Saturday, March 26, 2005

Former police chief accused of trying to eat evidence in court  

A former police chief accused of stealing tried to eat a piece of evidence, a receipt, during a court hearing, authorities said.
Darryl Briston scuffled with a state trooper during a preliminary hearing Thursday and elbowed the officer when he tried to stop Briston from eating the receipt, police said. Briston was later charged with aggravated assault and tampering with evidence.

The theft allegations relate to Briston's off-duty work at a tavern.

He was working as a security guard in October 2003 when the tavern's owner, Raymond Hovan, tried to get his attention by tapping on his cruiser's windshield with a beer cooler gasket. The chief accused him of damaging the cruiser's windshield.

Briston eventually collected $1,334 from Hovan to fix the car, but the repair work was never done, police said. Briston cashed the check and never put the money in the borough's general fund, police said.

Briston has denied the theft allegations, and said he didn't try to eat the receipt.

Briston, 41, of Penn Hills, PA was fired last year as police chief in Rankin when he was convicted for stealing $5,885 in cash seized as evidence by police and falsifying receipts to cover it up. Briston was sentenced in January to more than three years in prison in that case.

http://www.katu.com/stories/75994.html

posted by Matthew LeFande 9:57 AM
matt@lefande.com

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Deconstructing the Bush=Hitler slur.  

The effort to remove fascists in the Middle East and jump-start democracy, for all its ups and downs, has been opposed not just by principled critics who bristled at tactics and strategy, but also by peculiarly vehement cynics here and abroad — whose disgust was so often in direct proportion to their relative political impotence.

One of their most hackneyed charges, begun almost at the beginning of this war, has been the Bush/America as Hitler/Nazi Germany comparison. True, fast-changing events in the Middle East recently have left many of these hypercritics either embarrassed, discredited — or desperately reinventing themselves into the “I told you so” crowd. But we should not forget these slurs — nor expect them to disappear entirely inasmuch as they reflect a deep sort of self-loathing among Western elites.

Immediately after September 11, Ward Churchill compared the victims in the Twin Tower to “little Eichmanns.” Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.) more recently likened President George W. Bush’s political methodology to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Earlier during the run-up to the Iraqi war, German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin smeared Bush with a similar Hitlerian analogy.

In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.

Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.

In a world that is almost uniformly opposed to the democratic Jewish state, Israel has no better friend than Bush, who in turn is a believer in, not a tormentor of, Christianity. Afghanistan and Iraq, with 50 million freed, have elected governments, not American proconsuls, and there is a movement in the Middle East toward greater democratization — with no guarantee that such elected governments will not be anti-American. No president has been more adamantly against cloning, euthanasia, abortion, or anything that smacks of the use of science to predetermine super-genes or to do away with the elderly, feeble, or unborn.

So what gives with this crazy popular analogy — one that on a typical Internet Google search of “Bush” + “Hitler” yields about 1,350,000 matches?

One explanation is simply the ignorance of the icons of our popular culture. A Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing evil of Hitler’s regime, its execution of the mentally ill and disabled, the systematic cleansing of the non-Aryans from Europe, or mass executions and starvation of Soviet prisoners. Like Prince Harry parading around in his ridiculous Nazi costume, quarter-educated celebrities who have some talent for song or verse know only that name-dropping “Hitler” or his associates gets them some shock value that their pedestrian rants otherwise would not warrant.

Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.

On occasion, those who are tainted, sometimes unfairly, with past charges of rightist extremism, find some psychic release in calling an American democratic president or his conduct Nazi-like. Thus, a German politician, who de facto unfortunately operates under the suspicions of the post-Nazi world, gains the moral high ground and moral fides by gratuitously deflecting attention to an American — not as the descendant of the liberators of the Europe, but as the true inheritor of the German Hitlerian mantel.

George Soros can nearly destroy the Bank of England in his hyper-capitalist financial speculations but somehow find spiritual cover among the leftists of Moveon.org, which he subsidized and which ran ads comparing the president to Hitler. Sen. Byrd, who suffers from the odium of an early membership with the racist Ku Klux Klan, perhaps finds it ameliorative to associate others with the tactics of the 20th century’s premier racist.

Entire continents can play this game. If Europe is awash in anti-Semitism, then one mechanism to either ignore or excuse it is to allege that the United States — the one country that is the most hospitable to Jews — is governed by a Hitler-like killer. Americans, who freed Europe from the Nazis, are supposed to recoil from such slander rather than cry shame on its promulgators, whose grandfathers either capitulated to the Nazis or collaborated — or were Nazis themselves.

If the sick analogy to Hitler is intended to conjure up a mass murderer, then the 20th century’s two greatest killers, Mao and Stalin, who slaughtered or starved somewhere around 80 million between them, are less regularly evoked. Perhaps that omission is because so many of the mass demonstrators, who bore placards of Bush’s portrait defaced with Hitler’s moustache, are overtly leftist and so often excuse extremist violence — whether in present-day Cuba or Zimbabwe — if it is decorated with the rhetoric of radical enforced equality.

The flood of the Hitler similes is also a sign of the extremism of the times. If there was an era when the extreme Right was more likely to slander a liberal as a communist than a leftist was to smear a conservative as a fascist, those days are long past. True, Bill Clinton brought the deductive haters out of the woodwork, but for all their cruel caricature, few compared him to a mass-murdering Mao or Stalin for his embrace of tax hikes and more government. “Slick Willie” was not quite “Adolf Hitler” or “Joseph Stalin.”

But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities (e.g., Jonathan Chait’s embarrassing rant in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush” or Garrison Keillor’s infantile slurs about Bush’s Republicans: “brown shirts in pinstripes”), but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”

Thus, if former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore breezily castigates Bush’s Internet supporters as “digital brownshirts”; if current Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean says publicly, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for" — or, “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good"; or if NAACP chairman Julian Bond screams of the Bush administration that “Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side,” the bar of public dissent has so fallen that it is easy to descend a tad closer to the bottom to compare a horrific killer to an American president.

Is there a danger to all this? Plenty. The slander not only brings a president down to the level of an evil murderer, but — as worried Jewish leaders have pointed out — elevates the architect of genocide to the level of an American president. Do the ghosts of six million that were incinerated — or, for that matter, the tens of millions who were killed to promote or stop Hitler’s madness — count for so little that they can be so promiscuously induced when one wishes to object to stopping the filibuster of senatorial nominations or to ignore the objection of Europeans in removing the fascistic Saddam Hussein?

There is something profoundly immoral for a latte-sipping, upscale Westerner of the postmodern age flippantly evoking Hitler when we think of the countless souls lost to the historical record who were systematically starved and gassed in the factories of death of the Third Reich.

Finally, in such a debased climate, it was no accident that Alfred A. Knopf published a novel, Checkpoint, about musing how to kill Bush. Nor was it odd to hear of a New York play, “I’m Gonna Kill the President,” apparently centered around killing Bush. Late last year, a columnist in the Guardian, Charles Brooker, wrote to his British readers on the eve of the election :

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?

All this venom is not so funny when we now witness a Saudi American young man, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, currently under indictment for allegedly planning just such a murder. After all, when it becomes a cheap and easy thing to compare a president to a century’s great criminal, then it becomes even cheaper and easier to dream — or plan — to kill him.

At some point a Gore, Byrd, or Soros has a moral responsibility not to employ Nazi analogy, if for no other reason than to prevent unleashing even greater extremism by the unhinged. No doubt Abu Ali’s lawyer one day soon will say that his disturbed client’s “musings” were no different from what he read from Knopf or in the Guardian — or that he simply fell under the influence of Moveon.org and thought it was his duty to remove the Bush/Nazi threat that even U.S. senators and presidential candidates had identified and warned about.

The final irony? The president who is most slandered as Hitler will probably prove to be the most zealous advocate of democratic government abroad, the staunchest friend of beleaguered Israel, and the greatest promoter of global individual freedom in our recent memory. In turn, too many of the Left who used to talk about idealism and morality have so often shown themselves mean-spirited, cynical, and without faith in the spiritual power of democracy.

What an eerie — and depressing — age we live in.

http://nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200503180754.asp

posted by Matthew LeFande 5:51 AM
matt@lefande.com

Saturday, March 19, 2005

TSA Does Not Allow Military Personnel to Get Off the Plane at SFO  

Military personnel returning from Afghanistan did not get a warm welcome when they touched down in San Francisco.

The soldiers landed on a chartered ATA aircraft, but were forced to remain on the plane for three hours, while it refueled.

"There are some security issues involved here. They have weapons," said Ed Gomez with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). "They have weapons, and we have to secure the weapons. We have to secure the airplane. We have to communicate properly."

Generally, unloaded weapons are guarded as military personnel go into the terminal to get drinks, call home or stretch.

But a source at the airport said a TSA official told the airline that if the soldiers got off the plane, the terminal would be evacuated.

Tempers flared at the gate among TSA employees, airline personnel and the military.

Gomez said they will make accommodations in the future.

"The next time, we'll have some notice, and we'll be able to accommodate them," he said. "Next time, we'll have more notice, and we'll be there ready to greet them and take care of them the way they should be taken care of."

http://kcbs.com/pages/kcbs/news/news_story.nsp?story_id=67112569

posted by Matthew LeFande 4:28 AM
matt@lefande.com

Friday, March 18, 2005

Virginia Police Chief suspended after 2 DWIs in one weekend  

Middletown, VA Police Chief Roger L. Ashley has been suspended indefinitely without pay following two weekend drunken-driving arrests.

When appropriate, Ashley will be given a hearing to determine his future, according to a motion unanimously approved on Monday night by the Middletown Town Council.

Part-time Middletown Police Department investigator and field training officer R. Philip Breeden will serve as interim police chief during what Mayor Gene T. Dicks called “these troubled times.”

Breeden, 55, retired from the Warren County Sheriff’s Office after 30 years of service. The Middletown resident has worked as a sergeant with the town’s Police Department since December.

Ashley, 41, of Strasburg, was arrested on Saturday in Strasburg. He faces two counts of drunk driving and one count of driving with a suspended license.

By Monday night, Ashley had been released from the Shenandoah County Jail in Woodstock. A jail spokesman could not say where Ashley had gone or if he was still in someone’s custody.

Strasburg Police Officer L.W. Crum arrested Ashley on Saturday afternoon after being dispatched to an accident at Signal Knob Lane and Old Valley Pike, according to a criminal complaint filed in Shenandoah County General District Court.

When Crum arrived at the scene, he noted a strong odor of alcohol coming from Ashley, the criminal complaint states.

Ashley’s blood-alcohol level at the time of his arrest was 0.29, according to the arrest warrant — more than three times Virginia’s 0.08 legal limit.

After being arrested on a charge of driving under the influence, Ashley was released on a personal recognizance bond to a member of his department, Carter said.

The arrest also led to an administrative suspension of Ashley’s driver’s license, according to Shenandoah County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney C. Todd Gilbert.

At 7:05 p.m., dispatchers notified Strasburg Police Officer C.L. Bodkin that Ashley was driving from Middletown to Strasburg in a black Ford Explorer, according to Bodkin’s criminal complaint.

“I was sitting at Signal Knob Lane and Mr. Ashley drove by me. I stopped him,” the complaint states. “He got out of his vehicle staggering. He had a strong odor of alcoholic beverages on his breath.”

Bodkin asked Ashley to take some field sobriety tests, but Ashley said it wasn’t necessary because he was still drunk, Bodkin’s criminal complaint states.

Ashley eventually took an Alco-Sensor test, charting a 0.25 blood-alcohol level.

http://www.winchesterstar.com/TheWinchesterStar/050315/Area_chief.asp

posted by Matthew LeFande 3:10 AM
matt@lefande.com

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Playing Chicken Roulette  

Imagine that your local government makes it a crime to engage in an activity that you believe to be constitutionally protected -- like possessing a handgun in your home for self-defense. Imagine further that the weight of legal scholarship, from liberals and conservatives alike, holds that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and bear arms. Too bad if you live in Washington, D.C., where you may be faced with a Hobson's choice. You can forego possessing a gun for self-defense, and perhaps suffer personal injury. Or you can defy the law, illegally own a gun, use it to defend yourself, then risk arrest, prosecution, fine, or even incarceration when D.C. authorities investigate your "crime."

Ordinarily, citizens can avoid the horns of that dilemma. They can go to court, convince a judge that they'll be prosecuted if they break the law, and get the court to decide in advance whether the statute is constitutional. But D.C. plays by a somewhat different set of rules. There, the federal courts take a much narrower view of who has judicial "standing" to bring a lawsuit. In a 1997 case, Navegar v. United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that manufacturers of so-called assault weapons could not challenge a 1994 ban on such weapons unless the statute named a specific firearm that the manufacturer produced. In other words, simply identifying a firearm by characteristics, such as magazine size, wasn't deemed sufficient to constitute a real and imminent threat to prosecute companies that made weapons of that general type.

In February of this year, the D.C. Circuit applied the Navegar doctrine to deny standing to the plaintiffs in Seegars v. Ashcroft, a Second Amendment challenge to the city's ban on handguns and other operable firearms. The court held that general threats of prosecution by D.C. are not adequate to confer standing, and no Seegars plaintiff had been exposed to a specific, individualized threat. Although the court acknowledged that the statute barring the plaintiffs from possessing firearms might implicate a constitutionally protected interest, and that plaintiffs were sincere in their intention to violate the statute, still the court found that they did not demonstrate a sufficiently credible risk of prosecution.

OF COURSE, THERE IS MUCH to be debated about such a narrow doctrine. Suppose, for example, the 1994 statute at issue in Navegar had banned all commercial firearms, not just "assault weapons," without naming any particular weapon. Would the court have denied legal standing to every gun-maker who intended to enter the commercial market merely because no specific weapons were named? Not likely. In effect, however, that is what the court does when it rejects standing for every would-be handgun owner in Washington, D.C. who is not individually threatened with prosecution.

Notably, even Navegar granted standing to some firearms manufacturers if the challenged statute had targeted their product by name. But in D.C., the government prohibits all pistols and all functional long-arms, without exception. So the firearms that the Seegars plaintiffs owned (or intended to purchase) were incontrovertibly covered by the D.C. ordinance. In that sense, the D.C. gun ban goes far beyond the statute for which limited standing was approved in Navegar.

Fortunately, the D.C. Circuit will have one more bite at the standing apple. Parker v. District of Columbia, another Second Amendment challenge to the city's gun ban, is now before the court. Parker is factually distinguishable from Seegars in a several important respects:

First, the six plaintiffs in Parker were personally and unambiguously threatened with prosecution by D.C. -- both in the trial court during oral argument and by the Mayor's official spokesperson, as quoted in the press. Second, D.C. never raised standing as an issue until told to do so by the trial judge. Nor did D.C.'s prominent friends-of-the-court -- the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence -- raise standing in their extensive briefing. Most likely, they believed the city's announced intent to prosecute the Parker plaintiffs was enough to confer standing even under the strict guidelines of Navegar. Third, the trial judge ordered supplemental briefing on the standing question, but then proceeded to issue an opinion on the merits without even mentioning standing. Fourth, counsel for Parker filed 34 separate assertions of material facts, which D.C. was invited to dispute. The key assertion that D.C. officials "actively enforce" the gun ban was never disputed, and thus admitted.

IT WOULD SEEM, THEREFORE, that Navegar's exacting standing requirement -- a credible and specific threat of prosecution -- is amply satisfied in Parker. Indeed, the first threat to prosecute the Parker plaintiffs appeared on the front page of the Washington Times just two days after Parker was filed. According to the news report, Mayor Anthony A. Williams' office said the city would not budge. "The last thing this city needs is more handguns," said the Mayor's official spokesman, Tony Bullock. He added, "You're not going to see any will on the part of this mayor to relax the gun laws in the District." "We have to maintain the deterrent effect of the gun laws." The mayor's office now claims that it was merely "stating a general policy that the District intends to enforce its weapons laws." But that characterization of the statement ignores its context. The city's "general policy" was not front page news in the morning papers. The Parker lawsuit, filed two days earlier, was. That lawsuit, and the desire of the six Parker plaintiffs to possess proscribed firearms, is what prompted the Washington Times story, "Residents Challenge District's Gun Ban."

Later, in response to a direct question by the District Court at oral argument, counsel for D.C. stated once again that the Parker plaintiffs would be prosecuted for violating the challenged statutes:

THE COURT: "The city is not going to essentially grant immunity to these people. If they go out and take steps to possess firearms, they'll be prosecuted, I assume. They're not going to get a free ride because they're a plaintiff in this case, are they?"

D.C. COUNSEL: "No, and I think that Your Honor is correct, but I don't think the fact that if, in fact, they break the law and we would enforce the law that they're breaking, that that necessarily confers automatic standing on them in this case."

Three of the Parker plaintiffs were present in the courtroom to hear the city's attorney corroborate that they would, in fact, be prosecuted if they were to possess functional firearms within their homes. D.C.'s threat did not represent new policy. It reflected the policy that existed when Parker was filed. The plaintiffs were always justified in fearing that they would be prosecuted. But were there any doubt on that score, D.C.'s straightforward admission at oral argument surely confirmed the threat.

In hindsight, the Mayor's office might have been more circumspect in speaking with the press, and D.C. counsel might wish to have responded differently to the court's questions about prosecuting the Parker plaintiffs. Maybe counsel would now say, "If these plaintiffs break the law, they could be prosecuted. But whether they're actually prosecuted depends on a number of variables. We hope and intend to enforce all of our laws. Still, I am not prepared to speculate about the likelihood that these particular plaintiffs will get a free ride." But that was not the answer. The answer was "No" to immunity, and "Your Honor is correct" in response to the court's observation that "if they go out and take steps to possess firearms, they'll be prosecuted."

In Washington, D.C., six Parker plaintiffs want to be able to defend themselves in their own residences. Parker is not about machine guns and assault weapons on the street. It's about ordinary, garden-variety handguns, in the home for self-defense. No handgun can be registered in D.C. Even pistols registered prior to the District's 1976 ban cannot be carried from room to room in the home without a license, which is never granted. All firearms in the home, including rifles and shotguns, must be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Essentially, no one in the District can possess a functional firearm. And the law applies not just to unfit persons like felons, minors, or the mentally incompetent, but across-the-board to ordinary, honest, responsible citizens like the Parker plaintiffs.

It's time for the D.C. Circuit, and perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court, to tell us whether the city's total ban on all functional weapons withstands scrutiny under the Second Amendment. No one should have to break the law in order to vindicate a constitutional right. The D.C. Circuit put the principle succinctly in Seegars: "Public policy should encourage a person aggrieved by the laws he considers unconstitutional to seek a declaratory judgment against the [government], all the while complying with the challenged law, rather than to deliberately break the law and take his chances in the ensuing suit or prosecution." Now the D.C. Circuit has an opportunity to implement that crystalline principle by granting standing in Parker.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7882

posted by Matthew LeFande 1:16 PM
matt@lefande.com

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

If Bush has been right, then who's been wrong?  

"Middle East on the Move, Is Bush to Thank?", a newspaper's banner headline quite fairly asked Europeans last week. What a terrifying premise.

Perhaps not for scores of millions of Arabs. But if George Bush is proven right on Iraq, and more than a bit responsible for the Arab Spring of shaky political advances now shimmering from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, then it's a frightening development and delegitimizing situation for European politicians from Spain to Germany.

They are pols like Gerhard Schröder and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero who essentially won election by running against Bush and the Iraq war. Leaving the talk of freedom or jihadist terrorism to the yahoos, they have linked their futures to what they supposed would be the eternal vote-cornucopia of resistance to Bush's vision for the Middle East.

Adding France and Belgium, the group widens to include governments that hoped to leverage their stance on Bush and the war into a genesis myth for a Europe redefining itself as America's counterweight.

Until the elections in Iraq, in this view, Europe's wishful identity as both moral superpower and tower of wisdom had been demonstrated to the world through Bush's headfirst dive into the hopeless Middle East. In the minds of the Zapateros and Schröders, Europe's place as the Righteous Power had become so self-evident recently that in planning to end its embargo on arms sales to China, Europe could proceed with the single near-comic argument that Beijing's rulers felt discriminated against.

Now, things are happening that suggest the start of a change in European mind-set in the zone where the Bush administration usually was called dumb and dangerous.

Example: while hundreds of thousands of Lebanese hit the streets in pro-democracy demonstrations, the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted 473 to 8 to call on the European Union's 25 leaders "to take the necessary steps to end the terrorist activities" of Hezbollah, the largely pro-Syrian Shiite group that the United States has been asking the EU for years to put it on its terrorist list. The Parliament's motion said that "irrefutable proof exists of Hezbollah's terrorist action."

It's unlikely that Hezbollah will wind up officially labeled as terrorist by the EU, since Spain and France resist the idea, and such a designation would take a unanimous vote of the member states. But, all the same, the new tone of the Parliament last week was remarkable.

A near-identical buzz was also present in a letter sent by a coalition of legislators from all the parties in the Parliament's German delegation (the Berlin coalition's Social Democrats and Greens included) that called on Schröder to abandon his attempts to lift the China weapons embargo.

The group didn't just say that ending the ban disregarded continuing human rights violations in China and endangered the strategic balance in Asia. It also startlingly argued that the United States' opposition was "understandable" and the result of "justified concern for its interests in the region" guaranteeing the security of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

Could this be European revisionism on Bush? In any event, when it comes to movement in the Middle East, Laurent Murawiec, a French security affairs expert, wrote that progress certainly wasn't the work of the Holy Ghost or "the very French strategy based for so long on not 'isolating' terrorist killers" like Hezbollah.

The newspaper Le Monde, whose headline asked if Bush was to thank for the flicker of hopefulness in the Arab world, published a reply from official but unnamed French voices. Naturally, they said, France couldn't deny the power of American influence and military presence in the region, but instead they insisted the winds of change did not emanate from the war in Iraq, where little was yet resolved.

In this version, the advances in the Israel-Palestinian conflict yielded no credit to Bush for his refusal to deal with Yasser Arafat; or, indeed, introspection about the years of diligent French support for him. Rather, Bush's essential Middle East contribution had been pressuring Israel to enter talks with the Palestinians again.

Such is the region through French theoretical eyes. In fact, events have made France something of an American ward on the Lebanon-Syria issue, a situation that tacitly gives Bush his due more meaningfully than anything France could say.

When the Syrians pushed Jacques Chirac's intimate friend, Rafik Hariri, out of power in Lebanon, the gesture signified to the Middle East that French protection or practical leverage there meant little or nothing. To respond to this affront, and to jab at its former friends in Syria, France enlisted the Bush administration last fall to produce a joint Security Council resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

Then came Hariri's assassination a month ago. Because it refocused Arab attention on the incapacity of France to act alone in any material fashion in the region, the French hewed to the Bush line on the specifics of a Syrian pullout and supporting Lebanese democracy. On Iran's nuclear arms program, if the Americans have endorsed the European negotiating plan for now, it has come at the cost to France of a public promise to the Bush administration to help it in bringing Iran before the Security Council if the talks fail.

Unlike Schröder, Chirac has the personal luxury of staying away from immediate grief arising from the new facts. Schröder must go to the polls next year in German circumstances of disastrous unemployment and the weakest growth prospects in Europe.

Alongside that lost economic strength and the appearance of Bush-led change in the Middle East, add an increasingly ludicrous Schröder campaign boast of Germany re-emerging as a political force in the world on the basis of his opposition to the Iraq war.

Still, given a year to maneuver and Arab democratization more time to crystallize into reality, Schröder, as Europe's most facile political chameleon, might find a way to persuade his electorate that his steadfastness turned Bush into a peacemaker.

This revisionist reach is virtually impossible for Zapatero. In Spain's schoolyard of hand-on-throat politics, Zapatero seems required to inflict defeat every day on the conservative allies of his predecessor, José María Aznar, a vibrant supporter of Bush.

Saying that Bush may have gotten something right - Zapatero invited George Soros, Gary Hart and Tariq Ramadan, the Islamist political battler banned in the United States, to a conference here last week to insist that Bush hadn't - would mean the end of a domestic war Zapatero wants to continue roaring.

And that's not to mention disdain for looking at the world as it is.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/14/news/politicus.html

posted by Matthew LeFande 4:01 AM
matt@lefande.com

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Terror suspects bought guns in U.S.  

More than 40 terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms in the United States last year because background checks found no reason to stop them, says a government report released Tuesday.

Under current law, belonging to a suspected terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from owning a gun, the Government Accountability Office noted in its study.

The GAO recommended that the attorney general clarify procedures to ensure that information from gun purchase background checks is shared with counterterrorism officials and that the FBI should either monitor such checks more frequently or oversee all checks related to terror suspects.

The report showed that from February 3 through June 20, 2004, 35 known or suspected terrorists purchased guns in the United States. From July 1 to October 31 last year, 12 more suspected or known terrorists were allowed to buy firearms.

It said that background checks on these individuals did not provide any prohibiting information such as felony convictions or illegal immigrant status.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/03/08/gun.sales.ap/index.html

posted by Matthew LeFande 11:17 AM
matt@lefande.com

Video of knife wielding suspect 0wn3d by Tornoto po-mobile  

Wielding two ominous butcher knives, a seemingly crazed man confronted a slew of Toronto police officers at the corner of Yonge and Wellesley early Tuesday morning.

“Shoot me!” he taunted the officers, who surrounded him with guns drawn in a tense street standoff.

Death may have been his wish, but Toronto’s finest blew out the candles on his hopes for extinction, diffusing a potentially fatal confrontation by pinning the man between a bicycle stand and a police cruiser.

When the car backed up, the suspect was unhinged from his momentary prison. But it wouldn’t be long before he was in a more conventional form of custody.

Finally admitting defeat, he tossed both knives to the ground and police closed in, using pepper spray to further incapacitate their unstable nemesis.

The man, believed to be in his 30s, suffered a broken wrist in the ordeal and was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

http://www.pulse24.com/News/Top_Story/20050308-007/page.asp

Video
http://www.pulse24.com/In_The_Raw/Raw_Video/20050308-001/Video-5-2.asx

posted by Matthew LeFande 9:05 AM
matt@lefande.com

Sunday, March 06, 2005

M.E.'s oops: Man, 23, is woman, 81  

Next time you're sitting on a jury listening to a medical examiner with several pages of scientific credentials explain exactly how the victim died and what it has to do with the accused, keep this notion in mind:

You'd think after a few thousand autopsies, an M.E. would know a penis when he saw one.

Nobody would question Dr. Vladimir Parungao's credentials. He worked in the Harris County Medical Examiner's office for 20 years before taking early retirement five years ago.

Upset with his boss, then-Chief Medical Examiner Joye Carter, and the atmosphere of controversy over which she presided, he said the morale was so low that it was affecting his health.

That's how he ended up working in the Travis County M.E.'s office and how, I predict, he guaranteed himself a place in next year's Texas Monthly Bum Steer Awards.

It began last June 18 when Parungao performed an autopsy on a body found by law enforcement officials on a rural road in Burnet County.

There wasn't much left to the charred body. Parungao's two-page autopsy report said the residue weighed only 12 pounds and was 26 inches long.

Parungao described it as "that of a probable 23-year-old, white man.

"The abdomen cavity was also diffusely charred with exposure of the abdominal organs," Parungao reported. "There was a small segment of penis noted."

His conclusion, which lacks a verb or two: "It is my opinion, based upon the autopsy findings, that the decedent, Clayton Wayne Daniels, charred body, the cause and manner of death was undetermined."

The doctor knew from police reports that the car had belonged to Daniels, and that his wife had told Texas Rangers that a shoe sole found in the car was her husband's, and that he had left it in the car that morning.

But six weeks ago Parungao found himself writing a new report, an "addendum and correction."

It was mostly the same report but with two significant changes.

The first was the heading that said "Unidentified Human" instead of "Clayton Wayne Daniels."

A DNA report had come back indicating that the body wasn't Daniels.

The second was this: "The external genitalia was charred, however there was a small tissue were (sic) the penis was supposed to be."

Actually, this "clarification" needs clarification itself. Medically speaking, it looks like no actual penis was supposed to be there.

Women don't have them.

Law enforcement officials now believe the body was Charlotte Davis, who died in 2003 at the age of 81.

Based on a tip, officials dug up her coffin three weeks ago and found only an empty pillow case in it. According to a report in the Austin American-Statesman, Daniels' wife had confirmed that her husband had dug up a woman's body and gave them a rough description of the locale of the cemetery.

Husband and wife were arrested. Daniels was charged with arson, and his wife with insurance fraud and hampering her husband's arrest.

Daniels had reason to fake his death. In 2002 he accepted a plea bargain in connection with sexual assault of a child. He was given 10 years' probation and deferred adjudication.

But he failed to register as a sex offender, as required, and to honor appointments with his probation officer. Three days after the car burning he was scheduled to go to jail for 30 days.

Now he may face the full 10 years, plus punishment for the grave-robbing caper.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3069536

posted by Matthew LeFande 5:11 PM
matt@lefande.com

Armed Citizen of the Week  

Oklahoma City police released a 911 recording that reveals a dramatic struggle following an attempted purse-snatching in south Oklahoma City.

911 Call: 911 Tape: Woman Fights Back Against Purse Thief

Barbara Gesell, 83, had just pulled into her garage when a man ran inside her garage and grabbed her purse, which has hanging across her shoulder. A suspect, Robert Campbell, was arrested shortly afterward on suspicion of attempted robbery.

Police said the story might have ended differently if Gesell's daughter, Theresa Gesell, had not taken action.

According to police, Theresa Gesell ran behind Campbell and tried to catch him when he ran from the scene. While she was chasing the suspect, she called 911.

"A man has attacked us in our house, and we are fighting him in the yard," Theresa Gesell said to the 911 dispatcher.

As the struggle moved down the street, a neighbor -- whom Theresa Gesell identified as "Hershall" -- stopped to help. Theresa then grabbed her .45-caliber pistol and continued running after Campbell -- despite the dispatcher's plea for her to drop the handgun.

"I am going to go get my .45 ... you all are too slow," she said.

As the call continues, the dispatcher asks Theresa to get rid of the weapon. However, after the suspect tried to escape along a creek bed, Theresa and Hershall used the pistol to make sure he didn't leave.

"You can go put that gun up now," the dispatcher said.

"No sir," Theresa replied. "We have the gun pointed at him ... he must have been a city fellow because he didn't know anything about the woods."

Seconds later, police arrived and arrested Campbell. With Hershall's help, the Gesells retrieved Barbara's purse.

Campbell is currently housed in the Oklahoma County Jail. He is expected to be charged with assault and attempted robbery.

http://www.officer.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=1&id=21583

posted by Matthew LeFande 7:45 AM
matt@lefande.com

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Black marks in blue  

Hungry for new recruits, the NYPD is hiring applicants with arrest records and shoving others through without full background checks, the Daily News has learned.

In recent years, the Police Department has knowingly hired New Yorkers who have been charged with laundering drug money, assault, grand larceny and weapons possession, according to documents and sources familiar with the recruiting.

The News reviewed a February report by the city's Commission to Combat Police Corruption that details many of the problems. The report found:


- One of every five probationary cops in the January 2003 Police Academy class who were reviewed by the commission should have been disqualified by NYPD hiring standards.

- One of every four of the same group should have been more closely investigated because of "negative information" in their backgrounds.

- Half of the cops may not have met the NYPD residency requirements. The department never completed a full check before the recruits were hired.

- The NYPD often failed to conduct full background checks, such as interviewing ex-wives and girlfriends.

"We are hiring people to be cops who have no respect for the law," said former NYPD Sgt. Anthony Petroglia, who worked in the department's applicant processing division for nearly 10 years before retiring in 2002.

"We are hiring people who were charged with crimes that get you thrown off the force if you do them in uniform," he said. "All we are doing is buying trouble for the future."

NYPD investigators flagged many of the questionable recruits because of their arrest records or shady past. But after a review, police brass welcomed them to the ranks of the Finest.

NYPD Chief of Personnel Rafael Pineiro said the cases reviewed by The News were carefully vetted and met department standards.

In each case, the recruit's arrests - which included robbery, weapons possession and assault - were dismissed or pleaded down to less serious violations.

"I feel comfortable with these cases," Pineiro said. "We have certain standards and we met them."

Pineiro rejected the city commission's contention that much of the Class of 2003 should have been disqualified. But he conceded that extensive residency checks - where investigators talk with neighbors of recruits - may not be finished when new hires enter the Police Academy. He added that investigators do interview neighbors by phone before a candidate is hired.

NYPD officials argued that the quality of recruits was improving. Pineiro said 58% of the Police Academy class have an associate's degree or better. In addition, 33,000 people took the NYPD test last year, the most since 1993.

"We have hired some 8,000 candidates in the past 3-1/2 years," Pineiro said. "A handful of questions out of 8,000 is not a problem."

There is little dispute the NYPD is experiencing a brain drain. More than 10,500 veteran cops have retired from the force since 2001. An additional 3,477 cops have quit over the same period, with many jumping to higher-paying police jobs.

Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said the NYPD will have to accept marginal recruits until the city gives cops a raise.

"Younger, well-qualified candidates are choosing other opportunities because they can't make a livable wage as aNew York City police officer," he said. "The result is people are becoming cops who should not."

Cops have been without a contract since August 2002.

NYPD hiring guidelines require candidates to be rejected if they have any conviction within two years, if the initial charge was a felony; more than one conviction in the past two to five years, if the initial charge was a felony, or more than two felony-based convictions over five years. Recruits also can get blacklisted if they have more than three moving violations in less than two years.

"It's all judgment calls - bad ones," said a retired cop who worked nearly a decade in the applicant processing division. "But the bosses say, 'Send 'em through. We'll catch the problem ones later.'"

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/286291p-245109c.html

posted by Matthew LeFande 8:01 AM
matt@lefande.com

Anti-gun activist arrested after firearm found at home  

A Springfield, Illinois woman who began lobbying against gun violence after her son was shot to death in 2002 was arrested last week when police allegedly found an illegal gun and drugs in her home.

Annette "Flirty" Stevens, however, said Monday she's innocent, and the arrest is an attempt by police to get her to give up information about unsolved crime in the city.

The handgun, which had a scratched-off serial number, and drugs allegedly were discovered Friday morning inside Stevens' home in the 2500 block of South 15th Street. Authorities said they obtained a search warrant for the residence as part of an ongoing investigation of a recent series of drive-by shootings.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisted in the search.

Davis said detectives working on the drive-by cases - which already have resulted in four arrests - began taking a closer look at Stevens after her name came up in interviews with witnesses and informants.

"Basically, she has a close connection with individuals that have been involved in one side of these two groups that are feuding," Davis said, declining to elaborate.

After finding the handgun and drugs, police arrested Stevens at her job.

Since her son's death, Stevens has become involved in the anti-gun-violence movement. She helped establish and is president of a Springfield chapter of the Million Mom March, an organization that aims to prevent gun violence.

Last fall, she appeared with other anti-gun advocates at a Statehouse news conference to urge federal officials to renew a ban against semiautomatic assault weapons.

Stevens has not been formally connected to any crime directly related to the drive-by shootings. But Friday's discoveries could lead to her being charged with defacing the identification marks on a handgun, manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance and having no valid firearm owner's ID card, police said.

http://sj-r.com/sections/news/stories/49173.asp

posted by Matthew LeFande 7:47 AM
matt@lefande.com

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Some Arabs See Beginning of New Era  

It was a scene the Arab world's autocratic regimes have dreaded -- and through the power of satellite TV, it could catch on as fast as the latest hit music video: Peaceful, enormous crowds carrying flags and flowers bringing down a government.

What happened in Lebanon this week, analysts say, is the beginning of a new era in the Middle East, one in which popular demand pushes the momentum for democracy and people's will can no longer be disregarded.

Television stations broadcast Beirut's protests live into homes, coffee shops and clubs across the Middle East, with the dramatic images of Lebanese youths wearing red-and-white scarves and waving the country's red, white and green flag as they handed out roses Monday to troops who had been ordered to block them. The coverage, lasting all day with hardly a break on some stations, culminated with the Syrian-backed government's resignation.

Inevitably, it raised the question among many spectators: What about here?

"I wish this could happen in Yemen," Ahmed Murtada, an unemployed Yemeni, said in San'a. "But here, tanks would prevail."

Anas Khashoggi, a 46-year-old management consultant in the Saudi city of Jiddah, said he followed Monday's events from beginning to end. "I wanted ... to see how the government reacts to the will of the people," he said.

Was he disappointed? "Not at all," he said.

The scenes from Lebanon come as Saudis are having their first -- albeit small -- taste of democracy. In the second round of the country's first nationwide elections ever, Saudi men go to the polls Thursday in the kingdom's east and south to choose municipal councils. The monarchy has been promising reform, but going slowly.

Newspapers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- authoritarian nations where the state heavily influences the press -- did not shy away from showing the protests.

"The Lebanese street joins the opposition," read the banner headline across the front page of the Saudi daily Okaz, along with photos of the Lebanese protest tents and a banner in Arabic reading, "We want the truth."

In Syria, however, the state-controlled media was largely silent. It reported on the resignation of Prime Minister Omar Karami but did not mention -- much less show pictures -- of the protests. State TV aired none of the dramatic footage the few Syrians with satellite dishes could see with a flick of the channel.

Syria has kept a firm hand on its small reform movement. But it had a rare instance of civil violence last year, when riots in March between Kurds and police spread to parts of northeastern Syria and killed at least 25 people in unrest sparked by a soccer brawl but fueled by Kurdish resentment.

"What happened in Lebanon conforms with our hopes for every Arab country," said Michel Kilo, a Syrian intellectual. "It was a rehearsal for a peaceful popular movement that unfolded right before our eyes."

The protests in Lebanon -- triggered by the assassination of the popular former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14 -- come on the heels of a string of democratic steps in the Arab world, including elections in Iraq and by the Palestinians, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's promise to allow multi-candidate presidential elections.

But the forcing out of Lebanon's government sets a very different precedent in a region where freedom of speech is muzzled, human rights activists are jailed and sons either succeed or are being groomed to succeed their fathers.

"For the first time in the history of the Arab world, a country's policy has come face-to-face with the will of the people who went down to the street and said: 'We don't want you,'" said Dalal al-Bizri, a Cairo-based Lebanese sociologist.

"The minimum feeling among Arab masses now will be: 'Are the Lebanese better than us?'" she said.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-mideast-new-era,0,3833779.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

posted by Matthew LeFande 5:27 PM
matt@lefande.com

Find ANY word Find ALL words  Find EXACT phrase    Help

2007
May Archives
April Archives
March Archives
February Archives
January Archives


2006
December Archives
November Archives
October Archives
September Archives
August Archives
July Archives
June Archives
May Archives
April Archives
March Archives
February Archives
January Archives

2005
December Archives
November Archives
October Archives
September Archives
August Archives
July Archives
June Archives
May Archives
April Archives
March Archives
February Archives
January Archives

2004
December Archives
November Archives
October Archives
September Archives
August Archives
July Archives
June Archives
May Archives
April Archives
March Archives
February Archives
January Archives

2003
December Archives
November Archives
October Archives
September Archives
August Archives
July Archives
June Archives
May Archives

Another Blog

Fight Spam! Click Here!


New Counter as of 11/10/2003