bill bickel's crimeweek on yahoo

Yahoo glosses over the fact that they're being sued by the World Organization for Human Rights USA on behalf of journalist Shi Tao (sentenced to ten years in prison for circulating an e-mail about the Chinese governments restrictions on the media) and reporter Wang Xiaoning and his wife (imprisoned for distributing pro-democracy writings).

(Officially, these offenses are "leaking state secrets" and "incitement to subvert state power," respectively)

Yahoo assisted in all three prosecutions by turning over account information about She and Wang to the Chinese government. They justify this by insisting that in order to do business in China, they have to adhere to Chinese law. They deplore this sort of thing, of course, but what's a company to do? Business is business, you know.

Sixty-some years ago, the word for people and companies doing business with Nazi Germany on Nazi Germany's terms was "collaborators."

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Runaway Bride Jennifer Wilbanks got a lot more attention - being the first, I guess - but the tale of this year's version, Sara White, is a lot stranger:

For one thing, the 20-year-old California woman wasn't suffering from cold feet over her upcoming wedding, as Wilbanks was, but rather over a date she'd made with "Fernando," a man she'd met on a telephone chat room.

Suddenly deciding she didn't want to cheat on her fiancé, and apparently thinking that simple breaking the date would be too simple, she phoned Fernando and told him she'd been kidnapped.

Fernando called the police.

The police called White's cell phone, which she answered, and then had to play out the part of a woman who'd been hit in the head, abducted, and dragged into the trunk of a car. That's where she was now, she insisted, and she was having trouble breathing because of her asthma (which in fact she didn't have). She described being taken to a McDonald's in Sacramento (but described instead a McDonald's in her home town of Turlock, since she'd never been to Sacramento, and to a white house with green trim (describing her own home).

About 60 Sacramento police officers joined the search for her, before an officer was sent to check out her home in Turlock, white with green trim, where White answered the door...

She spent two nights in jail before being arraigned on charges of abusing emergency dispatch services, and she could face a maximum of a year in jail and a $1000 fine. Her fiancé still wants to go through with the wedding - but then again that's what Jennifer Wilbanks's fiancé said at the time.

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In Michigan, David Noordewier was fired from his job at Wal-Mart after mocking the store's customers on his MySpace page and commenting that the nation's average IQ would increase if bombs were dropped on the company's stores.

I think if we're really serious about raising the nation's average IQ, we should first go after people who belittle their workplaces on their MySpace pages, with their full names in full view, and somehow believe there won't be any consequences.

Then we can move on to people who use their MySpace pages to discuss their plans to blow up their schools, show photos of their marijuana plants, and brag about their extensive collections of child pornography.