Cross Country
A Superspammer Meets His Match
Robert Soloway won't be pitching any online Viagra or get-rich-quick schemes where the feds have him going. Last week, federal authorities indicted the Seattle man on 35 counts relating to Internet spamming in a case they hoped would lead to noticeably less unwanted E-mail.
Soloway is alleged to have employed thousands of so-called zombies, computers that are conscripted by malicious software to send false business offers and similar cons to other addresses, unbeknownst to the user. That characterizes the alleged crime as identity theft, a distinction that allowed prosecutors to invoke new federal ID theft statutes for the first time in a spamming case.
But while prosecutors were trumpeting the arrest as a major victory against unsolicited E-mail, antispam experts elsewhere were skeptical that the arrest would be anything more than a temporary setback for others.
An official with the Spamhaus Project, which once placed Soloway among the world's top 10 spammers, told the Associated Press that he had since been replaced by more prolific spammers outside the United States.
The 'Peace Mom' Calls It Quits
After almost two years of camping in Crawford, Texas, marching in Washington, and pamphleting the White House, the "face" of the antiwar movement has called it quits. Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar protester whose son was killed in Iraq, posted her bitter resignation on the liberal blog Daily Kos. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives," she wrote.
Her resignation left peace activists both saddened and emboldened. "I think it's a tremendous loss not to have her voice, but I think the way she's done it has awakened a lot of people to what's needed," said David Swanson, cofounder of the peace group After Downing Street.
Sheehan also offered up for sale "Camp Casey," her property near President Bush's ranch. "I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too," she wrote, "which makes the property even more valuable."
Mixed Outcomes for Asylum Seekers
Luck may be the biggest factor in deciding which refugees are granted asylum in the United States, according to a study by law professors from Georgetown University and Temple University.
The study, released last week in Washington, D.C., examined the four possible steps that refugees can take in seeking asylum—from applying with the Department of Homeland Security to appealing a case in federal court—and found that who hears the case and where it is heard makes all the difference. Female judges are more likely to side with refugees, the study found, and judges from the South are more likely not to.
The biggest surprise, said Philip Schrag, one of the study's authors, was the disparity among judges on the same court ruling on refugees from the same country. Of the 20 judges on the New York Immigration Court, for example, one approved asylum for Albanians 5 percent of the time and another approved it 96 percent of the time.
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