Focus on the Family, George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center, the American Conservative Union and the American Civil Liberties Union are all furious with Attorney General Eric Holder — and amazingly enough, it’s about the same thing.

The incitement for such an unusual alliance is the Justice Department’s failure to act in the face of a challenge to fundamental human dignity: The ongoing, almost commonplace rape of prisoners at the hands of other prisoners or prison guards.

Estimates based on a 2007 DOJ survey of inmates suggest that more than 60,000 prisoners — or about 1 in 20 — are sexually assaulted each year.

A law passed in 2003 created an independent commission to develop national standards to address the problem. The commission issued its exhaustive report in June 2009. And the attorney general was required by law to enact new standards by June 23, 2010.

That was nearly two months ago.

In a June letter June, Holder expressed his ‘regret’ that he would not be able to meet Congress’s deadline. He explained that the working group he commissioned — which represents 13 different Justice Department offices and the Department of Homeland Security — is moving as fast as it can.

So on Tuesday, the unusual […]

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The nightmare began with a party: three teenage girls with a webcam, visiting an Internet chatroom and yielding to requests to flash their breasts. A week later, one of the girls, a 17-year-old from Indiana, started getting threatening e-mails.

A stranger said he had captured her image on the webcam and would post the pictures to her MySpace friends unless she posed for more explicit pictures and videos for him. On at least two occasions, the teen did what her blackmailer demanded. Finally, police and federal authorities became involved and indicted a 19-year-old Maryland man in June on charges of sexual exploitation.

Federal prosecutors and child safety advocates say they’re seeing an upswing in such cases of online sexual extortion. They say teens who text nude cell phone photos of themselves or show off their bodies on the Internet are being contacted by pornographers who threaten to expose their behavior to friends and family unless they pose for more explicit porn, creating a vicious cycle of exploitation.

One federal affidavit includes a special term for the crime: ‘sextortion.’

No one currently tracks the numbers of cases involving online sexual extortion in state and federal courts, but prosecutors and others point toward several recent high-profile […]

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Efforts to create a new Iraqi government suffered a fresh setback on Monday when the opposition alliance that gained most seats in the election formally ended talks with allies of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister.

Iraqiya, led by Iyad Allawi, a former prime minister, said the decision was made after Mr Maliki described the alliance as ‘Sunni

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SAN FRANCISCO – – Virtual currency manager Jambool announced Monday that it has been purchased by Google for an undisclosed sum.

‘When the opportunity arose to join forces with Google… we couldn’t pass it up,’ Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein, co-founders of the startup, said in a blog post.

Jambool is the company that launched Social Gold virtual transactions technology that processes virtual currencies — make-believe money for online transactions such as games and social networks, including Facebook and MySpace.

The technology allows makers of online games and social networks to mine ‘real money from virtual goods’ — allowing genuine cash to be converted into virtual currency and vice versa.

The company has reported strong growth due to the popularity of online games.

‘Our vision is to build world-class products that help developers manage and monetize their virtual economies across the globe,’ the company said in the online post.

Gupta and Hussein said they started Jambool in 2006 as an online collaboration platform, but shifted focus a year later to building applications for social networks.

‘Along with success, we found fun and lucrative ways to monetize our apps — specifically virtual currency and goods,’ the former Amazon.com employees said.

‘That led us to create a platform to […]

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Religious believers have quite the love/hate relationship with Albert Einstein. Some quote the physicist’s comments about God not playing dice with the universe to support their own views – despite the fact that Einstein himself said, ‘I do not believe in a personal God.’ One young-Earth creationist site even uses an Einstein quote in a diatribe against evolution. Now the pendulum is swinging over to hate as Einstein goes the way of Darwin, becoming an unlikely enemy of some on the religious right.

It seems that the folks at Conservapedia – a sort of conservative alternative to the more famiilar online encyclopedia Wikipedia – are not fans of Einstein’s most famous theory, general relativity. In fact, they view it as a far-reaching liberal conspiracy.

The website TPMMuckraker recently drew attention to a page on the site titled ‘Counterexamples to relativity’. It says: ‘The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.’

In a footnote, this comment is followed up by: ‘Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book […]

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