Saturday link dump

[tangaroa]

• Taiwan and China have agreed to trade terms. Each still considers itself the legitimate government of the other, with Taiwan still calling itself the "Republic of China".
• Nepal's prime minister resigned after failing to achieve peace with Maoist rebels.
• India has imposed a curfew in East Kashmir.
• The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed state universities to deny aid to organizations that exclude homosexuals. In a dangerous dissent, the four most right-wing judges ruled that private groups have the right to receive state funding and exclude homosexuals at the same time, an opinion against the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has attempted to argue that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal rights should not apply to homosexuals.
• The Republican Party of Montana has called for the outlawing of homosexuality.
• The U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has declared fighting copyright infringement to be its top priority.
• The city of Detroit is suing Comcast in an attempt to overturn a Michigan law granting Comcast a monopoly over the entire state. The city argues that federal law expressly forbids the state law.
• An East Asian immigrant protest against crime in Belleville, France turned into a street fight between East Asians and Muslims.
• Women in Kabul are being jailed for "bad character" under Afghanistan's Shari'a law.
• Wahhabists beat an imam in Skopje, Macedonia and expelled him from his own mosque.
• Mohamed Nazim of the Maldive Islands was jailed for agnosticism.
• Toronto police illegally jailed dozens of protesters who had not broken any law.
• Anti-semitism in Europe is at its worst level since the Holocaust was exposed.
• Popular anti-semitism has led a British jury to nullify charges against saboteurs because they targeted arms being sent to Israel. The judge, who was brought out of retirement for this case, encouraged the jury to do so.
• A Jewish dance troupe was attacked by a mob in Hanover, Germany.
• Boston, Massachusetts activist group Spontaneous Celebrations cancelled a discussion on Iran's oppression of homosexuals after learning that the Jewish Community Relations Council was co-sponsoring it.. According to Spontaneous directors Jen Kiok and Bashier Kayou, the involvement of a Jewish social justice group "conflicted with the values of Spontaneous".
• Reuters is continuing to present the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood front Hamas as a "nationalist" organization opposed to jihad. In reality, Hamas is the Islamist alternative to the Arab Nationalist P.L.O. which itself has a jihadist foundation.
• Updates on British Petroleum and the Deepwater Horizon disaster:
  • Fred McAllister of Allegiance Capitol corporation accuses B.P. of trying to cover up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by using chemicals that submerge the oil below water. Note that Alliance has been trying to acquire a contract to provide oil skimmers, so the company has a financial interest.
  • B.P. is accused of willful negligence in a 2005 oil refinery explosion in Texas that killed 15 people.
  • Flordia environmentalist group Save Our Shores accuses B.P. of covering up polluted beaches with sand imported from elsewhere.
• Dell corporation lied to its customers about faulty capacitors in its Optiplex line of desktop computers.
• A 2009 rise in oil prices is blamed on a drunken trader issuing an order for seven million barrels.
• The World Atheist Conference has issued a set of principles called the Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life.
• Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch habitually lie about international law.
• Barry Rubin blasts the media for publishing any lie about Israel.
• An anonymous Turkish writer accuses Tayyip Recep Erdogan of having "turned Ataturk's Turkey into a Republic of Fear".
• Ron Radosh contrasts the Nation's current inaccurate reporting on Israeli history with the Nation's own reporting at the time, such as one Nation article with the title "Arab Claims to Palestine Without Justification".
• Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has repeated his earlier calls for forced separation of Jews and Arabs, basing his proposal on his claim that the Palestinian terrorist movement has infiltrated the Israeli Arab population to the point that "most of the country’s Arab population defines itself as Palestinian politically and culturally". So Lieberman would condemn them all.
• A Sudanese Popular Congress Party newspaper has claimed that Iran has a weapons factory in Khartoum.
  • Update: The journalists behind the story have been charged with treason and terrorism.
• A Republican Party activist who accused Democrats of being "parasites" has taken $1 million in government entitlements over the past 15 years.
• Over half of Nova Scotia's twelfth grade students failed their math exams.
• In honor of the firing of General Stanley McChrystal, John C. McManus presents a history of insubordinate U.S. generals while Kenneth Weisbrode revisits the firings of George McClellan and Douglas MacArthur