News bits...

[tangaroa]

• Erik Prince, the founder of the scandalous Blackwater mercenary group, has been accused of assassinating whistleblowers and leading a Christian crusade to kill Muslims. This is just an accusation at this point, but it is quite an accusation.
• A lone gunman killed two and wounded eleven at a GLBT youth meeting in Tel Aviv. There are no suspects at this time of writing.
• Arthur Laffer, of the Laffer Curve, worries that Obama might put the government in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. For the comprehension of our British audience, this would be like hearing someone of the stature of Alan Walters worrying that the NHS might someday be managed by the government.
• Ohio Senator George Voinovich, a Republican, has condemned the Southern influence on his party. The linked blogger Mike the Mad Biologist argues that Voinovic bears the responsibility for not speaking against the party's crazy turns in the past.
• 26 faked papers were published in medical journals on behalf of a drug company.
• The U.S. found the remains of Navy pilot Scott Speicher who was shot down and killed during the first Gulf War and buried by locals. Speicher's status was changed from Killed In Action to Captured during the propaganda campaign of late 2002 to promote the invasion of Iraq.
• A rapper in Florida was sentenced to two years in prison for writing a song about his desire to kill two real-life police officers who he named in the lyrics. See also a Volokh post about the legal ramifications.
• Jamie Zawinski describes how the U.S. legal culture of corporate lawfare affects him as a former Netscape programmer.
• A Wisconsin man was convicted of homicide for denying his daughter medical treatment, leading to her death. He thought that God would heal her if he prayed enough. This case raises the question of at what point the state should usurp the parents as the authority over their children. The jury found that neglect to the point of death, even with a religious basis, merits state involvement and criminal prosecution.
• 92% of primary schools in Ireland are controlled by the Catholic Church, and The Labour Party argues in favour of changing the system.
• U.S. Christians bankrolled a project to drill for oil in Israel in the hope that it would provoke nuclear war between Israel and the Arab States to cause the end of human life on Earth. Certain sects in the U.S. have a different theology from what an outsider might normally think of as Christian. This group came up with $10 million for the project.
• A woman in Sudan was arrested for wearing pants.
• Right-wing pundit Larry Kudlow describes the improving economy as an anti-Obama movement
• There are some flaws in a fake Kenyan Obama birth certificate that is floating around the Internet.