The Guardian reports:

Dozens of Saudi men caught dancing and "behaving like women" at a party have been sentenced to a total of 14,200 lashes, after a trial held behind closed doors and without defence lawyers. The men were also given jail sentences of up to two years. They were arrested last month when the police in Jeddah raided a party which was described by a Saudi newspaper as a "gay wedding".

Human Rights Watch said it had established that 31 of the men received prison sentences of six months to one year, plus 200 lashes each. Four were jailed for two years with 2,000 lashes.

[Link via Raw Story.] Background on the police raid is here.

The New York Times reports that former President Bill Clinton had some adoring fans in Rome this week:

Along the streets, people starting yelling "Bill, Bill, Bill," and a few shouted "U.S.A.!" One shopkeeper raced out with a photograph of Mr. Clinton on a past visit.

There was certainly a lot of affection for Mr. Clinton, who consistently got better press here during his presidency than Mr. Bush does....On Thursday, by the time Mr. Clinton made it out of the back streets and into the open square, a mob of hundreds developed. Mr. Clinton's nervous Italian bodyguards put him in a Mercedes and sped him away.

Hope you weren't planning on flying in or out of Denver today. Not a chance.

Update: It's midnight and still snowing. The wind is still strong. But since it's wet, spring snow, the roads are fairly clear.

First Florida, now Texas. The faith-based prison concept is catching on. Is it only for Christians? I'm not buying this distinction by the corporation that will run the prison, Dallas-based Corrections Concepts, Inc.

Corrections Concept's mission statement says it will use Christian principles to help inmates prepare for the outside world and makes no mention of evangelization or Christianity.

I think the language is a ploy to ensure the plan passes First Amendment consitutional muster. It still sounds like a Christian prison to me.

In Texacution land, the legislature has defeated a bill to make life without the possibility of parole an option to the death penalty.

Legislation that would allow those convicted of capital murder to be sentenced to life in prison without parole recently failed to win a key procedural vote in the Texas Senate, largely because of opposition from prosecutors and pro-death penalty organizations who said it would result in fewer death sentences.

Although supported by a strong majority of the senators and the people of Texas, the bill needed a 2/3 majority in order to be debated. The Senate's failure to pass the bill means that Texas and New Mexico remain the only two death penalty states in the nation to not offer life without parole as an alternative sentencing option.

Here is more information about LWOP. Our prior post on the Texas bill is here.

Deciding that drug dogs were no longer having the desired effect, the New Milford School District near Cincinnati has paid a private investigator $60,000. to go undercover at a high school to buy drugs and bust students.

Sixteen students were arrested last Friday, accused of drug trafficking, and reaction has ranged from kudos for the district's "courage" to cries of "entrapment."

The PI had been undercover since August.

We often say the Patriot needs to be fixed, not extended. In an editorial today, the New York Times makes a further important point: Fixing the Patriot Act should be just the beginning, not the end. As Congress debates the various Patriot Act fixes in the coming weeks, it should not lose sight of the ball.

These hearings should look beyond the Patriot Act, to the larger picture of civil liberties and the war on terror. After Sept. 11, the government rounded up illegal immigrants, and put hundreds with no ties to terrorism behind bars for months, often in deplorable conditions. The Justice Department's own inspector general found that the government made "little attempt" to distinguish people with ties to terrorism from those without. In conducting this roundup, the Bush administration gave itself far more power than the Patriot Act does. Under the act, aliens are to be held no more than seven days before immigration or criminal charges are brought.

Once again, it appears Congress didn't do its homework. Buried in the recently passed Intelligence Reform Bill, is a provision that paves the way for the Government to ask for millions of international bank records.

The initiative, as conceived by a working group within the Treasury Department, would vastly expand the government's database of financial transactions by gaining access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks.

Government officials said in interviews that the effort, which grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes.

What is this provision?

The provision authorized the Treasury Department to pursue regulations requiring financial institutions to turn over "certain cross-border electronic transmittals of funds" that may be needed in combating money laundering and terrorist financing.

Today is the second anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Here are pictures of the tens of thousands of protesters who took to the streets, demanding the U.S. leave the country.

Chanting "No! No to terrorism!" and "No! No to America," thousands of supporters of a radical Shiite cleric who once led uprisings against U.S. troops called Saturday for American forces to withdraw from Iraq, staging a massive protest at the same square where - two years ago to the day - protesters pulled down a towering statue of ousted Saddam Hussein.

More on the protests here.

A murder conviction has been overturned by a California appeals court because the victim's family wore buttons with an image of the victim throughout the trial. The jury may have been swayed by the display.

This is an extraneous influence calculated to sway the emotions of the jury. It's justly prohibited by law. Blame this one on the trial judge and the prosecutors. The defense objected to the buttons during trial and the judge refused to tell the family to remove them. The prosecutors should have told the family this is inappropriate. They gambled that they'd get away with this display in this age of victims' rights and they lost.

Justice Kennedy is in the cross-hairs of the radical right.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

A few days ago we sang the praises of Eric Rudolf's defense lawyer, Judy Clarke. Today, the Associated Press has much more - a "one woman dream team." What a great and accurate description.

David I. Bruck, who helped Clarke defend Susan Smith, said she is intelligent and "tough as nails" in court, but also has a calming influence on clients.

"She's straightforward, she's direct, she's honest. That's essential in the process of convincing a client that he should spend the rest of his life in a steel cage," Bruck said.

A former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Clarke gained prominence with the Smith case, convincing jurors that Smith did not deserve to die for drowning her sons by strapping them in a car and driving it into a lake. She donated her $83,000 fee for the case to a group that defends the poor in capital cases.

Before an Alabama judge appointed her to represent Rudolph, Clarke was assisting with the defense of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only U.S. defendant charged in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

We call her "Saint Judy."