by TChris

Almost two decades after Philadelphia police decided it would be a good law enforcement tactic to drop a bomb on the headquarters of MOVE -- a plan that failed to consider the risk to neighboring homes that were set ablaze by the bombing -- a federal jury awarded $530,000 to each of 24 residents to compensate them for the economic and emotional harm caused by the City's failure to keep its repeated promises to repair their homes.

The award amounts to more than three times the $150,000 that Mayor Street wanted to pay the homeowners to move them permanently out of their homes in 2000.

by TChris

Despite its assurances that it hasn't misused the power granted by the Patriot Act, the Justice Department doesn't want the public -- or, so far, the Senate -- to know what it's been doing with that power.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who leads the Judiciary Committee, said he and others in the Senate sought details from senior intelligence officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation about their demands for records and their use of roving wiretaps, secret search warrants and other provisions in the law.

Specter was frustrated that the Justice Department didn't produce those details at a closed-door briefing yesterday.

"This closed-door briefing was for specifics," Mr. Specter said after emerging from the session on Tuesday. "They didn't have specifics."

Deputy Attorney General James Comey claims he takes Senator Specter's concerns "very seriously" and says the public will support renewal of all Patriot Act provisions once it understands how the department is using the law. Funny, then, that it hasn't complied with requests to show the Senate how indeed it is "using the law."

We haven't had one of these in a while and I'll be off at court and the jail today. The floor is your's.

In what may be a coming trend, two right wing organizations have broken ranks with Republicans and are urging the defeat of the nuclear option and retention of the filibuster. They are the Gun Owners of America and the National Right to Work Committee.

[Note: All sources listed below are available on Lexis.com.]

The Gun Owners of America, which has strong libertarian leanings, has broken ranks before. It opposed the Patriot Act, and in particular, sneak and peek searches. [The National Journal November 3, 2001]. In 1998, it opposed Sen. Jeff Sessions ill-conceived and Dickensian juvenile crime bill, S. 10, that was proposed in response to the Arkansas school shootings that year. [Legal Times, March 30, 1998]

The group was an invaluable ally of defense lawyers when we were fighting for reform of the civil asset forfeiture laws and when we battled Newt Gingrich's Contract on America, specifically, the provision that would have made a good-faith exception for warrantless searches and seizures. It co-signed a letter saying:

If you are a college student who downloaded music or movies this past year from 'IHub2', get ready for an unpleasant surprise - 405 lawsuits were filed yesterday. More are planned.

The suits are targeting users of IHub2, also called Internet 2. "a separate network used by universities and colleges for sharing research and other academic works."

For the uninitiated (and that included us):

Remember Patricia Tabram, the 66 year old British grandma who didn't go to jail for cooking casseroles with marijuana for her neighbores? The Guardian has an update:

She was rumbled, she says, by a police informer on her street and remains utterly unrepentant. "Cannabis lifts depression! Queen Victoria used it for her period pains!" Now she is hoping to tackle the secretary of state for Wales, Peter Hain, on the electoral battleground of his Neath constituency, on a platform denouncing most mainstream medicine. ... "Since I started medicating with cannabis I don't use my walking stick any more, I don't wear my neck collar, I don't wear my hearing aid."

In a new interview with CBS News, Italian journalist and former Iraq hostage Giuliana Sgrena says the U.S. lied about the circumstances of her car being fired upon by U.S. soldiers.

The interview will air on 60 Minutes II Wednesday night. CBS background is here.

A Vermont legislator has introduced a bill to lower the state's drinking age to 18. He says we're driving drinkers underground. 18 year olds can do everything else - go to war, sign contracts, marry, vote - so why not drink?

The drinking age was 18 in New York when I was a teenager - It got raised in every state to 21 when the feds decided they would withhold highway money from states that didn't have a 21 year old age limit and passed the Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984.

When I was with bloggers at the Democratic convention in Boston this summer, there was one of our group who only 20. It was ridiculous that we could all order drinks and he couldn't.

When was the last time you heard a kid turn down a drink saying not "I don't drink, thank you," but "I better not, I'm not 21 yet." In other words, a kid is going to drink at 18 if she wants to, regardless of whether the law says 18 or 21. The juvenile courts are jammed with "minor in possession" cases. If they weren't, they might have more time and funds to deal with the kids with more serious issues.

Wednesday at 1:00pm, ET, the winners of the National Magazine awards will be announced. You can follow live as the awards are announced here.

I'm rooting for Denver's 5280 which is up for two awards, both for articles written by Maximillian Potter. More details here. [Full Disclosure: I've been blogging daily for 5280 for several months now -- here's last week's group of posts.]

All of the finalists worth reading, I've tracked down the links for the ones most germane to TalkLeft.

The AP is reporting that despite some devastating testimony against U.N. Ambassador nominee John Bolton, it appears he will be confirmed.

Bolton appeared a step closer to confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations despite scathing testimony Tuesday by a former State Department intelligence chief that he was a "serial abuser" of analysts who disagreed with his hard-line views.

A committee vote to send President Bush's nomination of Bolton, who has frequently dismissed the United Nations as irrelevant and misguided, to the full Senate could come as early as Thursday, depending on whether his Democratic foes request a few days to review State Department documents they sought to have declassified.

One witness, Carl Ford, Jr. referred to Bolton as a ""kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy."

Three men have been indicted on terrorism charges related to alleged planned attacks on financial institutions. The indictment is new, but we've all heard the details before:

A four-count indictment unsealed Tuesday accuses Dhiran Barot, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Qaisar Shaffi of scouting the New York Stock Exchange and Citicorp Building in New York, the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J., and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the District of Columbia.

The men are now in custody in England. The U.S. says one, Barot, is a leading al Qaeda figure. Now, the familiar details:

Prosecutors say the men conducted surveillance on the buildings between August 2000 and April 2001, including video surveillance in Manhattan around April 2001. U.S. officials have previously described detailed surveillance photos and documents, which they believe came from Barot, that were found on a computer that was seized in Pakistan last summer.

The terror information is years old. Agonist has the details and discrepancies in reports on the seized computer. Last August, Debka was skeptical of the information.

CNN has more on today's indictment and the arrests in Britain last August and of the Pakistani with the computer last July.

Update: Three Cheers for New York Assemblypersons!

The New York State Assembly Codes Committee today defeated a bill to reinstate New York’s death penalty. The vote comes after five full days of public testimony that the death penalty is riddled with flaws and wastes millions of dollars. The Assembly’s report of the hearing was released last week, adding to a growing wave of voices questioning the death penalty across the country.

“New York is not alone. There is a growing consensus in this country
that as a matter of policy, the death penalty is an expensive failure,” said Shari Silberstein, Co-Director of the Quixote Center, a national faith-based organization working for a moratorium on executions while questions of fairness are studied and addressed.

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Original Post: 4/11/05