A U.S. District Court Judge in New York City has issued a ruling that, when you really think about it, should be rather blindingly obvious:

Did you know that what you say on Facebook can be used against you in a court of law? If you’re sharing something with your friends, you may as well be sharing directly with the judge and jury: A recent ruling in a U.S. federal court says that if you post something on Facebook, your friend can share that information with the police — it’s not a violation of your privacy.

Accused gang member Melvin Colon had argued in court that investigators violated his constitutional right to privacy when they viewed his Facebook profile via one of his friends’ accounts. But US District Judge William Pauley III ruled that Colon’s messaged threats and posts about violent acts he committed were not private, and indeed fair game for prosecutors. To some extent, the ruling makes logical sense: When you say something publicly on Facebook, you’re often sharing a thought with hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. There’s not much that’s private about that.

No, there’s not, what you post on Facebook, or Twitter, or any other social networking site is considered publicly disseminated for the purposes of the law even if you have restricted access to your account to only a select group of people. It’s the same situation, essentially, as if you were having a conversation with a group of your friends in your home and one of those friends went to the police and reported that you confessed to a crime. In this particular case, it appears that what happened is that the police had obtained the cooperation of one of Colon’s co-conspirators in the case at hand, who also happened to be on of his Facebook friends and, as part of convincing that person to become a cooperating witness (no doubt in exchange for lower charges or a lighter sentence as is common in these situations) they required him to let the police use his Facebook account to see what Colon was posting. When they saw that Colon was posting about the acts he’d committed in the case at issue, along with other violent acts, they applied for a Search Warrant to be served on Facebook, with the probable cause being what they had seen during the course of their investigation.

###

50 States.com “State information resource links to state homepage, symbols, flags, maps, constitutions, representatives, songs, birds, flowers, trees, and more.”

Little League started in 1939 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, by Carl E. Stotz and brothers Bert and George Bebble. The league originally included boys age 8 to 12, but girls have been admitted since 1974. The Little League now includes a senior division for players age 13 to 15 and a big-league division for ages 16 to 18. – Provided by Reference.com

###

Why haven’t they asked for him?

Julian Assange has been given diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. How did this peculiar situation arise and how will it end? I’m not concerned here with the rights and wrongs of the Assange story. In accordance with a court decision, the UK has a legal obligation to extradite him to Sweden, and is determined to fulfil that obligation, as the FCO has stated.

There are many myths about diplomatic immunity: that ambassadors are allowed to break the law, or that the Ecuadorian Embassy in London is legally Ecuadorian territory. I am not an international lawyer or a protocol expert, but, like all diplomats, I have some practical experience of the way diplomatic immunity and privileges work.

An important point to emphasise is that the rules are not British but international, accepted in principle by all governments. The British government cannot simply change the rules, although it can seek to get them changed – a tedious business – or of course it can break them, in which case it may pay a penalty.

MORE.

###

Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works

Some 1.2 million people belong to one of AA’s 55,000 meeting groups in the US.

Photo: Christian Stoll

The church will be closed tomorrow, and the drunks are freaking out. An elderly lady in a prim white blouse has just delivered the bad news, with deep apologies: A major blizzard is scheduled to wallop Manhattan tonight, and up to a foot of snow will cover the ground by dawn. The church, located on the Upper West Side, can’t ask its staff to risk a dangerous commute. Unfortunately, that means it must cancel the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting held daily in the basement.

A worried murmur ripples through the room. “Wha… what are we supposed to do?” asks a woman in her mid-twenties with smudged black eyeliner. She’s in rough shape, having emerged from a multiday alcohol-and-cocaine bender that morning. “The snow, it’s going to close everything,” she says, her cigarette-addled voice tinged with panic. “Everything!” She’s on the verge of tears.

A mustachioed man in skintight jeans stands and reads off the number for a hotline that provides up-to-the-minute meeting schedules. He assures his fellow alcoholics that some groups will still convene tomorrow despite the weather. Anyone who needs an AA fix will be able to get one, though it may require an icy trek across the city.

That won’t be a problem for a thickset man in a baggy beige sweat suit. “Doesn’t matter how much snow we get—a foot, 10 feet piled up in front of the door,” he says. “I will leave my apartment tomorrow and go find a meeting.”

MORE.

###

What Is It Like Being an Olympians Parent?

What It is like being an Olympic

For Jackie Jamieson, the most emotional week of her life came four months before this year’s Olympics. In March, her son Michael was going through swimming trials, hoping to represent Great Britain in the breaststroke. He’d been unsuccessful at 100m, and with the 200m trial coming up, his mother decided to write him an email. There was a memory she had carried privately for 14 years. When Michael was 10, she had walked past his bedroom, “and he was sitting on the end of the bed, and looked in a wee daze,” she says. “I said to him: ‘Son, are you OK?’ And he said: ‘Oh Mum, I’ve just had a dream, and it was so, so real. I had a dream I was going to do something special as a swimmer.’”

Jamieson takes a deep breath as she tells this story, suppressing a sob. “He’d missed out in the 100, and he was devastated, and he wasn’t right in himself. And so the night before his 200, I sat, and I sent him an email, and I referred back to that story. I said, you may have forgotten, but I’ve carried this in my heart for a long, long time.” The next day he made the team.

MORE.

###

How WikiLeaks Blew It – By Joshua E. Keating

The story of WikiLeaks, once an exciting tale of overcoming government secrecy and empowering online activists and journalists, is now a story primarily concerned with the vagaries of diplomatic immunity, British-Ecuadorean relations, and Swedish rape laws. It’s a safe bet that it’s not the scenario that Julian Assange — who is reportedly now holed up in a windowless backroom of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, sleeping on an air mattress — had in mind when he founded the whistle-blowing website six years ago.

As Assange remains in international legal limbo, granted asylum in Ecuador but with no foreseeable way to get there, and as WikiLeaks struggles to stay afloat in the face of money problems and denial-of-service attacks, it’s worth reflecting on how we got here. How did an organization that once touted itself as the future of journalism — and for a time seemed to have a credible case for the claim — devolve into one man’s soap opera? If one looks back, several key tactical errors landed WikiLeaks in its current predicament.

MORE.

###

Stigma of Nuclear Plant Work Taking Toll

Doctors say that the psychological wellbeing of Japanese workers laboring to safely shut down the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant is in jeopardy. Stigmatized, harassed, and discriminated against by residents displaced by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused meltdowns at the plant, workers are increasingly suffering from depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and loss of motivation. Employment at the plant had once been viewed as a badge of honor, but workers, who place their health and lives at risk doing their jobs, now try to hide their ties to the company, which has been widely criticized for mishandling the nuclear disaster.

More

###

Cat parasite that worms into humans’ brains can drive victims to suicide

A parasite found in cats is tampering with people’s brains and driving them to suicide, research suggests.

Scientists have shown that men and women infected with a bug that breeds in cats’ stomachs and worms into people’s brains are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than others.

They say that Toxoplasma gondii may tinker with the delicate chemistry of the brain and screening people for it could help identify those at risk of taking their own lives.

The parasite, which is carried by many Britons, has a complicated life cycle but can only breed inside cats. The microscopic eggs are passed on in cat faeces, spreading the infection.

Pregnant women are advised not to empty cat litter trays because the parasite can be fatal to unborn babies. The bug can also be picked up from contaminated food.

###

We live in a world where our default state is to be permanently connected. It is up to us to make sure that it doesn’t consume us, says columnist Tom Chatfield.

The story of human relations with computers is one of increasing intimacy. Since the very first electronic computers emerged in the 1940s, they have made a remarkable progress: from room-sized mechanisms, incomprehensible without an advanced degree, to intuitive handheld devices functioning more like an extension of our minds than a conventional tool.

As Gordon Moore predicted in his eponymous “law”, computing power has roughly doubled every 18 months since the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s. At the start of the 1970s, a computer chip held a couple of thousand transistors. Today, it is more often counted in the billions and is still rising. It’s becoming increasingly clear, in fact, that many of the most crucial limiting factors in modern computing are no longer related to speed, cost, capacity or connectivity, but rather to us – and the all-too-human limitations of our capacities for attention, engagement and action.

MORE.

###

Exclusive: Daily News uncovers bizarre plot by San Francisco Giants’ Melky Cabrera to use fake website and duck drug suspension

MLB star tries to beat drug rap with fake product website

Next time you get a speeding ticket, try beating the rap by going back later and posting homemade signs that show a higher speed limit. Such was the strategy of San Francisco Giants slugger Melky Cabrera, recently nailed with a 50-game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance. To mount an alibi and avoid suspension, Cabrera had an associate create a phony Internet site and a non-existent product to suggest his transgression was inadvertent, triggering the drug program’s no-fault clause that has spared other players. But that ruse fell apart fast, and now the federal drug gumshoes are involved. Oh, what a tangled web a drug cheat will weave

###

The social cell

What do debutante balls, the Japanese tea ceremony, Ponzi schemes and doubting clergy all have in common?

A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest.

Converging lines of research from various schools in biology agree on these three necessities, but there is substantial unresolved controversy about the order in which they must have emerged at the origin of life. If the history of evolutionary biology continues along the paths it has followed so far, it is likely that the solution to this problem will prove to be some ingenious and indirect process of chance combinations and gradual refinements, in which metabolism-like cycles and reproduction-like processes joined forces with non-living membranes that were already floating around, objets trouvés that could be appropriated and exploited. Whatever their origins, the resulting designs have now been refined and optimised for more than three billion years and have proven remarkably hardy. Not only are such single cells the most abundant form of life on the planet, but all living things, from trees to fish to human beings, are constructed of them, harnessed by the trillions into co-operating multicellular teams.

MORE.

###

Drought dries up Indiana lake to reveal remnants of ghost town submerged since 1965

As the worst drought in decades continues to plague large swaths of the nation’s breadbasket, a tale of archaeological intrigue has emerged to provide a silver lining.As Indiana’s Salamonie Lake dries up, a former town has surfaced after being submerged for nearly half a century.The unrelenting drought has uncovered the long-buried remnants of Monument City which was one of three tiny towns sacrificed when the Salamonie reservoir was created in 1965.

MORE.

###

Hollywood Director Tony Scott Jumps Off Bridge To His Death

Anthony D. L. “Tony” Scott, brother of Ridley Scott, is an English film director. His films include Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Spy Game, Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123 and Unstoppable

Story

###

Cairo uses illicit Sinai tanks to bargain for massive US aid

Egyptian M60 tanks transported to Sinai Aug. 9

Israel’s deployment of an Iron Dome anti-missile battery in Eilat Sunday, Aug. 19, came five days after two Grad missiles were launched against its southernmost town. They exploded harmlessly. debkafile’s military sources report they were primarily a warning to Egypt from al-Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorists to hold off even its minimal raids and arrests of suspected terrorists in northern Sinai.

The Egyptians have meanwhile moved a battalion of 19 Egyptian M60A-3 tanks into the peninsula, using the Islamist attacks on Egyptian and Israeli military targets of Aug. 8 as their pretext for violating the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty’s military protocols. Fearing the tanks are there to stay, Israel has asked the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department in Washington to intervene with Cairo and get them withdrawn.

MORE.

###

I filled out my consent form to donate my body for plastination, and then carried the form around with me for two weeks. I checked the yes box, “I agree that my plastinated body may be used for the medical enlightenment of laypeople and, to this end, exhibited in a museum.” I will be immortal, I imagined, in Gunther von Hagens’s “Body Worlds”—a skinless anatomical écorché for all to see. I hadn’t originally planned an illustrious posthumous career, but von Hagens’s Institute for Plastination played just the right pompous note for me when it printed Immanuel Kant’s enlightenment slogans on its brochure: “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is man?”

The brochure assured me that having my dead body frozen and bathed in acetone, and my tissues “impregnated” with silicon, would be a triumph of reason over superstition and put me in a long tradition of principled scientific altruism. The testimonials of other donors sprinkled throughout the brochure echoed one young man’s selfless impulse: “I want to make myself useful, even after death.”

MORE.

###