A Day in Paradise

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The U.S. Supreme Court, on October 11, 2005, ruled against Tookie on his final appeal and set his execution date for December 13. Thus they disregarded 9 of the 24 Ninth Circuit Court judges’ assertion that the District Attorney at Tookie’s trial employed “reprehensible and unconstitutional” racist tactics, using animal-in-a-jungle metaphors to refer to Tookie and to the South Central environment in which he lived. This landmark ruling means that minorities can now legally be rejected from juries based on race. This is now the law of the land.

Very sad news! For anyone who hasn’t seen it already, watch Redemption NOW!

Sign the petition NOW! and visit AI’s page on the Death Penalty

Yahoo! Podcasts

Yahoo has started indexing podcasts for integration into their own Yahoo! Music Engine. I tried to use YME, but I hated it almost as much as I hate iTunes. I want an MP3 player which JUST plays MP3s… I have coolplayer and am VERY happy with it.

Anyhow, there are a lot of good ideas stuck into this. I like the fact that you can rate and review individual podcast “Episodes”, would have been cool if you could tag them as well. I hope there will be a way to exclude shows which are rated under a certain threshold.

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

Croatia has got to be one of my favorite countries in Europe… I’ve visited Zagreb tons of times, had friends in Rijeka, spent two summers in Makarska/Split area, and this short article brought all the memories of my many football-loving croatian friends flooding back in.

ZAGREB (Reuters) - Croatian soccer fans rushed to donate blood this week in exchange for tickets for the national team’s decisive World Cup qualifying game against Sweden, the Vecernji List daily reported Friday.

The game’s organizers set aside 300 tickets for the occasion but the number of volunteer blood donors in Zagreb was several times higher. Students cut classes and employees used their lunch breaks to queue in the hospital, the daily said.

Croatia came out even with Sweden after both games (0:0 on aggregate), but beat Malta, Iceland and Bulgaria squarely and currently stand on the top of the group.

Switzerland BABY! Not checking any email, IMs, IRC (ok, you might catch me there)…

Will take plenty of pictures and post them somewhere!

Later folks… if you guys don’t have anything better to do head on over to UtterlyBoring for your daily fix of amusement.

I’m quite sure every world leader uses the bathroom, not all get photographed writing a note requesting permission.

This picture was all over the press… my favorite headline was “Bush needs to go … NOW“

CNN.com - Spindly bush saves police officers - Sep 1, 2005

No, not that Bush… he was still on vacation, this was a useful bush which 14 police officers clung to while Katrina raged around them.

While 14 of the officers, dispatchers and other workers held onto the bush, the rest were being swept away until they were able to grab onto the station and climb up to the roof or onto trucks where they waited for the water to recede.

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Press awe at Katrina aftermath

The American meteorological service provided real-time precise information but the leadership failed in preparing for the anger of the weather…What is scary after Katrina is to see the biggest superpower in the world helpless, even if temporarily

Lot’s of other interesting views form the global media.

Google Talk

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free anytime, anywhere in the world.

Sounds like they really think they are doing something different, when in reality there is not much which is very special about google talk.

I tried out the official client, and the first thing that hit me was the sparse interface. What google has done is made the chat client as web-like as possible. In fact, you could probably whip up an AJAX client which is exactly identical in functionality. All links are underlined, and mcuh like web pages, there is nothing you will need to doubleclick on anything.

This works nicely with my theory that one morning we will wake up and find out that we won’t need anything more than firefox and google to be fully functional in our work and play.

A couple annoying things: No timestamps in the chat, no pasting of html… although links are made clickable. You can do some simple formatting using a *bold* and _italic_. Maybe there is a manual out there.

I tried the voice chat, it worked nicely. I only chatted with one person, so can’t say that it’s better than skype at this point, my one call was certainly no better than some chats I have had on skype which seemed to be totally flawless.

Google Talk is also tied into gmail so when you get a new email you’ll see a nice little message in the corner of your screen. Maybe I should start using my gmail some more.

Oh, well… I’m awormus@gmail.com add me

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Former minister Mo Mowlam dies

Very sad month for UK politics. First with the surprising death of Robin Cook and now with Mo Mowlam passing away. Both strong proponants of peace who left a mark on world history.

This week we also saw the shocking murder of Frère Roger Shutz, who had dedicated his life to reconciliation between churches.

It’s difficult to understand why the good ones are taken, while the evil bastards remain.

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

BERLIN (Reuters) - An “electronic nappy” used to monitor wetness sparked a bomb alert in a German post office when it arrived in a parcel ticking suspiciously, police in the southwestern city of Heilbronn said Thursday.

“They suspected it was a bomb so they put the package into an empty room and called the police,” said a police spokesman. “It was supposed to respond to wetness with bleeping sounds but this one ticked.”

Two squad cars rushed to the scene and immediately contacted the sender. Police gave the all clear after they contacted the woman who told them the intercepted package contained only a malfunctioning diaper.

The Australian: Brazilian did not flee UK gun cops [August 18, 2005]

Surprising how what really happened always has to come by the way of leaks. At least there are people who are willing to leak the information.

The amount of mis-truths which were propogated in the hours/days/weeks after the shooting were criminal.

CCTV footage showed Menezes was wearing a thin denim jacket that could not conceal a bomb, and he was not carrying a bag. Far from running away from police, he did not realise anyone was following him and even picked up a free newspaper before using his season ticket to pass through the station barrier. He began to run only when he saw his train pull into the station.

At the time of the shooting, Scotland Yard said Menezes’s clothing and his behaviour at the station added to their suspicions.

It was only when Menezes boarded the train that a surveillance officer guided four armed police into the same carriage.

A man sitting opposite Menezes said: “Within a few seconds, I saw a man coming into the double doors to my left. He was pointing a small black handgun towards a person sitting opposite me.

“He pointed the gun at the right-hand side of the man’s head. The gun was within 12 inches of the man’s head when the first shot was fired.”

And the report reveals that one of the surveillance team members had grabbed hold of Menezes before he was shot.

“I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side,” the statement says.

“I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had been previously sitting … I heard a gunshot very close to my left ear and was dragged away on to the floor of the carriage.”

BBC NEWS | UK | Family condemns police shooting

What more could a terrorist organisation want than to provoke a western government into killing their own people without the fear of recompense.

Anyone who reads this and thinks (or worse yet comments) that the extenuating circumstances made this case regrettable but an exceptable loss, is no better than the many people through history who justified the loss of life to attain a higher goal. Whether the end goal is Security, or the creation of a master race it doesn’t make any difference.

It’s not who we are, it’s what we do!

What we don’t hear anymore is that the police that killed this guy (brazillian electrician) were plainclothes police. If he was running at all he was running from MEN WITH REGULAR CLOTHES AND GUNS!

I find that highly disturbing.

Software patent directive REJECTED - Tobias Schlitt - Weblog

Time to celebrate people! Software Patents have been rejected in Europe.

The European Parliament today decided by a large majority of 648 votes to reject the directive “on the patentability of computer implemented inventions”, also known as the software patent directive. This rejection was the logical answer to the Commission’s refusal to restart the legislative process in February and the Council’s unwillingness to take the will of the European Parliament and national parliaments into account. The FFII congratulates the European Parliament on its clear “No” to bad legislative proposals and procedures.

Whether or not you are a programmer this is a very significant vote and we all owe the great people at the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure and all the people who campaigned against this a lot of thanks!

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US officers ‘murdered by soldier’

Not an unusual story, but the last sentance was the one that caught my eye…

In April, a US military court sentenced another sergeant, Hasan Akbar, to death for killing two US officers in a grenade attack in Kuwait at the beginning of the war in Iraq.

In short “Kill someone who’s job it is to kill for killing someone whose job it is to teach people to kill, to show that killing people is wrong.”

England Wins World Cup 2006 in Germany

In author Ozturk%u2019s spellbinding speculative fiction, Three Lions Roar: A Novel of World Cup 2006, England embarks upon the road to the World Cup trophy forty years after they last reached the ultimate victory. While this new English football team lacks the legendary Bobby Charlton, it makes up for the loss with two new heroes. These two men, coach Robbie Kiel and captain Josh Roark, lead their team to new heights and develop a bond that runs deeper than either man could imagine. Their lives become intertwined not only through their passion for football, but by their relationship as father and son. Yet this fact remains unbeknownst to both Robbie and Josh. Only Katie Roark, Robbie%u2019s lost love and Josh%u2019s mother, knows the truth. This secret connects the three characters while they struggle not only in the world of football, but also to simply live life.

Get the Book.