Day: September 5, 2001

FPS for Real

Okay, I’ve tried to explain to my wife that someday all those hours wasted playing Quake and Unreal might pay off. After all, you never know when you might be stuck in France and trapped in the middle of a rocket duel between a drug dealer and police:

Saphir Bghouia, 25, was killed by a police team on Sunday morning after using a Kalashnikov assault rifle to kill an aide to the Mayor of Béziers and hitting two police cars with rounds from a Russian-made rocket launcher. An accomplice was still at large last night.

…

Police chased Bghouia around the town through the night while he harangued them over his mobile phone, shouting Islamic slogans. Eventually he challenged them to face him in a “man-to-man” duel. The police accepted in a ploy to lure him to an unpopulated area. They arranged to meet him in the car park of an exhibition centre in mid-morning

And Europeans think the United States has a small arms problem. Sheesh.

Source:

Killer dies in rocket-launcher duel. Charles Bremner, The Times (UK), September 4, 2001.

Asset Forfeiture in Michigan

Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit and its suburbs, received national notoriety a couple years ago for using asset forfeiture to seize a woman’s car after her ex-husband used it to drive to Detroit and solicit a prostitute. Now, they’re threatening to seize a car inherited by a 10-year-old girl from her father because her stepfather allegedly used the car in the process of soliciting a prostitute.

According to the Detroit News, Wayne County police have seized more than 7,000 cars and netted more than $6.3 million since they began using asset forfeiture against people arrested for solicitation.

The little girl’s attorney, Majed Moughini, has filed a lawsuit against the cities of Detroit and Inkster as well as Wayne Country Prosecutor Michael Duggan on behalf of 10 people who have had their cars seized this year in prostitution stings. Of course as in federal forfeiture laws, Wayne County doesn’t actually have to prove in court that a crime occurred in order to seize someone’s car, but instead merely has to prove in civil court that the car was used in the commission of a crime by a preponderance of the evidence.

Source:

Stepdad’s arrest snags girls inherited car. David Shepardson, The Detroit News, September 4, 2001.

My Daughter’s Brief Public School Experiment

Ugh. My daughter really needs speech therapy. She is not that far behind from her peers, only about 6 months or so, but it is the sort of thing that we wanted tackle before she starts kindergarten next year.

There was a long wait for private speech therapy in our area, but the public school a few miles away had a speech therapist on staff. So we toured the facility and though we weren’t necessarily thrilled by the school, it looked like it might work.

Yesterday was Emma’s first day and everything seemed to go okay. Today, though, my wife called me during lunch freaking out.

The bus ride from the school to the day care center on campus was going to take an hour, so we told the school that we would pick up Emma and take her to the day care center ourselves. My wife showed up 5 minutes late to the school due to construction near the school, only to find out they had put her on the bus anyway. Which in itself might not have been a disaster, but they put her on the wrong bus. Lisa had to call the bus garage and have them radio around to figure out exactly which bus they had her on.

Needless to say, my wife’s confidence in the school has now rapidly gone through the floor, and it is very likely Emma won’t be returning to the school.

At least it’s not as bad as what hapenned to my neighbor — they dropped his 2nd grader off in a part of town that I would not feel safe walking in even during the day time. (His kids attend a private school now).

Fred Couples Designs Men-Only Golf Course

Professional golfer Fred Couples became embroiled in controversy in August after it was revealed that he is helping to design a golf course for the Southern Dunes Golf Course near Maricopa, Arizona. The club, intended for avid low-handicap golfers, will be men-only.

The club will be completely member-owned; once all of the 500 or so memberships are sold, the members literally own the club. Because this makes the golf club completely private and not open to the general public, this means that any sexual discrimination lawsuit against the club would have a huge mountain to climb.

Kathleen Ferraro, director of the women’s studies program at Arizona State University, told the Associated press, “I find it rather shocking that there are still such bastions of intolerance.”

But Brian Curley, a partner in the firm designing the club, points out, there are plenty of women’s only athletic clubs which no one ever accuses of being “bastions of intolerance.” Surely if there is nothing wrong for women to desire to join athletic clubs that only admit other women as members, it is a bit hard to understand what the problem would be with a men’s only private athletic club.

Source:

Couples helping to design men-only course. The Associated Press, August 23, 2001.