As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama claimed "we need to fully repeal the Defense of Marriage Act," which says states are not required to recognize other states' same-sex marriages.
That was then. This week, the Obama administration is facing the ire of gay rights groups after it filed a brief in California federal court defending the Defense of Marriage Act and calling it a "valid exercise of Congress' power" that is saving taxpayers money. The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. It doesn't prohibit same-sex marriages; instead, it says that no state "shall be required" to honor same-sex marriages taking place elsewhere or any "right or claim arising from such relationship."
Thousands of angry protesters have clashed with police after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's presidential poll.
Secret police have been attacked, while riot police used batons and tear gas against backers of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who called the results a "charade". Correspondents say the violence is the worst seen in Tehran in a decade.
In a televised address to the nation, Mr Ahmadinejad thanked voters for giving him a "great victory". He said the election had been "completely free".
Pete Doherty has been freed on $82,000 bail as he awaits trial on a dangerous-driving charge.
The Babyshambles singer appeared in court in Stroud, in western England, on Friday and pleaded guilty to heroin possession and driving without a license or insurance. Defense lawyer Peter Ratcliffe said Doherty will plead not guilty to dangerous driving and face trial on that charge.
Doherty, 30, a former boyfriend of model Kate Moss, has a history of drug use. He was charged Thursday after being stopped by police in Gloucester, about 100 miles west of London.
The court ordered Doherty to observe a nighttime curfew and usea medical implant to prevent drug use. His next court appearance is scheduled for Aug. 11.
There's enough smut on FOX News to make an entire porn site! All the footage you see in the video aired on the FOX News Channel. Satire and parody aside, we think this is extremely objectionable, misogynistic content. We still don't understand how FOX is allowed to call this "news."
The European Union is stepping up efforts to build an enhanced pan-European system of security and surveillance which critics have described as “dangerously authoritarian”.
Civil liberties groups say the proposals would create an EU ID card register, internet surveillance systems, satellite surveillance, automated exit-entry border systems operated by machines reading biometrics and risk profiling systems.
Europe's justice ministers will hold talks on the "domestic security policy" and surveillance network proposals, known in Brussels circles as the "Stockholm programme", on July 15 with the aim of finishing work on the EU's first ever internal security policy by the end of 2009.
Jacques Barrot, the European justice and security commissioner, yesterday publicly declared that the aim was to "develop a domestic security strategy for the EU", once regarded as a strictly national "home affairs" area of policy.
The days of the free Internet will draw to a close over the next five years, according to the chairman and chief executive of IAC, the interactive services company which operates a collection of more than 30 Internet sites which produce $1.5 billion a year in revenue.
The only missing link, according to Barry Diller, who cut his teeth building up over-the-air and cable TV networks: a good billing system, akin to Amazon’s “one-click” button or the Apple iPhone’s slick downloading of paid applications.
“I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid,” Diller said in a keynote discussion opening up the Advertising 2.0 conference held at his company’s futuristic glass building alongside the Hudson River in Manhattan. “Not every single thing, but anything of value. “
“So many questions,” the Guardian’sZoe Williams writes. “How did Silvio Berlusconi and Colonel Qaddafi become friends in the first place?” Part of the answer—and part of the reason Muammar Qaddafi is visiting Italy this week—is oil-and-natural-gas deals, but they also claim to genuinely like each other. Perhaps each, in his own way, makes the other feel respectable. Berlusconi has been a bit of a joke lately, what with his wife’s allegations that he has been carrying on with an eighteen-year-old and the pictures of a naked former Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek dallying at his villa. (Topolanek confirmed that he was the naked man but said that the picture was “modified”; Czech reporters had recognized him, despite a pixelated face, thanks to his white-rubber anti-Castro wristband, a gift from George W. Bush.) Then Qaddafi arrived with his “trademark” women bodyguards, pitched a Bedouin tent in a public park, and requested a meeting with seven hundred prominent Italian women. (Was Saint Ursula involved?)
Qaddafi, who stepped off the plane with a snapshot-size photograph (above) of Omar Mukhtar, who was hanged by the Italians in 1931, when Mussolini controlled Libya, pinned to his uniform, seems to have seen himself as acting out the dramatic postscript in an anti-colonial melodrama—the sort introduced by a screenshot saying, “Seventy-seven years later.” (Omar Mukhtar was, in fact, played by Anthony Quinn in “Lion of the Desert,” an epic that Qaddafi helped fund and that was, for a time, banned in Italy.) One would much rather deal with Berlusconi than with Mussolini—you have to give him that.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) told its member nations today that swine flu has become the first pandemic in 41 years, after calling a meeting of experts to discuss the threat posed by the virus.
In a statement sent to member countries, WHO said it decided to raise the pandemic alert level from phase 5 to 6, the highest level, after the meeting in Geneva organised by the United Nations health agency.
The move comes as infections have climbed in Europe, the US, Australia, South America and elsewhere, and after the WHO chief, Margaret Chan, yesterday examined eight countries with large swine flu outbreaks.
In developed nations – where efforts are already under way to try to create a vaccine and increase stocks of Tamiflu, which can treat symptoms of the virus – the escalation of the alert to pandemic levels may not change government policies in significant ways. guardian.co.uk
The latest bioterrorism attack by the New World Order is likely a beta test. It was a hybrid strain created from human, swine, and bird flu from North America, Europe, and Asia. It was created in a laboratory. This doesn’t happen in nature.
Baxter was caught shipping a weaponized avian bird flu mixed strain in their vaccines last march in Europe. See Toronto Sun article here.
Again, this is proof that this deadly virus was created in a laboratory because they did exactly that last month. Bayer was caught shipping HIV in their drugs in the 80s. Both of these events are published in mainstream newspapers. You can use Google like everyone else to find them.
I predicted this event last month in my documented and linked article when Baxter was caught. If Baxter was trying to do this, they weren’t going to stop trying, especially when Baxter wasn’t even prosecuted for the crime, and the television news was completely silent about it.
The CNEFG (Centre National dEntraînement des Forces de Gendarmerie, based in Saint-Astier, France) has set up an urban environment for training the gendarmerie (french para-military force) force in urban guerilla tactics. This ambitious stage set is a highly significant example of a certain way of superimposing fiction on reality by imitating that reality as closely as possible: the Gendarmes are confronted with a real problem - urban violence - which they learn to deal with in a fictional site.
The US military has failed to provide adequate oversight for tens of billions of dollars paid to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, a congressional report has said.
The US government also has no central record of who the contractors are, what they do or how much they are paid, according to the Wartime Contracting Commission report.
"In short, the environment in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to be a place for waste, fraud and abuse," Michael Thibault, the co-chair of the commission, told the House Oversight and Government Reform's national security subcommittee on Wednesday.
The US military's dependence on private sector employees has now grown to "unprecedented proportions," the report added. More on Al Jazeera.
There should be absolutely no doubt Glenn Beck is a government disinfo operative tasked with taking down the 9/11 truth and patriot movements. In fact, Fox News — as a primary fount of Operation Mockingbird — is tasked with attacking not only the 9/11 truth movement but the pro-liberty and Constitution movements as well.
“Our country is now vulnerable,” the operative Beck declares. “Those people who would like to destroy us — our enemies like Al Qaeda. They’d like to destroy us, and they will work with anyone. There are also people like white supremacists or 9/11 truthers that would also like to destroy the country. They’ll work with anybody they can.”
Attorneys and advocates are questioning why an 18-year-old East Texan with profound mental disabilities was sentenced to 100 years in prison in a child sex abuse case.
They say the case of Aaron Hart was mishandled from start to finish and raises questions over how to deal with the mentally disabled when they encounter the criminal justice system.
After a neighbor found Hart fondling her 6-year-old stepson in September, the East Texas teenager pleaded guilty to five counts, The Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday.
Hart has an IQ of 47 and was diagnosed as mentally disabled as a child. He never learned to read or write and speaks unsteadily. Despite being a target of bullies, he was courteous, well-behaved and earned money by doing chores for neighbors, supporters said. His parents say he'd never acted out sexually.
Dash cam video has been released showing exactly what happened between a Constable's deputy and a 72-yaer-old woman, before she was tasered last month. The officer says says Kathryn Winkfein mouthed off, and was physically non-compliant. Winkfein told fox news that wasn't true. Precinct 3 Sgt. Maj. Gary Griffin says he's reviewed the dash cam footage and he's standing by his deputy--he says followed policy.
The law lords have dealt a major blow to the government's controversial use of control orders on terror suspects, saying that reliance on secret evidence denies them a fair trial.
Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on board the Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 on board, it has emerged.
French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31.
Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections.
There is a possibility that the name similarities are simply a "macabre coincidence," the source added, but the revelation is still being "taken very seriously."
Flight AF447 crashed in mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm. While it is certain that there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out.
It was there that they established that two names on the passenger list are also on highly classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic. SKY News
But amid the media frenzy and speculation over the disappearance of Air France's ill-fated Flight 447, the loss of two of the world's most prominent figures in the war on the illegal arms trade and international drug trafficking has been virtually overlooked.
Pablo Dreyfus, a 39-year-old Argentine who was travelling with his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues aboard the doomed flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, had worked tirelessly with the Brazilian authorities to stem the flow of arms and ammunition that for years has fuelled the bloody turf wars waged by drug gangs in Rio's sprawling favelas.
He’s done it while talking about abortion and the Middle East, even the economy. The references serve at once as an affirmation of his faith and a rebuke against a rumor that persists for some to this day.
As president, Barack Obama has mentioned Jesus Christ in a number of high-profile public speeches — something his predecessor George W. Bush rarely did in such settings, even though Bush’s Christian faith was at the core of his political identity.
In his speech Thursday in Cairo, Obama told the crowd that he is a Christian and mentioned the Islamic story of Isra, in which Moses, Jesus and Mohammed joined in prayer.
At the University of Notre Dame on May 17, Obama talked about the good works he’d seen done by Christian community groups in Chicago. “I found myself drawn — not just to work with the church but to be in the church,” Obama said. “It was through this service that I was brought to Christ.” POLITICO.com
Six Metropolitan police officers have been suspended from duty following allegations they used a form of water-based torture on suspected drugs smugglers, it emerged last night.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said it was investigating the conduct of officers based in Enfield, north London, during drugs raids in the borough last November.
Neither the IPCC nor Scotland Yard would comment on the nature of the allegations but sources said the officers were accused of pushing suspects' heads into buckets of water.
One IPCC document is said to use the word "waterboarding" – the CIA technique condemned as torture by Barack Obama – in connection with the allegations. guardian.co.uk
Microsoft has announced the Project Natal device for your Xbox360. What is the Natal, why its a camera device that scans your body amongst other things in order to make you the controller. This will literally put a camera that can be activated through the internet at any given moment into the living rooms of millions of families, making it ever easier for Big Brother to keep an ever watchful eye on you.
Nearly six months since the devastating war in Gaza, Palestinians are still living amid the rubble. Despite stirring talk of reconstruction efforts, little has changed. Inigo Gilmore visits the devastated neighbourhoods to see how families are coping The al-Attar family, in this video, were first visited by the Guardian's Clancy Chassay three months ago. See the video on The Guardian website
The judge in The Pirate Bay trial, Tomas Norström, was not biased, Stockholm District Court has argued in its report to the Svea Court of Appeal, which will rule on the issue.
Nordström is a member of several organizations that take a pro-copyright stance. These memberships form the basis of accusations from defence lawyers that the judge is biased and they have voiced calls for a re-trial. Defence lawyers pointed out in appealing the convictions of their clients - Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundström and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg - on charges of complicity in breach of the Copyright Act, that one of the organizations receives funding from the recording industry organization IFPI. But the Stockholm District Court has now argued that the criticism is misplaced. The memberships are simply a means to gain increased knowledge of copyright legislation issues and are not therefore grounds to establish bias, the court argues. On the contrary, the court argues, it is imperative that judges remain abreast of the issues.
Defence lawyers have also maintained that Nordström had been hand-picked for the high-profile trial in contravention of the prevailing practice of the random selection of judges.
The U.S. Supreme Court has turned down a challenge to the Defense Department policy forbidding gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, granting a request by the Obama administration.
The court said Monday that it will not hear an appeal from former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The federal appeals court in Boston earlier threw out a lawsuit filed by Pietrangelo and 11 other veterans. He was the only member of that group who asked the high court to rule that the Clinton-era policy is unconstitutional. In court papers, the administration said the appeals court ruled correctly in this case when it found that "don't ask, don't tell" is "rationally related to the government's legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion."
Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay $15.5m to settle a lawsuit which accused the oil firm of complicity in rights abuses in Nigeria.
The case, due for trial in the US next week, was brought by relatives of a group of anti-Shell activists executed in 1995 by Nigeria's military rulers.
The families say Shell helped the government to punish the campaigners.
But the company insists it did nothing wrong and said the payment was part of a "process of reconciliation".
Shell official Malcolm Brinded said: "This gesture also acknowledges that, even though Shell had no part in the violence that took place, the plaintiffs and others have suffered." BBC
Shell is the third largest oil company in the world.
It is also the new sponsor of the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.
Despite attempts to ‘greenwash’ its reputation via blanket advertising and cultural sponsorship, Shell is still heavily implicated in producing ever-greater quantities of the oil and gas that are destabilising our climate to such an alarming degree.
Boys who carry a variation of the gene Monoamine oxidase A, are more likely to join gangs and be among the most violent members, U.S. researchers said.
Criminologist Kevin M. Beaver at Florida State University said the findings apply only to males -- not girls with the same variant of the so-called "warrior gene."
"While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role," Beaver said in a statement. "Previous research has linked low-activity MAOA variants to a wide range of antisocial, even violent, behavior, but our study confirms that these variants can predict gang membership."
That was then. This week, the Obama administration is facing the ire of gay rights groups after it filed a brief in California federal court defending the Defense of Marriage Act and calling it a "valid exercise of Congress' power" that is saving taxpayers money. 
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