some cops detained, arrested and released an innocent man on the tube because he was “suspicious”:

The police decided that wearing a rain jacket, carrying a rucksack with a laptop inside, looking down at the steps while going into a tube station and checking your phone for messages just ticked too many boxes on their checklist and makes you a terrorist suspect. How many other people are not only wrongly detained but wrongly arrested every week in similar circumstances? And how many of them are also computer and telecoms enthusiasts, fitting the police’s terrorist profile so well?

While a police officer did state that my rain jacket was “too warm for the season”, could it have been instead that the weather was too cold for the season? The day before had been the coldest July day for 25 years.

Nicholas D. Kristof calls George W. Bush “A Wimp on Genocide in Sunday’s New York Times:

Mr. Bush’s position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an “obligation” to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that “We are prepared to take collective action … on a case by case basis” to prevent genocide.

That was still an immensely important statement. But it’s embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can’t even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

I can’t understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base – the religious right – has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration “has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

ouch.

Jim Coyle writes in the Toronto Star about the toronto computer leasing scandal:

The first volume of the Toronto Computer Leasing Inquiry report was called Facts and Findings. It was called this, presumably, because the title Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them has recently been taken. Otherwise, it’s easy to get the impression Justice Denise Bellamy might have gone for it.
…
It was for Tom Jakobek, however, that she reserved her greatest disdain. It’s doubtful, in fact, that any Canadian political figure has ever been so stylishly sliced and diced. It’s one thing, after all, to be portrayed as an inveterate liar; a sin of a larger order, indeed, to be accused of sacrificing your mother to save your self.
Jakobek effectively tossed his own mother “into the spotlight to face questioning in the witness box” to account for his lies, she said.
“It was sad to see a dignified woman pushed so far out on a limb by her selfish and shameless son.”