Here are several news bits to start your long weekend.
- Unmarked chopper patrols NYC
- Ten days?!
- McCain rejects pastor’s endorsement
- Group wants wifi banned
- Fingerprint registry
- Hillary is sorry and “apologizes”
Unmarked chopper patrols NY City from high above
| On a cloudless spring day, the NYPD helicopter soars over the city, its sights set on the Statue of Liberty.
A dramatic close-up of Lady Liberty’s frozen gaze fills one of three flat-screen computer monitors mounted on a console. Hundreds of sightseers below are oblivious to the fact that a helicopter is peering down on them from a mile and a half away. “They don’t even know we’re here,” said crew chief John Diaz, speaking into a headset over the din of the aircraft’s engine. The helicopter’s unmarked paint job belies what’s inside: an arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment powerful enough to read license plates—or scan pedestrians’ faces—from high above the nation’s largest metropolis. Police say the chopper’s sweeps of landmarks and other potential targets are invaluable in helping guard against another terrorist attack, providing a see-but-avoid-being-seen advantage against bad guys. […] Police insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear. |
So, “they” say that’s the only helicopter like it in the country. Oh?
| It was not clear when the children — now scattered in foster homes across the state — might be returned to their parents. The ruling gave a lower-court judge 10 days to release the youngsters from custody, but the state could appeal to the Texas Supreme Court and block that.
[…] Every child at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado was taken into custody more than six weeks ago after someone called a hot line claiming to be a pregnant, abused teenage wife. The girl has not been found and authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax. Child-protection officials argued that five girls at the ranch had become pregnant at 15 and 16 and that the sect pushed underage girls into marriage and sex with older men and groomed boys to enter into such unions when they grew up. But the appeals court said the state acted too hastily in sweeping up all the children and taking them away on an emergency basis without going to court first. […] The court said the state failed to show that any more than five of the teenage girls were being sexually abused, and offered no evidence of sexual or physical abuse against the other children. Half the youngsters taken from the ranch were 5 or younger. Only a few dozen are teenage girls. The court also said the state was wrong to consider the entire ranch as a single household and to seize all the children on the grounds that some parents in the home might be abusers. […] The decision technically applies to only 38 of the roughly 200 parents who challenged the seizure. But Balovich said she expected attorneys for all the other parents to seek to join the ruling. […] The custody case has been chaotic from the beginning. During the first round of hearings, held two weeks after the April 3 raid, hundreds of lawyers crammed into a courtroom and nearby auditorium, queuing up to voice objections or ask questions on behalf of the mothers who were there in their trademark prairie dresses and braided hair. CPS has struggled for weeks to establish the identities of the children and sort out their tangled family relationships. The youngsters are in foster homes all over the sprawling state, with some brothers or sisters separated by as much as 600 miles. |
That’s a neat picture.
McCain rejects pastor’s endorsement
| Republican John McCain rejected the months-old endorsement of an influential Texas televangelist after an audio recording surfaced in which the preacher said God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.
“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well,” the presidential candidate said in a statement issued Thursday. […] Hagee has referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “the great whore” and called it a “false cult system.” He also has linked Hitler to the Catholic church, suggesting it helped shape his anti-Semitism. And Hagee said Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for homosexual sin. |
Rejecting an endorsement sounds like a dumb concept to me. “I reject his kind words about me. I will not accept his endorsement of my candidacy.” Weird.
Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings
| A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they’re allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings. |
They’re also allergic to cell phone signals. Now that’s going to be a problem!
Fingerprint Registry in Housing Bill!!!
| Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and proposed in the name of national security have generated much debate. Recently, “Server in the Sky†— a proposed international database of the fingerprints of suspected criminals and terrorists to be shared among the U.S., U.K. and Canada — has ignited a firestorm of controversy. As have cavalier comments by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that fingerprints aren’t “personal data.â€
Yet earlier this week, a measure creating a federal fingerprint registry totally unrelated to national security passed a U.S. Senate committee almost without notice. The legislation would require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries — and not suspected of anything — to send their prints to the feds. The database and fingerprint mandates were tucked into housing and foreclosure assistance bills that on Tuesday passed the Senate Banking Committee by a vote of 19-2. |
Helicopters in the sky. Wireless signals in the sky. Servers in the sky. A court case up in the air. An endorsement blown up. Makes me want to ask, “What’s up?” The euro. The price of fuel. Gold. Danders.
Clinton Sorry For Remark About RFK Assassination
| Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday invoked the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in explaining her decision to remain in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination….
“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” […] But even her advisers did not try to defend the reference, and by 5 p.m. she had apologized. “I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.” |
That was an apology?! I expect better of my children. (And of me.)
Mark,
I think the idea of rejecting endorsements goes back to 1884, when James G. Blaine (“the man from Maine”) failed to distance himself from the Protestant minister who, at a campaign rally, referred to the Democrat Party as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Turned off the Catholics, you see. It was a factor in Blaine’s loss to Grover Cleveland.
Enjoy your blog greatly!