Saturday link dump

[tangaroa]

• In India, activists are encouraging the people to give Zero Rupee notes to officials demanding bribes. They say it actually works by shocking officials into integrity.
• A group called the Carbon Farming Conference alleges that unsustainable farming will cause most of the world's topsoil to disappear by the end of the century.
• U.S. Senators Jim Webb and Blanche Lincoln of the Democratic Party have joined the Republicans in calling for the government to deny trials for people accused of terrorism.
• Tax collectors in Greece are striking in protest of pay cuts.
• The State of New York has filed fraud charges against the Bank of America, a private corporation, and two of the bank's officers. The bank has a large nationwide presence.
• Australian Internet service provider iiNet was found not guilty for copyright infringement by its customers.
• Hamas somehow got 54 Democratic members of the U.S. Congress to sign a letter calling on Israel to open its border to Gaza regardless the current state of war and without any expectation for Gaza to make peace with Israel.
• In related news, author Robert Wistrich has written a 900-page volume about anti-semitism after the Second World War.
• An Amnesty International official condemned his own organization's alignment with the pro-Taliban group CagePrisoners. The newspaper's lede misrepresents this as having to do with the human rights problems at Guantanamo; it does not.

Comments

[tcpip]

Hamas somehow got 54 Democratic members of the U.S. Congress to sign a letter calling on Israel to open its border to Gaza regardless the current state of war and without any expectation for Gaza to make peace with Israel.

Says a lot about the US that it's only 54.