their zeal to bring charges against the defendant(s), the prosecutors and investigators aggressively sought out statements the defendants had been compelled to make to government investigators in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and in the subsequent investigation", said the judge. 

Zealously pursuing killers? Seeking out incriminating statements? Good grief. Whatever next?

You can bet that somewhere in Iraq at this very moment plans are afoot to exact revenge. So even more people will die as a result of the activities of these homicidal mercenaries.

UPDATE: There are alternative views:

Mishandled by the government on purpose to get their buddies at Blackwater off? Ha! Things like that don’t happen outside the movies. That’s crazy talk!

Drinkers pay their way

Rising alcohol addiction costs 'could cripple the NHS'

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: "The nation's growing addiction to alcohol is putting an immense strain on health services, especially in hospitals, costing the NHS over £2.7 billion each year."

"This burden is no longer sustainable," he said.

The answer seems simple to me. Just spend some more of the £9 billion that was collected from drinkers last year in alcohol duty .
Cheers!

For Fox sake

The world must neutralise Tehran’s toxic threat - Liam Fox



No mention of Israel's huge nuclear arsenal from the Shadow Defence Secretary. But then he is a strong supporter of Israel and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel (something else that doesn't get mentioned in this piece).

Forget the stoopid pants bomber...

Dissident republican bomb plot foiled in Northern Ireland

Components and material for a huge bomb have been found in Northern Ireland, police revealed today. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said a major dissident republican bomb plot had been foiled after a lorry packed with material which could be used to build a 1,000lb – about 500kg – explosive device was found under a flyover in South Armagh. It was discovered on the A1 Newry road at Cloghogue, part of the upgraded carriageway between Dublin and Belfast. The vehicle had been there for several days.

Forget Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, these guys know what they are doing, they've done it before, they are white and they live in the UK.

Too bad they weren't 'manic-depressives'

Balance of Terror: From Detroit City to Ghazi Khan

A lone man on an airliner makes a badly botched attempt to ignite what appears to be some kind of hastily cobbled-together device that might or might not have caused some kind of unspecified but apparently non-crippling damage to the plane. The plane lands safely; no one is killed. Yet the reverberations from this half-baked enterprise quickly roiled the entire world. Within hours, a whole range of new, even more intrusive and draconian security procedures were imposed on travellers across the globe...

Here is another story in the news: in an isolated rural province in Afghanistan, 10 people were killed in a raid by American-led forces. The Afghan government, installed and sustained in power by the United States, said the victims were all civilians, including eight schoolboys. But there was no international outcry about this incident; it barely garnered a few mentions in the global press...

What a scream

Ultimate irony: Snowstorm squelches “screaming” climate change protest « Watts Up With That?

(KCPW News) Climate change activists will stage a “scream-in” today at the Gateway Mall in downtown Salt Lake City to vent their frustrations about the Copenhagen Accord adopted by global leaders two weeks ago. University of Utah student Cléa Major says the demonstration is intended to call attention to the fact that the accord doesn’t require countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The protest managed to gather support from six people who quickly gave up in the blizzard conditions.

(Oh, and the same thing happened to them last year!)

Happy New Year and remember...

...It's a Big Old Goofy World!

Make mine a large one

Home drinkers 'over-pour spirits'

Most people who drink spirits at home pour well over what they would get in a pub when trying to give a single measure, figures suggest...It could also mean that people wrongly think they are drinking within the NHS recommended limits** of two to three units a day for women and three to four units a day for men.

Of course they do!
One of the joys of drinking at home is pouring a decent amount of rum or whisky into a glass rather than the pathetic, overpriced dribble you get in pubs and bars.
But wait! Here danger lurks....

Public health minister Gillian Merron said: "Many of us enjoy a drink, especially at new year. But it's easy to get carried away and it's worrying to see just how much more people might be unwittingly pouring for themselves and their friends at home on a regular basis.  If you want to minimise your risk of diseases like cancer, heart disease and stroke, it's worth paying attention to the size of your measures."

**Would these be the alcohol limits that were plucked from the arses of the members of the Royal College of Physicians committee that was set up to look into alcohol misuse back in 1987?

The Noughties

The decade that politics forgot - spiked

The politics of behaviour: This was a phrase coined by a New Labourite to describe the UK government’s increased interest in legislating for everything from what we eat to what we should think and say. Political leaders with no grand ideas or vision of the future have lowered their horizons to micro-managing our lives. Abandoning any aspirations to mobilise people and forge the Good Society, they have instead focused on imposing their notions of the good citizen on the allegedly ‘anti-social’ masses.

Who is doing the mocking?

China has made a mockery of justice -  Clive Stafford Smith

It wouldn't have mattered to Clive Stafford Smith if Akmal Shaikh had been the sanest and most intelligent man alive. Or if he had masterminded the distribution of the entire world's heroin supply. Stafford Smith would still have opposed his execution. But it doesn't stop at being opposed to the death penalty. In Stafford Smith's world it is the murderers, rapists and terrorists who are the real victims.

...this brings up Clive's great central concept - which is that, in a sense, no one is guilty. Or, rather, that the question of their guilt is not what is interesting; what is interesting is why they did what they did, if they did it. Clive disliked Tony Blair's suggestion that the legal system needed to be “rebalanced” in favour of the victim. He sees the system as being inherently biased against the accused, and as pursuing vindictiveness at the expense of comprehension. The prosecutors, he argues, should be consumed with doubt about the guilt of those they prosecute. Those with the defending mentality should prosecute instead - a fascinating suggestion which he then undercuts. “I would never be a prosecutor,” he says emphatically. “ I just don't want to be. That just reflects my bias.”...

If he were a young lawyer starting out in Britain today, who would he seek to represent? “Paedophiles. Even Guardian readers hate paedophiles.”

Wrecked 'em?...

True Tales of Urban Terrorism:   James Wolcott

I was once sitting next to a guy on the subway whose underwear exploded.

And his underpants hadn't been wired with any exotic device neether (sic).

I had to move, like, two cars down.

I and my fellow stampeding passengers didn't lose our nerve that day and America shouldn't lose its nerve now.

Clueless

Liberal Conspiracy -  Tory strategy: to hope for a credit downgrade

Political anoraks. They really haven't got a clue, have they? Whether Britain's credit rating is downgraded or not will have absolutely no effect on the actions of voters in the general election. It's a complete irrelevance. 99.99% of voters don't even know what it means. It's only trainspotting political nerds like the author of this tedious and pointless piece that get aroused by such details.