En 27-årig man som i januari misstänks ha mördat sin mamma i Uppsala har åtalats.

En 53-årig man avled i kväll sedan han blivit påkörd av en bil utanför Västerås.

En gripen misstänkt för att ha öppnat eld på öppen gata.

A U.S. District Court Judge in California today ruled that so-called National Security Letters, used by government agencies to force business and organizations to turn over information on citizens, are unconstitutional. Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop using them, but gave the government a 90-day window to appeal the decision, during which the NSLs may still be sent out. The letters were challenged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of a telecom who was ordered to provide data. "The telecom took the extraordinary and rare step of challenging the underlying authority of the National Security Letter, as well as the legitimacy of the gag order that came with it. Both challenges are allowed under a federal law that governs NSLs, a power greatly expanded under the Patriot Act that allows the government to get detailed information on Americans’ finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and been reprimanded for abusing them — though almost none of the requests have been challenged by the recipients. After the telecom challenged the NSL, the Justice Department took its own extraordinary measure and sued the company, arguing in court documents that the company was violating the law by challenging its authority. The move stunned the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the anonymous telecom. ... After heated negotiations with EFF, the Justice Department agreed to stay the civil suit and let the telecom’s challenge play out in court. The Justice Department subsequently filed a motion to compel in the challenge case, but has never dropped the civil suit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the demise of Google Reader got all the attention, there are some other things going away in A second spring of cleaning. It’s worth reading.

One of the interesting ones: the CalDAV API will be removed for all but whitelisted developers. CalDAV builds on WebDAV and is an open standard. Instead you’d have to use the Google Calendar API.

I wouldn’t have noticed this except that I was out with two calendar developers last night: John Chaffee of BusyCal and Michael Simmons of Flexibits. I suspect they’ve got some coding to do.

Google certainly has the right to shut things down — and I think they’re right to do so, also. The company’s been all over the place and should continue to work on focus.

But I don’t like when they turn off existing support for an open standard like CalDAV in favor of a Google-only API. Sure, they can — it’s within their rights, obviously. But I don’t like it.

Minst nio personer omkom när en lastbil full med fyrverkeripjäser exploderade i Mexiko i dag.

Vill ha rabatt för att fortsätta använda de svenska planen.

Test Perl Data Language arrays (a.k.a. piddles) for equality

Adapter for CGI::header() function

Required attributes which fail only when trying to use them

What happens to late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's body is still unclear, as it may be too late to embalm him.

Två 18-åriga män från Kävlinge häktades i dag vid Lunds tingsrätt, misstänkta för att ha fört bort, utpressat och rånat en man.

En 23-årig man från Uppsala lurade till sig 100 000 kronor genom att ta snabblån med hjälp av kapade personuppgifter.

astroengine writes "Although there appears to be a mysterious dearth of exoplanets smaller than Earth, astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope have estimated that nearly a quarter of all sun-like stars in our galaxy play host to worlds 1-3 times the size of our planet. These astonishing results were discussed by Geoff Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, during a talk the W. M. Keck Observatory 20th Anniversary Science Meeting on Thursday. '23 percent of sun-like stars have a planet within (1-2.8 Earth radii) just within Mercury's orbit,' said Marcy. 'I'll say that again, because that number really surprised me: 23 percent of sun-like stars have a nearly-Earth-sized planet orbiting in tight orbits within 0.25 AU of the host stars.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter kxra writes "Do you have a federated jabber instant messaging account that never gets responses from Google accounts anymore? Or do you have a Gmail account that a friend has been unable to invite from their 3rd party Jabber account? The Free Software Foundation reports, 'Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains.' This sounds like something Facebook would try in order to gain even tighter control over the network, but they never even federated their Jabber service to begin with. According to a public mailing list conversation, Google is doing this as a lazy way to handle a spam problem."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.