Despite denials by the Palin campaign, new evidence proves that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin had a direct hand in imposing fees to pay for post-sexual assault medical exams conducted by the city to gather evidence. Palin’s role is now confirmed by Wasilla City budget documents available online. Under Sarah Palin’s administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees. Although Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella wrote USA Today earlier this week that the GOP vice presidential nominee ‘does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test…To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice,’ Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin’s knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city’s victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice. News of the controversial policy has leaked […]
There’s really only one way to prevent another stolen race, and that’s to focus national attention on the revelations of whistle-blower Stephen Spoonamore, who’s lately been revealing all we need to know about the Bush regime’s conspiracy to rig the vote from 2000 to the present. Spoonamore knows all the principals in this conspiracy, has been dealing with them for some time, and has a trove of emails, etc., to back up what he says. There have been several other whistle-blowers on this front, but none is as compelling as he is–not just because he knows about the whole plot overall, but also because he is (a) a Republican, (b) an erstwhile member of the McCain campaign (he quit some months ago, when he discovered what they have planned) and (c) a prominent and well-respected expert on computer fraud. Detection of such fraud is, in fact, his specialty. Spoonamore has named the man who was Karl Rove’s IT guru from 2000 until sometime last year: Mike Connell, a pro-life zealot who told Spoonamore that he had helped the Bush regime subvert elections ‘to save the babies.’ (The actual nuts and bolts of the election fraud machinery are largely […]
BOHMTE, Germany — When Ulrike Rubcic heard that her town would take down all of its traffic lights, she rolled her eyes in disbelief. Tucked between cornfields and cow meadows, the main street in this bucolic northern German community was also a thoroughfare with thousands of cars and trucks zooming to or from nearby Osnabruck. ‘Are we waiting for the first accident?’ she thought then. But this summer the town reworked its downtown thoroughfare, not only scrapping the traffic lights but also tearing down the curbs and erasing marked crosswalks. The busiest part of the main street turned into a ‘naked’ square shared equally by bikes, pedestrians, cars, and trucks. Now, there is only one rule: Always give way to the person on the right. Two months into the experiment, ‘Instead of thinking, ‘It’s going to be red, I need to give gas, people have to slow down, to look to the right and the left, to be considerate’ says Ms. Rubcic. The bonus? Town people recognize they have become a bit closer to one another. ‘The whole village has become more human. We look at each other, we greet each other,’ she says. In […]
WASHINGTON — A new scientific study adds evidence that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere fluctuated a bit over time, but that the sharp increase during the past few decades is bigger than anything in at least 1,300 years. The report was published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its conclusion is that temperature increased and decreased a little over the centuries, but the fluctuations were small enough that the line was roughly flat, like the shaft of a horizontal hockey stick. Then, from about 1980 to now, temperature increased sharply, more than any increase before – like the blade of the hockey stick. For the past 10 years, climate-change skeptics have been calling the hockey stick bogus. Now the scientists who studied the climate record and produced the original hockey-stick graph have done a new study using more data from more sources – and they got the same pattern. The new study ‘establishes further evidence that the recent warming isn’t just part of a typical cycle,’ said climatologist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. ‘Of course, this alone doesn’t establish the cause of that warming […]
Twenty years ago this month, on September 26 1988, Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a work in the magical-realist tradition, was launched at a party for the literary elite. The book’s two main protagonists survive a fall from a wrecked aircraft and turn into an angel (Gibreel, or Gabriel) and the devil (Shaitan, or Satan). The book also contains a series of transgressions against Muslim sensibilities: the title itself referred to a much-disputed passage in the Koran in which Mohammed was apparently tricked by Satan. Not long after this launch party, the book’s publishers, Viking Penguin (owned by the FT’s parent company, Pearson), and Margaret Thatcher’s government received angry calls from Muslims for the book’s withdrawal. India forbade its publication, and bans followed in Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa and Sri Lanka. By early 1989 this reaction had spread to other countries with sizeable Muslim populations: Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and even Venezuela. Then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or ruling on Islamic law, calling for Rushdie’s murder. Though the author swiftly made a statement regretting the distress caused by the publication, Khomeini’s office wrote: ‘Even if Salman […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
