Aren't all military costs paid for by the Australian taxpayer anyway.

Don't forget that there's a large private military involvement over there.

Nice one, champ.

New York's stop-and-frisk laws unconstitutional

From: AP August 13, 2013 9:12AM

A US federal judge has upended a cornerstone of New York policing, declaring the city's controversial stop-and-frisk policy a violation of the US constitution that unfairly targeted blacks and Hispanics.

In a 198-page ruling, Judge Shira Scheindlin said on Monday police randomly stopping individuals on the street and subjecting them to searches violates the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

It also runs afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law, said Scheindlin, who stressed how young black and Hispanic males were most likely to be targeted.

"The evidence at trial revealed that the New York Police Department (NYPD) has an unwritten policy of targeting 'the right people' for stops," the judge said.

"In practice, the policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling."


Mayor Michael Bloomberg says his administration will appeal the ruling, telling reporters that stop-and-search was a "vital deterrent" that had taken 8,000 guns off the street over a decade.

"There is no question that stop, question and frisk has saved countless lives," he said.

Scheindlin, a US District Court judge, refrained from ordering a total halt to stop-and-frisk.

But in a move unprecedented in New York police history, she ordered the appointment of an independent monitor to ensure that such searches are carried out "in accordance with the Constitution".

Bloomberg bristled at that idea, saying it was tantamount to putting the NYPD and its nearly 35,000 uniformed personnel "into receivership".

Stop-and-frisk has been a centrepiece of New York's efforts to bring criminality to heel after the drug-fuelled violence of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Of the 4.4 million cases between January 2004 and January 2012 in which New York police briefly detained individuals on suspicion of criminal involvement, 52 per cent involved blacks and 31 per cent Hispanics. Only 10 per cent involved whites.

"The city and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population," Scheindlin said.

"But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent - not criminal."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/new-yorks-stop-and-frisk-laws-unconstitutional/story-e6frg6so-1226696082540

One grower’s grapes of wrath

By David A. Fahrenthold

Marvin Horne didn’t like the obscure law allowing the federal government…

KERMAN, Calif. — In the world of dried fruit, America has no greater outlaw than Marvin Horne, 68.

Horne, a raisin farmer, has been breaking the law for 11 solid years. He now owes the U.S. government at least $650,000 in unpaid fines. And 1.2 million pounds of unpaid raisins, roughly equal to his entire harvest for four years.

His crime? Horne defied one of the strangest arms of the federal bureaucracy — a farm program created to solve a problem during the Truman administration, and never turned off.

He said no to the national raisin reserve.

“I believe in America. And I believe in our Constitution. And I believe that eventually we will be proved right,” Horne said recently, sitting in an office next to 20 acres of ripening Thompson grapes. “They took our raisins and didn’t pay us for them.”

The national raisin reserve might sound like a fever dream of the Pillsbury Doughboy. But it is a real thing — a 64-year-old program that gives the U.S. government a heavy-handed power to interfere with the supply and demand for dried grapes.

It works like this: In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business.

To prevent that, the government does something drastic. It takes away a percentage of every farmer’s raisins. Often, without paying for them.

These seized raisins are put into a government-controlled “reserve” and kept off U.S. markets. In theory, that lowers the available supply of raisins and thereby increases the price for farmers’ raisin crops. Or, at least, the part of their crops that the government didn’t just take.

For years, Horne handed over his raisins to the reserve. Then, in 2002, he refused.

Since then, his life has now become a case study in one of Washington’s bad habits — a tendency never to reexamine old laws once they’re on the books. Even ones like this.

When Horne’s case reached the Supreme Court this spring, Justice Elena Kagan wondered whether it might be “just the world’s most outdated law.”

“Your raisins or your life, right?” joked Justice Antonin Scalia.

Last month, the high court issued its ruling and gave Horne a partial victory. A lower court had rejected Horne’s challenge of the law. Now, the justices told that court to reconsider it.

Horne does not have the persona of a live-wire revolutionary. He used to be a tax auditor for the state. Now, in his second career, he watches fruit dry.

“If I knew we were going to go through all this, I would have just pulled the grapes out and put in almond” trees, he said.

But get Horne talking about the national raisin reserve, and the spirit stirs. Suddenly he can’t find a metaphor hairy enough to express his contempt. It’s robbery. It’s socialism. It’s communism. It’s feudalism. It’s . . .

“You have heard of the rape of the Sabine women? This is even worse,” Horne said, referencing a legendary mass abduction from Roman mythology. “The rape of the raisin growers.”

Raisin reserve takes root

Horne has now spent a decade trying to do one of the hardest things in American politics. He is trying to kill a law, by breaking it.

Specifically, Horne is trying to kill Marketing Order 989 — a federal regulation meant to solve a problem from the era after World War II. Peace, it turned out, was bad for raisins.

The government stopped buying huge amounts of them to send overseas with GIs, as it had done during wartime. So supply outstripped demand. Prices fell. The industry’s answer was to start a raisin reserve.

It’s not quite what it sounds like. There is no Fort Knox of raisins, no vault buried under Fresno. Instead, the government simply waits for farmers to grow their crops — nine months of growing grapes, then two to three weeks of drying them in the sun.

Then it takes away a part of that crop and stores it in warehouses around California. The government might save some of these “reserve” raisins for later years. It might sell them to foreigners. It might feed them to schoolchildren. Or cows. The point is to get them off the open market in the United States and lower the supply available to commercial buyers.

That, in theory, means greater scarcity and higher prices. The same approach works for oil and diamonds.

“It’s a cartel. Let’s use the power of the government to operate a cartel,” said Daniel Sumner, director of the University of California’s Agricultural Issues Center. Congress had given the USDA the authority to operate reserves during the New Deal: Other reserves existed for almonds, walnuts, tart cherries and other products.

Then, time passed. Wars came and went. The New Deal faded from memory.

The raisin reserve survived.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/lifestyle/40427624_1_raisins-grapes-dried-fruit

Edited by Joffa: 14/8/2013 07:27:11 PM

They have a raisin reserve? :?

The West gets involved:

"Westerners are evil! They steal our oil and destroy our nation!"

The west does not get involved:

"Why don't you help us!? Your silence says it all!"


](*,)

Better to leave just leave country's sort it out for themselves.

Waleed Aly raised a good point the other day, how do you sell democracy as a process to muslims after they follow the process and they end up in a worse position than they were in before square one?

Democracy means electing leaders favourable to capitalism

Democracy isn't just about getting the most votes at the ballot box, it is also going on to govern for all your citizens, not just those who voted you in (assuming the electoral process was democratic of course).

Introducing Sharia Law, persecuting and murdering Christians and generally looking to take the country back to the Stone Age is hardly the sign of a democratic government.

The MB went out to destroy whatever tolerance there was left in Egypt of peaceful coexistence with other faiths, of pluralism and secularism. It was a movement based on Islamic fundamentalism and on their belief that they are at war with all other faiths.

I'm glad the army took over. The world doesn't need an Iran Mark II.

This should be charged as a hate crime.

Unacceptable entirely. Publicly criticism is seen as racist though. Too many spineless twats in this country.

You're right in some regards. But it's hard to sell the democratic process when the country finally has democratic elections and it turns into an anarchic shit-storm.

The Muslim Brotherhood are frankly delusional, but displacing them through political means rather than military coup would have been a far more practical and civilised option. Instead we're left watching this complete debacle unfold.

Russia slips lower in human trafficking ranking

June 24, 2013 Yulia Ponomareva, RBTH

Russia, China and Uzbekistan face targeted sanctions from the U.S., after finding themselves in a group of countries that Washington deems to have made the least progress addressing human trafficking over the past year.

For the first time since 2002, the U.S. Department of State shifted Russia to the third tier (the lowest) in its Trafficking in Persons Report.
The Russian government, the report says, did not make significant efforts to comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and demonstrated minimal progress in efforts to protect and assist trafficking victims during the reporting period.
According to the report, one million people in Russia are estimated to be exposed to “exploitative” labor conditions. For instance, North Korean citizens imported for work in the logging industry in Russia’s Far East reportedly are subjected to conditions of forced labor.
Human Rights Watch reports abuse of workers in Sochi
In addition, Human Rights Watch has documented that employers of construction projects related to the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Sochi withheld pay, disregarded contracts, and seized workers’ passports and work permits.
In some of the labor trafficking cases throughout the country, foreign workers reportedly died while locked in factories or employer-provided housing.
“Prosecutions remained low compared to estimates of Russia’s trafficking problem,” the report states. Furthermore, the government did not report specific progress on any of the alleged cases of official complicity in human trafficking from the 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Trafficking in Persons Reports.
There is also anecdotal evidence of Russian police officers allegedly facilitating trafficking: returning trafficking victims to their exploiters; employers bribing Russian officials to avoid enforcement of penalties.
Related:
Foreign, illegal migrants commit half of crimes in Moscow - Interior Ministry
Russians need a new perspective on immigration
Despite media allegations of slave-like conditions in North Korean-operated timber camps in Russia, the Russian government did not report any investigations into this situation, either. In a case involving approximately 170 Vietnamese labor trafficking victims held in a garment factory, the government also did not initiate charges.
In 2012, twenty-nine trafficking offenders were convicted under Article 127.1 of the Russian Penal Code, which is typically used for sex trafficking crimes. Five traffickers were convicted of the use of slave labor, compared to a total of 32 people convicted under Article 127.1 and 11 convicted under Article 127.2 in 2011.
The government reported that 26 trafficking offenders were sentenced to imprisonment, seven were given suspended sentences, and two were sentenced to other dispositions.
Under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, it is the policy of the United States not to provide non-humanitarian, nontrade-related foreign assistance to any government that does not comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with such standards.
More about crime
“The president now will look at this to see what […] is in the U.S. national interest vis-à-vis the possibility of these types of targeted sanctions,” Ambassador Luis CdeBaca of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons said at a briefing on June 19. “That’s going to be what we’re working on over the next three months or so, and you’ll see something in the fall from the president.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, Konstantin Dolgov, said in a statement that any sanctions against Russia “would contradict the goal of further positive development of Russian-U.S. relations” and that “a commensurate response would ensue.”
Dolgov criticized the report’s methodology as “unacceptable,” pointing out that “countries are rated depending on the political sympathies or antipathies of the U.S. Department of State.”
Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of a nongovernmental organization that provides assistance to labor migrants and refugees, believes that the criticisms of the U.S. Department of State are justified, but sanctions would do little if anything to improve the situation.

More: Authorities tighten grip on migration control
“Our organization took up the problem of labor migrants because it really is a big problem,” Gannushkina told Gazeta.ru. “The Labor Inspection flinches from providing protection to such people [illegal immigrants] as not employed on a labor contract.”
“When law-enforcement officers show up at a construction site or a factory, they end up being bribed by those who use slave labor,” said Gannushkina. “In other cases, authorities penalize the victims of the system – labor migrants – for working without labor permits that they’re not issued anyway.”
In an interview with the Voice of America, the head of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, Mikhail Fedotov, admitted, “It is very difficult to bring to justice those who use slave labor.”

i
http://rbth.ru/society/2013/06/24/russia_slips_lower_in_human_trafficking_ranking_27401.html

Half of those people are just 12 year olds commenting "Murica" on everything. They have no concept of foreign policy or the positive impact America has on society and the world.

I was wondering how Paladisious got such a banging missus. :lol:

Three blacks kill a whiteboy for "fun" where's the outrage from Obama and other outrage merchants ?



http://www.news.com.au/national-news/victoria/three-teens-accused-of-murder-of-baseball-player-chris-lane-identified/story-fnii5sms-1226700172461

chancey is a half cast white boy ;)

Where's the national outrage at these kids? Oh wait, they're black and they killed a white person, so it doesn't matter.

Remember kids, only white people can be accused of hate crimes.

I feel sorry for the kid. had his whole life ahead of him ,but guys you are sounding very paranoid

Paranoid of what?

you seem to bring up peoples races alot. yes their black but we dont know what the president has done or said to the family .

Paranoid about blatant double standards ?

how so ? do you know what the president has said to the family?

White guy kills black kid - racial outcry.

Three black guys kill white kid - nobody says boo.

agree . it will bring vigilantes around. as someone who lost my father thru murder i wish the police catch them but i dont want to become the person who did this .

not yet .. until then im a hold judgement .

It's more a case of when and where they getting involved. They happy to jump in to Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya when there is no need to, but then want to take the moral high ground on Syria, Egypt etc etc.



Do you know much about the Muslim Brotherhood or taking the whole 'islamist militant' view that the media portrays?

A few articles I've found on the MB:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/20/egyptian-military-chief-orders-army-to-rebuild-every-coptic-church-burned-by-the-muslim-brotherhood/

http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/07/28/womens-group-denounces-brotherhood/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood

Some pretty detailed info and commentary.

Quick research shows that the first website is anti-islamic.

If we do want to pick and choose, then what about this from the wiki page:



Muslim Brotherhood started off as a very strong organisation and people took that extreme to a new level, but they have since denounced violence and began to work on a more democratic and functioning society.