France gives gay couples joint parental rights

France gives gay couples joint parental rights

From yahoo / Reuters

PARIS (Reuters) - France's top court ruled on Friday that both partners in a homosexual couple can exercise parental authority over a child, rather than just the biological parent.

The ruling by the Cour de Cassation, which decides how to interpret French law but does not hear trials, could open the way for further debate in France on gay marriage and the adoption of children by same-sex couples, which remains illegal.

"The civil code is not opposed to a mother, as sole holder of the parental authority, delegating all or part of the duties to the woman with whom she lives in a stable and continuous union," the court said in its verdict.

The decision also applied to male homosexual couples, where one of the partners was the biological father of a child.

The court said the right for same-sex couples to jointly exercise parental authority depended on the circumstances requiring such an arrangement and that it must be in the child's best interests.

Until now, French courts have ruled that the law only allowed parental responsibility to be delegated to a person other than the biological parents in unusual cases. This was not regarded as sufficient to include homosexual couples.

Friday's ruling came as the first French same-sex couple to form a civil union -- a right which the then Socialist-led government granted in 1999 -- got married in Belgium.

"It's a shame to have to go abroad to get married," said Dominique Adamski, 52, who married Francis Sekens, 60, in Mouscron, a small Belgian town just over the border from France.

The present, conservative government opposes gay marriage and does not allow same-sex couples to adopt children, but has given homosexual couples who form a civil union more financial rights.

US legislators press Rice on UN vote against gays

from Reuters

By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The Bush administration's support for Iran's proposal to bar two gay rights groups from a voice at the United Nations sparked a demand from U.S. legislators on Tuesday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repudiate the action.

The January 23 vote denying "consultative status" at the world body to the Belgium-based International Gay and Lesbian Association and the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians was a "drastic reversal" of Washington's previous stand on the issue, the U.S. House of Representatives members wrote.

Nearly 3,000 nongovernmental organizations have such status, which enables them to distribute documents and speak at meetings of some U.N. bodies and conferences.

In voting for Iran's proposal, "the United States joined some of the world's most oppressive regimes, among them China, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe" and demonstrated "a reprehensible inconsistency" in the protection of rights based on sexual orientation, the lawmakers said.

Among the 44 Democrats and one independent signing the letter were Democrats Eliot Engel of New York, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, Tom Lantos of California, Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

They called on Rice to publicly repudiate the action and support pending applications by three other gay rights groups.

The vote occurred in the U.N. Economic and Social Council's Committee on Nongovernmental Organizations.

U.S. officials said the United States had opposed the Belgian group in January due to its previous ties to the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which condones pedophilia.

But the United States had voted in 2002 to approve U.N. ties to the group. At that time, a U.S. diplomat told the committee Washington was convinced it no longer condoned pedophilia and praised it for its life-saving activities in the struggle against AIDS.

Despite U.S. support, the group failed to win enough votes to win consultative status in 2002, and the January 2006 vote had been its first chance since then to try again.

On January 23, the United States first abstained on a motion to deny a hearing to the two groups. That motion carried.

Washington then voted in favor of Iran's proposal to deny their applications, which carried 10-5 with three abstentions.

Following the vote, German envoy Martin Thuemmel said the committee decision "will haunt us for a long time" because it sent a message that it was acceptable to discriminate on the basis of an individual's sexual orientation.

'Net firms collect more data; lawyers, prosecutors are using it

'Net firms collect more data; lawyers, prosecutors are using it - Story at Boing Boing
Snip from a piece by Saul Hansell in today's New York Times:

[Internet] data led directly to a suspect in a school bombing threat; it has also been used by the authorities to track child pornographers and computer intruders, and has become a tool in civil cases on matters from trade secrets to music piracy. In St. Louis, records of a suspect's online searches for maps proved his undoing in a serial-killing case that had gone unsolved for a decade.

In short, just as technology is prompting Internet companies to collect more information and keep it longer than before, prosecutors and civil lawyers are more readily using that information. When it comes to e-mail and Internet service records, "the average citizen would be shocked to find out how adept your average law enforcement officer is at finding information," said Paul Ohm, who recently left the Justice Department's computer crime and intellectual property section.

The issue has come to the fore because of a Justice Department request to four major Internet companies for data about their users' search queries. While America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft complied with the request, Google is resisting it. That case does not involve information that can be linked to individuals, but it has cast new light on what privacy, if any, Internet users can expect for the data trail they leave online.

The answer, in many cases, is clouded by ambiguities in the law that governs electronic communication like telephone calls and e-mail.

Link for more info

Do something about it...
at the EFF,
at
>EPIC Online Guide to Practical Privacy Tools,
The ACLU
http://www.privacy.org/
Email Privacy.info

Could Your VoIP Phone Be Tapped?

Could Your VoIP Phone Be Tapped?
from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/27/AR2006012701086.html

Civil-liberties groups say the FCC's plans may pose a threat to your privacy and security.

Dennis O'Reilly, PC World
PC World
Saturday, January 28, 2006; 12:10 AM

BURLINGAME, CALIFORNIA -- Several privacy and civil-liberties organizations are mounting a legal challenge to prevent VoIP and other Internet-based communications from being subject to taps from law-enforcement agencies.

The group, which includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the COMPTEL association of communications service providers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation , says it will fight the FCC's plan to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994. It filed a brief this week with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The FCC's final rule, issued on August 5, 2005, would extend CALEA to all Internet-based communications, according to EFF Chairman Brad Templeton, who spoke at this week's Emerging Telephony Conference here, sponsored by O'Reilly Media. Once the FCC issues a final rule, vendors have 18 months to comply with it.

Templeton claims that the CALEA expansion proposed by the FCC would "require that people get permission to innovate" and would also create "regulatory barriers to entry." "The FBI gets veto on new companies," according to Templeton. Another, more threatening aspect of the regulation is its mandate that a "back door" be built into all Internet-communications hardware and software to provide access for law enforcement agencies. This same back door could be exploited by hackers to listen in and record these Internet communications, according to Templeton.

In March 2004 the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Agency petitioned the FCC to expand CALEA to cover Internet-based communications. The original statute applied only to calls made using the public switched telephone network.

The FCC's proposal would require that all VoIP hardware vendors comply with the wiretap mandate within 18 months of the order's effective date, but Templeton claims that many router vendors have already added the wiretap capability to their shipping products, despite the fact that the FCC hasn't yet issued any instructions for doing so. Templeton adds that the cost of implementing this proposal will be passed onto the businesses and consumers who use the products.

Among the politicians opposing the FCC's Internet wiretap plan is Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chief sponsor of the original CALEA legislation. Leahy says the Internet was explicitly excluded from the law's surveillance rules, with the understanding that the exclusion could be revisited. However, he claims that extending CALEA to the Internet of today is counter to the intention of Congress.

In a notice posted to the FBI's CALEA Web site yesterday, the FCC promises to release another order that will address such issues as "compliance extensions and exemptions, cost recovery, identification of future services and entities subject to CALEA, and enforcement."

Dominatrix scandal rocks a police department

(Greenburgh-WABC, February 3, 2006) - A scandal involving a dominatrix rocks a police department in the Westchester County town of Greenburgh -- and now several officers are under investigation.

One cop has been suspended, four others reassigned and the street crime unit has been taken off the street, after a dominatrix claims she was the victim of sexual harassment.

Eyewitness News Reporter Tim Fleischer is in Greenburgh with the story.

The fallout, up to this point, one officer with the street crimes unit has already been suspended without pay. This also comes after stunning allegations of misconduct against a dominatrix.

Greenburgh Police headquaters are stung by allegations of inappropriate conduct against officers by a 31-year-old woman who makes her living in bondage and S&ampM.

"You cannot justify the inappropriateness in any manner shape or form," said Greenburgh Police Chief John Kapica.

"There was behavior on the part of the police that one would characterize as unprofessional both at the scene and later at the station house," said defense attorney Tony Castro.

The woman -- 31-year-old Gina Annenoel Pane sitting in a car in the parking lot of a movie theater was arrested and charged with marijuana use. But after officers spotted what the chief describes as sex toys in the car, an officer allegedly began making comments of a sexual nature.

And then back at police headquarters, after she revealed to officers in a report that she was a dominatrix by profession, she alleges inappropriate behavior continued -- some of it caught on video tape.

"At least what we've seen did not reveal any improprieties on the part of the officers in that they didn't do anything that I would deem to be inappropriate," Kapica said.

Information she provided to police links her to a web site where she discuses services and favorite activities that includes domination.

But police reveal one more stunning detail:

"Another officer had met her afterwards and had done things that were inappropriate, if not criminal," Kapica added.

And in addition to the investigation at the police department, the district attorney's public integrity unit is also investigating these allegations.

Patriot Act fights dissent, not terror

excerpt from a well written article about Patriot Act fights dissent, not terror:

If the present version of the ``Patriot Act'' is passed by the Senate, any demonstrators attending security events such as the Super Bowl will in the future be arrested and charged with a federal felony by a newly created federal police force, ``Secret Service, Uniformed Division,''