Saddam Hussein's cousin, widely known as "Chemical Ali," was sentenced on Sunday to hang for masterminding a genocidal military campaign that used poison gas against Iraq's Kurds in the 1980s.
Ali Hassan al-Majeed, looking frail and wearing traditional Arab robes, stood silently as the judge read the verdict. As he was escorted from the Baghdad courtroom, he said: "Thanks be to God."
"This is judgment day for the aggressors against the Kurdish people," said Namiq Horamy, as he handed out sweets to colleagues in Kurdistan's Ministry of Martyrs, which looks after victims of the campaign.
Majeed, whose very name once sparked fear among Iraqis, directed a military campaign against the Kurdish north in which chemical weapons were used, villages demolished, agricultural lands destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.
At issue was whether a school principal violated a student's right to free speech by suspending him for displaying a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus".
Joseph Frederick unfurled the banner near to his school as the Olympic flame passed through Juneau, Alaska, in 2002.
The Supreme Court justices ruled by 5-4 that his rights were not violated.
Chief Justice John Roberts said in a written ruling that schools may prohibit student expression that can be interpreted as advocating the use of drugs.
A US man has lost a $54m (£27m) claim against a South Korean dry-cleaning firm which lost a pair of his trousers.
Roy Pearson, a judge of administrative law, claimed that Custom Cleaners had violated the Consumer Protection Act.
By refusing to pay him $1,000 (£500) after losing his trousers, they failed to honour a pledge to provide "Satisfaction Guaranteed", he argued.
But a Washington judge dismissed the case, which drew international attention, awarding the cleaners costs.
With the release of Michael Moore's "Sicko," a movie once again is adding sizzle to an issue that's a high priority for liberal politicians — this time comprehensive health insurance for all. But unlike Al Gore's film on global warming, which helped rally support on an equally controversial problem, "Sicko" is creating an awkward situation for the leading Democratic presidential candidates.
Rejecting Moore's prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party's next standard-bearer. However, his proposal — wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program — could be political poison with the larger electorate.
JANIS JOPLIN looms large in Kim Matulova’s consciousness — not least Ms. Joplin’s free-form hair, flounced frocks and fingers choked with rings. “My style is, like, gypsy,” Ms. Matulova said last week, “something like a ghetto hippie.”
Ms. Matulova, an actress and musician who says she is into “into folk and hip-hop,” gives expression to her passions, wearing a breezy flowered dress, porkpie hat and boots stamped with the image of a prairie rose. It is a streetwise amalgam she describes as “an urban hippie thing — sort of Bob Dylan, but, you know, today.”
She is one in a trickle of style setters embarking on a latter-day magical mystery tour, revisiting the hippie aesthetic of their mothers or grandmothers and giving it a brash new spin.
In pockets of downtown Manhattan and in cities as far-flung as Miami and Los Angeles, young women in the vanguard are setting aside their trapeze and baby-doll dresses — and as often as not, their drainpipe jeans — in favor of a breezier, more audaciously colorful interpretation of boho chic. Their pavement-grazing frocks, bells and feathers, flares and cascading hair, recall the freedom that once was a hippie rallying cry, an invitation, quite literally, to go with the flow.
The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses — the so-called "family jewels" documenting overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Thursday.
The documents, to be released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests — including the use of drugs — on U.S. civilians.
A junior editor at Dow Jones Newswires gave $1,036 to the liberal group MoveOn.org and keeps a blog listing "people I don't like," starting with George Bush, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, the NRA and corporate America ("these are the people who are really in charge").
[...]
MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.
The grandfather of an 11-year-old boy who was killed by a black bear blamed federal foresters Tuesday for not warning that the animal had harassed another group of campers hours earlier.
“We're hoping that the Forest Service will do a better job protecting campers. It's been like a surreal nightmare,” Eldon Ives said at a news conference on his front lawn.
First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.
For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.
“We were very angered when we heard about the Danish cartoons concerning our prophet; however, these two fatwas are harming our Islamic religion and our prophet more than the cartoons,” Galal Amin, a professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, wrote in Al Masry Al Yom, a daily newspaper here.
While that view is disputed by officials from both institutions, everyone acknowledges that those who issue fatwas serve as mediators between faith and modernity and as arbiters of morality. They are supposed to consider not only religious teachings, but the circumstances of the time.
At 11:30 one recent morning, a young woman entered and sat in the chair opposite him. She held her son, about 4, on her knee as she explained that her husband had married another woman (four wives are allowed in Islam) and that the new wife was only 18. “He said he would spend five nights with her and one with me,” the woman complained. “Can I ask for a divorce?”
Under Islam, the sheik advised, all wives must be treated equally. So if she could not work the matter out “peacefully, then yes, she could ask for a divorce.”
That was her fatwa.
The breast-feeding fatwa came in mid-May. A religious scholar, who headed a department that studies the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings at the Foundation of Religion College of Al Azhar University, wrote that there had been instances in the time of the prophet when adult women breast-fed adult men in order to avoid the need for women to wear a veil in front of them.
“Breast-feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” wrote the scholar, Izat Atiyah. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed.”
Doctors ought to quit using fuzzy terms to define children's weight problems and instead refer to truly fat kids as overweight or obese, a committee of medical experts recommended.
Less blunt terms used by the government and many doctors diplomatically avoid the term "obese." Instead, they refer to children many would consider too fat as being "at risk for overweight," and "overweight" for those others would consider obese.
[...]
"We need to describe this in medical terms, which is 'obesity.' When we talk to an individual family, we can be a little more cognizant of their feelings and more gentle, but that doesn't mean we can't discuss it," Washington said. "The evidence is clear that we need to bring it up."
Apple has launched a version of its web browser Safari for Windows, competing head to head with Microsoft's Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.
Chief executive Steve Jobs said Apple "dream big" and wanted to expand the 4.9% market share Safari enjoys.
Mr Jobs was speaking at a conference of developers for Apple products in San Francisco, California.
He said Safari was "the fastest browser on Windows", saying it was twice as fast as Internet Explorer.
A test version of Safari 3 for Windows XP, Vista and Apple Macs running OSX, is available for download from the Apple website. Apple is hoping to replicate the success of iTunes, which has proved enormously popular on both Macs and Windows machines.
In a rare public discussion of her husband's infidelity, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that she probably could not have gotten through her marital troubles without relying on her faith in God.
Clinton stood by her actions in the aftermath of former President Clinton's admission that he had an affair, including presumably her decision to stay in the marriage.
In three years here in the Palestinian territories, I've witnessed the huge suffering of the Palestinian people.
And my message is that their suffering is continuing, and that it is unacceptable.
Every day there are Palestinians arrested, imprisoned for no reason. People are killed on a daily basis.
The economic suffering is terrible, especially here in Gaza where there's an Israeli [audio jumps] absolute despair after nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation which has been supported by the West.
The situation in Iraq is even worse, we see every day maybe 100 or more Iraqis being killed, in the violence there which followed the failed invasion of Iraq by America and Britain.
Ordinary people who are losing everything and can't live their lives properly. Because of not just the violence, but the shortage of everything they need for normal lives, for bringing up their children.
Errr... Afghanistan, the situation again terrible.
