Final Random Bits: Mozilla goes for profit; Kirkuk looks to go boom; Blair slashes protest freedoms, "the last of the Great British"?

"Bombs Becoming Biggest Killers in Iraq." "Insurgents in western Iraq town prove an elusive enemy for Marines". "Syria rejects US blame for Iraq's unrest." Someone kills Chalabi's cousin. More about the growing sense of Kurdish separatism, which leads us to the problem that Kirkuk is Really a Tinderbox:

Tension was rising Saturday in the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk as residents say they fear an outbreak of civil war among the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.
Local officials in the northern city said a crisis erupted when hundreds of Kurds, accompanied by National Guards, began distributing residential lands to ethnic Kurds who were allegedly expelled from the area under the former regime of Saddam Hussein.
Turkmen sources in Kirkuk said these lands belonged to their own ethnic people before the former regime pushed them out or executed their members, after which the lands were excavated with bulldozers.

The story of murdered reporter Steven Vincent in Iraq is quite sad, but it has been suggested in the Telegraph that he was not killed merely for criticizing hardcore Shiite police behavior. Apparently no one claimed responsibility for his killing, which possibly had something to do with sleeping with his slain Iraqi interpreter, perhaps some kind of honor killing.

It would appear that Blair has decided to cut off some undesirable chunks of free speech in Britannia and push for treason against uppity Muslim clerics. Also, apparently you can't protest within a half-mile of Parliament without a license anymore due to the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act. Protesters have gotten arrested. However, Brian Haw, a dude I personally encountered outside Parliament last spring, has been sitting there since June 2001, and apparently his post has been grandfathered in. As he tartly put it within his unyielding stream-of-consciousness yowling at the government:

As the arrests were being made he shouted to police: "Officer address your heart, officer why are you here?"
Speaking about the protest on Sunday, he said: "I'm the last of the Mohicans, I'm the last of the Great British.
"My fellow compatriots have been denied a voice. I'm outraged by this, I'm outraged that the police are busy chasing old ladies with peace signs down Whitehall when there are bombs going off in London."

How depressing, I really expected better from the folks that brought us such fine traditions of free speech.

"Europe plays nuclear poker with Iran," some pretty good stuff from an Iranian based in India.

Mozilla Foundation is metastasizing into Mozilla (for-profit) Corporation. This is not necessarily bad, so I hope they stay smart. They are still on the open source path, but perhaps now they have ideas for making more money, which can be turned back into development. People ought to keep open minds about the various evolving ways to join open source software and capitalism together.

On a totally unrelated subject, Joel Stein's comparison of the trendiness index for Scientology and Kabbalah is pretty funny. He's very much after the K-Hotties...