Category Archives: Politics

Man Arrested for Feeding Homeless People

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The ABC is reporting that a man has been arrested in Orlando, Florida, for feeding “30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilising a ladle” (according to the arrest warrant).

The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers, has been challenged in court by civil rights groups. It allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within 3.2 kilometres of the Orlando City Hall only if they have a special permit. They are able to receive two permits a year.

Police mounted a surveillance operation to catch him and even took a sample of the food to use as evidence against him in court.

The sort of prejudice against homeless people that seems to have lead to this law getting passed is pretty typical, there was an interesting story in New Scientist recently talking about the neural side of prejudice, and a surprising way of breaking the freezing out of such people in the mind:

Psychologist Susan Fiske from Princeton University and colleagues got students to view photos of individuals from a range of social groups, while using functional MRI to monitor activity in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain region known to light up in response to socially significant stimuli. The researchers were shocked to discover that photos of people belonging to “extreme” out-groups, such as drug addicts, stimulated no activity in this region at all, suggesting that the viewers considered them to be less than human. “It is just what you see with homeless people or beggars in the street,” says Fiske, “people treat them like piles of garbage.” In new experiments, however, she was able to reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the pictures, such as, “What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar would like?” Just one such question was enough to significantly raise activity in the mPFC. “The question has the effect of making the person back into a person,” says Fiske, “and the prejudiced response is much weaker.”

You will need to be a subscriber to New Scientist to be able to read the whole thing online.

Did the Australian Government Commit a War Crime ?

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In 1995 the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was written into Australian Law, and section 268.76 of the Australian Criminal Code 1995 defines “War crime – denying a fair trial“, where:

(1) A person (the perpetrator) commits an offence if: (a) the perpetrator deprives one or more persons of a fair and regular trial by denying to the person any of the judicial guarantees referred to in paragraph (b); and (b) the judicial guarantees are those defined in articles 84, 99 and 105 of the Third Geneva Convention and articles 66 and 71 of the Fourth Geneva Convention; and (c) the person or persons are protected under one or more of the Geneva Conventions or under Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions; and (d) the perpetrator knows of, or is reckless as to, the factual circumstances that establish that the person or persons are so protected; and (e) the perpetrator’s conduct takes place in the context of, and is associated with, an international armed conflict.

The penalty for such a war crime is 10 years imprisonment.

In November 2006 a panel of lawyers (( The accompanying press release says “The Opinion has been signed by The Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC (Former Judge Advocate General of the ADF, Honorary Professorial Fellow, Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne); Peter Vickery QC (Special Rapporteur, International Commission of Jurists, Victoria); Professor Hilary Charlesworth (Professor of International Law and Human Rights, ANU); Professor Andrew Byrnes (Professor of International Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW); and Gavan Griffith AO QC (Solicitor-General of Australia 1984 – 97); and Professor Tim McCormack (Australian Red Cross Professor of International Humanitarian Law, University of Melbourne).” )) wrote a 30 page legal opinion (there is also a four page summary) titled “David Hicks – Military Commissions Act 2006 – Compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Hamdan Decision and Australian Law” on the first and second military tribunals created by the US government and concluded:

Further, the Replacement Military Commission will contravene the standards for a fair trial under Australian law provided for in the Australian Criminal Code, and counselling or urging a trial to take place before any such Military Commission with the requisite knowledge and intention would constitute a war crime under Division 268 of the Code.

This opinion was delivered by the Law Council of Australia to the Attorney General, Philip Ruddock, to inform him of the nature of the crime that was being committed by the government. To date no action to rectify this appears to have been taken.

Thanks to Tim for the pointer to the letter to the editor of The Age newspaper from one of the reports authors, the Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC, former Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia and former Judge Advocate General of the Australian Defence Force.

A Hopeful Sign

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The ABC is reporting that “Northern Ireland parties agree to power-sharing government“. Ian Paisley said:

We must not allow our justified loathing of the horrors and tragedies of the past to become a barrier to creating a better and more stable future

Gerry Adams said:

The discussions and the agreement between our parties shows the potential of what can now be achieved

Well here’s hoping, there’s been enough fear, loathing and killing in NI for long enough.

Blair “disingenous” over the misuse of intelligence about Iraq

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According to this BBC report in the run up to the Iraq war the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (often mis-identified as MI6) was open within UK government circles about their lack of knowledge of what was going on in Iraq.

When Lord Butler spoke in the House of Lords in February 2007 he quoted from an intelligence report dated 22nd August 2002 which said:

we … know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988

Pretty concise and easy to understand you would have thought – and yet somehow over the next month that got spun into “extensive, detailed and authoritative” intelligence when Tony Blair reported it to the House of Commons on the 24th September 2002.

I am aware, of course, that people will have to take elements of this on the good faith of our intelligence services, but this is what they are telling me, the British Prime Minister, and my senior colleagues. The intelligence picture that they paint is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

So much for good faith. Lord Butler called Blair “disingenuous” for that abuse of intelligence, and goes on to say:

Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.

So by misrepresenting what the intelligence community said he has completely blown the chance of people in future believing real reports of danger that come via those agencies. So Blair, Bush and Howard have become “the boys that cried wolf” and we are all less safe for it.

Lichtenstein Accidentally Invaded by Switzerland

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A training exercise for Swiss infantry turned into an accidental invasion of Lichtenstein, according to this BBC article:

A 171-strong Swiss company got two kilometres into its neighbour before realising the mistake and heading back. […] The company commander led his men in the wrong direction in bad weather but gave the immediate order to return when realising the error.

Oops.. 🙂

“An Inconvenient Truth” Wins Best Documentary Oscar

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Congratulations!

The film, An Inconvenient Truth, former US Vice-President Al Gore’s dire warning about the threat of climate change, has won the Oscar for best documentary. Making use of a vast body of scientific data, the film represents a stinging rebuttal to the dwindling and increasingly discredited band of skeptics who refuse to acknowledge the extent of climate change.

Egyptian Blogger Gets 4 Years in Jail

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The BBC is reporting that Abdel Kareem Nabil has been sentenced to 4 years in jail:

He had used his weblog to criticise the country’s top Islamic institution, the al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator. […] During the five-minute court session the judge said Nabil was guilty and would serve three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition, and one year for insulting Mr Mubarak.

More Scarey Australian Copyright Braindeadness..

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The Association for Progressive Communications has a really interesting summary of the possible implications of new copyright legislation in Australia. They have a set of PDF’s there that give a “risk matrix” for teens, families, small businesses and industry.

If you’ve ever wondered how a bunch of kids singing in a restaurant can turn into a criminal offence under copyright law then this is for you (especially if you own an iPod). Read ’em and weep..

(Via)

Did the IPCC Underestimate Sea Level Rise ?

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New Scientist has a rather interesting report on how the IPCC may be a little too conservative in their estimates of sea level rise due to climate change.

Previous estimates of how much the world’s sea level will rise as a result of global warming may have seriously underestimated the problem, according to new research.

This is because a new study, by Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, has been published in the journal Science which uses empirical data and computer models rather than relying solely on computational techniques. It apparently matches measured sea level rises very accurately and the New Scientist report goes on to say:

For a given amount of warming, Rahmstorf says, the rise in sea level “could well be twice as much as was so far expected, based on the last IPCC report”.

What does that mean in reality ?

At the top of the range of possible temperature rises estimated by the last IPCC report, the rise could be as great as 140 centimetres by 2100. That would be bad new for cities like London and New York, which lie close to sea level, and would leave them facing an increased risk of devastating storm surges. Even the lowest predicted temperature rises would cause a 50 cm rise, Rahmstorf says.

Keep your lifebelt handy..