Lord Mandelson is seeking to amend the laws on copyright to give the government sweeping new powers against people accused of illegal downloading.
[...]
The proposed alteration to the Copyright Act would create a new offence of downloading material that infringes copyright laws, as well as giving new powers or rights to “protect” rights holders such as record companies and movie studios – and, controversially, conferring powers on “any person as may be specified” to help cut down online infringement of copyright.
The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.
Mandelson says in his letter that he is concerned about “cyberlockers” – websites that offer users private storage spaces whose contents can be shared by passing a web link via email.
“These can be used entirely legitimately, but recently rights holders have pointed to them as being used for illegal use,” Mandelson writes in the letter.
But the proposal to alter the Copyright Act in this way has caused alarm within government, where some fear that an incoming Tory administration could use it to curry favour with Murdoch, head of the News International publishing group.
When the hostess agency put out the call for attractive, well-dressed women, under the age of 35 and over 1.7 metres (5ft 7in) tall, it was inundated with responses from hundreds of Roman women.
Most seemed to think they would be bringing a little glamour to a gala dinner with the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Instead, they found themselves being lectured by him for two hours on the role of women and invited to convert to Islam. “We were at least expecting a snack”, grumbled Silvia Figliozzi afterwards.
[..]
The women at Sunday’s event were promised €50 (£45) and told not to arrive in miniskirts or low-cut tops. They assembled outside a hotel in the centre, where several were rejected because they were either too short or revealingly dressed. The rest – most teetering on stilettos and some wrapped in furs – boarded buses and were driven to the Libyan ambassador’s residence.
According to the Italian news agency Ansa, about 200 filed through the heavily protected gates, where a security guard insisted to reporters that they were assembling for a “medical conference”.
After a delay of an hour, Gaddafi appeared, in a black uniform with a black beret. As he launched into his address, female members of his entourage distributed embossed copies of the Qu’ran and the colonel’s own great work, The Green Book.
Ok. It appears that this video and The Raw Story article are a tad manipulative and that the baggers may have caught on before the end. Clearly they have a semblance of intelligence. Still pretty funny as a prank, even if the speakers argument is undercooked.
A speaker at an anti-immigration rally in Minneapolis this past weekend got the crowd to support more than just the deportation of all illegal immigrants — he got them cheering for the eviction of all European-descended immigrants to America who “stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
[...]
“In Minneapolis where I’m from, we have a huge immigrant population that has been causing a number of problems,” Erickson began. “With the economy in recession and so many people laid off and unable to find work, immigrants should not be competing for the few jobs that are open. It’s just not fair to the folks who have a claim to this country and have a right to be here.”
[...]
“Let’s send these European immigrants back where they came from,” he said to wild cheers. “We need to send every one of them back home. … They stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
[...]
“Erickson” walked off the stage leading the crowd in a loud chant of “Columbus go home! Columbus go home!”
Oregon opened another chapter in U.S. marijuana history when at 4:20 p.m. Friday, about three dozen people christened the nation’s first cafe for licensed residents to sit down, sip coffee and smoke marijuana.
“Welcome to a place of our own,” said Madeline Martinez, a leader in the state’s medical marijuana movement and the leading force pushing to open the Cannabis Cafe in Portland. “Welcome to freedom.”
[...]
The only people permitted in the Cannabis Cafe are those licensed to smoke who also hold membership in the lobbying group Oregon NORML. Patrons will be charged $5 a day. They can bring their own or smoke donated marijuana. Oregon law says medical marijuana may not be sold.
[..]
After last week’s announcement of the cafe’s opening, the neighbors in the Woodlawn neighborhood weren’t happy. At a crowded neighborhood association meeting, people complained, among other things, that they could smell smoke from the meetings. Martinez promised to install air filters.
AN ABORIGINAL boy, 12, will face a children’s court today charged with receiving a stolen Freddo frog.
The chocolate frog, allegedly shoplifted by the child’s friend from a Coles supermarket in regional Western Australia, usually sells for about 70 cents.
The boy, who has no prior convictions, also faces a second charge involving the receipt of a novelty sign from another store. The sign, which was also allegedly given to the boy by his friend, read: ”Do not enter, genius at work.”
The boy’s lawyer, Peter Collins, has lobbied WA police for the charges to be withdrawn, but authorities had failed to respond to his request, he said.
”It’s scandalous that a 12-year-old child should be subject to prosecution for a case of this type,” he told The Age.
Mr Collins said that when the boy last month missed a court date due to a family misunderstanding, police had apprehended him about 8am on a school day and taken him into custody. The boy was then imprisoned for several hours in the holding cell at the police station.
Officer Suspended for Tasing Handcuffed Man – wltx.com — Yet another arbitrary tasing. Its pretty clear that cops are often using these things just to inflict pain. Note the ironic NWO4 text stamp. Also interesting that all charges on the arrested man were dropped.
Lansing, MI (Lansing State Journal, MI) — A Lansing police officer who Tasered a handcuffed man was suspended for two weeks without pay for violating department policies and procedures, officials said Thursday.
According to documents released from the Lansing Police Department, the victim suffered injuries to his face, including a broken jaw, a chipped tooth and eight stitches to his chin.
No charges have been filed against officer Ryan Smith, a two year veteran of the South Precinct. The union that represents him will protest the suspension.
Lansing Police Chief Mark Alley said the incident that led to the suspension occurred about 1 a.m. Aug. 16 in the 2400 block of North Wadsworth in Lansing after police responded to a call of a dispute between Rocky Allred, 43, of Lansing and a former girlfriend.
Alley said there was a scuffle between Allred and Smith prior to an arrest being made, and that Allred head-butted Smith while the officer tried to handcuff him. Smith attempted to use his Taser on Allred, but the weapon did not fire and Smith dropped the weapon.
Two other officers were able to subdue and handcuff Allred while Smith picked up and reloaded his Taser. Smith then used his Taser on the cuffed Allred, causing Allred to fall to the ground.
How the US funds the Taliban – The Nation — An excellent article and one that left me thinking what the hell is the REAL reason troops are in Afghanistan. It sure as hell ain’t saving the country from the Taliban. The whole thing a gigantic farce.
Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.
The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.” That is something everyone seems to agree on.
But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don’t really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s cooperation.
The European Union has financed a study to look at how grouping vehicles into ‘platoons’ or ‘road trains’ on the continent’s motorways could cut fuel consumption, journey times and congestion.
The quite-frankly bizarre idea sees groups of cars linked together via wireless sensors, with a lead vehicle (driven by a ‘professional driver’ – whatever that means) leading the train. The ‘lead driver’ would monitor the status of the road train, allowing those in the other vehicles to sit back, sleep or read a book whilst they travel along motorways.
The EU’s study will be entirely focused on the system working with wireless sensors and up to eight vehicles ranging from your everyday family cars to buses and trains. In theory, these vehicles could be mixed and matched in a ‘road train’, but I’m not sure I’d want to be in between a truck and a bus with no control.
The preliminary report picked up by the BBC says that ‘road trains’ could cut fuel levels by up to 20 percent presumably due to most vehicles being in the lead’s slipstream.
Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that “Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long…To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it.”
Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration. An extensively marked-up copy of Publisher John Cruickshank’s internal memo announcing the changes was sent to Torontoist by a self-described “intermediary who was asked to send this for a friend who works at the Star” this morning; it’s, allegedly, “the work of a Star editor.”
Fox News’ Glenn Beck has lost a claim that a website called glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com was registered in bad faith and in violation of his trademark rights.
The website was founded by Isaac Eiland-Hall earlier this year in response to a joke on odd-news site Fark about Beck’s lack of denial for a non-existent murder/rape. Eiland-Hall argued to WIPO that he registered the website as a satirical critique of Beck’s conspiratorial politics.
WIPO’s arbitration panel agreed that the website appeared “to be engaged in a parody of the style or methodology that (Eiland-Hall) appears genuinely to believe is employed by (Beck) in the provision of political commentary, and for that reason (Eiland-Hall) can be said to be making a political statement.”
The domain name dispute resolution body added Eiland-Hall’s speech was “strongly protected” under the First Amendment.
Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.
In an interview with Sky News Australia, the mogul said that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.
In recent months, Murdoch his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of “kleptomania” and acting as a “parasite” for including in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google’s search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards.
“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”
‘Prepare for war,’ Chavez warns Venezuelan military, populace – The Raw Story — It’s clear that the pretence of the wars on drugs and terror could be setting the stage for war in the region. Is Chavez right to be worried about an impending war with the US or is this an Orwellian exercise in managing the Venezuelan people?
The leader of the fifth-largest oil exporter in the world is warning his country’s military and citizenry to prepare for war with Colombia and the United States, according to published reports.
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez issued his warning during a weekly radio address.
“Let’s not waste a day on our main aim: to prepare for war and to help the people prepare for war, because it is everyone’s responsibility,” he reportedly said.
Chavez has repeatedly voiced deep fears of US encroachment in the region.
“Students, revolutionaries, workers, women: all are ready to defend this sacred homeland called Venezuela,” he continued, adding that the best way to “avoid war is to prepare for it”.
Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.
Amid increasing incidents of climate protesters disrupting the operations of fossil-fuel industries and airports in Britain and elsewhere, Gore suggests the scale of the emergency means non-violent lawbreaking is justified. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play,” he says. “And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.”
In his only UK newspaper interview to mark the publication of his new book, entitled Our Choice, Gore says it is crucial for Obama to attend Copenhagen in person, adding: “I feel certain that he will.”
I’m by no means a man made climate change sceptic, and I fervently believe that dissent is the essence of a democracy, but isn’t Gore essentially calling for revolution? I’m uneasy about this guy’s motives.
GENEVA : THE $6.5 billion machine designed to recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time had to be switched off after a bird dropped a “bit of baguette” into it, causing it to overheat.
As a result, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had to postpone their plans last week to emulate the universe’s Big Bang.
The European particle physics laboratory near Geneva launched the LHC in September last year. Physicists hoped to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass.
But the LHC, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99.9 per cent of the speed of light, has been out of action since a helium leak caused it to be shut down nine days after its start-up.
The bird dropped bread on a compensating capacitor – where the mains electricity supply enters the collider – cutting power to the LHC during a test run.
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