Activist and playwright Dakxin Bajrange was arrested on May 11th, 2003 for allegedly assaulting Prahlad Chhara. The real reason? Performing plays critical of the police. News of his arrest motivated Shashwati and I to go to India and make the documentary film, Acting Like a Thief. That trip changed our lives – and while Dakxin has gone on to become an award winning documentary filmmaker, even as he continues his work in the community, his case has not gone away. For years the case has dragged on through India’s notoriously slow legal system. Until now. I’m happy to say that today I received word that Dakxin’s case has finally been settled and he has been cleared of all charges. For a member of a community once declared “Born Criminals” this means a lot.

Our new film, with brings the viewer much deeper into the life and work of Budhan Theatre members and their families, including Dakxin, will be completed later this year. To stay up to date, please sign-up for our newsletter and stay tuned for major website updates later this summer.

Want to help Chhara kids? Help sponsor the Chharangar Library!

I’m glad that Taiwan is going smoke-free in public spaces and offices, but this PSA just made me laugh. Its so Taiwanese somehow …

This is a very complex picture (by Cooloud). Taiwan’s President and Vice-President were prisoners in this building during the White Terror. On Human Rights Day they announced its conversion into a Human Rights Memorial. However, at the same time, “not far from the ceremony, the police were forcefully breaking up a [peaceful] demonstration held by citizens protesting on the LeSheng Leprosy Institute issue.”

In 2000 Shashwati and I travelled to Iceland for our honeymoon. We had a fantastic trip, but the flight back was very early in the morning on the last day, and we were still pretty groggy when we got to customs. Actually, we were the very first travelers to arrive at customs, which was otherwise empty that morning.

There were only two x-ray machines there, with two young Icelandic security officials working them. We were directed to the first machine and promptly began unloading our baggage – which was bursting to the brim with all the gifts we had bought. I proceeded through the metal detector without a beep, but when I got to the other side the guard exclaimed something to his colleague who came rushing over. They talked a bit in Icelandic, and then came over to me, looking very serious. My bag still hadn’t come out of the machine.

This is what ensued:

Security: Excuse me. This is very strange. Do you have anything unusual in your bag?

Me (Still groggy and shaking my head): No. Why?

Security: I’ve never seen anything like it. Did you pack your own bags this morning?

Me: Yes.

Security: Perhaps you should come and take a look.

Then they showed me the X-ray screen which showed a foot in a boot, inside a bag.

Now, at this point I should have suspected a practical joke. We were the first people in the morning and they had clearly put their own foot in the machine and taken a picture before we came. But I had been so conditioned NEVER TO JOKE at customs or in an Airport that they very possibility never crossed my mind. I don’t know what I thought. I just ripped open my bag to show them that there was no severed human foot in there. They looked, said “OK” and waived me on. Shashwati and I didn’t fully register what had happened until we sat down and ate our breakfast, at which point we laughed at how different Iceland was from anywhere else we had been.

Somehow I don’t think that is the reaction that Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl had when she was locked up and put in shackles for two days at JFK without being allowed to contact her family. (More here.) Not very funny… even by Icelandic standards.

This is one of those “only in Taiwan” stories: Police in Hsinchu 新竹 captured an escaped convict when they noticed a man attending a police-sponsored BBQ.

During the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 almost every Taiwanese family has a BBQ, sort of like the Fourth of July in the US. The practice has become so wide-spread that the Taiwanese EPA called it an environmental hazard.

On the eve of last year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, October 7th, the EPA recorded a 45% jump in carbon monoxide pollution over northern Taiwan.

The criminal thought that the BBQ was “the last place police would have thought of looking for him.” Maybe it was the “eye-catching yellow windbreaker” he was wearing…

(警察辦烤肉 銬到通緝犯. Photo by Sharon.)

{Food, 台灣}

As John Gruber points out, the banning of third party applications on the iPhone is very much tied to Apple’s contract with AT&T:

That the 1.1.1 upgrade both breaks SIM-unlocking and third-party applications comes down to the same underlying reason: the closing of known techniques of accessing the iPhone file system.

But while I think Gruber is correct to point out the reason for the upgrade, I think he is wrong to say that those who hacked their iPhone had it coming:

The idea that Apple has screwed over or even somehow been rude to the grassroots iPhone developer community is absurd. Apple never asked for nor encouraged iPhone software development, and the fact that it happened anyway put Apple under zero obligation to support it.

While it is one thing to ask Apple to support such unauthorized uses, it is quite another to say that it is OK for them to actively undermine innovative uses for their technology. I think a good analogy is that of easement laws, also known as “right-of-way.”

In most of the United States, using someone else’s property, for example, for ingress and egress over a certain number of years, regularly and without the consent of the property owner, can give the user the right to continue using the property for the same purpose for as long as the user wishes.

Although things move much quicker in the world of high technology than they do in the world of property law, Apple having acted very quickly to put an end to unintended uses, I do think easement laws give us a wider perspective over how we might think about rights to technology. Another difference with property law is that consumers, not the manufacture, own the product in question. Does a manufacturer really have rights in-perpetuity over how people use their technology? Lets imagine a law which states that manufacturers should grant right-of-way to existing uses of their technology. Under such a law a manufacturer would have to show a compelling reason to disable such existing uses, with the burden of proof on the manufacturer to show that such “downgrades” are necessary.

So what am I to do? I did the same thing I did when I bought my Treo 650 two years ago – I bought a used one on eBay. It costs less than one third the price of a new one in Taiwan, even with shipping.

There’s only one catch. It turns out that you can’t ship cell phones to Taiwan. Nobody will stop you if you come in by plane, but if its in a box forget about it. Not only do you have to spend hundreds of dollars to get it cleared through customs, but the paperwork alone is a huge pain in the ass. Turns out I can’t return it to the US either. Returning it to the US would have cost more than I paid for the item.

So Taiwanese customs will dispose of my Treo …

But guess what! All of a sudden, and just as inexplicably as it started, my Treo started working again.

Maybe it will stay working long enough till I can get an Jesusphone in Taiwan … or at least a Centro. (Unfortunately, the same day the Treo came back alive, Shashwati’s cell phone which I was using as a backup died. Who knows?)

UPDATE: Maybe I jinxed myself by writing this post. My Treo died again immediately upon posting …

{Treo, Palm, Customs}

[Monica Goodling] was trying to tell us something important, but the dim bulbs of the U.S. press and the committee dolts wouldn’t listen. She began by accusing her bosses of perjury. The issue was her allegation that they knew all about “caging.” And no one asked her one damn question about it. Like what is “caging” and why would they commit perjury to cover it up?

… Caging works like this. Hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters were sent letters — do not forward. Letters returned as undeliverable (”caged”) were used as evidence the voter didn’t live at their registered address. The GOP goons challenged these voters’ right to cast ballots — and their votes were lost.

But whose letters were caged? Here’s where the game turns to deep evil. They targeted Black students on vacation, homeless men — and you’ll love this — Black soldiers sent overseas. They weren’t living at their home voting address because they were shivering under a Humvee in Falluja.

… Caging, by the way, is illegal. Law Professor Bobby Kennedy pointed out it violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and I’d add, as a former racketeering investigator, mail fraud statutes. So [newly hired federal prosecutor Tim] Griffin’s a felon — now U.S. Attorney.

• Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in the same age group.
• Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.
• But by 2000, high school dropouts of either race were being locked up three times as often as they had been two decades before. And racial disparities have become immense. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts are now prisoners or ex-cons.
• The disclosure of a prison record reduced the chances of getting a second interview by half for whites and by two thirds for blacks.
• as official unemployment hit record lows, joblessness among young black dropouts rose to record highs. The prison expansion reflected inequality. The prison expansion created inequality. The prison expansion hid inequality from view.
• physically separating some inmates from the rest of the population (often in conditions amounting to solitary confinement) has become a punishment of first resort, leading to what the commission called “tortuous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration.” From 1995 to 2000, the number of inmates in isolated cells rose 40 percent to 81,000.
• 1.5 million people who are released from prisons and jails each year with an infectious disease—tuberculosis, hepatitis, HIV, and drug-resistant staph infections. They are a threat to everyone, but especially to the minority neighborhoods from which they are disproportionately drawn. Meanwhile, the increasing number of prisons that require inmates to pay for part of their own medical care, an innovation intended to deter malingerers, has been found to reduce clinic visits by up to 50 percent.
• By the most conservative estimate, the mentally ill account for 16 percent of the prison population, or about 350,000 people on a given day; their true numbers may be twice as high.
• By denying the vote to felons, the average state disenfranchises 2.4 percent of its voting-age population—but 8.4 percent of its voting-age blacks. In fourteen states, the share of blacks stripped of the vote exceeds 10 percent. And in five states (including Kentucky), it exceeds 20 percent. Focusing on black men, Marc Mauer has estimated that felony laws keep nearly one in seven from voting nationwide. (See chart)
• If felons were allowed to vote, the United States would have a different president. … [and] seven modern Republican senators owe their election to laws that keep felons from voting: John Warner of Virginia (1978), John Tower of Texas (1978), Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (1984), Connie Mack of Florida (1988), Paul Coverdell of Georgia (1992), Jim Bunning of Kentucky (1998), and Mel Martinez of Florida (1998).

CHART: Share of population barred from voting by felon disenfranchisement laws.

{prisons, african american, vote, HIV, poverty, crime}

Why is this important? The standard method (NLRB elections by secret ballot) are much more prone to coercion by management:

During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose.

More from Kevin Drum.

From the Working Families website:

Sign the Petition: Tell Congress It’s Time to Support the Employee Free Choice Act

Today, 60 million workers in America want to join unions. But employers routinely block their efforts—and our laws are too weak to protect them. It’s time for Congress to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to make their own uncoerced decisions on whether or not to form a union. Please sign the following petition urging members of Congress to support this important legislation.

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