A COURT in Italy has convicted former Premier Silvio Berlusconi of tax fraud and sentenced him to four years in prison.
In Italy, cases must pass two levels of appeal before the verdicts are final. Berlusconi is expected to appeal.
The conviction was the media mogul's first; other criminal probes and trials had ended in acquittal or were thrown out for statute of limitations.
Earlier in the week, Berlusconi had announced he wouldn't run for a fourth term. The 76-year-old media mogul wasn't in the courtroom for the verdict on the case stemming from dealings in his Mediaset business empire.
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Anti-austerity demonstrators in Europe have suffered excessive police violence, Amnesia Amnesty International said Thursday in a report urging European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... (EU) governments to protect the right to peaceful protest.
The rights group said people rallying against government spending cuts, tax rises and job losses in countries hit by the eurozone crisis and elsewhere had sometimes been seriously injured by police or had had medical treatment withheld.
"People demonstrating peacefully in EU countries have been beaten, kicked, shot at and maimed with rubber bullets and sprayed with tear gas," Amnesty said.
"Yet excessive use of force by police goes uninvestigated and unpunished."
The Amnesty report, entitled "Policing demonstrations in the European Union", described several cases where police had severely beaten protesters in Greece, Spain and Romania.
Greek journalist Manolis Kypreos was left completely deaf in June 2011 after police threw a stun grenade at him, the report added.
Kypreos has since recovered some hearing but his disability has effectively ended his career, Amnesty said.
"Governments must spell out and reiterate that coppers may use force only when strictly necessary," said Fotis Filippou, Amnesty's campaign coordinator for Europe and Central Asia.
"They must introduce strict guidelines on the use of potentially lethal riot-control devices such as pepper spray and tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets."
The report warned that excessive force and arbitrary arrests of protesters could turn anger against governments into anger against the police, increasing the risk of violence at anti-austerity demonstrations.
Under international law, police can only use force when it is required for them to perform their duty and they must be restrained in its use, Amnesty said.
Police forces in several European countries have faced budget cuts themselves as governments seek to shrink their huge deficits, the report added.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/26/2012 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11137 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
police can only use force when it is required for them to perform their duty
So if a policeman's duty is to disperse a crowd impeding public passage and they do not do so when he asks them, he can further forcefully encourage them with his billy club. Etc.
#2
Well, as as a EU passport holder and awardee of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, I resemble the police brutality on my fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipients, even if they are delusional.
#5
Thanks for pointing that out, gromky. I've been methodically testing each link and fixing as needed. The queer thing is that Fred put the links in as normal, but for some reason the Naharnet links don't work until I copy and paste the exact same link over the one he'd pasted in. No doubt he and badanov will have fun figuring it out.
The bomber who blew up an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria in July, killing six people, had up to five foreign helpers locally and the attack was planned abroad, the interior minister said Thursday.
"The number of people who participated on Bulgarian territory is between three and five," Tsvetan Tsvetanov told the 24 Hours newspaper.
"To date we have no proof that any of them was Bulgarian," Tsvetanov added. He said the attack at Burgas airport was plotted outside Bulgaria over a period of a year and a half.
The probe into the identity of the foreign bomber, who killed five Israeli tourists and their Bulgarian driver as well as himself in the July 18 attack, has collected "lots of evidence," the minister said.
"Still, the time has not yet come to voice any concrete accusation against the people or groups who performed this terrorist act (...) We must work with concrete evidence. We have to be very cautious as national security is concerned," he added.
The accomplice theory gained ground right from the start of the investigation but Bulgarian police have so far released only one computer-generated image of a suspected helper, in addition to a composite portrait of the presumed bomber himself.
Israel had immediately blamed Iran and its "terrorist proxy" Hizbullah for the bombing, which was the deadliest on Israelis abroad since 2004. Iran denied any involvement.
Bulgaria has so far refrained from pointing a finger at anyone.
[Jerusalem Post] An increasing majority of people in La Belle France believe Islam plays too influential a role in their society and almost half see Mohammedans as a threat to their national identity, according to a poll published on Thursday.
That's nice. Are they going to do anything about it, beyond selling their unused churches to the Muslims for mosques, as is happening all over Europe and Britain?
The survey by pollster Ifop in Le Figaro newspaper showed that 60 percent of people believed that Islam was "too important" in La Belle France in terms of its influence and visibility, up from 55 percent two years ago.
It found that 43 percent of respondents considered the presence of the Mohammedan community as a threat to their national identity, compared with just 17 percent who said it enriched society. Forty percent of those questioned were indifferent to the presence of Islam, Le Figaro said.
"Our poll shows a further hardening in French people's opinions," Jerome Fourquet, head of Ifop's opinion department, told the newspaper.
The struggle of secular La Belle France, whose people are mainly Catholic, to assimilate the largest Islamic population in Europe was thrust into the spotlight in March when Mohammedan Mohamed Merah, went on a shooting spree in southwest La Belle France that killed three Jewish children, a rabbi and three soldiers.
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#1
I sense an oxymoron in here "French think", then how prey tell do the French think that after having Algeria as a department of France until 1962 and Algerians having French nationality by virtue of having been a part of Greater France, that there would not be a rise in Islamic influence ?
Posted by: Au Auric ||
10/26/2012 1:13 Comments ||
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[Ynet] La Belle France's Union of Jewish Students, which last week forced Twitter to remove anti-Semitic posts under threat of legal action, says 50 new messages sighted over weekend using new keyword #unjuifmort (#adeadjew).
A Twitter front man refused to comment directly on the anti-Semitic tweets and reiterated the company's standard response that it "does not mediate content."
He added, "If we are alerted to content that may be in violation of our terms of service, we will investigate each report and respond according to the policies and procedures outlined in our support pages."
These state that Twitter cannot delete tweets but allow for accounts generating content in breach of its rules or considered illegal to be suspended.
The site will not hand over details of account holders unless obliged to do so by a judge.
Last week, Twitter suspended the account of a neo-Nazi group in Germany, responding to a request of that nature from a national government for the first time.
French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has warned Twitter that it has a duty to uphold the country's laws on racism and anti-Semitism.
The row over the tweets has blown up against a background of increasing attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in La Belle France.
A community watchdog said two weeks ago that anti-Semitic acts had surged by 45% since the start of the year and were given fresh impetus by attacks by Islamic bad boy Mohamed Merah.
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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.
[Jerusalem Post] An increasing majority of people in 
