Jun
03
2013
Strong gusty winds, heavy smoke and heat continued to challenge more than 2,000 firefighters who worked into a fourth night on Sunday to suppress the fast-moving Powerhouse Fire that has consumed 25,000 acres within the Angeles National Forest and was headed toward a popular poppy reserve.
At least 1,000 people from the Lake Hughes and Elizabeth Lake areas remained evacuated from their homes as the blaze made a destructive march north toward the Antelope Valley Poppy …
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Jun
03
2013
Wendy’s, the world’s third largest burger joint, is having a makeover. From being “Wendy’s Old Fashioned Burgers” we’re now told it’s just “Wendy’s.” The ginger-haired befreckled Wendy remains on the logo, though in their TV spots she’s a hipper twentysomething. Yet behind the new facade lie some very old-fashioned attitudes.
Above all, like every corporation, Wendy’s exists for the sole purpose of bringing value to its shareholders. This is why shareholders at Wendy’s Annual Meeting in …
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Jun
03
2013
The trial of 25-year-old army Pfc. Bradley Manning begins on Monday, “the latest and most high-profile in a series of leak prosecutions brought by the Obama administration.”
As law professor Marjorie Cohn, describing The Uncommon Courage of Bradley Manning, wrote:
When he was 22 years old, Pfc. Bradley Manning gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. They included the “Collateral Murder” video, which depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including …
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Jun
03
2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can continue to take DNA from people they arrest without getting a warrant. The court’s five-justice majority said DNA testing was a legitimate police arrest procedure, like fingerprinting.
‘‘Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,’’ Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority.
But …
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Jun
03
2013
(Reuters) – Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan accused anti-government protesters on Monday of walking “arm-in-arm with terrorism”, remarks that could further inflame public anger after three days of some of the most violent riots in decades.
Hundreds of police and protesters have been injured since Friday in the riots, which began with a demonstration to halt construction in a park in an Istanbul square and grew into mass protests against what opponents call Erdogan’s authoritarianism.
He …
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May
31
2013
One woman is raped every 20 minutes in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Anti-rape protests swept the country in recent months, calling for strict and immediate action from the authorities after a 23-year-old medical student was brutally gang-raped in a moving bus in the capital December 2012.
As of March 2013, 24,000 cases of sexual violence were pending before state high courts and the Supreme Court of India.
In a move designed to prevent …
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May
31
2013
By Stephen Eisenhammer
LONDON, May 30 (Reuters) – Protests in northern Peru over
the $5 billion Conga gold mine make “no sense” and could spell
the end of the project if they succeed in preventing the
draining of a nearby lake, the project’s junior partner said on
Thursday.
Tensions flared up again this week over Newmont’s
proposed mine, with hundreds of protesters taking to the streets
and bringing to an end nine months of …
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May
31
2013
Thousands of demonstrators from the anti-capitalist Blockupy movement have cut off access to the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt to protest against policymakers’ handling of Europe’s debt crisis.
Clasping signs with slogans such as “humanity before profit”, the protesters gathered in the rain to block roads including those leading to Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in the city’s financial district on Friday.
The crowd, estimated by police at roughly 2,500 protesters, was met by armed police wearing helmets …
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May
31
2013
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — A seriously ill Salvadoran woman whose struggle to get a medical abortion drew international attention received permission on Thursday to end the troubled pregnancy with a Caesarean section.
El Salvador’s health minister on Thursday approved the C-section for the 22-year-old woman suffering from kidney failure and lupus, a day after the Supreme Court ruled that she could not have an abortion despite her lawyers’ appeal that the pregnancy was life-threatening.
Ultrasound …
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May
30
2013
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s coalition government was in disarray Thursday over efforts to crackdown on growing racist violence, as majority conservatives and their center-left partners clashed over the best way to tackle anti-immigrant violence.
The embarrassing rift in conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ government occurred amid pressure from the European Union and human rights groups to toughen anti-racism laws.
Greece, in its sixth year of recession — and with the highest number of immigrants entering the …
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