Two U.S. Army deserters who lost a Federal Court of Appeal hearing in their bid to stay in Canada haven't lost hope and will seek leave to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, their lawyer says.
"This is not a setback that will dissuade us," solicitor Jeffry House said of last week's appeal court ruling.
Still, his clients Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey "are very disappointed," the court didn't conclude they should have refugee status.
The court had been asked whether a soldier should be forced to take part in an illegal war, House noted. The former soldiers have argued that the Iraq war is illegal because it violates international law and that conscientious objectors should not be punished.
The above, noted by Vic, is from Leslie Ferenc's "U.S. deserters plan Supreme Court bid" (Toronto Star) and that's where it stands now for Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey. Yesterday's news resulted in many e-mails. Brady highlighted Alexandra Fenwick's "Author is not afraid of questions" (Stamford Advocate):
Robert Meeropol stood at the front of Room 101 at Norwalk Community College's West Campus yesterday and urged students to ask him about his life, his work and his parents - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
"Some of you may be thinking, 'I don't want to ask that, it's too personal,' " Meeropol said. "But I wouldn't be up here if I was afraid of questions."
Meeropol was 6 when his parents were electrocuted at Sing Sing prison in 1953, after a swift trial that convicted them of conspiracy to commit espionage. The Rosenbergs were accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in a case that came to represent the terror of the Cold War and the red-scare McCarthy era.
As part of a visit as NCC's second author-in-residence, Meeropol laid bare his life story and drew parallels between the McCarthy era and the current war on terror as a guest lecturer for professor Steve Berizzi's "Individuals and Society" class yesterday morning.
Students peppered him with questions about his parents' trial, the FBI's evidence against them, his opinion of their activities and about his own activist work as head of the Massachusetts-based Rosenberg Fund for Children.
"I wish I could stand up here and say to you I can prove my parents were innocent," he said. "But I know they didn't do the thing they were killed for and the government knew they didn't do the thing they were killed for. Could they have done something else? Yes."
Whatever communications his parents had with Soviets, they did not warrant the death penalty, he said.
[. . .]
The nonprofit Rosenberg Fund for Children, which he founded in 1990, supports the children of activists persecuted or killed for their political activities - children like Meeropol, who was shuttled among relatives and friends and placed in a shelter while his parents were jailed.
Brady, "Surprising that someone who's gone through so much can still reach out while adults whose parents were war resisters think it's okay to sit silently on the sidelines and say and do nothing."
Erica Walsh's "Fatherly advice blooms into novel, film" was noted in the public account:
When 1st Sgt. Charles Monroe King sent a 200-page journal of life lessons to his infant son from Iraq, he couldn’t have known that his lessons eventually would teach thousands more people.
King was killed Oct. 14 in Baghdad when he volunteered for a mission and an improvised explosive device detonated next to his vehicle. He had mailed his fiancée, Dana Canedy, formerly of Radcliff, the journal for their son, Jordan, a few months before.After his death, the journal led to an article by Canedy in The New York Times. That story led to attention from the literary world and Hollywood.
Canedy recently sold the book and movie rights to her article about King. She will share the story behind the journal in a novel, "A Journal for Jordan," and it was announced this week that Denzel Washington will produce and star as King in the film.
The interest King's journal created has been bittersweet for Canedy.
"Charles died, so it's hard to celebrate this," she said. "What I am celebrating is that so many people will know about him and his legacy."
Celebrate while you can. Your story has a ton of holes in it and while the public editor and your own editor may have ignored it, putting it up on the big screen is going to expose a lot. That embarrasing front page sob-fest -- heavy on the emotions, light on the details and not quite right on the details -- came and went. If you intend to do something similar on the big screen, the people who knew Charles King will not remain silent while you continue to distort the record. As I found out after we addressed the sob-fest, she's offended a lot of people who knew King. The paper knows all about that but elected to look the other way. A movie studio won't have that option. Nor are they going to be thrilled to have the sob-fest blow up in their face. Assertions made beneath the Times banner may allow the paper to circle the wagons on very real criticism of claims made, but that won't be the case with a studio. Especially post-A Beautiful Mind.
Turning to the Times, Alissa J. Rubin offers more miscounting in "Suicide Bombers Kill 25 Near Ramadi, Dealing Blow to Recent Gains Against Insurgents:"
Two suicide car bombs killed 25 people near Ramadi on Monday, the provincial security chief said, dealing a blow to a city recently considered a showcase for the strategy of integrating former insurgents into the Iraqi security forces.
So far, so good. Alissa's counting. Then she offers this:
Elsewhere in Iraq, attacks killed nine civilians, according to the Interior Ministry, while five members of Iraqi security forces died in an assault on a checkpoint in Baagh, a small town near Mosul, the town’s mayor said. Thirty bodies were found in Baghdad and at least six were discovered elsewhere in Iraq.
12 people were shot dead in Iraq yesterday. In addition to Ramadi, 23 were killed in explosions. 35 somehow translates into "nine" for Rubin. The undercount at the paper continues.
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