They Say It's All About To End.

Conditions: Edgy.


Silence In London.

Remember the whole Menezes killing thing? Where London police shot some kid like ten times in the head because they thought he was a suicide bomber? And then got away with it? Well, one of the main claims the cops have stuck to is that they fully announced who they were BEFORE they executed the dude. "Armed police, freeze!", "Get down!", that kind of thing. Well, the latest inquests has brought to light something new: letting eyewitnesses say what they saw. So what did they see?

"Then I thought they were terrorists and it was only when I left the carriage and somebody moved me gently out of the way that I figured they must be good guys," Ms Wilson added.

Nicholas Hilliard QC, counsel to the inquest, asked her: "Specifically, did you ever hear anybody shout 'armed police'?"

Ms Wilson answered: "If I had heard that, I would have thought they were police, so no."

Well, I'm sure it's possible one person could have missed all the obvious shouting that the armed officers said that they did. Right, Mr Livock?

Mr Livock replied: "No, certainly not.

"I remember that specifically because one of the conversations that Rachel and I had afterwards was that we had no idea whether these were police, whether they were terrorists, whether they were somebody else.

"The thing that made me realise it wasn't a group of lads playing around or something else happening was when the first shot was fired."
- bbc.co.uk/

Hmmm. So on one hand we have the idiot cops, who couldn't figure out who were the evil terrorists about to blow up a train, and who were the ordinary electricians making their way to work, despite having everyone under surveillance. And they say they clearly identified themselves, shortly before pumping some kid full of lead. And on the other hand we have ordinary fellow commuters, who happened to be present when a bunch of scared cops charged onto a train and executed a guy as quickly as they could. It's a freaking conundrum!



This Week In Stupidity.

According to accounts, America launched a rapid raid into Syria last weekend, where they either killed a family of farmers, or took out a cache of terrorist leaders. Or maybe both. Or maybe neither. But what's really odd is that they seem to be trying to pretend it never happened.

The White House has neither confirmed nor denied Sunday's strike near Abu Kamal, some eight kilometres (five miles) north of Iraq's border with Syria.

Syria had protested to the UN Security Council in a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the state news agency Sana said on Tuesday.

It urged the Security Council "to hold the aggressor responsible for the deaths of the innocent Syrian nationals".

An unnamed US official told Reuters news agency the raid killed Iraqi Abu Ghadiyah, a former lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader who was killed in 2006.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

Is this how the mighty U.S does things now? By stealing around and then pretending they had nothing to do with it?

Washington - While US officials continue to avoid discussing the weekend strikes that killed eight people in eastern Syria, Middle East experts have condemned the attacks as a violation of international law that threatens to further destabilize US-Syria relations.

Sunday, special operations forces carried out a cross-border raid from Iraq into Syria. Press reports quote one unnamed US official who claims that the strike was successful in killing Abu Ghadiya, a terrorist leader in the region. Details of the strike have not yet been released by the US government.

However, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said the attack killed eight unarmed civilians in a farming village. Ahmed Salkini, spokesman for the Syrian Embassy in Washington, DC, condemned the strike, calling it a "criminal terrorist attack" that "intentionally targeted innocent civilians."

According to Princeton international law scholar Richard Falk, neither the US nor Syria presented sufficient evidence to back up their claims. Regardless of the intent of the raid, Falk called the US action "a serious violation of international law," which allows for the use of violence only in self-defense.

Yet, Falk does not predict that any enforcement action will be taken, because international laws regulating the use of military force have been so undermined by the US and other countries in recent years. Falk called the raid "the latest display of Washington's disregard for the restraints of international law on the use of force.

- www.truthout.org/

And there you have it. It was done because they wanted to do it, and because no one could stop them, and because they knew they wouldn't get into trouble for it. Just another day on Planet War.







Thank God It's All About To End.

There's no denying it, it's been a rough eight years. Let's go out with a song.

Film Review: Max Payne.

Max Payne is the story of an improbably-named cop who's trying to deal with a life that's been destroyed. His wife and child murdered, and his career ruined. But while the murder seemed like a home invasion gone wrong, Max gradually discovers there's much more to what happened than simple bad luck. The film is actually based on a video game, stars Mark Wahlberg in his patented 'quiet brooding' mode, and has been described by just about everyone as being absolutely terrible.

So imagine my surprise to find that the film actually isn't all that bad at all. It has a good plot, it's been cast well, the effects are well done, and the direction is superb. When dealing with a cop movie it;s easy to fall into cliches, but Max Payne does a good job of avoiding being bogged down. This is actually a pretty solid film, as long as you're not prejudiced against it. It's super stylized, and delivers a solid plot after what seemed like a bit of a flat opening.

The director stays away from the shaky cam, blessings be upon him for that, and stitches together some pretty exciting action sequences in between the drama. There's a bit of super soldiers, some demonology and a little bit of Norse mythology to make things interesting. They do put the end of the film at the start, which is stupid and pointless, but you can't have everything. Three and a half wings out of five.



- Peace out.