German Judge Albert Bartz has taken issue with laws that ban drivers from talking on handsets while driving but do not address many other potentially more distracting activities, including sexual activity. 

"The police have no legal basis for taking action against a driver who is, for example, letting their left hand dangle out of the open car window while they use their right hand to work on a laptop that's sitting on the passenger's seat and steer the car with their thighs," Bartz said. "In my opinion, the current legislation is outdated." 

The judge considered the law while handling the case of a man who appealed his fine for talking while driving. Bartz insists however that he does not have personal motivation for his legal position. 

Bartz emphasized that he has never been caught using his mobile phone in the car and that he also avoids other risky activities while driving. As he told the mass circulation daily Bild: "Sex at the steering wheel is strictly off-limits for me."

Bartz forwarded the statute on to Germany's highest court, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, for further review.  

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

A disturbing report from The Telegraph suggests that China may soon cut off the world's supply of the metals needed for many modern electronics:

A draft report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

China mines over 95pc of the world’s rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.[...]

New technologies have since increased the value and strategic importance of these metals, but it will take years for fresh supply to come on stream from deposits in Australia, North America, and South Africa. The rare earth family are hard to find, and harder to extract.

 Danger Room's Nathan Hodge comments:

[I]t’s a reminder of the role that strategic resources play, especially for the high-tech military of the United States. [...]

Of course, China is not the only country that’s figuring out how to play the mineral wealth hand in geopolitics. For several years now, Russia has used natural gas supply as a way to exert less-than-subtle pressure on its neighbors. Energy, the Kremlin found, is a more effective instrument than an aging nuclear weapons stockpile: You can actually turn the gas taps off when you feel like punishing someone.

As an old piece of wisdom from Strategic Air Command put it: “When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

India's Dalits, or "untouchables," may have experienced political success in recent months (both as individuals and as a party) and the resulting benefits of being in power, but the class remains the subject of significant levels of discrimination, with true equality not yet in sight. Now, ministers in  the Bihar state in East India are seeking to improve the Dalits' quality of life through the wonders of radio. 

"It (radio) will entertain the tired villagers with music and will make them aware about what is happening around with news," Bihar's Tribal Welfare Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, said Wednesday.

Manjhi said the move will empower the dalit villagers further and raise general awareness levels.

"You can listen to music, news and improve your areas of information if you have a radio at home," Chief Minister Nitish Kumar added.

PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images

West Africa's SAT-3 broadband cable connection to Europe was severely disrupted this week, temporarily crippling many industries like Nigeria's banking sector, as that country lost 70% of its bandwidth. It could take up to two weeks to fix the offshore cable, which runs from Portugal all the way to South Africa. 

Meanwhile, East Africa has been awash in coverage and excitement about SEACOM, the coast's first broadband hookup, since its launch last week.

Along with excitement, the Internet boom raises some policy questions for African governments and companies. On the governmental side, Nigeria is now being lobbied by business groups to declare SAT-3 "critical infrastructure" and help avoid future breakdowns. East African governments should take note: the downside of increased Internet connectivity is increased vulnerability when one of your only connections goes down.

As far as the private sector, Steve Song, creator of that awesome broadband cable map, has an interesting series: "What Google Should do in Africa." Song's biggset priorities are that the company should 1) Support open spectrum; 2) Launch Google Voice in Africa; and 3) Lobby for cheaper SMS (text messaging) rates.

Of particular interest to me is the SMS suggestion, as mobile phones and SMS are frequently cited as a potentially powerful tool for poverty reduction. A Stanford classmate of mine, for example, helped found FrontlineSMS: Medic to reduce costs of rural healthcare using mass texting technology.

As Song notes, Google is interested, and recently rolled out a partnership in Uganda with the Grameen Foundation and MTN, a wireless company, to increase information availability, particularly for rural farmers. Though applauding the initiative, Song is skeptical of the choice to make the new technology available with only one company. 

There is a desperate need for organisations like Google who have a vested interest in seeing more data traffic to help lobby for more competition, for lower barriers to entrepreneurship in the telecom sector, and for cheaper access for all.

So when I see the company that wagered billions in the 700MHz spectrum auction in the U.S. to effectively arm-wrestle Verizon into OpenAccess conditions, the company that has made countless submissions to the FCC to lobby for unlicensed access to television white spaces spectrum, announce that they have “partnered” with a single mobile operator in Uganda to deliver SMS services, you will understand me if I seem a little let down.

I agree with the sentiment, but for what it is worth MTN Uganda is the largest provider, with over half of the market share. And as desirable as it may be for Google to work with everyone, logisitcally, you have to start somewhere. 

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As many countries have debated introducing ID cards, one of the greatest arguments against has been the enomously complicated logistics putting an entire country's information into one database. India, though, is about to test just how tough this challenge really is.

It is surely the biggest Big Brother project yet conceived. India is to issue each of its 1.2 billion citizens, millions of whom live in remote villages and possess no documentary proof of existence, with cyber-age biometric identity cards.

The Government in Delhi recently created the Unique Identification Authority, a new state department charged with the task of assigning every living Indian an exclusive number. It will also be responsible for gathering and electronically storing their personal details, at a predicted cost of at least £3 billion.

The task will be led by Nandan Nilekani, the outsourcing sage who coined the phrase “the world is flat”, which became a mantra for supporters of globalisation. “It is a humongous, mind-boggling challenge,” he told The Times. “But we have the opportunity to give every Indian citizen, for the first time, a unique identity. We can transform the country.”

If the cards were piled on top of each other they would be 150 times as high as Mount Everest — 1,200 kilometres.

Perhaps just as interestingly, unlike many states where ID cards have been pushed on grounds of national security and/or immigration, in India the biggest issue is welfare.

India’s legions of local bureaucrats currently issue at least 20 proofs of identity, including birth certificates, driving licences and ration cards. None is accepted universally and moving from one state to the next can easily render a citizen officially invisible — a disastrous predicament for the millions of poor who rely on state handouts to survive. 

India is not the largest state with such a scheme: China introduced a national ID card in 1984, but the first version of its Resident ID card ran into serious trouble with counterfeiters, and only recently has China begun to create a similarly powerful database of personal information. But with India's acceptance of ID cards, Australia, Japan, and the United States are the most prominent countries without any plans to issue national ID cards.

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As many as 26 U.S. and South Korean Web sites have been hit by thousands of zombified computers in the last two days, according to news agencies from both countries. Though the hackers responsible have not stepped forward, South Korea's intelligence service believes the widespread outages are the work of the North Korean government:

'This is not a simple attack by an individual hacker, but appears to be thoroughly planned and executed by a specific organization or on a state level,' the National Intelligence Service said in a statement, adding that it is cooperating with the American investigative authorities to investigate the attacks."

In addition to a handful of South Korean government agencies and private organizations, The New York Times claims denial-of-service attacks also affected Web sites maintained by the following:

... those of the White House, the State Department and the New York Stock Exchange ... The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points."

The implications of an attack on any country's economic infrastructure can be pretty dire. Corporations can expect as much as a five percent drop in their stock price following a cyberattack. 

Discussing the ethics of cosmetic surgery, Slate's William Saletan recalls the strange case of Australian politician Hanjal Ban who at age 23 decided to undergo surgery in Russia to increase her height. She gained around 8 centimeters through a mostly experimental procedure involving breaking her legs in four places and slowly stretching them while they healed. After recovering, Ban went on to successfully win a city council seat inLogan City, Queensland.

Under a pseudonym, Ban wrote a book, God Made me Small, Surgery Made me Tall, and is now republishing a new version, Her Secret, under her own name. Though Ban has vocally said the surgery is not for everyone, book promotion on her official website makes her choice seem almost heroic:

International media recently described her as one of the world's most beautiful politicians. Hanjal's explosive story gripped Australia and gained international attention. Prepare yourself for what you didn't hear in the interviews.

Read how Hajnal over came her darkest moments that almost ended her life. Learn how she turned herself around to become an inspiring role model who exudes confidence, elegance and style.

If you too want to exude confidence and style, The Times of London notes that the surgery is available in at least 18 countries including the U.S. but not the U.K. Do you need to be beautiful to win office? Silvio Berlusconi sure seems to think it can help.

CBS reports that Scottish gamemakers are coming out with "Rendition: Guantanamo," a video game for XBox. Moazzam Begg, a Briton detained at the U.S. military prison for three years, advised the company and helped them depict Gitmo realistically. 

The game takes place in the future, after Guantanamo's closure and the player uses guns to defeat mercenaries trying to keep them as lab rats. 

Now we know what Cheney's grandkids are getting for Xmas? 

Days before his murder, Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg recorded this video predicting that he would soon be killed and that the Guatemala's President Alvaro Colom would be responsible:

Rosenberg was shot and killed while riding his bicycle on Sunday. He had been representing a financial expert named Khalil Musa who was himself murdered along with his daughter after accusing a state-owned bank of corruption. Rosenberg had publicly accused the government of conspiring the kill Musa. The video quickly went viral after Rosenberg's death, sparking anti-government demonstrations with thousands of angy protesters demanding Colom's resignation and calling for an international investigation.

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin has been following the tech angle on all of this including today's arrest of an IT worker for "inciting financial panic" by suggesting on Twitter that Guatemalans remove their money from the accused bank. Guatemalan Twitter users are responding by retweeting his post en masse.

Do we have a second "twitter revolution" on our hands? And does this one have a better chance of success? Over to you, Evgeny.

Update: Great rundown of the situation so far from Ethan Zuckerman.

An interesting editorial in The Guardian by a member of Britain's Royal Society, the country's national academy of science, announced -- with a bit of modesty bordering on self-skepticism -- plans to look into "geoengineering" schemes to combat climate change:

The Royal Society has set up a study group on geoengineering climate. Without the answers there will be no way to take sensible decisions on this issue, based on evidence and facts rather than beliefs and suppositions (either for or against the idea). It may well be that our study will conclude that such schemes are not feasible, or too costly, have serious side-effects, or are too difficult to control. But it may not; and it is likely that we will need a lot more information before we can really decide."

After this rather remarkable bit of don't-get-your-hopes-too-high-ism, John Shepherd, the author, gets around to defining just what geoengineering means:

Geoengineering schemes for moderating climate change come in two main flavours. First there are those that aim to increase the amount of sunlight that is reflected away from the Earth (currently about 30%) by a few percent more. Second there are some that aim to increase the rate at which CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, by enhancing the natural sinks for CO2, and maybe even by deliberately scrubbing it out of the air. 

In other words, the Royal Society will be studying the possibility of reflecting sunlight away from the earth on a massive scale, and looking at new ways to sink CO2 into the ocean, or scrub clean the atmosphere. Pretty Jules Verne-seeming stuff, as Shepherd acknowledges:

If world leaders are unable to agree on effective action to deal with climate change ...  we may in future be glad that someone took these ideas seriously. Seriously enough to separate the real science from the science fiction, anyway."

What's remarkable is that the Royal Society, founded in 1660, represents nothing if not the nation's crusty scientific establishment. And while the author presents these schemes with much hesitation and ado, it does seem an indicator of just how much more urgent, and desperate, the discussion over climate change is beginning to seem in the U.K.  

Ukraine says its security service says it caught three persons attempting to sell radioactive material, which they said was plutonium-239, for $10 million. A government spokesperson said the material could possibly have been used in a "dirty-bomb" attack, and that it was of Soviet origin.

Relatedly -- Jeffrey Lewis and Meri Lugo discuss the draw-down of nuclear weaponry in an excellent FP Argument post today. 

You know what sucks? Flying all the way to Washington for a high-profile meeting with the U.S. president only to get the cold shoulder. You know what's worse? Getting him a rare and thoughtful gift and getting a bunch of DVDs in return. You know what's even worse than that? Not even being able to watch the DVDs. 

The Telegraph reports that when Brown recently settled in for the night to watch Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, he got a "wrong region" message on his screen. Turns out the DVDs Obama had given him were formatted to play on North American players.

Poor guy.

First, we learned that the U.S. is using drones to survey pirates off the coast of Somalia. Next big thing in the fight on piracy? Chat rooms.

Keeping up their reputation for packing the latest and greatest high-tech pirate-fighting gear, U.S. forces and their European allies are sprearheading a computer-based coordination system meant to allign the efforts of an entire coalition of navies working in the region. Instant messages (not all that different from your Gchat dispatches) convey the positions of pirate-fighting ships, reports of incidents and threats, and incoming intelligence. So popular are the coordination systems that even Chinese and independent and vessels are signing on.

Something the coalition is doing seems to be working; pirates' boat seizures have fallen noticeably from their peak last fall. Still, the anti-piracy push is not out of the woods. Bad weather so far this year is one explanation for the slowdown, the AP reports. Asian countries seem to recognize this and have dug in their heels. Japan sent its first vessels this week, and China announced that its 800-soldier anti-piracy mission was in for the long haul. 

Of course, real military success on the high seas will depend heavily on the situation on land in Somalia. No instant gratification there (or instant messaging for that matter), but as FP found out in Seven Questions this week, at least there's a squint of hope... 

In the long meantime, the Navy will be online.

Over a month since the United States launched its own counter-piracy effort, details of the operations are emerging. The U.S. coalition is deploying technological and legal creativity to get the job done.

The first tactic: drones. After a report surfaced last week that U.S. unmanned aircraft vehicles were watching the Somali skies, I wrote to Navy Lt. Nate Christensen, who replied: "I can confirm that UAVs are being used aboard U.S. Navy ships to conduct counter-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. They bring the ability to stay airborne for long periods and cover hundreds of square miles of ocean during the course of one mission." The resulting intelligence is shared among allies. A good start to tackling the surveillance conundrum of patrolling miles and miles of high seas.

Perhaps even more interesting, the U.S. is now detaining and holding pirates -- there are 16 in custody now. As Derek Reveron pointed out in "Think Again: Pirates," that's no small feat. Most countries have been nervous about touching the pirates, let alone keeping them in custody. Britain, for example, instructed its patrols not to pick up any of them. There is no mandated court to try the offenders, and many fear that amnesty requests would be the result of naval arrest. No such fears plague the U.S. Navy, apparently. "They will remain aboard Lewis and Clark until information and evidence is assembled and evaluated and a decision is made regarding their further transfer," reads a military press release.

Good effort, team, but it looks like the pirates haven't lost their edge yet. A coal carrier was taken hostage today, just one of the 24 attacks so far in 2009. (Navies have stopped nine others). At that rate, this year would bring in about 100 less attacks than last. Alas!

Photo: U.S. Navy