The Halfbakery, a repository of all things halfbaked. “Whatever you can think of.”

Supreme Court declines to hear appeal of denial of law license to white supremacist. “…(The) leader of the segregationist World Church

of the Creator was denied a law license last summer even though he

graduated from Southern Illinois University’s law school and passed the state

bar exam.

State bar officials noted that Hale had “dedicated his life to inciting racial

hatred,” and said he could not “do this as an officer of the court.”

I Was Certain, But I Was Dead Wrong. Any conviction based on the sole evidence of one eyewitness, no matter how competent and confident, can be a mistake. Commentary in the aftermath of the execution in Texas of Gary Graham.

The American Civil Liberties Union reacts to the completion of the human genome map with a warning about the urgency of legislation against genetic discrimination.

Greenpeace press release: Greenpeace Installs Webcam At The End Of France’s

Nuclear Reprocessing Discharge Pipe ‘To Open The Eyes

Of Governments’

The Register: Sony to unveil Palm-based multimedia handheld, according to the WSJ, which apparently got a sneak preview. With a slot for a memory stick and possibly a Handspring-like Springboard expansion slot for modem etc., “The Sony device will weigh a light 5.3 ounces, be narrower than the

stylish Palm V and thinner than the Palm III, and come in

black-and-white as well as color versions,” explained an unusually

gushing Journal. It also boasts a “JogDial scrolling and highlighting

button that allows users to manoeuvre the screen with one hand”.

St. Louis Riverfront Times: Not Just Another Pin-up in the Ste. Genevieve County Jail. In a bid for an interview scoop, St. Louis TV reporter Deanne Lane sent a handwritten letter and a postcard-sized color photo of herself to convicted and incarcerated serial rapist Dennis Rabbitt, now serving several consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to sexual assaults on 14 women. “Think about it. Sending a picture of yourself to a sex offender

— what do you think he’s gonna do with it? It was just gross,”

says Rabbitt’s attorney. “Dennis thought it was ridiculous. Dennis gave

it to me. He said, ‘This is what I got. You keep it.’ He thought

it was silly. He was unimpressed.”

Asked about the handwritten letter and the photo, Lane is

foggy on details. “I don’t recall that,” she says when asked

whether she included a photo with her letter to Rabbitt.

Norman Mailer to draw cartoons for the New York Observer. “They’re somewhere between Feiffer and Picasso,”

Observer editor-in-chief Peter Kaplan says. “There is a nuance to them that is a

little darker and a little more intense than the average

cartoon. They look like they were done by a

novelist.”

Helping Parents Choose Wrong. Op-ed piece in The New York Times by Patrick Murphy, public guardian of Cook County IL, decries the bill just passed by the New York State legislature allowing legally sanctioned abandonment of newborns:

I work at the bottom of the judicial food chain, in juvenile

court, and the clients I represent there, abused and

neglected children, have the least clout of any in the legal

system. Daily I see their lives laid waste. In some cases it is

inevitable: what some parents do to children cannot be

undone by social workers, judges and lawyers. But too often

the misused influence of politicians and interest groups is

causing unintended misery.

But IMHO his opposition is for the wrong reasons — he mainly fears the discouragement of the adoption process. I think the problem with the law is, first and foremost, that it strips away any remaining residue of responsibility, thoughtfulness or obligation from the decision to have a child. It should be thought of as one of those benchmarks by which we measure the worth of our society, like several others I can think of off the top of my head — our incarceration rate; our eagerness for state-sanctioned murder; and our glorification of the mediocre and unthinking insofar as someone like George Dubya leads the pack for President. Just for starters.

New York Times: A Magic Carpet of Cultures in London In a much more vibrant and fertile way than, say, in New York or LA, multiculturalism pervades London’s cultural life. Maybe it comes of being an erstwhile colonial power?

But unlike before, the purveyors of diversity are more than

suppliers. They choose not to be possessed but to possess,

and to move beyond becoming just another choice for the

insatiably greedy white consumer. The “ethnic minorities”

are beginning to redefine the very essence of what it means

to be a Londoner.