UN Court

Two Syrians living in the occupied Golan Heights have been sentenced to jail by an Israeli military court for blocking an Israeli ambulance that was transporting al-Nusra militants for treatment. Syria’s official news agency SANA reported that on Thursday the court sentenced Amal Abu Saleh to seven years and eight months in jail and issued a fine of more than 3,000 dollars. The other Syrian, Bashira Mahmoud was sentenced to 22 months in prison. She was fined 1,000 dollars.

You’ve no doubt heard about Brock Turner, the former Stanford undergraduate and swimmer convicted of raping an unconscious woman, but only sentenced to six months by the judge. Turner’s father had pleaded with the court for leniency, saying his son’s life shouldn’t be ruined over “20 minutes of action.” Kate Geiselman lives in Turner’s hometown, and this kind of thing seems familiar to her. Excerpts:

Bowe Bergdahl walked off.

In the court of public opinion, this is the central fact all can agree upon—-that a 24-year-old Army private first class who had been in Afghanistan fewer than two months walked off his outpost one day and vanished.

Everything that happened between Bergdahl’s walk-off and the present moment, where he stands trial for desertion and “misbehavior before the enemy,” has formed the basis of one of the most bizarre and dramatic tales of a missing soldier in recent memory. To say this case has become a political flashpoint is an understatement.

Fred Korematsu wearing his Presidential Medal of Freedom; photo by Capital News Service

Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

The current frenzy over the vacancy on the Supreme Court in the wake of Scalia’s death should be enough to make it clear to even the most naïve observer that the Supreme Court is a partisan and political institution, and nothing like the group of disinterested non-political sages that we are supposed to believe the court to be. As I wrote in “The Mythology of the Supreme Court,” the idea of the court as a group of jurisprudential deep thinkers is a tale for little school children: