Eideard

Thanks, Rhonda – for a link to the parties in the suit

The profiles of the two legally warring parties could not be further apart.

On the one side are two poor tribesmen living in a remote part of New Guinea; on the other a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling author and arguably the world’s most urbane magazine, The New Yorker.

The tribesmen this week filed a $10m lawsuit for defamation in a Manhattan court claiming that Jared Diamond had portrayed them wrongly as vengeful, bloodthirsty killers. The two-page complaint said they were falsely accused of “serious criminal activity and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, including murder”…

The contentious New Guinea article is no longer available from the New Yorker’s magazine, presumably for legal reasons, but an abstract still carried by the magazine’s website bills it as a work of anthropology. It explores the story of a New Guinean highlander whose uncle was killed in a battle against a neighbouring clan and who thus felt duty-bound to seek revenge.

The tribesman named in the article is Daniel Wemp, a member of the Handa clan, who is one of the two individuals that have brought the lawsuit. In the New Yorker he is said to have prosecuted his public fight over three years, at the cost of 29 lives in the course of six battles and the theft of 300 pigs.

The other man listed in the legal action is Henep Isum Mandingo, who Wemp is said in the article to have held responsible for his uncle’s murder…

But key elements in the story have been challenged by a self-appointed media monitoring website called stinkyjournalism.org. It claims to have looked into the article, to the lengths of sending three fact-checkers to the highlands of New Guinea to interview the central characters.

Diamond has yet to respond to the allegations.

You mean the readership of The New Yorker in New Guinea is sufficient that neighbors are standing round hollering at these two guys – because of an article by an anthropologist?

Follow-on interviews since the story hit the Web indicate the plaintiffs claim they told the stories to Diamond – but, they weren’t the principals in the tales.

Privacy? Har, har, har…
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

An internet privacy law is coming, Congressman Rick Boucher promised, as he steered his committee into the marshes of online behavioral advertising, deep packet inspection and location-tracking services.

Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and longtime ally of digital rights groups, now heads the House subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. He said wants the committee to write a broad online privacy law this year.

For instance, Boucher made it clear he’s concerned about ISPs using so-called deep packet inspection technology, or DPI, to examine the data packets it delivers to and from its customers. “The thought that a network operator could track a user’s every move on the Internet, record the details of every search and read every email or attached document is alarming.”

But the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Leslie Harris warned the committee not to get too wrapped up with any particular technology, since the privacy threats change quickly — pointing out that current privacy laws are good in some areas — video rental records, for one — and non-existent in others…

It’s not clear how broad a law Boucher has in mind, though it’s likely to be some codification of generally accepted data-privacy practices. Those include telling people when you collect data and why, letting them choose to join in or not, using the data only for the reason you collected it, letting people see and correct the information and destroying it when its not longer needed…

The Free Press’s Ben Scott summed up what he and many consumer advocates would like to see in an overarching privacy bill.

“It needs to cover intentionality, behavior, and outcome,” Scott said. “Why do you want my information? What are you going to do with it? And what does that mean for me?”

I’ll second that.

Australian police have released an X-ray image showing the skull of a murdered Chinese immigrant shot repeatedly with a nail gun.

Police are appealing for help to solve the murder of Chen Liu, 27, whose body was found by two children last year in marshland in south Sydney. Detectives said the weapon was a gas nail gun used in construction, firing nails up to 85mm (3.3in) long.

A post-mortem examination revealed that Mr Liu was shot 34 times in the head and neck with a high-powered nail gun, police said.

The weapon has not yet been recovered. Police have appealed for information from anyone who may have been in the area at the time of Mr Chen’s death.

“In 36 years, I’ve never seen a murder of this nature,” Homicide Squad Superintendent Geoff Beresford told reporters. “It’s a particularly brutal and vicious murder and hence the reason we are seeking information from the public,” he said.

Mr Chen’s badly decomposed body was found on 1 November 2008, wrapped in plastic, wire and an electrical cord.

Obvious from this article and others that the killer(s) tried their best to keep the body from being discovered. Earlier coverage noted Chen Liu’s car was first discovered in the area after he went missing.

I hope they catch the cruds who did this, soon.

The pages of a policeman’s notebook, clumped as they are with impenetrable acronyms and tales of suspects proceeding in northerly directions, seldom crackle with urgent prose or lapse into howls of sardonic anger and moments of compassion.

But one serving officer, who used his daily jottings and professional experiences as raw material for a blog, has just been rewarded with the Orwell special prize for blogs.

According to the judges, the pronouncements of “Night Jack – An English Detective” provided a perfect example of the medium’s power and importance.

“The insight into the everyday life of the police that Jack Night’s wonderful blog offered was – everybody felt – something which only a blog could deliver, and he delivered it brilliantly. It took you to the heart of what a policeman has to do – by the first blogpost you were hooked, and could not wait to click on to the next…”

Although he suspended his blog activities this month, Jack posted a message to accept the prize – the need to stay anonymous meant he did not attend in person.

He said he had pledged the £3,000 winnings to the Police Dependents’ Trust, and is adamant that no one outside his family and friends will learn his true identity. He is also currently working on a novel.

“It would appear I can write so I’m trying to see whether I can write more than a chapter of a police procedural,” he said. “After 20 years on the job, it’s all I know about.”

RTFA. I’m recommending it – and Night Jack – to a couple of mates who are coppers, retired or otherwise.

This is UPDATED here.

Afghan interpreter and U.S. Marine working at route clearance
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Ahmad Shakib says he knows he is risking his life to work for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but with a casual shrug and an idiomatic American twang, he laughs off the danger.

“Afraid of the Taliban? No, I’m the man,” said Shakib, 22, one of thousands of Afghans recruited to work with U.S. and NATO forces as interpreters, or “terps.”

Terps have been killed alongside U.S. and NATO colleagues on operations, and others have been targeted by militants who accuse them of collaborating with foreign forces.

The U.S. government offers military interpreters the prospect of an immigrant’s visa to the United States after two years. Shakib says that’s what tempts some. But he’d do it anyway. “I like this job. I like helping the people, helping the Americans. The way they do their job, I just love it,” he said…

His job means he can no longer go back to Kandahar, the southern city that was the birthplace of the Taliban in the 1990s, where he went to school and his brother still lives.

“(A relative) could say ‘oh by the way, my cousin is an interpreter, he’s working with the Americans’. So they (the Taliban) will be like let’s go and pop him,” Shakib said, using U.S. slang for an assassination…

Captain Christopher Garvin, who trains the Afghan army in Farah, a desert province on the Iranian border, says he relies on his terps for more than just the language.

“Coming here the first challenge was to fully understand the culture and how they like to operate,” said Garvin. “Having a good interpreter is the key.”

RTFA. The military has always come up with field expedients like this to compensate for lousy preparedness and all the other political crap that surrounds imperial hubris.

Fortunately, good officers learn early on about smart solutions. If they’re going to survive in the field.

Angie Zapata

A Colorado man was convicted of first-degree murder and a bias-motivated crime and sentenced to life in prison for killing a transgender teen he met on an online social networking site.

It was the first time in the nation that a state hate crime statute resulted in a conviction in a transgender person’s murder.

Seated in the front row of the courtroom, the family of Angie Zapata broke out in tears as the verdicts against Allen Andrade were read Wednesday.

The jury deliberated for just under two hours before returning the verdict shortly after 3 p.m.

“I lost somebody so precious,” said Maria Zapata, the victim’s mother. She glanced at Andrade and continued: “The only thing he can’t take away is the love and the memories that I have of my baby. My beautiful, beautiful baby.”

Andrade spoke just one word. “No,” he said when asked if he wished to address the court.

Judge Marcelo Kopcow then imposed the mandatory sentence for the first-degree murder conviction — life in prison without parole.

So much fear and trembling over sex. How much of any society’s culture is generated by ignorance, fear rooted in hatred of the unknown and different? Bloody Dark Ages of the mind.

Cripes – just leave people alone if you can’t deal with them.

Here they come, again!

President Barack Obama has promised his administration will move quickly to open U.S. roads to Mexican trucks to end $2.4 billion of Mexican retaliation on U.S. goods, a Mexican official said on Thursday.

Mexico imposed the retaliation in March after Obama signed legislation canceling a pilot program to allow Mexico trucks to operate in the United States, as required under a U.S. commitment to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

U.S. lawmakers said they were canceling the program because of safety concerns, but Mexican officials said the real reason was U.S. protectionism.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood has been leading the Obama administration’s effort to develop a new proposal that would open the border to Mexican trucks.

Safety concerns must not be diminished by cross-border politics.

If we let Mexican trucks onto U.S. highways without requiring them to match standards for driving hours, safety inspections, proper tires – all qualities where Mexican standards aren’t up to U.S. requirements – we’re just adding to existing over-the-road dangers.

Lauren Threlkeld got sick after eating baby spinach

In just about every major contaminated food scare, Minnesotans become sick by the dozens while few people in Kentucky and other states are counted among the ill.

Ruth Ann Merrick of Somerset, Ky., is still bitter about how her case was handled. The state never investigated why she and three friends went to the hospital after eating Chinese food.

In Kentucky, a county health worker called Lauren Threlkeld only to verify that she had fallen ill in another county.

Contaminated peanuts? Forty-two Minnesotans were reported sick compared with three Kentuckians. Jalapeño peppers last year? Thirty-one in Minnesota and two in Kentucky became ill. The different numbers arise because health officials in Kentucky and many other states fail to investigate many complaints of food-related sickness while those in Minnesota do so diligently, safeguarding not only Minnesotans but much of the rest of the country, as well.

Congress and the Obama administration have said that more inspections and new food production rules are needed to prevent food-related diseases, but far less attention has been paid to fixing the fractured system by which officials detect and stop ongoing outbreaks. Right now, uncovering which foods have been contaminated is left to a patchwork of more than 3,000 federal, state and local health departments that are, for the most part, poorly financed, poorly trained and disconnected, officials said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A decade-long battle for marriage equality in Connecticut ended when the General Assembly voted to update the state’s marriage laws to conform with a landmark court ruling allowing gay and lesbian couples to tie the knot.

“It feels so good. It really does feel like the book is closing,” said Anne Stanback, president of Love Makes a Family, a gay-rights group that has led the fight for same-sex marriage in the state.

A spokesman for Gov. M. Jodi Rell said she will sign the bill, which passed 28-7 in the Senate and 100-44 in the House of Representatives late Wednesday, into law. While Rell, a Republican, signed the state’s 2005 civil unions law, she has said she believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

The bill comes six months after the State Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that same-sex couples have the right to wed in Connecticut, rather than accept the civil union law designed to give them the same rights as married couples.

It redefines marriage in Connecticut as the legal union of two people. State law previously defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

Carol Gignac, a 62-year-old Roman Catholic from Bristol, clutched her rosary beads as she watched Wednesday’s debate from the Senate gallery. She said she was praying during much of the day for God’s mercy on Connecticut.

Connecticut is known as the Constitution State because the state’s essential legal document was the model for the U.S. Constitution. A fact that won’t mean much to those Americans who could care less about civil liberties or civil rights.

This battle for civil rights will have to stretch out for decades, state-by-state, because our Congress-critters have neither the courage, smarts or leadership qualities to drag the rest of the nation up into the 21st Century. The White House crew isn’t likely to try it – because they’re all about winning this week’s wannabe winnable.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The former Manchester United manager, who left his first managerial job at Sunderland in December, was confirmed as the new Tractor Boys’ manager this morning. He replaced Jim Magilton, who was shown the door at Portman Road on Tuesday, having failed to reach the Championship play-offs in his three years at the club.

Keane said that the board’s desire to succeed was a big factor in his decision to take the job. “I enjoy working with ambitious people,” said the 37-year-old, who has signed a two-year deal.

When asked why specifically he accepted the job, the former Republic of Ireland legend continued: “My gut feeling, the ambition of the club, the history of the club.

“There’s enough people out there with no ambitions who are happy to go through the motions in life.

“It’s going to be very difficult [to gain promotion], looking at the teams that will come down [from the Premier League].

“It’s a massive challenge, but hopefully we will be in the mix. At the moment we are 26 points behind Wolverhampton Wanderers, so that’s a big, big gap to make up.”

At least I got over a year’s wear from my Sunderland kit. Now, I have to get a Tractor Boys t-shirt, at least.

Won’t help much that I’m married to a Wolves supporter.