History Will Not Absolve Us

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn't let them in.

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Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques—without disclosing anything about them.

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

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Mexican Trucks Begin Crossing Border Saturday

The union said Wednesday it would ask a federal appeals courts to block the Bush administration's plan to begin allowing Mexican trucks to carry cargo anywhere in the United States.

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See a Lie Inside the Brain

Polygraph tests, the old standard of being able to tell when someone is lying, are rarely admitted as evidence into court. The polygraph measures blood pressure, sweat and breathing, among other things, to look for emotional signs of lying. But it is possible in some cases for people to learn to control these things and trick the machine.

Now there may be a solution: a truth serum without the needles.

I read the "Truth Machine".

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Doctors Offering No-Interest Loans to Patients

Zero-interest financing, a familiar sales incentive at car dealerships and furniture stores, has found its way to another big-ticket consumer market: doctors’ and dentists’ offices.

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Of course, going into debt to pay for medical procedures is nothing new for many people. And this type of financing is still only a fraction of the nation’s $900 billion market for consumer revolving credit.

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Teenagers hooked on TV and computer games only get four hours' 'junk sleep' a night

Teenagers often get as little as four hours of sleep a night because they secretly play video games or watch TV until the early hours.

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Most blame computers or television for keeping them up but a significant number also lie awake worrying about relationships and exams.

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Many Won't Run Next Two 'Opus' Strips With Sex Joke, Islam Reference

Berkeley Breathed's Aug. 26 and Sept. 2 strips -- which comprise sort of a two-part series -- show the Lola Granola character wanting to become an Islamic radicalist (and wear traditional Muslim clothing) because it's a "hot new fad on the planet." Content also includes what Shearer described as "a sex joke a little stronger than we normally see."

Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won't publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. "They just don't want to touch that," she said.

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Judge sides with RIAA: file-sharing apps lead to direct infringement

One of the arguments the RIAA has made in every file-sharing lawsuit it has ever filed is that making a song available on a P2P network is the same as distributing it, therefore violating the record label's copyright on the song.

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Trafficked women auctioned in pubs and locked up in brothels

The scale of the abuse has horrified the officers and other agencies working with them, who have found women being forced to work in the sex trade in houses in villages as well as city centres, being unable to go out and having sex with up to 60 men a day, earning thousands of pounds for the gangs.

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One described being beaten so hard that she had a broken arm for which she was not allowed medical attention. Another told of being forced to have unprotected sex with up to 25 clients a day. She was refused a testing kit when she thought she might be pregnant, and threatened by security guards with a samurai sword and a baseball bat.

Humans are such disgusting creatures.

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Obesity Rates Climb All Through U.S.

Loosen the belt buckle another notch America: Obesity rates continued their climb in 31 states last year. No state showed a decline. Mississippi became the first state to crack the 30 percent barrier for adult residents considered to be obese.

West Virginia and Alabama are just slightly behind, according to the Trust for America's Health, a research group that focuses on disease prevention.

Colorado continued its reign as the leanest state in the nation with an obesity rate projected at 17.6 percent.

Read more then go get some freakin' exercise.

Safety fears over new register of all children

Senior social workers have given warning of the dangers posed by a new government register that will store the details of every child in England from next year.

They fear that the database, containing the address, medical and school details of all under-18s, could be used to harm the children whom it is intended to protect.

Just another reason to either leave the UK or to never move there in the first place.

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Young Americans too fat to fight

AN EPIDEMIC of obesity could have serious consequences for America's economy and its ability to defend itself, according to a leading politician.

Self-confessed "recovering foodaholic" Mike Huckabee, a Republican Party presidential candidate, told a group of governors from the American South that the increasing numbers of people who were either over-weight or obese meant more and more people were having to take time off work for health reasons.

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He questioned whether the nation's increasingly obese population would be able to defend itself "if we don't have enough people who are healthy enough to show up and pick up a backpack?"

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Vick Issues Apology After Guilty Plea

Vick made his first public statements on the dogfighting ring and said:

"I made a mistake of using bad judgment and making bad decisions. Those things just can't happen. Dogfighting is a terrible thing, and I do reject it."

I don't believe you believe your own words. Otherwise, you wouldn't have done the things you have done in the first place. Can people change? Sure. But, I question the change when it's to avoid jail time.

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AIDS victims 'buried alive' in Papua New Guinea

"I said, 'Why are they doing that?' And they said, 'If we let them live, stay in the same house, eat together and use or share utensils, we will contract the disease and we too might die.'"

This is our world.

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“We Are Going to Get Hit Again”

Al Qaeda has an active plot to hit the West. The United States knows about it but doesn’t have enough tactical detail to issue a precise warning or raise the threat level, says Vice Admiral (ret.) John Scott Redd, who heads the government’s National Counterterrorism Center. In an interview at his headquarters near Washington, D.C., Redd told Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and Jeffrey Bartholet that the country is better prepared than ever to counter such threats. But he also believes another successful terror attack on the U.S. homeland is inevitable.

Despite the obvious scenario "if you fuck around with other countries there will be retaliation", how much of this is a scare tactic for the American people? Why would the "powers that be" make such an announcement? Doesn't that let the "enemy" know that you are on to their plans? Or is it simply to keep the masses in fear? Isn't that pretty much what Orwell wrote about in 1984?

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Vick's next role is an unsavory one: Government informant

Read both documents and the conclusion is obvious: His motivation right now is not to express his innocence of the charges, but to cooperate enough to land on probation, or on house arrest or some lesser form of punishment that will keep him away from a federal penitentiary. Vick likely faces 12-18 months in prison, but ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack believes it's possible Vick could provide enough information to federal investigators about the illegal, underground world of dogfighting and the people who finance it that he might not go jail at all.

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Still, for all the emotion and anger, for all of the societal hot buttons this case has pressed at once -- race, class, privilege, the debate about cruelty to animals versus the value of human life -- this conclusion feels unsatisfying. Here is the saga of a man who financed and oversaw an inhumane operation, who was party to all of its graphic brutality and who, to date, has not shown an ounce of remorse. The fact that he still has a chance to avoid jail seems incongruous, even unfair, especially in a world in which it appears that hard time seems to exist only for the guilty poor, the average or the unconnected.

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Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

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More Enemies = Greater Profits

We have kept ourselves in military operations since WWII not to make us safer or to bring freedom to the world, but chiefly to keep our Defense and Munitions industries alive and profitable. I'm not saying that there haven't been reasonable and righteous reasons for us to be involved in military conflict at certain times since WWII. But the Iraqupation may be the greatest misuse of our military power in our nations history and contrary to popular belief, it has not backfired, at least not for those making money off it.

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NFL suspends Vick indefinitely

The National Football League has indefinitely suspended Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick without pay, officials with the league said Friday.

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More War on the Horizon

No pullout from Iraq while I'm president, declares George W. Bush.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a "peace-seeking state" that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers' money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns.

The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it.

Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime's build up for initiating war with Iran.

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Children taken from parents and adopted ‘to meet ministry targets’

It says that the number of parents in England who have lost their children, despite insufficient evidence that they were causing them harm, has reached record levels.

One reason, according to social workers, is that they are under pressure to meet government adoption targets – in line with ministers’ policy for more children in care to be adopted.

At the same time, it is claimed, parents are not always given a proper chance to challenge adoptions because of the short time limit for appeals and the secrecy of the family courts. Lawyers say that hearings in private fuel parents’ sense of injustice and can in some cases breed bad practice, preventing them from properly defending themselves.

Pathetic.

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