BBC NEWS | UK | Terror detainees win Lords appeal:

“Indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is anathema in any country which observes the rule of law. It deprives the detained person of the protection a criminal trial is intended to afford.”
Lord Nicholls

The UK’s highest court has ruled that detaining foreign terrorist suspects without trial breaks human rights laws. “Detainees” held at Belmarsh have been compared to the situation at Guantanamo.

In other news – US sales figures are up, but only at the really really nice stores. Seems that Europeans are getting at 50% or more discount on really nice clothes because the dollar is worth zip. Sales where most of us shop are down this year.

And in yet another tale of lost proportionality, Porsche Brown was handcuffed, taken to the police station, suspended from her Philadelphia elementary school and may be expelled – for having scissors in her desk.

Now that they’ve passed mandatory mental health screening for all our children (without parental consent), it seems the drug companies have got the kids market sewed up. Now, time to move on to more of the adults. Got AADD? The simple quiz would elicit positive answers from most of us in the USA today – quick, run and get the Prozac and Adderall. Source that attention deficit disorder now affects 8 million adults (and after this PR push, many many more?) – the drug companies, of course. And they own the FDA too!

Locally, people stealing christmas gifts collected for children at a church in Gwinnett County. A 62-yr old man was bitten by a rabid coyote while walking in a park in Cobb Country. The Atlanta Boy Scouts inflated the claimed numbers of its black membership to get more donations. Another big skyscaper goes up, another big chemical leak causing evacuation, and yet another person shot in the Buckhead Club District – this time in the torso and legs.

Sigh.