Aldermarston: Apparently, Aldermarston is currently being blockaded by protesters opposed to plans to expand the Atomic Weapons Establishment. There's a report on Indymedia.

Labels: aldermartson, nuclear, protest

 
Compare and Contrast
Republican Jon Kyl, talking about plans to subpoena the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the sackings of the eight attorneys:

"It is a bad precedent to be subpoenaing the attorney general," he said, "I think it's clear that some people would view it purely as a political exercise."


Republican Jon Kyl, talking about his support for the impeachement of Bill Clinton:

"What is striking about this case is the President's persistent, sustained, carefully calculated, deliberate and callous manipulation of the judicial process for over a year...

An acquittal in this case will make it much harder to deal properly with similar conduct in the future. We will be hard pressed to perpetuate a double standard, so the lowest common denominator of conduct will be established as the permissible norm. And this cannot help but weaken the ability of courts to enforce truth-telling and prevent obstruction of justice. "

Labels: albert gonzalzes, bill clinton, jon kyl, republicans, US

 
Have your say
Since The Sun never approves my responses, for some reason, here's my response to the story about how six-figure sailor Faye Turney "blasted" the Iranian president:


Forgive me for worrying about facts... but was it Ahmadinejad's "brutal underlings stripped her to her knickers, threw her in a freezing cell and made her believe she would be killed" - or was that a local group working on their own initative?

That Ahmadinejad wasn't involved with the actual seizure of the sailors might explain why he didn't seem to know much about what happened to them while they were being held, don't you think?

If he'd personally ordered the capture, he presumably wouldn't have made mistakes on camera about what had happened to them.

By the way - can't find anything in the Sun about Sky News' role in the capture - that Iranian sources say that Skt's reports on Channel 5 had led them to believe HMS Cornwall was spying. Wonder why?

Labels: faye turney, iran, navy, rupert murdoch, sky news, the sun

 
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE LAW, CHANGE THE LAW:
"He said it may require a new law to "address the concerns about some of these people who really need to be incarcerated forever, but that doesn't get them involved in a judicial system where there is the potential of them being released," Gates told the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

-Robert Gates proposes a way round those pesky human rights.

Labels: human rights, law, robert gates

 
Voting machines work perfectly, except when it's not a low turn-out: Early voting in Florida suggests that the electronic machines are screwing up already:

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

So... the machines are great, unless people turn up to vote? Is it just us being picky, or does a polling system which can't match votes cast with what it's displaying - and then require a fifteen-step "fix" constitute a polling system which doesn't actually work?

 
Faith in the process: Leaving aside the question of if you can trust them, can you rely on Diebold to deliver the right result from next week's US midterms?

Probably not. They can't even get themselves straight when complaining about a film HBO have made about the accuracy of their voting machines. They've issued a highly detailed attack... on a completely different film.

But that's understandable: after all, complaining about VoterGate when you think you're complaining about Hacking Democracy isn't so very different from discovering you've voted for Bush when you thought you were voting for Kerry.

 
THEY DON'T SAY WHAT THE OTHER 15% ARE: This morning's Daily Mail is very excited by a new report:

UK diversity map reveals 85 percent chance of meeting an ethnic person

Ethnic Persons, of course, come from the small mountain state of Personia, which joined the EU in 1984.