Reuters takes the first step into virtual reality by establishing a news bureau in the online simulation game Second Life.

The fact that it’s in a virtual world doesn’t change things as much as you’d think,” said [Reuters reporter] Pasick, 30, a native of Michigan who is based in London. “It’s not any different than when Reuters opens up a bureau in a part of the world that has a fast-growing economy that we weren’t in before.”

Pasick’s avatar, Adam Reuters, was modeled on the reporter and has a press pass. The virtual shop will be set up in a hybrid of Reuters’s main offices in London and New York. While players who drop in (flying is one of only a few superhuman aspects of “Second Life”) can read Reuters news from the real world, Pasick’s articles will be strictly about - and addressed to - “Second World” players. One of his first articles examines “Second Life’s” biggest lender, who charges 40 percent annual interest.

No news on whether Reuters will permit the use of the word “terrorist” in Second Life.

When I hear it said that former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami, who made a triumphant visit to the United States last month, where he was lauded as a “reformer,” is a moderate, it makes me sick to my stomach.

Russell Berman at Telos, from whom I took the picture below, explains:

The Ayatollah Boroujerdi, an Iranian cleric who advocates the end of political Islam in Iran and a reversion to traditional shi’ism, who I wrote about here, is a real reformer: a religious reformer: he is trying to snatch back Islam from the pestilential mullahs of Iran, who, along with their thug-enforcers, wield it as a political weapon.

Before his recent arrest, Boroujerdi made an emotional appeal to his followers. It was videotaped and the film was smuggled out of Iran. PJMedia has the video. Here is Boroujerdi’s message:

“…Tell the world that Boroujerdi did not fear death…. He defended an Islam which promotes love and kindness not the Islam that these lot advocate which has brought poverty, corruption, prostitution, addiction ….I don’t want you to risk your lives for me, I just want you to tell the world what happened here,.”

Some of us hear him. We will remember.

Lynne Stewart, a corpulent grandmother who has made a lifelong career of defending political radicals, is coming up for sentencing today for her actions on behalf of a violent Islamist cleric who was a sworn enemy of the United States. She has regrets as she contemplates the possibility that she will die in jail, and she plans to ask for mercy, implying that she shouldn’t be punished for her naivete.

“To me, the sheik was part of the demonized other,” she said, “part of a continuum” with other violent radicals she had defended more successfully, including members of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers.

Her self-defense is a dangerous illusion. Terrorists are not romantic figures battling Amerika. When lawyers fall for their shit, it makes us less safe as a nation. Naivete—if indeed Stewart was naive, and I don’t buy it for a minute—is not an excuse for thinking and behaving as if you are above the law.
Stewart’s kind of thinking should be discredited. It if takes locking her up and throwing away the key, so be it.