Glenn Beck: That innocent Boston Bombing bystander I called a terrorist can’t sue me for libel because he became a public figure when I accused him of being a terrorist.
Gov. Brewer: Inmate who gasped and snorted for almost two hours before dying in botched execution “did not suffer.”
A Penny from British Mandate Palestine, struck 1927. Arabic, English, Hebrew.
Southwest Airlines removes man from flight after he tweets that airline staff were rude.
After a botched execution that reportedly left Joseph Wood gasping and gagging for almost two hours before he finally died, Arizona officials followed up with a further sickly comical indignity: sending out an email announcement that got Wood’s name wrong. State officials appear to have accidentally resent an execution announcement from last year since the email announced the execution of Robert G. Jones who was in fact executed in October of 2013.
“A condemned Arizona inmate gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half during his execution Wednesday before he died, his lawyers said, in an episode sure to add to the scrutiny surrounding the death penalty in the U.S.” Details here.
As much as it’s treated as sick or a joke, firing squad really would be a vastly more humane form of execution than the one we now have.
Another reader testimonial on the emerging phenomenon of phone line regeneration. From TPM Reader TF …
Just thought I’d share my own similar experience with a zombie phone line. Many years ago when I moved from LA to NYC to pursue my graduate degree, I cancelled my LA phone service (then with MCI, remember them?).
I’ve taken on a whole new interest today, as you can see, in the subterranean ‘zombie phone line’ ecosystem. So I was fascinated to get this email from TPM Reader JK …
I work for a small CLEC in [state redacted] and we deal with this type of thing commonly. When you port a number from one carrier to another, it is automatically cancelled from the losing carrier. However, if there are any lines on an account that are not ported, then unless the customer explicitly cancels the lines with the old carrier, they will continue to a) be available and in service even if they are unused, and b) fully billable.