Laura Ling & Euna Lee Sentenced to 12 Yrs in N. Korean Labor Camp
Two journalists who were arrested for crossing the border of North Korea unlawfully, and accused of illegally filming for the purpose of showing the trafficking of females, were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean camp late last night.
Al Gore, rather than immediately trying to free the women, only got the brilliant idea to help them after their sentencing. He had an opportunity to save them from “man-bear-pig” a couple of months ago, but the weather was not warm enough for him to leave a massive carbon footprint via his personal jet.
The Korean Central News Agency says the Central Court tried American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from June 4 to 8.
It said Monday the trial confirmed an unspecified “grave crime” against the nation, and of illegally crossing into North Korea.
The report says the court “sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor.”
The journalists – working for former Vice President Al Gore’s California-based Current TV – were arrested March 17 as they were reporting about the trafficking of women. It’s unclear if they strayed into the North or were grabbed by aggressive border guards who crossed into China.
Although the Americans were accused of illegally entering North Korea and unspecified “hostile acts,” Pyongyong has yet to publicly announce the exact charges against them. South Korean legal experts have said a conviction for “hostility” or espionage could mean five to 10 years in a labor camp.
U.S. officials and others working for the reporters’ release have said they’ve received no information about the defendants and even lacked independent confirmation about whether the trial has started. The North has said the proceedings wouldn’t be open to foreign observers, including Swedish officials who act as Washington’s proxy in Pyongyang because the two countries do not have diplomatic ties.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday she was “incredibly concerned” about the plight of the two women. In working for their release, Clinton said she has spoken with foreign officials with influence in North Korea and explored the possibility of sending an envoy to the North, but suggested that no one would be sent during the trial.
Now, the big question is, will North Korea finally close its labor camps to repair its image abroad?
Representative Blackburn (R-TN) Puts Gore Through the Grinder
This is great! Through questioning she has called out Gore on his conflict of interest with his money being tied up in “Green” companies and this Cap-and-Trade agenda.
This week Al Gore lied to congress. In his testimony he said at one point, “It’s going to save you money, and it’s going to make the economy stronger,”. Please remember this statement when in some not so distant January you read stories about children wearing two coats inside their homes because their average Middle American parents cannot afford the heating bill. Gore states at one point it would only cost the average family 18 cents more to implement both a carbon tax and Cap and trade policies. Right. The numbers that old Al was basing that on came from a paper that assumed that the United States would double the number of Nuclear power plants that it currently has; which is obviously not the case as environmentalists have stopped the production of any nuclear facilities completely.
According to the GPO and the Congressional Record, the real cost of Cap and Trade will mean about $3000 more in energy costs a year for the average American family. This column cannot quote you Democrat numbers, because the democrats have not published any estimates, other than Al’s “less than a postage stamp” comment . The brunt of this hideous new tax is going to be borne by those living in the areas of the United States with the greatest extremes in temperature. In summer that will be the south from coast to coast. In winter, the Midwest where freezing temperatures is the norm.
And we already know that Cap-and-Trade is a big tax – one of their own (Dingell) even admitted as such!
No wonder why Gore didn’t want to debate this during the hearing.
Democrats and Gore Refuse to Let Global Warming Skeptic Argue His Case at Congressional Global Warming Hearing
Al Gore and the Democrats refuse to let U.K. conservative and former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher debate Mr. Gore and be allowed to argue his side of the global warming issue.
This is just another case of Democrats showing their “fair-mindedness” to others as well as the public. The public should have a right to hear both sides of the issue to make up their own minds, but the more the Democrats shy away from letting the other side speak, the more it indicates to me that they know this is a junk science. Al Gore has been given plenty of opportunities to debate and argue his case and he almost always declines at the last minute. Man-made global warming is a hoax and Gore, a man who never studied science, knows that. Gore just doesn’t want anyone to figure it out any time soon since all of his money is riding on Green stocks and Green companies that have not reached their full potential yet. They will only reach their full potential with the perfect storm to pass their Green agenda – and that time is now. It’s really sad that the main reason for this alarmism is to pad the pockets of all the liberals who are hoping to make a buck for themselves. This same thing is happening at GE, which is why they are backing Obama so heavily and don’t want anyone to figure out what’s really going on so their Green products will have to be bought and sold.
Washington, DC — UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.
“The House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”
According to Monckton, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ranking Member on the Energy & Commerce Committee, had invited him to go head to head with Gore and testify at the hearing on Capitol Hill Friday. But Monckton now says that when his airplane from London landed in the U.S. on Thursday, he was informed that the former Vice-President had “chickened out” and there would be no joint appearance. Gore is scheduled to testify on Friday to the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment’s fourth day of hearings on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The hearing will be held in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building.
According to Monckton, House Democrats told the Republican committee staff earlier this week that they would be putting forward an unnamed ‘celebrity’ as their star witness Friday at a multi-panel climate hearing examining the House global warming bill. The “celebrity” witness turned out to be Gore. Monckton said the GOP replied they would respond to the Democrats’ “celebrity” with an unnamed “celebrity” of their own. But Monckton claims that when the Democrats were told who the GOP witness would be, they refused to allow him to testify alongside Gore.
[ Update: 1:55 PM EST: A GOP House source told Climate Depot that the Democrats on the Committee said “absolutely not” to allowing Monckton to appear during today's Gore hearing. The GOP committee “pushed at multiple levels” to bring Monckton in to testify but the Democrats “refused,” according to the GOP source. Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich was called in to testify after Monckton was rejected by the committee Democrats, according to the Congressional source.]
“The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the US Constitution. Congress Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) refusal to expose Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear,” Monckton said from the airport Thursday evening.
“Waxman knows there has been no ‘global warming’ for at least a decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years’ global cooling. Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who condemned Gore’s mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially inaccurate, ‘the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view,’” Monckton explained. Monckton has previously testified before the House Committee in March. (See: Monckton: Have the courage to do nothing…US Congress told climate change is not real ) Monckton has also publicly challenged Gore to a debate. (See: Al Gore Challenged to International TV Debate on Global Warming By Lord Monckton – March 19, 2007 )
A call to the Democratic office of the House Energy and Commerce Committee seeking comment was not immediately returned Thursday night.
Visit Climate Depot for more info on “global warming.”
An Inconvenient Film For an “Inconvenient Truth”
Gore is about to be featured in a new movie, but he’s not going to like it very much. Titled Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, the film presents a devastating account of the shaky foundations and hefty price of Mr. Gore’s brand of self-interested and hypocritical alarmism.
Created by the Irish film making duo of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney — who made another excellent documentary about the “dark side of environmentalism” called Mine Your Own Business — Not Evil provides the perfect rebuttal to Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Despite being chock-a-block with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, Mr. Gore’s movie has frightened schoolchildren all over the world, driven the public policy debate, and garnered both an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize for its star.
Not Evil — which is due to be released later this year — will appear at a crucial time. The world’s crisis-beset nations are due to meet in Copenhagen in November to concoct a new policy straitjacket to succeed the meddlesome but utterly failed Kyoto Accord. If global warming’s U.N.-based ringmasters have their way, this will lead to a slashing of industrial production in developed countries and to a huge extension of boondoggle redistributionist schemes to fund “green” technologies in developing countries.
Such policy represents a triple threat: it will destroy economic activity; it will cripple trade; and it will hurt the poorest the most. Nevertheless, President Obama appears to be on-board this ship of fools, having bought into the notion that there are net “green jobs” to be had from a massive increase in taxation and regulation of industrial activity.
The impact on Canada could be horrendous, and not merely on the oil sands, which have been targeted by environmental non-governmental organizations. This week, Environment Minister Jim Prentice admitted that Canada could be forced to adopt more draconian regulation if it is not to be hit by threatened U.S. carbon tariffs.
The truly astonishing feature of this policy fandango is that it will have little or no effect on the climate, the science of which is still only dimly understood. However, alarmists such as Mr. Gore have successfully sold the notion that the science is “settled.” This is just one of the claims to which Not Evil Just Wrong puts the lie.
Alternating credible skeptics with arresting imagery, the film makes clear that the science, far from being settled, has been comprehensively misrepresented by the likes of NASA’s James Hansen, who is to Al Gore and climatology what Trofim Lysenko was to Joseph Stalin and agronomy.
There is a wonderful scene of Mr. Hansen becoming almost discombobulated at the very mention of Stephen McIntyre, the maverick Canadian who, with the help of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, took on the UN climate change establishment over the so-called “hockey stick” temperature graph, and won. Mr. Hansen claims that paying attention to such inconvenient truths amounts to just “clouding the issue.”
The film dramatically outlines the dreadful damage already done by environmental hysteria, in particular the millions of unnecessary deaths caused by the campaign against DDT. That campaign started with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was at the root of the modern environmental movement in every sense. Despite the World Health Organization’s lifting of the DDT ban, Al Gore remains devoted to Ms. Carson’s memory. And methods. As Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace but now a skeptic, points out, radical environmentalists “care more about fish eggs than they do about children.” Meanwhile kids are shown fretting about about imminent global inundation and the deaths of polar bears.
