Legion of Angels News Archive

The popular 1995 Honda Civic continues to be the top pick among thieves, holding onto that position for the 2007 calendar year, according to the “Hot Wheels” report released in July 2008 by the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

And while the types of vehicles being stolen remain consistent from year to year, overall car theft in the U.S. declined almost nine percent in 2007. “The continuing national decrease in vehicle theft is a positive sign that the fight against vehicle theft by law enforcement, the insurance industry and the NICB continues to be effective,” said Robert M. Bryant, NICB’s president and chief executive officer.

The most recent NICB report listed the 1991 Honda Accord as the second-most-stolen vehicle, followed by the 1989 Toyota Camry. In fourth position, the 1997 Ford F-150 was the highest-listed pickup truck as well as the most stolen domestic-branded vehicle. The only other domestic brands on the list were also trucks — the 1994 Chevrolet C/K 1500 and the 2004 Dodge Ram Pickup.

Other perennial favorites among thieves include the Acura Integra and Nissan Sentra. According to the NICB, thieves continue to target these older vehicles because they provide the best market for stolen vehicle parts.

The NICB encourages everyone to follow what it calls a “layered approach” to auto theft protection by employing simple, low-cost suggestions to make vehicles less attractive to thieves. The four layers include common sense, a warning device, an immobilizing device, and a tracking device.

The least expensive form of defense, common sense simply means using the standard anti-theft features of a vehicle by locking the car and taking the keys. The second layer is a warning device or alarm on the vehicle.

The third layer suggests some sort of immobilizing device, such as a fuel cutoff or smart key that prevents the vehicle from being driven. The fourth layer consists of a tracking device allowing law enforcement officers to track and recover a vehicle if stolen.

The NICB study is based on information reported to the National Crime Information Center.

Here are the 10 most stolen vehicles as reported by the NICB — the number in parentheses is the model year most stolen:

1. Honda Civic (1995)
2. Honda Accord (1991)
3. Toyota Camry (1989)
4. Ford F-150 (1997)
5. Chevrolet C/K 1500 (1994)
6. Acura Integra (1994)
7. Dodge Ram Pickup (2004)
8. Nissan Sentra (1994)
9. Toyota Pickup (1988)
10. Toyota Corolla (2007)

Source — MSN

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) — A comic-book character popular in Mexico for generations has run into a cultural barrier at the border, where Americans see him as a racist caricature.

For more than 60 years Mexicans have followed the adventures of “Memin Pinguin.” But the dark-skinned Memin’s exaggerated features in “Memin for President” came as a shock to Houston, Texas, Wal-Mart shopper Shawnedria McGinty.

“I was like, OK, is that a monkey or a boy?” McGinty said. “To me it was an insult.”

She’d never heard of “Memin Pinguin.” She bought a Spanish-English dictionary and tried translating but still didn’t like what she saw.

“So I asked my boyfriend, does that look like a monkey to you?” she said. “And we went back and forth and he was like, no, that’s a black woman,” referring to the character’s Aunt Jemima-like mother.

McGinty and Houston community activist Quannel X want the comic books removed from the stores.

“This is absolutely insensitive toward race, in particular the African-American culture, and also people of color,” Quannel X said. “This is poking fun at the physical features of an entire people.”

But Mexican readers who grew up following the shenanigans of Memin say critics need to look beyond the cover and understand the stories.

“They will bring a smile to their face because we’re so fond of that character,” said Javier Salas, a Spanish-language talk show host on Chicago radio station WRTO. “We respect him, we love him. And that’s why it’s so absurd for us to hear complaints from people who don’t know, don’t understand Memin.”

Memin is a poor Cuban-Mexican kid with bug eyes, thick lips and protruding ears. The mischievous and caring boy helps his mother by selling newspapers and shining shoes.

“We grew up reading, learning and educating ourselves with a lot of the topics they always touched on, which was honesty, justice, tolerance. He was a very unique character,” Salas said.

Wal-Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez said the retailer has instructed stores to remove the books from shelves and discontinue sales.

“We received the customer complaint regarding the book, which we knew was based on a popular cartoon character in Mexico. We looked into it further, and we decided to no longer distribute the book and are in the process of removing the books from the stores.”

The store has received no other complaints about Memin, Lopez said.

“We have a wide array of products that we provide to Hispanic customers, but when we looked at this more carefully and given the sensitivity of the topic, we thought it was best to no longer carry the book in our stores,” he said.

He did not know how many copies of Memin books the chain had or how long it would take to remove them from displays.

Memin is no stranger to controversy. Three years ago, a series of Mexican stamps honoring Memin ignited an international uproar. The stamps were discontinued because of protests from African-American leaders.

“This is saying we respect and regard the African-American community by making them look like Sambos on a stamp?” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at the time. “This goes over the line.”

Quannel X called the comic book “a disgrace.”

“Look how they portray his mother, with huge ethnic lips, dark skin, making her look like the big gorilla and him like the little monkey.”

But fans of Memin say the valuable lessons of a beloved comic book character tackling real-life problems have been lost in translation.

Source — CNN

NEW YORK (AP) – Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.

The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user’s real name or e-mail address.

Lawyers for Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data — equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books — would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users’ privacy.

The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.

Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative.

Stanton rejected a request from the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code — the technical secret sauce — powering its market-leading search engine, saying there’s no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.

The court has yet to rule on Google’s requests to question comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Viacom’s Comedy Central.

Viacom is seeking at least $1 billion in damages from Google, saying YouTube has built a business by using the Internet to “willfully infringe” copyrights on Viacom shows, which include Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants” cartoon.

The lawsuit was combined with a similar case filed by a British soccer league and other parties.

Together, the plaintiffs are trying to prove that YouTube has known of copyright infringement and can do more to stop it, a finding that could dissolve the immunity protections that service providers have when they merely host content submitted by their users.

Though Google said giving the plaintiffs access to YouTube viewer data would threaten users’ privacy, Stanton referred to Google’s own blog entry in which the company argued that the IP address alone cannot identify a specific individual.

In a statement, Google said it was “disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

Google did not say whether it would appeal the ruling or seek to narrow it.

Stanton’s ruling made only passing reference to a 1988 federal law barring the disclosure of specific video materials that subscribers request or obtain.

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Stanton should have considered that law along with constitutional free-speech rights, including a right to read or view materials anonymously.

He said a user’s ID can sometimes include identifying information such as a first initial and last name.

Viacom said it isn’t seeking any user’s identity. The company said any data provided “will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google (and) will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner.”

This is not the first time Google has fought the disclosure of user information it had been stockpiling. While gathering evidence for a case involving online pornography, the U.S. Justice Department subpoenaed Google and other search engines for lists of search requests made by their users.

After Google resisted, a federal judge ruled that Google was obliged to turn over only a sample of Web addresses in its search index, not the actual search terms requested.

Source — CNN