A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets.
The four girls were born at a US hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units.
Yay socialized medicine!
No asterisk.
In the Seattle Times’ local section today there is a story titled “Cemetery shooting leaves 1 dead, 1 hurt.” But really when you think about it, wouldn’t a cemetery shooting leave thousands dead, and maybe a few dozens alive?…
This is how I parse the English language.
Chip… Chip… Chip away at our rights, until none are left.
I have been consistently impressed with The Seattle Times’ investigative reporting series “Your Courts, Their Secrets.” In the series, they are opening up all sorts of Washington Court cases that were improperly (ie, illegally) sealed from the public record. What they have turned up ranges from simply disappointing tales on human nature to shocking scandals that have been meticulously covered up. The most recent article is much more the latter, accusing one of the more highly regarded school districts in the State of gross negligence over a sexually abusive elementary school teacher, who was allowed to continue teaching despite repeated warnings from many parents, students, and co-workers.
The fallout has been swift and immediate. The Northshore school district, where the incident happened, immediately responded, as did the Issaquah school district, where a key administrator accused of negligence in the article now works. The administrator also responded.
Isn’t it amazing how fast government employeez act when it is their own feet to the fire? On the other hand, when you need a field trip permission form, or permission to use the school for an educational purpose, it takes weeks if not months of forewarning to get approval. I know from firsthand experience having done such things as both a student and as a mentor for the Titan Robotics Club.
Keep up the good work, Seattle Times.
Victim fatally shoots downtown assailant
By Jonathan Martin
Seattle Times staff reporter
A bizarre case of what appeared to be justifiable homicide rattled the heart of Seattle’s swanky downtown shopping district late Saturday morning.
Seattle police are still piecing together what happened, but this much is known: A young man was killed on the crowded sidewalk outside Westlake Center, and the confessed shooter was allowed to walk out of a police station.
The case, according to police and witnesses, began at 11 a.m. Saturday with a 911 call.
Witnesses reported a man in a yellow shirt acting erratically, insulting and threatening passing pedestrians at Pike Street and Boren Avenue near the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, said Seattle police spokeswoman Deb Brown.
A half-hour later, a man matching the same description was reported near Westlake Center. At the same time, a second man, described by witnesses as balding and wearing a leather jacket, was walking through the nearby plaza after finishing his lunch.
Neither man’s identity was released by police on Saturday.
The man in the yellow shirt apparently focused in on the second man, saying, “I am going to kill you,” Brown said. He then began punching and kicking the second man until the man fell to the sidewalk.
“He was down there, minding his own business. There is nothing to think he was anything but a random target,” Brown said.
The victim happened to have a concealed-weapons permit, Brown said, and he was carrying a handgun. He pulled out the gun and fired once, hitting his attacker in the abdomen.
“It looked to me like he shot him in self-defense,” said Linda Vu, who was across the street from the shooting, handing out fliers for political activist Lyndon LaRouche. “It’s kind of crazy.”
No, “kind of crazy” is the LaRouche supporters. This event does not qualify.
The man in the yellow shirt died after being taken to Harborview Medical Center. The King County Medical Examiner was trying to determine his identity, a task complicated by the fact that the man carried no identification.
Several nearby Seattle police officers heard the gunshot. When they arrived at the shooting scene, the victim, sitting on a streetside planter full of purple pansies, handed the gun to them and said, “I am the one who did this,” according to Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel.
The man was arrested, but after questioning him and other witnesses, detectives determined they did not have probable cause to book him into the King County Jail. The man was released. Police said they were withholding his name as a crime victim — of the assault.
It will be up to the county prosecutor to determine whether the man will face charges. But Pugel said, “It could be considered justifiable homicide.”
“Could be?” What kind of question about the incident is there? Was he just supposed to take the beating and pretend it wasn’t happening? I think this is clearly justified. End of story.
The shooting stunned Jim and Edith Welsh, tourists from Australia who’d just left the Nordstrom store across the street when police arrived. Peering across the police tape draped across Pine Street, Welsh hugged his wife. “I think we’re going back to our hotel right now,” he said.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
Oh noes! Crime stopped in its tracks by an armed citizen? What could be more disturbing?!
Below I include the relevant portion of the Pope’s recent address
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on — perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara — by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between — as they were called — three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point — itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole — which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that sura 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: “For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Muslim R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
I have come to the conclusion that any large group of people that finds offense in these words is utterly moronic. I would be sorry for saying so, but every way I can parse it, there is no fight in these words. The Pope simply mentions a dialogue from ancient times where another person uttered one sound byte: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” which repeated oft enough and out of context has led vast swarms of people into frothing hysteria.
Certainly, there are Jews and Christains who react similarly when something that might reflect badly on their religion of choice comes up (Mel Gibson, anyone?), but in these cases they are not all unified in their idoicy (Michael Medved defended Gibson). Islam really very badly needs moderates to vocally oppose this lunacy if it wants to be taken seriously. Unless, of course, the oft-quoted quote is true, and that shocking truth is what has led to the current situation.