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[Source:NYtimes]

Cozy!

The market price for a seal pelt has plummeted in recent years

Canada’s annual seal hunt has ended with only a quarter of the quota of seals being caught.

The quota had been set at 273,000, but fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador, eastern Canada, took some 70,000 seals.

They blame plummeting prices for seal pelts and an impending European Union ban on seal products, which is expected to come into effect in October.

Some local fishermen are wondering if this could be the beginning of the end for the centuries-old practice.

At Bagram, Lasseter wrote, guards kicked, kneed, and punched prisoners with systematic brutality. Former guards as well as detainees told McClatchy reporters about what Lasseter called sadistic violence. According to them, the brutality reached a peak in December 2002, when two Afghans were hung from ceiling chains by their wrists and beaten to death by American soldiers.

Two soldiers were prosecuted for those killings. Specialist Willie Brand admitted that he hit one of the Afghan men thirty-seven times. He was sentenced to be reduced in rank to private. The other person prosecuted was Captain Christopher Beiring, who commanded an army reserve military police company. He was given a letter of reprimand.

The army lawyer who investigated Beiring, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Berg, urged leniency because “the government failed to present any evidence of what are ‘approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.'” In other words, members of the United States Army are no longer expected to know that beating a prisoner to death is against the rules.

So far, President Obama has managed to curb Congressional calls for a national commission to investigate Bush administration detention policies. But Mr. Obama cannot control the courts, and lawsuits are turning out to be the force driving disclosures about brutal interrogations.

Federal agents violated the constitutional rights of four illegal immigrants in raids that critics say were retaliation for a New Haven program that provided ID cards to foreigners in the country illegally, a federal judge has ruled.

The sweeps in New Haven on June 6, 2007, came two days after the city approved issuing identification cards to all city residents, regardless of immigration status. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deny the early morning raids were retaliatory, saying planning began the year before.

Immigration Judge Michael Straus, in decisions last week, said the ICE agents went into the immigrants\’ homes without warrants, probable cause or their consent, and he put a stop to deportation proceedings against the four defendants, whose names were not released.

The French Constitutional Council has ripped into the new Création et Internet law which would disconnect repeat online copyright infringers, calling the basic premise unconstitutional. \”Innocent until proven guilty\” remains a central principle of French law, and it cannot be bypassed simply by creating a new nonjudicial authority.

The recording industry has spent (and continues to spend) millions of dollars on its litigation campaign against accused file-swappers, but if two lawyers have their way, the RIAA will have to pay all the money back. Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.

The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged \”$100+ million\” it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the reason why these protection measures weren\’t working became startlingly clear. The Soviet fleets, which included the biggest factory ships ever built, had been working to a radically different plan – to kill just about every whale they encountered, irrespective of size, species or rarity, and lie about it.

Since Alexey Yablokov first spilled the beans in 1993, the story has been told and re-told, the real catch records (kept secret and not submitted to the IWC, ironically chaired by a Soviet, MN Sukhoruchenko, during some of the years when the apparent ineffectiveness of protection regimes was being discussed) have been dissected and analysed.

But rarely has it been told as well as it has this week, in an article [pdf link] by Phil Clapham and Yulia Ivashchenko in Marine Fisheries Review, the US journal. If you\’re not familiar with the story, reading their article will be 15 minutes of your time well spent; if you are familiar with it, well, it\’s worth a read anyway.

And some US leftists continue to get their marching orders from the dear departed SU when it comes to animal welfare.