Robbing The Dead

Most people would think pretty badly of someone who robbed the dead of the things they had in their possession when they died, Society becomes outraged when an ambulance attendant steals a wallet or rings from a dead accident victim (a rare occurrence). So why is it, Jonathan Turley asks, that we pay no mind when the dead are robbed of their reputations?

Elvis Presley was a pedophile. Queen Victoria, a lesbian. Abraham Lincoln, a gay adulterer. Winston Churchill, a murderous conspirator.

These are all "facts" published in recent years about famous people, and in each case such claims would normally bring charges of libel per se — a legal term signifying defamation so serious that damages are presumed. However, these statements also share one other important element: They were all published after the subjects had died. As a result, the publishers are protected by the longstanding rule that you cannot defame the dead (which, in practical terms, means you can). Once Elvis has left the living, you can say anything you want about him. No matter how malicious, untrue or vile.

Indeed, while most people are raised not to speak ill of the dead, the law fully supports those who do. Under the common-law rules governing defamation, a reputation is as perishable as the person who earned it. It is a rule first expressed in the Latin doctrine actio personalis moritur cum persona ("a personal right of action dies with the person"). The English jurist Sir James Stephen put it more simply in 1887, "The dead have no rights and can suffer no wrongs." In other words, you're fair game as soon as you die — even if writers say viciously untrue things about you and your life.

Turley makes a good case here for giving some legal protection to the good names of the dead. It does seem odd that when someone dies that anyone can make any claim with no proof and get away with it. Go read it and see where you stand on the issue.

An Odd Post For Me

Here's a post I really can not believe I would ever write, given my upbringing. My Mother's parents, I have mentioned before, came here to the US after the First World War from Norway. They were, obviously, Lutheran, that being by far and away the dominant religion in those parts. My Father, as far as I know had no particular religious orientation although his forebears came to the country a very, very long time ago as French Huguenot - or Protestant - refugees. So my mother, who had been raised in the Lutheran church, pretty much determined what religion we would be raised in. So I was brought up in the Lutheran church, specifically, in the Lutheran Church in America or LCA. We were taught a bit about the history of the church in Sunday School, about Martin Luther and his defiance of the Pope. We were taught that we were part of the catholic - or universal -  church but, most assuredly, not part of the Catholic church - as in Roman Catholic. We recognized no Pope. But we were not taught to hate others who did not share our beliefs, either.

I have absolutely no animus toward any religion that anyone chooses to believe in, at least none of the ones I am aware of. I certainly do not judge anyone by the religion they hold. That is between them and their God. Or, if they choose to believe in no God, that's also fine with me. As long as I am not expected to obey their religious beliefs, while still respecting them - there is a difference - I'm pretty laid back about the whole thing that is religion. Still, I never, ever thought I would be defending a Pope and offering what little support I could give to him, given I was not taught to particularly respect the Pope as anything more than a man who happened to head a church that my church had broken away from.

However, I read an article like this one and I begin to get angry. I get angry because a certain element who use religious trappings to try to obtain temporal political power think they have the right to dictate what other people can and cannot think, say or do.

Morocco's foreign ministry announced that its ambassador would be recalled effective Sunday for consultation on the instructions of King Mohammed VI after "offensive remarks about Islam and Muslims made by Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg university on September 12".

The head of the Roman Catholic Church on Saturday said he "sincerely regretted" that he may have offended Muslims, but stopped short of retracting his words.

The Muslim world seethed with fury over the pope's comments, which critics said linked violence and Islam.

Reacting to the pope's statement, Muslim groups in Egypt said Benedict had not been sufficiently contrite.

"This is not an apology. The Vatican secretary seems content to confirm that the pope is sorry because his remarks were misinterpreted. But they were not misinterpreted," said Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood group.

"The pope made a mistake, he must recognise it and apologise," he added.

In Jordan, Zaki bin Arshid, the general secretary of the Islamic Action Front — one of the country's most influential political parties — said Benedict's comments Saturday were "a step in the right direction, but not enough."

"The apologies must be accompanied by clear and calming letters," he continued, adding, "if the pope's declarations were just an error, then an apology will be sufficient."

But he continued that he hoped the remarks made in the speech were "not the pope's or the Roman Catholic Church's real views, because then the situation would be very serious."

This is an attempt to force compliance to certain "religious" rules and behaviors backed by implicit threats. (The rules are not really religious, they are just being used as an excuse to impose quite worldly things upon others.) That I have a problem with. While I will respect other's rights to hold certain beliefs, I will not obey those beliefs myself. Just as I cheerfully ate meat on Fridays while my Roman Catholic friends (and I had many growing up in those days before that rule was relaxed) could not. I also never once had one of them demand that I not eat meat to comply with their beliefs. Not once did I have any of my friends demand I comply with their beliefs.

And the Pope should not bow to these thugs and their threats and intimidation. For what it is worth, I will stand with him on this, too. Let them foment riots and kill more of their own people over their manufactured outrage. Let them burn each other out of house and home. But no, do not bow to such as these. For they do not do this in the name of their religion. They do this out of hate for all other religions. Not because of the religion, per se, but because the other religions stand in their way of gaining political, temporal power.

Do not bow to such as these.

Crystal Ball Department

The lights are dimmed, the candles flicker. Let us all join hands while our mystic sage looks deep into the recesses of the crystal ball. (Cue sinister music). Come to us, oh all-seeing spirits. Hear our pleas for knowledge and understanding! Help us see the future and all that it brings to us. Wait, I feel the presence of the spirits! They whisper to me from a place beyond out imagining. They tell me that we can expect…….

…. Full employment for lawyers.

An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat — this time on a national scale — of last week's Election Day debacle in the Maryland suburbs, election experts said.

In the Nov. 7 election, more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines, and a third of all precincts this year are using the technology for the first time. The changes are part of a national wave, prompted by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 and numerous revisions of state laws, that led to the replacement of outdated voting machines with computer-based electronic machines, along with centralized databases of registered voters and other steps to refine the administration of elections.

But in Maryland last Tuesday, a combination of human blunders and technological glitches caused long lines and delays in vote-counting. The problems, which followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable and whether election officials are adequately prepared to use them.

In a polarized political climate, in which elections are routinely marked by litigation and allegations of incompetent administration or outright tampering, some worry that voting problems could cast a Florida-style shadow over this fall's midterm elections.

"We could see that control of Congress is going to be decided by races in recount situations that might not be determined for several weeks," said Paul S. DeGregorio, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, although he added that he does not expect problems of this magnitude.

"It's hard to put a factor on how ill-prepared we are," said Democratic former Ohio governor Richard F. Celeste, who recently co-chaired a study of new machines with Republican Richard L. Thornburgh, former governor of Pennsylvania, for the National Research Council. They advised local election officials to prepare backup plans for November.

"What we know is these technologies require significant testing and debugging to make them work," added Celeste, now president of Colorado College. "Our concern — particularly as we look to the November election, when there is a lot of pressure on — is that election officials consider what kinds of fallbacks they can put in place."

This is so simple almost anyone could figure it out. Paper ballots and require voters to identify themselves with a photo ID. Period. Any bull about the ID requirement "disenfranchising" legitimate voters is making excuses for voter fraud. Period. Any high-tech voting method is subject to tampering.

Paper ballots, photo ID. It. Could. Not. Be. More. Simple.

Things To Think About

Ross Kaminsky at the RCP Blog wrote this yesterday, I just caught it. It is well worth a read. It is a discussion about why the group of Senators led by John McCain have it exactly wrong in the balking of Bush's request for clarification on what we can and should do.

However, this does not mean Bush is always wrong on legal issues surrounding the war. Thursday provided a case in point as Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Republicans John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham, passed a bill out of the Committee which directly contradicts Bush's position on treatment and trial of terrorist captives.

The Bill would effectively give terrorist captives protection under the Geneva Conventions; allow them to see classified evidence against them, and "bar statements obtained through torture or inhumane treatment."
The only part of that I agree with is barring statements obtained through torture. As part of the discussion surrounding this issue, the President wanted to clarify "the terms “cruel, inhumane and degrading'' in describing treatment barred by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Bush seeks to define the treaty as barring “severe physical or mental pain'' and “severe physical abuse.''"

Bush's position here is exactly right. The terrorists are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections. To the degree that we must do something because of the incorrect Supreme Court ruling on the issue, we should do the minimum possible to comply. And, as Condi Rice said, where such treaty requirements are vague, we have a right to interpret them in any reasonable way we see fit. Indeed, we should interpret them in the way least generous to those whose motive is to destroy us.

The disappointing (and apparently disappointed) Colin Powell weighed in with a letter to John McCain saying that "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism". Powell, along with McCain and friends miss the point: The ultimate "moral basis" of our fight against terrorism, in fact the moral basis for the very existence of government, is the protection of our citizens' lives.

The people (and I use that term loosely) whom we are discussing here would never offer such niceties as Geneva Convention protections to Americans they capture; we have seen enough beheadings to understand that…unless you are McCain, Warner, Graham, Susan Collins, or a Democrat.

The idea that our "reinterpreting" the Conventions in this area would leave our soldiers vulnerable to poor treatment later is a red herring.

This is really quite brief and very, very worth the read. Kaminsky's three "right answers" are especially compelling, I think.

Meanwhile, Down In Mexico

The supporters of uber-loser Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have declared a "parallel government" with AMLO as the head of state. They have declared that the president-elect of Mexico, Felipe Calderon is not really the winner and refuse to recognize him.

Lopez Obrador's supporters, who insist fraud denied the leftist the July 2 election, derided Fox as a "crook" during the parade. Fox and President-elect Felipe Calderon are both from the conservative National Action Party.

After the parade passed, Lopez Obrador supporters moved back into the capital's enormous main square, Zocalo. They set up temporary meeting places for the hundreds of thousands of delegates they expected to attend what they were calling a "National Democratic Convention."

Lopez Obrador supporters had camped out for nearly seven weeks in the Zocalo, clogging the heart of the capital until Friday when they agreed to end their protest. On Friday night, as holiday celebrations kicked off, Fox stayed away from the square and went to another city to avoid confrontation with Lopez Obrador loyalists holding their own party there.

Lopez Obrador, who refuses to recognize Calderon's election, arrived in the late afternoon Saturday, greeting supporters from a large stage in front of the National Palace.

Convention members, voting with a show of hands, elected Lopez Obrador as Mexico's "legitimate" president and formally refused to accept Calderon's administration. Calderon is scheduled to take office on Dec. 1.

"There has been a big fraud and we are no longer able to accept that the federal electoral institute spent 28 billion pesos to commit fraud," said Antonio Romano Hernandez, a 56-year-old baker from Mexico City. "This convention is the most palpable proof of how the people of Mexico feel."

Which means what exactly? Any nation that treats with these people is encouraging civil war. If any nation (hint, Venezuela, Cuba) does treat with them, it should rightfully be regarded as an act of war. When they realize that the legitimate government will not give them any benefits or help them in any way, AMLO's sleazoid power-grab will collapse under its own weight of fraud.

British Muslims Threaten War

The words have been spoken, not by some radical Islamist cleric in Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or Egypt. No they come from a Arabic language newspaper in Great Britain.

The most extreme opinion was voiced by Hani Pahas in the London-based Arabic-language daily newspaper Al-Hayat, who wrote “the pope’s comments may lead to war; we fear that the pope’s statements may lead to a war that we, Muslims and Christians alike, are trying to prevent through dialogue between East and West.

Hussein Shabakshy wrote in an article published by the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat “It is clear that such remarks only contribute to the fueling of the fire raging between Islam and the West. There is no difference between Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri speaking from their caves in Tora Bora and the stage of an important Christian saint. Both parties contribute to the world verbal weapons for mass destruction.”

“The pope’s latest statement cannot be considered a slip of the tongue or a comic bit from a TV show; the situatio0n here is different, and his remarks are indicative of an important and highly symbolic stance toward the religion (Islam) and the prophet of about a billion and-a-half Muslims,” he said.

“These are ignorant comments previously made by Adolf Hitler, who spoke of a supreme white race against all the other races, especially the African race.

Be ever so careful what you wish for here, Mr. Pahas. Be ever so careful.

Ice Cream Castles

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons evrywhere
Ive looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on evryone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
Ive looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
Its cloud illusions I recall
I really dont know clouds at all

(Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now)

Payback Will Be A Bitch

The Anchoress has a history lesson. Remember 1981? It would be a good idea to either do so if you lived through those years or to look up the history if you didn't.

The Last Fashion Show

It's quite possible that Madrid, in its excessive zeal to protect the self-image of women and girls (their excuse) may end up killing the golden goose of the major fashion show that is the biggest event of that kind in Spain. Instead of the expected 300 models, only 68 showed up for the government mandated weight inspection. The nanny-statism run amok had dictated that models who did not meet the arbitrary height to weight ratio the government imposed would be barred from the runways. Of the 68 who showed up, five were turned away.

The show, known as the Pasarela Cibeles, had decided earlier this month not to allow women below a predetermined body mass index to parade down the catwalk.

Doctors Susana Monereo of Spain's National Endocrinology Society and Basilio Moreno, an obesity consultant at Gregorio Maranon Hospital, were among the specialists called on to medically assess the models.

Five of the 68 models who showed up for appraisal failed the test, the doctors said. The models were over 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed less than 121.25 pounds, Monereo said.

"They had a body mass index below, well below, that which is considered normal not just by the Spanish endocrinology society, whom we represent, but also by the limits set by the World Health Organization," Monereo said.

Each model was allowed to appear at the examination accompanied by an agent and a representative from the fashion industry.

The show, which starts Monday and runs until Friday, wanted to project an image of beauty, elegance and health, and also banned makeup that makes models appear sickly, organizer Cuca Solana said.

"Clearly we don't want walking skeletons," Solana said.

Some well-known models had not gone to the examination, Solana said, but they were not identified.

Around 300 models originally were expected to apply for inclusion in the prestigious fashion event, but only 68 applied this year.

Solana said the rigorous pre-show test was not necessarily the cause for the downturn. One possibility was that model agencies may have chosen to send more models to other shows.

Last year's show drew protests from medical associations and women's advocacy groups because some of the models were positively bone-thin.

This time the Madrid regional government decided to pressure organizers to hire fuller-figured women as role models for young girls obsessed with being thin, Concha Guerra, deputy finance minister of the regional administration, said earlier this month.

Other politicians in Europe are jumping on this little bandwagon hoping to get a little free publicity. But consider for a moment what just happened. Instead of having enough models to present the event, 63 models will have to do every, single show that is planned. By the end of the week, they will be exhausted and will likely look it, meaning the later-scheduled designer's shows will have poor presentation. So why in the world would they want to come back next year? This is one of those blatantly stupid solutions in search of a problem that far too many politicians impose, "For your own good".

It may not be good for Madrid in the long run.

Priceless

That is the only word for this post from My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

What Guantanamo Isn’t

It is not at all what the media have succeeded in painting it to be. Nor are the people being held there at all what the press informs us they are. James Taranto has an extensive talk with the commander at Guantanamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris.

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba–You might call Rear Adm. Harry Harris a jailer. As commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, a job he has held for six months, he is in charge of one of the world's best-known detention facilities. But if you call this place a prison, he will correct you.

"Prisons are about rehabilitation and punishment," Adm. Harris told me in a phone conversation last week, reiterating a point he had made a few days earlier in a briefing for visiting journalists here. "What we are about is keeping enemy combatants off the battlefield. . . . The enemy combatants that we have here were captured on the battlefield or running from the battlefield, and they were engaged in combat operations against Americans, and in many cases killed Americans. What we're trying to do here in Guantanamo is simply keep them off the battlefield, because we know that many of them would go back to the fight."

In fact, Adm. Harris says, many of them have kept fighting even while in captivity. They are carrying out coordinated actions with the apparent goals of disrupting the camp's operations, furthering anti-American propaganda, and wounding and intimidating the servicemen who guard them.

One such action unfolded on May 18. Early that Thursday morning, guards patrolling the high-security Camp 1 (one of five numbered detention areas, with a sixth under construction) found two detainees who had attempted suicide. "One was found unconscious," Adm. Harris recalls, "and then another one was found a little later, frothing at the mouth, if you will. It looked like . . . poisoning of some sort." Both survived, although one took seven days to regain consciousness, and the other took four days. Neither had a prescription for any drug, "so they had to get the meds from other detainees somehow."

To prevent more suicide attempts, "the detention group commander ordered a shakedown of all the cells. He was going through each of the cells looking for contraband, looking for pills. He found some, throughout the day. He found some hidden around the toilet area; he found some hidden in the bindings of the Holy Quran." (Each detainee receives a personal Quran in his native language, which non-Muslim guards are forbidden to touch.)

This one is a must read. There is much more complexity to this issue, and to dealing with people like this than we are getting from the media or from opponents. There is a long overdue dialog that must be done about captured terrorists, but the debate is being cut off and poisoned by disinformation from the media.

On Irresponsible Journalists

It is not enough that the media has helped stir the pot over remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI. It is not enough that they are amplifying the Muslim anger and rage. Now the Associated Press makes sure to point out - in detail - that a statement made by the Pope "stops short of an apology". Great idea. Make sure you spin this up even more, folks. Make sure that more churches are bombed, more rioting ensues and people start dying left and right. Make sure you set up the confrontation.

But the statement stopped short of the apology demanded by Islamic leaders around the globe, and anger among Muslims remained intense. Palestinians attacked five churches in the West Bank and Gaza over the pope's remarks Tuesday in a speech to university professors in his native Germany.

In a broader talk rejecting any religious motivation for violence, Benedict cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," particularly "his command to spread by the sword the faith."

The pontiff didn't endorse that description, but he didn't question it, and his words set off a firestorm of protests across the Muslim world.

The new Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said the pope's position on Islam is unmistakably in line with Vatican teaching that says the church "esteems" Muslims.

Benedict "thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions," Bertone said in a statement.

He noted that earlier during his German trip, Benedict warned "secularized Western culture" against holding contempt for any religion or believers.

I for one am getting tired of this. Barbaric behavior keeps getting excused. Too many in the West keep blaming the West for the behavior like this. This is not the fault of the West, it is not the fault of anything the Pope said. It is manufactured outrage meant to provoke more and more apologist behavior from the useful idiots in the West. In reality, it has nothing to do with religion, only with politics. Certain people can be utterly relied upon to jump onto the self-loathing bandwagon. Certain people can be utterly relied upon to take the culturally chauvinistic stance that the "Muslim Street" only does what it does because of what we provoke them to do.

Certain utterly reliable people led by the utterly reliable irresponsibility of the Western media, unfortunately.

Frankly, at this point, I can no longer conceive of any action the West can take that will not provoke "Muslim Rage". I can think of no words that anyone in the West can say or write that will not provoke immediate shrieks demanding an apology. Frankly, I am sick to death of it. Assisted by the media and the useful idiots in the West, we are heading relentlessly toward a crisis. No that's wrong. Not assisted; led by.

The calls for the Pope to be beheaded are already circulating. The rioting is starting. The frenzy is building pumped up and pimped by an irresponsible media machine that is increasingly unaccountable for the death and destruction it is causing. I am disgusted with the people who are doing this. I am sick of the apologists, I am sick of the journalists, I am sick of the thuggish behavior of too many so-called leaders. Especially the ones hiding behind a religious facade in their quest for temporal power.

It is time to stand up and say, "Enough"! It is time to stop excusing the behavior and hold these people to the same standards demanded of the West. It is time to stop blaming the West for the actions of the people who are acting in a barbaric fashion. It is time to start holding the media accountable for the murder and mayhem they are stirring up. It is time to stop this. Before we all go off a cliff.

Seals Invade North Carolina

When are people going to wake up to the threat of the animal uprising? They keep shrugging off the warnings we give them and keep looking at us like we're crazy or something. Or they keep hanging up on us when we call them. Like the North Carolina state aquarium. We called just to let them know that while one Arctic ice seal on a beach in the Southern part of the state might be a navigation error, more than half a dozen in two months constitute an invasion!

The 4-foot-long seal didn't seem to be emaciated and growled at beachgoers at Wrightsville Beach, said Ann Pabst, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. It was taken to the state aquarium.

"An ice seal, by definition, is out of habitat when it's found this far south," Pabst said.

The seal's appearance on a southern beach isn't unprecedented, said Wendy Walton, a veterinarian technician with the Virginia Aquariums stranding program.

A half dozen wayward ice seals have been brought to the facility in the past two months. The seals have been found as far south as Florida and the Caribbean. Walton said it was too early to tell whether the seal would be released.

This isn't the Good Housekeeping seal folks. These things are savage. Wait until swimmers start getting treated like beach balls. Then maybe they'll stop slamming the phone down when they hear us on the other end of the line.

The Lonely Voice

Despite the constant criticism, despite the hate sent his way on a daily basis, despite the monstrous accusations, despite the interpretation of every move he makes in the most malevolent way possible, George W. Bush continues to try to shame the UN and the world into standing up and doing something about Iran and Darfur.

Bush, who arrives in New York on Monday, will meet with leaders from Iraq, France, Malaysia, El Salvador, Honduras and Tanzania, as well as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, before heading back to Washington on Wednesday.

The rhetorical centerpiece of Bush's visit to the UN General Assembly will be a speech on Tuesday defending his "freedom agenda" to spread democracy across the Muslim world as an antidote to the tensions that fuel terrorism.

But in public and private, he and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will press the case for sanctions against Iran, which Washington accuses of seeking nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic program, aides say.

Amid European optimism that talks with Iran are making progress towards defusing the standoff, Bush warned US partners on Friday not to take pressure off the Islamic Republic, which he suggested was playing for time.

"My concern is that, you know, they'll stall; they'll try to wait us out," he said at a White House news conference. "So part of my objective in New York is to remind people that stalling shouldn't be allowed."

"They need to understand we're firm in our commitment and that if they try to drag their feet or, you know, get us to look the other way, that we won't do that," said Bush.

Asked whether he would consider meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the UN sidelines, Bush replied sternly: "No, I'm not going to meet with him."

"I have made it clear to the Iranian regime that we will sit down with the Iranians once they verifiably suspend their enrichment program, and I meant what I said," the US president said.

….

Asked to assess US-UN relations, Bush said he liked UN chief Annan personally but warned that many Americans were wary of the United Nations and that he shares that view when it comes to inaction over "genocide" in Darfur.

"I'm frustrated with the United Nations in regards to Darfur," the US president said in a wide-ranging 58-minute news conference Friday. "The United Nations hasn't acted."

The UN Security Council last month approved the deployment of a 20,000 UN force in Darfur to replace an African Union force, whose mandate expires on September 30. But the Sudanese government has refused to give its blessing.

A senior US official said Bush was not referring to a new proposal, but that he would make the case that "we don't see the government of Sudan having a veto power over whether the UN puts a peacekeeping force there or not."

The combined effects of war and famine in Darfur have left up to 300,000 people dead and displaced 2.5 million in three and half years of civil war pitting the government and allied militias against ethnic minority rebels.

Despite the raging anti-Americanism in the world, which existed long before Bush took office, despite the perfidy of putative allies like France, despite the Greek chorus of criticism from the left, his is the last, lonely voice trying to salvage some good out of the mess that the UN has become.

I also have no doubt his critics will continue to blame him despite the evidence of their own eyes.

More Bombings In Thailand

Three bombs went off simultaneously in Southern Thailand, killing four people and wounding dozens. The bombs went off inside two department stores and at a hotel in the city of Hat Yai, the largest city in Southern Thailand and a popular tourist destination.

The blasts occurred at the Odean and Big C stores, as well as the Lee Garden Hotel in Songkhla province's Hat Yai city, the largest city in southern Thailand, according to officials and news reports Saturday night.

Television news reports said at least four people had been killed in the blasts and 30 wounded, although police could not confirm the figure.

TV news showed images of bloodied victims lying in restaurants or being led to safety by rescue personnel amid vehicles burning in streets strewn with shattered glass and overturned tables and chairs.

One body was shown covered with a white sheet next to an overturned motorcycle. Dozens of other motorcycles and larger vehicles also appeared to be destroyed.

"There are injured people, but it is too early to know how many," one police officer told AFP.

The blasts occurred at the same time a meeting was being held to try to resolve the problems that are leading to the Islamist violence.