[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdpei]

• Amused Cynicism reports that the modern Egyptian government wants to extend copyright protection to ancient Egyptian cultural artifacts, some of them five thousand years old and more. Practicality comes to mind as a major objection to this new policy.
• 'Aqoul has an open comments thread on Benazir Bhutto's assassination, and another on the way in which the American occupation authority has finally decided to patronize local tribal sheikhs.
• Boing Boing reports on the recent brawl between Armenian and Greek Orthodox priests during clean-up at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
• Bonoboland's Edward Hugh reports that wage and price inflation in Russia is growing, hinting at some potential for breakdown ahead.
• Charlie Stross blogs his Christmas wishes.
• Crooked Timber has an open comments thread on the death of Benazir Bhutto.
• False Positive's Christmas cookies look delicious.
  
• Joel at Far Outliers links to an interesting post about the Abayudaya, Uganda's indigenous Jews.
• Ian at Hunting Monsters suggests that some Israelis, at least, might be moving towards some sort of pragmatic accomodation with Hamas-run Gaza.
• Joe. My. God links to recent reports that, in 1992, Ron Paul wrote a rather racist essay in which he claimed that 95% of Africa--Americans in Washington D.C. were criminals. (Paul says that a ghostwriter wrote it..)
• Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has an interesting essay about the bad side-effects of Pakistan's post-independence policy of privileging the Urdu language over all others.
• I'm not sure whether this thread debating the claim that the spread of English and inter-jurisdiction tax competition is creating a single European Union labour market is entirely crazy.
• Peteris Cedrins' Marginalia writes, in the wake of Latvia's accession to the Schengen zone and the signing of a border territory ratifying Russian annexations of once-Latvian territories, about his frontier-crossing experiences in that Baltic state.
• The Pagan Prattle reports that radical British parliamentarian George Galloway has outed himself as a creationist.
• Finally, Strange Maps hosts a map of the Kiribati island of Kiritimati, also known in English as Christmas island,