Blog Heap of Links for the day 25 July 2015

Two former detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba were arrested by Belgian police in a counterterrorism operation targeting a recruiting network for al Qaeda in Syria. …

"He has a smirk on his face …I don't know if there's any remorse whatsoever based on that picture…"

A group is planning to unveil an 8-foot-tall bronze statue featuring a goat-headed Satan in Detroit during a gathering that’s being billed as the “largest public satanic ceremony in history.”…

Capacitance Electronic Disks are one of the great disasters in the history of video storage systems, and are pretty much unknown today… much like traditional vinyl phonograph records, but with the grooves much, much finer. …

…In 1788, Newton published a pamphlet, Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the horrible conditions on the slave ships, and wrote that “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” He joined in the efforts of William Wilberforce and other abolitionists in Parliament to outlaw the slave trade, and he lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act on March 25, 1807. Nine months later, he died in London, the city of his birth.

John Newton is best remembered today as the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” In 1982, 175 years after his death, he was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.…

…Take the steak home. Get a bigass frying pan and put the shit on the stove, cranking the heat up as far as that fucker will go.…

The quarter-century controversy over the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial has finally ended, after the US Department of Defense sold the government land on which the 29-foot cross stood.

Judges have disagreed over how emblematic the San Diego memorial really was of Christianity.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals referred to the cross as a “distinctively Christian symbol” in its 2011 ruling that the memorial was unconstitutional. It sided with opponents who argued the cross signified “that Jesus is the Son of God and died to redeem mankind.”

In contrast, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested “the cross was a war memorial,” maintaining that it was “outrageous” to conclude that the only dead veterans it honored were Christians. The high court has twice refused to review the case.…

Scientists across Africa are celebrating the news that the world's first vaccine against malaria has been approved by the European Medicines Agency. The vaccine, named Mosquirix, was given the green light on Friday after more than 30 years of research, detailed in 230,000 pages of data. It now means that the vaccine will be examined by the World Health Organisation and, if approved, could be administered to children across Africa within the next few years.… [Video: Auto-run]

…Defense Department asked armed citizens to stop guarding recruitment centers.

"The presence of armed civilians, it said, might cause safety problems….

The conservative activist group Citizens United is releasing a new poll of its membership, which surveyed some 4,000 activists across the country. Just two percent approve of the job Congress is doing. More than 90 percent want their Member of Congress to replace current House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH).…

…You may know these physical feelings as chills or tingles – but some people feel them so powerfully, they describe the sensations as “skin orgasms”.… researchers have then been able to pinpoint the kinds of features that are more likely to trigger the different sensations during a musical frisson. Sudden changes in harmony, dynamic leaps (from soft to loud), and melodic appoggiaturas… seem to be particularly powerful.

… On this day in 2014 the big news was the EPA illegally blocking an Alaska Gold Mine using the clean water act BEFORE a study was even done.…