-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Second Amendment Gun Rights Upheld in Lubbock Judge Sets Precedent By Upholding Constitutional Right to Bear Arms LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) -- A federal judge dismissed charges against a man accused of breaking an arcane law that prohibits someone under a restraining order from owning a gun. Legal experts said Friday the decision set an important precedent that could be the basis for challenges to other gun-control laws. "If appealed, this could be the springboard for a definitive Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment," said Stephen Holbrook, an attorney who represented sheriffs in a successful challenge to provisions of the federal Brady gun-control law. ``That could have wide implications.'' The case revolves around Timothy Joe Emerson, a doctor in San Angelo who was arrested last year and charged with violating a restraining order after brandishing a handgun in front of his wife and her daughter. Defense attorneys argued that Emerson has a right to own guns under the Second Amendment and that any law infringing upon that is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings agreed, ruling on Thursday that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is a protected individual right -- and not just a right belonging to an organized militia, as federal prosecutors contended. Cummings said he based his decision on a ``historical examination of the right to bear arms, from English antecedents to the drafting of the Second Amendment.'' Government lawyers planned to appeal. Activists on both sides of the issue agreed that the decision could be the first in which a judge specifically called a law unconstitutional because it infringed on an individual's Second Amendment rights. "This has monumental potential," said former state Sen. Jerry Patterson, who authored the law that allows Texans to carry concealed handguns. ``If federal prosecutors proceed with an appeal, this could be the case that the court uses to directly rule on the issue.'' Anti-gun activists, however, assailed the case as an anomaly that will probably be overturned. "No gun-control law has ever been struck down because of the Second Amendment," said Brian Morton, a spokesman for Center to Prevent Handgun Violence in Washington, D.C. "With all respect to the judge, this goes almost totally contrary to all decisions on the matter," Morton said. "This is a case that is screaming for appeal." Associated Press, April 2, 1999 Kosovo/Vietnam Belgrade Bombs Unite Serbs Behind Milosevic Now, let's see, which one is Hitler? Clinton or Milosevich? THE chief of Yugoslavia's army has vowed to fight on in the wake of yesterday morning's bombing of Belgrade. The raid seemed only to strengthen Serb resolve, leaving Nato ever more reliant on military options. In a defiant message to his troops, General Dragoljub Ojdanic warned: "The Yugoslav army has fulfilled all its tasks so far and is ready to fulfil them to the end as long as there is any form of aggression against us." The cruise missile attacks on two government ministries were the first against the Yugoslav capital since the conflict began 12 days ago, signalling a stepping-up of the bombing campaign. As daylight broke and Belgrade's air-raid sirens sounded the all-clear, Serbs emerged on to the streets yesterday to the shocking reality that the heart of the city had been bombed for the first time since 1941. Eight cruise missiles slammed into the interior ministry and police headquarters, the buildings from which the campaign of terror in Kosovo has been conducted, setting them ablaze. The precision attacks left nearby buildings untouched; there were no reports of casualties, although 70 new-born babies and their mothers were evacuated from a neighbouring hospital to an underground bunker. "The flames almost licked our clinic," said Spasoje Petkovic, the obstetrician on duty. Speaking on television while the buildings were still burning behind him, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, the Serbian interior minister, described the attack by "Clinton and Nato's neo-Nazis" as "an act of monsters and criminals". With the Allies intensifying the air war, there is deepening confusion in London and Washington over how to end the conflict, even if President Slobodan Milosevic were to signal he had had enough of the bombing. No one is talking about the peace deal hammered out last month in France. Under the Rambouillet agreement, Kosovo would remain formally part of Serbia but run its own affairs, protected by a 28,000-strong Nato-led force. The constitutional status of Kosovo would be decided after three years. It was the Yugoslav president's refusal to sign up to the Rambouillet deal, thereby to accept what he saw as an army of occupation while withdrawing his troops from Kosovo, that provided Nato with the justification to drop bombs on Serbia. Now, in the second week of bombing, Foreign Office officials look acutely embarrassed at the mention of Rambouillet. They never mention it unless forced, and then dismiss it obliquely as "a political aim and not the military objective, which is to end the humanitarian crisis". Policy-makers admit that they have been "wrong-footed" by the ferocity of the Serbian campaign to rid Kosovo of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90 per cent of the population. Mr Milosevic, only a month ago regarded as someone to sign deals with, is now talked of by officials as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot rolled into one. "Rambouillet is dead," said Professor Paul Wilkinson, chairman of international relations at St Andrews. "It doesn't make any sense to have a fudgy compromise where these poor people are expected to live under Milosevic's rule. It would be like expecting the people of Belgium after the Second World War to live under a government headed by Himmler or Hitler." But if Rambouillet is consigned to the dustbin, the new objective is unclear. As refugees stream out of Kosovo, Nato seems further than ever from achieving the goal of protecting the 1.8 million Kosovars. "We cannot make the same mistake as we did with Saddam," insists Prof Wilkinson. "If Nato is really to do the job properly and be believed in, it must settle for nothing less than the removal of this ghastly dictator. Otherwise, the moment we relax our guard he'll grab another slice of the Balkans in the name of a greater Yugoslavia." Ministry of Defence officials insist that the sustained bombing is taking its toll on Serbian targets, even though low cloud over the Balkans has hampered air raids. "We always knew this would be a long campaign," they insist, adding that the arrival of US B1B all-weather bombers has boosted their capability. Mr Milosevic's forces, they claim, are critically short of fuel, although they offer no evidence to back the claim. Despite the direct hits on the interior ministry and police headquarters, the government in Belgrade shows no sign of the collapse that some had assumed Nato air strikes would provoke. Instead, the bombs have united the country behind Mr Milosevic in a wave of patriotic fervour. Throughout yesterday Serbian residents were fed television pictures of the burning Belgrade skyline as politicians queued up to compare Nato and Bill Clinton to the Nazis, the city's last attackers. Angry demonstrators with targets pinned to their clothes chanted "Serbia, Serbia" in Belgrade. "We all knew something like this might happen but still we didn't really expect it," said Dragan, 29, an engineer. "It is a terrible shock to realise your own city can be bombed." While the initiative rests with Mr Milosevic, Nato is in a race against time before the Yugoslavs rid the entire province of Kosovars. Officials warned that at the current rate Kosovo would be empty of ethnic Albanians within 10 to 20 days. The London Telegraph, April 4, 1999 Kosovo/Vietnam Clinton and Albright Lit Kosovo's Fire The President & Secretary of State toast marshmellows President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set the stage for the catastrophe in Kosovo. If there were a Nobel Prize for ineptitude in diplomacy, they would be its joint recipients. Doing a bad imitation of Vito Corleone at Rambouillet, Albright told the Serbs she would have their signature on the peace accord or their brains. The deal they were told to accept, or else, involved immediate autonomy for Kosovo and a three-year transition toward unspecified goals, supervised by NATO troops. It didn't take a genius to see that the transition would be to independence. That's fine for ethnic Albanians, 90 percent of the population, but tough luck for Serbs, who consider the land the cradle of Serbian nationalism and their Orthodox faith (it contains over 500 monasteries and other monuments) -- a combination of Philadelphia and Canterbury. Knowing that he would eventually be forced to accept a settlement (possibly partition), Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic decided to create a Serbian enclave he can hold. This involves an eviction (nearly a third of the province's population) that the West calls "ethnic cleansing." Interesting how the media coins a phrase that's repeated by rote. Worse, some segue from ethnic cleansing to genocide -- verbal overkill bordering on absurdity. If forcible population transfers are cruel and unfair, cruelty and unfairness are nothing new. During the fighting in Bosnia, Croat forces drove an estimated 300,000 Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia. The aged and infirm who couldn't move were shot. There were no expressions of international outrage over this ethnic sanitation, let alone cruise missiles and stealth bombers. When India and Pakistan gained their independence in 1948, Muslims and Hindus each tidied up their territory, with 10 million pushed across borders. After the establishment of Israel, 950,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. Like the Serbs, Turkey is fighting a war against terrorist secessionists. Since 1992, the Turkish army has razed more than 3,000 Kurdish villiages, to deny guerrillas a base of support. In the process, hundreds of thousands have been left homeless. Turkey is a NATO member. Prior to Milosevic's major deployment in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army "encouraged" Serbs in the province to relocate. Serbian police and government officials were assassinated (this was also intended to provoke Belgrade), villagers were kidnapped and murdered -- about what you'd expect from a cutthroat gang tied to both terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden and Albanian crime syndicates. A March 4 article in The New York Times mentions the village of Velika Hoca, where five Serbian women said their homes were invaded one night last July and 16 men marched away at gunpoint never to return. None of this justifies the expulsion of ethnic Albanians (Belgrade says they're fleeing NATO bombing), but why selective reprisals from the West? Why bomb a people who have done us no harm and were our allies in both two world wars? How far will Clinton go to keep the burgeoning Chinese spy scandal off the front pages? I never thought of myself as an isolationist. Unlike our president, I supported every Cold War intervention from Asia to Central America. Soviet communism was at war with us, and we were forced to defend ourselves on distant fronts. Likewise, I supported the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein with the region's oil wealth, armed with nuclear and biological weapons, would have ignited the Middle East. But Serbia? As Mr. Spock would say, this does not compute. There is no international Serbian conspiracy, no Serb sponsorship of subversion and insurrection. Serb panzers will not roll across Europe in pursuit of a continental empire. Serbia seeks only to keep what was its from time immemorial. While America should try to contain or punish tyrants through diplomatic isolation and sanctions, the decision to intervene militarily cannot be based on altruisim. Humanitarian rescue missions will inevitably lead to the overextension of American power. The military will be so exhausted by doing social work with bombs and troops that resources won't be there to defend the United States when our vital interests are at stake. (Cruise missiles and laser-targetted bombs don't come in Crackerjacks boxes.) When China confronts us in Asia, we can tell our allies there that we spent all of our missiles in the Balkans. Kosovo was an avoidable tragedy. Clinton and Albright should toast marshmallows over the flames of Kosovo. They lit the fire. Boston Herald, April 1, 1999 Free Markets in the Middle East A Goat, a Rug, and a Special Price How much for that hub-cap of sugar? Khasab, Oman. As Dawn breaks behind the mountains of Oman’s Musandem peninsula, a peculiar scene unfolds in the tiny port of Khasab. Round the headland and into the harbour comes a procession of 12-foot dinghies, powered by outboard motors and steered by Iranian peasants. After two nerve-racking hours spent dodging the Iranian coastguard on their way across the Strait of Hormuz, the smugglers have reached their destination. As they approach the shore, an unearthly thudding and yelping drifts across the water: each boat is packed with 20-30 seasick sheep or goats, destined for the dining tables of rich Gulf Arabs. Other odd spectacles present themselves across the Middle East: Iraqi taxi-drivers taping cigarettes to their legs or jerry-rigging their cars to carry extra petrol on their way to Jordan; Libyans stuffing their hub-caps full of subsidised sugar for resale in Tunisia; pack-mules loping across the mountains from Turkey to Iran laden with cargoes of playing cards. The region is a smugglers’ paradise—not just for illicit imports like drugs or illegal immigrants, but for everyday household goods subject to high tariffs or stifling regulation. And, as always, the Middle East’s complicated politics add an extra twist. On their return trip from Khasab, for example, the Iranians load their dinghies with American cigarettes. These are banned in Iran but the well-to-do smoke nothing else. So three-quarters of the shops in Khasab’s market sell nothing but cigarettes. Traders in northern Iraq and Turkey grow rich sending other forms of contraband—booze, pornographic films, playing cards—across the mountains into Iran. Even legal trade is so regulated in Iran that many prefer to dodge official channels, to the tune of $3 billion-4 billion a year. Since 1995, when new rules required exporters to repatriate their hard-currency earnings, half the saffron crop has disappeared into the black market. Iranian carpet exporters complain they face bankruptcy if they do not smuggle out their wares. In Lebanon, a thriving market in smuggled artefacts has sprung up partly because legal sales are so difficult. Generous subsidies in some countries create irresistible opportunities for arbitrage. Petrol costs 4.5 cents a litre in Iran, but 76 cents in Turkey. Libyan customs officials at the crossing-points into Tunisia are tenacious in ferreting out subsidised tins of milk powder and sacks of flour hidden in cars; but they can do little about the caravans of the stuff making their way across the Sahara to Chad and Niger. The biggest incentive to smuggling comes from the high import duties levied by almost all the countries in the region. Middle Eastern governments, which generally have a hard time persuading their citizens to pay their taxes, tend to rely disproportionately on customs duties as a source of revenue. In Lebanon, import tariffs account for half the government’s income. In most of the Gulf states, which do not even levy income tax, duties are the third-biggest source of government finance after oil exports and investment income. It is cheaper, according to Kurdish tradesmen, to ship bananas from Ecuador to Turkey and then smuggle them through Iraq into Iran than it is to bring them legally from nearby India or Africa. Most governments do try to crack down on smuggling, but regional politics hampers their efforts. Given its testy relationship with the other Gulf states, Iran has a hard time persuading them to play ball over smuggling. The trade in goats and sheep is perfectly legal in Oman. Iraq is only too happy to break the all-encompassing trade embargo imposed on it by the United Nations. It smuggles its own oil out through the Gulf, Iran and Turkey and brings in food and consumer goods with the proceeds. Some 5,000 tonnes of diesel fuel are trucked across the border to Turkey every day, with the Turkish and Iraqi authorities and Kurdish intermediaries all taking a cut of the profits. The Kurds, who run their own affairs in a swathe of northern Iraq, live by trade with the neighbours, almost all of it illegal: the endless stream of smugglers’ trucks has dug eight-inch ruts into the road to Turkey. The Economist, April 4, 1999 ------ Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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