U.S. Supreme Court ruling affects many immigrant convicts in South Florida

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Wednesday shuts the door on appeals for hundreds of Floridians convicted in the past of crimes for which they could be deported.

The high court, in Chaidez v. United States, ruled that immigrants convicted of certain crimes before 2010 cannot appeal their cases if their criminal defense lawyer did not properly warn them of deportation.

Wednesday?s decision followed up on the court?s 2010 ruling throwing out the conviction of military veteran Jose Padilla, whose lawyer failed to warn him he faced deportation to his native Honduras when pleading guilty to marijuana smuggling in Kentucky.

After the ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky, thousands of convicted immigrants ? fearing deportation, or some ordered deported ? asked lower courts across the country to throw out their convictions. That included Roselva Chaidez, a longtime U.S. resident from Mexico convicted in Chicago of auto insurance fraud.

But seven of nine justices said Wednesday that the Padilla ruling established ?new law? and was not legally ?retroactive.? Under federal law, non-citizens convicted of an ?aggravated felony? can be deported.

The U.S. Attorney General?s Office had also argued that applying Padilla retroactively ?would be overwhelming to the administration of justice? ? flooding the courts with thousands of cases, most of them so old that witnesses or evidence in the cases have disappeared.

South Florida defense attorneys greeted Wednesday?s ruling with dismay.

?There will be an increase in voluntary departures, only the ?voluntariness? will be based on the fact that there is no recourse if the person?s case pre-dated Padilla ... an increase in orders of deportations and in increase in money spent to supervise people who cannot be deported to countries such as Cuba,? said defense attorney Maggie Arias, who along with Benji Waxman argued the issue before Miami?s appeals court.

?They?ve cut the legs out of anyone who would have recourse in criminal court based on bad advice ? or no advice ? from a criminal defense lawyer.?

Two Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented.

The issue of ?retroactivity? had been particularly vexing in immigrant-rich South Florida, and several Miami cases had made their way through the appellate courts.

One such case: Gabriel Hernandez, who arrived in the United States from Nicaragua when he was 2 years old. Now 30 and a legal resident, he boasts a bachelor?s degree and works as a successful computer network administrator for a Miami bank group.

His one blemish occurred when he was 19 years old. He was arrested on charges of selling LSD.

In an outcome typical for first-time offenders, Hernandez pleaded guilty and accepted a year of probation in return for a promise that no felony conviction would appear on his record. But Hernandez insists he never understood that the plea deal could wind up getting him deported to Nicaragua.

Miami?s Third District Court of Appeals denied Hernandez?s bid to throw out the conviction based on the Padilla case. The Florida Supreme Court, in November, upheld the ruling.

Hernandez?s lawyer, Michael Vastine, was chagrined by Wednesday?s court decision.

?From here on out, Florida immigration judges are going to be deporting people for crimes that are constitutionally suspect,? Vastine said. ?I find that a little bit galling.?

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/20/3244718/us-supreme-court-ruling-affects.html

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US, Iran find common ground: Olympic wrestling

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? The caretakers of the Olympics may have inadvertently accomplished what has eluded diplomats: Galvanizing Iran and the U.S. on a common goal.

Wrestling officials from the arch foes appeared to be in bonding mode Tuesday on the sidelines of a Tehran tournament less than a week after the stunning decision by the International Olympic Committee that will force the ancient sport ? as old as the Olympics themselves ? to lobby for a spot at the 2020 Games.

Already, the fight to keep wrestling in the Olympics has brought the U.S. and Cuban federations into a possible alliance. But close cooperation between Iran and America would be an even more remarkable display of common cause with almost everything else driving them apart ? led by an impasse over Tehran's nuclear program and Western sanctions that have upended the Iranian economy.

It's unlikely that any kind of wrestling detente would spill over into the wider issues, but it's certain to at least draw attention to the power of sports as a low-risk icebreaker going back to the historic 1971 "pingpong diplomacy" between China and the U.S.

U.S. freestyle coach Zeke Jones, speaking to The Associated Press by phone from Tehran, said that officials from 10 of the world's top wrestling nations will meet Wednesday in Iran. Delegations from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, the United States, Russia and Turkey will gather to discuss how to reverse the IOC's decision.

Jones said that those countries were chosen because they finished in the top 10 in the freestyle competition at the 2011 world championships, the last time team scores were held at a major international meet.

"We'll be standing arm-in-arm with Iran, and we'll be standing with Russia as we will with lots of other countries," said Mitch Hull, national teams director for USA Wrestling, in an interview in Tehran with AP Television News before the World Cup Tournament.

"Those (countries) really do make a difference because politically we're not always on the same page, or politically with Russia, but in wrestling, there's no doubt that we are all together in this effort and we consider Iran one of our strongest allies in the sport of wrestling," Hull said.

Hull described them as "sport rivals, but they are friends in sport, too."

"We have great confidence that we can work with the Iranian wrestling federation, Iranian wrestlers and the Iranian people to show the world that, no matter what's happening politically, we have the same goal and the same belief and passion about the sport of wrestling," he said.

Jones said that the World Cup, which ranks below only the world championships in annual importance, has come at a "perfect time," given the IOC's recent move.

Though Jones acknowledged that relations between international wrestling teams like the U.S. and Iran can be difficult, he said such competitions usually foster the kind of camaraderie and friendship the sport desperately needs.

"You'll have absolutely zero problem with the countries being unified on saving wrestling," Jones said. "The countries will do anything in working together to keep Olympic wrestling in the program."

Hojatollah Khatib, the head of Iran's wrestling federation, said the tournament would offer "the best opportunity to confront the decision" to drop the sport from the Olympics.

"We should resist the decision, determinedly," Khatib was quoted by the semiofficial Mehr news agency as saying. "We should show our unity in the current event."

On Monday, U.S. wrestling officials agreed to create a special committee charged with seeking to save Olympic wrestling, which will remain in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. But it must compete against seven other events ? including squash, roller sports and wakeboarding ? for one open slot in the 2020 Games, which have yet to be awarded to a host city.

Iran also has said it is looking to join wrestling's "big powers" to reverse the IOC decision. Last week, Iran's wrestling federation and its Olympic committee said they would send a protest letter to the IOC.

The independent Etemad newspaper ran a report that described the "axis" of wrestling ? Iran, the United States and Russia ? as joining forces to keep the sport in the Olympics.

For Iran, it's a mission of serious importance. Wrestling is considered by many to be something of a national sport ? not as popular as soccer or with the deep Persian roots of polo, but one that gives Iran a chance to shine in international competitions. Wrestling also is Iran's major medal sport at the Olympics.

Iran won three gold medals, its first in the Greco-Roman division, out of six overall in wrestling at the London Games, and the U.S. took two gold medals out of four overall.

"Do we destroy our historical sites which are symbols of humanity? No. Then, why should we destroy wrestling?" Iranian gold medalist Ali Reza Dabir said shortly after the IOC decision on Feb. 13.

In the current 14-team World Cup tournament in Tehran, the U.S. is joined by other freestyle wrestling powers including Russia and many of the former Soviet republics. Last week, Alexander Mamiashvili, the head of the Russian wrestling federation, said President Vladimir Putin had ordered a committee be formed to contest the IOC decision.

Despite the shared dismay over wrestling's Olympic snub, Iran's state media had only limited reports on the arrival of the American wrestlers ? perhaps linked to the official anger over the sanctions that have hit Iran's critical oil exports and blacklisted the country from international financial networks.

The cool reception is in distinct contrast to the almost celebrity welcome given in 1998 to the first U.S. wrestlers who competed in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that collapsed ties between the two countries. Washington cut relations after the U.S. Embassy was stormed, leading to 52 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

U.S. sports team now make occasional appearances in Iran, but the two countries often compete together in international events.

There also have been some false starts.

In 2009, Iran invited the U.S. women's badminton team to compete in a tournament, then denied visas by saying there was not enough time to process the applications. In late 2011, Iran bowed out of an invitational table tennis exhibition tournament in Qatar that included the U.S., North Korea and Pakistan.

The U.S. has sent more than 30 athletes to Iran under a sports exchange program launched in 2007, and more than 75 Iranian athletes and coaches have visited the United States.

___

Murphy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. AP Sports Writer Luke Meredith in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-iran-common-ground-olympic-wrestling-171355970--oly.html

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Morrissey Schedules First-Ever Vegetarian Concert at Staples Center

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/02/morrissey-schedules-first-ever-vegetarian-concert-at-staples-cen/

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Anti-austerity strike brings Greece to a standstill

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek workers walked off the job on Wednesday in a nationwide protest against wage cuts and high taxes, keeping ferries docked in ports, shutting state schools and leaving hospitals working with emergency staff.

Greece's two biggest labor unions brought much of the near-bankrupt country to a standstill during a 24-hour strike over the cuts, which they say only deepen the plight of a people struggling to get through the country's worst peacetime downturn.

Representing about 2.5 million workers, the unions have gone on strike repeatedly since Europe's debt crisis erupted in late 2009, testing the government's will to implement necessary reforms in the face of growing public anger.

"The (strike) is our answer to the dead-end policies that have squeezed the life out of workers, impoverished society and plunged the economy into recession and crisis," said the private sector union GSEE, which is organizing the walkout with its public sector sister union ADEDY.

"Our struggle will continue for as long as these policies are implemented," it said.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's eight-month-old coalition government has been eager to show it will implement reforms it promised the European Union and International Monetary Fund, which have bailed Athens out twice with over 200 billion euros.

It has taken a tough line on striking workers, invoking emergency laws twice this year to order seamen and subway workers back to their jobs after week-long walkouts that paralyzed public transport in Athens and led to food shortages on islands.

But in a sign it is buckling under pressure, it announced on Monday it would not fire almost 1,900 civil servants earmarked for possible dismissal, despite promising foreign lenders it would seek to cut the public payroll.

STRIKES PICKING UP

Strikes have picked up in recent weeks, underscoring Greeks' anger at record high unemployment and poverty levels. A one-day visit by French President Francois Hollande in Athens on Tuesday went largely uncovered as Greek journalists were on strike.

In northern and central Greece, farmers have been protesting at high production costs and fuel prices for nearly a month, occasionally blocking the country's main north-south highway.

Most business and public sector activity came to a halt during Wednesday's strike, with school teachers, train and bus employees and bankers among various groups joining the walkout.

"We are on our knees. The country has been destroyed, the young people have been destroyed," said Nikos Papageorgiou, 56, a civil servant.

"I'm outraged with the Europeans and our politicians as well. They should all go to jail."

Hospitals ran on emergency staff and ships were docked in ports as seaworkers defied government orders to return to work.

Several marches are expected to culminate in demonstrations at around noon outside parliament at Syntagma square in central Athens, where protests have often ended in violent clashes between police and activists in the past.

Analysts said Greece securing bailout funds in December, which averted bankruptcy and ended months of uncertainty over the country's future in the euro zone, created expectations among Greeks that things would improve for them on a personal level as well.

"If these expectations are not satisfied by the summer, then whatever is left of the working class will respond with more protests," said Costas Panagopoulos, head of Alco pollsters.

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Pravin Char)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/anti-austerity-strike-brings-greece-standstill-072434363.html

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TAHC Releases Part of the Fever Tick Temporary Quarantine Area in Texas

The Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) has announced the release of a portion of the remaining temporary preventative fever tick quarantine area (TPQA) in South Texas (Starr County), effective Feb. 15, 2013.

The TAHC established a TPQA for portions of Starr County on July 3, 2007 following findings of cattle fever tick infestations on multiple premises. Cattle fever ticks are capable of carrying and transmitting Babesia parasites, which are deadly to cattle. Horse owners are worried because this tick species can also spread the?Babesia?parasites that can cause equine piroplasmosis in horses. (There are Babesia parasites that affect horses, cattle, dogs, cats, mice, humans, and other mammals.) The fever ticks are common in Mexico, but are not normally found in Texas. (Editor's Note: See 'Fever Ticks' Spreading Across Texas Could Have Equine Impact on TheHorse.com for additional background information.)

The size of the area currently being released in Starr County consists of 23,478.5 acres. Previously released areas from the TPQA in this part of Starr County consisted of 42,111 acres released on Nov. 2, 2011, followed by 45,969 acres released on Dec. 21, 2011.

The release of this portion of the Starr County TPQA rescinds all movement restrictions placed on the livestock and wildlife within the 23,478.5 acres. With the release of this area the TPQA for Starr County is reduced to one remaining small area consisting of 33,024 acres. The area released is located west of FM 649 in the northwestern part of the county. A full description of the remaining Starr County TPQA ?and a map which shows the area released can be found at www.tahc.texas.gov.

"Releasing another area in the TPQA continues to confirm that the cooperative efforts between the USDA-Veterinary Services Tick Force, TAHC, the Texas cattle industry and local land owners, are working successfully," said Dee Ellis, DVM, TAHC executive director and state veterinarian. "The TAHC and USDA will continue to work closely with local land owners to maintain an effective surveillance program so that fever ticks do not reoccur in the area."

Source: http://feeds.thehorse.com/~r/TheHorse/News/~3/qiL6Wt8BEks/31382

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Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (S8X1101BK)

Essentially identical to the Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (PanScn08) that I reviewed last year (and is still available on the Web at this writing), the Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (S8X1101BK) offers all the same strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it combines capable hardware with highly limited software, which means it's a far better value if you already have the programs you need than if you have to go out and buy additional software.

At 1.4 by 10.4 by 1.5 inches (HWD) and 7.9 ounces, the S8X1101BK is on the large side for a wand scanner even though it's just two or three-tenths-of-an-inch larger in each dimension than, for example, the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST415-VPS . However, it's small enough to count as highly portable, and it works like any other wand scanner, letting you start at the top or side of a page, and scan down or across with a single sweep. Two sets of rollers on the bottom make it easy to control during the scan.

Like all wand scanners, the S8X1101BK scans to memory rather than a computer, which in this case means scanning to a microSD card. Sunglow includes a 2GB card with the scanner, so you don't have to buy one separately, and it also includes a microSD adaptor so you can easily plug the card into your PC if it has a card reader. Alternatively, you can leave the card in the scanner, connect to your computer using the supplied USB cable, let the computer recognize the card as USB memory, and then copy the files to your hard drive.

Setup and Scanning
As with most wand scanners, set up for the S8X1101BK is almost trivial. Simply insert the microSD card and rechargeable battery, and then charge the battery, either by connecting to a computer by USB cable or by connecting the cable to the power block and plugging into a power outlet. You can also optionally install the only program the scanner comes with, NewSoft Presto! PageManager. PageManager is a somewhat limited document management program. However it includes optical character recognition (OCR) to let you convert scanned documents to editable text or searchable PDF files.

Once the battery is charged, scanning with the S8X1101BK is easy. In addition to a power button that also works as a Scan button, the scanner offers three additional buttons, with each one letting you choose between two settings: color mode or grayscale, 300 pixels per inch (ppi) or 600 ppi, and JPG or PDF file format. The default whenever you turn the scanner on is color, 300 ppi, and JPG. Simply change one or more settings if you want to, and then scan.

As is typical with wand scanners, I didn't have any trouble getting good scans from the start at 300 ppi. At 600 ppi it's easy to go too fast, but the scanner will warn you with a blinking error light, so you know to start over.

Scan Results
Given the software that comes with the scanner, the only two of our standard suite of scanner tests I could run were for OCR and document management. As with the Pandigital PanScn08, the S8X1101BK didn't score well in either category, but the problems were mostly due to software issues.

The combination of scanner and PageManager did reasonably well for the very narrow task of recognizing text on a character-by-character basis, but PageManager did such a poor job with formatting that it would be misleading to say that it was at all accurate.

Similarly, the document management score suffered from PageManager's limitations, rather than any problems with the scan itself. Note too that although PageManager can combine multiple pages into a single PDF file, it won't do the same for text files. Each page goes to a separate file, leaving it to you to copy and paste the pages into a single file.

As a final test, even though the scanner doesn't come with any photo editing software, I included some photos to get a sense of the photo scan quality. Overall, the scans qualified as good enough for casual photo scanning?for capturing photos in magazine articles, for example, or for sending as snapshot quality?but not for anything more demanding.

Given the limitations of the software it comes with, it's hard to give the Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (S8X1101BK) anything more than a qualified recommendation. If it came with more capable software, like you get with the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST415-VPS or the Editors' Choice VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Wi-Fi PDSWF-ST44-VP, it would be a lot more attractive. As it stands, though, the only way to get the most out of the hardware side of this package is if you already have the scan software you need, or are prepared to spend additional money to buy it.

More Scanner Reviews:
??? Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner (S8X1101BK)
??? Pandigital Handheld Wi-Fi Wand Scanner (S8X1102WH)
??? Pandigital Personal Scanner (S8X1100)
??? Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S55
??? Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S85
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/q7wkJVi9ACw/0,2817,2415597,00.asp

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Luke Davis and Nick Rozsa, California

True shame what the body-boarder does in this clip, but you can tell Rozsa has some class and doesn?t resort to emotion. This is the reason that body-boarders get a bad reputation sometimes. Not all are bad, but when you see a blatant drop-in, its a sign of disrespect. Obviously, we didn?t see all the waves caught and know what went down, but still, its bullshit.

Source: http://stabmag.com/luke-davis-and-nick-rozsa-california/

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