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Indian Muslims say they do not want the gunmen killed by the security forces during the attacks in Mumbai to be buried in Muslim graveyards.

Community leaders believe the militants cannot be called Muslims because they went against the teachings of Islam and killed innocent civilians.

One leader said the militants had “defamed” the religion.

Nine militants died when they stormed targets in India’s financial capital, killing at least 172 people.

[..]

They said that they could not believe that the assailants, who they said had “killed innocent civilians unprovoked”, were true followers of Islam.

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Consistent with the values of any “open government,” and with his strong leadership on “free debates” from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.

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In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.

The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.

Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.

Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.

Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.

“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.

Well, technically this isn’t corruption.

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Earlier this year, Congressional investigators discovered that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, had failed to report to Harvard at least $1.4 million in income from drug companies, in violation of the university’s conflict-of-interest guidelines.

Now, internal drug company e-mail and documents that surfaced in a lawsuit have sketched out what looks like an unsavory collaboration between Dr. Biederman and Johnson & Johnson to generate and disseminate data that would support use of an antipsychotic drug, Risperdal, in children, a controversial target group.

The various documents indicate that Dr. Biederman repeatedly asked a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary to fund a research center at Massachusetts General to focus on children and adolescents with bipolar disorders and that the company provided almost $1 million. Disturbingly, one of the center’s publicly stated missions, along with improving the psychiatric care of children, was to “move forward the commercial goals of J.& J.”

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(for the non-dutch: the police is trying to get people interested in working for them. Spotted in Rotterdam)

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The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

“Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories,” California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

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I was trying to figure out how to explain to you all that is involved in the case of the U.S. v. Lori Drew, the
cyberbullying case that so many lawyers are expressing concerns about. I felt I needed a lawyer to explain it, but where would I find one who felt like doing some unpaid work, and over the Thanksgiving holiday to boot?

Then I had a brainstorm. I could show you the amicus brief [PDF] submitted in the case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Public Citizen, which was also signed by “14 individual faculty members listed in Appendix A who research, teach and write scholarly articles and books about internet law, cybercrime, criminal law and related topics at law schools nationwide”. Appendix A is at the very end. If you look at the list, you’ll see that it’s some of the finest and most knowledgeable lawyers and law professors specializing in cyberlaw. The brief was written by Jennifer Granick of EFF and Philip R. Malone of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s Cyberlaw Clinic.

I think when you read it, it will turn your hair white. It did me. In fact, I don’t think it’s overstating it a bit to say that unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer. At a minimum, I’d feel I’d need to avoid signing up for membership at any website, particularly MySpace. Why particularly MySpace? The Times Online has their statement:

MySpace, which is a division of News Corporation, owner of The Times, said in a statement that it “respects the jury’s decision and will continue to work with industry experts to raise awareness of cyber-bullying and the harm it can potentially cause.”

If it respects this decision, I don’t feel safe there. I didn’t even want to visit its web site to try to find its terms of use. But according to this article, MySpace gets to be the one that decides if we’ve violated their terms:

MySpace users agree that the social networking site has the final say on deciding whether content posted by users violates a long list of regulations contained in the agreement.

There is no recourse. They make the law and if you mess up, you go to jail. You used a computer, after all, didn’t you, and their server isn’t yours, and if they say you have violated their terms, you have.

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“I’m used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it’s something I just didn’t believe,” he said. “But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It’s a zero year. There’s zero production. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

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To the German radio presenter, the real news about the measures announced by Washington on Tuesday to jolt banks into lending again was not so much the astronomical costs, but a little-noticed comment in Hank Paulson’s statement.

“Millions of Americans,” croaked the US Treasury secretary, were being denied credit or facing rising credit card rates, “making it more expensive for families to finance everyday purchases”. The notion that families should finance everyday purchases on credit, the anchor commented, “suggests Washington has still to understand what brought us there in the first place”.

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NASA always prefers to land the space shuttles at their home base in Florida. It takes about a week and costs $1.8 million to transport a shuttle from California to Florida, atop a modified jumbo jet.

How do you attach an orbiter to a 747?

Hattip to Neal

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Support for the Government’s plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children’s welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money.

Live trials of the filters, which will block “illegal” content for all Australian internet users and “inappropriate” adult content on an opt-in basis, are slated to begin by Christmas, despite harsh opposition from the Greens, Opposition, the internet industry, consumers and online rights groups.

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

“Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people’s view,” she said.

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via

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It was like a scene from Hamish MacBeth. Police launched a full-scale drugs raid on a Highland home – but discovered only the 79-year-old owner’s tomato plants.

Uniformed officers burst into Lulu Matheson’s house in the village of Shieldaig, Wester Ross, kept her son Gus in his bedroom for two hours, handcuffed her grandson Stephen, and turned the house upside down.

The high-profile afternoon raid involved three squad cars, seven officers and sniffer dogs. They told the family they were looking for cannabis, but after searching for several hours had to concede the green plants visible in the window from the roadside were tomatoes.
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The plants, of which police requested a sample for analysis, were bearing fruit.