Published Pedophile Charged in Florida

Fla. cops charge author of pedophilia guide


Dec 20 2010

TAMARA LUSH


(Pueblo County Colorado Sheriff's Office File Photo)

The above photo provided by the Pueblo County Colorado Sheriff's Office shows Philip Ray Greaves II, a writer and self-professed pedophile.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Florida officials filed an obscenity charge Monday against the author of a self-published how-to guide for pedophiles that was yanked from Amazon.com last month after it generated online outrage. Colorado authorities arrested Philip Ray Greaves II at his home in Pueblo, Colo., on a warrant that charges him with violating Florida's obscenity law.

Sheriff Grady Judd in Polk County, Fla., said his office was able to arrest Greaves because he sold and mailed his book, "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct," directly to undercover Polk deputies. Judd says Greaves even signed the book.

"He very proudly sold us his personal copy," Judd told the Associated Press. "I was outraged by the content. It was clearly a manifesto on how to sexually batter children ... You just can't believe how absolutely disgusting it was."

Laurie Shorter, spokeswoman for the Pueblo County Sheriff's Department, said Greaves would be held in the county jail, where he was being booked Monday morning. It was unclear if he had an attorney. Judd said Greaves could be in Florida as early as Monday night.

"If he will waive extradition, it's my goal for him to eat processed turkey on Christmas Day in the Polk County Jail," Judd said.

Judd, who keeps a Bible on his desk, is known throughout Florida as a crusader against child predators. In past interviews, he said his campaign against child porn started when he was a vice officer and comes from his fervent commitment to protect children.

Denver attorney David Lane, who has handled several high-profile First Amendment cases, said Florida could have a hard time extraditing Greaves. He is entitled to a hearing where he can argue he should not be sent there to face charges.

"The main question is whether what he's accused of in Florida would be a crime in Colorado," Lane said. "Obviously, it's not a crime in Colorado because he hasn't been arrested here."

"Most other extradition cases present clear-cut cases, the defendant was dealing drugs in that other state or some other crime that is also illegal here," Lane said.

Other legal experts also question whether Greaves' right to free speech would come into play if there's a trial. If the government is willing to prohibit this book from being shipped and sold in Florida, what would prevent officials from prosecuting a bookseller who ships and sells Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," a novel about a pedophile?

"As bad as this book may be, the charge opens a very big Pandora's box," said Dennis J. Kenney, a former police officer in Polk County and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "The charge sounds to me like a significant overreach."

Greaves has no criminal record, but his self-published book of advice on how to make sexual encounters with children safe caused a flap when it showed up on Amazon in November.

Judd said he was incensed when he heard about the book and that no one had arrested Greaves for selling it.

"What's wrong with a society that has gotten to the point that we can't arrest child pornographers and child molesters who write a book about how to rape a child?" Judd said.

Detectives worked with the Polk County State Attorney to compile a warrant, which was then signed by a county judge, Judd said.

Florida' obscenity law _ a third-degree felony _ prohibits the "distribution of obscene material depicting minors engaged in conduct harmful to minors."

The book, Judd said, included first-person descriptions of sexual encounters, purportedly written from a child's point of view.

Greaves argues in the book that pedophiles are misunderstood, as the word literally means to love a child. He adds that it is only a crime to act on sexual impulses toward children, and offers advice that purportedly allows pedophiles to abide by the law.

The Polk Sheriff's Office quoted passages form the book in a press release, including the "guiding principles" and "standards of conduct" Greaves said pedophiles should abide by.

"Do not imagine that you have been given a mere code of ethics," Greaves wrote in the book. "Instead, consider that the nectar of love has been given from the hand of compassion and grace."

Judd said his undercover detectives got Greaves to sell the book to them for $50; he sent it through the mail and told officers it was his last copy.

"If we can get jurisdiction ... we're coming after you," Judd said. "There's nothing in the world more important than our children."

___

Associated Press Writers P. Solomon Banda and Kristen Wyatt in Denver contributed to this report.

South Carolina Woman Killed By Flying Pothole

Young wife, mother of 2 killed by a simple pothole

Dec 19 2010

(AP Photo/Ala. Department of Public Safety)

HEFLIN, Ala. — A South Carolina woman was slain by an Alabama pothole on March 15, 2010 along a rough, crumbling section of I-20.

The errant pothole came crashing through the windshield of the vehicle in which she was riding, killing her the following day. (Look at the size of that hole in the windshield of the vehicle!)

Using federal studies, the Washington-based transportation safety advocacy group TRIP estimates the United States could save 145 lives over a decade for every $100 million spent on a variety of road safety improvements and maintenance.

The cost is high and budget crunchers question if it is worth the money. That's almost $70,000 to keep one person alive. "These people are going to die eventually, so the process is just being sped up a bit by poor maintenance by the State of Alabama,"according to a highway department official who requested anonymity. Yeah, right. Her name is Betty Smith.

A Wild, Wooly, And Bizarre Year 2010

Icelandic volcano eruption that grounded 7 million persons scheduled for air travel in Western Europe AP Photo/Brynjar Gauti

12-19-10
Seth Borenstein, Julie Reed Bell and the Editors of BizarreStuff

A short tour of the bizarre occurrences of a wild 2010:


HOW DEADLY WAS IT?

While the Haitian earthquake, Russian heat wave, and Pakistani flooding were the biggest killers, deadly quakes also struck Chile, Turkey, China and Indonesia in one of the most active seismic years in decades. Through mid-December there have been 20 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher, compared to the normal 16. This year is tied for the most big quakes since 1970, but it is not a record. Nor is it a significantly above average year for the number of strong earthquakes, U.S. earthquake officials say.

Flooding alone this year killed more than 6,300 people in 59 nations through September, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, 30 people died in the Nashville, Tenn., region in flooding. Inundated countries include China, Italy, India, Colombia and Chad. Super Typhoon Megi with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China.

Through Nov. 30, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, compared to 15,000 in 2009, according to Swiss Re. The World Health Organization, which hasn't updated its figures past Sept. 30, is just shy of 250,000. By comparison, deaths from terrorism from 1968 to 2009 were less than 115,000, according to reports by the U.S. State Department and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The last year in which natural disasters were this deadly was 1983 because of an Ethiopian drought and famine, according to WHO. Swiss Re calls it the deadliest since 1976.

The charity Oxfam says 21,000 of this year's disaster deaths are weather related.

HOW EXTREME WAS IT?

After strong early year blizzards _ nicknamed Snowmageddon _ paralyzed the U.S. mid-Atlantic and record snowfalls hit Russia and China, the temperature turned to broil.

The year may go down as the hottest on record worldwide or at the very least in the top three, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The average global temperature through the end of October was 58.53 degrees, a shade over the previous record of 2005, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Los Angeles had its hottest day in recorded history on Sept. 27: 113 degrees. In May, 129 set a record for Pakistan and may have been the hottest temperature recorded in an inhabited location.

In the U.S. Southeast, the year began with freezes in Florida that had cold-blooded iguanas becoming comatose and falling off trees. Then it became the hottest summer on record for the region. As the year ended, unusually cold weather was back in force.

Northern Australia had the wettest May-October on record, while the southwestern part of that country had its driest spell on record. And parts of the Amazon River basin struck by drought hit their lowest water levels in recorded history.

HOW COSTLY WAS IT?

Disasters caused $222 billion in economic losses in 2010 _ more than Hong Kong's economy _ according to Swiss Re. That's more than usual, but not a record, Schraft said. That's because this year's disasters often struck poor areas without heavy insurance, such as Haiti.

Ghulam Ali's three-bedroom, one-story house in northwestern Pakistan collapsed during the floods. To rebuild, he had to borrow 50,000 rupees ($583) from friends and family. It's what many Pakistanis earn in half a year.


HOW BIZARRE WAS IT:

A volcano in Iceland paralyzed air traffic for days in Europe, disrupting travel for more than 7 million people. Other volcanoes in the Congo, Guatemala, Ecuador, the Philippines and Indonesia sent people scurrying for safety. New York City had a rare tornado.

A nearly 2-pound hailstone that was 8 inches in diameter fell in South Dakota in July to set a U.S. record. The storm that produced it was one of seven declared disasters for that state this year.

There was not much snow to start the Winter Olympics in a relatively balmy Vancouver, British Columbia, while the U.S. East Coast was snowbound.

In a 24-hour period in October, Indonesia got the trifecta of terra terror: a deadly magnitude 7.7 earthquake, a tsunami that killed more than 500 people and a volcano that caused more than 390,000 people to flee. That's after flooding, landslides and more quakes killed hundreds earlier in the year.

Even the extremes were extreme. This year started with a good sized El Nino weather oscillation that causes all sorts of extremes worldwide. Then later in the year, the world got the mirror image weather system with a strong La Nina, which causes a different set of extremes. Having a year with both a strong El Nino and La Nina is unusual.

And in the United States, FEMA declared a record number of major disasters, 79 as of Dec. 14. The average year has 34. If you and your friends missed out on your annual disaster, contact FEMA AT 1-800-Buzzoff. Ask for "Brownie."

Through September, the 2010 disaster death toll had already surpassed such notable years as 2004, when the South Asia tsunami struck, and 2008, when Myanmar was hit by a massive cyclone and China suffered a devastating earthquake.

A list of day-by-day disasters in 2010 compiled by the AP runs 64 printed pages long.

"The extremes are changed in an extreme fashion," said Greg Holland, director of the earth system laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

For example, even though it sounds counterintuitive, global warming likely played a bit of a role in "Snowmageddon" earlier this year, Holland said. That's because with a warmer climate, there's more moisture in the air, which makes storms including blizzards, more intense, he said.

White House science adviser John Holdren said we should get used to climate disasters or do something about global warming: "The science is clear that we can expect more and more of these kinds of damaging events unless and until society's emissions of heat-trapping gases and particles are sharply reduced."

And that's just the "natural disasters." It was also a year of man-made technological catastrophes. BP's busted oil well caused 172 million gallons to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Mining disasters _ men trapped deep in the Earth _ caused dozens of deaths in tragic collapses in West Virginia, China and New Zealand. The fortunate miners in Chile who survived 69 days underground provided the feel good story of the year.

In both technological and natural disasters, there's a common theme of "pushing the envelope," Olson said.

Colorado's Bilham said the world's population is moving into riskier megacities on fault zones and flood-prone areas. He figures that 400 million to 500 million people in the world live in large cities prone to major earthquakes.

A Haitian disaster will happen again, Bilham said: "It could be Algiers. it could be Tehran. It could be any one of a dozen cities."

___

Aral Sea - Going, Going...Gone

Dec. 19, 2010

Uzbekistan.

One of the most glaring examples of the growing impact of global warming is the virtual disappearance of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. At one time the Aral was the 4th largest lake in the world. Now it is a dried up ghost of its former self.

This photo is the current view of the ship graveyard near Muynak over the dried up Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The Aral Sea has shrunk by 90 percent. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Polite Groper and Masturbator Arrested at Courthouse

Courthouse Groper Itching To Be Busted
Floridian, 41, nabbed after pervy Judicial Center spree

Dec. 18, 2010

Tony Gustin, a 41-year-old Florida man was at the courthouse in Bradenton yesterday morning for an appearance on a minor traffic incident. While in the elevator, Gustin struck up a conversation with a woman there on a child support matter. As the 19-year-old exited the elevator, Gustin “reached out to her with his left hand (shown above) and grabbed her left breast and squeezed it,” according to a police report.

He then told the woman "thank you and have a nice day,” cops noted.

The woman reported the incident to a case worker, who sought to track down the elevator groper. After Gustin, pictured above, was located on the courthouse’s sixth floor, a second woman approached investigators to report that he had just masturbated in front of her.

After being handcuffed and read his Miranda rights, Gustin denied the grope, claiming he was alone in the elevator. As for the second woman, he acknowledged that he “called a girl over to him because he thought he knew her.” While admitting that his hands were in his pants, Gustin said, “I had an itch.”

When cop Debbie Perry asked why he would call someone over while scratching himself, Gustin had a ready explanation: “Because I thought she might scratch it for me.”

The unemployed Gustin was booked into the Manatee County jail on a misdemeanor battery count. He is being held in lieu of $750 for his courthouse actions.

Home of the Brave, Land of Solitary Confinement - The Two Faces of Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning's Prison Hell

Dec 17 2010

Denver Nicks, The Daily Beast

Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of secret government documents to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks, turns 23 in jail Friday. The Daily Beast's Denver Nicks, in an exclusive interview with Manning's attorney, reports on his solitary confinement, what he's reading (from George W. Bush to Howard Zinn), and his legal strategy.

The last time Bradley Manning saw the world outside of a jail, most Americans had never heard of WikiLeaks. On Friday, Manning, the man whose alleged unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents put the website and its controversial leader, Julian Assange, on the map, turns 23 behind bars. Since his arrest in May, Manning has spent most of his 200-plus days in solitary confinement. Other than receiving a card and some books from his family, his birthday will be no different. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, his attorney, David Coombs, revealed key details about Manning's imprisonment and kind gestures from his family that provided a bit of comfort in the inmate's otherwise extremely harsh incarceration.

"They're thinking about him on his birthday, that they love and support him," Coombs said of Manning's family and the card his mother, father, sister and aunt passed along via the lawyer on Wednesday. "They wish they could be with him on his day, but they are not allowed because visitation is only on Saturday and Sunday, and a family member would be going down to see him on Saturday." Coombs passed a message to Manning from his aunt on behalf of the family; Manning, the lawyer says, asked Coombs to tell his aunt he loved her and wishes he could be with her as well.

Manning asked for a list of books, which his family bought for him and will be delivered over the next few weeks to coincide with his birthday and Christmas. On the list?

Decision Points, by George W. Bush; Critique of Practical Reason, by Immanuel Kant; Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant; Propaganda, by Edward Bernayse; The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins; A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn; The Art of War, by Sun Tzu; The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel; On War by Gen. Carl von Clausewitz.

Manning is being held at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 hours a day alone in a standard-sized cell, with a sink, a toilet, and a bed. He isn't allowed sheets or a pillow, though First Lieutenant Brian Villiard, an officer at Quantico, said he is allowed bedding of "non-shreddable" material. "I've held it, I've felt it, it's soft, I'd sleep under it," he told The Daily Beast.

He isn't allowed to exercise (Quantico officials dispute this), but he has started stretching and practicing yoga.

For an hour every day, a television is wheeled in front of his cell and he's allowed to watch TV, including news, though usually local news, Coombs told The Daily Beast. He is allowed to read the news as well. Courtesy of Coombs, Manning now has a subscription to his favorite magazine, Scientific American. The November "Hidden Worlds of Dark Matter" issue was his first.

The conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held would traumatize anyone (see Salon's Glenn Greenwald for a rundown of the legal and psychological issues associated with extended solitary confinement.) He lives alone in a small cell, denied human contact. He is forced to wear shackles when outside of his cell, and when he meets with the few people allowed to visit him, they sit with a glass partition between them. The only person other than prison officials and a psychologist who has spoken to Manning face to face is his attorney, who says the extended isolation-now more than seven months of solitary confinement-are weighing on his client's psyche. (And is evident in his physical appearance. At 23 he looks like a 40 year-old man. The editor)

When he was first arrested, Manning was put on suicide watch, but his status was quickly changed to "Prevention of Injury" watch (POI), and under this lesser pretense he has been forced into his life of mind-numbing tedium. His treatment is harsh, punitive and taking its toll, says Coombs.

"The command is basing this treatment of him solely on the nature of the pending charges, and on an unrelated incident where a service member in the facility took his own life," Coombs said, referencing the February suicide of a marine captain in the Quantico brig. Coombs says he believes Quantico officials are keeping Manning under close watch with strict limitations on his activity out of an overabundance of caution. Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection.

Manning, of Potomac, Maryland, faces a military court-martial on charges of providing WikiLeaks with classified information in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He plans to plead not guilty when brought to trial. His future remains uncertain.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) followed with a call for punishment. "I have no sympathy for the alleged thief in this situation," Poe said, insisting the source of the leak, whoever it is, be held responsible. "He's no better than a Texas pawn shop dealer that deals in stolen merchandise and sells it to the highest bidder."

Manning's fate will be determined over the following months. What is clear today is that he's being held in extraordinarily harsh conditions-notably harsher than Bryan Minkyu Martin, the naval intelligence specialist who allegedly tried to sell military secrets to an undercover FBI agent, and is currently being held awaiting trial, though not in solitary confinement. Manning, who has been convicted of nothing, has spent the better part of a year incommunicado, living the life of a man convicted of a heinous crime. Coombs challenges the legality of what he says is "unlawful pretrial punishment." He is working to lift the POI restrictions placed on his client.

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Denver Nicks is an editorial assistant at The Daily Beas

Oklahoma Killer Executed With Drugs Used to Euthanize Animals

Dec. 17, 2010

Inmate Killed Like a Dog or Cat

A death row inmate in Oklahoma was injected with a drug used by veterinarians to euthanize animals. Due to a shortage of the drugs normally used in human executions, the Oklahoma prison system decided to use the untried drug on John Duty, 59, who was convicted of killing his prison cellmate.

When strapped to the gurney on which he was executed John said he was sorry. That possibly made everything okay and the victim's family went home happy.

The warden was happy, too. If the execution had gone badly the warden could have been looking for a new line of work and the family of the vegetized prisoner looking for a good lawyer.