Eideard

Kay Gilderdale and her daughter, Lynn

A judge made the rare step of attacking the Crown Prosecution Service…for pursuing a case of attempted murder against a loving mother who helped her seriously ill daughter to die.

Stoking the debate over mercy killings, he praised the common sense, decency and humanity of the jury at Lewes crown court, who took just two hours to clear Kay Gilderdale over the death of 31-year-old Lynn.

Kay Gilderdale administered a cocktail of lethal drugs to end Lynn’s life in December 2008 after her daughter called her for help when her own attempts at suicide failed…

At Lewes today Mr Justice Bean, the Gilderdale trial judge, openly challenged prosecutors, demanding to know who had made the decision to pursue the case.

“Are you in a position to tell me why it was thought to be in the public interest to proceed with the prosecution of attempted murder rather than accepting the plea of assisted suicide?” he asked the prosecutor, Sally Howes QC.

He said interim guidelines on assisted suicide, drawn up last November by the director of public prosecutions to reassure relatives they would not be prosecuted for helping a loved one die, should have applied in the case.

Turning to the jury he said: “I do not normally comment on the verdicts of juries but in this case their decision … shows that common sense, decency and humanity which makes jury trials so important in a case of this kind.”

I have nothing polite to say about the officials who decided to prosecute for murder. I hope their political careers are over.

Kay Gilderdale, Justice Bean, the members of the jury gathered to rule on her aid to her daughter – obviously – were the only human beings in the courtroom. They deserve all the praise in the world.

Foursquare has inked a partnership with the Canadian version of Metro, the free newspaper that gets distributed on subway trains and other locations in various cities, that will give its users the ability to see local news and reviews related to a specific location they are “checking in” at using the service’s iPhone or BlackBerry app.

Metro International, a Swedish company that publishes free papers in more than 100 cities around the world, says this is the first time the location-based startup has partnered with a news organization in any country.

In Canada, the paper is in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and claims circulation of some 800,000. So if a Foursquare user is near a restaurant in one of those cities for which Metro has a review, that will be displayed as a choice for the user. Although the Metro release doesn’t say whether other forms of news will be available as well, the potential is there for Metro reports on fires, break-ins, celebrity sightings or other news to be provided to users of Foursquare based on their location as well…

Mark Briggs at Lost Remote makes a good point that in the long term, location-based news would be better accomplished by way of an open API and open data-sharing rather than proprietary relationships between news services and app vendors. But at least in the short term a deal like that of Foursquare/Metro could provide some interesting evidence as to what’s possible when you blend location and news (or marketing) content.

Any of our Canadian readers have a chance to try this, yet?

No, this ain’t the newest, fastest supercomputer in the world, although – come to think of it – it is the fastest supercomputer owned by a state government.

Gov. Bill Richardson spearheaded the launch on Monday of eight “gateway” sites to connect communities across New Mexico with the state’s supercomputer in Rio Rancho.

The sites will be used by universities and local businesses that need high-performance computing for design and modeling purposes. Users can access the supercomputer, dubbed “Encanto,” for research, educational activities, training and business modeling in the areas of energy, environment, digital film and biotechnology, said Richardson.

“The opening of these supercomputer gateways is significant to New Mexico’s economic and high-tech future,” Richardson said. “We’re bringing the highest level of supercomputing to every corner of the state, giving New Mexicans the opportunity to tap in to its remarkable educational and economic possibilities…”

At today’s launch event, Richardson met “virtually” with university and college heads from the gateway sites, using the supercomputer’s teleconferencing capabilities…

Encanto is housed at the Intel facility in Rio Rancho. It can perform 172 trillion calculations per second.

Rock on, Governor Bill.

The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a riposte to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to introduce paywalls to newspaper websites, claiming that it could lead the industry to a “sleepwalk into oblivion”…

Last year Murdoch revealed that he would introduce charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, Sunday Times and the News of the World by this summer. Last week the New York Times confirmed that it too would introduce a paywall to its website by 2011.

Rusbridger pointed out that News Corp has frequently used the price of news to attack rivals. “Murdoch, who has in his time flirted with free models and who has ruthlessly cut the price of his papers to below cost in order to win audiences or drive out competition (‘reach before revenue’, as it wasn’t called back when he slashed the price of the Times to as low as 10p), this same Rupert Murdoch is being very vocal in asserting that the reader must pay a proper sum for content – whether in print or digitally,” he said.

“Fleet Street is the birthplace of the tradition of a free press that spread around the world. There is an irreversible trend in society today which rather wonderfully continues what we as an industry started – here, in newspapers, in the UK.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion…

The Guardian editor told an audience of academics and journalists in London that it is more important than ever to focus on journalism: “If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis.”

RTFA. Please. If you care to learn about where a major stream of journalism is going on the Web.

Murdoch will relegate his empire to decline and dusty signs along disused secondary roads. Just like a great deal of Route 66 alongside Interstate 40.

Women’s gallery at a session of the Iranian parliament in Tehran
Reuters Pictures used by permission

Standard issue bed-warmer in our family

International hotel chain Holiday Inn is offering a trial human bed-warming service at three hotels in Britain this month.

If requested, a willing staff-member at two of the chain’s London hotels and one in the northern English city of Manchester will dress in an all-in-one fleece sleeper suit before slipping between the sheets…

The bed-warmer is equipped with a thermometer to measure the bed’s required temperature of 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit)…

Florence Eavis, Holiday Inn spokeswoman told Reuters that the “innovative” bed-warming method was a response to Britain’s recent cold weather and marked the launch of 3,200 new Holiday Inns worldwide.

She could not explain why the beds were not being warmed by hot water bottles or electric-blankets, but admitted the human method was quirky.

Holiday Inn are promoting the service with the help of sleep-expert Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Center, who said the idea could help people sleep.

All the sleep experts I ever knew in the Edinburgh area were more likely to recommend Laphroig as a sleep aid.

What to ban from your church

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex”.

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.

The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – because they’re idiots – others have raised concerns. “It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground,” father Jason Rogers told local press. “You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?”

Where do we start? Where do we stop?

Limiting access to information is always excused by limiting access to opinion, ideology – everything an insecure society fears. And if there’s anything the nutballs in this society fear almost as much as individual liberty – it’s sex.

This was a promotional photoshopped picture of a SmartFor2 – with a graphic of mayor Michael Bloomberg on the side – as a package offered to the city of New York Police Department.

The Marines marked the end of nearly seven years in Iraq on Saturday by handing the Army their command of Anbar province, once one of the war’s fiercest battlefields but now a centerpiece of U.S.-Iraqi cooperation.

The changing of the guard — overseen by military brass and some of Anbar’s influential Sunni sheiks — signals the start of an accelerated drawdown of American troops as the U.S. increasingly shifts its focus to the war in Afghanistan…

But fears are growing about a possible resurgence in sectarian tensions — fed by the Shiite-dominated government’s plans to blacklist more than 500 parliamentary candidates over suspected links to Saddam Hussein’s regime…

The White House worries the bans could raise questions over the fairness of the March 7 parliamentary election, which is seen as an important step in the American pullout timetable and a way to break political stalemates over key issues such as dividing Iraq’s oil revenue…

As many as 25,000 Marines were in Iraq at the peak of the fighting, mostly in Anbar province. Fewer than 3,000 remain. All but a handful of those will ship out in a matter of weeks.

The Marines’ extended stay in Anbar went against the grain of the Corps’ usual role as a fighting force designed to quickly seize territory and then turn it over to the Army to maintain control from fixed bases…

If all goes as planned, the last remaining Marines will be followed out by tens of thousands of soldiers in the coming months. President Barack Obama has ordered all but 50,000 troops out of the country by Aug. 31, with most to depart after the parliamentary election in March.

The remaining troops will leave by the end of 2011 under a U.S.-Iraqi security pact.

Overdue.

A candidate who opposes the relocation of an American air base on Okinawa won a crucial mayoral election on Sunday, raising pressure on Japan’s prime minister to move the base off the island, a move opposed by the United States.

The election in the small city of Nago could force Japan to scrap, or at least significantly modify, a 2006 deal with the United States to build a replacement facility in the city for the busy Futenma United States Marine air station. The base is currently in a crowded part of the southern Japanese island.

The fate of that deal has already become the focus of a growing diplomatic rift between the United States and Japan, its closest Asian ally. The Obama administration has been pushing Japan to honor the deal, but the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has said he will take until May to decide whether to support it or name a new site for the base…

Before his Democratic Party’s historic victory in national elections last summer, Mr. Hatoyama campaigned on promises to move the base off Okinawa or out of Japan altogether. In doing so, he was tapping deep misgivings in Japan about the 2006 agreement, which was signed by Mr. Hatoyama’s predecessors, the Liberal Democrats…

In deciding whether to support the 2006 deal, Mr. Hatoyama has said he will heed the voice of Okinawa, which overwhelmingly supported his party in the election, which ended a half century of government by the Liberal Democrats. That made Sunday’s vote in Nago, a city of 60,000 in the island’s underdeveloped north, widely watched here as an important litmus test of Okinawan public opinion ahead of Mr. Hatoyama’s self-imposed deadline.

On Sunday, Susumu Inamine, the city’s school board chairman and an opponent of the base, defeated the incumbent mayor, Yoshikazu Shimabukuro, who supports it as a source of jobs and investment. Mr. Inamine, 64, won 52 percent of the vote, according to the Kyodo News Service.

The Pacific War ended 65 years ago. When will American politicians realize these military enclaves aren’t acceptable fiefdoms anymore?