Author: Локомотив (CC)

NPR reports:

The Danish government on Friday won a legal battle against a freewheeling neighborhood that has remained largely self-governing since its creation by hippie squatters four decades ago.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision from 2009 saying the roughly 900 residents of Christiania have no irrevocable right to use the former naval base as their home.

The decision ends a six-year legal standoff and means the government can go ahead with plans to “normalize” the neighborhood and tear down scores of ramshackle homes built at the site without permits.

Residents say they will resist any attempts to evict them from the neighborhood, which has become a major draw for tourists curious about its counterculture lifestyle and liberal attitude toward soft drugs.

“The court process is now finished,” Christiania spokesman Thomas Ertman said. “We have to now look to the future and need to sit down with the state and work out a negotiation for Christiania.”

Ertman emphasized that a political solution needed to be found as the residents don’t intend to move…

[continues at NPR ]

Welcome to high school. Now drop and give me 50.

The entire freshman class at Carvers Bay High School has been automatically enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, a military-sponsored program that trains high school students in military discipline and concepts. Principal Richard Neal, a Navy veteran, said the school’s Marine Corps JROTC class is fulfilling the student’s physical education requirement and is part of the school’s Ninth Grade Academy.

But Charles Holloway, the parent of a freshman student at Carvers Bay, said he did not want his son in that program and when he asked that his son be taken out, his son was put in a class by himself. Holloway said he feels his son was being punished for not wanting to take part in that class…

[continues at The Sun News]

A U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a 15-year-old Mexican boy after a group trying to illegally enter Texas threw rocks at officers near downtown El Paso, U.S. authorities said Tuesday.

The shooting, which happened Monday evening beneath a railroad bridge linking the two nations, drew sharp criticism from Mexico, where the government said Tuesday that “the use of firearms to repel attacks with stones represents disproportionate use of force, particularly coming from authorities who have received specialized training.”

It was the second death of a Mexican at the hands of Border Patrol officers in less than two weeks, and the case threatened to swell into a full-blown international incident when U.S. and Mexican officials traded suggestions of misconduct.

Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua Attorney General’s office, said a spent 40-mm shell was found near the body – raising the question of whether the fatal shot was fired inside Mexico, although he did not explicitly make that suggestion. That would violate the rules for Border Patrol agents, who are supposed to stay on the U.S. side of the border…

[continues at CBS World News]

Vieques, Puerto Rico (CNN) — Nearly 40 years ago, Hermogenes Marrero was a teenage U.S. Marine, stationed as a security guard on the tiny American island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico.

Marrero says he’s been sick ever since. At age 57, the former Marine sergeant is nearly blind, needs an oxygen tank, has Lou Gehrig’s disease and crippling back problems, and sometimes needs a wheelchair.

“I’d go out to the firing range, and sometimes I’d start bleeding automatically from my nose,” he said in an interview to air on Monday night’s “Campbell Brown.”

“I said, ‘My God, why am I bleeding?’ So then I’d leave the range, and it stops. I come back, and maybe I’m vomiting now. I used to get diarrhea, pains in my stomach all the time. Headaches — I mean, tremendous headaches. My vision, I used to get blurry.”…

[continues at CNN.com]

An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him.

Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness.

The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing a wading pool and sitting on a truck. In one, the girl is wearing a swim suit and part of her buttocks are exposed.

The Army says Miller will stay in Afghanistan until his court martial. His unit came home last August. Miller faces jail time, if convicted.

Terri Miller says the pictures are innocent.

Read More: Chicago Breaking News Center

Only miles from the scenic vistas and celebrity mansions that draw sightseers from around the globe — but a world away from the glitz and glamour — a bus tour is rolling through the dark side of the city’s gang turf.

Passengers paying $65 a head Saturday signed waivers acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of tattooed ex-gang members who say they have negotiated a cease-fire among rivals in the most violent gangland in America.

Read More on SFGate

In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.

The Senate bill, approved Thursday morning, allows any state to bar the use of federal subsidies for insurance plans that cover abortion and requires insurers in other states to divide subsidy money into separate accounts so that only dollars from private premiums would be used to pay for abortions.

Just days before the bill passed, the Catholic Health Association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement that it was “encouraged” and “increasingly confident” that such a compromise “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion.” An umbrella group for nuns followed its lead.

Read More: New York Times

A senior Republican senator is urging the Obama administration and European allies to consider rearming Georgia, an action that would inevitably upset Russia.

The recommendation comes from Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, a lawmaker who has long cultivated cooperation with Russia. Lugar has been a key ally for President Barack Obama on his pursuit of an arms control deal with Russia…

Read More on the Associated Press

Wal-Mart is charging extra on shipment to APO/FPO addresses… Amazon is not, Target is not so why is Wal-Mart? So as I’ve said for years Wal-Mart only rolls back the prices after they’ve rolled them up. So after they catch a little crap about charging more for shipments to the troops don’t be surprised if they reduce those rates and then pat themselves on the back claiming they care about the troops and they’ve rolled back the shipping prices to prove it…. scumbags…

[continues at Resistnet]

LUCASVILLE, Ohio — State prison authorities are preparing to use a new method of lethal injection to execute a convicted killer next week.The change will make Ohio the only state in the nation to use the new method.

On Monday, reporters and photographers, including News Center 7, were allowed inside the Death House at Lucasville Correctional Facility, where the death penalty will be carried out. Prison officials readily admitted that Ohio will be the first state to use this lethal injection method for executions. They said it is both humane and effective.

Since the state began using the death penalty again in 1999, officials used a series of three drugs to execute inmates. First, to sedate and then to stop the heart and lungs.

Now, authorities are switching to a new method that includes a large and lethal dose of just one drug.

Peruvian authorities say they have arrested four members of a gang that specialized in selling to European labs fat obtained from dead humans.

Officials are investigating the disappearance of at last 60 people they believe were killed by gang members in two mountainous states in central Peru, lead prosecutor Jorge Sanz Quiroz said Friday.

The four suspects have been charged with murder in the September slaying of a Peruvian man, the prosecutor said.

“They killed to obtain human fat because there were European laboratories that would pay them,” Sanz Quiroz said.

The suspects told authorities they were paid $15,000 for a liter (about 1 quart) of human fat.

Read more: CNN

More than one in seven American households struggled to put enough food on the table in 2008, the highest rate since the Agriculture Department began tracking food security levels in 1995.

That’s about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of U.S. households. The numbers are a significant increase from 2007, when 11.1 percent of U.S. households suffered from what USDA classifies as “food insecurity” — not having enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.

Researchers blamed the increase in hunger on a lack of money and other resources.

Read more: Associated Press via Google News

As we previously noted, our colleague Weston Kosova gave the Obama administration some much-needed grief on Friday for refusing a federal judge’s recent order to turn over documents showing how big telecommunications firms lobbied to get immunity for their participation in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.

But that is actually only one of many examples of how Obama appointees are standing up for Bush-era secrecy.

In just the last few days, virtually unnoticed by most of the news media, administration officials have:

* Rejected a new Freedom of Information request for White House visitor logs (despite their announced intention to start making such documents public).
* Appealed, yet again, to invoke “state secrets” to block a lawsuit that might shed light on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to countries that practice torture.
* Gotten Congress to pass legislation that would prevent graphic photographs of detainee abuse by the U.S. government from ever becoming public. (Update: Obama on Thursday signed into law a homeland security bill that exempts from the photos from the Freedom of Information Act.)

And all of this is in spite of Obama’s vow—in a memo on the first full day of his presidency—to create “an unprecedented level of openness” in government.

We intend to keep track of these matters regularly on Declassified…

MILWAUKEE — The world’s largest retailer wants to keep its customers even after they die.

Wal-Mart has started selling caskets on its website at prices that undercut many funeral homes, long the major seller of caskets.

The move follows a similar one by discount rival Costco, which also sells caskets on its site.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home…

Check out the Los Angeles Police Department’s creepy new public service announcement for its city-wide anti-terrorism iWatch program. The civilian program was launched earlier this month and is endorsed by 63 police chiefs around the country.

The ad features wide-eyed, blink-free residents reciting Orwellian mantras and looking as if they’re about to crawl out of your television like that girl in “The Ring.”