Westboro Baptist Church, the moral bastion from Topeka, Kansas, currently on trial for gay-bashing at a dead soldier's funeral, announced yesterday that it's planning on protesting Elizabeth Edwards's funeral on Saturday. Typically they reserve their hateful, irrational invectives for gay people and, more recently, Muslims, so what are they saying Edwards did to invoke their wrath? Well, there is the statement she made about her son, who died in a car accident at age 16 (“My God could not ... protect my boy”) and a statement she made about her painful struggle with cancer (“I’m not praying to God to save me from cancer”), as well as the sin of attempting in vitro fertilization. But really, asking for reasons from unreasonable people is a fool's errand. The church might be protected by the First Amendment when it comes to what it writes on its website, however legal experts are now saying its proposed actions at Edwards's funeral might not have the same protections. Don Herzog, a First Amendment expert, agreed. "People generally think that if you have a First Amendment right, you get to do whatever you want. But while the government can't criminalize speech, there are limits," he told AOL, adding that Edwards's family could sue the group for inflicting emotional distress.

Sergey Aleynikov, the ballroom-dancing former Goldman Sachs vice-president who was arrested last summer for stealing proprietary source code from Goldman Sachs's high-frequency trading platform has been convicted. The 40-year-old Russian immigrant with dual citizenship faces up to ten years in prison. The judge placed him under home confinement and electronic monitoring until he's sentenced on March 18. Goldman's charge was that Aleynikov, who uploaded the code just before resigning from his $400,000-a-year job, intended to hand it over to his new employer, Teza Technologies, a start-up high-frequency trading firm. In fact, it was Aleynikov's indictment that helped push high-frequency trading and flash trades and their potential abuses into the headlines. The computerized system, which can transmit millions of orders at lightning speed was offered as an explanation why Goldman and other large banks and hedge funds were posting profits so soon after the financial system collapsed.

Because getting hurt in a car accident isn't bad enough — actually, it's because the city needs money — next year the FDNY is planning to start levying a "crash tax" on motorists they provide with emergency services. Responding to a vehicle fire, or an incident with injuries, is going to cost $490. Just a fire, no injuries, will run you $415. And assistance after an accident involving no fire and no injuries will set you back only $365. But wait, didn't we already pay for the services of the FDNY when we paid our taxes? Yes, but apparently that system is horribly flawed.

Pissed-off parents, some schlepping laptop bags and slurping coffee, jostled for a seat at a crisis meeting at the Children's Aid Society in a Greenwich Village auditorium last night. Their goal? To try to save the school. CAS announced last week that it would likely shutter the school because it no longer met its mission to help only poverty-stricken children. The CAS's three buildings on Sullivan Street are expected to be put up for sale, with an estimated $20 million to $30 million price tag, after its board votes on the issue on December 16. At the meeting, which I attended because my son Jack is a student there, a task force called SAVE — Save A Village Education — was announced to take on the cause. The plan is to either buy the school or find buyers to keep it an affordable, independent community school and to preserve the programs once CAS pulls out.

Key defectors from the WikiLeaks camp have been working on a rival website called OpenLeaks for some time, and according to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, it's set to launch Monday. Why would Daniel Domschelt-Berg, Julian Assange's former spokesperson and right-hand man, launch his own Leak-o-pedia rather than sticking with WikiLeaks?

It sounds like Assange's domineering personality had something to do with it. In the course of questioning Assange over how he planned to proceed with releasing earlier Iraq war documents, Domschelt-Berg called Assange "some kind of emperor or slave trader." Domschelt-Berg and other ex-WikiLeakers also felt Assange was hogging the limelight and, more substantively, failed to redact critical names from the trove of 400,000 Iraq War documents. They plan to run OpenLeaks with a lower profile, focusing on disseminating information apolitically (i.e. with less focus on the U.S.). Rather than receiving and publishing leaked info directly, OpenLeaks will let other collaborating organizations access its system and publish the material, a clearinghouse firewall that may help the new group avoid espionage charges.