When the U.S. Supreme Court meets Monday to decide Troy Anthony Davis’ fate, its nine justices face a fairly straightforward question: Is there sufficient doubt about Davis’ guilt to warrant further scrutiny of his case?
Davis needs four justices to vote “yes.” Otherwise, his execution, halted by the high court less than two hours before it was to be carried out Tuesday evening, will be rescheduled. The court is expected to announce its decision by Oct. 6.
The high court’s granting the stay at such a late hour, while not unprecedented, indicates the case has the justices’ interest, court watchers said.
“The court can grant a stay and then refuse to hear a case, but they don’t issue the stay lightly,” said Thomas Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who specializes in arguing cases before the high court. “They are thinking about it hard.”
The stay infuriated the family of slain Savannah Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail. They had traveled Tuesday to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson to witness the execution. But it sent Davis’ family and supporters, who arrived at the prison in a church bus to stage a protest, into a jubilant frenzy.
Davis sits on death row for the Aug. 19, 1989, murder of MacPhail, a 27-year-old officer shot dead after he responded to the wails of a homeless man being pistol whipped in a Burger King parking lot. The former Army Ranger and father of two, working off-duty as a security guard, did not have time to draw his gun before being shot three times.
Davis was convicted with scant physical evidence: no DNA, no fingerprints, no murder weapon.
Since the 1991 trial, seven of nine key witnesses who testified against Davis, 39, have recanted their testimony. These include trial witnesses who testified they saw what happened, as well as witnesses who testified Davis told them he killed MacPhail. More witnesses have come forw
Sunday, October 5, 2008
U.S. Supreme Court Decision on Hearing for Troy Davis Scheduled for Today
The Noose Tightens
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Saturday, September 13, 2008
Marijuana Ingredient May Fight Bacteria
Researchers in Italy and Britain have found that the main active ingredient in marijuana — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — and related compounds show promise as antibacterial agents, particularly against microbial strains that are already resistant to several classes of drugs.
It has been known for decades that Cannabis sativa has antibacterial properties. Experiments in the 1950s tested various marijuana preparations against skin and other infections, but researchers at the time had little understanding of marijuana’s chemical makeup.
The current research, by Giovanni Appendino of the University of the Eastern Piedmont and colleagues and published in The Journal of Natural Products, looked at the antibacterial activity of the five most common cannabinoids. All were effective against several common multiresistant bacterial strains, although, perhaps understandably, the researchers suggested that the nonpsychotropic cannabinoids might prove more promising for eventual use.
The researchers say they do not know how the cannabinoids work or whether they would be effective, as systemic antibiotics would require much more research and trials. But the compounds may prove useful sooner as a topical agent against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, to prevent the microbes from colonizing on the skin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/science/09obdrug.html?_r=2&ref=science&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Thursday, September 4, 2008
What does a police state look like?
What does a police state look like? That is a good question. Maybe it looks something like this. Here is a photo of a small group of people trying to hold a demonstration in Denver at the Democratic Party convention. Notice the police overkill.But at least there is still freedom of the press! Right? Apparently [...]
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US: Halliburton Ex-OfficialPleads Guilty in Bribe Case
In a wide-ranging foreign-corruption investigation, fired former Halliburton Co. executive Albert J. "Jack" Stanley pleaded guilty to orchestrating more than $180 million in bribes to senior Nigerian government officials. The bribes were used to win a contract to build a liquefied-natural-gas plant in Nigeria.
Under a plea agreement entered Wednesday in a Houston federal court, Mr. Stanley faces seven years in prison and a $10.8 million restitution payment. His lawyer, Lee Kaplan, said, "We're hopeful the government finds his cooperation merits" a reduction in his prison sentence.
Mr. Stanley's agreement to cooperate could breathe new life into the five-year federal investigation, and additional charges of executives are possible. Various current and former executives of KBR, once a unit of Halliburton but now an independent company, have been subpoenaed, as have other companies involved in the construction.
The guilty plea exposes the corruption that sometimes goes hand in hand with enormous energy investments in Africa and other parts of the world. As energy companies search the world for oil and gas and related projects, they sometimes encounter foreign government officials whose approval is needed for investments but who seek bribes. Bribing such officials subjects companies and executives to possible prosecution under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
According to the plea, government prosecutors said bribes began in 1995, while Mr. Stanley worked for M.W. Kellogg, then part of a company called Dresser Industries Inc. Halliburton acquired Dresser in 1998 and merged M.W. Kellogg into an engineering and construction unit of Halliburton called Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR.
Several of the bribes Mr. Stanley has said were paid occurred after that acquisition, during the time when Vice President Dick Cheney led Halliburton, and they continued after Mr. Cheney left. Though there was no evidence Mr. Cheney knew of the bribes, the future vice president promoted Mr. Stanley to run KBR in 1998. Mr. Stanley's guilty plea said the bribes continued until 2004, the year Halliburton fired him. Mr. Cheney's tenure as Halliburton chief executive ended in 2000.
The guilty plea thus could renew attention to Mr. Cheney's past ties to Halliburton. The oil-service company was the focus of intense scrutiny in Washington starting in late 2003 when evidence emerged of extensive overcharging for work in provisioning the U.S. war effort in Iraq. Pentagon auditors later found dozens of examples of shoddy billing and inadequate services, including evidence that a KBR subcontractor was supplying fuel to the Iraqi market at highly inflated prices.
Mr. Cheney was traveling in the Caucasus region Wednesday and couldn't be reached. His office in Washington said it wouldn't comment on "pending litigation."
Halliburton did not comment on the guilty plea, but it has said in financial filings that it has produced documents to investigators and made employees available for interviews. A spokeswoman for KBR Inc., which Halliburton spun off last year, said it hadn't reviewed the plea and couldn't comment, but that the company "does not in any way condone or tolerate illegal or unethical behavior."
Halliburton, despite no longer owning KBR, still faces investigations, including a federal criminal investigation and a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, governments in Switzerland, the U.K. and elsewhere are looking into the matter.
According to Mr. Stanley's plea, a construction consortium that included Kellogg and later KBR paid a combined $182 million, through two agents, to bribe Nigerian officials in a scheme to win a series of contracts. The work involved building a $6 billion facility to cool natural gas until it turns into a liquid and can be transported on thermoslike tankers. The facility was built on Bonny Island in the Nigerian River delta.
Mr. Stanley, 65 years old, said he and others met with Nigerian officials to ask how the illegal payment should be handled.
Mr. Stanley also pleaded guilty to taking $10.8 million in kickbacks from an agent of the construction firms. In 2004, Halliburton dismissed Mr. Stanley for taking "improper" payments from a British lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler. Mr. Tesler, who has denied wrongdoing in the past, is suspected by investigators of helping funnel money from the consortium to Nigerian officials.
The liquefied-natural-gas trade was beginning to boom in 1995, when what was then M.W. Kellogg first submitted a bid, along with three other companies. Mr. Stanley was Kellogg's representative on the consortium's steering committee and helped hire agents who would later bribe Nigerian officials to win engineering and construction contracts.
According to the federal filing in the case, the bribery scheme moved money through a series of banks, in Amsterdam, New York City, Japan and Switzerland, before it was paid to senior Nigerian government officials and a Nigerian political party. Mr. Tesler operated out of an office in a rundown north London immigrant neighborhood.
Allegations that bribes had been paid first surfaced in an unrelated case in France. A French magistrate began looking into the matter in October 2003, uncovering shell corporations in Gibraltar and bank accounts in Switzerland. U.S. investigators joined the hunt in January 2004, according to Halliburton SEC filings.
Over the years, the investigation has grown in scope. According to Halliburton's financial filings, the SEC has issued subpoenas looking into multiple construction projects initiated over the past two decades, both inside and outside Nigeria. The plea agreement Wednesday was the first time any executive had pleaded guilty in this investigation.
In the earlier focus on Halliburton over its supply work in Iraq, Democratic lawmakers accused Mr. Cheney of having helped steer work to Halliburton, and held hearings on the subject. The matter became an issue in the 2004 presidential election, during which Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry accused the Bush administration of being soft on Halliburton. The Stanley case, especially if it balloons to include still-more-senior Halliburton officials, could supply fresh ammunition for Democrats to attack the Bush administration and the Republican Party as being overly cozy with Big Oil.
--Neil King Jr. contributed to this article.
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Zodiac Killer's Identity And Weapon Uncovered?
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) " The Zodiac Killer attacked at least eight people, terrorizing the Bay Area and taunting police in the 60's and 70's. Thursday, the FBI confirmed to CBS13 they are now running laboratory tests on some items that may link a suspect to the killer. The evidence was given to the FBI by a Pollock Pines man who also claims he recently found the disguise worn by the Zodiac Killer during one of his attacks."The identity of the Zodiac Killer is Jack Tarrance. He's my stepfather," says Dennis Kaufman. Eight years of Dennis Kaufman's life has been consumed with attempting to prove the only father he's known since he was five-years-old is none other than the Zodiac Killer. "This a handwriting comparison I did," says Kaufman, showing handwriting samples claiming to be his father's and the Zodiac Killer's, which bear a striking similarity. Similarities Dennis says are no coincidence.Photo of Jack Tarrance (left) and a composite of the Zodiac Killer.
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Comcast to Limit Customers' Broadband Usage
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers' Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers. Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies."If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use," according to the company's updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use. Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.Comcast said up to 99 percent of its 14 million Internet subscribers would not be affected by the new threshold, which it said would help ensure the quality of Internet delivery is not degraded by a minority of heavy users. U.S. Internet subscribers are typically not aware of any limit on their Internet usage once they sign up to pay a flat monthly fee to their service provider.
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