I’ll Take the Money

A couple people in China stole money from a bank (eventually $6.6 million) to play the lottery.

Sects and Marriage

Ah, so this is what a religion dominated region looks like:

Woodrow Johnson was 15, and by the rules of the polygamous sect in which his family lived, he had a vice that could condemn them to hell: He liked to watch movies.

…

The church settlement is essentially one town crossing the border, a jumble of walled compounds, trailers and farm fields at the base of spectacular red bluffs. Nearly all of the 6,000 residents follow the dictates of Mr. Jeffs, who they believe speaks for God; women wear ankle-length dresses, and children are taught to run away from outsiders.

Mr. Jeffs, 51, is in the Purgatory jail in southern Utah, his trial scheduled to start on Sept. 10 on charges of being an accomplice to rape, for his role in forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry an older cousin. He faces several other sex-related charges in Arizona.

…

Mr. Gilbert estimates that 100 boys from his school class, or 70 percent of them, have been expelled or left on their own accord; there is no way to verify the numbers. “There are a lot of broken-hearted parents, but you question this decision at the risk of your own salvation,” Mr. Gilbert said.

Count me out.

The Situation in Iraq

This long article in the NY Times gets the major points in it’s opening paragraph:

Seven months after the American-led troop “surge” began, Baghdad has experienced modest security gains that have neither reversed the city’s underlying sectarian dynamic nor created a unified and trusted national government.

The article notes that one reason the violence has ebbed in some neighborhoods:

The Sunnis are gone, forced out by the Mahdi Army. And in the wake of that rout — which peaked just before a company of American soldiers moved into a joint security station on Jan. 31 — violence has declined. One or two bodies a week now appear in the streets instead of the 30 or 40 that surfaced weekly in December.

Terror and instability, however, have remained. Here and in nearly every other Shiite-dominated area of Baghdad, from Ur and Sadr City east of the Tigris to Shula west of it, residents and American officials report that the Mahdi Army has expanded and deepened its control of daily life.

and remember that even the little that has improved (and there have been improvements in some neighborhoods), it won’t last without a stable, secure central govenrnment.  How is that going?

But there has been little action. And he points out that there is simply no government near Sadr al-Yusufiya for the Sunnis to turn to, even now that they want to. American officers in areas where similar arrangements have been in place longer say that the Sunni groups lack training and are already growing frustrated with the slow process of being accepted by the Shiite-dominated police.

FBI and Community of Interest

Were you in someone’s ‘community of interest’?  If so, the FBI might have been spying on you:

A federal judge in Manhattan last week struck down parts of the USA Patriot Act that had authorized the F.B.I.’s use of the national security letters, saying that some provisions violated the First Amendment and the constitutional separation of powers guarantee. In many cases, the target of a national security letter whose records are being sought is not necessarily the actual subject of a terrorism investigation and may not be suspected at all. Under the Patriot Act, the F.B.I. must assert only that the records gathered through the letter are considered relevant to a terrorism investigation.

Some legal analysts and privacy advocates suggested that the disclosure of the F.B.I.’s collection of community of interest records offered another example of the bureau exceeding the substantial powers already granted it by Congress.

This is the type of thing that happens without oversight, because groups like the FBI are under a lot of pressure (if they miss something, people might die).  The same thing happened with their use of National Security Letters.