Monday, December 5, 2011

Australian teen freed from Bali drug detention (AP)

BALI, Indonesia ? A 14-year-old Australian boy has been released after serving two months in an Indonesian detention center for buying drugs while vacationing with his family on the resort island of Bali.

The teenager wore a mask to hide his face from photographers as he walked out of the immigration detention center on Sunday with his parents.

The boy, who cannot be named because of his age, has promised to enter a drug rehabilitation program after returning home to Morrisset Park, just north of Sydney.

He was arrested Oct. 4 and could have faced 12 years in detention under Indonesia's tough narcotics laws. The court decided last week to be lenient because he admitted having bought 0.13 ounces (3.6 grams) of marijuana and repeatedly expressed remorse.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111204/ap_on_re_as/as_indonesia_australia_drugs

ok state ok state kurt budke regis philbin regis and kelly reno fire regis philbin last show

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Sony Reader WiFi officially drops to $129.99

Love 'em or hate 'em, one thing's for sure -- e-readers just keep getting cheaper. The latest to see a dip in price is the Sony Reader WiFi, which debuted at $149.99 just a couple of months back, but has now received a permanent drop to $129.99. What's more, Sony is also running a trade-in program through the end of December that will give you an additional $50 off if you turn in any old e-reader. Not quite the instant discount that an ad-supported Kindle gives you, but certainly not a bad deal if you're looking to upgrade from an older model.

Sony Reader WiFi officially drops to $129.99 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceSony  | Email this | Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/02/sony-reader-wifi-officially-drops-to-129-99/

asu football arkansas lsu storage wars storage wars millionaire matchmaker millionaire matchmaker shawshank redemption

Citadel lawyer hoped to avoid criminal probe of abuse (Reuters)

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters)- Newly released documents tied to a 2007 internal probe of child sexual abuse allegations against a camp counselor at The Citadel show a school lawyer hoped a criminal investigation of the matter could be avoided.

Local and state police are investigating The Citadel -- South Carolina's military college -- for not reporting to authorities a 2007 allegation by a former summer camper that he was sexually abused by the counselor five years earlier, when he was 14.

The case emerged in public in the wake of the child abuse scandal at Penn State University involving a football coach. Another case of alleged sexual abuse by a coach has prompted an investigation at Syracuse University.

The man at the center of the allegations, former camp counselor Louis "Skip" ReVille, was arrested last month on separate charges of abusing five boys in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Police said he had admitted to those crimes, and more charges have since been filed.

A Citadel graduate, ReVille had worked as a counselor at the school's camp for three summers between 2001 and 2003. The Citadel closed its camp in 2006. ReVille had worked elsewhere as a school principal and sports coach.

The Citadel did not report the allegations to police, instead asking in-house counsel Mark Brandenburg to investigate, and took no further action.

"I found (the former camper) to be believable," Brandenburg wrote in an e-mail in August 2007, according to the documents released by The Citadel on Wednesday.

"His story remained the same as the one he related to me over to the phone some time ago," Brandenburg wrote.

"No 'formal' civil or criminal investigation has been initiated," he wrote in another email that month.

"Although the complainant could certainly file a report with the police, which would start a criminal investigation, or file a lawsuit in civil court, which would start a civil investigation, the complainant has done neither."

"Moreover, I am hopeful that, by conducting an investigation on behalf of the school, no 'formal' investigation -- civil or criminal -- will occur," Brandenburg wrote.

According to an interview transcript, which The Citadel released last month, the young man told Brandenburg he and other campers used to hang out in ReVille's room "and then one night, he pulled out a pornographic video and put it in and started masturbating".

"He encouraged everyone in the room to join in. And they did. And I guess he made an agreement with these kids that he would keep buying them Chinese food and pizza and all these good things and give them privileges if they continued to come to his room," the interview document said.

The emails show Brandenburg writing that the former camper's parents felt "the school can be part of the solution, even as it was part of the problem," and that the ex-camper expressed interest in attending The Citadel.

The documents state The Citadel wanted to reach a financial settlement with the family, and Brandenburg was authorized to offer them $20,000.

Julie Moore, a Charleston lawyer for the former camper, said last month that: "When (the family) went to The Citadel in 2007, they wanted to make sure that there were no other victims of Skip ReVille. They didn't want any other family to go through what they went through."

"Fortunately, since we now have an interview with (the former camper), we have an unequivocal trigger for the statute of limitations," Brandenburg wrote in a November 2007 email, going on to detail when the period for bringing formal charges might expire under the statute.

The documents show Brandenburg referring to the former camper's allegations as "a new round of sexual abuse at the summer camp" and linked the case with a previous child sexual assault case at The Citadel.

In 2006, the school paid a $3.8 million judgment in a civil suit filed by five former campers who said they were sexually assault by Marine officer and camp counselor Michael Arpaio. Arpaio was court-martialed for the crimes by the U.S. Marine Corps and served time in Charleston's Navy Brig.

"Skip (ReVille), as I have reported, denies all this," Brandenburg wrote in an e-mail. "However, Arpaio's initial denials were equally forceful, and, unfortunately, ultimately proved totally false."

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson has said he will review the sexual abuse scandal when police investigations finish.

Citadel President John W. Rosa apologized at a news conference last month.

"This should have been reported (to police)," he said. "We're profoundly sorry, sorry that we didn't pursue it more. We acted on what we thought was our best information ... We're all held accountable."

(Editing by Jerry Norton and Greg McCune)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111201/us_nm/us_crime_abuse_citadel

jason mayhem miller clemson honey badger brooke mueller herman cain bcs rankings big ten championship game

Saturday, December 3, 2011

UK expels Iran diplomats after embassy attack (Reuters)

TEHRAN (Reuters) ? Britain shut Iran's embassy in London and expelled all its staff on Wednesday, saying the storming of the British mission in Tehran could not have taken place without consent from Iranian authorities.

Foreign Secretary William Hague also said the British Embassy in Tehran had been closed and all staff evacuated following the attack on Tuesday by a crowd that ransacked offices and burned British flags in a protest over sanctions imposed by Britain on Tehran.

Iran warned that Britain's closure of the Iranian embassy in London would lead to further retaliation.

Tuesday's incident was the most violent so far as relations between the two countries steadily deteriorate due to Iran's wider dispute with the West over its nuclear program.

Analysts say it also appeared to reflect factionalism within Iran's ruling establishment, a unique hybrid of clerical and secular authority, and efforts by hardliners to undermine President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On top of its ban on British financial institutions dealing with Iran and its central bank last week, Britain has called for further measures and a diplomatic source said London would now support a ban on oil imports from the Islamic Republic.

Hague said Iranian ambassadors across the European Union had been summoned to receive strong protests over the incident. But Britain stopped short of severing ties with Iran completely.

"The Iranian charge (d'affaires) in London is being informed now that we require the immediate closure of the Iranian embassy in London and that all Iranian diplomatic staff must leave the United Kingdom within the next 48 hours," Hague told parliament.

"We have now closed the British embassy in Tehran. We have decided to evacuate all our staff and as of the last few minutes, the last of our UK-based staff have now left Iran."

France, Germany and the Netherlands said they were recalling their ambassadors for consultations. Germany said it would offer to take over consular duties on behalf of Britain in Tehran.

It was the worst crisis between Britain and Iran since full diplomatic relations were restored in 1999, 10 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa that author Salman Rushdie could be killed for writing "The Satanic Verses."

Hague said it was "fanciful" to think Iranian authorities could not protect the British embassy, or that the assault could have taken place without "some degree of regime consent."

"This does not amount to the severing of diplomatic relations in their entirety. It is action that reduces our relations with Iran to the lowest level consistent with the maintenance of diplomatic relations," he added.

Mindful of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, when radical students held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, Britain waited until all its two dozen diplomatic staff and dependents had left the country to announce its move.

Iran's state TV quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as calling London's closure of the Iranian embassy "hasty." "Naturally the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran would take further appropriate action regarding the issue," a news reporter said.

RIFTS IN IRAN

Negotiations on Iran's nuclear program were now "dead," said Ali Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St Andrews University in Scotland.

"What you are moving into is a period of containment and quarantine. I don't think we are into a military confrontation, but we are into a period of containment and they (the West) are going to try and tighten the noose."

The attack also exposes widening rifts within Iran's ruling elite. It appeared to be part of a move by the conservatives who dominate parliament to force Ahmadinejad to heed their demand to expel the British ambassador.

Ahmadinejad and his ministers have shown no willingness to compromise on their refusal to halt Iran's nuclear work but have sought to keep talks open to limit what sanctions are imposed.

The West believes the program is aimed at building a nuclear weapon, a charge Tehran strongly denies.

"This incident was planned by elements who are not opposed per se to negotiations but want to stop them merely because of their own petty political struggles," said Trita Parsi, a U.S.-based expert on Western-Iranian relations.

"The push to get the UK ambassador out came from parliament which is headed by Ali Larijani," Parsi said. "When Larijani was chief nuclear negotiator Ahmadinejad carried out a similar campaign against negotiations."

Ahmadinejad was once seen as a protege of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But he has faced challenges this year from hardliners who fear his faction threatens the role of the Islamic clergy in the political system that emerged after Iran's 1979 revolution: a parliamentary one, with a directly elected president overseen by a powerful cleric.

Khamenei's recent comment that the directly elected presidency could be replaced with one elected by parliament has been welcomed by those who want to clip Ahmadinejad's wings.

Conservative newspapers trumpeted the embassy seizure.

The daily Vatan-e Emrouz declared: "Fox's den seized," referring to Britain's nickname "the old fox" which reflects a widely-held view in Iran that London still wields great power behind the scenes in Iranian and international affairs.

While Iranian police at first did not stop the protesters storming the embassy gates, they later fired tear gas to disperse them and freed six Britons held by demonstrators.

Iran's Foreign Ministry expressed its regret for the "unacceptable behavior of few demonstrators."

The protesters hit back, saying they had been "seeking to answer to the plots and malevolence of this old fox" and the Foreign Ministry should not sacrifice "the goals of the nation for diplomatic and political relations."

"We expected the police to be on the side of the students instead of confronting them," said a statement by a group calling itself the Islamic community of Tehran universities.

Britain imposed sanctions on the Iran central bank last week after a report by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency suggested Iran may have worked on developing a nuclear arsenal.

Iran, the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, says it only wants nuclear technology to generate electricity.

Britain has not backed a ban on Iranian oil imports, but that could now change, the diplomatic source told Reuters, and London will likely back a call by France to do just that and impose "sanctions on a scale that would paralyze the regime."

The United States, which cut diplomatic relations with Iran after its embassy was stormed in 1979, has not bought Iranian oil since the 1990s, but has not taken any measures against Iran's central bank. That would cripple Iran's economy as it would not be able to process payments for its vital oil exports.

(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Ramin Mostafavi in Tehran, Adrian Croft and Tim Castle in London and Parisa Hafezi in Istanbul; Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111130/wl_nm/us_iran_britain_embassy

terrell owens terrell owens carrie ann inaba california earthquake california earthquake jenna lyons jenna lyons

Friday, December 2, 2011

Trita Parsi: Why the UK Embassy in Iran was attacked - the domestic angle

The disgraceful attack by hardline Basijis - the same group that beat and killed peaceful demonstrators in Iran in 2009 - against the British embassy in Tehran appears on the surface to be a response to Britain's role in imposing crippling sanctions on Iran. The US and the EU are preparing new sanctions on Iran, including potentially Central Bank and oil sanctions. And there has been an onslaught of computer viruses, assassinations of Iranian scientists, and several Iranian facilities have blown up in just a few weeks. Viewing the attack on the British embassy as a response to the increasing pressure Iran is faced with may be accurate. With Iran trying to prove to the West that it doesn't respond to pressure, Tehran might have calculated that upping the ante may make that message crystal clear.

But there is more to this picture.

While the actions of the Basij government militia takes place in a foreign policy context and has clear implications for Iran's relations with the West, there are also some significant domestic political roots to this crisis.

Consider the following. The Obama administration has been on the offensive in the past few weeks, ratcheting up pressure on Iran through sanctions and measures to isolate Iran. Yet, behind the scenes, conversations have been held with partners in the UN Security Council - not necessarily driven by the United States - to restart diplomacy, centered on the nuclear issue. Sometimes early in 2012, another meeting between the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran have been in the making.

The Ahmadinejad government has given some public indications that it would welcome such talks. In conversations with Russia, the Iranians have further signaled that it was ready for talks, whether based on some version of the Russian proposal for a step-by-step process or on Iran's offer to end enrichment at 20% in return for having the West sell it fuel rods for its Tehran Research Reactor. (Washington gave this reactor to Iran more than 40 years ago, and today it produces isotopes for approximately 850,000 Iranian cancer patients.)

But Ahmadinejad's domestic rivals, mainly conservatives around the current Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani, is in no mood to permit a new round of diplomacy where the Ahmadinejad government would lead the talks. As part of the political infighting between the conservatives themselves, fueled by the upcoming parliamentarian elections, the parliament has under Larijani's leadership gone to great lengths to paralyze the Ahmadinejad government and turn him into a lame duck.

One apparent avenue for the Larijani camp to undermine the prospects for talks was to target Britain's new ambassador to Iran, Dominick Chilcott. Ahmadinejad and his foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi had been pushing to get the British ambassador accredited. Larijani's parliament, however, began a campaign a few weeks ago to expel Ambassador Chilcott, reduce diplomatic representation to the level of charge d'affaires and to pare down economic relations. The measure was approved by the parliament this past Sunday, but needed Ahmadinejad's approval to take force.

Ahmadinejad and Salehi resisted, knowing very well that it would significantly diminish the prospects for a new round of talks. At that point, apparently, the hardliners around Larijani decided to unleash their mobs. Approximately 300 paramilitary Basijis staged a demonstration outside of the embassy and eventually broke into the premises, causing severe damage. All in front of the cameras of Iran's state TV, aired live. The Basijis demanded that the parliament's edict be implemented.

The divide is not necessarily over whether there should be talks with the P5+1 or not. Larijani's maneuvering is more about weakening Ahmadinejad and strengthening his own future position in Iran than to oppose diplomacy per se. And Ahmadinejad desire for diplomacy is not due to new-won moderation.

In fact, not long ago, the tables were turned. When Larijani was Iran's nuclear envoy and negotiated with the P5+1 over the nuclear issue, Ahmadinejad went to great lengths to sabotage his efforts. Often times, a few offensive statements by Ahmadinejad - whose talent for insulting and provoking Western audiences is well established - was enough to render progress in the talks impossible.

And it's not only the West that has been the target of Ahmadinejad's sharp tongue. In 2006, Ahmadinejad undermined Larijani's efforts to make diplomatic headway in Moscow by telling reporters that Moscow must dismantle its nuclear weapons. A year later, Larijani resigned his post as nuclear envoy in frustration and began his plans to treat Ahmadinejad with his own medicine.

The attack on the British embassy was not only illegal and disgraceful, it was also a sign of how statecraft in Iran has deteriorated over the past years as a result of internal bickering within the political elite. Key actors within the regime are willing to be take excessive risks on the international stage through reckless actions in order to score points in their petty domestic rivalries.

Increasingly, it seems as if there are no adults in the room when Tehran makes its decisions.

?

Follow Trita Parsi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tparsi

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trita-parsi/why-the-uk-embassy-in-ira_b_1125027.html

keystone xl pipeline jack dempsey lake malawi hines ward warren jeffs james harrison james harrison