When U.S. forces freed Saddiq Ahmad Turkistani from a Taliban prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in late 2001, the detainee met with reporters at a news conference and told U.S. officials that he had been wrongly imprisoned for allegedly plotting to kill Osama bin Laden.
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…Turkistani was [then] taken to a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, where he was stripped, bound and thrown behind bars. U.S. officials then strapped him into an airplane, fitted him with dark goggles and sent him to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, according to U.S. lawyers who represent him.

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A spokesman for Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri said Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut had misgivings over the proposed nine-state plan to cut so-called greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Carcieri is concerned about the costs, according to spokesman Jeff Neal. “Ultimately we don’t know how much this plan will raise energy prices,” Neal said.

A spokeswoman for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said he would likely comment on the matter on Thursday. Romney has expressed concerns with the initiative in the past, saying the costs of cutting emissions would be passed on to consumers.

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Va. Governor Orders Broad Case Review
And yet there are still people who claim that only the guilty are found guilty by jury trials…

Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) announced the test results Wednesday. One of the defendants served 20 years in prison for a rape in Alexandria that the new testing shows he did not commit. The other man was released in 1992 after serving about 11 years for an assault in Norfolk. The governor did not reveal the names of the exonerated men because they had requested privacy. He said he would expedite their pardon requests.
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Virginia’s review marks one of the first instances in which a governor has ordered a broad examination of DNA cases and places the state at the forefront of a national debate over post-conviction DNA. Virginia has executed more people than any state except Texas since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Like other states, its judicial system has been rocked by exonerations from DNA testing in several high-profile cases.

The latest results from Virginia are sure to provide ammunition to those who question the reliability of non-DNA evidence in criminal cases. Both of the recent cases had relied heavily on eyewitness testimony. The samples taken at the time were used to determine blood type, a far-less discriminating test than the DNA methods used today.

Although the Virginia men were not eligible for the death penalty for their convictions, their cases could help those who say greater use of DNA testing will detect the presence of possibly innocent inmates awaiting execution across the country.

“This is a 7 percent innocence rate — among people who never even asked for testing — that should give pause to people who think mistakes in our criminal justice system are flukes,” said Peter Neufeld, co-director of the New York-based Innocence Project. “This should be a beacon for other governors across the country to implement post-conviction DNA testing.”

The new testing conclusively proved that Virginia should not have jailed the Norfolk and Alexandria men and produced a “cold hit” linking someone else to the Alexandria rape. Alexandria Commonwealth’s Attorney S. Randolph Sengel said prosecutors would do “everything humanly possible” to bring the real criminal to trial.

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Study Finds Elevated Lead Levels in Neighborhoods
The article doesn’t raise the question, but I have to wonder if the poor and lower-middle class are or will be disproportionately affected by this…

The dirt poses the greatest hazard to small children who might play in it, said Steven M. Presley, a toxicologist at Texas Tech University, who led the soil survey team. The hazard could be reduced by keeping the dirt from becoming dry and airborne, by covering it with uncontaminated soil or, if necessary, by hauling it away.

“These levels are not astronomical. It’s not like this is an insurmountable hazard. But we are saying that we did find levels that exceeded these thresholds for human health,” Presley said yesterday after the study, which will appear in Environmental Science & Technology, was posted on the American Chemical Society’s Web site.

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Reversal Follows Condemnation

In a letter addressed to the groups, Ford said not only will it resume buying corporate ads featuring Land Rover and Jaguar, it will begin advertising Ford’s other brands in gay-themed publications as well. In the past, Ford had not purchased advertisements for the Ford, Mercury and Lincoln brands in gay-oriented publications.
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Ford also said it will continue to support nonprofit groups and events in the gay and transgender communities. Additionally, Ford reiterated its commitment to supporting gay employees in the automaker’s workforce. Ford, the No. 2 U.S. automaker, has received high marks for those efforts from the gay community in the past.

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During a security test of Diebold voting machines in Leon County, Florida, Finnish security expert Harri Hursti demonstrated the ease with which Diebold voting machines could be hacked. In a test election where the results should have been yes: 2, no: 6, Hursti got the machine to read yes: 7, no: 1.

The method used required only a moderate level of inside access, and was accomplished without being given any password and with the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA. It changed votes in a one-step process that could not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, it required only a single a credit-card sized memory card, any single individual with access to the memory cards could do it, and it required only a small piece of equipment which can be purchased off the Internet for a few hundred dollars.

Leon County supervisor of elections Ion Sancho has announced that he will never again use Diebold in an election.