Saturday Morning Roundup

• INSURGENTS pounded the main prison in Baghdad with 33 mortar bombs and five rockets late Wednesday before US troops shot dead one person and arrested 55 others.
• The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will have to consider scaling back the scope of its inquiry and limiting public hearings unless Congress agrees by next week to give the panel more time to finish its work, its chairman said yesterday.
• Five Britons and a Dane will be released from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held for two years without trial as terrorism suspects, officials in Britain, Denmark and the United States announced Thursday.
• Israel will take down a section of the West Bank separation barrier that had isolated a Palestinian town, an official said Friday, days before world court hearings on the legality of the partition.
• Australia's Great Barrier Reef will lose most of its coral cover by 2050 and, at worst, the world's largest coral system could collapse by 2100 because of global warming, a study released on Saturday said.

And in what has become the requisite "Friday Afternoon Outrage" from the Bush administration:

After three years of watching Senate Democrats block his
judicial nominees, President Bush trumped them for the second time this
year by installing Alabama Attorney General William Pryor on the
federal appeals court.
Bush on Friday gave Pryor an almost two-year stint on the 11th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, calling him a "leading American
lawyer" and saying Democrats had used "unprecedented obstructionist
tactics" last year to stop him and five other nominees.
Last month, Bush did the same thing with Mississippi federal Judge
Charles Pickering, appointing him to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals in New Orleans. Bush picked Pryor last April for a seat on the
11th Circuit that covers Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Abortion rights
advocates immediately opened a campaign against the nominee, citing his
criticism of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision that said women
had a constitutional right to terminate pregnancy. Pryor also came
under fire for filing a Supreme Court brief in a Texas sodomy case
comparing homosexual acts to "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia,
bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and
pedophilia."

Posted by flow Frazao on February 21, 2004 at 10:59 AM | Permalink