WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish military prosecutor shot himself in the head Monday after cutting short a news conference in what appeared to be a dramatic protest in a turf war between Poland's civilian and military prosecution services.
Mikolaj Przybyl was taken to hospital in the western city of Poznan after reporters heard a gunshot and hurried back to find him lying slumped on the floor in a pool of blood.
His life was not in danger, officials said, but the apparent suicide attempt quickly triggered a public dispute between the heads of Poland's military and civilian prosecution services over plans, criticized by Przybyl, to merge the two.
Shortly before the shooting, Przybyl had asked the reporters to leave his office. In his news conference, he had criticized media leaks from the ongoing probe into the 2010 crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, mostly senior Polish officials, in Smolensk, western Russia.
Several news outlets showed footage of Przybyl's body behind his desk before an ambulance took him to hospital. A doctor later told local media his team was still looking for the bullet that had lodged in the prosecutor's head.
Poland's chief prosecutor Andrzej Seremet said Przybyl was expected to survive.
Seremet added that he had disagreed with some of Przybyl's comments at the Poznan news conference.
Military prosecutors had been right to seek journalists' mobile phone records while searching for the source of leaks in the Smolensk investigation, the chief prosecutor said, but he added they had broken the law by also seeking access to text messages.
"This case has been accompanied by so much emotion, including unnecessary hysteria, in my view," said Seremet, who also contradicted Przybyl's assertion that the civil and military prosecution services were to be merged, saying no final decisions had been taken.
PROSECUTORS' FIGHT
Poland's top military prosecutor, Krzysztof Parulski, told a separate news conference he fully backed all Przybyl's comments and actions over leaks from the Smolensk investigation.
Parulski accused Seremet, his civilian supervisor, of acting unethically by seeking a separate analysis into the work of the military prosecutors and making it public before a court ruling.
Parulski said Przybyl had faced numerous threats, including a break-in at his flat and damage to his car, aimed at intimidating him and stalling other investigations the prosecutor was leading over possible financial misconduct within the army.
That is why Przybyl had lately been carrying a gun, Parulski added.
President Bronislaw Komorowski said in a statement he was "concerned" about the incident and asked the national security bureau to monitor the situation.
The Smolensk crash investigation remains a very sensitive political issue for Poland and for its relations with Moscow.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who leads the main opposition party and was twin brother of the late president, has accused Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government of collaborating with Moscow to cause the crash and of later conniving with Russia to cover up its real causes.
The government says such claims are absurd.
Since taking office in late 2007, Tusk has tried to improve relations with Moscow that have long been strained over energy, security and other issues. But disagreements over the investigation into the Smolensk crash have chilled the atmosphere.
Lunes, Enero 9, 2012
The Supreme Court Takes on Cher's Use of the F Word
When the entertainer Cher launched an expletive on live broadcast television in 2002, she probably had little idea she was triggering a major test of the government's ability to regulate content over the public airwaves.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case stemming from celebrities' use of isolated expletives as well as images of partial nudity during primetime broadcast programming. The case involves Cher's use of the F word on a Fox broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards and a similar outburst the following year on the same awards show by actress Nicole Richie.
The Court will also review an episode of ABC's "NYPD Blue" that featured a seven- second shot of an adult woman's nude buttocks. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), charged with regulating public airwaves, found that the incidents violated its prohibitions against the broadcast of indecent material before 10 p.m.
At issue before the Court is whether the FCC's current indecency-enforcement policy violates the Constitution. A lower court struck it down, ruling it was "impermissibly vague." Fox Television; ABC, Inc.; and other broadcasters argue that the current policy is arbitrary and puts a chill on broadcast speech.
"The FCCs current enforcement policy, which subjects even isolated expletives or brief, scripted images to multi-million-dollar fines, cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny," argues Carter G. Philipps in court papers on behalf of Fox Television Stations INC.
The broadcasters are urging the Court to overturn a 34-year-old precedent in a case called FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. At issue in that case was a broadcast of comedian George Carlin's "filthy words" monologue, aired on a radio broadcast in the middle of the afternoon. After complaints from the public, the FCC ruled that the broadcast was indecent and could be subject to sanctions.
The Supreme Court rejected a First Amendment challenge to the FCC's determination, finding "of all forms of communication, broadcasting has the most limited First Amendment protection." The Court ruled narrowly, finding in part that the broadcast medium is unique because "material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public but in the privacy of the home." The Court also found that "broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children."
But the broadcasters currently argue that much has changed since Pacifica was decided and that they should no longer be regulated more restrictively than other media such as cable and the internet.
"Pacifica justified reduced First Amendment scrutiny of broadcast indecency regulation on the theory that broadcasting was uniquely pervasive and uniquely accessible to children," writes Seth P. Waxman, an attorney representing ABC, Inc. "Neither predicate is true today." Waxman points out that today the vast majority of households receive television through cable or satellite and are exposed to the internet.
"Over the past three decades," Phillips writes, "the media marketplace has changed dramatically, thoroughly undermining Pacifica's rational for its unequal treatment of broadcast speech under the First Amendment."
Although the broadcasters want the Court to overrule Pacifica, they say that even without doing so the Court can find that the FCC has improperly expanded its indecency policy since Pacifica in a way that is confusing and vague. They say, for example, the policy allows the use of expletives in a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" depicting war but found the same words indecent in "The Blues," a music documentary by Martin Scorsese.
"The Commission's vague standard has led to both arbitrary enforcement and a chill on protected expression," writes Waxman. "The Commission appears to base indecency determinations on its own artistic judgments, in derogation of fundamental constitutional principles. Broadcasters have refrained from engaging in constitutionally protected expression for fear of incurring multi-million dollar fines and license revocations."
After the particular episode of NYPD Blue aired in 2003, the FCC fined ABC and its affiliated stations a total of $1.24 million.
But Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., arguing on behalf of the FCC, says in briefs that the FCC's enforcement rules remain a "reasonable and constitutional implementation of the government's compelling interest in protecting children from harmful exposure."
"Generations of parents," Verrilli writes, "have relied on indecency regulations to safeguard broadcast television as a relatively safe medium for their children. The rise of alternative communications media has strengthened, not undermined, that reliance interest."
He points out that when Cher swore during her acceptance speech, the broadcast was viewed by "millions of children including more than one million under age 11."
Professor Mark L. Rienzi of Catholic University, Columbus School of Law, says that even if the Court were to overrule Pacifica and say that broadcast networks have the same freedom from government regulation as cable, satellite or the internet, programming during prime time would not radically change. "At 8 o'clock at night most television stations decide that it is in their own best market interest to avoid constant uses of the F bomb and partial nudity," he says. "I would not expect the broadcasters to have wildly different programming if Pacifica is gone."
Although the broadcasters argue that parents have tools, like the V-Chip technology to block offensive programming, Verrilli says that those tools don't always work and that the FCC policy should be upheld. "So long as the federal government must exercise selectivity in allocating limited spectrum among numerous licensees (and broadcasters benefit from the use of a valuable public resource without charge), it may constitutionally require licenses to accept content-based restrictions that could not be imposed on other communications media."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor will not participate in this case because she dealt with it at the lower court level before her nomination to the Court.
The Court's ruling in this case is expected to affect another case, frozen in the lower court, regarding singer Janet Jackson's so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that exposed the entertainer's breast briefly during halftime of the Super Bowl in 2004.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case stemming from celebrities' use of isolated expletives as well as images of partial nudity during primetime broadcast programming. The case involves Cher's use of the F word on a Fox broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards and a similar outburst the following year on the same awards show by actress Nicole Richie.
The Court will also review an episode of ABC's "NYPD Blue" that featured a seven- second shot of an adult woman's nude buttocks. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), charged with regulating public airwaves, found that the incidents violated its prohibitions against the broadcast of indecent material before 10 p.m.
At issue before the Court is whether the FCC's current indecency-enforcement policy violates the Constitution. A lower court struck it down, ruling it was "impermissibly vague." Fox Television; ABC, Inc.; and other broadcasters argue that the current policy is arbitrary and puts a chill on broadcast speech.
"The FCCs current enforcement policy, which subjects even isolated expletives or brief, scripted images to multi-million-dollar fines, cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny," argues Carter G. Philipps in court papers on behalf of Fox Television Stations INC.
The broadcasters are urging the Court to overturn a 34-year-old precedent in a case called FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. At issue in that case was a broadcast of comedian George Carlin's "filthy words" monologue, aired on a radio broadcast in the middle of the afternoon. After complaints from the public, the FCC ruled that the broadcast was indecent and could be subject to sanctions.
The Supreme Court rejected a First Amendment challenge to the FCC's determination, finding "of all forms of communication, broadcasting has the most limited First Amendment protection." The Court ruled narrowly, finding in part that the broadcast medium is unique because "material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public but in the privacy of the home." The Court also found that "broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children."
But the broadcasters currently argue that much has changed since Pacifica was decided and that they should no longer be regulated more restrictively than other media such as cable and the internet.
"Pacifica justified reduced First Amendment scrutiny of broadcast indecency regulation on the theory that broadcasting was uniquely pervasive and uniquely accessible to children," writes Seth P. Waxman, an attorney representing ABC, Inc. "Neither predicate is true today." Waxman points out that today the vast majority of households receive television through cable or satellite and are exposed to the internet.
"Over the past three decades," Phillips writes, "the media marketplace has changed dramatically, thoroughly undermining Pacifica's rational for its unequal treatment of broadcast speech under the First Amendment."
Although the broadcasters want the Court to overrule Pacifica, they say that even without doing so the Court can find that the FCC has improperly expanded its indecency policy since Pacifica in a way that is confusing and vague. They say, for example, the policy allows the use of expletives in a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" depicting war but found the same words indecent in "The Blues," a music documentary by Martin Scorsese.
"The Commission's vague standard has led to both arbitrary enforcement and a chill on protected expression," writes Waxman. "The Commission appears to base indecency determinations on its own artistic judgments, in derogation of fundamental constitutional principles. Broadcasters have refrained from engaging in constitutionally protected expression for fear of incurring multi-million dollar fines and license revocations."
After the particular episode of NYPD Blue aired in 2003, the FCC fined ABC and its affiliated stations a total of $1.24 million.
But Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., arguing on behalf of the FCC, says in briefs that the FCC's enforcement rules remain a "reasonable and constitutional implementation of the government's compelling interest in protecting children from harmful exposure."
"Generations of parents," Verrilli writes, "have relied on indecency regulations to safeguard broadcast television as a relatively safe medium for their children. The rise of alternative communications media has strengthened, not undermined, that reliance interest."
He points out that when Cher swore during her acceptance speech, the broadcast was viewed by "millions of children including more than one million under age 11."
Professor Mark L. Rienzi of Catholic University, Columbus School of Law, says that even if the Court were to overrule Pacifica and say that broadcast networks have the same freedom from government regulation as cable, satellite or the internet, programming during prime time would not radically change. "At 8 o'clock at night most television stations decide that it is in their own best market interest to avoid constant uses of the F bomb and partial nudity," he says. "I would not expect the broadcasters to have wildly different programming if Pacifica is gone."
Although the broadcasters argue that parents have tools, like the V-Chip technology to block offensive programming, Verrilli says that those tools don't always work and that the FCC policy should be upheld. "So long as the federal government must exercise selectivity in allocating limited spectrum among numerous licensees (and broadcasters benefit from the use of a valuable public resource without charge), it may constitutionally require licenses to accept content-based restrictions that could not be imposed on other communications media."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor will not participate in this case because she dealt with it at the lower court level before her nomination to the Court.
The Court's ruling in this case is expected to affect another case, frozen in the lower court, regarding singer Janet Jackson's so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that exposed the entertainer's breast briefly during halftime of the Super Bowl in 2004.
Snoop Dogg Arrested for Weed
Snoop Dogg has a medical prescription for cannabis in California, his home state, but that doesn't fly in Texas. The rapper was arrested over the weekend after a drug-sniffing police dog found less than half an ounce of marijuana in a waste basket, according to reports.
The bus was stopped at a border-control checkpoint in Sierra Blanca – the same town where Willie Nelson was busted for weed in 2010. Snoop was cited on a misdemeanor drug possession and released. If convicted, he could face up to 180 days in jail.
The rapper has been arrested on other occasions for possession of marijuana and, in some cases, weapons possession, including firearms and a police baton.
The bus was stopped at a border-control checkpoint in Sierra Blanca – the same town where Willie Nelson was busted for weed in 2010. Snoop was cited on a misdemeanor drug possession and released. If convicted, he could face up to 180 days in jail.
The rapper has been arrested on other occasions for possession of marijuana and, in some cases, weapons possession, including firearms and a police baton.
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