Midweek link dump

[tangaroa]

• Arctic seabed methane is venting into the atmosphere at a faster rate. This could lead to a feedback cycle that will exacerbate global warming.
• Muslim militia massacred the entire populations of three Christian villages near Jos, Nigera.
• Leaked C.I.A. documents show the U.S. torture program was carefully coordinated.
• A Pennsylvania woman of unspecified European descent has been charged with attempting to assassinate Swedish cartoonish Lars Vilks as part of a Jihadist plot.
  • Seven Moroccan and Yemeni immigrants in Ireland are held in the same plot.
  • The conservative site Jawa Report has been tracking the Pennsylvania woman's online actions for two years.
• Russia blames last November's train bombing on the jihadist organization of by Alexander Tikhomirov, also known as Saïd Buryatsky, who was recently killed in a battle with the Russian military.
• A few items on Turkey:
  • Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute discusses the current situation in Turkey.
  • Turkey refused offers of aid from its ally Israel after an earthquake killed over 50 people.
  • Barry Rubin takes offense to a Newsweek article prasing the Turkish government's arrests of opposition critics.
• William Thompson of the University of Nevada reports that Vietnam is now a capitalist state.
• Several items via Ed Brayton:
  • "How embarassing should it be for this country that Iran puts its officials on trial for torture and we don't?"
  • Indian secular humanists Innaiah Narisetti, Subba Rao, and Macha Laxmaiah have been arrested for writing a book that contains excerpts from Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and one of the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons.
    • The Indo-Asian News Service has more information on the authors' arrest for blasphemy against Islam.
    • Related: A collection of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons and commentary on them.
  • Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reports on Ohio public school teacher John Freshwater, a Christian fanatic who taught Creationism in science class and burned crosses into students' arms.
  • The District of Colombia branch of Catholic Charities has ceased giving employees spousal benefits so that they do not risk ever giving such benefits to a homosexual couple.
  • The New York Times reports on defectors from Scientology.
  • Police in Colombus, Missouri broke into a man's house and shot his dogs to recover "a small amount of marijuana".
  • Police in Putnam, Indiana took a man's money on the grounds that he might possibly use it to buy drugs in the future. After more than a year of lawsuits, Putnam County Judge David Polk ordered the police to return the money but the man will not be reimbursed for his legal costs.
  • National Public Radio lists several times when the Congressional process of reconciliation has been used in the past thirty years to push forward health care legislation.
    • Related: Jamison Foser notes that the media did not consider reconciliation to be newsworthy when the Republicans used in in 2003.
• Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has ordered state universities to allow discrimination against homosexuals, claiming that universities lack the legal authority to forbid it.
• Tower Hamlets borough councillor Shiria Khatun reports receiving death threats for dressing immodestly.
• Three young Muslim men drove into San Francisco to shoot people with a BB gun for looking homosexual. They were caught, but reports do not ask who taught them to hate. A smaller outrage in this incident is the "deadly weapon" charge for the BB gun.
• A diplomatic delegation of Pakistani lawmakers aborted a visit to the United States in protest of the U.S.'s excessive airport security measures.
• Rush Limbaugh called Congressional House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an Islamic terrorist mastermind.
• British philosopher Harry Taylor has been charged with blasphemy for distributing anti-religious cartoons at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool.
• Christians in Bristol, Virginia are going around telling women they deserve to be raped for wearing punk clothing.
• Law professor Peter Tague provided a lesson in the need for skepticism of trusted sources when he told a first-year class that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was retiring, upon which a student text-messaged Radar Online from class and Radar Online ran the story.
• A study by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics finds that people who score high on Intelligence Quotient tests tend to be more liberal, although there are plenty of exceptions.
  • Related: Razib Khan has a few charts of numbers.
• Many home-school textbooks popular in the United States teach Creationism instead of evolution.
• A study finds that black men in the U.S. have trouble gaining respect in jobs traditionally seen as womens' work. In particular, black male nurses run into popular disbelief in their skills and knowledge.

[Edit 2010/05/08: fixed Cuccinelli's name.]