"Court rejects NYC ban on big sodas" New York Times June 27, 2014
NEW YORK — The state’s highest court Thursday refused to reinstate New York City’s limits on sales of jumbo sugary drinks, which was championed by former mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, exhausting the city’s final appeal and handing a major victory to the US soft drink industry.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, a supporter of the soda proposal, said he was “extremely disappointed” by the latest decision, saying it was “irrefutable” that sugary drinks have detrimental effects on health....
So does reading a newspaper because I always feel better when I have not.
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Now for the real thing:
"NYC woman who fled marriage testifies against father" Associated Press June 27, 2014
NEW YORK — The New York City cab driver from Pakistan and his daughter both began weeping the second she first took the witness stand at his murder conspiracy trial. Once composed, she told a jury that they had a loving relationship — and that he had once threatened to kill her.
The encounter came in a case where Mohammad Ajmal Choudhry has pleaded not guilty to charges he arranged the killings last year of two relatives of a man who helped his daughter flee an arranged marriage in Pakistan. Prosecutors at the trial in federal court in Brooklyn have likened the shooting deaths to so-called honor killings — the ruthless vigilantism against Pakistani women accused of disgracing their families.
See: Pakistan's Terrorist Infants
Also see: The Girls of Pakistan
It's all politics.
‘‘I don’t want to hear any more complaints about you,’’ Amina Ajmal, 23, claimed her father warned her when he first learned she wanted out of the marriage. ‘‘I will kill you if you do anything wrong.’’
Though she agreed to testify for the government, Ajmal often sounded and acted on Thursday like she didn’t want to be there. There were long pauses before meekly mumbling answers to prosecutor’s questions about her father’s alleged misdeeds. Yes, she answered, he had threatened her, but she quickly added, ‘‘I don’t think he meant it.’’
Asked earlier to describe their relationship, Ajmal responded, ‘‘We were very close. . . . He loved me.’’
The defense claims that Choudhry, who was in Brooklyn at the time of the deaths in Pakistan, had no hand in them. They say government agents coached the daughter on how to manipulate her father into making empty threats that were recorded for use as evidence against him.
Ajmal was born in Pakistan, lost her mother as a child, and was largely raised in Brooklyn by her Muslim father. She testified she was the only one of his five children to take to Western trappings like social media and to go to college. But in 2009, she said, her father tricked her into visiting Pakistan so the family could force her to marry one of her cousins there.
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Those Muslims and their treatment of women!
It's almost enough to make you want to go to war with them. I can't think of anything worse that could be done to a woman, other than dropping a drone missile into the middle of the hut.
