Dear ICO. On behalf of web developers everywhere, what the frolicking duck?

As the body responsible for policing the infamous Cookie Law in the UK, you don’t exactly have a popular job, to be fair.

A year ago you graciously granted us an extra year to comply with the law, announcing your decision just 24 hours before the law came into effect. Last week, 24 hours before the really-we-mean-it-this-time law took hold, you changed it completely.

Any web developer who actually tried to comply with the law in either case has been royally and totally screwed, for no reason other than your blithering incompetence. Thanks for that.

Curiously – and don’t think we haven’t noticed – a lot of big sites, like the BBC, Guardian, BT, Channel 4 etc. all revealed solutions which comply with your revised guidelines just prior to you announcing it. We assume you’ve enjoyed long and comfortable consultation periods with all of them, which you decided to share with us one sunny Friday morning a day before it becomes law. You know – the same lazy day everyone is making their solutions live.

Now you might say you’ve already spoken out publicly about what a light touch you’ve been aiming for, which is true. However anyone who’s been following the law for the past year can agree on one thing – no one had a bloody clue what they were meant to do. Not the Wall St Journal, or The Guardian, or WebTrends, or Adobe, or half-a-bazillion web devs. We’re been floundering in a wind of ignorance while the one body with the responsibly to clarify anything sat on their collective asses and changed their mind last minute.

Apple’s filing doesn’t try to defend the five publishers the DOJ has accused of colluding to fix prices. In fact, it basically throws them under the bus, pointing out that if there was a price-fixing conspiracy among its co-defendants — as alleged — they kept it secret from Apple.

Meanwhile, the government’s lawyers are going to have a hard time proving that Apple violated antitrust laws because the company’s market share in the e-book business before the launch of the iPad was essentially zero.

They can’t make a case against Apple for collusion because whatever the publishers may have said to one another, there’s no evidence that Apple conspired with its competitors.

They can’t even use as evidence the blunt quotes taken from the Steve Jobs biography because they are hearsay.

The one element of the government’s case that seemed to give Apple’s lawyers a hard time was the charge that the most-favored-nation provision Steve Jobs added at the last minute was “designed to protect Apple from having to compete on price at all, while still maintaining Apple’s 30% margin.”

In its response, Apple’s legal team can’t even bring itself to name the provision, referring to it repeatedly as MFN. But they manage to shoot some holes in the government’s argument, pointing out, among other things, that the 30% cut Apple takes is hardly pure profit margin. It costs money to run the iBookstore, and while Apple doesn’t claim to lose money on e-book sales, that’s not where it gets the big bucks.

You can get the gist of Apple’s filing in those first six introductory paragraphs. The rest is an item-by-item refutation of the government’s case and a summary of Apple defenses, should it come to that.

For Java, the question of whether there’s a FRAND licensing obligation under antitrust law is a non-issue: FRAND licenses for clean-room implementations are already available.

The Java example shows that FRAND is different from a fair use exception in some ways. While fair use denies that a creator is entitled to a payment, FRAND licenses are typically royalty-bearing. And it’s no less important to consider that FRAND licenses are often made available only to those who create a fully compliant implementation of a standard (whether a near-compliant implementation qualifies for FRAND under antitrust law is a separate question).

If Google made Android fully Java-compatible, it would be entitled to a FRAND license. In light of that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Judge Alsup to depart from the standard for copyrightability (by a factor of 1,000 or more) or to invoke “fair use” when there actually is a FRAND option.

FRAND also has an advantage to implementers. For example, FRAND licenses relating to a standard typically cover all categories of intellectual property — including patents that are essential (i.e., they are inevitably infringed by a reasonable implementation of a standard). Patent law doesn’t have a “fair use” exception, and if you want to talk to a patent office about the public policy considerations Google puts front and center in the Android/Java case, good luck: patents are granted based on strictly technical criteria, and public interest exceptions only come into play under exceptional circumstances (such as in the event of an epidemia or national security concerns).

Antitrust law can’t impose a FRAND licensing obligation in connection with every API, but it doesn’t have to. If there are viable alternatives to an API, there may not be a FRAND obligation, but in that case, market dynamics will give the more available and affordable API a competitive advantage. But in those cases in which the market can’t take care of itself, competition law can come to the rescue.

Just to be clear: I don’t categorically reject competition-related arguments as far as intellectual property law itself is concerned. As far as my personal position is concerned, I’d like patent examiners to have to justify the grant of a patent in light of the fact that a patent is a (time-limited) monopoly. But we have to make a proper distinction between the way we’d like the law to be shaped and the way in which it can be reasonably applied today.

Google’s position on competition and IP is contradictory in itself. On the one hand, Google endorses and now directs Motorola’s abuse of standard-essential patents. On the other hand, Google wants free-of-charge and unrestricted access to certain Java-related IP and twists and turns the case law, suggesting that fair use cases established an actually non-existent conflict between copyrightability and compatibility and advocating that copyright holders should become victims of their own success. Right in the middle between those two extremes there’s a balanced solution called FRAND.

Besieged by identity theft , Florida now faces a fast-spreading form of fraud so simple and lucrative that some violent criminals have traded their guns for laptops. And the target is the United States Treasury .

With nothing more than ledgers of stolen identity information — Social Security numbers and their corresponding names and birth dates — criminals have electronically filed thousands of false tax returns with made-up incomes and withholding information and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful refunds, law enforcement officials say.

The criminals, some of them former drug dealers, outwit the Internal Revenue Service by filing a return before the legitimate taxpayer files. Then the criminals receive the refund, sometimes by check but more often though a convenient but hard-to-trace prepaid debit card.

The government-approved cards, intended to help people who have no bank accounts, are widely available in many places, including tax preparation companies. Some of them are mailed, and the swindlers often provide addresses for vacant houses, even buying mailboxes for them, and then collect the refunds there.

Postal workers have been harassed, robbed and, in one case, murdered as they have made their rounds with mail trucks full of debit cards and master keys to mailboxes.

The fraud, which has spread around the country, is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, federal and state officials say. The I.R.S. sometimes, in effect, pays two refunds instead of one: first to the criminal who gets a claim approved, and then a second to the legitimate taxpayer, who might have to wait as long as a year while the agency verifies the second claim.

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified before Congress this month that the I.R.S. detected 940,000 fake returns for 2010 in which identity thieves would have received $6.5 billion in refunds. But Mr. George said the agency missed an additional 1.5 million returns with possibly fraudulent refunds worth more than $5.2 billion.

Florida, with its large population of elderly residents and health care facilities, provides a wealth of opportunities for swindlers. South Florida, which had the highest rate of identity theft in the nation, and Tampa have been hit hardest.

Ministers are preparing to publish a Justice and Security Bill in the next few days that could allow some cases to be held in their entirety behind closed doors.

David Cameron agreed to the change after pressure from the security services, MI5 and MI6, it was reported.

Whitehall sources said officials were “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” on the plans, which have exposed a rift at the heart of the Coalition.

The publication of the Bill has been delayed after the Liberal Democrats objected. The legislation is now due to be published this week.

Ministers are justifying extending closed trial procedures to civil cases because they want to be able to contest compensation claims, rather than settle them to avoid any disclosure of documents that could be damaging to Britain’s national security.

Sami al-Saadi and Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who allege that they were taken by rendition by Britain to Libya eight years ago, are expected to begin legal proceedings against Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and the Government next month.

Under the new Bill members of any jury hearing the case, as well as those suing the Government, would be unable to view some intelligence if it risked national security.

The measures have been criticised by civil liberties groups, forcing Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, to narrow the proposals solely to cases that compromise national security. MPs and peers on the Joint Committee on Human

Rights have said that the proposals amount to a radical departure from the “UK’s traditions of open justice and fairness”.

There is also concern that it falls to ministers, rather than a court, to decide when the closed-trial system would apply.

A member of the National Labor Relations Board accused of leaking inside information has resigned, the agency announced Sunday.

Terence Flynn had been under pressure to leave since March, when the board’s inspector general found that Flynn committed ethics violations by improperly revealing confidential details on the status of pending cases.

Flynn, a Republican, shared the information with two former board members, including a one-time labor adviser to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign. That adviser, Peter Schaumber, left the Romney campaign in December, around the time the investigation into Flynn began.

Flynn submitted a letter to President Obama and to the board’s chairman, Mark Pearce, late Saturday saying he would resign effective July 24, but would recuse himself from all agency business until he departs.

While Flynn did not mention the allegations against him, he had previously denied any wrongdoing. Flynn’s personal lawyer had claimed any discussions about board proceedings were not illegal.

Flynn is one of five members of the board, which oversees union elections and enforces labor laws. It has been the focus of intense partisan wrangling, with Republicans and business groups complaining that it leans too heavily in favor of labor unions.

Obama bypassed the Senate to appoint Flynn and two Democratic nominees to the board in January. Republicans had filibustered the nominations for months.

In two separate reports, the board’s inspector general said Flynn improperly leaked information about the status of cases, how other board members planned to vote, and the board’s internal strategy for handling litigation against it.

In one instance, the inspector general found that Flynn secretly helped Schaumber draft an opinion column denouncing a board decision that favored unions.

The alleged ethical violations occurred in 2010 and 2011, when Flynn was a staff lawyer for the board.

The case has already been referred to the Justice Department for a separate investigation. It also has been forwarded to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to investigate potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

Congressional Democrats and union leaders had been calling on Flynn to resign, saying his disclosures compromised the agency’s integrity.

In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.

An analysis of the state-wide list by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted” as ineligible by the list. Conversely, “whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

Late last year, Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not access to reliable citizenship data. So election officials attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file. That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable and refused to release. Browning resigned in February and Scott pressed forward with the purge.

The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their license information was collected.

Today's ruling, coupled with Tuesday's, have presented police efforts to criminalize protest activity "a temporary roadblock," Stolar said, adding that the profusion of cameras at Occupy Wall Street protests have made it harder for police to get away with fabricating stories to justify arrests.

"I've seen this from the first arrests back in September," Stolar said. "Some people are charged with resisting arrest (which ups the stakes to a crime) and police are claiming in complaints that people are kicking their legs and twisting their bodies. And then when you look at the video, it's just not there -- the people are being totally cooperative, and those charges were just put in there to make the person arrested look bad."

Despite this pattern, Stolar said that police officers' qualified immunity mean it's unlikely they'll suffer any consequences for misrepresenting the facts to justify their arrests of protesters.

Don’t like that answer? Try focusing on earnings rather than sales, and you get only a marginally different result. Assuming its profit margin stays constant (instead of falling as it could very well do as it grows), assuming its P/E ratio in five years will be just as high as Google’s is today, and assuming that its stock will produce a five-year return of 11% annualized, Facebook’s stock today should be just $16.66.

How can Facebook investors wriggle out from underneath the awful picture these calculations paint? By assuming that its revenue and profitability will grow faster than the average IPO between 1996 and 2010 — and not just by a little bit, either, but a whole lot faster.

Of course, it’s always possible that Facebook will be able to pull that off.

But, as Professor Ritter pointed out to me earlier this week, “the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to maintain percentage growth.” And Facebook is already huge — larger, in fact, than all but 47 other publicly traded companies in the U.S., by market capitalization.

So my back-of-the-envelope calculations for this column could very well be too optimistic rather than too pessimistic.

Given all this, Ritter said that a market cap “of $63 billion … five years from now seems like a very reasonable scenario.”

Governor Perry’s office and anti-choice lawmakers in the state have rallied behind the claim that “There are more than 2,500 qualified providers in the WHP that operate more than 4,600 locations across the state,” downplaying the significant role Planned Parenthood plays in bringing WHP access to low-income women. What Perry’s office doesn’t mention is that most of those providers are small clinics and individual doctors that aren’t currently equipped to take on the tens of thousands of women who will have to leave Planned Parenthood should the courts rule in favor of the State of Texas.

I set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.

In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?

A search for providers within 30 miles of 78702 turned up 137 doctors and clinics–initially, a very promising number. But once the duplicates were weeded out there were just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When I called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, I was understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.

Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, said they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.

The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising, but they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients. Neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.

Ultimately, I found nine providers within a 30-mile radius of the selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on underserved populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.

But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.

And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck to find nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood. From the study:

In FY 2010, PPFA clinics accounted for approximately 49 percent of all WHP-financed care, furnishing services to 51,953 WHP clients out of 105,998 WHP clients served. Of the 1,469 providers that billed the WGP in FY 2010, 908 (62 percent) served 10 or fewer patients, while 368 (25 percent) served only one patient. The authors conclude that the WHP program lacks any reasonable access alternative.

Multiply just one caller looking for care by 51,953, and it’s easy to imagine that a morning of phone calls to doctor after doctor—again, if a woman working and managing a family had the time to dedicate to it—might turn up no available appointments, or appointments that could only be made months in advance.

It’s also important to remember that an imagined Austin-based client lives in a major metropolitan area with public transportation and multiple hospitals and women’s health centers. WHP clients in other areas of Texas, especially those in rural towns, will have even fewer options.

I asked a Texas Planned Parenthood representative what area of Texas the group thought would suffer most if it could no longer participate in the WHP. The results were dismal: based on their research, nearly 80 percent of WHP clients get their care from family planning clinics, and they turned over a list of 25 cities that have no family planning clinics other than Planned Parenthood that serve WHP clients. The top four results–Edinburg, McAllen, San Juan and Weslaco, Texas—are all located near the Texas-Mexico border, an area that has been hit especially hard by clinics closing.

And if women in South Texas can’t see their Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses for WHP care, the Texas WHP website won’t be much help either: A search for doctors within the McAllen zip code on the WHP site turned up anesthesiologists, pediatricians and a night clinic in their top results–plus one provider that did not take WHP clients.

If the State of Texas wants to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, they’re going to need to go beyond technical support for their website to invest huge sums of money increasing access to care throughout the state, replicating the system they are seeking to eliminate.

But at the high-quality end of the Internet’s curve — how do you sort and rank the very best information? What if the information returned by two sites — Google Places and Yelp, for example — is nearly identical? Those decisions are judgment calls, coded into Google’s algorithm by humans. Not neutral, not the unbiased calculations of a machine, no matter how it works in a given instance. Volokh’s paper rests on this idea (he uses the word judgment 34 times) that in exercising judgment, Google’s engineers are essentially acting as editors, curators, or, even, parade organizers — all of whom the First Amendment protects in their decisions to include or exclude content, even when they themselves are not the creators of that content.

There’s a lot of support for Volokh’s argument including two lower court decisions (2003 and 2007), and, as First Amendment and technology law expert Marvin Ammori argues, other courts — and even the Court — would likely agree. The result would be greater protection for Google and its preference for its own products — something we may not like. But the First Amendment has never been interested in curating society to our liking — quite the opposite in fact. The results of a strong First Amendment are often distasteful in varying degrees, with hateful speech at the extreme end. But the converse is much worse — would we really want the government to have a say in the content of Google’s returns? Could you imagine what it would like to do with something like this?

The law is always under revision as new technologies emerge and challenge the old categories we had created. Is Google like a publication — such as the New York Times — or a utility like the gas company that merely conveys information “neutrally”? Which set of laws should we apply? These comparisons never work perfectly, and refining their raggedy edges is the work of the courts and the participants in their adversarial process. In the case of Google, its search results do seem more like the handiwork of a newspaper editor or a parade organizer than an electrical utility. But the impact of its choices — judgment, if you will — are so much greater, so much more central to our civic life that it can be scary to give it such free reign. But that free reign is at the core of our grand experiment with free speech and a free press, an experiment you just have to hold your breath and hope for, because the alternative is much, much worse.

A German court has ruled that Motorola Mobility infringed a Microsoft patent which allows long text messages to be divided into parts and then reassembled by receiving handsets.

It marks the first patent ruling against Google since it completed its takeover of Motorola.

Microsoft can now demand a German sales ban of Motorola products, although it signalled it would prefer a licence fee.

Google said it may appeal.

Google’s chief executive had previously said that his firm bought Motorola and its patents “to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.

I’m not sure whether I’d dub this the perfect storm, but Facebook is currently on track to be the biggest IPO flop in recent memory, with all three CEOs taking the blame.

If the Facebook IPO has taught us anything, it’s that not all social-media companies are automatic buys. Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA ) shareholders, for instance, have learned that the hard way. With more than 90% of its revenue tied to Facebook, Zynga shares are now well below their IPO price.

Facebook, we really do need a “dislike” button for last week’s fiasco.

This week 43 Catholic institutions, including the Archdioceses of New York and Washington DC as well as Notre Dame University, sued the Obama administration over its mandate requiring employers to provide contraception in their health insurance plans.

The move not only escalated an unusual fight between church and state but also threatened to cause splits within the Catholic Church itself.

The Catholic Bishop of Stockton, California, Stephen Blaire, told America magazine that he was concerned the campaign against the mandate was becoming too political.

He said he was worried his fellow bishops were being co-opted by political conservatives.

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

The suits against Dish are a response to the “Hopper” DVR and its “Auto Hop” feature, which automatically skips over commercials. According to the networks’ complaints, the Hopper automatically records eight days’ worth of prime time programming on the four major networks that subscribers can play back on request. Beginning a few hours after the broadcast, viewers can choose to watch a program sans ads.

You’d think Montgomery County, Texas, would’ve learned its lesson. In 2011, when its Sheriff’s Office was preparing to become the first police agency in America to order a drone that could carry weapons, Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel said, “I’m tickled to death,” adding, “It’s so simple in its design and the objectives, you just wonder why anyone would choose not to have it.” That was before the day of the most famous drone test in Texas. It seemed like a perfect photo-op. They’d get out the BearCat armored vehicle they own, which looks like a small military tank, and fly a bad-ass $300,000 drone above it. The problem came when the drone operator lost control of the unmanned aircraft, which plummeted earthward, hitting the BearCat on the way down.
The accident got them ridiculed on the Internet. But they never wavered in their commitment to drones. And now, apparently still tickled to death, Chief Deputy McDaniel has been quoted telling the press that tear gas and rubber bullets might be added to the unmanned aerial vehicle. CBS News quotes him explaining that “those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system.” That’s rather vague, but there’s no getting around one thing: the situations would all involve police deliberately shooting rubber bullets or tear gas clouds at civilians from an unmanned drone.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

This transparency report gives Google a chance to highlight some of its good citizenship as an online service provider. Although the burden of liability is supposed to be on the organization that sends the takedown notice — it is required to claim under penalty of perjury to have a good-faith belief of copyright infringement — in practice many groups are willing to skirt those rules, sending takedown notices to silence unfavorable speech or even without human review . The 3% of takedown notices that Google chooses not to comply with is a large absolute number, and each of those are instances of legitimate speech that would have otherwise been shut down. Google deserves to be commended for that behavior.

A unanimous Senate Armed Services Committee took a bipartisan shot at Pakistan on Thursday for the sentencing of the physician who helped catch Osama bin Laden, approving a $631.4 billion defense policy bill that withholds aid to the wavering ally until supply lines are open, support for terrorist networks ceases and the doctor, Shakil Afridi, is released.

The committee’s defense measure for the fiscal year that begins in October largely sticks to the budget caps agreed to last summer and is $4 billion below the version approved by the House on Friday. It leaves in place a delicate compromise on detainee policy from last year that some critics believe authorizes the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects apprehended on U.S. soil.

Facebook, its founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the banks leading its flotation are being sued by disgruntled shareholders.

A writ, filed in a Manhattan court, alleges that Facebook’s revised growth figures were not disclosed to all investors.

US financial regulators have already said the Morgan Stanley may have questions to answer over the disclosure of information ahead of Friday’s float.

The bank, lead underwriter to Facebook, said it fully complied with the rules.

The lawsuit claims that defendants concealed from investors during the flotation marketing process “a severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue growth forecasts.

It is the latest problem to dog one of the most anticipated stock market listings of recent times.

The flotation was disrupted on Friday by technical glitches on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The share price has since slumped amid worries that the company was over-valued by advisers marketing the float.

On Tuesday, the leading financial regulator in Massachusetts issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley as part of an investigation into whether its analysts selectively disclosed revised revenue forecasts for Facebook.

Now, a group of investors has issued a class-action lawsuit alleging that Facebook revenues were revised down because of a surge in the number people using mobile devices for apps and connection to websites.

Morgan Stanley has not yet commented on the latest lawsuit.

Google did not infringe patents owned by software developer Oracle, a jury in a California court found on Wednesday.

The Silicon Valley giants had fought over whether Google used Oracle’s Java programming language in its Android mobile operating system.

Two weeks ago the same jury ruled that Google infringed Oracle’s copyright, but could not agree whether Google’s actions constituted “fair use”.

The internet search giant maintains Android was built “from scratch”.

Oracle sued Google in August 2010, saying Android infringed its intellectual property rights.

Google said it does not violate Oracle’s patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, which is an “open-source”, or publicly available, software language.

Without a finding against Google on the “fair use” issue, Oracle cannot recover the up to $1bn (£637m) in damages it was seeking.

The case focused not on using the Java programming language itself, but rather the use of 37 application programming interfaces (APIs) which help developers create software on the platform.

With internet innovation moving fast, it is common for software writers to adapt APIs that mini-programs use to “talk” to one another.

The jury concluded that Google infringed on 37 copyrighted APIs but it also agreed that Google demonstrated that it was led to believe it did not need a license for using Java.

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

The data includes call history, texts and contacts, and the BBC has learned that it will be retained regardless of whether any charges are brought.

The technology is being used in 16 London boroughs, and could potentially be used by police across the UK.

Campaign group Privacy International described the move as a “possible breach of human rights law”.

Until now, officers had to send mobiles off for forensic examination in order to gather and store data, a process which took several weeks.

Under the new system, content will be extracted using purpose built terminals in police stations.

It will allow officers to connect a suspect’s mobile and produce a print out of data from the device, as well as saving digital records of the content.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a main provision of the Voting Rights Act on Friday, rejecting an Alabama county’s challenge to the landmark civil rights law. The provision requires governments with a history of discrimination to obtain approval from the Justice Department or from a federal court in Washington for changes in election procedures. It applies to all or parts of 16 states. The court said that Congress developed extensive evidence of continuing racial discrimination when it reauthorized the provision six years ago.

The United States on Thursday announced the imposition of antidumping tariffs of more than 31 percent on solar panels from China.

The move by the Commerce Department is certain to infuriate Chinese officials already upset after recent bilateral frictions over China’s human rights policies and its increasingly confrontational approach toward American allies like the Philippines and Japan.

The antidumping decision is among the biggest in American history, covering one of the largest and fastest-growing categories of imports from China, the world’s largest exporter.

The department said the United States bought $3.1 billion worth of Chinese solar cells last year, giving China more than half the American market for the devices.

Many solar panel installers in the United States have opposed tariffs on Chinese panels, contending that inexpensive imports have helped spur many homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their rooftops. The new tariffs are likely to mean a substantial increase in the price of solar panels here.

Chinese officials have been indignant at American criticism of their solar power industry, pointing out that the United States has urged China for years to embrace renewable energy as a way to reduce air pollution, combat climate change and limit the need for oil imports from politically volatile countries in the Mideast.

Government support for solar energy is an important feature of China’s current Five-Year Plan, which runs through 2015, although Premier Wen Jiabao publicly cautioned in March that he was becoming concerned about overcapacity in the sector.

Shooting photos or video of police officers is a Constitutionally-protected right, says the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a win for technology, citizen journalism, and our Constitutional rights, the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a letter to the Baltimore City Police Department reconfirming that photographing, video- and audio-recording on-duty police officers is a Constitutional right protected by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

“Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations,” reads the DoJ’s letter (pdf). “More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant. In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights. Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.”

The letter, which was brought to our attention via photojournalist Carlos Miller of PixIQ (who says in his bio that he’s been arrested three times for recording police), comes in response to a lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Christopher Sharp, against the BPD, whose officers confiscated Sharp’s cellphone and deleted a video of police arresting his friend at the 2010 Preakness Stakes horse race.

After the DoJ first took interest in the lawsuit earlier this year, the BPD issued a seven-page General Order to officers stating that citizens have the “absolute right” to record police doing their duties, provided the recording does not violate any other laws, like obstruction of justice. Rather than stick to these principles, however, BPD simply adopted a broader interpretation of the law, which led to further crackdowns on recording. The DoJ’s most recent letter, issued on May 14, says that the BPD’s order does not go far enough to protect the rights of citizens.

The DoJ’s letter, written by Jonathan Smith, chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, also reconfirms that members of the press and other private citizens share the same right to record police, and that displaying press credentials should not be a prerequisite for recording police officers.

Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng - who was at the centre of a diplomatic crisis with Washington - is on his way to the United States.

The blind activist and his family boarded a flight to Newark, near New York, after being taken from a Beijing hospital to the capital’s airport.

Mr Chen recently spent six days in the US embassy in Beijing after escaping house arrest in north-east China.

He has been offered a fellowship at New York university.

Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught lawyer who campaigned against forced abortions under China’s one-child policy, was jailed for four years in 2006 for disrupting traffic and damaging property, and placed under house arrest after his release in 2010.

The board of the N.A.A.C.P voted to endorse same-sex marriage on Saturday, putting the weight of the country’s most prominent civil rights group behind a cause that has long divided some quarters of the black community.

The largely symbolic move, made at the group’s quarterly board meeting in Miami, puts the N.A.A.C.P in line with President Obama, who endorsed gay marriage a little over a week ago. Given the timing, it is likely to be viewed as both a statement of principle as well as support for the president’s position in the middle of a closely contested presidential campaign.

All but two of the organization’s board members, who include many religious leaders, backed a resolution supporting same-sex marriage, according to people told of the decision.

Borrowing a term used by gay right’s advocates, the resolution stated: “We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

In a statement, Roslyn M. Brock, chairwoman of the board, said that “we have and will oppose efforts to codify discrimination into law.”

A spokesman for the group declined to discuss a breakdown of how the board members voted.

The practical implication’s of the the N.A.A.C.P.’s decision is unclear. Several of its leaders have already expressed support for same-sex marriage, and local branches have repeatedly opposed measures
to ban such unions, most recently in North Carolina, where voters just passed a referendum against weddings and civil unions for gay people.

Last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a decision that a woman from Kansas could be sent to jail if she refused to testify against the man she accused of sexual assault.

The 24-year-old woman initially filed charges in August 2012 against a 63-year-old Nebraska man for sexually assaulting her when she was 7 years old. Last year, however, she refused to testify in court because she felt it would bring further shame and humiliation to her family. In response, Lancaster County District Judge Paul Merritt threatened her with a contempt charge and ninety days of jail time, saying that the case hinged on her testimony.

Unfortunately, this case is not unique but part of growing trend of criminalizing rape survivors in order to guarantee their testimonies at trial.

In April, law enforcement officials in Sacramento, California, detained a 17-year-old girl for twice failing to appear in court against the man accused of raping her. Prosecutors argued that her testimony was crucial because the defendant, Fran William Rackley, was accused of sexually assaulting another victim and therefore posed a clear and present danger to the larger society.

For many victim rights advocates, the detention was seen as a violation of California Marsy’s Law, a state constitutional amendment that protects and expands the legal rights of victims. Thanks to the diligent efforts of her lawyer, Lisa Franco, and advocates, the judge ordered an ankle-monitoring bracelet as an alternative to more jail time after she already had been detained for more than a week.

In both cases, the judges recognized that threatening or detaining the victims might not be the best way to address the victim’s reluctance to take the stand. And yet, ultimately the rights of the victims were seen as secondary to public good.

The US state of Texas is likely to have executed an innocent man due to careless handling of the case, a report by US law students claims.

Carlos de Luna was killed by lethal injection in 1989 for the brutal murder of a single mother six years earlier.

Right up until his execution, de Luna maintained a fellow Hispanic called Carlos Hernandez was the real culprit.

The Columbia University report backs his claim. It says “shoddy police work” probably led to the wrong man dying.

Under the supervision of Professor James Liebman, 12 students spent five years painstakingly dissecting the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez in the Texan city of Corpus Christi. The petrol station clerk was stabbed in the chest with a lock-blade buck knife.

The students combed through endless police files and crime scene footage, and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, including detectives who had worked on the case.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton announced today that she will not be given the opportunity to testify during a congressional hearing on a bill that would prohibit abortions in D.C. after 20 weeks.

This Thursday the House Subcommittee on the Constitution will consider the bill introduced by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) in January. (A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee.) Last week Norton requested the right to speak—which could have been granted by Franks, who is also the committee’s chair—as she has for other hearings in which legislation directly targeting D.C. is considered. Her request was denied.

“The post-20-week D.C. abortion ban bill targets an entire group of individuals, women who live in the District of Columbia, and their constitutional rights. Using the women of one congressional district to reach for extreme encroachments on women’s reproductive rights has become a pattern of the House Republican majority, but also reflected nationwide. We will vigorously fight the bullying tactics of the Republican majority against the District’s women, and in standing up for ourselves, we recognize that we are also in the larger fight to protect the reproductive rights of women everywhere,” said Norton in a statement.

Norton announced that she would participate in a press conference before the hearing with Mayor Vince Gray and Christy Zink, a professor at the George Washington University who had an abortion after 20 weeks due to the malformation of the fetus. Zink will be testifying against the bill.

In response to Franks’ bill, DC Vote is encouraging D.C. residents to bring their constituent problems to “Mayor” Franks’ D.C. Constituent Services Day on May 23. In March a small group of pro-choice and pro-D.C. activists protested outside Franks’ district office in Glendale, Arizona against the bill.

The Virginia legislature considered a similar restriction this year and rejected it. The 20-week restrictions have been passed in Alabama, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas.

A German man who alleges he was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by the CIA has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Khaled al-Masri claims he was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured.

He wants Macedonia to recognise its part in the alleged kidnap.

Mr Masri has already brought several cases against the US and German authorities, without success.

An attempt to sue the 13 CIA agents in the US courts failed, and a later approach to the German authorities to request their extradition was dropped.

His case is still pending at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Lebanese-born Mr Masri claims he was abducted in Skopje, capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and detained for five months in Afghanistan.

He says four of those months were spent in a secret prison outside Kabul, nicknamed the “salt pit”.

Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

In a budget proposed this week, California joined more than a dozen states that want to help close gaping shortfalls using money paid by the nation’s biggest banks and earmarked for foreclosure prevention, investigations of financial fraud and blunting the ill effects of the housing crisis. California was awarded more than $400 million from the banks, and Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed using the bulk of that sum to pay the state’s debts.

The money was part of a national settlement valued at $25 billion and negotiated with five big banks over abuses in their mortgage and foreclosure processes.

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

As part of the settlement, the banks agreed to pay the states $2.5 billion, money intended to help homeowners and mitigate the effects of the foreclosure surge. But critics complained that this was the only cash the banks were required to pay — the rest comes in the form of “credits” for reducing mortgage debt and other activities. Even that relatively small amount has proved too great a temptation for lawmakers.

Only 27 states have devoted all their funds from the banks to housing programs, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. So far about 15 states have said they will use all or most of the money for other purposes.

In Texas, $125 million went straight to the general fund. Missouri will use its $40 million to soften cuts to higher education. Indiana is spending more than half its allotment to pay energy bills for low-income families, while Virginia will use most of its $67 million to help revenue-starved local governments.

Like California, some other states with outsize problems from the housing bust are spending the money for something other than homeowner relief. Georgia, where home prices are still falling, will use its $99 million to lure companies to the state.

He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

Even “all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them,” and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is “emblematic” of legal system failure.

DeLuna, 27, was put to death after “a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure,” Liebman said.

FORT WORTH - The U.S. government didn’t offer a reward for the capture of Houston grandmother Elisa Castillo, nor did it accuse her of touching drugs, ordering killings, or getting rich off crime.

But three years after a jury convicted her in a conspiracy to smuggle at least a ton of cocaine on tour buses from Mexico to Houston, the 56-year-old first-time offender is locked up for life - without parole.

“It is ridiculous,” said Castillo, who is a generation older than her cell mates, and is known as “grandma” at the prison here. “I am no one.”

Convicted of being a manager in the conspiracy, she is serving a longer sentence than some of the hemisphere’s most notorious crime bosses - men who had multimillion-dollar prices on their heads before their capture.

The drug capos had something to trade: the secrets of criminal organizations. The biggest drug lords have pleaded guilty in exchange for more lenient sentences.

Castillo said she has nothing to offer in a system rife with inconsistencies and behind-the-scenes scrambling that amounts to a judicial game of Let’s Make A Deal.

“Our criminal justice system is broke; it needs to be completely revamped,” declared Terry Nelson, who was a federal agent for over 30 years and is on the executive board of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “They have the power, and if you don’t play the game, they’ll throw the book at you.”

Castillo maintains her innocence, saying she was tricked into unknowingly helping transport drugs and money for a big trafficker in Mexico. But she refused to plead guilty and went to trial.

In 2010, of 1,766 defendants prosecuted for federal drug offenses in the Southern District of Texas - a region that reaches from Houston to the border - 93.2 percent pleaded guilty rather than face trial, according to the U.S. government. Of the defendants who didn’t plead not guilty, 10 defendants were acquitted at trial. Also, 82 saw their cases dismissed.

The statistics are similar nationwide.

The latest case in point came this week with the negotiated surrender of a Colombian drug boss Javier Calle Serna, whom the United States accuses of shipping at least 30 tons of cocaine.

While how much time Calle will face is not known publicly, he likely studied other former players, including former Gulf Cartel lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

Cardenas once led one of Mexico’s most powerful syndicates and created the Zetas gang. He pleaded guilty in Houston and is to be released by 2025. He’ll be 57.

But the statistics suggest the country has not lost its way due to laziness. If you look at the average annual hours worked by each worker, the Greeks seem very hard-working.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that the average Greek worker toils away for 2,017 hours per year which is more than any other European country.

Out of the 34 members of the OECD, that is just two places behind the board leaders, South Korea.

On the other hand, the average German worker - normally thought of as the very epitome of industriousness - only manages 1,408 hours a year. Germany is 33rd out of 34 on the OECD list (or 24th out of 25 looking at the European countries alone).

New York City police officers stopped and questioned more than 200,000 people in the just the first three months of 2012, setting up a record pace for much criticized tactic. The “Stop, Question, Frisk” policy has been a major initiative for the NYPD, which credits the tactic as a key contributor to a years-long drop in street crimes. However, numerous studies have shown that the stops overwhelmingly target black and Latino males. A recent study by the ALCU released last week showed that were 168,000 stops of young black men last year, which exceeds the actual population of young black men living in the city.

Police have been given the authority ”stop and frisk” anyone on “reasonable suspicion” of being involved in a crime — a much lower standard than probable cause — yet more that 90 percent of those stopped are never charged with anything. Despite such criticisms, the department continue tout the policy as an important factor in keeping the peace. On they same day they released the street stop numbers, they NYPD also announced that there have been just 129 murders through the first 132 days of the year, putting the city on pace for fewest number of homicides since reliable statistics have been tracked. The 471 homicides in 2009 is the lowest total on record.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of private citizens to record the actions of police while they are performing their duties in public places. The decision resulted from a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois against the state’s unusually broad eavesdropping statute. It criminalizes all audio recordings made without the consent of the parties involved, even of public officials in public places.

“The act of making an audio or audiovisual recording is necessarily included within the First Amendment’s guarantee of speech and press rights as a corollary of the right to disseminate the resulting recording,” wrote the two-judge majority in a Tuesday decision. The Illinois statute “interferes with the gathering and dissemination of information about government officials performing their duties in public. Any way you look at it, the eavesdropping statute burdens speech and press rights and is subject to heightened First Amendment scrutiny.”

But Judge Richard Posner disagreed with his colleagues. Posner is the judge who raised concerns in oral arguments that striking down the statute would lead to more “snooping around by reporters and bloggers.”

The majority’s ruling “casts a shadow over electronic privacy statutes of other states,” Posner wrote in his dissent. He worried that crime victims would be hesistant to report crimes to police officers in public out of fear that the conversation might be recorded by a third party’s cell phone and posted to the Internet.

In short: We know you’re using your role as governor to endorse belief in god and you can’t do that.

The FFRF litigants wanted previous Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations declared unconstitutional and they want to prevent further proclamations from being issued. Initially, a judge said FFRF had the right to sue on behalf of Colorado taxpayers but the governor wasn’t doing anything illegal.

FFRF didn’t like that ruling and wanted to challenge it. The Governor didn’t like that FFRF had a right to sue. So they took the case to a state Appeals court.

There, the judges said FFRF still has the right to sue.

The Governor’s people didn’t want to address the Constitutionality of the proclamations — they just said it was a part of state history. But the court said that was a lie:

There [was] no indication in the record that, at the time of Colorado’s founding or at any time before 2004, Colorado’s governors had an annual tradition of proclaiming, separately from Thanksgiving, a Colorado Day of Prayer.

Furthermore, they said, it’s not a secularized day, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It’s “avowedly religious.” The court then said “we conclude that the six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations have predominantly religious content.”

Documents just released by US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to one of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests show that DHS is considering collecting DNA from kids ages 14 and up—and is exploring expanding its regulations to allow collection from kids younger than that.

The proposal appears to be working its way through DHS in the wake of regulations from the Department of Justice that require all federal agencies—including DHS and its components such as ICE—to collect DNA from individuals arrested for federal crimes as well as “from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States,” whether or not they have been involved in criminal activity. While the law specifically exempts a few classes of “aliens,” the documents we received show DHS may start DNA collection from anyone it fingerprints. Currently, that’s any child over 14 who’s detained, but we also found records that show ICE could lower that age even more.

DHS estimates that as many as 1 million people who are subject to administrative detention or arrest annually could now be subject to DNA collection. But it’s important to note that many of these people are not involved in criminal activity. Collecting DNA from anyone detained by the government for any number of non-criminal reasons—especially juveniles—seems to be yet another step on the slippery slope to collecting DNA from everyone in the United States, no matter their status.

ICE is the first component within DHS to collect DNA under the new DOJ regulations. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) offices in San Diego, St. Paul, and San Juan, Puerto Rico are part of a 6-month pilot program to test out the new procedures and were set to start collecting DNA around July 2010. After the pilot program, the rest of HSI’s offices (more than 200 throughout the US and abroad) will start collecting DNA and presumably all other DHS components will follow suit shortly thereafter.

JPMorgan Chase, which emerged from the financial crisis as the nation’s biggest bank, disclosed on Thursday that it had lost more than $2 billion in trading, a surprising stumble that promises to escalate the debate over whether regulations need to rein in trading by banks.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, blamed “errors, sloppiness and bad judgment” for the loss, which stemmed from a hedging strategy that backfired.

The trading in that hedge roiled markets a month ago, when rumors started circulating of a JPMorgan trader in London whose bets were so big that he was nicknamed “the London Whale” and “Voldemort,” after the Harry Potter villain.

For a bank that earned nearly $19 billion last year, the trading loss, which could go higher, will not cripple it in any way. Still it demonstrates how a market blunder can shake even a financial giant that celebrates its “fortress balance sheet.”

Some of what Mitt Romney did as a schoolboy definitely falls into that category. My high school classmates tormented various teachers routinely. Leading a blind teacher into a door is cruel, but it’s still within the category of prank, in part because it targets authority. Bart Simpson pranks. But Nelson Muntz bullies. And the story of the attack on the young nonconformist gay boy is a particularly ugly piece of bullying. It was a vicious and violent assault by a mob organized by Romney, who held him down on the floor, and cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

I do not believe Romney has no memory of this. I believe he is lying. His absurd statement that he has no memory of the event but that he didn’t target the boy for being gay is hilarious for its self-contradiction. A boy who routinely snickered “Atta girl!” when one young gay kid in his class spoke up is not just bashing hippies. I went to an all boys high school in the 1970s. What Romney did was a gay-bashing.

Should we judge a man today by what he did all those years ago?

Not entirely. He has apologized. But there is surely something here: the notion that being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.

And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem. It matters that we know that one candidate for president was an anti-gay bully in high school, targeting a weak and defenseless kid and humiliating and traumatizing him. Today, he does the same thing in a larger, more abstract way: targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power. It gives me the chills.

A US judge has refused to throw out charges against two-time former presidential candidate John Edwards.

Lawyers for Mr Edwards argued that the prosecution had failed to prove he intentionally violated the law.

The former Democratic North Carolina senator’s lawyers will begin presenting their case on Monday.

The 58-year-old denies six counts of campaign finance law violations to hide a pregnant mistress, and faces up to 30 years in jail if convicted.

Prosecutors at the trial in Greensboro, North Carolina, rested their case on Thursday by playing a tape of a 2008 national television interview of Mr Edwards.

The video shows Mr Edwards confessing to his affair with Rielle Hunter, but denying having fathered her baby. At the time his late wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was fighting breast cancer.

In the ABC News recording, he also rejects suggestions that he used money from his campaign to hide an affair.

To prove Mr Edwards guilty, prosecutors must show that he knew about the money used in the cover-up, and also that he knew he was violating the law.

Sometimes during lengthy floor debates on bills, interesting things happen in the witching hours.

Such was the case late Wednesday, when Representative John Lewis of Georgia pushed back with a fiery speech directed at an amendment offered by Representative Paul C. Broun of Georgia that would have barred the Justice Department from using money to enforce a part of the Voting Rights Act.

At around 10 p.m., Mr. Lewis, a former civil rights leader, took to the podium to denounce the amendment, which sought to end financing for enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minority voters from being disenfranchised.

He began by saying it was “hard and difficult and almost unbelievable that any member, especially a member from the state of Georgia,” would offer the amendment. As he laid out various methods used before the civil rights movement to suppress the black vote, he added: “People died for the right to vote! Friends of mine! Colleagues of mine!”

Mr. Broun appeared shaken and, in an unusual move, withdrew his own amendment.

On Thursday, Meredith Griffanti, a spokeswoman for Mr. Broun, who is a medical doctor, said that he “fully believes in the intent of his amendment to prevent the Justice Department from enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” but added that “given the magnitude of this change and out of respect for his colleagues, Dr. Broun withdrew the amendment.”

“He felt as though it deserved ample debate time where all members could participate rather than during a closed-off discussion in the late hours of the evening,” she said. “Dr. Broun looks forward to having this debate in the future.”

Rush Limbaugh today dismissed a Washington Post report detailing “pranks” and “troubling incidents” Mitt Romney engaged in as a high school student, saying: “You had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get razzed. It didn’t matter. They weren’t gonna think you were in the Beatles. If you had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get made fun of.” Limbaugh added: “See, 1965’s a great year; bullying was legal.”

Limbaugh blamed a “pro-Obama media” for making this a story, saying, “The Washington Post can find out what Romney was doing in high school but they can’t be bothered to find out what Obama’s transcripts — even some of his writings from college and law school.” He continued:

LIMBAUGH: This is the campaign. This is exactly — you’ve been warned. You knew. You don’t need to be warned. You know this kind of stuff’s coming. This is what the drive-by media does in conjunction with the Democrat in the White House. When I saw this, I just — I started laughing.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: Now maybe I’m wrong, but I think most people are gonna laugh at this. It’s so obvious now — it is so pathetically transparently transparent what this is. Media ganging up on Romney — a pro-Obama media ganging up on Romney. 1965 — probably a stretch to say it had anything to do with the kid being presumed gay. You had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get razzed. It didn’t matter.

They weren’t gonna think you were in the Beatles. If you had long hair in 1965, you were gonna get made fun of. See, 1965’s a great year; bullying was legal.

Limbaugh added: “Watch that be a quote that shows up at Media Matters: ‘Limbaugh praising bullying while defending Romney.’ “

Alas, the Tea Party movement won’t be setting up shop in Zurich anytime soon.

Representative Michele Bachmann has asked the Swiss government to withdraw her dual citizenship, saying she’s all American.

“Today I sent a letter to the Swiss Consulate requesting withdrawal of my dual Swiss citizenship, which was conferred upon me by operation of Swiss law when I married my husband in 1978,” Mrs. Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, said Thursday in a statement.

“I took this action because I want to make it perfectly clear: I was born in America and I am a proud American citizen. I am, and always have been, 100 percent committed to our United States Constitution and the United States of America. As the daughter of an Air Force veteran, stepdaughter of an Army veteran and sister of a Navy veteran, I am proud of my allegiance to the greatest nation the world has ever known.”

Politico reported late Tuesday that Mrs. Bachmann had become a Swiss citizen in March, a month after her husband, Marcus, the son of Swiss immigrants, registered with the Swiss consulate. (Foreign women who married Swiss men before 1992 received automatic Swiss citizenship.)

Becky Rogness, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Bachmann, said Wednesday that the Bachmanns recently decided to obtain Swiss citizenship as a family because “some of their children wanted to exercise their eligibility for dual-citizenship.”

Her Swiss citizenship didn’t go over well with some conservatives, who expressed their displeasure on Wednesday.

The US Department of Justice has sued an Arizona sheriff accused of racially profiling Latinos, among other alleged civil rights violations.

The lawsuit alleges sloppy police work and a disregard for minority rights by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

US officials wanted the sheriff to agree to train his officers in how to perform duties such as traffic stops.

But Sheriff Arpaio, who denies the allegations, said the department’s demands would nullify his authority.

The self-styled toughest sherriff in the US, he shot to prominence forcing prisoners to wear pink underwear.

Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Perez told a news conference on Thursday: “We have invariably been able to work collaboratively with law enforcement agencies to build better departments and safer communities.”

He added that Sheriff Arpaio’s Maricopa County office had been “a glaring exception”.

In one case cited by the lawsuit, a sheriff’s officer stopped a Latino woman - a US citizen who was five months pregnant - as she pulled into her driveway and insisted she sit on the hood of her car.

“When she refused, the officer grabbed her arms, pulled them behind her back, and slammed her, stomach first, into the vehicle three times,” the suit said.

The woman failed to show she had motor insurance, but the matter was resolved when she provided such proof to a court, the lawsuit said.

In December, the justice department released a scathing report accusing his office of multiple offences, including punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish.

He previously apologised for his office’s botching of sex-crime investigations, including child abuse allegations. When cases were reopened, 19 arrests were made.

On the eve of the lawsuit, Sheriff Arpaio said: “If they sue, we’ll go to court. And then we’ll find out the real story. They’re telling me how to run my organisation.”

Maricopa County has also been under investigation for criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009, an inquiry which has focused on the sheriff’s anti-public corruption squad.

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will “come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through.”

The idea isn’t to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It’s to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, “Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort.”

WASHINGTON — Congressional ethics investigators concluded in a report released Wednesday that Representative Vern Buchanan, a Florida lawmaker who leads House Republican fund-raising operations nationwide, appeared to have tried to illegally influence the testimony of an ex-business partner regarding allegations of campaign finance violations in his own race.

With the financial sector sure to summon massive amounts of money and resources to battle any criminal or civil prosecutions over its role in the 2008 crisis, a key is how much resources authorities will have at their disposal to battle back.

When New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman appeared before the Congressional Progressive Caucus in late April, he asked the members to help him obtain funding for the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, which he co-chairs. “If you want to help me badger everybody, that’s good,” he said. “I’m a good badger by myself but I know there are some experts in this room.”

Yesterday, Representative Maxine Waters, a member of the caucus, made the first attempt to get the RMBS group funding—and it didn’t work.

She offered an amendment to a large appropriations bill, created by Republicans, that would fund, in part, the Department of Justice. The bill provided only a fraction of the $55 million the DoJ asked for in its budget request for “investigating and prosecuting financial and mortgage fraud.” Waters proposed re-appropriating some money in the bill from the NASA program to fully fund the $55 million request.

“Considering the retirement of the space shuttle program and a shift in NASA’s priorities, I believe we should use the funds in these accounts to help bring justice to defrauded investors, homeowners, and consumers,” she said on the House floor.

Representative Brad Miller also rose in support of Waters’ amendment. Though Miller was turned down for the job of executive director—because, he believes, the working group was afraid of industry blowback—Waters has been circulating a letter, signed by forty members of Congress, asking the working group to hire him anyway.

Miller strongly urged members to fully fund the RMBS investigation. “Every [Wall Street] defendant would have a defense team that would make the O.J. defense team look like a public defender, two years out of law school, handling 100 other cases,” he said. “We would be swamped by the opposition.

“But that is certainly no reason not to pursue those charges,” Miller continued. “In fact it’s all the more reason to go forward and pursue criminal fraud—to assure Americans that you…do not get a get out of jail free card because you are rich and powerful.”

At least for now, we use the law as our guide. We don’t give anyone the boot based on the nature of their business unless they make it clear that they plan to use the CRM to facilitate illegal activities.

We hate patent trolls because they’re enemies of the “free as in speech” nature of technology. We strongly believe tech should be open, free, and unbiased—and since we tell our users that they own their data, that means we can’t legitimately inject our own personal opinions into the matter without being hypocritical. The law become the only logical limit, since it is the point at which these issues cease to be a matter of opinion.

Of course, if you’re an asshole, you’ll still get the boot—that policy remains firmly in place.

I gave the patent troll a demo of our system, complete with genuine recommendations about how he could best track his entire process from start to end. I was definitely a little relieved that he had a few hang-ups about Less Annoying CRM’s feature set. While we did set up customization for him, ultimately he abandoned his account. Probably the best ending we could have hoped for.

“I really don’t want this guy’s money,” Tyler said at one point. We’re glad not to have it.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has been given the nod to take over a US bank, the first such US approval for a Chinese firm.

The US Federal Reserve approved state-owned ICBC’s plans to acquire the US subsidiary of Bank of East Asia.

This comes just days after high-level economic talks between the US and China in Beijing.

The Fed also gave permission to two other Chinese banks to increase their presence in the US.

“It is a pretty significant step. There has been a lot of backlash about Chinese state-run companies acquiring overseas assets,” Stephen Joske of Australia Super, an institutional investor in Beijing, told the BBC.

“The permission [given] to ICBC is a clear message that things may be returning to normal and that fears about Chinese state-run firms may be moderating.”

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

Republicans took to the Senate floor Tuesday to denounce a bill proposed by Democrats that would freeze student loan rates by closing a loophole that allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes on some of their income, in anticipation of a procedural vote on the measure Tuesday afternoon. Democrats have referred to the bill as the Edwards bill, as it targets the tax strategy former presidential candidate John Edwards was criticized for using.

But in the past, many conservatives have dinged the same tax loop hole Democrats now seek to close.

Republicans have denounced the bill — which would pay for the $5.9 billion loan rate freeze by preventing individuals with incomes exceeding $250,000 who file their taxes as a small business to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on some of their income – as punishing wealthy individuals at a high cost.

“Sadly the misguided government solution we will vote on today will be counter productive for our job creators,” said Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, on the Senate floor.

But conservatives have often had a dim view of this loop hole. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal editorial page lamented:

“Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn’t stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a ‘subchapter S’ corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder. Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends.”

The conservative columnist Robert Novak, that same year, wrote, “It is one of the last loopholes left in the Internal Revenue Code, and it is a big one.” Even Sean Hannity of Fox News got in on the act that year saying: “Hey, John Edwards is worth, what, $30 million to $40 million, set up a sub-S corporation to keep him from paying Medicare taxes on 90 percent of his income, and then he lectures the rest of us how Medicare is going broke.”

The House has passed its own version of a bill to that would keep rates on subsidized undergraduate loans from reverting from its current 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent by stripping $5.9 billion from a program within the health care law to pay for the freeze.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, said Monday: “For Republicans, well, we don’t think young people should have to suffer any more than they already are as a result of this President’s failure to turn the economy around. We just disagree that we should pay for a fix by diverting $6 billion from Medicare and raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.”

“This therapy can be dangerous,” said the bill’s author Sen. Ted Lieu. The Torrance Democrat added the treatments can “cause extreme depression and guilt” that sometimes leads to suicide.

Conservative religious groups emphatically reject that view of sexual orientation therapy and say the ban would interfere with parents’ rights to seek appropriate psychological care for their children.

The bill would prohibit so-called reparative therapy for minors and obligate adults to sign a release form that states that the counseling is ineffectual and possibly dangerous.

Representatives of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality on Tuesday called the bill a piece of social engineering masquerading as a solution to a clinical problem.

David Pickup, who is registered with the California Board of Psychology, said a ban would prevent people from recovering from trauma of sexual abuse.

“Any therapist worth his salt knows that homosexual feelings commonly occur in victims as a result of abuses,” he said. “I ought to know because I was one of those boys.”

The debate comes as gay rights issues take the spotlight around the nation.

Why do otherwise rational people think it’s a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.”

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make us any safer—and it actually puts us all at risk.

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, than we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

Gay marriage is in the news, as the White House scrambles to explain President Obama’s “evolving” position on the issue even as other members of the administration — notably Vice President Joe Biden — find their personal evolutions progressing more rapidly. Obama’s caution on the issue is widely assumed to be not a matter of personal conviction but one of political calculation. So where are the American people on the issue?

The answer, according to a new Gallup poll : sharply divided. The survey finds 50 percent say gay marriage should be legal and valid, compared to 48 percent who said it should not.

That’s a slight, statistically insignificant downtick from the last time Gallup polled — last year, 53 percent of Americans favored gay marriage . But the long-term trend has support for gay marriage gradually climbing and opposition gradually waning. It was just last year that the trend lines crossed for the first time, and support for gay marriage outperformed opposition. Clearly, both socially and politically, this is an issue in rapid transition in terms of public opinion.

A look at the breakdowns across subgroups in the poll, which Gallup provided to me, is also revealing: Support for gay marriage is strongest among women, college graduates, the nonreligious, and the young. Democrats overwhelmingly support legal gay marriage, but not as overwhelmingly as Republicans oppose it; independents are also strongly in favor. And there is no real difference between whites and nonwhites in their views on the issue.

The age breakdown is particularly revealing: Two-thirds of Americans aged 18-34 favor legal gay marriage, compared to just 40 percent of those 55 and older. Generational turnover is a major reason that activists on both sides of the issue expect the overall trend of support for gay marriage to continue. At the same time, the political debate continues to lag, from the president to the voters of North Carolina, who are expected to approve a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in Tuesday’s election. The question now is when the political debate flips, and supporting gay marriage — rather than tepidly opposing it — becomes the safe position to campaign on

Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a court order requiring it to turn over three months worth of messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protester being prosecuted for disorderly conduct.

In a motion (PDF) filed on Monday in New York City Criminal Court, Twitter lawyers argued the city’s district attorney’s office is overstepping its authority in ordering the tweets and other subscriber info of Malcolm Harris, whose handle on the microblogging site is @destructuremal . Prosecutors seeking the data failed to get a court warrant based on probable cause, making an order they obtained earlier a violation of federal law and the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Twitter brief argued.

“If the order stands, Twitter will be put in the untenable position of either providing user communications and account information in response to all subpoenas or attempting to vindicate its users’ rights by moving to quash these subpoenas itself—even though Twitter will often know little or nothing about the underlying facts necessary to support their users’ argument that the subpoenas may be improper,” Twitter’s attorneys argued.

Rather than get a warrant based on probable cause, the New York City prosecutors cited the Stored Communications Act, which requires only that investigators show the requested information is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. After receiving the demand, Twitter provided notification to Harris, who challenged the demand on the grounds the information prosecutors were seeking fell outside the limitations of the statute. Last month, New York Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. denied Harris’s motion (PDF ), arguing he had no legal standing to challenge the subpoena because he had no proprietary interest in the data investigators sought.

Reports from the US say the would-be suicide attacker in a foiled “underwear bomb” plot was in fact a double agent.

US officials are quoted as saying that the person dispatched by Yemen-based al-Qaeda to attack a US-bound plane had infiltrated the group.

In an apparent intelligence coup, the agent left Yemen with the device and delivered it to the CIA.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon says it is sending military trainers back to Yemen to help counter al-Qaeda militants.

US intelligence learned last month that militants with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen planned to attack a plane with a more sophisticated version of a bomb hidden in a passenger’s underwear, similar to one used in a failed 2009 attempt, Associated Press news agency reported.

Officials told US media that the would-be bomber had been recruited by Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency and sent to Yemen where he infiltrated the militants’ cell.

The BBC’s Steve Kingstone in Washington says the double-agent was reportedly given an ambitious task by Saudi intelligence - to convince AQAP that he wanted to blow up himself and a US-bound aircraft.

The agent was given the device which he then delivered to the CIA and Saudi officials.

The New York Times reports that the double-agent is now safe in Saudi Arabia.

FBI analysts are now studying the device.

The upgraded underwear bomb is described by officials as a “custom-fit” device, that would have been difficult to detect even with careful security checks.

We’ve talked a lot about the difference between gatekeepers and enablers , and how the latter are becoming more important than the former. Both are types of middlemen, of course. And there have been some reasonable discussions about how enablers can become gatekeepers at times. Indeed, this is something to be aware of, and we should worry about it and speak out when we see evidence of it happening. For example, ebook platforms have become great enablers, allowing lots of new written works to be published, promoted, distributed and sold. In 2002, 250,000 books were published. In 2010 the number was over 3 million — with much of that being thanks to the easy publishing of ebooks, and the platforms that made it possible to publish a book without a gatekeeper.

But… sometimes those enablers turn into gatekeepers. Witness the news, via Slashdot , that Barnes & Noble removed Linux Format magazine from the Nook store because the magazine dared to publish an article entitled Learn to Hack . It is true that they were using “hack” in the (increasingly less common) definition having to do with breaking into other computers and networks, but the framing of it was mostly around understanding these things to keep yourself secure. Still, do we really want platforms like Barnes & Noble acting as gatekeepers concerning what people can and cannot read?

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng has telephoned a US Congressional hearing to plead for help in his attempts to leave China with his family.

Mr Chen said he feared for the safety of his family and wanted to meet visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton face-to-face.

The activist is in a Beijing hospital sealed off by Chinese police.

He had spent a week at the US embassy but left after initially accepting China’s assurances of his safety.

Mr Chen said that only after leaving the embassy did he fully realise the threats that had been made against his family members.

Activist Chen Guangcheng says he does not know when he will be allowed to leave China despite an offer from a US university.

Mr Chen, who spent six days at the US embassy, said US officials were still being barred from his hospital.

He told the BBC he had asked Chinese officials for help but had not started doing the paperwork for a passport.

On Sunday US Vice-President Joe Biden said a visa was waiting for Mr Chen as soon as he applied.

“[Chinese officials] promised that they would help me process the passports, but I haven’t been given an exact time. I haven’t started filling in the forms,” Mr Chen said.

“I hope they can help me process this because I’m lying in bed and can’t do it myself.”

Mr Chen said he had been able to talk to US officials.

It’s a little reported anecdote, but in 1981 presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney was arrested for disorderly conduct. The issue of Romney’s arrest first came to light during his 1994 Senate run against incumbent Senator Ted Kennedy, appearing at an unfortunate time while Romney was running ads talking to police officers with sirens in the background, promising to be tough on crime

According to what Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, he had taken his family of to Wayland, Mass.’s Lake Cochituate, about an hour outside Boston, for a summer excursion. As Romney prepared to put his family boat into the water, a park officer told Romney not to launch because his license appeared to have been painted over. The officer told Romney if he put his boat into the water he would face a $50 fine.

Romney felt that his license was still visible and decided to ignore the order from the officer and pay the fine.

“I figured I was at the state park with my kids. My five kids were in the car wondering why we weren’t going out in the boat, so I said I’d launch and pay the fine,” Romney said in 1994.

Romney said the office didn’t tell him not to launch his boat, just that he would face a fine for doing so.

“I was willing to pay the fine. But if he had said don’t launch the boat and not mentioned the fine, I would not have done it,” Romney said.

After Romney put the family put into the water, the office reappeared visibly angry and arrested Romney for disorderly conduct. Romney was handcuffed on the scene, taken to the local police station, and booked.

“There I was, dripping wet in a bathing suit,” Romney told the Globe. A magistrate let him go without bail.

Several days later, Romney appeared in Natick District Court and threatened to sue the arresting office for a false arrest. The charges were dropped and sealed at Romney’s request.

“He did not have the right to arrest me because I was not a disorderly person. This was an obvious case of false arrest,” Romney said. “The officer obviously agreed because he agreed to dropping the case.”

This is beyond heinous:

A group of partiers on the roof of a Cornell frat house allegedly taunted black students and threw objects — including an empty Jack Daniels bottle — at them as they passed on the street.

Beverly Fonkwo, a sophomore, says she and a friend were walking home when people began throwing things at them from the Sigma Pi roof. When she confronted the crowd, she says, they threw more trash and a full beer can, saying “come on up here, Trayvon” and making other racist remarks.

The president of the fraternity, Zach Smith, told the Cornell Daily Sun on Sunday that the frat had “figured out who the perpetrator was, and will turn his name over to police.” Smith claimed that only one person was involved in the attack, and that the perpetrator was not a member of the fraternity.

The Cornell Sun reports that Cornell’s Chief of Police Kathy Zoner has confirmed people were making racist slurs and throwing bottles from the roof, but would not report more as an investigation by Ithaca Police is ongoing. But according to that statement and the students’ account of what must have have been a ridiculously fucked and scary experience, there were multiple people involved in the attack.

“I feel like it was targeted and racially motivated … we felt very threatened,” Beverly Fonkwo said, adding that the assailants “were just laughing at the whole situation until we called the police and then they ran inside.”

We’ll keep you posted on any updates.

A shareholder seeking the dismissal of Yahoo’s chief executive has demanded the search firm allow access to documents relating to his recruitment.

In January, Yahoo named Scott Thompson, the president of online payments firm Paypal, as its new head.

But investment firm Third Point discovered that Mr Thompson did not hold a degree in computer science as had been claimed.

Third Point had set a Monday deadline for Yahoo to fire Thompson.

Mr Thompson graduated from Stonehill College and was said by Yahoo to hold a degree in accounting and computer science - though the college did not offer the latter subject at the time.

Yahoo has acknowledged the “inadvertent error” and has said it will conduct a review.

But after the Monday deadline passed without incident, Third Point demanded that Yahoo hand over documents and records related to Mr Thompson’s recruitment.

“Third Point believes that Yahoo shareholders and employees will be best served if the board accepts responsibility quickly for this latest debacle,” it said.

It wants to “investigate wrongdoing or possible mismanagement” by Mr Thompson and the board over the issue.

There are frequent fliers, and then there are people like Steven Rothstein and Jacques Vroom.

Both men boughttickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life on American Airlines.It was almost like owning a fleet of private jets.

Passes in hand, Rothstein and Vroom flew for business. They flew for pleasure. They flew just because they liked being on planes. They bypassed long lines, booked backup itineraries in case the weather turned, and never worried about cancellation fees. Flight crews memorized their names and favorite meals.

Each had paid American more than $350,000 for an unlimited AAirpass and a companion ticket that allowed them to take someone along on their adventures. Both agree it was the best purchase they ever made, one that completely redefined their lives.

In the 2009 film “Up in the Air,”the loyal American business traveler played by George Clooney was showered with attention after attaining 10 million frequent flier miles.

Rothstein and Vroom were not impressed.

“I can’t even remember when I cracked 10 million,” said Vroom, 67, a big, amiable Texan, who at last count had logged nearly four times as many. Rothstein, 61,has notched more than 30 million miles.

But all the miles they and 64 other unlimited AAirpass holders racked up went far beyond what American had expected. As its finances began deteriorating a few years ago, the carrier took a hard look at the AAirpass program.

Heavy users, including Vroom and Rothstein, were costing it millions of dollars in revenue, the airline concluded.

The AAirpass system had rules. A special “revenue integrity unit” was assigned to find out whether any of these rules had been broken, and whether the passes that were now such a drag on profits could be revoked.

Rothstein, Vroom and other AAirpass holders had long been treated like royalty. Now they were targets of an investigation.

Defence lawyers for five men accused of plotting the 11 September 2001 attacks have challenged the fairness of the military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

The defendants, who include the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were formally charged with murder and other offences on Saturday.

None of the defendants has yet entered a formal plea, and during the hearing they mostly remained silent.

The men’s lawyers say the court is censoring evidence of torture.

The defence counsel at Guantanamo are a mix of military and civilian lawyers.

At a joint news conference they complained of what they called “assembly line justice” protected by a “veil of secrecy”.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was repeatedly water-boarded secret CIA prisons before being brought to Guantanamo.

His lawyer, David Nevin, said “everything is being done to prevent this [tribunal] from being fair”.

The jury deciding whether Android violates Oracle’s Java-related copyrights has reached a unanimous decision on three of the four questions it is tasked with answering, but will break for the weekend and deliberate again Monday on the unresolved issue.

The State Department, responding to a wave of complaints from foreign students about abuses under a summer cultural exchange program, issued new rules on Friday significantly revising the types of jobs the students can do, prohibiting them from most warehouse, construction, manufacturing and food-processing work.

The rules are the most extensive changes the State Department has made to its largest cultural exchange program since several hundred foreign students protested last summer at a plant in Pennsylvania that packs Hershey’s chocolates. The students said they were forced to work on grueling production lines lifting heavy boxes, often on night shifts, isolated in the plant from any American workers.

After paycheck deductions, the students said, they were paid so little they could not afford to travel in the United States, as the program promised.

Robin Lerner, deputy assistant secretary of state for private sector exchange, said the department’s goal with the revisions was “to bring the program back to its core cultural purposes.”

The five-decade-old Summer Work Travel Program brings more than 100,000 foreign university students here each year to work for up to three months and then travel for a month. The program, which uses a visa known as J-1, is designed to give students who are not from wealthy backgrounds a chance to experience the United States. The students’ trips are arranged by American sponsoring agencies that find jobs and housing for them.

The department said “the work component” of the program “has too often overshadowed the core cultural component” that Congress intended. The department also said the changes responded to concerns raised by the students at the Hershey’s packing plant.

Those students were “concentrated in single locations for long hours in jobs that provided little or no opportunity to interact with U.S. citizens,” the department wrote to explain the rules. They were “exposed to workplace and safety hazards” and “subjected to predatory practices through wage deductions” for housing.

So there you have it. A darn-near perfect explanation of the GSIII design. Sure, it's butt ugly, but it's also 100% (well maybe 90%) lawyer approved.  An amorphous, unsymmetrical blob that doesn't come in black, with a non-permanent dock and non-square icons. There's no way Apple can add this design to their Samsung lawsuit.
So Samsung, was it worth it? Your product won't sell as well, but you won't piss off one of your biggest component customers either. I understand the motivation, but I still feel like you've sold your soul.
When Apple started patent trolling, they basically admitted they weren't going to win in an open market, and they decided to drag Samsung down with them. The crazy thing is, Samsung is letting them. They've ceded ownership of the rectangle and other common sense design traits to Apple, and did everything they could to bow down to their largest customer.
The result? A phone designed by lawyers. What a scary precedent.

The copyright phase of the Oracle v. Google trial is winding down. While the world waits for a jury verdict on the facts, the judge overseeing the case is wrestling with the complexities of the law. Oracle has argued that the “structure, sequence and organization” of the Java API is eligible for copyright protection, while Google disagrees.

On Thursday, Judge William Alsup asked each party to submit a 20-page brief answering a series of 13 in-depth questions about the Java API and the relevant precedents. Among other things, he asked the parties to weigh in on the implications of this week’s EU court decision that allowing functional characteristics of programming languages to be copyrighted would “monopolize” ideas.

Some of Judge Alsup’s comments in the courtroom in recent days suggested that he is skeptical of Oracle’s position.

Most people don’t really read books. A typical book buyer can be expected to buy a single book every year or so. On the other hand, a small minority are avid readers, the sort who’ll buy 100-150 books a year. This market is one that publishers are eager to protect, and it’s likely that anyone who spends $100 or more on an ebook reading device is an avid book reader already. That’s why publishers spent so much time worrying about whether Amazon was discounting new ebook releases too deeply. Kindle owners overlap with avid readers, and avid readers are the target market for new, full-price hardcovers.

Discounting ebooks when the hardcover is just out is likely to cannibalise one of the critical profit-centres for the industry.

However, these readers are also the ones most likely to run up against the limits of DRM. They’re the customers who amass large libraries from lots of suppliers, and who value their books as long-term assets that they expect to access until they die. They may have the chance to change their ebook reading platform every year or two (the most common platform being a mobile phone, and many people get a new phone with each contract renewal). They want to be sure that their books travel with them. When their books don’t, they’ll be alienated, frustrated and will likely seek out unauthorised ways to get books in future. No one wants to be punished for their honesty.

There’s the other population of readers – the very occasional reader, someone who’ll grab a book on the way to a beach holiday or a weekend away and then toss it out afterwards. Avid readers start off as occasional readers, and there are a lot of occasional readers in aggregate, so it’s not a market that publishers can afford to alienate.

These readers are also poorly served by DRM, since they aren’t likely to know much about ebooks and ebook readers, and are thus prone to buying books that aren’t compatible with their reading devices and vice-versa.

Absent DRM, these customers will also have tools that effortlessly read any vendor’s ebooks.

In mature gadget markets – like DVD players and MP3 players – formats stop mattering altogether. Especially at the low end of the market, these devices support every format their makers can discover. The cheap-and-cheerful manufacturers at the low end don’t have a secondary market they’re trying to protect, no app store or crucial vendor relationship with a big distributor or publisher. They just want a product that ticks the box for every possible customer. Since multiformat support is just a matter of getting the software right, what tends to happen is that a standard, commodity firmware emerges for these devices that just works for just about everything, and the formats vanish into the background.

Now that Tor has dropped DRM – and acquired a valuable halo of virtue among committed ebook readers, who’ll celebrate their bravery – it’s inevitable that the competition will follow. It seems we have reached the beginning of the end of the ebook format wars, which is good news for readers, writers and publishers.

After a year-long seizure and six more months of secrecy, the court records were finally released concerning the mysterious government takedown of Dajaz1.com – a popular blog dedicated to hip hop music and culture. The records confirm that one of the key reasons the blog remained censored for so long is that the government obtained three secret extensions of time by claiming that it was waiting for “rights holders” and later, the Recording Industry Association of America, to evaluate a “sampling of allegedly infringing content” obtained from the website and respond to other “outstanding questions.”

In other words, having goaded the government into an outrageous and very public seizure of the blog, the RIAA members refused to follow up and answer the government’s questions. In turn, the government acted shamefully, not returning the blog or apologizing for its apparent mistake, but instead secretly asking the court to extend the seizure and deny Dajaz1 the right to seek return of is property or otherwise get due process. The government also refused to answer Congressional questions about the case. ICE finally released the domain name in December of 2011, again with no explanation.

It’s not hard to guess what some of the unanswered “outstanding questions” might have been. Dajaz1.com, was seized with much fanfare by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security over the 2010 Thanksgiving weekend. It was widely reported at the time that Dajaz1 should never have been targeted, that much of the blog’s content was lawful, and that many of the allegedly infringing links were given to the site’s owner by artists and labels themselves – including Kanye West, Diddy, and a vice president of a major record label. So, at a minimum, we imagine the government was asking the RIAA to provide some evidence that the seizure was justified in the first place.

When Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities brokerage firm, went public in May 2011, the initial public offering (IPO) on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges made headlines for weeks in the Financial Times and the trade-industry press, which devoted endless columns to the company’s astonishing valuation of nearly $60 billion — higher than Boeing or Ford Motor Co. The massive new wealth turned nearly 500 employees into overnight multimillionaires and made billionaires of at least five senior executives, including CEO Ivan Glasenberg. “We are not going to change the way we operate,” vowed Glasenberg, who had started as a lowly coal trader for the Swiss firm nearly three decades earlier and, with the IPO, immediately became one of Europe’s richest men. “Being public will have absolutely no effect on the business.”

And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called “the biggest company you never heard of,” turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus , the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world’s seaborne coal; was one of the world’s largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an “empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa,” as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. “Glencore is at the center of the raw material world,” said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. “Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants.”

The Obama administration on Monday offered its first extensive explanation of how American officials decide when to use drones to kill suspected terrorists — a tactic that the government often treats as a classified secret even though it is widely known around the world.

“Yes, in full accordance with the law — and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives — the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” John O. Brennan , President Obama ’s top counterterrorism adviser, said before the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The use of armed drones to strike at suspected militants in places like Pakistan and Yemen has grown dramatically under the Obama administration, and the emergence of the new technology — which has sharply reduced the cost and risk of warfare to its operators, making it easier to engage in sporadic combat in far-flung regions — has led to growing concerns both about civilian casualties and about a future in which other countries also acquire drones.

The United States government has been reluctant to talk openly about its use of drones, apparently in part because foreign governments that granted permission for strikes did so on the condition that the deals would remain secret.

Defending drone strikes as “legal, ethical, and wise,” Mr. Brennan said the president had directed officials to be more open about how they “carefully, deliberately and responsibly” decide to kill terrorism suspects — including what he described as “the rigorous standards and process of review to which we hold ourselves today when considering and authorizing strikes against a specific member of Al Qaeda outside the ‘hot’ battlefield of Afghanistan.”

Merely being a member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies is not enough to be targeted, Mr. Brennan said, because that describes many thousands of people. Rather, policymakers approve the killing of only those who pose a particular threat, he said, like operational leaders who are planning attacks against United States interests, lower-level militants training for such an attack, and those who possess “unique operational skills that are being leveraged in a planned attack.”

Mr. Brennan also said the administration preferred capturing such suspects alive — usually by telling a foreign government where to arrest them — and would authorize a strike only if that was not feasible.

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail , accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

News Corp. executives Rupert and James Murdoch can give a small sigh of relief, perhaps, that U.K. lawmakers investigating the tabloid hacking and bribery scandal did not conclude they misled Parliament in earlier testimony.

But that may be just about the only relief the Murdochs receive.

The scathing report accuses the company and several of its former top British executives of lying to Parliament and of seeking to cover-up widespread phone hacking, computer hacking and bribing of government employees.

James Murdoch, who stepped down in recent months as chairman of the company’s British units, was accused by MPs of “willful blindness” in failing to realize he was authorizing a cover-up by making a huge confidential payment to a hacking victim. Rupert Murdoch, still CEO and chairman, was deemed “not a fit person” to lead a major international corporation.

The father and son find themselves bloodied at a time they are seeking to restore calm and show they still can assert control over the corporation.

News Corp. has its headquarters in New York City and is publicly traded on NASDAQ. But it is effectively run as a family concern. Despite the scandal, James Murdoch retains his role over global television operations as News Corp.’s deputy chief operating officer. The Murdoch family controls about 40 percent of shareholder votes; a friendly Saudi prince holds another seven percent of votes. That makes it nearly impossible for shareholders to dislodge the family’s control.

The conclusions of the panel were near-unanimous – save the assessment of Rupert Murdoch’s “fitness,” which was arrived by a majority vote. Conservative lawmakers voted against that language. That phrase has particular resonance because the U.K. media regulator Ofcom is reviewing whether News Corp. is a “fit and proper” controlling owner in the British pay TV giant BSkyB.

A new survey has revealed that young people are responding to tough legislation and increasing levels of online spying by investing in VPN services. The study, carried out by the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University, found that when compared to figures from late 2009, 40% more 15 to 25-year-olds are now hiding their activities online.

Faced with the almost impossible task of physically restricting people’s activities online, during recent years authorities and copyright holders have sought to have legislation tightened up, to encourage citizens towards a path of “doing the right thing” through the fear of more and more serious consequences.

In Sweden, the results of intense lobbying are clear. Due to a combination of fat Internet pipes and its status as the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay, Sweden and file-sharing go hand in hand. As a result the country is being subjected to considerable online surveillance.

But according to new research from the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University, an increasing proportion of the country’s population are taking measures to negate the effects of spying on their online activities.

The study reveals that 700,000 Swedes now make themselves anonymous online with paid VPN services such as The Pirate Bay’s iPredator.

A similar study carried out in 2009 revealed that 500,000 Swedes were taking steps to anonymize their connections. Today’s results therefore reveal a 40% increase in privacy service uptake in roughly 2.5 years.

As mentioned in the quickies a few weeks ago, Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association , revealed that a “weeping” cross was not actually a miracle at all, but in fact caused by a leaky drain. When he refused to retract his findings, the local Catholic Church filed a case against him for blasphemy and he now has arrest warrants out for him.

Some background: In March, Edamaruku was contacted by an Indian TV channel and asked to investigate a miracle in Mumbai. Edamaruku is no stranger to investigation. You may remember this story from a few years ago when he challenged a guru to kill him on live TV.

Edamaruku was being asked to investigate a crucifix in front of the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni. The crucifix had water dripping from the feet of the statue for several days. This water was being given to people to drink and claims of its healing powers had already begun to fly. When Edamaruku investigated, he quickly identified the the source of the water as a drain from a nearby washroom and explained the capillary action that caused the water to reach Jesus’ feet.

In presenting his findings on live TV , he also accused the priests of the church of ‘miracle mongering’ for publicity. The local church leaders quickly filed First Information Reports (FIR) against Edamaruku, accusing him of blasphemy, which is illegal under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code .

A US man who has spent more than 16 years in prison has been freed after new DNA evidence cleared his name.

Robert Dewey was sentenced to life for the rape and murder of a woman found strangled with a dog leash in Palisade, Colorado, in 1994.

But a court has now found him innocent, with the judge saying his exoneration marked a “historic day”.

Prosecutors say improved DNA techniques have led them to a new suspect, who is currently serving life.

Following his release, Mr Dewey met his girlfriend - whom he formed a relationship with by correspondence while in prison - for the first time.

Five men, including three self-described anarchists, are being questioned over an alleged plot to blow up an Ohio bridge.

The FBI says the accused were part of a plan to attack a four-lane bridge 15 miles (24km) from central Cleveland.

The public was not in danger because the explosives did not work and were being controlled by an undercover agent, the agency added.

None of the suspects are associated with foreign terror groups.

The overnight arrests were the result of an undercover sting operation as part of an investigation launched in October 2011, an FBI affidavit said.

The suspects, aged between 20 and 35, were due to appear in a federal court later on Tuesday.

Three of the men - Brandon Baxter, 20, Douglas Wright, 26, and Anthony Hayne, 35, face charges of conspiracy and trying to damage property and affect interstate commerce.

The other two, Connor Stephens, 20, and Joshua Stafford, 23, have not yet been charged.

“The individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views,” said Special Agent Stephen Anthony, of the FBI’s Cleveland division, in a statement.

“The Joint Terrorism Task Force will continue to be vigilant in its efforts to detect and disrupt any terrorism threat, domestic or international.”

An official from the US Department of Justice said that the plot was not connected to the first anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death.