[Quote]:

A ruling that the Catholic Church can be held liable for the wrongdoings of its priests has been upheld.

Last year Mr Justice MacDuff decided in favour of a woman, now 47, who claimed she was raped and assaulted as a child by a priest of the Portsmouth Diocese.

The Court of Appeal has upheld this decision, which raises “an issue of wide general importance in respect of claims against the Catholic Church”.

[Quote]:

So imagine your reaction when the police confiscate your entire collection of vacation photos, claim that your vacation photos contain hidden encrypted messages (which they don’t), and sends you off to jail for five years for being unable to supply the decryption key?

[Quote]:

O, how the mighty fall have an asthma attack and roll off the side of a cliff. Digg, erstwhile king of the internet, just sold itself for a mere $500,000. In 2008, it turned down Google’s offer of two hundred million.

[Quote]:

The Reykjavík District Court has ruled that Valitor, formerly known as VISA Iceland, violated contract laws by blocking credit card donations to Wikileaks, according to a press release posted on the whistleblowers’ Twitter account.

The court also ordered that the donation gateway should be reopened within 14 days otherwise Valitor will be forced to pay a fine of $6,200 daily. Valitor CEO Vidar Thorkellsson told Bloomberg, however, that the company would appeal the ruling. He declined to comment further.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said “This is a significant victory against Washington’s attempt to silence WikiLeaks. We will not be silenced. Economic censorship is censorship. It is wrong. When it’s done outside of the rule of law its doubly wrong. One by one those involved in the attempted censorship of WikiLeaks will find themselves on the wrong side of history.”

[Quote]:

“Sesame Street has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult. We use parodies and celebrity segments to interest adults in the show because we know that a child learns best when co-viewing with a parent or care-giver. We also value our viewer’s opinions and particularly those of parents. In light of the feedback we’ve received on the Katy Perry music video which was released on You Tube only, we have decided we will not air the segment on the television broadcast of Sesame Street, which is aimed at preschoolers. Katy Perry fans will still be able to view the video on You Tube.”

(original)

[Quote]:

The game is easy: Guess whether each quote you see is from the Taliban and their associates, or from delegates of the esteemed United States Republican party. Each time you vote you’ll see how players before you guessed..

[Quote]:

The director to the NAACP’s Washington Bureau revealed on Thursday that GOP hopeful Mitt Romney had conservative African Americans “flown in” to the 103rd convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to make it appear that he had more support than he really did.

During an interview with Fox News host Neil Cavuto, Romney said that he had met with a “number of African American leaders” after his NAACP speech and they told him “a lot of folks” were disappointed in President Barack Obama.

On Wednesday night, MSNBC host Ed Schultz asked NAACP Washington Bureau Director Hilary Shelton which “African American leaders” Romney was referring to.

“The campaign actually gave me a list of African American VIPs that they brought in to the NAACP meeting,” Shelton explained. “So, I’m sure those are the one they set down with because, quite frankly, none of the rank-and-file NAACPers met with him.”

“He’s talking about African American Republican politicians that were actually brought in — flown in — to the NAACP convention in Houston, Texas to be there for the [candidate] alone,” he added.

“That means that Mitt Romney rigged the crowd to support him there so he could go on TV and say, ‘You know, actually I got a lot of support among African American leaders,’” Schultz noted.

“Apparently, that’s what the case is,” Shelton agreed. “They are bringing people in that they know will support his agenda from other places that aren’t active with the NAACP. These are people that were actually brought in to provide the cheering for him so there will be some support for him along those lines.”

While Romney did receive some sparse cheers and applause during the speech, the loudest reaction came when the crowd booed him for vowing to repeal “Obamacare.”Watch this video from MSNBC’s The Ed Show, broadcast July 11, 2012.

[Quote]:

Apparently, McDonald’s are so terrified of off-brand chips that they will only let you buy them as part of a British Heritage Ye Olde Fishe and Chippes package. Heaven forfend you should try to ask for just the chips. I dare say they’ll get one of the Eastern European hammer-throwers to hurl you bodily from the venue.

[Quote]:

ast week was a good week for those who believe in the internet and culture, with the rejection of ACTA being a key moment in Europe, on par with the rejection of SOPA in the US six months earlier. Of course, as we saw with the defeat of SOPA, a number of ACTA supporters who haven’t come to terms with why the public was so upset are lashing out. One of the more outspoken responses against the EU Parliament’s decision came from Ewan Morrison for The Guardian, in a piece that I honestly read over a few times to make sure it wasn’t satire. I don’t think there’s a single truly accurate statement in the entire thing. It sets the bar of misinformation so high that I think from now on I will compare any clueless article to the newly developed Ewan Morrison scale of wrongness, with this column scoring a perfect 10 out of 10. Let’s explore why.

The headline defines the kind of malarkey we’re in for, stating: Throwing out Acta will not bring a free internet, but cultural disaster.

Really? So blocking an agreement that ratchets up copyright enforcement marginally, and which might criminalize a few things that are widely accepted in the public, means we’re headed for cultural disaster? How so? Morrison never bothers to tell us. He makes no reference, whatsoever, to anything that’s actually in ACTA, but seems to merely assume that ACTA would have magically made piracy go away and sent people back to buying CDs and DVDs… and even paying for news again. Clearly he has never read ACTA. Many of our concerns about ACTA weren’t in what it would directly do, but in how it would set new floors that meant today’s problems in copyright law couldn’t be fixed going forward. There were also issues of vague definitions that we were afraid would be used overly broadly (“commercial scale” for example), but that wouldn’t have changed the basic issues Morrison seems concerned with.

History is strewn with moments when politicians made swift decisions that led to disastrous consequences. One such moment has just occurred. In throwing out the Acta (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) bill on Wednesday, MEPs in the European parliament have unwittingly signed their countries up for a future in which internet piracy will lead to the decline of film, the novel, journalism and music on an industrial scale.

This is pretty funny, in that this was actually quite the opposite of a “swift decision.” Copyright expansion, on the other hand, has a long history of government officials pushing for “swift decisions” that expand copyright law, without giving anyone any actual economic evidence that it’s needed, or explaining any logical rationale. This is an issue that goes back centuries. Copyright expansion is always rushed through. We almost never see thoughtful debate on the issue. Instead, the rejection of ACTA was quite the opposite. It was a case where the public spoke up, and many MEPs actually took the time to inform themselves of the details and realized that ACTA is not a path forward. In fact, many MEPs changed their minds on the issue over the last six months as more data and evidence was presented to them. That’s the exact opposite of what Morrison claims happened.

This is not scaremongering. One need only look at the stats from the US, where during the Clinton administration the internet companies were given free rein to pillage copyright material via the rushed-through Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).