VIENNA, Austria -- Austrian prosecutors say the man accused of imprisoning his daughter for 24 years and fathering her seven children has been charged with murder. The state attorney's office says it has charged suspect Josef Fritzl with homicide because one of the children died in infancy. Prosecutors say experts believe the infant might have survived if Fritzl had arranged for proper medical care.
The 73-year-old retired electrician also was charged Thursday with rape, incest, false imprisonment and slavery. Fritzl's trial is expected to begin early in 2009.
His daughter, now 42, and several children were released in April and have been getting counseling at an undisclosed location.
#3
They are saying he would only get 10-20 yrs and the prosecutor wants him to spend it in an insane asylum. I know hes old but that seems too good for him. It should be 100 yrs or something. It would send a message to the daughter that what he did was horrible and he deserves the severest of punishments. Unless the asylums are horrific in Austria but I cant believe that. On another site they said He should go to prison and be in the general population. And let his crimes be known. I agreee! That would take care of him! I dont think shell ever feel free until he dies.
VANCOUVER - A former B.C. provincial politician and his wife have recovered what is believed to be the seventh detached foot to have washed ashore on the West Coast since last year.
Ken Johnston says his wife Diane was walking their dogs along a Fraser River beach in Richmond, B.C., on Tuesday when she spotted the sneaker. "She could see it was a running shoe and it was sitting on a rock about 10 feet from the beach, but the tide was in and she had the dogs with her and was unable to reach it," he said.
Johnston said the pair returned to the spot later in the day. "She said, 'Let's go and see if the shoe is still there.' Now it was between two logs, so she went down the bank and threw it up to me.
"I flipped it over and could see a sock and other material inside I couldn't identify," said Ken Johnston, a member of the B.C. legislature from 2001 to 2005. The couple decided to phone the police, who collected the shoe.
Richmond RCMP said the left New Balance running shoe, thought to be a woman's, has been turned over to the Coroners Service of British Columbia, so that any tissue inside can be processed for DNA tests. "It's too early to draw any parallels (to other shoes) until we conduct an examination and extract a DNA sample from the remains," said Const. Annie Linteau. She declined to provide any details about the size, colour or model of the latest shoe.
Another New Balance sneaker, a white shoe fitted for a right foot, washed up in B.C. in May. Of all the shoes that have washed ashore in B.C., that was the only other woman's shoe. In the previous cases, there was no indication of foul play. The feet appear to have come detached "through natural processes," according to police.
Five of the six previous feet were found in B.C., and the other was found Aug. 4 on a beach south of the U.S.-Canada border, near Port Angeles, Wash.
There were also several hoaxes. On June 18, what was thought to be a foot washed up near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. It was later discovered that someone placed the bones of an animal's foot in a sock and packed it inside a sneaker with seaweed. Then in September, someone placed a plastic foot in a runner on an East Vancouver beach.
"Obviously, due to the fact that a hoax was perpetrated previously . . . we want to proceed cautiously until we know what exactly we are dealing with," Linteau said.
Diane said she hopes the find will help determine the identity of the victim so their family might find some solace. "I feel a great deal of empathy for a family in that situation," said Diane.
In the summer of 1989, the couple's six-year-old son, Adam, drowned at a nearby beach. The boy had vanished during the outing and it took the police more than a day to recover his body. She doesn't need to describe the agony she and rest of the family endured while waiting for him to be found. "My son would be 26 now so, yes, it did occur to both of us how important it is to find something - even just a small part of someone's loved one," she said.
Police are continuing to probe missing-persons files to identify the remains in all the cases where human remains were confirmed through tests.
The first two shoes, both containing right feet, were discovered within a week in late August 2007 on islands in the Strait of Georgia. The third case, also involving a right foot that washed up on an island in the Strait of Georgia, was in February. The other two shoes - containing left feet - were found on islands in the Fraser River last May 22 and June 16.
Posted by: chris ||
11/13/2008 9:05 Comments ||
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#4
Has there been any human trafficking there lately. Maybe all of these feet belong to illegals that were thrown off a boat and have finally come to rest. Or, maybe there is a cannibal loose that doesn't like feet and prefers only to eat the other parts. Ha Ha.
A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from Security Fix on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network.
For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today. On Monday, Security Fix contacted the Internet providers that manage more than 90 percent of the company's connection to the larger Internet, sending them information about badness at McColo as documented by the security industry.
On Tuesday afternoon, I heard back from Global Crossing, one of McColo's major Internet providers. Their spokesman declined to discuss the matter, except to say that Global Crossing communicates and cooperates fully with law enforcement, their peers, and security researchers to address malicious activity.
Two hours later, I heard from Benny Ng, director of marketing for Hurricane Electric, the Fremont, Calif., company that was the other major Internet provider for McColo. Hurricane Electric took a much stronger public stance: "We shut them down," Ng said. "We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said 'Holy cow! Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them."
Hadn't noticed before, they hadn't, nope, nope ...
As of this writing, McColo's Web site is no longer available. In fact, I pinged no fewer than three different researchers who have tracked activity at McColo for many months: None could find a single Internet address assigned to the hosting provider that was still reachable. Officials from McColo did not respond to multiple e-mails, phone calls and instant messages left at the contact points listed on the company's Web site before the site was taken offline.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/13/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
This could explain why we are seeing rather amateurish spamming activity; by the next generation of trainees...
#3
Some interesting points raised on this subject in a different forum:
At the very least, it seems that this makes any prosecution more difficult. While it appears that folks did a great job of following the network connections--to nail the individuals involved you need to follow the money. Even worse, what if the FBI *was* investigating them already, and now their target has been shut down? Unless there was behind-the-scenes cooperation that hasn't been reported, someone (on either the technical or law enforcement side) was not behaving responsibly. This should have been a coordinated shutdown--simultaneously involving closing network connections and arresting individuals.
Secondly, aren't we still playing whack-a-mole here? The network controlled over a million compromised PCs. Those machines are still compromised. Since the individuals who controlled them are evidently still at large, I think it's safe to assume that the keys to those machines are still out there. If that's the case, then those machines will be up and spamming again inside of a week. The only thing that might delay that would be if the primary payment processors really were taken offline as well. I don't want to open the "counter-virus" can of worms. But how hard would it have been to identify the control sequences for those PCs and change them to random sequences? Shutting down a central control center is good news, but taking 1.5 million PCs permanently (at least until next infection) out of a botnet would be really impressive.
Maybe more information will prove me wrong, but right now this seems more like a lost opportunity than a great success. I was quite surprised to hear that so many operations were centralized in one place. I doubt that opportunity is going to come again.
#7
So, you guys started building the gallows yet? I've got some plywood and 2x4s in the garage if you need them. And a nail gun. Come to think of it, let's dispense with the hanging and just use the nail gun on them; cheaper that way.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/13/2008 11:40 Comments ||
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#8
Plenty more potential spammers where these came from.
#9
They didn't catch any spammers, just got the network shut off to one of their nests. They will build a new nest and be back online in a week or two.
Descendants of World War I flying ace Harvey Weir Cook celebrated the Veterans Day dedication of a new passenger terminal bearing his name, a belated consolation for the removal of his name from the airport he helped develop more than 60 years ago.
Indianapolis International Airport, known as Weir Cook Airport before 1976, dedicated the $1 billion terminal Tuesday with more than a dozen members of the Cook family and others in attendance.
"We all took it hard," said Harvey Weir Cook III of Columbus, Ohio, who helped ceremoniously cut a red ribbon to open the midfield terminal. "It's a great honor to have my grandfather recalled this way."
Cook, a native of Wilkinson east of Indianapolis, shot down seven German planes while a captain with the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I. He returned to military service in World War II as a lieutenant colonel in 1942 and died in a plane crash the following year in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific. The airport was named after Cook in 1944.
The development of the new terminal sparked an effort by family members, veterans groups and others to return the Weir Cook name to the entire airport, but a compromise with airport leaders resulted in naming the new structure the Col. H. Weir Cook Terminal Building. The main road serving it is also named after the flying ace.
#1
God forbid naming the entire thing after him. Ehat they saving the name for Obama international airport,. it will go right along well with the local high school named after Obama too.
Posted by: chris ||
11/13/2008 10:33 Comments ||
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"And I thought MY jokes were bad"./geek mode
An ancestor of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.
Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died. "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" is the reply.
In the Python sketch, written 1,600 years later, the shopkeeper claims the dead parrot is "pining for the fjords". The 265 jokes in Philogelos are attributed to a pair of jokers called Hierocles and Philagrius, about whom very little is known.
Their manuscripts have been published into a multimedia online e-book, which features video of veteran comic Jim Bowen bringing the old jokes back to life in front of a 21st Century audience. Some of the jokes are strikingly similar to modern ones, with subjects including farts, sex, ugly wives and a dimwit referred to as "a student dunce".
"One or two of them are jokes I've seen in people's acts nowadays, slightly updated," said Bowen. "They put in a motor car instead of a chariot - some of them are Tommy Cooper-esque," he added.
Jim Bowen performed the old jokes in front of a 21st Century audience. Some jokes are likely to baffle modern audiences, however - especially the ones about lettuce, which only make sense if you share the ancient superstition that the vegetable is an aphrodisiac.
The book has been translated by William Berg, an American professor of Classics. "The text of Philogelos comes to us from several manuscripts ranging from the 11th to the 15th Centuries," Berg said. "All of them trace back to an earlier original, probably - judging from the content and language - from the 4th Century."
Other jokes in the book include:
Someone needled a well-known wit: "I had your wife, without paying a penny". He replied: "It's my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?"
An Abderite sees a eunuch talking with a woman and asks him if she's his wife. The guy responds that a eunuch is unable to have a wife. "Ah, so she's your daughter? "
A misogynist is attending to the burial of his wife, who has just died, when someone asks: "Who is it who rests in peace here?". He answers: "Me, now that I'm rid of her!"
Posted by: Mike ||
11/13/2008 11:37 Comments ||
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#2
Nothing new under the sun...
Seriously, when I did a Greek and Roman lit course in college, I began to think that Roman comedy was very like American TV sitcoms - about six characters and that many stock situations and jokes... most of them were encapsulated in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum". If you watch that, you've seen everything there was to Roman popular comedy...
Scheduled shifts in Earth's orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said Wednesday. . . . Two researchers built a high-powered computer model to take a closer look at these intriguing phases of cooling and warmth. In addition to the planetary shifts, they also factored in levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), found in tiny bubbles in ice cores, that provide an indicator of temperature spanning hundreds of thousands of years.
They found dramatic swings in climate, including changes when Earth flipped from one state to the other in a relatively short time, said one of the authors, geoscientist Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. These shifts, called "bifurcations," appear to happen in abrupt series, which is counter-intuitive to the idea that the planet cools or warms gradually.
"You had a big change about a million years ago, then a second change around 650,000 years ago, when you had bigger glaciations, then 450,000 years ago, when you started to get more repeated glaciations," Thomas told AFP. "What's also interesting is that the inter-glaciations also became warmer."
According to the model, published in the British journal Nature by Crowley and physicist William Hyde of Toronto University, Canada, the next "bifurcation" would normally be due between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now. Do your part to prevent the next Ice Age: trade that Prius in on a carbon-spewing V-8 Detroit musclecar and go tear up the roads.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/13/2008 14:38 ||
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#1
If you really want to warm the Earth up in a hurry, tunnel down into the oceanic floor methane ice and pump hot water into it. You'll get a gigantic eruption of methane gas that is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
#3
Um...and fast shifts in climate are new how? We talk about such extensively in my geology courses and there's been LOTS of studies showing the onset of an Ice age can take as little as 10 years.
Southern Californians by the millions were signed up to simultaneously drop to the floor on Thursday and huddle face down under tables and desks for two minutes of imagined seismic turmoil in the biggest U.S. earthquake drill ever.
The Great Southern California ShakeOut drill was organized by scientists and emergency officials as part of a campaign to prepare the region's 22 million inhabitants for a catastrophic quake that experts say is inevitable and long overdue.
The exercise is based on the premise of a magnitude 7.8 temblor striking the San Andreas Fault, similar in strength to a devastating quake that hit China in May.
Well over 5 million people officially signed up to take part in the drill, and organizers said they assumed many more would join in without registering.
At precisely 10 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST), people in classrooms, offices and homes throughout the region will be asked to perform the prescribed "drop, cover and hold-on" exercise for two minutes, the duration of the hypothetical quake. They will be guided by a public service message distributed to businesses and schools and played over the airwaves by radio and TV stations.
#5
OTOH, we are severely impacted by illegal immigration, a federal problem. Although it's the federal government's responsibility to secure the border we get the bill for the health care, welfare, education and incarceration of illegal aliens. So maybe it is about time we get some help.
The story can't possibly be as good as the headline, so we'll just leave it at that.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/13/2008 07:08 ||
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You know how you can tell if the beer keg is hot? Your pee glows in the dark.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
11/13/2008 11:20 Comments ||
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We certainly could have used these for our underage keggers out in the deep woods back in the day...
Posted by: Dar ||
11/13/2008 13:47 Comments ||
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If you wre evil and wanted an easier path to smuggle a nuke or dirty bomb into the US, what better way than to contaminate the scrap metal stream so that millions of products emitted radiation to provide you with a 'smoke screen.'
If you think they're out to get you, you're not alone.
Paranoia, once assumed to afflict only schizophrenics, may be a lot more common than previously thought. According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia Expert™ at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College and the author of a book on the subject.
Experts™ say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence to the irrational fears many people have daily. "We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it," said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Van Os was not connected to Freeman's studies.
Continued on Page 49
#1
Traumatic events can make people more vulnerable to having paranoid thoughts. Since the attacks, Penn said Americans have been conditioned to be more vigilant of anything out of the ordinary.
With the possible exception of presidential elections.
#5
unfounded fear that others are trying to hurt you
So is paranoia up by a factor of three - or are there three times as many people out there trying to hurt others? It's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you.
#8
It's not paranoia if they're really out to get ya.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/13/2008 12:09 Comments ||
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A) London is an increasingly non-homogeneous society. Of *course* trust levels will decrease - one of the benefits of social homogeneity is higher levels of implicit social trust.
B) London is an increasingly more dangerous environment, what with actual, living, breathing terrorists wandering about under 'surveillance'. Paranoia is a rational response to changing conditions.
C) The authorities have stripped the populace of their means of self-defense, and poisoned the civil wells from which social trust is periodically refreshed. If all trust and authority is delegated to the government, and it becomes increasingly clear that the government doesn't have your best interests at heart, a raging case of squint-eyed paranoia is an increasingly necessary tool for survival. After all, if it's in the government's best interest that you die quickly so as to not burden public health service, and not defend yourself against chavs and 'yoots', then your stringy ass is all alone in the New Britain.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
11/13/2008 12:48 Comments ||
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#12
Another factor beyond being told that dangerous things aren't dangerous and pay no mind and give up your right to self-defence is that sometimes the media exagerates the threat of fairly mild things.
If the facts are mailable how can we blame people for not trusting anything.
Religious police in Saudi Arabia announced the creation of a new council to monitor its activities after recent criticism that they had overstepped their authority, in a move that was greeted with mixed reactions.
The Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announced Monday that it was forming a Presidency Council charged with monitoring the activities of the religious police, president of the commission Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Abdullah al-Ghaith said in a press conference Monday.
The council, whose members will come from the top leadership, will review the policies and strategies of the commission's presidency as well as monitor its activities.
Self-monitoring, that's going to work about as well as Eliot Spitzker's review of his own hotel bills ...
"The council will also develop the commission's financial, administrative, technical and field matters and will set the proper mechanisms to facilitate the work," the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) quoted Ghaith as saying.
The commission has fallen under harsh criticism recently in the wake of flagrant violations committed by its officers, including illegal detentions, beating and car chases.
" The name reminds me of the authority of Arab revolutionary councils "
Dr. Ali Saad al-Moussa
Some viewed the formation of the watchdog council as a positive step intended to address criticism. "This shows the Commission is a dynamic body that redresses its mistakes. We are happy about these decisions since they mean more accuracy and efficiency in the Commission's performance," Saudi journalist Khaled al-Moshawah told AlArabiya.net.
He added that this step will have a positive impact on the Saudi society, especially since the majority of Saudis support the commission's goals and consider it as the community's "safety valve."
Saudi academic and author Dr. Ali Saad al-Moussa expressed concern that the council would expand the authority of the commission and overlook its mistakes. He noted that the newly formed council's expanded powers would effectively turn it into a legislative and executive authority that can arrest and try people.
"This means if the Commission finds out that a problem in one of the ministries requires its intervention, they will have the right to summon top officials," Moussa told AlArabiya.net, adding that he objected to the name "Presidency Council". "The name reminds me of the authority of Arab revolutionary councils," he said.
In response to criticism of the religious police overextending their authority, the Saudi Ministry of Interior earlier this year banned commission officers from detaining offenders at their headquarters and confined their role to transferring them to police stations. The head of the Commission for Investigation and General Prosecution circulated a copy of the new regulations and said that surprise visits to commission officers will be made to ensure there are no illegal detentions.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/13/2008 00:00 ||
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KHAMIS MUSHAYT: When an eight- or ten-year-old girl is told that she should cover her entire body from head to toe -- as an adult woman is supposed to do -- then immediately the child's mother asks why.
This is exactly what is happening in the southern province of Asir where school regulations stipulate that pre-pubescent girls should dress in such a way that no part of their body, including head and face, is visible.A child who dares to violate the new dress code faces severe punishment, including a public scolding and deductions from her marks.
This has put parents in a real dilemma. On the one hand, this new dress code is being imposed; on the other, they find it difficult to convince their young daughters that it is necessary for them to be completely veiled.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
11/13/2008 00:00 ||
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Mohammed married Ayesha when she was six and started raping her when she was nine. Bin bags for eight year olds sounds like a sensible precaution given the cultists surrounding them.
I'm truly sorry about the job losses - the average Joe Giorgi gets the shaft as usual, while the rich Oleg stays rich - but I'm glad the short-sighted pollution of Lake Baikal has stopped. Hope it's not too late....
After decades of campaigning, environmentalists in Russia are celebrating the closure of a notorious factory controlled by the billionaire Oleg Deripaska that pumped toxic waste into Lake Baikal.
Since it was built more than four decades ago the Baikalsk paper and pulp mill has allegedly run off thousands of tonnes of dioxin and other harmful byproducts into the world's deepest lake. Generations of activists had seemed powerless to stop the pollution, but yesterday the mill announced it was halting production and laying off 1,400 workers.
Pressure from activists forced the mill to transfer to a "closed-water" system in September, cutting waste discharge into the lake. A spokesman said that change had contributed to the closure because the factory could no longer produce bleached pulp, its most profitable export. The global economic crisis had also hit margins.
Roman Vazhenkov, head of Greenpeace Russia's Now there's a pairing I wouldn't have expected to survive
Baikal programme, said the closure was a "historic moment".
Lake Baikal - often called the Pearl of Siberia - is a Unesco world heritage site, which holds around 20% of the world's fresh water unfortunately undrinkable at the moment, but what's a little pollution when there's a buck to be made. A campaign to close the paper mill at Baikalsk on the lake's southern tip started in earnest during perestroika when some of the Soviet Union's first free public movements united around environmental protests.
Engineers must seal a toxic pond under the factory which is leaking, but Baikal's self-cleaning ecosystem will help to save the lake. Billions of tiny crustaceans known as epishura constantly filter out algae and bacteria, cleansing the water. Wonder how many other lakes have this "self-cleaning" feature? And why don't we know about it?
The mill's future will remain under review until February, but it is expected to stay closed permanently. Until the Russians come up with something else to pollute the lake with.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/13/2008 15:57 ||
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This is a good thing. Lake Baikal is truly a unique, fascinating, and important ecosystem, one that actually is deserving of preservation. Properly developed, there are probably tourism opportunities that could provide gainful employment for the displaced workers.
#2
Lake Baikal is a truly amazing place. I remember having a Russian boat captain take me and a buddy out in the middle of it, dip a cup in the water and hand the crystal-clear (and I mean *crystal* clear) water to me to drink. When we got back to shore, we got schnockered on vodka from a label-free bottle, after which he cursed the paper mill referenced below. Chalk one up for the good guys.
Discount German supermarket chain Lidl has issued an apology after workers at one of its Swedish stores deliberately poisoned discarded food in a bid to keep homeless people at bay.
"Lidl Sweden has been informed that cleaning liquids have been poured into the trash to stop trespassers from stealing garbage at one of our stores during a short time period," Mathias Kivikoski, Lidl's chief executive in Sweden, said in a statement.
"We deeply regret what has happened and this is not something the company recommends or permits," it added.
A newspaper in the Stockholm suburb of Solna revealed that Lidl employees at a local store had become tired of homeless people searching trash bins had last week begun pouring toxic cleaning products on discarded food.
They put up a sign near the bins warning that the goods had been poisoned, but it remained unclear if anyone had eaten the food, the Mitt i Solna paper reported. Uhhh ... check the local hospitals ... and the morgues.
Food had disappeared from the bins after the staff began poisoning it, it said.
Rolf Nilsson, who heads a Stockholm homeless organization, described the employees' actions as criminally insane "crazy."
"This is just so upsetting and distressing. We're talking about people who have to dig in garbage containers to find food to eat," Nilsson told the Aftonbladet daily.
Posted by: chris ||
11/13/2008 10:34 Comments ||
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#2
8,000 cousins? Yeah, I've got barely 8,000 Thorn/Thorne 'cousins', and that's after almost FOUR CENTURIES of frontier-style f'huge families. Somebody's counting the sort of relation which bears more resemblance to 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' than to proper genealogy.
Reading closer, it sounds as if one of Obama's third or second twice removed cousins married into this Bedouin tribe back in the thirties. Which in and of itself sounds kind of dodgy. Isn't this what Arabic-style cousin marriage is designed to avoid?
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
11/13/2008 12:31 Comments ||
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#3
their all inbred who knows mitch
Posted by: chris ||
11/13/2008 12:34 Comments ||
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We knew hed win, the sheikh said, constantly interrupted by a barrage of phone calls from wellwishers and those hoping to cash in on his newfound wasta, an Arabic term denoting influence or clout. We have always been a lucky family
An Iranian court has sentenced an Iranian journalist of Arab ethnicity to five years in prison for allegedly inciting a 'revolt' among Arabs in southern Iran. Yousef Azizi-Banitaraf was arrested three years ago and charged by the Revolutionary Court in Tehran with 'inciting revolt' among the Arab population in the south of Iran.
In April 2005, a group of people protested in oil-rich Khuzestan over an alleged letter that was reportedly attributed to Iran's presidential desk, saying that urgent action was needed to change the ethnic demographics of the province.
Banitaraf was arrested and released a few weeks later after he criticised the repression of protesters in the south of the country at a meeting at a Tehran human rights centre.
"The objective of this sentence is to silence the critical voices, and reduce freedom of expression to a minimum," said Banitaraf's lawyer, Saleh Nikbath
Banitaraf, 58, has published more than 25 works on various subjects, including tribal affairs, nomadic tribes and folk storytelling among the people of Khuzestan.
An elderly woman bearing a cross who attended a gay marriage protest to voice her support of the California ban was attacked by demonstrators and may now press charges.
Carrying a large, Styrofoam cross, 69-year-old Phyllis Burgess showed up at a rally last Friday against Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage that was passed on Election Day in California. She was there to show her belief in traditional marriage, she said.
Within minutes, however, angry protesters swarmed around the Palm Springs resident, yanked the cross from her hands and trampled on it. The incident was videotaped and posted on YouTube.
Now, Burgess says she might press assault charges, according to The Desert Sun. "I guess I didn't see the gravity of the whole thing and how it was being portrayed to the public," Burgess told the paper. "People are incensed. They seem to want some kind of justice."
Palm Springs police have made no arrests yet, but said they spent time Sunday trying to convince Burgess to file charges against some of the demonstrators.
#2
Kudos to these brave chartreuse lions attacking a 69 year old woman instead of going into Watts and bending over those who voted for Prop 8 in large numbers.
Posted by: ed ||
11/13/2008 14:11 Comments ||
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A great preacher who had a knack for seeing things ahead of times predicted that America's gay community would one day become militant and intolerant to the point of dieing for thier cause. But of course I think he was refering to how those people acted in the Bible stories that were written in the days of old...
Posted by: Jack Anginerong6126 ||
11/13/2008 14:17 Comments ||
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#4
The word I left out also was that they would be extremely obusive to those who regect their demands.
Posted by: Jack Anginerong6126 ||
11/13/2008 14:17 Comments ||
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#5
Carrying a large, Styrofoam cross...
These are a lot lighter if you are going to do much protesting.
How about sicing the gay protesters on the Westboro Baptist Church? Seems like a good match.
#6
JohnQC, I'll put my money on the Westboro crowd. Never ever get in a brawl with inbred idiots.
-----------------
But....although I am sympathetic to the idea of gay marriage, I gotta take the devil's advocate position in this argument. I don't see where they are denied any right that a straight person has. They have the right to marry (or not) anyone of the opposite gender just like the next guy or girl.
Love between the parties involved, the willingness to have children, or even sexual fidelity are not legal requirements for marriage in any of the 50 states. No one cares if you like men, women, furry animals or blow up dolls when you apply for the license. If any of those three things I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph were a prerequisite for a license, they might have a legitimate bitch, but until they are, what they are essentially asking for is another option to be added.
You do not, nor have any of us ever really had, the legal "right" to marry someone based on love or sexual attraction alone. If I may quote one of my favorite musical philosophers, Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with it?" That's what it boils down to. The people have spoken, so....try to make your case better the next time.
BTW, guys....insulting the parties who disagreed with you, beating up on little old ladies and using ethnic slurs ain't the way to change hearts and minds, ok?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Scheduled shifts in Earth's orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said Wednesday. . . . Two researchers built a high-powered computer model to take a closer look at these intriguing phases of cooling and warmth. In addition to the planetary shifts, they also factored in levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), found in tiny bubbles in ice cores, that provide an indicator of temperature spanning hundreds of thousands of years.
Southern Californians by the millions were signed up to simultaneously drop to the floor on Thursday and huddle face down under tables and desks for two minutes of imagined seismic turmoil in the biggest U.S. earthquake drill ever.
If you think they're out to get you, you're not alone.
