Midweek link dump

[tangaroa]

• The Washington Post reports on the jailing of Venezuelan judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni for ordering the release of an opposition figure who had been jailed without a hearing for three years.
  • Rory Carroll of the Guardian reported that the court baliffs and defense lawyers in the case were also jailed.
• A Brazilian judge has fined Google for allowing an anonymous poster to insult a user of the social networking service Orkut.
• Al-Shabaab is advancing into territory previously held by pirate gangs.
• An Arizona truck driver was handcuffed and jailed on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant after providing two legally valid forms of identification.
• Media Matters has a short list of recent Fox News ethics scandals.
• Massachusetts has passed a law requiring companies to encrypt all identifying information about their customers.
• Canadian science fiction writer Peter Watts was fined $1,628 for being beaten by U.S. border police after asking why he was stopped. A jury following the judge's instructions determined this to be resisting an officer in his duties under Michigan law. The good news is that Watts avoids jail time after having been threatened with two years in jail.
  • Related: An early report by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing.
• San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs was convicted of felony computer tampering for refusing to give supervisors passwords to the routers controlling the city's fiber network.
• British Trades Union Congress representative Tony Greenstein condemned the National Union of Students' Anti-Racism and Anti-Fascism Campaign co-founder Lucianne Berger as "racist to the core" and endorsed a former member of the neo-Nazi British National Front as an alternate candidate.
  • Related: The Jewish Chronicle alleges that racist leaflets have been spread in Liverpool against Berger and another Jewish Labour candidate, Louise Ellman.
• Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust has written a three-part series on the National Front's alliance with Iranian and Libyan jihadis during the 1980s:
  • Political Soldiers and the New Man - Part One
  • Political Soldiers and the New Man - Part Two
  • Political Soldiers and the New Man - Part Three
• djm4 has begun a series of posts on "Why I am a Liberal Democrat":
  • Introduction
  • Part one: The Freedom Bill
  • Part two: The Banks, the Credit Crunch, and Vince Cable
• Silicon Shamon pulls together two articles about the rich getting richer during the current economic depression and concludes that the depression is intentional. Interesting suggestion; needs investigation. Preferably by people with subpoena power.
• David Hazony of Commentary writes about the censorship of South Park.
• Muslim blogger Irshad Manji references the recent censorship of South Park to draw attention to a petition to oppose the threats to assassinate herself and eleven other liberals who signed a manifesto opposing threats to assassinate the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists.
• An elite U.S. science panel warned about the greenhouse effect in 1979.