A North Carolina man with a bad back, a growth on his chest, and no job or money decided to swap his freedom for prison health care by robbing a bank. Richard James Verone, 59, walked into a bank, handed the teller a note demanding just $1—then sat down…
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Pflanzen vs Zombies Minispiele 19 Pogo Party (lost?) Rupees Light Show!!! Pokemon Leaf Green Playthrough Ep.3 || o P o G o Craven55 says: @BeckieDavies thats what I did to you too aww you shudda pogo `ed too, or punched em in the back of the head
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Unemployed and without health insurance, man in North Carolina has himself arrested in order to receive treatment It was not perhaps the most obvious way of getting a bad back, arthritis and a dodgy foot seen to. But if you’re unemployed in North Carolina with no health insurance, there is no obvious way. So on 9 June James Verone left his Gastonia home, took a ride to a bank and carried out a robbery. Well, sort of. What he did was hand the clerk a note that said: “This is a bank robbery, please only give me one dollar.” Then, as he later told the local NBC news station , he calmly sat in the corner of the bank having told the clerk: “I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police.” Before his peculiarly modest robbery, Verone, 59, sent a letter to the Gaston Gazette . “When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.” He invited the paper to send a reporter to interview him in Gaston county jail, where he is now in custody facing charges of stealing from a person (for just $1 the prosecutors didn’t think they could hold up a bank robbery charge). He told the paper he had lost his job after 17 years as a Coca-Cola delivery man, and with it his health insurance. He was in increasing pain from slipped discs, arthritic joints, a gammy foot and a growth on his chest. Since being in the jail he has attained his goal: he has been seen by nurses and an appointment with a doctor is booked. US healthcare North Carolina United States Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
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Boost and Verizon shouldn’t have all the fun, right? The latest kid to do a cannonball into the low-cost prepaid pool is wearing a blue-and-orange swimsuit, as AT&T will be ready to start up $50 unlimited GoPhone plans June 26th. The new prepaid selection sheds $10 off its previous limitless talk and text offering, while tossing in web access for Quick Messaging Phones. In order to be fully competitive in the pay-as-you-go realm, the aforementioned plan will allow the same texting privileges across our borders; you’ll be able to SMS or IM your buddies in Mexico, Canada, and 100 other countries. The unfortunate (albeit unsurprising) part is that heading the smartphone route will come at an additional monthly cost, ranging from $5 to $25. Even though it seems Big Blue is a little tardy for the party, a wireless giant is never late — it arrives exactly when it means to. Full press release after the break. Continue reading AT&T to offer $50 unlimited prepaid plan, ready to ‘GoPhone’ June 26th AT&T to offer $50 unlimited prepaid plan, ready to ‘GoPhone’ June 26th originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Human activity has degraded the world’s oceans with dizzying speed and a mass extinction of marine life only seen five times before in the planet’s history is likely if urgent action is not taken, a panel of marine experts warns. The International Program on the State of the Oceans panel,…
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Inquest hears of traumatic treatment meted out to killed Britons employed to protect computer programmer in Baghdad Three security guards kidnapped in Iraq were subject to mock executions, regularly beaten and kept chained and blindfolded for lengthy periods before being shot dead by their captors, an inquest heard on Tuesday. Jason Creswell, 39, Jason Swindlehurst, 38, and Alec MacLachlan, 30, were protecting computer programmer Peter Moore when they were seized in May 2007. The men, who were employed as security guards by the global firm GardaWorld , were kidnapped when a gang of armed men posing as police officers stormed the Iraqi finance ministry in Baghdad. All three were eventually executed while Moore was released in December 2009 after two years and seven months in captivity, the inquest at Trowbridge, Wiltshire, was told. A fourth security guard who was snatched with them, Alan McMenemy, 34, has never been found and is presumed dead. Chief inspector Mark Moles, of the SO15 counter-terrorism unit at Scotland Yard, went through a statement given by Moore detailing the mistreatment they suffered. He said: “They were all subjected to mock executions. This saw them placed on their knees, blindfolded, a gun pointed to their heads and a different gun firing off elsewhere in the room. This caused immense trauma. “They were always chained by their feet to a rail or bar and blindfolded for long periods.” The five Britons were seized by “between 50 and 100 men”, the inquest was told. Moore, 36, of Lincoln, was working in the building for American firm BearingPoint, teaching Iraqi officials how to use a new IT system when the armed men entered the building. Moles said the security guards would not have been aware of the ambush as officials in police uniform entered constantly. He said: “All were patrolling different parts of the building. They would have had no cause to have suspicion as police and military entered the building all the time. It wouldn’t have been until the very last moments they would have pulled their weapons in defence. “The attack gave them no chance to act, no chance to challenge, no chance to take any action to prevent their kidnap.” The five men were bundled into two vehicles. Once driven away, they were stripped to their underwear and all personal effects were thrown out of the vehicles. The kidnappers returned to the ministry in search of a second man the bodyguards had been protecting, Peter Donkin, but staff had hidden him in a compartment under the floor. It is thought the men were moved to Basra or a major city south of Baghdad because tests revealed their bodies contained high levels of lead, in line with the dust and air they would have inhaled. When Moore was debriefed following his release , he said the hostages had been moved to different locations every few months. He said the prisoners were beaten regularly, especially before they were to be moved to a new location in order to make them “compliant”. Moore said they were made to sleep on the floor or with a thin blanket. They were given food and water and allowed to shower regularly. He said they were occasionally allowed to watch television, enabling them to keep a track of the date. The bodies of Swindlehurst, from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, and Creswell, from Glasgow, were handed over to authorities at a Baghdad police station in June 2009. Swindlehurst had suffered two gunshot wounds to the head and one to the chest. It is thought Creswell, from Glasgow, died from three shots to his chest and abdomen while he knelt with his hands on his head. The body of MacLachlan, 30, of Llanelli, south Wales, was recovered in September 2009. He had been shot twice in the head. The Iraqi Shia group Asaib Ahl al-Haq has been blamed for holding the men hostage but has denied claims of torture and abuse. The Wiltshire and Swindon coroner, David Ridley, ruled the men had been unlawfully killed. British hostages in Iraq Iraq Middle East Steven Morris guardian.co.uk
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Kelly Wiedemer of Westminster, Col., spent four nights in jail this month because she hasn’t paid fines and restitution she owes from a car accident that happened nearly two years ago. The fenders got bent in August 2009 when Wiedemer, now 45, failed to give another car the right of way while making a turn. “It was my fault,” Wiedemer says. She didn’t have car insurance, she says, because she’d lost her job as a financial analyst in July 2008. The fines totaled more than $500. An Adams County magistrate judge also tacked on $1,915 in restitution for the victim’s trouble. (Wiedemer says nobody was hurt in the accident, and that the other car was damaged but able to drive away from the scene of the accident.) As the cost of Wiedemer’s penalty increased, her ability to pay it decreased. She says she missed a payment while recovering from an emergency hysterectomy in October 2009. When her unemployment benefits ran out in May 2010, she stopped paying altogether. In April 2010, she had received a notice that if she didn’t pay the full amount she owed — at that point, $1,853 — the judge would issue a bench warrant for her arrest within 10 days. In a letter, she pleaded with with the judge for an extension. “My unemployment benefits were exhausted nearly two months ago,” Wiedemer wrote at the time. “I continue to look for work but despite having a BS in Finance and experience working as a business analyst and in the financial services industry for over 12 years, I have not found work. The jobs similar to those I’ve done in the past either no longer exist or have been deemed as ‘non-essential’ by corporate America in this economic environment. I have been told many times that I am overqualified for the position I had applied for.” The bench warrant went out the following July, but Wiedemer avoided arrest until June 6 of this year. She says she was driving to a job interview and a cop noticed her expired plates and pulled her over. If it hadn’t been for the bench warrant, she would have received a summons for driving with a suspended license and without insurance or legit tags. Instead, she spent the rest of the week in jail. Her sister paid $50 to bail her out. “I thought debtors’ prison was supposed to be unconstitutional,” she says. It’s unconstitutional to lock people up for being poor, and most states abolished debtors’ prisons before the Civil War, but many municipalities these days have been jailing people for defaulting on legal financial obligations, or LFOs, in what the American Civil Liberties Union has called “the rise of America’s new debtors’ prisons.” “Imprisoning those who fail to pay fines and court costs is a relatively recent and growing phenomenon,” says an October report by the ACLU. “States and counties, hard-pressed to find revenue to shore up failing budgets, see a ready source of funds in defendants who can be assessed LFOs that must be repaid on pain of imprisonment, and have grown more aggressive in their collection efforts.” There aren’t any data showing that more and more people are getting locked up for not paying debts, but ACLU Deputy Legal Director Vanita Gupta tells HuffPost that the ACLU’s state offices increasingly hear about the phenomenon and that local public defenders report the same. “There’s a number of different sources that tell us this is on the rise,” Gupta says. Alan White, a law professor at Valparaiso University, says some forms of the “new debtors’ prisons” are more deplorable than others. “To me, the most objectionable form of debtors’ prison is just threatening people who owe ordinary civil debts with going to jail,” says White, who has blogged about the issue. “It’s a spectrum.” HuffPost readers: Looking at jail time because you can’t pay off a debt? Tell us about it — email arthur@huffingtonpost.com. Please include your phone number if you’re willing to do an interview. A century ago, counties and towns would shelter criminals, the indigent, the elderly, and the sick all together as “inmates” in poorhouses, of which homeless shelters, nursing homes and local jails are all descendants. The ACLU points out that it costs local governments lots of money to lock people up. Poorhouses, too, were much more expensive than direct assistance. Yet direct assistance was considered too generous — with business interests worried such payments would increase wages — until the Great Depression spread economic misery widely enough to increase national sympathy for people out of work through no fault of their own. In the 1930s, the Social Security Act created retirement insurance, unemployment insurance and welfare. Darlene, the Adams County collections investigator on Wiedemer’s case, doesn’t have a ton of sympathy for her predicament. (Darlene didn’t disclose her last name.) “She owes the victim money in the case and one of our priorities is collecting money for the victim,” the investigator says. “She can go out and do some kind of work.” The investigator says Wiedemer has paid $696 and still owes $1,828.50. Of that, $1,450 is restitution and the rest is fines. She’s racked up $70 in fees for being late and setting up an installment plan, plus another $30 for the bench warrant. The investigator wants Wiedemer to make timely half-payments of $50 per month. “We don’t get any pleasure from having anyone arrested or put in jail,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s of your own doing because if you make your half payments with the court and you do it on time — and you can call us, we’re willing to work with people if they need an extra week or so — they would never ever get in trouble. It’s just the people who think they can just ignore it and it’s going to go away that end up finding themselves in a worse bind than they would have been.” The investigator says Wiedemer could wind up in jail again if she doesn’t pay. Wiedemer blogs about unemployment for the Examiner and says her situation is an example of the obstacles faced by the long-term unemployed. She set up a website that sympathizers can use to donate directly to the court on her behalf. “This whole unemployment thing –- it destroys people,” she says.
Continue reading …President Obama will outline his plans for starting to get American troops out of Afghanistan in a speech to the nation tomorrow night, administration officials say. The president is weighing a range of options for the next step of the war, all of which include the withdrawal of some or…
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Amr Moussa, who played central role in securing Arab support for Nato strikes, calls for ceasefire and ‘political solution’ The outgoing head of the Arab League and a frontrunner to become president of a democratic Egypt has voiced reservations about Nato’s bombing campaign in Libya, calling for a ceasefire and talks on a political settlement while Muammar Gaddafi remains in power. Amr Moussa, the veteran Egyptian diplomat who played a central role in securing Arab support for the Nato air campaign against Gaddafi, told the Guardian he now had second thoughts about a bombing mission that may not be working. “When I see children being killed, I must have misgivings. That’s why I warned about the risk of civilian casualties,” he said. Arab support, in the form of an endorsement from the Arab League, was essential to the Anglo-French-led bombing campaign launched in March following a UN security council resolution mandating the use of force to protect Libyan civilians. But senior European officials say that the Arab world is again turning against the west because of the Libya campaign. “The Arab League is telling us that we’re losing the support of the Arab world,” said one senior source involved in negotiations over Libya. In an interview with the Guardian in Brussels, Moussa made clear he thought the military campaign would not produce a breakthrough. “You can’t have a decisive ending. Now is the time to do whatever we can to reach a political solution,” he said. “That has to start with a genuine ceasefire under international supervision, a ceasefire that is implemented rigorously. Until the ceasefire Gaddafi would remain in office and the ceasefire would be accepted by both sides. Then there would be a move to a transitional period … to reach an understanding about the future of Libya.” Asked whether that meant a halt to the Nato air strikes, he said: “A ceasefire is a ceasefire.” According to senior diplomats and officials in Brussels dealing with the Libyan crisis, there are absolutely no signs of Gaddafi giving up. They also say that the opposition leadership in Benghazi will have no truck with Gaddafi and is making his removal a precondition for a negotiated settlement of the war. Repeated offers of a ceasefire from Gaddafi have been dismissed as meaningless by the Nato leadership and western governments. “There are different political channels going on to persuade the Gaddafi regime it has to go,” said the senior EU official. UN envoys, the Russian government, and the South Africans had been talking quietly either directly with Gaddafi or with his entourage. All reported no progress. “The Russians have just tried mediating and came back from Tripoli saying Gaddafi is not moving one bit,” said the official. Moussa headed the Arab League for a decade until three weeks ago and remains its caretaker chief until his successor takes over in September. He indicated that inquiries were being made to see if any countries, possibly in Africa or the Middle East, would be willing to offer Gaddafi a safe haven and even raised the possibility that Gaddafi could stand down but remain in Libya. While voicing misgivings about the course of the air campaign, Moussa said the Arab League supported it initially because of Gaddafi’s attacks on Libyan civilians. The League’s response, however, to the Syrian regime’s killing of an estimated 1,400 civilians was different. “There was unanimity on Libya, but [on Syria] there are some hesitations because of strategic, political considerations,” he said. Arab leaders were worried about the impact of the Syrian crisis in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and on the Kurdish issue. Nonetheless, he added, “we are outraged by all that has happened in Tunisia, in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen … We are really worried about the situation. The vast majority [in the Arab League] is not comfortable with what is going on in Syria.” The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, faced a dilemma and could be losing the initiative, Moussa said. “[His] chance is eroding. It is a race. You have to change as fast as you can. It is a race between reform or revolution.” The dramatic upheavals of the past six months across north Africa and the Middle East meant that no Arab society would remain untouched. “I don’t think there will be exceptions.” At the age of 74, Moussa is an unlikely figurehead for an Egyptian revolution that was driven by the country’s youth camping out on Tahrir Square. But he appears to be popular and trusted by the younger leaders who helped topple the Mubarak regime in February, despite the fact that he served that regime for a long time as a senior diplomat, ambassador, and foreign minister. He is running for president in an election that he says should not be held until the end of the year at the earliest. If he won, he would only want to serve one term because of his age, Moussa maintained. “Egypt is going to be a democratic republic with a constitution, a president, a council of ministers, a parliament,” he declared. While the Egyptian army remains in charge in the post-Mubarak turmoil, it is not entirely clear, however, how the declared passage to democracy is to be structured, sequenced, and organised. Moussa argued passionately for presidential elections to be held before a parliamentary ballot despite the momentum towards a parliamentary vote within a few months. “I disapprove of parliamentary elections in September because the landscape is not ready.” If priority was to be given to drafting a new constitution, then parliamentary elections should be shelved and instead a constituent assembly should be elected to write the new charter. Moussa appeared worried that the attempt to entrench a new democratic system could backfire, resulting in an ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood plunging Egypt into chaos. “I can’t blame the Muslim Brotherhood for being disciplined and organised. The others are not organised,” he said. Moussa predicted that the Brotherhood could take up to 35% of the vote in a September parliamentary poll and that this would suffice for it to construct a coalition, dominate the new assembly, and take over the running of the country. “Then there would be chaos,” he warned. “There would be no new constitution. I prefer to work for a presidential system because the political landscape in Egypt is not yet mature. Not because of the Muslim Brotherhood per se, but because the situation is not fully ready.” Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Egypt Nato Middle East Africa Ian Traynor guardian.co.uk
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Government supporters and opponents clashed in three Syrian cities and security forces opened fire, killing at least seven people including a teenager, activists reported. The bloodshed came as President Bashar Assad’s regime sought to counter a 3-month-old pro-democracy uprising with mass demonstrations. The Local Coordinating Committees, which track the Syrian protest movement, said a 13-year-old boy was killed when security forces opened fire on antigovernment protesters in a main square in the central city of Hama. Three other people were killed in Homs, central Syria, and three in the Mayadin district in the eastern city of Deir el Zour during pro and anti-regime demonstrations. The two…
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