By AARON BEARD, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

RALEIGH, N.C. - More than a year after shocking allegations emerged about Duke University’s lacrosse team, prosecutor Mike Nifong was back in court Tuesday - this time, as the defendant.

The North Carolina State Bar charged the Durham County district attorney with several violations of the state’s rules of professional conduct, all tied to his handling of the lacrosse case.

His trial is expected to run for five days, and as it started Tuesday, the hearing commission chairman promised a quick verdict. If convicted, Nifong could be disbarred.

Well before the start of the hearing, reporters and observers - including the mothers of David Evans and Collin Finnerty, two of the once-charged and now cleared lacrosse players - packed the state Court of Appeals courtroom to watch. Finnerty and the third player, Reade Seligmann, were expected to attend the trial at some point, as were their attorneys.

Nifong won indictments against the three last year after a woman hired to perform as a stripper for a lacrosse team party in March 2006 said she was raped there. He aggressively pursued the case, at one point calling the lacrosse team “a bunch of hooligans” in a newspaper interview.

That interview, along with several others made in the case’s early days, formed the basis of the bar’s initial complaint against Nifong, which said he made misleading and inflammatory comments to the media about the athletes.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

RETAIL THEFT AT AN ALL TIME HIGH

WOMAN KNOCKED UNCONSCIOUS BY JUMPING STURGEON

ARMY RECRUITING DIPS IN MAY

DESPERATE MEASURES: AFGHAN MOMS USE OPIUM AS PAINKILLER

IRAN/CHINA DISCUSS OIL COOPERATION

BOMBINGS TARGET 3 KEY BRIDGES IN IRAQ

PROSECUTOR WANTS LIBBY IMPRISONED NOW

CONTROVERSY DOGS 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF MONTEREY POP

BIG APPLE TO HOST FARM AID CONCERT

UN WANTS BIGGER ROLE IN IRAQ BUT FEARS SAFETY

SOME PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES NO SHOW FOR NO CONFIDENCE VOTE

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT CHRONICLES HISTORY OF SPACE TRAVEL

PUTIN’S CENSORED PRESS CONFERENCE

Crossposted from AntiWar.com

by Ralph R. Reiland

Ten days before the vote in the U.S. Senate to authorize a preemptive war against Iraq, a 90-page classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, containing numerous qualifications and dissents on Iraq’s weapons capabilities, was made available to all 100 senators.

It was the most comprehensive analysis by America’s intelligence agencies. Only six of the senators read it.

“Senators were able to access the National Intelligence Estimate at two secure locations in the Capitol complex,” explain Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta in the June 3 issue of the New York Times Magazine. “Nonetheless, only six senators personally read the report, according to a 2005 television interview with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, then the vice chairman of the intelligence panel.”

Nevertheless, on Oct. 11, 2002, the Senate voted 77-23 to give George W. Bush the authorization to launch a war against Iraq.

Two months earlier, on Aug. 14, seven months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the CIA sent a classified, six-page report to the White House, titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq,” highlighting the potential downside of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Among other things, the CIA’s analysis, according to a report about prewar intelligence recently released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that a U.S. invasion could result in al-Qaeda taking “advantage of a destabilized Iraq to establish secure safe havens from which they can continue their operations.”

Read more »

By Eric Alterman and Mark Green

from

What if the research agenda of the University of Texas College of Natural Sciences were drafted not by the professors who actually conduct the studies but by, say, the alumni who funded the department? We might end up with research on the stickiness of Mr. Big’s brand of glue instead of the development of an AIDS vaccine. Luckily, most research universities don’t work that way. The federal government, however, occasionally does. In the Bush Administration, when the religious right or big business weighs in on a matter of science, politics usually prevails. So while this President may lack the powerful eloquence of William Jennings Bryan, in the world of science he’s the modern equivalent of the Great Orator defeating the infidels of evolution in the Scopes Trial of 1925.

Scientific panels and committees have proven especially susceptible to political manipulation by the White House. In one revealing case, Bush & Co. intervened at the precise moment that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention was set to consider once again lowering acceptable blood-lead levels in response to new scientific evidence. The Administration rejected nominee Bruce Lanphear and dumped panel member Michael Weitzman, both of whom previously advocated lowering the legal limit. Instead, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson appointed William Banner–who had testified on behalf of lead companies in poison-related litigation–and Joyce Tsuji, who had worked for a consulting firm whose clients include a lead smelter. (She later withdrew.) Banner and another appointee, Sergio Piomelli, were first contacted about serving on the committee not by a member of the Administration but by lead-industry representatives who appeared to be recruiting favorable committee members with the blessing of HHS officials.

The supposedly nonpartisan President’s Council on Bioethics–a panel whose creation Bush announced during his much publicized stem-cell speech of August 2001–proved susceptible to a different arm of his political base, the far right. The council is the organization charged with leading America through the murky waters of cloning and other genetic research. But instead of appointing a calm voice to lead those difficult discussions, President Bush chose Leon Kass, a University of Chicago bioethicist who opposed in vitro fertilization in the 1970s on the basis of Brave New World-esque fears of reproduction run amok and likes to refer to abortion as “feticide.” In a recent issue of The Public Interest, Kass lamented that today’s young women live “the entire decade of their twenties–their most fertile years–neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely….” He is hostile to everything from “woman on the pill” to sex education and believes children of divorce are “maimed for love and intimacy.”

read more at The New Democracy Project