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Decades before the September 11th terrorist attacks, New York City saw another tragic event in its skies, when two airliners collided in mid-air over Brooklyn, weeks before Christmas.

Two passenger planes – United Airlines Flight 826 and Trans World Airlines Flight 266 – collided while they were making their descents toward Idlewild and LaGuardia on December 16, 1960, leaving a trail of carnage and flames in their wake.

But out of the tragedy, a new era of airline safety measures was instigated, including the way flight recorders – commonly called black boxes – are used to investigate airline crashes.

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Wouldn’t it be great if a Republican presidential candidate could just buy the support of just about every major conservative talk show host in America? Well, it may not be as far-fetched as you may think. Clear Channel owns more radio stations (850) than anyone else in the United States. They also own Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, among others. Needless to say, Clear Channel basically owns conservative talk radio in the United States. So who owns Clear Channel? Well, it turns out that Bain Capital is one of the primary owners of Clear Channel. Yes, you read that correctly. The company that Mitt Romney ran for so long is one of the “big bosses” over virtually all conservative talk radio in America. Of course Mitt Romney is not running Bain Capital anymore. He is a “retired partner”, but he still has a huge financial stake in Bain Capital.

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Let me introduce you to the face of America for the rest of the world. Empirically, Dana Loesch is an attractive person. But what she represents with her statements as a CNN contributor is sheer ugliness and worse, it is how we are perceived in the rest of the world.

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I left Guantanamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier — shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor.

My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantanamo orange.

When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials. The American officer offered to reshackle my wrists.

But the commanding German officer strongly refused: “He has committed no crime; here, he is a free man.”

Strange, I thought, as I stood on the tarmac watching the Germans teach the Americans a basic lesson about the rule of law.

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In what could simply be described as an enormous loss for Pakistan, Arfa Karim, the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Saturday night, lost the battle of life after remaining admitted here at Combined Military Hospital for 26 days, Geo News reported.

Arfa Karim was only sixteen years old.

Her funeral prayers will be offered on Sunday at 10 AM in Cantt area.

Arfa Karim remained in intensive care at Combined Military Hospital (CMH) after suffering an epileptic seizure and cardiac arrest a few weeks ago. After battling for life for 26 days, one of Pakistan’s brightest brains left this world for good.

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Smith, a 29-year-old lawmaker from Columbus, was pulled over after leaving Hal’s restaurant on Old Ivy Road and allegedly running a red light while traveling southbound on Peachtree Road, the police report said.

Efforts to contact Smith were unsuccessful Friday night.

Atlanta police Officer Z.A. Kramer, who was following the lawmaker’s 1998 gold four-door Jaguar XJ8, said the traffic light had just turned red when Smith went through the intersection at Pharr Road.

Kramer said he informed Smith, who was traveling alone, why he was stopped, and the lawmaker told him he didn’t realize the light was red.

“I observed the odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from Mr. Smith’s breath,” Kramer said in his report. “He advised me he was a state representative and gave the name ‘Kip Smith.’”

Smith, whose given name is John Andrew Smith, first told the officer he had not consumed any alcoholic beverages.

“I asked him again, and he stated he had consumed a single beer at Hal’s. I noticed also that Mr. Smith’s eyes were watery, and I asked him to exit the vehicle, which he did,” Kramer said in the report.

Smith told the officer he’d had the beer 45 minutes earlier, and the officer asked him to blow into a hand-held “intoximeter”. The officer said the lawmaker refused, stating he would prefer to go to a clinic or the hospital to get tested.

The officer told Smith that was done only after an arrest, and that Smith had not been placed under arrest, but Smith “seemed to be having a difficult time understanding what I was trying to explain to him,” the officer said in the report.

The officer said Smith finally agreed to blow into the device. The report stated that Smith blew a .091., which is above the legal limit of .08.

Kip Smith co-sponsored HB 464, which is one of the many bills that would require drug testing for public assistance. I guess he knows from personal experience why testing for any intoxication is a good thing…

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Last week, Arkansas constituent Kelly Eubanks, a college student who has two jobs and two children, confronted her Congressman, Rep. Steve Womack (R), at a town hall meeting over his attack on the program she now relies on. But instead of any explanation, Womack lashed out at Eubanks, telling her to pay her own way by “joining the military” like he did. After refusing to answer her question, he finally just asked her to “be quiet and listen.”

when a politician starts to get so comfortable in his office that he tells a constituent to sit down shut up and listen, it is time to put him out of a job.

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The English and Welsh law allowing the police to stop-and-search people in “exceptional” circumstances was used against black people 29.7 times more often than it is against white people in the past year. According to The Guardian, these stop-and-search stats represent “the worst international record of discrimination involving stop and search.” The report was compiled by the London School of Economics and the Open Society Justice Initiative.

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[T]his sets a terrible precedent. If a UK citizen can be extradited to the US because of the content of their web pages hosted in the UK, why wouldn’t US citizens be able to be extradited to Thailand on charges of disrespecting the king or to China for undermining the government by being critical of it? To even press this case at all shows either a fundamental undervaluing of the freedom of speech of everyone, including US citizens, or, more likely, a belief in the most fundamental of American hypocrisies: the idea that the rules that the US applies to the rest of the world shouldn’t be applied to the US.

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I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about #SOPA and #PIPA

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#/!/response/combating-online-piracy-while-protecting-open-and-innovative-internet

and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

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When I talked to Linus Torvalds he said that Secure Boot is a good thing, but can be used in a bad ways. That’s proving to be true.

When Microsoft published The Certification Requirements for Windows 8 it was evident that the company wanted to use the secure boot to lock Linux out of such hardware, thus creating a Windows only hardware. The discovery lead to a strong protest from the FLOSS community. Microsoft allowed the non-ARM hardware to be able to run Linux if the hardware vendors chooses to allow that. But as we saw the arrival of ARM on desktop Microsoft “wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8.”