“Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the head of Catholics in England and Wales … was supported by the Church of England and the Muslim Council of Britain. It was a formidable coalition. But it failed … Now the Cardinal accuses ministers of trying to impose a ‘new morality’ in Britain. If this new morality means it will [...]

“A German court has issued arrest warrants for 13 people, thought to be CIA agents, suspected of kidnapping a man mistaken for a terrorist … The case of Mr al-Masri is the best known of several individual allegations against the CIA, which is accused by human rights campaigners of secretly ferrying hundreds of terrorism suspects [...]

“By the time most presidents leave the White House, they have already chosen the site that will be a repository of their papers for future scholars as well as a museum where they can exert control over how they are seen in years to come. Those facilities are turned over to government administrators. But Mr [...]

From BoingBoing, here.

“Today’s ‘great political divide’ is a phoney war, in which both sides are given to fearmongering, conspiracy-invention and a petty and pernicious authoritarianism. The Islamo-clash does nothing to clarify the challenges facing humanity today, and a lot to stultify genuine and honest political debate.” Spiked has an interesting article on “Islamofatigue” here.

From bLaugh, here.

From Explosm, here.

“Windows Vista lands in stores Tuesday, more than five years after its predecessor Windows XP debuted. With that much time for Microsoft to rewrite its operating system, you might expect it to be a sharp break from the Windows we’ve known … It isn’t.” All the reports seem to suggest that Vista is little more [...]

“…the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler – can you imagine a [...]

Reproduced by permission of Jessica from the Indexed blog, here.

“Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer who was detained by American officials in 2002 and deported to Syria, where he was jailed and regularly tortured, will receive 11.5 million Canadian dollars ($9.75 million) in compensation from the Canadian government … he had been held for 10 months in a 3-by-6-foot cell and beaten repeatedly, often [...]

“The controversy about Israel’s use of cluster bombs during its conflict with Hizbollah in July last year will reopen today when the US State Department publishes its draft report, which concludes that the American-made weapons were misused in civilian areas.” It’s good to see the US recognising that Israel’s use of cluster bombs was appalling [...]

“It bugged me for a minute, why this sounded familiar, and why it seemed particularly ironic coming from an African country, until I realized that it sounded like any number of slave codes from right here in the United States that, among other things, mad [sic] it a crime to for blacks gather in numbers, [...]

“Of course, the mastering engineer has no control over how loud a CD gets played. But this is about the volume of the low-level signal encoded on the CD. Artists and record companies hope that louder music will stand out, but in practice the listener may just turn it down. Unfortunately, the techniques used to [...]

From bLaugh, here.

“The Home Office report, Exploring the Decision-Making of Immigration Officers, published last week, provides further evidence of what most non-white travellers have long known to be true. That the practice of profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion persists at borders around the world.” The Guardian’s Gary Younge on racial profiling – click [...]

Zackie Achmat recently successfully campaigned to make HIV medication available through South Africa’s public health system. In response, the Treatment “Information” Group, which claims that anti-retrovirals (ARVs) are harmful, has filed an indictment with the International Criminal Court in the Hague accusing Achmat of genocide for giving people access to HIV medication. It gets worse. [...]

This post, as with all the others I’m currently posting, is a bit late due to my dissertation being due in last Friday. However, the New York Times had an interesting article last week on the new iPhone, protesting against “crippleware”. The article was interesting not because it said anything against DRM that hasn’t already [...]

“The Prime Minister is believed to have promised Catholic leaders that religious groups would be allowed some exemptions under the Equality Act, which bans discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on the basis of sexual orientation.” Why does religion stand on a pedestal above everything else? Why should religions get to have [...]

From Explosm, here.