Normally I would never advocate something like a boycott of the Olympics.  The Olympic games are very important to me, and I don't want to rob any of the athletes of the experience.  These games are different though. They're bigger than sports, medals, glory and even honor.

It is very, very rare that we, as nations and as citizens of nations, have something to hold over the Chinese government's head.  The human rights trampling totalitarian regime has put the 2008 Olympics as their #1 priority.  Never before has there been such an opportunity to demand that they listen, and that they adhere to some standard of human decency.




I suggest that we boycott the Olympic games until China starts to respect human rights.

        

A new study shows that more than a third of motorists in Edinburgh admitted texting on a mobile phone while driving.  Tons of people are getting tickets over there for using their cell phones while they drive.

I recently had a conversation with somebody about this sort of thing.  I tend to be weary of slippery slopes in the law. 

I can agree that it can be distracting to use a cell phone in the car.  I think people can potentially be more distracted by speaking to people in the back seat, or by selecting music on their ipod, or by navigation systems they have to look at, or by DVD players showing movies in the back seat that the driver listens to.  Pagers are worse too, because you have to look at them. 

Where do we draw the line?

        

A woman who claims that a sting operation by "Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator" drove her brother to kill himself  is suing NBC for $105-million, and a federal judge ruled that the case can proceed on Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said a jury might conclude the network "crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement."

Louis William Conradt Jr., a suburban Dallas prosecutor, fatally shot himself after he was accused of engaging in a sexually explicit online chat with an adult posing as a 13-year-old boy, according to a lawsuit filed by his sister.

In the lawsuit, Patricia Conradt accused NBC of putting pressure on police to arrest her brother after telling police he failed to show up at a sting operation 50 kilometres away.  Her lawsuit is based on an argument that the suicide was foreseeable, and that NBC acted with deliberate indifference.

Chin wrote that a reasonable jury could find there was no legitimate law enforcement need for a heavily armed SWAT team to extract a 56-year-old prosecutor from his home when he was not accused of any actual violence and was not believed to have a gun.

I can't figure out how this could be NBC's liability.  They can't force the police to use violence to arrest somebody.  In fact, they're not supposed to be allowed to make them arrest anybody for anything!  Perhaps the guns were not necessary for the arrest, but guns are what they use to arrest people.  I don't tend to think that excessive force makes the experience any more embarrassing than it would be for any other one of those arrested on the show.

According to the judge, "A reasonable jury could find that by [sensationalizing the event], NBC created a substantial risk of suicide or other harm, and that it engaged in conduct so outrageous and extreme that no civilized society should tolerate it."

OK media... no more sensationalism starting.. now!

        

I used to be convinced that the niched social networks would be so strong that they would provide serious competition to the big players (that's why I founded Probook.ca).  Lately I feel like you can't find any news about networks with less than 10 million users or with anything other than a general purpose.  If the niched networks are thriving, they're not getting much media attention.

I wonder how the smaller niched sites will ultimately cope with the competition from the big players, or even how they're coping now.  All of the bigger sites let users network over more niched topics, through groups and applications, and they have the one big selling point: your friends are already on them.

I only really use the big sites, so I took to the streets (read: my Facebook friends) to find out what else they use.  Of course, there are tons of other sites, so if I've left out your favourite site please let me know.

I found a bunch of interesting hobby sites.  SwitchFly is a network for fly fishing enthusiasts.  For lovers of cars, there's CarDomain.  If you consider loving your dog a hobby (which lots of people do), there's Dogster.   For dancers, there's The Inter Mission.  For chess players, there's Chess.com.  For those who like to develop open-source software, there's Advogato.

There are tons of social networks for music lovers and book lovers alike.  Jesse Stay recently wrote an article about Amazon's social network, but there's also aNobii and LibraryThing.  If music is more your style, you might like SoundPedia or MOG.  If you're going to be travelling, you'll need some good books and good music, but you'll also need to know where to go.  That's why there are Travbuddy and Travellerspoint.

In my studies, I found myself drawn to Cake Financial and Zecco, social networks for investors.  Also, as a sports fan, I couldn't help but check out Fanspot, the “MySpace for sports” and Fannation, which focuses instead on news aggregation and stat tracking.  Being a law student, Lawyrs.net, the professional network for lawyers, piqued my interest as well.  Lawyrs may not be as useful to the world as Sermo though, the network that allows licensed physicians to share their knowledge.

I'm sure I've left a ton of sites out, so I encourage everyone to post their favorite smaller, niched network in the comments below.  Also, if you hate this article and want to complain, you can do so at VentBox: the social network for chronic whiners.

        

I've decided to bring the blog back.  I promise to be as apolitical and unbiased as I can.  We'll see how it goes....

        

Temp. Blog Hiatus.



I've been warned by my career services department to cease and desist from blogging while I am in the process of seeking summer employment.  In no position to disagree, I've decided to comply.  Therefore, the blog will be on hiatus until somebody takes it over, or I find employment with a firm or business that doesn't mind that I run it.

I will still be posting interesting news when I find it.

Write me if you would like to write for LegalIntellects.com

Jonathan Kleiman

        

Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, is wary of DRM, and she's not afraid to tell other branches of government about her concerns. Stoddart has just sent a public letter to Jim Prentice, the Canadian Minister of Industry, telling him that his impending copyright reform bill should not protect any DRM that gathers and transmits personal data.

Read more here.

        

Police in Kansas told the local newspaper that somebody lost $300 of crystal meth at the courthouse.  Why?  To make sure he doesn't think somebody else stole it!

Check out the story.

        

By David Ljunggren:

 OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Canada's foreign ministry has put the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured and also classifies some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, according to a document obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch ally of both the United States and Israel.

The document — part of a training course on torture awareness given to diplomats — mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

The man, Omar Khadr, is the only Canadian in Guantanamo. His defenders said the document made a mockery of Ottawa's claims that Khadr was not being mistreated.

Under "definition of torture" the document lists U.S. interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier tried to distance Ottawa from the document.

"The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government," he said.

The document was provided to Amnesty International as part of a court case it has launched against Ottawa over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

Khadr has been in Guantanamo Bay for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier during a clash in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Right groups say Khadr should be repatriated to Canada, an idea that Prime Minister Stephen Harper rejects on the grounds that the man faces serious charges.

"At some point in the course of Omar Khadr's detention the Canadian government developed the suspicion he was being tortured and abused," said William Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. lawyer.

"Yet it has not acted to obtain his release from Guantanamo Bay and protect his rights, unlike every other Western country that has had its nationals detained in Guantanamo Bay," he told CTV television.

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

A spokeswoman at the U.S. embassy said she was looking into the report. No one was immediately available for comment at the Israeli embassy.

The torture awareness course started after Ottawa was strongly criticized for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An inquiry into the case revealed that Canadian diplomats had not received any formal training into detecting whether detainees had been abused. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Rob Wilson)

        

Lawyers representing Mattel and Hasbro have asked Facebook to shut down the popular game Scrabbulous.  They have already tried the owners of the application themselves, who have failed to comply. 

It will be interesting to see what Facebook does, since it's a known fact that their employees enjoy the game, and since 600,000 people use the game via Facebook every day.

See the article here.