be just

Police in CA looking into possibility of hate crime in death of severely beaten Iraqi woman By Associated Press, Published: March 24 | Updated: Sunday, March 25, 6:54 PM EL CAJON, Calif. — A woman from Iraq who was found beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” has died, and police are investigating the possibility of a hate crime. Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Shaima Alawadi was taken off life support Saturday afternoon. “The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened,” said Mohebi, who met with family members. Alawadi, a 32-year-old mother of five, had been hospitalized since her 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the family’s El Cajon home in suburban San Diego on Wednesday, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said. “A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that,” Lt. Mark Coit said. “We don’t want t...

 Incarceration Nation   : Information Clearing House March 25, 2012 "TIME.com" --  Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain - with a rate among the highest - has 153. This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans int...

A veteran American journalist has been fired after referring to Israel's occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land as "brutal." Sunni Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR-FM in Baltimore, was dropped by the public radio station on Thursday after more than nine years on the job. He had been on probation following criticism of comments he made on Facebook about Israel's continued illegal occupation of Palestine. "I, for one, have had enough of this pandering before the Israeli regime," he wrote. "The war-mongering toward Iran has, once again, distracted the world from Israel's brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights." Khalid, who previously worked for National Public Radio, has also written for Time Magazine, The Washington Times, and USA Today. Israel maintains a siege of Gaza and a military occupation in the West Bank, with devastating consequences for the indigenous Palestinian population. Rights grou...

'Belambai' is Afghanistan's 'My Lai'  : Information Clearing House March 23, 2012 "Al Jazeera" - - San Pedro, CA - I immediately thought of the My Lai Massacre when I heard the news of a US Army sergeant who murdered at least 16 civilians, including nine children and three women, burning most of their bodies after murdering them, in their homes near Belambai in Kandahar, Afghanistan. As with My Lai - where 504 unarmed civilians were murdered on March 16, 1968 - it was a single bloody incident that seemed to epitomise the entire misbegotten war.  Whatever illusions or delusions might have been harboured early on, had by then either faded or been violently stripped away. The massacre of innocents came as no real surprise, however much some might still pretend to be shocked or surprised. Also like My Lai, Belambai is clearly a massacre after the war has already been lost, but before the generals and politicians are prepared to admit it. To be honest, b...

Government Now Allowed to Store Info on Innocent Americans -- News from Antiwar.com The U.S. intelligence community can now store information innocent Americans for up to five years under new Obama administration rules, expanding previous authority to hold details on individuals with no ties to terrorism.

Mali Coup Leader: President Has Been Arrested -- News from Antiwar.com The leader of the military coup in Mali said Friday that the president and other top government officials have been arrested and will soon be handed to the courts for trial, but refused to reveal their whereabouts. photo via BBC News “These people are safe and sound. We will not touch a hair on their heads. I will hand them over to the courts so that the Malian people know the truth,” Captain Amadou Sanogo said. Sanogo and the rebel troops he leads toppled the democratically elected government in Mali this week after tensions arose over how to fight the Tuareg insurgents in the north of the country. Mali’s army had grown upset with President Amadou Toumani Toure for not arming them sufficiently enough to quell the Tuareg fighters who had recently returned from fighting for Gadhafi’s side in Libya. Mali appears to be very unstable from this week’s events. Looting has spread throughout the country and Tuareg...

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia (left), the country’s top Islamic cleric, has declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” placing Christian places of worship throughout the Arabian Peninsula in potential jeopardy. Since Christianity is already forbidden in Saudi Arabia and no churches exist there, the implications of the cleric’s words were that the church ban should extend to other countries in the region, including Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. According to the Arabic Christian news site Linga.org, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah made the controversial statement during a meeting with a delegation from the Kuwait-based Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage, in response to a query about Sharia law concerning the construction of churches in Islamic countries. As reported by the Christian Post, the question was in reference “to a recent controversial statement by a Kuwaiti member of parliament who reportedly called f...