Link dump

[tangaroa]

• Iran is threatening the families of expatriate Iranians who question the outcome of the recent election. Also, one Iranian whistleblower has been assassinated.
• Brazilian radio and newspaper owner Jose Givonaldo Vieira was assassinated by unknown attackers.
• Honduran National Resistance Front leaders Santos Corrales García and Walter Trochez have been assassinated, in Garcia's case allegedly by uniformed Honduran police; I am unable to find any report that is not full of N.R.F. propaganda, even and especially from the wire services, so I will not link to any. Also, Honduran news host Karol Cabrera and Army press officer Edwin Canana survived assassination attempts that took lives of their family members.
• A Russian policeman who assassinated web-logger Magomed Yevloyev of Ingushetiya.ru was sentenced to two years in prison for negligent homicide.
• Australia will begin censoring the Internet in 2010. This is the same country whose legal system thinks cartoons of Simpsons characters having sex are real child porn, so I have to wonder how wide the scope of the censorship will be.
• As Dubai's economy hit the skids, Businessweek magazine has a front cover extolling the country's economic greatness as "not a mirage". Whoops.
• Two British men who defended their home from invaders were sentenced to over two years in prison for beating one of them after capturing him. The home invaders were not charged.
• Britain's National Health Service has left a man with a broken arm waiting for surgery since last December. He was declared to be too unhealthy to be operated on, but was denied unemployment benefits after another doctor declared him to be in full health.
• Also in Britain, Surrey resident Paul Clarke found a shotgun on his property and immediately turned it in to the police. He now faces five years in prison for doing so. The lesson: keep the gun and never surrender your weapons to the police.
• A British hacker has been jailed for refusing to decrypt his hard drive, with this punishment stemming from the terrorism-related charge of owning a model rocket.
• A British businessman was fined for recycling all of his business's waste.
• Police in Toronto, Canada searched 6,000 houses to give the appearance that they were doing something in the case of a missing girl who vanished without a trace. Needless to say, they lacked the evidence that would be needed for a search warrant in, for example, the United States.
• A Sacramento, California man who accidentally downloaded child pornography and immediately deleted it is being charged with felony possession.
• A San Jose, California man went for a walk while carrying a gun, which the U.S. Constitution guarantees as a human right, and the police and public over-reacted.
• A Samoan M.P. was jailed for over a week by overzealous immigrations officials in Missouri.
• A Canadian man accuses U.S. border guards of roughing him up and then charging him with assaulting them.
• Via BoingBoing: "How police departments use asset forfeiture laws to steal money from poor people".
• Ed Bayley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the types of contracts which software vendors impose on the owners of their products.
• A U.S. garage door opener manufacturer is citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to prohibit competition.
• Adam Levick of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has a lengthy report on anti-semitism on supposedly "progressive" websites.
• In New York, the false designation of "blight" is being used as a legal excuse to take land from the common people and give it to the wealthy.
• The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation responded to Freedom of Information Act requests by releasing documents that were completely blacked out.
• The U.S. Republican Party attempted to filibuster a military spending bill. Democrats were excoriated when they tried to do the same, but there is no outrage in this case.
• Former U.S. Democratic Party head Howard Dean condemned the Democrats' health care bill, saying "we didn't elect Democrats to pass crap."
• The 1900 court case John Bad Elk v. United States recognizes a right to use force to resist an unlawful arrest. Try that today and you would be in a world of trouble.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared carbon dioxide to be a health hazard, granting itself the power to regulate products which produce CO2 as exhaust. Conservatives have already condemned the declaration as "job-killing" and a threat to liberty before the E.P.A. has done anything with the power. The E.P.A. cites the 2007 Supreme Court decision of Massachusetts v. E.P.A. as legal justification for its decision.
• There has been a major brouhaha in the blogosphere over the publication of climate researchers' e-mail and computer code. It seems like everyone discussing the case has immediately drawn up battle lines to declare that the entirety of their side's set of facts and allegations is true and the entirety of what the other side says is false, while the other side declares the exact opposite. Here is a discussion where a lot of claims are shaken out. Also: the conservative-leaning site factcheck.org finds nothing to the story.