Post Your Interesting News Articles Here

[crazy8]

SYDNEY, Australia - A driver stranded on a remote stretch of Australian highway Wednesday tried to summon help by playing dead in the middle of the road, a police officer said.

A woman who was driving with her two children spotted the man and had to swerve to avoid hitting him, said Doug Backhouse, a detective with the Western Australia state police.

"She drove around the body — which didn't move at all — and got to the nearest phone," Backhouse said.

Local police arrived with an ambulance and found the man alive and well, but with car troubles.

"The best way he thought to get a vehicle to stop was to lay down in the middle of the road and pretend to be dead," Backhouse said, adding that the man didn't think anyone would stop if he were standing up.

Police said they told the man that lying in the road was "a stupid thing to do" but didn't charge him with any offense.

The incident occurred near Esperance, about 450 miles southeast of the state capital, Perth.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The man was pro'ly black 

[_BP_]

Faith I agree with you about black people digging their own graves, supporting a gang of morally bankrupt people who have hijacked the country. At every step of the way they undermine the system they were entrusted to protect.

There isn’t enough support for repealing the estate tax?  Let’s get rid of the IRS agents who are in change of enforcing it. Slick...

There is a law against Domestic spying sans a warrant?  We can find a way to beat that too.

There are conventions against torture?  Let’s come up with ways to get around this.  If that fails, let’s ship people to other countries and outsource our torture.

We'll always have some bright young lawyer to interpret the statutes in a way that will make this work. What's next on our list?

[mivida2k]

Congress sure does move when they want to.  I don't remember them moving so quickly after Katrina.  (praying that Kanye doesn't read this article)

WASHINGTON - The House voted Tuesday to add money to a federal repatriation program and ensure that 8,000 to 15,000 Americans fleeing Lebanon have lodging, medical care and transportation.    

The Health and Human Services Department expects to reach the program's $1 million cap this week.

"We need your assistance in lifting this cap as soon as possible," Secretary Michael Leavitt wrote to House Speaker       
Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. "Arriving U.S. citizens who are exhausted and without financial means will be left to fend for themselves upon arrival in their home country."

The government provides temporary assistance to citizens and their families when they arrive in the United States after fleeing foreign countries due to destitution, illness, threat of war, invasion or other crises.

Repatriation centers have opened at Baltimore's and Philadelphia's airports to assist Americans returning from Lebanon. They are staffed by medical and mental health professionals, and they have phone banks and computers to help people contact friends and relatives.

The House bill, passed by voice vote, temporarily lifts the program's $1 million cap to keep assistance flowing to the 8,000 to 15,000 Americans expected to leave Lebanon.

"Many don't need much help, but some do," said Rep. Jim McDermott (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash, and the program "enables us to help Americans who escaped a conflict with their lives but little else."

The program provides aid for up to 90 days.

It is designed to help get people to their homes or other destinations as smoothly as possible. In the majority of cases, evacuees don't need much assistance, and they pay their own way for their lodging or for the airplane tickets.

In some cases, people fled without money or credit cards to pay for immediate needs. The government can provide money, medical care, lodging or transportation in those cases, and evacuees getting assistance promise to repay the money.

In a small number of cases, when a citizen is truly destitute, the government will pay the expenses for getting them to their final destination. The program also repays states for any assistance they provide to repatriating Americans.

___

Information about the bill, H.R. 5865, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov/.

[crazy8]

Please, they're just trying to make up for the fact that they didn't give a damn about what happened to these people as they watched their European friends get shipped out without a glitch.

[crazy8]

Paraphrasing Uncle Ben (from Spiderman): With Great Knowledge Comes Greater Responsibility

A black man with credentials that some would die for and this is the way he chooses to use it?

Epithet 'Has Many Meanings,' a Harvard Professor Testifies
 
By COREY KILGANNON
Published: June 8, 2006

The witnesses in the trial of a white man accused of a racially motivated beating of a black man in Howard Beach last summer had been typical for an assault case in Queens. Until yesterday.

Nicholas Minucci, in shirtsleeves, at the table with his lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, Queens.
All of the previous witnesses — the hardened detective, the newsstand owner, the pizza maker, the career criminal and other assorted neighborhood characters — had offered plain-spoken testimony about Nicholas Minucci, 20, who is charged with using a racial epithet while attacking Glenn Moore with a baseball bat on June 29, 2005.

But the final witness for Mr. Minucci was a stranger to him, to Howard Beach and to the State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, Queens. The defense got the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy to travel from Boston to testify about the current usage of the racial epithet, sometimes referred to in court as the "n" word.

The epithet has become central to the trial, as a measure of whether Mr. Minucci attacked Mr. Moore because of his skin color. Several witnesses have testified that Mr. Minucci repeatedly spewed the epithet in anger while chasing Mr. Moore and beating him on the head. Mr. Minucci insists that Mr. Moore was about to commit a robbery and that he used the word as a form of benign address before subduing him with a few swats to the side and legs.

Mr. Minucci's lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, said he hoped Professor Kennedy's testimony would convince the jury that the mere use of the epithet did not constitute racism. On the stand yesterday, Professor Kennedy's explanation of the modern usage of the word seemed to support Mr. Gaudelli's claim.

"The word is a complex word," he testified. "It has many meanings."

Professor Kennedy had just taken the stand in a packed courtroom and rattled off his impressive credentials — which include attending Princeton, Oxford and Yale, a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and his membership in the Bar of the Supreme Court.

He said the epithet was "a word that can be put to many different uses," ranging from a pejorative term to a friendly salutation.

Mr. Gaudelli asked Professor Kennedy, who is black, about his book on the subject.

"My second book is entitled, 'n-word: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,' " the professor responded. Mr. Gaudelli handed him a copy of the book, and had it entered into the case as Exhibit W.

Professor Kennedy said that in modern parlance, the word could have many different meanings and was no longer restricted to use by or about black people. In fact, he said, many new immigrants use the word casually after learning it from movies, music videos and popular songs. In San Francisco, he said, the word is commonly used among young Asian immigrants.

"It is used by all sorts of people, black and white, and other groups as well," he said.

Later, outside the court, Professor Kennedy said it was the first time he had testified in a criminal trial about the use of the word. He said he had agreed to come to Queens to testify "to advance the aims of justice," but not to take Mr. Minucci's side.

"I do not feel I was championing somebody's cause," he said. "I was asked to speak as an expert witness about a particular issue. Somebody's liberties are at stake here."

Mr. Gaudelli said that when he phoned Professor Kennedy and asked him to testify, for no fee, the professor initially declined. But Mr. Gaudelli persisted.

"I said: 'Do you believe what you wrote? Are you willing to stand by it?' Do you want to deprive my client of a fair trial?' " Mr. Gaudelli recounted. "He said, 'I'll call you in the morning.' "

Asked how the testimony went, Mr. Gaudelli said: "I think I did good; I got a Rhodes scholar to testify for nothing and all I had to do is drive him to the airport."--Interpreted..."I think I did good; I got a smart a$$ black man (who is even smarter than me) to come to court and do something insanely stupid.  And I didn't even have to pay him for it."

Early on, Professor Kennedy said the epithet, which dates to the 17th century, derived its name from the Latin niger, meaning black. It "seeped into English" through Spanish and Portuguese, he said.

In the cross-examination, Mariela Herring, a Queens prosecutor, asked Mr. Kennedy, "Are you here to tell us the "n" word is no longer a derogatory term?" She then asked more directly, "Is it a derogatory term?" Professor Kennedy responded, "It can be."

She asked Professor Kennedy if he had chosen the title of his book, published in 2002, for "shock value," and she cited a newspaper interview in which he said the "catchy title" would grab attention.

Professor Kennedy said the meaning of the epithet depended on the context in which it was used. Ms. Herring asked him to assume that the context was a white man wielding a baseball bat, about to attack a black man. Justice Richard L. Buchter disallowed the question, saying Professor Kennedy could not conjecture as to what the attacker would be thinking.

Justice Buchter also denied Mr. Gaudelli's attempt to enter a chapter of Professor Kennedy's book — "The Use of the Word Today" — as evidence, for the jury to consult.

Mr. Gaudelli maintains that Mr. Minucci, growing up in Lindenwood, a racially diverse neighborhood adjacent to Howard Beach, grew up with many nonwhite friends and used the term as part of his regular vocabulary.

The lawyer insists that his client, encountering a black man carrying a bag of tools at 3 a.m. in a middle-class white neighborhood, decided that Mr. Moore was about to commit a robbery and decided to use "reasonable force" to stop him. Mr. Moore has admitted that he and his friends intended to steal a car that night.

During yesterday's proceedings, Mr. Minucci responded to a question from the judge by saying that he would not take the stand. Five of the 19 counts against Mr. Minucci were eliminated, to streamline and simplify the indictment.

Both sides are to give their closing arguments today, and the judge is expected to give the case to the jury in the afternoon.

[2Lacoste]

Bush Sends Kerry to Solve Israel-Hezbollah War

After learning that the battle between Israel and Hezbollah could have been prevented if Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, had been the U.S. Commander in Chief, President George Bush today dispatched Sen. Kerry to the war-torn region to “get this thing solved.”

Sen. Kerry, a career Vietnam veteran, who told a political gathering in Detroit yesterday that “we must destroy Hezbollah” and that the president “has been absent on diplomacy“, said he would bring his own brand of “diplomatic destruction” to the terrorist group.

“Senator Kerry’s presence and intellect alone should bring a swift end to hostilities,” said Mr. Bush, who admitted that he, and the State Department, had “kind of put the Middle East thing on the back burner” while following televised coverage of the Tour de France bicycle race.

In related news, as hostilities along the Lebanon border approached the two-week mark, the crisis was officially added to the list of “bad things that would not have happened during a John Kerry presidency.”

 

[crazy8]

Bush Sends Kerry to Solve Israel-Hezbollah War

After learning that the battle between Israel and Hezbollah could have been prevented if Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, had been the U.S. Commander in Chief, President George Bush today dispatched Sen. Kerry to the war-torn region to “get this thing solved.”

Sen. Kerry, a career Vietnam veteran, who told a political gathering in Detroit yesterday that “we must destroy Hezbollah” and that the president “has been absent on diplomacy“, said he would bring his own brand of “diplomatic destruction” to the terrorist group.

“Senator Kerry’s presence and intellect alone should bring a swift end to hostilities,” said Mr. Bush, who admitted that he, and the State Department, had “kind of put the Middle East thing on the back burner” while following televised coverage of the Tour de France bicycle race.

In related news, as hostilities along the Lebanon border approached the two-week mark, the crisis was officially added to the list of “bad things that would not have happened during a John Kerry presidency.”

 

Who wrote this?  Lacoste here's a good way to practice your bluebooking....quoted text always needs a cite 

[2Lacoste]

   I didn't write it.  I'm not that funny.   

[crazy8]

  I didn't write it.  I'm not that funny.   

I figured you didn't write it, that's why I mentioned it being cited?  Where is it from, it's funny?

[2Lacoste]

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