Ambushed

A journalist's Obama election celebration ends in jail.

Even the police were swept up in the mood, smiling and posing for photos. An occasional handful of students would venture into the streets to high-five enthusiastic, honking motorists, only to be waved back by the police, but otherwise, it was as peaceful and well-behaved as a high school pep rally.

Then I looked up the street, to where the police had blocked off St. Paul Street with almost a dozen cruisers. A phalanx of about a dozen cops had lined up.

They began marching, and I saw one of the cops holding a pile of plastic flexicuffs. No one had a bullhorn or a PA. They just moved into the crowd and started yelling at people. There was no clear officer in charge, just a group of belligerent, angry police.

My brother came running up the sidewalk. "Some guy just got tasered!" he said. I saw some cops walking back toward us, so I crossed the street to stay out of their way. The first arrestees were being led to the paddy wagon. I pulled out my cell phone and started snapping pictures.

A beefy officer saw me taking photos and approached. I held my hands at my side and said, "I'm a journalist. I'm just taking pictures."

He slapped my cell phone out of my hand and grabbed my shirt. "Well, write a nice, long story about this," he said, spinning me around as another officer cuffed me. I was in the paddy wagon before I could even comprehend what was happening. After processing at Northern District I was thrown into a concrete cell, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and subject to the singular degradation of a long night spent in Central Booking.

Read the entire story here.

Extreme Home Takeover

Squatters take over multimillion dollar estate.

Five squatters made their entrance last month by donning high-visibility jackets, to make them look like builders, and putting up a rented ladder against the front of the building. One man climbed up on to a balcony, and was delighted to find an unlocked window.

They have since connected up to the utilities, and say that they will pay their energy bills. Bedding paraphernalia, rucksacks and "artworks" cover the floors. The new tenants feed themselves by rummaging in bins. They claim that far from damaging the house, they are improving it after years of neglect, and deny that they are breaking the law.

"Other people can come here," one of the squatters, 21-year-old Stephanie Smith, said. "We want people to use it as project space. People can work here, stay wherever they want."

Religious Rule

Somali woman stoned to death after adultery conviction.

Real America

Olbermann's special comment on the right's divisive politics:



On a lighter note, The Daily Show wants to help you figure out if you're one of Palin's real Americans:

The Vice Guide to North Korea

This is part one of an interesting and funny documentary about an American's experience in North Korea.



It's broken up into several parts, click here for them, you imperialist pig.

Turdblossom Steals the Election

Karl Rove tells you how they steal elections:



Learn more here

Big Macs for Homophobes

McDonald's gives in to anti-gay agenda.

After months of pressure from an anti-gay-marriage group, McDonald's Corp. has given up a director's seat and will stop sponsorship of a national gay business organization.

Burger King always did taste better anyway.

Skype Gripe

Chinese Skype users are being watched.

Users of Chinese Skype are being monitored by an extensive surveillance system which tracks and archives the online messages for words deemed politically sensitive, according to a report.

Bulletproof

I wish Frank were still with us.

Killer Television

Owners of satellite television channels in Saudi Arabia who broadcast "immoral" content can be killed.

Saudi Arabia's top judiciary official has issued a religious decree saying it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV networks that broadcast immoral content.

The 79-year-old Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan said Thursday that satellite channels cause the "deviance of thousands of people."

Many of the most popular Arab satellite networks - which include channels showing music videos often denounced as obscene by Muslim conservatives - are owned by Saudi princes and well-connected Saudi businessmen. Al-Lihedan did not specify any particular channels.

Read more here.

Beat the Press

St. Paul officials are feeling the heat after what may have been an orchestrated round-up of journalists covering the Republican's convention.

Journalists and St. Paul citizens assembled outside St. Paul City Hall today to deliver more than 60,000 letters to Mayor Chris Coleman and prosecuting attorneys demanding that they immediately drop charges against all journalists arrested this week as they covered the Republican National Convention

By Friday morning, dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers had been booked by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office in what appears to have been an orchestrated round-up of media makers covering protests during the convention.

"From the pre-convention raids to the ongoing harassment and arrests of journalists, these have been dark days for press freedom in the United States," said Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, who delivered the letters on behalf of the nonpartisan media reform group Free Press.

"Tragically, there are stories that the world needed to hear this week that will never be told," Brown said. "They won't be told because reporters working on them were sitting in the back of squad cars, were stripped of their cameras, or were face down on the pavement with their hands cuffed behind their backs."

Read more here.

Abducted at the RNC

Were protesters of the RNC abducted by police?

A half-dozen representatives of the so-called Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee met with the media in a St. Paul, MN press conference on Thursday to condemn the widescale police raids and arrests that have targeted protesters in that city this week.

The strongest accusations were made by RNC Welcoming Committee co-founder William Gillis, who has been among those planning the protests for the last two years.

"Police kicked down doors with guns drawn on families with their children at dinnertime," Gillis charged. "Reporters and the media at large have been repeatedly targeted for repression. Activists have been abducted off the street in unmarked vans and political prisoners held without access to medical attention."

Land of the Pee

A short but sweet video revealing the truth about cannabis, marijuana & its prohibition.



From the film: 1 in every 40 prisoners is a marijuana offender. The US is world's biggest jailer.

Our Greatest Threat

From a new article by Paul Craig Roberts:

The success of the Bush Regime's propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

It certainly worked with Americans.

The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.

He closes with:

The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.

No More Games

A board game has been seized by police in the name of fighting terror.



Police in Kent, UK arrested some climate protestors and confiscated their "criminal" equipment, including a satirical boardgame about the war on terror. The police claim that the ski mask that came with the game could be used in a criminal act.

Whew, I feel safer already.

Bad Camp

"Concentration camp" for DNC protesters?

In Denver, police are preparing what a local political organizer calls a 'concentration camp', laying in wait for mass arrests anticipated during the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

On Wednesday, a Denver CBS affiliate sent a news crew to crash the police department's improvised detention facility, found in a warehouse owned by the city on the north-east side of town.

"This is a building filled with metal holding cells," described reporter Rick Sallinger, introducing the segment. "We showed up at the facility unannounced today, the doors were wide open, and we managed to shoot for several minutes until a Denver sheriff's captain asked us to leave."

Footage of the warehouse revels tall, chain-link fence capped by barbed wire, and segmented pens each bearing an identifying letter at about shoulder height.

"Each of these fenced in areas is about five yards by five yards," said Sallinger. "There's a lock on the door. How long those arrested will be kept here is not known. A sign on the wall reads, 'Warning! Electric stun devices used in this facility.'"

Power House

This is the house that sun runs.

Mike Strizki's solar-hydrogen house has liberated him entirely from gas, electric and oil bills for the past two years.

Despotism or Democracy Quiz?

A film from 1946.

Troll Roads

Bush wants more toll roads.

The Bush administration unveiled a plan to impose new tolls on freeways and encourage more private investment to finance road and mass-transit projects, a move aimed at stirring debate as lawmakers prepare for a major overhaul of transportation policy.

The White House says more tolls and public-private partnerships can solve perhaps the biggest problem confronting the nation's aging infrastructure: There are limited funds available to upgrade transportation networks and too many federal funds are doled out inefficiently through earmarks and pet projects that do little to improve mobility or reduce congestion.

Dark Forces

Would both McCain and Obama like to see militarized domestic security forces?

Appearing before the Urban League this week, John McCain revealed his plan for imposing a military dictatorship in "high crime neighborhoods" in the United States.

On the other side of the fixed race, we have Obama's Hitlerjugend, a "national security force… as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces".

Read more here.

Nothing but Net

FCC backs "net neutrality".

This Week's Headlies

Vanishing Act

How to disappear without a trace.

Sorry

US says sorry for slavery.

US lawmakers Tuesday offered the federal government's first formal apology for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity" of slavery and the legal segregation of African-Americans.

Media Kings

Former Governor, pro-wrestler, and actor Jesse Ventura talks with Howard Stern about 9/11, the wars, and politics.



Find part two here.

Why You Should Never Talk to the Cops

These guys say you should never, ever talk to the police.

Watch part 2 here.

Strangling the Net

We're making global connections, spreading information, learning and growing over the internet. Our masters just cannot have that.

In the upcoming weeks watch for a report in Time Magazine that will attempt to smooth over the rough edges of a diabolical plot by Bell Canada and Telus, to begin charging per site fees on most Internet sites. The plan is to convert the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and then pay to visit sites beyond a cutoff point.

Read more here.

Beijing Bar Bullies

Black people & Mongolians being banned from Chinese bars?

Comply or Resist

China's All-Seeing Eye

China's setting up a high-tech police state with the help of US businesses.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world.

Read more @ Rolling Stone

Slave Trade

A modern day rescue of slaves.

Refuge

Canada no longer "a refuge from militarism" for US soldiers.

"It's quite clear that the current Canadian government does not want to annoy the U.S. government on this issue and will not give any ground," said Michael Byers, a professor of politics and international law at the University of British Columbia.

Digital Rebels

Blogging is getting to be a dangerous hobby in Iran.

New legislation has been proposed in Iran that could make blogging a crime punishable by death.

School Daze

This is funny in a sad way...

Forced Labor

Unemployed young adults in the UK to be forced into "boot camps"?

A future Conservative government will bring in "boot camps" for unemployed young people aged between 18 and 21 who refuse to take a job, Chris Grayling, the party's welfare spokesman, will say tomorrow.

Read more here