Haiti can never catch a break.The UN has taken the rare step of invoking its legal immunity to rebuff claims for compensation from 5,000 victims of the Haiti cholera epidemic, the worst outbreak of the disease in modern times and widely believed to have been caused by UN peacekeepers importing the infection into the country.
Citing a convention laid down in 1946, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, telephoned President Michel Martelly of Haiti to tell him that the UN was not willing to compensate any of the claimants. The epidemic has killed almost 8,000 people and stricken hundreds of thousands more – about one out of every 16 Haitians.
For the UN to claim immunity for a crisis that most experts are convinced it unwittingly caused through its own disaster relief mission is highly contentious. The infection is thought to have been carried into Haiti by UN peacekeepers from Nepal sent to help with disaster relief following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
UK Guardian
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Disaster Relief Turned Into Disaster
This Should Be Interesting
You remember Comey – he of the infamous scramble to get to John Ashcroft in the hospital. In the long run, it doesn't seem to have mattered, but at the time, it was pretty exciting stuff.resident Obama will nominate former Deputy Attorney General James Comey to be the next director of the FBI, according to sources.
Comey is a Republican who served in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, and is perhaps best known for his time as acting Attorney General, when he refused to certify parts of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.
The Hill
Yeah, I wonder. I don't have any idea how that might play out. Times are strange and everybody's got an angle.
Obama's Sin Eater May Be Gagging
And Obama right behind him, but don’t hold your breath.Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration's sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. [...] Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation.
[...]
Holder's refusal to accept responsibility for the AP investigation was something of a change for the political insider. His value to President Obama has been his absolute loyalty. Holder is what we call a "sin eater" inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions.
[...]
Yet, at this month's hearing, the attorney general had had his fill. Accordingly, Holder adopted an embarrassing mantra of "I have no knowledge" and "I had no involvement" throughout the questioning. When he was not reciting the equivalent to his name, rank and serial number, he was implicating his aide, Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
[...]
The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.
On Thursday, Obama responded to the outcry over the AP and Fox scandals by calling for an investigation by ... you guessed it ... Eric Holder.
[...]
The feeble response was the ultimate proof that these are Obama's sins despite his effort to feign ignorance.
[...]
I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.
Jonathan Turley
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Sunday, May 26, 2013
It's Sunday
If he's not careful, he could be retiring soon.Pope Francis rocked some religious and atheist minds today when he declared that everyone was redeemed through Jesus, including atheists.
During his homily at Wednesday Mass in Rome, Francis emphasized the importance of "doing good" as a principle that unites all humanity, and a "culture of encounter" to support peace.
[...]
"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!"
HuffPo
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Rahm Emanuel - Doing Chicago Proud
Rahm Emanuel, political genius and mayor of Chicago, has stepped into it up to his eyeballs. In the same week he's planning to shut down 54 schools and six mental-health centers, Emanuel has proposed to hand DePaul, and its extraordinarily mediocre basketball program, $100 million in taxpayer money in order to build a new building in which they can be mediocre.
Charlie Pierce
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Not only is this wrong and unfair, it is nigh onto insane. Say DePaul plays 18 men's games in the new arena. That only leaves 357 days of emptiness. Sure, there would be some other games held there - I don't know, maybe dodgeball and mud wrestling - but this is such a guaranteed money-loser that it boggles this little scribe's rapidly balding head. Maintenance alone would bankrupt a small town. Plus, Chicago already has the United Center, which seats almost 22,000. It's a much better facility than DePaul's current Allstate Arena home court, which is 15 miles away in Rosemont. The United Center is much closer to DePaul than McCormick Place is. It does about 200 events a year, has a nice hockey rink and wooden hoops floor, clean washrooms, and it already offered itself to DePaul for 10 years, rent-free. No deal. DePaul likes this Emanuel idea more. And why shouldn't it? If you're at the trough, you're going to waddle over to the feeding spot with the most slop rolling down the flume. In Chicago, this is known as business as usual. Of course, everything's a game in Chicago, run by people who have power, people we don't interact with doing things [...] that we only become aware of when we catch up to the rusty can that has been kicked down the road and find out we've cut our feet badly and we're bleeding away. Or our taxes abruptly resemble shakedowns.
Chicago Sun Times
Monday, May 20, 2013
But Wait...It Gets Worse
Those Freedom of the Press ratings will have to be adjusted again.
What’s that poem….”I didn’t speak up when they came for…”
Many mainstream journalists seemed to be okay with it then.It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.
New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ's attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News' chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests - something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist - something done every day in Washington - and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for "espionage".
The focus of the Post's report yesterday is that the DOJ's surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters.
[...]
The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information - something investigative journalists do every day - Rosen himself broke the law.
[...]
Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.
[...]
That same "solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can "charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them."
Glenn Greenwald
What’s that poem….”I didn’t speak up when they came for…”
It is now.That's what always made the establishment media's silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That's why James Goodale, the New York Times' general counsel during the paper's historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that "the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening."
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Happy 104th Birthday, Sir Nicholas Winton
Yes, he's still alive.
Click the pic for details. (update: broken link fixed)
Click the pic for details. (update: broken link fixed)
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