Saturday link dump

[tangaroa]

• Violence broke out in Nicaragua after President Daniel Ortega issued an order allowing Supreme Court justices Armengol Cuadra and Rafael Solis, his political allies, to remain in office after their terms legally ended, and the National Assembly attempted to pass legislation to revoke Ortega's order. After Ortega's Sandinista party withdrew from the National Assembly and blocked entrance to the assembly hall, the two judges led a riot involving a mortar assault on the hotel where the Assembly was reconvening.
  • The Economist discusses the situation.
  • The Sandinistas have followed up with an attack on the Liberal Alliance Party's headquarters.
  • Side note: The National Assembly's gathering in a hotel is reminisicent of the Tennis Court Oath of the French Revolution in which the revolutionaries declared that "the National Assembly exists wherever its members are gathered".
  • A document claiming to be from the Sandinista organization in 2009 proposes a "Revolutionary Brotherhood" with Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, and since-deposed Manuel Zelaya of Honduras (English link). The plan offers Venezuelan and Cuban aid in establishing single-party, single-person rule over the entire government and in raising a partisan militia of two million men. I cannot say whether or not the document is genuine.
• Conservatives advanced in the British elections, but not by enough to win a majority. They will need to partner with the Liberal Democrats to form a government.
• Riots occurred in Greece after the government announced plans to cut wages and raise taxes.
• Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has issued a subpoena for all records and correspondence by University of Virginia climatologist Michael Mann, 38 other scientists, and all of their research aides and secretaries on charges of falsifying evidence to secure government funding. Mann is the lead author of the influential "hockey stuck" report showing the effects of postindustrial global warming compared to preindustrial records. This subpoena looks to me like a fishing expedition by greenhouse-effect deniers to look for any politically useful information they can find to smear him with, as well as an attempt to build an enemies list from Mann's contacts -- the evidence that there is such a list is in the list of 38 other scientists in the subpoena -- and to harass the university for publishing his research.
  • The Washington Post hosts a Cuccinelli's subpoena.
  • The American Association of University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, and over 250 members of the National Academy of Sciences have condemned the subpoena.
  • An earlier post mentioned that Cuccinelli ordered universities to end their bans on discrimination against homosexuals.
• In the U.S.A., Republicans have quieted their support for oil drilling after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
  • California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has ended support for off-shore drilling after having pushed for drilling in the past.
• "Payday Loan" usurers in California have pressured their victims to lobby Congress against legislation to protect people from high interest rates.
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State killings.
• A Pew poll checks the popularity of political terms like "Socialism" and "Family Values" in the United States of America.
• Fox News has refused to run an advertisement calling for Congressional legislation to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
• Wal-Mart was fined $27.6 million for dumping toxic waste in California.
• Police in Hamilton, Ontario broke into a man's house and beat him because they thought he might have been a drug dealer.
• A Texas school suspended a ten-year-old girl for a week for bringing a piece of candy to school. The school cited a law preventing schools from serving candy.
• Washington Post readers interview Gary Ackerman, of the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism, on the subject of the Times Square bombing attempt.