Eideard

Turkey and Armenia have agreed on a framework to normalize ties after nearly a century of hostility, a move that could stabilize the volatile, oil-rich Caucasus but may affect European energy security plans.

The announcement, which was welcomed by Washington, came on the eve of the April 24 commemoration of mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. The two countries have been engaged since last year in high-level talks to restore ties, which could include reopening a border closed in 1993…

The stand-off has isolated impoverished Armenia and obstructed Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union…

Turkey and Armenia did not say how they would tackle the genocide dispute, which has traumatized ties. Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died as a result of genocide.

Turkish officials would not discuss the issue further.

Americans generally are quick to demand that other nations “learn how to forget the past”. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else – especially over the impenetrable wall of hate that winds through the Balkans. I smirk over the same people who switch their brains off regarding the genocide our nation committed against Native Americans. Or what the real history of the Monroe Doctrine did to the fabric of life and death throughout Latin America.

It’s always easiest for the oppressor to “forgive and forget”.

A Queens couple made crime a family affair when they brought two small children along while burglarizing homes.

Alleged getaway driver Erika Santa, 23, had a loaded gun and her daughters, Genesis Jiminez, 4, and Brianna Lantigua, 5 months, in the car when cops caught her Monday. Santa waited in a van with the kids as Brianna’s father, Hugo Lantigua, 22, and pal Pedro Camillo, 19, broke into a home on 83rd St. Monday, police said.

Two cops, on the lookout for a blond getaway driver in a van following a rash of break-ins, spotted Santa and moved in. Sgt. Joseph Tarsio and Officer Brett Huzar nabbed Lantigua and Camillo as they carried out jewelry, cash and electronics, police said.

Police found Brianna buckled in a car seat and Genesis bouncing free in the back. The gun was in a dashboard compartment.

Genesis told cops “Mommy and Mommy’s boyfriend come home with money every day,” a police source said.

Creeps!

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She said she was a scapegoat. She said she was just following orders. She said she was demoted unfairly.

Now, retired Army Col. Janis Karpinski can say: I told you so.

Karpinski was one of two officers punished over the aggressive interrogations at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Pictures of detainees caused outrage around the world when they were leaked to the news media in May 2004. The photos showed naked prisoners stacked on top of each other or being threatened by dogs or hooded and wired up as if for electrocution.

Throughout the ordeal, Karpinski maintained that she and her troops were following interrogation guidelines approved by top brass. Today, Karpinski has found validation in a few Bush-era memos released last week by the Obama administration.

“The outrage was over the photographs, because the photographs were living color of what those top-secret memorandums authorized,” Karpinski said in an interview Wednesday. “So, it is unfair … the soldiers may have moved through [the military justice] system, but they never had a fair court-martial. Not any one of them, because they were condemned as one of the ‘bad apples…’ “

The memo, by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and then-Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury, allowed the use of such tactics as keeping a detainee naked and in some cases in a diaper, and putting detainees on a liquid diet. One memo said aggressive techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and slapping did not violate laws against torture absent the intent to cause severe pain…

The guidance was delivered to Abu Ghraib by then-Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was summoned to Baghdad from Guantanamo to evaluate the prison system.

Accusations were never allowed to proceed above members of the military. The sacrosanct Bush Administration publicly washed their hands. Lying through their teeth.

Too bad the mainstream press was busy tidying up after the lack of oversight from Congress. Stopped asking questions after a few hearings, baseline trials – don’t offend the guys in power.

Braxton and friend

Call it the stimulus package from God.

Manhattan’s Riverside Church – one of the country’s most illustrious religious institutions – is paying its new senior pastor, the Rev. Brad Braxton, more than $600,000 in annual compensation.

That’s twice what Braxton’s predecessor, James Forbes, one of the country’s best-known preachers, was getting after running Riverside for more than 18 years. It amounts to almost 10 times what William Sloane Coffin, the legendary anti-Vietnam War clergyman, was paid in his last year as senior minister at Riverside in 1987.

Braxton was selected in a vote of the congregation last fall and is to be officially installed Sunday.

A group of church dissidents claims the members were never told about the lavish package. Those dissidents filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court last week to stop Braxton’s installation, revealing a growing divide among the church’s 1,500 members.

The Wall Street-like package, the dissidents say, is outrageous for a man of the cloth – especially when you consider Riverside’s long history of advocating social justice.

I guess it doesn’t matter much which hustle you choose, nowadays? They all pay better than working for a living.

This particular clownsuit caricature upsets me more than country club doctors. It’s just about a complete denial of the lifestyle premise Christian preachers swear by. Right?

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Firms getting U.S federal bailout cash spent millions on lobbying so far this year, including efforts to block pay limits and tougher oversight, filings show.

The leaders were General Motors Corp., which spent nearly $1 million a month for three months on lobbying, and Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, which combined spent more than $2.5 million.

In all, major bailout recipients spent more than $10 million during the first three months of 2009 and more than $22 million in the six months since the Troubled Assets Relief Program began, Senate disclosure records indicated.

The disclosures come as Congress and the public show anger over bailout recipients’ complaints over caps on company bonuses and pay, and some strings tied to the government loans, the Washington Post said.

Advocacy groups and some lawmakers say firms should not be lobbying against stricter oversight while receiving billions from TARP.

What I always want to know is – who are the politicians welcoming these creeps with open arms? I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill informational tasks, the sense of what lobbying originally was about. I mean the long-lost bubba who brings the giftmas presents.

A man accused of performing an exorcism on a 14-year-old autistic boy has been found guilty of battery and criminal confinement by a jury in Indiana.

Eddie Uyesugi, 24, now faces between two and eight years in jail on each felony count. Prosecutors say the 14-year-old boy suffered bruises, abrasions and two black eyes as a result of a ceremony Uyesugi conducted to rid the boy of demons.

Deputy prosecutor Darcie Winkle of Monroe County told jurors Uyesugi beat the boy and restrained him against his will for hours during an exorcism that took place in May of 2007.

Uyesugi defense attorney Matt Blanton said the boy’s grandmother sanctioned the exorcism and instructed Uyesugi to help her get the demons out of her grandson.

A criminal idiot hired by a superstitious fool.

Gordon Brown embarrassed again by arrests based on insinuation
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This whole exercise has been a farce worthy of Mel Brooks. Gordon Brown’s flunkies should audition for “The History of the World, Part 3″ – presuming “Part 2″ is still dedicated to the Bush-Blair twins.

The government faced a barrage of criticism after police released without charge the remaining 11 suspects arrested a fortnight ago in the north-west of England over an alleged terror plot.

The last two men to be released joined nine others given their freedom last night and one freed on 11 April.

Opposition parties, human rights lawyers and Muslim groups accused the government of mistreating the suspects and botching the anti-terror operation…

Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights group Liberty, said: “In the vital task of policing open societies, it is inevitable that you arrest more people than you charge and that sometimes suspicion will never be converted into evidence. But national security deportation is an extremely shadowy process and we need assurances from ministers that these powers will only be used for public safety and not for political signalling.”

Gordon Brown had claimed the operation uncovered a “very big plot” against the UK.

We Posted about this when it got started by the Commissioner of Klutzy Car Exits and Silly Walks. Including Bob Quick’s resignation.

When push comes to shove, you can’t continue to abuse police powers if you turn up nothing more than people who read books the government doesn’t approve of – and make statements unacceptable at tea-party book signings.

Students collect brick from the rubble of their destroyed school in Mingora
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Nuclear-armed Pakistan is becoming a “mortal threat” to the world, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“Pakistan poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world,” Clinton said. “And I want to take this occasion … state unequivocally that not only do the Pakistani government officials, but the Pakistani people and the Pakistani diaspora…need to speak out forcefully against a policy that is ceding more and more territory to the insurgents…”

Taliban militants Tuesday took over the northwestern Pakistan district of Buner, just 60 miles from the capital of Islamabad. Militants were patrolling its streets with no signs of government law enforcement personnel, Pakistan’s English-language newspaper Dawn reported. The move came after the Taliban last week imposed Shariah, or strict Islamic law, in the neighboring Swat Valley as part of a peace agreement with the government.

“(We) cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances now within hours of Islamabad that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state,” Clinton said.

Nice to hear Hillary voice what some of us in the blogosphere have been saying for a while. Though, often, we have couched our criticism of the Zardari regime in terms as polite as possible – the politics of that government become no more palatable, understandable, except as a reflection of fear and inability to act.

The weak link in all struggles against Islamist terrorism has been and remains Pakistan. It’s time for the government of Pakistan to reach out to allies, foreign and domestic, to counter the Taliban threat.

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The U.S. and Mexico are drawing up plans to dispatch up to 300 former U.S. law enforcement officials to Mexico later this year to train thousands of Mexican police investigators in their escalating fight against drug cartels, federal officials said.

Mexican government officials would select about 9,000 Mexican police for training at undisclosed locations in Mexico, one U.S. diplomatic and one federal law enforcement official said. The goal would be to quell rampant corruption and violence, much of it fueled by warring drug organizations.

The officials have been briefed on the proposal but asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to comment. They said the plan would create a law enforcement academy where Mexican investigators could be trained in narcotics and weapons trafficking, money laundering, fingerprint examination and other disciplines key to their battle against the cartels and other criminal groups. The State Department would oversee the U.S. side of the program…

Scott Erskine, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, said recruiters for the mission in Mexico have approached his group about the availability of former agents to serve as trainers…

The training plan is the latest in a series of steps the U.S. is taking to try to contain the violence in Mexico, where 7,000 have died in the past 14 months.

Overdue.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A Congressional panel is expected to approve legislation…that would curb high credit card fees and penalties assessed by many banks that have benefited from the federal government’s financial bailout program.

The pro-consumer bill, which would mean sweeping changes for banks that issue cards, is an important test of the political will of Democrats who are pushing for U.S. financial regulation reform…

“It’s a new era in Washington,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat and chief sponsor of the House bill. “It’s taken three years of hard work, but I’m delighted that we’re on the brink of real protections for consumers.”

Her proposed legislation would halt credit cards from imposing arbitrary rate increases and penalties and certain billing practices on balances with different rates. It is expected to win approval by the committee, and later by the full House.

But it remains unclear whether Democrats in the Senate can muster the 60 votes needed in that chamber to advance controversial legislation amid stiff opposition from the banking industry. The Senate’s version of a credit card reform bill includes tougher language…

U.S. lawmakers have expressed anger that the same banks such as Bank of America, Citi and Chase with big credit card operations, charge excessive interest rates and fees while getting U.S. government bailout from the taxpayers who use these credit cards.

There was a time in this land when usury was illegal. States had laws generally prohibiting interest rates higher than 18%. Now, between payday loan sharks and the greediest banks on Earth, interest rates that blow through that old ceiling – are the rule.

Bank lobbyists infest the halls of Congress like never before – checking out who’s naughty or nice by their definitions. Keep an eye on the vote in Congress on this one – and you’ll see who is owned by Wall Street.