This really got my blood boiling the other night. How the bloody sin can RIM, with it's customer base, not have better HA/DR solutions in place? Grr. -Pk

Major Blackberry Outage

This is a follow up to a story that I'd posted a few days ago. The police officer was fired. :)

What was never mentioned in any of the articles was that the woman that was thrown to the ground during the arrest was holding another woman's baby at the time.

I've got witnesses reports here from the moms involved:
"One of the public school teachers that uses the park with us now, saw his knife on his belt and called the police saying that he had it out flashing it around their children, . . .A plain clothes investigator charged the shelter shouting at (another parent's) son to take his hands out of his pocket and then shouting at my son that he was talking to him, he never announced that he was an officer, where his badge and
gun were at on his hip no one could see at the time, when he reached out for my son, a mother stepped in and tried to keep him from grabbing him. He shoved her
backwards while she held another mother's baby. She shouted for someone to call the cops and he shouted he was the cops. He shoved my son to the ground and shouted for a uniformed officer who was catching up to him at this time to cuff her and arrest her. They walked **** to the police car and cuffed him and put him the car. She was already driven up to the police station and placed in a cell, all because she protected my son from a strange man that was being chased at a distance by uniformed officers. My son was arrested for carrying a deadly weapon/concealed weapon. She was charged with felony assault on an officer. One officer said he was about to draw his weapon, he had already unsnapped it and was pulling it out to draw and aim at my son, because he thought he was about to pull the knife on the plain clothes investigator. This same officer said no telling how many people could have gotten killed, in other words he was prepared to shoot towards the shelter with all the small children around. . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And from the other mom:

The plainclothes officer was incredibly belligerent and angry right
from the moment he rushed under the shelter. He could so easily have
stopped as soon as he came up to us, announced that he was a police officer and needed to talk to the boy with the knife, but he didn't do any of that.
Instead he shouted, shoved, verbally abused, intimidated. He acted so horrible it never occurred to me, or to any of us, that he was a police officer. He just seemed like a crazy man. He never announced who he was until he had shoved the woman holding the baby and then she asked the mother of the baby to call the police. Only then did he say he was an officer. I asked him how we were supposed to know that and he said he was wearing a gun and a badge and so it was obvious. The gun and the badge were on the side of him that was turned away from all of us, I think, so I don't know how we were supposed to see them. Also he was yelling so much we didn't think to look at... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Follow up - Police officer FIRED for excessive force

"While Sudbury Valley gives children plenty of freedom to play and develop as individuals, it also requires them to participate in the community through school meetings, in which everyone votes on all decisions made at the school. The weekly meeting, says graduate Anna Rossetti, shows that, “democracy can be painful. You’ve got to listen to a lot of different crap before you get to a consensus.” Students and staff sometimes spend hours hashing out every single issue.

Yet Rossetti acknowledges that the experience has often come in handy. “Participating in democracy at Sudbury Valley instills in you an incredible sense of empowerment,” says Rossetti, who now works at a Whole Foods Market in San Diego, California, while finishing her bachelor’s degree in social sciences. “That’s something I take with me all the time.”

Democratic Schools - What happens when kids have a say in their education

A little more insanity...

Homeschool group says police used excessive force

I had recalled hearing the testimony during the hearings that the pictures the media had got were the tip of the iceberg - torture lite, so to speak, and that the unreleased photos were much worse - that there was evidence of murder and sodomy that had happened at Abu Ghraib. I had heard that there were many other pictures and even movies on 2 CDs. I kept waiting for the story to break -surely as it was a public hearing the media heard it too and would be looking into that further - especially the part about rape and the murder.... the rape of an underage Iraqi male prisoner....but I never heard another thing about it....until...this. Gotta love the US MEDIA and controlled release news.

Murder at Abu Ghraib - Controlled Release News?

This is set to my favorite commercial - they Nextel guys dancing to "Push It."

Miss the Superbowl Commercials? Find them here

"The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory. Similar devices have recently been used to monitor youngsters in some parts of Japan.
But few American school districts have embraced such a monitoring system, and civil libertarians hope to keep it that way."

Parents protest school rfid Tags on their kids

I've been following this story closely. I was quite alarmed when Bill O'Reilly and several people that I know started calling for this guy to be tried for treason.

Also,his speech from today is played tonight on C-Span. They will probably replay it. Its quite and eye opener to listen to him, and to listen to the reports. I'm starting to think Bill O'Reilly has a mission to crucify him, and academic freedom with him, especially for liberals.

ACLU defends the right of Ward Churchill to Free Speech

One of the country's leading dissidents, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, gives a major new address on the Iraq war, the re-election of President Bush and imperialism. On Iraq's elections, Chomsky predicts what a Shiite-controlled Iraq may look like: "The first thing they'll do is reestablish relations with Iran...The next thing that might happen is that a Shiite-controlled, more or less democratic Iraq might stir up feelings in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, which happen to be right nearby and which happen to be where all the oil is. So you might find what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare-a Shiite region which controls most of the world's oil and is independent." [includes rush transcript - partial]

Noam Chomsky: U.S. Might Face 'Ultimate Nightmare' in Middle East Where Shiites Control Most of World's Oil

"Somebody go get DICK"

Spank BUSH - 'Spanking is an Act of Terror'