They came after those scientists who failed to predict the earthquake and no one stopped them. They came after those scientists who keep predicting gerbil worming disasters...well you can dream!
The head of Italy's disaster body, Luciano Maiani, has resigned in protest at prison sentences passed on seven colleagues over the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila.
Six scientists and an ex-official were convicted of multiple manslaughter for giving a falsely reassuring statement.
Prof Maiani, a physicist, said the Serious Risks Commission could not work "in such difficult conditions".
The 6.3-magnitude quake killed 309 people and left the city in ruins.
Prof Maiani's decision to quit was announced by the Italy's Civil Protection Department, which said the commission's vice-president, Mauro Rosi, and emeritus president Giuseppe Zamberletti had also tendered their resignations.
"The situation created by yesterday's sentence... is incompatible with running the commission's work in a calm and efficient manner and with its role of giving high level advice to the organs of the state," Mr Maiani said in a statement on the department's website.
"A scientific committee has to give in its own judgement... The advice may be wrong. Or it may be imprecise. But if you have such a heavy punishment the committee will not act properly," he later told the BBC's Newshour.
"A committee will tend to be, always, on the very, very conservative side. I think there is a definite danger that scientific communities will refrain from giving advice to the government."
Prof Maiani, a world-renowned physicist who was director general of the Cern nuclear research centre in Switzerland from 1999-2003, said the possibility of being judged for your scientific judgement was a "serious problem".
"In this condition, and with this precedent, I would not take the job," he added.
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[Jerusalem Post] The French Moslem Council (CFCM) urged the government on Monday to ban a far-right group that occupied a mosque on Saturday and issued a "declaration of war" against what it called the Islamization of La Belle France.
Some 73 protesters from a movement called Identity Group seized a mosque in the western city of Poitiers on Saturday and unfurled a banner referring to Charles Martel's historic defeat of advancing Moslem troops there in 732.
They stayed for more than six hours before police ejected them.
In a video posted on its website, the movement issued what it called a "declaration of war" on multiculturalism. It also called for a referendum to block further immigration from outside Europe and further construction of mosques in La Belle France
In response, CFCM President Mohammed Moussaoui said his group was "demand[ing] the dissolution of this group." He said the protest, the first time a mosque in La Belle France had been occupied like that, represented "a new escalation in violence against Moslems".
Violent acts and threats against Moslems rose by 34 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, and went up again by 14 percent in the first half of this year, Moussaoui told news hounds.
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#1
The French citizens are starting to push back. From what little I've seen, this appears to be a youth movement. Paging Charles Martel to the white courtesy phone.
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.
