Link Dump

[tangaroa]

• In Muvatupuzha, India, Malayalam language professor T.J. Joseph of Newman College in Kerala had his hands chopped off for blasphemy after assigning a text which included a fictional conversation between God and Mohammed. The text is said to be "an excerpt from a screenplay" and another report says the Mohammed in the text is not the Prophet but a fisherman who happens to be named Mohammed.
• Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahhar reiterated that Hamas's goal is to conquer all of Israel.
• The guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush says he expected to be killed for the act. He was instead jailed for eight months which is still too much for misdemeanor assault, but an improvement over what would have happened had he thrown a shoe at Saddam Hussein.
• U.S. judge Joseph Tauro ruled that California's definition of marriage as heterosexual-only violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
• Germany has filed charges against Facebook for storing information about people without their permission.
• An Islamic militia raided a leftist meeting in Banyuwangi, West Java.
• A meat distributor in Gansu, China labeled pork as halal goat meat.
• Two journalists were arrested and permanently banned from Miami's passenger railways for taking video and photographs.
• One in twelve home mortgages in the United States is in default. While Republicans have been blaming the urban poor, millionaires are far more likely to be in default than commoners.
• A California jury ordered Disney to pay Celador $270 million for fraudulent accounting.
  • Related: TechDirt explains Hollywood Accounting using the example of a Harry Potter movie.
• Science Blogs sold writing space to Pepsi corporation. This led to an exodus of ten writers.
• Australia's new Prime Minister Julia Gillard is openly nonreligious.
• James Duncan Davidson reports on the Deepwater Horizon cleanup that "Only contracted employees can go work. Of course, those contracts expressly forbid talking with media."
• Cable News Network senior editor Octavia Nasr reports being "saddened" by the death of jihadist preacher Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
  • Related: Con Coughlin describes Fadlallah as a terrorist mastermind.
• An amputee reports being beaten by police in Toronto.
• J. Christian Adams accuses the Justice Department of refusing to enforce a law requiring voter rolls to be purged of dead voters. This might be because Republicans used voter roll purges to remove tens of thousands of black people from the Florida voter rolls in 2000.
• A University of Illinois religion professor was fired for presenting the Catholic Church's anti-homosexual doctrine in a course on Catholicism.
• A Georgia couple were arrested for tattooing crosses on the hands of their children.
• Kenneth Levin compares modern Western tolerance of Arab racism to historical British tolerance of German racism during World War 2.
• CiFWatch notices the silence after Russian spies used false passports and compares that to the novel outrage when Israelis used false passports.
• U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan had once written a brief against Florida's ban on the Two Live Crew rap album As Nasty As They Wanna Be.
• Jordanian youth are protesting against peace with Israel.
• Larrikin Music is suing the band Men At Work for including notes from the 1934 Girl Guides song Kookaburra in its hit 1981 song Down Under.
  • Background: Larrikin had bought the rights to the song from the public trustee after the death of the author Marion Sinclair.
• A Colorado man faces attempted murder charges for firing at thieves who were stealing his trailer.
• Analysis of an early draft of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America shows that its author, Thomas Jefferson, had described the people of the colonies as "subjects" before he quickly thought better of it and erased the word.