Article:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Both sides in the gay marriage debate agree on one thing: It's time for the Supreme Court to settle the matter.

 FILE- In this June 26, 2013 file photo, gay rights advocate Vin Testa waves a rainbow flag in front of the Supreme Court in Washington. Both sides in the gay marriage debate agree on one thing: It’s time... (Associated Press)

 Even a justice recently said she thinks so, too.

 The emerging consensus makes it likely that the justices soon will agree to take up the question of whether the Constitution forbids states from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. A final ruling isn't likely before June 2015, but a decision to get involved could come as soon as the end of this month.

 "I don't see a lot of reasons for them to wait," says Dale Carpenter, a gay rights expert at the University of Minnesota law school. "You have almost no one at this point opposed to certiorari," the legal term for high court review.

 Officials in five states in which marriage bans were struck down by federal courts have rushed their appeals to the Supreme Court, in time for consideration by the justices when they meet in private on Sept. 29. Moving at breakneck speed, at least for the legal system, Indiana and Wisconsin filed appeals on Tuesday, just five days after the federal appeals court in Chicago struck down their state bans. The Chicago decision itself came just nine days after judges heard arguments, extremely fast for a process that usually is measured in months. Officials in Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia also have appealed to the Supreme Court.

 Adding to the momentum, the winners in all those cases — who typically want to preserve their lower court victories and would normally oppose Supreme Court review — want the justices to weigh in. As expected, so do the losers.

 In all, 36 states, encompassing both those that allow same-sex marriage and those that don't, want the justices to join the fray. Thirty businesses, including Alcoa, Amazon, eBay, General Electric, Intel, NIKE, Pfizer and Target, say the Supreme Court should extend same-sex marriage nationwide because the "current patchwork of state laws causes employees justifiable uncertainty about how their employers and governments will treat their familial relationships."

 The range of cases seems to meet the standard set by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she predicted in an interview with The Associated Press in July that the court would not look for ways to avoid ruling on same-sex marriage, as it did for many years on interracial marriage bans.

 "I think the court will not do what they did in the old days when they continually ducked the issue of miscegenation," Ginsburg said. "If a case is properly before the court, they will take it."

 The speed at which gay marriage has moved through the courts stems from the Supreme Court's decision less than 15 months ago in U.S. v. Windsor to strike down a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that denied a range of tax, health and veterans benefits to legally married gay couples.

 Since that decision, nearly two dozen judges have relied on Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the court to extend the Windsor decision to strike down state same-sex marriage bans in every region of the country. Only one federal trial judge, Martin Feldman in Louisiana, has upheld a state anti-gay marriage law. Elsewhere, two appellate judges have dissented from rulings in favor of same-sex marriage.

 "We all know this is going to be decided one step up," attorney Monte Stewart said Monday in his court presentation in support of gay marriage bans in Idaho and Nevada.

 "And we all know by whom," said appellate Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

 Reinhardt was referring to Kennedy, the deciding vote in the Windsor case and the author of all three major gay rights decisions at the Supreme Court stretching back to 1996.

 "Justice Kennedy has built himself quite a legacy on gay rights issues," said the University of Minnesota's Carpenter, doubting that Kennedy would repudiate that legacy by casting a likely decisive vote against the right to marry.

 The Windsor decision expressly left open the question of whether states could limit marriage to a man and a woman, yet "courts are all looking to the Supreme Court's Windsor precedent as the rule of decision for challenges to state marriage laws," Colorado and 16 other states that do not allow same-sex marriage told the court in support of the state appeals.

 Gay and lesbian couples can now get married in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Judges in an additional 14 states have struck down prohibitions but put the rulings on hold pending appeals. The federal appeals court in Cincinnati could issue a decision at any time affecting Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. Appellate judges in San Francisco heard arguments Monday over bans in Idaho and Nevada.

 The situation is strikingly different from the last time a state's same-sex marriage ban came to the Supreme Court — and that was only two years ago. Same-sex marriage then was legal in just six states.

 "Talk about a journey. It's a movement that took a long time to get going, but it has really snowballed in the last two years," said James Esseks of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents gay couples seeking to marry in Indiana, Virginia and Wisconsin.

 Then, supporters and opponents of gay marriage squared off over whether the justices should even hear the case. Opponents urged Supreme Court review, while supporters pleaded with the justices to stay out of it. After all, they had won what they wanted in the lower courts, the invalidation of California's Proposition 8.

 The court eventually agreed to hear the California case as well as the federal Defense of Marriage Act case. The justices issued a technical ruling in the California case that eliminated Prop 8 but left for another day whether same-sex couples elsewhere have a constitutional right to marry.

 The prevailing view is that day will soon arrive.

 ___

 Follow Mark Sherman on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/shermancourt ||||| Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

 On Monday morning, the Supreme Court declined to review seven gay marriage decisions out of five different states. In each case, an appeals court had ruled that state-level gay marriage bans are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court's refusal to hear every case means that gay marriages can begin immediately in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

 The move is unexpected and somewhat bizarre. Most court-watchers, including me, assumed the justices would wait to make a move on gay marriage until a circuit court ruled that state-level marriage bans were constitutional, swimming against the tide. At that point, the Supreme Court would be presented with a circuit split, essentially forcing it to wade in. And since the 6th Circuit seems poised to rule in favor of anti-gay-marriage laws, the justices probably would not have had to wait long.

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 It appears, however, that the justices were not eager to keep gay couples in legal limbo while they awaited the 6th Circuit’s ruling. Instead, their move on Monday allows thousands of gay couples in five different states to wed legally. Should the 6th Circuit still rule against gay marriage, of course, the Supreme Court could take the case then. For now, however, the justices have rid themselves of the issue. ||||| That doesn’t mean, of course, that the court refused to hear those cases altogether. It simply means that the justices haven’t decided which, if any, of the cases they’d like to review. Conventional wisdom suggests that the court is waiting for a circuit court to rule against gay marriage before revisiting the topic; at that point, the circuits would be split on the issue, and the court would be more or less forced to intervene. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently suggested as much, noting that, until a circuit court found gay marriage bans to be constitutional, there would be “no need for us to rush.” ||||| Justice The Supreme Court Just Quietly Made Marriage Equality The Law Of The Land In Many States CREDIT: AP Photo/Richard Vogel

 In a surprising anti-climax to one of the most important legal battles of the last several decades, the Supreme Court announced today that it would not hear several cases where federal appeals courts held that the Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the same marriage rights as straight couples. The announcement listed these marriage equality cases as part of a lengthy order listing the cases where the Court had denied review. The justices offered no explanation for their decision.

 As a practical matter, however, this decision not to hear these cases is an earthquake for gay rights. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, refused to issue a stay halting its order favoring marriage equality. Although the Supreme Court later stepped in with its own stay order, that order provides that the Supreme Court’s stay will “terminate automatically” if the Supreme Court denies review of the case. Now that the justices have done so, there should be no further legal barriers preventing marriages from beginning in those five states — although it is possible that there may be some delay before marriages may begin due to procedural steps that need to be taken by the judiciary.

 The Court also denied review in cases arising out of the Seventh Circuit, which covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, and in the Tenth Circuit, which covers Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming. It is likely that marriages will be able to begin quickly in those states as well — although it may be necessary for plaintiffs in some of those states to seek an order from a federal court requiring states that oppose marriage equality to comply with their obligations under the Constitution.

 One thing that should be noted is that there are still marriage equality cases pending before conservative circuits that could rule against equality. Nevertheless, the fact that marriages are likely to begin very shortly in the states currently subject to court orders will make it very difficult for the Supreme Court to reverse course — and retroactively invalidate those marriages — in a subsequent opinion. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| The Supreme Court was asked to consider petitions for certiorari in seven separate cases challenging state laws barring legal recognition of same-sex marriage. On Monday morning, SCOTUSBlog reported, the Supreme Court denied all seven petitions.

 Most commentators have assumed the Supreme Court would take one or more of these cases and (perhaps) conclusively determine whether the federal Constitution bars states from refusing to recognize same-sex marriages under state law. Yet all seven cases below had come out the same way. In all seven, lower courts struck down the challenged state laws, so there was no circuit split.

 Given the lack of a split, I do not think it is at all surprising that the court denied these petitions. (Indeed, coincidentally, I was planning on writing a post raising doubts about when and whether the court would take on a same-sex marriage case.) There are several more cases pending in lower courts, including some in which there are reasons to suspect the states will prevail. If so, the court will have a split to resolve, making a grant a sure thing. If not, and same-sex marriage advocates run the table, the court can avoid resolving the issue.

 Of course, on this issue, the real question is what Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks. Is he ready and willing to hold that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage? Or is he still conflicted given his federalist sympathies? This may ultimately determine when or whether the court takes a case challenging a state prohibition on same-sex marriage and how such a case is resolved.

 UPDATE: Roberts Barnes reports for the Post here. How Appealing rounds up more news coverage.

 SECOND UPDATE: It’s worth remembering that Justice Ginsburg remarked last month that there was “no urgency” to taking a same-sex marriage case. At the time she noted that some circuits, such as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, had yet to rule. As Dale Carpenter reported here, there is some reason to think the Sixth Circuit might well uphold the challenged state laws barring recognition of same-sex marriages, even if on particularly narrow grounds. That case was argued in August, and an opinion is likely in the next several weeks.

 STILL MORE: Lyle Denniston explains here why most observers expected the Court to grant at least one of the petitions. |||||Summary:

– The Supreme Court made a surprise decision this morning by refusing to hear appeals from five states trying to ban same-sex marriage, kick-starting a flurry of "What does this mean?" and "What happens next?" speculation. Some reaction: Under the headline "The Supreme Court Just Quietly Made Marriage Equality The Law Of The Land In Many States," Ian Millhiser writes at ThinkProgress that the "anti-climax" of a decision is, nevertheless, "an earthquake for gay rights" practically speaking. Though Millhiser notes there may be a waiting period and logistical obstacles for same-sex couples, he writes that looming marriages "will make it very difficult for the Supreme Court to reverse course—and retroactively invalidate those marriages—in a subsequent opinion." Over at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern calls the court's move "unexpected and somewhat bizarre," citing his own Slate piece last week in which he noted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's recent comments that there was "no need for [the Supreme Court] to rush" until circuit courts found same-sex marriage bans to be constitutional. He brings up one other interesting point: "If no circuit court ever rules against gay marriage, the gay marriage question will be effectively settled, and the Supreme Court will never have to wade in again." Agreeing that "almost no one expected that to happen," Lyle Denniston writes at SCOTUSblog that the decision was so surprising because: the Supreme Court had actually been asked to review all seven state cases ("a rare thing … that almost never fails to assure review"); that the court appeared to have given recent indications it was ready "to confront the basic issue"; and that today's decision doesn't exactly sync up with last year's ruling in United States v. Windsor, which struck a major blow to the Defense of Marriage Act, as per the AP. Jonathan H. Adler at the Washington Post, however, wasn't terribly surprised, mainly because all petitions before the Supreme Court had already been nixed by lower circuit courts. Instead, Adler wants to know—especially since the decision came with zero comment from the judges—"is what Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks. … Is he ready and willing to hold that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage? Or is he still conflicted given his federalist sympathies?"


Here is a news article: As Israel's Operation Protective Edge entered its 24th day on Thursday, the security cabinet has ordered the military to press on with the offensive in the Gaza Strip, focusing on the destruction of Hamas' tunnel network.

 An Israeli delegation traveled to Cairo on Wednesday for several hours of talks over Egypt’s efforts to broker a truce in Gaza. An official said Israel will continue to allow temporary humanitarian cease-fires in certain areas.

 Three Israel Defense Forces soldiers were killed and 12 wounded on Wednesday afternoon in the Khan Yunis area of south Gaza, bringing the death toll in the military to 56. Three Israeli civilians have been killed in the current round of fighting.

 In Gaza, the death toll in the Israeli operation has topped 1,360 according to Palestinian health officials. More than 6,500 Palestinians have been wounded in the Israeli strikes.

 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared Gaza a "humanitarian disaster area" and urged the international community to protect and provide relief to the battered enclave. In a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, he accused Israel of committing war crimes.

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 For Wednesday's live updates, click here

 Latest updates [Thursday]:

 1:18 A.M. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says Gaza ceasefire a 'lull of opportunity,' imperative that sides make best efforts to find common ground.

 The UN representative in Jerusalem, Robert Serry, has "received assurances" that all parties have agreed to the pause, according to a joint statement released by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and United States Secretary of State John Kerry.(Reuters, DPA)

 1:15 A.M. According to the Palestinian news agency Ma'an, 84 Palestinians were killed over the last 24 hours in the Gaza Strip, and 258 were wounded. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Palestinian death toll since fighting began is now 1,442, and the number of wounded has risen to 8,295. According to the Ma'an report, the Strip's Housing Ministry estimated the damage caused by the IDF operation as totaling $4 billion, and that 5,238 buildings have been completely destroyed. (Haaretz)

 12:55 A.M. Hamas says will abide by three-day Gaza truce to begin on Friday.

 "Acknowledging a call by the United Nations and in consideration of the situation of our people, resistance factions agreed to a 72-hour humanitarian and mutual calm that begins at 8 a.m (0500 GMT) on Friday as long as the other side abides by it," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

 "All the Palestinian factions are united behind the issue in this regard," Abu Zuhri said. (Reuters)

 12:39 A.M. Israel and Hamas have agreed to a 72-hour ceasefire in their conflict in the Gaza Strip starting on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday.

 The ceasefire will begin at 8 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) on Friday, Aug. 1, they said in a joint statement. The statement said "forces on the ground will remain in place" during the truce, implying that Israeli ground forces will not withdraw.

 "We urge all parties to act with restraint until this humanitarian ceasefire begins, and to fully abide by their commitments during the ceasefire," Kerry and Ban said. "This ceasefire is critical to giving innocent civilians a much-needed reprieve from violence."

 Israeli and Palestinian delegations will immediately travel to Cairo for negotiations with the Egyptian government to reach a durable ceasefire, the statement said (Reuters)

 11:42 P.M. Call for residents of towns in Zikim to stay indoors canceled. Announcement made due to fears, now refuted, of suspected security-related incident. (Shirly Seidler, Gili Cohen)

 11:03 P.M. Israel will be required under international law to take responsibility for helping Palestinian civilians if there are any further large-scale displacements from the fighting in Gaza, UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl tells the United Nations Security Council.

 Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the council debated a statement to condemn the deadly attacks on UN schools, the rockets hidden in vacant schools and the deaths of UN staff, but could not reach agreement. (Reuters)

 10:56 P.M. Entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque will be limited to men over 50, due to concerns of violent clashes. Police forces are expected to be deployed in the area. (Yaniv Kubovich)

 22:54 P.M. Hundreds of riot police in Paris deployed near the Israeli Embassy Thursday for the first major pro-Israel rally since the start of the latest Gaza war.

 Several thousand people turned out for the rally, waving signs with slogans like "Gaza hostage of Hamas" and "We protest for peace."

 The demonstration happened amid persistent reports the Jewish Defense League faces a government ban. JDD militants stepped in to assure security at synagogues during pro-Gaza protests, but were blamed for provoking violence at pro-Palestinian rallies. (AP)

 10:41 P.M. Officials in Ramallah are increasingly getting the impression that Israel is not interested in reaching a cease-fire agreement based on the Egyptian proposal, Haaretz has learned. Rather, they believe, Israel seeks to complete its military mission and withdraw unilaterally to the Gaza Strip border, as it did in the 2005 disengagement. (Jack Khoury)

 10:07 P.M. Residents of Zikim, Yad Mordechai asked to lock themselves in homes until further notice, due to suspected security-related incident near Gaza border. (Gili Cohen)

 9:36 P.M. The White House says there is little doubt it was Israeli artillery that hit a UNRWA school in Gaza, and is describing the shelling as "totally unacceptable and totally indefensible."

 White House spokesman Josh Earnest cited statements from the UN blaming Israel for the shelling, as well as the Israeli government's acknowledgement that it was firing in the area of the school. Earnest says that while the U.S. supports a full investigation into the matter, "it does not appear there's a lot of doubt about whose artillery was involved." (AP)

 9:31 P.M. Rocket sirens sound in Ashkelon, Gaza-bordering regions (Haaretz)

 8:55 P.M. "The Hamas leadership must be taken out," says coalition chairman Yariv Levin, considered one of the more influential MKs in the Likud party. "We can't leave the Gaza Strip as it is today. We need to create a wide swath of land beyond the border, that will be a no-man's-land that the Palestinians will not be allowed to enter. The area needs to be flattened, in the sense that there will be no houses that tunnels can be dug under."

 "We definitely should aim at hurting the Hamas leadership," added Levin. "It is important that Hamas know it will pay a personal price for the continuation of the fighting. Such people are dead men walking." (Jonathan Lis)

 8:11 P.M. Two IDF solider wounded by sniper fire in Shujaiyeh (Gili Cohen)

 8:10 P.M. Mortar shells hit house, barn in Eshkol Regional Council; rocket siren sounded, no injuries reported. (Shirley Seidler)

 An Israeli woman surveys the damage after a rocket fired by Gaza militants landed in the southern town of Kiryat Gat. July 31, 2014 (Reuters)

 7:50 P.M. UNRWA spokesman in Gaza Chris Gunness says the IDF is responsible for yesterday's artillery strike on the UN-run school in Jabalia, where 15 Palestinians were killed. Speaking on Israel's Channel 2, Gunness said the conclusion was made after checking the shooting's trajectory. He also said the accusations that weapons found inside UNRWA schools were returned to Hamas are lies, and that the arms were in fact turned over to disarmament experts.(Haaretz)

 7:42 P.M. Number of Israelis wounded from mortar fire attack near Gaza border rises to eight. (Shirley Seidler and Gili Cohen)

 7:40 P.M. Rocket hits high-voltage electricity line, cuts power to nine communities near Gaza border. (Shirley Seidler)

 7:37 P.M. Ministers Sa’ar, Shalom critizise handling of Gaza op, say goal of IDF operation should have been to topple Hamas’ reign. For full story, click here (Barak Ravid)

 7:31 P.M. Call for residents of towns in Sdot Negev to stay indoors canceled. Announcement made due to fears, now refuted, of suspected security-related incident. (Haaretz)

 7:13 P.M. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says there’s “no promise” of a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip.

 A Palestinian man covers his face to protect him from the smoke billowing from a milk factory hit by an Israeli strike, north of Gaza City on July 31, 2014 (AFP)

 Kerry told reporters Thursday in New Delhi that the U.S. remains hopeful that a cease-fire is achievable, and he said the sooner it happens, the better.

 He urges both sides to begin, quote, “bona fide negotiations” to stop the bloodshed.

 The violence is now in its fourth week and has killed over a thousand Palestinians living in Gaza and several dozen Israeli troops fighting there. (AP)

 7:10 P.M. The French Interior Ministry is considering placing a ban on the radical Jewish group Ligue de Défense Juive. The ministry announced it is “analysing” its legal options against the group, which has been accused of provoking pro-Palestinain demonstrators in the Paris area in recent days, the Independant reports. (Haaretz)

 6:52 Several mortar shells and rockets hit open areas in Eshkol Regional Council (Shirley Seidler)

 6:40 P.M. Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar confronted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a cabinet meeting on Thursday over the goals of the Gaza operation. A source who took part in the meeting says Sa'ar told the prime minister that the goal of the operation should have been to topple Hamas' reign in Gaza.

 “I wasn’t one of those (ministers) to go out in public, in front of the media, and say we need to topple the Hamas regime but today I am saying it here that that should have been the operation’s objective,” the source quoted Sa’ar as saying.

 In response, Sa’ar told Haaretz, “I am legally obliged to avoid responding to things that were said in the cabinet meeting even if those quotes are incorrect.” (Barak Ravid)

 6:02 P.M. Two people wounded by rocket-fire in Kiryat Gat; one, a 30-year-old man, was hospitalized in serious condition. The rocket, one of several shot at the southern city, struck the third floor of a residential building. Three other rockets were intercepted above Kiryat Gat, and another landed in an open area within the city limits. Seven people are being treated for shock.

 Shortly after the rocket struck in Kiryat Gat, July 31 2014 (Matan Shimonov)

 6:00 P.M. Rocket alerts sound across Tel Aviv metropolitan area, and Gaza border-regions. Iron Dome intercepts rocket over Tel Aviv. (Gili Cohen, Shirley Seidler)

 5:55 P.M. Rocket alerts sound in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza-bordering regions (Haaretz)

 5:50 P.M. UNRWA's Gaza Spokesman Chris Gunness says eight of the UN's refugee agency killed in Gaza. (Haaretz)

 BREAKING NEWS: 8 UNRWA staff members killed in #Gaza war says @PKraehenbuehl to Security Council RT — Chris Gunness (@ChrisGunness) July 31, 2014

 5:31 P.M. Rocket alerts sound across western Negev, Ashkelon region (Haaretz)

 4:57 P.M. Rocket alerts sound in Gaza-bordering regions (Haaretz)

 4:25 P.M. Hamas heads publish several statements simultaneously, in which they declare imminent victory. "The Palestinian people will be marking their victory in the very near future," Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said. Khalil al-Haya, a member of Hamas' diplomatic bureau, said Netanyahu was "searching for a way out" after suffering 'blows from the resistance forces,' and added that "the only way out was an acceptance of the resistance's terms." Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, meanwhile, said "Netanyahu is leading his army into the unknown. His allies have pulled him into a failing operation, the results of which he fails to understand." (Jack Khoury)

 3:53 P.M. IDF strikes car in eastern Gaza, killing two and wounding one (Jack Khoury)

 3:33 P.M. Rocket sirens sound in Ashkelon, Gaza-border region (Haaretz)

 2:50 P.M. Three mortar shells hit near towns in Eshkol Regional Council. Rocket alerts were sounded. Security forces are conducting sweeps near the Gaza border fence in Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, after a rocket struck in the vicinity. (Shirley Seidler)

 2:38 P.M. The UN's top human rights official is accusing Israel and Hamas militants of committing war crimes in the latest Gaza war.

 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay says that by placing and firing rockets within heavily populated areas both sides are committing "a violation of international humanitarian law, therefore a war crime."

 Pillay also told reporters Thursday in Geneva that she sees "a recurrence of the very acts" from the 2009 Gaza war in which the UN concluded Israel deliberately targeted civilians and might have committed war crimes, along with Hamas. (News Agencies) Read full article

 2:36 P.M. Mortar shell explodes in Eshkol Regional Council (Shirley Seidler)

 2:04 P.M. An IDF soldier was lightly wounded by sniper fire shot from inside a mosque in Shujaiyeh. IDF responded with tank fire. (Gili Cohen)

 IDF soldiers atop a tank, outside near Gaza. July 31, 2014 (Reuters)

 1:21 P.M. Rocket explodes in an open area in Sdot Negev Regional Council. (Shirly Seidler)

 1:18 P.M. Malaysia denied Thursday that it is providing training for Hamas fighters in Gaza.

 Deputy Home Affairs Minister Wan Junaidi Jaafar said the government has never allowed the country to be used as a training ground for Hamas fighters, even if Malaysia supports the Palestinians.

 "It does not matter what kind of freedom fighting group they belong to, even those against Israel, we have never given permission to have such trainings here," he told the Astro Awani television station. "The report is incorrect."

 A Hamas commander told Shin Bet commanders he and 10 other militants were sent to Malaysia to practice flying paragliders four years ago.

 Malaysian leaders both from the opposition and the government have criticized the Israeli government for its continued Gaza operation. (DPA)

 1:02 P.M. Nearly one quarter of the population of Gaza has been displaced over the three weeks of Israel's operation: Some 225,178 people have sought refuge in 86 UNWRA schools across the Strip. The head of UNWRA told Haaretz that the organization has demanded a number of times in recent days that Israel, as an occupying force, deliver the necessary humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. (Amira Hass)

 Palestinians wait to receive food supplies from a UN food distribution center in Khan Yunis. July 31, 2014 (Reuters)

 12:01 P.M. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israel was determined, regardless of ceasefire efforts, to complete the destruction of tunnels that Palestinian militants have built under the Gaza-Israel border.

 "We are determined to complete this mission with or without a cease-fire," Netanyahu said in public remarks at the start of a cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv. "I wont agree to any proposal that will not enable the Israeli military to complete this important task for the sake of Israel's security." Read full article

 11:59 A.M. Barrage of rockets fired at Sderot and nearby towns on Gaza border as Prime Minister Netanyahu addresses public in live address from Cabinet meeting.

 11:55 A.M. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opens cabinet meeting at the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv.

 Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon in Tel Aviv, July 31,2014.(Reuters)

 11:44 A.M. Rocket aimed at Ashkelon lands in Gaza territory. Seventeen rockets and mortars fired at south Israel since midnight. (Shirley Seidler)

 11:24 A.M. Five mortar shells explode in open areas in Eshkol Regional Council. Two rockets explode in open areas in Ashkelon. (Shirley Seidler)

 11:16 A.M. Rocket alarm sirens sound in Ashkelon.

 11:01 A.M. Rocket alarm sirens sound in Gaza border town.

 10:31 A.M. Rocket alarm siren sounds in Gaza border town.

 10:27 A.M. Five Palestinians killed overnight and early morning on Thursday: Three in Khan Yunis, one in Rafah, and another who succumbed to wounds in hospital. The Gaza Health Ministry places the death toll from three weeks of the operation at 1,364 - of that number 315 children and 166 women. The number of wounded has risen to 6,785, of them 2,307 children and 1,529 women. (Jack Khoury)

 9:25 A.M. Rocket alarm sirens sound in Eshkol Regional Council.

 An IDF soldier prepares a Merkava tank, near the Gaza border. July 31, 2014 (AFP)

 9:23 A.M. Mortar shell explodes in open area in Eshkol Regional Council. No damages reported. (Shirley Seidler)

 8:37 A.M. Rocket explodes in open area near Be'er Sheva. No injuries. (Shirly Seidler)

 8:30 A.M. Rocket alarm sirens sound in Be'er Sheva.

 8:00 A.M. IDF attacked 19 targets in Gaza overnight, including five houses which were reportedly used as command centers. (Gili Cohen)

 6:45 A.M. The IDF decided on Wednesday to call up 16,000 additional reserve troops in order to allow the military "room to breathe," a senior officer says. Their deployment will begin on Thursday, raising the number of reserve soldiers called up so far to 86,000. (Gili Cohen)

 4:30 A.M. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel speaks with Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and reiterates "the United States' support for Israel's security and its right to defend itself," according to a statement released by the Department of Defense.

 A Palestinian firefighter near the wreckage of a house, in Gaza City July 31, 2014 (Reuters)

 "Secretary Hagel also expressed the United States' continued concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza," the statement said.

 "Secretary Hagel stressed the need for a humanitarian ceasefire that ends hostilities and leads to a permanent cessation of hostilities based on the November 2012 ceasefire agreement, and reaffirmed the U.S. view that any process to resolve the crisis in Gaza in a lasting and meaningful way must lead to the disarmament of Hamas and all terrorist groups."

 According to the statement, Ya'alon thanked Hagel for his support for the defense of Israel, particularly the Iron Dome missile interception system.

 3:20 A.M. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Hamas is solely responsible for the death and destruction in Gaza, The Canadian Press reports.

 "Obviously no one likes to see the suffering and loss of life that has occurred," Harper was quoted as saying. "That said, we hold the terrorist organization Hamas responsible for this. They have initiated and continue this conflict and continue to seek the destruction of the state of Israel."

 2:00 A.M. A delegation comprised of Hamas and PLO representatives is prepared to depart for cease-fire talks in Cairo "at any moment," the Palestinian Safa news agency reports, citing a senior Hamas official. The official reportedly said that the truce proposal that is to be discussed is different from the one previously brought forth by Egypt. An itinerary for the trip has yet to be set.

 12:10 A.M. CNN reports that the United States has agreed to an Israeli request for several types of ammunition as the ground battle in Gaza is entering its third week.

 According to CNN, the items being bought are 120mm mortar rounds and 40mm ammunition for grenade launchers. Those will come from a stockpile the United States keeps in Israel, which is worth more than $1 billion, officials said.

 It’s not an emergency sale, a U.S. defense official told CNN. (Jacob Kornbluh)

 Weapons in a house in Gaza. Photo by IDF Spokesperson

 12:01 A.M. J Street issues statement on Gaza conflict, calling for "the fighting to end through a sustainable ceasefire agreement."

 "J Street strongly supports Israel’s right to defend itself proportionately against the threat of relentless rockets and to destroy tunnels leading into Israel. At the same time, we see no military victory over an ideology and no military solution to a fundamentally political conflict. We adamantly oppose calls for Israel to “reoccupy Gaza.”

 "We support efforts by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry as well as the engagement of other countries such as Egypt to bring about an immediate ceasefire. Any such ceasefire must account for Israel’s security concerns, specifically from rockets and tunnels, as well as Palestinian humanitarian needs, and should be structured to lead to negotiations to establish arrangements related to security, political issues and humanitarian assistance. We support the inclusion of the Palestinian Authority in the ceasefire and in the negotiations around security, political arrangements and humanitarian assistance.

 "We are deeply offended by attacks on and mischaracterizations of the Secretary’s efforts to resolve this crisis and his relationship to the state of Israel. We believe his pursuit of not only a cease-fire, but a two-state solution represents the highest possible form of friendship to Israel and all the people of the region, and we salute and support the Secretary for his efforts." ||||| Displaced Palestinians pass time at a U.N school where they now live, in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip, on Thursday, July 31, 2014. Israeli attacks in the strip continued Thursday, with witnesses saying... (Associated Press)

 JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel will destroy the Hamas tunnel network in the Gaza Strip "with or without a cease-fire," as the military called up another 16,000 reservists to pursue its campaign in the densely-populated territory.

 Netanyahu's vow came as international efforts to end the 23-day-old conflict seemed to sputter despite concern over the mounting death toll, with more than 1,300 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and more than 50 Israelis, almost all of them soldiers, killed since July 8.

 "We have neutralized dozens of terror tunnels and we are committed to complete this mission, with or without a cease-fire," Netanyahu said. "Therefore I will not agree to any offer that does not allow the military to complete this important mission for the security of the people of Israel."

 An initial Israeli aerial campaign against Hamas was widened into a ground offensive on July 17. Since then the campaign has concentrated on destroying more than 30 cross-border tunnels that militants have constructed to carry out attacks on Israeli territory.

 Israel says that most of the 32 tunnels it has uncovered have now been demolished and that getting rid of the remainder will take no more than a few days.

 The new reserve call-up follows another day of heavy fighting, in which tank shells struck a U.N. school where Palestinians were sheltering and an airstrike tore through a crowded Gaza shopping area. At least 116 Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers were killed Wednesday.

 Speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss the matter with the press, an Israeli defense official said the purpose of the latest call-up was to provide relief for troops currently on the Gaza firing line. However, Israeli officials have also said they do not rule out broadening operations in the coming days.

 Fifty-six Israeli soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side have been killed since the offensive began, as Palestinians have fired hundreds of rockets at Israel -- some reaching major cities -- and carried out attacks through tunnels beneath the heavily guarded frontier.

 Israel has called up a total of 86,000 reserves during the Gaza war, which it launched to try to end rocket fire from Hamas and other armed groups.

 Israeli attacks in the strip continued Thursday, with witnesses saying that munitions struck the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque next to a U.N. school in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. Israeli fire near another U.N. school in Gaza killed more than a dozen people the day before, drawing international condemnation.

 The strike in Beit Lahiya early Thursday damaged water tanks on the roof of a building near the mosque, sending shrapnel flying into the adjacent school compound, where dozens of Palestinians displaced by the fighting had taken shelter.

 "The shrapnel from the strike on the mosque hit people who were in the street and at the entrance of the school," said Sami Salebi, an area resident.

 Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra said at least 15 people were wounded, with three of them in critical condition.

 Kifah Rafati, 40, was being treated for shrapnel injuries at the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital. She said she and her six children had been sleeping in a classroom facing the mosque when the explosion went off. "There is no safety anywhere," she said.

 On Wednesday Israeli tank shells struck a U.N. school in the Jebaliya refugee camp where some 3,300 Gazans had crammed in to seek refuge from the fighting, killing at least 17 people. The military said it was responding to mortar fire coming from the area of the school.

 But Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the deadly school shelling "outrageous" and "unjustifiable," and demanded an immediate humanitarian cease-fire.

 "Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children," the U.N. chief said.

 The White House also criticized the shelling of the U.N. school in Jebaliya.

 "We are extremely concerned that thousands of internally displaced Palestinians who have been called on by the Israeli military to evacuate their homes are not safe in U.N. designated shelters in Gaza," said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the White House's National Security Council.

 Later on Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded shopping area in the Shijaiyah district in Gaza City, killing at least 16 people, including Palestinian video journalist Rami Rayan, who was wearing a press vest at the time, and wounding more than 200 people, al-Kidra said.

 Thursday marked a third day of particularly heavy Israeli air and artillery attacks, at a time when Egyptian cease-fire efforts appeared to have stalled. Israeli media said late Wednesday that Israel's Security Cabinet decided to press forward with the operation.

 Egyptian officials, meanwhile, met with an Israeli envoy about Israel's conditions for a cease-fire, including disarming Hamas, according to a high-ranking Egyptian security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss the delicate diplomatic efforts.

 Hamas has said it will only halt fire once it receives guarantees that a Gaza border blockade by Israel and Egypt -- tightened after the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007 -- will be lifted.

 Israel says it wants to decimate Hamas' rocket-launching capability, diminish its weapons arsenal and demolish the tunnels. It has launched more than 4,000 strikes against Hamas-linked targets, including rocket launchers and mosques where it says weapons were being stored.

 Israeli strikes have also hit dozens of homes. Mahmoud Abu Rahma of the Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan said nearly half of the Palestinians killed so far died in their homes.

 Israeli officials have said Hamas uses Gaza's civilians as human shields by firing rockets from crowded neighborhoods. Palestinian militants have fired more than 2,600 rockets at Israel over the past three weeks.

 However, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, chief of the U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees, said Israel must try harder to ensure that civilians are not hurt, especially in Gaza, where 1.7 million people are squeezed into a small coastal territory. His agency has opened 80 of its schools to more than 200,000 Palestinians fleeing the violence.

 "What maybe the world forgets ... is that the people of Gaza have nowhere to go," he said. "So when the fighting starts and they move, it is not as if they can cross a border to somewhere."

 ___

 Barzak reported from Gaza City, Gaza Strip. |||||
A summary of this is?

– Benjamin Netanyahu today vowed to destroy Hamas' tunnels at all costs, even as Israel called up an additional 16,000 reservists—bringing the total so far to 86,000 troops. "We are determined to complete this mission with or without a ceasefire," he said of the tunnels' destruction, as per Haaretz. "Therefore I will not agree to any offer that does not allow the military to complete this important mission for the security of the people of Israel." He also issued a get-in-line message to two ministers who have been critical of his actions against Hamas, saying "beware of what you're doing." Netanyahu's statement vis a vis the tunnels comes as ceasefire efforts are sputtering anyway, notes the AP, and on the heels of the worst day of casualties thus far in Gaza.


Uncredited/Associated Press

 The Buffalo Bills have announced the hiring of Kathryn Smith as a quality control assistant under head coach Rex Ryan, which makes her "the first full-time female assistant coach in NFL history."

 The team announced a statement regarding the news, via Josh Reed of WIVB Sports:

 Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk first reported the news Wednesday. Smith will report to special teams coordinator Danny Crossman.

 Smith issued a statement on Thursday regarding the news, via NFL on ESPN:

 "I just like the way she is," head coach Rex Ryan said Friday, per Joe Buscaglia of WKBW. "She's really all about the team and how she can help. Exceeded what we thought she'd do."

 She has been part of Ryan's staff for the last seven years but never officially as part of the coaching staff. She held an administrative assistant position each of the last two seasons, and before that she worked within the New York Jets' player personnel department.

 Smith's hiring is a monumental moment for gender progress in the NFL, and it's been a long time coming. Jen Welter became the NFL's first female assistant of any kind before the 2015 season, serving under head coach Bruce Arians during training camp. Her position was temporary—teams regularly hire additional assistants on a temp basis to handle the extra players in camp—but it nonetheless opened a door Smith will walk through.

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 Last year, the NFL also hired Sarah Thomas as the first female referee in history. She worked as a full-time official during the 2015 season.

 While this is a promising step, the NFL is not the first league to welcome women into the coaches box. The NBA has long been at the forefront of the gender equality issue. Lisa Boyer was a volunteer assistant for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2001-02, and the San Antonio Spurs hired Becky Hammon as an assistant before the 2014-15 campaign. Nancy Lieberman became the second full-time female assistant in the NBA in 2015.

 In September, the Oakland Athletics made Justine Siegal the first woman to hold a coaching position with an MLB team. As it stands, the NHL is the only one of the United States' four major professional sports leagues yet to make a major step on the gender equality front.

 Follow Tyler Conway (@jtylerconway) on Twitter ||||| The Buffalo Bills' news release on the hiring of Kathryn Smith:

 The Buffalo Bills today announced that Kathryn Smith has been named the team’s special teams quality control coach.

 Smith is the first female to be named to a full-time coaching position in NFL history.

 “Kathryn Smith has done an outstanding job in the seven years that she has worked with our staff,” said Bills Head Coach Rex Ryan. “She certainly deserves this promotion based on her knowledge and strong commitment, just to name a couple of her outstanding qualities, and I just know she’s going to do a great job serving in the role of Quality Control-Special Teams.”

 “Kathryn has been working in a football administrative role and assisted the assistant coaches for years. She has proven that she’s ready for the next step, so I’m excited and proud for her with this opportunity. She will work with Danny Crossman and Eric Smith involving a number of responsibilities.”

 “I consulted with Bruce Arians on this since he was really the first NFL head coach to make this kind of move when he hired a female linebackers coach through the summer. You can see the success some of these young ladies are having in the coaching profession, such as the young lady that is an assistant to Coach (Greg) Popovich at the San Antonio Spurs, and realize how exciting this is for women like Kathryn Smith as well as the Bills organization.”

 Smith, who will enter her 14th year in the NFL next season, joins the Bills coaching ranks after spending 2015 as the team’s administrative assistant to the head coach.

 Prior to joining the Bills in 2015, Smith spent 12 seasons working for the New York Jets. Smith originally began her career in 2003 as a Jets gameday/special events intern. She became a college scouting intern in 2005 before being promoted to player personnel assistant in 2007 and going on to be named assistant to the head coach in 2014. ||||| The Buffalo Bills today announced that Kathryn Smith has been named the team’s quality control-special teams coach.

 Smith is the first female to be named to a full-time coaching position in NFL history.

 “Kathryn Smith has done an outstanding job in the seven years that she has worked with our staff,” said Bills Head Coach Rex Ryan. “She certainly deserves this promotion based on her knowledge and strong commitment, just to name a couple of her outstanding qualities, and I just know she’s going to do a great job serving in the role of Quality Control-Special Teams.”

 “Kathryn has been working in a football administrative role and assisted the assistant coaches for years. She has proven that she’s ready for the next step, so I’m excited and proud for her with this opportunity. She will work with Danny Crossman and Eric Smith involving a number of responsibilities.”

 “I consulted with Bruce Arians on this since he was really the first NFL head coach to make this kind of move when he hired a female linebackers coach through the summer. You can see the success some of these young ladies are having in the coaching profession, such as the young lady that is an assistant to Coach (Gregg) Popovich at the San Antonio Spurs, and realize how exciting this is for women like Kathryn Smith as well as the Bills organization.”

 Smith, who will enter her 14th year in the NFL next season, joins the Bills coaching ranks after spending 2015 as the team’s administrative assistant to the head coach.

 Prior to joining the Bills in 2015, Smith spent 12 seasons working for the New York Jets. Smith originally began her career in 2003 as a Jets gameday/special events intern. She became a college scouting intern in 2005 before being promoted to player personnel assistant in 2007 and going on to be named assistant to the head coach in 2014. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– The Buffalo Bills made a power run through a glass ceiling on Wednesday by hiring Kathryn Smith, the first full-time female member of coaching staff in NFL history. Smith, who has worked in the NFL since 2003 and joined the Bills last year as an administrative assistant to head coach Rex Ryan, is the new special teams quality control coach, reports the Buffalo News. She started out at the New York Jets, where she became a player personnel assistant in 2007 and was promoted to assistant to the head coach in 2014. "She certainly deserves this promotion based on her knowledge and strong commitment, just to name a couple of her outstanding qualities, and I just know she's going to do a great job serving in the role of quality control-special teams," Ryan said in a Bills press release. Her hire is a big step for the NFL, Bleacher Report notes, although there are already full-time female coaches in MLB and the NBA, leaving the NHL with some catching up to do. (Last summer, the Arizona Cardinals made Jen Welter the first woman to hold any kind of coaching position in the NFL.)


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 For the last four years, Martin Gill and his partner have been raising two foster children in their North Miami home. The brothers, now age four and nine, have thrived in Martin and his partner's care. After the parental rights were terminated in 2006, Martin and his partner hoped to adopt the children. Since 1977, however, the state of Florida, while allowing gay and lesbian couples to serve as foster parents, has automatically banned adoptions by gay people.

 With the help of the ACLU, Martin is challenging this ban, and last November a juvenile court judge granted the adoption. The case is not settled yet though because Florida's attorney general immediately appealed the lower court's decision. Fortunately for now, the brothers remain in Martin and his partner's care. ||||| Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.

 What?s in the data set:

 Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011

 Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011

 Number of captures: 2,713,676,341

 Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159

 Number of hosts: 29,032,069

 The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa?s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.

 However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.

 We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available ?warts and all? for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.

 If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you?re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say ?yes? to all requests, since we?re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered. |||||Summary:

– A Florida court has struck down the state's 33-year-old ban on gay adoptions, ruling that the law is unconstitutional and there is "no rational basis" for it. Gov. Charlie Crist says the state will stop enforcing the ban immediately, although he hasn't commented on whether the state plans to appeal the ruling to the Florida Supreme Court, the Miami Herald reports. "Given a total ban on adoption by homosexual persons, one might expect that this reflected a legislative judgment that homosexual persons are unfit to be parents,'' stated the court, which noted that the law was the only remaining one of its kind in the country. "No one in this case even hinted at any such argument. The parties agree 'that gay people and heterosexuals make equally good parents.'" The case was a hard-fought battle by plaintiff Martin Gill and his partner, who have been foster parents to two brothers, now 6 and 10, but were blocked from adopting the boys. "I'm going to get their birth certificates with me listed as their father. That will be a thrilling thing for me," Gill told AP.


Write an article based on this summary:

– The writ of habeas corpus lets prisoners appear in court to make their captors justify why they're being held. Until now in the US, those who've used this legal tactic have been human. But a New York judge yesterday ruled that the writ may be used by two lab chimpanzees at Stony Brook University, Science magazine reports. NY Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe ordered a university rep to address a suit filed by the Nonhuman Rights Project by appearing in court May 6 to argue why the college is holding Hercules and Leo. The group, which says the animals are being detained for biomedical experiments, says its ultimate goal is to have the animals released to the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Fla., per the NhRP's website. "This is a big step forward to getting what we are ultimately seeking: the right to bodily liberty for chimpanzees and other cognitively complex animals," Natalie Prosin, the project's executive director, tells Science. The case kicked off in December 2013 with lawsuits that also included two chimps held on private property; each case was struck down, sending the NhRP down the appeals path. Not everyone's convinced the upcoming hearing will mean liberation for the chimps. A Pepperdine University law professor tells Science that the judge likely just wants to hear both sides of the story: "It would be quite surprising if the judge intended to make a momentous substantive finding that chimpanzees are legal persons" without doing so, he notes. Prosin, meanwhile, says her group isn't stopping with the chimps and will also target the release of other animals. (Click to read about what chimps talk to each other about.)

Habeas corpus, or the Great Writ, is the legal procedure that keeps the government from holding you indefinitely without showing cause. When you challenge your detention by filing a habeas corpus petition, the executive branch must explain to a neutral judge its justification for holding you. Habeas corpus prevents the King from simply locking up subjects in secret dungeons and throwing away the key. It’s been a pillar of Western law since the signing of the Magna Carta in England in 1215.

 The Founders of our nation believed habeas corpus was so essential to preserving liberty, justice, and democracy that they enshrined it in the very first article of the United States Constitution.

 What happened to habeas corpus?

 In its waning days, the last Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006. Among many ill-considered and dangerous provisions, the MCA revoked the right to habeas corpus for anyone detained at Guantánamo Bay as well as for any foreigner the government detains anywhere and labels an “enemy combatant.” This provision applies to legal residents of the U.S. as well, meaning someone who has lived in the U.S. for years could potentially be labeled an “enemy combatant” and then thrown into prison with no legal recourse to challenge their detention.

 How does it relate to Guantanamo?

 The government has little or no evidence against most of the men detained at Guantánamo. We now know that almost none of the Guantánamo prisoners were taken into custody by U.S. forces or captured on any battlefield. The overwhelming majority were sold into captivity by Northern Alliance and Pakistani warlords for substantial bounties—$5,000 and more for each person they turned in; enough money, as leaflets the U.S. military distributed throughout Afghanistan said, “to take care of your family . . . for the rest of your life.” In fact, of the nearly 800 men that have been held at Guantánamo, only 10 have ever been charged with any crime.

 Soon after the first 20 detainees were flown to Guantánamo, CCR began filing habeas corpus petitions asking the government to explain why it was holding these men outside of the reach of the U.S. court system in what has since become a notorious offshore penal colony. Despite numerous legal victories that affirm the detainees’ right to challenge their detention, the Bush administration has managed to prevent the detainees from getting a fair hearing in the courts.

 What does it mean for the detainees?

 In June 2007, the Supreme Court decided to hear CCR’s most recent case challenging the detention of many Guantanamo detainees. These men have faced indefinite detention, sham trials, and conditions rapidly inducing psychological deterioration for nearly six years. In the coming Supreme Court term, for the third time, the high court will hear the detainees’ cases and, we hope, once more seek to hold the Administration accountable and uphold habeas corpus.

 The MCA extends a second-class system of justice far beyond Guantánamo to any non-citizen – including legal permanent residents of the U.S. – anywhere in the world whom the executive unilaterally declares to be an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

 What does it mean for everyone else?

 Habeas corpus was originally meant to act as a bulwark precisely against this type of executive power. The founders of our nation considered habeas corpus the most fundamental of rights because it insured that the executive branch could not hold people without cause. Since the founding of the U.S., the writ has been suspended on only four occasions, each for a brief period of time and each in territory that was an active combat zone.

 By compromising this core legal value and necessary protection against the executive branch, the MCA has eroded the very foundation of our legal and constitutional framework. If we do not defend the right to habeas corpus, we all lose. ||||| Update, 21 April: Science has learned that the court order referred to in this story has been amended. The words “writ of habeas corpus” have been struck out, suggesting that the court has made no decision on whether Hercules and Leo—two research chimpanzees at Stony Brook University in New York—deserve to be treated as legal persons. The Nonhuman Rights Project has responded to the amendment, stating, “This case is one of a trio of cases that the Nonhuman Rights Project has brought in an attempt to free chimpanzees imprisoned within the State of New York through an ‘Article 70-Habeas Corpus’ proceeding. These cases are novel and this is the first time that an Order to Show Cause has issued. We are grateful for an opportunity to litigate the issue of the freedom of the chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, at the ordered May hearing.” Stony Brook has also issued a statement about the case: “The University does not comment on the specifics of litigation, and awaits the court's full consideration on this matter.”

 Update, 22 April: The court hearing has been moved back from 6 May to 27 May. At that time, the judge will hear legal arguments regarding whether Hercules and Leo should remain at Stony Brook.

 In a decision that seems to recognize chimpanzees as legal persons for the first time, a New York judge today granted a pair of Stony Brook University lab animals the right to have their day in court. The ruling marks the first time in U.S. history that an animal has been covered by a writ of habeas corpus, which typically allows human prisoners to challenge their detention. The judicial action could force the university, which is believed to be holding the chimps, to release the primates, and could sway additional judges to do the same with other research animals.

 “This is a big step forward to getting what we are ultimately seeking: the right to bodily liberty for chimpanzees and other cognitively complex animals,” says Natalie Prosin, the executive director of the animal rights organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), that filed the case. “We got our foot in the door. And no matter what happens, that door can never be completely shut again.”

 Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a noted opponent of personhood for animals, cautions against reading too much into the ruling, however. “The judge may merely want more information to make a decision on the legal personhood claim, and may have ordered a hearing simply as a vehicle for hearing out both parties in more depth,” he writes in an e-mail to Science. “It would be quite surprising if the judge intended to make a momentous substantive finding that chimpanzees are legal persons if the judge has not yet heard the other side’s arguments.”

 The case began as a salvo of lawsuits filed by NhRP in December 2013. The group claimed that four New York chimpanzees—Hercules and Leo at Stony Brook, and two others on private property—were too cognitively and emotionally complex to be held in captivity and should be relocated to an established chimpanzee sanctuary. NhRP petitioned three lower court judges with a writ of habeas corpus, which is traditionally used to prevent people from being unlawfully imprisoned. By granting the writ, the judges would have implicitly acknowledged that chimpanzees were legal people, too—a first step in freeing them.

 The judges quickly struck down each case, however, and NhRP has been appealing ever since. Today’s decision is the group’s first major victory. In her ruling, New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe orders a representative of Stony Brook University to appear in court on 6 May to respond to NhRP’s petition that Hercules and Leo “are being unlawfully detained” and should be immediately moved to a chimp sanctuary in Florida. Both animals have been used to understand the evolution of human bipedalism. (Stony Brook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

 Prosin says that even if NhRP loses the case, it will use the habeas corpus ruling to sway judges in other jurisdictions. “It strengthens our argument that these nonhuman animals are not property,” she says. The group plans to file another case—this one involving a captive elephant—by the end of the year and has set its sights on other animals, including research animals, across the country. “We have the scientific evidence to prove in a court of law that elephants, great apes, and whales and dolphins are autonomous beings and deserve the right to bodily liberty,” she says.

 Related content: |||||


“Now, this is real simple,” President Obama told a crowd at Prince George’s Community College, in Maryland, in late September. “It’s a Website where you can compare and purchase affordable health-insurance plans, side by side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak … same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on, and you start looking, and here are all the options.”

 As we all now know, the bug-infested Website healthcare.gov turned out to be anything but “real simple.” After the site’s disastrous October 1 launch, the administration organized a frantic rescue effort shepherded by Jeffrey Zients, who is to become Obama’s chief economic adviser in January, and on December 17, the administration tapped Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene to lead the effort to build out the rest of the Website. The site is working better (but as of this writing still not perfectly) for consumers, though the complications it has unleashed for President Obama will be even harder to fix. The New York Times called the broken Website a “crisis that suddenly threatened his presidency,” and according to a CBS News poll, Obama’s job-approval rating has plunged to an all-time low. Americans’ approval of the Affordable Care Act has also dropped to its lowest level since CBS News began polling support for the law.

 The story of how the Obama administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agencies tasked with implementing the Affordable Care Act got it so wrong is still unfolding. Much of the blame has to fall on an insular White House that didn’t want to hear about problems, and another chunk has to land on CMS, which instead of hiring a systems integrator, whose job it would have been to ensure that all the processes feeding into healthcare.gov worked together, kept that role for itself. As anyone who has worked with the federal government on such projects knows, it is utterly inept when it comes to technology. “The government continues to struggle with how best to acquire the expertise to integrate technology,” says Stan Soloway, the C.E.O. of the Professional Services Council, which represents contractors who work with the government. Soloway has a scary stat, which is that of the 80,000 information-technology workers in the federal government, for every one person under 30, there are 10 people over 50.

 That lack of expertise explains why in building healthcare.gov, the government turned to industry contractors; in particular, to CGI Federal, a subsidiary of CGI Group, a Canadian company. To those uninitiated in the dark art of government contracting, it seems scandalous that CGI, a company most Americans had never heard of, a company that is not located in Silicon Valley (where President Obama has plenty of Internet superstar friends who could have formed a dazzling brain trust to implement his signature legislation) but rather in Montreal, could be chosen as the lead contractor for the administration’s most important initiative. While right-wing news outlets have focused on the possible relationship between Toni Townes-Whitley, senior vice president for civilian-agency programs at CGI Federal, and Michelle Obama, both of whom were 1985 Princeton graduates, CGI’s selection is probably more an example of a dysfunctional system than it is a scandal. “A lot of the companies in Silicon Valley don’t do business with the government at that level [the level required for federal contracting],” explains Soloway. “It is very burdensome, and the rules make it very unattractive.” Indeed, government contractors have to meet a whole host of requirements contained in a foot-thick book, including cost accounting and excessive auditing, to prove that they are not profiting too much off the American taxpayer. Hence, there tends to be a relatively small, specialized group of companies that compete for this work, even on such critical matters as healthcare.gov.

 In this context, the selection of CGI, which has had a long relationship with the U.S. government through the companies it has acquired—among other projects, CGI also ran recovery.gov, the Website for all data related to the Recovery Act—doesn’t seem so odd. Back in 2007, CGI was one of 16 companies given an umbrella contract to do unspecified systems work for CMS. These so-called indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, or ID/IQ, contracts exist throughout the federal government. Companies compete to be on the list, and then when a specific task arises, they compete again to be awarded that task; but because the list of competitors is predetermined, the process is shorter. When the Obama administration selected a main contractor for healthcare.gov, they decided to use the prequalified contractors, rather than starting afresh, in order to save time, according to Bloomberg. CGI was chosen as the lead contractor for the Website over three other bidders: IBM, QSSI, and Computer Sciences Corporation. According to congressional testimony, CGI stands to be paid $292 million for its work on healthcare.gov.

 CGI’s lack of visibility before healthcare.gov wasn’t a reflection of the size of the company or how much work it does. With a market value of roughly $11.6 billion, CGI, after the decline of BlackBerry maker RIM, boasts of being Canada’s biggest technology company. (All figures in this story are in Canadian dollars; one U.S. dollar is worth about 1.07 Canadian dollars at the present time.) In truth, companies like CGI are more body shops than true technology companies, and the projects they take on require a lot of grunt work by a lot of low-level employees. CGI employs almost 70,000 people, who are embedded in businesses and governments around the globe. Its U.S. clients have included the military, the F.B.I., Pennsylvania’s Medicaid Medical Assistance program, and at least 40 state governments.

 CGI is short for Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique, or Consultants to Government and Industry. It was founded back in 1976 by two Québécois, Serge Godin and Andre Imbeau. The publicity-shy Godin, now 63 and still active as the company’s chairman, became a billionaire this year, according to Slate, which called him a “classic tortoise” who had built his fortune with a “reliable, and more patient, business strategy than stumbling on the right tech at the right time.” He’s received numerous awards and honorary titles, including being inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, and he is a major owner of harness-racing horses. His daughter, Julie Godin, is the company’s executive in charge of human relations, and her father’s presumptive heir.

 CGI has been a big stock-market success. According to the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, CGI’s stock has risen an average of 25 percent annually for the last 25 years. At its peak in November, the stock was up almost 70 percent in 2013, and the problems of healthcare.gov seemed to be having no discernible impact. Slate said that that’s because healthcare.gov is such a small part of its business. At any rate, CGI just reported revenues of $10.1 billion in its fiscal year ended in September 2013, up more than 100 percent from a year ago.

 Even before healthcare.gov, CGI was embroiled in its share of controversy about its work, from problems with Ontario’s online medical registry to difficulties with the Department of Taxation’s collection system in Hawaii. As CGI worked on healthcare.gov, government officials were frustrated with the company for missing deadlines, and Michelle Snyder, CMS’s chief operating officer, told colleagues, “If we could fire them, we would,” according to The New York Times. Both Marilyn Tavenner, CMS administrator, and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, testified in congressional hearings that CGI didn’t meet expectations. A CGI spokesperson says, “as a matter of policy, we do not discuss the specifics of our ongoing client projects.”

 On Wall Street, there’s an entirely different sort of controversy brewing about CGI. Several smart investors—including well-known short-seller Jim Chanos, who runs Kynikos Associates—are betting against CGI, or shorting its shares, not because of the quality of its work but because of questions about its earnings. In September, Deutsche Bank analyst Bryan Keane downgraded CGI to a rare “sell” rating, citing quality-of-earnings questions. What he and others point out is that a number of questionable accounting tactics could be creating the illusion that CGI’s business is far more successful than it actually is. After the news broke in Newsweek that Chanos was shorting CGI, its stock fell more than 12 percent, although it’s begun to climb again.

 CGI is what’s known as a “roll-up,” meaning that it was built by acquiring other businesses, or rolling them up. Indeed, since its founding in 1976, CGI has acquired more than 70 businesses. (“Please stand up if you’ve ever been acquired,” Godin asked a crowd at a company gathering last February, according to the Globe and Mail. Almost everyone in the room stood up.) In the U.S., CGI built its business with the 2004 purchase of American Management Systems, based in Arlington, Virginia, and the $1.1 billion 2010 purchase of Stanley Inc., another Arlington, Virginia–based company. Stanley’s biggest customer was the U.S. Army, and the Stanley deal, according to Cormark Securities analyst Richard Tse, was instrumental in entrenching CGI with the government. “They are quite embedded,” he told the Globe and Mail. “Stanley was an entity that was really effectively managing many of the back-office systems for government and military.” Most recently, CGI bought Logica, a management-consultancy company headquartered in the United Kingdom. ||||| CGI Federal, the company responsible for building the problem-plagued Web site for the Affordable Care Act, won the job because of what federal officials deemed a “technically superior” proposal, according to government documents and people familiar with the decision.

 Not considered in the 2011 selection process was the history of numerous executives at CGI Federal, who had come from another company that had mishandled at least 20 other government information technology projects more than a decade ago. But federal officials were not required to examine that long-term track record, which included a highly publicized failure to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers.

 By 2011, CGI Federal already had been cleared to do government work at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency overseeing the rollout of the new health-care law.

 The company had been included in a pool of pre-screened, approved contractors in 2007, during the George W. Bush administration, and only firms in that pool were later allowed to bid for the Affordable Care Act work. It was at that earlier time that the problems at American Management Systems, the Fairfax County IT contractor acquired by CGI, would have figured into the assessment of CGI Federal, contracting experts say.

 In hindsight, one former CMS official said, the AMS record “could well have knocked [CGI Federal] out of the competition, and probably should have.”

 View Graphic A look at the consumer's route through the HealthCare.gov website and the potential failure points.

 In light of the bungled launch of the health-care Web site, critics have repeatedly asked how CGI Federal got the contract, and there has been widespread speculation on online news sites and blogs that the firm was selected because of political ties to the Obama administration.

 But a review of internal documents and interviews with former and current federal officials show that the selection process was walled off from politics.

 Career officials at CMS, working out of an obscure Baltimore-based contracting office, focused in 2011 on the proposals submitted by four bidders, examining technical competency and cost while giving relatively little attention to past performance. Since 2007, CGI Federal had won 17 other CMS jobs under the pre-screened contract, worth several hundred million dollars.

 The review of CGI Federal concluded there was “no evidence of performance risk,” according to a CMS document, portions of which were read to The Washington Post by a person familiar with the contracting process.

 CGI Federal won the $93 million contract, now worth $293 million, in September 2011.

 At the time of the earlier selection process in 2007, CGI Federal was still relatively new to federal contracting. It had grown out of CGI Group’s acquisition in 2004 of AMS, which had a recent history of troubled projects, including a Philadelphia school computer system that sent paychecks to dead people and a Mississippi tax system so dysfunctional that a jury awarded a $474 million verdict against the firm.

 Three former CMS officials said in recent interviews that the AMS problems should have raised red flags.

 “Should CMS have recognized that ‘Okay, here’s CGI Federal. It’s a new company, but, oh, my God, it looks a lot like the AMS from yesterday’?” asked one former CMS official familiar with the contracting process who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal procedures. “Yes. I would consider that dropping the ball.’’

 Tasha Bradley, a CMS spokeswoman, said in a statement that the agency “adheres by a long-

 established contracting process where expert, career contracting officials evaluate and award contracts based on criteria outlined in the contract solicitation, including past performance, technical expertise and proposed contract value.”

 CMS declined to comment on specific questions about how closely CGI Federal’s past performance was evaluated and whether that review looked at AMS.

 Former AMS executives have defended that company’s performance, and CGI officials have rejected any comparison with AMS’s earlier failures.

 CGI Federal has also defended its work on HealthCare.gov, despite an October launch that White House officials have acknowledged was disastrous. Federal officials have faulted the company’s performance, saying it missed deadlines, understaffed the job and overstated its progress.

 People familiar with the project have said it was also hampered by administration mismanagement, fierce Republican opposition and political sensitivities that delayed policy and regulatory decisions.

 The federal online marketplace that is selling health plans in 36 states under the 2010 health-care law has been functioning better in recent weeks, but officials are still working to fix lingering problems, including errors in enrollment records sent to insurance companies. CGI Federal remains intimately involved in the project, writing computer code in attempts to fix various aspects of the system.

 Linda Odorisio, CGI’s vice president for global communications, said the company “continues to work closely with CMS and all of its vendor partners to deliver continuous enhancements in system performance and the user experience” on the Web site.

 She added that CGI Federal “contributed to the significant improvements made to the system over the last two months, resulting in more than half a million Americans enrolling in just the first three weeks of December.”

 Umbrella contract

 In December 2006, CMS put out a request for proposals. The agency said it was seeking “world-class IT services” to improve and maintain the massive systems that run Medicare and Medicaid, according to contracting documents. Thirty-one bidders responded, including CGI Federal.

 CMS used a procurement method that has become increasingly common over the past decade. The agency first awarded an umbrella contract to a group of firms, and those firms were then eligible to bid on future IT work. Experts say this saves the government time because it shortens the subsequent bid process.

 In evaluating the bids, CMS was to scrutinize each company’s performance on previous contracts, according to an internal agency document obtained by The Post. The document described a “risk assessment” of cost control, on-time delivery and other factors.

 Federal law requires that past performance be considered for all federal contracts worth more than $150,000, with limited exceptions. Federal regulations also say CMS should have considered the record of “predecessor companies,” such as AMS. Several former officials familiar with the 2007 selection said no concerns about CGI Federal were raised inside the agency.

 AMS projects had run into trouble at the federal level and in at least 12 states, according to government audit reports, interviews and news accounts. The purchase of AMS was CGI’s entree into the U.S. government market, and AMS executives flocked to CGI Federal. Today, more than 100 former AMS employees are senior executives or consultants working for CGI in the Washington area.

 One former CMS official said the agency especially should have examined the most publicized AMS failure, an effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers. AMS was fired in 2001 by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board after going $60 million over budget, writing computer code that turned out to be useless and never delivering a workable system, according to government reports.

 AMS had settled lawsuits arising from the project in 2003. “That should have stood out,’’ the former official said.

 CGI Federal was ultimately chosen for an umbrella contract, worth up to $4 billion in future work, along with 15 other firms, including Lockheed Martin and IBM.

 While it is unclear whether agency officials examined the AMS track record, former CMS officials said it probably would not have made much difference, because past performance has long been an overlooked component of federal contracting.

 Deadline pressure

 In the summer of 2011, the Obama administration was racing to figure out who would build the Affordable Care Act’s all-important Web site. “Time is of the essence,” said an internal CMS draft request for proposals, dated June 24, 2011.

 With deadlines looming, officials limited the bidders to the winners of the 2007 umbrella contract. “There was very great time pressure,” recalled a former CMS official familiar with the process. “The feeling was we had a lot of big IT powerhouses and they knew our work.’’

 Four firms applied: IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., Quality Software Services and CGI Federal.

 As is tradition, the selection process was strictly sheltered from political considerations and political appointees at CMS or elsewhere in the administration, according to numerous former and current CMS employees.

 “I deliberately stayed out of contracting,’’ said Leslie Norwalk, the agency’s acting administrator under President George W. Bush. “If that had changed, I would have heard rumblings.’’

 Agency documents show that a career contracting officer, in the CMS Office of Acquisition and Grants Management, was in charge of awarding the contract for the Web site. The selection process focused on bidders’ business and technical proposals, which described the proposed cost, hardware and software required, proposed infrastructure design, security requirements, and key personnel.

 The companies’ past performance was not a priority. The CMS document listed it as the second least important of seven technical evaluation factors. And the review would look only at past work under the 2007 umbrella contract, the document said.

 While the review found no performance risk for CGI Federal, agency officials had not always been satisfied with the company’s work. In 2010, CMS rejected CGI Federal’s bid under the umbrella contract to perform work on four health IT systems, in part citing unspecified performance issues in carrying out an earlier contract, according to a Government Accountability Office ruling. CGI Federal protested the CMS decision, but the GAO upheld it.

 And the review did not take into account problems that several other CGI projects had encountered, including years of delay and system failures on a state computer system in Hawaii. State auditors in 2010 partially faulted another CGI subsidiary, CGI Technologies and Solutions, for those issues.

 CGI says its overall work is high-quality and nearly always on time and on budget, and the company has also had many successes. In the past two years, CGI Federal has been awarded contracts with at least 25 federal agencies.

 Documents and interviews show that CGI Federal was selected because of what was deemed to be the company’s technical prowess, even though the price of the firm’s proposal was higher than that of at least of one competitor. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– It turns out there were even more reasons the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shouldn't have picked the free-wheeling and allegedly shady CGI Federal to build HealthCare.gov. When CGI was vetted back in 2007, it didn't have any obvious black marks on its record, the Washington Post explains. But CGI is a "roll-up" company formed by acquiring other companies—one of which, American Management Systems, was one giant black mark. AMS projects have hit trouble in at least 12 states as well as at the federal level, including a much-publicized 2001 failure to automate federal retirement benefits. The company went $60 million over budget on that one, yet produced nothing useful. More than 100 AMS alumni are now CGI executives or consultants. "Should CMS have recognized that ‘OK, here’s CGI Federal. It’s a new company, but, oh, my God, it looks a lot like the AMS from yesterday’?" asked one ex-CMS official. "Yes. I would consider that dropping the ball." But it didn't come up in 2007, and CMS never re-vetted the company, the Post's review of internal documents reveals. On the bright side, the review also reveals that the decision was politics-free, made purely because officials considered CMS' bid "technically superior." Vanity Fair, meanwhile, has an in-depth piece today on what many suspect is an accounting scandal brewing at CGI. It looks a lot like the company is using its acquisitions to mask financial problems, a quasi-legal practice known as creating a "cookie jar."


– With more paint and a couple of horses, they could have had zebras, too: A pair of chow chow puppies dyed black and white looked enough like pandas to fool visitors to a traveling circus near Milan, officials in Italy say. Forestry officials—who investigate many animal cases in Italy—uncovered the ruse after a tip-off and have charged the owner with having false documents for the dogs, which had been imported from Hungary with false pet passports, the Guardian reports. The circus may also be charged with fraud and cruelty to animals, though the dogs' owners were able to hold on to the animals, so long as the dogs never masquerade as pandas again. Circus-goers had been charged to have their photos taken with the "pandas"; the Local reports one dog was male and one was female. Investigators say that while the dogs were in generally good health, they had watery eyes that could have been caused by continuous exposure to camera flashes. A circus spokesman denies trying to trick the public, telling the Independent it was "obvious they are dogs." "No animal was mistreated," he says. "They are like children to us." (Meanwhile, this year saw a real panda with a fake pregnancy.)

Expand this summary.

The dogs looked like dogs.

 Then, after a lick of paint and a splash of dye, they looked like pandas. So much so that visitors to a travelling circus near the Italian town of Brescia had believed the Chow Chow dogs were a rare example of the Chinese bear. The white dogs, originally shipped from Hungary, were seized from the circus by authorities in Italy after a tip-off. News website The Local reported that the dogs had been put on display, with children posing next to them as their parents paid a fee for the privilege.

 The animals were said to be in good health, albeit with watery eyes, which could have been aggravated, police said, by “continuous exposure to camera flashes”.

 The circus has denied allegations of cruelty and trickery. Its secretary, Riccardo Gravina, said it should have been “obvious they are dogs”. He added: “No animal was mistreated. They are like children to us.” The animals have since been returned, but the circus is no longer permitted to use them in their shows.

 A pair of Chow Chow dogs at a pet market in Beijing (Getty)

 Hsin Ch’en, a pet shop owner in the southwest province of Sichuan claims he started the craze for these decorated dogs in China which sell for considerably more than the average Chow Chow.

 “Ten years ago the natural instinct of a Chinese person was to eat a dog. Now we are like westerners and want one as a companion.” ||||| One of the chow chow dogs seized by police. Photo: Corpo Forestale dello Stato

 Two painted chow chow dogs posing as pandas have been seized from a circus in northern Italy, after tricking children into handing over cash, police have said.

 The male and female dogs were seized by police after it became clear that they were not, in fact, pandas.

 To an unassuming child visiting the circus in Brescia, a small furry animal with white and black stripes may do the trick.

 But The Local readers may notice a distinct difference. Here is a real panda:

 Panda photo by Shutterstock.

 And here are the dogs-in-disguise:

 Cani truccati da panda: blitz della Forestale al circo Orfei http://t.co/BXYTkAS8k0 pic.twitter.com/VaFUaQPewB — Corriere della Sera (@Corriereit) December 22, 2014

 The police were not fooled, who said the dogs were put on display ahead of the circus show. Children posed for photos with the animals, paying a fee for the “panda” privilege.

 The environmental police moved in to seize the animals, which they said were in general good health but had particularly watery eyes. This was “probably aggravated by the continuous exposure to camera flashes”, Italy’s environmental police said in a statement.

 Police moved in on animal cruelty grounds and the circus owner is facing charges over the animals’ false passports. The chow chows were imported from Hungary and were six months younger than documents stated, police said.

 The circus owner could also be caught for cheating his customers out of cash. |||||