Illinois Woman With Neo-Nazi Leanings Charged In Canadian Mass Murder Plot

Lindsay Souvannarath

A young woman from Illinois with an apparent taste for neo-Nazi symbolism and white-supremacis beliefs was one of two people arrested last week in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for plotting to commit a mass murder at a Halifax mall on Valentine’s Day.

Lindsay Kanittha Souvannarath, a 23-year-old from Geneva, Ill., was arrested along with Randall Steven Shepherd, 20, of Halifax, at the local airport after she had flown in to meet him there. According to authorities, she confessed to the plot shortly after her arrest.

A young man associated with the plot, James Gamble, 19, of nearby Timberlea, Nova Scotia, shot himself in the head as police surrounded his home on Friday morning. A fourth young man was arrested with Shepherd at the Halifax airport and then released after police determined he had nothing to do with the plot.

Canadian authorities said the trio planned to invade a local mall on Valentine’s Day, armed to the teeth, and begin killing as many people there as they could. However, all of the officials involved insisted that it was not a terrorist act, since there was no “cultural” component to the plotters’ motives. READ MORE

U.S. soldier held in shooting rampage that killed 16 Afghans, officials say

By Ernesto Londoño and Javed Hamdard, Published: March 11

KABUL — An American soldier walked off his base in a remote southern Afghan village shortly before dawn Sunday and opened fire on civilians inside their homes, killing at least 16, including nine children, Afghan officials said.
The shootings in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province appeared to mark the deadliest intentional attack on civilians by a U.S. soldier in the decade-long Afghanistan war. Although U.S. officials promptly detained the suspect, a staff sergeant, the incident seemed certain to stoke anti-American sentiment at a time of growing unease about the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and increasing pessimism among Americans about the U.S. mission here.

Coming as Afghan rage over the burning of Korans by U.S. soldiers last month was beginning to taper off, the killings Sunday threatened to spark a new crisis in the strained relationship between the United States and Afghanistan. The two nations are in the midst of contentious negotiations over an agreement that could extend the presence of U.S. troops in the country beyond 2014.
The incident also provided fresh fodder to critics of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy who are trying to portray the 2009 troop surge as a failed attempt to secure a dignified exit.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the shootings an “assassination” and demanded an explanation from U.S. officials.  READ MORE

Trusting the Candidates With Indefinite Detention

January 18, 2012
Posted by Amy Davidson

Can a person trust Mitt Romney, and with what? All sorts of people, from all ideological directions, have asked this, usually with regard to a specific position on an issue like abortion or gun ownership. It was in an attempt to establish his credibility on the latter issue that Romney, in the candidates’ debate in South Carolina on Monday night, tried to remember the animal that he’d recently taken a shot at—not a moose, he decided, but an elk. The question is maddening enough when the parameters are clear—when, for example, he and the other candidates say what the rate in the highest federal income tax bracket should be. (Romney: twenty-five per cent; Ron Paul: “zero per cent. What’s so bad about that?”) Trust, and its opposite, are also behind the calls for Romney to release his tax returns.

More broadly, do we trust Romney or any candidate with power?
  READ MORE