Author: Trent

TMZ, via WMFU’s Beware the Blog: Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Mel Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’…

Guardian: Meanwhile, the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation,…

From SF Chronicle: A jury convicted four leaders of a white-supremacist prison gang Friday on charges they used murder and intimidation to protect their drug-dealing operations behind bars. The trial is part of one of the largest federal capital cases, with more than a dozen people potentially facing the death penalty. More defendants face trials…

From the BBC: Television journalists were travelling with Russian forces who captured a group of rebel fighters sheltering in the village of Alkhan-Kala. Mr Yandiyev, dressed in camouflage, can be seen in the footage standing injured near a bus. He is questioned by a Russian general who eventually shouts: “Take him away, finish him off,…

From the New York Times: The crisis in Darfur, long neglected, finally burst into the world’s consciousness. Congo remains largely forgotten. It is hard to understand why. Four million people have died in Congo since 1998, half of them children under 5, according to the International Rescue Committee. Though the war in Congo officially ended…

From the Washington Post: The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials. On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III,…

NYT Magazine: The counterfeiting of American currency by North Korea might seem, to some, to be a minor provocation by that country’s standards. North Korea, after all, has exported missile technology in blatant disregard of international norms; engaged in a decades-long campaign of kidnapping citizens of other countries; abandoned pledges not to pursue nuclear weapons;…

From the BBC: One of the Islamist leaders, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, urged all gunmen not allied to the UIC to surrender their weapons. “Any attempt to fight the Islamic courts is pointless. We are committed to put Mogadishu under one leadership,” he said. “Any group that tries to fight the Islamic courts will be…