Mark Penn, the pollster and senior strategist of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, predicted Thursday that nearly a quarter of Republican women would defect from the GOP if the New York senator is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.
At a breakfast with political reporters, Penn said his internal polling shows Clinton would win over some 24 percent of Republican women in the 2008 general election because of the “emotional” appeal of electing the country’s first woman president.
Penn said the trend is as evident in the South, a region Democratic presidential candidates have had trouble winning in recent elections, as in all other regions of the country.
Penn said the trend indicates that Clinton would be a stronger Democratic presidential candidate in the South than either Al Gore was in 2000 or John Kerry was in 2004.
The Metropolitan Police commander who ordered the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes knew the Brazilian was not one of the wanted July 21 bombers some time before he was killed, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.
Surveillance officers following the 27-year-old formally identified him as not being Hussain Osman, who they were hunting over the failed suicide attempts on London’s transport network the day before.
Commander Cressida Dick, who oversaw Operation Theseus, ordered the surveillance Grey Team to stop Mr de Menezes and question him about the area in which he lived.
He had been spotted in Scotia Road in Tulse Hill, south London, which was linked to 28-year-old Osman after the terrorist’s gym card was found bearing the same address.
But despite being negatively identified “in minutes”, Mr de Menezes was followed from his home, onto a bus and into Stockwell Tube station where he was killed on July 22, 2005.
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Cdr Dick ordered a “hard stop” to be carried out by firearms officers after anti-terror and surveillance teams failed to stop him, the court heard.
Details of the identification came from a surveillance co-ordinator giving evidence during the health and safety trial against the Metropolitan Police.
The officer, known only as “Owen”, told the court: “There was a point when the senior management group knew that it wasn’t Nettletip (Osman’s codename). I believe that came across on the radio.
“I can’t say what the exact words were but there was a discussion about the situation on the bus and they wanted SO13 anti-terror police to stop the subject and establish intelligence about the residents and flats at Scotia Road.
“If he lived next to the subject he may have been able to tell us things of relevance. It later emerged that they (surveillance) had continued and Cressida Dick asked why the unidentified individual was still being followed if it was not Nettletip.”
Clare Montgomery, QC, prosecuting, asked: “Was he identified as positively not Nettletip?”
Owen replied: “Yes, the direction was for the surveillance teams to stop and for the anti-terror officers to gather the intelligence about the block of flats.
“After three or four minutes Cressida Dick and I were aware that the surveillance team had not pulled back and they were still following the male. Her belief was it definitely wasn’t the suspect.”
Owen said that at no time during the operation was Mr de Menezes, who came to Britain in 2002, “positively identified” as Osman.
A second surveillance officer, identified as “Pat”, told jurors how it had been difficult to communicate over the racket in the control room.
“People were shouting to make themselves heard,” he said. “I had difficulty getting people’s attention because I couldn’t leave my seat.”
He said there had been trouble with the radio link to the undercover and firearms teams: “There seemed to be problems with the system, but that is not uncommon.”
A composite photograph used on behalf of the Metropolitan Police to attempt to show the similarity between Jean Charles De Menezes and a failed suicide bomber was dishonestly manipulated to make the two men appear more alike, a court at the Old Bailey was told yesterday.
Prosecutors at the trial of the police force, which is accused of endangering the public during the botched operation that led to the death of the 27-year-old Brazilian, told jurors that they believed an image shown in court had been stretched or resized to create a misleading match between the two men.
The photograph consisted of half the face of Mr De Menezes and half the face of Hussain Osman, the bomber who attempted to blow up a train carriage at Shepherds Bush on 21 July 2005. By placing the two pictures side by side, lawyers for Scotland Yard had sought to show the difficulties that officers tracking Mr De Menezes would have faced in trying to differentiate between the men. But a forensic expert told the court that the picture of the Brazilian in the police composite appeared to have been brightened and the definition of some of his facial characteristics had been reduced.
Clare Montgomery QC, prosecuting, said that overall the image had been altered “by either stretching or resizing so the face ceases to have its correct proportions”. The court was then shown an alternative composite in which the two faces have distinctly different skin tones and their mouths and noses are not aligned, unlike the original produced for the police force. Both composites were based on a photograph of Mr De Menezes taken from his 2001 identity card and a picture of Osman taken by police when he was arrested in Rome.
Mr Justice Henriques, the trial judge, said: “A serious allegation has been made that a picture has been manipulated so as to mislead.” Under cross-examination, Mr George was asked whether there had been manipulation of the “primary features” of Mr De Menezes’s face. He replied: “I don’t believe there has been any. But making the image brighter has changed the image.”
The Yard is being prosecuted under health and safety legislation for alleged “fundamental” failures that led to Mr De Menezes being shot seven times in the head on board a London Underground train the day after the failed 21 July bombings. The force denies the charge that it put the public at undue risk of danger during the surveillance operation in which the Brazilian was mistaken for Osman.
Earlier, defence lawyers were challenged by the judge over a line of questioning about Mr De Menezes’s immigration status after a counterfeit stamp was found in his passport.
Mr Henriques asked Ronald Thwaites QC, representing the Yard: “He is a member of the public who is entitled to the protection of the Health and Safety at Work Act whatever his status, is he not?” The court also heard that Mr De Menezes’s permission to remain in the UK would have run out on 23 July, the day after he was killed.
The prosecution closed it case and the defence is expected to open its case today.
A West Scranton woman could face up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $300 for allegedly shouting profanities at an overflowing toilet while inside her Luzerne Street home.
Dawn Herb, whose potty mouth caught the attention of an off-duty police officer, was charged with disorderly conduct recently, prompting her to fire off a letter to the editor and vow to fight the charge.
“It doesn’t make any sense. I was in my house. It’s not like I was outside or drunk,” said Ms. Herb, who resides at 924 Luzerne St. along with her four young children. “A cop can charge you with disorderly conduct for disrespecting them?”
The obscenities hit the fan when she battled her overflowing toilet around 8 p.m. Thursday, she said.
Although Ms. Herb doesn’t recall exactly what she said, she admitted that she was frustrated and let more than a few choice words fly. Unfortunately, it was near an open bathroom window.
“The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling (for my daughter) to get the mop,” she said. “A guy is yelling, ‘Shut the f— up,’ and I yelled back, ‘Mind your own business.’ ”
Her next-door neighbor, Patrick Gilman, a city police officer who was off-duty at the time, apparently had enough of Ms. Herb’s foul mouth and asked her to keep it down, police said. When Ms. Herb didn’t stop, he called the police.
Patrolman Gerald Tallo responded and charged Ms. Herb with disorderly conduct.
The citation accuses the defendant of using obscene language or gestures “with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm or recklessly (creating) a risk …”
“There was no intent to do anything,” Ms. Herb said. “I just feel so violated and irritated … I don’t even have a criminal record.”
Efforts to reach Patrolmen Gilman and Tallo were unsuccessful.
Scranton Public Safety Director Ray Hayes said if anyone feels they were unjustly accused, they can address it before a judge.
“At the end of the day, the opinion that counts is of the magisterial judge,” he said. “It may be something open to interpretation. The officer has his own and this person had the opposite opinion.”
The use of obscene language or gestures is an offense under the state criminal code. But cursing at a police officer isn’t a punishable offense, said Mary Catherine Roper, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union based in Philadelphia.
“It cannot be the basis for a citation. You can’t prosecute somebody for swearing at a cop or a toilet,” she said. “We bring one of these cases a year and sue some police departments because they do not remember that they are not the language police.”
THE bodies of five newborn babies have been discovered in a plastic bag in a cellar in northern France, a judicial source said.
A 35-year-old woman, who admitted giving birth to the babies between 1999 and 2006, and her boyfriend were held for questioning.
The boyfriend found the bodies after smelling rotting flesh and alerted the police on Wednesday night.
It was not immediately known whether the boyfriend was the father of any of the babies.
One of the bodies had a plastic bag on its head, in a sign the infant may have been suffocated after its birth.
The case is the third of its kind to make headlines in France in a year.
In August, police discovered the bodies of three babies hidden in boxes in a house in eastern France.
The mother admitted she had tried to hide them, saying she kept them in various places, including a freezer, to avoid being discovered.
Both cases are reminiscent of the so-called “Seoul freezer babies” story, which made headlines in France last year.
Frenchwoman Veronique Courjault was taken into custody on suspicion of killing her two babies and storing their corpses in a freezer in the family’s apartment in Seoul, South Korea.
Police sources have said Courjault also admitted to killing a third child.
Courjault, who has two other children, explained her actions by saying the pregnancies were unwanted.
She could face life in prison if convicted of murdering her own children.
Bush is obviously hellbent on starting a nuclear WWIII, but by now I hope you the reader are savvy enough to understand that the Bush mafia family, Putin and Hu Jintao are all buddy-buddy business partners and that they are all in on this together. After all, they won’t suffer so much as a scratch when the nukes fly.
The same thing happened in WWII. All the major players were high masonic occultists (Stalin, Hitler, FDR, Churchill, Truman etc) and were simply acting out according to a script provided by the elite councils of “wise men” who rule the world behind the scenes. Since they have controlled the wealth of nations for centuries, the only thing they lack is centralized totalitarian domination of the entire world, its resources and its peoples. WWI and WWII were preliminary steps in that direction, serving as pretexts for the League of Nations and the UN.
Not only will WWIII pay off handsomely in terms of war-profiteering, it will provide them the final solution for an all-encompassing global government police state system, and as a side-benefit, they will get to exterminate untold millions, or even billions, of “useless eaters” in the process. So it looks like the perfect crime is in the making.
These Illuminati behind the scenes, pulling the levers of global politics, are extremely evil people. They are clever, cunning and psychopathic. They have absolutely no empathy or compassion for ordinary people because they see themselves as far superior to us and think that they can do whatever they want with us. In fact, most of us are seen as mere impediments to their incredibly diabolical plans.
Will enough people in this world wake up in time to thwart them? I sure hope so.
President George W Bush has raised the spectre of “World War Three” breaking out if Iran was allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Mr Bush was speaking hours after Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, proposed an end to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme at a meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Teheran.
Mr Bush said: “We’ve got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel.
“So I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
Mr Bush said he was not worried by growing Russian ties to Iran, which has been an American enemy since the 1979 Islamic revolution, though his tone betrayed unease about Mr Putin’s motives.
He said he was “looking forward to getting Mr Putin’s read-out from the meeting”, but trusted that Mr Putin still agreed it was a bad idea for Teheran to build the bomb.
“He (Putin) recognises it’s not in the world’s interests for Iran to have the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, and they have been very supportive in the United Nations,” Mr Bush added.
No further details were given on Mr Putin’s proposal, which was made during his talks with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday. The talks followed Mr Putin’s back-slapping welcome on Tuesday from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose opinions on Israel have deeply alarmed the West.
Iran insists it is only pursuing peaceful nuclear energy, but has twice ignored United Nations resolutions demanding it stop uranium enrichment, which could be used in making a nuclear bomb.
Feeling increasingly isolated and fearing an American attack, the Islamic republic received a major boost from the visit by Mr Putin, who said US military action against Iran would be wrong. At the same time, the Russian leader resisted Iranian pressure to set a firm starting date for the nuclear power plant that Russia is building at Bushehr.
Mr Bush’s remarks are likely to inflame a delicate situation, which has seen intense speculation about possible US air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets.
The Pentagon is known to have drawn up attack plans and Mr Bush’s close advisers are divided between those who think Teheran needs to be taught a lesson and those who think bombing raids would hand Mr Ahmadinejad a propaganda victory. Publicly, the president has repeatedly said that “all options are on the table” regarding Iran.
Critics will view Mr Bush’s choice of words, which were delivered off the cuff, as typically injudicious, reminiscent of his early description of the war on terror as a “crusade”.
“I am sure people around the world will be terrified by these comments,” said Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is clearly an apocalyptic streak in his rhetoric, but his historical understanding is very limited.
“Even if, God forbid, we went to war with Iran it wouldn’t be World War Three because Iran is not a major power. It would be more of a colonial style war.”
Earlier in the White House press conference, Mr Bush refused to answer repeated questions about an Israeli air strike inside Syria last month that US officials has said obliterated a nascent nuclear reactor built with North Korean assistance. “This is not my first rodeo,” the president said.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has angered America’s powerful gun lobby by backing legislation requiring semi-automatic handguns to mark bullets with serial numbers to help police identify casings found at crime scenes.
The former Hollywood action hero, who played trigger-happy characters in violent films such as The Terminator, approved the crime-fighting technology despite opposition from the National Rifle Association, which said it could be used to implicate the innocent.
The law, the first of its kind in the US, will require all semi-automatic guns made or sold in California to “microstamp” every bullet fired with the weapon’s make, model and serial number.
America’s most populous state, parts of which are plagued by gang violence and lead the nation in drive-by shootings, already has some of its toughest gun laws.
The Republican governor, who has broken with his party on issues such as gun control, the environment and stem cell research, has backed previous landmark measures such as a 2004 ban on a particular type of machine gun.
Gun makers and sellers have until 2010 to comply with the Crime Gun Identification Act. The measure was supported by the California Police Chiefs Association, which said it would help them trace the guns used in crimes and connect offences where the same weapon was used.
According to the Brady campaign against gun violence, no arrests are made in nearly half of killings in California because police lack evidence to identify suspects. The group claimed the law “set a new national standard”.
Opponents, however, argued that the technology was unreliable, and could be tampered with or used to mislead police. They suggested criminals could sprinkle bullets from another weapon at a crime scene.
The governor, who last week discussed issues including gangs and gun crime with the Tory leader David Cameron, also backed a law banning lead ammunition in certain areas of the state where lead bullets are believed to be poisoning endangered condors.
President George W Bush has raised the spectre of “World War Three” breaking out if Iran was allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Aftermath News 
