Illegal movie download forces shutdown of free Wi-Fi

By KATHIE DICKERSON

COSHOCTON — A free service enjoyed by hundreds has been shut down due to illegal activity conducted by one individual.

“It’s unfortunate that one person ruins it for those who use the service legitimately,” said Commissioner Gary Fisher.

About five years ago, the county made a free wireless Internet connection available in the block surrounding the Coshocton County Courthouse at 318 Main St.

It was disabled last week after someone used the wireless local area network address to illegally download a movie.

The county’s Internet Service Provider — OneCommunity — was notified by Sony Pictures Entertainment about the breach, and the county’s Information Technology Department was in turn notified by OneCommunity.

Elizabeth Kaltman, vice president of corporate communications with the Motion Picture Association of America, said movie piracy is something the industry fights everyday.

“It’s a very, very common occurrence all across the U.S., in towns big or small,” she said.

Part of it could be due to a generation that’s grown up with computers and the Internet.
“They’re used to instant access and instant gratification,” she said. “They have the philosophy ‘if it’s there, I can take it.’”

It’s not true. There are many sites out there offering illegal movie and music downloads, but there’s also a growing number of sites that offer video streaming legally. Those are available on the MPAA’s Web site, Kaltman said. In addition to the recognizable names such as Netflix and Blockbuster, Disney Video, Fox on Demand, Cartoon Network and others have joined the instant download move.

“There are a growing number of ways to get the information they want legitimately,” she said.

The MPAA focuses most of its efforts on catching the source of the movies, like pirates who illegally use a camcorder in a theater.

“We target piracy at its source,” she said. “We really focus on keeping the product out of the market in the first place.”

Illegal downloads would be prosecuted as a civil matter, she said, and could be subject to fines up to $150,000.

Mike LaVigne, IT director, said the number of people who access the Internet using the connection varies widely, from perhaps a dozen people a day to 100 during busy times such as First Fridays and the Coshocton Canal Festival.

It’s used by Coshocton County Sheriff’s deputies who can park in the 300 block and complete a traffic or incident report without leaving their vehicle. Out-of-town business people can park and use their laptops to make connections.

During festival times, vendors find it a convenience to check the status of credit cards being used to make purchases, LaVigne said.

Because it’s a single address used by many people, it’s difficult to tell who made the illegal download, although the county plans to investigate the matter .

Each of the 270 to 300 computers in the regular county system have password protected secure log-ins, and so could be readily identified if illegal activity had taken place at one of those locations. Its firewall also prevents access to illegal sites, said Commissioner Dane Shryock.

LaVigne has done some homework and found a program that would prevent the illegal downloads from happening in the future; however, it would cost the cash-strapped county about $2,900 to implement, $2,000 for equipment and then $900 annually for the filtering program.

Commissioners questioned whether the investment would be justified for the free service, but LaVigne said it could be put to use on the entire county system to monitor activity.

“It would be beneficial to both realms,” he said.

This short-range service is entirely separate from the wireless broadband being deployed throughout the county by Lightspeed.

Crowd control at eBay

If over the last decade you have read any of the many books and articles promoting the Net as a new world where people are able to form self-regulating, super-democratic communities, you have no doubt come across glowing descriptions of eBay's feedback system. By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we've been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially manages itself. Tom Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat,

voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a "self-governing nation-state."

Nice story. Too bad it didn't work out.

EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to its feedback system, setting up more "non-public" communication channels and, most dramatically, curtailing the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. It turns out that feedback ratings were being used as weapons to deter buyers from leaving negative feedback about sellers.

When Bill Cobb, the president of the company's North American operations, announced the changes, he underscored just how broken the feedback system had become:

To give you some background, the original intent of eBay's public feedback system was to provide an honest, accurate record of member experiences. Over the years, we've adjusted the system to add non-public means of providing feedback to try to improve its accuracy. For example, we instituted Unpaid Item Reports in 2006, and that has helped us to hold buyers accountable.

But overall, the current feedback system isn't where it should be. Today, the biggest issue with the system is that buyers are more afraid than ever to leave honest, accurate feedback because of the threat of retaliation. In fact, when buyers have a bad experience on eBay, the final straw for many of them is getting a negative feedback, especially of a retaliatory nature.

Now, we realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do ... and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago.

So we have to put a stop to this and put trust back into the system.

But I think – and I'm sure you'll agree – that the most compelling reason we need to change feedback is so that buyers will regain their confidence on eBay and they will bid and buy more often.

We explored a number of solutions, and talked to eBay's founder Pierre Omidyar, who created the Feedback system. He agrees that bold changes are required to fix Feedback. And that's exactly what we're going to do ... here's the biggest change, starting in May:

Sellers may only leave positive feedback for buyers (at the seller's option).

I know this is a huge change, but we're also putting into place protections that sellers have wanted for years. In addition to holding buyers accountable via non-public seller reporting tools, such as Unpaid Item reports, we are planning a number of other Seller Protections against inaccurate feedback.

He goes on to list seven new "protections," including more aggressive central monitoring of members' behavior and various restrictions on buyers' ability to leave feedback about sellers.

Patti Waldmeir, in a column in the Financial Times today titled "The death of self-rule on the internet," writes, "For those who were there from the start of this experiment in digitising utopia, including me, this is very disillusioning." By "radically rewriting the constitution of the democratic republic of Ebay," she says, the company has closed the book on a certain brand of internet idealism:

For most of [its] 13 years, Ebay has been run largely as a self-policed island, a place where order was preserved less by real world laws than by norms and customs and expectations and reputations that were almost entirely virtual. Ebayers governed themselves by rating each transaction using the site's "feedback" system, where they could report crooks, not to the state but to each other. The theory was that, as in a medieval souk in which everyone knew everyone, everyone on Ebay would know who the crooks were by reading their feedback. Now the company has basically admitted that the cybersouk model does not work: buyers did not tell the truth about sellers, and sellers did not tell the truth about buyers. And in a market where traders lie, the trust that is so central to online commerce cannot flourish.

This isn't unusual. It follows a common pattern that we've seen play out in other "social production" sites like Digg and Wikipedia. (Disclosure: I'm on the editorial advisory board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.) As these sites grow, keeping them in line requires more rules and regulations, greater exercise of central control. The digital world, it seems, is not so different from the real world.

In a new post about how "bottom-up" communities need "top-down" controls to work successfully, Kevin Kelly notes that "the supposed paragon of adhocracy - the Wikipedia itself - is itself far from strictly bottom-up. In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia's process reveals that it has an elite at its center (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears."

Kelly argues that "the reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture." He's implying that, if you gave them enough time, self-governing communities would eventually work out their problems and run just fine - like happy beehives. But that's contradicted by experience. What we've seen happen with self-regulating communities, both real and virtual, is that they go through a brief initial period during which their performance improves - a kind of honeymoon period, when people are on their best behavior and rascals are quickly exposed and put to rout - but then, at some point, their performance turns downward. They begin, naturally, to decay. Leave them alone long enough, and they're far more likely to collapse than to reach perfection.

Kelly confuses human with nonhuman systems. He writes: "The main drawback to pure unadulterated darwinism is that it takes place in biological time - eons. Who has eons to wait during internet time? Nobody." But darwinism has little to do with the development of human systems like eBay or Wikipedia or Digg. People aren't genes (or bees). You can build a good emergent system out of genes because genes are dumb - they don't make their own decisions, they don't consider what other genes are doing, they don't think. People, in contrast, actually do think. Sometimes, we're inspired by fellow-feeling. Other times, we act selfishly or with prejudice or we try to game whatever system we're part of. And the more times we're confronted with other people acting selfishly, or fraudulently, the more we retreat into self-interest ourselves. Trust, a fragile thing, breaks down.

And that's why eBay's feedback system decayed. Time was its enemy, not its friend.

What is a fascist?

It's a word much applied by opponents to the British National Party and other radical political movements, but what is a "fascist"?

Both of these men are often categorised as fascists

"Fascist" and "fascism" are terms that one might suppose to be simple badges, but dig beneath the surface and there are myriad complexities and a morass of academic debate.

It is more than six decades since the end of World War II and the fall of Nazi Germany, but those events are the prism through which the word "fascism" is still viewed.

The first "fascist" movement to gain power was Mussolini's Blackshirts in Italy in 1922. Their movement could certainly be said to be nationalist and authoritarian, as well as accepting of violence in the struggle for political power, but much of the rest of its characteristics have been subject to academic dispute.

"Frustratingly, I can't give a simple definition," says Kevin Passmore, reader in history at Cardiff University and author of Fascism: A Very Short Introduction. "It depends on definitions."

If your definition of "fascist" is someone who holds beliefs that can be categorised as "fascism", the terms fascism still needs to be defined.

THE ANSWER There isn't an answer Many say 'fascists' are authoritarian and nationalist But some say racism is part of the definition Others link the term to its Italian genesis While still more use an amalgam of the Blackshirts and the Nazis

"You can say 'is fascism a movement that resembles what fascism was in Italy?'" says Mr Passmore. But for many users of the terms, fascist and fascism must be a blend of the common denominators between Italian fascism and German Nazism.

But in a letter to the Times on Tuesday, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne is keen to distinguish the terms. The 85-year-old former Sunday Telegraph editor confesses that like "most of my octogenarian generation of British... [I] believed in white superiority".

But that "in no way meant [we] were fascists," says Sir Peregrine, before adding he is "no longer a racist".

One of the problems in likening fascism to Nazism is that the two do not cross over as neatly as some people assume. Racism, and particularly anti-Semitism, was central to the ideology of Nazism, but the position in Italian fascism was far more ambiguous. So for some scholars, the mere presence of racism in a modern group's ideology might not be enough to earn the "fascist" label.

Fascism in Italy also had corporatism ingrained in is political make-up. Corporatism is usually defined as a political and economic system where individuals are organised into different groups - for example "plumbers" or "priests" - within the state, negotiating with other groups to make progress.

Some activists would accept the fascist label while others eschew it

It is unlike a modern liberal democracy where the basic political unit is the individual. The corporatist model emphasises co-operation over competition.

Another characteristic associated with fascism is autarky - the self-sufficient economy. But by no means all modern autarkic states - Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example - have been widely classed as fascist.

Fascist symbols are also significant. The term derives from the "fasces" - the axe and bundle of rods used in ancient Rome - sported by Mussolini's fascists. Franco's Falangists, used arrows joined by a yoke, the symbol of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. The Nazis used a Swastika. Symbols that in some way echo these older motifs are common among some modern extremists.

Of course, another problem in refining a "fascist" label is that the stated ideology of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis often did not marry up completely with the political policies they pursued.

But the clearest problem in the definition of the word "fascist" is the very wideness of its application over the years. There is a plethora of uses from Rick in the Young Ones deploying it as an insult, to the Oxford English Dictionary's differing definitions "(loosely) a person of right-wing authoritarian views" and "a person who advocates a particular viewpoint or practice in a manner perceived as intolerant or authoritarian". So you have "body fascism".

Broadly speaking, in political discourse, it is a "boo word", a term used more for purposes of condemnation than precise categorisation. The Nazis were bad, and in this view their ideology was fundamentally linked to fascism, meaning that fascism is fundamentally bad.

"It is a useful political weapon to say a modern political movement is like fascism," says Mr Passmore.

And those groups often categorised by opponents as fascist, like the BNP, often choose not to use it to describe themselves.

One definition is entirely related to Italian fascism

"You can ask why don't they call themselves fascists given they admire several aspects. Why is it it remains a bad word? Anti-fascist movements have often said fascism is the same as Nazism," notes Mr Passmore.

There might be some who prefer an "elephant in the room" definition, believing that it is possible to know a "fascist" when one sees one, even if a precise definition is hard to come by. For them any nationalist political movement that is authoritarian, opposed to free speech, in favour of a one party state or dictatorship, and seems to have racist tendencies, is open to the "fascist" label.

But the debate over a precise definition will roll on.

"Students like to think this word means this," says Mr Passmore. "I lean towards the view that it's much more interesting to look at how the term has been used. History and life is about debate over what words mean."

---

Here is a selection of your comments.

One of the greatest mistakes that people make concerning fascism is associating it with "right wing" ideology. In fact fascism and right wing thought are completely opposed to each other in terms of their fundamental goals and ideal (their roots). To put it as simply as possible fascism is a political force that wishes to begin a new state of equality in a sort of national rebirth. This is different from right wing thought because it wishes to preserve a sort of "status quo" and the stability of a traditional order.
Thomas, Massachusetts

Much more interesting than the definition of "fascist" which has in many instances become little more than a catch-all perjorative, is the wider definition of "right wing". So for example, the BNP is classed as "right wing" (indeed usually "extreme right wing"), yet its economic aims would largely find favour with the left of "Old" (and not so old) Labour. A person who believes in "small" government, the rights and responsibilities of the individual, and the private sector, is usually regarded as "right wing", yet corporatism and state control, as is pointed out in this article, is seen as fascist which is always "right wing". Right wing is seen as reactionary, yet people who stand up for democracy, sovereignty and the sanctity of the UK parliament are seen as reactionary, while people who champion the unelected supremacy of the EU are seen as progressive.
Steve, London UK

My basic understanding is that fascism is generally made of concepts of authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism and racial supremacy. My studies, as a student have also suggested that fascist look to some historic state as the ideal, such as Hitler's desire to recreate a Germany based on earlier "Reichs" or Mussolini's desire to recreate the Roman Empire, while never accepting the present situation of the state as ideal.
Martin Meyer, Dundee, Scotland

While fascism might often have racist undertones, Mussolini gave the world a very concise and convenient definition: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

Now, obviously authoritarianism and nationalism are natural consequences of this definition. But, what is ironic is that while most (including the article) agree that Mussolini was the first to implement fascism, no one wants to quote Mussolini definition of fascism as even a starting point to a more encompassing definition. Instead, politicians and scholars, alike, seem to rather simply equate fascism to the Nazi party, thus polarizing the debate and rendering fascism as a "dirty" and politically incorrect word. However, the "inconvenient truth" is that Western governments (and their economies) already closely mirror those of Germany and Italy in the late 1920s.
George P. Burdell, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Surely it is the way a word is currently used that matters? "Fascist" has come to mean someone of extreme right-wing or bigoted views to the vast majority of people, so isn't that what the word actually means?
Catherine Hilton, Todmorden, England

"Fascism" these days is taken to be synonymous with the Far Right, but in fact it is and always was a socialist movement. Both fascist and Nazi parties advocated a state-controlled and planned economy, centralised authority and collectivism (sacrificing individual liberty to the ends of society). In fact, the only difference between fascism and communism was the group that was to be favoured in the revolution: for the fascists it was defined by race; for the communists, by class. But in practice even this distinction was blurred.
Tom , London

A major problem with the "elephant in the room" definition given at the bottom is that it includes many regimes that - almost self-definingly - could not be called fascist. Stalin's Soviet Union would fit as fascist by that definition, yet was ostensibly communist - and communism is usually regarded as the exact opposite extreme of fascism.
Dave Lowering, Melbourne, Australia

As a history graduate I had the pleasure of studying fascism at the University of Sheffield. The module itself was confined within the years "1914-1945", which I think is a very telling indication of what the intended "definition" of the word was. Of course fascism is ultra-nationalist, even virulently so; of course, it's totalitarian - based around an autocratic hierarchy; and of course fascism has, I believe, pseudo-racial/xenophobic implications due to its intrinsically nationalistic character. Alas, the word has become far too liberally applied. For example, I despair when some unread people equate fascism and communism (notably Stalinism) as one and the same thing - simultaneously overlooking the profound and intricate details of their unique ideological origins. There seems to be this idea that just because Stalin and Hitler's regimes committed acts of despicable genocide they are automatically the same breed.
Danny Bird, Bristol, UK

Fascism is now a useless word having so many negative connotations as to render it virtually meaningless. In academic circles the differences between Italian and Spanish Fascism and German Nazism are understood but still terminology gets in the way. But it is surprising how many "fascist" ideas keep appearing in modern politics under different names. When Tony Blair announced the "Third Way" in British politics in the 1997 election he was using a term coined by Mussolini about the corporate state. The corporate state allowed big business to operate in a purely commercial way until it was deemed to have failed when the state would step in and impose a socialist style planned economy. The grouping of workers into similar trades was seen as a way of protecting them from the predations of big business and managing their labour/trade as part of a planned economy. Thus the Third way was a middle ground between a socialist planned economy and a democratic/liberal market economy.
Hugh Davie, London UK

Fascism simply means extreme collectivism. The individual is worthless and all that matters is the group - in most cases the nation. Nazis are just one type of fascist and it also includes communists and those traditionally believed conceived as being on the extreme left. They also believe in giving absolute power to the state, shutting down debate and "removing" individuals seen as disruptive to the "good of the whole".
Chris, London

Surely the best definitions work on etymological principles. The fasces symbolised the authority of the state to inflict corporal punishment (with the axe in the middle of the bundle symbolising its right to impose death). I take the defining quality of fascism to be this elevation of state power to absolute levels - "this is the state above the law" - coupled with the state exercising social control by the denial of people's right to free association. Under this definition, fascist states include those of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, as well as Hitler and Mussolini. This seems quite reasonable to me, as they seem to have recognisable features in common that can fairly be described by the word "fascism".
John D Salt, Risca, Caerfilli

An essential element of fascism is German political idealism, where (among several things)the individual is subservient to the state. Giovanni Gentile imported German idealism into Italy. Any definition of fascism behooves the inclusion of its basic philosophical background and ideas. Because of this Franco cannot be properly catalogued a fascist.
Rafael Gonzalez, Greoux les bains, France

In my view, the Taliban are fascists. They do not want any one who does not agree with their brand of Islam (which, in my opinion, is totally off the track of what Islamic values and ideals are). They do not believe in free speech, free movement, and are very intolerant of even moderate individualism. Let's stand up against the fascists (white supremacists) here in the UK and the fascists (Taliban and their like) in Pakistan. Human civilisation depends on it.
S Shafqat, Pakistan/UK

This brings to mind the question of whether the Soviet Union, for all its anti-fascist (ie anti-German) propaganda during the Second World War, was itself fascist. Soviet communism seems to meet every one of the aforementioned criteria, except for the use of the fasces as a symbol. Ironically, the US dime (10 cent piece), from 1916 until 1945, depicted the fasces on its reverse.
Ben S, New Orleans, USA

I like to use Thomas Sowell's definition as he is an economist who has written extensively on this subject. Fascists, communists and Nazis are all socialists, which has as its central doctrine totalitarian dictatorship, centrally planned economy, and ownership of the means of production of the government. The difference between them is merely membership. The communist doctrine is by class, by Nazism by race (regardless of what race) and fascism by corporate membership (by fact of citizenship or physical presence). By these definitions it is easy to identify the flavour of socialist one may be. It also reminds us of the core values of each type: government ownership of everything including human and civil rights. this is why the government can kill off those who don't fit the definition they have chosen.
Donald, Tulsa, United States

"Fascist" - like "racist" - is, as you say, a boo-word, something you accuse your opponent of when you cannot be bothered to actually present any argument to justify your disagreement with his opinion.
Megan, Cheshire UK

A fascist is someone you can't agree with. Simple.
Mo, Corby

When I was at school we were taught a definition of fascism as "a system of government that sanctifies the interests of the state over those of the individual".
Eustace Tuttle, London

For me, a central aspect of Fascism is the externalisation of conflict, an exemplar of which can be found in George Orwell's "1984" where, with the lack of any external threat, one needs to be invented in order to unify society and mobilise it to war.

I think a key work in this field is Slavoj Zizek's "The Sublime Object of Ideology" - which examines the psychoanalytic idea that the individual subject and society as a whole is inherently internally antagonistic, and the fascistic consequence of externalising this in ideology...
Peter Robinson, London

I don't know why "Marxist" hasn't also become a pejorative term. It could be argued that Stalin, Mao Tse Tung etc, have been responsible for more misery and deaths than Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were. Personally, I think most "isms" are obnoxious and anti-human.
Skeptic, Bognor Regis

I'm going to use the biological to explain fascism. Fascia is an uninterrupted, three-dimensional web of tissue that extends from head to toe, from front to back, from interior to exterior. It is responsible for maintaining structural integrity; for providing support and protection; and acts as a shock absorber. Fascia comes from the Latin for a band, if you look at your image of the axe and rods there is a band surrounding it. Therefore fascism is the binding of society into a collective with structural integrity that works together for a common cause, whether that cause is good or bad.
Stuart, Manchester

Fascist is not the same thing as Nazi. Had Mussolini joined with Britain in 1940, and Italy been invaded by Germany several years earlier the title 'Fascist' would have a much different meaning in this country.
Brian Gates, Medway Kent

In Norway, even murders and rapists have a shot at landing in "open prison."

An inmate enjoys the sun outside his house at Bastoey Prison in Norway. (©Fredrik Naumann/Felix Features)

By Gwladys Fouche

OSLO, Norway — The first time I went to prison, it was to an idyllic place with lush woodland, bright-colored houses and the waters of the Oslo fjord sparkling in the summer sun.

It was July 2006 and I was visiting Bastoey, an open prison 45 miles south of the Norwegian capital. It is home to about 115 detainees, including murderers, rapists and other felons, who enjoy activities not usually associated with prisons.

In summer, they can improve their backhand on the tennis court, ride a horse in the forest and hit the beach for a swim. In winter, they can go cross-country skiing or participate in the prison's ski-jumping competition.

Inmates work between 8:15 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. The island is a farm, so there are cattle to tend, timber to cut and organic crops to grow. Inmates also work at a sawmill, using axes, knives and saws. Another job is to restore wooden houses dotted around the island. Based on their time in Bastoey, many men will obtain professional qualifications.

After work, inmates retreat to their homes: comfortable wooden houses shared between four to six inmates.

Bastoey is based on the idea that traditional, repressive prisons do not work.

"The biggest mistake that our societies have made is to believe that you must punish hard to change criminals," explained Oeyvind Alnaes, Bastoey's then-prison governor. "This is wrong. The big closed prisons are criminal schools. If you treat people badly, they will behave badly. Anyone can be a citizen if we treat them well, respect them, and give them challenges and demands."

Alnaes' views reflect the way Norway and the rest of Scandinavia run their penal systems. In Norway, there are no death sentences — or even life sentences. The maximum jail term anyone can receive is 21 years, including for murder. Most people will serve two-thirds of their term before being released. Convicts retain the right to vote and can exercise it while in jail.

All inmates start their sentence in a traditional, closed prison. These more secure facilities share some of the ills their American counterparts are known for, including high drug abuse, lack of education and job opportunities, which means most detainees spend 23 out of 24 hours locked in their cells. Even so, the experience of closed prisons here is quite different from those of prisons abroad.

The second time I went to prison was in September, to a high-security detention facility in central Oslo. I was there to meet Bjoernar Dahl, a 43-year-old inmate who, a few days before, had been debating crime policy with the justice minister and an opposition politician, during a primetime television election debate. The debate was broadcast live from inside the prison walls, in front of an audience of inmates and guards.

"It was high time the politicians came here to talk about crime policy," said Dahl, who is serving a five-year sentence for complicity in smuggling amphetamines. "This is about us, what happens in prisons and how we can return to society in a way that is beneficial to everyone."

The show caused no outrage in Norway. There were no headlines expressing shock that inmates could voice their opinions in public debate. Nor was there condemnation of NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, for hosting a political debate inside a prison.

"There is a greater tendency to keep prisons open [to the public] so that people can see inmates as human beings they can identify with," said Nils Christie, a professor of criminology at the University of Oslo.

That's not to say that crime and punishment issues are uncontroversial in Norway. The Progress party, the largest party in opposition, has for years called for tougher, longer sentences for perpetrators of violent crimes — a view that has now been adopted by the Labour-led government.

But overall, Norway is much less repressive than America is. Norway has one of the lowest incarceration rates in Europe at 66 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 738 per 100,000 inhabitants in the U.S.

"When you listen to the justice minister, he generally emphasises the need for reintegration into society rather than the need for punishment," Christie said. "In Norway, there is more emphasis [than in other countries] on seeing prisons as part of normal society."

Official policy suggests that inmates finish their sentence in an open prison like Bastoey, to ease their reintegration into society.

Another issue of debate, now solved with the addition of more cells, has been the long waiting time convicted criminals had to wait before going to prison, as Norway does not overcrowd its detention centers. It could take months, sometimes years, before they could serve their sentences. During that time many would be staying at home.

If God Had Wanted Me To Be Accepting Of Gays, He Would Have Given Me The Warmth And Compassion To Do So

By Jane Kendricks

I don't question God. The Lord is my Shepherd and I shall put none above Him. Which is why I know that if it were part of God's plan for me to stop viciously condemning others based solely on their sexual preference, He would have seen fit—in His infinite wisdom and all—to have given me the tiniest bit of human empathy necessary to do so.

It's a simple matter of logic, really. God made me who I am, and who I am is a cold, anti-gay zealot. Thus, I abhor gay people because God made me that way. Why is that so hard to understand?

Here, let's start with the basic facts: I hate and fear gay people. The way they feel is different from how I feel, and that causes me a lot of confusion and anger. Everyone knows God is all-powerful. He could easily have given me the capacity to investigate what's behind those feelings rather than tell strangers in the park they're going to hell for holding hands. But God clearly has another path for me. And who am I to question His divine will?

Compassion, tolerance, understanding, basic decency, the ability to put myself in another person's position: God could have endowed me with any of those traits and yet—here is the crucial part—He didn't. Why? Because the Creator of the Universe wants me to demonize homosexuals in an effort to strip them of their fundamental human rights.

I'm sorry, but you can't possibly ask me to explain everything God does. He works in mysterious ways, remember?

Try to understand. If I were capable of thinking and acting any other way, then I'm sure I would, but God seems to be quite adamant about this one. He's just not budging at all. So unless our almighty Lord and Savior decides to change His mind about my ability to empathize on even the most basic level—which I find highly unlikely—then everyone is just going to have to accept the fact that I'm going to keep on hating homosexuals. And I know that He will fill me with the strength to remain mindless and hurtful in the face of adversity.

Which isn't to say that my faith hasn't been tested. Believe me, there have been times when I've drifted from the bitter and terrified life God has chosen for me. When my younger brother told me he was gay, it shook my faith to its very core. But here I am, 27 years later, still refusing to take his calls. Just the way God intended.

It's actually pretty astonishing how many complaints to the school board you can make regarding the new band teacher you've never met when you are filled with the Light of Christ and devoid of any real kindness or mercy toward His other children.

At the end of the day, I'm just trying to lead a good Christian life. That means going to church on Sunday, following the Ten Commandments, and fighting what I believe to be a sexual abomination through a series of petty actions and bitter comments made under my breath. Sure, I sometimes wish God would just reach into my heart and give me the ability to treat all people with, at the very least, the decency and respect they deserve as human beings. But unfortunately for that new couple who moved in three houses down, He hasn't yet.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have God's work to do.

Boy punished for cutlery breach

Zachary brought in the set to use to eat his lunc

A six-year-old American schoolboy will be suspended after bringing his favourite camping cutlery to school.

Zachary Christie took out the combination knife, fork and spoon at lunch, in violation of the school policy of not bringing in knives.

The school had originally said Zachary should spend 45 days at an alternative school for troublemakers.

But after a meeting, the board voted instead to suspend Zachary for between three and five days.

Downes Elementary School, in Newark, Delaware, operates a zero tolerance policy on knives, banning them as dangerous instruments.

Officials said they were forced to act regardless of Zachary's age or what he planned to do with the knife, the Associated Press reported.

"Politically, zero tolerance is what everybody clamours for, until we start to realise how harsh zero tolerance can be," School board member John Mackenzie told AP ahead of the vote.

But the seven-member board voted unanimously to reduce the punishment for the school's youngest students.

In other cases school officials have ignored the policy and Mr Mackenzie said he was surprised this had not happened in Zachary's case.

Zachary and his mother supported the policy but were unhappy with its implementation, saying the punishment had been too harsh.

Why Do Conservatives Hate America?

By Eugene Robinson

Somebody explain this to me: The president of the United States wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and Rush Limbaugh joins with the Taliban in bitterly denouncing the award? Glenn Beck has a conniption fit and demands that the president not accept what may be the world’s most prestigious honor? The Republican National Committee issues a statement sarcastically mocking our nation’s leader—elected, you will recall, by a healthy majority—as unworthy of such recognition?

Why, oh why, do conservatives hate America so?

OK, I know, it’s just some conservatives who’ve been exhibiting what they, in a different context, surely would describe as “Hanoi Jane” behavior. Others who haven’t taken leave of their political senses—and are familiar with the concept of manners—responded to President Barack Obama’s unexpected award with equanimity and even grace. Sen. John McCain, for example, offered his good-natured congratulations.

Some of Obama’s most strident critics, however, just can’t give it a rest. They use words like farce and travesty, as if there were always universal agreement on the worthiness of the Nobel peace laureate. Does anyone remember the controversy over Henry Kissinger or Yasser Arafat or F.W. de Klerk?

The problem for the addlebrained Obama-rejectionists is that the president, as far as they are concerned, couldn’t possibly do anything right, and thus is unworthy of any conceivable recognition. If Obama ended all hunger in the world, they’d accuse him of promoting obesity. If he solved global warming, they’d complain it was getting chilly. If he got Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu to join him around the campfire in a chorus of “Kumbaya,” the rejectionists would claim that his singing was out of tune.

Let the rejectionists fulminate and sputter until they wear themselves out. Politically, they’re only bashing themselves. As Republican leaders—except RNC Chairman Michael Steele—are beginning to realize, “I’m With the Taliban Against America” is not likely to be a winning slogan.

More interesting, but no less goofy, is the recommendation—by otherwise sane commentators—that Obama should decline the award. This is ridiculous.

If the award just represented the political views of a handful of left-leaning, self-satisfied Norwegian Eurocrats, as some critics have charged, then it wouldn’t matter whether Obama won it or not. But of course it means much more. The Nobel Peace Prize, irrespective of the idiosyncratic process that selects its winner, is universally recognized as a stamp of the world’s approval. For an American president to reject such a token of approval would be absurdly counterproductive.

Obama has shifted U.S. foreign policy away from George W. Bush’s cowboy ethos toward a multilateral approach. He envisions, and has begun to implement, a different kind of U.S. leadership that I believe is more likely to succeed in an interconnected, multipolar world. That this shift is being noticed and recognized is to Obama’s credit—and to our country’s.

The peace prize comes as Obama is in the midst reviewing war strategy in Afghanistan. Some advocates for sending additional troops are complaining—and some advocates of a pullout are hoping—that the award may somehow limit the president’s options. But the prize is nothing more than an acknowledgment of what Obama has been saying and doing thus far. He hardly needs to be reminded of his philosophy of international relations—or that he once called Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” Threading that needle is not made any easier or harder by the Nobel committee’s decision.

What I really don’t understand is the view that somehow there’s a tremendous downside for Obama in the award. It raises expectations, these commentators say—as if expectations of any American president, and especially this one, were not already sky-high. Obama has taken on the rescue of the U.S. financial system and the long-term restructuring of the economy. He has launched historic initiatives to revolutionize health care, energy policy and the way we educate our children. He said flatly during the campaign that he wants to be remembered as a transformational president.

The only reasonable response is McCain’s: Congratulations. Nothing, not even the Nobel Peace Prize, can set the bar any higher for President Obama than he’s already set it for himself.

Seeing Red In Pink Products: One Woman's Fight Against Breast Cancer Consumerism

by Joan Raymond

I just redeemed a coupon from P&G for a Swiffer. For my effort, two cents will be given to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. I would have to buy 500 Swiffer wet thingies to make a $10 donation. But I needed a Swiffer anyway. And two cents is better than nothing. So why not use the coupons that were inserted into my newspaper?

Because, says Barbara Brenner, the executive director of Breast Cancer Action, a nonprofit watchdog group headquartered in San Francisco, buying pink products has little to do with helping cure and treat breast cancer. Says Brenner: “Everyone has been guilt-tripped into buying pink things. If shopping could cure breast cancer it would be cured by now.”

Well, I wasn’t particularly “guilted,” just out of some basic necessities. And hey, two cents is two cents.

But Brenner says consumers need to strip off their pink-tinted glasses.

“Swiffers. What do they have to do with breast cancer? This is about marketing. As long as we are in a situation in which corporate America is trying to solve a problem we don’t understand, we are in trouble.”

Too much of the money, says Brenner, is going to fund a cure—with too little being spent on studying what causes cancer in the first place, or toward giving aid to women with cancer. We still know little about how breast cancer works, or the best way to treat it, or how often we should screen for it. And shopping, she says, won’t help.

“We have to get past the idea that a simple answer is going to solve a complicated problem,” she says, noting that the huge increase in pink products in this month may afford the disease to just 30 days worth of attention per year. “People think breast cancer only happens in October,” she says.

On the other hand, the extreme amount of attention it does receive this month gives people the impression that breast cancer is well taken care of, says Brenner. “I got an e-mail in late October last year and it said the breast-cancer problem is solved, why aren’t you guys working on autism? I was floored. The breast-cancer problem is not solved.”

Seven years ago, BCA launched Think Before You Pink, a watchdog group monitoring products marketed for breast-cancer awareness. The group came in response to the Breast Cancer Action’s concerns that called for more transparency and accountability by companies taking part in breast cancer fundraising. They want consumers to start asking a lot more questions before they whip out their pink credit card to pay for that pink household-cleaning product.

She is particularly concerned about 4 categories of product-cause marketing related to breast cancer: cosmetics companies that use substances that have been tangentially linked to breast cancer; automobile companies (Ford, for example, which has its Warriors in Pink breast cancer awareness program) since there are toxins coming out of the tailpipe; dairy companies using bovine growth hormone rbGH; and alcohol manufacturers who cash in on pink “when we know that too much drinking” can lead to breast cancer, says Brenner.

“Companies say they care about breast cancer,” but they have elements in their products that can “cause” breast cancer, too, she says. And it doesn’t make her happy.

I asked her if she thought I was stupid to cut out my little coupon and buy my Swiffers.

“Nobody who buys this stuff is stupid,” she says. “But they’ve been told by corporate America that buying solves the problem.”

Brenner was diagnosed with breast cancer 16 years ago. “I’m fortunate to still be here,” she says. “Breast cancer gets so much attention, but what kind? Awareness is not what we need, and buying things ain’t going to solve the problem.”

Advocates for pink marketing disagree. “I’d say pink is doing its job very effectively—I’m thinking there should be even more pink if it helps us get rid of this disease forever,” said ambassador Nancy G. Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure in a statement to NEWSWEEK. “These products provide tens of millions of dollars for research and support programs; they remind people to get their screenings and allow people to participate in this movement conveniently ... Of course, people should look at Web sites and labels to make an informed choice, but it’s short-sighted to simply dismiss the positive impact that businesses are having in our fight to end an awful disease.”

While it’s unlikely to stop consumers from shopping, Think Before You Pink has taken a more proactive view as well. Several years ago, they focused on Yoplait’s pink-lidded yogurt, which was sold to raise money for breast cancer, but was made with dairy stimulated with the hormone rBGH.

The online campaign called on General Mills, the manufacturer of Yoplait to “put a lid” on rBGH, and gave activists the tools to send that message directly to the CEO. Working with many partners dedicated to ridding the world of rBGH, BCA activists persuaded General Mills to do the right thing. As a result, Yoplait is now rBGH free.

Two weeks after General Mills announced they were going rBGH free, Dannon responded to public pressure and made the same promise to consumers. These two companies represent two thirds of America’s dairy products.

Brenner and Think Before You Pink weren’t able to stop the tidal wave of pink products that flood the market each October. But they were able to make some of those products safer for women. It’s a small step—but an important one.

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Fun