Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:
Saudi Slams Hezbollah
A leading Wahhabi cleric in Saudi Arabia has issued a scathing fatwa against Hezbollah — the latest in a series of condemnations from the usually supportive Arab world. Sheik Abdullah bin Jabreen declares it against Muslim Sharia law to support, join, or even pray for the terror group, writing, “Our advice to the Sunnis is to denounce them and shun those who join them to show their hostility to Islam and to the Muslims.”
The New York Sun reports that the fatwa also condemns Iran for funding and supporting Hezbollah to further what Jabreen called its imperial ambitions.
Something In the Water?
Comedian, activist, and onetime presidential candidate Dick Gregory told this week’s NAACP convention that white racists are turning blacks into criminals — by poisoning their food and water. Gregory said, “They convince you that I’m just a heathen… [but] I murder because something’s in my food, something’s in my water.” He didn’t say whom he meant by “they.”
Gregory went on to claim that white-owned beer companies spike malt liquor with manganese, saying, “Once you get so much manganese in you, you will kill your momma.”
He also claimed the FBI has secret documents “on the relationship between lead exposure and homicide,” and that “polluted water can cause brain damage that turns ordinary people into violent criminals.”
Where’s the Woodpecker?
A U.S. district judge has suspended a $320 million federal irrigation project to help Arkansas farmers because the construction could disturb the habitat of an endangered woodpecker that hasn’t been seen in America in 62 years.
Arkansas federal Judge William Wilson, a Clinton appointee, says he’s assuming the ivory-billed woodpecker lives in the area after a kayaker said he spotted the bird in 2004, even though 100 volunteers and researchers were unable to find evidence of its existence last winter.
Wilson ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers agencies may have violated the Endangered Species Act by not studying the habitat fully, and ordered the group to evaluate any nests and forage sites near the project — which is 14 miles from where the bird was allegedly spotted.
Association for Justice
The Association of Trial Lawyers of America will henceforth be known as the American Association for justice, after members voted to remove “trial lawyers” from their name. A spokeswoman says the change “reflects whose side we’re on in the fight for justice.”
But critics at the U.S. chamber institute for legal reform called the move “an astounding admission of the unpopularity of trial lawyers in America,” saying instead of abandoning its name, the group should be “abandoning the high-dollar business model of industry-targeted lawsuits, followed by a real commitment to comprehensive reform of our civil justice system.”
—FOX News Channel’s Aaron Bruns contributed to this report.
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