Nov

29

Thousands Back Gays in Peaceful Polish Demonstrations

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Thousands Back Gays in Peaceful Polish DemonstrationsUK Gay News (press release), UK -… and their allies – start their demonstration for equality in the Polish capital’s Plac Konstytucji (Constitution Place), The UK GreenParty will protest …

Nov

26

Liberia elects Africa’s first woman president

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[From feministing]
Great news. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has been elected president in Liberia, making her the first female president in Africa. The election commission confirmed the tally on Wednesday — officially naming her Liberia’s president-in-waiting and first woman to ever win an election…
Continue reading Liberia elects Africa’s first woman president at feministing

Nov

23

WOMAN PUT ON FLIGHT WATCH LIST FOR ANTI-BUSH BUTTON

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VIN SUPRYNOWICZ, LAS VEGAS REVIEW JOURNAL – Dawn Hansen is Nevada chairman of Mothers Against the Draft. Her husband, Christopher Hansen, is the paralegal and retired contractor who served as chairman of last year’s failed “Axe the Tax” tax-rollback petition drive. The couple are active in the Independent American Party; they’re no wallflowers when it comes to voicing their political views. But Dawn says she does not set out to cause problems at the airport — just the opposite. “I’m always smiling and polite, I never wear anything that I think is going to set off the alarms,” she said.
She does wear a couple of political buttons, though. When I met with Dawn last weekend she told me she was wearing exactly what she’d been wearing as she entered the security checkpoint at Oakland International Airport Aug. 27 — a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads “Dissent is Patriotic.” The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled “Daddy’s Little War Criminal.” She’s convinced that’s what started the trouble.

“I went to show my ID, and the guy said, ‘Oh, I don’t need that.’ But when I went to show my boarding pass she looked at me, yanked it out of my hand, undid the rope, and said, ‘Come over here!’ No ‘Please,’ no ID check. Then she said, ‘Give me your jacket!’ They made me go through the metal detector twice even though I didn’t set it off either time. Then this second woman said, ‘You go sit down over there!’ They wanded me, they made me put my legs out, they went up inside my back and around my boobs. “They passed my jacket from person to person, each security person in turn was looking at the buttons. They asked me, ‘Why are you traveling with so much reading material?’ “

Dawn says she was carrying seven or eight general circulation magazines, a biography of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward’s latest book. “I did have one subversive publication; I was carrying a copy of The New York Times. . . They asked me why I was carrying so many legal documents. I’d been in California helping my brother do some legal research on a case. . .

They finally let Dawn Hansen fly home. She called Southwest Airlines on Monday morning and was referred to the Transportation Security Administration. When she called the TSA, “I was informed I’d been put on the watch list. I was not on any watch list before I went to Oakland. . . “TSA told me I would be under that kind of security every time I fly. TSA said I could fill out this big form that you can download from their Web site, it asks for your Social Security number and three separate forms of ID and all this information. … I said, “You can forget that. You’re just data mining. You have no right to all that information.’ And they said, ‘Well then you’re going to have to go through it every time.’ “

Nov

23

Its not a chemical weapon when we use it

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Back in the day when they thought Saddam was using phosphorous weapons the Pentagon did consider it a chemical weapon.
Think Progress has the contents of a formerly classified Pentagon document from 1995:
IRAQ HAS POSSIBLY EMPLOYED PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST THE KURDISH POPULATION IN AREAS ALONG THE IRAQI-TURKISH-IRANIAN BORDERS. […]
[...]

Nov

22

Iraqi Leaders Call for Pullout Timetable

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[From Guardian Unlimited]
Iraqi Leaders Call for Pullout Timetable
By SALAH NASRAWI
Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) – Leaders of Iraq’s sharply divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis called Monday for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces in the country and said Iraq’s opposition had a “legitimate right” of resistance.
The final communique, hammered out at the end [...]

Nov

20

British-trained police in Iraq ‘killed prisoners with drills’

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[From Independent Online Edition > Middle East]
By Francis Elliott, Raymond Whitaker and Kim Sengupta
Britain has been dragged into the growing scandal of officially condoned killings in Iraq
[...]

Nov

17

Lie detectors for keeping you busy at airport security

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[From Engadget]

Well, if they get by Team Engadget using the
FriskerPRO all vigilante style, potential airport ne’er-do-wells (and all of the hapless passengers who live in fear of them) might soon have one more safety check to make it through: a walk-thorugh lie detector test. The passenger puts on headphones and is asked yes [...]

Nov

15

Fur flies at meeting on voting technology

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[From Palm Beach Post]
Fur flies at meeting on voting technology
By George Bennett
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
With their requests to bring in outside critics, reopen past controversies and invite the public to air grievances, opponents of paperless electronic voting have exasperated the chairwoman and some other members of a technology panel put together by Palm Beach [...]

Nov

15

Attempted Copyright Infringement

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[From The J-Walk Blog]
At CNET: Justice Dept. pushes stiffer antipiracy laws.

The Bush administration announced on Thursday that it is lobbying for new laws that would bump up criminal penalties for pirates, expand criminal prosecutors’ powers and punish anyone who “attempts” to infringe a copyright.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, speaking at an antipiracy summit [...]

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