Nasser Karimi and Brian Murphy report for AP:

Iran's election overseers removed potential wild-card candidates from the presidential race Tuesday, blocking a top aide of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a former president who revived hopes of reformers.

Their exclusion from the June 14 presidential ballot gives establishment-friendly candidates a clear path to succeed Ahmadinejad....  It also pushes moderate and opposition voices further to the margins....

The candidate-vetting group is called the Guardian Council.

Many US States have a similarly undemocratic system for choosing judges.  A commission, unaccountable to the people and typically dominated by the state bar either outright or as a practical matter, approves a short list of candidates.  The person who actually is accountable to the people, the governor, gets the same kind of lesser of evils (but not by much) choice that the people of Iran will get for their president.

The selection commission serves the same function as the Guardian Council.  It makes sure that the Great Unwashed, through the person they elected, do not choose any candidates of insufficient ideological purity.  The Orwellian name for this system is "merit selection."

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."  This variation on Occam's razor, attributed to Albert Einstein, shifts the emphasis to warn against oversimplification as well as overcomplication.

In drug policy debates, there is a lot of oversimplified claptrap on both sides.  A note of caution on marijuana comes to us from across the pond.  The title of this post is the headline of this story in the London Telegraph by John Bingham.

Batman's usual venue is, of course, Gotham City.  Gotham is a nickname for New York City.  However, the Caped Crusader recently handed a wanted man over to the police in the West Yorkshire town of Bradford, Russell Jenkins reports for the Times of London.

From today's decision of the Ninth Circuit in Institute of Cetacean Research v. Sea Shepherd Cons. Soc., No. 12-35266:

You don't need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.

Regular readers of Ninth Circuit opinions will have no difficulty guessing the author.  The self-high-minded folks are anti-whaling activists who disagree with international law on whaling and therefore deem themselves entitled to forcibly enforce their own view of the law.  Surprisingly, they actually prevailed in the district court, leading to the suspicion the judge shares their views on whaling and allowed those views to influence his legal judgment.  But the Ninth Circuit has its own surprise for the district court judge:

The district judge's numerous, serious and obvious errors identified in our opinion raise doubts as to whether he will be perceived as impartial in presiding over this high-profile case. The appearance of justice would be served if the case were transferred to another district judge, drawn at random, and we so order in accordance with the standing orders of the Western District of Washington.

If a judge regularly makes "numerous, serious and obvious errors" in a particular class of cases, and if there is good reason to believe that his strong views against the underlying law are the reason, should he be disqualified from cases of that class?  Would the Ninth Circuit be willing to apply that rule to its own judges?

For more on the definition of "piracy," there are multiple posts over at Volokh Conspiracy.

This post is critical of the government of Vietnam.  That is a criminal offense for which I could get a long prison sentence if I were in Vietnam.  Thank God I am not.  James Hookway has this article in the WSJ with contribution by Nguyen Anh Thu.

Although the Cold War is a fading memory, a substantial portion of the Earth's population still lives under communism.  We should never forget how thoroughly evil it is.

It is a commonplace for the Left to accuse the Bush administration of rationalizing, condoning and conducting torture.  The most urgently and frequently pressed accusations are of waterboarding, an excruciating practice that simulates drowning (but produces no permanent injury).  It is said (although never by the Left) to have resulted in a huge amount of actionable intelligence from the otherwise recalcitrant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  Some of that intelligence helped the Obama administration, which had relentlessly demagogued the torture issue in 2008, on the path toward killing Osama --  undoubtedly the single most popular act in the President's first term.

No, not here.  David Stringer and Don Melvin report for AP that Britain is seriously considering leaving the European Union.  Among the grievances:

Such distrust is tangled with worries over the fallout from the European debt crisis and anger at the European Court of Human Rights -- castigated by British politicians for ordering Britain to give prisoners a vote in national elections, and preventing the U.K. from deporting terrorism suspects to countries with patchy human rights records.

If the UK does split from the EU, a declaration stating the reasons is in order.  Maybe it could begin something like this:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ... a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

...looks like this: 

Italian Scientists Convicted over Earthquake Warning 

L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - An Italian court convicted six scientists and a government official of manslaughter on Monday and sentenced them to six years in prison for failing to give adequate warning of a deadly earthquake which destroyed the central city of L'Aquila and killed more than 300 people in 2009.

Kirk Makin reports for the Globe and Mail:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has strengthened his imprint on the Supreme Court of Canada bench, naming a centrist judge from Quebec - Mr. Justice Richard Wagner - as his fifth appointment to the nine-judge bench since the Tories came to power in 2006.

*                                 *                                *

With his fifth Supreme Court appointment, Mr. Harper is well on the way to refashioning the very bench that will ultimately rule on the legitimacy of several controversial aspects of his criminal-law reform package.

Univision had this story by Gerardo Reyes and Santiago Wills last Sunday (text in English, video in Spanish).

On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

John Malcolm has this commentary today at National Review Online.

Our friends on the other side of the aisle love to say that the United States is the only Western democracy that still has the death penalty.  Any conservative who so limited his survey of other countries on any topic would be swiftly denounced as Eurocentric and racist for excluding the views non-Western cultures and persons of color.  It's okay for the left, though.  They have immunity, you see.

Tsuyoshi Tamura reports for the Asahi Shimbun:

A faith healer who beat six followers to death was hanged on Sept. 27, making her only the fourth woman to be executed in Japan since 1950, the Justice Ministry said.

Sachiko Eto, 65, was one of two convicted murderers put to death, taking to seven the number of executions carried out this year.

Eto's punishment was carried out at the Sendai Branch Detention House in northeastern Japan.

The slayings occurred during "exorcism" rituals in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture, in 1994 and 1995. Two of the victims were male. Eto ordered the fatal beatings, which involved blows with heavy wooden sticks used for Taiko drumming, and took part in them with her followers.

Our opponents like to say that retaining the death penalty puts us in the same category as Iran, etc.  That is preposterous.  If you are going to classify countries by their criminal justice systems, the first-level categorization has to be on fundamental matters of due process of law.  Having or not having the death penalty comes considerably lower on the classification tree.

So having due process of law, not punishing people for their religion or speech, and having the death penalty puts us in the same category as Japan.  Given a choice between being categorized with Japan or, say, Italy, I'd take Japan any day.

I'm gonna take the weeks, gonna have a fine vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations
Well I called my congressman and he said "Whoa!"
"I'd like to help you son but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues

--Eddie Cochran

Cochran's song was ridiculous and funny.  The NAACP is ridiculous and serious, taking its complaint about not letting felons vote to the U.N.  Jamey Keaten has this story for AP.

The way to reduce the number of people who lose their vote for committing felonies is to reduce the number of people who choose to commit felonies.

STV News reports:

A new study has revealed almost a third of Scottish criminals are convicted of another offence within a year.

The Scottish Government has highlighted that reconviction rates within 12 months are at their lowest in 13 years at 30.1%.

Figures released by the government on Tuesday also revealed that almost one quarter of offenders convicted of violent crime reoffended within a year.

While 58.4% of offenders who were given a prison sentence of three months or less had another conviction within one year.

Michael Mukasey, former US Attorney General and trial judge at the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, has this op-ed in the WSJ.

Are senior Obama administration officials considering transferring to Egypt a poisonously influential Islamist cleric serving a life term in federal prison for trying to unleash a war of urban terrorism in the United States? That's the impression several officials have given over the past three months, apparently out of fear that if the cleric dies in U.S. custody, American outposts in the Middle East could be overrun by vengeful mobs.

Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik, is one of the world's leading theologians of terrorism. Abdel Rahman, who has diabetes and is in his mid-70s, is confined at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons medical facility in Butner, N.C. He served as spiritual adviser to El Sayid Nosair (in connection with the 1990 assassination in Manhattan of Meir Kahane, a right-wing Israeli politician) and to the band of terrorists who carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six and wounded numerous others (an operation undertaken in part to free Nosair from jail).

Abdel Rahman was convicted in 1995 of participating in a seditious conspiracy that included the Kahane murder, the 1993 WTC bombing, and a plot to blow up other landmarks in New York and to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak when he visited the United Nations. I presided over the trial as a U.S. district judge; upon his conviction, I sentenced Abdel Rahman to life in prison.

Why life in prison?  Why is this man still alive to be the subject of a release demand?  Because Congress inexcusably stalled until 1994, after the crime, to enact the post-Furman/Gregg federal death penalty law.

Crime has not been much of an issue in the U.S. presidential race.  It is in South Korea, though.  Jaeyeon Woo has this post at the WSJ's Korea Real Time blog.