G_j
G_j's JournalSuccessful Surgery For Pakistani Girl Whose Shooting Has Caused Outrage
Source: NPR
After several hours of surgery, the girl whose shooting by the Taliban has caused deep anger in Pakistan and has exposed that nation's "deepest fault line," is said to be in stable condition.
Malala Yousufzai, our colleague Philip Reeves reports from Islamabad, is surrounded by her family. The BBC says doctors successfully removed a bullet from her head. Pakistan's Express Tribune newspaper says doctors have decided she will not need to be sent abroad for more treatment.
As Phil said earlier on Morning Edition, what happened to Malala on Tuesday has led to "one of the most disturbing images to emerge from years of conflict in Pakistan: A 15-year-old girl lies on a hospital bed, with a bullet wound in her head.
"This is her punishment."
And why has this happened to her?
"Because," Phil said, "she had the courage to demand the right for girls like her to get an education. Because she criticized violent Islamist militants who want to make sure they can't."
Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/10/162626193/successful-surgery-for-pakistani-girl-whose-shooting-has-caused-outrage?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20121010
"Bear hunting dreams come true for children with disabilities and illnesses"
(my input: there certainly are far healthier "dreams" than killing something) 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/hunters-critically-ill-kids-chance-hunt-big-game-article-1.1176262
Bear hunting dreams come true for children with disabilities and illnesses
The United Special Sportsman Alliance asked bear hunters in Wisconsin to donate their hunting permits to help children achieve their dreams.
By Michael Walsh / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, October 5, 2012, 6:09 PM
An 11-year-old girl, waiting for a heart and liver transplant, had her dream come true when she killed a 335 pound black bear with a single shot to the heart.
The United Special Sportsman Alliance (USSA) organized hunting trips in Junction City, Wis. for children with disabilities. The non-profit charity is dedicated to helping disabled and critically-ill children experience the "outdoor adventure of their dreams!" In this instance, the dream was bagging a black bear.
Kaitlynn, 11, from Stetsonville, Wisc., was born with tricuspid atresia, a type of heart disease. She expected to return from the hunt empty handed but managed to shoot the 335 pound black bear, which her family intends to mount on the wall.
"When I looked through that scope I didn't see it as a bear, I saw it as like a 300 pound lion that's about to like attack you, so I held the gun as steady as I could, I turned my head and then I shot," Kaitlynn told ABC News affiliate WAOW-TV.
Little Savannah, pictured above, has had trouble feeling “normal” because of her constant battle with illness, her mother explained. On the trip Savannah managed to capture a 121 pound bear.
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Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/hunters-critically-ill-kids-chance-hunt-big-game-article-1.1176262#ixzz28oTKHcGr
Let's celebrate Columbus Day by
walking into someone's house and saying we live there now.
NC Tea Party PAC hosts ”Machine Gun Social” Saturday as a political fundraiser
oy..
The event attracted national attention, and received coverage from the Huffington Post and USA Today.
Organizers said the money raised will be used to pay for political advertising.
WLOS has video of the event, and interviews participants:
http://www.ashvegas.com/wlos-video-asheville-tea-party-pac-machine-gun-social-in-brevard
From an Asheville Tea Party blog post about the social:
Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”
George Washington – First President of the United States
“To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”
Richard Henry Lee – American Statesman, 1788
.
From the Huffington Post article in August about the event:
According to the event’s flyer, attendees can give $25 for a 30-round magazine on a 9mm submachine gun of their choice — an HK MP5, an Israeli UZI or a Swedish I. Guests can spend $35 for 30 rounds on an AK47, while the most ambitious of Tea Party patriots can drop $50 for 30 rounds on an M16.
Iraqi-American is imprisoned by US for saving his family from US sanctions
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/28/iraq-us-constitution-and-civil-liberties?INTCMP=SRCHIraqi-American is imprisoned by US for saving his family from US sanctions
A harrowing case of a Missouri engineer highlights the travesties routinely imposed on Muslim Americans
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Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 September 2012 10.30 EDT
I'm currently traveling around the US on a speaking tour, and as I've written before, one of the prime benefits of doing that is being able to meet people and their families whose lives have been severely harmed by the post-9/11 assault on basic liberties. Doing that prevents one from regarding these injustices as abstractions, and ensures that the very real human costs from these government abuses remain vivid.
Such is the case with the treatment of Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American nuclear engineer who just began a three-year prison sentence at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas penitentiary for the "crime" of sending sustenance money to his impoverished, sick, and suffering relatives in Iraq - including his blind mother - during the years when US sanctions (which is what caused his family's suffering) barred the sending of any money to Iraq.
Yesterday in Columbia, Missouri, I met with Hamoodi's son, Owais, a medical student at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine, and Hamoodi's son-in-law, Amir Yehia, a Master's student in MU's School of Journalism. The travesty of this case - and the havoc it has wreaked on the entire family - is repellent and genuinely infuriating. But it is sadly common in post-9/11 America, especially for American Muslim communities.
Hamoodi came with his wife to the US in 1985 to work toward his PhD in nuclear engineering from MU and, not wanting to return to the oppression of Saddam's regime, stayed in the US. He was offered a research professor position at the university, proceeded to have five American-born children, all of whom he and his wife raised in the Columbia community, and then himself became a US citizen in 2002.
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New comet will fly by in 2013! And it could be brighter than the Full Moon
http://io9.com/5946859/new-comet-will-fly-by-in-2013-and-it-could-be-brighter-than-the-full-moon?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_twitter&utm_source=io9_twitter&utm_medium=socialflowNew comet will fly by in 2013! And it could be brighter than the Full Moon
George Dvorsky
Russian astronomers using the International Scientific Optical Network's (ISON) telescope have discovered a comet that's scheduled to make its closest appearance to Earth in December of 2013. Called C/2012 S1, it's expected to be the brighest visitor to our solar system in the past century — a comet that'll be considerably brighter than Hale-Bopp (1997) and Halley's Comet (1986). The disintevaporating hunk of ice and rock could be visible for up to three months.
The comet was discovered on September 21 by Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok. The object will hit its perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun) on November 28, 2013 at a distance of 0.012 AU, or 1,800,000 miles. On October 1, 2013, the comet will swing by Mars, and then the Earth on December 26, 2013.
Experts predict it could become a rather spectacular sight in the night sky — but that's assuming it doesn't disintegrate before then. As witnessed by Elenin last year, a comet can break-up at any given time, particularly as it gets closer to the Sun.
Writing in Red Orbit, Lawrence Le Blond notes that C/2012 S1 is currently hanging out just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. "The comet is currently very faint, but as it approaches the Sun, it will steadily brighten," he writes, "It will be easily picked up by experienced amateur astronomers with CCD equipment in the coming months, and will be within binocular view by late summer 2013, and eventually by the naked eye in early November. Depending on brightness, the comet should remain visible to the naked eye from early November 2013 to mid-January 2014."
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poverty, climate change, gun violence
Three things I would like to see addressed at the debates, but which probably will not be mentioned.
TV Stations Accept Political Ad Cash -- and Leave Viewers in the Dark
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/24-6Published on Monday, September 24, 2012 by Free Press
TV Stations Accept Political Ad Cash -- and Leave Viewers in the Dark
by Timothy Karr
The political ad invasion is upon us. It’s a toxic mix of half-truths and negativity that’s beaming into homes across the county — especially homes in battleground states like Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Media analysts project that campaigns, Super PACs and “social welfare” groups will spend a record-breaking $3.3 billion on political ads by Election Day.
For the local stations that air these ads, it’s a political goldmine. But what’s a cash windfall for stations is a nuisance for tens of millions of viewers.
And let’s consider these stations — are they offering any local news coverage to debunk the lies in these ads? Are they exposing the deep-pocketed interests behind the groups buying ad time?
To find out, Free Press took a deeper look at local news coverage in five of the cities — Charlotte, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Tampa — where ad spending has been highest.
We inspected the political files of stations in these markets, identified the groups most actively placing political ads and pored over hundreds of hours of local news transcripts. In all five of these markets, we found that local newscasts were lacking when it came to covering the ads that dominated their stations.
In other words, they provided no local stories exposing the special interests behind these ads, and only one station among the 20 surveyed devoted even a few minutes to investigating whether these ads told viewers the truth.
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Citizens United accounts for 78% of 2012 outside election spending
http://m.guardiannews.com/ms/p/gnm/us/sk8Ao3GRK94EPSkOd_cicLg/view.m?id=15&gid=world/2012/sep/24/super-pac-spending-2012-election&cat=world_us-elections-2012Citizens United accounts for 78% of 2012 election spending, study shows
Impact of supreme court's 2010 ruling shown by report into outside money spent on this year's US presidential election
Almost $465m of outside money has been spent on the US presidential election campaign so far, including $365m that can be attributed to the supreme court's landmark Citizens United ruling, according to a report released on Monday.
Super Pacs, which came into effect following the 2010 Citizens United verdict, accounted for $272m of the expenditure in the study, conducted by the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organisation devoted to increasing transparency in government.
A further $93m has been spent by corporations, trade associations and non-profits which, according to the supreme court's decision, are able to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigning without disclosing the source of their funds.
"This cycle's outside spending mostly comes in the form of 'independent expenditures' supporting or opposing political candidates by unions, corporations, trade associations, non-profit groups and Super Pacs," wrote Kathy Kiely, managing editor of the Sunlight Foundation.
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US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan – and the west stays silent
http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drones-strikes-target-rescuers-pakistan?cat=commentisfree&type=articleAttacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Mon 20 Aug 2012 15.33 BST
The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.
A 2004 official alert from the FBI warned that "terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack"; the bulletin advised that such terror devices "are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population". Security experts have long noted that the evil of this tactic lies in its exploitation of the natural human tendency to go to the scene of an attack to provide aid to those who are injured, and is specifically potent for sowing terror by instilling in the population an expectation that attacks can, and likely will, occur again at any time and place:
"'The problem is that once the initial explosion goes off, many people will believe that's it, and will respond accordingly,' [the Heritage Foundation's Jack] Spencer said … The goal is to 'incite more terror. If there's an initial explosion and a second explosion, then we're thinking about a third explosion,' Spencer said."
A 2007 report from the US department of homeland security christened the term "double tap" to refer to what it said was "a favorite tactic of Hamas: a device is set off, and when police and other first responders arrive, a second, larger device is set off to inflict more casualties and spread panic." Similarly, the US justice department has highlighted this tactic in its prosecutions of some of the nation's most notorious domestic terrorists. Eric Rudolph, convicted of bombing gay nightclubs and abortion clinics, was said to have "targeted federal agents by placing second bombs nearby set to detonate after police arrived to investigate the first explosion".
In 2010, when WikiLeaks published a video of the incident in which an Apache helicopter in Baghdad killed two Reuters journalists, what sparked the greatest outrage was not the initial attack, which the US army claimed was aimed at armed insurgents, but rather the follow-up attack on those who arrived at the scene to rescue the wounded. From the Guardian's initial report on the WikiLeaks video:
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ACLU Sues CIA Over Drone Killings
http://theintelhub.com/2012/09/24/aclu-sues-cia-over-drone-killings/
By Stephen Lendman, Contributor
theintelhub.com
September 24, 2012
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been around since the Vietnam era. They were used as reconnaissance platforms. In the 1980s, Harpy air defense suppression system radar killer drones were employed. In the Gulf War, unmanned combat air systems (UCAS) and X-45 air vehicles were used.
Others were deployed in Bosnia in 1995 and against Serbia in 1999. America’s new weapon of choice is now commonplace in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, elsewhere abroad, and domestically for law enforcement and surveillance. Escalated domestic and foreign use is planned.
A previous article called drone warfare remote control killing like sport. From distant or nearby command centers, operators wage virtual war.
They dismissively ignore human carnage. It shows up as computer screen blips. They look no different from video game images. The difference, of course, is people die.
They’re mostly noncombatants. Studies show militants are successfully hit about 2% of the time. Others are wrongly targeted or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On January 13, 2010, the ACLU petitioned Washington under the Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA). It requested legal justification claimed for conducting predator drone targeted killings abroad.
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