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Parents of murdered British students criticise Barack Obama (via telegraph.co.uk)

The parents of two British students murdered in Florida have criticised President Barack Obama for his lack of compassion over their son’s deaths.

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Shawn Tyson

Story via NYPOST.com

A good 20 minutes before the West Village Japanese restaurant Takashi opens its doors at 6 p.m. on a recent Monday, there is already a line of hungry customers forming out front.

Alex Raij, 43, is one such customer. “We’re super-excited,” says Raij, who had enlisted her mother to watch her two kids so that she and her husband, Eder Montero, 36, could dine out.

“We’ve been really keen to try it.”

What could have stoked such excitement in Raij — herself a busy chef at highly regarded tapas spots Txikito and El Quinto Pino?

Raw meat.

Takashi is one of a small but growing number of restaurants around the city catering to those who are rah-rah about consuming their animal flesh raw-raw.

The heart sashimi is a popular draw at Takashi in the West Village — but it’s not for the faint of (heh, heh) heart.

The first dish to come out is the yooke, ground chuck prepared like a Japanese version of steak tartare. Topped with a raw quail egg, it’s adorned with Japanese seaweed and an enormous shiso leaf.

It’s also by far the tamest uncooked dish at Takashi, which gets its meat from some of the better purveyors around, such as Dickson’s Farmstand and Pat LaFrieda.

There’s the heart sashimi — the organ thinly sliced and simply dressed with wasabi and soy. There’s the namagimo — slivers of liver with sesame oil and rock salt. And, perhaps wildest of all, there’s the nama-senmai, a white, chewy third stomach. (Cows have four stomachs — the third one is used to absorb nutrients.) Flash-boiled but essentially raw, it’s served with spicy miso sauce and scallions and somewhat resembles a bowl of discarded computer parts. “I like that snappiness,” says Raij of the stomach dish. But it’s not her favorite. That would have to be the niku-uni, beef tartare topped with sea urchin and wasabi. “That was delicious. It really contrasted [with seared beef] in temperature and flavor,” she says.

While New Yorkers have long embraced the concept of raw fish, our relationship with raw meat has been more complicated. “Raw meats or undercooked foods leave you at risk of infection [of parasites or a slew of other illnesses],” says Dr. Michael Mansour of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The health risks — including tapeworms — are not all that different than the ones you face eating sushi. “If you are a person who is elderly, pregnant or your immune system is compromised . . . you should think very carefully about exposing yourself to raw foods, whether sushi or raw meat,” he adds.

According to NYC’s Department of Health, restaurants must notify diners when food isn’t cooked to required temperatures — either verbally or by printing this on the menu. A diner may also request such a dish. Basically, it’s buyer beware — though the DOH says it will investigate complaints of people getting sick from eating raw food. But with so many New Yorkers obsessed with high-quality ingredients, meat so fresh it can be served raw is seen as a benchmark — not a danger.

“There’s no better way to sample quality than when all the other things are stripped away,” says “Bizarre Foods” TV host Andrew Zimmern. The appeal of eating raw is that one tastes the meat without the smoke or the char associated with the cooking process.

And then there’s the primal urge: “Since cavemen have been dragging a brontosaurus leg to the homestead [people enjoyed raw meat],” adds Zimmern.

At downtown’s Acme, you’ll find endive leaves stuffed with a mix of raw bison and sweet shrimp. At Manzo in Eataly, Piedmontese beef is hand-cut and ground to order. Hakata Tonton, just a couple of blocks from Takashi, offers veal liver sashimi on its menu, as does EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street. Last fall, Hecho en Dumbo in the East Village offered venison tartare on the chef’s menu. (It plans to bring it back next fall, too.)

“This is basically dzik,” says Danny Mena, chef of Hecho en Dumbo, referring to the Yucatan specialty. Mena puts his own spin on the dish by soaking cubes of raw venison in sour orange juice, radishes, red onion and cilantro.

And then there’s raw chicken, a dish not for the squeamish. “There are a lot of places in the city that serve raw chicken,” says Dave Pasternack, chef-owner of Esca in Hell’s Kitchen. But you might have to ask, with a nudge and a wink, to go off the menu.

For some, raw meat is uncontroversial. “It’s my soul food,” says Takashi’s Inoue, who grew up in Osaka. “That’s how we eat in my home in Japan. The meat is very, very fresh.”

At First Oasis, out in Bay Ridge, Said Albahri serves raw kebbeh — minced raw lamb mixed with cracked wheat, onions and spices.

“Raw meat is very popular in Syria,” says Albahri, who grew up in Damascus. His customers include plenty of Middle Easterners and locals — but also the epicurious from as far away as Queens.

Still, some dishes haven’t crossed the cultural divide. At the original branch of Eataly in Turin, Italy, you’ll find a raw sausage sandwich — an item you can’t get in NYC.

And despite the popularity of places like Takashi, it can still be a struggle to get diners to try their meat raw. Mena only serves venison tartare on his tasting menu, where there are no substitutions. “I would never put it on the regular menu,” he says. But one can’t argue with the reaction. “It was very positive,” says Mena. “The customers might not have ordered [it if it was served à la carte], but 99 percent of people would finish it.”

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/food/they_like_it_raw_U1hn0eFWD4rCY2KlDQdm6L#ixzz1qRClL3TG

Dumb bitch.

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Funny coincidence indeud….

Heather Smith

Billionaire investor George Soros lost a challenge to his 2002 insider-trading conviction, with the European Court of Human Rights’s Grand Chamber refusing to review whether France had violated his rights.

The court declined to hear Soros’s appeal it said in a statement today, without providing any reasoning. Soros, 81, was convicted by Paris courts in 2002 for using inside information about Societe Generale SA (GLE) in his trading. He argued that French market regulations weren’t clear enough to hold him responsible.

Read the rest here.

“U.S. Supreme Court justices hinted they might strike down President Barack Obama’s health-care law as the court’s Republican appointees suggested Congress went too far by requiring Americans to obtain insurance.

On the second of three days of arguments in the historic case, justices’ questions indicated they might split 5-to-4, with the court’s five Republican appointees banding together to topple the law.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said the measure is unlike others the court upheld previously because it tells individuals they “must act.” Kennedy, who most often occupies the court’s ideological middle ground, said, “That changes the relationship of the government to the individual in the very fundamental way.”

The law would extend coverage to 32 million people and revamp an industry that accounts for 18 percent of the U.S. economy. The court hasn’t overturned a measure with such sweeping impact since the 1930s, when it voided parts ofFranklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the package of economic programs enacted in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression.

The court probably would rule in late June, months before the November election. A ruling against the measure would give ammunition to Obama’s Republican challengers, who have said the law should be repealed….”

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via dailymail.co.uk 

It was the kind of crime that strikes terror into the hearts of  parents everywhere.

A bright young couple were carjacked after a Saturday night date and murdered in the most brutal way imaginable.

Christopher Newsom, 23, was tied up and raped, shot in the back of the head and then dragged to a railway track and set on fire.

His girlfriend, 21-year-old University of Tennessee student Channon Christian’s fate was even more horrific.

Her death came only after hours of torture, during which time she was raped and savaged with a broken chair leg.

She was beaten in the head and a household bleach was poured down her throat and over her bleeding and battered genital area in an attempt by her attackers to cover any evidence of rape – all while she was still alive.

Torture: Channon Christian was forced to watch the attackers rape and kill her boyfriend Christopher Newsom before she was murdered

Then she was ‘hog-tied’ with curtains and a strip of bedding and a plastic bag was wrapped over her face.

Her body was stashed inside five bigger rubbish liners and dumped in a bin, where, according to the autopsy report, she slowly suffocated to death.

On Monday, the alleged ringleader of the gang accused of the killings goes on trial in Knoxville, Tennessee.

One of the gang has already been convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But, even though the killings happened in January, 2007, they have attracted very little national and international coverage.

That’s because they do not fit into the conventional contours of an attack in America’s Deep South, where a shameful history of racial intolerance has meant assaults by whites on blacks have historically been regarded in the context of race.

In this case, the races were reversed: the victims were white and the four men and one woman charged in connection with the murders are black.

Ironically, the case has now generated more publicity surrounding the furore over whether or not political correctness was behind the US media’s decision to largely ignore the story than it did for the murders themselves.

Lemaricus Davidson, centre, goes on trial in Tennessee over the murders this week. Letalvis Cobbins, top right, has been jailed for life. Eric Boyd, Vanessa Coleman and George Thomas will be tried after Davidson

Life: Letalvis ‘Rome’ Cobbins was found guilty of multiple counts of first degree murder. He was also convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery

Defence lawyers were quick to say that some of the accused dated white women and even prosecutors denied any racial overtones.

‘There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,’ said John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney Randy Nichols.

‘It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive. We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialised with white people, dated white people.

‘So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there’s evidence to the contrary,’ he added.

But that hasn’t stopped conservative critics from blaming liberal bias in the US mainstream media for failing to cover the attacks.

Columnist and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin weighed in, saying: ‘This case – an attractive white couple murdered by five black thugs –doesn’t fit any political agenda.

‘It’s not a useful crime. Reverse the races and just imagine how the national media would cover the story of a young black couple murdered by five white assailants.’

Country music singer Charlie Daniels pointed out the media frenzy that came after a black woman accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of raping her.

The players were later cleared after their accuser changed her story.

But Daniels said on his website: ‘If this had been white on black crime, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their ilk would have descended on Knoxville like a swarm of angry bees.’

Victims: Channon christian, 21, and boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, were carjacked and murdered after a Saturday night date in Tennessee in 2007

Much of the criticism over the scant coverage of the murders has been on the internet through blogs and websites.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds said the American media has a ‘template’ for covering white-on-black crime but not the reverse.

‘I think it would have gotten a lot of national play faster if it had been a black couple kidnapped and killed by five white people,’ he told the local paper in Knoxville.

White supremacists have jumped onto the bandwagon, seeking to twist the facts for their own racist agenda.

They spread false details about the murders, claiming the victims were sexually dismembered and that Channon was sexually tortured for days, neither of which is true.

‘The DA’s office is outraged they have tried to abuse the victims by using the death of loved ones for racist purposes,’ John Gill said.

‘The things that have been seized on by these hate groups are things that never happened.’

‘There are people out there that just want to make something even worse than what it already is,’ Channon’s father, Gary Christian, said in a recent interview.

But Chris’s father, Hugh, told a local TV station: ‘Would they have done that to a black couple? I don’t think so.’

‘With all the things they did to them, what else could you call it but hate?’ his wife, Mary, said.

‘I think any kind of crime like that’s a hate crime. Was it racial? No, I don’t think so’, Mr Christian added.

Outrage: Campaigners believe the murders haven’t received extensive media coverage because of race issues

Knox County Sheriff Jimmy Jones said: ‘I don’t believe if they’d been Mexican, Chinese or Japanese it would have mattered. I believe these  people were evil.

‘I believe it was a plan. These two kids just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

According to court testimony, Chris, a talented carpenter and former high school baseball player, and college senior Channon had gone to a friend’s home after a date at a local restaurant when they were held up at gunpoint and carjacked on January 6, 2007.

They were forced to drive to an old clapboard house in one of Knoxville’s toughest neighbourhoods, where their captors, some of them ex-convicts, subjected them to the nightmare ordeal.

Wearing glasses and dressed smartly in trousers, a collared shirt and jumper, Lemaricus Davidson, 28, looked more like a college student than an accused killer during pre-trial hearings.

The seven women and five man jury includes just one black juror. If convicted, Davidson could face the death penalty.

In a separate trial last month, Davidson’s brother, Letalvis Cobbins, 27, was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of multiple counts of first degree murder. He was also convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery.

George Thomas, 27, and Cobbins’ former girlfriend, Vannessa Coleman, 21, will be tried after Davidson.

A fifth defendant, Eric Boyd, 37, is serving an 18-year prison sentence after being convicted of being an accessory to a fatal carjacking.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220695/Is-political-correctness-blame-lack-coverage-horrific-black-white-killings-Americas-Deep-South-Tennessee-Channon-Christian-Christopher-Newsom-carjack.html#ixzz1qKYKvvzB

Stocks opened higher Monday after their worst week this year.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 99 points at 13,179 in the first minutes of trading. The Standard & Poor’s 500 was up 11 at 1,408. The Nasdaq composite index was higher by 26 at 3,093.

Last week, the S&P lost half a percent and the Dow more than 1 percent in a break from a strong rally in stocks this year.

Traders were digesting remarks from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who said the U.S. job market remains weak despite three months of strong hiring and that Fed’s existing policies will help increase growth.

Bernanke told a conference in Arlington, Va., that more job gains will probably require more robust demand from Americans and businesses. His comments suggested the Fed is ready to keep short-term interest rates near zero.

All 10 industry groups in the S&P 500 opened higher. Health care companies and industrial and materials stocks led the way with gains of more than 1 percent apiece. Fewer than 20 stocks in the S&P 500 were lower in the early going.

Lions Gate Entertainment was among the early winners on Wall Street. The stock climbed more than 5 percent after its movie “The Hunger Games” made $155 million on its opening weekend.

European markets were mostly higher. The benchmark index in Germany added more than 1 percent, and stocks also climbed in France and Germany. The euro gained half a penny against the dollar.

Wall Street this week will closely watch consumer confidence numbers due to be released Tuesday, as well as the final March numbers for consumer sentiment on Friday.

Source

Read here:

Paul Ceglia’s claim on Facebook may finally face the music.

Citing a wealth of forensic evidence, Facebook on Monday filed a motion to dismiss what it labelled a “shakedown” lawsuit by Paul Ceglia, who sued the world’s biggest social network in June 2010 for breach of contract — claiming a document entitles him to ownership of 85 percent of the company.

“Today’s motion proves what Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have emphatically stated all along: this case is a fraud,” said Orin Snyder, partner with Gibson Dunn and the attorney for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

Along with the motion, Facebook filed what it described as a “treasure trove” of evidence attacking the authenticity of the contract and a series of emails between Zuckerberg and Ceglia.

“The motion … demonstrates that Ceglia has forged documents, destroyed evidence, and abused the judicial system in furtherance of his criminal scheme. Ceglia must be held accountable,” Snyder said.

Digital forensics experts with Stroz Friedberg hired by Facebook uncovered what they call the authentic contract between Ceglia’s company StreetFax and Zuckerberg on hard drives submitted by Ceglia as evidence. That contract dates to 2003 — before the creation of the social network.

What they mean to say is that bin Laden and his family were invited to receive asylum by Pakistan, and now the fire is too hot so Pakistan is going to pretend like they had no idea bin Laden and his kin were there, and prosecute all of them, including the women, who probably are so devoid of civil rights they have no idea what is even going on.

ISLAMABAD – A Pakistani court is set to charge five members of Usama bin Laden’s family with illegally entering and living in the country, their defense lawyer said Monday.

The Al Qaeda chief’s family has been in Pakistani detention since last May, when U.S. commandos raided the house where they were living in the northwest army town of Abbottabad and shot and killed bin Laden.

Pakistan was outraged by the raid because it was not informed beforehand. Officials have insisted they did not know the Al Qaeda chief was living there, and the U.S. has not found any evidence that they did.

A Pakistani court will charge three of bin Laden’s widows and two of his daughters on April 2 when the hearing against them resumes, said their lawyer, Mohammad Amir. The court gave the five women copies of the case and evidence against them on Monday, he said.

Pakistani legal experts have said the maximum punishment the women could receive is five years in jail.

Read here:

Twenty-five journalists with the Gannett media group in Wisconsin signed a petition calling for the recall of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, according to a Green Bay newspaper where some of those journalists work.

Kevin Corrado, publisher of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, disclosed the actions of Gannett Wisconsin Media employees in a recent column and said they are facing disciplinary action.

“It was wrong, and those who signed the petition were in breach of Gannett’s principles of ethical conduct,” Corrado wrote.

The state’s Gannett investigative team recently broke the story about how 29 circuit court judges had signed the very same recall petitions.

Corrado said nobody involved in that project, or in “our news or political coverage,” had signed the petitions. “Had they been directly involved, we would identify them,” Corrado wrote.

Still, he said the fact that any employees signed it — including seven at the Press-Gazette — is “disheartening.”

Corrado wrote that some of the journalists equated signing the petition to casting a vote in an election — something journalists routinely do.

But Corrado suggested that signing the petition got them “personally involved” in the issue.

Read here:

Top leaders at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, already under fire from lawmakers in the wake of the “Fast and Furious” debacle, also get harsh marks from the men and women who serve under them, according to an internal survey.

An ATF memo obtained by FoxNews.com reveals that rank-and-file workers at the beleaguered federal agency, where whistleblowers who first alerted lawmakers to the “gun-walking” scandal say they were threatened or even punished, don’t trust the agency’s leaders.

“A key area in which ATF fell short was leadership,” the e-mail from ATF Headquarters, describing the results of the internal survey, reads.

“Most troubling were responses to the question – ‘My senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity.’”

Just 44 percent of ATF employees said that their leaders maintained such standards last year, according to the Partnership for Public Service, the non-profit that administers the annual survey to government employees.

On “leadership effectiveness” in general, ATF scored a 40.5, placing the agency nearly last among government agencies, at 215th out of 228 agencies surveyed. That rating was the first since the “Fast and Furious” scandal broke, and it is down 10 percentage points from the year before.

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — Just hours after the United States warned that North Korea would achieve nothing with threats or provocations, Pyongyang moved a long-range rocket it plans to test fire to a launch pad Monday, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said.

A U.S. official said the United States also has seen signs the North Koreans are preparing to launch a long-range rocket.

The news broke at the start of a two-day nuclear summit in Seoul that is bringing together leaders from the United States, Russia, China and dozens of other nations to discuss how to deal with nuclear terrorism and how to secure the world’s nuclear material.

Overshadowing the summit’s message of international cooperation was an announcement by North Korea that it plans to carry out a rocket-powered satellite launch in mid-April.

South Korea has said it considers the satellite launch an attempt to develop a nuclear-armed missile, while U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday such a launch would bring repercussions.

“Here in Korea, I want to speak directly to the leadership in Pyongyang. The United States has no hostile intent toward your country,” Obama said during a speech to students at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

“But by now it should be clear, your provocations and pursuit of nuclear weapons have not achieved the security you seek. They have undermined it.”

WASHINGTON—By Saturday, a short queue had already formed on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court building, filled by people with hopes of snagging prime seats for what will likely be historic oral arguments debating the fate of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

Those few souls, who braved a weekend of rain for the hottest ticket in town, will be joined by thousands more over the next three days, as activists from far and wide descend on Washington, D.C.

Tea parties, unions, liberal advocacy organizations, religious groups and nonaligned curiosity seekers are arriving outside the court, with rallies planned in front of the steps and in the nearby parks surrounding the building. Groups are busing thousands into the city from around the country for the three-day marathon. Demonstrations, counter-rallies and prayer vigils will be held each day under the watchful eye of security personnel and the discerning observations of hundreds of reporters from news agencies that have dispatched entire teams to cover the hearings.

via hotair.com  Hat Tip @Woodshedder for the lead

A good catch by The Daily Caller’s Caroline May: As of this morning, two provocative web addresses — Socialists.com and Communists.com — redirect to the Barack Obama campaign website. Type “Socialists.com” into your browser and you’ll swiftly be greeted with an invitation to “like” Obamacare. (Yes, that is the current landing page for Obama’s campaign site — an invitation to express support for Obamacare!) May reports:

It is unknown who the responsible party is.

While it’s unclear if the campaign can come up with a solution for this, Twitter users have already begun to take notice.

“Someone is being cheeky: go to http://communists.com or http://socialists.com” tweeted @zaijian.

“So http://Socialists.com and http://Communists.com redirect to Obama’s website. Yeah, this is going to be a fun campaign,” added @DavidKenner.

The prankster behind this actually betrays uncommon insight into the conflict of visions that exists in this country. In one corner, free marketeers. In the other, collectivists and statists. Individuals range along the spectrum, but it doesn’t change the nature of the conflict, which was introduced in the twentieth century but, surprisingly, was still not settled by the outset of the twenty-first, despite the evidence of numerous failed centrally planned economies.

It serves no point to try to rename “socialism” or “communism” or to eliminate the words from our lexicon. The terms refer to theories of social and economic organization in the same way that “capitalism” does — and the theories continue to attract adherents to greater and lesser degrees. The president has openly stated his approval of wealth redistribution and has also displayed a marked tendency toward central planning, particularly in the area of energy policy. Why he should balk at being called either a “socialist” or a “communist” puzzles me. Why not attempt to defend his ideas instead of hiding behind conservative rhetoric as he pushes a progressive agenda? I’d never recoil from the label of “capitalist”even though “the 99 percent” thinks capitalism is evil. What does it matter to the president if half the country doesn’t like his ideas? Oh, right. That’s why it matters. He has an agenda to push, yes, but he has to win reelection to push it. That’s why this prank is so brilliant. I’d love to hear the president explain why he doesn’t want those links to redirect to his website. Or, better yet, I’d love to hear him explain why he does.

Expanding the definition of “cracker,” a t-shirt featuring the photo of the man who shot Trayvon Martin is now available for purchase.

As seen (above), the shirt has a picture of George Zimmerman and the words “Pussy Ass Cracker.” Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic, killed Martin, 17, last month while acting as a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida.

The shirt’s “pussy ass cracker” line is apparently a reference to lyrics from the rapper Plies’s song “100 Years,” which bemoans stiff sentences handed out by racist judges.

VIA THESMOKINGGUN.COM

Source

NEW DELHI — A Tibetan exile lit himself on fire and ran shouting through a demonstration in the Indian capital Monday, just ahead of a visit by China’s president and amid a series of self-immolations done inside Tibet to protest Beijing’s rule.

Indian police, who had already tightened security in New Delhi for President Hu Jintao’s visit, swept through the protest a few hours later, detaining scores of Tibetans.

The man apparently had doused himself with something highly flammable and was engulfed in flames when he ran past the podium where speakers were criticizing China and Hu’s visit.

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