[Quote:]

The California Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to uphold Proposition 8 and existing same-sex marriages left in place all rights for California’s gays and lesbians except access to the label “marriage,” but it provided little protection from future ballot measures that could cost gays and other minorities more rights, lawyers and scholars said Tuesday.

[Quote:]

You can help! Send the IRS an official complaint about the LDS Church’s activities, either by email, fax or US Mail.

1. Prepare a copy of the Official LDS Prop. 8 Letter read in all LDS churches in California on 29 June 2008.
2. Prepare one or more other articles of your choice (you can use these links, or do your own research) showing the LDS Church’s substantial activities attempting to influence this legislation.
3. Prepare this Pre-Filled IRS Form 13909 and add your personal information, or fill out a Blank IRS Form 13909 from scratch with the information in the pre-filled form (these links and an alternative filled form are copied below in RESOURCES.)
4. Don’t forget to date your referral at the top and include your submitter information. If you are a member of the Church, you may wish to check the box marked “I am concerned that I might face retaliation or retribution if my identity is disclosed.”
5. Send it to the IRS, either by:
   * Email: Prepare your documents as PDF’s or web links, and send your complaint form with supporting documentation to eoclass@irs.gov.
   * Fax: fax your documents to (214) 413-5415
   * Mail: mail your documents to
   IRS EO Classification
   Mail Code 4910DAL
   1100 Commerce Street
   Dallas TX 75242-1198

[Quote:]

It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”

[Quote:]

What you are looking at here is the very first image ever taken of the surface of Mars. It was acquired by NASA’s Mariner 4 using a television camera, and rendered using crayons. Look closer:

[..]

The people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn’t wait for them to be processed by the lab’s imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and color them with pastel crayons.

[Quote:]

Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn’t rely on improved network infrastructure—instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

Imagine that you were trying to load a station wagon full of magnetic tapes into the library of congress. And a football field full of Volkswagen Beatles filled with hard disks races around you and charges you money for the privilege. Meanwhile, the hogshead of petrol that you bought a fortnight ago is running out while you wait.

[Quote:]

I hardly know what to say. What’s worse: A health care system where someone is so desperate, he’d blow up buildings to pay for his brother’s treatment, or an FBI that thinks nothing of setting people up so they can claim they caught some “terrorists”?

[Quote:]

A Swedish political party set up to promote internet piracy and reform copyright laws is set to win several seats in the European Parliament, according to reports.

The Times reported that the pro-file-sharing Pirate Party is now Sweden’s third largest political party, according to a new poll which put its support at eight per cent, enough to give it a number of seats in Brussels.
Advertisement

Rick Falk Vinge, the party’s leader, is reported as saying that the establishment and politicians have “declared war against our entire generation” .

“Our politicians are digital illiterates,” he added. “We need politicians that will not let themselves be bullied by foreign powers. To vote in the EU elections is more important than ever before.”

[Quote:]

It was billed as the one of the most dramatic warnings the world has ever received over the dangers of ecstasy. A study from one of America’s leading universities concluded that taking the drug for just one evening could leave clubbers with irreversible brain damage, and trigger the onset of Parkinson’s disease.

The study, published in the eminent journal Science last September, had an immediate impact. Doctors and anti-drug crusaders spoke of a ‘neurological time bomb’ facing the young. Others suggested that taking one of the tablets was the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with the brain, and demanded tighter ‘anti-rave’ laws to deal with it.

But today, scientists are facing up to the humiliation of admitting that the stark results they reported in the study were not a breakthrough but a terrible, humiliating blunder.

The study was based on the fact that laboratory monkeys and baboons had a severe reaction to the drug when it was injected in small doses. But it emerged this weekend that the vials of liquid did not contain ecstasy. Instead, the animals received a dose of methamphetamine, or speed – a drug widely known to affect the body’s dopamine system. The tubes had somehow been mislabelled by the supplier.

In this week’s Science, the scientists will publish a retraction of their original study, reigniting the row over the role of those who investigate ecstasy, as well as the real risks or benefits of the drug.

Anybody want to bet that the “just one pill will Parkinson” anti-drug talk will be with us for decades to come?

[Quote:]

Speaking at the installation of his successor, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, O’Connor referred to the battles that will be won and lost in the effort to sustain the Christian presence in a secular society.

What is most crucial is the prayer that we express every day in the Our Father, when we say, deliver us from evil. The evil we ask to be delivered from is not essentially the evil of sin, though that is clear, but in the mind of Jesus, it is more importantly a loss of faith. For Jesus, the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils.

You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trust between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people.

So not believing in your invisible sky person is worse than raping young boys for a few decades? Methinks you have your priorities wrong…

[Quote:]

The Church of Scientology has gone on trial in the French capital, Paris, accused of organised fraud.

The case centres on a complaint by a woman who says she was pressured into paying large sums of money after being offered a free personality test.

The church, which is fighting the charges, denies that any mental manipulation took place.

France regards Scientology as a sect, not a religion, and the organisation could be banned if it loses the case.

[Quote:]

This story has been brought to you by the letter S and the numbers 15 and 40.

I started a new batch, and as per request, Glasgow is part of it…

Meet Judah, who’s now living with me:

[Quote:]

A Catholic church in Malaysia which prays to Allah has prompted a court case over who can use the word.

Muslim leaders say Islam should be the only faith to use it, saying its use in other faiths could lead to confusion and conversions.

[Quote:]

On his radio show this morning, “conservative libertarian” talker Eric “Mancow” Muller set out to prove that waterboarding isn’t torture by having himself waterboarded. But instead, after enduring “6 or 7 seconds” of the interrogation technique, Mancow admitted that it was “absolutely torture”:

Turns out the stunt wasn’t so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’”

[Quote:]

From the what-a-world department: Daimler AG’s $50 million investment in Tesla Motors this week means the San Carlos electric car maker is worth roughly half the value of the world’s largest auto manufacturer, General Motors Corp. With one roadster on the market and one sedan in prototype, Tesla, thanks to Daimler’s 9 percent stake, is valued at $550 million. GM sold 8.35 million vehicles worldwide in 2008; its market value as of Thursday was $1.17 billion, based on the closing stock price of $1.92.

“It’s sort of amusing,” remarked Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard.

If you receive an email from the Department of Health telling you not to eat tinned pork because of swine flu – ignore it. It’s just spam.

[Quote:]

Said Rembert G Weakland:

We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature.

Weakland, who retired in 2002 after it became known that he paid $450,000 in 1998 to a man who had accused him of date rape years earlier, said he initially:

Accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’.

Just approved by Apple, another batch of my street level city maps for the iPhone (the previous sentence is for the google indexer, the rest of you already know what this is about…)

Belfast
Brussel
Barcelona
Athens
Utrecht
Berlin

But take a look at the site I’ve built for this – and smile at how many more I’ve got queued up for Apple. I’ll soon be the most prolific app developer in the entire store…

[Quote:]

Obama proposed a new system of Indefinite Preventive Detention yesterday in his National Security speech that is stunning in its illegality.

Obama is proposing we keep people locked up not for the crimes they have committed and we prove they committed in a court of law, but on the chance that they might commit crimes in the future. There will be no trial, for no crime exists to be charged. There is only the nebulous threat of “future acts” to justify depriving people of their liberty potentially indefinitely.

Is this justice?

Imagine you are picked up off the street for daring to write something provocative in your blog. Perhaps you vaguely threaten to relocate to Afghanistan and work with a humanitarian aid organization there. Unkown to you the humanitarian aid organization might possibly be associated with the Afghan resistence. Perhaps the head of the aid organization is the third cousin twice removed of a suspected warlord causing our march for empire trouble on the border. Based on that alone you could be kept in a cell forever. After all, letting you out of that cell might mean you really would do what you threatened and we can’t have that.

Don’t think it couldn’t happen.

[Quote:]

picture-19The judge assigned to review whether the trial judge in the Pirate Bay trial was biased has now been removed — for bias, of course.

[Quote:]

12:33 Phase 3 complete. 12:34: execution complete. Curtain closed. Medical personnel pronounce death

Dennis Skillicorn was sentenced to die in 1996 for the murder of businessman/good Samaritan Richard Drummond and two other deaths in connection with a 1994 crime spree. Yesterday morning, local news outlet Missourinet, with a slight time delay, tweeted his execution. Elyria, Ohio’s Chronicle Telegram is discussing plans to tweet an upcoming execution, but they are not sure if they should.

via

[Quote:]

The report said that the level of emotional abuse of disadvantaged, neglected and abandoned children by religious and lay staff was “disturbing” and that the Catholic Church was aware long-term sex offenders were repeatedly abusing children.

There were angry scenes at the launch of the report in Dublin’s Conrad Hotel this afternoon when some victims were refused admission. Reacting to the report, victims’ group One in Four said it was a “shameful day for Ireland”.

The report is a devastating indictment of Church and State authorities when it came to their exercise of responsibility for the care of children in the Republic of Ireland throughout most of the 20th century.