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A federal court threw the future of Internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt Tuesday with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission.

Comcast – Everyone else  1-0

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Searching Google Books using euphemistic keywords like +cleric +corrupt reveals a centuries long history of rape and abuse within the Church, a history often celebrated by the Church itself, but as a lesson of overcoming temptations of the flesh. For example, consider the 12th century Christina of Markyate, a “young girl or adolescent” who after taking a vow of chastity, fled from an arranged marriage and sought protection from the Archbishop of York. Her story is told in John of Tynemouth‘s 13th century Latin manuscript Sanctilogium Angliae:

The archbishop commended her to the charge of a certain cleric, a close friend of his, whose name, I am under obligation not to divulge. He was at once a religious and a man of position in the world: and relying on this twofold status Christina felt the more safe in staying with him. And certainly at the beginning they had no feelings about each other, except chaste and spiritual affection. But the devil, the enemy of chastity, not brooking this for long, took advantage of their close companionship and feeling of security to insinuate himself first stealthily and with guile, than later on, alas, to assault them more openly. And, loosing his fiery darts, he pressed his attacks so vigorously that he completely overcame the man’s resistance. But he could not wrest consent from the maiden …  Sometimes the wretched man, out of his senses with passion, came before her without any clothes on and behaved in so scandalous a manner that I cannot make it known, lest I pollute the wax by writing it, or the air by saying it.

This one story, 900 years old now, contains all the key elements of the scandal: abuse of trust, secrecy, and complicity of the hierarchy. As you have been writing, there are many more recorded accounts like it, and undoubtedly innumerable accounts never recorded.

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Here’s the problem: the very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users’ information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control.

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An update on that video released earlier today by Wikileaks, which shows US occupying forces shooting and killing civilians—including two Reuters journalists—in Baghdad. Wikileaks has released additional photographs and video that provide more background. These include interviews with survivors of the attack: a widow and her two children. And, above, one of the last two photos taken by war photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen before he was shot by American airmen during the 2007 incident.

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1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Since Interface Builder’s library doesn’t have a SwitchViewController, we’ll have to add a view controller and change its class to SwitchViewController.

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The Northern Hemisphere once more begins its tilt towards the Sun, awakening flowers, ushering in new life, and coaxing people outdoors once again. The changing of the season is easily observed in gardens, parks, zoos, farms, festivals and more. Collected here are a handful of photographs showing signs of Spring, 2010, as the final remnants of last winter start to melt away. (27 photos total)

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A bumblebee is dusted with pollen as it collects nectar from a flower in one of Kiev’s parks on March 31, 2010 during a warm spring sunny day in Ukraine. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images) #

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Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, charged Monday that Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, not the current pope, had delayed last-minute attempts to punish a dying US priest with a long history of sexually abusing deaf boys.

Pope Benedict XVI was earlier accused by the New York Times of slowing up efforts to punish Lawrence Murphy, said to have criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974.

Die Zeit said it had obtained from lawyers representing the deaf men both the correspondence and the minutes of a 1998 meeting chaired by Bertone at the Vatican with US bishops, less than three months before Murphy died.

The correspondence had been formally addressed to the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Joseph Ratzinger, now pope. But it had in fact been conducted with Bertone.

Since this offers a way out for Ratzinger, it’ll be interesting to see if, and how fast, the Vatican dumps Bertone.