A morning blend of stories ranging from the strange to the maddening:
Car-pool no-no: “a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of ‘an act of unfair and parasitical competition’.”
HT: Confessing Evangelical
Nearly 1,000 people were on three trains that collided in southern Pakistan Wednesday morning, killing at least 107 people and injuring 800 more. Police now say the death toll is at least 150. One train, the Karachi Express, rammed into the back of another, the stationary Quetta Express, after missing a signal causing several cars to derail. The derailed carriages were then hit almost simultaneously by a third train, the oncoming Tezgam Express, which was taking passengers from Karachi north to Rawalpindi, near the capital of Islamabad. It is well known that Pakistan’s railways are antiquated, and dozens of people have been killed in train accidents in recent years.
Jason Battista, 28, is citing stress from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in a bid for less prison time, the second time the argument has been used by a bank robber. Battista is expected to be sentenced for robbing 15 banks in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. He was "impacted deeply" by the terror attacks, said his attorney, Stephen Seeger. "He was unable to function properly because of what he saw," Seeger said. "The drug use seemed to spiral out of control after 9-11. He wasn’t the same individual." Last year Pamela Kaichen, known as the "Blond Bandit," received a reduced sentence after arguing she had a mental condition that developed from volunteering at ground zero in New York following the attacks. "It’s clear this defendant was acting under significant mental disabilities triggered by her horrendous experience at ground zero," U.S. District Judge Ellen Bree Burns said at the time.
In this interview for Crosswalk.com, Acton Institute senior fellow Marvin Olasky talks about his book, The Religions Next Door. Olasky says, in part, on the importance for Christians to learn about other religions,
Following last month’s Supreme Court decision in No. 04-277, National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services, which denied the use of established cable lines to high-speed ISP competitors, there might be a new addition to the broadband internet market.
Over at OpinionJournal, Robert Bork examines the effects of “radical personal autonomy” on American jurisprudence in “Their Will Be Done: How the Supreme Court Sows Moral Anarchy.” Says Bork:
Once the justices depart, as most of them have, from the original understanding of the principles of the Constitution, they lack any guidance other than their own attempts at moral philosophy, a task for which they have not even minimal skills. Yet when it rules in the name of the Constitution, whether it rules truly or not, the court is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy. The combination of absolute power, disdain for the historic Constitution, and philosophical incompetence is lethal.
In a recent commentary criticizing the fast food tax, I wrote,
the fast food industry is really too easy a target for the government. Besieged by the media and public opinion (consider the popularity of the film Super Size Me), quickservice restaurants have gotten the reputation for being extremely unhealthy.
Today is the UN-sponsored World Population Day, which most of us have never heard of, I’m sure. From the name, I cynically (and rightly) assumed that rather than celebrating human life, this day would instead address many of the spurious “crowded planet” concerns put forth most popularly in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (first edition 1968).
As the jobless levels across the nation continues to decline, Michigan continues to lag behind. The nationwide unemployment rate decreased to 5.0% in June, to the lowest levels since September, 2001 according to reports. Meanwhile, Michigan remains at the bottom of the list with the worst unemployment levels, upwards of 7%.
On the heels of the defeat of proprosed protections for intellectual property at the hands of the European Parliament, according to the AP the European Commission is addressing an aspect of the same debate: online music and copyright.
