Germany rejects Sarkozy call for internet regulation

California Told to Cut Prisoner Population

Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies...”

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Adam Liptak @'NY Times'

Important health tip! Why every builder should wear a moustache (1853)

Via

The Great Democracy Meltdown

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Manning, Assange, and the Espionage Act

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HA!

Courtney Comes Clean

I first encountered Courtney Love on a warm evening last September at New York’s Mercer Hotel, where the singer was staying while hunting for a new Manhattan apartment. She was scheduled to headline a large concert the next day to benefit the recovery community. Intrigued by the prospect of her performing for thousands of recovering addicts and drunks, I asked her if she'd agree to an interview about her hard-won sobriety. I arrived at the appointed hour to find her slumped over a table in the lobby, nursing a bottle of Stella.
“Who the fuck are you?" she snapped, as I approached her table, tape recorder in hand. Apparently she'd forgotten about our meeting. Joining her that evening were two other well-known musicians, both of them sober, who'd agreed to back her at the rally. Micko Larkin, Hole’s latest guitarist, is a moppet-haired 24-year-old Brit whom Love describes as her "little brother." Simon Kirke, the drummer for the band Bad Company, battled his own problems with substances over the years, but managed to overcome them. As Courtney carried on for the next few hours, he smiled serenely, providing a Zen-like counterpoint to her high-wattage presence...

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Maer Roshan @'The Fix'

Twitter's European boss Tony Wang gives legal warning

Twitter's new European boss has suggested that users who break privacy injunctions by posting on the site could face the UK courts.

Tony Wang said people who did "bad things" needed to defend themselves.
He warned that the site would hand over user information to the authorities where they were "legally required".
Lawyers are challenging Twitter in court to reveal the identities of Twitter users who violated a super-injunction.
MP John Hemming named Manchester United footballer Ryan Giggs in Parliament on Monday as the footballer who had used a super-injunction to hide an alleged affair, after Mr Giggs' name had been widely aired on Twitter.
Responding to a question from BBC News at the e-G8 forum in Paris, Mr Wang said: "Platforms have a responsibility, not to defend that user but to protect that user's right to defend him or herself".
He declined to comment on the case directly but explained that Twitter would comply with local laws to turn over user details.
He stressed that the site would also notify those individuals of any such request.
Little sympathy Mr Wang made it clear that if the matter came to court, those people would be on their own.
He said Twitter would, "let them exercise their own legal rights under their own jurisdiction, whether that is a motion to quash the order or to oppose it or do a number of other things to defend themselves."
The subject of legal jurisdictions and the internet has been hotly debated at the first e-G8 summit.
Technology industry leaders including Google's Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were among the speakers at the event.
While many attendees felt that there was a need for further discussion, among delegates from the United States, there was little sympathy for the British legal position.
"I do view it to being similar to the Chinese situation where they also cover up misdeeds of high ranking people," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC.
He said that, although the internet was a global phenomenon, it was unlikely to pander to those countries with stricter rules.
"The US is going to be absolutely inflexible on this point. It is in the constitution," he said, referring to freedom of speech provisions.
"I think that puts intergovernmental communication and co-operation on this issue into a different light, which is, there's not a whole lot to co-operate on."
@'BBC'