[Quote:]

The suspect in this morning’s fatal shooting of George Tiller is in custody, according to emergency dispatchers.

Authorities have yet to release more information about the arrest. Wichita police have scheduled a 4 p.m. news conference to discuss the case.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses, a city official and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

[..]

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women’s Health Care Services at 5107 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

Abortion is something to be avoided, but not this way.

Oh, and to all these anti-abortion groups: fuck you. Your goal is to incite people just short of saying “Go kill abortion doctors” so you can act shocked and say things like in this article:

“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” anti-abortion group Operation Rescue said in a statement on its Web site. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

Let’s emphasize that- the leading anti-abortion group in America responded to the cold-blooded murder of a doctor who performed legal medical procedures by saying they merely wish he was punished differently. Tomorrow morning, they will be be considered a legitimate and respectable organization.

Fuck that.

Apple accepted another 23 of my citymaps for the iPhone…

And that on a Sunday! I know at Apple it’s crunch time shortly before a WWDC, but apparently even the app-approval department is feeling the pressure!

Christchurch
Abu Dhabi
Vienna
Prague
Aruba
Baghdad
Tallinn
St Petersburg
Siem Riep (Angkor Wat)
Ottawa
Honolulu
Kabul
Suva (Fiji Islands)
Las Vegas
Tehran
Rio de Janeiro
Sydney
Seattle
Warsaw
Houston
Riga
Quito
Tokyo

[Quote:]

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs” according to Jean-Claude Maurice in his book Si vous le répétez, je démentirai… published by Plon

As this is a mostly English site – the only other English link I found was here.

During those private interviews, Jacque Chirac had purportedly confessed to the journalist some personal remarks regarding the faith of George W. Bush that seemed quite daunting. He told the journalist that the latter called him twice beseeching him basically, in the name of their common “spiritual faith”, i.e., “Christianity”, to join the collective effort of the coalition being formed to wage a preemptive war against Iraq. In his first telephonic call he reportedly said to Jacque Chirac: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East” and then added that “the biblical prophecies are being fulfilled”. Bewildered, Jacque Chirac did not react immediately.

[Quote:]

In Spain, a judge has dismissed a case against a man who downloaded and shared 3322 copyrighted movies on the Internet. Despite efforts from local anti-piracy outfits, the legal system in Spain continues to stand firmly behind those who share music and movies without financial gain.

[..]

Not everyone agrees with Spain’s liberal view on copyright infringement. According to the US, the Spanish government has done little “to change the widespread misperception in Spain that peer-to-peer file-sharing is legal.” However, as the courts show time and time again, this is no misperception – it is how the law spells it out.

[News from 2003:]

Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was on the board of technology giant ABB when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants.

Weapons experts say waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called “dirty bombs”.

The Swiss-based ABB on Friday told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang

[Quote:]

In what could be a major pharmaceutical breakthrough, research published in The FASEB Journal describes how scientists from St George’s, University of London have devised a one-two punch to stop HIV. First the report describes a new protein that can kill the virus when used as a microbicide. Then the report shows how it might be possible to manufacture this protein in quantities large enough to make it affordable for people in developing countries.

[Quote:]

A Quebec court has ordered a cinema to pay $10,000 in damages after staff searched patrons’ bags and turned up smuggled snacks and birth control pills — and in the process violated their privacy rights.

The incident happened in 2007 when a woman took her two daughters to Cinemas Guzzo in Montreal to watch the film “Shrek the Third,” said CTV Montreal’s Rob Lurie.

Staff at the theatre were searching customers’ bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy.

Security guards didn’t find any video equipment in the family’s bags, but did turn up a large selection of snack food, which they asked the family to take back to their vehicle, Lurie said.

“They did so willingly. But they continued the search of the bags and while searching they also uncovered some birth control pills belonging to the older daughter,” Lurie said.

“Needless to say the mother was not pleased to find out in this manner that her daughter had those pills in her possession.”

[Quote:]

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims — that classified CIA memos show enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding worked — are wrong.

Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in New York on Wednesday, said an investigation by his committee into detainee abuse charges over the use of the techniques — now deemed torture by the Obama administration — “gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s claims.”

The Michigan Democrat told the crowd that the two CIA documents that Cheney wants released “say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques.”

“I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction,” he added.

[Who else but The Onion:]

In a slight shift from his campaign trail promise, President Obama announced Monday that his administration’s message of “Change” has been modified to the somewhat more restrained slogan “Relatively Minor Readjustments in Certain Favorable Policy Areas.” “Today, Americans face a great many challenges, and I hear your desperate calls for barely measurable and largely symbolic improvements in the status quo,” said Obama, who vowed never to waver in his fight for every last infinitesimal nudge forward on the controversial issues of torture and the military ban on homosexuals. “Remember: Yes we can, if by that you mean tiptoeing around potentially unpopular decisions that could alienate a large segment of the populace.” Washington insiders said that, while the new mottos are certainly in keeping with Obama’s pledge of government transparency, they are significantly less catchy.

[Quote:]

This is surely one of the most original/bizarre/impressive/controversial hybrids we’ve seen in quite some time. In fact, it’s likely to be so controversial as to single-handedly effect Franco-Italian relations. After all, how does one explain away the melding of one of Italy’s favorite sons (F355) and a variant of France’s iconic people’s car, the 2CV fourgonnette?

[Quote:]

While Somalia recently has been in the news for its notorious pirates, back on-shore the country continues to struggle through a years-long war that has intensified lately, and to seek some sort of functional unifying government. Back in January, the Transitional Federal Parliament of Somalia elected moderate Islamist Sharif Sheikh Ahmed as President. Ahmed has gained international backing in his efforts to bring an end to 18 years of civil conflict. However, hard-line Islamist groups such as al Shabaab, Hezb al-Islamiya and others continue to reject the government and have been attacking its forces and civilians for years now, most of the fighting taking place in the capital city of Mogadishu. The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) provides over 3,000 troops to maintain security where it can. Since the start of this insurgency in December 2006, nearly 17,000 civilians have lost their lives. (32 photos total)

11
Teenage hard-line Islamist fighters man a checkpoint at a road near the presidential palace in Mogadishu, on May 14, 2009. Insurgents have been redeploying many forces from across the country to launch an unprecedented offensive, while Ugandan and Burundian African Union peacekeepers held the fort for Sharif’s beleaguered administration. Government forces-backed AU peacekeepers controlled only the presidential compound, a handful of other government institutions in adjacent buildings, the airport and the seaport, witnesses and an AFP correspondent said. (MUSTAFA ABDI/AFP/Getty Images) #

Apple accepted another 5 of my citymaps for the iPhone…

München
New York
Turin
Stockholm
Venice

[Quote:]

Right now, in Geneva, at the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world’s copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners.

At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages). This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn’t want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it’s possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?

The USA, that’s who. The Obama administration’s negotiators have joined with a rogue’s gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU.

Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.

[Quote:]

To say that Rush Limbaugh has been among the most prolific critics of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor would be something of an understatement.  

In the last few days, he has blasted her as “an angry woman” and a “bigot”, an “anti-constitutionalist,” the “greatest living example of a reverse racist,” while urging Republicans to “go to the mat” to oppose her and prevent her from getting confirmed.

All of which is pretty standard stuff from Limbaugh.  But, just for old time’s sake, I thought I’d highlight this quote from him back in 2005 in which he literally screamed at Democrats to “shut up” about Bush’s Supreme Court nominees because, until they could start winning elections, their views didn’t matter:

I’m tired of these Democrats acting like they won the election. Somebody needs to stand up and say, “When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don’t come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these socialist wackos, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, all over the court, but until then, SHUT UP! You are really irritating me.”

[Quote:]

In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.

Closing out the longest-running court case in Wikiland history, the site’s Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favor of the move, which takes effect immediately.

[Quote:]

A fraudster has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison after copping to a series of phishing scams that affected 7,000 victims and netted an estimated $700,000 in illicit income.

Sergiu Daniel Popa, 23, started his fraudulent activities almost seven years ago back in June 2000 when he was only 14 years-old, the Minneapolis Star Ledger reports.

Popa, who was originally from Romania, crafted scam emails that posed as messages from institutions such as SunTrust, Citibank and PayPal, in a bid to trick recipients into handing over login details to the bogus websites he created. The miscreant harvested names and addresses, bank account numbers, credit card and social security information as well as PIN codes from credulous marks.

[Quote:]

Anti-Aliasing is a very well known technique used to improve the visual quality of images when displaying them on low resolution devices. It’s based on the properties of the human vision. Look at the following picture and try to guess what it means.

Well, it’s a word drawn with Anti-Aliasing. In terms of Kotelnikov-Shannon’s theorem, the maximal frequency of the image is far above of the Shannon limit.

Now look at the same picture that has normal size and within the context.

You easily recognize word “stereo”. However, the pictrures are exactly the same. The first one is just an enlarged version of the last one. This very property allows us to reconstruct missing information on the basis of accumulated experience. Anti-Aliasing doesn’t make you see better, it basically makes you brain work better and reconstruct missing details. The result is great. It allows us to draw much more detailed maps for example.

via

Apple accepted another 16 of my citymaps for the iPhone…

Kopenhagen
Edingburg
Denver
Helsinki
Dubai
Cairo
Havana
Nassau
Oslo
Milan
Marseille
Lissabon
Miami
Dublin
Naples (Italy)
Moncao, Cannes, Nice

[Quote:]

A Singapore cancer patient was held for four hours by immigration officials in the United States when they could not detect his fingerprints — which had apparently disappeared because of a drug he was taking.

The incident, highlighted in the Annals of Oncology, was reported by the patient’s doctor, Tan Eng Huat, who advised cancer patients taking this drug to carry a doctor’s letter when traveling to the United States.

The drug, capecitabine, is commonly used to treat cancers in the head and neck, breast, stomach and colorectum.

One side-effect is chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet and the skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters — or what is known as hand-foot syndrome.

[Quote:]

A mere 32% of the secret censorship list is related to a category covering potentially sexually provocative images of persons appearing to be under the age of 18, pages with links to these images or other “child abuse” information. The list is claimed, by the government, to be for tackling child pornography.

[Quote:]

In most societies it is traditional to be somewhat sneaky in squeezing your shareholders or the government.  You might set up a complicated transfer pricing scheme or perhaps you arrange for a family-owned firm to acquire assets on the cheap from the publicly traded corporation that you control.  Or you could always arrange for the Kremlin to provide foreign exchange at a “special” price.

In the New United States, life is much simpler and bank tunneling considerably more brazen.

[Quote:]

On Oct. 15, 1910, the airship America took off from Atlantic City in a bid to cross the Atlantic. The six crewmembers took along a cat, Kiddo, for luck.

The frightened tabby was still underfoot when chief engineer Melvin Vaniman tried to send a historic wireless message back to shore. So officially the first radio communication ever made from an airship in flight was:

“Roy, come and get this goddamn cat.”

[Quote:]

The Chicago Police officer charged with striking and killing a 13-year-old South Side boy in a hit-and-run crash Friday told arresting officers that he just wanted to “go back.”

“I want to go back. I just want to go back,” Richard Bolling told the officer who inquired about the front-end damage to his Dodge Charger when he was spotted driving the wrong way on a one-way street blocks away from where Cook County prosecutors said Bolling hit Trenton Booker, knocking him off his bike.

[..]

Booker said he wasn’t surprised by reports that Bolling allegedly was given a Breathalyzer test fours hours after he was arrested. “It sounds fishy,” he said.

“I expect nothing but that,” Booker said of any possible preferential treatment to Bolling. “They [police] are what they are.”

The tests on Bolling revealed a blood-alcohol level of .079, just shy of the .08 legal limit, according to the state’s attorney’s office.

Four hours wait, and juuuuuuuuust shy of the legal limit.

What an amazing coincidence.

Apple last night accepted three more street maps for the iPhone:

Frankfurt
Madrid
Curaçao

And they accepted a small update to TwitterLoc.

[Quote:]

Seeking to quell fears of terrorists somehow breaking out of America’s top-security prisons and wreaking havoc on the defenseless heartland, President Barack Obama moved quickly to announce an Anti-Terrorist Strike Force headed by veteran counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer and mutant superhero Wolverine. Already dubbed a “dream team,” their appointment is seen by experts as a crucial step in reducing the mounting incidents of national conservatives and congressional Democrats crapping their pants.

“I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force,” explained President Obama. “Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes.” Mr. Bauer said, “We’re quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn’t dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should Lex Luthor, Magneto or the Loch Ness Monster attack, we’ll be there to stop them.”