links for 2010-03-13

According to a federal indictment, the 46-year-old LaRose began her jihad in June of 2008 when, under the username JihadJane, she commented on YouTube that she was "desperate to do something somehow to help" Muslims. She began corresponding with like-minded people in South Asia and Europe, two of whom advised Jihad Jane to take advantage of her imperviousness to racial profiling so they could attack a target CNN identifies as Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks,

Britain is to give 42m condoms to South Africa in response to a request for an extra billion as part of an HIV prevention drive before the World Cup, the government will announce today.

The request for British help in stockpiling sufficient condoms for the expected influx of thousands of football supporters in three months' time was made during President Jacob Zuma's recent visit to the UK to meet the Queen.

FBI informant Ted Gardiner's death last week is the third. Critics say the federal government has been overzealous in its prosecutions and that his videotaped testimony should not be allowed…But Gardiner's family said that despite the tragedy associated with the case, the prosecutions had to happen. "These people were digging up grave sites. They were taking artifacts off Native American bodies," said Gardiner's 23-year-old son, Dustin. "This history needed to be preserved."

A second former New Orleans police officer pleaded guilty Thursday in connection with police shootings of civilians on a Louisiana bridge in the days following Hurricane Katrina, authorities said.

Two glowing brides in matching white gowns and four other same-sex couples made history in Mexico City on Thursday as they wed under Latin America's first law that explicitly approves gay marriage.

A Suffolk Superior Court judge has taken the unusual step of overruling a jury that awarded a black teacher from Boston Latin School more than $300,000 after he complained that the school’s administrators had discriminated against him.

Sports journalism tends to be celebratory, regardless of who is the focus of the story…But, as with The Blind Side, the story often becomes about how it takes a village of white people to transform a troubled kid by means of civilizing leisure. There's the white adoptive family, the white coaches, the white private-school teachers, the white personal tutor…The "fuller humanity" that black film critic Armond White applauds in the movie sounds a lot like white humanity. The stories reverberate with a sense of the impressive graciousness and broadmindedness of a sport that will let anyone play—even black people. Sure, The Blind Side is about football, which is a pretty black-friendly sport, but the premise is the same: it's a literalization of the fantasy undergirding all those stories about black pioneers—that black progress requires the efforts of a lot of well-meaning white people.

In the latest sign of the nation’s shifting racial and ethnic composition, births to Asian, black and Hispanic women in the United States are on the verge of surpassing births to non-Hispanic whites…“It looks like ‘majority’ births would drop below 50 percent around 2012,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau.