Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
REpost: Meanwhile not so long ago...
The Tories were today forced to deny that a video clip purporting to show a long-haired party-goer at a 1988 outdoor rave was the party leader David Cameron.The purple-tinted video, set to a hypnotic acid house rave track, shows a man bearing a striking similarity to Cameron with shoulder-length hair and wearing dungarees. The video, called 'Acid House Sunrise 1988 Part 4', has surfaced on YouTube and has been picked up by political blogger Guido Fawkes.Held during the so-called second Summer of Love in 1988, the long-haired man appears to be joining in the fun at the outdoor event. Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, was Head of PR for the 1988-89 rave party planners, Sunrise. It was Fawkes who received the emails sent by Brown's special advisor Damian McBride about slurs on top Tories which led to McBride's sacking. Posting on his blog, Guido asks his readers to decide for themselves whether the man in the clip really is the Tory leader and Old Etonian. Alongside stills from the video, he says: 'This has been building up for a few weeks and now Guido is getting calls from Dead Tree Press diarists, it is probably time to bring it out into the open. 'Is this a picture of a long-haired 22 year-old David Cameron? 'The pictures are taken from a video of a Sunrise Party held in the summer of 1988. You decide… ' However a Tory press spokesperson 'categorically' denied that the man in the clip was Cameron. Raves, fuelled by dance music, boomed during the late 1980s and were infamous for the widespread use Ecstasy. The all-night parties, frequently illegal, were held at secret locations in warehouses or in fields. In 2007, it was revealed that Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton after being named by a fellow pupil as a cannabis user. Cameron repeatedly refused to answer questions during his successful Tory leadership campaign on whether or not he had taken drugs. And he has stuck by his insistence that all politicians are entitled to a 'private past' and should not be required to reveal everything of their lives before they enter politics.
Let the battle begin...
(Thanx Drew!)
...don't forget what the Toties did to the country last time and don't kid yourself that they won't do it all over again!
Regretsy - Where DIY meets WTF!
Golden poo small
Description
Here are the poos that you wish you took; Soft, Gold and Shiny,
plus, they don't smell, unlike your poo.
These georgeous poo are made from gold metallic fabric and filled with cotton.
you can use them as cushion on couch or bed,
as a cocktail hat on you and you loved one's head for some party, as a knee cap warmer on your knee cap or your loved one's thigh when you are chatting with friends.
pretty much you can put anywhere they need attention, or put on anybody who needs attention.
These georgeous poo are made from gold metallic fabric and filled with cotton.
you can use them as cushion on couch or bed,
as a cocktail hat on you and you loved one's head for some party, as a knee cap warmer on your knee cap or your loved one's thigh when you are chatting with friends.
pretty much you can put anywhere they need attention, or put on anybody who needs attention.
Elián González: Now
He is grown up now, almost an adult, but there is no mistaking the face of Elián González. The 16-year-old youth in an olive-green military school uniform has not changed so much from the boy who a decade ago was the subject of a diplomatic battle between Cuba and the US.
Cuba's rulers have released photos of González attending a Young Communist Union congress at a convention centre in west Havana last weekend. The images were posted on government websites yesterday, then widely transmitted by state-controlled media.
His hair is still cropped short, his expression remains solemn, except this time González presumably knows that, like it or not, he is still a political symbol.
"Young Elián González defends his revolution in the youth congress," read the headline over the photo posted on Cuba Debate, the same site where Fidel Castro posts columns.
State media did not elaborate on the adolescent's role but the green uniform with red shoulder patches appears to be from a military academy. There is a military school near his hometown of Cárdenas.
In November 1999, aged five, he was found floating off the coast of Florida in an inner tube after a vessel sank and his mother, Elizabeth Broton, died with other Cubans who tried to flee the island.
US immigration officials ruled the boy should return to his father in Cuba but Cuban exiles in Miami demanded he stay, prompting an uproar that galvanised mass protests on both sides of the Florida straits.
When Miami-based relatives refused to give him up, federal agents stormed the house 10 years ago this month and returned him to Havana.
Elián was celebrated as a hero and his father, restaurant employee Juan Miguel González, was elected to parliament. Cuba has marked González's 7 December birthday with parades but kept the boy away from foreign media.
Rory Carroll @'The Guardian'
'pedophiles go to jail' and 'church = mafia = state'
Seen on a wall of the Church of St Eutizio in Soriano on Easter Monday April 5, 2010
Beyond torture: the future of interrogation
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay: two names that have become synonymous in many people's minds with torture and abuse of human rights by American interrogators. When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, he set out to erase the stain such practices have left on America's image. The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group established later that year has as one of its stated aims to interrogate without brute force and to employ "scientifically proven" techniques - though without saying what these might be.
It seems like a noble goal, but on closer inspection it raises a host of questions. Can science validate interrogation techniques - and if so, how? What is the effect on the human mind of coercive interrogation that stops short of physical torture? And, crucially, are there any interrogation techniques that can be shown to be both effective and humane?
In the past, the US military used a set of 19 approved interrogation methods laid down in the Army Field Manual 2-22.3, which explicitly prohibits threats or coercion. Following the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the George W. Bush administration decided that this should change. So, after legal consultations, new ways to apply pressure on people under interrogation were drawn up. For several years they remained secret, but more recently we have acquired a pretty good idea of the techniques interrogators used at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the US base at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
Take, for example, the treatment log of Mohamed al-Kahtani, made public in March 2006. This revealed that for weeks on end he faced a daily routine of just 4 hours of interrupted sleep, prolonged stress positions, blaring music, extremes of temperature, and various humiliations - including being treated like a dog, and a mock birthday party at which he was shown puppet shows of himself engaging in sexual acts with Osama bin Laden.
The technique known as waterboarding, in which the subject experiences the sensation that they are drowning, was also common. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed responsibility for planning the 9/11 attacks, was subjected to waterboarding more than 180 times in March 2003 alone.
Do any or all of these amount to torture? The 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment is somewhat vague. It differentiates between torture - "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person" - and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" (CIDT). This distinction may reflect the notion that inserting needles under someone's fingernails or pulling out their teeth is in some way worse than, say, blindfolding and hooding, forced nudity, isolation, humiliation, forced stress positions, or deprivation of sleep or light.
Yet the UN convention is clear: both torture and CIDT are illegal. And maybe the distinction is unimportant anyway, as there appears to be little to choose between them in terms of the long-term ill-effects they cause to their victims.
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