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Mindful Webworks / Radical Incline / blog-heap o' links
from 2006-mar
Just random links galore. Latest on top.
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FRI 2006-MAR-31
Violating Public Trustchron.com/ ... 11:51:50A former National Security Agency computer analyst was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday for taking home classified documents and storing them in boxes in his kitchen after he left his job... [when arrested] in 2004... acknowledged he took the records.... later claimed he was framed by an ex-girlfriend....
Police Riotmiami.com/ ... 11:50:10A Broward police union put personal information on the Web about a reporter for a South Florida television station after he produced a piece called `Police Station Intimidation.'... about how police in Broward and Miami-Dade counties deal with the public... [oh, the irony!]
Disturbing Family Patternsnews.tbo.com/ ... 11:38:13NEW PORT RICHEY - When the mother first heard a neighbor had raped her 7-year-old son, she confronted the man and threatened to call police. That's when she stopped acting like a concerned parent and began negotiating, police said Wednesday. She accepted $600 in hush money and let the neighbor molest her son again.... "We don't know if this was supposed to be an ongoing arrangement," he said...
Sex can be Dangerouslocal6.com/ ... 11:37:17A 34-year-old woman in Cocoa, Fla... a mother, married with three kids... was charged with repeatedly having sex with a 14-year-old boy... would show up at the boy's home and help him sneak out of the residence to have sex with her... The boy, described by Matthews as a "good kid," ended up telling someone else about the illicit relationship... local6.com/ ... 10:51:49Owners of a strip club in Flagler County, Fla., where protesters have been taking photos of patrons and posting them on the Internet said they may tear down the club if the town allows condominiums to be built on the property... ww2.wpri.com/ ... 10:51:29NORTH SMITHFIELD, R.I. -- A [16yo] girl has been charged with conspiracy in a child pornography case involving two other teenagers.... accused of taking explicit photos of two friends, 19-year-old... and a 16-year-old girl from Lincoln whose name hasn't been released... thesmokinggun.com/ ... 10:49:45The Washington headquarters of NASA was raided this week as part of a kiddie porn probe targeting an executive with the space agency...
Violencevoanews.com/ ... 10:21:18Turkish police backed by armored personnel carriers used tear gas and truncheons to disperse a violent march Thursday by tens of thousands of Kurdish protesters in Diyarbakir. A seven-year-old boy was reported to be in critical condition after sustaining bullet wounds in his stomach. Witnesses said he was fired on by police. The reports could not be confirmed...
9/11 - still with usnydailynews.com/ ... 10:20:30Christopher Hanley: "Yeah. Hi. I'm on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. We just had an explosion up here."
FDNY: "All right, we're there. We're coming up to get you."
C.H.: "I can see the smoke coming up from outside the windows...."
FDNY: "We're on the way, sir."
C.H.: "OK. Please hurry."
FDNY: "All right, just keep the windows open. It's going to be a while because there's a fire going on downstairs."
C.H.: "We can't open the windows unless we break them."
FDNY: "OK. Just sit tight. Just sit tight. We're on the way."
C.H.: "All right. Please hurry..." newsday.com/ ... 10:17:52After a three-year court battle, the city Friday will release eight hours of 911 calls made on the morning the World Trade Center was attacked. In CDs to be issued by the New York City Law Department, the voices of callers have been redacted and only emergency operators can be heard. Twenty-eight callers -- including one survivor -- were identified on the tapes. Those families, which include the Hanleys, were notified this week about the tapes and given the opportunity to hear their loved one's unedited call. But in a last-minute legal wrinkle, a temporary stay was granted by a State Supreme Court judge on the release of the names of callers spoken by the operators...
Threatswashingtonpost.com/ ... 10:16:11Iran's armed forces on Friday successfully test fired a domestically produced missile which can evade radar, state television reported, a development analysts said could be worrying for Western forces in the Gulf... abcnews.go.com/ ... 10:02:30Plans for a Pentagon-led experiment that involves detonating 700 tons of explosives in the desert drew criticism from state leaders and a disarmament activist... will involve nearly 40 times the amount of commercial ammonium nitrate and fuel oil explosive set off in the largest open-air, non-nuclear blast at the site to date... "I am concerned that tests of this magnitude have been planned without providing Nevadans with any information about the possible impact on their health or safety," said Demcratic Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid in a statement Thursday... the site obtained the required state approvals and air quality permits in January... "Given the level of contamination in areas where nuclear tests were conducted, I have real concerns about the dust and other pollutants that will be released into the air as a result of this explosion," said U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley. Disarmament activist Pete Litster said tests at the site violate international law...
Lost & Foundabcnews.go.com/ ... 10:00:24When Jill Carroll was unexpectedly released Thursday after 82 days in captivity in Iraq, the first phone call she made was to her twin sister, Katie Carroll, to say, "I'm free..." Next, she called her parents... "In a matter of hours, 48 hours or 72, this world that she's been in the last three months is going to come crashing down on her and she is going to need her mental toughness to get through this," said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent and now ABC News consultant... One enormous challenge former hostages must deal with is grappling with emotions about their captors. On Thursday, when Carroll gave an interview to an Iraqi TV station, she portrayed them as sympathetic, which experts say is normal... The real trick for Carroll in terms of recovery could be lowering her expectations, as James Loney, a former Canadian hostage who was released last week, has done...
Nature is Dangeroustoday.reuters.com/ ... 00:15:19TEHRAN, March 31 - A strong earthquake hit west Iran on Friday morning, killing at least 15 people and heavily damaging villages in the area, Iranian state media reported. State television reported 263 injured people were taken to two hospitals in Boroujerd, a city in the area where the quake struck.... magnitude of 6.0... preceded by two smaller tremors measuring 4.7 and 5.1...
Extraterrestrialsciencedaily.com/ ... 22:38:28Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have found evidence that a new class of small moonlets resides within Saturn's rings. There may be as many as 10 million of these objects within one of Saturn's rings alone... could help answer the question of whether Saturn's rings were formed through the break-up of a larger body or are the remnants of the disk of material from which Saturn and its moons formed... The latest findings mark the first evidence of objects of about 100 meters (300 feet) in diameter...
Feeding Ourselvessciencedaily.com/ ... 22:27:54A novel enzyme in corn helps the plants defend themselves from voracious caterpillars by disrupting the insects' ability to digest food, and ultimately killing them... could be used in tandem with other biological pesticides such as the Bt toxin to prevent the pests from developing resistance and making the toxin more effective...
Animal Companionscommercialappeal.com/ ... 11:57:22Cat ExcitedDays with neither food nor water, the cat... was trapped behind the wall... new house under construction... heard a crying cat and spotted a paw... just enough space between the fireplace gas pipe and edge of the hole made for the pipe for the cat to push its paw through for someone -- anyone -- to see... "He had his paw out touching -- not clawing -- the whole time, like he was saying 'Come on! Come on!''... his ribs were sticking out... temporary name... Wally...
Only Naturalsciencedaily.com/ ... 22:39:19Testing by U.S. scientists finds that the Pacific Ocean is getting warmer and more acidic, while the amount of oxygen is decreasing... sciencedaily.com/ ... 22:30:52cologists have long asked, Why is the world green? In other words, why aren't herbivores, such as insects and grazing animals, more successful at eating the world's green leaves, also known as plant biomass? In the May 2006 issue of American Naturalist, Steven D. Allison (University of California, Irvine) asks the same questions a different way: Why is the ground brown? Why don't the organisms that break down the carbon in the soil consume it all?.. timesonline.co.uk/ ... 11:52:20Air temperatures above the entire frozen continent of Antarctica have risen three times faster than the rest of the world during the past 30 years...
Good is Innatesfgate.com/ ... 11:49:20Hiker finds $1 million in jewels... [in] tourists' Louis Vuitton bag on park bench... turned it over to police with all its contents... a Cartier watch, diamond and ruby rings, pearl earrings, necklaces with large diamond stones, and $500 in cash... 28-year-old son, Ali Khalili, said of the phone call. "My mom started to cry again and my dad became very emotional, too... That was a big deal. There are still good people in this world..."
Science Marches Onnnnnnsciencedaily.com/ ... 22:40:18In a new study forthcoming in the May 2006 issue of The American Naturalist, Mark A. Changizi and his coauthors, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo, from the California Institute of Technology explore the hypothesis that human visual signs have been cross-culturally selected to reflect common contours in natural scenes that humans have evolved to be good at seeing. "[We] analyzed one hundred writing systems, Chinese characters, and non-linguistic visual signs, and found that these very different types of human visual signs possess a similar shape structure," explain the researchers... sciencedaily.com/ ... 22:35:17Los Alamos scientists, working with collaborators from around the world, recently observed experimental evidence of solitary vibrations (solitons) in a solid. First observed as localized waves on the surface of water more than a century ago, the concept of solitons in solids was only theorized as possible two decades ago... Scottish scientist John Scott Russell first described the soliton in August 1834 after observing the phenomenon on the surface of water in Scotland's Union canal. In the late 1980s, scientists theorized that solitons might exist in solids and molecules, calling them intrinsic localized modes or discrete breathers, but had no physical evidence of their existence. Although the discovery will have immediate implications for uranium science and the field of solid-state physics, the potential applications of this discovery in other fields are yet to be seen. They might include new explanations of the roles that localized vibrations may play in breaking chemical bonds in biological processes. The new knowledge might also provide the scientific underpinnings for the development of future devices that exploit localized energy waves... sciencedaily.com/ ... 22:29:31IBM scientists have developed a powerful new technique for exploring and controlling magnetism at its fundamental atomic level... "We can now position atoms and then measure and control their magnetic interactions within precisely designed structures..." sciencedaily.com/ ... 22:27:24...gold nanoparticles can act as tiny, precise and powerful heaters for use in biomedical applications... a metal nanoparticle, such as gold, can be stimulated with the right frequency of laser light to heat an area up to 1,000 times its size... "What's amazing is that we're taking particles that you can't even image with a light microscope, and all of the sudden they cause a huge change in a macroscopic system..." newscientist.com/ ... 12:01:38A DEVICE that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed... One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:53:32The company that cloned the first horse to be sold commercially said on Thursday it plans to market 22 similar animals before 2008, marking another step forward for the controversial technology...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 22:42:02us-flagArmy Pfc. Sean D. Tharp, 21, of Orlando, Fla., died in Baghdad, Iraq on March 28, when his element came under enemy small arms fire while conducting dismounted patrol operations. Tharp was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry, 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. defenselink.mil/ ... 10:22:43us-flagAir Force Tech. Sgt. Walter M. Moss Jr., 37, of Houston, Texas, was killed in the explosion of an improvised explosive device while conducting safing operations in the vicinity of Baghdad, Iraq on March 29. Moss was assigned to the 366th Civil Engineer Squadron, Mountain Home AFB, Idaho.
Ummm....theindychannel.com/ ... 22:25:50LAWRENCE, Ind... Councilman R. Douglas Reeser, upset at the end of a special council meeting, expressed his displeasure after he and two other Republicans were outvoted on some measures... upset because they felt they didn't get a chance to speak to their point of view... stirred controversy with a Nazi-style salute in protest...
Free Expressionhosted.ap.org/ ... 22:23:34SEATTLE -- The state Supreme Court ruled Thursday a trial judge overreached his authority when he restricted a man from posting information on a Web site. Paul Trummel was jailed for more than three months in 2002 in his free-speech standoff with the judge over the Web site he used as a forum for attacking the Council House, a federally subsidized retirement home where he once lived. Trummel posted the phone numbers and addresses of Council House staff, directors and residents - something that King County Superior Court Judge James Doerty characterized as harassment. Trummel removed the information after his release from jail, but appealed his case...
Transport Incidentnaplesnews.com/ ... 11:55:00was driving... when the pet snake he had wrapped around his neck attacked his face... crashed into several roadwork barricades...
Theory of Educationlocal6.com/ ... 11:44:11Several parents in Apopka, Fla., are upset over a surprise school "Holocaust" project that some say tormented children... eighth-graders with last names beginning with L through Z... were given yellow five-pointed stars for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Other students were privileged.... Father... said his son was forced to stand in the back of the classroom and not allowed to sit because he was wearing the yellow star. "He was forced to go to the back of the lunch line four times by an administrator.... He was crying.... I said, 'What are you crying about?' He said, 'Daddy, I was a Jew today.'.... I tried to talk to my son and I asked all of these questions and the only thing he said is, 'Daddy, the only thing I found out today is I don't want to be Jewish...'" "..they could not use the water fountains..." "some not told the rule..."
People Diewoai.com/ ... 10:52:47A woman whose 457-pound body sat in a morgue for more than a month during a dispute over the cost of her cremation will be cremated within the next few days... wasn't immediately cremated because Dallas County and the crematorium it contracts with disagreed over the extra dollar per pound charged for bodies weighing more than 300 pounds...
Digital Threatnews.ft.com/ ... 10:50:29MySpace.com, the fast-growing community website hugely popular with American teens, has removed 200,000 “objectionable” profiles from its site as it steps up efforts to calm fears about the safety of the network for young users...
Sex can be... disturbingdailymail.co.uk/ ... 10:48:08most women still believe one-night stands are immoral...
Sex can be Boringcontactmusic.com/ ... 10:47:46Legendary performer LIZA MINNELLI has declared she is through with sex and just wants to find a partner who is kind and has some integrity...
Iraqtoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:47:01U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice... "Yes, I know we have made tactical errors, thousands of them," she said in answer to a question over whether lessons had been learned since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. "I believe strongly that it was the right strategic decision, that Saddam had been a threat to the international community long enough," she added...
Print is Deadnydailynews.com/ ... 10:45:26Tens of thousands of New York Posts were dumped at two recycling centers yesterday morning, just hours after being printed, in a bizarre circulation ploy that has already come to the attention of newspaper circulation authorities. An executive at a Brooklyn facility where at least 10,000 Posts were dumped said the papers would be sent to China, still wrapped in their original plastic binders... The decision to dump the Posts en masse is even more puzzling as the papers had been sponsored by Nike and Jordan Brand, and were originally destined to be given away to consumers in the city...
Alcohol Was Involvedforbes.com/ ... 10:21:44Many previous studies suggesting that moderate drinking helps prevent heart disease may be flawed, says a report by a group of researchers from Australia, Canada and the United States. They analyzed 54 studies that looked at the association between drinking and risk of premature death from all causes, including heart disease. The new report concluded that many of those studies did not account for the effects of age and illness that make abstainers have higher death rates than moderate drinkers...
CD/DVD/etc is Deaddigital-lifestyles.info/ ... 10:16:58Toshiba has today released the first HD-DVD player. The Japanese release will be a big PR boost for the HD-DVD camp in their long running battle for the next-gen High Definition DVD format with Blu-ray. Toshiba said they plan to release the HD-DVD player in the US by the middle of next month and computers equiped with HD-DVD in April-June this year...
Theory of Justiceorlandosentinel.com/ ... 11:41:33...a college student who ran a red light in 2004 and killed two girls [5 & 2] as they crossed the street with their mother, has pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide... was ordered to serve 30 days in the Orange County Jail without the chance of work release... also must serve 500 hours of community service, completing 10 hours per month by speaking to young drivers about safe driving... drivers license was revoked for three years... A chief concern was whether Townsend was using a cell phone at the time of the incident... told an FHP investigator she was... cell-phone records, however, indicate she was not... forbes.com/ ... 10:06:52Profile of the judge in the Moussaoui trial, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema... Brinkema, a graduate of Rutgers and the Cornell law school, has a reputation for fairness and a direct, no-nonsense style in court... Brinkema is particularly protective of her juries - she has kept the names of jurors secret in the Moussaoui trial and in other terror cases. She makes more than the usual effort to explain various legal asides to the jury to assuage their curiosity. On several occasions she has described the panel weighing evidence in the Moussaoui trial as "a good jury" for the case. She made a point of maintaining eye contact with jury members throughout the trial, even arranging seating so that a tall juror wouldn't block her view of others. She even inquired, unsuccessfully, about obtaining HOV lane passes for jurors who were worried about getting to court on time...
World Without Bordersworldnetdaily.com/ ... 22:24:21The coalition that organized an estimated 500,000 marchers in Los Angeles to protest immigration reform announced its next mass action is "an economic and labor boycott that will paralyze the U.S. economy." The radical separatist publication La Voz de Aztlan, the Voice of Aztlan, said the proposed boycott is in response to a "racist" measure in Congress... apnews.myway.com/ ... 22:24:02President Bush said Friday the United States believes it is important to enforce laws protecting borders and told the leaders of Mexico and Canada that was crucial to keeping prosperity alive. He also reiterated strong support for a "guest worker" program that would allow undocumented immigrants already in the United States to remain in the country to fill low-paying jobs that Americans won't take... azstarnet.com/ ... 10:47:26Tensions over immigration reform heightened in the Phoenix area's East Valley Thursday when students raised a Mexican flag over Apache Junction High School — and then other students yanked it down and burned it. "I know (they) shouldn't have burned the Mexican flag," said Jacob Stewart, a 16-year-old sophomore. "I heard it was raised above the American flag and that just irked me..." theglobeandmail.com/ ... 10:15:51For the top Hamas man in the West Bank, it isn't a shock that Western countries have begun cutting funding and ties to the Palestinian Authority. But it was surprising for him to see Canada go first... washingtonpost.com/ ... 00:33:35Guard the Borders -- And Face Facts, Too By George F. Will... America, the only developed nation that shares a long -- 2,000-mile -- border with a Third World nation, could seal that border... But control belongs at the top of the agenda, for four reasons. First, control of borders is an essential attribute of sovereignty...
Digital Culturesciencedaily.com/ ... 22:39:01An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is studying whether RFID technology can be used as a low cost, reliable means to track firefighters and other first responders inside buildings and help them navigate under hazardous conditions... washingtonpost.com/ ... 00:35:50online experiment based on... Whack-a-Mole!.. About 1,500 people found their way to our Web site to whack away at eight celebrities, eight politicians or eight notorious dictators... Participants also took a survey that asked how they feel about the Republican and Democratic parties and about selected party leaders. To measure the cathartic effect of online whacking, half were questioned before they started pummeling; the other half afterward... washingtonpost.com/ ... 00:34:43Second Life, the trendy online universe... fast-growing, three-dimensional place where people are not only hanging out but buying land, building virtual casinos and opening other businesses that earn real dollars selling virtual stuff... Second Life's creator, a company called Linden Lab, landed an additional $11 million in financing this week from a group of high-profile investors, including Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar... marketwatch.com/ ... 00:32:27John C. Dvorak... Apple vs. Apple is an old song... In an effort to save the money, though, I would suggest that the company change its name for good. Offer a million dollars to the public-at-large in a competition to rename the company...
Culturecsmonitor.com/ ... 00:31:50'Ice Age: the Meltdown' is a family reunion that everyone can warm up to... The best parts of the film, as in the original, are the sequences with Scrat squeaking and scrambling after an elusive acorn...
Supernaturalsptimes.com/ ... 00:31:17Is it the prayer that's flawed, or is it the study? A study says heart surgery patients didn't benefit from being prayed for - but other scientists and clergy say no study could measure such a thing...
THU 2006-MAR-30
Prison Suckstennessean.com/ ... 17:32:29Large jars of peanut butter have been banned in Tennessee's 15 state prisons because inmates were hiding guns, drugs and other contraband in the 18-ounce containers, state corrections officials said. The ban came after an investigation revealed that George Hyatte, a prisoner in Knoxville, had concealed a smuggled cell phone in a jar of peanut butter at the prison where he was being held and used it to coordinate a deadly breakout while being taken to court in August...
Theftbreitbart.com/ ... 17:28:01German authorities have arrested a man who is accused of trying to extort $2 million from the Christian Science Monitor by promising to win the release of American reporter Jill Carroll, who was freed from captivity in Baghdad Thursday...
Transport Tragedyfoxnews.com/ ... 17:40:36MANAMA, Bahrain — A ferry carrying up to 150 people sank Thursday night in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Bahrain, and at least 44 bodies had been recovered... at least 52 people had been rescued... was on an evening cruise that was to last several hours. It overturned less than a mile off the coast... breitbart.com/ ... 08:42:22DogA pet owner sued American Airlines on Wednesday after his English bulldog died following a cross-country flight. Terrence Ing, 29, claims airline employees refused to provide a veterinarian and other care after the dog became sick. He is seeking unspecified damages...
Yuck!local6.com/ ... 08:35:35Signs warning of bird droppings were posted along a stretch in downtown Orlando this week after cars, benches, sidewalks, plants and even people are hit and covered by the white bird waste...
Threatsbreitbart.com/ ... 17:26:05The US military plans to detonate a 700 tonne explosive charge in a test called "Divine Strake" that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said. "I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency... The aim is to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures... thenewstribune.com/ ... 08:31:37A 5-year-old Fircrest kindergartener, who got up on a chair at home, climbed on the washer-dryer and grabbed an old pistol from a cupboard, took the gun to school Monday. The boy carried the unloaded .22-caliber weapon in his backpack to Whittier Elementary School and showed it to a friend on the playground... did not make any threats with the gun, which he eventually put into a friend’s backpack. He told the principal what he’d done and was suspended for 10 days... worldnetdaily.com/ ... 08:26:42As a Los Angeles police officer for the past 32 years, I must agree that the immigration issues will lead to violence in this country. The city of Los Angeles is ripe for riots spurred by angry youths and activists... breitbart.com/ ... 08:08:24A US court sentenced Ahmed Omar Abu Ali to 30 years in prison for conspiring to kill President George W. Bush and for supporting Al-Qaeda. The Arab-American student, 25, was found guilty last November on nine counts of plotting to kill Bush, conspiracy to hijack a plane and offering to aid Osama bin Laden's terror network...
Lost & Foundkare11.com/ ... 08:33:29Two runaway teenage girls told police that a St. Paul family kidnapped them and forced them into prostitution, drugging them and pistol-whipping them when they resisted... Police arrested five people when they raided a home to rescue one of the girls. A mother and her two sons have been charged. Four other children ages 2 to 10 who lived at the home were put in protective custody... The teenagers told investigators that they were subdued by being forced to smoke crack, take sleeping pills or use methamphetamine. The Ramsey County attorney's office on Monday charged ...a 34-year-old mother, with kidnapping, aiding and abetting criminal sexual conduct and terrorizing the two girls... 16-year-old son was charged with four counts of kidnapping for aiding and abetting criminal sexual conduct. ...15-year-old son was charged, but details of that case were not released because of his age... today.reuters.com/ ... 08:06:55Journalist Jill Carroll was freed in Iraq on Thursday, nearly three months after being kidnapped in Baghdad...
Violencetelegraph.co.uk/ ... 08:34:53A doctor and his assistant have each been jailed for two years in India for using ultrasound scans for sex-selective abortions. Dr Anil Sabsani, a radiologist, and his assistant, who was not named, were trapped in the northern state of Haryana after the authorities were told that his clinic was offering illegal sex-determination tests. Dr Sabsani told a pregnant woman sent in undercover that he would reveal the sex of her child for an additional fee of 1,500 rupees (£20). After the woman paid the money, Dr Sabsani was caught on a hidden video camera confirming that the unborn child was female, saying: "But that can be taken care of..." examiner.com/ ... 08:08:03Rep. Cynthia McKinney and a police officer scuffled Wednesday after the Georgia Democrat entered a House office building unrecognized and refused to stop when asked, according to U.S. Capitol Police. McKinney, a sixth-term congresswoman who represents suburban Atlanta, struck the officer according to one account, a police official said, adding there were conflicting accounts of exactly what happened... bloomberg.com/ ... 08:00:23U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan destroyed two bases of the Taliban movement after fighters attacked a coalition post in the southern province of Helmand... At least 20 gunmen were killed at the bases and weapons and materials for explosive devices destroyed in the raids... At least 12 gunmen died in the attack... news.monstersandcritics.com/ ... 07:59:30Kabul - A suicide bomber targeting Canadian soldiers killed himself Thursday and injured seven people, including a woman and two children, when he blew up his car in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar... The main target was a convoy of Canadian soldiers... Canadians suffered no casualties...
In southeastern province of Khost, two civilians and a policeman were injured Thursday morning in Ali-Khil district of the province after a remote-controlled device was detonated against a convoy of Afghan police...
Only Naturalwashingtonpost.com/ ... 17:42:41The brains of very intelligent children appear to develop in a distinctive and surprising way that distinguishes them from less intelligent children... children with the highest IQs began with a relatively thin cortex -- the folded outer layer of the brain that is involved in complex thinking -- which rapidly grew thicker before reaching a peak and then rapidly becoming thinner, said Philip Shaw, the lead investigator. Children of average intelligence had a thicker cortex around age 6, but by around 13 it was thinner than in children of superior intelligence...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 19:09:16us-flagArmy Sgt. 1st Class John T. Stone, 52, of Norwich, Vt., died March 28 in Lashkagar, Afghanistan as a result of enemy mortar and small arms attacks during combat operations. Stone was assigned to the Army National Guard's 15th Civil Support Team, South Burlington, Vt. defenselink.mil/ ... 08:14:37us-flagArmy Sgt. Michael D. Rowe, 23, New Port Richey, Fla., died in Rutbah, Iraq on March 28, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations. Rowe was assigned to the 46th Engineer Battalion, Warrior Brigade, Fort Polk, La.
US Militarydefenselink.mil/ ... 08:14:13This week, the Air Force and Navy announced an increase in the number of reservists on active duty in support of the partial mobilization, while the Army and Marine Corps numbers decreased. The Coast Guard number remained the same. The net collective result is 628 fewer reservists mobilized than last week. This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel, who have been mobilized, to 112,635, including both units and individual augmentees.
Healing Ourselvescbsnews.com/ ... 08:02:51Blood pressure and loneliness might be related, especially in older adults...
Digital Future is Nownews.com.com/ ... 08:02:24The world's largest electronics firms have decided to use Bluetooth wireless technology to send high-quality video between devices in the home, two industry associations said Tuesday. The decision, by WiMedia Alliance and Bluetooth SIG, is expected to determine how hundreds of millions of televisions, video recorders and personal computers will be connected without wires by the turn of the decade...
Extraterrestrialspaceflightnow.com/ ... 08:01:39A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome today and streaked into orbit, carrying a fresh two-man space station crew and a Brazilian test pilot making his nation's first trip off planet...
Digital Cultureblog.washingtonpost.com/ ... 17:44:22RealNetworks has issued an update to its fleet of media-player products that fixes at least three critical flaws in the applications that attackers could use to infiltrate vulnerable PCs... I long ago abandoned RealNetworks' products because I didn't like how they seemed to take over my machine's settings, generate odd pop-up screens and generally hog my bandwidth. I installed RealPlayer the other day on a PC I don't use much in order to test this update and noticed that the program still appears to have some of those same behaviors. But it occured to me that if RealNetworks can generate all of these messages, at least one of the pop-ups should remind me that I need to download a security update. Alas, RealPlayer does not do that...
Supernaturalwashingtonpost.com/ ... 17:43:23Praying for other people to recover from an illness is ineffective, according to the largest, best-designed study to examine the power of prayer to heal strangers at a distance...
That's Not Funny!foxnews.com/ ... 17:41:41...The next time you’re at the movies enjoying some comedy blockbuster, listen hard to the laughter around you. Why are all these strangers, in unison, exploding into such weird, gasping, grunting noises? Their laughs may suddenly stop seeming familiar, and more like the inhuman chatter of birds or the screeches of monkeys at the zoo. Once you start looking at laughter as behavior, it can lead to some odd questions. Why do we do it? Do animals laugh? And why do we expect that any decent James Bond villain will cackle diabolically when revealing his plan for world domination? What’s so funny?..
US Congressupi.com/ ... 17:30:37WASHINGTON, March 30 -- For the fifth time since 1993, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., had a run-in with Washington security personnel when an officer failed to recognize her... In 1993, Capitol Police posted a photo of McKinney on an office wall so officers could remember who she was after she complained. Then in 1995, she complained again about being stopped. In 1996 and 1998, she complained that White House security officials did not give her the same treatment as other members of Congress, at one time mistaking her 23-year-old white aide for her. McKinney is black. "I am absolutely sick and tired of having to have my appearance at the White House validated by white people," she said at the time...
Families Todaymetimes.com/ ... 08:40:00ANAND, India -- After giving birth to healthy twins, Mrs A, a young Indian woman, handed them to a US-based couple knowing that she was unlikely to see them again. "Her parents never knew what she was doing," her mother-in-law confides. "She told them she had a baby boy but he passed away." Mrs A, 27, is part of India's most prolific family of surrogate mothers, something that although not unlawful has to be kept a secret in this conservative country...
Transport Incidenttelegraph.co.uk/ ... 08:37:19A pilot who landed his passenger jet at the wrong airport in Northern Ireland... touched down his Airbus A320... at the Ballykelly military airport five miles short of his intended destination at City of Derry Airport... Soldiers from the base boarded the aircraft on landing... One passenger said: "As soon as we arrived at the military base... the pilot apologised that we may have arrived at the wrong airport. Everyone started laughing and thought it was a joke..."
Transportbreitbart.com/ ... 08:30:52KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Traffic engineers trying to ease congestion and reduce accidents in Kansas City have come up with an audacious idea for this side of the Atlantic: making people drive on the left side of the road... Planners said they modeled their "diverging diamond" design after one in use in the French city of Versailles, where motorists drive on the right. The cost will be $6 million, or about half the $11 million that competing ideas were projected to cost. The project is to be started and finished in 2007. Drivers will reach a traffic signal, then be guided to the opposite side of the road, which will be divided by a concrete median with glare screens to minimize the potentially disorienting sight of oncoming cars to the right. After about 600 to 700 feet, motorists reach another traffic signal and are returned to the right side of the road. Ramps before the first and second lights will allow motorists to enter I-435. The design spares motorists from having to turn left in front of oncoming traffic to get onto the highway...
Sportsmanshipbreitbart.com/ ... 08:29:32Teen golf prodigy Michelle Wie will test herself against male professionals here in July at the John Deere Classic, officials of the four million-dollar PGA tournament announced... No woman has made the cut at a US PGA Tour event since Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1945...
Now That's Funny!news.kypost.com/ ... 08:38:00In all, Covington police recovered 21 lifeless lawn figurines from the yard on Blue Ridge Drive. Nobody - including the home's residents - has any idea how the outdoor knick-knacks got there. "I just woke up to it. They were right in front of the driveway here..." washingtonpost.com/ ... 08:28:44"I feel very comfortable up here," Dick Cheney said as he stood at the podium at the 62nd annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner last night at the Hilton Washington. "The lighting could be better, but I can still see the whites of your eyes," the sometime quail hunter joked. The vice president was the featured speaker at the event, and he brought along a comic slideshow. He was pretty funny, and he seemed to be having a good time. Several times he even smiled, sort of. "I know how to have fun," he said. "I'm a real party animal." That got a laugh...
Reasons for Repealansa.it/ ... 08:27:54Rome, March 27 - Mafia drug traffickers were building a submarine to bring cocaine from Colombia to Italy, Italy's anti-Mafia chief said Monday...
Theory of Sex Educationkutv.com/ ... 08:27:26FERRON- A former junior high school teacher in Emery County is charged with felony sex abuse of a minor for allegedly molesting a 15-year-old boy. Brandy Yates, 26, was a teacher at San Rafael Junior High School in Ferron. Authorities have filed a second-degree felony count of forcible sexual abuse against her because she was in a position of special trust...
Under Tyrannybreitbart.com/ ... 17:29:25BEIJING - Authorities say they are holding a Chinese filmmaker because he committed a crime, but they refuse to give any details or allow visitors, his sister said Thursday. Wu Hao, a Beijing-based documentary filmmaker, has been in police custody in the capital since Feb. 22... worldnetdaily.com/ ... 08:26:15As attention focused on an Afghan Christian convert who faced the death penalty for his conversion, Algeria quietly passed a law that punishes anyone who persuades a Muslim to leave his faith, with up to five years in prison, and banishes house churches...
Theory of Justicebreitbart.com/ ... 08:21:07Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a scathing letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, accused the newspaper's staff of watching "too many episodes of the Sopranos" for interpreting a hand gesture he made at a cathedral as obscene...
World Without Bordersbreitbart.com/ ... 17:28:57US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met French President Jacques Chirac in Paris as part of a lightning tour of Europe for consultations on Iran. Rice arrived from Berlin, where she attended a meeting with foreign ministers of the major United Nations powers on how to act on Iran's nuclear program... [photo: Chirac kissing Rice] breitbart.com/ ... 17:27:39The state's highest court, which made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage, ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from other states cannot marry here... chron.com/ ... 17:27:12Reagan High School Principal Robert Pambello was ordered to remove a Mexican flag Wednesday morning that he had hoisted below the U.S. and Texas flags that typically fly in front of his school — a symbol he agreed to fly to show support for his predominantly Hispanic student body. At nearby Hamilton Middle School, a child was asked to wipe off Mexican and U.S. flags painted on his face. Hundreds of other students carried Mexican flags during walkouts Wednesday — acts of protest that they vow to continue until Congress rejects legislation that would further restrict immigration... hosted.ap.org/ ... 08:08:57CANCUN, Mexico -- The leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada are converging in this bikini-and-beer mecca for a second annual show of North American unity. Despite the emphasis on cross-border comity and cooperation, however, the neighbors come together with no resolution of nagging issues that for years have strained U.S. relations with its two largest trading partners... worldnetdaily.com/ ... 08:07:23While debates about guest-worker programs for illegal aliens take place in the corridors of power, in the streets of America's big cities no amnesty is being offered by activists calling for the expulsion of most U.S. citizens from their own country...
But is it Art?people.aol.com/ ... 08:06:05Gallery co-owner David Kesting confirmed that calls of protest have come in from as far away as "Tokyo, England, France. Some people are upset that Britney is being used for this subject matter. Others who are pro-life thought this was degrading to their movement. And some pro-choice people were upset that this is a pro-life monument..."
World of Culturescontactmusic.com/ ... 17:32:00HARRISON FORD hates the internet, because it means anyone can spread malicious gossip about him... "Any kind of rubbish goes on the internet and it can have a f**king life of its own..." [said the foul-mouted star....] chron.com/ ... 08:01:05Lawyers for Apple Computer Inc. on Thursday asserted the company's right to distribute music through its iTunes music store, rejecting claims by The Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd. that doing so violated a 1991 trademark agreement. Apple Computer lawyer Anthony Grabiner said the "distribution of digital entertainment content" was permitted under the agreement, in which the two companies promised not to tread on the other's sphere of business. Grabiner said "even a moron in a hurry" could distinguish between the computer company's online music business and a record label like Apple Corps...
Opposing Tyrannycanada.com/ ... 07:58:09Canada shuts out Hamas Canada became the first country to sever relations and cut tens of millions of dollars in aid to the new Palestinian government yesterday for its refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel. "There will be no contact and no funds, period," Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said after a meeting with the Conservative caucus. "We cannot send any direct aid to an organization that refuses to renounce terrorist activity, refuses to renounce violence..."
WED 2006-MAR-29
9/11 - still with usbreitbart.com/ ... 13:50:14Construction workers cleaning toxic waste from a vacant skyscraper near the World Trade Center site have found more bone fragments and human remains... city medical examiner's office plans to extract DNA from the latest remains to be recovered from the former Deutsche Bank building and try to match it against a database of the 2,749 people killed at the trade center on Sept. 11, 2001...
Sex can be Dangerousgulf-news.com/ ... 13:47:13Dubai: A lawyer has asked the Dubai Public Prosecution to reconsider the case of a gang-raped flight attendant and charge her with drinking and having an illicit relationship...
Scary Timesbreitbart.com/ ... 13:35:48A 13-year-old boy has been charged with a felony for sending two e-mails threatening President George W. Bush ahead of his upcoming visit to Cincinnati, Ohio... was allowed to remain in his mother's custody ahead of an upcoming court appearance... "He is extremely well versed in the history of President Bush," Florence, Kentucky Police Captain Linny Cloyd told the Cincinnati Enquirer. "In talking with him, you can tell this is a hot-button topic with him." An investigation was launched when the town's mayor received an anonymous e-mail threatening the president, who is expected to throw the first pitch for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team on Monday. A second e-mail was also sent to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon. "We asked him what brought him to this point," Cloyd said. "He didn't have an answer he was willing to share with us..." breitbart.com/ ... 13:34:57Authorities charged two teenagers in connection with a break-in at a water facility and expected to charge a third as more than 9,000 area residents waited Wednesday to hear if their drinking water had been contaminated... authorities do not yet know what, if anything, was put into the water... teens became suspects after talking about the incident at school... breitbart.com/ ... 13:34:15BLACKSTONE, Mass. Residents of two towns were ordered to stop using water from their taps after someone broke into the area's supply facility and left behind a 5-gallon container that had an odor. Authorities have ruled out terrorism, and the FBI has decided not to pursue the case... The ban remained in effect while the container and water were being tested for biological or chemical contaminants...
Animals can be Dangerousapnews.myway.com/ ... 13:32:17CatFAIRFIELD, Conn. - Residents of the neighborhood of Sunset Circle say they have been terrorized by a crazy cat named Lewis. Lewis for his part has been uniquely cited, personally issued a restraining order by the town's animal control officer. "He looks like Felix the Cat and has six toes on each foot, each with a long claw..." a neighbor said... "They are formidable weapons..."
Violencemarshfieldnewsherald.com/ ... 13:46:51A 38-year-old Spencer man was charged Monday in Marathon County court with the murder of his wife after authorities suspect he suffocated her by shoving a ceramic Easter bunny-shaped plate down her throat... seattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 13:18:50RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Saudi authorities arrested 40 suspected members of al-Qaida - including some allegedly involved in last month's attempted bombing of a key oil complex - and seized a large cache of weapons and explosives, the official Saudi Press Agency reported Wednesday. ...security forces carried out simultaneous operations in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and Qassim in the north and Asir in the south...
Only Naturalhosted.ap.org/ ... 13:58:14As the heavens and Earth moved into rare alignment, all that could be seen of the sun were the rays of its corona - the usually invisible extended atmosphere of the sun that glowed a dull yellow for about three minutes, barely illuminating the west African nation. Automatic street lights flickered on, authorities sounded whistles and schoolchildren burst into applause across Ghana's capital, Accra. Many in the deeply religious country of Christians and Muslims said the phenomenon bolstered their faith. "I believe it's a wonderful work of God, despite all what the scientists say," said Solomon Pomenya, a 52-year old doctor. "This tells me that God is a true engineer..."
Healing Ourselvesthestar.com/ ... 13:17:10KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Canadian troops fought a long and deadly battle early today in the desert sands northwest of here, leaving a 22-year-old soldier dead and three other soldiers wounded... In addition to the Canadian casualties, a U.S. serviceman and at least eight Afghan National Army soldiers also died in the battle. The dead Canadian was identified as Pte. Robert Costall, a new father who went to Afghanistan to "make a difference"... The Canadian general commanding coalition forces said the young soldier died defending his comrades... theadvertiser.news.com.au/ ... 13:10:14STEM cells harvested from the brains of mice can restore some walking ability in laboratory rats with spinal-cord damage, Canadian scientists reported yesterday. The findings are the latest success in rodent experiments to improve movement using a type of stem cell, an immature cell that can turn into different cells and tissues. Researchers hope to eventually test stem-cell therapies in people who are paralysed and help them walk again...
Supernatural Threatsbreitbart.com/ ... 13:51:18Authorities moved to quash panic among mobile phone users in eastern India after a rumour that "devil calls" from certain numbers have led to death and illness. People started turning off their handsets after a rumour swept Orissa state of phones exploding like bombs killing their owners when they answered the calls... "What I suspect is it could be the handiwork of vested interests to subsequently market anti-virus software for mobile phones. We will investigate," said Sunil Agarwal, general manger of Bharat Sanchar Nigam in Bhubaneswar city...
People are Bornbreitbart.com/ ... 13:48:46Surgeons operated on a 2-month-old Pakistani girl Tuesday to remove two fetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in her mother's womb...
Big Whoops Cascadeavpress.com/ ... 13:56:53When George Beane went to his neighborhood Burger King on Tuesday afternoon, he got four burgers his way... the charge to his debit card for two $1 Whopper Jrs. and two $1 Rodeo cheeseburgers at the drive-up window... was $4,334.33 instead of the $4.33 it should have been... Because the debit card was linked to Beane's checking account at Bank of America, the electronic charge "went through and left us penniless," Beane's wife, Pat, said Friday. Their mortgage payment was due at the time, and her fear was that they not only would have no money to pay new bills, but the checks sent for their old ones would bounce, she said... palmbeachpost.com/ ... 13:47:44A Boca Raton police sergeant left her loaded service handgun in a public bathroom at the Boca Raton Resort & Club shortly before Vice President Dick Cheney was set to arrive for a GOP fund-raiser...
Digital Culturetoday.reuters.com/ ... 13:46:31A California man in the process of getting a divorce said on Monday he was suing a popular online dating service that barred him from joining until his marriage is officially over...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinajc.com/ ... 13:46:02"The officer asked if I knew I had a lewd decal on my car and I thought, 'Oh gosh, what did my kids put on my car?' " As it turns out, the decal was an anti-Bush bumper sticker Grier slapped on her 2001 Chrysler Sebring last summer. The bumper sticker — "I'm Tired Of All The BUSH—" — contains an expletive. The officer "said DeKalb had an ordinance about lewd decals and wrote me a ticket" for $100, said Grier, an oncology nurse at Emory University Hospital who lives in Athens. Grier said she thanked the officer — and vowed to see him in court. "This is all about free speech," Grier said in a telephone interview Monday. "The officer pulled me over because he didn't agree with my politics. That's what this is about, not whether I support Bush, not because of the war in Iraq, but about my right to free speech..." worldnetdaily.com/ ... 13:45:11"I am exposing the frauds Hillary directed, and I witnessed, that won her seat in the Senate on her march to the White House," Paul told WorldNetDaily. "It has become my penance to warn the American people of the real threat to our republic posed by this power-hungry sociopath..."
Hurricanes Aftermathbreitbart.com/ ... 13:38:16Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is taking a long shot and hoping to sell its flooded, unsalvageable school buses on eBay. Some submerged to their roofs in the black flood waters, the yellow school buses were widely photographed in the days after Hurricane Katrina and have become an icon of the city's devastated school system...
Digital Theory of Educationhosted.ap.org/ ... 13:37:32A University of Memphis law professor has banned laptop computers from her classroom...
Unclear on the Conceptbreitbart.com/ ... 13:36:30Democrats are stepping up their effort to cut into the public perception that Republicans are stronger on national security... Congressional Democrats vow to provide U.S. agents with the resources to hunt down Osama bin Laden...
Tax Money Will Fix Alllatimes.com/ ... 13:33:34If terrorists come to tiny Dillingham, Alaska, security cameras will be ready. But privacy concerns have residents up in arms... DILLINGHAM, Alaska — From Anchorage it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state's southwestern edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine. This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote... pop. 2,400... So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera's shape and design resemble a robot's head... By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more — all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack...
Transportmyrtlebeachonline.com/ ... 13:25:13After a three-year run, Myrtle Beach's homegrown airline, Hooters Air, is bowing out of regularly scheduled air service...
Sex -- always attractivepugbus.net/ ... 13:22:19"...lips are the new cleavage..."
--FHM's interactive editor, Harry Groughton
World of Culturesmanagement.silicon.com/ ... 13:18:06As the two Apples - the Beatles' record label and the maker of iPods - head to court today, the question in most people's minds is not 'will they settle?' but 'for how much?'... chron.com/ ... 13:17:51Profanity getting worse? You bet your @&*# Almost 75% of Americans say they hear it in public frequently, poll finds... This is a story about words we can't print in this story... [dang!]
World Without Bordersnst.com.my/ ... 13:15:43An Afghan Christian who faced the death penalty for converting from Islam arrived in Italy from Kabul, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced... nst.com.my/ ... 13:15:21Former Liberian president and war crimes suspect Charles Taylor, captured in Nigeria, left Liberia for Sierra Leone aboard a United Nations helicopter afternoon, AFP correspondents at Monrovia airport said...
TUE 2006-MAR-28
Threatsdailymail.co.uk/ ... 16:39:51A British terror cell planned to smuggle the ingredients for a bomb from Pakistan into the UK using shampoo bottles and bags of dried fruit, the Old Bailey heard today. The vital ingredients for the explosive device were aluminium powder, ammonium nitrate and detonators...
9/11 - still with ustoday.reuters.co.uk/ ... 15:35:55Top al Qaeda operatives and others in U.S. custody said in testimony on Tuesday that Zacarias Moussaoui was untrustworthy and not part of the September 11 attacks...
Disturbing Family Patternsconcordmonitor.com/ ... 15:35:36A North Carolina mother charged with abducting her two children was accused of posing as a man while on the run. And authorities say the heavyset woman with cropped hair and a slight mustache even had the kids calling her "Daddy..." said it was all a misunderstanding...
Violencebreitbart.com/ ... 16:34:40PHILADELPHIA Two teenagers taunted a man rummaging through a trash bin and then killed him after he bared his buttocks at them... seattletimes.nwsource.com/ ... 15:34:49In Montana, the mother of a quiet young man turned mass murderer is shocked: "It's so unbelievable and overwhelming," a distraught Mary Kay Huff told the Whitefish Free Press. "At this point, I don't know what to think ... we didn't see this coming..." They found nothing in his apartment that indicated he was capable of what Deputy Chief Clark Kimerer called "homicide mayhem..." His computer... yielded no clues. His identical twin brother, Kane, with whom he shared a Northgate-area apartment, police said, was stunned and baffled by Huff's rage... today.reuters.com/ ... 15:27:39The gunman who shot and killed six young people before committing suicide arrived at the weekend house party with an arsenal of weapons and uttered "there's plenty for everyone" during the murderous rampage... police do not know the motive...
Only Naturalnews.yahoo.com/ ... 16:39:12ACCRA, Ghana - Tourists and scientists were gathering at spots around the world for a solar show — the first total eclipse in years, which will sweep northeast from Brazil to Mongolia, blotting out the sun across swathes of of the world's poorest lands... Wednesday's eclipse will blot out the sun in highly populated areas, including west Africa, where governments scrambled to educate people about the dangers of looking at the eclipse without proper eye protection. In Togo, authorities imported hundreds of thousands of pairs of special glasses that consumers cleared rapidly from shelves in the capital, Lome. But villagers in the interior won't have access to the eyewear and officials called on them to stay home...
Digital Animal Culturestuff.co.nz/ ... 16:37:26DogThe Government has snubbed farmers and their lobbyists by refusing to exempt farm dogs from rules that dogs first registered from July must be microchipped... Prime Minister Helen Clark told a press conference yesterday that Cabinet would not be changing the law, which it authorised yesterday...
Healing Ourselveswebmd.com/ ... 16:30:36Most U.S. adolescents are falling short on sleep
  • One in five adolescents get the optimal amount of sleep for their age group (nine or more hours per night).
  • Nearly half (45%) get an insufficient amount of sleep (less than eight hours per night).
  • High school students are more likely to have a sleep shortfall than those in middle school.
Adolescents with sleep shortfalls are more likely to report crankiness, school tardiness, and drowsy driving...
Culturedesmoinesregister.com/ ... 15:28:33Skyler Bartels, a Drake University sophomore from Harvard, Neb., decided to spend his spring break at the Wal-Mart in Windsor Heights... flooded with e-mail and phone calls. Some of the correspondence included requests for national media appearances and interviews. First to get in touch was a representative from "The Late Show with David Letterman..."
Supernatural Threatsnews-journalonline.com/ ... 16:46:40The most memorable moment of Terica Washington's 30th birthday Monday was looking into the sky and seeing an airplane towing a black banner with words written in white: "6/6/06 You have been warned". She was alarmed enough to call the FBI. "It made me feel really creepy, especially in this day and age," said Washington, who works at Ocean Walk Resort. Noting that June 6 is a Tuesday, she drew the connection to Sept. 11, 2001, also a Tuesday. "I thought it might be terrorists," she said... [photo]
Under Tyrannyapnews.myway.com/ ... 16:44:39KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan man who had faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity quickly vanished Tuesday after he was released from prison, apparently out of fear for his life with Muslim clerics still demanding his death...
Fun can be Dangerousstartribune.com/ ... 16:40:28Devin Haskin isn't the first little boy to find the inside of a toy machine too enticing to resist. When the 3-year-old Austin boy crawled through the discharge chute of a Toy Chest claw machine at a Godfather's Pizza here, he ended up on the other side of the glass surrounded by stuffed animals... [photo!]
World Zookeepingdetnews.com/ ... 16:38:34SUPERIOR TOWNSHIP ---- The bodies of two more dogs... two pit bulls... have been discovered in eastern Washtenaw County, bringing to nine the number that have been found in 11 days... Neither of the young male dogs was decapitated like four of the other seven dogs... reward for anyone helping solve the case has risen to $13,000... Besides the dogs, more than 30 foxes, coyotes and deer have been discovered in the same three-mile area since January. Most were skinned and some beheaded. The humane society believes the skinnings and decapitations are connected but still have many questions about the case, including how and where the animals died...
World Without Borderstoday.reuters.com/ ... 16:35:53London's rambunctious mayor, already fighting suspension for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, landed in fresh hot water on Tuesday for likening the U.S. ambassador to a "chiseling little crook." Mayor Ken Livingstone has been quarrelling with the U.S. embassy since last year, when it announced it would not pay the "congestion charge" fee imposed on cars entering the city center. The embassy says the charge is a tax and that diplomats are immune under treaty. Livingstone says the charge, one of his flagship policies, is a road toll which diplomats have to pay...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinnews.yahoo.com/ ... 16:35:17Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi'ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque... rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi'ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies...
1980s - less with uswashingtonpost.com/ ... 16:44:06Lyn Nofziger, 81, the rumpled, irreverent political strategist and public affairs adviser who served at Ronald Reagan's right hand both in the California capitol and in the White House, died yesterday of cancer at his home in Falls Church... An offbeat figure who wore Mickey Mouse ties with the knot pulled down, Mr. Nofziger won a reputation as a shrewd, two-fisted political battler, who blended loyalty, cantankerousness and pungent phrasemaking. He was known as one of the key staff members involved in Reagan's rise from the California governor's chair to the pinnacle of American power... today.reuters.com/ ... 16:34:22Caspar Weinberger, who as Ronald Reagan's defense secretary oversaw a massive U.S. military buildup, died on Tuesday at age 88... As head of the Pentagon, Weinberger strongly opposed concessions to Moscow in arms control negotiations and pushed hard for increased defense spending, such as Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, a program to develop a land-and space-based missile shield commonly known as "Star Wars..." Weinberger became caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal that bedeviled the Reagan administration. He resigned the defense secretary job in 1987 and afterward was indicted on felony counts of lying to the independent counsel investigating the administration's program for selling missiles to Iran and giving the proceeds to the right-wing Contra forces fighting Nicaragua's socialist Sandinista government. He was pardoned by the first President Bush in 1992 days before he was to go on trial...
Transport Incidentboston.com/ ... 15:29:16A city street collapsed under a sports utility vehicle early Monday, leaving the vehicle nose down into a deep sinkhole that officials said was caused by a water main break. The driver of the SUV escaped without serious injuries... From street level, the vehicle was barely visible inside the 12-foot-wide hole...
Theory of Sex Educationnbc10.com/ ... 15:27:18A New Jersey community is outraged to learn about inappropriate sexual behavior among kindergarten students on their school bus... several incidents involving inappropriate touching... "There was some sexual curiosity going on and once the school district was apprised of it, we asked the children to stop and they stopped..."
Defining Ourselvestoledoblade.com/ ... 16:46:08A 14-year-old central Toledo girl told police she was abducted at gunpoint yesterday by a man seeking sex, but escaped after she hit him in the groin area with a hammer she found under his car seat... told police she had previously learned in school that, if something like this were to happen, to search for a weapon. So the teen told the abductor she had dropped her ring in the suspect's car and was searching for it... "That was good thinking on her part," Sgt. Richard Murphy said of the victim... worldnetdaily.com/ ... 15:26:36What does the shape of a Minneapolis stripper's naked bottom have in common with a landmark of English finance? And how is it possible that the color of the roadside prostitutes in Italy can harbor any implications for the ability of a New York woman to stay home with her children? The point of commonality, as it happens, is historical patterns of migration. In 1990, Umberto Eco wrote an article titled "Migrazioni," which was published in L'Espresso. In that essay, he presciently noted that what Europe was undergoing at that time was not a phenomenon of immigration, but of migration. The difference is significant and one of degree – an individual can immigrate or emigrate, but only a people migrate....
Under Digital Libertywashingtonpost.com/ ... 15:25:14In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Federal Election Commission left unregulated almost all political activity on the Internet except for paid political advertisements. Campaigns buying such ads will have to use money raised under the limits of current federal campaign law. Perhaps most important, the commission effectively granted media exemptions to bloggers and other activists using the Web to allow them to praise and criticize politicians, just as newspapers can, without fear of federal interference...
MON 2006-MAR-27
Threatstoday.reuters.com/ ... 23:09:18investigators were able to easily enter the United States with enough radioactive material to make two so-called dirty bombs...
Violencenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 22:10:40Several people have died during a police operation to quell a revolt by prisoners at a jail in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The justice ministry said seven inmates were killed. But the authorities have not yet given a final casualty figure... a group of inmates tried to stage a mass breakout... Georgia's reformist President Mikhail Saakashvili has launched a campaign against organised crime and corruption in the country's prisons, which house about 9,000 inmates. Breakouts are common... breitbart.com/ ... 11:41:59BOULDER, Colo... a party turned violent, leaving blood "in almost every room of the house..." rape and robbery... Six men were arrested... a seventh suspect was being sought... The victim, whose name was withheld, became acquainted with the suspects through MySpace... knew only their first names but their pictures were posted on MySpace... nysun.com/ ... 11:32:35The new documents suggest that the 9/11 commission's final conclusion in 2004, that there were no "operational" ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, may need to be reexamined in light of the recently captured documents... apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:31:33As new violence flared Monday in northern Iraq with 40 dead in a suicide bombing, Shiite leaders cut off political talks and denounced the United States over a weekend raid that they said killed worshippers in a mosque... Although the United States said no mosque was attacked, Shiites blamed the military for killing 22 people Sunday... forbes.com/ ... 11:12:00A suicide bomber attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi military base in northern Iraq in Monday, killing at least 15 people and wounding as many as 30... forbes.com/ ... 11:08:48Three explosive devices detonated at the homes of aviation industry employees in western Colorado were similar to a device that exploded at a company's corporate headquarters in Tennessee last month... cbc.ca/ ... 11:07:51The gunman who went on a shooting rampage after a zombie rave in Seattle early Saturday morning was invited to the party by one of the guests... party called "Better Off Undead." Some of the guests were "made up to look as if they were dead..." Most of the youths were asleep...
Disturbing Family Patternsbuffalonews.com/ ... 10:59:05CORTLAND - Police raiding a house for suspected illegal drugs found a 5-year-old boy weighing just 15 pounds, suffering from Down syndrome and sitting in diapers full of his own waste. Lice covered his body... home was littered with bags of garbage, dirty diapers and cockroaches... an 11-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy in the home also suffered from malnourishment and neglect...
Transport Tragedyapnews.myway.com/ ... 10:51:13At least 20 vehicles crashed on a rural Wyoming interstate in blizzard conditions Sunday, killing at least six people... undetermined number of injured... Troopers at the scene reported zero visibility... Interstate 80 was closed for about 100 miles... crash.. involved semitrailers and passenger vehicles...
Feeding Ourselvestoday.reuters.com/ ... 23:10:30The diet of preschoolers may influence the risk of breast cancer during adulthood... researchers used a 30-item food frequency questionnaire to obtain early diet information... Women who frequently consumed French fries at preschool age had an increased risk of breast cancer. The increased risk of breast cancer for one additional serving of French fries per week was 27 percent. Consumption of whole milk was linked to a slightly decreased breast cancer risk -- for each additional glass of whole milk per day, the risk decreased by 10 percent. No association was found between nutrient levels and the risk of breast cancer... cautioned against over-interpreting the results...
World Zookeepinglocal6.com/ ... 22:08:56PENSACOLA, Fla. -- Two men face felony charges of animal cruelty after they allegedly dragged a donkey behind their pickup... deputies said they found the donkey laying on the ground gasping for air with several severe open wounds. The animal had a rope tied around its neck with the other end tied to the bumper of a truck... Panhandle Equine Rescue transported the donkey to a veterinarian in Atmore, Ala., for treatment...
Only Naturallivescience.com/ ... 22:07:24A city-sized iceberg has broken off an island near Antarctica... about 8 miles wide and 15 miles long... Last year, a larger wandering iceberg named B-15A rammed into the continent and single-handedly ripped two other new city-sized icebergs free...
Digital Future is Nowlivescience.com/ ... 22:06:32European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together... squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size. They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip... the proteins... "provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip..." Electrical signals from neurons were recorded using the chip's transistors, while the chip's capacitors were used to stimulate the neurons...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 22:04:02us-flagArmy Spc. Frederick A. Carlson, 25, Bethlehem, Pa., died in Taqqadum, Iraq on March 25, from a non-combat related cause. Carlson was assigned to the Army National Guard's 228th Forward Support Battalion, 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Division, Bethlehem, Pa. The incident is under investigation. defenselink.mil/ ... 15:32:09us-flagArmy Staff Sgt. Christopher L. Robinson, 36, Brandon, Miss., died in Sangain District, Afghanistan on March 25, when his HMMWV came under enemy small arms fire during combat operations. Robinson was assigned to the Army National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group, Jackson, Miss.
It's All in Your Minddailynews.att.net/ ... 11:37:05Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists... a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago... her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature...
Culturedesmoinesregister.com/ ... 10:58:15Iowa... living at the Windsor Heights Wal-Mart for three days. Really living there. Eating, sleeping, checking out the DVDs, never leaving. The plan was to spend his entire spring break there. Under the radar... Could the biggest, most successful discount store in the world really meet his every need? Twenty-four hours a day? That's what the TV spots were telling him. "That was the goal," he said. "To buy everything I needed at Wal-Mart..." lived off energy drinks, doughnuts, yogurt and Subway sandwiches... figures he slept four hours out of the 41... a few minutes whenever he could - in a Subway booth or a restroom stall, which isn't recommended, especially with the night stockers bursting in every five minutes... best place for dozing was lawn and garden, where the lights weren't so bright. Nobody worked there between 2 and 4 a.m. Bartels found a lawn chair, kicked back and wondered how life could be better... By Tuesday morning, not even halfway through the great experiment, the store was on to him...
Sex can be... disturbingtoday.reuters.com/ ... 23:15:41Young men who feel good about their looks are more likely than their peers with a less positive body image to engage in risky sexual behavior...
People Dietoday.reuters.com/ ... 23:14:31AHMEDABAD, India - A jobless alcoholic burned himself to death after his wife refused to serve him meat for dinner...
Marriage Todaytoday.reuters.com/ ... 23:13:34A Muslim couple in India has been told by local Islamic leaders they must separate after the husband "divorced" his wife in his sleep... Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband Aftab had uttered the word "talaq," or divorce, three times in his sleep... The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split. The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn...
Motherhoodtoday.reuters.com/ ... 23:11:41Hemorrhage and high blood pressure are the leading causes of maternal deaths in poor countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America... Each year about 8 million women suffer pregnancy-related complications and over half a million die, but many of the deaths could be prevented...
Ummm....today.reuters.com/ ... 23:13:47Up to a third of telephone users in Britain make calls in the nude, with men more prone to do it without clothes than women... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 22:11:10The government in India's most lawless state, Bihar, has come up with a new approach to crime. It is paying criminals to surrender and give up their weapons. A murder takes place every two hours, a rape is committed every six and a bank is looted every day in Bihar, according to police records. Now a desperate state government is offering 10,000 rupees ($222) to every criminal to turn themselves in...
Digital Threatnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 22:09:25No_ieMicrosoft has urged consumers to be wary as three newly discovered bugs leave people open to attack while using the internet. All three flaws affect the software giant's Internet Explorer browser...
Under Tyrannyreuters.myway.com/ ... 22:08:10Chinese police have detained a Chinese-born film maker who is a permanent U.S. resident, a family member said on Monday, weeks before President Hu Jintao visits the United States. Hao Wu, who returned to China in 2004 after living in the United States for 12 years, had been missing since February 22 after interviewing human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, while making a documentary about an underground Christian congregation... An officer at the Beijing Public Security Bureau confirmed Wu's detention last week, but declined to give a reason or say where he was being held...
9/11 - still with usbreitbart.com/ ... 22:05:00Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House. Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom. His account was in stark contrast to his previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release an Egyptian sheik imprisoned on separate terrorist convictions... knew the World Trade Center attack was coming and he lied to investigators when arrested in August 2001 because he wanted it to happen. "You lied because you wanted to conceal that you were a member of al- Qaida?" prosecutor Rob Spencer asked. "That's correct," Moussaoui said. Spencer: "You lied so the plan could go forward?" Moussaoui: "That's correct..." told the court he knew the attacks were to take place some time after August 2001 and bought a radio so he could hear them unfold. Specifically, he said he knew the World Trade Center was going to be attacked, but he asserted he was not part of that plot and didn't know the details...
That's Not Funny!newsday.com/ ... 11:43:01ALBANY, N.Y. -- It was just a joke, potential Republican challenger Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland said Saturday after the New York Post reported her saying Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's camp was spying on her... "This is a perfect example of what is happening in American politics. One misinterpreted joke and your opponents are smearing you in the press.... I continue to believe that we can be better than that. But, I've got to tell you, it's not easy..."
Police Riotchron.com/ ... 11:40:16AUSTIN - The state has ordered its troopers to cover up any tattoos in a move intended to preserve the officers' clean-cut image...
Digital Theftnews.yahoo.com/ ... 11:40:00[male], 32, pleaded guilty this week in Winnebago County to remotely accessing someone else's computer system without permission... has the dubious distinction of being the first person to face the charge in Winnebago County, and prosecutors say they're taking the crime seriously...
Defending Ourselvespalmbeachpost.com/ ... 11:38:51WEST PALM BEACH — For two months, they spent their nights as volunteer security guards in their burglary-plagued house of God. The vigilance paid off early Friday when a suspected burglar broke through a window and encountered a half-dozen church members wielding baseball bats and broom handles...
Supernatural Threatsworldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:31:00Could the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork – some of it hundreds of years old? That is the seemingly incredible thesis of a new documentary, "Rape of the Soul," made not by anti-Catholic bigots, but by devout followers of the Church. "Rape of the Soul" is in theatrical release in major cities, including New York and Los Angeles... [ad]
Theory of Sex Educationbuffalonews.com/ ... 11:44:04Laura Murphy planned on attending her prom at Villa Maria Academy. She paid the $100 deposit, scheduled a limousine rental and asked her date. She ran into a snag, however, and it has nothing to do with what shoes to wear. Administrators of the private, all-girls Catholic high school school don't like Murphy's choice of companion, and they've told her to find someone else or come alone. Murphy, a senior who is openly lesbian, wants to bring her girlfriend of six months, Lindsey Shelton, and believes school administrators are discriminating against them... morningjournal.com/ ... 11:43:39Lorain school officials this week executed an ''emergency removal'' of an 8-year-old boy who they say sexually harassed a girl in gym class... worldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:29:39popular middle school teacher, 43-year-old Pamela Diehl-Moore, had tearfully pleaded guilty to having sex with a child – a 13-year-old male student who had just completed 7th grade... New Jersey Superior Court Judge Bruce A. Gaeta... "I really don't see the harm that was done here," the judge proclaimed, "and certainly society doesn't need to be worried. I do not believe she is a sexual predator. It's just something between two people that clicked beyond the teacher-student relationship... Maybe it was a way for him, once this happened, to satisfy his sexual needs.... People mature at different rates... I don't see anything here that shows this young man has been psychologically damaged by her actions. And don't forget, this was mutual consent. Now certainly under the law, he is too young to legally consent, but that's what the law says. Some of the legislators should remember when they were that age. Maybe these ages have to be changed a little bit..." " Clicked"? With a 13-year-old?.. Five years probation – no jail time...
U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten in Kansas... "Where is the clear, credible evidence that underage sex is always injurious? If you tell me because it is illegal, I reject that..." worldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:26:42The ever-increasing list of teachers having sex with students...
World Without Borderswashingtonpost.com/ ... 11:06:45a case that, had the Bush administration acted responsibly at any time in the past 4 1/2 years, would not even be in court. The case is a challenge to the military commissions the administration has set up at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to try war-crimes suspects. It poses a bewildering array of difficult legal questions: Are the commissions legal? What procedural rights must they guarantee to comply with statutes, treaties and the Constitution? After a congressional move to strip the courts of jurisdiction over litigation from Guantanamo, does the court even have the power to hear this case? But these questions confront the justices only because of the administration's insistence on pursuing a strategy that has failed in all respects... newsday.com/ ... 11:06:09The Republicans' election-year push for immigration reform was supposed to be a boon for the party, coupling tough border protections with a humane guest-worker program to bring 12 million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. Instead, that effort, which comes to a head this week in the Senate, has splintered the Republican ranks, pitting pro-business moderates and the White House against hard-liners eager to tap voter anger on the issue...
Theory of Educationtoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:05:34taught real estate finance and development at the university, stole at least $1.5 million in the first 10 months of 2005, telling students and other investors he would buy land in Chicago and Las Vegas and then sell it for large profits...
World of Culturessfgate.com/ ... 11:05:02More than 25,000 evangelical Christian youth landed Friday in San Francisco for a two-day rally at AT&T Park against "the virtue terrorism" of popular culture, and they were greeted by an official city condemnation and a clutch of protesters who said their event amounted to a "fascist mega-pep rally..."
SUN 2006-MAR-26
Transport Tragedybreakingnews.nypost.com/ ... 11:01:35ALAMO, Nev... 26-year-old woman drifted off the road and lost control of the van just before 4 a.m... truck driver, a 59-year-old male, attempted to swerve but crashed into the van nearly head on... truck driver was uninjured... killing the van's pregnant driver and five children... between the ages of 2 and 11... The sole survivor in the minivan was the driver's 50-year-old mother...
Digital Threatwashingtonpost.com/ ... 10:53:59For almost two years, intelligence services around the world tried to uncover the identity of an Internet hacker who had become a key conduit for al-Qaeda. The savvy, English-speaking, presumably young webmaster taunted his pursuers, calling himself Irhabi -- Terrorist -- 007. He hacked into American university computers, propagandized for the Iraq insurgents led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and taught other online jihadists how to wield their computers for the cause. Suddenly last fall, Irhabi 007 disappeared from the message boards. The postings ended after Scotland Yard arrested a 22-year-old West Londoner, Younis Tsouli, suspected of participating in an alleged bomb plot. In November, British authorities brought a range of charges against him related to that plot. Only later, according to our sources familiar with the British probe, was Tsouli's other suspected identity revealed. British investigators eventually confirmed to us that they believe he is Irhabi 007... Countless Web sites and password-protected forums -- most of which have sprung up in the last several years -- now cater to would-be jihadists like Irhabi 007. The terrorists who congregate in those cybercommunities are rapidly becoming skilled in hacking, programming, executing online attacks and mastering digital and media design -- and Irhabi was a master of all those arts... our future security is going to depend increasingly on identifying and catching the shadowy figures who exist primarily in the elusive online world...
Industrial Incidentnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:50:12Sixteen people were taken to hospital after a floor collapsed at a building where a funeral wake was being held. West Midlands ambulance crews were called to an address in Lozells Street, Lozells, following reports that up to 30 people were trapped... up to 50 people were in the building attending a wake when a floor collapsed into a cellar... bystander said he heard a lot of screaming...
Lost & Foundforbes.com/ ... 10:30:23A woman who said she ran off with a school security guard when she was an eighth-grader and was held in his house for a decade is getting counseling following her escape...
Disturbing Family Patternssuntimes.com/ ... 10:13:11Third time still not charm for bank robbers... The third and final try was an apparently carefully planned scheme... allegedly enlisted the help of another woman... didn’t bring her family along this time... suntimes.com/ ... 10:11:44in the western suburbs... 38-year-old mother had her high-school aged son plant drugs in another boy's backpack... then phoned in to report where the marijuana and pills could be found. The motive: She was mad at the boy's mother.... Her family would only say Friday night that Marmolejo, who underwent treatment for a mental illness at Hinsdale Hospital in the days leading up to the incident, was embroiled in a years-long, ongoing feud with the victim's mother.... sister also said this is a case of a mother taking the rap to protect her 14-year-old son... In one episode of the popular Sunday night soap opera, one of the "Housewives" tipped off the school that her son had drugs in his locker -- part of a complicated plot twist to make the son understand the consequences of his actions...
Violencenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 22:43:21At least 16 people have been killed in a raid on a mosque in Baghdad where militants loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr were based... US forces led the raid on a mosque, while the US says Iraqi troops ran it with US support. "No mosques were entered or damaged during this operation," the US military said in a statement. In a second raid, US troops arrested more than 40 Interior Ministry staff said to be guarding a secret prison... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:47:56Iraqi security forces have found 30 bodies, all of them beheaded, near the town of Baquba... whotv.com/ ... 10:30:36BAGHDAD, Iraq Iraqi police say a roadside bomb has killed a 13-year-old student in front of a school... upi.com/ ... 10:29:15SEATTLE, March 26 -- Seattle police say they had "absolutely no idea" of what drove a man to kill six people, wound two others and then kill himself in a police showdown... forbes.com/ ... 10:08:20Seattle... A gunman opened fire early Saturday in a home, killing six partygoers and critically injuring at least one other before committing suicide when confronted by police outdoors...
US Militarymsnbc.msn.com/ ... 10:54:57The Airborne Laser, or ABL, is a Boeing 747 aircraft being equipped with a high-powered chemical laser to destroy ballistic missiles in their boost phase... As envisioned, the aircraft would fly in a figure-eight pattern over an area deemed a likely site of a missile launch. Onboard infrared sensors would detect the launch and feed that information into a computer that would direct the laser turret to point at the ascending missile. The turret would then fire two lower-powered solid-state lasers — one to track the missile and one to measure atmospheric distortion — before shooting the high-powered chemical laser at the target...
Digital Culturenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:49:33In Japan... the launch of electronic books and comics specifically for phones... The story of the Japanese mobile novel begins in Tokyo's fashionably hip youth hangout of Shibuya... It was here five years ago that a budding young author calling himself Yoshi gave out leaflets to 2,000 teenage girls. Little did he realise that this would be the spark to ignite a whole new era. Deep Love, the story of adolescent romance through a chance encounter, was a runaway success. Yoshi made good use of the fact that users could feedback comments, and revised it accordingly...
Prehistory - still with usscience.monstersandcritics.com/ ... 10:28:38Ethiopian and US scientists engaged in palaeo- anthropological field research announced Friday the discovery of a human cranium in Gona, in Ethiopia's north-eastern Afar region. The 'significantly complete cranium' was believed to have stemmed from the Middle Pleistocene stage, making it 200,000 to 500,000 years old...
Culturerogerebert.suntimes.com/ ... 10:09:57Roger Ebert... Not very much really happens in "Duck Season," but in its rich details, it remembers how absorbing and endless every single day can seem when you're 14...
Sex can be Dangerouscharlotte.com/ ... 22:49:23A dancer who reported that she was raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team said she thought she would be dancing for five men at a bachelor party, but she and another woman were surrounded by dozens. Men shouted racial slurs at the women, both black... "We started to cry," she said. "We were so scared..." 46 members of the men's team submitted DNA samples to police... players deny the criminal allegations...
Why People Go Vegannews.yahoo.com/ ... 22:47:38PigResearchers say they have created cloned piglets that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the oil that is prized as being beneficial to the heart...
Alcohol Was Involvedsuntimes.com/ ... 22:46:13A woman was charged with drunk driving Sunday after plowing through a fence at a South Side high school and crashing into a restaurant... failed to stop at a stop sign... crashed into another car... through a fence... continued driving and finally crashed into the kitchen of a restaurant...
Iraqnews.telegraph.co.uk/ ... 10:57:16Saddam Hussein planned to use "camels of mass destruction" as weapons to defend Iraq, loading them with bombs and directing them towards invading forces...
It's Only Moneytoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:55:22IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, ranked 4th richest man in the world, drives a 15-year-old car and always flies economy class, in part to inspire his 90,000 employees worldwide to see the virtue of frugality...
Rebuildingazcentral.com/ ... 10:29:38Arizona's Sen. John McCain held a news conference in Baghdad Saturday, and Valley soldiers stationed there said they agree with him that U.S. forces shouldn't leave Iraq until the country's military and police forces are ready to quell internal strife...
Supernatural Threatsctv.ca/ ... 10:28:58The case against a man who converted from Islam to Christianity was dismissed by an Afghan court on Sunday because of a lack of evidence...
Theory of Sex Educationsuntimes.com/ ... 22:44:33Eight additional female students came forward Friday to accuse an unpaid [21yo] assistant track coach at Joliet Township High School of carrying on illicit affairs with them... charges he had sex with two teenage student athletes... may have engaged in sexual behavior with even more underage girls. "There's an indication that there are additional potential victims who have still not come forward, and we're encouraging any students who have been involved in similar instances to please come forward..." suntimes.com/ ... 10:19:40An East Leyden High School teacher who allegedly sexually assaulted one of his female students on campus during the school day was ordered held on $750,000 bond Friday... had multiple "sexual encounters" with a high school junior during the current school year. Some of the alleged assaults occurred in Duncantell's classroom during the regular school day... victim was an aide... assaults came to light after the victim told a friend, and the information made its way to another teacher... [They don't give the age of the "victim," and certainly the betrayal of trust involved in this is disgusting and wrong for those in positions of authority, , but I can't help but think that sometimes the propagandistic language used in some of these trysts is too strong, as well as the law being too harsh about the "sex crime" involved -- there has to be some recognition of the scale that runs between some fat ugly old skank fiddling around with her sixth-graders, and a 17 year old boy making it with his foxy 23yo gym teacher...]
SAT 2006-MAR-25
Violencenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:18:42Thirteen civilians have been killed in a landmine blast carried out by suspected Maoists in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh, police say. Four others are said to be seriously injured in the blast which took place in the state's Kanker district. District police chief Pradeep Gupta said the rebels blew up a jeep carrying a group of traders late on Friday. Thousands have died in Maoist campaigns across central and southern India in the past 30 years... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:18:16Six Tamil Tiger rebels have died after blowing up their vessel off Sri Lanka's north-west coast... as the navy approached the rebel boat which was suspected of gun-running... Eight sailors are missing, while 11 others were rescued. The navy gunboat was also destroyed in the explosion. The Tamil Tigers denied involvement... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:14:34Freed hostage Norman Kember has thanked the soldiers who rescued him from kidnappers in Iraq after being reunited with his wife Pat at Heathrow airport. But the peace campaigner - criticised earlier for apparently failing to thank the rescuers - restated his opposition to foreign troops in the country. He also said he needed to reflect on whether he was "foolhardy or rational" to have gone to Iraq last year...
Industrial Tragedytoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:26:55Reebok International said on Thursday it is likely to conduct a global recall of certain promotional bracelets after a child in the United States died of lead poisoning after reportedly swallowing one... edition.cnn.com/ ... 11:06:22An explosion at a French chemistry college has killed a professor and seriously injured one other person... cause of the blast was still unknown...
Prison Suckstoday.reuters.com/ ... 00:10:16A former professional baseball player given a phantom job in a prison library to help the guards win a softball tournament was ordered to repay his $1,400 salary, the Florida attorney general said Wednesday...
Extraterrestrialspaceflightnow.com/ ... 11:00:03The maiden flight for a new breed of low-cost rockets designed to revolutionize the space launch industry met a disastrous fate Friday, tumbling out of control and slamming into the Pacific Ocean moments after liftoff... More than three years of development... South African.. Elon Musk.. spent part of the fortune he made as co-founder of PayPal... and the earlier Zip2 software company to create Space Exploration Technologies Corp... Priced at $6.7 million per launch... dsc.discovery.com/ ... 10:58:01Scientists got a glimmer on Friday of what to expect when NASA's new sharp-eyed Mars probe finally reaches its operating orbit later this year. Test images received Friday show no smears, no blurs and fine details, even in shadow...
US Militarycbs2.com/ ... 16:13:49Sonia Goldstein was flattered by the nice recruiting letter asking her to consider becoming one of "the few, the proud." But at age 78, she thinks she may be just a little old to enlist in the Marine Corps. The letter told her the corps could use her unique language skills, but also warned that life as a Marine would test her physical and mental abilities. Goldstein says she'll do whatever she can for her country, but this is kind of stretching it... sptimes.com/ ... 10:56:33A World War II airman whose frozen body was chipped out of a California glacier last fall was laid to rest Friday in his hometown of Brainerd, Minn., more than six decades after the young man disappeared during a training flight. Leo Mustonen's two nieces were among about 100 people who gathered at First Lutheran Church to say goodbye. A full military funeral followed at a cemetery overlooking the Mississippi River... He was buried alongside his mother, Anna, who grieved for years over the loss of her son...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 00:18:53us-flagArmy Sgt 1st Class Randy D. McCaulley, 44, Indiana, Pa., died in Habbaniyah, Iraq on March 23, when his dismounted patrol came under enemy small arms fire during combat operations. McCaulley was assigned to the Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 110th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 28th Infantry Division, Indiana, Pa. defenselink.mil/ ... 00:17:48us-flagArmy Spc. Antoine J. McKinzie, 25, of Indianapolis, Ind., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on March 21, when his HMMWV came under enemy small arms fire during combat operations. McKinzie was assigned to the 4th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery Regiment, 1st Armored Division, Baumholder, Germany.
Animal Culturesciencedaily.com/ ... 00:16:04The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours...
Transport Futurenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:15:10A new jet engine designed to fly at seven times the speed of sound appears to have been successfully tested. The scramjet engine, the Hyshot III, was launched at Woomera, 500km north of Adelaide in Australia, on the back of a two stage Terrier-Orion rocket. Once 314km up, the Hyshot III fell back to Earth, reaching speeds analysts hope will have topped Mach 7.6 (9,000km/h). It is hoped the British-designed Hyshot III will pave the way for ultra fast, intercontinental air travel... sciencedaily.com/ ... 00:15:41A remote-controlled aeroplane packed with scientific know-how has recently had a test flight in the United Kingdom, heralding a new generation of aircraft... FLAVIIR - flapless air vehicle integrated industrial research... "...future generation uninhabited air vehicles, so called UAVs..." "...The concept of a flapless vehicle, using fluidic thrust vectoring (where direction is changed with a secondary air flow) and air jets, is one important area of investigation. Another is the replacement of the pilot by sophisticated software that can autonomously fly the vehicle without collisions in what might be dangerous or remote environments..."
World Zookeepingtoday.reuters.com/ ... 00:10:38A giant aldabra tortoise thought to be around 250 years old has died in the Kolkata zoo of liver failure, Indian authorities said on Thursday. The tortoise had been the pet of Robert Clive, the famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century... Local authorities say the tortoise, named "Addwaitya" meaning the "The One and Only" in Bengali, was the oldest tortoise in the world but they have not presented scientific proof to back up their claim... today.reuters.com/ ... 00:09:55PandaTaiwan President Chen Shui-bian told China Thursday to drop the idea of giving the island a goodwill gift of a pair of pandas, saying they would not be happy...
Healing Ourselvesfreep.com/ ... 11:07:17A strain of virtually untreatable tuberculosis has been diagnosed, raising concern about a worldwide epidemic... resists all so-called first-line drugs and three of the six classes of second-line drugs... "The emergence of XDR TB is cause for concern because it is widely distributed geographically, including in the United States, and renders patients virtually untreatable with available drugs..." sciencedaily.com/ ... 00:13:45Sea experiments show there's a constant shuffling of genetic endowments among tiny plankton.... The "coinage" the plankton use seems to be a flood of viruses... [I've noted for decades that viruses are mutating us constantly... not just the "sniffles & flu" ones we tend to be aware of, but a "flood" of them... doing far more to us than we yet imagine....] breitbart.com/ ... 00:06:28LOS ANGELES... Authorities are examining a surveillance tape that shows an elderly woman wandering Skid Row in a hospital gown and slippers as they investigate the practice of hospitals and police agencies dumping homeless people downtown...
It's All in Your Minden.wikipedia.org/ ... 16:20:17Dancing mania is the name given to a phenomenon that occurred mainly in mainland Europe from the 14th century through to the 17th century, in which groups of people would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, until they collapsed from exhaustion. The first major outbreak of the mania was in Aachen, Germany, in July 1374....
Transportapnews.myway.com/ ... 16:19:37EOLIA, Mo. - In local diners and truck stops, drivers talk about this little highway town with a word of warning. Watch your lead foot when driving through, they say. This is a speed trap town. Eolia gained national recognition earlier this month when it was added to a rogue's gallery of speed traps listed on a Web site, speedtrap.org. That doesn't come as news to many residents, who are furious over a jump in speeding tickets being handed out under the new police chief who took over in November. "You can be in Illinois or Iowa, and you mention Eolia, and they say: Oh - the speed trap," said Jerry Burbridge, a trucker who lives in Eolia, about 70 miles northwest of St. Louis. Eolia Police Chief Jerry Sutton said he's just enforcing the law... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:17:45A man with no arms has been caught speeding at 121 km/h (75 mph), according to police in New Zealand... used one foot to steer and another to operate the pedals, told officers he was born with no arms but had been driving for years... had passengers in the car when he was stopped... Police fined the unemployed man NZ$170 (£60) and banned him from driving...
World Without Bordersnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:16:08Russia has denied providing Saddam Hussein with intelligence on US military moves in the opening days of the US-led invasion in 2003... A US Pentagon report said Russia passed details through its Baghdad ambassador. One piece of intelligence passed on was false, and in fact helped a key US deception effort, the report said...
Print is Deadtimesonline.co.uk/ ... 11:00:51Encyclopaedia Britannica... rejects study that puts it on a par with free amateur internet source... The venerable Britannica, founded in Edinburgh in 1768, is demanding that the scientific journal Nature publicly retract its finding that the open-source Wikipedia “comes close” to Britannica in accuracy...
Transport Incidentwoi-tv.com/ ... 10:57:09A luxury sternwheeler is aground on the Columbia River just upstream from Portland, Oregon... Some 260 people are aboard, and officials are trying to decide what to do with them...
Reasons for Repealseattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 10:52:18A couple rescued with four family members from a snowbound motor home in southern Oregon this week... were charged with possession of dangerous drugs for sale - methamphetamine - and possession of drug paraphernalia... In an interview in Friday's newspaper, Elbert Higginbotham acknowledged he had been arrested on drug charges in Arizona, where the couple live, but said the drugs were not his. "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. Arizona authorities and Elbert Higginbotham said he was house-sitting for a friend in Heber, Ariz., when police raided the home. Higginbotham said he knew the drug was there but called the arrest entrapment. He said he would contact Arizona authorities about the charges. "I've got to call them and take care of business. We don't run from things," he said...
Sex can be... disturbingsciencedaily.com/ ... 00:17:25Mouseexposed female mice to odors of either a male mouse alone or a male mouse with a female. The females consistently preferred the scent of males linked to other females... "Our data suggest that female mice may use, or even copy, the interests of other females based on olfactory cues.... It could also be seen as a female trusting the mate choice of another female..."
Under Tyrannytoday.reuters.com/ ... 00:09:23SAN ANTONIO, Texas - Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday. The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication...
Supernatural Threatsstartribune.com/ ... 00:08:54ST. PAUL, Minn. - A small Easter display was removed from the City Hall lobby on Wednesday out of concern that it would offend non-Christians. The display - a cloth Easter bunny, pastel-colored eggs and a sign with the words "Happy Easter'' - was put up by a City Council secretary. They were not purchased with city money...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinlatimes.com/ ... 00:08:21Madeleine Albright... It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction.... Bush may have thought he was striking a blow for good over evil, but the forces unleashed were considerably more complex. The administration is now divided between those who understand this complexity and those who do not...
Human Rightreuters.myway.com/ ... 00:05:57SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota - Abortion rights supporters planned to launch an attack on Friday on a new South Dakota abortion law designed as a direct challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion 33 years ago... South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families.. said it would lay out its strategy to take down the law in mid-morning news conferences in Sioux Falls and Rapid City... abortion rights supporters may try to take the issue before South Dakota voters in November. State law allows ballot referendums seeking to overturn legislation... "When you take things to the courts you don't have the opportunity to engage the public in the process. You don't have the ability to build a movement," said Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kate Looby. If they choose to pursue a referendum, abortion rights supporters must collect more than 16,700 signatures by June 19 to get the issue on the ballot for the November 7 election...
World - Energybreitbart.com/ ... 00:04:31A court Friday ordered the shutdown of Japan's second-largest nuclear reactor in response to a lawsuit by residents who feared it could leak dangerous radiation during a powerful earthquake...
FRI 2006-MAR-24
Industrial Tragedynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:16:42A huge explosion has ripped through a chemistry institute in Mulhouse, eastern France, killing one person and injuring another... not yet clear what caused the explosion...
Hurricanes Aftermathnewsday.com/ ... 08:09:54Young Hurricane Katrina refugees living in Texas scored considerably worse on a statewide standardized exam than Texas children, and thousands of them could be held back...
Disturbing Family Patternsnewsday.com/ ... 08:09:25OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- Two young girls [3 & 2] were found dead in the back seat of a car after their father -- wanted on rape charges -- fatally shot himself in what police called an apparent murder-suicide... newsday.com/ ... 08:07:15KILLEEN, Texas -- A Fort Hood soldier and his wife have been accused of injury to a child for allegedly forcing their 3-year-old daughter to beat up an older boy as they videotaped it...
Police Riotnewsday.com/ ... 08:06:42HORN LAKE, Miss. -- An unidentified elderly Horn Lake couple were hospitalized Thursday after police burst into their home thinking it housed a methamphetamine laboratory... right address but the wrong house... A man and a woman -- both in their 80s -- were injured as TACT team members secured the house although no drugs were found. There were children in the house also, but they were not awakened... Beshears said the woman received a dislocated shoulder and the man received bruised ribs... "Obviously, a mistake was made and it was regrettable.... But, I stand by my officers. I think they acted properly...."
Thefttmz.aol.com/ ... 09:32:44Randy Quaid has filed a lawsuit claiming he was done in by producers of 'Brokeback Mountain.'... claiming producers falsely represented the movie to him as \"a low-budget, art house film, with no prospect of making any money.\" Qauid claims the representations were a ruse from the beginning. 'Brokeback' has grossed around $160 million... claim that the defendants "were engaged in a 'movie laundering' scheme designed to obtain the services of talent such as Randy Quaid on economically unfavorable art film terms..." newsday.com/ ... 08:04:49SAMMAMISH, Wash. -- Whoever bounced off with 54 new soccer balls and other paraphernalia from a high school ticket booth took a lot of time so as not "to make a big mess..." A quarter-inch-thick glass pane weighing about 30 pounds was carefully removed... "It wasn't a smash and grab, it was kind of like a 'nice' burglar -- not to make a big mess.... You wouldn't have noticed it because the window was missing..."
Violencebreitbart.com/ ... 14:19:33The wife of a slain minister confessed to shooting him at their church parsonage, then fleeing to Alabama, where she was found the following night with their three young daughters... Police investigator... declined to discuss a motive.... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:17:43Pakistani troops have killed at least 15 militants in fighting near the Afghan border... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:17:19Five Iraqis have been killed and 17 injured by a bomb planted outside a Sunni mosque in the town of Khalis, 60km (40 miles) north-east of Baghdad...
Earlier, a series of insurgent attacks in the capital left seven other people dead, including three policemen...
Police also discovered the bodies of seven men in the city's east. They had been handcuffed and shot in the head... newsday.com/ ... 08:09:38Sheriff's deputies investigating two stabbings took a man into custody Thursday after a more than three-hour standoff at his mobile home, where Nazi flags were displayed outside... newsday.com/ ... 07:44:19KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A police chief was killed Thursday by his own guard... who was killed immediately after by other guards... in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, while coalition forces announced the killing of six Taliban members in a separate incident... Musa Qala, about 280 miles southwest of the capital Kabul, is believed to be a hide-out of members of the deposed Taliban regime, which has increased attacks in southern Afghanistan in recent months. Some of the violence has also been blamed on a booming trade in drugs. Separately, coalition forces said that Afghan soldiers backed by coalition troops killed six Taliban fighters Tuesday in the central Afghanistan province of Oruzgan. The operation was carried out against a "Taliban command cell" and also led to the confiscation of materials to make homemade bombs, the statement said...
Lost & Foundnewsday.com/ ... 07:51:38Hose kept her in his parents' house since she was reported missing in eighth grade. As the years went by, she said, she started to believe her relationship wasn't normal... "He had a puppet, I've come to realize..." had her record their sessions in a calendar book so "he could brag to co-workers and friends of him engaging sex and how often..." About 10 months ago, Hose devised a plan for her to change her identity... told his parents his new girlfriend Nikki was moving in... She was allowed to go to church and venture out during the day, she said, but soon realized her living situation was not normal... "He let me keep my birthday. I got to celebrate my birthday on my birthday..." usatoday.com/ ... 00:15:23For 10 years Sherri Koehnke of West Mifflin, Pa., bore the mystery of her daughter's disappearance in near silence. She cried in private, and only a handful of her friends knew that Tanya Kach went missing at age 14, said Koehnke's husband, Craig... Then the couple joined a church and, three weeks ago, Sherri Koehnke told the pastor and started praying for her daughter's return... She was just 2 miles from her father's house she had fled in McKeesport, Pa... "The Lord answered our prayers. It's just that simple," Craig Koehnke said... wpxi.com/ ... 00:14:10A man accused of holding a McKeesport woman hostage for 10 years is expected to be released from jail... plans to put up his bond Thursday night... Police said Hose held her captive and brainwashed her into staying. Now police are investigating whether Hose could be connected to an unsolved homicide in McKeesport... pittsburghlive.com/ ... 00:12:29A McKeesport beautician helped Tanya Kach run away from home and move in with a security guard accused of holding the teen captive in his parents' home for a decade, according to a police affidavit released this morning. Judy Sokol told police she cut and dyed Kach's hair in 1996 as a favor to the security guard, Thomas Hose, now 48, even though "she knew Hose was engaged in an inappropriate relationship," the affidavit states... The Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families even contacted Sokol about Kach's whereabouts, prompting the beautician to sever her ties with the pair, the affidavit states, but it does not explain what Sokol told CYF case workers. Allegheny County police said they are investigating why CYF contacted Sokol in connection with Kach's disappearance. They're also taking a closer look at Hose in connection with the murder of 14-year-old Kimberly Krimm, whose body was found in 1998 in a cemetery that is within view of Hose's Soles Street home...
Animal Companionswcbstv.com/ ... 09:33:22UPPER FREEHOLD, N.J. Two dozen horses perished in a fire early Friday at what is billed as New Jersey's largest horse farm. The blaze broke out after midnight at Perretti Farms, claiming 12 mares and 12 foals in the stable. Their lineage was not immediately available. The stable burned to the ground...
Animal Culturenewsday.com/ ... 08:02:30Alligator....heard someone knocking at the door of her home in a gated community in this southwest Florida community earlier this week... looked out to see... an 8-foot alligator.... had wandered up from the pond behind the house, had a bloody lip from banging its head against the door... trapper John French captured it later... "You're starting into what's called the crawl season, the breeding season.... We get them out of front porches, out of garages, out of swimming pools..."
Human Rightbreitbart.com/ ... 14:23:03A high-tech alarm audible only to youngsters which has dramatically cut loutish behaviour outside a British shop must be switched off over fears it infringes human rights, police said. The Mosquito emits an irritating high-pitched pulse that most people aged under 20 can hear but almost nobody over 30 can... Gwent Police: "...it was decided by the Newport Community Safety Partnership (NCSP) that before endorsing the device, issues concerning health and safety and human rights need to be resolved.... concerned NCSP spokesman: "If the noise upset a baby in a pram or caused a dog in a neighbouring house to bark incessantly then these are issues we would have to address..."
Supernatural Threatsnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:16:15Increasing international pressure over the case of Christian convert Abdul Rahman is forcing the Afghan government to play a careful balancing act between its Western allies and religious conservatives at home. Under the interpretation of Islamic Sharia law on which Afghanistan's constitution is based, Mr Rahman faces the death penalty unless he reconverts to Islam...
People Livenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:15:02A Los Angeles man who worked cleaning buses for the Metropolitan Transport Authority for 76 years has finally called it quits on his 100th birthday. Arthur Winston was only absent for one day during his working life - when his wife died in 1988...
Big Nannywjhg.com/ ... 09:31:01Bay County sheriff's deputies made their first lewd and lascivious arrests of spring break. It started with a wet t-shirt contest that took place Tuesday night at Hammerhead Fred's bar on Thomas Drive. Investigators say the male DJs and customers used alcohol to help encourage the female participants to remove the t-shirts, expose themselves, and allow the audience to fondle them and bite their breasts... “They had taken a contest and basically there were females up there performing oral sex on one another, that was the original complaint. And we sent in a couple of investigators in at the time to see what was taking place. Inside they saw, certainly things that would be classified as violations of the law..." [Were they not all adults? Was anyone forced to see it?]
World Without Bordersabcnews.go.com/ ... 08:37:44...seven documents from Saddam Hussein's government, which the U.S. government has released... discuss Osama bin Laden, weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda and more... Two Iraqi documents from March 2003 — on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion — and addressed to the secretary of Saddam Hussein, describe details of a U.S. plan for war. According to the documents, the plan was disclosed to the Iraqis by the Russian ambassador... [Fortunately, Saddam believed whatever he wanted and ended up being a pushover....]
[One] document also includes an account of an amusing incident in which several Iraqi Army officers (presumably seeking further elaboration of the U.S. war plans) contacted the Russian Embassy in Baghdad and stated that the ambassador was their source. Needless to say, this caused great embarrassment to the ambassador, and the officers were instructed "not to mention the ambassador again in that context..."
People Dienewsday.com/ ... 08:11:28BANGOR, Mich. -- on the day he returned to his Army base in Kentucky from his third tour of duty in Iraq... A decorated soldier died after crashing an all-terrain vehicle...
Under Tyrannynewsday.com/ ... 08:02:48Chinese authorities have shut down dozens of Web sites that carried pornographic material or offered pirated movies or online games, the government announced Thursday...
Whoops!newsday.com/ ... 08:00:22The Bruintjes family says a city inspector was barking up the wrong tree when he handed them an euro80 (US$97) bill for the Dutch dog tax. The family insists it does not have a dog -- only a barking doorbell...
Modern Family Lifenewsday.com/ ... 07:45:44Commuters racing to catch the train typically forget things in the car -- keys, wallets, briefcases. But a baby daughter?.. "I don't know exactly when he got the memory flash, but he was in D.C. when it was the horrible defining moment, 'Oh my goodness, I think I've left my child back in my car...'" got off the southbound train and onto a northbound one... By that time, other commuters had noticed the 7 1/2-month-old girl in the back seat of the car, firefighters had opened the locked door and the child had been taken to a hospital as a precaution... "Child Protective Services was comfortable with releasing the child back to the mom.... We all believe that the child was not intentionally left in the car..."
Just Random Chancenewsday.com/ ... 07:43:17ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Newly minted poker millionaire Mike Schneider has one regret about how he spent his spring break: He didn't get to see much of the Caribbean. But Schneider has a million other reasons to be happy. The 22-year-old University of Minnesota student won $1 million in a high-stakes Limit Hold'em poker tournament on a Caribbean cruise last Friday...
Opposing Tyrannynewsday.com/ ... 07:42:42In reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, laws creating drug-free zones around schools spread nationwide. Now, hard questions are being raised -- by legislators, activists, even law enforcement officials -- about the fairness and effectiveness of those laws... A former assistant attorney general in Massachusetts reviewed hundreds of drug-free-zone cases, and found that less than 1 percent involved drug sales to youths...
Sex can be Dangerousnewsday.com/ ... 08:03:08Municipal authorities in the southern Romanian town of Giurgiu have come under media criticism for spending public funds on two parties for female employees which featured male strippers... newsday.com/ ... 07:41:47under a bill passed by the Senate on Thursday... Doctors performing abortions on girls younger than 13 years old would be required to preserve a sample of the fetal tissue for law enforcement... Tennessee Bureau of Investigation could use those samples for DNA tests to help prosecute rapists...
Digital Culturecaliburn.nl/ ... 07:40:56Why is Bottom-posting better than Top-posting By A. Smit and H.W. de Haan...
Top-posting: Writing the message above the original text, when one replies to an email or a post in a newsgroup.
Bottom-posting: The opposite of top-posting. Now the new message is placed below the original text. amusingquotes.com/ ... 07:38:58The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners...
Business Cultureexaminer-enterprise.com/ ... 00:16:18An effort by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to enter the banking arena is being met by a barrage of criticism from community bankers nationwide who fear the world's largest retailer will run them out of business... “Our neighboring areas have experienced firsthand the effects of Wal-Mart closing local grocery, clothing and hardware stores that have been a vital part of rural communities for generations,” wrote Jim Pieters, president of High Plains Bank in Colorado in a March 3 letter to the FDIC. Beyond its potential to stomp out local banks by opening banks in its retail stores, opponents say Wal-Mart's foray into financial services could blur the historic divide between banking and commerce... Wal-Mart officials maintain the uproar is unfounded. The goal is not to set up a legion of Wal-Mart banks nationwide, but to save the retailer at least $5 million in annual bank costs by processing credit card, debit card and check transactions in-house, said John Kelly, Wal-Mart's financial services lobbyist in Washington...
Theory of Sex Educationwchstv.com/ ... 00:11:06WoodsThirty-eight-year-old Toni Woods, a former 6th grade teacher in Braxton County, received 4 to 20 years in prison. Woods was arrested last March after telling police she had sex with four boys--all under the age of 16... "I was the monster these families think I am..." tried tp convince the court her bizarre behavior was linked to taking Prozac and diet pills and that she was a candidate for probation or home confinement. The Judge wasn't buying it... One victim's parent said Woods turned her son into a drinking, drug using somebody she doesn't know. ...another parent: "For him (his son), this is a lifetime thing. It's not going to end today..."
Big Whoops Cascadesun-sentinel.com/ ... 00:08:16More Walgreens customers sue over insults on their prescription printouts... Less than a month after a Palm Beach woman sued Walgreens for labeling her CrAzY!!" and "psycho" in its nationwide computer system, two more Floridians have come forward with similar allegations... grandmother, 64, filed suit Wednesday, accusing the retail chain of negligent supervision and intentional infliction of emotional distress for typing in its system in May 2003: "WATCH CONTROLS SHE SEEMS SHADY..." [other woman,] 30, and a married mother of three who lives outside Ocala, was shocked when she saw that her Walgreens DUR labeled her a "b----." Also alleging negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress...
Theory of Educationbreitbart.com/ ... 00:06:40The College Board apologized to high school students and college admissions offices after acknowledging that more students received mistakenly low scores on the SAT exam, a mistake discovered just as many students await college admission decisions. The board disclosed Wednesday that 27,000 of 495,000 college entrance tests taken in October were not fully re-scanned for errors after scoring problems surfaced. When they were, an additional 375 students were found to have incorrectly low marks... This would be a comedy of errors if the impact on human lives were not so tragic," said Robert Schaeffer of the group FairTest, which opposes excessive standardized testing. "How many more missing forms are there lost in the system? How many other errors have not been reported?.."
THU 2006-MAR-23
Nature is Dangerouskansascity.com/ ... 10:26:08FORDLAND, Mo. — Matt Suter can’t get the tornado out of his head — or his ears. Every time a late-night freight train thunders past, Suter wakes up and remembers the vicious twister that pulled him from his home March 12 and landed him in a pasture — a quarter-mile away. Suter’s harrowing encounter has brought him sudden fame, with national media exposure. One tornado expert said he knew of no one who traveled as far as Suter did in a tornado and lived to tell about it. “It’s a pretty awkward record to have...." “The window busted, and the door got sucked out,” Suter said. “I looked at my grandmother, and the walls were like Jell-O. The trailer was rocking back and forth. I jumped between the coffee table and couch, and I remember the trailer tipping.”... A large heavy glass lamp struck Suter on the top of his head, knocking him unconscious... When he came to, Suter found himself in a soft, grassy pasture. Last week a global positioning satellite device used by National Weather Service meteorologist Dave Gaede measured the distance at 1,307 feet from the trailer site...
Sick, Sick, Sickkptm.com/ ... 10:24:05Two Sarpy County Sheriff's Deputies were apparently intentionally poisoned with methamphetamine in their food... became sick after eating food at an area restaurant last week...
Missingwsaw.com/ ... 10:07:23A reward of $5000 is being offered for information that leads to the safe return of two Milwaukee boys missing since Sunday (March 19, 2006) afternoon. The disappearance of 11-year-old Purvis Parker and 12-year-old Quadrevion Henning as they played outside on the city's northwest side...
Violencefoxnews.com/ ... 18:50:47SELMER, Tenn. — Police searched Thursday for the missing wife and three young children of a church minister who was found shot to death in his parsonage. Investigators declined to say if the minister's wife was considered a suspect. Authorities also weren't sure if she had the children... "They were a nice family... They just blended in..." news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:04:51Pakistan says 16 of its nationals travelling in Afghanistan were arrested and then killed by Afghan security forces. A Pakistani embassy spokesman in Kabul told the BBC that the men "were innocent Pakistani civilians". The Afghan foreign ministry said on Thursday the dead were all "Taleban... from Pakistan"... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:04:03Ana Aizpiri Leyaristi's brother Sebastian was shot dead by the Basque separatist group Eta in 1988. She gave the BBC News website her reaction to the ceasefire announced by the group on Wednesday... pulse24.com/ ... 10:22:29Multinational rescuers dissed by peace activists: "We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end... We renew our commitment to work for an end to the war and the occupation of Iraq... " [You're welcome....] nytimes.com/ ... 10:20:21Three Western peace workers who were held hostage in Iraq for four months were rescued in a military operation today, two weeks after their American colleague was killed in captivity... The three men — James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, both from Canada; and Norman Kember, 74, of Britain — had been kidnapped last November along with the American man, Tom Fox, in Baghdad while working with the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams. Mr. Fox's body was found this month. He had apparently been tortured by his captors before being shot multiple times in the head and dumped on a trash heap next to a railway line in western Baghdad... The men were freed by multinational forces in a military operation... forbes.com/ ... 10:07:43Bombings in Baghdad on Thursday killed at least 35 people and wounded dozens, many of them children, while another 11 bodies were found throughout Iraq in the continuing string of shadowy sectarian slayings... pittsburghlive.com/ ... 10:04:10Tanya Kach was 14 when she walked out of her father's McKeesport home more than a decade ago... The case went cold and stayed that way until Tuesday - 10 years, one month and 11 days later - when Kach walked back into her father's life and told the world that a school security guard with whom she had fallen in love held her captive since Feb. 10, 1996... spent most of the past 10 years locked in a bedroom of Hose's parents' Soles Street home... told Kach she would have to remain hidden from his parents until he mustered the courage to tell them about her. She agreed and dreamed of their future together - a wedding, and maybe even children. But it was mostly a nightmare. He locked her in an upstairs bedroom where she used a bucket as a toilet. He brought her water and food - mostly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She was allowed to watch television and listen to the radio, but only with headphones so his parents wouldn't hear. She tiptoed around the room. Hose made her memorize which floorboards creaked. Hose gave her a new first name - Nikki - and told her to pick another last name. She opened the telephone book, closed her eyes and pointed: Allen. "So from then on, I was Nikki Allen," she said... "You're stupid. You're immature. Nobody cares about you but me," he told her...
Transport Near-Tragedyforbes.com/ ... 09:38:04Inside their snowbound RV, the family's supplies and fuel were running low, and news reports indicated that a search for the six missing relatives had been called off. "We had fuel and food but we were running short. We were rationing," said Elbert Higginbotham, one of the missing. The family decided to send two members out for help, hoping to end more than two weeks trapped in the snowy wilderness. It worked... The two children passed the evenings by reading jokes from the Reader's Digest to the adults... The family lived through the ordeal on dehydrated food and other provisions. The area is too remote for cell phone service...
Transport Tragedyedition.cnn.com/ ... 18:49:09Only 27 of 150 passengers on a ship traveling from Nigeria to Gabon survived when the vessel sank Wednesday night, said the harbor master for the main port in Cameroon... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:02:54More than 125 people are feared drowned after a boat capsized off Cameroon's Atlantic coast near the port of Kribi. Local fisherman discovered the shipwreck, raised the alarm and rescued 23 people found clinging to flotsam... hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:22:42Fire broke out on a cruise ship in the Caribbean early Thursday, killing one person and injuring 11 others before the crew extinguished the flames... breitbart.com/ ... 09:33:33A bus carrying cruise ship tourists plunged 300 feet down a mountainside in northern Chile Wednesday, killing 12 Americans... Two other Americans and two Chileans, the driver and the tour guide, were hospitalized in serious condition...
Healing Ourselvesnydailynews.com/ ... 10:10:11Manhattan drum maker Vado Diomande waved his arms and did a two-step yesterday to show his terrifying bout with anthrax hadn't robbed him of his African dance skills. Speaking publicly for the first time since collapsing from inhalation anthrax in mid-February, Diomande declared himself a walking miracle... Diomande said he has no plans to stop making drums out of cow and goat skins, but pledged to wear a breathing mask and to make sure his workspace is well-ventilated... forbes.com/ ... 10:09:04The current maximum level of fluoride allowed in U.S. drinking water is too high, and may cause health problems such as bone fractures and, ironically, erosion of tooth enamel. That's the conclusion of a panel from the National Academy of Sciences commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assess the safety of fluoride levels in drinking water...
Animal Culturesuntimes.com/ ... 18:53:52FelineA man convicted of kicking and killing a neighbor's kitten was sentenced today to six months in jail — and 100 hours of community service in an animal shelter when he gets out... [ummm... does that seem wise? I'd give him continuous supervision!!] kitten belonged to a 14-year-old girl who also lived in the trailer park... local6.com/ ... 10:30:30MouseHomeowners in an Orange County, Fla., neighborhood claim their community has been overrun by rats big enough to pick fights with small dogs... nydailynews.com/ ... 10:08:43A crafty coyote turned roadrunner and led the law on a two-day chase through Central Park before he was brought down yesterday by a sharpshooter with a tranquilizer gun...
Digital Future is Nownews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:35:50A new plastic that could rival silicon as the material of choice for some electronic devices has been developed. The invention could eventually slash the cost of flat panel screens and bring electronic paper into common use. The new material can also be laid down using simple printing techniques rather than the expensive and elaborate methods used to process silicon...
Future is Nownews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:35:26the commercial exploitation of space is about to open a new frontier for mass tourism...
World Zookeepingnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:35:01Virtually all indicators of the likely future for the diversity of life on Earth are heading in the wrong direction...
US Militarynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:34:25Snails with left-handed shells can have a big advantage in life - predators may find it impossible to eat them... the crab is unable to open left-handed shells because it only has a tool for peeling them on its right claw; so it discards them...
Theory of Justicefoxnews.com/ ... 18:51:43a teacher at a secondary school in the U.K... is suing for constructive dismissal and sex discrimination, saying she was forced to sit in a chair that made flatulent noises when she moved while her male colleagues were sitting pretty in chairs that could control themselves... voanews.com/ ... 18:50:13A former FBI agent testified Thursday that investigators may have been able track down some of the September 11 hijackers if Zacarias Moussaoui had confessed his role with al-Qaida before the 2001 attacks...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spintimesonline.co.uk/ ... 18:48:44THE Christian group whose activists were freed in a British-led raid in Baghdad yesterday did not thank their rescuers but instead called on them to withdraw from Iraq.... Christian Peacemaker Teams... pointedly failed to acknowledge that the hostages had been freed in a military operation involving British, American, Canadian and Iraqi forces. Instead they blamed the presence of foreign troops for Iraq’s problems... No mention was made of the special forces, intelligence officers and police who worked for months to secure the men’s release... The group was founded two decades ago by Ronald Sider, a Canadian-born American theologian, who called for Christians to be prepared to “die by the thousands” for peace to counter those killed by armies at war. Volunteers for duty in Baghdad must sign an agreement declaring that they understand that they might be injured, kidnapped or killed... drudgereport.com/ ... 18:46:34A top producer at ABC NEWS declared "Bush makes me sick" in an email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT... "Bush makes me sick...."
World - Energynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:07:19The building, which houses a cluster of renewable energy associations, is now something of a living laboratory. Over the past few years it has been gutted and rebuilt. As it has been reconstructed, state-of-the-art environmental technology has been embedded within. Much of the building is heated not by oil or gas, or electricity, but by little brown cylinders of compressed sawdust...
World Without Bordersnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:05:29Nine athletes have gone missing from the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne... Seven are from Sierra Leone and have not been seen for two days. The others are from Tanzania and Bangladesh. Team officials have said they have no idea if the athletes are hoping to apply for asylum in Australia. Officially, they have not breached any immigration rules because they have been issued with special visas for the Games, valid for another month...
Ummm....news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:04:31Zimbabwe has run out of locally manufactured Coca-Cola. Retailers were told bottling plants in Zimbabwe had run out of the imported syrup used to make the drink and supplies would resume later this month. The cola drought is the latest symptom of a foreign currency crisis gripping the country...
But is it Art?news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:02:21Chinese micro-painter Jing Ying Hua has painted an image of a giant panda on a single human hair...
Under Tyrannymiami.com/ ... 10:36:20A former aide spills the dirt on Fidel Castro A member of Fidel's inner circle now lives in Miami and is talking up a storm.... "The initial idea of Fidel was good. Batista was an assassin.... What happened was, the course he took with the revolution was wrong. It has dissolved into this unstoppable, insatiable corruption without limits, a vast lie. The people are in misery. Cuba's people have been enslaved as cheap labor for foreign businessmen...."
Digital Threatbangornews.com/ ... 10:28:21The problem, as Clark sees it, is greater than Maine teenagers' longtime pursuit of drinking beer with some friends in the gravel pits or woods. These parties reportedly were advertised on the personal Web sites Myspace.com and Facebook.com, he said. The high-tech advertising might have been one reason at least 60 youths found their way to the isolated camp located at the far end of a narrow, winding road in Otis. "It was just a sea of kids in this camp," Clark said. "And just about every one of them was drinking or had been drinking. Some continued to drink after we got there. ... You probably could have made your month's mortgage payment on your house just with the returnables." That kind of flagrant disregard for the police and underage drinking laws is worrisome, the sheriff said. "I don't know why they have that attitude," Clark said. "It was that carelessness and that casualness that we saw when we pulled into that party. There were only a couple who appeared to feel bad that their parents would find out..."
Big Whoops Cascadesuntimes.com/ ... 18:52:52Illinois.... Callers to a state road-construction information line Thursday might have been surprised to hear, "We love nasty talk as much as you do.... Hey there, sexy guy. Welcome to an exciting new way to go live, one on one, with hot, horny girls waiting right now to talk to you..." stltoday.com/ ... 10:30:02A radio personality at 550 KTRS was fired on the spot this morning after using the word “coon” on the air in a conversation about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice... “She’s just got a patent resume, of somebody that’s got such serious skill... She loves football, she’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon, a big coon – oh my God, I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that, OK? I didn’t mean that. That was just a slip of the tongue.” Lenihan later said he meant to use the word "coup..." editorandpublisher.com/ ... 10:23:27For the second time in less than a week, The New York Times today admitted to a serious error in a story. On Saturday it said it had misidentified a man featured in the iconic "hooded inmate" photograph from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Today it discloses that a woman it profiled on March 8 is not, in fact, a victim of Hurricane Katrina--and was arrested for fraud and grand larceny yesterday...
Supernatural Threatseonline.com/ ... 10:12:38On Wednesday's South Park 10th season premiere, Hayes' Chef character was struck by lightning, impaled, shot, mauled by a mountain lion, eaten by a grizzly bear, and, oh, yes, accused of being a child molester... In an off-screen twist, doubt has been cast as to whether Hayes really meant to depart the animated series... In the end, Chef dies a million Kenny deaths, only to live on, sort of, as a Darth Vader version of himself...
Human Rightwashingtonpost.com/ ... 10:02:29The Supreme Court narrowed police search powers yesterday, ruling that officers must have a warrant to look for evidence in a couple's home unless both partners present agree to let them in. The 5 to 3 decision sparked a sharp exchange among the justices. The majority portrayed the decision as striking a blow for privacy rights and gender equality; dissenters said it could undermine police efforts against domestic violence, the victims of which are often women... makes a significant change in the law nationwide, because most other lower federal and state courts had previously said that police could search with the consent of one of two adults living together... Now, officers must first ask a judicial officer for a warrant in such cases. Quarrels between husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends, keep police busy around the country; in the District, almost half of the 39,000 violent crime calls officers answered in 2000 involved alleged domestic violence...
Theory of Educationtelegraphindia.com/ ... 09:38:57London, March 22: The law lords, the highest court in Britain, today settled a long running legal dispute by backing a comprehensive school which sent home Shabina Begum, a Muslim girl who had insisted on wearing the head to toe Islamic dress called the jilbab. Denbeigh High School in Luton, Bedfordshire, where 75 per cent of the pupils were Muslims, had worked out a policy of allowing girls to wear the salwar kameez with a head scarf after consulting parents and community leaders. But this was not enough for Shabina, now 17, who took her head teachers and school governors to court in 2002. She argued that her human rights were violated if she was not allowed to practice her religion by wearing the jilbab...
To Tell the Truthnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:36:23The image of a twitchy nervous liar touching his nose and stroking his hair may itself be a lie... researchers found when people lied they tended to stay still as they were acutely aware their body language might give them away...
WED 2006-MAR-22
Under Tyrannyreuters.myway.com/ ... 17:11:54...a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday... "There are no people with physical defects in North Korea..." babies born with physical disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or in homes and were quickly buried. The practice is encouraged by the state...
Mass Madnessbreitbart.com/ ... 17:08:51Construction on a skyscraper expected to be the world's tallest was interrupted when Asian workers upset over low wages and poor treatment smashed cars and offices in a riot that an official said Wednesday caused nearly $1 million in damage. The stoppage triggered a sympathy strike at Dubai International Airport, with thousands of laborers building a new terminal also laying down their tools...
Big Brotherkansascity.com/ ... 17:07:31If you are stopped by police in Kansas, don’t be surprised if the officer pulls out a little black box and takes your fingerprints. The gadget allows officers to identify people by fingerprints without hauling them to the police station. Over the next year the Kansas Bureau of Investigation will test 60 of the devices with law enforcement agencies around the state. State officials said similar tests are being planned for New York, Milwaukee and Hawaii...
Scary Timesthepittsburghchannel.com/ ... 17:08:09Police closed off most of the Golden Triangle and blocked highway exits to Downtown while they investigated reports of an armed man atop a building on Wednesday afternoon. After about two hours of frenzied police activity... they had determined that the man seen by witnesses had only been shooting a pellet gun or air rifle at pigeons... nydailynews.com/ ... 17:06:35The NYPD is installing 505 surveillance cameras around the city - and pushing to safeguard lower Manhattan with a "ring of steel" that could track hundreds of thousands of people and cars a day... testing audio sensors that would allow the cameras to point in the direction of gunshots... $9.1million in homeland security funds... today.reuters.com/ ... 17:04:51A man was taken into custody after throwing a suspicious package over the White House fence on Wednesday but no explosives were found...
Violencevoanews.com/ ... 10:07:31An Afghan army officer says government troops have killed at least 15 suspected Taleban fighters who crossed the border from neighboring Pakistan. The Afghan commander says his soldiers attacked the insurgents late Tuesday near the border town of Spin Boldak, in Kandahar province. He said among the dead was Taleban commander Mullah Shien, who is believed to have led several attacks... alertnet.org/ ... 10:06:36Bomb blasts rocked two small hotels in the center of the Bolivian city of La Paz, killing two people, and officials said on Wednesday they had arrested two foreign suspects... apparently a Uruguayan and an America... alertnet.org/ ... 10:01:01Rebels blasted an Iraqi police station with grenade and mortar fire before dawn on Monday, killing four policemen in Madaen, south of Baghdad... police said... they had detained about 70 suspects in raids in the town after the assault, which occurred a day after at least 22 people were killed and 30 prisoners released in a similar attack on a police post northeast of the capital... breakingnews.iol.ie/ ... 00:41:39An American man... near Batavia in Ohio... described as being devoted to his meticulously kept lawn has been charged with murder over the shooting of a 15-year-old boy who apparently walked across his garden...
Transport Near-Tragedyseattletimes.nwsource.com/ ... 00:41:08MEDFORD — Six family members missing in a recreational vehicle since March 4 were found alive today in a remote, snowy section of Southern Oregon... first found two of the family members, who had decided to walk out of the woods and left the vehicle... Later, search and rescue workers in a helicopter made contact with the other four...
Threatsbreitbart.com/ ... 17:04:30Signs are mounting that al-Qaida terrorists are setting their sights on Israel and the Palestinian territories as their next jihad battleground. Israel has indicted two West Bank militants for al-Qaida membership, Egypt arrested operatives trying to cross into Israel and a Palestinian security official has acknowledged al-Qaida is "organizing cells and gathering supporters." Al-Qaida's inroads are still preliminary, but officials fear a doomsday scenario if it takes root... Al-Zarqawi has established footholds in the countries neighboring Israel... Mideast watchers warned against overstating the al-Qaida presence because the issue is easily manipulated for political ends... edition.cnn.com/ ... 10:02:01Seven men accused of planning al Qaeda-linked terrorist attacks in Britain discussed several possible targets including a nightclub in London, and one of the plotters had tried to obtain an atomic bomb... news.yahoo.com/ ... 00:38:20In a statement published by Italian daily Repubblica... an Italian member of a new European neo-Nazi movement... claims neo-Nazis across Europe met in Braunau in Austria to plan attacks against supporters from Islamic countries during the World Cup in Germany from June 9 to July 9...
US Militarydefenselink.mil/ ... 17:13:37This week, the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps announced a decrease in the number of reservists on active duty in support of the partial mobilization, while the Navy and Coast Guard numbers remained the same as the previous week. The net collective result is 4,725 fewer reservists mobilized than last week. This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel, who have been mobilized, to 113,263, including both units and individual augmentees. abcnews.go.com/ ... 09:59:31An Army dog handler convicted of tormenting Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison with his snarling animal was unrepentant about the abuse charges at his sentencing hearing, telling a court-martial jury that soldiers aren't supposed to be "soft and cuddly..."
Animal Culturefoxnews.com/ ... 09:30:45coyote... remained on the loose in Central Park Wednesday... At one point, authorities tried to corner the animal in the southeast corner of the park, by Wolman Rink. The clever creature jumped into the water, ducked under a bridge, then scampered through the rink grounds and ran off... Another coyote found its way to Central Park in 1999 and is now kept in the Queens Zoo. "It's very unusual to have them in Manhattan.... They have to be particularly adventurous..."
History - still with usfoxnews.com/ ... 09:29:06A 2,500-year-old sarcophagus with vivid color illustrations from Homer's epics has been discovered in western Cyprus...
Digital Future is Nownews.zdnet.co.uk/ ... 10:11:07Samsung is planning to shake up the hard drive market with a 32GB drive that uses NAND flash memory chips rather than magnetic platters... It has forecast that by 2008, one third of laptops will use solid-state hard drive, rather than rotating magnetic disks... At present, 1GB of NAND flash costs around $30, compared to around 70 cents for 1GB of disk... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:25:55The maze of pipes and cables that snake beneath the UK's streets are to be mapped in a £2.2m pilot project. An intimate knowledge of this tubular underworld is expected to help reduce the number of holes that need to be dug by utilities, and cut traffic jams...
Cold War - still with usnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:25:06Survival blankets and crackers dating back five decades to the Cold War have been found in a long-forgotten storage room under New York's Brooklyn Bridge. Officials believe the stash, discovered during a structural inspection, may be one of many created in the US in the 1950s amid fears of a nuclear war...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 17:12:41us-flagArmy Pfc. Amy A. Duerksen, 19, of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on March 11, from a non-combat related injury. Duerksen was assigned to the 4th Combat Support Battalion, 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. defenselink.mil/ ... 00:43:53us-flagArmy Staff Sgt. Ricardo Barraza, 24, of Shafter, Calif.
us-flagArmy Sgt. Dale G. Brehm, 23, of Turlock, Calif.
died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on March 18, when they came under small arms fire by enemy forces during combat operations. Both solidiers were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort Lewis, Wash.
Healing Ourselvessciencedaily.com/ ... 00:43:08Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the Minneapolis VA Medical Center have for the first time identified a substance in the brain that is proven to cause memory loss. This discovery in mice gives drug developers a target for creating drugs to treat memory loss in people with dementia... sciencedaily.com/ ... 00:42:55A version of a gene previously linked to impulsive violence appears to weaken brain circuits that regulate impulses, emotional memory and thinking in humans... forbes.com/ ... 00:42:13The children of mothers who are successfully treated for depression have a markedly reduced risk of developing psychiatric disorders themselves. But if a mother's depression continues, her children face an increased risk of also having such problems, a new study showed... medpagetoday.com/ ... 00:38:50study suggests that treating depressed mothers appears to be an effective intervention for treatment of their children as well...
People Do Drugstoday.reuters.com/ ... 17:10:38Taking the drug Ecstasy can impair memory and learning, but giving up the drug can stop the slide in mental capacity... However... in heavy Ecstasy users, the effects on memory may persist even after they quit...
Theory of Sex Educationdailymail.co.uk/ ... 17:09:55Children exposed to sex in TV programmes, films, magazines and music are more likely to engage in sexual activity than those who are not, according to research out today. There is a direct relationship between the amount of sexual content a child sees and their level of sexual activity or their intentions to have sex in the future... has at least an equal influence on sexual behaviour as religion or a child's relationship with their parents and peers...
Transport Incidenttheglobeandmail.com/ ... 10:07:04Vancouver — Rescuers plucked dozens of people from lifeboats off B.C.'s Queen Charlotte Islands early Wednesday after a large ferry ran aground and sank in choppy seas. All of the 102 passengers and crew have been accounted for...
Peace 3000news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:58:35Message from Euskadi Ta Askatasuna [Eta] to the Basque people.
Euskadi Ta Askatasuna has decided to declare a permanent ceasefire from 24 March 2006...
Business Culturefoxnews.com/ ... 09:27:06A new television ad for Coke's Powerade Option sports drink features a "drag race" between two farmers in Amish dress, riding horse-drawn carts loaded with hay bales — one with ten bales and one with 50. The ad shows the cart with fewer bales easily cruising to victory, and touts that Powerade Option has 10 calories compared to Gatorade's 50 calories. "In other words, Coca-Cola is telling consumers that Powerade Option's fewer calories literally make you go faster. However, Coca-Cola cannot possibly substantiate this overall superiority claim," the suit says. Powerade Option, which contains "negligible calories, cannot refuel athletes in a similar manner" as Gatorade, the court filing claims...
Transporttmcnet.com/ ... 00:42:34the air transport industry is losing in the region of $2.5 billion annually because of misconnects and mishandled baggage...
Ummm....tv.com/ ... 00:39:42Big Love.... From creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer comes Big Love, the story of a man, Bill Henrickson, living in Salt Lake City with his three wives, three houses, and three families. As if normal family life isn't enough trouble, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton, Twister, Thunderbirds) has everything in triple: three wives, three houses, three families... The series kicks in as Bill receives troublesome news about his father (Bruce Dern) who lives in a fundamentalist community in rural Utah...
TUE 2006-MAR-21
Police Riotnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:15:28The recent killing of an unarmed Virginia doctor has raised concerns about what some say is an explosion in the use of military-style police Swat teams in the United States. Armed with assault rifles, stun grenades - even armoured personnel carriers - units once used only in highly volatile situations are increasingly being deployed on more routine police missions. Dr Salvatore Culosi Jr had come out of his townhouse to meet an undercover policeman when he was shot through the chest by a Special Weapons and Tactics force... As officers approached with their weapons drawn... A handgun was accidentally discharged, fatally wounding Dr Culosi...
Threatsbloomberg.com/ ... 16:04:08Police intercepted a group of men planning deadly bombings in Britain just before their final targets were selected, prosecutors told a London court. Seven men went on trial today in connection with the alleged plot, which also involved terror suspects in the U.S. and Canada. One defendant, Omar Khyam, who is charged with helping acquire more than half a ton of fertilizer laced with explosive ammonium nitrate, said he planned to target pubs, nightclubs and trains, prosecutor David Waters QC told jurors... haaretz.com/ ... 16:02:33A helicopter-directed police chase on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway ended Tuesday with the capture of a van transporting a would-be suicide bomber carrying explosives meant for an attack in the center of the country... 10 men inside the vehicle were taken for questioning, and it was later determined that the prospective bomber was among them. The arrests capped a 15-minute high-speed chase, complete with wailing sirens, roaring helicopters and heavily armed elite police commandos racing on motorcycles. The terrorist is a resident of the Yamoun village in the West Bank and has ties to Islamic Jihad...
Violenceforbes.com/ ... 16:00:16About 100 masked gunmen stormed a jail near the Iranian border at dawn Tuesday - cutting phone wires, firing rocket-propelled grenades and killing 20 security men - in an operation that freed 18 fellow insurgents who had been captured in police raids just two days earlier. Police also said 15 other captives were sprung in the daring assault on the Muqdadiyah lockup and at least 10 insurgents were killed...
Nature is Dangerouswwwa.accuweather.com/ ... 15:55:05"The Northeast is staring down the barrel of a gun," said Joe Bastardi, Chief Forecaster of the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center. "The Northeast coast is long overdue for a powerful hurricane, and with the weather patterns and hydrology we're seeing in the oceans, the likelihood of a major hurricane making landfall in the Northeast is not a question of if but when..."
Theftfreep.com/ ... 15:53:05The sedate, urbane world of public broadcasting was rattled Thursday as prosecutors charged three former employees of Michigan Public Media with illegally accepting golf club memberships, Persian rugs, airline tickets and massages in exchange for on-air considerations at the state's top public radio station. Each of the men... was charged by Washtenaw County... with embezzlement of under $20,000.... Each could face up to five years in prison if convicted...
Digital Culturewired.com/ ... 16:07:36Amazon.com said Monday it had modified the way its search engine handles queries for the term "abortion" after receiving an e-mail complaint that the results appeared biased. Until the recent change, a user who visited the Seattle internet retailer and typed in the word "abortion" received a prompt asking, "Did you mean adoption?" followed by search results for "abortion." Spokeswoman Patty Smith said the automated prompt was purely based on technology, and that no human had made the decision to show the question. "Adoption and abortion are the same except for two keystrokes," Smith said. "They also, in this case, happen to be somewhat related terms..."
Digital Future is Nownews.zdnet.co.uk/ ... 16:03:43The Microsoft chairman said, in essence, that the development world has changed with the advent of new Web technologies that give people any-time, any-place access to their data — a far cry from the PC-centric world of the past. "Everything we do now, we have to be user-centric, not device-centric," he said. Gates also pledged to bolster the company's development efforts on Internet Explorer, which he said has lagged in recent years. "In a sense we're doing a mea culpa, saying we waited too long for a browser release," Gates said. "I expect us to move very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities." Gates said that Microsoft is already working on the next two versions after Internet Explorer 7, which is due later this year with Windows Vista...
US Militarynewsday.com/ ... 15:59:49A military jury this morning convicted Army dog handler Sgt. Michael J. Smith on six counts of maltreating and assaulting prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, clearing him of seven other charges. A judge later dismissed one of the counts against Smith, saying it duplicated another count. The 24-year-old faces up to 8 1/2 years in prison on the five remaining counts, forfeiture of all pay and allowances and a dishonorable discharge...
Supernatural Threatsnydailynews.com/ ... 16:10:00South_park003Contrary to popular assumption, "South Park" fans have not seen the Chef sling his final serving of hash. The character, who until last week was voiced by Isaac Hayes, is back tomorrow in the first of several new episodes... the gang... notice that something about Chef seems different... would not be a stretch to assume that "Chef Returns" is the latest salvo in the battle between "South Park" and... Scientology...
People Dieallheadlinenews.com/ ... 16:00:38Dallas, TX - A man trying to escape from sheriff's deputies early Tuesday morning got stuck in a mud hole and died as authorities tried to rescue him...
Theory of Educationwashingtonpost.com/ ... 15:54:21Putting Parents In Their Place:
Outside Class Too Much Involvement Can Hinder Students' Independence, Experts Say...
[Soon, maybe, we can remove parents from the childraising process altogether, so Government Experts can do their job...?]
Rebuildingapnews.myway.com/ ... 15:51:57President Bush said Tuesday the decision about when to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq will fall to future presidents and Iraqi leaders, suggesting that U.S. involvement will continue at least through 2008. Acknowledging the public's growing unease with the war - and election-year skittishness among fellow Republicans - the president nonetheless vowed to keep U.S. soldiers in the fight. "If I didn't believe we could succeed, I wouldn't be there. I wouldn't put those kids there," Bush declared...
Supernatural Justicetoday.reuters.com/ ... 15:49:23An outbreak of deadly bird flu in Israel is God's punishment for calls in election ads to legalize gay marriages, according to Rabbi David Basri, a prominent sage preaching Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinhotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/ ... 14:15:40He calls on Helen Thomas, teasing her for her performance at the Gridiron dinner. Thomas: "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis...every reason given has turned out not to be true...why did you really want to go war?" Bush: "I think your premise...I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong. No president wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. Our foreign policy changed on that day. We used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy but we realized on 9/11 that killers could destroy innoncent life. And I'm never going to forget it and never going to forget the vow to do everything in my power to prect the American people." (Thomas tries to cross talk and Bush is not happy with the interruption.) "I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically...that's why I went to the security council....the world say, disarm, disclose or face serious consequences....therefore, we worked with the world...and when [Saddam] chose not to disclose, then I made a difficult decision to remove him..."
MON 2006-MAR-20
Transport Tragedynews-leader.com/ ... 17:02:43A small twin-engine Piper Seneca plane carrying four people crashed near U.S. 165 in Branson early this afternoon, killing all aboard... crashed nose first into the edge of a storage building in a complex with about 12 long storage buildings, about a hundred yards south of Missouri 76, behind Ruby Tuesday’s Restaurant and Ripleys Believe it or Not... Only the tail of the plane remained intact, the rest of the plane was charred twisted rubble... Mark Parent, manager of the Taney County Airport said he saw two males and two females waiting to get on the plane...
Violenceapnews.myway.com/ ... 17:15:25Suspected insurgents marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Monday with roadside bombings that killed at least seven policemen, and authorities reported finding 10 more bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the capital, one of them a 13-year-old girl. The violence took up where it left off Sunday when at least 35 people died. One of the roadside bombings Monday, just a few hundred yards from an Interior Ministry lockup in central Baghdad, killed at least three Iraqi police commandos and a prisoner, police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said. Four commandos were injured in the midday attack... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:08:17A man is being held by German police after walking into a petrol station with his wife's severed head in a bag... the man... was in a confused state and admitted killing his wife... two children - girls aged 13 and six... found in the flat and taken into police care... "It seems they didn't see the body or what was going on..." man and his wife were of Turkish origin, with German citizenship... washingtonpost.com/ ... 17:01:11In Duluiyah, a stretch of farms along the Tigris River about 45 miles north of Baghdad, soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division's 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team battled insurgents, the U.S. military said in a statement... The statement said American troops were responding to insurgents who opened fire with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades in the area, predominated by Sunnis. Seven of the attackers were killed, and two U.S. soldiers were wounded. A top police official, as well as a resident who claimed he saw the fighting, said U.S. troops also shot and killed a family of three during house-to-house searches after the firefight...
Nature is Dangerousbreitbart.com/ ... 17:10:42Parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, treasured as the world's largest living organism, were probably killed by Cyclone Larry... "you're looking at the death of almost all corals on parts of the reef that were affected by the wind and the waves... All hard corals and things like sponges, soft corals, sea fans -- all this kind of thing -- live stuck to the sea floor just like a tree is rooted in one place, so they just have to sit there and take the brunt of it. "Most of the bigger animals you'd expect would have swum away and wouldn't really have been affected..." disasternews.net/ ... 16:58:32Authorities in Dallas recovered the body of a woman whose car was swept off a water covered road.... numerous water rescues... now expected to bring trouble to much of the South and southeast U.S., with strong thunderstorms predicted through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama... drenched parts of Texas... dumped as much as two feet of snow in some areas... One man was killed in a traffic accident blamed on the weather in Colorado... expected to keep dropping snow in the region for much of Monday and Tuesday... columbiatribune.com/ ... 16:57:03...7 inches of snow on Central Missouri by tomorrow afternoon... a storm system... barreled across the Plains states yesterday, piling snow that stalled highway and train travelers in South Dakota and Colorado and causing flooding in Texas... Hundreds of schools were closed today in Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado and South Dakota... at least two deaths... About 200 miles of Interstate 90 was closed today across South Dakota... news24.com/ ... 16:54:50Emergency services who fanned out across the cyclone-hit northeastern coast of Australia to assess the damage were greeted by scenes of devastation on Monday. The powerful cyclone, packing winds up to 290km/h, ripped roofs off buildings, wreaking havoc in coastal towns and leaving an unknown number of people homeless. Fortunately only a handful of injuries were recorded... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:07:24A powerful tropical cyclone has hit Australia's north-east coast, packing winds of up to 290km/h (180mph). Tropical Cyclone Larry smashed into Queensland at Innisfail, about 100km (62 miles) south of Cairns - forcing thousands to evacuate their homes...
Healing Ourselvestoday.reuters.com/ ... 17:09:31Scientists have developed a vaccine for the food-borne disease listeria that they hope to apply to more common illnesses like salmonella and tuberculosis...
Supernaturalnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:07:11A missing Nepalese teenager popularly known as "Buddha Boy" reappeared briefly on Sunday, his followers say... video of its members purportedly meeting the boy near his village in southern Nepal... Bomjan had spoken to them for half an hour. Ram Bomjan's meditation has attracted many devotees "He said he would reappear after six years. He has asked monks to perform prayers in the meditation spot," Mr Lama told reporters. "I left because there is no peace here... Tell my parents not to worry," Mr Lama quoted Bomjan as saying...
US Militaryseattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 17:00:18After a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine in western Iraq, American troops went into nearby houses and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old-girl, residents told The Associated Press on Monday. The military says about 12 Marines are under investigation for possible war crimes by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service following the Nov. 19 insurgent attack in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad. The allegations against the Marines were first brought forward by Time Magazine, which reported this week that it obtained a videotape two months ago taken by a Haditha journalism student that shows the dead still in their nightclothes... cbsnews.com/ ... 16:59:50At first, U.S. Marines said 15 civilians and 8 suspected insurgents who died in the village of Haditha, Iraq, last November were killed by a roadside bomb. Later, a video turned up – not of the incident, but of the village the next day - including the villagers talking about what happened... U.S. Marines are accused by survivors in the village of having gone on a rampage after seeing one of their own blown up by a roadside bomb... the military says it has no reason to believe it is not genuine, although it says it doesn't tell the whole story of what took place that day when the Marines were ambushed and spent five hours hunting down their attackers...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 16:44:13us-flagArmy Sgt. Amanda N. Pinson, 21, of St. Louis, Mo.
us-flagArmy Spc. Carlos M. Gonzalez, 22, of Middletown, N.Y.
died in Tikrit, Iraq, on Mar. 16, when a mortar round detonated. Pinson and Gonzalez were assigned to the 101st Military Intelligence Detachment, 501st Special Troops Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
Culturecomixstuff.com/ ... 12:09:53Old Comic Book Ads
Only Naturallocal6.com/ ... 17:12:47birth of a new lamb born with six legs... healthy, but cannot walk... wait for the lamb to get stronger before he'll try to amputate two of the legs next week. "The front two legs have to go, this one is a good one..." today.reuters.com/ ... 17:09:52Want to peer into the steaming summit of an erupting volcano without risking death? Anyone with an Internet connection and a computer can do just that, thanks to about 30 cameras and other recording devices set up on Alaska's Augustine Volcano that are streaming information to a Web site hosted by the Alaska Volcano Observatory, a joint federal-state office. The site http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Augustine.php has received over 253 million hits since the start of the year, becoming a popular destination for everyone from scientists to amateur volcano buffs who want to keep tabs on the restless 4,134-foot (1,260-meter) volcano... newscientist.com/ ... 12:08:5913 things that do not make sense...
1 The placebo effect...
2 The horizon problem...
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays...
4 Belfast homeopathy results...
5 Dark matter...
6 Viking's methane...
7 Tetraneutrons...
8 The Pioneer anomaly...
9 Dark energy...
10 The Kuiper cliff...
11 The Wow signal...
12 Not-so-constant constants...
It's All in Your Mindtoday.reuters.co.uk/ ... 17:04:59Older women who say talk shows and soap operas are their favorite TV programs tend to score more poorly on tests of memory, attention and other cognitive skills... souldirected.com/ ... 12:07:07Perversely, some people follow a path that they know will produce more costs than benefits, because following the path of greatest advantage sets up a conflict. On one side there is the autonomous behavior that leads to immediate gratification. Against this is pitted the person’s decision to move in the direction of greatest advantage. The conflict plays out in real time: choices are made, outcomes are experienced, and so the course of one's life is defined. Following the path of greatest advantage is not a trivial task; one must over-ride two attributes of the psyche that favor relapse despite good intentions:... psycharts.com/ ... 12:06:33Illusions -- Most people attribute their failure to behave the way they had intended to factors within themselves such as weakness, perversity, or disease. Task difficulty is almost always under-rated...
Business Culturenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:06:13Wal-Mart plans to hire an extra 150,000 staff in China over the next five years as it boosts its presence in the fast-growing retail market...
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!today.reuters.com/ ... 17:09:15Taliban, poverty fueling Afghan opium boom... [AND MOST OF ALL THE BLACK MARKET PRICES CREATED BY THAT LIBERTY-THIEVING PEACE-DESTROYING DEMON, PROHIBITION!!!!!] news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:05:58tens of thousands of illegal "grow-ops" remain in Canada. Estimates suggest marijuana may generate up to C$7bn (£3.5bn; US$6.1bn) a year in BC, the sunny province thought to be at the heart of the industry. Canada's new Conservative government says people like Frank are a menace to society, putting drugs on the streets and fuelling organised crime - and it has vowed to get tough on them. But critics accuse the government of being wilfully blind to the historic failures of law enforcement, and ignoring public opinion and the findings of expert committees in favour of a policy of demonising marijuana - a policy they liken to the short-lived Prohibition of alcohol in 1920s and 30s America...
Digital Threatnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:04:41A bus driver caught playing video games at the wheel has been sacked...
Under Digital Tyrannynews.zdnet.co.uk/ ... 17:03:45Plans to force creators of content that features 'lewd exhibition of the genitals' into an Internet red-light zone have been proposed by two US Democratic senators...
Supernatural Threatsnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:03:27An Afghan man is being tried in a court in the capital, Kabul, for converting from Islam to Christianity...
World Without Borderstimesonline.co.uk/ ... 17:17:18low-tech cunning continues to haunt America’s increasingly expensive efforts to stem the tide of illegal traffic across the Mexican border... “There are so many tunnels under Nogales, we’re just waiting for the whole place to cave in,” said special agent George Gibson as he drove me around town pointing out houses, sheds, manhole covers and even a former church that had been used to conceal tunnel exits... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 17:05:17The UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR, says it has been ordered to leave Uzbekistan within one month. The agency said it had received a communique saying its entire office must shut, an order which it told the BBC was "a rare occurrence"... voanews.com/ ... 16:55:07The European Union has approved emergency aid for the Palestinians, while warning the Islamic party Hamas that it must recognize Israel and renounce violence if its government is to receive further aid...
SUN 2006-MAR-19
Nature is Dangerousabc.net.au/ ... 13:11:55Areas along the far north Queensland coast have been evacuated as one of the most severe tropical cyclones in recent history continues to track towards Innisfail. Tropical Cyclone Larry is expected to intensify to a category 5, with winds up to 280 kilometres an hour, before crossing the coast between Innisfail and Mission Beach on Monday morning...
Transport Tragedyfreenewmexican.com/ ... 09:48:26Viviana Terrazas' receptionist desk at Concentra Medical Center was straight in the path of a pickup that plowed through the building Friday. The 20-year-old was the mother of a 1-year-old son, and her sisters say Terrazas' life was just beginning... abqtrib.com/ ... 09:48:12SANTA FE - Three people died and eight were injured when a pickup truck plowed through a plate glass window at a medical clinic at a strip mall... "That truck was flying..." was traveling so fast... it plowed through the reception area and only stopped after 20 to 30 feet... force of the crash caused the clinic's ceiling to collapse... The three dead... receptionist Viviana E. Terrazas, 20; a patient, David Rodriguez, 16; and the teenager's mother, 43-year-old Janelle Rodriguez... Four others were hospitalized with injuries, three in critical condition... Three others were treated... "We don't believe alcohol was a factor, but we are serving a search warrant to see if the driver was under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants..."
Violenceedition.cnn.com/ ... 09:58:25Somali militiamen who skirmished with U.S. Navy vessels claimed Sunday they did not fire the first shot and that they had been patrolling Somali waters to stop illegal fishing vessels... theaustralian.news.com.au/ ... 09:58:00Suspected Islamist militants blew up a police vehicle in northwestern Pakistan yesterday, killing seven people, including three policeman and three paramilitary troops... SUSPECTED Islamist militants blew up a police vehicle in northwestern Pakistan yesterday, killing seven people, including three policeman and three paramilitary troops... today.reuters.com/ ... 09:42:40Two U.S. Navy ships returned fire on Saturday on a group of suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia, killing one and wounding five... in the Indian Ocean about 25 miles off the coast of Somalia... USS Cape St. George, a guided missile cruiser, and the USS Gonzalez, a guided missile destroyer... One suspected pirate was killed... took 12 other suspects, including the five who were injured, into custody... also confiscated a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and automatic weapons... Somalia's waters have become among the most dangerous in the world since warlords ousted military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Typically, armed pirates use speedboats to attack and board ships, including oil tankers...
US Militarywashingtonpost.com/ ... 13:51:31Veterans' Voices On Iraq Voices of 100 Veterans: The War in Their Words... Iraq was bad, nearly all of them agreed. "Not knowing day to day what was going to happen." "Hard to figure out who the enemy was." "Never being able to relax." "The rules are that there are no rules..." breitbart.com/ ... 13:48:06Hundreds of elderly farmers face forcible eviction from their land to allow the expansion of a U.S. military base near Seoul, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. Some of the farmers _ mainly in their 60s and 70s _ suffered bloodied noses and several human rights activists were detained during clashes with riot police earlier this month...
Only Naturallivescience.com/ ... 13:29:42When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to create a digital walking Tyrannosaurus rex for a new dinosaur exhibit, it turned to dinosaur locomotion experts John Hutchinson and Stephen Gatesy for guidance. The pair found the process humbling. With powerful computers and sophisticated modeling software, animators can take a pile of digital bones and move them in any way they want. This part is easy; but choosing the most likely motion from the myriad of possibilities proved difficult. "We kind of took a step back and said 'Whoa, boy! Limbs are very complicated.'...
Extraterrestrialtimesonline.co.uk/ ... 13:14:05NASA... has unveiled plans for one of the largest rockets ever built to take a manned mission to the far side of the moon. It will ferry a mother ship and lunar lander into Earth orbit to link up with a smaller rocket carrying the crew. Once united they will head for the moon where the larger ship will remain in orbit after launching the lunar lander and crew... Under the project, up to four astronauts at a time will land on the far side of the moon to collect rock samples and carry out research, including looking for water that might one day support a lunar base. The scale of the missions is much larger than the earlier Apollo programme, which is why Nasa will need two separate rockets to take the mother ship and crew into space. Some missions will also see manned spacecraft landing in unexplored areas such as the lunar mountains and on the moon’s south and north poles...
It's Only Moneychron.com/ ... 13:47:26NEW ORLEANS... The woman who owned the flood-damaged home knew nothing about the money in the walls. She was as shocked as the young volunteer who found it while helping tear out moldy Sheetrock... By an unofficial count, it was more than $30,000... the woman who owned the home, which she said previously belonged to her father and had been in the family for generations... suspects the money belonged to her father, who grew up in the Depression and was wary of keeping his money in a bank... "She said it was a miracle. And when you think about it, it was..."
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!sfgate.com/ ... 13:28:52Bitter fight over sweet pot treats Drug agents fear candies appeal to kids.... [...p.o.'d 'cause y'can't smell smoke from candy..?] medical marijuana users insist they're legal...
Rebuildingwashingtonpost.com/ ... 13:49:49What We've Gained In 3 Years in Iraq By Donald H. Rumsfeld... The rationale for a free and democratic Iraq is as compelling today as it was three years ago... Consider that if we retreat now, there is every reason to believe Saddamists and terrorists will fill the vacuum -- and the free world might not have the will to face them again. Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis. It would be as great a disgrace as if we had asked the liberated nations of Eastern Europe to return to Soviet domination because it was too hard or too tough or we didn't have the patience to work with them as they built free countries... cbsnews.com/ ... 13:27:32In a live interview with Bob Scheiffer, Cheney, one of the war's chief architects, echoed the Bush administration's line that the war in Iraq is progressing according to plan. “The facts are pretty straightforward. The Iraqis met every single political deadline that's been set for them,” Cheney said. “They haven't missed a single one.” The vice president said that talk of civil war is overblown and the insurgency is being promoted mostly by terrorist groups. “There's continuing violence because our adversaries understand what's at stake here, because they know that if we're successful in establishing a democratic government in Iraq, that that's going to put enormous pressure in that part of the world on all of those other regimes and governments,”...
Theory of Justicewww2.ljworld.com/ ... 13:11:17Police and prosecutors are getting tough on Lawrence party houses and other noise ordinance violators. Maybe too tough, a representative of the Kansas University chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union told a group of city, KU and neighborhood leaders Friday. “I think students are worried that we are perhaps being treated unfairly,”... journalstar.com/ ... 13:10:46He said his name was on the lease, so he pleaded no contest. One of the charges was dismissed. His roommates both got fines, and he thought he would, too. In a 2½ page sentencing order, Pokorny went through, reason by reason, “why courts need to take a harder look at this type of case and Mr. Herchenbach.”... "I think Pokorny wanted to make an example of someone, and I just happened to be in the courtroom on the wrong day I think, which sucks..." newsday.com/ ... 13:06:36Cutting apart airline defense Flap over testimony in Moussaoui hearing exposes discrepancy that may hurt airlines facing 9/11 civil suits...
Digital Culturetoday.reuters.com/ ... 09:59:27March Madness gripped the Internet on Thursday, with more than 1 million video streams carried in the first day of CBS' free on-demand out-of-market games... CBS served more than 268,000 simultaneous streams of first-round games Thursday, pushing its first-day total to more than 1.2 million by 6 p.m. EST...
Whoops!washingtonpost.com/ ... 09:40:03The White House said yesterday that it will discipline two government employees who masqueraded as journalists this month while scouting locations for a presidential visit to the Gulf Coast. A Mississippi couple whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina said two men who later identified themselves as Secret Service agents pretended to be Fox News journalists when surveying their neighborhood in advance of a March 8 visit from President Bush... Tom Mazur, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said he did not know who the men were but they were not Secret Service officials. "I checked with our people down there in Mississippi who were involved in the advance, and it was not Secret Service people who identified themselves as members of the media," Mazur said. "We wouldn't do that..."
SAT 2006-MAR-18
Violencenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:47:14Six men have been arrested in Iraq on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a female journalist and her crew from the al-Arabiya television network... seized by gunmen and shot dead near Samarra in February. They were reporting on the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in the city... bloomberg.com/ ... 08:26:08U.S. and Iraqi forces were holding about 30 people as part of a major operation to root out insurgents northeast of Samarra. The suspects were among about 50 arrested, of whom 17 were released... No casualties have been reported by Iraqi security forces or coalition units...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 13:19:00us-flagArmy Staff Sgt. Marco, A. Silva, 27, of Alva, Fla., assigned to the Army's 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
us-flagArmy Sgt. Corey A. Dan, 22, of Norway, Maine, assigned to the Army's 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
died near Ar Ramadi, Iraq on March 13, when they came under small arms fire and an improvised explosive device detonated during combat operations. defenselink.mil/ ... 13:17:51us-flagArmy Pfc. Angelo A. Zawaydeh, 19, of San Bruno, Calif., died in Baghdad, Iraq on March 15, when his traffic control point came under mortar attack during combat operations. Zawaydeh was assigned to the Army's 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
US Militarynewscientist.com/ ... 09:08:54The material, called QuikClot... was developed for the US military to cut down the number of soldiers who bleed to death on the battlefield. More than 85 per cent of soldiers killed in action die within an hour of being wounded. Improved haemorrhage control "could probably save 20 per cent of the soldiers who are killed in action"... The material is already used by the navy and a few US police departments. Researchers would like to see it used more widely, but one major safety problem has prevented this happening. Now developers are hoping that advances in the material and the design of new substances could see blood clotting treatments used by ambulance crews, in operating theatres, and even in the home. Every US marine and navy soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan carries QuikClot...
WW2 - still with usnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:52:03The exhumed bodies of thousands of German soldiers killed in World War II have been stored in a Czech Republic factory for three years... Some 4,000 sets of remains have been awaiting burial since they were exhumed by a German war graves association... Plans to establish a permanent cemetery in Prague have run aground because of a lack of funds... The remains include soldiers who fought across eastern Europe during the war...
Extraterrestrialnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:49:50Terrestrial rocks blown into space by asteroid impacts on Earth could have taken life to Saturn's moon Titan.... The theory of panspermia...
Healing Ourselvescnn.com/ ... 08:34:57The Food and Drug Administration warned doctors to watch for a rare but deadly infection previously implicated in four deaths of women who had taken RU-486. The drug combination, also called Mifeprex or mifepristone, has not been proved to be the cause in any of those cases... Nor has the FDA confirmed the cause of the latest two deaths. However, in one of them, the woman's symptoms appeared to resemble those in a cluster of four cases in California where the women died from an infection of the bloodstream, or sepsis. Those women did not follow FDA-approved instructions for a drug-induced abortion, which requires swallowing three tablets of one drug, followed two days later by two pills of another drug...
Supernaturalhollywoodreporter.com/ ... 09:11:51Keisha Castle-Hughes has been cast as Mary in "Nativity," New Line Cinema's look at the life of the Virgin Mary before the birth of Christ...
Modern Family Lifenews.telegraph.co.uk/ ... 09:11:29A truant's parents were banned by a court yesterday from going out at night to ensure that their son goes to school every day. They were ordered to wear electronic tags to stop them going to their local pub and bingo hall and must stay at home between 7pm and 7am for three months...
Headline of the Daynews.independent.co.uk/ ... 09:07:45China accused of locking sane dissidents in asylums...
World Without Bordersazstarnet.com/ ... 09:06:52The driver of a pickup truck that ran a checkpoint at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on Tuesday headed back to his native Mexico in an ambulance Thursday and may never be prosecuted... driver, an illegal entrant... Though the driver recovered enough from his injuries to be transported, police were not able to interview him before he left. They also have not interviewed the passenger, who remains at UMC... driver... was found with a loaded handgun at his feet and possible cocaine in his pocket. They also said the truck's cab smelled heavily of alcohol at the time of the accident...
Theory of Sex Educationnews.bellinghamherald.com/ ... 09:05:33EVERETT -- A [47yo] suburban high school science teacher has been accused of smoking marijuana with a 17-year-old student and having oral sex with her in his car at a shopping mall... the girl told other students... let some girls listen to messages... she had saved on her cell phone... Under police questioning the girl admitted smoking marijuana and performing oral sex on him, adding that he did not want to have intercourse "because he is married,"...
It's Only Moneynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:54:58The Wynn claims to be one of the most advanced casino resorts in the world. It was built fully future-proofed - and it should be - at a cost of $2.7bn (£1.54bn). It is one of the few casinos in Las Vegas that is already coin-free. All the poker chips on the property carry a radio frequency ID tag so they can be tracked from the cashier to the table tops. The suppliers, Shuffle Master, located nearby, also make optical readers that can tell which cards are where on the table at any given moment... Of course what every hotel would love is a fully automated casino. Shuffle Master has made one called the Table Master...
Under Tyrannynews.telegraph.co.uk/ ... 09:11:07The California town of Calabasas led the western world by imposing a ban on public smoking yesterday, provoking celebration, bemusement and anger among its residents... timesonline.co.uk/ ... 09:07:30The Ministry of Public Security has drawn up new rules and babies’ names must in future be drawn from a database that excludes thousands of rare Chinese characters. Out go indecipherable names. With the introduction of electronic identity cards, the authorities will register only names that they decide to include on their database... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:46:28Iran's most prominent dissident journalist Akbar Ganji has been freed from jail after five years.... jailed in 2001 for writing articles in which he linked senior officials to the murder of dissidents. Correspondents say he is a hero to Iran's reformists for standing up to hardliners, and many world leaders have called for his release...
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!abcnews.go.com/ ... 08:35:51Federal drug enforcement agents in Northern California shut down an elaborate "marijuana candy" factory that produced drug-laced snacks called Rasta Reece's, Pot Tarts, and other parodies of popular products. Authorities raided five locations Thursday, arresting 12 people for allegedly running the criminal enterprise. Police say the group produced candy and soda that looked like popular treats but were laced with pot. Agents seized boxes of "treats" with names like Buddahfingers, Munchy Way, Rasta Reece's, Pot Tarts and Puff-a-Mint Pattie... Drug Enforcement Administration agents said the sophisticated operation, which called itself Beyond Bomb, cultivated thousands of plants in warehouses with factorylike precision. Employees in one location wore white doctors' gowns and punched time clocks when they came to work, said officials. One of the buildings that was raided in Oakland is associated with the Compassionate Caregivers Club, a medical marijuana dispensary, authorities said...
Big Whoops Cascadenytimes.com/ ... 09:03:59His prominence made sense, because he claimed to be the man in the photograph that had become the international icon of the Abu Ghraib scandal: standing on a cardboard box, hooded, with wires attached to his outstretched arms. He had even emblazoned the silhouette of that image on business cards.... Mr. Qaissi had been interviewed on a number of earlier occasions, including by PBS's "Now," Vanity Fair, Der Spiegel and in the Italian news media as the man on the box... The trouble was, the man in the photograph was not Mr. Qaissi... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:48:17A runaway train killed seven people and injured at least 11, severing some of their limbs, during the filming of a TV show in Uruguay... The accident occurred during a "test of strength" challenge to raise money for a hospital... Contestants were pushing and pulling a train and two carriages when the vehicle gained speed and ran them over... About 3,000 schoolchildren were at the recording and witnessed the accident... ca.today.reuters.com/ ... 08:30:08Space shuttle Discovery's robotic arm was set to return to its Canadian manufacturer for repairs on Friday after the latest in a spate of accidents... The accident is unrelated to NASA's decision, announced on Tuesday, to delay Discovery's launch from May to July... Discovery's robotic crane was hit by a bucket-shaped work platform employees were using to clean up areas of the shuttle's payload bay. The cleanup was ordered after another accident on March 3, when a technician broke a work light... Workers accidentally started a small fire last week on the roof of the 525-foot (160-meter) tall building where the shuttle is attached to its fuel tank and booster rockets. At the time, two fully assembled solid rocket shuttle boosters were in the building. If the fire had reached the boosters, it could have triggered an explosion which Kennedy said could have been "catastrophic." Workers also forgot to lock the shuttle Endeavour's nose landing gear while the 75-ton spaceship was being transferred between floor jacks in its processing hangar. As the move began, the nose of the ship pitched forw...
Under Digital Libertynews.com.com/ ... 08:28:05a federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data but said users' search queries were off-limits...
People Do Drugscnn.netscape.cnn.com/ ... 08:16:04Thousands of teenagers and students swarmed onto Spanish streets on Friday for mass drinking sessions, defying legislation introduced to stop the binges known as "botellones..." cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ ... 08:15:42a new generation of American children getting high on and addicted to prescription drugs. Teenagers are increasingly experimenting with legal drugs like OxyContin, widely known as "hillbilly heroin," and Vicodin, often bought online or taken from medicine cabinets, even before trying marijuana or alcohol, health officials say...
Digital Threatbreitbart.com/ ... 08:14:55Google Inc.'s mysterious methods for ranking Web sites came under attack Friday in a lawsuit accusing the online search engine leader of ruining scores of Internet businesses that have been wrongfully banished from its index. The civil complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose by KinderStart.com, seeks to be certified as a class action representing the owners of all Web sites blacklisted by Google's Internet-leading search engine since January 2001. KinderStart, a Norwalk-based Web site devoted to information about children, says it was dropped from Google's index a year ago without warning... KinderStart alleges Google has engaged in anticompetitive behavior and misled the public by positioning its search engine as an objective source for finding Internet content... Because Google handles far more search requests than its rivals, its ranking system can make or break Web sites without a well-known domain name... the suit alleges the banished sites can't determine how they can restore their standings because the company doesn't explain its actions...
Supernatural Whoopsbreitbart.com/ ... 08:13:03A Mescalero Apache family in southern New Mexico has sued the producers of Steven Spielberg's television miniseries, "Into the West," claiming a set stylist cut an 8-year-old girl's hair without regard for tribal customs...
Supernatural Threatsbreitbart.com/ ... 08:12:35South_park003South Park" has declared war on Scientology. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the animated satire, are digging in against the celebrity-endorsed religion after a controversial episode mocking outspoken Scientologist Tom Cruise was yanked abruptly from the schedule Wednesday _ with an Internet report saying it was covert warfare by Cruise that led to its departure. "So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!" the "South Park" creators said in a statement Friday in Daily Variety. "Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies... You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!.."
FRI 2006-MAR-17
Scary Timessuntimes.com/ ... 13:03:50On Oct. 21, men in two vans stopped at Sears Tower's loading dock along Lower Wacker Drive and asked if they could gain access to the building's sky deck from there. Security guards told the men to leave. The guards provided authorities with license plate numbers and surveillance video. The vehicles were tracked to a rental facility near O'Hare Airport. Investigators determined the men were Mexicans visiting Chicago and were not involved in terrorist activity, Caluris said...
Threatstime.com/ ... 22:27:20On Scene: How Operation Swarmer Fizzled Not a shot was fired, or a leader nabbed, in a major offensive that failed to live up to its advance billing... msnbc.msn.com/ ... 11:33:35federal investigators recently were able to carry materials needed to make a... homemade bomb through security screening at 21 airports... sciencedaily.com/ ... 11:33:05U.S. federal officials have confirmed they are investigating an incident where three men were seen studying and taking pictures of Chicago's Sears Tower... guards recorded the car's license plate and it was traced to a rental agency, which said the car was returned about an hour after the incident. It was later determined it had been rented with a fictional name... Also within the last three weeks... a man was questioned about sketching the Boeing World Headquarters building... worldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:32:10Among the pre-war documents posted online yesterday by the Pentagon is a letter from a member of Saddam's intelligence apparatus indicating al-Qaida and the Taliban had a relationship with the regime prior to the 9-11 attacks. The letter by the member of Saddam's Al Mukabarat to a superior, dated Sept. 15, 2001, reports a pre-9/11 conversation between an Iraqi intelligence source and a Taliban Afghani consul...
Nature is Dangerousbreitbart.com/ ... 11:17:37A disabling mosquito-borne disease that has hit the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion has claimed 148 lives, and almost a third of the population has been affected...
Violencemyrtlebeachonline.com/ ... 11:39:42A University of North Carolina graduate accused of trying to kill people by driving through a crowded campus plaza appeared briefly in court Thursday... harged with nine counts of attempted murder and nine of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, inflicting serious injury. If convicted on all counts, he could be sentenced to about 150 years in prison... Acquaintances described Taheri-azar as a contradictory person, someone who professed religious devotion but refused to follow standard practices of Islam; who was unfailingly polite but enjoyed baiting his teachers... Other Muslim students at UNC said his religious practices were highly unorthodox. "I never heard of a Muslim who was so anti-Arabic..." would not respond to "Assalaam Alaikum," a common Arabic greeting. He wouldn't face Mecca during prayers and refused to recite them in Arabic, contrary to Islamic practice... suntimes.com/ ... 11:18:48...33, cut off his own penis during a Northwest Side rampage Wednesday morning. When confronted by police, Fik hurled several knives and his severed [penis] at the officers... Officers stunned him with a Taser and took him into custody. "We took him out without any serious injury, with the exception of his own," said Chicago Police Sgt. Edward Dolan of the 16th District... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:09:55At least 22 people have been killed by gunmen near Iran's border with Afghanistan... Many of those killed were government employees and the governor of the provincial capital, Zahedan, was seriously injured in the attack... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:09:32A major military operation targeting insurgents and foreign fighters in northern Iraq is continuing into a second day... The operation near the town of Samarra is not as huge as has been suggested, correspondents say. Local people say there has been little if any combat... said to have detained about 40 suspects but 17 of these were later released. The joint US and Iraqi force said it had captured a number of weapons caches, containing shells, explosives and military uniforms... cbsnews.com/ ... 11:00:31A gunman opened fire early Friday morning at a Denny's restaurant and one man was killed and another seriously wounded, police said. It was the third fatal shooting to occur at the restaurant chain in Southern California this week... about 2:45 a.m. at a Denny's restaurant near Angel Stadium baseball park after a fight broke out between two large groups of people in the restaurant... It appears that the shooting was not related to street gangs... A 37-year-old Pomona man was fatally shot in the parking lot of a Denny's restaurant in Ontario on Thursday after getting into an altercation with a group of people. The gunman was still being sought.
St Patricksuntimes.com/ ... 13:02:19"Shamrock only exists on St. Patrick's Day. Every other day of the year, it's just young clover," said botanist Charles Nelson, Ireland's leading shamrock expert...
Cultureinkwellimagesink.com/ ... 22:26:47Mutt and Jeff -- The Original Animated Odd Couple csmonitor.com/ ... 11:47:29His wooden puzzles come in simple blue and green boxes, some no larger than a Rubik's cube. But they don't come with a picture. Completed puzzles include dropouts (empty spaces that no pieces fill), phony corners (pieces that look like corners but fit into the interior), and whammies (abutting pieces that take a third piece to lock them in place)...
Healing Ourselveswashingtonpost.com/ ... 11:07:17CHICAGO -- Soaring numbers of American children are being prescribed anti-psychotic drugs _ in many cases, for attention deficit disorder or other behavioral problems for which these medications have not been proven to work...
Feeding Ourselvesfoodnavigator-usa.com/ ... 11:06:54Low-carbohydrate diets could pose a serious health risk and are not a safe way to lose weight...
Animal Culturenytimes.com/ ... 11:06:30The nation's best known birder, David A. Sibley... says in an article being published today in Science that a blurry videotape that was the strongest evidence of the [ivory billed] woodpecker's continued existence does not show an ivory bill at all... was almost certainly a common pileated woodpecker...
Digital Culturenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:10:06Disabled people are being drafted in to help ensure websites are usable by all... sci-tech-today.com/ ... 11:05:23According to the "Windows XP on Mac" Web site, a hacker known only as "narf" has managed to load Windows XP on an unmodified Intel-based Apple Macintosh computer. It is a feat that Apple engineers, as recently as last Thursday, said was impossible...
History - less with uscbc.ca/ ... 11:01:10Toxicologists who examined Slobodan Milosevic's blood tests say the former Yugoslav president was not poisoned...
Big City Storieseconomist.com/ ... 22:26:21Appearances often deceive, but, in one respect at least, the visitor's first impression of Chicago is likely to be correct: this is a city buzzing with life, humming with prosperity, sparkling with new buildings, new sculptures, new parks, and generally exuding vitality...
Criminally Stupidsuntimes.com/ ... 12:59:15Federal authorities are hunting for a man and woman they say tried to rob a Naperville bank -- through its drive-up lane. The pair pulled a champagne-colored SUV into the drive-through lanes of Mutual Bank on Raymond Drive on Monday and sent the teller a note that read: "You have 10 seconds to fill up the tube w/100's and 50's. No dye packs. Or I'll shoot everyone [in] the parking lot..." The teller told the bank manager, who locked the bank's doors and called police... Thirty minutes later, the two went into a MidAmerica Bank in Wheaton, and Kates demanded money from the teller, saying, "The man behind me has a gun." They made off with about $900... Wednesday, they struck again, robbing $2,800 after going inside a Chase Bank in Naperville and threatening the teller... Cameras caught clear shots of the robbers in all three holdups... An Oak Park detective recognized the robbers...
Family Patternsworldnetdaily.com/ ... 12:56:39Father empowers irresponsible daughter...
Infrastructure Threatnews.independent.co.uk/ ... 11:43:54The world's biggest dam is to open in May, months ahead of schedule. The Three Gorges dam is viewed by supporters with pride as a symbol of China's economic and social change but environmentalists believe it is a catastrophe waiting to happen...
Business Culturefoxnews.com/ ... 11:43:31Michael Jackson has shut down his Neverland Ranch for good. Employees were summoned to the ranch Thursday at 5 p.m. PST in staggered groups, given back pay for 12 weeks through today and told the ranch had been shut down by the California Department of Labor. In fact, Jackson made the decision... Some of the employees of Neverland had been there with Jackson since he bought the place in the late '80s. A few actually had worked for the previous owner. They leave without pensions or the ability to apply for COBRA health insurance...
Theory of Sex Educationkeloland.com/ ... 11:36:57A teacher's aid from Hull, Iowa, is accused of having sex with a 15-year-old student... first incident happened in May of last year, when the boy was still 15 years old... charged with different crimes from after the boy turned 16, sexual exploitation by a school employee and lascivious conduct with a minor, for as many as 20 sex acts that authorities believe happened during the school year...
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!worldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:35:25Just nine days after being released from Placer County Jail because of good behavior and overcrowded conditions, Steven Wynn Kubby is behind bars again – this time on charges of violating probation. The 59-year-old medical marijuana advocate turned himself in at the jail late Wednesday to begin a 60-day sentence imposed the preceding day by Superior Court Judge Robert McElhany, who ruled that Kubby had violated probation when he moved to Canada in 2001 with his wife, Michele, and the couple's two young daughters to avoid a sentence for drug possession. A co-author of California's voter-approved Compassionate Use Act and the 1998 gubernatorial candidate for the Libertarian Party, Kubby seemed in far better spirits than at the beginning of his earlier stint. "I know everyone at the jail now so I told them – Get my suite ready," he joked to WorldNetDaily...
Opposing Tyrannynews.enquirer.com/ ... 11:41:22The city of Cincinnati has the right to take the home of an 80-year-old Clifton resident... a magistrate ruled Tuesday... the widow who's lived at Dixmyth and Clifton avenues since 1959, could be forced from her home as soon as Saturday... The city really wants his mother's property to facilitate the $122 million expansion of Good Samaritan Hospital... newhousenews.com/ ... 11:20:41A feminist blogger has posted explicit directions online for a surgical abortion, in reaction to the new South Dakota law... Is it a harbinger of a return to the era of secret, illegal abortions?..
Compromising with Evilvariety.com/ ... 11:19:46a "South Park" episode called "Trapped in the Closet," which lampooned both the religion and Tom Cruise... Comedy Central abruptly pulled a repeat of that episode that was scheduled to air Wednesday evening...
It's Only Moneyapnews.myway.com/ ... 11:17:59The Senate on Thursday passed an election-year budget plan forsaking President Bush's tax cuts and Medicare curbs, hours after lifting the ceiling on the national debt to $9 trillion...
Headline of the Daywoai.com/ ... 11:17:17Flying Cow Leaves Two Police Cars in Flames...
Supernaturaltoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:15:40Imagine John Lennon spinning in his grave. The ex-Beatle, who was murdered over 25 years ago, is the latest subject of a pay-per-view seance arranged by the producers of a 2003 attempt to contact the dead Princess Diana. That show made money but was slammed by critics as hitting a new low in television tastelessness. "People say this is disgusting and I accept that criticism..."
Sex can be... disturbingtoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:15:01Media were initially delighted to find the cast of moderately famous Bulgarians on "VIP Brother" included self-described "sex hedonists," an ex-Playboy playmate, and former Miss Bulgaria Violeta Zdravkova. But opinion shifted when Zdravkova brought her 3-year-old daughter Danaya to the show, which in previous years has featured nudity, sex and short-lived affairs between housemates...
Alcohol Was Involvedtoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:13:07When Italian police pulled over the vehicle, they found a completely naked 70-year-old woman who had been trying to have sex with the driver -- 11 years her junior. After demanding the joy-riding couple get dressed, the police tested the semi-nude male motorist for drunk driving. "He was three times over the legal (blood-alcohol) limit... We assume they must have been drinking at lunch and then things got out of control..."
Human Rightlifesite.net/ ... 11:46:14A new UK law prohibits restaurants from preventing homosexuals from public displays of affection under pain of prosecution. The same law mandates that bed and breakfasts and hotels give rooms to same-sex couples or face legal backlash... [A problem I see here is that if a public place were to interfere when hetero couples got too sloppy-smoochie in public, they'd have that right, but if the place objected to the same level of sloppy-smoochie were going on with a homo couple, they could sue, much like some African decendants who cry "racism" every time they are accused of anything. Equality must be true equality, not favoritism.] newsday.com/ ... 11:04:40The City Council's first openly gay leader, who refused to participate in the nation's largest St. Patrick's Day Parade on Friday, blasted its chairman for remarks that compared gay Irish-American activists to neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and prostitutes... [Funny-- that's how all us superior humans feel about the Irish, too!] [NB: The Blog-Heaper is kidding to make the point that the Irish themselves were once considered an inferior class. Mrs Blog-Heaper's family is very Chicago Irish.]
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinbreakingnews.iol.ie/ ... 11:01:36Jessica Simpson has fired back at press reports she snubbed a meeting with President George Bush, insisting he ran out of time to sit down with her...
THU 2006-MAR-16
Digital Age Violencebreitbart.com/ ... 18:13:56Members of a neighborhood gang videotaped themselves beating people with a trash can, slamming a man with a bicycle and robbing others at gunpoint... Six juveniles and two men, ages 18 and 19, have been arrested, and police have identified three more suspects in the Newport News attacks... there appeared to be six to 12 attacks on the tape...
Transport Tragedylatimes.com/ ... 18:10:30The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's investigation into a mysterious crash that destroyed a rare $1-million Ferrari in Malibu last month is now focusing on a videotape that was purportedly shot from inside the vehicle at the time of the accident... sources said that Ferrari owner... and the other man in the car... had a video camera rolling as they raced on Pacific Coast Highway on the morning of Feb. 21 at speeds in excess of 162 mph... destroyed one of only 400 Enzo Ferraris ever made... An animated re-creation of the crash made available to The Times on Thursday shows the driver of the Ferrari losing control, veering right off the road and then traveling a considerable distance before hitting a power pole and splitting the sports car in half. "Anyone in that was lucky to survive..."
Nature is Dangerouscnn.com/ ... 08:42:30Stiff wind swept across the dry Texas landscape Wednesday, challenging firefighters weary from three days of battling wildfires that have blackened 840,000 acres and killed 11 people... In the 24-hour period that ended at midday Tuesday, the state had sent crews and aircraft to more than 200 fires covering 191,000 acres. Those blazes destroyed 15 homes, closed at least one highway and forced the evacuation of 45 people, officials said. Since last weekend, 1,900 others in seven counties had been forced to evacuate. About 10,000 cows and horses were feared dead across the smoking landscape...
Violenceforbes.com/ ... 23:40:39A preliminary autopsy indicates a state social worker whose body was found along a country road was strangled... Sally Blackwell had received threats related to her work, authorities and relatives said... "In the 15 or 16 years she has been there, this is the first time she was actually scared..." CPS investigates reports of abuse and neglect of children, and, if necessary, places them in foster care. Blackwell, 53, oversaw 46 caseworkers, their supervisors and support staff in nine counties... news.ft.com/ ... 23:39:38Up to four members of Indonesia’s security forces were killed in the country’s remote Papua province yesterday in a clash with student activists demanding the closure of the world’s largest gold and copper mine... today.reuters.com/ ... 18:15:26A British horror film fanatic who wanted to be an infamous serial killer was found guilty on Thursday of murdering four strangers during a three-day rampage through southern England... military.com/ ... 18:12:54U.S. forces, joined by Iraqi troops, on Thursday launched the largest air assault since the U.S.-led invasion, targeting insurgent strongholds north of the capital, the military said. "More than 1,500 Iraqi and Coalition troops, over 200 tactical vehicles, and more than 50 aircraft participated in the operation," the military statement said of the attack designed to "clear a suspected insurgent operating area northeast of Samarra," 60 miles north of Baghdad... today.reuters.com/ ... 08:38:58A Los Angeles man and woman were each sentenced to two years in prison on Wednesday for stealing a gold chain from around the neck of a 5-year-old girl in January... ripped one of the chains off the girl, giving her an 8-inch (20-cm) cut... couple admitted to police that they later pawned the necklace for drug money... suntimes.com/ ... 08:13:16Police shot a man on the West Side Wednesday after he allegedly pointed a gun at an officer... wound to the leg.... the man along with another offender were involved in an armed robbery.... offenders brandished a TEC 9 machine pistol during the robbery...
Cosmologyphysorg.com/ ... 23:41:48Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence to support the concept of inflation. The concept poses the universe expanded many trillion times its size in less than a trillionth of a second at the outset of the big bang...
Animal Companionstoday.reuters.com/ ... 18:16:03DogA San Diego arena was evacuated for about two hours on Thursday, delaying a first-round game in the hugely popular national college basketball championship, after a hot dog cart attracted the attention of a bomb-sniffing dog...
Supernaturaltheglobeandmail.com/ ... 08:33:01Cambridge University cosmologist and mathematician John Barrow was awarded $1.6-million yesterday to do research into whether God is sitting at the control panel behind the Theory of Everything about the universe... believes that monotheistic religious thought about God and creation offers a better explanation than anything else, including most science, of how the universe works. He is one of the leading proponents of the anthropic principle of the universe, the dials-set-right idea -- the notion that the universe is, in Goldilocks's words, "just right" for life on Earth. Because if it were a little bigger or smaller, a little colder or warmer, a little younger or older, then life wouldn't exist...
US Militarydefenselink.mil/ ... 18:19:23The Department of Defense announced today... the department has made great progress in establishing a robust and effective sexual assault prevention program. All of the military services implemented aggressive education and training programs designed to build a climate of confidence. Fundamental changes to reporting procedures were also adopted across the department. This integrated program resulted in 2,374 reported allegations of sexual assault involving a service member as either a victim or perpetrator. Previous DoD studies and commissions found that some victims chose to forego support services rather than participate in the investigative process.... military.com/ ... 18:12:00Halliburton Co. failed to protect the water supply it is paid to purify for U.S. soldiers throughout Iraq, in one instance missing contamination that could have caused "mass sickness or death," an internal company report concluded... military.com/ ... 18:11:12Persistent insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are prompting the Pentagon to rely more heavily on warplanes and air transports to attack the enemy and move troops and supplies. The increase in airstrikes is most dramatic in Afghanistan, where they nearly doubled to 157 last year, compared with 86 in 2004... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:31:27The use of dogs at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where detainees were abused by US guards was not properly controlled, a former top commander there has said. Col Thomas Pappas told a hearing he regretted not setting "appropriate controls" at the jail near Baghdad...
Culturesuntimes.com/ ... 08:15:16"Kids, I'm proud to say, have always liked Devo music. They get it," says one of its creators, Devo bassist and songwriter Gerald V. Casale. "Parents tell us over and over how their kids love it, how they play it unprompted -- and it's still happening, with kids who are way too young to remember Devo. There's something in the structure of Devo music that goes right into the id, all this insidiously subversive, manically happy, mathematically assembled stuff. There's something we did right, where if these songs weren't old '80s songs, they'd be new..." This month, they're unveiling Devo 2.0, a quintet that has everything -- the bouncy songs, the flower-pot hats, a few jumpsuits -- except Casale, Mothersbaugh and the other original Devo members... imdb.com/ ... 08:07:16Maurice LaMarche... [at IMDB]"The All-Night Show" (1980) TV Series .... Lips by Maurice... "The All-Night Show" was North America's first regular late-night marathon, running live nightly from after sign-off until 6:00 AM... tv.com/ ... 08:05:37MouseMaurice LaMarche... His most famous performance is the voice of Brain (aka "The Brain") in the cartoon show, "Pinky and the Brain"... voted "Most Likely to Be Someone Else" by his Toronto high school classmates. Only the third person in history, and the second in the last 50 years, to be the official voice of Popeye. Voices Toucan Sam, Fruit Loops' animated spokes-bird...
"I recently read this article about how all these old fart actors in Hollywood are causing a protest about how no one will give them work because of how old they are. I have two words for all you guys--voice-overs. They can't see how old or how fat you are!.."
Viet Nam War - still with uscbc.ca/ ... 23:41:15The U.S military has decided to release the B.C. man arrested last week for deserting the U.S. Marine Corps nearly 40 years ago at the height of the Vietnam War. Allen Abney is still at the base, pending completion of some final paperwork...
Rebuildingwashingtontimes.com/ ... 08:43:07Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim they have purged the region of three-quarters of al Qaeda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters. If true, it would mark a significant victory in the fight against Abu Musab Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, and could partly explain the considerable drop in suicide bombings in Iraq recently...
Unclear on the Conceptbreitbart.com/ ... 08:41:31When a dump truck backed into Curtis Gokey's car, he decided to sue the city for damages. Only thing is, he was the one driving the dump truck. But that minor detail didn't stop Gokey, a Lodi city employee, from filing a $3,600 claim for the December accident, even after admitting the crash was his fault. After the city denied that claim because Gokey was, in essence, suing himself, he and his wife, Rhonda, decided to file a new claim under her name. City Attorney Steve Schwabauer said this one also lacks merit because Rhonda Gokey can't sue her own husband...
Digital Threatapnews.myway.com/ ... 08:40:50A new variety of unusually powerful Internet attacks can overwhelm popular Web sites and disrupt e-mails by exploiting the computers that help manage global Internet traffic, according to security researchers. First detected late last year, the new attacks direct such massive amounts of spurious data against victim computers that even flagship technology companies could not cope. In one of the early cases examined, the unknown assailant apparently seized control of an Internet name server in South Africa and deliberately corrupted its contents...
Under Tyrannytoday.reuters.com/ ... 08:39:49Doing good deeds, volunteering on building sites and obtaining Chairman Mao's autograph are some of the objectives of "Learn from Lei Feng," a new online game starring the Chinese Communist Party's legendary hero...
Healing Ourselvestoday.reuters.com/ ... 08:38:03Employees at office parties are considered to be at work until the boss leaves, a German court ruled in the case of an employee seeking damages for a head injury sustained at a company Christmas celebration...
Digital Culturetoday.reuters.com/ ... 08:36:09Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google... "The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little screen..."
Change Happensnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:35:18UN experts are meeting to determine the risks which climate change poses to some of the world's special places... says climate change threatens World Heritage Sites such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Tower of London... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 08:34:55Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari says he is willing to withdraw his nomination to lead the new government if the Iraqi people want him to do so...
People Diesuntimes.com/ ... 08:14:27An 80-year-old priest who had just performed funeral services for a nun accidentally fell to his death down a flight of stairs at a Rogers Park girls high school Tuesday night... The priest, unidentified pending family notification and who was visiting from Peru, Ill., had performed funeral services for a nun Tuesday at St. Scholastica Academy... “We believe he may have been going back to his guest room and mistook the stairs, that led to a basement, for the room.’’...
Police Riottoday.reuters.com/ ... 08:37:12Police in eastern China can tap the country's first human body odor bank to help their dogs get a nose for criminals... suntimes.com/ ... 08:11:13Ten plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday, alleging illegal activities by four Chicago Police officers, according to a release from the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Among the activities alleged in the suit are extortion, fraud, use of excessive force and racketeering. The federal government has lodged similar criminal charges against the four officers... alleges the officers barged into a Plainfield home, handcuffed the plaintiffs and shook them down for money, then threatened that if they did not pay, they would be brought up on criminal charges... Thousands of dollars were taken from the plaintiffs under threat of intimidation or arrest...
WED 2006-MAR-15
Transport Tragedynbc11.com/ ... 21:44:20Austin police now say the reigning Miss Deaf Texas was killed by a freight train apparently while text-messaging family and friends on her cell phone... lead locomotive's snowplow -- which extends 16 inches from either track -- clipped McAvoy, killing her... Gene Mirus... a deaf studies instructor at Gallaudet.... the nation's leading university for the hearing-impaired... [said] many deaf people who think they can detect approaching trains by their vibrations are mistaken...
Digital Sex can be Dangerousbreitbart.com/ ... 12:24:14U.S. and international authorities have charged 27 people in an online child pornography sting... arrests in Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina and Tennessee...
Scary Timesbangkokpost.com/ ... 21:44:36US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday sounded a rallying cry for countries in South-East Asia in the war on terrorism, saying Muslim extremists were trying to turn the region into "a ring of fire..." cnsnews.com/ ... 12:23:38Democrats... election-year agenda... Pelosi on Tuesday offered what amounts to a draft version... said Democrats will end tax subsidies for companies that send jobs overseas.... said Democrats support the "right of all Americans to organize...." said Democrats are "fighting" to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) in the House and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) in the Senate.... describing the income of corporate American CEOs as "immoral...." also mentioned the Democrats' "Innovation Agenda..." "guarantees" that every American will have affordable access to broadband within five years.... support "energy independence" within ten years; health care for all American within five years; and "dignified retirement" (no privatization of Social Security) through an "AmeriSave" plan...
Industrial Tragedynews8austin.com/ ... 10:53:03The reigning Miss Deaf Texas was hit by the northbound train Monday afternoon while walking along some train tracks in South Austin...
Thefttoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:40:57U.S. Customs agents in California said on Tuesday they had found 250 bogus billion dollar bills while investigating a man charged with currency smuggling... one billion dollar bills with an issue date of 1934 and bearing a picture of President Grover Cleveland. "You would think the $1 billion denomination would be a giveaway that these notes are fake, but some people are still taken in..."
Violencesalon.com/ ... 21:42:22279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable... hosted.ap.org/ ... 21:41:48A man armed with two handguns opened fire inside a Denny's restaurant during lunch hour Wednesday, killing two people and wounding a married couple before taking his own life.... As many as 15 people were inside the restaurant at the time, authorities said. Many fled or hid in bathrooms for safety. "The witnesses described him as coming in with a dazed look on his face, then they said he started shooting...." wounded couple were listed in good condition.... Investigators believed the gunman's motive could be unrelated to the restaurant or its employees after a witness told them about something the gunman said. They declined to give details... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:39:20One person is reported to have been killed after a bomb exploded in a car in northern Paris... One of the people in the car was known to French police, who say the bomb attack may have been a settling of scores between criminals... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:38:50Chadian troops have foiled an attempt to oust President Idriss Deby, Chad's communications minister has said. Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor said a plan to shoot down Mr Deby's plane on his return from abroad had been discovered. Several arrests have been made and the president returned home on Tuesday night after leaving a summit in Equatorial Guinea early... today.reuters.co.uk/ ... 10:38:28Pakistani authorities have arrested at least 30 people, blown up a religious school and banned sale of weapons as part of an effort to suppress Islamist militancy in a troubled tribal region... today.reuters.co.uk/ ... 09:57:22TIKRIT, Iraq - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house. Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women... The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network". "Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets. "There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed." Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned...
Nature is Dangeroushosted.ap.org/ ... 09:02:31An 1890s-era plantation dam failed in the rugged hills above northern Kauai, sending water and mud surging through two homes and wiping out the only highway. Searchers found one person dead and were looking for at least seven others, some of them children who hadn't been seen since the deluge...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 10:57:22us-flagMarine Lance Cpl. Nicholas R. Anderson, 21, of Sauk City, Wis., died March 13 in a non-hostile vehicle accident in Afghanistan. He was assigned to the1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. The incident is under investigation. defenselink.mil/ ... 10:57:00us-flagMarine Lance Cpl. Kristen K. Figueroa, 20, of Honolulu, Hawaii, died March 12 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Only Naturalservice.spiegel.de/ ... 12:28:37Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed -- at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn... The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean... recent months have seen hundreds of crevices splitting the desert floor and the ground has slumped by as much as 100 meters (328 feet). At the same time, scientists have observed magma rising from deep below as it begins to form what will eventually become a basalt ocean floor. Geologically speaking, it won't be long until the Red Sea floods the region. The ocean that will then be born will split Africa apart... Geophysicists have calculated that in 10 million years the East African Rift System will be as large as the Red Sea. When that happens, Africa will lose its horn... ananova.com/ ... 10:54:20Russia... a freak fall of coloured snow... panicked locals bombarded police and emergency services... sand storms from neighbouring Mongolia are to blame...
Feeding Ourselvesbreitbart.com/ ... 10:53:29Colleen Porter, already a state mango record holder, has been confirmed by the Guinness Book of World Records as growing the world's heaviest mango _ 5 pounds, 7 ounces. The monster mango appears to be close to the size of a human head...
US Militarynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 21:45:36The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later... defenselink.mil/ ... 12:31:49This week, the Air Force and Navy announced an increase in the number of reservists on active duty in support of the partial mobilization, while the Army, Marine Corps and Coast Guard numbers decreased. The net collective result is 1,446 fewer reservists mobilized than last week. This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel, who have been mobilized, to 117,988, including both units and individual augmentees. kfoxtv.com/ ... 10:46:13The El Paso FBI office has renewed its focus on gang activity after discovering some U.S. soldiers are affiliated with one of the most violent gangs in country. El Paso FBI agents are now focusing on identifying soldiers they believe are affiliated with the Folk Nation gang...
Digital Culturetoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:43:13A new Discovery Channel homework Web site aims to remind parents whose math and history knowledge has gotten rusty how to help their children with the very things they have forgotten. Cosmeo, a new online subscription site from Discovery Communications, offers a range of tools from a WebMath equation solver to educational videos and subject-specific Brain Games... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:42:53a robotic fish unveiled by Japanese scientists this week could one day be used to observe fish in the ocean or survey oil platforms for damage. Modeled on the koi, a decorative strain of carp popular in Japan, the remote-controlled white, red and gold robot can maneuver its way around a fish pond with a realistic flick of its tail. The 80-cm (32-inch) carp can also use sensors in its mouth to monitor the concentration of oxygen in water, a key to fish health... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:41:36MADRID - Are you the owner of a jeweled cross lost in Madrid in the middle of the last century? If you're still alive and know your way around the Internet, you could finally get it back. The city is clearing out decades' worth of lost property in a very modern way -- on eBay...
Healing Ourselvestelegraph.co.uk/ ... 22:10:35The substance in chillies that causes the tongue to burn also drives prostate cancer cells to kill themselves... capsaicin makes the cells undergo programmed cell death or apoptosis... it induced approximately 80 per cent of cancer cells growing in mice to follow the molecular pathways leading to apoptosis... Prostate cancer tumours treated with capsaicin were about one-fifth the size of tumours in non-treated mice... Every year, 10,000 men die and more than 30,000 are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK... "Capsaicin had a profound anti-proliferative effect on human prostate cancer cells in culture..." dose of pepper extract fed to the mice was equivalent to giving 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week to a 200-pound man, roughly equivalent to between three and eight fresh habañera peppers... Britain's Prostate Cancer Charity welcomed the study, but advised men not to eat more hot chillis... "Eventually, it may be possible to extract the capsaicin and make it available as a drug treatment. In the meantime we caution men with prostate cancer in the UK against upping their weekly intake of the hottest known chillies. High intake of hot chillies has been linked with stomach cancers in the populations of India and Mexico..." [So eat some yogurt beforehand....] local6.com/ ... 12:30:55IOWA... a rare strain of virus is behind an outbreak of the mumps in Iowa. So far, 60 cases have been reported... virus may have come from Europe, but a similar strain has been detected in New Jersey... 24dash.com/ ... 09:56:35Two men were fighting for their lives in a London hospital after six volunteers fell seriously ill while taking part in a trial of a new drug... One man's head had swollen up to three times its normal size, it has been reported... the drug, which is to treat chronic inflammatory conditions and leukaemia...
Supernatural Threatscentredaily.com/ ... 22:08:38Tipping his red hat to Chicago's Irish Catholic heritage, Cardinal Francis George has again taken action to resolve a St. Patrick's Day dilemma: Every few years, the holiday falls on a Friday during Lent, when consuming meat is traditionally forbidden. But what would St. Patrick's Day be without corned beef and cabbage? So George has declared an exception that permits his flock to eat meat on Friday. At least 76 other U.S. bishops reportedly have granted similar dispensations, including Joliet Bishop Joseph Imesch. While eating meat on a Lenten Friday isn't a mortal sin, many look to the church for guidance before bending the rule... "It's one of the church's manmade rules having nothing to do with dogma..." [So, we resolved the corned beef during St Pat's during Lent issue yet again! Whew!! Now, about WOMEN'S EQUALITY... and other trivial issues...? Cults are dangerous]
Theory of Justicenewsday.com/ ... 22:06:44Prosecutors have told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema that they will likely give up their death-penalty case against al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui if they can't overturn her dramatic Tuesday ruling banning aviation-security evidence from the case. "We don't know whether it is worth us proceeding at all, candidly, under the ruling you made," prosecutor Rob Spencer told Brinkema during a teleconference late Tuesday, according to a transcript released yesterday. "Without some relief, frankly, I think that there's no point for us to go forward..." a mistake experts say most law students wouldn't make, by a heretofore unknown mid-level attorney at the Transportation Security Administration, could abort the costly, emotional 41/2-year death-penalty effort... government lawyer... had improperly coached seven Federal Aviation Administration witnesses on their planned testimony... "Punitive measures, to the extent necessary, should be Ms. Martin's problem," they told Brinkema. "To direct them at this case ... hinders rather than forwards the public interest in a full and truthful disclosure of critical facts..."
Ummm....courttv.com/ ... 12:25:42she managed to pocket 100 items valued at $900. The polo sweat suit has no pockets, and the outfit's tight cut could have hidden perhaps 100 bobby pins, but little else. It really is no mystery that she now finds herself incarcerated...
Let It Go Already!breitbart.com/ ... 12:24:54Saddam Hussein testified Wednesday for the first time at his trial, calling on Iraqis to stop a bloody wave of sectarian violence and instead fight American troops, prompting the chief judge to close the courtroom after declaring Saddam was making political speeches. Even as the judge repeatedly yelled at Saddam to stop, the deposed leader read from a prepared text, insisting he was still Iraq's president...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:56:26Potus talked himself hoarse pointing out that the United Arab Emirates is not just a moderate Middle East nation that hates and fears al-Qaeda, it also happens to be one of America's closest allies in the war on terror and a port which the US Navy uses as an essential staging post for its missions. No-one seemed to be listening. American naval ships make a scheduled 500 stops in Dubai every year, a fact that never seemed to worry the likes of Senator Hillary Clinton or Republican Congressman Pete King, who were competing with each other to torpedo the ports deal. The swagger of the first term has become the stagger of the second...
World of Culturesnews.independent.co.uk/ ... 10:54:59It's possibly the oddest musical since a Mel Brooks's character pitched "Springtime for Hitler". Its director had to use his own kidney as collateral to have it made. And its hit song is "All I want is rice!" Nevertheless, Yoduk Story hit the stage in Seoul last night to give an all-singing, all-dancing vision of life in the gulags of North Korea...
Under Tyrannynews.yahoo.com/ ... 22:03:41The FCC said an episode of the CBS crime drama "Without a Trace" that aired in December 2004 was indecent. It cited the graphic depiction of "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy." CBS said it strongly disagrees with the FCC's finding... The program "featured an important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children. The program was not unduly graphic or explicit," the network said in a statement... philly.com/ ... 10:52:38the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office has seized four computer hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper as part of a statewide grand-jury investigation into leaks to reporters...
Modern Medicine can be Dangerousbreitbart.com/ ... 10:51:54A Circuit Court jury on Monday awarded $5.6 million to the family of a man who had the shaft of a screwdriver implanted into his spine by an orthopedic surgeon... Dr. Robert Ricketson had contended he acted properly when he operated on Arturo Iturralde in 2001 because two titanium rods he planned to attach to Iturralde's spine were discovered missing during the operation... The stainless steel screwdriver snapped days later, and the then-73- year-old Iturralde had to have three more back surgeries as a result. He died two years later...
Transporttoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:42:21As the Baby Boomers who transformed Harley's rumbling, lumbering bikes from countercultural totems into American icons enter their senior years -- the leading edge of the generation is turning 60 this year -- they're increasingly in the market for knee and hip replacements, not Harley's notoriously bone-shaking bikes. That's forcing the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based company to scramble to find new customers among women, blacks and Hispanics -- groups that have not been traditional Harley-Davidson riders. The quest has involved the development and rollout of new products, like the 883 Sportster Low, built for smaller, lighter riders, and new marketing efforts, like Harley's TV ad campaign during the NCAA tournament this spring...
People Carry Ontoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:40:07The sad image of a grieving widow may not be entirely accurate, according to a study published on Tuesday showing that six months after the death of their partner, nearly half of older people had few symptoms of grief...
WW2 - still with usnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:39:38Online codebreaking enthusiasts working to solve a series of German World War II ciphers have cracked the second of three codes...
Digital Threatnytimes.com/ ... 10:45:53A group of European computer researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to insert a software virus into radio frequency identification tags... possible to infect a tiny portion of memory in the chip, which can hold as little as 128 characters of information... a series of worrisome prospects, including the ability of terrorists and smugglers to evade airport luggage scanning systems that will use RFID tags in the future... he researchers' paper, "Is Your Cat Infected With a Computer Virus?..." describes how the vulnerability could be used to undermine a variety of tracking systems... inside information would be required in many cases to plant a hostile program... commercial software developed for RFID applications had the same potential vulnerabilities that have been exploited by viruses and other malicious software, or malware, in the rest of the computer industry... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:38:12The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday sharply cut its demand for Google Inc. customer data and a U.S. judge signaled he intended to require the search company to hand over some records, potentially opening the door to compromise in a test case for Web privacy... [NEVER COMPROMISE WITH TYRANNY!! DON'T BE EVIL!!]
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!worldnetdaily.com/ ... 09:03:06Steven Wynn Kubby, co-author of California's watershed medical marijuana law and the Libertarian Party's 1998 gubernatorial candidate, is a free man – at least for now...
Human Rightworldnetdaily.com/ ... 09:02:48In a child custody case involving two lesbians, a judge ruled a Vermont civil union is not valid in the state of Virginia...
World - Energyexaminer-enterprise.com/ ... 21:45:01ConocoPhillips has announced plans to shut down production this week from the Greater Ekofisk Area in the Norwegian North Sea for unscheduled equipment modifications and maintenance designed to ensure continued safe and reliable operations. The total gross production impact is expected to be approximately 1.6 million barrels of oil equivalent which is approximately 560,000 BOE net to ConocoPhillips... news.yahoo.com/ ... 09:02:05Vicente Fox climbed aboard a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday to formally announce a new deep-water oil discovery he said could eventually yield 10 billion barrels of crude oil...
Police Riotonline.indianagazette.com/ ... 09:01:31A former Indiana Borough police officer has been accused of soliciting a sexual favor from an Indiana University of Pennsylvania coed in exchange for not citing her for underage drinking... charged Thursday with official oppression and false imprisonment... picked up the student near campus... offered to take her to the Lawrence Hall dormitory. Instead, Emigh drove her in a marked police cruiser to a darkened section of [a]... salvage yard...
TUE 2006-MAR-14
Prison Suckswashingtonpost.com/ ... 09:20:11A forensic pathologist who observed a second autopsy on a teen who died at a juvenile boot camp said the results seem to indicate his death was caused by a beating by guards, not by a blood condition...
Violencelocal6.com/ ... 09:54:44Women involved in prostitution in Daytona Beach, Fla., have reportedly armed themselves and are searching for a serial killer behind the slayings of three residents... woai.com/ ... 09:48:47A teenager was shot Monday afternoon after he was arguing over tater tots with another teen... Neighbors told police the uncle of one of the boys told the teens to stop fighting. They were ready to stop, but investigators said a 20-year-old man would not let them. “Another person out here in this apartment complex, I think wanted to see the young boys continue fighting..." The man then walked into a nearby apartment complex, grabbed a gun and started shooting... fired several shots into the living room where the boys were watching television... hit the young man in the back... condition was unavailable Monday night... suspect remained on the loose... sfgate.com/ ... 09:43:22Authorities called it one of the worst rape cases they could recall. Seven gang members and three female associates were charged Monday with raping a woman as the mother of one suspect allegedly watched and encouraged the assault... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:29:12In pictures: Somali drought... leaving some 11.5 million people in need of food aid... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:28:04The Brazilian army has ended a nine-day occupation of slums in Rio de Janeiro aimed at recovering weapons stolen from an army base. The occupation was carried out by 1,500 troops with support from helicopters and tanks but failed to recover any of the weapons. The army says it will continue to mount further operations to find the weapons. The occupation led to daily shootouts with armed drug gangs which left several people injured... mg.co.za/ ... 09:19:42Baghdad.... In the past 24 hours, police have found the bodies of at least 85 men killed by gunfire execution-style in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian killing... msnbc.msn.com/ ... 09:19:21The United States is pouring billions more dollars and fresh platoons of experts into its campaign to “defeat IEDs,” the roadside bombs President Bush describes as threat No. 1 to Iraq’s future. The American military even plans to build special, more defensible highways here, in its frustrating standoff with the makeshift munitions — “improvised explosive devices” — that Iraqi insurgents field by the hundreds to hobble U.S. road movements in the 3-year-old conflict. Out on those risky roads, and back at the Pentagon, few believe that even the most advanced technology will eliminate the threat... washingtonpost.com/ ... 09:18:54Amid gunfire, street clashes and billowing black smoke from explosives, Israeli forces laid siege Tuesday to a Palestinian jail in the West Bank town of Jericho demanding custody of prisoners there alleged to have participated in the assassination of Israel's tourism minister in 2001. The operation, coming two weeks before the election in Israel, was among the most aggressive Israeli incursions into a Palestinian town in months... There were unconfirmed reports from the city of at least one death and numerous injuries. TV footage showed some Palestinians surrendering to Israelis with their hands in the air but the wanted men were not among them. Numerous explosions were heard in the city and people hurled rocks at the Israeli troops and set fire to tires and barricades at intersections...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 11:27:24us-flagMarine Lance Cpl. Bunny Long, 22, of Modesto, Calif., died March 10 from a suicide, vehicle-borne, improvised explosive device in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Extraterrestrialnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:21:31Planet hunters have discovered an icy "super-Earth" circling a distant star. International astronomers suspect it is a bare, icy, rocky world, much colder than the Earth and 13 times its mass... spotted last April but details have only just been revealed... orbits a star about half as big as our Sun, positioned some 9,000 light-years away... "First, this icy 'super-Earth' dominates the region around its star that in our Solar System is populated by the gas-giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn.... We've never seen a system like this before because we've never had the means to find them. "And second, these icy 'super-Earths' are pretty common. Roughly, 35% of all stars have them..." npr.org/ ... 09:02:48Scientists studying particles of comet dust captured by the spacecraft Stardust reported a big surprise Monday. Findings from the mission are challenging assumptions about comets and how they formed... scientists studying comet dust from the Stardust probe found minerals formed by intense heat, suggesting the minerals came from the neighborhood of the sun itself. That's the earliest discovery in what's expected to be decades of study...
Feeding Ourselvestoday.reuters.com/ ... 09:31:56A 42-year-old gourmet food junkie has skipped out on her restaurant bill so many times that she has been banned from the city of Rome... suntimes.com/ ... 08:57:11A cow in Alabama has tested positive for mad cow disease...
History - still with usbreitbart.com/ ... 08:59:52Underground chambers and tunnels used during a Jewish revolt against the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago have been uncovered in northern Israel... shows the ancient Jews planned and prepared for the uprising, contrary to the common perception that the revolt began spontaneously... foxnews.com/ ... 08:54:56An Egyptian-German archaeological team has discovered 17 statues of Sekhmet, an ancient Egyptian goddess with the head of a lioness and the body of a woman. The statues, estimated to be about 3,000 years old, were found during restoration work on the temple of Amenhotep III, in the southern city of Luxor... Last week, the team discovered six similar black granite statues depicting Sekhmet seated on a throne and holding the "key of life" in her left hand. Two of those statues were broken, with only the lower parts found...
Animal Culturefoxnews.com/ ... 08:54:20Hungry Michigan Wolves Attacking Each Other...
Free Expressionbreitbart.com/ ... 09:52:39Thomas Burns, of New Castle, contends he was denied his First Amendment free speech rights when he was cited for giving an obscene hand gesture to a construction worker in April...
Under Tyrannywashtimes.com/ ... 09:43:56Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
Marriage Todaytoday.reuters.com/ ... 09:31:38MEXICO CITY - A Mexican couple were recovering separately after a marital spat got out of control and saw them firing guns, throwing knives and hurling homemade bombs... fought until their house blew up in a homemade gasoline bomb explosion... [he] told reporters he was glad his wife had suffered burns, while [she] said she was only sorry she had not "hacked off his manhood" during the fight... [Ready for reconciliation, obviously... -Mrs. Blog-Heaper]
Supernatural Equalitynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:24:16Singer Isaac Hayes is to stop providing the voice for a character in cartoon South Park because he objects to its "inappropriate ridicule" of religion. Hayes, 63, who is the voice of the lustful Chef, has been a regular on the show since its US TV debut in 1997. But co-creator Matt Stone said Hayes had "never had a problem" until the Scientology Church, to which Hayes belongs, was parodied. The show was insensitive to "personal spiritual beliefs", said Hayes...
Modern Medicine can be Dangerousnewsday.com/ ... 09:22:40Infants exposed to at least one course of antibiotics during their first year of life are twice as likely to develop asthma as children who do not take the medications...
Digital Whoopsvnunet.com/ ... 09:01:43McAfee was forced to publish an update to its virus pattern database on Friday after the previous version mistakenly flagged system files as malware... caused several versions of McAfee's antivirus software to quarantine or delete system files...
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!today.reuters.com/ ... 09:01:05People who regularly smoke marijuana may find their memories growing hazy over time... a study of long-term and shorter-term marijuana users, researchers in Greece found that both groups performed more poorly on tests of memory, attention and other cognitive abilities than a comparison group who'd only occasionally used the drug... Long-term users - who'd smoked four or more joints per week for at least 10 years - showed the greatest deficits... [DON'T BELIEVE ANY STUDIES DONE UNDER THE DISTORTING TYRANNY OF PROHIBITION! THEY'VE BEEN MAKING UP LIES FOR... GEE.. I CAN'T REMEMBER HOW LONG...]
Theory of Sex Educationpalmbeachpost.com/ ... 08:59:05The [51yo] former Rolling Green Elementary teacher had been accused of having a 19-month relationship with the [11yo] boy, including sexual acts at the school and intercourse during sleepovers at her home, on field trips and at activities... carted off to prison this morning to serve a five year sentence... 10 years of sex offender probation following her release...
Oh! The Irony!foxnews.com/ ... 08:56:41Peter Tomarken, 63, host of the hit 1980s game show "Press Your Luck," and his wife, Kathleen Abigail Tomarken, 41, were... killed Monday morning when their small plane crashed into Santa Monica Bay...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinsalon.com/ ... 09:47:16The New York Times announced Monday night that it would review the accuracy of a recent Page One story that claimed to identify the hooded detainee shown in one of the most iconic photos of abuse from Abu Ghraib, after Salon presented evidence suggesting that the paper had identified the wrong man... An official report by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) concluded that the photo the Times said showed Qaissi actually showed another detainee, named Saad, whose full name is being withheld by Salon to protect his identity... foxnews.com/ ... 08:55:41Nearly three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, some two million documents and tape recordings seized during Operation Iraqi Freedom remain largely un-translated, unanalyzed, and unavailable to the American public. These items appear to contain information relevant to the ongoing debate over the former dictator's terror ties, including some that describe in detail how Saddam trained thousands of Islamic radicals in the waning years of his regime...
People Do Drugswsu.edu/ ... 08:50:45The Opium War, also called the Anglo-Chinese War, was the most humiliating defeat China ever suffered. In European history, it is perhaps the most sordid, base, and vicious event in European history, possibly, just possibly, overshadowed by the excesses of the Third Reich in the twentieth century. By the 1830's, the English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of criminality. Growing opium in India, the East India Company shipped tons of opium into Canton which it traded for Chinese manufactured goods and for tea. This trade had produced, quite literally, a country filled with drug addicts, as opium parlors proliferated all throughout China in the early part of the nineteenth century. This trafficing, it should be stressed, was a criminal activity after 1836, but the British traders generously bribed Canton officials in order to keep the opium traffic flowing. The effects on Chinese society were devestating. In fact, there are few periods in Chinese history that approach the early nineteenth century in terms of pure human misery and tragedy. In an effort to stem the tragedy, the imperial government made opium illegal in 1836 and began to aggressively close down the opium dens...
MON 2006-MAR-13
Scary Timestime.com/ ... 10:52:47The world may be anxious to see how Israel and Hamas deal with each other. But Palestinians are more worried about another showdown: between Hamas and Fatah, the organization founded by Yasser Arafat, whose members do not want to relinquish control of the Palestinian government to the upstarts. Both Palestinian officials and Israeli security experts say that a clash between the two forces is inevitable and could swiftly turn violent. The feud runs deep... "Fatah guys were worse than the Israelis," recalled a member of a third militant group, Islamic Jihad. "The Israelis would stop beating us to let us pray. Fatah never stopped..."
Mass Murdering Monstersnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:27:30The Taleban says it has killed four foreigners kidnapped at the weekend in southern Afghanistan... said the bodies of three Albanians and a German had been dumped "between Helmand and Kandahar"...
Nature is Dangerouswwwa.accuweather.com/ ... 10:41:37At least three people are dead following a second consecutive night of severe weather across the Midwest. A twister reported to be a half mile wide cut a 16 mile long path of destruction through the town of Sedalia, Missouri, killing a woman as she sought shelter in her mobile home. Tornadoes also touched down in central Illinois and Arkansas, but there were no reports of injuries... one hundred reports of tornadoes... 300 reports of hail damage and 90 reports of wind damage... brought snow to parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Some areas received over 6 inches... The powerful storms are fueled by a strong jet stream dividing unseasonably warm, moist air from much colder, drier air to the north and west... foxnews.com/ ... 10:25:16Massive wildfires raced across the dry southern plains early Monday, burning more than half a million acres in Texas, leaving at least seven people dead and injuring at least seven more... Four people died in a chain-reaction crash on Interstate 40 east of Groom as smoke obscured the road. Three others died in fires near Borger...
Violencenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:27:44A suspected Islamic militant and three others have been killed in a bomb blast in eastern Bangladesh after security forces besieged a house... washingtonpost.com/ ... 10:25:53A rare suicide car bombing yesterday in Afghanistan's capital, which killed two civilians and left former president Sibghatullah Mujaddedi with burn injuries, could set back government reconciliation efforts with Taliban members and aggravate a growing war of words with neighboring Pakistan over terrorist violence... chicagotribune.com/ ... 10:25:33KABUL, Afghanistan -- A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers Sunday, and suicide bombers targeted the Afghan official responsible for persuading former Taliban members to support the new government... smh.com.au/ ... 10:24:46THE Iraqi capital is braced for another round of retribution attacks by Shiites after six car bombs ripped through markets in the Shiite bastion of Sadr City, killing up to 50 and wounding 200 other evening shoppers... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:19:58KABUL - U.S. forces captured 11 insurgents believed responsible for a roadside bomb that killed four U.S. troops... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:19:40Iraq's president pressed political parties on Monday to accelerate efforts to form a broad government to arrest a slide into civil war after bomb blasts in a Baghdad Shi'ite slum killed 52 people...
History - less with usforbes.com/ ... 10:24:34A Dutch toxicologist said Monday he found traces of an unprescribed antibiotic in Slobodan Milosevic's system earlier this year after the former Yugoslav leader did not respond to blood pressure medication given at the U.N. detention center. Donald Uges said he found traces of rifampicin, an antituberculosis drug that "makes the liver extremely active" and thus breaks down other medications very quickly, possibly taking away their effectiveness...
Star Trek -- still with ussuntimes.com/ ... 10:50:06[William] Shatner is. An. Actor. For the. Ages!!!..
TV debut: 1954, as Ranger Bill on the "Howdy Doody Show..."
'KHAAAAAAAN!' A movie line so riveting it has its own Web site (www.khaaan.com)...
Marriage Todaymsnbc.msn.com/ ... 10:49:12the Centennial Park Action Committee, a group that lobbies for decriminalization of the practice. She's among a new wave of polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement...
Hospitals can be Dangerousnew.edp24.co.uk/ ... 10:48:10An outbreak of the winter vomiting bug became more serious last night as nine wards were affected at two Norfolk hospitals. Visitors have been banned at seven wards at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital... it is affecting 36 patients... [I can understand healthy people not being allowed into that disease-infested environment, but by that logic I can understand all the less why you'd take SICK people there!]
Opposing Tyrannynewsregister.com/ ... 10:46:11"I got a ticket for $97..." [for] snuggling up to her husband... [sitting in] the middle of their Fifth Avenue's broad expanse of front seat... she began looking through Oregon's seat belt laws... Sheriff's Deputy... told her it was a traffic violation to forgo a shoulder harness when one was available... she began looking through Oregon's seat belt laws... found a provision requiring shoulder harnesses for children, whenever one is available, but no comparable provision for adults... sheriff's office... [said] She was right. The ticket would be voided....
Theory of Justicenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:27:06A federal judge has interrupted the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man to be charged in the US in connection with the 9/11 attacks. Judge Leonie Brinkema is considering whether to rule out the possibility of executing Moussaoui because of "egregious" government misconduct...
Viet Nam War - still with usforbes.com/ ... 10:26:45A man who deserted the U.S. Marine Corps in 1968 was being held in the brig here following his arrest as he tried to enter the country from Canada...
Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!today.reuters.com/ ... 10:23:17President Evo Morales presented the U.S. secretary of state with an Andean guitar that bore a coca-leaf inlay. "The gift was well received. We will just have to check with our customs to see what rules apply. We certainly hope we can bring it back (to Washington)," said a senior State Department official who attended the meeting...
Whoops!today.reuters.com/ ... 10:21:45"I turned on the tap to clean some knives and forks and beer came out," Haldis Gundersen told Reuters from her home in Kristiansund, west Norway. "We thought we were in heaven..." Beer in Norway is among the most expensive in the world... a worker in a bar two floors below had mixed up the pipes.... "If it happens again I'm going to order Baileys (coffee liqueur)..."
Transport Incidenttoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:20:48SYDNEY - Police charged an Australian driver with "reversing further than necessary" after he traveled backwards for more than 25 miles along one of the country's busiest highways... told them reverse was the only gear in the car that worked and that he was traveling home to the small regional town of Numurkah, another 56 miles away... also charged with unlicensed driving and driving an unregistered car...
SUN 2006-MAR-12
Nature is Dangerousapnews.myway.com/ ... 22:40:07LAWRENCE, Kan. - Severe storms swept through parts of Kansas and Missouri Sunday, carrying winds that knocked over airplanes at the downtown Kansas City airport and ripped roofs off homes, businesses, and buildings at the University of Kansas. The storms followed powerful tornadoes that ripped across southern Missouri and southern Illinois during the night, destroying homes along a path of more than 20 miles and killing a married couple whose car was blown off the road... several weather spotters reported twisters in the area...
Supernatural Threatsworldnetdaily.com/ ... 08:01:00While the "all-American college boys" arrested for a series of church arsons claimed they had committed their crimes for the fun of it – with no religious or political motivation – new reports from friends say the students dabbled in the occult and Satanism...
Industrial Tragedychattanoogan.com/ ... 07:42:56Nine people died in a house fire at Evensville in Rhea County early Saturday morning... The only person on the first floor, 18-year-old Joseph Alexander, was able to escape by jumping out a kitchen window... there was a smoke alarm on the first floor, but it was not working... no smoke alarms on the second floor... victims were identified as Reba Ann Alexander, 42; Krystal Alexander, 25; Misty Marie Alexander, 23; John David Smith II, 17; Jennifer Marie Edwards, 10; Lexie Weaks, 5; Angel Dawn Weaks, 2; Jaden Rhea Sullivan, 1; and Clarissa Sanchise, 1...
Thefttime.com/ ... 07:41:54Claude A. Allen, President Bush’s domestic policy adviser, told his bosses before he resigned in February... The White House threw him a farewell reception in the Roosevelt Room... turns out that Allen, a 45-year-old father of three who is a nationally prominent conservative, knew that he was under investigation by police... arrested Thursday and charged with "theft" and "theft scheme" following a bizarre incident at a Target store that detectives allege was part of a year-long spree of fraudulent refunds at Target and Hecht’s stores that netted him more than $5,000 in credits to his credit cards...
Violencemsnbc.msn.com/ ... 22:41:10Online postings dating to last summer on Facebook.com, a networking Web site for college and high-school students, indicate that the church burnings may have only been the students' latest attempt at wreaking havoc. Cloyd's messages to Moseley refer to alcohol, drunken driving, illegal hunts, guns, vandalism and feckless law-enforcement officers... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 07:52:12Taleban militants have kidnapped four Albanians and their Afghan guards in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 07:51:59Suicide bombers have tried to kill Afghanistan's Senate leader, in an attack in which... two civilians were killed as well as the two attackers... Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, who also leads a government commission seeking reconciliation with the Taleban, escaped unhurt... Mr Mujaddedi blamed Pakistan's spy agency, but Pakistan denied the claim... news.scotsman.com/ ... 07:38:07Memorial held for murdered hostage... A group of Quakers sat in silence as they have done every week since American Tom Fox was taken hostage in Iraq last year - but this time they prayed not for him, but for his killers...
US Militaryapnews.myway.com/ ... 22:38:24Uncle Sam wants YOU, that famous Army recruiting poster says. But does he really? Not if you're a Ritalin-taking, overweight, Generation Y couch potato - or some combination of the above. As for that fashionable "body art" that the military still calls a tattoo, having one is grounds for rejection, too. With U.S. casualties rising in wars overseas and more opportunities in the civilian work force from an improved U.S. economy, many young people are shunning a career in the armed forces. But recruiting is still a two-way street - and the military, too, doesn't want most people in this prime recruiting age group of 17 to 24...
Population Boomingwashingtonpost.com/ ... 07:44:34The U.S. population age 65 and older will double in 25 years, and the new elders will be healthier, wealthier and more highly educated than previous generations, redefining what it means to be older in America, a Census Bureau report issued yesterday shows...
World Zookeepingnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 07:44:05A squirrel-like rodent discovered in Laos is the sole survivor of a group that otherwise died out 11 million years ago... he animal made headlines in 2005 when it was hailed as the only new family of living mammals to be found in 30 years. But scientists now believe it is a "living fossil", the relic of a group of prehistoric rodents once widespread in South East Asia and Japan...
History - less with ushosted.ap.org/ ... 22:44:42A heart attack killed Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said, citing preliminary findings from Dutch pathologists who conducted a nearly eight-hour autopsy Sunday on the former Yugoslav leader... A tribunal spokeswoman said it was too early to determine if poison could have caused the heart attack... apnews.myway.com/ ... 22:44:04Traces of a drug used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis were found in a blood sample taken in recent months from former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a Dutch news report said... they were searching for an answer to why Milosevic's medication for high blood pressure was not working... The report came hours after Milosevic's legal adviser showed journalists a letter the late Serb leader wrote Friday, one day before his body was discovered in prison, alleging that he was being poisoned... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 07:46:32In the light of his death, the tribunal has got the worst of all possible outcomes - no verdict on any of the indictments... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 07:37:46Few Serb tears for Milosevic By Matt Prodger BBC News, Belgrade... The most famous leader of the former Yugoslavia may have just died, but there is little to suggest his passing will be much missed here. There is no outpouring of grief, no protests, no tears... thestar.com/ ... 07:37:21What I saw in the eyes of Milosevic... Olivia Ward, feature writer, Toronto Star.... Some of those who were convicted of heinous acts came to understand the horror of what they had done. But those who watched Milosevic in action knew he would not be among them...
In the glassy reflection of Milosevic's eyes, I could see an elderly librarian in the Kosovar village of Krushe e Madhe whose own life sentence was to remember the day when 241 of his neighbours were mowed down by Serbian forces, among the dead his sons Blerim and Hashim. I could see Behar Haxhiavjia, a Kosovar from Djakova, whose only souvenir of his murdered family was a handful of children's birthday photographs and some scraps of charred bone. And Myradije Mamouti, a Kosovar grandmother from Prizren whose life was reduced to an endless shriek of pain after Serbian paramilitaries killed her husband, two daughters and baby grandchild in front of her eyes. And the group of Kosovar women huddled in sweaters in sweltering heat, weeping with shame as they told of their capture and rape by Serbian soldiers. For all those people, the war had never ended. It was within themselves...
Big City Storiessuntimes.com/ ... 22:51:3328 arrested after rocks, bottles thrown at cops... suntimes.com/ ... 22:51:17Third girl dies from fire injuries... suntimes.com/ ... 22:51:05Four arrested at South Side parade... suntimes.com/ ... 22:50:41Decomposed body found in Little Calumet River... suntimes.com/ ... 22:50:29Gunfire kills another girl in Englewood... suntimes.com/ ... 22:50:17Schools close, violence spikes...
World Without Borderstelegraph.co.uk/ ... 08:08:30Bolivians are optimistic that newly elected Left-wing presidents for both Bolivia and its neighbour Chile will open a new era of diplomacy and, importantly, a corridor to the sea through Chilean territory... Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile more than a century ago at the end of the War of the Pacific (1879-1884). The country's lack of a sea port is regarded as one of the reasons it is the poorest nation in South America, while its neighbour Chile is one of the most thriving. The piece of Atacama desert Chile annexed from Bolivia is rich in minerals and is one of the main sources of Chile's wealth. A railway gives Bolivians access to the sea, but only under the close supervision of Chilean customs officials... The 50 permanent officers of the Fourth Naval District at Tiquina, believe that their chief role is to keep the pressure on Chile. They have four patrol boats docked at their base and two smaller logistical support vessels. Further down the lake, near the border with Peru, several full-size battleships regularly carry out war exercises. How any large ship could be moved from lake to sea, however, is questionable. Only one small river drains the lake at its southern end, and it does not reach the sea...
But is it Art?news.telegraph.co.uk/ ... 08:06:4733 years after his death, the first significant exhibition of Pablo Picasso's work in South Africa has provoked a furious row after a senior government official accused him of stealing the work of African artists to boost his "flagging talent"...
Defending Ourselvesseattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 08:06:26WOODINVILLE -- Even with a string of armed robberies under his belt, a would-be robber wound up captured after a group of teens tackled him when he tried to rob a sandwich shop... The man pulled a ski mask over his face as he walked into the sandwich shop, demanded money and pulled up his sweat shirt to reveal what appeared to be a handgun tucked into his pants. The sandwich maker, a girl, 17, told the man she could not open the register unless he bought a sandwich. When the robber began to yell at her, three teen boys, all friends of the girl, who were waiting for her to close up for the night, tackled the man and pinned him to the ground...
People are Trashyfoxnews.com/ ... 08:04:21The first settlers on Easter Island didn't arrive until 1200 A.D., up to 800 years later than previously thought, a new study suggests... revised estimate is based on new radiocarbon dating... The finding challenges the widely held notion that Easter Island's civilization experienced a sudden collapse after centuries of slow growth... would mean that the island's irreversible deforestation and construction of its famous Moai statues began almost immediately after Polynesian settlers first set foot on the island...
Cold War - still with ustimesonline.co.uk/ ... 08:03:23This week an Italian parliamentary commission will officially conclude that [would-be Papal assassin Mehmet Ali] Agca was part of a huge conspiracy masterminded by the GRU, the Soviet military secret service, on the orders of the politburo and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist party...
Under Libertytimesonline.co.uk/ ... 08:01:31TWO MEN kissing in a park and a topless woman bather are featured in a film that will be shown to would-be immigrants to the Netherlands. The reactions of applicants — including Muslims — will be examined to see whether they are able to accept the country’s liberal attitudes...
Prison Suckstoday.reuters.com/ ... 07:54:53The United States is in discussions about how to send terrorism suspects held in Guantanamo Bay back to their home countries and close the detention camp, a senior U.S. official said on Sunday...
Movies are deadtoday.reuters.com/ ... 07:54:33After years of haggling, Hollywood's movie studios and theater owners agreed in 2005 to replace old film projectors with new digital systems, but some say the equipment is not ready for use... New digital cinema projection systems are expected to bring clearer images and three-dimensional movies to audiences, as well as new revenue opportunities to theater owners... Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance, which fell 9 percent in 2005 in the United States... But digital deployment is expensive at about $100,000 per screen, and while the studios agreed to foot most of the bill, current equipment does not meet all the technology standards set by the industry...
Digital Culturetoday.reuters.com/ ... 07:55:52When she tried a Linksys router, it took multiple customer service calls, both her daughters, her piano teacher and her friend to figure out why she couldn't get her two Dell computers on the network. They all failed. It took a technician from the Geek Squad (http://www.geeksquad.com), Best Buy's home computer tech service, to figure out the problem. He nailed it in less than an hour... today.reuters.com/ ... 07:43:33Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile USA have temporarily stopped selling the Razr, Motorola Inc.'s flagship cell phone, due to a technical glitch that causes the phone to drop calls or shut down...
Culturemsnbc.msn.com/ ... 22:39:16"V for Vendetta"... The film may spark interesting debates—about the nature of terrorism and governments, about the inalienable right of artists to shock and provoke—but what we're dealing with is a lackluster comic-book movie that thinks terrorist is a synonym for revolutionary... flickfilosopher.com/ ... 07:27:07[just a well-written negative review of the flick "Failure to Launch"]
SAT 2006-MAR-11
Digital Thefttechweb.com/ ... 09:23:37The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs "the worst consumer scam to date." Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K. But Citibank is only the tip of the iceberg... The scam -- and scandal -- has hit national banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Washington Mutual, as well as smaller banks, including ones in Oregon, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which have re-issued debit cards in recent weeks. "This is the worst hack ever," Litan maintained. "It's significant because not only is it a really wide-spread breach, but it affects debit cards, which everyone thought were immune to these kinds of things... Up until this breach, everyone thought ATMS and PINs could never be compromised...." thieves hacked into a as-yet-unknown system, and made off with data stored on debit cards' magnetic stripes, the associated "PIN blocks," or encrypted PIN data, and the key for that encrypted data...
Mass Murdering Monstershosted.ap.org/ ... 09:21:07An American who was among four Christian activists kidnapped last year in Iraq has been killed, a State Department spokesman said Friday. The FBI verified that a body found in Iraq Friday morning was that of Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Va., spokesman Noel Clay said. He said he had no information on the other three hostages...
Alcohol Was Involvedchron.com/ ... 09:32:41Three college students suspected of a string of Alabama church fires may have been out drinking when they began their spree... local6.com/ ... 01:02:57S. [42yo m] was drinking inside a car with friends as they drove... S's friends told police that they kicked him out of the car because he was pulling down his pants and exposing himself through the car windows... "They got nervous and kicked him out and told him to find his own ride home...." troopers believe S. began to walk on I-4 at about 3:40 a.m. and was hit by a car a short time later. Minutes before S's body was found, troopers were working an unrelated crash just a few feet away and did not notice the body in the grass until after 7 a.m....
Scary Timeswnbc.com/ ... 00:58:59Authorities partially evacuated the Delta Air Lines terminal at LaGuardia Airport for about half an hour Friday after a man left a checkpoint before screeners finished testing a swab for explosives residue from his shoes... Authorities stopped looking for the man early Friday evening after conducting an extensive search for him in the terminal, causing flight delays into Friday evening. "We suspect that he left the checkpoint under the impression that his screening was complete," TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said. "The fact that the machine alarmed should not be a cause for concern as some commonly found substances can set it off..."
Threatsworldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:03:34Islamic websites yesterday posted a "last warning" warning by Rakan Ben Williams, who describes himself as an "al-Qaida undercover soldier" in the U.S., threatening two major operations designed to bring Americans "to your knees..." iol.co.za/ ... 10:04:17Police found a cache of explosives Saturday at a railway station in Mumbai, India's financial hub... "Some explosives and some parts which can be used for making an IED (improvised explosive device) have been found at Byculla railway station on top of a toilet block... about two kilograms of explosive..." reuters.myway.com/ ... 00:57:49U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday called Iran a "grave national security concern," but said he sought a diplomatic way to cap its nuclear goals...
Violencenews.scotsman.com/ ... 10:00:01FRENCH riot police used tear gas today to break up a protest at Paris's Sorbonne university, which students had occupied to press the government to abandon its youth jobs plan... news.yahoo.com/ ... 00:56:22Some 375 gang members have been arrested in 24 states and the District of Columbia over the past two weeks as part of a yearlong operation targeting gangs with criminal immigrant members, the Homeland Security Department said Friday... Chertoff said none of the gang members was identified as having ties to al-Qaeda, but more than 260 of those arrested in the last two weeks have committed crimes like rape, murder and assault and brought drugs and weapons into neighborhoods. Of those arrested during the past year, 533 were charged with crimes and 1,855 with immigration violations...
Fun can be Dangerousnews.independent.co.uk/ ... 10:08:50The famous Lahore kite festival, the biggest celebration in the city's calendar and irresistible occasion for kite enthusiasts the world over, will this year be different in one crucial respect: kite flying will be banned... At least 74 people were arrested for flying or selling kites on the streets of Lahore after the ban was announced. Seven people have been killed by kite strings coated with glass over the past fortnight, including a four-year-old boy who bled to death in his father's arms after his throat was cut... In Lahore, kites are not for children... several motorbike riders killed when they unwittingly drive into the glass-coated strings or wires that are everywhere in the city. Two child passengers on motorbikes - a legal mode of transport for children - and a college student were among the seven who died... news.yahoo.com/ ... 00:52:02A 17-year-old Newfoundland girl is believed to have died from toxic shock syndrome - and the infection that killed her may have resulted from a nipple piercing...
Digital Future is Nownews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:18:11Mr Cerf was was one of two people responsible in the 1970s for coming up with the language by which internet traffic communicates. The decision to throw the details of TCP/IP, as it is known, open to the world is what has allowed the network to flourish and grow into what we know as the internet today. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that the question of who controls the network is still at the top of his mind... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:15:30Cebit 2006: Gadget round-up
Samsung... camcorder... has a lens that can send images wirelessly over a short distance to the main body of the gadget. Maximum range for the lens is about 4 metres....
digital picture frame from Parrot helps to create a revolving slide show of up to 100 images... 7 inch LCD screen...
Called MiViewTV, the idea aims to let people watch the TV channels and programmes to which they have subscribed no matter where they are... [broadcast is dead]
FMN Communications has produced a coin operated wi-fi hotspot that lets you pay for access by the minute...
As well as being designed to look like a bag complete with swappable skins, the screen of the Ego notebook computer - with the help of an onboard camera - can be turned into a mirror... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:56Soon you could be running your laptop computer all day without a recharge as commercial versions of fuel cells go on sale...
History - less with usnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:10:49Obituary: Slobodan Milosevic
To some, Slobodan Milosevic WAS Serbia. To others, he cynically used Serbia as the battering ram which broke Yugoslavia apart piece by piece in a series of brutal wars... Tito's death left a vacuum at the apex of power. Milosevic, with his drive and cunning, was meanwhile using Serbia as his ladder to the top... politics.guardian.co.uk/ ... 10:00:45John Profumo gave his name to the scandal that had everything - sex, spies, cabinet ministers, aristocrats (even a royal connection) and lying. But it was the timing of the Profumo affair, as well as its spectacular content, that has guaranteed the former war minister who died yesterday at the age of 91 the kind of press and public send-off that even prime ministers do not always receive. Profumo himself was a upper-class politician from another age, a gentleman Tory of the old school, Harrow and Oxford, and the last surviving member of the group of 33 Conservative MPs whose votes against their own government in May 1940 helped to bring down Neville Chamberlain and to usher Winston Churchill into the premiership... But the revelation of his affair with Christine Keeler in the hot summer of 1963 - the summer of the Great Train Robbery and the Beatles' She Loves You - precisely marked the never-to-be repeated tipping point between the age of sexual concealment and discretion which preceded it and the age of sexual openness and extravagance which it helped to usher in and which we inhabit today.
Healing Ourselvesforbes.com/ ... 09:41:31red wine may help keep gums healthy and strong... antioxidant components in red wine and grape seeds have anti-inflammatory effects that may ward off periodontal troubles... upwards of 80 percent of Americans are estimated to have some form of gum disease, either in the relatively mild form known as gingivitis or in a more serious form, known as periodontitis... Smokers, diabetics and those taking steroids, oral contraceptives and certain cancer drugs are a higher risk for developing periodontitis... inflammation and immune responses which accompany serious gum infection may also provoke an increased risk for diabetes, heart disease and birthing abnormalities among periodontal patients... inflammation is the immune system's natural response to the presence of such bacteria, Unfortunately, that response also involves the accelerated production of unhealthy molecules called "free radicals." The production of too many free radicals can lead to a further weakening of gums. The result is inflammation, bleeding, and a gradual tissue and bone decay that can ultimately result in the loss of one or more affected teeth. But Houde and her colleagues found that -- in the test tube, at least -- red wine polyphenols inhibit key proteins at the cellular level to slow free radical production. They speculate that red wine's antioxidant punch could be a useful weapon in the fight against gum disease...
Extraterrestrialnews.nationalgeographic.com/ ... 09:39:55When Cassini imaged Enceladus's south pole early last year, researchers noticed plumes of what appeared to be a steamlike substance spewing from the 300-mile-wide (480-kilometer-wide) moon's crust. At first Porco's team thought the billows might be water vapor rising from subsurface ice deposits. Then the scientists realized they were seeing something unprecedented: outer-space liquid-water geysers not unlike Yellowstone's Old Faithful. What causes these geysers to form? According to Porco and her colleagues, unknown heat sources inside Enceladus melt ice into deposits of subsurface water. Under pressure, these water pockets burst through the icy crust in fountainlike jets. Most of these just frozen particles fall back to the ground. Their highly reflective surfaces help give Enceladus its unofficial status as the shiniest object in our solar system... cnn.com/ ... 00:58:31The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, on a two-year mission to study the Martian atmosphere and surface, and search for water, pulled off a dangerous and tricky maneuver known as "orbit insertion" and began circling the red planet Friday...
Lasting Contributionsblog.lewrockwell.com/ ... 00:51:28How sad to hear the news that Harry Browne (born June 17, 1933), author and long-time spokesman for libertarian causes, died yesterday, March 1, 2006. He was a man of great principle who courageously and consistently stood up for liberty even when his position clashed with mainstream political culture and public opinion. He was a great writer who worked hard to turn a phrase in a way that would serve to educate people about free markets and the free society. He was a supremely thoughtful man, who read voraciously to educate himself, was not adverse to admitting error, and constantly struggled to say what was true as he understood it...
Only Naturalazcentral.com/ ... 10:18:31Today, after 143 days of record-setting dryness, rain will come to the Valley of the Sun. Not one of those "did that count?" types of rain but a legitimate all-day soaking... ananova.com/ ... 00:50:49A German burglar has escaped a prison sentence - because he suffers from a permanent erection. Maurice Baumann, 32, was sentenced to a year's jail for burgling homes in the British army garrison town of Bielefeld. But he escaped prison after entering hospital as an "emergency case" for his unrelenting priapism...
Whoops!iht.com/ ... 23:33:05As American troops were fanning out across Baghdad, Saddam Hussein turned to his sons. "We are leaving now," he said. The Iraqi leader was determined to make his escape before more checkpoints were set up around the capital. Saddam had not anticipated the fall of the city, and his plan was simple: Drive west toward Ramadi, where there were few American forces... his escape was desperate and improvised... Saddam was nowhere near the site of two failed bombing raids intended to kill him... The United States never came close to killing him... nytimes.com/ ... 23:28:49As American warplanes streaked overhead two weeks after the invasion began, Lt. Gen. Raad Majid al-Hamdani drove to Baghdad for a crucial meeting with Iraqi leaders. He pleaded for reinforcements to stiffen the capital's defenses and permission to blow up the Euphrates River bridge south of the city to block the American advance. But Saddam Hussein and his small circle of aides had their own ideas of how to fight the war. Convinced that the main danger to his government came from within, Mr. Hussein had sought to keep Iraq's bridges intact so he could rush troops south if the Shiites got out of line... just one of many incidents, described in a classified United States military report, other documents and in interviews, that demonstrate how Mr. Hussein was so preoccupied about the threat from within his country that he crippled his military in fighting the threat from without... Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction...
Supernaturalbreitbart.com/ ... 23:19:56A 15-year-old boy whose followers believe he is the reincarnation of Buddha has disappeared after 10 months of meditation in the jungles of Nepal... Followers of Ram Bahadur Banjan reported his disappearance and a police team has been sent to the jungles of Bara, about 100 miles south of the capital, Katmandu, to investigate... It was still unclear when he went missing, but initial reports said he was last seen on Friday. Subedi said police were investigating if the boy just wandered into the jungle or he was abducted by robbers...
Transport Incidenttelegraph.co.uk/ ... 11:03:17A motorist was trapped in his car driving at almost 130mph for 60 miles after the accelerator jammed. Kevin Nicolle, 25, was unable to stop the automatic BMW going at top speed after the malfunction on the A1... His terrifying journey, which was followed by four police cars and a helicopter, ended when he smashed the car into a roundabout, flipping it on its roof... "I jammed my foot on the brake and that was keeping the speed to a steady 70mph..."
"My brakes were burning out and starting to fail - that's when the speed really started to build... I could see the speed building to 120mph or 130mph. I remember starting to shake and freeze up. I was really panicking and broke into tears. I couldn't help it because I thought I was definitely going to die. I was trying to slip the car into neutral but because the car was over-revving and red-lining I couldn't do it. I couldn't turn off the ignition because it would have disabled the power steering and made it even more dangerous.... I'd buy another BMW because, although there was a problem, it saved my life in that crash..."
Music industry is deadnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:16:00The US Department of Justice is investigating allegations of price fixing by top music labels on their charges for digital downloading...
Digital Threatnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:15:46Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, where hackers overload networks with data in an effort to disable them, have risen 50%...
Energynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:26An oil spill discovered at Prudhoe Bay field is the largest ever on Alaska's North Slope region... up to 267,000 gallons (one million litres) of crude leaked from a corroded transit pipeline....
It's Only Moneynews24.com/ ... 10:10:22The independent co-producer of Crash, last week's surprise winner of the Oscar for best film, said that she was broke... "I have the interesting distinction of having made five movies in a row without being paid. I can't pay my bills..." Crash, produced for just $6.5m, had earned $83m worldwide before it won the Oscar, according to reports...
Human Rightnytimes.com/ ... 10:07:25the nightmares of his nearly six-month ordeal at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004. Mr. Qaissi, 43, was prisoner 151716 of Cellblock 1A. The picture of him standing hooded atop a cardboard box, attached to electrical wires with his arms stretched wide in an eerily prophetic pose, became the indelible symbol of the torture at Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad... he is now a prisoner advocate who clearly understands the power of the image: it appears on his business card...
Defending Ourselvesnewstodaynet.com/ ... 10:06:11...adding insult to injury are the 'secular' politicos, the mainline media and sundry other self-styled intellectuals issuing lofty statements calling for calm and advising restraint to the lambs even as the wolves are on the rampage. The marked reticence to utter the phrase 'Islamic terror' was matched only by the spontaneous spurt of concern about 'Hindu communal forces'. To these dense minds, even self-defence would seem communal and legitimate protests be deemed political. After all, does not the law of the jungle ordain that the carnivores should eat up the herbivores? India's secular rulebook sounds strikingly similar!..
Theory of Justicebloomberg.com/ ... 09:59:23Milosevic died more than five years after being driven from power in a popular uprising in October 2000. His downfall ended his 13-year rule in Serbia, former Yugoslavia's most populous republic, and brought an end to a decade of wars in the region... novinite.com/ ... 09:58:52The tribunal killed my husband, Mirjana Markovic, wife of late Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic said in an interview for CNN... judges refused a request by Milosevic to go to Moscow for treatment at a specialist hospital for heart disease. They said there had been "no real attempt to demonstrate that the accused's medical needs cannot be met in the Netherlands", adding it had not been proven that the Bakulev Centre in Moscow is the only possible place to treat Milosevic... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:58:09Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has died in the detention centre at The Hague tribunal... cause was not yet clear... no indication of suicide... c-n.com/ ... 09:35:01All they wanted was to confront the man who murdered their loved ones. Instead, family members of Charles Cullen's Pennsylvania victims were forced to shout over the serial killer's bizarre outbursts in a Lehigh County courtroom Friday, and watch in horror as officers attempted to gag him -- first with a hood and later, with duct tape... Neither worked, and Cullen managed to repeat the phrase, "Your honor, you need to step down," over and over again for 30 minutes. He used the same cadence as he repeated the phrase methodically, like a mantra, about 40 times per minute... newsday.com/ ... 09:32:20A third trial looms for John A. "Junior" Gotti after a jury all but begged to be freed from deciding whether he committed racketeering and arranged the brutal attack of the Guardian Angels crimefighting founder... "We are completely DEADLOCKED. More time will not change the views in this room. ... P.S. We want to leave ASAP..."
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinweeklystandard.com/ ... 09:31:43Says Pence: "I left both meetings with the unambiguous impression that the president of the United States wants these documents to reach the American people." Negroponte never got the message. Or he is choosing to ignore it. He has done nothing to expedite the exploitation of the documents. And he continues to block the growing congressional effort, led by Hoekstra, to have the documents released... For months, Negroponte has argued privately that while the documents may be of historical interest, they are not particularly valuable as intelligence product. A statement by his office in response to the recordings aired by ABC said, "Analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that, while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq's weapons programs." Left unanswered was what the analysts made of the Iraqi official who reported to Saddam that components of the regime's nuclear program had been "transported out of Iraq." Who gave this report to Saddam and when did he give it? How were the materials "transported out of Iraq"? Where did they go? Where are they now? And what, if anything, does this tell us about Saddam's nuclear program? It may be that the intelligence community has answers to these questions. If so, they have not shared them. If not, the tapes are far more than "fascinating from a historical perspective..." Details about the Mukhabarat's Russian spy training emerged from some Iraqi agents' personnel folders, hidden in a back closet in a center for electronic surveillance located in a four-story mansion in the Mesbah district, Baghdad's wealthiest neighborhood... at precisely the same time Russian intelligence was training Iraqi operatives, senior Russian government officials were touting their alliance with the United States...
World Without Bordersnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:40Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has repeated his wish to visit China... cbs2chicago.com/ ... 00:57:30CHICAGO Crowds marched through the city on Friday to rally against HR 4437 – The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005... thousands of people in Chicago's Latino community call the pending bill a blatant violation of rights...
Theory of Educationdenverpost.com/ ... 00:56:43A Cherry Creek social studies teacher will not lose his job, after a student went public with a tape recording of controversial comments the teacher had made in class...
Liberty Worksbreitbart.com/ ... 00:59:55While Cuba played the Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic, a spectator in the stands raised a sign saying: "Down with Fidel," sparking an international incident that escalated Friday with the velocity of a major league fastball. The image of the man holding the sign behind home plate was beamed live Thursday night to millions of TV viewers _ including those in Cuba. The top Cuban official at the game at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan rushed to confront the man. Puerto Rican police quickly intervened and took the Cuban official _ Angel Iglesias, vice president of Cuba's National Institute of Sports _ to a nearby police station where they lectured him about free speech. "We explained to him that here the constitutional right to free expression exists and that it is not a crime," police Col. Adalberto Mercado was quoted as saying in El Nuevo Dia, a San Juan daily... The brouhaha gathered steam Friday when Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma, called the sign-waving "a cowardly incident." Cuba's Revolutionary Sports Movement exhorted Cubans to demonstrate in Havana late Friday, saying U.S. and Puerto Rican authorities were involved in "the cynical counterrevolutionary provocations." The Cuban Baseball Federation, in a statement released Friday in San Juan, said authorities failed to provide security and preserve the spirit of the sporting event, and "evidently had no intention of doing so..." today.reuters.com/ ... 00:55:06An Alaska high school violated a student's free speech rights by suspending him after he unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across the street from the school, a federal court ruled on Friday... The appeals court said the banner was protected speech because it did not disrupt school activity and was displayed off school grounds during a non-curricular activity... "Public schools are instrumentalities of government, and government is not entitled to suppress speech that undermines whatever missions it defines for itself..."
FRI 2006-MAR-10
Thefttoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:17:48...67-year-old German man who drew his dead brother's pension for 26 years... unmasked after police stopped him for driving without a seatbelt....
Mass Murdering Monstersnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:10:21At least 26 people have been killed after their vehicle hit a landmine in the south-western Pakistan province of Balochistan... Several people were also injured... mine was planted by tribal rebels. The vehicle was carrying people to a wedding party...
Threatsnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:09:57A court has convicted nine Muslims of belonging to a terrorist group and planning to attack Dutch politicians. Two men in the so-called Hofstad group were jailed for 15 and 13 years for using a hand grenade against police. The court did not pass a jail term on the group's leader, Mohammed Bouyeri, as he is already serving life in prison for murdering film-maker Theo van Gogh...
Violenceforbes.com/ ... 10:09:25Bombings and shootings Friday killed at least 17 people around Iraq on Friday.
A suicide truck bomb ripped through a line of vehicles waiting at a checkpoint Friday in Fallujah, killing at least seven civilians.
Authorities in the capital discovered the bodies of six men who were blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the back of the head...
Car bombs killed three people in Samarra, where an attack on a Shiite shrine last month ignited nearly two weeks of sectarian violence.
A bomb hit a U.S. tank in east Baghdad, setting it afire and blowing off the treads, police said.
The American military said the M1A2 Abrams tank hit a roadside bomb and the crew escaped unharmed.
A policeman in Tikrit died disarming a roadside bomb when a second explosive device detonated, also wounding two others...
US Militarydefenselink.mil/ ... 18:45:04All services exceeded their recruiting goals in February.
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 18:43:26us-flagMarine Gunnery Sgt. Justin R. Martone, 31, of Bedford, Va. died March 7
us-flagMarine Gunnery Sgt. John D. Fry, 28, of Lorena, Texas died March 8
from improvised explosive devices in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
Digital Future is Nownewscientist.com/ ... 11:08:14A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at a major trade fair in Germany... dubbed the "mental typewriter..." A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain... and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around... users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor moves in their minds... The trick is the machine-learning algorithms developed at the Fraunhofer Institute..." The next stage is to develop a cap that does not have to be attached directly to the scalp...
Digital Culturetoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:16:14A British Internet journalist set up a Web site two years ago filled with fictional accounts from friends who claimed to have used bluetooth technology to make contact for a chat, romance or even sex -- a practice the site dubbed "toothing". News organizations across the world, including Reuters, the Guardian and the BBC, fell for the story and reported that "toothing" had taken off among commuters. A year later the journalist behind the site published an online confession claiming it was an elaborate hoax to prove he could create a new sexual buzzword... "I tried some tests on the underground and pubs and found lots of cellphones were turned on and used for 'toothing', which was strange because I thought it was a joke too...." To play you need you need to activate the bluetooth facility available on your mobile phone, which will then show a list of people within a few meters (yards) who are also active. Then write a message and press send. Young men in Dubai have been using the technology to contact women in public places, according to the BBC's Web site...
Only Naturaltoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:16:56The Nigerian government, anxious to avoid a repeat of riots that marked a solar eclipse in 2001, warned citizens they may suffer "psychological discomfort" during a new eclipse this month but urged them not to panic... an eclipse five years ago caused riots in northern Borno state because people did not know why it happened. "Some people even felt some evil people in their communities were responsible for the eclipse..." cnn.com/ ... 09:52:01Storms moving across the South on Thursday brought winds strong enough to rip off roofs and blow apart barns. At least two deaths were attributed to the weather, and thousands of people lost power. Southern Oklahoma had baseball-sized hail and surrounding states saw heavy rain... Power failures and wind damage were reported in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee... kcba.com/ ... 09:50:57A state appeals court in San Francisco ruled today that urinating in public is a crime under California law... The court rejected [plaintiff]'s bid for suppression of the cocaine evidence and upheld his conviction...
Marriage Todaytwincities.com/ ... 11:09:43The upcoming premiere of HBO's "Big Love" is causing a big buzz in the Beehive State... show about a Utah polygamist and his three sometimes desperate housewives... polygamists say they're sure the series won't accurately portray the "boring" reality of their lives...
World Zookeepingtimesonline.co.uk/ ... 11:03:35A [20yo] man who grabbed a rabbit from the petting corner at a zoo and fed it to the alligators... laughed as he dropped the white rabbit from a balcony into a pond in the alligators’ enclosure, where it was seized and eaten by a large male called Albert... found guilty of cruelty after a day-long trial... carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment. Sentencing was deferred... He told his friends that “he must be hungry” before going to the petting corner, where small animals are kept for children to handle. He reached across the fence, picked up one of two large rabbits by its ears... the three also threw a lit cigarette at a chimpanzee and F. was seen reaching into the arctic fox enclosure... “We were all laughing. I was laughing just because of the shock of it happening. I found it funny at the time but I feel pretty bad about it now. It is not a nice thing to have happened. I felt as guilty as the others just for being there, but I did not touch the rabbit.”...
World Without Borderscbs2.com/ ... 11:01:19Two El Centro Border Patrol agent supervisors were indicted Thursday after being accused of taking $300,000 in bribes from immigrant smugglers... wpbfnews.com/ ... 11:01:06Senators writing an immigration reform bill are debating whether an actual or "virtual" fence should be built along parts of the U.S.-Mexico border... using cameras and other technology to monitor illegal traffic.... signonsandiego.com/ ... 11:00:22DULZURA – A van loaded with 18 suspected illegal immigrants crashed in the pre-dawn darkness yesterday just north of state Route 94, killing one young woman and seriously injuring several other people... 6-year-old girl was critically injured... two youths ages 14 and 15 suffered serious injuries. A Vista man, 20, identified as the driver, was later arrested... booked on suspicion of felony hit and run and possibly vehicular manslaughter... he has been arrested twice before on suspicion of people smuggling...
Theory of Educationnews.telegraph.co.uk/ ... 10:59:02A boy of 16 wore a stab-proof vest because he feared for his safety after an argument over a girl, it emerged yesterday. Children as young as 10 have also asked for the body armour, some because they are scared for their lives and others as a badge of honour. The owner of a shop selling the vests said he has three inquiries a week from youngsters, some of whom have returned with their parents to buy them...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spinnews.yahoo.com/ ... 10:58:53Reuters runs picture of VP Dick Cheny with "RETIRE" [apparently a portion of a banner] over his head...
Liberty Workstoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:18:51A Japanese Buddhist priest who was arrested on suspicion of having paid sex with a teenage girl said he was under stress and had given in to lust... 73, chief priest at a temple in the western Japanese prefecture of Hiroshima and also head of a nursery school... paid the 15-year-old girl 80,000 yen ($675)... "I could not resist my lust. A lot of stress built up from running the school..." Japan has long had a relatively lax attitude toward sexual exploitation of young people. Teenage prostitution -- known as "compensated dating" -- was outlawed in 1999, but it still goes on, though less openly than before... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:17:13Prostitutes in the Brazilian city of Salvador are starting up their own radio station...
Digital Threatnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:55You might never lose another sock once radio frequency ID (RFID) tags are used everywhere, Google's chief internet evangelist has said... a Europe-wide consultation study on RFID... promises to revolutionise the way we track items - and even people, which worries civil liberties groups...
Culturetoday.reuters.co.uk/ ... 11:10:35A video that recreates the introduction to "The Simpsons" with live actors is spreading across the Internet faster than Homer can say "D'oh" -- part of a viral marketing campaign by satellite broadcaster BSkyB... theglobeandmail.com/ ... 10:08:21For the 2006 version of The Shaggy Dog, the five screenwriters hired by Disney to update its family comedy classic have decided to push the story forward with science--Flubber science, that is. And they also toss in a dash of spirituality for good measure...
Healing Ourselvesnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:15The number of people dying of measles across the world has fallen by almost half [since 1999]... breitbart.com/ ... 09:45:54North Carolina health officials are investigating the death of a woman who died last week of a flesh-eating bacteria three days after accidentally jamming her hand in a wheelchair while working at a nursing home... a rare invasive form of group A streptococcal bacteria... "It's kind of like getting bitten by a shark or struck by lightning... It's not something that spreads to the community..." "...she could have picked it up at the gas station, at the grocery store, anywhere.... We will never know..." breitbart.com/ ... 09:44:09A neurosurgeon was wrestled to the floor by sheriff's deputies outside the operating room after he threw a fit because he had to wait for instruments to be sterilized... the hospital's chief of neurosurgery since 2002, allegedly became belligerent when nurses told him that instruments brought in from another medical facility had to be sterilized.... deputies believed Castro-Moure was drunk, and two nurses told investigators they had smelled alcohol on the doctor's breath... took two breath tests. Neither showed him to be intoxicated, but he had not blown into the device long enough for a proper reading... During the dispute, the doctor insisted that a man who broke his ankles and fractured his spine in a two-story fall needed immediate attention and urged staffers to skip the two-hour sterilization process... Two other surgeons, however, had determined earlier that the injuries were not life-threatening, authorities said. It took three deputies to subdue the doctor...
It's Only Moneytoday.reuters.com/ ... 10:14:09A group of lawmakers on Friday said an industrial bank owned by Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, could threaten the stability of the U.S. financial system and drive community banks out of business... "Wal-Mart's plan, to have its bank process hundreds of billions in transactions for its own stores, could threaten the stability of the nation's payments system.... Given Wal-Mart's massive scope and international dealings, it is not possible to rule out a financial crisis within the company that could damage the bank and severely disrupt the flow of payments throughout the financial system..." breitbart.com/ ... 09:42:14Bill Gates increased his lead at the top of the megarich ranking as the world's wealthiest people added 400 billion dollars to their net worth... His 50 billion dollar fortune increased by 3.5 billion dollars from the 2005 Forbes list...
Under Tyrannykatu.com/ ... 09:41:24NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The state Senate on Thursday passed a proposal to amend the Tennessee Constitution so that it doesn't guarantee a woman's right to an abortion...
THU 2006-MAR-09
Transport Tragedyworldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:07:21Five suspected illegal aliens are in custody after the pickup truck they were in smashed into a car yesterday in suburban West Palm Beach, Fla., killing a popular school principal... today.reuters.com/ ... 11:01:09At least 25 people were seriously injured in Germany when a delivery van collided with a funeral procession in the Bavarian town of Jettingen-Scheppach Thursday... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:58:23Thirteen people are dead, and at least 16 more feared killed, after a bus plunged into a river in central Turkey...
Theftsuntimes.com/ ... 21:52:10Officer Kelly A. Davis was at the Chase Bank branch on the 1700 block of N. Wells St. around 9 a.m. when he noticed a man in a Bozo mask who appeared to be armed with an Uzi, according to a police news release. The man fled from the bank and hopped on a bicycle to escape, the release said. As Davis chased the offender, he called the Near North District Police Station to report what he had witnessed, police said. Kelly caught up to the offender in the 1600 block of North Park Avenue and restrained him until other officers arrived... newpaper.asia1.com.sg/ ... 01:16:37ARMED gunmen made off with a large haul of cash yesterday after a dramatic robbery of a jet plane on the runway of a Swedish airport... escape plan could have come straight out of a blockbuster Hollywood caper movie...
Scary Timesnytimes.com/ ... 22:03:00A Jersey City teenager who vanished on her way to school on Monday turned up unharmed in New York City yesterday, and the police said her chilling story of abduction, confinement in a dark basement and sexual abuse — told in cryptic text messages to her mother — appeared to be false... cbc.ca/ ... 01:16:09The backdrop here is that India is both the world's largest democracy (with a super-heated economy) as well as its most conspicuous nuclear pariah. By several counts it now has between 50 and 100 nuclear warheads as well as long-range missiles that can strike up to 2,250 kilometres away...
Sex can be Dangerouspalmbeachpost.com/ ... 11:12:05The couple and their two young children were videotaped from September to November 2002 while they were guests in M.D.'s home... taped both the family and his then-wife through ceiling vents as they used bathrooms in the residence... was caught when his former wife found a videocassette recorder with tapes inside under a bed... sheriff's deputies discovered special wiring in both the wife's bathroom and an adjoining bathhouse used by the visiting family... local6.com/ ... 10:43:10A teen baby sitter in Central Florida was arrested after a parent's hidden camera videotaped him forcing two 8-year-olds to perform sex acts on him... breitbart.com/ ... 01:15:21Authorities arrested a man accused of making thousands of harassing and obscene calls to random cell phone numbers in at least eight counties... phone records show he made 2,623 calls in 20 days, "all basically obscene in nature..."
Violencenews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:05:21A former teacher who held 21 students and two adults hostage at a school in western France for several hours has handed himself in, police say. They said the captives were unharmed and the handover passed off calmly... timesonline.co.uk/ ... 11:08:26Pakistan appears finally to be rooting out the insurgents on its border... described a ferocious five-day battle between Taleban insurgents and the Pakistan military for control of the town of Miran Shah in the tribal lands of Waziristan... fayettevillenc.com/ ... 11:08:02A University of North Carolina graduate accused of running down nine people on campus began thinking about the attack two years earlier to avenge mistreatment of fellow Muslims, investigators said in an affidavit... apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:07:49A dust storm enveloped Baghdad on Thursday as explosions killed 11 people and wounded 19 - all civilians... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:56:33A former teacher has taken 18 students, a teacher and a teaching assistant hostage at a school in France. The man, who is armed with a handgun, is holding the hostages at a school in Sable-sur-Sarthe, south-west of Paris... cbsnews.com/ ... 01:14:32Three university students were arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons last month that allegedly were set first as "a joke" and later as a diversion...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 22:08:54us-flagMarine Cpl. Adam O. Zanutto, 26, of Caliente, Calif., died March 6 at National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., from wounds received as a result of an improvised explosive device in Al Anbar province, Iraq on Feb. 25. defenselink.mil/ ... 22:08:36The remains of
us-flagArmy Air Forces Aviation Cadet Leo Mustonen, 22, of Brainerd, Minn., missing since 1942, have been identified and will soon be returned to his family for burial. Mustonen was one of four men aboard a routine navigation training flight that departed Mather Field, Calif., on Nov. 18, 1942. Their AT-7 Navigator aircraft carried about five hours of fuel, and ... the plane did not return to base....
Only Naturalnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:56:51Scientists say they have witnessed the possible birth of a future ocean basin growing in north-eastern Ethiopia. mg.co.za/ ... 15:51:48Lake Nyos is a scene of breathtaking beauty. But the picture is deceptive. A detailed study reveals that without emergency measures, the lake could release a lethal cloud of carbon dioxide, capable of wiping out entire communities around its shores. The warning, from a team of scientists, comes nearly 20 years after the lake belched an estimated 80 cubic metres of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Heavier than air, the cloud of gas rolled down surrounding hillsides, engulfing villages. Silent, odourless and invisible, it starved the air of oxygen, asphyxiating hundreds of cattle and claiming the lives of more than 1 700 people up to 26km away... finkbuilt.com/ ... 15:48:58Erupting Volcano Cake... msnbc.msn.com/ ... 15:48:08BEND, Ore. - A recent survey of a bulge that covers about 100 square miles near the South Sister indicates the area is still growing, suggesting it could be another volcano in the making or a major shift of molten rock under the center of the Cascade Range... livescience.com/ ... 15:47:52A rare volcanic eruption is rapidly expanding the size of an island in the South Atlantic... Montagu Island, a volcano in the South Sandwich Islands, has grown by 50 acres (0.2 square kilometers) in the last month as lava pours into the sea... livescience.com/ ... 15:47:23Wild Volcanoes...
World Zookeepingwcco.com/ ... 11:18:04After deciding the deer wasn't badly injured, Weiser put it in the back seat of her car and drove back to Foley, Minn., to wake her 26-year-old roommate... After deciding the deer wasn't badly injured, Weiser put it in the back seat of her car and drove back to Foley, Minn., to wake her 26-year-old roommate... Worried that authorities might euthanize the injured deer, the two headed to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota in Roseville, Minn. "I was driving through the Twin Cities with a deer in my car," Miller said. "I felt weird..." The young deer napped most of the way... deer is stabilized but seems to have suffered head trauma...
Extraterrestrialdrudgereport.com/ ... 11:05:48NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus...
US Militarydefenselink.mil/ ... 14:34:36This week, the Air Force announced an increase in the number of reservists on active duty in support of the partial mobilization, while the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard numbers decreased. The net collective result is 691 fewer reservists mobilized than last week. This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel, who have been mobilized, to 119,434, including both units and individual augmentees. stripes.com/ ... 11:16:04Marines who encounter roadside bombs and respond appropriately now are eligible for the Combat Action Ribbon, according to the Marine Corps. The ribbon was and still is awarded to Marines who performed satisfactorily in a firefight or under enemy fire, said Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee in a Marine Corps announcement. But warfare has evolved to include a new threat — roadside bombs, also known as improvised explosive devices — Hagee said... tampatrib.com/ ... 10:35:09officials of Westchase, in northwest Hillsborough County... say the 2-foot-high sign... "Support Our Troops..." [placed in her yard by the wife of a soldier in Iraq] violates community rules... could be fined $100 a day if she does not remove the sign... sign sits back from the street, next to the Kelleys' garage...
Digital Future is Nowlivescience.com/ ... 15:46:55Cutting-Edge Robots... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:07:02Unfortunately, early information about the first Origami device, aka the ultra-portable PC, shows that the reality falls far short of the glossy video and Bill Gates' hopes... breitbart.com/ ... 10:28:27Eco-Be... a one-inch (2.5-centimeter) robot... will match its skills against other robots during the 2006 RoboCup in Bremen, Germany in June... apnews.myway.com/ ... 10:27:46Microsoft Corp... Project Origami, the company finally showed off the product: an ultracompact computer running Windows XP with a touchscreen and wireless connectivity... everything a full computer or laptop is, minus the keyboard. It has a 7-inch touch-sensitive screen.... about an inch thick and weigh less than 2 1/2 pounds... will run on a full version of Windows XP... marketing it as a category it's calling the ultramobile PC...
Lasting Contributionstoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:04:56Although most moviegoers' final image is of the von Trapp clan climbing the Alps to escape to Switzerland, in reality the family emigrated to the United States in 1939 and settled in picturesque Stowe, 325 miles north of New York City. After touring the country for a while as the Trapp Family Singers, Georg and Maria von Trapp and their 10 children opened their hill-top home with its sweeping views to visitors in 1950, and now 100,000 people a year visit the lodge... The real story varies in some details from the schmaltzy 1959 Broadway musical that prompted the Oscar-winning movie -- for example, they actually left Austria via Italy by train... four great-grandchildren of Georg and Maria von Trapp formed a new group in 2003 -- The Von Trapp Children -- and are again touring the world in Austrian costumes, singing "Edelweiss..." Of the 10 children, six are still alive and living in the United States with their families... Their parents, however, are long gone. The captain died in Stowe in 1947, aged 67. Maria von Trapp died 20 years later, at the age of 82... mother sold the rights of their story for about $10,000 to a German film company that made a little-known first screen version in 1956... The U.S. producers of the musical and movie did, however, later agree to give the family a small percentage of proceeds from "The Sound of Music..." us.imdb.com/ ... 01:33:44Ed Wynn at IMDB en.wikipedia.org/ ... 01:21:29Ed Wynn, in Wikipedia [just because I was thinking about him today] findagrave.com/ ... 01:20:59Grave marker for Ed Wynn
It's All in Your Minden.wikipedia.org/ ... 22:06:15Cluttering (also called tachyphemia) is a communicative disorder... en.wikipedia.org/ ... 22:05:03Clutter may refer to any of the following:... en.wikipedia.org/ ... 22:04:30Compulsive hoarding (or pathological hoarding) is a term which is used to describe extreme hoarding behaviour in humans. It involves the collection or failure to discard large numbers of objects even when their storage causes significant clutter and impairment to basic living activities such as moving around the house, cooking, cleaning or sleeping. Hoarding rubbish may be referred to as syllogomania...
Mass Media is Deadnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:06:47Media are becoming democratised, and a global conversation is emerging... Distribution is also becoming less expensive and easily arranged... is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers... does not necessarily foretell that traditional media are dinosaurs of a new variety. If we are fortunate, we'll end up with a more diverse media ecosystem in which many forms - including the traditional organisations - can thrive. It's fair to say, though, that the challenges to existing businesses will be enormous...
Supernatural Threatsmodbee.com/ ... 11:16:55A small Kansas church known for its anti-gay protests said Wednesday it will still picket on the day of soldiers' funerals but won't violate new state laws that limit when and where such demonstrations take place. "We're not going to get arrested. We obey the law," said Shirley Phelps-Roper, an attorney and member of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, a fundamentalist congregation headed by her father, the Rev. Fred Phelps... Members of the congregation contend soldiers are being struck down by God for defending a nation that tolerates homosexuality...
Defending Ourselvesazstarnet.com/ ... 11:10:40The 56-year-old woman was walking near East Fort Lowell Road and North Country Club Road when a man dressed in black approached her and demanded money, said Officer Dallas Wilson, a Tucson Police Department spokesman. The robber implied he had a gun, so the woman complied with his order and gave him $1.50, hoping he would leave, Wilson said. Then, thinking her life was in danger, she drew a Smith & Wesson revolver and pointed it at the robber, who ran away... wkyc.com/ ... 11:09:49SUMMIT COUNTY -- A local great-grandmother... 75, said she keeps her .380 handgun loaded and nearby at all times. "I already had the gun out," she said. "Somebody was breaking into my house so I took the gun out and went to the door. They flew..." neighbor quickly called police who arrested the suspects, ages 15 and 17, in nearby yards...
Sexual Equality??today.reuters.com/ ... 11:02:02Mexico is deploying an army of inflatable sex dolls dressed as office executives in a head-turning publicity campaign against workplace harassment of women in the famously macho country...
People Dietoday.reuters.com/ ... 11:00:51An elderly man spent at least three days in his vehicle on the side of a busy Canadian highway before anyone - including police who checked the car's license plate - realized he was dead... A passing motorist discovered the man's body after deciding to check the vintage-model car...
Free Expressionlocal6.com/ ... 10:36:03Charles Smith has been marketing shirts that read, "I (heart) Wal-ocaust" T-shirts. Wal-Mart filed a cease-and-desist order in an attempt to make him stop printing the shirts. The company said Smith is engaging in trademark infringement. It has threatened to sue Smith if he continues to display the logos on his Web site and to print them on his products...
Healing Ourselvesabcnews.go.com/ ... 10:33:12A Pensacola, Fla., woman may have contracted HIV from bone tissue she received as part of a routine surgery... a bone graft into her neck... believes she contracted HIV from bone tissue that was illegally harvested from corpses and sold to hospitals... The tissue the woman received was harvested by a company in New Jersey called Biomedical Tissue Services... now being investigated for allegedly stealing tissue from corpses at a New York funeral home -- skipping the mandatory disease-screening process -- then sending it onto a company called Regeneration Technologies for cleaning...
Tax Money Will Fix Allabcnews.go.com/ ... 10:31:15country music artist... Faith Hill... "There's no reason why someone can't go down there who's supposed to be the leader of the free world … and say, 'I'm giving you a job to do and I'm not leaving here until it's done. And you're held accountable, and you're held accountable, and you're held accountable. This is what I've given you to do, and if it's not done by the time I get back on my plane, then you're fired and someone else will be in your place. '... I fear for our country..."
Police Riotkxan.com/ ... 10:26:25Dozens of Central Texas drivers got pulled over Thursday for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Travis County deputies kicked off what has become a controversial reward program... "The big cargo truck that was in front of you and you allowed to get in front of you, that was a very nice thing you did and because it was a safe thing, we want to reward you with a Round Rock express baseball tickets," Taylor tells a good driver. Free baseball tickets for good drivers - some like it and don't mind being pulled over like Erin...
--"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" should include not being stopped by police because they have some goofy new idea....
Under Tyrannyworldnetdaily.com/ ... 11:07:04California... a bill pending in the Legislature, if approved, could remove all references to gender in public schools – threatening even references to "mom" or "dad" in textbooks... Sponsored by Democratic Sen. Sheila Kuehl – a lesbian actress best known for playing Zelda in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" in the '60s... news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:59:30Many women rights' activists in Iran say women here achieved a great deal in recent years. They have become more active in society and in the workplace, and now comprise around 65% of university entrants. Women also serve in parliament and local government. But activists say Iranian women still have fewer rights than men in the Islamic Republic. They point out that women have not been able to run for president or serve as judges. Women cannot have full guardianship over their children after divorce, and they get half as much inheritance as men... cnn.com/ ... 10:58:04Abortion rates declined significantly among Texas girls -- though some got riskier abortions later in pregnancy -- after the state enacted a parental notification law... [So, more unwanted babies and more riskier abortions... great!] today.reuters.com/ ... 10:23:57The number of cigarettes sold in the United States in 2005 fell to the lowest level in 55 years largely due to enforcement of marketing restrictions imposed on the tobacco industry...
World Without Bordersforbes.com/ ... 22:03:26A Dubai-owned company abruptly abandoned its plans for managing U.S. ports on Thursday, defusing an election-year showdown between President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress over an issue that had become a political land mine for the GOP. "DP World will transfer fully the U.S. operations ... to a United States entity..." breitbart.com/ ... 01:13:43Ariz... Gov. Janet Napolitano on Wednesday ordered more National Guardsmen posted at the Mexican border to help stop illegal immigrants and curb related crimes. National Guard troops have worked at the border since 1988, but Napolitano signed an order authorizing commanders to station an unspecified number of additional soldiers there to help federal agents...
Reasons for Repealcourant.com/ ... 01:12:46A [42yo] mother was arrested by Bloomfield police Monday after drugs were found in the coat her 6-year-old daughter wore to a Hartford magnet school... A search of the girl's home resulted in the seizure of about a half-pound of marijuana and her mother's arrest... was charged with risk of injury to a minor, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, possession of more than 4 ounces of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.... held with bail set at $10,000... "She arrived at school and immediately told her teacher she had something.... She reported it before she even got her coat off. That little girl did exactly as she was supposed to do..." [ANOTHER FAMILY DESTROYED BY PROHIBITION]
WED 2006-MAR-08
Sex can be Dangerouseastvalleytribune.com/ ... 12:25:12A Mesa deputy fire chief is on paid leave after being accused of bestial acts with his nextdoor neighbor’s lamb... washingtonpost.com/ ... 12:15:49The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Dublin said Wednesday that 102 of its priests are suspected of sexually or physically abusing at least 350 children since 1940 -- the biggest such admission to date in Ireland...
Violencewashingtonpost.com/ ... 12:15:17Two young men have been arrested and a third person is being sought in the string of church arsons that destroyed or damaged nine rural churches in Alabama last month... today.reuters.com/ ... 09:55:09Gunmen wearing the uniform of Iraqi police commandos seized dozens of employees from the offices of a security company in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday... about 50 people were taken... Many Iraqis have complained that gunmen dressed in police uniforms raided their houses and seized relatives. But Sunni and other groups have accused the interior ministry of condoning death squads operating inside the ministry targeting Sunnis areas. The ministry denies it...
Threatshome.kyodo.co.jp/ ... 12:16:14North Korea launched two surface-to-air missiles near the country's border with China on Wednesday... views were divided over whether it was a case of test-firing or launches by mistake... drudgereport.com/ ... 10:37:07The United States has alleged that Iran has enough uranium gas to make 10 nuclear weapons and has called for new inspections in the Islamic Republic, a diplomat in Vienna told AFP Wednesday... iranmania.com/ ... 09:46:44US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Iran of sending Revolutionary Guard forces into Iraq to make trouble, and warned Tehran it was "an error in judgement", AFP reported. "They are currently putting people into Iraq to do things that are harmful to the future of Iraq, and we know it, and it is something that they will look back on as having been an error in judgement..."
Mass Murdering Monstersabcnews.go.com/ ... 09:39:42A U.S. military patrol and Iraqi police discovered 23 bodies many of them handcuffed and strangled in various parts of Baghdad, authorities said Wednesday, while bombings, gunfire and other violence claimed at least seven other lives. Among the reported deaths was a U.S. soldier...
Sociopath Threatstheaustralian.news.com.au/ ... 09:39:19THE US heightened its rhetoric against Iran's bid for a nuclear program yesterday as Washington and Moscow presented a more united front on how to deal with the crisis. Russia stepped back from a proposal to allow Iran to process small amounts of nuclear fuel, apparently coming into line with the US and Europe over demands that Tehran abandon all its enrichment work. The backdown came after talks between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who indicated they had reached an understanding on how Iran's nuclear program would be reported to the UN Security Council next week... abcnews.go.com/ ... 09:38:48Iran threatened the United States with "harm and pain" Wednesday for its role in hauling Tehran before the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear program...
US Military Casualtiesdefenselink.mil/ ... 12:34:57us-flagArmy Staff Sgt. Dwayne P. R. Lewis, 26, of New York City, died in Baghdad, Iraq on Feb. 27, when his unit was attacked by enemy forces using small arms fire during a dismounted patrol.
Healing Ourselvesnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:45Not everyone with lung cancer is - or has been - a smoker. But some sufferers say people assume they have been - and warn that the stigma could be costing lives...
Alcohol Was Involvedsentinelandenterprise.com/ ... 12:33:43"Drink beer," the lifelong Leominster resident said. "I did, I'm still living." Goguen celebrated her 100th birthday Monday, and joked that she enjoyed a beer now and then while she and her late husband, Jack, owned the Blue Moon, a restaurant in Leominster. But her husband never drank, she said. "It was nice, we had a good business. We sold beer," she said. "We sold beer over the counter for years, and he never drank any of it..."
People Livenews.telegraph.co.uk/ ... 12:31:15A schoolgirl cross-country runner won a race against time when she saw a woman plunge through ice into a lake. Caroline Baird, 16, ran a mile across steep, muddy fields to summon help...
World Without Borderskpho.com/ ... 12:27:41Authorities are investigating the death of an illegal immigrant who the Border Patrol says was accidentally run over by one of its vehicles in a desert area in Yuma County. Another illegal immigrant was injured... agency says the two victims apparently were hiding behind low-lying brush and the driver of the Border Patrol vehicle didn't see them...
Transport Threatnytimes.com/ ... 12:18:20With a tendency to stare zombie-like and run into stationary objects, a new species of impaired motorist is hitting the roads: the Ambien driver. Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug...
Under Tyrannynews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:35:26In Britain people tend to think of the countryside as a rural idyll, a bucolic landscape of green fields and happy folk. In China, if they can, people try not to think about the countryside at all. When they do, it is not of a rural idyll, but a grim, dirty place where people are poor and life is harsh... China's urban population has a strong tendency to look down on country folk. The word for "farmer" in Chinese has a distinctly pejorative flavour. "Rural people are of a very low quality" is a phrase you often hear in Beijing... And rural people are not just treated like second class citizens, they are. Almost everything in the countryside is worse than in the cities, according to popular belief...
Feeding Ourselvesnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:25The fatal sinking of a US water taxi in Baltimore was partly caused by rules that had not considered Americans' increasing weight, a report says...
Not Yet Truly Automobilesnews.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:02A motorist has been fined after being caught by a speed camera taking both hands off the wheel to apply make-up while driving near a north Wales town...
Broadcast is Deaddailymail.co.uk/ ... 12:16:35Surfing the Internet is now more popular than watching television... in Britain... today.reuters.com/ ... 10:30:53Ads for products ranging from instant noodles to lubricating oil run for around a minute between the end of the news and the weather report, during which spots for local companies often fill most of the space for regional forecasts. The prime-time ads are among the most lucrative for China Central Television, which dominates the country's airwaves... [Imperialist Capitalist Tyrant China!]
Fun can be Dangerous