June 18, 2008 - By: David Gutierrez - From: Natural News
A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.
The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.
Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus’s current location as provided by the GPS device.
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The Texas Court of Appeals has finally restored order to one tiny corner of the universe. It has ordered the return of the Texas Polygamist Children to their parents holding that there was an almost complete failure of proof to justify such an action. You can read the opinion here.
The removal of the children at th Texas Polygamist Compound is the latest example of knee jerk panic leading to mass violations of human and constitutional rights.
I am braced for all the outrage comments but The Texas Court Of Appeal did the right thing in returning the Texas Polygamist Children to their parents. What happened here was nothing more than a an attempt to use the court system to kidnap children because we panicked. This was a “legal lynch mob”. Not legal in the sense that what was done was legitimate, legal in the sense that it was a judicial lynching.
I am not saying there are children who were not in legitimate danger. I frankly agree that they may have been. What I am saying is this is not Communist China or North Korea. Those parents had and have rights. You can not mass bypass the rights of all these parents by doing it tecnically[sic] right for a few and using “panicked supposition” for the rest.
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May 25, 2008 - By: Matt Apuzzo - From: Associated Press
If his cell were at Guantanamo Bay, the prisoner would be just one of hundreds of suspected terrorists detained offshore, where the U.S. says the Constitution does not apply.
But Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a U.S. resident being held in a South Carolina military brig; he is the only enemy combatant held on U.S. soil. That makes his case very different.
Al-Marri’s capture six years ago might be the Bush administration’s biggest domestic counterterrorism success story. Authorities say he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent living in middle America, researching poisonous gasses and plotting a cyberattack.
To justify holding him, the government claimed a broad interpretation of the president’s wartime powers, one that goes beyond warrantless wiretapping or monitoring banking transactions. Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.
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Sometime soon, drunken driving suspects in Kane County will have a new choice: Get your blood-alcohol level measured in a breath, blood or urine test, or have your blood drawn involuntarily.
On No Refusal Weekend the option of refusing to take a test will not be available. At least not to drivers arrested by St. Charles, Batavia and Geneva police and Kane County sheriff’s deputies.
Kane County State’s Attorney John Barsanti announced the proposal Wednesday. He refused to say what weekend the program will be instituted. The idea was brought to his attention by First Assistant State’s Attorney Clint Hull, who read about its use in other states.
Illinois law requires people suspected of DUI to submit to testing. Prosecutors are frustrated by advice given by defense lawyers, many of whom recommend on their Web sites that people refuse to take a test if they think they are legally impaired. A case without blood-alcohol evidence is hard to get a conviction on, Barsanti said.
Currently, if you are a first-time misdemeanor DUI arrestee older than 21 and you refuse to take a test, the state will immediately suspend your driver’s license six months. If you take a test and are over the limit, you typically have your license immediately suspended for three months and, if convicted, receive a one-year suspension.
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