posted October 11, 2007 12:14 AM              

HIGH COURT REJECTS BID BY PRISONER
October 10, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - A German man who says he was abducted and tortured by the CIA as part of the anti-terrorism rendition program lost his final chance yesterday to persuade U.S. courts to hear his claims.

The Supreme Court rejected without comment an appeal from Khaled el-Masri, effectively endorsing Bush administration arguments that state secrets would be revealed if courts allowed the case to proceed.

Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, claims that he was mistakenly identified as an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers and held for four months in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan.

The government has neither confirmed nor denied Masri's account and, in urging the court not to hear the case, said that the facts central to his claims are "highly classified." Source

NYC must pay for exec's son's special ed
NEW YORK -
A multimillionaire who sued New York City over its refusal to pay for his learning-disabled son's private school education won by default Wednesday when the Supreme Court couldn't agree which side was right.

On its face, the outcome means that New York City's Education Department will have to pay Freston a little less than $22,000 to cover a year's tuition at the Manhattan private school his son attended after he was diagnosed with mild learning disabilities in the late 1990s. Note: The city already paid $50,000 in tuition over two years before deciding to stop the payments.

But the court didn't even address the case's key question: Do the parents of students have a right to demand a private school education for their kids without even giving public schools a try first?
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Hospital Gives Man Drip-Feed Of Vodka
BRISBANE, Australia, Oct. 10, 2007
Doctors plugged an Italian tourist into a drip-feed of vodka to save him at a hospital in Australia that ran out of the medicinal alcohol it would normally have used for treatment.

"We quickly used all the available vials of 100 per cent alcohol and decided the next best way to get alcohol into the man's system was by feeding him spirits through a naso gastric tube,"

"The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit," he said. "The hospital's administrators were also very understanding when we explained our reasons for buying a case of vodka."
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