Are sharia councils failing vulnerable women?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22044724?

Sharia courts “as consensual as rape”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/relig…

Female genital mutilation – unreported, ignored, unpunished
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/…

Migrants from Europe bringing girls to tolerant Britain for genital mutilation
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/…

Saudi school lessons in UK concern government
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11799713

BBC’s Panorama claims Islamic schools teach anti-Semitism and homophobia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/…

British schools where girls must wear the Islamic veil
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/…

Religious butchering now commonplace in Britain
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddri…

Ex-soldier jailed for burning Koran
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-…

Muslim spared prison for anti-Semitic incitement to violence
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/608…

Jailed for anti-Islam images in window
http://www.thisislincolnshire.co.uk/G…

Anti gay bigotry, the East London Mosque, and Lutfur Rahman
http://hurryupharry.org/2011/07/04/an…

East London Mosque breaks its promise on homophobic speakers after just eight days
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/and…

East London Mosque holds a rally for terrorist lovers
http://hurryupharry.org/2013/02/05/ea…

East London Mosque condemns homophobia yet advertised four anti-gay speakers in one month
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/and…

More on the East London Mosque and homophobia
http://hurryupharry.org/2013/01/22/mo…

Inextricably linked to controversial mosque: the secret world of IFE
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/polit…

Islam: List of persecution of homosexuals
http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2…

You can download an audio version of this video at
http://patcondell.libsyn.com/

A post on Reddit says she “is a family friend of ours and painted this portrait of me. She is a spectacular person!”

The painting was made from this photograph:

A commenter “fixed” the image with the following version:

This spawned the following exchange:

See more of her artwork at http://www.galleryariana.com

Some Small Businesses Opt for the Health-Care Penalty:

Small-business owners across the U.S. are bracing for the health-care law that kicks in next year, fearing it will increase the cost of providing insurance to employees.

But Rick Levi, a business owner in Des Moines, Iowa, is among those considering the government’s escape hatch: paying a penalty to avoid the law’s “employer mandate.”

Under the Affordable Care Act, employers with 50 or more full-time workers will be required to provide coverage for employees who work an average of 30 or more hours a week in a given month. An alternative to that mandate is for business owners to pay a $2,000 penalty for each full-time worker over a 30-employee threshold.

Mr. Levi currently spends about $140,000 a year on insurance premiums to cover 25 managerial staff at his business, Consolidated Management, which runs cafeterias at schools, offices and jails.

Under the new law, he will have to offer insurance to all of his 102 full-time employees starting in January. Assuming all of them take the coverage, Mr. Levi says the cost of premiums could exceed $500,000.

“I’ve never made a profit in any year of the company that has surpassed that amount,” says Mr. Levi, 62 years old. “I don’t make enough money.”

He says it makes more sense to drop insurance entirely and pay a penalty of about $144,000.

Simply understanding the bill is difficult enough to the point that the Government wants to hire “navigators” to help people understand the foreign language that is the Affordable Care Act:

Tens of thousands of health care professionals, union workers and community activists hired as “navigators” to help Americans choose Obamacare options starting Oct. 1 could earn $20 an hour or more, according to new regulations issued Wednesday.

It is still not clear how many navigators will be required. California, however, provides a hint. It wants 21,000.

That could be an expensive proposition. The proposed rules, now open for public comment, suggest an estimated pay of $20-$48 an hour.

The coming blame game approaches as Sibelius initiates the talking point of scapegoating Republicans for the coming Obamacare messes:

As Democrats grow increasingly worried that ObamaCare will explode on the launch pad just as midterm elections get going, the Obama administration seeks to pin blame on Republicans. Good luck with that.

Earlier this week, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she didn’t realize how complicated getting ObamaCare off the ground would be.

Sebelius complained that “no one fully anticipated” the difficulties involved in implementing ObamaCare, or how confusing it would be with the public.

She wasn’t talking about the massive and impossible task of imposing central planning on one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

Instead, she was trying to find a way to blame Republicans for ObamaCare’s failures when the inevitable problems start emerging.

Rather than say “let’s get on board, let’s make this work,” recalcitrant Republicans have forced her to engage in “state-by-state political battles,” Sebelius said at a Harvard School of Public Health forum. “The politics has been relentless.”

So let’s see if we get this. Democrats shoved an unpopular, expensive, ill-conceived and poorly written law down the country’s throat with no Republican support, and without bothering to see whether states would want to take on the thankless and costly task of helping the feds implement it.

And now that many of these states are rebelling, it’s the Republicans’ fault?

My philosophy is, always tell the truth. You don’t have an agenda, just be yourself and be natural, and then you don’t have to pose like you’re doing something different. … I’ve tried to lead the right kind of life, a life that is inspired by my love of God and my love of my fellow man. And, you know, it is very difficult to demonize someone under those circumstances.

Dr Carsons speech at the 2013 CPAC event, briefly mentioned in the interview above is here:

Dr Carsons original speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that started his national media attention is below in its entirety:

“Who owns your phone at the end of the day?” asks Derek Khanna, a visiting fellow at Yale Law and former staff member at the Republican Study Committee.

Last fall, Khanna earned notoriety – and a pink slip – for a public memo urging GOP members of Congress to rethink their stance on copyright law.

More recently, in a column for The Atlantic, Khanna blasted a new ruling that criminalizes the unlocking of cellphones under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Unlocking the phone simply means that a person could use a phone designed for one carrier on another carrier, assuming they had switched his plan. In addition to civil penalties, breaking this law could land you in prison for up to five years and force you to pay a fine of up to $500,000.

“In 1998 a poorly written statute, the DMCA, was passed and it prohibited a wide swath of commonly used technology in the name of defending copyright,” Khanna explains. “If this is allowed to stand, then the answer is you don’t own your phone.”

A White House petition to change the law recently reached the 100,000 signature threshold, which means the Obama administration will have to give an opinion on the matter.

Khanna sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to discuss the unlocking your cellphone, the flaws in the DMCA, and why he was fired from the Republican Study Committee after writing a paper condemning current copyright law.

“My statement to someone that is the victim of a patent troll lawsuit is that you are completely screwed,” says Austin Meyer, who is himself the target of a so-called “patent troll” lawsuit.

Meyer is a software developer and aviation enthusiast. His two passions intersected in the ’90s when he created a flight simulator called X-Plane, which quickly grew in popularity, outlasting even the once-popular Microsoft Flight Simulator. As many software developers do, Meyer made his application available on mobile devices like the iPhone and Android. And this is where he first ran into trouble.

A company called Uniloc has sued Meyer for patent infringement over a patent called, “System and Method for Preventing Unauthorized Access to Electronic Data.” When a computer runs a paid application, one way that developers can assure that a customer has actually purchased the application is by coding the application to match a license code with an encrypted database. This is a method that most paid applications on the Android market use. It’s a method that Meyer argues has been in use since at least the late ’80s. This is the idea that Uniloc claims to own.

“A patent troll is a company, a person… who owns patents, but doesn’t make anything or sell anything,” says Julie Samuels, an attorney and the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Samuels says that patent trolls are a huge tax on innovation and add nothing valuable to the marketplace. A study out of Boston University estimates the direct economic damage that patent trolls cause to be around $29 billion a year, and this doesn’t account for hush-hush, off-the-record settlements. But the bigger problem, says Samuels, is the patent system itself.

“You can’t separate the problem with the patent troll from the problem with software patents,” says Samuels. “There are hundreds of thousands of software patents floating around that are really broad, that are really vague … and a lot of them are bought up by patent trolls.”

A Yale study found that the U.S. patent office is approving new software patents at an approximate rate of 40,000 a year. That’s more than 100 new software patents every day. Tracking every software patent to make sure one is not in violation would be an utter impossibility without a full-time team of lawyers on staff.

Uniloc, which purchased the patent in question at a bankruptcy proceeding, declined an interview request for this piece. But on their website, they brag about a victory over software giant Microsoft resulting in $388 million in damages (though this amount was later lowered in an appeals court). Despite the enormous risk, and the enormous cost just to defend against a patent suit, Meyer is resolved to do so.

“I will not simply give somebody money that endorses the idea that they should sue people for doing something amazing,” says Meyer. “It must be stopped at some point.”

About 6 minutes.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Amanda Winkler, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller. Music by Case Newsom, Broke for Free, and Pionir.

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