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From CBS news:

“Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,” Kurnaz says.

“The point of the doctor’s visit was not to treat you. It was to see if you could take another six hours hanging from the ceiling?” Pelley asks.

“Right,” Kurnaz says.

“I suspect you know that the U.S. military will deny this happened. The U.S. military will deny that you were shocked. It will deny your head was held in a bucket of water. It will deny that you hung from a ceiling for days at a time,” Pelley remarks.

“Doesn’t matter whatever they will say. The truth will not change,” Kurnaz says.

“And you’re telling me in this interview that this is the truth?” Pelley asks.

“This is the truth,” Kurnaz insists.

Kurnaz isn’t alone in these allegations: other freed prisoners have described electric shocks at Kandahar, and even U.S. troops have admitted beating prisoners who were hanging by their arms. Kurnaz’s story fits a pattern.
…

Six months after Kurnaz reached Guantanamo, U.S. military intelligence had written, “criminal investigation task force has no definite link [or] evidence of detainee having an association with al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”

…

“Have you ever in your legal career run across anything like this?” Pelley asks Baher Azmy.

“In my legal career, no,” Azmy says. “But in Guantanamo, no detainee has ever been able to genuinely present evidence before a neutral judge. And so as absurd as Murat Kurnaz’s case is, I assure you there are many, many dozens just as tenuous.”

And a U.S. federal judge agreed. She ruled the Guantanamo military tribunals violated the prisoners’ right to a defense, and she singled out Kurnaz’s case as an example.

60 Minutes asked the Department of Defense to talk to us about Kurnaz. Instead they sent 60 Minutes a statement, calling his allegations “unsubstantiated” and “outlandish,” adding that claims that the U.S. military “engaged in regular and systematic torture of detainees cannot withstand even the slightest scrutiny.” The statement didn’t address why Kurnaz was held to begin with. (Click here to read the full Department of Defense statement.)

We have zero convictions for ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantanamo, which begs the question of whether this is the exception or the norm.

It’s only natural that someone would come along and adapt what was briefly the most technically advanced movie ever. It’s perhaps a little less natural that adaptation would be in cardboard.

From Time:

It hasn’t exactly panned out like that. Thursday’s opening was a disaster. British Airways, the sole carrier operating from the terminal, canceled 34 flights, owing to computer glitches, human error and, according to airport officials, “initial teething problems.” There were also staff shortages: some employees struggled to get through security checkpoints, while others couldn’t find the employee parking lot. Only one of the terminal’s eighteen elevators was functioning, and at least one handicapped passenger was left stranded curbside — for an hour.

Terminal 5, which took two decades of planning and construction, boasts 11 miles of baggage conveyors as part of a state-of-the-art system designed to handle up to 12,000 bags an hour. And yet seven flights left on Thursday without luggage. By the early evening the airline had suspended check-in luggage because the terminal’s conveyor belt was clogged, and arriving passengers waited up to four hours to reclaim their luggage. Angry scenes reportedly erupted in passport control and baggage claim areas as disgruntled passengers pushed and shoved.

I had the pleasure of listening to the live BBC reports early morning while the terminal was opening, before any flight was scheduled to depart. What struck me was that even just for the small traffic load of the reporters arriving at the terminal caused a small traffic jam for parking.

The only thing worse than a failure is a slow failure you can watch unfold.

If you were a really talented high school basketball prospect - talented enough to be able to play anywhere - how would you make your decision? The coach? The campus? The program?
What about the median graduate salary? Payscale.com is giving future college players exactly that option. Love the state of North Carolina, but not sure if UNC or Duke is your best option? Duke grads are making $20k more a year, on average. Tennessee your favorite state? Take Venderbilt over Tennessee for that same $20k boost.
Sure most of these kids are dreaming of the NBA, but if they’re willing to indulge in a moment’s prudence they should consider that an extra $20k a year over a 30-year non-basketball career, invested modestly, is well more than $1,000,000.

The trio of long-haired teenagers grasped the plaza wall to shield their bodies as hundreds of youths kicked and punched them while filming the beating on cell phone cameras. “Kill the emos,” shouted the assailants, who had organized over the Internet to launch the attack in Mexico’s central city of Queretaro. After police eventually steamed in and made arrests, the bloody victims lay sobbing on the concrete waiting for ambulances while the mob ran through the nearby streets laughing and cheering.

Time just ran a lead story on the anti-emo phenomenon running through urban Mexico. The LA-based blog, Intersections, has been following this for a few days, and they’re a more reliable place to track both the details on the ground and the response in Mexico.

Mob violence is never good.

bird lady, originally uploaded by stiatic.

John McCain:

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.

America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad. We must fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundation of our society. We can’t torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control.

John McCain delivered a speech on foreign policy in which he appeared to move back to his recently abandoned positions on torture, and delivered a weighty appraisal of the cost of war. His assessment of the cost of war makes he belief that we can “win” the war on terror, as it’s embodied in our was in Iraq, even stranger given we’ve clearly learned at this point that Iraq was not invested in global terror on any large scale as we were led to believe prior to our invasion.

Boat cat (alt), originally uploaded by Orcinus O.

What a huge lily (a lie about a lie) caught on video.

Dead simple, greatly needed. The only question is how long it can last.
Ironically I heard about this from Peter yesterday morning before I saw it anywhere else, but he hasn’t uploaded a mix or posted anything about it on his blog.

Here’s my mix (mux?). You should also give yewknee’s a spin.

Twitter still seems a little ridiculous to me. But Stephanie Sullivan and Greg Rewis would probably disagree, since they were recently engaged via the micro-blogging platform.
Then again, I recently grew a beard for four months, posted a daily photo featuring the beard then travelled to Nashville for a giant party with the fellow beard-growers, most of whom I’d never met in real life before. So perhaps proposing online, growing a beard online with a community or picking a stranger’s attire only seem strange because they’re very normal actions in a new context.

Blurry Pic of the Ring, originally uploaded by Stef Sull.

Brilliant.

Koleston_Hair_Care, originally uploaded by Souseki.