blog-heap o' links
from
2008-jan
Just random links galore. Latest on top.
Links load in a separate page.
Suggestions welcome.
THU 2008-JAN-31
WW2 - still with us
spiegel.de/ ... 23:27:16
Dozens of words in the German language, from "degenerate" to "final solution," have become taboo because of their use by the Nazis. A new dictionary of Third Reich terms provides a guide through the linguistic minefield...
Fire
efluxmedia.com/ ... 11:48:00
mother... tossed... infant of four months... from the third-floor balcony of a burning building in Wheaton Wednesday night... [into] the arms of a neighbor [who] was on the ground...
[no mention of how the baby fared]
Violence
foxnews.com/ ... 23:13:05
...There are no solid statistics on the rate of domestic violence within the Muslim-American community, and it is difficult to determine whether Muslim women are victimized more than women in the general population... "I suspect it's happening a lot more than we think..." "We hear again and again from [abused] women who say, 'I can't tell my parents back home because if they find out, my younger sister can't get married,'..."
foxnews.com/ ... 11:45:48
DAWSONVILLE, Ga. A drifter charged with kidnapping and killing a hiker will plead guilty... led authorities to [24-year-old Meredith] Emerson's body earlier this month in exchange for an agreement that prosecutors not seek the death penalty...
Supernatural Justice
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:57:16
The upper house of parliament in Afghanistan has withdrawn its support for a death sentence issued against a journalist convicted of blasphemy...
Sex -- always attractive
reuters.com/ ... 10:16:16
...If the adult entertainment industry has its way, Americans will soon get a choice of free porn on cell phones -- or at least some photographs of good-looking girls in bikinis. Unlike in Europe, mobile porn has yet to take off in North America as carriers have been afraid of offending political and religious groups and parents concerned about children being exposed to adult content...
Alcohol Was Involved
nbc30.com/ ... 11:42:41
Chicago suburb of Hinsdale... Trains Hitting Car Caught On Tape... A 72-year-old man accused of drunken driving was able to escape his minivan before it was struck by two commuter trains thanks to the aid of several good Samaritans Monday evening... An empty train first struck the vehicle and then an occupied train struck it, causing it to catch on fire... no one was injured...
reuters.com/ ... 10:09:45
With beers in hand, hundreds of former patrons Tuesday protested the closing of Mexico's oldest cantina, where Cuban President Fidel Castro, revolutionary Che Guevara and Mexican leaders all once drank. Supporters called El Nivel (The Level) a national cultural treasure. The drinking dive, which was handed the first cantina license in 1855, closed on January 2 after losing a long legal battle against the owners of the building... "Today we declare El Nivel a Mexican cultural and drinking heritage site," read a sign they placed on the cantina's door. "We consider it a place of learning at the university of life," said protester Marco Rascon, reading from a manifesto...
Transport Trouble
thisislondon.co.uk/ ... 11:14:44
Passengers watched on as the First Officer was pinned down by fellow crew members... shackled by his ankles and handcuffed to a seat... led off the plane with his feet still bound and muttering to himself... heard the rambling First Officer say "he wanted to talk to God... that the plane was low on fuel"...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:06:40
An Air Canada flight made an emergency landing in the Irish Republic after a
pilot apparently suffered a breakdown...
carried from the plane shouting and swearing, saying he wanted to talk "to God"... "At no time were the safety of the passengers or crew in question," said an Air Canada spokesman...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 22:46:33
Abu Laith al-Libi, an al Qaeda field commander in Afghanistan who has been described by Western intelligence officials as one of Osama bin Laden's top six lieutenants, has been killed, U.S. officials and a mouthpiece for the organisation said on Thursday...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:56:50
Rockets slammed into the British base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Thursday, slightly wounding three British soldiers...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:56:35
A bomb being transported by a suicide bomber on a bicycle exploded prematurely Thursday... killed the suicide bomber and three civilians... injuring 13 others in Sri Lanka's volatile north... There was no immediate comment from the rebels, who have been
fighting since 1983 to create a separate state for ethnic minority Tamils. The fighting has killed more than 70,000 people, including more than 700 since the government officially quit a cease-fire earlier this month, according to the military. Tamils, who have suffered decades of discrimination by majority Sinhalese-controlled governments, consider Jaffna their cultural heartland. The military has controlled the region since 1995, but the rebels operate underground and carry out frequent attacks. Jaffna is cut off from the rest of Sri Lanka by rebel-held territory...
reuters.com/ ... 10:48:54
A
suspected U.S. missile strike
that killed up to 13 foreign militants
in Pakistan's North Waziristan region
this week had targeted second or third tier al Qaeda leaders, according to residents in the tribal area. Initial reports said 10 people were killed in the attack on Monday on a house in Torkhali village near the town of Mir Ali. An intelligence official, however, told Reuters on Thursday that based on information gleaned from tribal contacts there were seven Arabs and six Central Asians killed... believed to have been carried out by a pilotless U.S. Predator aircraft flown across the nearby border with Afghanistan... Pakistani authorities have not confirmed the attack, and the Pentagon has denied taking any action, but the
Defense Department does not speak for the Central Intelligence Agency,
which operates Predators... ...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:05:50
Authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir say the security forces have killed four militants of the separatist Hizb-ul Mujahideen group. Among the slain militants is Sajjad, alias Tahir, commander of the group, who was most wanted by security forces...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:03:57
South African police have raided Johannesburg's Central Methodist Church, arresting around 1,500 homeless people and Zimbabweans. Dozens of police, some heavily armed, raided the church compound, rounded up those there and took them away. The police said they were looking for drugs, guns and illegal immigrants...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:00:47
Two more Western reports say that international efforts are failing to make Afghanistan a stable state. The Atlantic Council says that Nato is not winning in Afghanistan and Oxfam warns that the country faces a humanitarian disaster...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:59:59
Rebels in Chad say they have seized a strategically important town... Oum Hadjer... in the central region of Batha, about 400km (248 miles) from the capital, Ndjamena...
A European Union peace force is preparing to deploy to eastern Chad in the next few weeks. The 3,700-strong contingent will aim to protect refugees from Sudan's Darfur region and people displaced by internal fighting... The rebels want to drive President Idriss Deby from power...
Industrial Tragedy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:58:56
Two explosions at an unlicensed fireworks factory in Istanbul have killed at least 19 people and injured at least 70... caused part of the five-storey building... to collapse... Debris smashed nearby cars and littered the streets...
Slavery - still with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:58:09
...105... boys are aged between five and 15... rescued from suspected people traffickers in Nigeria... discovered by police two weeks ago, packed into a minibus.... parents said they gave consent for the boys to be taken to the school but anti-trafficking authorities said they may be "complicit" in the crime.
Traditional Islamic education involves sending children away from their homes to learn the Koran. But many children end up as bonded labourers....
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 23:32:40
Army Sgt.
James E. Craig,
26, of Hollywood, Calif.
Army Staff Sgt.
Gary W. Jeffries,
37, of Roscoe, Texas
Army Spc.
Evan A. Marshall,
21, of Athens, Ga.
Army Pfc.
Brandon A. Meyer,
20, of Orange, Calif.
Army Pvt.
Joshua A. R. Young,
21, of Riddle, Ore.
died from wounds suffered when their unit encountered an improvised explosive device during convoy operations Jan. 28 in Mosul, Iraq. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
Language Culture
nationalpost.com/ ... 23:28:30
"Canadian" has apparently become a code word for blacks among American racists...
World Energy
chron.com/ ... 23:24:45
Clean-burning ethanol may have a smoggy secret. If power companies are to be believed, the only one way to keep up with the fast-growing ethanol industry is to invest in good old fashioned coal-fired electricity... "It's just damning of the notion of ethanol as a clean fuel," said Mark Kresowik, a Sierra Club organizer based in Iowa. "If we need to burn coal to create a clean burning fuel, we're not creating a clean burning fuel. It rips the shiny green veneer right off of ethanol..."
World Climate
azstarnet.com/ ... 23:24:07
The scientific community has long believed that as global warming continues and large amounts of freshwater ice melt into the ocean, the ocean's circulation will slow. This would have a catastrophic impact on the environment as vividly, if somewhat overdramatically, portrayed in the film "The Day After Tomorrow." But a paper published last week in Nature magazine, the result of several studies of past and possible future weather, says that in fact the very opposite is true and ocean circulation will become stronger as the icecaps melt. "We missed what was right in front of our eyes..."
Evolution Isn't Easy
foxnews.com/ ... 23:13:29
The fossil remains of a land-bound reptile described as a possible "missing link" between prehistoric and modern-day crocodiles were displayed to the public for the first time on Thursday...
foxnews.com/ ... 23:09:51
Danish researchers have concluded that all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor, presumably someone who lived 6,000 to 10,000 years ago... "Originally, we all had brown eyes... But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes..."
It's All in Your Mind
medpagetoday.com/ ... 22:47:54
..."We know scratching is pleasurable, but we haven't known why..." Dr. Yosipovitch and colleagues found that the scratching induced deactivation of the perigenual anterior cortex and in the dorsal and ventral posterior cingulate cortex, bilaterally in all cases...
US Military
defenselink.mil/ ... 23:31:00
National Guard... January 30, 2008... This week the Army and Navy announced a decrease, while the Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard announced an increase. The net collective result is
248 fewer reservists
mobilized than last week... This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized to
94,481,
including both units and individual augmentees....
csmonitor.com/ ... 22:49:37
Proposing what it called the first substantive reforms to the National Guard and Reserve in more than 50 years, a panel wants to refashion America's "weekend warriors" into an operational partner with the active-duty military. That way, the reserve could be quickly mobilized to respond to a terrorist attack or natural disaster on the scale of a hurricane Katrina, says the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, which released its 368-page report Thursday...
blog.washingtonpost.com/ ... 11:35:11
The Post reports today that suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980...
Animal Culture
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:58:33
Remarkable new footage of Canada's Arctic wolves has been caught on camera by a BBC crew...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:57:43
A species of hummingbird makes a chirping noise with its tail feathers, not its throat, a study using high-speed video has suggested. The exact source of the noise from male Anna's hummingbirds has been the subject of debate among researchers...
Why People Go Vegan
cnn.com/ ... 11:54:43
The Humane Society of the United States released a video Wednesday it says shows mistreatment of "downed" cows at a California slaughterhouse -- and one lawmaker said it raises questions about the safety of the nation's food supply...
[grisly details]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:51:48
Every autumn and winter, hunters from this craggy Japanese fishing village corral thousands of dolphins into a tiny, isolated cove and kill them for meat and fertilizer, turning the water red with their blood. And every year, foreign animal rights protesters converge on the town, interfering with the slaughter... Now, Japan's dolphin hunters face a new, powerful opponent: mercury contamination...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:51:04
Bats are dying off by the thousands as they hibernate in caves and mines around New York and Vermont, sending researchers scrambling to find the cause of mysterious condition dubbed "white nose syndrome..." for the white circle of fungus found around the noses of affected bats... Up to 11,000 bats were found dead last winter and many more are showing signs illness this winter. One hard-hit cave went from more than 15,000 bats two years ago to 1,500 now... For some unknown reason, the bats deplete their fat reserves and die months before they would normally emerge from hibernation...
Feeding Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 10:49:55
...Cloning has been around for years. Dolly the cloned sheep was born in 1996. But the move by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month to lend its support to meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is likely to mean it will soon enter the food supply. Europe's top food safety agency has also said cloned food products are safe to eat, but has yet to give the green light to marketing cloned food products to consumers. Chefs at a culinary forum in Milan with Padoan this week said no such products would be appearing in their menus...
History - still with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:55:16
Aboriginal leaders welcomed Thursday a new era of indigenous relations in Australia with a government that plans to acknowledge their traditional land ownership and apologize for past injustices...
reuters.com/ ... 10:47:00
800-year-old cellar under a central Berlin car park which they say dates the city back to the 12th century, earlier than previously thought... dates from 1192, was found alongside the remains of a graveyard, church and school on a site which the archaeologists say formed the heart of medieval Berlin...
Solar System
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:58:15
"I think there's little doubt on the part of our team that there has been widespread volcanism on Mercury..." cited a cratered basin which has been flooded with smooth material, probably representing volcanic flows...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:54:29
The first pictures from the unseen side of Mercury reveal the wrinkles of a shrinking, aging planet with scars from volcanic eruptions and a birthmark shaped like a spider... "It has very subtle red and blue areas.... Mercury doesn't look like the moon..." "there are some features we haven't been able to explain yet..."
reuters.com/ ... 10:45:40
Mercury... a massive impact crater on its surface is larger than previously thought... "It's a very dynamic planet with an awful lot going on..."
Science Marches Onnnnnn
reuters.com/ ... 10:44:22
Japanese researchers have implanted a small camera inside a mouse's brain to see how memory is formed...
Big Nanny
eveningnews24.co.uk/ ... 11:07:47
Eight cameras at Waterloo Park and one at Eaton Park have been connected to their own loudspeaker system and, through Norwich City Council's 33-screen, £500,000 CCTV control room, the voice of a camera operator will boom out across each park to tell off those causing a nuisance, committing low level crime and anti-social behaviour... "It is a really positive thing for the city..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:59:19
A call for a ban on outdoor heaters has been backed by the European Parliament... a timetable should be set to phase out patio heaters, as well as standby modes on televisions... experts disagree about the impact outdoor heaters have on the environment compared with other appliances...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:26:56
The European Commission proposed simplified food labels Wednesday highlighting fat, sugar and salt contents in an attempt to contain the spread of obesity and junk food in the 27-nation EU...
Staying Healthy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:27:59
Doctors can cut the risk of cerebral palsy in half for very premature babies by giving their mothers magnesium sulfate just before they give birth...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:27:45
Mercury from vaccines
seems
to disappear
rapidly from the blood, returning to pre-vaccination levels in one month, according to a small study of children in Argentina...
[just "evaporates into the ether" inside the body...?]
reuters.com/ ... 10:26:40
Watching a big soccer match can strain a fan's heart -- not just figuratively, but literally... for German men, the risk of having a heart attack or some other serious heart problem was more than three times higher on days when their team played. It was 82 percent higher for German women...
reuters.com/ ... 10:25:15
Women who take folic acid supplements for at least a year before becoming pregnant can greatly reduce their risk of delivering a baby prematurely...
Animal Companions
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:21:16
...Virginia Beach home... a dog, a bird, and three cats... 100 live ferrets... most of them suffering from dehydration and malnutrition... frozen bodies of 89 ferrets, a cat, a rat and an otter... Sixty-one of the live ferrets had to be euthanized...
Antiquity - still with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:02:23
UN peacekeepers in the disputed African territory of Western Sahara have vandalised ancient rock paintings... some 6,000 years old... a UN official has told a UK newspaper... regarded by the local Sahrawi people as a place of great cultural significance...
[And 6000 years from now, the vandalization will be considered ancient and valuable..?]
Digital Future is Now
news.nationalgeographic.com/ ... 23:25:25
A new contact lens embedded with electronic circuits could be the seed for "bionic eyes" that can see displays overlaid on a person's field of view...
Now
That's
Funny!
scrappleface.com/ ... 23:03:00
Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards today quit the race for the Democrat presidential nomination, and immediately endorsed Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain...
Reasons for Repeal
newstimes.com/ ... 11:56:56
Students at Brookfield High School said it was "a day like any other" earlier this month when two sophomores from the school were arrested for conspiring to sell marijuana on school property...
chicagotribune.com/ ... 11:56:35
Cook County sheriff's police arrested a Texas man after confiscating more than $450,000 in marijuana from a rental truck he was driving...
network.nationalpost.com/ ... 11:56:10
A woman newly widowed by her common-law husbands sudden death was further set back when the responding paramedics discovered an alleged grow-op in her home, and she was arrested by police...
chicagotribune.com/ ... 11:55:37
The Cicero police commander accused of having a burned marijuana cigarette and a bag of marijuana in his car after being stopped last weekend on Chicago's South Side is scheduled to take a drug test Thursday that could determine his future at the Police Department...
mercurynews.com/ ... 11:55:13
The Berkeley City Council unanimously passed a plan this week to help get medical marijuana to patients if the Drug Enforcement Administration raids and shuts down any of the city-permitted dispensaries...
Constitutional Threat
news.com/ ... 11:53:46
The government claims that driver's license "reform" will help combat illegal immigration and generally protect national security, but it fails to acknowledge that the Real ID Act seriously threatens privacy and civil liberties on a national scale...
People Die
foxnews.com/ ... 23:10:50
35-year-old man from the U.K... drank himself to death after consuming too much water... Water intoxication, also known as hyponatremia...
boston.com/ ... 11:51:20
MARLBOROUGH... kindergartner chokes to death on school bus... "parent's worst nightmare..." Officials declined to say what [he] choked on except to describe it as a foreign object...
Business Culture
foxnews.com/ ... 23:07:34
WHEATLAND, Wis. Having a tornado demolish her home was bad enough. But when Ann Beam received a $2,000 cable bill a few weeks later, she was floored. "I just couldn't believe it," Beam said. "I was like, 'What are they thinking?'..."
news.yahoo.com/ ... 11:04:53
The scent of ham, eggs, cheese and bacon will soon stop competing with the aroma of coffee in Starbucks stores as hot breakfast sandwiches become the first casualty of the company's battle to win back customers...
Cyber Storm
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:39:52
...dozens of detailed, mock disasters confronting officials rapid-fire in the U.S. government's biggest-ever "Cyber Storm" war game, according to hundreds of pages of heavily censored files obtained by The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department ran the exercise to test the nation's hacker defenses... The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. described as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing another multimillion-dollar war game, Cyber Storm 2, to take place in early March...
Digital Culture
reuters.com/ ... 10:37:56
An opposition Web site in the southern Russian region of Ingushetia accused local authorities on Thursday of trying to shut it down after it promoted protests and published details of kidnaps and murders. Ingushetiya.ru had been one of the only information sources criticizing the authorities from the mainly Muslim region bordering Chechnya. The Web site promoted and helped organize a protest on Saturday in which demonstrators armed with petrol bombs clashed with police and burnt a pro-government newspaper office...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:34
YouTube users in the UK will be given the chance to make money from the videos they post on the site. The project is already up and running in the US and is now being extended to other countries, starting in the UK...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:20
MOORE'S LAW The number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965... But according to many industry insiders this miniaturisation cannot continue forever... "The consensus in the industry is that we can do that shrink for about another ten years and then after that we have to figure out new ways to bring higher capability to our chips," said Professor Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard... Even Gordon Moore... admits that it can only go on for a few more years. "Moore's Law should continue for at least another decade.... That's about as far as I can see..."
[Mark these predictions to be filed alongside "everything that can be invented has been invented...."]
Big Whoops Cascade
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:24:13
Ore. Goodwill store sells parked bike... But the 13-year-old is going to get his bike back... after the buyer saw a newspaper story about the mix-up...
Theory of Justice
cnn.com/ ... 22:50:07
The Supreme Court blocked a scheduled execution at the last minute, keeping in place a de facto moratorium on capital punishment while it considers the constitutional question over how lethal injection is administered...
washingtonpost.com/ ... 11:53:11
judge presiding over the murder case of the man charged with killing four people in a 2005 shooting rampage that began inside a courthouse said Wednesday that he is stepping down from the case... Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller cited recent media reports referring to a New Yorker magazine article quoting him as saying of the defendant, Brian Nichols: "Everyone in the world knows he did it." The quote was made in the context that Nichols's attorneys were employing an insanity defense...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:18:38
she made an improper U-turn to attend to her vomiting daughter... got a $123 citation... realizes she violated the law but wished the deputy had exercised discretion upon seeing why...
Love is Beautiful
reuters.com/ ... 10:12:23
Retired hospital porter Steve Smith, who is suffering from a potentially fatal heart defect, won almost 19 million pounds ($38 million) on Britain's National Lottery -- but said he
would give it all up if he could spend a few more years living with his wife Ida...
It's Ida I worry for, it's leaving her behind. I would give all that back if I am allowed to still be with her because there are no shops in the cemetery are there?.."
Love is Strange
reuters.com/ ... 10:11:02
the basis of a speed-dating event organized by a New York entrepreneur bringing together 20 "sugar mamas" and 20 "boy toys" vetted by an elite New York matchmaker... "Symbiosis has allowed ugly rich men to attract young, gorgeous, money-hungry women for centuries; it's now the women's turn..."
US Election 2008
blogs.abcnews.com/ ... 22:55:15
Former President Bill Clinton was in Denver, Colorado, stumping for his wife yesterday... "We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren..." At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? "Slow down our economy"?..
reason.com/ ... 22:52:10
The Washington Times reports that Barack Obama, who told an audience of college students when he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004 that he favored decriminalizing marijuana, still holds that position, although
he opposes complete legalization...
[MINCING SPINELESS JELLYFISH!]
blogs.abcnews.com/ ... 11:08:58
"I think whatever he said which was certainly never intended to cause any kind of offense to anyone," Clinton said, "if it did give offenses then I take responsibility and Im sorry about that."
"Can you control him?" asked McFadden.
"Oh of course," Clinton replied...
sfgate.com/ ... 11:07:15
Friday, February 18, 2000... Greenville, S.C. -- Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to apologize yesterday for his use of a racial slur to condemn the North Vietnamese prison guards who tortured and held him captive during the war. "I hate the gooks," McCain said... "I will hate them as long as I live..." "I was referring to my prison guards," McCain said, "and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends." McCain made it clear that his anger extends only toward his captors...
the racial slur used by the senator has a long, painful history that is felt by many Asian Americans. The word "gook" was first used in 1899 by American soldiers fighting Filipino insurgents. During the Korean War, the term was aimed at Koreans and Chinese. It was directed at the Vietnamese when Americans were fighting in Vietnam. It is now used as a slur toward any Asian or Pacific Islander...
[thnx2 DrudgeReport]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:23:30
Rudy Giuliani this week became the latest victim of a
political urban legend - that New York City mayors who aim for higher office will always miss...
The last New York City mayor who succeeded at ascending to higher office was John T. Hoffman, who won his bid for governor in 1869. The last mayor to be elected to any office after serving in City Hall was Ardolph Loges Kline, who was briefly mayor in 1913 and later served as a congressman... Asked Wednesday about whether New York mayors are forever politically jinxed, [former NYC mayor Ed] Koch blamed it on divine intervention. "God says, 'Anyone who doesn't appreciate that I've given you the best job in the country, and looks to go higher, I'm going to stop you.... Why be greedy?.."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:05:31
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has pulled out of the Republican race for the White House after disappointing primary results in Florida... giving his support to Arizona Senator John McCain... Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Governor, will later endorse Mr McCain...
[Three Weasles....]
Earlier, Democrat John Edwards left the race, without backing any of his rivals... "It's time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path..."
Digital Business
breitbart.com/ ... 11:04:34
Damage to undersea Internet cables hit business across the Middle East and South Asia on Thursday, including the vital call centre industry, prompting
calls for people to limit their surfing...
two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea... damaged on Wednesday... rupturing connections thousands of kilometres (miles) away... "Two of our cables are affected; everyone will go onto a third cable," [Egyptian] ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur told AFP. "But that will not be enough bandwidth. The cable will be overloaded and no one will be able to get access.... People should know how to use the Internet because
people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do..."
[Sez YOU! Bureaucrats!]
reuters.com/ ... 10:15:11
Dell said on Wednesday it would close all of its 140 U.S. kiosks, a concept it launched in 2002 to showcase computers, as it expands sales of PCs in retail stores...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:07:57
Disruption to internet services in south Asia and the Middle East is continuing the day after Mediterranean undersea cables were damaged. Operations outsourced to India from the UK and US are badly hit...
[Giving them a chance to brush up on their English....]
could take a week or more to restore full services... Further disruption has been reported in Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka...
India is the world leader in offshore outsourcing, with the remote servicing of IT or other business processes worth an estimated £24bn...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:03:33
Internet services have been disrupted in large parts of the Middle East and India following damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption... International telephone calls... have also been affected... some reports suggest it was caused by a ship's anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt...
WED 2008-JAN-30
Disturbing Family Patterns
wpxi.com/ ... 09:52:51
A Washington County [PA] woman is accused of locking her 10-year-old grandson in a feces-filled dog crate for about 90 minutes... because the boy laced the family's drinks with lamp oil and household cleaner... possible the boy had been spiking the drinks for a while...
Threats
haaretz.com/ ... 09:49:30
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on the West Wednesday to acknowledge Israel's "imminent collapse..."
[Excuse me, did he say Iran's imminent collapse?]
Nature can be Dangerous
star-telegram.com/ ... 09:59:27
The bad weather reached upstate New York by early Wednesday and forecasters warned that the arctic blast would send mercury tumbling across the Northeast and New England. "This is going to be a hard, vicious slap in the face from Mother Nature..."
indystar.com/ ... 09:58:44
High winds downed trees, cut power and moved vehicles across much of the state Tuesday and reportedly killed two people at a mobile home park in Southern Indiana... Most of the damage appeared to be caused by straight-line winds but tornadoes may have touched down in isolated areas...
cbs2chicago.com/ ... 09:48:17
CHICAGO... At this time on Tuesday morning... Temperatures ranged from 47 to 50 degrees... in blew a winter storm that began with whipping, blowing snow, followed by a drop of nearly 50 degrees in a matter of hours... temperature at 5 a.m. was -1 at O'Hare International Airport, 0 and Midway International Airport, and 3 degrees downtown...
Opposing Tyranny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:35:02
Burma's detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is "not satisfied" by recent discussions with the country's military leaders...
Nuclear is Nasty
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:34:42
Canada ordered a nuclear reactor to be re-opened even though the risk was far greater than international standards permit... The plant produces two-thirds of the world's medical isotopes, and the shutdown created a worldwide shortage... some safety back-up systems were not working... said the chance of a failure was one in 1,000, while the permitted international standard is one in a million...
Supernatural Justice
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:33:47
The upper house of the Afghan parliament has supported a death sentence issued against a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambaksh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case. The Afghan government has said that the sentence was not final...
Modern Medicine can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:12:40
Doctors and nurses on the go often skip soap and water in favor of an alcohol-based hand gel, thinking the quick-acting goo will kill bacteria on their hands and curb the spread of infection. It turns out that's not enough... The doctor who studied the problem pointed to many villains: Rings and fingernails that are too long and hard to clean, poor handling of catheters and treatment areas that aren't sanitized...
reuters.com/ ... 09:11:44
...A nurse had confused Levophed, which can boost blood pressure, with the antibiotic Levaquin. The
rate of drug name mix-ups has more than doubled since 2004...
reuters.com/ ... 09:11:09
Burns around the lips and mouth
- primarily from the use of a cauterizing device -- are an
underreported complication of tonsillectomy,
and can result in long-term problems... Removal of the tonsils (along with the nearby adenoid glands) "remains one of the most commonly performed surgical procedures in the United States..."
Animals can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:08:58
A golf course in tropical Australia has a new water hazard: a crocodile that took up residence in a lake at the 14th hole... posed no "significant threat" to people...
Police Riot
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:08:03
Calif... Glenn County sheriff's deputy
shot a man with a Taser gun for allegedly riding his bike at night without proper lighting...
sheriff's spokesman said the deputy's decision to use the Taser was proper...
[The bicyclist only got one prong hit, no shock, fled on foot, was later charged with]
resisting arrest, riding a bicycle without proper lighting, riding under the influence of alcohol and using false citizenship government documents...
[Not a good day for him.]
Rage -- not a good idea
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:06:14
AUSTIN, Texas... Jan 29... volunteer at a community radio station set fire to the station because he was upset that his song selections for an overnight Internet broadcast were changed...
Digital Theft
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:02:49
A gang of Swedish criminals... had placed "advanced technical equipment" under the [bank] employee's desk that allowed them to take control of his computer remotely... employee discovered the device shortly after he realized his computer had started an operation to transfer "millions" from the bank into another account... literally pulled the plug.... happened in August.... announced... Wednesday after seven suspects... were arrested...
Transport Trouble
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:00:21
EUGENE, Ore... Jan 29... The chickens had no intention of crossing the road. Instead, they came crashing off a trailer, in crates, leaving feathers and carcasses on a mile-long stretch of Interstate 5... Three drivers reported hitting crates. Some of the fowl died inside, others on the highway or in the snow-filled ditches... "A lot of trucks running up and down I-5 dump their loads.... We've cleaned up chickens before. We've chased cows and sheep and horses off the road. It happens more often than you'd think..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 08:58:41
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo... drunken driver crashed through a fence at a small airport and drove onto a runway before getting stuck atop electrical equipment...
US Military
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:23:57
The Department of Defense (DoD) announced today that is has begun recruiting for the National Language Service Corps (NLSC) Pilot, a public civilian organization composed of volunteers engaged on-call to provide diverse language services across a broad range of local, state and federal government departments and agencies. The opportunities for service will vary from emergency relief to international crises to immediate national need--wherever language skills are needed.... It is an integral component of the Defense Department's comprehensive language roadmap and the President's National Security Language Initiative. The pilot corps will include two pools of certified language capable individuals. The "national pool" will consist of a broader array of talent that will be maintained to be drawn upon during times of need. The "dedicated pool" will be a smaller cadre of individuals who enter relationships with sponsoring organizations and who agree to be available to those organizations should the need arise. U.S. citizens interested in volunteering, or seeking more information, should call 1-800-Say-NLSC (729-6572) or go to http://www.nationallanguageservicecorps.org .
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:21:35
Army Sgt.
Mikeal W. Miller,
22, of Albany, Ore., died Jan. 27 at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., of wounds suffered in Baghdad, Iraq on July 9, 2007, when the vehicle he was in encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
Lasting Contributions
reuters.com/ ... 10:08:25
t was her singing and his fatherly protection that ignited President Truman's well-known temper, leading him to write one of the most famous presidential letters in history. After Washington Post music critic Paul Hume panned one of her vocal recitals -- "Miss Truman cannot sing very well" -- Truman responded from the White House that the review was "poppycock" and the critic was a "frustrated old man" who was "off the beam." "Some day I hope to meet you," the president wrote Hume, ignoring the fact the critic had called his daughter "extremely attractive." "When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!.."
nysun.com/ ... 10:05:27
Margaret Truman,
who died yesterday at 83, had careers as a singer, journalist, biographer, and mystery writer... At the time of her birth in 1924, Margaret Truman's father, Henry [Harry S.], was a county judge in Missouri. She attended public schools until 1935, when her father was elected to the United States Senate...
It came from the sky
breitbart.com/ ... 09:50:00
The U.S. military is developing contingency plans to deal with the possibility that a large spy satellite expected to fall to Earth in late February or early March could hit North America. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, who heads of U.S. Northern Command, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the size of the satellite suggests that some number of pieces will not burn up as the orbiting vehicle re-enters the Earth's atmosphere and will hit the ground...
History - still with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:33:05
Australia will issue its first formal apology to its indigenous people next month... a milestone that could ease tensions with a minority whose mixed-blood children were once taken away on the premise that their race was doomed... "The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people..."
Feeding Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:31:21
It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:27:53
Crowded N.J. county opens fire on deer... perhaps nowhere else have the trained shooters been so close to so many people as they are on the South Mountain Reservation, a nature preserve bordering hundreds of high-priced homes in the thick of the country's most crowded state. "I could come out on my deck and get shot..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:27:05
The number of chinook salmon returning to California's Central Valley has reached a near-record low, pointing to an "unprecedented collapse" that could lead to severe restrictions on West Coast salmon fishing this year...
Extraterrestrial Threat
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:26:39
According to supercomputer simulations by Sandia National Laboratories physicist Mark Boslough, the asteroid that destroyed the forest at Tunguska in Siberia in June 1908 had a blast force equivalent to one-quarter to one-third of the 10- to 20-megaton range scientists previously estimated... wasn't nearly as large as previously thought... "We can more accurately predict the location of an impact and its time better than we can a hurricane, so you really could get people out of there if it's below a certain threshold..." Smaller asteroids approach Earth about three times more frequently than large ones. So if large asteroids approach about every 1,000 years, a smaller one would be about every 300 years...
"The bottom line is it takes a lot less energy, a small explosion, to create ground damage" such as that at Tunguska...
It's All in Your Mind
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:24:28
Electrical stimulation of areas deep within the brain could improve memory...
[Coming in the future: "bars" where you get deep-brain electrode stimulation..?]
Orbiting Overhead
reuters.com/ ... 09:23:51
Two U.S. astronauts serving aboard the International Space Station floated outside the complex early on Wednesday to begin a spacewalk considered critical to the growth of the outpost... The shuttle will be carrying Europe's first permanent space laboratory, a bus-sized module named Columbus, which is to be connected to the seven-room complex. NASA plans to follow Columbus' launch with the first part of Japan's Kibo laboratory complex in March. Before the Japanese components can be installed, NASA must recover part of the station's troubled solar power system. One side of the station's two solar power wings has been locked in place since December, producing a fraction of the power needed to support expanded station operations. Whitson and Tani will attempt to replace a 200-pound motor that should restore partial mobility, allowing the wing to pivot its panels to catch the sun's rays... A more complicated repair that will allow the wing to freely rotate like a Ferris wheel is still in the planning stages...
Healing Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 09:10:22
The idea that a woman's personality traits can make her more prone to breast cancer appears nothing more than a myth, according to a Dutch study...
Headline of the Day
thedistrictweekly.com/ ... 10:19:16
WHEN THEY OUTLAW MARIJUANA, ONLY THE POTHEADS WILL HAVE POT...
Reasons for Repeal
thedistrictweekly.com/ ... 10:18:26
...The test case was brought by Gary Ross, who in no way fits the stereotype of prescription-forging riff-raff: he is 46, a veteran of the Air Force, and due to injuries sustained in the service he now suffers back spasms severe enough to qualify him for both government benefits and a medical
marijuana ID card. In 2001 he was hired as an administratornot a pilot or school bus driverby Raging Wire Telecommunications. Ross informed Raging Wire of his use of medical marijuana from the beginning, and presented his ID card before taking his drug test. A week later, when the test came back positive for trace amounts of marijuana, Raging Wire fired Ross. This is the latest installment in the comedy of errors that passes for drug policy in the state of California and the US as a whole...
the-signal.com/ ... 10:15:46
Sheriff's deputies raided an upscale Tesoro del Valle home Tuesday - confiscating more than 1,000
marijuana plants including some with names like "Big Bud" and "Beastie Boom" - after a neighbor walking his dog tipped them to an odor wafting from the residence...
news.google.com/ ... 10:14:51
Meanwhile, at Farm Snyfontein near Keetmanshoop in Karas, a man and a woman were arrested after they were found in possession of 7parcels of
cannibis weighing 2 thousand, 3 hundred and 65 kilogrammes, last week...
Government at Play
cnn.com/ ... 10:14:01
Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, said Tuesday that Federal Emergency Management Agency tried to control the outcome of a scientific study on formaldehyde in trailers used to house victims of Hurricane Katrina...
People Do Drugs
washingtonpost.com/ ... 10:12:03
President Bush plopped himself into a chair between two former prisoners... and asked to hear how their lives had changed. But first, he wanted them to know something about him: "I understand addiction... and I understand how a changed heart can help you deal with addiction.... Addiction is hard to overcome.... As you might remember, I drank too much at one time in my life. I understand faith-based programs. I understand that sometimes you can find the inspiration from a higher power to solve an addiction problem..."
Theory of Sex Education
wltx.com/ ... 09:51:49
COLUMBIA [somewhere]... Two teenagers have been
kicked out of school... for the rest of the academic year... for kissing on a school bus...
for "sexual misconduct..." tape... showed the pair kissing for maybe two minutes...
Land of the Free
news.yahoo.com/ ... 09:48:58
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. - A town petition making President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney subject to arrest for crimes against the Constitution has triggered a barrage of criticism from people who say residents are "wackjobs" and "nuts..."
US Election 2008
apnews.myway.com/ ... 09:43:24
Following his third place finish in Florida, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is expected to drop out of the presidential race today and endorse Sen. John McCain...
reuters.com/ ... 09:30:51
Former North Carolina Sen.
John Edwards... will withdraw
from the presidential race in a speech later on Wednesday...
[The world is suddenly just a little bit safer....]
reuters.com/ ... 09:30:17
John McCain, savoring his status as Republican presidential front-runner, moved into national campaign mode on Wednesday expecting to win the backing of defeated rival Rudy Giuliani ahead of next week's "Super Tuesday" showdown, but Mitt Romney vowed to fight on...
Under Digital Tyranny
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:21:05
China will take a new step Thursday to tighten control of the Internet when rules go into force limiting online video-sharing to state companies. But regulators, wary of hurting a fast-growing industry, are expected to let private operators work around the restrictions...
Digital Culture
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:20:23
A new method of digital rights management (DRM) which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians... asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community. This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM... Dr Kimberly Christen, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen...
Opposing Digital Tyranny
reuters.com/ ... 09:19:32
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday to extend the U.S. government's antitrust oversight of Microsoft Corp for two more years, but stopped short of granting a five-year extension sought by states accusing the company of continuing monopolistic behavior...
Just Random Chance
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:05:41
An Australian retiree won a $1.8 million lottery prize... [ticket bought] Sept. 19, 1995... original ticket did not print correctly, so he asked for a new one, which turned out to be the winner... discovered that the replacement ticket had been canceled, not the misprinted original, and was unable to claim the prize. He sued NSW Lotteries... Supreme Court Judge... awarded [him] $1.8 million in damages, citing negligence and breach of contract by the newsstand and the state lottery company...
Language Culture
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:04:11
Sign language interpreters in Thailand have run afoul of some ruling party supporters by holding their noses to refer to the new prime minister... has been nicknamed "Mr. Rose Apple Nose" because many claim his nose resembles the fruit... One interpreter... [said] "It is not meant as a nose joke.... We have touched our noses for years to refer to Samak but people noticed this time because we had to repeat the movement over 300 times..."
TUE 2008-JAN-29
Unclear on the Concept
reuters.com/ ... 10:58:43
A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend... "Really, it makes no sense addressing this theme with drums and dancing girls..."
Violence
reuters.com/ ... 10:49:26
Four robbers with pistols refused to give up about 30 hostages, including a pregnant woman and children, on Tuesday in a standoff with hundreds of heavily-armed police at a bank in central Venezuela...
Nature can be Deadly
efluxmedia.com/ ... 10:51:33
Western states are to face a hard winter as heavy snow has fallen from Washington to Arizona, triggering power cuts, chaos on the streets and the overwhelming at one ski resort... In northern Idaho roofs from several businesses fell under the pressure caused by the weight of snow... A new storm is expected on Tuesday, which could bring 1 to 3 inches of snow in the low areas and about 2 to 4 inches in the mountains. Heavy snow warnings are posted for Washington, Oregon and Idaho...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:47:49
It is estimated that 500,000 people are stranded in the southern city of Guangzhou as they wait for train services to resume... a scene of horror... countless thousands of desperate and freezing people... There are only a dozen toilets... The amount of mess is indescribable...
abcnews.go.com/ ... 10:45:44
Some of the worst winter weather to hit southern China in decades took 25 more lives Tuesday when a bus plunged off an icy road... Numerous cities suffered blackouts as heavy snowfalls caused power lines to snap and hampered the delivery of coal, used to generate most of China's electricity. Around 50 deaths so far have been blamed on the weather...
Under Tyranny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:35:29
Iran has sentenced three members of the Bahai faith to four years in jail for security offences and 51 others to suspended prison terms. They were convicted for propaganda against the system in the southern city of Shiraz...
Bahaism is a branch of Islam viewed as heresy by Iran's religious authorities...
the 51 suspended sentences were conditional on attending courses by state propaganda officials... authorities said they were proselytising in the southern city of Shiraz
under the cover of helping the poor...
Humans can be Dangerous
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:13:22
Ecuadorean officials are investigating the slaughter of 53 sea lions from the Galapagos Islands nature reserve, which were found with their heads caved in. The dead animals included 13 pups, 25 youngsters, nine males and six females... The Galapagos sea lions have no natural predators on land and generally do not fear humans...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 11:13:54
The United States used waterboarding in terrorism interrogations but no longer does, a former U.S. spy chief said in the Bush administration's clearest confirmation of the technique's use...
reuters.com/ ... 10:48:17
Sri Lankan troops have captured 16 Tamil Tiger bunkers in the northwest and killed at least 22 rebels in fighting on Tuesday, the military said...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:02
Eleven schoolchildren are among at least 18 people killed in a bomb attack on a bus in north-western Sri Lanka... pro-rebel Tamilnet website said it was carried out by the Sri Lankan army...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:18
At least 12 suspected militants have died in a missile attack in north-west Pakistan, local officials said. The attack took place after midnight in Khushali Torikhel village in the troubled North Waziristan district. Meanwhile, a Pakistani soldier was killed in fighting between security forces and militants in South Waziristan district...
reuters.com/ ... 10:16:31
Nine bodies and 10 severed heads were found on Tuesday in an abandoned field north of Baghdad in a region where U.S. and Iraqi forces are pressing ahead with offensives against al Qaeda forces...
In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide car bomber killed one civilian and wounded 15 others in an attack on a U.S. convoy...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:04:02
THENIA, Algeria... A car loaded with explosives and headed for a police station in northern Algeria exploded Tuesday after officers stopped the attack with bullets. At least two people were killed and 23 wounded...
Modern Medicine can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 09:41:35
Over-the-counter cough and cold drugs send an estimated 7,000 U.S. children under the age of 12 to emergency rooms every year, most for overdoses... Two-thirds of the cases were children who took the drugs without supervision, but just under 26 percent were children who acted unusually sleepy, had an allergic reaction or other ill effect after a parent gave them the recommended dose...
Transport Trouble
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:39:17
Charleston Mayor Danny Jones... at a California airport... had misplaced his driver's license, and the expired one in his wallet wouldn't do... Then he remembered picking up a copy of Charleston Magazine... Inside was a photograph of him... he allowed to board...
Theft
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:38:14
ARLINGTON, Texas... [car break-in]... fencing one of the stolen items could prove difficult... Greek Orthodox... Bishop Metropolitan Isaiah's... jeweled crown of gold and silver, which Isaiah estimated to be worth between $6,000 and $10,000...
[Couldn't fence it, dude, so I just wear it while eating pizza and watching TV....]
Alcohol Was Involved
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:35:29
ADRIAN, Mich... Police found... [49yo] man... cutting through a snowstorm... riding down the center of the street... on a John Deere tractor [lawn mower] Saturday night, toting four bottles of wine in a paper bag... blood alcohol level... 2 1/2 times Michigan's legal driving limit of 0.08 percent...
Nudity can be just Nudity
reuters.com/ ... 09:32:24
Travel agency OssiUrlaub.de said it would start taking bookings from Friday for a trial nudist day trip from the eastern German town of Erfurt to the popular Baltic Sea resort of Usedom... The 55 passengers will have to remain clothed until they board, and dress before disembarking... The crew will remain clothed throughout the flight for safety reasons...
Criminally Stupid
reuters.com/ ... 09:31:26
[54yo] New York state employee who had access to government-owned archives has been arrested on suspicion of stealing hundreds of historic documents, many of which he sold on eBay...
Sick, Sick, Sick
reuters.com/ ... 09:30:56
The uncovering of an illegal kidney transplant racket in a booming IT city has gripped India, with reports hundreds of poor laborers may have been duped or forced into donating organs to wealthy clients, including foreigners...
Yuck!
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:57:52
First-person-shooter Call of Duty 4 was last year's biggest selling game...
reuters.com/ ... 09:30:12
A hospital patient in Finland found a mouse head among the steamed vegetables on his plate... "Understandably, he lost his appetite..." most likely originated in a bag of Belgian vegetables... being "a Belgian mouse, the rest of it could be anywhere in Europe..."
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:32:22
Army Maj.
Alan G. Rogers,
40, of Hampton, Fla., died Jan. 27 of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated while he was conducting a dismounted patrol in Baghdad, Iraq. He was assigned to the Military Transition Team, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:32:03
Army Staff Sgt.
Robert J. Wilson,
28, of Boynton Beach, Fla., died Jan. 26 of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated while he was conducting a dismounted patrol in Baghdad, Iraq. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
Evolution Isn't Easy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:14:44
Chameleons... change colour for a variety of purposes - communication, camouflage and temperature control... "[Our research] suggests that chameleons
evolved colour change for signalling,
to fend off rivals or attract a mate, and not so they could match a greater variety of backgrounds..."
Being Human
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:12:35
Scientists have found that each cell of the body has an internal "clock", which can be affected by various genes... skin cells can be used to measure the speed of a person's body clock... a mutation in a gene known as Period3... makes someone more likely to be a morning person... makes them more prone to tiredness during the day, so they prefer to go to bed early...
Epidemic Without Borders
reuters.com/ ... 10:09:48
The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer, as some experts have believed... While many perfectly healthy people certainly were cut down, those already in poor health prior to the arrival of the plague were more likely to have perished...
The plague epidemic of 1347 to 1351 was one of the deadliest recorded in human history, killing about 75 million people, according to some estimates, including more than a third of Europe's population...
Healing Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 09:45:13
Administering flu vaccines under the tongue may be more effective and offer more protection than injecting or inhaling the drug... "It (the base of the mouth) is a very good absorbent and competent tissue ... in taking vaccine and presenting it to the immune system ... to initiate an immune response..." There is currently no vaccine that is administered under the tongue...
Staying Healthy
washingtonpost.com/ ... 11:06:35
"A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related diseases and premature death. Inactivity may diminish life expectancy not only by predisposing to aging-related diseases, but also because it may influence the aging process itself..." The researchers looked at the physical activity levels, smoking habits and socioeconomic status of 2,401 white twins. The researchers also collected DNA samples from participants, and examined the length of telomeres-repeated sequences at the end of chromosomes in white blood cells (leukocytes). Leukocyte telomeres shorten over time and may serve as a marker of a person's biological age...
reuters.com/ ... 09:44:32
Moderately happy people are wealthier -- and maybe healthier -- than extremely happy individuals...
People Live
foxnews.com/ ... 11:15:41
A Queens man received the gift of life from his beloved sister, who saved him twice once by getting him on dialysis, and again by giving him her kidneys after her tragic, sudden death...
State of the Union
apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:09:24
President Bush, standing before Congress one last time, urged the nation Monday night to persevere against gnawing fears of recession and stay patient with the long, grinding war in Iraq. He pressed Congress to quickly pass a plan to rescue the economy...
Now
That's
Funny!
breitbart.com/ ... 11:09:00
US soldiers are lampooned, policemen are shown as buffoons and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is irreverently cheered by penguins... Iraqis are turning more and more to You Tube to express their dark-edged humour. The main butt of send-ups posted by Iraqis on the popular Internet video site is, as one might expect, the US military. With around 160,000 troopers scattered across the country there is clearly no dearth of subjects -- nor lack of innovative video makers... One of the main targets in the highly religious country is Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shiite cleric whose thousands-strong Mahdi Army militia is known to hero-worship him. One video clip shows a colony of penguins, led by a large male with distinctive orange markings on his neck, swaggering around the ice chanting "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!" The 66-second segment, its soundtrack clearly recorded at a Mahdi Army gathering engaged in rowdy praise of the cleric, shows the penguins raising their flippers heavenwards, beaks wide open as they become more and more enthusiastic about Sadr...
Digital Business
businessweek.com/ ... 11:14:55
At first glance, Nokia's (NOK) Jan. 28 purchase of a small Norwegian open-source software company seems a confusing strategic shift. After all, the world's largest maker of mobile phones has long resisted the idea of using the grassroots Linux operating system in handsets, favoring instead homegrown software in its mass-market models and the Symbian operating system in its top-of-the-line smartphones. But analysts hailed the 104 million ($153 million) acquisition of Oslo-based Trolltech as a kind of strategic hat trick. In one stroke, Nokia has managed to defend itself against incursions into the mobile-phone business by Apple (APPL) and Google (GOOG), while potentially further accelerating the meltdown of rival Motorola (MOT). "Nokia is responding extremely quickly to what Google and others are doing," notes Ben Wood, director at British mobile consultancy CCS Insight...
businessweek.com/ ... 10:55:41
FCC's Auction: Not Going According to Plan?.. If Auction 73 proves to be at all similar to Auction 66, open wireless networks initiatives may be in trouble...
Digital Culture
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:40:06
Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia encylopedia, talks to the BBC about his new venture - Wikia Search... "Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks..." "The proof will be in the pudding¿ I just believe that transparency is an important political issue on the web. One of the things I make an analogy to is openness in a free society, openness in a court system. I love Google, I trust Google but I still think that there's a problem with secrecy in that you never know who you really can trust..."
Snail Mail is dead
reuters.com/ ... 10:38:23
An IT worker, after receiving a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter...
US Election 2008
apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:10:34
Rival Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama came within a foot of one another just before President Bush's State of the Union speech Monday night and managed not to acknowledge each other... A doorkeeper, caught in that highly awkward dance, cringes in the photo that captures the moment...
washingtonpost.com/ ... 11:02:38
The political and social legacy of the late president -- Camelot, the Big Myth, the story of American royalty, a sense of Americans being awestruck by themselves -- was gift-wrapped by the Kennedy family yesterday and given to Sen. Barack Obama, a political gift with remarkable and remarkably strange baggage... "Over the years, I've been deeply moved by the people who've told me they wish they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president," Caroline Kennedy told a cheering throng of students at American University. "This longing is even more profound today. Fortunately, there is one candidate who offers that same sense of hope and inspiration, and I am proud to endorse Senator Barack Obama for president..." Bay of Pigs! Marilyn! No need to mention these sorts of things today...
media.newsbusters.org/ ... 10:59:56
HARRY SMITH: When you see that enthusiasm [for Obama] though, and when you see the generational change that seems to be taking place before our eyes, does it make you at all fearful?
Kennedy understandably had no idea what Smith was driving at, and gave an innocuous answer about people's desire for "a new day and a new generation." But Smith's follow-up left no real doubt as to what he had in mind.
SMITH: I just, I think what I was trying to say is, sometimes agents of change end up being targets, as you well know, and that was why I was asking if you were at all fearful of that.
When you tell a man with Ted Kennedy's family history that "you well know" about politicians becoming "targets," the implication is unmistakable.
This time, Kennedy [to his credit I would say] chose to ignore Smith's suggestion, giving another bland answer about Obama being a candidate for change.
upi.com/ ... 10:52:35
[ACLY] filed a legal challenge on voting technology to be used in and around Cleveland in the March 4 presidential primary elections... to Cuyahoga County's move back to paper ballots away from electronic touch-screen systems... The ACLU said other counties using electronic systems notify a voter if they make an error while the paper ballot system doesn't, which contravenes the U.S. Constitution's equal protection laws...
reuters.com/ ... 10:16:04
Edward Kennedy may have thrown his political weight behind Democrat Barack Obama in the White House race, but he says that doesn't mean he harbors ill feelings toward his old friends, Hillary and Bill Clinton...
World Energy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:10:50
Britain is likely to face a shortfall in electricity generation within five to seven years, a report concludes...
1960s - less with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:04:34
After more than 50 years of leading his Transcendental Meditation movement, the one-time Indian guru to the Beatles has retreated into near-silence and turned over daily management of his global network to aides... Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is thought to be 91 and is losing the strength to keep up...
Digital Threat
reuters.com/ ... 10:06:52
Sweden plans this week to charge the people running Pirate Bay, one of the world's most visited Web sites, with being accessories in breaking copyright law. Pirate Bay helps Web surfers share copyrighted
[OR NON-COPYRIGHTED]
music and film files, which is illegal in many countries, including Sweden...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:03:33
Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read... A seamless, global network of electronic "sniffers" will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, "live spam," may be beamed at them... In "Smart Homes," sensors built into walls, floors and appliances will inventory possessions, record eating habits, monitor medicine cabinets - all the while, silently reporting data to marketers eager for a peek into the occupants' private lives... much of the radio frequency identification technology... already exists - and new and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:01:18
As digital technologies and the Internet began to emerge in the mid-1990s, many content companies responded by betting on the ability of technological protection measures to re-assert the control that was rapidly slipping from their grasp... A decade later, the strategy lies in tatters. Many content owners have dropped digital locks after alienating disgruntled consumers fed up with their inability to freely use their personal property. Electronics manufacturers have similarly rebelled... In recent months, a new strategy has begun to emerge. With the industry gradually admitting that locking down content does not work, it has now
dangerously shifted toward locking down the Internet...
envisions requiring Internet service providers to install filtering and content monitoring technologies within their networks...
[ARRRGGHHHHH!!! NOOOOO!!!!!]
Print is not so Dead
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:58:18
More books are sold on the internet than any other product and the number is increasing...
Under Digital Tyranny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:57:37
One of the best tracing programs around is DTrace, developed by Sun Microsystems for use on its Solaris operating system. DTrace is available under an open source license, and when Apple announced that it would be available on Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X, every serious Mac OS programmer looked forward to having a new, powerful tool to work with. Unfortunately early experiments with the Apple version of DTrace identified some unusual behaviour... Adam Leventhal, one of its original developers, found that he could not see any information about iTunes, apparently because Apple had modified his tool to ignore some of its own programs. Leventhal is rather annoyed about this, because the point of a trace program is that it can see everything in order to help developers find and fix errors...
Music industry is dead
reuters.com/ ... 10:53:16
The world's biggest music companies, including Warner Music Group Corp and Sony BMG, denied that they have agreed to license songs for a free download service that was launched by Qtrax on Monday... A source close to Universal Music, the largest of the group, said it also had not signed a deal... And a source close to EMI Group said that while its song publishing unit has an agreement with Qtrax, its recorded music arm, EMI Music, does not...
reuters.com/ ... 10:07:52
the music industry is trying new business models to boost digital sales and offset the decline in CDs... At the annual industry meeting on the French coast this week, much of the talk was dominated by a new service called Qtrax, which plastered all available space with huge posters declaring the CD dead and estimating that over 1.2 billion illegal downloads would be made during the event itself. Qtrax plans to offer millions of tracks for free with the backing of the music majors, though on Monday it was still in talks for deals with the four big music groups...
reuters.com/ ... 09:55:35
European Union countries can refuse to disclose names of file sharers on the Internet in civil cases, the EU's top court said on Tuesday in a blow to copyright holders trying to fight digital piracy. The European Court of Justice ruled on a dispute between Spanish music rights holders association Promusicae and Spain's top telecoms operator Telefonica. Telefonica argued that, under a national law based on EU rules, it only had to disclose the name of an Internet subscriber for criminal actions, not civil ones...
reuters.com/ ... 09:54:46
[Background music: a chorus of "clueless" sung to CSNY's "Helpless"...]
Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of rock band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce disconnection policies to end illegal music downloads and urged governments to make sure they do... McGuinness said it was time for artists to stand up against what he called the "shoddy, careless and downright dishonest way they have been treated in the digital age..."
Digital Future is Now
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:59:22
In the past, said Mr Horton, one of the biggest problems was that there was no way to know if the images being shot on two cameras in preparation for 3D projection would match until the film was developed. "You could not see stereo effects when you were shooting," he said. "Now you can see what you are doing while you are doing it and that's a big step forward..." "Where the tools are getting really sophisticated now is in the level of control between the two cameras..."
reuters.com/ ... 09:56:18
More than a quarter of people who bought Apple... iPhone are using them on wireless networks other than AT&T's... a "stunning" number that will pressure the company's business model, an analyst said on Monday...
[As the Rascals said, "People everywhere just got to be free...."]
reuters.com/ ... 09:53:06
Dr. Howard Stark's office is quiet... he and his assistant Michele Norris-Bell check e-mail alerts on handheld devices and -- between seeing patients in person -- on a desktop computer. Stark
has moved most of his practice, based in Washington, onto the Internet and he couldn't be happier...
reuters.com/ ... 09:52:32
Transistor radios tinier than a grain of sand, made using nanotechnology, can not only tune in to the traffic report, but may end up outperforming current silicon-based electronics...
Reasons for Repeal
ssnewstelegram.com/ ... 11:20:33
Sulphur Springs... Somewhere USA [newspaper websites are really bad about identifying their location on article pages]... Local drug interdiction officers seized nearly 80 pounds of marijuana early Sunday morning following a
routine traffic stop...
traffic violation...
[unspecified, but it really doesn't matter.]
[31yo] driver...
appeared unusually nervous...
newsday.com/ ... 11:17:58
CANTON, N.Y. - Police say a traffic stop in northern New York results in the discovery of more than 27 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of a car...
reuters.com/ ... 09:44:16
Smoking a
joint is equivalent to 20 cigarettes in terms of lung cancer risk, scientists in New Zealand have found, as they warned of an "epidemic" of lung cancers linked to cannabis...
[an epidemic which for SOME reason just hasn't shown up in the last FORTY YEARS of cannabis puffing! Another study "proving" what the PuriTalibaNazis want to prove, as trustworthy as a USSR history book!]
scientists said cannabis
could be expected
to harm the airways more than tobacco as its smoke contained twice the level of carcinogens...
[Note the weasel words that say nothing. This has all been studied before!]
Cosmetology
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:36:48
Brazilian model Angela Bismarchi will dance nearly nude ahead of a 300-person drum corps in next month's Carnival parade... In preparation... she's having her 42nd plastic surgery - closing in on the Guinness World Record of 47... "I always was vain..."
But is it Art?
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:35:55
A man who calls himself a tantric master broke his own world record by standing engulfed in ice for 72 minutes...
Woman's Right
reuters.com/ ... 09:30:40
Asda, Britain's second-biggest food retailer and owned by U.S. giant Wal-Mart, says it will no longer charge women more for bigger bras in its George fashion range. "We're putting an end once and for all to one of the last prejudices -- that of the bigger-busted woman..."
MON 2008-JAN-28
Transport Trouble
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:28:30
FOLSOM, Pa... Philadelphia International Airport... "(Expletive) U FAA..." a suburban couple wrote on the roof of their home... one letter of the profane word is substituted with an underline... jets have been flying over their house since last month, when the Federal Aviation Administration altered departure headings out of Philadelphia... frustrated after being unable to leave a message with the FAA's noise-complaint hot line because the voice mailbox was always full...
Nudity can be disturbing
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:18:45
WEST FRANKFORT, Ill... several female motorists reported [34yo Male Marion IL resident] driving without a stitch of clothing... said he just liked to
drive unencumbered to check out the ladies...
insisted he didn't mean to offend any one in the southern Illinois town of 8,200...
Criminally Stupid
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:35:59
72-year-old man accused of robbing a Lynchburg bank... told the branch manager, "give me all your money..." then appeared to be conflicted, handed the money back and told the teller to call the police. He also tried to give her his gun...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:35:09
SANDY SPRINGS, Ga... [22yo] bank robbery suspect was arrested while waiting at a bus stop to make her getaway... "That just wasn't too bright," Sandy Springs police Lt. Steve Rose said... what made G. think she could escape on public transportation? Police say she told them she had done it before...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:32:27
HARTFORD, Conn... Police said they found a half-pound of
marijuana in a man's car after they pulled him over for throwing bottles at a truck...
[Was he just naturally stupid [Answer: Yes], or was he smokin' that mythical extra-good pot only the PuriTalibaNazi Tyranny propagandists seem to know about?]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:25:34
Thieves in Malaysia stole an adult cow, squeezed it into the back seat of a car and drove off with it, but abandoned the animal when the getaway vehicle crashed into a tree... The cow, injured in the crash, was slaughtered by villagers...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:21:15
CHERRYVILLE, N.C... unsuccessful robber... dropped a .45-caliber handgun in front of Gasland USA on Sunday. The gun hit the ground and went off... shot himself in the foot...
Disturbing Family Patterns
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:41:52
Shoplifting is all in the family for one California clan... A grandmother, her daughter and some of her grandchildren tried to steal $900 worth of merchandise from a Target store in Lodi, 35 miles south of Sacramento... surveillance video... showed them cutting open boxes and hiding MP3 players, digital cameras, DVDs, jewelry and sports equipment in purses, bags and a backpack... "The 5-year-old actually had a pack of gum. A small item but we could see where her life was heading because she thinks more than likely this is a normal way of life, this is what you do..."
Nature can be Deadly
usatoday.com/ ... 12:58:38
A waterlogged California shivered through the end of a week-long storm system Monday that was being blamed for at least two fatal traffic accidents over the weekend... rainfall reaching nearly 8 inches in some remote mountain areas...
nytimes.com/ ... 12:56:14
Severe snowstorms over broad swaths of eastern and central China have wreaked havoc on traffic throughout the country, creating gigantic passenger backups, spawning accidents and leaving at least 24 people dead... In many areas... accumulation has been described as the heaviest in as many as five decades...
Rage -- not a good idea
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:30:30
CROSSVILLE, Tenn... argument between neighbors escalated with a shotgun and a chainsaw...
Violence
abcnews.go.com/ ... 12:57:58
DNA collected at the house where a 19-year-old Reno woman disappeared from more than a week ago matches DNA gathered by investigators after the sexual assault of another college student just blocks away in December...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:37:02
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil... Two men on a motorcycle grabbed a woman as she walked to church, pulled out a machete and cut off the waist-length hair she had been growing for two decades... "It must have been nearly a meter and half (more than four feet) long..." second recent case of hair robbery in Aracaju... Similar attacks have occurred in other Brazilian cities, where the demand for human hair is high... v
Civilization vs Gangsterism
voanews.com/ ... 12:55:22
Lebanon is observing a day of mourning, after riots in a Hezbollah stronghold of Beirut left more than half a dozen people dead and dozens wounded, putting the country's embattled pro-Western government on the defensive...
reuters.com/ ... 12:54:58
Five U.S. soldiers were killed in a coordinated ambush in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday... hit by a roadside bomb and then came under small arms fire...
Iraqi defence ministry spokesman Major-General Mohammed al- Askari said Iraq was studying the prospect of temporarily shutting the border with Syria as part of the offensive intended to stop foreign fighters joining al Qaeda...
abcnews.go.com/ ... 12:54:29
Gunmen who took up to 250 Pakistani school children hostage on Monday in a northwestern town freed them all and surrendered to tribal elders...
Feeding Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:29:35
found a tiny frog comfortably nestled in the leaves of organic lettuce she was preparing to eat... no bigger than the tip of her pinky finger... named the frog "Curious..."
Animal Companions
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:23:46
HONOLULU... Two former golf club employees have been charged with theft and cruelty to animals in the death of a
pet dog
... 8-month-old German shepherd-Labrador mix... the owners say was
cooked and eaten...
he and his wife considered the dog like a child they never had. ...received expressions of sympathy and offers of new dogs from as far away as Colorado... they now have a 3-month old mixed German shepherd-Golden retriever...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:20:17
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich... the couple and their three children were sleeping when... [mother] awoke to hear the family's black cat howling and screeching from the garage, where it spends its nights... opened the door to the garage, smoke started pouring inside, so she grabbed the cat and ran back through the house, waking up everyone and telling them to go outside... [fire] originated in the garage but apparently was not started by the cat...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:17:11
"Hi, you're not going to believe this, but I am calling from Fort Worth, Texas, and I accidentally picked up your husband's luggage. And when I opened the luggage, a cat jumped out..."
Reasons for Repeal
star-telegram.com/ ... 13:09:16
AUSTIN -- A few years ago, politicians who dared to suggest anything other than jail time for
marijuana users were considered pro-drug fringe candidates. Not anymore. Now all the major Democratic presidential candidates are offering more lenient stands on medical marijuana, and White House hopeful Ron Paul, a Texas Republican, has made ending the federal drug war a centerpiece of his campaign. "There has definitely been a change in the political climate for liberalization..."
[Recognition of Human Right still coming slowly to our world....]
People Die
efluxmedia.com/ ... 13:07:18
North Carolina... A 10-year-old autistic boy died Sunday afternoon after wandering away from a Cabarrus County residential care center for the disabled... later found in a creek nearb...
People Live
ap.google.com/ ... 12:57:16
"It was very disturbing. He was saying, 'I'm going down. Don't let me die.' It was really scary," neighbor... said. "I just grabbed the canoe and went off like on a skateboard out to him and then the ice started to crack, so I just pushed it as far as I could and then the fireman came up beside me..."
Big Whoops Cascade
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:40:45
Russian woman got a nastier surprise when she returned from her country house: her home was gone, torn down mistakenly by construction workers clearing a site...
US Election 2008
thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/ ... 13:03:58
Mrs. Clinton now finds herself relying primarily on her margin among white women, which is a precarious place to be, while Mr. Obama has a serious problem among Latinos, which could cost him some major states. Both campaigns will spend the next eight days slicing up the primary electorate in targeted ads and mailings. Its a political scientists dream, the kind of thing from which countless masters theses are derived...
Theory of Justice
reuters.com/ ... 09:44:24
A Spanish driver who collided with a cyclist is suing the dead youth's family $29,300 for the damage the impact of his body did to his luxury car... wants a further 6,000 euros to cover the cost of hiring another vehicle while his car was being repaired... The youth had been cycling alone at night without reflective clothing or a helmet... family won 33,000 euros compensation from Delgado's insurance company after the firm acknowledged he had been driving at excessive speed and this could have contributed to the incident... The family said they had previously pitied Delgado for the guilt he must feel at killing their son but were now disgusted that his greatest concern appeared to be money...
Digital Business
tgdaily.com/ ... 13:00:29
AMD is challenging Nvidia with its first dual-CPU card, which, according to first reviews, in fact is able to reclaim the performance crown from the green team...
reuters.com/ ... 13:00:05
PayPal... said on Monday that it would acquire Israel's Fraud Sciences Ltd in an all-cash deal worth about $169 million. Fraud Sciences' risk tools and analytics are likely to enhance eBay and PayPal's fraud management systems...
Lost & Found
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:39:58
MARSHFIELD, Wis... where has the overdue book been for the past 57 years? "We don't have records that go back that far.... We don't know who checked it out..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:34:01
MCMINNVILLE, Ore... "The Sexy Sex: All Nude Revue Rug One." It is a hooked rug in hand-dyed alpaca, 85 by 17 inches. Bremer said it took about two years to complete... In October, the weaving was taken from an exhibit at Linfield College, where the Portland artist is an adjunct professor... a man saw it in a garbage bin Monday, recognized it from news about the theft and called... "My guess was that it had been in the Dumpster a day, two or three. Hence it was a little stinky.... It wasn't mistreated..."
[But... is it art?]
It's Only Money
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:26:35
It took Vicki Armstrong almost 19 years to save $550, which isn't much of an accomplishment - except that she did it one penny at a time... "It helped me be a little bit more conservative in my lifestyle..."
SUN 2008-JAN-27
Violence
sfgate.com/ ... 23:32:50
A motorist traveling with his girlfriend and their toddler on Interstate 580 in Richmond [Calif] was shot and critically injured today... The attackers pulled alongside... and opened fire... "We don't know if it was a road-rage incident or if he was some kind of a target of the people who shot him..."
Transport Trouble
koin.com/ ... 23:31:45
SPOKANE, Wash. - A Southwest Airlines plane out of Portland skidded of a snow-covered taxiway in Spokane Sunday. None of the 118 passengers on board were injured...
Bartlesville - prarie frontier town
examiner-enterprise.com/ ... 23:28:03
A Mexican national wanted by United States Marshals in connection with the New Years day stabbing death of a 22-year-old Mexican man in Seguin, Texas has been arrested at a Bartlesville motel. According to Bartlesville Police Chief Tom Holland, the suspect, 28-year-old Juan Manuel Garcia, was apprehended around midnight last night at a motel in the 2300 block of Washington Boulevard...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 23:21:42
TIJUANA, Mexico, Jan 26.. A key hitman for Mexico's Arellano Felix drug cartel was arrested on Saturday in this crime-ridden border city... had dodged arrest for a decade in Tijuana, which is just over the U.S. border from San Diego. He is wanted in the United States for drug trafficking and arms possession...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 23:35:50
Army Sgt. 1st Class
Matthew Ryan Kahler,
29, of Granite Falls, Minn., died Jan. 26 in FOB Fenty, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from small arms fire in Waygul, Afghanistan. Possible friendly fire. Afghan guard (ally) possibly mistook the soldier as an enemy combatant and engaged with small arms fire. Incident is under investigation. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Vicenza, Italy.
defenselink.mil/ ... 23:35:22
Army Pfc.
Duncan Charles Crookston,
19, of Denver, Colo., died Jan. 25 in Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle during combat operations in Baghdad, Iraq. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
defenselink.mil/ ... 23:35:11
Army Sgt.
Tracy Renee Birkman,
41, of New Castle, Va., died Jan. 25 in Owesat, Iraq, from non-combat related injuries. She was assigned to the 626th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
Reasons for Repeal
pr.cannazine.co.uk/ ... 23:34:48
Europe's premier cannabis exhibition fights against all the odds to stage the FOURTH SPANNABIS EXPO Cannabis trade show...
earthtimes.org/ ... 23:34:23
URBANA, Ill., Jan. 27 Police have arrested a man they allege attempted to deliver nearly 87 pounds of
marijuana to an Illinois home through FedEx...
telegraph.co.uk/ ... 23:33:21
California's first
marijuana vending machines
open today. The machines can be used by patients who are prescribed marijuana for health reasons...
Music industry is dead
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 23:25:37
After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing,
the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs.
With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks. The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax websites jukebox in return for authorised use of almost every song available. The service will use the "peer-to-peer" network, which contains not just hit songs but rarities and live tracks from the worlds leading artists...
Beatles - still with us
komotv.com/ ... 23:19:56
Ringo Starr is known for being the amiable Beatle, but the rock star showed his tough side Tuesday when he walked off the set of "Live With Regis and Kelly" rather than cut short one of his songs...
SAT 2008-JAN-26
Transport Trouble
cbsnews.com/ ... 21:33:21
believe a teen accused of plotting to hijack a plane was suicidal... [16yo] removed from a Southwest Airlines flight Tuesday night at Nashville International Airport. He was being held at a juvenile detention facility... had handcuffs, rope and duct tape in his bag... Authorities searched the boy's home in California and found a mock cockpit...
"His plan had a low probability of success..."
Supernatural Threats
breitbart.tv/ ... 21:23:12
Hackers Post YouTube Video Declaring War on Scientology... "For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind--for the laughs--we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. We acknowledge you as a serious opponent, and we are prepared for a long, long campaign. You will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your methods, hypocrisy, and the artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell..."
Violence
newsday.com/ ... 21:20:28
INDEPENDENCE, Mo... [35yo] man... accused of offering an undercover officer $5 and 90 pills of the painkiller Oxycotin to kill a woman... roommate said [he] wanted the girlfriend out of the way so the men could be together...
Hospitals can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:52:04
MINNEAPOLIS... Oxygen ignited inside a special hood worn by a newborn infant in a hospital, burning the boy's head and face and leaving him in critical condition...
Data Theft
reuters.com/ ... 10:48:18
Greek police said on Friday they had arrested a man suspected of selling corporate secrets from France's Dassault Group, including data on weapons systems...
Under Tyranny
reuters.com/ ... 10:47:21
China's broadcast watchdog has slammed a provincial station for ignoring an order to remove sexually explicit television programs from the air, and demanded better "spiritual food" for viewers...
9/11 - still with us
reuters.com/ ... 10:19:48
A detailed 1998 New York Police Department analysis opposed the city's plans to locate its emergency command center at the World Trade Center but then-mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's administration overrode the objections...
Among the location's vulnerabilities was its history as a target... The command center was destroyed during the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center that also destroyed the twin towers in the seven-building complex...
WW2 - still with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:10:24
Scattered across America are 20 old men who remain the target of the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, the OSI. For three decades it has been the driving force exposing and expelling naturalised Americans who in their youth sold their souls to Hitler's apparatus of mass murder... as one OSI prosecutor remarked: "We are in a race against the Grim Reaper and he sometimes wins because the tactic of all defence lawyers is to delay proceedings so their clients can die in freedom still in the USA..." So that figure of 20 cases still pending probably marks the final limits of America's long hunt for Nazi-era fugitives...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 21:33:38
Iraqi security forces have begun a "decisive" final offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq to push the Sunni Islamist militants out of their last major stronghold in the north, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Friday...
news.com.au/ ... 21:19:22
Jan 22... man killing himself and three others on Tuesday when his bomb-filled waistcoat exploded as he was putting it on in the southern town of Lashkar Gah...
Jan 24... would-be suicide bomber fell down a flight of stairs and blew himself up as he headed out for an attack in Afghanistan... "Two civilian women and a man were wounded..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:05
An American aid worker has been kidnapped with her driver while travelling to work in a volatile region in southern Afghanistan. Unknown gunmen took the pair outside of the southern city of Kandahar...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:09:28
GEORGETOWN, Guyana... Gunmen stormed into a coastal village early Saturday and shot dead 11 people... escalating violence blamed on a gang leader who has threatened widespread attacks...
Threats
reuters.com/ ... 21:36:15
Islamist extremists were planning attacks across Europe, especially against public transport, before their arrests in Barcelona last weekend, a Spanish paper reported on Saturday, citing a would-be attacker's testimony...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:51:28
Pakistan has raised the state of alert around its nuclear facilities
amid concerns they could be targeted by Islamist militants. But a senior military official said there had been no specific threat to the sites...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:08:57
"I accuse the government of Colombia of devising a conspiracy, acting as a pawn of the U.S. empire, of devising a military provocation against Venezuela..."
--Venezuelan President Hugo [Troublemonger] Chavez on Friday.... He cited intelligence reports but did not offer evidence to support his claim...
It came from the sky
breitbart.com/ ... 21:35:12
A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and propulsion and could hit the Earth in late February or March... could contain hazardous materials... unknown where... it might come down...
Animal Companions
breitbart.com/ ... 21:37:20
MARSHALL, Texas... An animal protection group on Friday rescued more than 200 animals, including 26 hissing cockroaches and two bearded dragons, from an eastern Texas home... 68 dogs, 16 rabbits, 15 guinea pigs, 13 gerbils, seven doves, two dwarf hamsters, two hedgehogs, an opossum and a pink toe tarantula... One dead frog and a dead guinea pig...
foxnews.com/ ... 21:22:19
She and [her dog] Izzy share a rare neuromuscular disease that can't be treated medically...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:57:42
Army Staff Sgt.
Robert J. Miller,
24, of Iowa City, Iowa, died Jan. 25 in Barikowt, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when he encountered small arms fire while conducting combat operations. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C.
Cosmetology
reuters.com/ ... 10:33:02
Botox and a similar injection should come with stronger warnings following reports of 16 deaths after the botulinum toxin spread inside the body...
Cosmology
reuters.com/ ... 10:29:16
Samples of rock dust retrieved from a comet called Wild 2 are forcing scientists to alter they way they think about these intriguing objects that streak through our solar system... much more like an asteroid than scientists had expected... Comets are celestial bodies made of rock, dust and ice with characteristic tails of gas and dust streams that are formed in the solar system's distant, frigid reaches. A long-standing notion had been they were sort of a frozen time capsule of material from when the solar system formed 4-1/2 billion years ago, including stardust from other stars. But this is not the case with Wild 2...
World Water
reuters.com/ ... 10:26:30
The aqueduct serving Puglia, the important agricultural region that forms the heel of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula, is riddled with so many holes that it leaks more water than it delivers...
Feeding Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 10:32:22
A proposed class action filed on Wednesday in California accuses The Dannon Co Inc of mounting a massive false advertising campaign to convince consumers to pay more for yogurt containing "probiotic" bacteria because of the products' health benefits. The lawsuit, filed in a Los Angeles federal court, said Dannon's own studies failed to support its advertised claims that its Activia, Activia Lite and DanActive were "clinically" and "scientifically" "proven" to have health benefits that other yogurts did not...
reuters.com/ ... 10:25:30
Opponents of biotech crops said on Wednesday they were filing a lawsuit to challenge the USDA's deregulation of Monsanto Co's genetically engineered sugar beet because of fears of "biological contamination" and other harm to the environment. The Center for Food Safety, the Sierra Club and two organic seed groups said the lawsuit involved the United States Department of Agriculture's approval of Monsanto's glyphosate-resistant sugar beet, which is engineered to withstand treatment of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide...
Anthropology
reuters.com/ ... 10:24:27
An almost complete human skull fossil that could date back 100,000 years has been unearthed in China... "More astonishing than the completeness of the skull is that it still has a fossilized membrane on the inner side, so scientists can track the nerves of the Paleolithic ancestors..."
Antiquity - still with us
reuters.com/ ... 10:23:39
The victims of human sacrifice by Mexico's ancient Mayans, who threw children into water-filled caverns, were likely boys and young men not virgin girls as previously believed... Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for rain and fertile fields by
throwing them into sacred sinkhole caves,
known as "cenotes." The caves
served as a source of water
for the Mayans and were also thought to be an entrance to the underworld...
[Does that sound unhealthy to you?]
bones of 127 bodies discovered at the bottom of one of Chichen Itza's sacred caves... 80 percent were likely boys between the ages of 3 and 11... other 20 percent were mostly adult men... Some of the children were ritually skinned or dismembered before being offered to the gods...
Healing Ourselves
dailymail.co.uk/ ... 21:17:20
An experimental helmet which scientists say could reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease within weeks of being used is to be tried out on patients. The strange-looking headgear - which has to be worn for ten minutes every day - bathes the brain with infra-red light and stimulates the growth of brain cells. Its creators believe it
could reverse the symptoms of dementia - such as memory loss and anxiety - after only four weeks...
reuters.com/ ... 10:28:19
An Australian teenage girl has become the world's first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor... a "one-in-six-billion miracle..." now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9... body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ... Her new liver's blood stem cells then invaded her body's bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:07:49
Scientists say they have identified a key reason why bird flu has so far not posed a widespread menace to humans... to enter human respiratory cells the virus must first pick a very specific type of lock... Flu viruses attack by binding sugar chains, called glycans, that line the airways and lungs... The chemical linkages between the sugar molecules in these chains differ between humans and birds. Until now it has been assumed that bird flu viruses would be adapt to humans simply by acquiring mutations that enable them to attach to the human types. But Dr Ram Sasisekharan and colleagues found this step depends on the shape assumed by the flexible sugar chains rather than the type of linkage. Bird flu viruses currently require cone-shaped glycans to infect birds, so the umbrella shape found in humans has protected most of us from avian flu. This suggests that for the H5N1 bird flu virus to become pandemic it must adapt so that it can latch onto the umbrella-shaped glycans of the human upper respiratory tract...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:03:03
A gel to speed up wound healing and reduce scarring is being developed by UK scientists. It works by suppressing a key gene, boosting blood supply, and altering the way new tissue is laid down... may aid not just surface injuries, but also people who suffer internal organ tissue damage through illness or abdominal surgery...
Evolution Isn't Easy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:59:52
Scientists believe they could be a step closer to solving the mystery of how the first birds took to the air... the key to understanding the evolution of bird flight is the angle at which a bird flaps its wings... birds move their wings at the same narrow angle, whether they run, fly or glide... early birds may have begun to fly by simply learning to flutter their wings at the right angle...
Science Marches Onnnnnn
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:02:35
A boat that was deliberately trapped in the Arctic ice in an effort to monitor the region's changing climate has broken free after more than 500 days...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:56:55
Scientists have made the lethal virus Ebola harmless in the lab, potentially aiding research into a vaccine or cure. Taking a single gene from the virus stops it replicating...
[Inappropriately compounded sentence of the day:]
Ebola, currently handled in highly secure labs, kills up to 80% of those it infects...
Tax Money Will Fix All
breitbart.com/ ... 21:35:31
A Democratic lawmaker in New Mexico wants to tax televisions and video games to raise funds to fight childhood obesity and improve education in the state...
Supernatural
myfoxcolorado.com/ ... 21:28:38
Florida Couple Find Jesus in a Potato...
[I'm just glad they found Jesus!;]
Digital Theory of Education
orlandosentinel.com/ ... 21:26:56
ALLENTOWN, Pa. - Police faced a difficult if not impossible task Thursday as they tried to stop the spread of pornographic video and photos of two high school girls, images that were transmitted by cell phone to dozens of the girls' classmates and then to the wider world...
Virtual Future is Now
online.wsj.com/ ... 21:26:43
Jan 23... In the real world, banks are reeling from the subprime-mortgage mess. In the online game Second Life, a
shutdown of the make-believe banking system is causing real-life havoc for thousands of people...
Yesterday, the San Francisco company that runs the popular fantasy game pulled the plug on about a dozen pretend financial institutions that were funded with actual money from some of the 12 million registered users of Second Life. Linden Lab said the move was triggered by complaints that some of the virtual banks had reneged on promises to pay high returns on customer deposits...
Families Today
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 21:25:34
A Vietnamese woman who travelled to Taiwan to find the father she had never met, ended up working for him without knowing it...
What's In a Name?
gazettextra.com/ ... 21:25:09
Blackhawk Technical College... situated between Janesville and Beloit, often has offered itself as a place where whites, blacks and other minorities can meet. But even the best of intentions cant prevent a misstep... with a recent advertisement BTC sent to local households... The cover featured two smiling adults and two children. Underneath the photo was this headline: "A Family Affair: BTC is the perfect fit for the White family..." Perhaps most people understood immediately that the article was about a family whose name is White. Apparently, others...
Reasons for Repeal
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:53:06
Employers can fire workers who use medical
marijuana even if it was legally recommended by a doctor, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday, dealing the state another setback in its standoff with federal law enforcement...
[I'm all for employer liberty, but this judgment regarded only the federal illegality.]
That's
Not Funny!
reuters.com/ ... 10:48:03
"Tonight Show" host Jay Leno got the last laugh Wednesday in his legal battle with the creator of numerous joke books filled with stolen gags and punch lines...
Lost & Found
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:38:07
t dusk on New Year's Eve, Erika Gunderson got into a taxi in New York City and entered a digital-age mystery. Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn't seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner. But how?.. "I thought, with all this data in the camera, there's no way we're not going to get it back to them..." "It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world..."
[Intriguing tale...]
Digital Business
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:46:58
Computer science student Kris Athi got in touch with the BBC's Your News when he had problems quitting the MySpace social network. Here he tells his story to technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:44:55
The overseer of the net's addressing system has asked the US government to be freed from official control... The report will be the focus of a meeting to consider Icann's progress on objectives the US government set it in preparation for independence. Icann argues these objectives have been achieved earlier than planned and now is the time for talk to turn into deciding what happens on independence...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:43:56
Opponents of the global march toward near continuous copyright and anti-piracy reforms have long cautioned against the "unintended consequences" of such efforts. Concerns have often centered around the negative effect of reforms on consumer rights, free speech, and personal privacy. Last week, Canada's top privacy watchdog, Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart, joined the fight. She warned against the potential negative privacy impact of Canadian copyright legislation that has yet to be tabled...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:43:24
Currys, Dixons and PC World are to stop stocking analogue televisions and will instead promote "integrated" sets with built-in digital Freeview tuners. The chains said more than 90% of the TVs they sold were already digital...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:41:39
Like it or loathe it, adverts are going to be helping to support the online world for a long time to come...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:34:09
The online advertising leader Google Inc. said Friday it would help make it less lucrative to tie up millions of Internet addresses using a loophole and keep those domain names from legitimate individuals and businesses. Over the next few weeks, Google will start looking for names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within a five-day grace period for full refunds. Google's AdSense program would exclude those names so no one can generate advertising revenue from claiming them temporarily, a practice known as domain name tasting - the online equivalent of buying expensive clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a party...
Print is Dead
reuters.com/ ... 10:32:44
A record number of readers visited U.S. online newspaper sites last year... confirming the Web as one of the few bright spots for the struggling newspaper industry...
Digital Culture
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:44:13
Social networking websites could be "romanticising" suicide, an MP claims after the deaths of seven young people from her area in the past year...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:43:03
The best gadgets of CES 2008...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:42:16
If you're ever asked to forecast the way computing will develop, offer to look three to five years ahead. It's a good, safe time frame because if you're right then people may just remember your prediction when you remind them how clever you are, and if you're wrong it's very unlikely anyone will think to point it out. Trying to anticipate significant developments for the coming year is a lot harder, perhaps because the tendency is to overestimate the impact of the few obvious trends and miss the slow-burn developments that are on the verge of going mainstream and changing the way we see the world...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:38:56
Do text messages disappear - like oral conversations - or are they permanently logged somewhere for potential retrieval - like e-mail usually is? For standard consumer text-messaging technology, the answer is largely that they disappear... "I think people can feel comfortable we're not storing information that can later be used against them," Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Erica Sevilla said. "Unless you have something stored on your phone or on a recipients' phone, it does not stay on our network for a long period..."
reuters.com/ ... 10:26:00
Fans of the great outdoors can now watch many of the world's most powerful geysers erupt via Yellowstone National Park's first live streaming webcam...
US Election 2008
online.wsj.com/ ... 21:47:07
PEGGY NOONAN... Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportmentthis is a former president of the United Statesis a civic embarrassment... On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!" This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party...
apnews.myway.com/ ... 21:38:47
Barack Obama routed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the racially-charged South Carolina primary Saturday night... Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina battled for a distant second place... About half the voters were black, according to polling place interviews, and four out of five of them supported Obama. Black women turned out in particularly large numbers...
reuters.com/ ... 10:14:34
Sen. Hillary
Clinton, in an about-face,
said on Friday she wants the Democratic Party delegates in two states that were barred by the national party to be reinstated and counted in the race to determine the party's U.S. presidential nominee. In those states, Michigan and Florida, Clinton could stake claim to nearly all the delegates to the nominating convention in question -- more than 350...
Clinton, in an about-face
...
in an about-face
...
about-face
...
World Without Borders
mcclatchydc.com/ ... 21:21:30
Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens...
FLORENCE, Ariz. Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona. On Thursday, Warziniack finally became a free man... "The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:12:40
Thousands of Gazans have poured into Egypt for a fourth day, despite Egyptian attempts to reseal the border. For the first time many Palestinians used cars to cross, rather than going on foot...
Broadcast is Dead
reuters.com/ ... 10:33:13
Top bidders put up a total of more than $2.4 billion on Thursday in the opening round of the Federal Communications Commission's auction of coveted U.S. government-owned airwaves...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:11:48
US television network ABC may have to pay a fine of $1.4m (£707,000) for airing an episode of NYPD Blue which depicted female nudity... the 2003 show had "multiple, close-up views" of a woman's buttocks... ABC has rejected the claims, saying the buttocks are not a sexual organ...
World of Cultures
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:10:46
Working as a Westerner in the Muslim world has been complicated by the conflicts of recent years but BBC correspondent Kate Clark who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza still finds delight in the hospitality and kindness of strangers...
Language Culture
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:01:27
A woman believed to be the last native speaker of the Eyak language in the north-western US state of Alaska has died at the age of 89... Marie Smith Jones was a champion of indigenous rights and conservation. She died at her home in Anchorage. She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary, so that future generations would have the chance to resurrect it. Nearly 20 other native Alaskan languages are at risk of disappearing... "To the best of our knowledge, she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive.... She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it. She was about as tenacious as you can get...." With her husband, a white Oregon fisherman, Ms Jones had nine children, seven of whom are still alive. But none of them learned Eyak because they grew up at a time when it was considered wrong to speak anything but English...
World Climate
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:58:59
The world's climate is "clearly out of balance and is warming", the world's largest society of Earth and space scientists has said in a statement. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) warned that changes to the Earth's climate system were "not natural"...
[Does that mean they're... SUPERNATURAL?]
Changes in temperature, sea level and rainfall were best explained by the increased concentration of greenhouse gases from human activities, it added...
It is the first time the AGU has updated its policy position on climate change since 2003, when it called for a concerted worldwide study to understand how the Earth would change as a result of climate change...
[Sounds like they came to a conclusion and went looking for proof... hardly the scientific method....]
World Energy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:57:33
Plans to build one of Europe's biggest wind farms on the Isle of Lewis are set to be turned down... Scottish Government ministers are "minded to refuse" the 181 turbine scheme... believed environmental concerns are behind the decision...
FRI 2008-JAN-25
Threats
reuters.com/ ... 11:15:20
The United States is likely to keep a high threat designation for the airline industry because militants still see air travel as a target, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said...
Iraq
reuters.com/ ... 11:15:01
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein kept up the illusion that he had weapons of mass destruction before 2003 because he did not think the United States would invade, an FBI agent who questioned him said... "He told me he initially miscalculated... President (George W.) Bush's intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998... a four-day aerial attack... He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack..."
Transport Trouble
reuters.com/ ... 11:09:43
Three ships, including an oil tanker, collided in Newark Bay, New Jersey, near New York City on Thursday...
Transport Tragedy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:08:00
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has announced the start of a major offensive against al-Qaeda militants in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:07:39
A high-speed passenger train has hit a group of railway workers in eastern China, killing 18 of them...
Supernatural Silliness
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:04:00
The governing party in Turkey and a key opposition party have agreed to work together to lift a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities...
Police Riot
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:30:09
One of Egypt's latest hit films opens with scenes of police brutally beating pro-democracy protesters and ends with angry masses storming a police station where demonstrators are tortured. The audiences cheer. The film, "Heya Fawda" - Arabic for "It's Chaos" - is a rare, frank look at police torture, corruption and political oppression that rights groups say is widespread in this top U.S. ally. It has been pulling in viewers and spurring criticism since opening in November...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:08:54
Palestinians have bulldozed down part of the Gaza-Egypt border wall again, hours after Egyptian troops blocked holes recently made by militants. Guards with riot shields stood by and then pulled out of the border areas completely as Palestinians swarmed through the newly-demolished barrier. Hundreds of thousands have surged into Egypt to buy supplies since the first breaches were made on Wednesday. Recently Israel tightened a blockade of Gaza, leading to acute shortages there...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:07:19
Two Palestinians infiltrated a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and attacked students at a religious school before being shot dead... the two men, who were disguised as Israeli soldiers, managed to stab two students in Kfar Etzion, near Bethlehem, before being killed... In a separate attack, an Israeli border policeman was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen on the outskirts of Jerusalem... A female colleague of the officer was also wounded...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:03:45
US-led coalition forces have mistakenly shot dead 10 Afghan policemen and two civilians in central Afghanistan... Americans say they are unable to confirm such reports... the police had gone to a site where Taleban rebels were said to have gathered... US coalition forces were already on patrol there and, confusing the police for rebels, opened fire... the forces also called in air strikes. Ten policemen and two civilians, one of them a woman, were found dead two hours later... The police chief for a district in the city of Ghazni, Abdul Wakhil Kamyab, was one of those killed... The US-led coalition has given a different account, saying it killed several insurgents after being fired on during an operation to degrade Taleban networks...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:31:27
U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops clashed with insurgents while searching a compound near the Pakistani frontier on Friday, leaving one coalition soldier dead... Troops called in airstrikes, which "destroyed an insurgent cell" after the clash in Nari district of Kunar province...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:31:05
Pakistani security forces backed by helicopter gunships and artillery targeted militant hide-outs in the country's northwest on Friday, killing up to 30 rebels... Two paramilitary troopers also died in the attack on Dara Adam Khel, a town in North West Frontier province... a day after a group of suspected militants hijacked four truckloads of supplies - including ammunition and other military materials...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:30:42
A car bomb ripped through eastern Beirut on Friday, killing Lebanon's top anti-terrorism investigator as he returned from a meeting on the probe into the 2005 assassination of a former prime minister... Three others died in the blast... The force of the explosion in the primarily Christian neighborhoods of Hazmieh set a dozen vehicles ablaze and ripped a crater in the asphalt six feet wide and 3 feet deep...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:29:49
The abandoned apartment block known as the Pepsi building vanished in seconds, leaving a 30-foot-deep blast crater and a ring of destruction for a quarter mile in every direction through a shanty district in Mosul. Then on Thursday - even before the final death count was tallied - came more bloodshed: A suicide bomber killed a police chief and two other officers as they toured the devastation from the previous day. Residents with insurgent sympathies taunted the chief moments before the attack. Two deadly days have underscored what some U.S. military commanders fear is ahead for the northern city: that al-Qaida in Iraq could be prepared to use all means of chaos and violence to defend its last urban redoubt. The stakes are high on both sides. Al-Qaida and its supporters would find themselves without a major base of operations if ousted from Iraq's third-largest city, which occupies transport crossroads between Baghdad, Syria and other points. But a drawn-out fight could serve to rally insurgents and expose potential security weaknesses where U.S. troops are thin and Iraqi forces must take a front-line role...
WW2 - still with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:21:27
Israel's Holocaust memorial launched an Arabic version of its Web site Thursday, including vivid photos of Nazi atrocities and video of survivors' testimony, to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim world... Last year, Yad Vashem presented a similar version of its Web site in Farsi, aimed at Iran...
Extraterrestrial Threat
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:13:11
An asteroid at least 500 feet long will make a rare close pass by Earth next week, but there is no chance of an impact... closest approach at 334,000 miles, or about 1.4 times the distance of Earth to the moon...
[Wow! Astronomically, that's almost a flesh wound....]
An actual collision of a similar-sized object with Earth occurs on average every 37,000 years...
Extraterrestrial
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:11:55
Within a few years, a handful of rich tourists may be blasting into space in a craft that looks a little like a cross between the space shuttle and a corporate jet... British billionaire Richard Branson and the aerospace designer Burt Rutan unveiled a model Wednesday of SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle they hope will be able to take passengers on suborbital joy rides, sheerly for the fun of it, with test flights beginning as soon as this year...
Antiquity - still with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:14:37
Marine archaeologists will begin work in June to uncover the sand-buried hull of a 2,300-year-old ship thought to have been ferrying wine when it sank off the coast of Cyprus... one of only a few to have been found so well-preserved... may shed light on the nautical and economic history of the period in the east Mediterranean... believe the vessel's wooden hull may be preserved under tons of sand...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:11:28
Archaeologists in northeast Syria have unearthed a 3rd century cemetery in the shape of a cross... Ten skeletons, along with pottery and coins, were found... 441 miles northeast of the capital Damascus... Some of the artifacts contained inscriptions in the ancient Aramaic language...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:09:54
Fifteen pilot whales died in beach strandings Wednesday in southern New Zealand while rescuers monitored progress of 15 others toward safer waters... found beached at two locations on Farewell Spit on New Zealand's South Island... Rescuers helped refloat the remaining 15, but they were not out of danger yet because they remained in a tidal area where they risked beaching themselves again...
Science Marches Onnnnnn
reuters.com/ ... 11:09:24
Researchers have assembled the entire genome of a living organism -- a bacterium -- in what they hope is an important step to creating artificial life... Mycoplasma genitalium, has the smallest known genome of any truly living organism, with 485 working genes. Viruses are smaller, but they are not considered completely alive as they cannot replicate by themselves. Bacteria can and do, and the team at the non-profit J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland has been working for years to try to build M. genitalium from scratch...
Gardeners of Earth
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:53:27
The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction... In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost... rising commodity prices are encouraging farmers to clear more land to plant crops such as soya...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:08:13
Army Sgt.
Michael R. Sturdivant,
20, of Conway, Ark., died Jan. 22 in Kirkuk, Iraq, of injuries sustained in a vehicle accident during convoy operations. He was assigned to the 431st Civil Affairs Battalion, U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C.
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:05:22
Marine Lance Cpl.
James M. Gluff,
20, of Tunnel Hill, Ga., died Jan. 19 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
US Military
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:09:48
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing from the Korean War, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
Army Pfc.
Billy M. MacLeod,
U.S. Army, of Cheboygan, Mich. was buried Saturday in Cheboygan.... MacLeod was a member of Company B, 32nd Infantry Regiment, then making up part of the 31st Regimental Combat Team, 7th Infantry Division, operating along the eastern banks of the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. From Nov. 27-Dec. 1, 1950, the Chinese People's Volunteer Forces overran the U.S. positions, forcing their southward withdrawal. Regimental records compiled after the battle indicate that MacLeod was killed in action on Nov. 28, 1950. Between 2002 and 2005, three joint U.S.-Democratic People's Republic of Korea teams, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), excavated an area with two mass graves on the eastern shore of the Chosin Reservoir. They were believed to be burial sites of U.S. soldiers from the 31st RCT. The teams found human remains and other material evidence. Analysis of the remains subsequently led to the identifications of eight individuals, including MacLeod....
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:07:42
The Navy will christen the newest Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer, Dewey, Saturday, Jan. 26, during a 10 a.m. CST ceremony at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in Pascagoula, Miss. Designated DDG 105, the new destroyer honors Adm. George Dewey (1837-1917) who commanded the Asiatic Station from the cruiser Olympia. Shortly after the onset of the Spanish-American War, Dewey led his squadron of warships into Manila Bay on April 30, 1898. The next morning, his squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet in only two hours without a single American loss. A widely popular hero of his day, Dewey was commissioned admiral of the Navy, a rank created for him, in March 1903. Two previous ships have proudly carried his name. The first was a destroyer (DD 349) that survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and went on to receive 13 battle stars for World War II service. The second was a destroyer commissioned as a guided-missile frigate (DLG 14) before being reclassified as a guided-missile destroyer (DDG 45).... The ship will be able to conduct a variety of operations, from peacetime presence and crisis management to sea control and power projection. Dewey will be capable of fighting air, surface and subsurface battles simultaneously and contains a myriad of offensive and defensive weapons designed to support maritime defense. This is in keeping with "A Cooperative Strategy of 21st Century Seapower," the new maritime strategy that postures the sea services to apply maritime power to protect U.S. vital interests in an increasingly interconnected and uncertain world....
defenselink.mil/ ... 10:04:47
National Guard... Jan 23, 2008... This week the Army and Navy announced a decrease, while the Air Force and Marine Corps announced an increase. The Coast Guard number remained the same. The net collective result is
110 fewer
reservists mobilized than last week.... This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized to
94,729,
....
World Water
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:15:35
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world on Thursday to put the looming crisis over water shortages at the top of the global agenda this year and take action to prevent conflicts over scarce supplies... reminded business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum that the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan was touched off by drought - and he said shortages of water contribute to poverty and social hardship in Somalia, Chad, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Colombia and Kazakhstan... "Too often, where we need water we find guns instead..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:12:16
Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the
awesome amounts of cooling water
they need to operate...
World of Cultures
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:56:32
On the crest of a 1,000ft (304m) ridge, stupendous cliffs dip to the Libyan Sea. Africa lies 180 miles (289km) to the south, closer than Athens. To the north loom the Cretan mountains... It was the scene, he tells us, of the shipwreck of Odysseus on his way home from Troy. He was rescued by the alluring goddess of the island, Calypso. She warmed him beside a fire of cedar wood and held him in pampered imprisonment for seven years... Gavdos for decades has been haemorrhaging people. The 500 or more on the island at the beginning of the last century has fallen to fewer than 100 today...
Sportsmanship
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:20:37
In a blast of harsh rhetoric, China lashed out Thursday at the Dalai Lama and critics of Beijing's support for Sudan, saying attempts to link political issues to the Beijing Summer Olympics betrayed the spirit of the games...
[As opposed to, say, the host country being a repressive tyranny, that's somehow in the spirit of the games?]
TUE 2008-JAN-22
Yuck!
madison.com/ ... 16:52:55
...Dane County Court Commissioner Todd Meurer, saying words he never thought he'd say, ordered B. to only defecate in toilets...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spin
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:01:24
Sympathizers submitted hundreds of questions to al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri's "on-line interview" before a recent deadline. Among them: Why hasn't al-Qaida attacked the U.S. again, why isn't it attacking the Israelis and when will it be more active in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria? So far, there have been no answers...
Iran
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:41:49
Iran's supreme leader has overruled its president by ordering him to implement a law to supply gas to remote villages...
WW1 - less with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:40:38
Louis de Cazenave,
who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, died in his sleep at his home in Brioude, central France... at the age of 110... One of the last two surviving French veterans of World War I...
Nature can be Deadly
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:37:37
Unusually heavy snowfall in central China has been blamed for at least 10 deaths and has stranded hundreds of thousands of people ahead of the peak Lunar New Year travel season... caused pipes to burst, leading to water shortages for thousands... Power lines carrying electricity from the massive Three Gorges Dam to Shanghai snapped... Heavy snow damaged thousands of homes, and at least one person was crushed to death when a roof collapsed at a gas station... closed highways... forced the cancellation of scores of flights...
Police Riot
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:32:22
The police commander poured gasoline down the walls of three slum shacks and set them alight. At each home, his officers waited until his back was turned, then doused the flames. The small rebellion is symptomatic of rifts within Kenya's police force over harsh tactics ordered to suppress opposition protests, some officers say - a new fracture in ethnic and political conflicts tearing at the country since a disputed presidential election...
local6.com/ ... 10:40:31
Jan 21... A 75-year-old woman was
arrested
at a Clearwater [Fla.] McDonald's drive-thru, because police say
she wouldn't pull her car forward...
said the McDonald's employees told her to wait there for her food... handcuffed behind her back and put in the cruiser... took her to the Pinellas County Jail... she was searched, photographed and fingerprinted...
[We need to develop new means of dealing with non-violent social aberrances for the 21st Century.]
Under Sexist Tyranny
sundayherald.com/ ... 10:35:36
IN ITS global campaign to attract foreign tourists, the country's "Incredible India" adverts feature a young woman enjoying a morning yoga session on a secluded beach. What it doesn't show is what tourists, especially women, are more likely to experience: the persistent ogling and heckling by scores of Indian men...
[Huh. Sounds like South of the Border N Am.]
new study identifying rape as the fastest-growing crime in the nation's capital... While more and more Indian women are moving into the high-tech workforce and occupying key government posts, some analysts say many appear to be losing the battle to overcome centuries-old cultural attitudes that devalue the role of women...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:42:52
A suicide bomber has attacked mourners at a funeral ceremony in northern Iraq, killing at least 15 of them and wounding a similar number... The bomber walked into a tent where residents were mourning the relative of a provincial security chief near the city of Baiji...
The US military says al-Qaeda has regrouped... [in] Northern Iraq...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:32:55
Details emerging in the investigation into a teenage suicide bombing near Fallujah on Sunday suggest the boy was dispatched by his family on the mission and took advantage of tribal ties to pass through tight security - raising concerns about infiltration within Sunni groups now allied with U.S. forces against extremists. It also points to concerns that al-Qaida and its backers are still committed to campaigns of revenge and intimidation against fellow Sunnis even as insurgents try to regroup after being driven from strongholds across central Iraq...
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ ... 10:33:31
21 Jan... A director of the Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau, Nisar Khan, was shot dead by an unidentified gunman in Seerikh village adjoining Mohmand tribal district in the North West Frontier Province...
Nature vs Transport
msnbc.msn.com/ ... 10:29:36
HANOI - Vietnam has seized more than a ton of rat snakes found aboard a Vietnam Airlines flight from Bangkok, the second time in about a month such snakes were found in air cargo to Vietnam... found in more than 60 boxes...
Transport Trouble
breitbart.com/ ... 10:28:36
Jan 21... Heavy turbulence injured 10 people, including two flight attendants, on a United flight bound for Chicago flight early Monday... diverted to Denver... maintenance crews inspected and cleared the plane and it completed the flight to Chicago...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:09:28
Army Spc.
Richard B. Burress,
25, of Naples, Fla., died Jan. 19 in Al Jabour, Iraq, of wounds sustained when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:09:01
Army Staff Sgt.
Justin R. Whiting,
27, of Hancock, N.Y., died Jan. 19 in Mosul, Iraq, of wounds sustained when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Campbell, Ky.
World Zookeeping
suntimes.com/ ... 16:54:21
Jan 20... In what Brookfield Zoo officials are calling a freak accident, an 11-year-old male giraffe broke its neck and died Saturday morning... neck got tangled up in a rope... had stretched his neck over the gate and into a passageway between pens. His neck was turned at a 90-degree angle and stretched across a 6½-foot span. There, he became entangled in a rope used in a pulley system to occasionally feed the animals... "This is not something we felt he could get to..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:07:35
Visitors can now see the Los Angeles Zoo's newest attraction, but he can't see them... A blind harbor seal named Alfred, which made its debut Friday, was rescued off the coast of New Jersey nearly a year ago and, after a long search by the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, the L.A. Zoo took him in October... placed among four female companions... "They are doing everything that they should be doing, so blindness doesn't seem to be affecting that part of nature..."
reuters.com/ ... 11:55:58
A giant Chinese salamander that predates Tyrannosaurus rex and the world's smallest frog are among a group of extremely rare amphibians identified by scientists on Monday as being in need of urgent help to survive...
Disease Without Borders
reuters.com/ ... 11:53:05
An industrial pollution-control air scrubber in Sarpsborg, Norway has been identified as the source of an outbreak of Legionnaires disease that occurred in May 2005...
Legionnaires disease is a severe form of pneumonia caused by bacteria in water droplets...
All 56 people lived up to 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) apart and had not visited places in common...
Orbiting Overhead
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:49:56
Israel launched an advanced spy satellite Monday that will be able to track events in Iran... operates with a special radar system, allowing it to view much more than existing Ofek satellites that use cameras...
Healing Ourselves
skepdic.com/ ... 16:55:25
Therapeutic touch... has no scientific basis... Why do so many patients testify to the benefits of therapeutic touch or other bogus therapies such as homeopathy and magnet therapy? Some commit the regressive fallacy. Most testimonials are not followed up...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:04:24
It's a dirty little secret of food poisoning: E. coli and certain other foodborne illnesses can sometimes trigger serious health problems months or years after patients survived that initial bout. Scientists only now are unraveling a legacy that has largely gone unnoticed... high blood pressure, kidney damage, even full kidney failure striking 10 to 20 years later in people who survived severe E. coli infection as children, arthritis after a bout of salmonella or shigella, and a mysterious paralysis that can attack people who just had mild symptoms of campylobacter...
reuters.com/ ... 11:54:52
The time elapsed since a primary care physician's last board certification correlates with a decline in the quality of care provided to patients, according to a study published today... findings support the current policies of mandatory re-certification...
reuters.com/ ... 11:53:58
Identifying pigmented moles that look different from a person's other moles -- the "ugly duckling sign" -- is a practical way to spot malignant melanoma skin cancer...
reuters.com/ ... 11:53:44
A nasal spray made from Atlantic Ocean seawater eased wintertime cold symptoms faster and slowed cough and cold symptoms from returning among children ages 6 to 10, researchers in Europe reported on Monday... exact reason why... not known...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:31:46
The genes involved in the devastating immune system disease Lupus, which affects 50,000 people in the UK, have been identified... might one day lead to a test to speed up the diagnosis of the condition...
Netsurf Flotsam
statesman.com/ ... 16:51:55
...for a number of Christians across denominations,
Interstate 35 is a holy stretch of asphalt leading to divine salvation.
Some believe I-35 might be shorthand that links the interstate to Isaiah 35:8 of the Bible: "And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not pass over it, and fools shall not err therein..." "It's amazing that there's a Scripture that talks about the highway of holiness, and there's an actual one..."
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 15:58:38
Tress MacNeille
(born June 20, 1951) is an American voice actress best known for providing various voices on the animated television shows The Simpsons, Futurama, and Animaniacs. Her most notable characters on The Simpsons include Agnes Skinner, Brandine Spuckler and Lindsey Naegle, while her performance as Mom is her most notable Futurama role...
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 10:51:30
Balthazar (also spelled Balthasar or Balthassar), is the name commonly attributed to one of the Three Wise Men, at least in the west. Though no names are given in the Gospel of Matthew, this was one of the names the Western church settled on in the 8th century, though other names were used by Eastern churches... It is an alternate form of the Babylonian king Belshazzar, mentioned in the Book of Daniel...
Feeding Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:05:57
Iowa State University researchers say their analysis shows that a lack of food isn't necessarily to blame... they're not sure why so many children from low-income families are overweight...
iht.com/ ... 10:37:59
Too much caffeine during pregnancy may increase the risk of miscarriage... suggests that pregnant women may want to reduce their intake or cut it out entirely...
money.cnn.com/ ... 10:30:01
Jan 19... After a half-century of dominance, the U.S. is losing its edge in agriculture to a booming, high-tech Latin American powerhouse. Its secret weapon? Soybeans...
Digital Future is Now
reuters.com/ ... 12:06:40
A Dutch company has squeezed a display the size of two business cards into a gadget no bigger than other mobile phones -- by making a screen that folds up when not in use...
Digital Democracy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:01:09
This year, for the first time, expatriate Democrats can cast their ballots on the Internet in a presidential primary for people living outside the United States...
Digital Business
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:01:47
Electronic Arts is to release a free online version of the popular Battlefield game to be supported by adverts and micro payments...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:01:35
IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday...
reuters.com/ ... 11:56:45
Time Warner Inc pay TV channel HBO will launch a service on Tuesday to let subscribers download movies and television shows over the Web, joining a crowded market for video on the Internet...
reuters.com/ ... 11:56:28
In the two months since MTV Networks and Harmonix released the music-based videogame "Rock Band," players have purchased and downloaded more than 2.5 million additional songs made available after the game's initial distribution...
Activision, meanwhile, said it has sold more than 5 million new songs via download for "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock" since it began adding downloadable content in early November. \
By comparison, it took wireless operator Sprint four months to sell 1 million songs on its over-the-air full-song download service...
Look Who's Talking!
reuters.com/ ... 11:55:43
The world's largest energy consumer the United States on Monday called for a global push for increased energy efficiency to help meet rising demand and alleviate the impact of high prices on economic growth... The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels per day of oil, around a quarter of the world's supply...
Transport Future
reuters.com/ ... 11:55:19
Higher fuel costs and mounting pressure to curb emissions are leading modern merchant fleets to rediscover the ancient power of the sail...
Ummm....
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:50:12
A Swedish university has received $590,000 in research funds to measure the greenhouse gases released when cows belch...
Data Threat
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:36:06
British Defense Secretary Des Browne told lawmakers Monday he could not discount the possibility that a stolen laptop containing sensitive details on 600,000 prospective military recruits had been specifically targeted for theft... the data - including details of candidates' religions and some banking records - was not encrypted... Alarm has been raised among defense officials over the case, in part because police broke up an alleged plot last year to kidnap and kill a British Muslim soldier. Prosecutors claim a gang planned to target a Muslim soldier in Birmingham, the same city where the laptop was lost. Browne told lawmakers that two other military laptops, which contained unencrypted details of at least 500 people, had been stolen since 2005. He said, in the latest case, the recruitment officer had breached procedures by having such a large volume of data stored on the laptop.
"It is not clear to me why recruiting officers routinely carry with them information on such a large number of people or, indeed, why the database retains this information at all,"
Brown said...
Bartlesville - prarie frontier town
examiner-enterprise.com/ ... 10:37:40
But theres something different about Lori lately. The new year has brought her an opportunity to gain a new lease on life. Roper has been chosen to be the recipient of a new community project: "The Bartlesville Health & Beauty Makeover..."
Reasons for Repeal
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:43:35
Mexican special forces have captured a man suspected of being a senior member of the powerful Sinaloa drugs cartel... in the north-western city of Culiacan along with three other people... They were allegedly carrying $900,000 (£460,000) in cash in two suitcases and a Kalashnikov rifle. Mexico is in the grip of so-called "narco wars" - the fight between drug cartels and the security forces...
[oh, hey, here's a thought...]
washingtontimes.com/ ... 10:36:16
Mexican military efforts to crush heavily armed drug-smuggling operations in five cities along the U.S.-Mexico border pose a "grave threat" to U.S. authorities and a half-million Americans in the area, according to former U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service officials...
[oh, hey, here's a thought: repeal! Repeal! REPEAL!]
Digital Culture
foundationnews.org/ ... 17:07:05
As technologyparticularly the Internethas opened the floodgates to more and more information in recent years, the need for information management has escalated... More than a decade ago, Richard Saul Wurman wrote in Information Anxiety, "a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:03:42
I've finally given up grubbing around for open wireless connectivity on the move and invested in a 3G modem for my laptop. No more will you find me wandering down dark alleyways in search of an elusive open network... since I have my laptop with me nearly all the time I don't need to compromise on a small screen or inadequate keypad... And life is good...
arstechnica.com/ ... 10:33:54
Ever wonder what it's like to have a media badge at Macworld Expo? From my observations, it seems to mostly be about sitting in the media room talking with other media types and surfing the web. You get lunch too...
People Live
breitbart.com/ ... 10:31:26
Jan 20... An 81-year old man in the small Chilean village of Angol shocked his grieving relatives by waking up in his coffin at his own wake... was not in any pain, and only asked for a glass of water...
Under Digital Tyranny
breitbart.com/ ... 10:30:27
Jan 20... A Turkish court has again blocked access to the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube because of clips allegedly insulting the country's founding father...
MON 2008-JAN-21
US Election 2008
humanevents.com/ ... 17:40:21
Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina all allow crossover voters -- independents and Democrats -- to vote in the Republican primaries... Though Florida isnt a typical Red state, it will be the first real barometer of Republican voters thinking...
SUN 2008-JAN-20
Disturbing Family Patterns
foxnews.com/ ... 23:25:41
Police in Newmarket, N.H. are investigating whether a recent ad on craigslist offering to sell a baby is true or just a hoax...
Sex can be... disturbing
www2.tbo.com/ ... 23:25:20
She's wearing only a thong and giving every motorist on 66th Street a come-hither look... But the billboard outside the Bottoms Up Gentlemens Club... meets the county requirements for billboards, said... the manager of the club... "Everything's legit. and they can't do anything about it..."
Animals can be Deadly
www2.tbo.com/ ... 23:23:56
With a body as thick as a fencepost and a head like a clenched fist, the rattlesnake shook off the pesky .22-caliber bullets. That's if the bullets even found the coiled, menacing serpent. The shooter didn't dare get any closer than 15 feet... "It was stalking a little kitten..." measured 6 feet in length and was about 5 inches thick. There were 16 rattles...
Defending Ourselves
ksl.com/ ... 23:22:13
A woman hiding in a closet from burglars was shocked when they opened the doors -- not once but twice -- and never saw her... The burglars spotted police and scrambled. One jumped into the bedroom closet... "I could have kissed his cheek if I'd stood on my tippy toes..." She stayed still and silent until officers entered the bedroom. Then Brittney said, "He's in here!" Police ordered him out of the closet. "He looked at me with a completely dumbfounded expression, like, 'Where'd she come from?'..."
sun-sentinel.com/ ... 23:20:38
A would-be burglar met his match when he tried to elude... a [53yo F] marathon runner with a black belt in karate who also knows kickboxing and kung fu... "Go ahead and run," the former yacht detailer said she yelled. "You're not going to get away from me. I've been running for 40 years..." "I outran the kid.... He had no cardiovascular system..."
Nuclear is Nasty
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 23:13:54
The FBI has been accused of covering up a file detailing
government dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets...
Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...
Threats
telegraph.co.uk/ ... 23:11:15
Islamic courts meet every week in the UK to rule on divorces and financial disputes. Clare Dwyer Hogg and Jonathan Wynne-Jones report on
demands by senior Muslims that sharia be given legal authority...
Violence
ksby.com/ ... 23:10:53
Santa Maria couple accused of using witchcraft and drugs to lure a teenage girl into sex...
chron.com/ ... 22:33:01
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. A woman who claimed she tried to "fix" her 3-year-old autistic daughter by suffocating her with a plastic bag was convicted of murder on Thursday after jurors rejected her insanity plea... told police she could no longer deal with her daughter's illness. "Maybe I could fix her this way, and in heaven she would be complete..."
stltoday.com/ ... 22:32:20
[28yo] homeless man... used a chain saw and a knife to attack four training center employees in Callaway County... Two employees were injured by the chain saw, and two by a knife...
sfgate.com/ ... 22:31:04
Two people were killed in a spate of shootings at two separate parties in the Los Angeles area...
news10.net/ ... 22:29:51
A Granite Bay mother faces murder charges after allegedly drowning her 8-day-old daughter early Sunday morning...
suntimes.com/ ... 22:28:53
...30-year-old woman who was supposed to be taking care of a 5-month-old boy was charged with murder early Sunday in his death on [Chicago's] West Side... died of internal injuries...
Transport Tragedy
pe.com/ ... 22:27:32
At least four people died Sunday when
two small airplanes collided
in midair near Corona Municipal Airport, raining down debris and body parts that smashed into cars at nearby auto dealerships...
One person died in each airplane, and two people died on the ground
when hit by falling debris...
Democracy in Action
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:07:13
Cubans have begun voting to elect a new National Assembly or parliament. Only one person is standing per seat, including ailing leader Fidel Castro, even though he has not been seen in public for almost a year-and-a-half... 614 candidates contesting 614 seats. Campaigning is not allowed, but a turnout of about 90% is expected...
Nature can be Deadly
cbs2chicago.com/ ... 01:51:47
Bitter, dangerous cold has settled across the Chicago area and its neighbors in the Upper Midwest, making just walking a block a miserable experience. A wind chill advisory is in effect for all of northern Illinois and most of Indiana, as well as the entire states of Wisconsin and Minnesota and most of Michigan. The forecast high for the day in Chicago is a mere 7 degrees, with an overnight low of 3 below zero. But with northwest winds at 20 to 25 mph, the wind chills will make it feel as if it were 20 to 25 below...
Nicotine is a Drag
reuters.com/ ... 01:45:53
Beijing's first smoke-free restaurant chain faces going out of business after its customers deserted it in droves after the ban was enforced...
Love is Strange
reuters.com/ ... 01:45:38
A 19-year-old Chinese student recorded the killing and dismembering of her married lover by her boyfriend...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:05:37
Pakistani police say they have arrested a teenage boy who has confessed to being part of a team instructed to kill opposition leader Benazir Bhutto... But local newspapers say investigators are treating the boy's claims with caution...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:04:54
The U.S. military said Sunday that attacks in Iraq with Iranian-made bombs have fallen off in recent days after a sharp but brief increase earlier in the month, and that the overall flow of weaponry from Iran has dropped.... explosively formed penetrators, or EFP... EFP attacks had risen by a factor of two or three recently... "It's uncertain again what is happening in Iran that's leading to that occurrence.... we don't think that the level of training has been reduced at all. We don't believe that the level of financing has been reduced..."
Meanwhile, a suicide bombing killed six people in western Iraq, the second such strike in as many days in Anbar province... attack near the city of Fallujah missed its target: a local tribal leader who is organizing resistance to the terror group...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:01:36
A roadside bomb probably intended for Afghan or NATO forces killed five civilians... three wounded... in a taxi in an unstable part of southern Afghanistan... in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province, the site of heavy battles between NATO troops and Taliban fighters over the last 18 months...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:40:45
A 15-year-old detained near the Afghan border has confessed to joining a team of assassins sent to kill Benazir Bhutto... first arrests in the case since the attack that killed the opposition leader. Police also announced they had foiled new suicide attacks against the country's Shiite minority...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:40:21
Hezbollah's reclusive leader claimed Saturday the militant group had the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon during the 2006 war, saying the dead were left behind "in our villages and fields..."
Cold War - still with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:40:03
Russia's military chief of staff said Saturday that
Moscow could use nuclear weapons
in preventive strikes to protect itself and its allies, the latest aggressive remarks from increasingly assertive Russian authorities...
Evolution Isn't Easy
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 23:18:54
the origin of human hands and fingers could lie in the emergence of a finned fish 365m years ago. Similarly, the sophisticated joints that give us the ability to run, grip and turn may owe their existence to a sea creature known as the tiktaalik that lived in the Arctic 375m years ago. Even our acute vision may be a legacy of an even earlier ancestor, similar to a jellyfish, whose genes have been adapted to play a crucial role in the human eye...
"An entire tree of life, from microbe to worm, to fish and mammal, is embedded inside of us..."
Healing Ourselves
telegraph.co.uk/ ... 23:16:07
China...
'Half man'...
Nearly 13 years after his body was sliced in half when he was struck by a freight truck, Peng Shuilin is making the most of life, thanks to an assortment of mobility aids...
Only Natural
iht.com/ ... 22:59:37
Another factor might be contributing to the thinning of some of the Antarctica's glaciers: volcanoes... identification of a layer of volcanic ash and glass shards frozen within an ice sheet in western Antarctica... "This is the first time we have seen a volcano beneath the ice sheet punch a hole through the ice sheet" in Antarctica... Volcanic heat could still be melting ice to water and contributing to thinning and speeding up of the Pine Island glacier, which passes nearby...
Unidentified
chron.com/ ... 22:34:57
Texas Interviewers with the Mutual UFO Network met with about 200 people who said they saw something mysterious in the night skies over Stephenville in late December and early January... While members of the organization met Saturday with the witnesses, at least a couple hundred onlookers gathered as well, some wearing aluminum-foil hats...
US Military
cnn.com/ ... 10:33:14
Up to 20 percent of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may have suffered mild concussions but were unaware of them and did not get treatment, an Army study released Thursday shows... The Army now checks soldiers before and after deployment to identify and treat as many TBI-affected troops as possible. Less than half who suffered from a mild traumatic brain injury in combat have persistent symptoms associated with it... But symptoms from the injury such as irritability affect a soldier's interaction with family and fellow soldiers...
In the Line of Duty
tulsaworld.com/ ... 23:09:57
MUSKOGEE [Okla] -- A firefighter was wounded Friday night when the heat from a bedroom blaze caused a gun inside to fire...
reuters.com/ ... 10:23:36
A U.S. Border Patrol agent trying to stop a suspected drug smuggler was struck and killed by the suspect's car in southern California on Saturday... about 20 miles (32 km) west of Yuma... "...was laying a spike strip across the road when the vehicle swerved and struck him. He died at the scene..." [With all due respect to this fine officer, and more for those who still live and serve, repeal! Repeal! REPEAL!]
Food Recall
reuters.com/ ... 01:44:45
New Era Canning Co is expanding a recall of canned green beans and garbanzo beans because of potential botulism contamination, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Friday. The FDA said the beans might be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, which can cause botulism, a serious and sometimes life-threatening condition. The affected cans are large institutional-sized containers, weighing approximately six and a half pounds...
World Zookeeping
tulsaworld.com/ ... 23:01:15
ADAIR [Okla] After nearly
100 animals died in a fire
at an exotic animal refuge in Mayes County on Thursday, the owner is left feeling as if he has lost part of his family... Safari Joes, located on 200 acres about three miles north of Adair on U.S. 69, is a sanctuary for unwanted, abused and neglected exotic animals, including tigers, lions, alligators and wolves... Ive been crying all morning, he said. Ive gotten calls from children who have visited, asking if an animal they know was killed in the fire or just checking on the animals. When I have to tell them that a particular animal was killed, both of us are crying. I am just sick about it.
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:39:00
The directors of two Interior Department agencies said Thursday they're confident oil and gas exploration in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska can proceed without threatening polar bears that depend on the sea ice...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:38:40
The Interior Department has abandoned attempts to craft a recovery plan for the endangered jaguar
because too few of the rare cats have been spotted
along the Southwest region of New Mexico and Arizona
to warrant such action...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:38:11
A federal agency recommended
killing about 30 sea lions a year
at a Columbia River dam where the marine animals feast on salmon migrating upriver to spawn. By many estimates, the sea lions devour about 4 percent of spring runs...
Feeding Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 01:36:44
Diets high in protein may be the best way to keep hunger in check... a study... offers insight into how diets work. They found that protein does the best job at keeping a hunger hormone in check, while carbohydrates and fats may well deserve their current nasty reputation...
Antiquity - still with us
reuters.com/ ... 01:36:15
Italy proudly celebrated the return on Friday of a prized 2,500-yeard old vase it says was looted and sold illegally to New York's Metropolitan Museum more than 30 years ago. The krater, a perfectly preserved Greek vessel for mixing water and wine which was the showpiece of the Met's antiquities collection for more than three decades, was unveiled in Rome -- the first time it has been on display in Italy. The return of the vase, considered the best work of Greek artisan Euphronios, is part of the agreement Italy reached with the Met in February 2006 ending decades of wrangling over antiquities Rome says were plundered...
It's All in Your Mind
telegraph.co.uk/ ... 23:17:01
Researchers have found that two key parts of the brain work together to help humans plan and follow routes in a familiar city. A part of the brain called the hippocampus stores memories about key locations and landmarks while other brain cells - grid cells - provide our internal sense of space and distance, rather like a GPS system. The two parts of the brain "talk" to each other and allow us to remember routes and plan new ones. But in people who get lost easily, navigation cells are less efficient at talking to each other, so they get disoriented...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:33:10
Four years after being diagnosed with epilepsy, Gayle recently underwent brain surgery at Long Island Jewish Medical Center to cure a rare condition known as musicogenic epilepsy... became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang...
Cartoons Count
msnbc.msn.com/ ... 23:11:36
Belarus on Friday jailed for three years an editor of an independent newspaper who reproduced cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that first appeared in Denmark in 2005 and caused mass demonstrations across the Muslim world...
But is it Art?
breitbart.com/ ... 22:52:36
A cluster of articifial islands inspired by the "wonders of the solar system" is to be built off the coast of the booming Gulf emirate of Dubai...
Sportsmanship
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 23:16:41
At least 10 workers have been killed while working on the Olympic stadium but, in a rush to complete the project, Chinese officials have denied the deaths...
cbs2chicago.com/ ... 22:52:21
for today's NFL playoff game in Green Bay... high... expected to be
3 degrees,
but will likely fall below zero when the Packers and the New York Giants play... wind chill and temperatures will likely feel like 20 below or even worse... compares with a temperature of 13 below and a wind chill of 40 below at the so-called Ice Bowl... Dec. 31, 1967... Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL title at Lambeau Field... coldest NFL game ever played... Fans are being urged to dress properly...
People Die
ew.com/ ... 22:38:59
Suzanne Pleshette,
the actress best known for her role as Bob Newhart's wife Emily on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 to 1978, has died from respiratory failure. She was 70... The Bob Newhart Show consistently ranked among TV's Top 20 shows...
Supernatural Silliness
mtv.com/ ... 22:25:33
Tom Cruise talks for nine minutes in his instantly famous Scientology video now, can anyone figure out what he's actually saying?.. Scientology-Video Glossary...
Reasons for Repeal
informativepost.com/ ... 22:48:40
...Most reckon that the
cannabis around today is much stronger and potent than it was years ago, but being a cannabis smoker myself I can refute these claims and shine some light on the matter. For a start it does not smell as strong and is not as pure as it once was with the dealers adding more and more impurities to make it larger and thus make more money. Some batches when smoked smell terrible with not a scent of cannabis... I would not condone the taking of any drugs, but I can not see the harm in having the odd spliff if thats all it is...
bbsnews.net/ ... 22:46:29
A Tel Aviv medical clinic has quietly begun giving
cannabis to cancer and AIDS sufferers, legally and with Health Ministry approval. The clinic began giving the drug to patients about six months ago. By Israeli law, cannabis can legally be used as a medicine if a patient obtains a special approval from the Health Ministry. The cannabis is grown in Israel...
bbsnews.net/ ... 22:44:44
Canadians who are prescribed
cannabis to treat their illnesses will
no longer be forced to rely on the federal government
as a supplier following a Federal Court ruling that struck down a key restriction in the government`s medical cannabis program... essentially... allows growers to supply the drug to more than one patient... fewer than 20 per cent of patients actually use the government's supply...
echoroukonline.com/ ... 22:43:08
Algerian custom's officers seized... some7.5 quintals of
cannabis hidden in a refrigeration container heading for Spain. Four individuals were arrested... An inquiry is being conducted by the national gendarmerie to shed the light on various shadowy zones in connection to the case, which could lead a number of heads to fall in the port of Oran...
my58.com/ ... 22:40:39
Officers responded to reports of a strong
marijuana odor coming from the Holiday Inn Express in Lincoln on Saturday afternoon... found approximately 20 pounds of processed and bagged marijuana along with approximately $20,000 in cash...
[How dumb can you get?]
arrested the three...
news.independent.co.uk/ ... 22:39:24
An angry row has blown up over proposals to upgrade cannabis to a class B drug, with leading experts from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) accusing the Government of a "deliberate leak" of its plans... The outburst followed claims that Gordon Brown and the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, were determined to reverse the decision to downgrade the drug to class C when the ACMD completes its report in the next few months. Although its recommendations are not yet known, ministers are already making clear that Ms Smith is prepared to overrule the expert body...
smokedot.org/ ... 10:38:52
a bill to decriminalize the posession of less than an ounce of Marijuana is in the works in Massachusetts... Do we have any readers in Massachusetts who have heard anything about this?..
chinapost.com.tw/ ... 10:37:37
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The police arrested a 19-year old senior high student implicated in the smuggling of over 6 kilograms of
marijuana into Taiwan...
fox12news.com/ ... 10:37:04
[29yo] Ada [Idaho] County man was arrested for growing
marijuana in a Boise apartment, one he never lived in... An Ada County man was arrested for growing marijuana in a Boise apartment, one he never lived in...
ourmidland.com/ ... 10:36:21
Marijuana changes teen's life... Now almost 65 days sober and out of jail, she's beginning to see a new world around her, and hoping she can adjust to a reality she avoided for years... Jessie said parents should pay attention to their kids, who could be using drugs even if there are no obvious signs of their use... Jessie met a guy who dealt cocaine when she was 16...
wktv.com/ ... 10:34:56
51-year old...
pulled over
on Route 5 in the Town of Westmoreland
for an expired inspection.
After searching the vehicle, police found more than $3,000 and about six ounces of
marijuana and drug paraphernalia...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:06:47
top US anti-drugs official... John Walters, said Venezuela had become "a haven" for shipments of cocaine manufactured in neighbouring Colombia...
[So, we have the PuriTalibaNazi tyrant of American taboo enforcement coming down on another nation's tyrant for not being oppressive enough.... oh, the irony!]
World of Cultures
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:49:10
Undeterred by controversy, a mysterious visitor paid his annual tribute at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe early Saturday, placing three red roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac before stealing away into the darkness... was, as usual, able to avoid being spotted by the crowd... began in 1949 at the latest...
Poe... died Oct. 7, 1849, in Baltimore at the age of 40 after collapsing in a tavern. Next year will be the 200th anniversary of his birth...
US Election 2008
embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/ ... 10:21:04
Fred Thompson delivered a somber speech tonight thanking his supporters and talking more about the past than the future, leading many observers to believe that his departure from the race is imminent. But he made no firm statement about his political future Saturday night...
csmonitor.com/ ... 10:20:38
Sen. John McCain won the South Carolina primary Saturday, a pivotal victory in a conservative stronghold that makes him the man to beat as the race for the GOP nomination moves to Florida and a raft of other large states. The victory is likely to mute questions about Senator McCain's support among traditional Republicans and conservatives, and comes eight years after his bitter defeat to George W. Bush here in 2000. "You know, it took us a while... But what's eight years among friends?.."
mediabistro.com/ ... 10:11:44
Remember when MSNBC laughed at John McCain's victory speech in New Hampshire? Well, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann (and the MSNBC folks that can be heard in the background) were equally unimpressed with Fred Thompson's speech...
[video]
afp.google.com/ ... 10:10:18
Hillary Clinton said in an soul baring interview aired Friday she never doubted her husband's Bill Clinton's love for her, despite the former president's infidelity with a White House intern... "I really had to dig down deep and think hard about what was right for me, what was right for my family..."
[Er, uh, and, um, oh yeah, maybe my political ambitions....]
apnews.myway.com/ ... 01:51:11
Mitt Romney... ignored a loss in South Carolina to celebrate an easy win in Nevada's caucuses, which followed up his victory Tuesday in Michigan's primary...
apnews.myway.com/ ... 01:50:33
Hillary Rodham Clinton said her victory in the popular vote at Nevada's caucuses on Saturday gave her a positive sendoff into the next big battleground, South Carolina. "I guess this is how the West was won," she told cheering supporters... Clinton won the popular vote, but Barack Obama won in the national convention delegates at stake, taking 13 to her 12...
apnews.myway.com/ ... 01:49:38
Republican John McCain called his victory in South Carolina's presidential primary on Saturday evidence that his campaign "can carry right through" Florida into the giant round of caucuses and primaries on Feb. 5. "I know it's not easy," he told The Associated Press, "and we've got a long way to go..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:46:20
A mailer from a congressional candidate's campaign contains a photo of his head attached to an image of a different body that makes him look thinner...
Theory of Justice
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:45:21
The luck keeps rolling for a convicted bank robber who won a $1 million lottery prize: Though he violated his probation by buying the ticket, a judge says he can keep the money...
Virtual Future is Now
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 01:35:06
The US space agency is exploring the possibility of developing a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game...
Data Threat
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:34:50
Personal information on about 650,000 customers of J.C. Penney and up to 100 other retailers could be compromised after a computer tape went missing. GE Money, which handles credit card operations for Penney and many other retailers, said Thursday night that the missing information includes Social Security numbers for about 150,000 people... was on a backup computer tape that was discovered missing last October. It was being stored at a warehouse run by Iron Mountain Inc., a data storage company, and was never checked out but can't be found either...
Digital Future is Now
reuters.com/ ... 01:34:04
Half of the 21 million Americans who do not have cable or satellite TV will probably continue to use rabbit ears after the switch to digital TV in February 2009, according to a new study. About 43% of over-the-air households indicated they would buy a converter box or purchase a digital TV between now and the transition date, but only 12% of those said they would bite the bullet and pony up for a pay service...
Digital Business
reuters.com/ ... 01:35:47
A small Chinese high-tech firm is suing Microsoft Corp because it says the software giant has stolen its creation that allows Internet users to type Chinese characters, but Microsoft countered the claim on Friday...
reuters.com/ ... 01:35:34
The Hollywood writers strike looks like a boon for the DVD and video game industries...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 01:35:21
UK online sales rose by more than 50% in the three months to Christmas, according to an industry survey...
reuters.com/ ... 01:33:41
German anger over plans by Nokia to close a plant escalated on Friday, with the finance minister accusing the cellphone maker of "caravan capitalism" and others vowing to replace their Nokia phones...
SAT 2008-JAN-19
Modern Medicine can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 10:23:19
For children and adults who suffer repeated bouts of tonsillitis, surgery to remove the tonsils (tonsillectomy) leads to substantial improvements in quality of life, according to results of two studies published this month...
Defending Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:23:00
Ninth-grader Michael Six locked himself in his bedroom, grabbed an aluminum baseball bat and hid in his closet and after seeing a man use a screwdriver to break open a sliding-glass door of his home. Six dialed police and was talking to a 911 operator when the intruder used the screwdriver to get into his room. As the burglar rummaged through Michael's backpack, Michael stepped out and swung the bat. The burglar cursed as Michael nailed him on the back and shoulder, and Michael can be heard on the 911 tape yelling, "Sorry, man!" The intruder
took the bat from the boy
and fled...
[This is the problem with instruments of self-defense. Kid was lucky.]
Healing Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 10:24:31
A potentially fatal type of malaria is being commonly misdiagnosed as a more benign form of the disease, putting people at risk, researchers in Malaysia say. Malaria parasite Plasmodium knowlesi was until recently thought to infect only monkeys, especially long and pig-tailed macaques that are its natural hosts. But a study of samples taken from more than 1,000 malaria patients in Malaysia between 2001-2006 found that the disease was more widespread in humans than previously thought. Four of those infected, all from Sarawak, died...
reuters.com/ ... 10:24:08
An eight-year-old Indonesian boy died of bird flu on Friday... bringing the country's death toll from the virus to 97... boy's neighbor ran a chicken slaughterhouse...
reuters.com/ ... 10:23:42
Indian health workers urged villagers at the centre of a bird flu outbreak to stop dumping dead fowl in ponds on Friday, as ignorance about the virus hampers efforts to contain its spread...
FRI 2008-JAN-18
Violence
myfoxtampabay.com/ ... 23:02:17
Police have arrested a suspect in connection with the disappearance of young mother from North Port [Fla], but they're still searching for the victim... 21-year-old Denise Amber Lee disappeared from her home on Thursday afternoon. They say her husband came home to find their two young children alone, and that's when he called police...
honoluluadvertiser.com/ ... 22:59:11
[23yo] man who allegedly threw a boy off a pedestrian freeway overpass yesterday was occasionally asked to care for the toddler and recently had been sent for psychiatric evaluation...
news.bostonherald.com/ ... 22:57:21
Authorities say they now believe the aunt... 39... veered across the median strip of the highway, began driving against oncoming traffic before stopping on the side of the road... She removed her "clothes and the clothes of the children" for some unknown reason... then walked the children onto the highway "under her arms" to their deaths...it by two cars...
Theory of Justice
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:24:50
A Canadian al-Qaeda suspect who pleaded guilty in 2002 to plotting to bomb US embassies is to face a US court, in a case that has been shrouded in secrecy. Prosecutors are expected to seek a life sentence when Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, 26, appears before a judge in New York. Officials say Jabarah struck a plea deal in 2002, agreeing to work as an informant, but that his attitude has changed markedly in recent years. They say his altered stance and ongoing plotting mean a new sentence is needed...
Democracy in Action
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:16:20
Masai fighters battled rival tribesman loyal to President Mwai Kibaki on Friday, with both sides using machetes, swords, bows and arrows on the final and bloodiest day of protests this week over Kenya's disputed election... at least 22 people have been killed... Since the Dec. 27 election, Kibaki's Kikuyu people have been chased from western Kenya by other ethnic groups...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
news.monstersandcritics.com/ ... 22:54:17
At least 26 Iraqis have been killed, four wounded and 27 detained, including suspected members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, in separate incidents in Iraq...
edition.cnn.com/ ... 22:53:39
Pakistani military forces clashed Friday with Islamic militants in mountainous northwest Pakistan, in battles that left at least 90 militants dead and four military personnel wounded... In a separate incident elsewhere in South Waziristan, militants attacked a convoy of security forces with rockets and small arms fire... The Pakistani forces retaliated with rockets and small arms fire, killing 50 to 60 militants...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:24:23
At least 15 people have been killed in clashes between police and members of a Shia cult in the southern Iraqi cities of Nasiriya and Basra... began after members of the Soldiers of Heaven launched apparently co-ordinated assaults on police positions and fellow Shia. Clashes between the cult and Iraqi troops last year left 263 people dead...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:23:56
The CIA has added its support to the view that a Pakistani militant, Baitullah Mehsud, and al-Qaeda organised Benazir Bhutto's killing...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:15:06
Gunmen believed to be al-Qaida militants opened fire on a tourist convoy in eastern Yemen on Friday, killing two Belgians and wounding four others... The tourists were in a convoy of at least five vehicles traveling through a desert valley called Wadi Daw'an in the eastern Hadramut region...
Theory of Sex Education
frontiersman.com/ ... 11:45:34
A 13-year-old Sutton girl is being held... after two boys said she... touched them [sexually] over their clothing...
Nature can be Deadly
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:20:20
The number of people who have died due a cold snap in Afghanistan has risen to 200...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:13:54
14,110-foot Galeras... volcano erupted violently in southwestern Colombia Thursday, spewing ash miles into the sky and prompting the evacuation of several thousand people living nearby... no immediate reports of injuries or serious property damage... estimated that the ash cloud reached five miles into the air...
A 1993 eruption of the volcano, near the border with Ecuador, killed nine people, including five scientists who had descended into the crater to sample gases...
allheadlinenews.com/ ... 11:40:23
Russians are bracing for temperatures of as low as
minus 55 degrees Celsius (minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit)
in Siberia as Russia's emergencies ministry warns on Wednesday of its impending dangers in the coming weeks...
Missing
signonsandiego.com/ ... 11:27:13
A belt-shaped explosive charge is missing in the waters off San Diego after it failed to detonate during a Navy training exercise and sailors are hoping the tide will find it for them...
Iraq
reuters.com/ ... 11:25:58
Iraq's army and police could be ready to take over security in all 18 provinces by the end of this year as the U.S. military moves toward a less prominent role in the country, U.S. officials said on Thursday...
Transport Near-Tragedy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:25:27
A British Airways jet that crash-landed at Heathrow was being controlled by the co-pilot... initial report in to the crash has shown the engines "did not respond" to a demand for increased thrust as the plane came in to land...
wcbstv.com/ ... 11:30:00
NEWARK... For the second time in two months two planes nearly hit each other in the sky... "When you have two massive planes, each with hundreds of people and tons of jet fuel and flying at hundreds of miles an hour and coming within 600 feet of each other, that's a big deal..." Investigators blame an air traffic controller...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:21:59
A family of five got lucky as they drove down a busy Anchorage street - their car hit a snow bank. That allowed emergency responders to rescue them Wednesday morning from poisonous carbon monoxide fumes that had seeped into the vehicle, causing the driver to pass out... Emergency responders found a mother and several children unconscious or unresponsive... "Once they were out in the fresh air, everybody came around..." "The exhaust pipe had been turned, so rather than venting out into the open air, the exhaust pipe itself was actually venting into the trunk, which of course was connected to the inside of the vehicle..."
Digital Threat
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:14:48
Federal regulators on Thursday approved the first cyber-security standards for the nation's electric industry, following growing concerns about the power grid's vulnerabilities. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved mandatory reliability standards for protecting physical and electronic access to control systems, training personnel on security matters, reporting incidents and recovery planning from a cyber incident...
Alcohol Was Involved
reuters.com/ ... 11:10:02
Mexico's oldest cantina, a classic drinking dive patronized by dozens of past presidents and Cuban leader Fidel Castro when he was in exile here, has closed its doors after more than 150 years... El Nivel's owner, Ruben Aguirre, is looking for new premises after losing a long legal battle against the owners of the building, the National Autonomous University of Mexico...
Threats
reuters.com/ ... 11:14:22
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that Israel "would not dare attack Iran", after Israel said it tested a missile and warned against Tehran's nuclear program...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:05:25
Just how close might a military confrontation between Iran and the United States be?..
Look Who's Talking!
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:03:37
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that President Bush sent a "message of confrontation" during his recent Mideast trip...
Prison Sucks
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:56:49
INDIANAPOLIS... A court security deputy was fired and two others suspended after an
inmate was left in a holding cell for more than two days without food...
Big Nanny
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:55:14
State Del. Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying replicas of human genitalia on vehicles... He said he won't hesitate to bring a set of $24.95 trailer testicles with him for a legislative show-and-tell...
Hospitals can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:53:11
A construction worker claimed in a lawsuit that when he went to a hospital after being hit on the forehead by a falling wooden beam, emergency room staffers forcibly gave him a rectal examination... "assaulted, battered and falsely imprisoned..." got eight stitches for a cut over his eyebrow...
Scary Times
washingtonpost.com/ ... 22:58:43
A man carrying a loaded shotgun, a samurai-type sword and a bag filled with gunpowder was arrested while walking near the Capitol today... also was wearing a tactical vest and had a bow in his car... Officers were alarmed to see wires coming out of the glove box and propane tanks in the vehicle... "was not rigged" to explode...
news.yahoo.com/ ... 11:25:37
The World Bank said it would not open its buildings in Washington on Friday because of a bomb threat...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:49:55
A Swedish bomb squad called out to disarm a suspicious package on Wednesday did not find a ticking bomb. But they did find a vibrating sex toy...
Criminally Stupid
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:55:42
accidentally shot himself in the groin as he was robbing a convenience store... as he placed the gun in the waistband of his pants...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:49:24
arrested Wednesday on theft charges after allegedly receiving electronic payroll bank deposits from a New Jersey company he never worked for... checks had been mistakenly direct deposited into his account for nearly five years... collected more than $469,000...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:47:57
Police are trying to figure out why a Roosvelt, Long Island man sped away from police in Hempstead, and then jumped out of his car to run - leaving his 2-year-old son in the backseat. Police say the motorist, who was not identified, did not have a record and didn't have any alcohol or drugs on him...
Feeding Ourselves
sciam.com/ ... 23:13:55
Bowing to pressure from consumer advocates, Pennsylvania officials have dropped plans to bar farmers from revealing whether or not milk hails from hormone-enhanced cows...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:39:01
Army Pfc.
Danny L. Kimme,
27, of Fisher, Ill., died in Balad, Iraq
Army Pfc.
David H. Sharrett II,
27, of Oakton, Va., died in Pallouata, Iraq
Army Spc.
John P. Sigsbee,
21, of Waterville, N.Y., died in Balad, Iraq
Jan. 16 of wounds suffered in Balad, Iraq, when they were attacked by grenade and small arms fire during combat operations. They were assigned to the 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
Animal Companions
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:58:13
"Let other folks retire to warm climates," said the 68-year-old Bray. "I'm spending the rest of my days where the weather may be cold but the hearts are warm..." [after the] icy rescue of her pet dog Buddy... reflecting on the firefighters' response. "That's not their job, really," she said. "They are there to rescue people. The kindness that was demonstrated was amazing to me..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:53:59
MASTIC, N.Y... A man was arrested Tuesday for walking on a highway with a 14-foot python wrapped around his body... charged with animal cruelty and failure to protect the public against dangerous wildlife...
World Zookeeping
reuters.com/ ... 12:28:48
Police arrested the head of the animal rights group PETA for a breach of public peace and insulting religious feelings... Ingrid Newkirk... [was] protesting against a
bullfighting festival in south India...
[Holy Cow!]
...blindfolded a statue of Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi to protest against cruelty towards bulls in the ancient sport of
"jallikattu"... India's version of the running of the bulls... Fighters and muscular wild bulls -- often pepped up with large amounts of homemade liquor
[presumably they DO mean BOTH the fighters and bulls are liquored up]
-- dash after each other in the streets of the southern state of Tamil Nadu...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:52:10
sometime Sunday, 17 lop-eared Angora rabbits - a species not indigenous to the area - wandered onto Utah Highway 91. Local officers took action to save the furry critters from a four-wheeled fate and rounded them up... "They're just a mess.... They have been neglected..."
Digital Business
marketwatch.com/ ... 23:14:17
The bitter rivalry between Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices took an odd turn this week with Wall Street's seemingly bizarre reactions to the two chipmaker's contrasting fortunes...
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ ... 23:13:21
Time Warner said on Wednesday that it was going to start testing a new rate plan in Beaumont that would limit the amount of bandwidth each customer can use each month before additional fees kick in. Alexander Dudley, a Time Warner spokesman, said that the exact terms had not been set, but that packages would probably offer between 5 gigabytes and 40 gigabytes a month. The top plan would cost roughly the same as the companys highest-speed service, which typically runs between $50 and $60 a month... I spoke to Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, and one of the most knowledgeable people around on the economics of high-speed Internet service. He argued that Time Warners interest in bandwidth caps had little to do with its own costs and a lot to do with the emergence of movie downloads and streaming television programs over the Internet. "The smart people at Time Warner are scared of people watching TV directly over the Internet," he said. "Lost and Desperate Housewives look better over the Internet than they do on digital cable." Moreover, the marginal cost of extra bandwidth is very small, he said. For broadband Internet service, 80 percent to 90 percent of the costs are fixed regardless of use. And the all-in cost of a gigabyte of use is about 10 cents or less. Most cable and phone systems keep their costs secret...
marketwatch.com/ ... 23:11:26
JOHN DVORAK... Sun Microsystems Inc. gobbling up MySQL is perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions. The move, announced earlier this week, is potentially a disaster for the entire sector for reasons I'll outline here... The only good news is that since MySQL is an open-source initiative, an immediate development fork will occur with a new open-source relational database appearing within a year or two, based on aspects of the original code. The original MySQL will simply vanish over time, along with Sun's billion...
Supernatural Threats
reuters.com/ ... 12:32:58
The Vatican on Friday condemned the cloning of human embryos, calling it the "worst type of exploitation of the human being"...
[Ummm.... no, but nevermind... just call it the old guy's hyperbole...]
US Election 2008
washingtonpost.com/ ... 12:06:15
For 10 days, the "Hardball" host had doggedly insisted he was just reciting a bit of history when he said on the air that "the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around." But protests against those and other remarks by Matthews reached a peak yesterday when the presidents of such groups as the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority and National Women's Political Caucus sent a joint letter of complaint to NBC News President Steve Capus...
money.cnn.com/ ... 11:59:01
in last night's Democratic presidential debate in Nevada, Clinton floated what is perhaps the dumbest solution to the current mortgage mess I've heard from a top presidential contender... her proposal to
freeze mortgage rates for five years...
such a freeze would be disastrous. Interest rates on new mortgages would skyrocket...
politico.com/ ... 11:52:25
"Hillary Clinton does not respect our people," the ad says in Spanish... "Its pathetic and it's sad and it's unfortunate that they have to stoop so low," said Dolores Huerta, a longtime Hispanic labor leader who supports Clinton...
apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:49:21
Vegas... Barack Obama... trying to use humor to bring... Hillary... down before this weekend's Democratic presidential caucus... Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork - something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America. "Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'" "Folks, they don't tell you what they mean!.."
Reasons for Repeal
ktar.com/ ... 23:18:08
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the San Luis Port of Entry seized 182 bundles of marijuana, with an estimated street value of almost $5 million, hidden in a secret compartment of a tractor trailer. The seizure Thursday was the largest amount of marijuana caught coming through that port ever... Since October 1st, CBP Officers at the San Luis port of entry have stopped 25 attempts at smuggling marijuana into the United States, seizing 3,695 pounds...
shreveporttimes.com/ ... 23:17:32
An early morning raid today at a residence in the 900 block of Johnson Street in Mansfield led to the discovery of 38 grams of marijuana hidden in a pizza box, in addition to packaging materials, assorted drug paraphernalia and $200 in cash... In unrelated arrests Thursday, the Directed Patrol Unit arrested three of four people on drug charges during traffic stops near Mansfield...
canadianpress.google.com/ ... 23:16:52
SEATTLE - A former Blaine, Wash., border guard has denied letting a Canadian woman bring drugs into the U-S in exchange for sex...
canadianpress.google.com/ ... 23:15:37
REPENTIGNY, Que. - The first sign something was wrong was when the dizziness and nausea began to set in. Then some students passed out and others started complaining of heart palpitations not long after chowing down on some muffins to celebrate an end to their trade school term... possibly containing a heavy concentration of
... cannabis...
[Purely evil to subject anyone to a substance without their knowledge...!]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:19:16
Pullman [WA] police said a WSU student was arrested twice the same night for smoking marijuana...
Marriage Today
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:18:31
Vermont... [33yo F] was cited last week on a second charge of bigamy for having three husbands... married a third time two months after being charged with bigamy in 2007. In that case, both Warren and her second husband were charged with bigamy because the man also was already married to someone else... when [her] first two husbands learned of the alleged bigamy, 'they pretty much didn't care either way....' prescription drug abuse may be a factor...
[Isn't Vermont one of those liberal states that allows unusual marriages?]
People Die
blogs.usatoday.com/ ... 22:54:42
Five bodies found in a submerged car have been identified as a Kentucky family that was last heard from in Ohio two days after Christmas. The initial investigation shows no signs of foul play...
breitbart.com/ ... 11:26:56
REYKJAVIK, Iceland... Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64... kidney failure... Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph... "Chess is war on a board," he once said. "The object is to crush the other man's mind..."
reuters.com/ ... 11:09:27
A Berlin burglar's break-in took an unexpected turn when he stumbled upon a corpse and felt compelled to call the police... burglar has not been heard of since...
Big Whoops Cascade
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:20:13
emptied the shredder, collected pieces of the ticket... [for] Sunday's National Football Conference championship... and put them in a plastic bag...
reuters.com/ ... 11:08:42
Russia's military Thursday offered compensation to a homeowner after a small rocket veered off course and hit his country house outside Moscow...
Digital Culture
pcworld.com/ ... 23:11:44
The number of Internet users in China soared past 200 million in 2007...
reuters.com/ ... 11:06:15
If the blood-splattered creative juices aren't flowing, the authors of crime and thriller novels are increasingly turning to the Web and digging up, often by chance, the idea for their next blockbuster...
Peace 3000
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:05:56
Omar Osama bin Laden bears a striking resemblance to his notorious father - except for the dreadlocks that dangle halfway down his back. Then there's the black leather biker jacket. The 26-year-old does not renounce his father, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, but... said there is better way to defend Islam than militancy: Omar wants to be an "ambassador for peace" between Muslims and the West...
Digital Future is Now
reuters.com/ ... 11:03:56
Virtual worlds, mobile coupons and bar-code readers on cell phones are the next technology wave that U.S. chain stores must ride if they hope to stay competitive in the fast-changing world of global retail...
Theory of Education
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:51:13
BELLEVUE, Neb... identical twins earned perfect ACT scores... The 18-year-old brothers have maintained straight-As through high school, and both are in the running for class valedictorian. "We're pretty competitive..."
Sportsmanship
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:47:41
Pardeeville, Wis... Upset that his 7-year-old son wouldn't wear a Green Bay Packers jersey during the team's playoff victory Saturday, a man restrained the boy for an hour with tape and taped the jersey onto him... his wife told authorities... [and] filed a restraining order... "I didn't mean no harm..."
Untied Nations
reuters.com/ ... 10:45:45
Proposed new lyrics for Spain's national anthem have stirred national divisions rather than pride and have been scrapped... Spain's "Royal March" national anthem has been played without words since 1978, when lyrics approved by right-wing dictator Francisco Franco were ditched... With the Beijing games approaching, Spain's Olympic committee held a competition to find new words for the anthem rather than see its athletes hum along or chant "la, la, la," as has long been the case... winning version was leaked and met derision in the Spanish media and among members of parliament responsible for approving the lyrics...
Lost & Found
reuters.com/ ... 11:10:39
Proving boomerangs really do come back, an Australian town was Thursday celebrating the return of a boomerang stolen from an outback museum by an American tourist 25 years ago... by a Vermont man who named himself in a letter only as Peter. "I removed this back in 1983 when I was younger and dumber. It was the wrong thing to do. I'm sorry, and I'm going to send it back..." also sent a check...
reuters.com/ ... 10:44:04
Police in the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda were baffled to discover that a woman arrested for shoplifting last weekend had been registered as dead a month earlier. The woman's parents had mistakenly identified a body found in a forest as that of their 27-year-old daughter...
THU 2008-JAN-17
Modern Medicine can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 11:49:18
Nearly a third of antidepressant drug studies are never published in the medical literature and nearly all happen to show that the drug being tested did not work...
Hospitals can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:47:54
Mental patients at the Oregon State Hospital, the setting for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," were exposed to threats ranging from infectious outbreaks to patient-on-patient assaults, according to a Justice Department report released Wednesday...
Under Digital Tyranny
reuters.com/ ... 11:40:14
China said it would issue new rules cracking down on "undesirable" elements of online games amid fears of growing Internet addiction as the number of players soars...
Fun can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 11:38:45
[16yo] decided to throw a party while his parents were on holidays... posted a notice on his MySpace site... 500 people turned up to his suburban home in the southern city of Melbourne on Saturday... revelers clashed with police called in by frightened neighbors. Party goers threw bottles at police cars until the arrival of reinforcements including a helicopter and the police dog squad...
[but wait! there's more...]
Opposing Tyranny
reuters.com/ ... 10:44:05
The United States stressed on Thursday that it opposes Taiwan plans to hold a referendum on U.N. membership, while China urged Washington to help oppose the vote that it calls a dangerous provocation...
[It's only dangerous because China appears to still be a dangerous greedy empire that can't let real China, driven to Taiwan by communist thugs, live out their own lives as they choose. America has been on the wrong side of this one since that nitwit Nixon. -BH]
Nature can be Deadly
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:36:14
There have been a number of deaths and considerable damage to crops in the Middle East as temperatures in the region have fallen to exceptional lows. Local reports say that 10 people died in Saudi Arabia after snowfalls...
World of Sexual Cultures
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:35:56
Bangladesh... once I had turned down a certain side street I had entered the biggest brothel in Bangladesh. I was expecting to see one big building, but in fact it was more like a vast covered market with criss-crossing alleyways lined with fruit stalls, tailors and TV repairers. I was with an NGO, the Bangladeshi Women's Health Coalition, which holds afternoon workshops on safe sex... When the women get pregnant, many hope for daughters who in time will be able to join them working in the brothel... Every single woman I spoke to told me she was planning to leave in a year or so, but in reality most feel they have no alternative but to stay... Denied Muslim burial rights, the women have their own graveyard...
Sex can be Fatal
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:23:09
A former lawmaker has been sentenced to death in China for raping more than 20 young girls... began his campaign of rape after being told by a fortune-teller that having sex with virgins would prolong his health...
[apparently, however, not extend his life....]
was aiming to have sex with 100 virgins...
Transport Trouble
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:21:15
A passenger jet landed short of the runway at Heathrow airport on Thursday, forcing Prime Minister Gordon Brown to delay his trip to China as his plane was on the runway waiting to take off. Three people were reported injured...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:30:33
Israeli forces have carried out further raids on the Gaza Strip, killing three Palestinian civilians in an air strike. Militant group Islamic Jihad said the air strike was aimed at its men, but missed the target. The Israeli military says its raids are to stop rocket attacks by militants. It said the civilians were killed by mistake and it is investigating...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:29:40
Hundreds of militants have overrun a paramilitary fort in north-west Pakistan, killing or kidnapping many troops... At least eight soldiers died in the raid and 15 escaped... whereabouts of another 25 are unknown... A Taleban spokesman told BBC Urdu that 16 troops had been killed and another 12 captured during the fighting. Two Taleban died in the fighting, he said.
South Waziristan is a known stronghold of pro-Taleban and al-Qaeda militants...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:29:01
A women wearing an explosives belt has blown herself up near a Shia mosque in Diyala province north of Baghdad, killing 11 others... in the town of Khan Bani Saad, south of Baquba... Eighteen people were wounded...
Diyala has defied the trend towards lower violence in Baghdad and much of central Iraq over the past six months... Diyala is the current battleground between the Sunni insurgency and its opponents and also one of the places in Iraq where Shia and Sunni live side by side...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:19:42
Sri Lanka's military said air force jets destroyed a hideout used by senior Tamil Tiger rebels Thursday and soldiers captured a strategic stretch of road in a battle that left nine insurgents dead... a day after suspected insurgents killed 27 people in an attack on a civilian bus, an assault that coincided with the government formally ending a cease-fire that had been largely ignored in recent years...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:17:30
A satchel of letters carried out of the jungle by two women freed by Colombian rebels details the heart-wrenching suffering and depredation of the hostages they left behind... chained by the neck... suffering from malaria, tropical parasites, heart ailments and diarrhea so severe that one captive couldn't walk...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:16:25
Jan 17... A suicide bomber fired gunshots then blew himself up at a Shiite mosque in Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least seven people and injuring 20... as minority Shiite Muslims prepared to mark the Ashoura festival, which is often marred by sectarian violence involving rival Sunnis... seven people including one policeman who tried to stop the bomber from entering the mosque were killed and a few policewomen were among the wounded...
US Military
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:57:11
The Department of Defense announced today the selection of Citibank to provide travel charge card services for its members under the General Services Administration's umbrella SmartPay® 2 master contract....
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:56:26
This week the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard announced an increase, while the Marine Corps announced a decrease. The net collective result is
2,166 more reservists
mobilized than last week.... This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized to
94,839,
including both units and individual augmentees.
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:55:47
The Navy announced today that two important steps have been taken under existing law and regulations to allow it to conduct effective, integrated training with sonar off the coast of southern California after a federal court earlier this month imposed untenable restrictions on such training....
Reproduction
reuters.com/ ... 11:50:48
The U.S. abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1976, with about 20 percent of pregnancies being terminated by abortion... probably due to a combination of
better access to contraception
and
less access to abortion providers
... "Slightly more than one in five pregnancies end in abortion, indicating that unwanted pregnancy is still too common in the United States," the report reads...
[hmmmm]
Why People Go Vegan
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:49:01
Federal health officials are investigating if there's a link between illnesses reported by several workers at a pig slaughterhouse in Indiana and those seen recently in workers at a Minnesota pork plant...
Solar System
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:19:57
The first pictures taken by the Messenger probe as it passed
Mercury
on Monday have started to arrive at Earth. They include images that show parts of the surface missed by the Mariner 10 spacecraft when it flew by the planet in the 1970s... Messenger needs to perform another two fly-bys and a number of engine firings to get itself into orbit in 2011. Monday's manoeuvre took the probe to within just 200km (125 miles) of the planet at closest approach...
Science Marches Onnnnnn
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:26:36
UK... Regulators have given scientists the green light to create human-animal embryos for research...
Scientists want to create hybrid embryos by merging human cells with animal eggs in a bid to extract stem cells. The embryos would then be destroyed within 14 days. The cells form the basic building blocks of the body and have the potential to become any tissue, making them essential for research. At the moment, scientists have to rely on human eggs left over from fertility treatment, but they are in short supply and are not always good quality. Critics say they are repulsed by the idea and there must be no creation of an animal-human hybrid. They say it is tampering with nature and is unethical. It is already illegal to implant human-animal embryos in the womb or bring them to term...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:22:23
The "darkest ever" substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory... created from carbon nanotubes... absorbs light [close to] perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths... "The application will be to things like more efficient solar cells, more efficient solar panels and any application where you need to harvest light..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:58:49
Scientists in California say they have produced embryos that are clones of two men... made with ordinary skin cells... not the first time human cloned embryos have been made... Stem cells weren't produced by the new embryos either, and because of that, experts reacted coolly to the research... "I found it difficult to determine what was substantially new..." "It's only a matter of time before some group succeeds..."
Gardeners of Earth
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:54:04
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar... A self-destructing palm tree that flowers once every 100 years and then dies has been discovered on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar... "even for Madagascar this is a stupendous palm and an astonishing discovery..."
Orbiting Overhead
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:47:05
A Boeing-built satellite for mobile voice and data services was placed in orbit Tuesday by a rocket launched from a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean... from a spot on the equator... The launch by Long Beach-based Sea Launch Co. was "perfect," said Sea Launch spokeswoman Paula Korn... Unusually strong currents that affected Sea Launch's oceangoing launch platform foiled the first attempt in November. The self-propelled platform and the command ship had to return to home port in Long Beach, resupply and sail back to the launch site.
The Sea Launch system takes advantage of a principle of physics that allows a rocket launched at the equator to carry a heavier payload into orbit than it could from elsewhere on the Earth's surface...
Evolution Isn't Easy
reuters.com/ ... 10:41:35
Scientists in Uruguay have found the fossil remains of a 2,000 pound (1,000 kg) rodent that lived 2 million to 4 million years ago -- the largest rodent ever found... probably ate soft food such as fruit or tender plants... Josephoartigasia monesi...
Feeding Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 11:49:37
Undernutrition causes more than a third of child deaths worldwide, but simple programs like promoting breastfeeding and providing supplements could keep some of those children alive, experts said on Thursday...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:48:32
It's called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it... The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is paying California-based health care giant Kaiser Permanente $338,000 to test and interview patients suffering from Morgellons' bizarre symptoms. The one-year effort will attempt to define the condition and better determine how common it is...
reuters.com/ ... 11:29:39
Americans may eat it if they want, but the agriculture minister of France said on Thursday that if offered a dish of cloned meat, he'd have to say "non"... "I think there are ethical problems and problems of social acceptability and we are not going to start copying the American model..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:36:29
The production of one of Italy's best known exports, mozzarella, is under threat from an infection spreading through herds of water buffalo...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:56:58
Proposed rules meant to keep foreign species out of the Great Lakes would require oceangoing ships to flush their ballast tanks with salt water before entering the St. Lawrence Seaway...
[This seems long overdue!]
The rules also call for increased inspections of salt-water freighters, believed to be a leading source of invasive species such as zebra and quagga mussels that scientists say are causing massive environmental and economic damage to the lakes... Under the proposed rules, ships carrying even small amounts of water or sediment would have to rinse their tanks with salt water at least 200 miles off any North American shore.
At least 185 exotic species have been found in the lakes. Many were scooped into ship ballast tanks in foreign ports, hauled across the Atlantic and dumped into the Great Lakes when the ships emptied their tanks to take on cargo. Ballast tanks help stabilize ships in rough ocean waters...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:51:45
At least 20 endangered sea turtles have washed up dead along the southern Bangladesh coast over the last week, an official said Wednesday.... olive ridley turtles... the smallest of all sea turtles... ranging from 90-130 pounds... Pollution and the use of illegal nets by fishermen near the shoreline were believed responsible... Last year, several hundred of the turtles died along the same coast...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:47:33
State wildlife officials say a destructive species known as the zebra mussel has been discovered in California for the first time... in the San Justo Reservoir in San Benito County... known to clog water pipes and boat engines and alter the chemistry of marine ecosystems...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:20:56
Australia said Thursday it would send a ship to pick up two anti-whaling activists who jumped on a Japanese harpoon vessel from a rubber boat in Antarctic waters, offering a solution to a tense, two-day standoff on the high seas. The protesters from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society scored a victory with their stunt, bringing Japan's whale hunt to a standstill while officials scrambled to resolve the faceoff...
US Election 2008
breitbart.com/ ... 14:09:36
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton welcom[ing] her traveling press corps aboard her campaign plane Wednesday... "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard the maiden flight of Hil Force One.... My name is Hillary and I am so pleased to have
most of you
on board.... FAA regulations prohibit the use of any cell phones, Blackberries or wireless devices that
may be used to transmit a negative story about me.
In a few minutes, I am going to switch off the 'Fasten Your Seat Belt' sign. However, I've learned lately that things can get awfully bumpy when you least expect itso you might want to keep those seat belts fastened. And in the event of an unexpected drop in poll numbers, this plane will be diverted to New Hampshire. If you look out from the right, you will see an America saddled with tax cuts for the wealthiest and a
war without end.
If you look out from the left, you will see an America with a strong middle class at home and a strong reputation in the world.
[Ummmm... no...]
Once we've reached cruising altitude, we'll be offering in-flight entertainment: my stump speech. Once again, thank you for joining us on Hil Force One. We know you have choices when you fly, and so we are grateful that you chose the plane with the most experienced crew. And so we are grateful that you chose the plane with the most experienced candidate..."
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 14:06:49
Geraldine Anne Ferraro (born August 26, 1935) is a Democratic politician and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She is best known as the
first and only woman to date to represent a major U.S. political party as a candidate for Vice President.
Ferraro and running mate Walter Mondale were defeated in a landslide by incumbent President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1984 election. She was later appointed as an ambassador to the United Nations and is currently a businesswoman...
nomoreblather.com/ ... 14:06:19
Mike Huckabee and the Mexican consulate... arranged discount office space in a state office: just $1 per year... passed out countless "Matricula Consular" ID cards to illegal aliens... FBI has called those ID cards a security risk... Arkansas is home to major poultry processing and other firms that are widely believed to employ large numbers of illegal workers...
Recall
reuters.com/ ... 11:47:06
AT&T said on Wednesday it will replace 17,000 batteries mostly used to back up power supply for its U-verse television network after two fires and two explosions in a little over a year...
Digital Threat
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:46:40
UK... The home secretary has outlined plans to target websites promoting extremism, as part of efforts to stop people being drawn towards radical groups...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:46:22
Thousands of small web shops have been unwittingly poisoned with malicious code that infects PC users who visit. Security experts said the sophisticated attack had succeeded on a larger scale than many other similar attacks... "It looks like the rootkit type technique that we have been worried about for the last two or three years. It's very clever..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:45:33
Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download...
Digital Culture
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:45:16
Playing computer games such as the Nintendo Wii can improve a surgeon's performance in the operating theatre... Only certain games are effective - those requiring delicate movements...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:44:26
AUBURN, Ala... Chances are you'll recognize Alice Fraasa, but you won't be able to figure out from where. Fraasa, a 19-year-old sophomore at Auburn University, is the face of Snorg Tees, a successful Georgia-based company that sells T-shirts online imprinted with funny, occasionally rude, comments...
Digital Future is Now
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:43:15
BBC News website picks some of the key technologies on offer at the Consumer Electronics Show...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:42:34
While the globe may not yet be covered in a seamless wireless network, the building blocks are being put into place...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:42:16
Everything about the televisions on show at CES is extreme... world's largest plasma... thinnest commercial screen... first laser television..."We're going to be able to recognise who is watching the set by their eyes and change parental controls automatically..."
Reporting Science
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:15:07
An Edinburgh scientist's study of a 15 million-year-old lake buried under the ice of Antarctica could yield clues on climate change and the origins of life...
[Behold! a lead line which uses not one but two hot hooks, the latest pop-mod flashword, "climate," and the classic science-reporting superhook, "the origin of life"!]
more than 150 lakes locked beneath Antarctica's vast ice sheets that have been discovered using radar and satellite technologies...
People are Trashy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:52:08
Texans' fondness for large, manly vehicles has helped make the Lone Star State the biggest carbon polluter in the nation...
But is it Art?
reuters.com/ ... 10:40:13
A sketchbook believed to have been Vincent van Gogh's containing portraits similar to those in his most famous works has been found in Greece... Taken by a Greek resistance fighter from a Nazi train, the sketchbook was discovered in storage boxes by his daughter, who is seeking to establish its authenticity with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam...
World Water
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:31:36
China is facing its worst drought in a decade, with water in parts of the Yangtze River at the lowest level in 142 years.... Millions of people were short of water... dozens of ships had run aground in the river since October... Officials said low water levels in the Yangtze were not linked to construction of the massive Three Gorges Dam...
World Without Borders
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:30:14
16 Jan... US President George W Bush is wrapping up an eight-day Middle East tour with a brief visit to Egypt. Speaking in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh Mr Bush said that he hoped Egypt would build on moves towards greater democracy... stopped short of directly criticising Egypt's government...
Theory of Justice
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:27:24
A US court has ordered Libya and six Libyan officials to pay more than $6bn (£3bn) in damages over the bombing of a French aircraft over Niger in 1989. The award is payable to relatives of the seven US victims aboard UTA Flight 772, and the aircraft's American owner. Libya has already agreed to pay $1m compensation to the relatives of each of the 170 people on board the flight - but has denied any link to the bombing...
Peace 3000
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:20:26
He once carried an assault rifle and planned attacks on Israelis. Now, the retired Palestinian militant breaks up fights between children in a theater that he helped establish in the West Bank town of Jenin. The new role brings Zakariya Zubeidi full circle. As a child he belonged to a children's theater group run by an Israeli woman seeking to promote Jewish-Arab coexistence...
Broadcast is Dead
reuters.com/ ... 11:47:26
French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday proposed to eliminate commercials from state-owned radios, having already proposed to scrap advertising on public television...
reuters.com/ ... 10:18:38
The head of the Federal Communications Commission expressed concern on Tuesday that the credit crunch could hinder bidders in an upcoming government auction of wireless airwaves...
Digital Business
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:44:57
a new search service is employing a novel tool to answer queries sent by cell phones: human beings...
reuters.com/ ... 11:39:54
Mission Praise -- which has sold more than two million copies as one of most popular hymn books in Britain and around the world -- is now available at www.missionpraise.com... Visitors to the site will be able to search through more than 1800 songs and -- for an annual subscription of 40 pounds ($79) per book -- download words, sheet music, accompanying audio backing tracks...
reuters.com/ ... 11:39:28
Pizza Hut... this week introduced new cell phone services that let customers order from any of its 6,200 outlets nationwide via text message or the mobile Web...
reuters.com/ ... 10:19:03
Borders has been running its site in an alliance with Amazon.com. Amazon has operated the site, while Borders got a portion of the sales from Borders.com. But that will change in its fiscal first quarter when Borders' agreement with Amazon is no longer in effect, and it launches its new Web site on its own. "We're literally starting with a blank page..."
reuters.com/ ... 10:18:21
The makers of word game Scrabble have asked Facebook to remove its popular online version "Scrabulous," which they say infringes their copyright...
The U.S. and Canada rights to Scrabble are owned by Hasbro Inc, the world's second-largest toy and game company, while the biggest, Mattel Inc, has the rest of the world...
WED 2008-JAN-16
Civilization vs Gangsterism
dailymail.co.uk/ ... 11:53:49
A computer nerd from Shepherd's Bush, West London, became al Qaeda's top internet agent, it can be revealed today. Younes Tsouli, 23, an IT student at a London college, used his top-floor flat in W12 to help Islamist extremists wage a propaganda war against the West. Under the name Irhabi 007 combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for terrorist he worked with al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and came up with a way to convert often gruesome videos into a form that could be put onto the Web... His capture led to the arrest of several Islamic terrorists around the world, including 17 men in Canada and two in the US...
Threats
reuters.com/ ... 11:52:53
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Wednesday that one of the biggest threats to U.S. security may now come from within Europe... becoming a "platform for terrorists"...
[You mean like all those guys who hung out in Germany before 9/11?]
Sex can be... disturbing
sg.news.yahoo.com/ ... 11:44:44
the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy... filed a brief Tuesday supporting... Sen. Larry Craig... cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms "have a reasonable expectation of privacy..."
Big Brother
technology.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 11:43:44
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a workers
productivity, physical wellbeing and competence... links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism... measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure... employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computers assessment of their physiological state...
Sex Slavery
apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:41:03
FORT WORTH, Texas... Several teenage gang members have been arrested on suspicion of forcing girls as young as 12 into a prostitution ring... After befriending the girls and getting them high... targeted runaways and other girls with unstable homes, and if the girls refused to have sex for money the members beat and sexually assaulted them and threatened their families... "To have such young individuals in a somewhat organized business, a forced prostitution ring, is somewhat alarming and such a horrendous crime against the 12- to 16-year-old girls..."
Pure Mathematics
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 16:43:41
In geometry, the tesseract, also called 8-cell or octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the (three-dimensional) cube. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square; or, more formally, the tesseract can be described as a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells. A generalization of the cube to dimensions greater than three is called a "hypercube", "n-cube" or "measure polytope". The tesseract is the four-dimensional hypercube or 4-cube...
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 16:43:17
Hypercube...
In geometry, a hypercube is an n-dimensional analogue of a square (n = 2) and a cube (n = 3). It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, at right angles to each other...
geocities.com/ ... 15:40:23
The Hypercube... A 7x7x7x7 Hypercube axonometry...
Pop Culture
newsoftheweird.blogspot.com/ ... 15:39:05
BlogHeaper recommended:
News of the Weird Daily...
Breaking News Culled for Your Eyebrow-lifting, Sanity-gauging Pleasure by America's Weird-News Anchorman, Chuck Shepherd...
pitbullarmory.com/ ... 15:38:06
Hi there, Welcome to Pitbull Armory. I love to make armor for women and animals but my goal is to provide people with zero to low maintenance armor that is lightweight and comfortable. I build it out of steel, aluminum, and almost indestructible HPDE plastic. Wearing my HPDE plastic armor will increase your speed, agility, and endurance allowing you to fight longer, or just wear it for a much longer period of time comfortably. Are you tired of cleaning the rust off your mild steel armor and beating the dents out of it after every event? OF COURSE YOU ARE...
[Armor for dogs. Armor for squirrels! (Thanks to News of the Weird Daily for the link.)]
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 15:36:33
"Louie Louie"
is an American rock 'n' roll song written by Richard Berry in 1955. It has become a standard in pop and rock, with hundreds of versions recorded by different artists. The song is written in the style of a Jamaican ballad; and tells, in simple verse-chorus form, the first-person story of a Jamaican sailor returning to the island to see his lady love. The singer brags of his "fine little girl" to the Louie of the title, presumably a bartender. A version by The Kingsmen recorded in 1963 is the best-known recording. The Kingsmen's version was also the subject of an FBI investigation about the supposed but non-existent obscenity of the lyrics, an investigation that ended without prosecution... It is unknown exactly how many versions of "Louie Louie" have been recorded, but it is believed to be over 1,500, according to LouieLouie.net...
Animal Companions
dailymail.co.uk/ ... 11:49:44
scientists... have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks... "Stranger", "fight", "walk", "alone", "ball" and "play"...
[soon: a program that translates cat: "Pet me" "Feed me" "If it moves, kill it" and of course "meeeeeee"]
US Executive Branch
news.yahoo.com/ ... 11:51:32
The White House has acknowledged
recycling its backup computer tapes
of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages including those pertaining to the CIA leak case have been taped over and are gone forever...
[Those who will not learn from Nixon are destined to be taped over.... waitaminnit... TAPES?]
Digital Business
ft.com/ ... 11:42:18
Next months Super Bowl will feature a sales promotion that is audacious even by that events over-inflated standards: Amazon.com, the largest online retailer, will offer as many as 1bn free downloads from its new digital music store in partnership with Pepsi and singer Justin Timberlake...
breitbart.com/ ... 11:41:44
Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop at Macworld Tuesday, unveiling a personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it's opened...
[[stifled yawn] Is that a parameter that can be overridden?]
US Election 2008
latimesblogs.latimes.com/ ... 11:39:26
...Ron Paul thumped two reputed Republican heavyweights in the Michigan primary -- former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani...
[Whoop. Paul now has two (2) delegates to the convention.]
thehill.com/ ... 11:37:53
Republican presidential candidate
Mike Huckabee
has
reversed his position
on a federal ban aimed at workplace smoking and now believes the issue should be addressed by state and local governments...
["..I'm so diz-zy my head is spinnin'..."]
breitbart.com/ ... 11:37:10
The Michigan Republican Party mistakenly sent out a news release Tuesday night
congratulating John McCain for winning the state's GOP primary...
[Now THAT'S funny!]
nypost.com/ ... 11:35:42
With this field of losers, it's no wonder the race for the GOP presidential nomination remains completely up for grabs. The only common bond among the Republicans running is that each one has managed to humiliate himself with disastrous defeats at some point or another. These guys have no running game, no passing game, no nothing.... only one GOP candidate that beats all the rest at being a loser: Rudy Giuliani. He has perfected the art of underperforming to the point that his campaign now insists it was all part of his game plan....
Even fringe candidate Ron Paul - the million-to-one long shot everybody picks on to make themselves look good - is beating Giuliani...
-Charles Hurt, NY Post
apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:34:02
Mitt Romney
scored his first major primary victory Tuesday... in his native Michigan... set the stage for a wide-open Republican showdown in South Carolina in just four days... John McCain... Mike Huckabee...
THIS is the cream of the Republican crop? Siiiiiigh!
Michigan doesn't typically hold its primary until February but state party officials scheduled it earlier to try to give the state more say in picking a president. The Republican National Committee objected and cut the number of Michigan delegates to the national convention by half as punishment while the Democratic National Committee stripped the state of all 156 delegates to its national convention, including 28 superdelegates who would not have been bound by the outcome of the primary...
TUE 2008-JAN-15
Alcohol Was Involved
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:26:06
WELLINGTON, New Zealand... charged with driving a lawn mower while drunk...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:25:50
mixed up a bottle of gasoline with alcohol... apparently grabbed the wrong bottle and took a swig... spat it out... gas hit a lit cigarette... setting his apartment ablaze...
Fun can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:24:22
An Australian teenager who threw a wild party while his parents were away could face a hefty fine after police said Monday they might charge him for the cost of breaking the gathering up...
Transport Trouble
reuters.com/ ... 15:22:34
Aircraft taking off from London City Airport have had their compasses affected by iron and steel buried below the runway, leading to significant navigation problems... main culprit is recycled oil pipelines used as steel casing on concrete piles that underpin the holding area where aircraft prepare for take-off, as well as buried railway lines and bollards...
Sex can be... disturbing
reuters.com/ ... 15:13:50
Recording secret videos of sex with your partner is not illegal, Italy's supreme court has ruled... The woman had agreed to the man using a video camera to project live images of them having sex on to the bedroom wall, but did not know he was recording the action. The court acquitted the man because he had not distributed the films to other people...
Big Nanny
reuters.com/ ... 15:13:01
BERLIN... many disobeying a law banning smoking in public places -- cafes, bars, restaurants and night clubs -- in force in Berlin and 11 other German states from January 1... Berlin police have not responded to complaints about renegade smokers and are by and large letting cafe and bar owners decide whether customers can smoke or not...
Sex can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 15:09:26
CANBERRA... An Australian man who waved out of a car window at two young women was expected to lose his arm Monday after it was almost severed by another passing vehicle...
Scary Times
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:51:35
Microsoft Corp. is bringing digital advertising to the grocery cart...
Under Sexist Tyranny
reuters.com/ ... 14:39:22
Iran... Western diplomats and rights groups see the detention of women activists as part of a wider crackdown on dissent, which they say may be in response to Western pressure over Iran's nuclear work...
Fire
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:36:34
A deadly fire that has ravaged two huge markets in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta has continued to rage for a third consecutive day... More than 6,000 shops have been destroyed... Scores of traders have been left penniless after their stocks were wiped out by the blaze...
Masses can be Deadly
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:35:35
At least two people in Yemen have been killed at a protest in the southern port city of Aden. Witnesses said security forces opened fire on the crowd but a local official told the official news agency Saba that "criminal elements" had opened fire... At least 15 people were injured...
War is Hell
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:32:39
Dutch troops in Afghanistan killed two of their own men during a nighttime battle, and separately two allied Afghan soldiers they mistook for enemies...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:16:15
An explosion targeted a U.S. Embassy vehicle Tuesday in northern Beirut, killing at least three Lebanese and injuring an American bystander and a local embassy employee...
reuters.com/ ... 14:50:42
U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed 60 militants, seized dozens of weapons caches and detained 193 suspects during the first week of a major offensive against al Qaeda in northern Iraq, the U.S. military said... in four northern provinces... part of a larger countrywide operation targeting al Qaeda...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:37:06
14 Jan... A high-ranking judge has been shot dead along with his driver by gunmen in the Iraqi capital Baghdad... Correspondents say professional people, such as judges, lawyers, and doctors, have often been singled out for attack in Iraq in recent years...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:31:48
...Cosa Nostra could always count on fear. No more. In a rebellion shaking the Sicilian Mafia to its centuries-old roots, businesses are joining forces in refusing to submit to demands for protection money called "pizzo." And they're getting away with it, threatening to sap an already weakened crime syndicate of one of its steadiest sources of revenue. The Mafia has a history of bouncing back from defeat, but this time it is up against something entirely new: a Web site where businessmen are finding safety in numbers to say no to the mob...
Digital Sex can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 15:23:25
Nine Canadians, including social workers and people involved with children's organizations, have been arrested on charges of possessing child pornography purchased from a European Web site, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Tuesday... all male... investigation was launched after the arrest of an Italian running a Web site selling videos of underage girls... videos produced by the Web site were "tailor-made" for customers: the children posed in certain positions or wore lingerie provided by the customers...
newsday.com/ ... 00:52:40
Diamond, MO... small-town mayor and church pastor was in jail Monday on charges of soliciting sex over the Internet from a police detective posing as a 13-year-old girl...
Family Tragedy
newsday.com/ ... 00:52:07
PANAMA CITY, Panama - The 1 1/2-year-old triplets of an Italian U.N. World Food Program official drowned at a home on the outskirts of Panama City... chased their dog out into the yard Sunday and fell into the pool... "The family is completely destroyed..."
Transport Tragedy
newsday.com/ ... 00:51:36
CARACAS, Venezuela - A life vest found floating off the Venezuelan coast is the first sign of a twin-engine airplane carrying 14 people that crashed at sea more than a week ago...
Nature can be Deadly
newsday.com/ ... 00:51:07
Tsunami-like waves created by an earthquake may have triggered the world's largest known hydrothermal explosion some 13,000 years ago, a federal scientist says. The explosion created the Mary Bay crater that stretches more than one mile across along the north edge of Yellowstone Lake. Debris from the explosion has been found miles away... Though much has been made in recent years of a possible eruption of Yellowstone's "super volcano," geologists studying the park have long said that the likelihood is greater for a large hydrothermal explosion... The explosions happen when hot water just below the surface flashes into steam and breaks through the surface. Smaller explosions in Yellowstone happen about once every two years but rarely when people are around or in danger... But geologists are still trying to better understand the larger explosions that happen about once every 700 years...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:26:28
A chimpanzee cannot be declared a person, Austria's Supreme Court has ruled...
Epidemic Without Borders
reuters.com/ ... 15:24:05
Plague, the disease that devastated medieval Europe, is re-emerging worldwide and poses a growing but overlooked threat, researchers warned on Tuesday...
Raising Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 15:17:27
Five thousand children die every day globally because they do not have access to clean toilets...
US Military
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:16:52
About 3,200 extra United States marines are to be sent to Afghanistan this spring, the Pentagon has confirmed... 2,200 will help Nato fight the Taleban in the south of the country... will be deployed for about seven months. The other 1,000 troops will help train Afghan security forces... US already has about 26,000 troops in Afghanistan, half of them under the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf)...
Animal Companions
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:06:49
FREDERICK, Md... A woman who had 45 cats in her home last year was found to be in violation of her probation for having two dogs and seven cats in her home...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:06:28
CHAMPLIN, Minn... Dave Carlson says the police in this north-metro suburb thought he was joking when he called to report that his wallaby went AWOL. "And then they wanted to know what a wallaby was..." caller told police, "I may need to go to a psych ward, but I think I saw a kangaroo go by..." Eventually, Carlson nabbed Rachet...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:03:56
A Swedish landlord inspecting a recently vacated cottage got an ugly surprise when she found dozens of dead or ailing snakes, mice, rats and lizards locked up in cages inside the house... 90 snakes, three lizards and 60 mice and rats... All the lizards and rodents were dead, as were 17 of the snakes... "I would guess they have been there since October without water..."
Feeding Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:24:54
What they didn't know was that their dog, for as long as they had owned him, had been living with part of an arrow lodged in his chest...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:21:48
Scientists in the US say they have created a genetically-engineered carrot that provides extra calcium...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:55:53
Whittier Farms dairy... still deliver milk right to your door, in glass bottles... hormone-free... three elderly men have died and at least one pregnant woman has miscarried since last June after drinking bacteria-contaminated milk from the dairy's plant in Shrewsbury, about 35 miles west of Boston... listeria... believed to be only the third time listeria has ever been linked to pasteurized milk in the United States... "We know something is going on; we just don't know what it is..."
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 15:28:32
Marine Lance Cpl.
Curtis A. Christensen Jr.,
29, of Collingswood, N.J., died Jan. 11 from a non-hostile incident in Al Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C. The incident is currently under investigation.
defenselink.mil/ ... 14:30:44
Army Pfc.
Keith E. Lloyd,
26, of Milwaukee, died Jan. 12 in Tal Afar, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Hood, Texas.
Christmas 2007
reuters.com/ ... 15:12:07
A German man threw himself out of an apartment window along with a Christmas tree during a late-night attempt to dispose of his festive decorations... fell 22 feet... tree did not break the victim's fall... severe head injuries...
People Live
reuters.com/ ... 15:08:55
A Japanese climber lost in the mountains for more than a week in frigid conditions survived by eating snow before making his way down to a ski resort on Friday...
People Die
reuters.com/ ... 15:11:27
The body of a young man was found in an elegant Vienna square with a rake embedded in his head...
reuters.com/ ... 15:08:40
A 66-year-old Austrian woman lived for almost a year with the corpse of her 85-year-old partner...
World Energy
reuters.com/ ... 15:08:25
Almost a third of the U.S. grain crop next year may be diverted from the family dinner table to the family car as fuel...
Just Random Chance
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:07:32
An obstetrician saved his wife and six children from a fire that ravaged their home, delivered a baby while the house was still smoldering and then got cited with building violations. Dr. Herman Weiss said Friday "was just my day..."
Theory of Education
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:07:16
DES MOINES, Iowa... Several members of a high school swim team were suspended after they impaled 15 car antennas with fetal pigs and smeared crawfish on hoods and windshields in their rival school's parking lot...
It's Only Money
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:05:18
A Janesville [Wis] couple are hoping they will be allowed to keep the nearly $12,000 in cash they found in their refrigerator when they moved into an apartment... previous renters have been charged in drug trafficking cases... "If it is determined that the money is the proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, then it would be contraband, and on behalf of Janesville taxpayers, we would seize that money..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:04:27
The Utah Court of Appeals gave the bad news to an 86-year-old lawyer who stumbled across a decades-old bank passbook showing a balance of $150,000... evidence suggests the account belonged to somebody else who cashed out long ago...
Sportsmanship
reuters.com/ ... 14:50:12
South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius, who runs with carbon fiber blades attached to his legs, will not be allowed to compete at this year's Beijing Olympics... gave him a significant advantage over able-bodied runners... "Pistorius was able to run with his prosthetic blades at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters with about 25 percent less energy expenditure..."
Modern Family Life
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:33:11
Recently released Colombian hostage Clara Rojas was reunited Sunday with her 3-year-old son, who was fathered by one of her guerrilla captors but taken away from her months after he was born...
Nature's Aftermath
kotv.com/ ... 00:50:09
The December ice storm has left months of work for anyone with a chainsaw: tree trimmers, debris removal companies, and artists. Clayton Coss is probably Oklahoma's premier chainsaw sculptor and his phone has been ringing off the wall... Coss says ultimately the tree dictates what he can do...
People Do Drugs
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:56:21
About 3.1 million people between the ages of 12-25 have used cough and cold medicine to get high... comparable to use of LSD and much greater than that for methamphetamine among the age group...
kotv.com/ ... 00:49:33
Washington County Treasurer Stan Stevens... Police believe he was part of a larger drug ring... Chief Holland... expects several more people to be taken into custody in connection with the case...
kotv.com/ ... 00:48:34
Stan Stevens... investigation began here in mid-December when the woman's husband committed suicide...
MON 2008-JAN-14
WW2 - still with us
suntimes.com/ ... 23:31:17
An American soldier dangled from a parachute snagged on a building in a small German town, a crowd gathering below. Little boys jeered: "Heil Hitler!" Across the street, a girl watched, horrified... The visitor thanks the woman. He finds this oddly soothing. Now he knows: His Uncle Shep, in the minutes before he was murdered, did not cry or scream, though he looked very sad. This is why the visitor came, just for this. This is why he flew to Germany from Chicago...
Iran
suntimes.com/ ... 23:27:40
Sailors in the Persian Gulf have known him for years: a radio operator who taunts and insults passing ships. The rants are heard, logged then mostly forgotten. But now the phantom voice has taken center stage in the latest flurry of claims and counterclaims between Iran and the United States following a tense high seas confrontation raising new questions about whether Washington could have gotten a key element of the story wrong. The radio transmission a staccato burst suggesting U.S. Navy ships were targeted for explosion was a central part of an audio-video presentation that U.S. officials claimed showed Iranian speedboats swarming three Navy warships on Jan. 6 in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is the only entry and exit to the Gulf...
Sex can be Fatal
reuters.com/ ... 23:12:03
New genetic evidence supports the theory that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe from the New World...
reuters.com/ ... 22:10:45
A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria... methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus... has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex... can cause life-threatening and disfiguring infections and can often only be treated with expensive, intravenous antibiotics...
"Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable..."
can be passed by touching other people or by depositing the bacteria on surfaces or objects...
Infrastructure Tragedy
washingtonpost.com/ ... 22:07:13
A
design flaw
caused a Minnesota bridge to collapse last summer, killing 13 people and injuring 100 in an accident that focused renewed attention on the safety of the nation's highways and bridges... When the bridge was constructed in the 1960s, its gusset plates were not thick nor strong enough to meet safety margins of the era...
Scary Times
worldnetdaily.com/ ... 21:55:08
British monarch Queen Elizabeth was targeted by al-Qaida-linked suicide terrorists posing as TV crews at November's Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Uganda, but the plot was discovered by authorities and "neutralized" before it could be carried out, an Ugandan official has confirmed...
Industrial Trouble
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:54:17
China has closed more than 11,000 small coal mines as part of a two-year-old safety crackdown aimed at stemming the industry's high death toll... represents 45 percent of all small mines slated for closure...
Prison Sucks
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:11:47
Sri Lanka... DP James was 30 years old when he was arrested for stabbing and wounding his father and sent to jail.... was moved to a psychiatric hospital shortly after entering prison in 1957, and returned to jail in the mid-1980s, where he seems to have been forgotten... He is now 80... has been released from prison... 50 years without conviction... His lawyer hopes the case against him will be dismissed...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
suntimes.com/ ... 23:28:14
When it came down to business, Cosa Nostra could always count on fear. No more. In a rebellion shaking the Sicilian Mafia to its centuries-old roots, businesses are joining forces in refusing to submit to demands for protection money called "pizzo." And they're getting away with it, threatening to sap an already weakened crime syndicate of one of its steadiest sources of revenue...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 23:10:07
At least six people have died in an attack by Taleban fighters on a luxury hotel in the Afghan capital... a bomber detonating his explosive jacket...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:48:14
China has closed more than 11,000 small coal mines as part of a two-year-old safety crackdown aimed at stemming the industry's high death toll... represents 45 percent of all small mines slated for closure...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:26:19
US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell has said the interrogation technique of water-boarding "would be torture" if he were subjected to it. Mr McConnell said it would also be torture if water-boarding, which involves simulated drowning, resulted in water entering a detainee's lungs. He told the New Yorker there would be a "huge penalty" for anyone using it if it was ever determined to be torture...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:20:49
13 Jan... A woman has been injured in a bomb blast in Burma's commercial capital, Rangoon, officials say - the third bombing incident in three days...
reuters.com/ ... 09:09:21
The United States has agreed in principle to provide Israel with better "smart bombs" than those it plans to sell Saudi Arabia under a regional defense package...
War is Hell
reuters.com/ ... 01:34:14
The United States has agreed in principle to provide Israel with better "smart bombs" than those it plans to sell Saudi Arabia under a regional defense package...
Nuclear is Nasty
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:31:53
Global warming and rocketing oil prices are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential shining knight of clean energy...
Under Tyranny
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:31:30
China's ties with Taiwan should benefit from the island's legislative election, in which the independence-leaning ruling party suffered a stinging defeat...
Antiquity - still with us
dailymail.co.uk/ ... 22:29:49
He had found it! The Holy Grail - the elusive detail experts on Roman Britain had been in search of for centuries: letters to and from the Roman soldiers who had garrisoned Britain from AD43 to 410... exhibition shows that soldiers in remote outposts yearned for nothing so much as the luxury of clean underwear...
Unidentified
news.yahoo.com/ ... 22:17:40
STEPHENVILLE, Texas... Several dozen people including a pilot, county constable and business owners insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it... federal officials insist there's a logical explanation... People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object...
Dinosaurs -- still with us
news.nationalgeographic.com/ ... 22:09:04
Big dinosaurs, like humans, reached sexual maturity during the messy growth spurts of adolescence... The reproductive strategy of dinosaurs was unlike that of their reptilian ancestors or their bird descendants... "They are growing really fast and yet maturing early... Among living animals, the only things that do that are medium- to large-size mammals, including us..."
Solar System
space.com/ ... 22:08:13
For the first time in 33 years, a space probe zoomed by the planet Mercury with cameras blazing on Monday while eager scientists looked on from Earth... $446 million mission will answer long-standing questions over Mercury's oddly high density, magnetic field and thin atmosphere, as well as shed new light on how planets formed during the solar system's infancy...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 22:02:36
Army Lt. Col.
Richard J. Berrettini,
52, of Wilcox, Pa., died Jan. 11 in San Antonio of wounds suffered on Jan. 2 in Khowst Province, Afghanistan, when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the Pennsylvania Army National Guard Medical Detachment, Erie Clinic, Erie, Pa.
World Zookeeping
suntimes.com/ ... 23:26:59
A six-year-old male dolphin at the Brookfield Zoo died in his trainer's arms from a severe tracheal infection Sunday afternoon...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 01:32:51
COLUMBUS, Ohio... Fluffy, a 24-foot python billed as the largest snake in captivity, is staying put to lure visitors into the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium... The zoo paid $35,000 to the snake's breeder in Oklahoma to keep the reticulated python on permanent display...
Big City Stories
suntimes.com/ ... 23:30:14
I know only two Chicago jokes... goes like this: A man gets on a bus and asks the driver, "Does dis bus go to da Loop?" The driver says, "No, it goes 'beep beep.'..." The only other Chicago joke I know -- other than the crude one -- is more of a serious sociological observation:...
But is it Art?
suntimes.com/ ... 23:28:52
Chicago... About 35 people participated Saturday in "No Pants Day" on the L, an event organized by a New York-based improv group called Improv Everywhere... Similar stunts were also planned for Saturday in New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. Pantsless riders rode from Granville to Monroe on the CTA's Red Line and back again, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they weren't wearing trousers...
Digital Culture
time.com/ ... 23:26:38
Top 10 Gadgets... of 2007
Transport Pre-Automation
time.com/ ... 23:14:33
The Dozen Most Important Cars of All Time...
It's Only Money
kansascity.com/ ... 22:25:58
The 2003 series U.S. $100 bill was a fake, but not just any fake. It was a "supernote," a counterfeit so perfect its an international whodunit... "its by far the most sophisticated counterfeiting operation in the world..." "We are not certain as to how this is being done or how its happening..." so good that they appear to have been made by someone with access to some governments printing equipment...
Digital Threat
blogs.wsj.com/ ... 22:18:41
Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect Americas cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like "a walk in the park..." in order to accomplish his plan, the
government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse...
Reasons for Repeal
sullivannews.com/ ... 22:14:32
A Worcester, MA man is behind bars after allegedly transporting, with intent to distribute, 25 pounds of marijuana along a Franklin County roadway...
dnj.midsouthnews.com/ ... 22:14:20
Four men and a woman, accused of funneling thousands of dollars worth of marijuana into Murfreesboro out of an apartment complex filled by college students, will appear in court on charges next month... Police confiscated 12 pounds of densely packed cannabis, three loaded handguns, more than $10,000 cash and buckets filled with items from the suspects apartment home...
ketknbc.com/ ... 22:13:55
About four thousand pounds of marijuana was found during a traffic stop in Nacogdoches...
montanasnewsstation.com/ ... 22:13:43
CHEYENNE, Wyo... The Wyoming Highway Patrol said Monday that nearly 145 pounds of marijuana seized on Interstate 80 east of Cheyenne was likely headed to the Wichita, Kan., area...
canada.com/ ... 22:13:24
A company in Duncan on Vancouver Island is
gearing up to supply nearly 300 customers with medical marijuana
in the wake of a federal court ruling striking down a key restriction on sales of the drug...
newsinfo.inquirer.net/ ... 22:13:08
Just when he thought he was home free, a Japanese passenger on an outbound Philippine Airlines flight was busted for carrying marijuana in the most private of places...
allafrica.com/ ... 22:12:57
The Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Ahmadu Giade said at the weekend that Cannabis otherwise known as Indian hemp is the biggest drug challenge in the country and the African continent...
foxnews.com/ ... 22:00:54
Researchers have concluded in a yet-to-be published study of the economics of prostitution in Chicago that the women claim they were forced to service police officers, worked more on holidays and varied pricing based on race...
People Do Drugs
tulsaworld.com/ ... 21:59:43
Nancy C Shipley, Nowata: ...the Washington County Commissioners were aware of part of this situation with their Treasurer and chose to ignore it. The IT Director was terminated because of grievance he filed with them concerning the affair of the Commissioners Secretary and the Treasurer. The work wasn't being done so he filed a grievance and they 'killed the messenger' so to speak. I've been to the courthouse numerous times when the Secretary's door was locked with the Treasurer inside the office!
Most corrupt Courthouse in the State of Oklahoma!!..
tulsaworld.com/ ... 21:58:59
Washington County treasurer jailed...
[reader comments]
brett, bartlesville: they are all crooks they just get away with it....
Bville Boy, Bartlesville: you get what you vote for, and the people of Washington County have continually voted for Stan Stevens. No one with ears is surprised that Stan is a crook. We're just shocked that it took this long for him to get caught...
mm, bville: Good for Washington County. Now they need to concentrate on the corruption in the DA's office. Now there's a story...
Tim, Bville: Yeah but did you see the Little Secretary WOW...
Transport Trouble
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 22:28:54
A British yachtsman thousands of miles from home and seriously injured during a solo transatlantic voyage managed to summon help from an unlikely but familiar source: his local pub...
upi.com/ ... 22:07:37
A United Airlines Boeing 757 jet backed into a SkyWest plane carrying 60 passengers and crew at the San Francisco International Airport... no injuries...
news.scotsman.com/ ... 21:54:47
11 Jan... A [14yo] Polish schoolboy who turned a city's tram network into a giant toy by manoeuvring rolling stock using a TV-style remote control has been arrested after he caused chaos on the public transport system... in one incident alone 12 people were injured...
US Election 2008
plutarch01.wordpress.com/ ... 21:53:51
It has been rumored that Huckabees weight loss was due not to diet and exercise but to gastric bypass (bariatric) surgery. This blog seeks to examine the evidence that is publicly available, to determine whether weight loss from diet/exercise or bariatric surgery is more likely. Because evidence such as witnesses, money trail, etc are lacking, the analysis is primarily medical. The principle used is the Law of Parsimony, a medical application of Occams Razor, in which the validity of a diagnosis is gauged by the degree to which it explains all the clinical findings, without the need to add further diagnoses...
Theory of Justice
worldnetdaily.com/ ... 22:01:55
Tyranny of the American Bar Association...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:36:45
An Indonesian housemaid has been
executed in Saudi Arabia
after being convicted of... suffocating her female boss and stealing her jewellery... second execution in the country in 2008...
SUN 2008-JAN-13
Transport Near-Tragedy
apnews.myway.com/ ... 14:08:24
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a near-collision of two airplanes on the runway at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Friday. Investigators believe an Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight bound for Greensboro, N.C., ignored orders from the control tower to stop its taxi across the runway, coming within seconds of running into a Mexico-bound Delta Air Lines Inc. jet...
Nature can be Dangerous
wbztv.com/ ... 14:07:52
the commute Monday will be a mess across southern New England... a Nor'easter will move in overnight, bringing more than a foot of snow to several communities... Boston area and communities north and west could get 8 to 14 inches of snow...
Under Tyranny
iht.com/ ... 01:17:49
President Hugo Chavez threatened again on Friday to seize property from businesses if they are caught hoarding products, as Venezuela struggles with shortages of some basic foods and high inflation...
Big Cannibal
telegraph.co.uk/ ... 01:16:30
Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to
take organs from dead patients without explicit consent...
Reasons for Repeal
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 01:14:58
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead. The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology...
Healing Ourselves
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 14:07:17
SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch. The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein "skeleton" that created its shape was left. Then the skeleton was seeded with live "progenitor" cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ...
Epidemic Without Borders
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 01:15:52
The winter vomiting bug norovirus has struck 2.8million people, with health professionals braced for another rise as people return to schools and offices...
CD/DVD/etc is Dead
technology.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 14:26:05
Most of Hollywood seems to have made its choice: in the Blu-ray corner there is Columbia, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Lionsgate, Miramax, New Line, Sony and now Warner Brothers, who previously produced for both formats... Paramount and Universal, which still back HD DVD, may yet switch sides. In any case, punters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas seem confident that the battle is almost over...
[I'LL say!]
Digital Culture
pcworld.com/ ... 14:17:50
Microsoft will provide the technology that allows visitors to the U.S. Library of Congress to first take a virtual tour of historic documents and map out what exhibits they want to see, the two organizations announced Thursday...
People Do Drugs
examiner-enterprise.com/ ... 01:19:07
Bartlesville Police Department officers arrested Washington County Treasurer Stan Stevens on drug related charges late Friday night... result of a lengthy and intense investigation... allegedly purchased 50 Lortab/hydrocodone pills from an unidentified individual in a controlled buy situation... son... also arrested Friday morning on drug charges...
World Without Borders
news.yahoo.com/ ... 01:18:01
He even built fences at two immigration jails, a Border Patrol station and the U.S.-Mexico border. Which is the second irony, because he admits now that many of his company's fences were built by illegal immigrants. Federal authorities knew it, and they went after him tenaciously, determined to send him to prison as an example to other employers who hire undocumented workers...
Big Brother
news.independent.co.uk/ ... 01:17:02
Ministers are planning to implant "machine-readable" microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails...
US Election 2008
news.yahoo.com/ ... 01:15:35
A senior adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton was arrested and charged with aggravated drunken driving a day before the New Hampshire primary... Sidney Blumenthal... 70 mph in a 30 mph zone...
Reasons for Repeal
peterboroughtoday.co.uk/ ... 14:24:17
Police in the Leicestershire village of Barwell have seized cannabis plants with a street value of £1m... 1,000 plants... Insp Martyn Ball said: "The seizure sends a clear message that cultivation of the drug will not be tolerated..."
[by the PuriTalibaNazi oppressors.]
timesargus.com/ ... 14:23:41
MONTPELIER Senate lawmakers will consider a bill making it a civil, not criminal, offense to possess small amounts of
marijuana. At the same time, they will also look at a second bill increasing the penalties for possessing heroin and cocaine by reducing the amount possessed that constitutes "trafficking..."
[Just to show they remain absolutely unclear on the concept of human right.]
burlingtonfreepress.com/ ... 14:22:35
Advocates for the decriminalization of
marijuana have argued that we are losing the war on drugs. They argue that the jails are being filled with these minor offenders and that our resources are not being used wisely.
As a prosecutor
[read: clueless imam of PuriTalibaNazi prohibitionist oppression & tyranny]
of 30 years I can unequivocally state that such claims are extreme exaggerations or outright lies...
[etc ad nauseum....]
northumberlandgazette.co.uk/ ... 14:21:08
Police in Co Durham have seized
cannabis plants with a street value of about £18,000 in the second raid on suspected drugs farms in two days...
pr.cannazine.co.uk/ ... 14:20:35
The headlines are big and bold. The message they scream out to the nation, dark and sinister. Children as young as 12 are being treated for cannabis and the nation is doomed to a future of drug abuse and depravation at the hands of council estate cannabis dealers. I would be interested in finding out exactly how many "12 year olds" well-respected treatment centre The Priory will actually treat as to be fair The Telegraph have printed a news story which doesn't actually give us any news...
chicagotribune.com/ ... 14:19:08
Chicago police uncovered what appeared to be about $300,000 worth of
marijuana Saturday night after making a traffic stop near the city's Chinatown area on the near South Side... 50,000 grams... large amount of cash and a weapon... Seven people were in taken into custody...
examiner-enterprise.com/ ... 00:39:05
District Attorney Rick Esser wants the public to know that while the 11th Judicial District is presently able to continue its funding of officers with the Bartlesville Police Department,
a large part of that funding comes from forfeitures and seizures...
kptm.com/ ... 00:38:08
LINCOLN, Neb... A state senator wants stiffer penalties for possessing
marijuana... Senator Russ Karpisek of Wilber has introduced a bill (LB844) that would raise possession of an ounce to a pound of marijuana to a Class II misdemeanor. The penalty would be a maximum of 6 months in prison and a $1,000 fine...
640toronto.com/ ... 00:37:31
TORONTO... An east-end house fire has uncovered a major
marijuana grow-op...
foxnews.com/ ... 00:37:10
ALTON, Ill. Authorities in Madison County say the owner of an Alton florist shop and three of his kids grew
a lot more than flowers...
kxmc.com/ ... 00:36:26
PIERRE, S.D... It's a class-4 felony in South Dakota to give or sell any amount of
marijuana to a minor punishable by up to 10 years in prison no matter how little or how much pot winds up in a kid's hands. However, the attorney general's office is pushing legislation that would base the punishment on the amounts of marijuana that minors receive. HB1061 would go a little easier on small amounts of marijuana but a lot tougher for large amounts...
news.monstersandcritics.com/ ... 00:35:47
Sydney - With cannabis now said to be the biggest cash crop on Australia's east coast, Queensland police Sunday launched a 'dial-in a druggie' campaign that enlists the help of the public to catch growers...
sfgate.com/ ... 00:35:29
California... Police can't enter a home without a warrant just because they see someone inside smoking
marijuana, a state appeals court ruled Friday. In overturning a Pacifica man's conviction, the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco said officers may enter someone's home to preserve evidence of a crime - but only if the crime is punishable by jail or prison. Under a 1975 California law, the court noted, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is a misdemeanor carrying a fine of as much as $100, with no jail time even for a repeat offense. That means police who see someone smoking can enter only if they have the resident's permission or a warrant from a judge, the court said...
nationalpost.com/ ... 00:34:45
Canada... The federal government lost another court challenge to its controversial medical
marijuana program, and now has 30 days to decide whether to appeal the ruling that declared one of its key policies unconstitutional. Under the current set of regulations, licensed producers are only allowed to grow the drug for one patient at a time. Federal Court Judge Barry Strayer said that one-to-one ratio violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The decision, the latest in a string of court cases, will essentially mean more choice for approved medical marijuana users and should provide easier access for them to the drug...
SAT 2008-JAN-12
Disinformation Propaganda & Spin
edition.cnn.com/ ... 16:55:51
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Friday for Europe to remove from its list of terrorist organizations two Colombian groups -- including FARC, the group that freed two hostages Thursday in a mission Chavez organized...
Nature can be Deadly
abcnews.go.com/ ... 16:33:59
Storms from Illinois to Louisiana are spawning rare January tornados, including one twister... in Caledonia, Miss... that
tossed a bus onto the roof of a school full of children...
Disturbing Family Patterns
thisislondon.co.uk/ ... 16:31:30
Insurance executive Alberto Izaga suffered an "extreme and sudden" psychological breakdown which made him think the little girl was possessed by the Devil. Sweating and shouting with rage, the 36-year-old millionaire ranted that "God doesn't exist! The universe doesn't exist! Humanity doesn't exist!" His terrified wife was powerless to stop him as he shook and punched their only child before repeatedly smashing her head against the floor... Shortly before... he had been affected by seeing a horror film made by the director of The Exorcist...
orlandosentinel.com/ ... 16:30:26
Every time he looked at his baby girl... he grew annoyed and angry because she was not the boy he had hoped for. ...abusing his daughter... became such a "habit" that he slapped her while she slept... [she] died Christmas Day... 4 months old... When a detective asked... what a 4-month-old could do to warrant such severe punishment, the report said he stated, "Nothing..."
Alcohol Was Involved
11alive.com/ ... 16:28:58
school bus driver in Clinton, Connecticut... in November... drank vodka for an hour and then drove a bus with 77 children... ignored radio calls from other drivers asking her to stop the bus... was swerving within lanes with the caution lights on... blood alcohol content was more than four times the legal limit... no injuries...
Opposing Tyranny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:25:38
Taiwan's opposition nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party has won a landslide victory in parliamentary polls...
Threats
thisislondon.co.uk/ ... 16:25:17
A plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up the Eiffel Tower has been uncovered. A scrambled short-wave radio conversation exposing the planned attack on the world's most visited monument was picked up by Portuguese air traffic controllers and passed on to French spy chiefs... in a "vague and muffled" radio conversation picked up by air traffic controllers in Lisbon on Thursday...
Digital Sex can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:14:02
Freehold [NJ]-based Too Much Media, which sells accounting software for adult Web sites, told its customers last month that a security breach on its computers allowed hackers to access various adult Web sites' subscriber lists. Keith Kimmel of Norman, Okla., who runs two Web sites that feature porn, said the breach has the potential to embarrass. "Would you really want a record floating around the Internet that you subscribe to hardcore bondage?.." appears stolen personal and company information is being used to bombard subscribers, many of whom would rather not have their identities known, with junk e-mails advertising sexually explicit images from competitors. No credit information appears to have been stolen...
Under Tyranny
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:07:27
China is so keen to keep foreign investment flowing that it probably will let private Web sites work around strict new rules limiting video-sharing to state-controlled companies, analysts say...
Transport Tragedy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:57:39
A military helicopter from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia taking soldiers home from Bosnia has crashed, killing all 11 people on board...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:21:28
A roadside bomb Wednesday killed four soldiers and wounded two others who had been carrying out a sweep for suspected terrorist cells in an area east of the capital...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:57:24
Fifty-nine Tamil Tiger rebels have been killed in the latest fighting in Sri Lanka, the military said, adding that one of its soldiers was also killed... the Tigers... have dismissed the figures...
Nuclear is Nasty
reuters.com/ ... 10:46:13
The U.S. Department of Energy has overstated the success of a long-standing program to prevent former Soviet nuclear scientists from selling their secrets to the highest bidder, a U.S. watchdog said on Friday...
Iran
reuters.com/ ... 10:17:36
"There's no doubt in my mind that shots would have been fired, had the situation demanded it," said Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff. "The incident ought to remind us all just how real is the threat posed by Iran and just how ready we are to meet that threat if it comes to it.... We will defend ourselves and our ships, and we will do so with deadly force if need be..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:16:46
The U.S. Navy said Friday that one of its ships fired warning shots at a small Iranian boat in the Strait of Hormuz in December during one of two serious encounters that month... first official confirmation that the United States had fired warning shots in any recent confrontation with Iran in the Gulf...
In the second incident that month, the USS Carr encountered three small Iranian craft on Dec. 22, two of which were armed... Carr did not fire warning shots, but sent warning blasts on the ships whistle, which caused the boats to turn around...
Sex can be... disturbing
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:12:47
Police in Norway hunting a paedophile linked to scores of assaults on young boys have arrested a suspect, some 30 years after the crimes began... nicknamed the "Pocket Man" by the press because he reportedly kept a hole in his trouser pockets... travelled the country, inducing boys aged between six and 12 to reach into a pocket on the pretence of helping him find an object... sometimes filled his pockets with sticky tape hoping his victims' hands would get stuck...
Iraq
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:57:59
The Iraqi parliament has passed legislation allowing former officials from Saddam Hussein's Baath party to return to public life... It will allow thousands of former party members to apply for reinstatement in the civil service and military...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:09:58
Security responsibility for Anbar province - once Iraq's most dangerous - could transfer to Iraqi forces by March, a senior US general said. Maj Gen Walter Gaskin of the US Marines said a fall in violence had paved the way for handing Anbar to Iraqi control...
Prison Sucks
nydailynews.com/ ... 16:57:26
ALBANY - Citing a drop in the state's inmate population, the Spitzer administration today targeted four prison facilities for closing, drawing sharp reaction from GOP pols representing the regions where the lockups are located. The administration said the closings would save the state more than $30 million a year in operating costs...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:13:39
American Olympian Marion Jones has been sentenced to six months in prison for lying about steroid use and involvement in a drugs fraud case...
[Banning her from sports, I could see. Making her go on the lecture circuit, great. But... PRISON??? WHAT TH...?]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:09:34
The number of men held at Guantanamo Bay is declining rapidly, but there is no way out for most of the Yemeni detainees... now making up the biggest group of prisoners... because their homeland's government and Washington are mired in a diplomatic impasse over security concerns...
Healing Ourselves
usatoday.com/ ... 16:55:11
The Food and Drug Administration ordered seven pharmacies Wednesday to stop making "false and misleading" claims about custom-made "bioidentical" hormones for menopausal symptoms... The FDA took action against the pharmacies, which often market their compounds online, for three main reasons. It said the businesses claimed their mixtures could prevent or treat illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke and cancer; claimed the mixtures were superior to approved commercial drugs; and used the hormone estriol, a weak estrogen that isn't FDA-approved...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 11:43:43
Army Spc.
Todd E. Davis,
22, of Raymore, Mo.
Army Staff Sgt.
Jonathan K. Dozier,
30, of Rutherford, Tenn.
Army Staff Sgt.
Sean M. Gaul,
29, of Reno, Nev.
Army Sgt.
Zachary W. McBride,
20, of Bend, Ore.
Army Sgt. 1st Class
Matthew I. Pionk,
30, of Superior, Wis.
Army Sgt.
Christopher A. Sanders,
22, of Roswell, N.M.
died Jan. 9 in Sinsil, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated during combat operations. They were assigned to the 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Division, Vilseck, Germany.
Animal Companions
reuters.com/ ... 11:06:58
Houston-area man was killed in a hunting accident after his dog stepped on a loaded shotgun in the back of a pick-up truck, triggering a blast that pierced the vehicle and the hunter's leg...
US Military
reuters.com/ ... 10:45:29
An anthropology professor from the East Bay campus of California State University near San Francisco, he's a self-described peacenik who opposed the war in Iraq, did his academic research in Guatemala and never carries a gun... part of the U.S. military "Human Terrain Team" (HTT) program, which embeds anthropologists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of helping tactical commanders in the field understand local cultures...
Dinosaurs -- still with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:07
New research into the Bristol dinosaur Thecodontosaurus suggests it lived on subtropical islands around the city and not in a desert. A microscopic study of marine algae and fossil pollen revealed the dinosaur lived just before the Jurassic Period in lushly vegetated islands. It had been thought the dinosaur lived in the arid uplands of the late Triassic Period. The original dinosaur was discovered in 1834 near what is now Bristol Zoo...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:32:11
A fossil unearthed in China has given scientists a rare glimpse of what dinosaurs were like in the flesh. The plant-eating Psittacosaurus had a thick layer of shark-like skin hidden under scales or feathers. Palaeontologists believe this tough outer coating supported the dinosaur's organs and protected it from predators. Tooth marks suggest the dinosaur was torn open by a scavenger, giving a unique insight into their biology, 100 million years after this one's death...
Cosmology
news.nationalgeographic.com/ ... 16:38:10
Astronomers have found three galaxies in a never before seen perfect alignmenta discovery that may help scientists better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy believed to dominate the universe... like beads on a string, one directly behind the other... "It's more unlikely than winning two consecutive bets in a single number of roulette..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:36:51
The "supermassive" black holes at the centres of most galaxies could be spinning at a dizzying rate... These celestial monsters may be rotating so fast, they are close to the maximum rates allowed by Einstein's theory of relativity...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:49
New work by a team of US astronomers has shown that wherever there is room for a planet to form around a young star, it does...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:31
A Nasa telescope has discovered bulky black holes lurking where they are least expected - in skinny galaxies. So-called supermassive black holes were thought to reside at the cores of nearly all galaxies. But svelte galaxies lacking a central concentration of stars - or bulge - were thought to be a rare exception. The latest results from the Spitzer Space Telescope suggest this is not the case...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:38
Hundreds of rogue black holes, each several thousand times more massive than the Sun, may be roaming the Milky Way galaxy...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:13
Astronomers have weighed the biggest known black hole in the Universe. The monster celestial object is 18 billion times more massive than our own Sun, says a team from Finland - six times larger than the previous record...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:03
Two old stars may be undergoing a second episode of planet formation, long after their initial window of opportunity...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:32:43
Astronomers probing the distant Universe have found the building blocks of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. They discovered ancient galaxies, about one-tenth the size of the Milky Way, which were among the first to form in the Universe. Over billions of years, galaxies like these merged to form much bigger spiral galaxies such as our own...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:28:25
The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos, the more they find it's a bizarre and violent universe. The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing "rogue" black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach.
"It's an odd universe we live in..."
The odds of one of these black holes swallowing up Earth or the sun or wreaking other havoc is somewhere around 1 in 10 quadrillion in any given year... "This is the glory of the universe.... What is odd and what is normal is changing..."
an approaching gas cloud... has a mass 1 million times that of the sun. It is 47 quadrillion miles away. But it's heading toward our Milky Way galaxy at 150 miles per second. And when it hits, there will be fireworks that form new stars and "really light up the neighborhood..." 40 million years in the future...
When astronomers this week unveiled a giant map of mysterious dark matter in a supercluster of galaxies, they explained that the violence of the cramped-together galaxies is so great that there is now an accepted vocabulary for various types of cosmic brutal behavior. The gravitational force between the clashing galaxies can cause "slow strangulation," in which crucial gas is gradually removed from the victim galaxy. "Stripping" is a more violent process in which the larger galaxy rips gas from the smaller one. And then there's "harassment," which is a quick fly-by encounter...
Feeding Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 16:59:11
Consuming too much sorbitol, a sweetener widely used in "sugar-free" chewing gum and sweets, can cause serious bowel problems...
bloomberg.com/ ... 16:26:16
Carl Karcher, who borrowed $311 to buy a Los Angeles hot dog cart in 1941 and turned it into a fast-food empire with more than 3,000 Carl's Jr. and Hardees restaurants in 13 countries, has died. He was 90... He introduced salad bars, char-broiled chicken-breast sandwiches and self- service beverage stations, which are now common, according to Nation's Restaurant News...
reuters.com/ ... 11:29:46
Sitting down for regular family meals may protect teen girls from developing eating disorders...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:26:04
Meat and milk from cloned animals is probably safe for humans, the European Union's food safety agency said in a preliminary report released Friday... "Based on current knowledge, there is no expectation that clones or their progeny would introduce any new food safety risks compared with conventionally bred animals..."
Solar System
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:25:06
The possibility of a collision between Mars and an approaching asteroid has been effectively ruled out... 1 in 10,000... no closer than 2,480 miles...
[Still pretty close in astronomic terms!]
Gardeners of Earth
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:23:41
New York... the 100-year-old European beech on Central Park's Cherry Hill was the center of attention Thursday, chosen by city officials as the first of 25 "historical" trees to be cloned as part of a
plan to add a million new trees to public spaces over the next decade...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:16:32
At least 50 rare jackals were poisoned to death in northern India by farmers angry over alleged attacks on children and damage to crops blamed on the animals...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:59:50
A Greenpeace ship on Saturday confronted a Japanese whaling fleet that had initially planned to hunt protected humpbacks... in the Antarctic Ocean after a 10-day search... the hunting ships immediately steamed off with the activists in pursuit...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:59:08
At least 19 bald eagles died Friday after gorging themselves on a truck full of fish waste outside a processing plant. Fifty or more eagles swarmed into the truck, whose retractable fabric cover was open, after the truck was moved outside the plant... The birds became too soiled to fly or clean themselves, and with temperatures in the mid-teens, began to succumb to the cold. Some birds became so weak they sank into the fish slime and were crushed... truck's contents had to be dumped onto the floor of the Ocean Beauty Seafoods plant so the birds could be retrieved... survivors were taken to a heated fish and wildlife warehouse to recover, though some were in critical condition...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:25:28
Veterinarians and pediatric surgeons combined their efforts to remove a cyst near the spine of a baby gorilla at the Woodland Park Zoo, an operation they believe is the first of its kind...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:22:52
Gemina, a giraffe with a distinctive crooked neck and one of the most beloved animals at the Santa Barbara Zoo, has died. She was 21... "We did everything we could but the time came when we had to make the humane decision..."
Because It's There
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:10:56
Nepal, the country of Mount Everest, has been remembering Sir Edmund Hillary, the joint first conqueror of the summit... He continued visiting Nepal regularly until the end of his life, drawn to its communities as much as to its mountains... Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of the man who reached the summit with him, said the New Zealand explorer had remained a very simple and humble man. He said he was a father figure to Sherpas and would be greatly missed...
Nature can be Beautiful
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:02:56
The
morning flurry Friday was the first in memory in the heart of the Iraqi capital.
Perhaps more significant, however, was the rare ripple of delight through a city snarled by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings. "For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this falling in Baghdad.... When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern Baghdad.... But
snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent scene was beyond my imagination..."
"...This scene has really brought me joy. I called my other friends and the morning turned out to be a very happy one in my life."... "cotton-like snow drops covering the trees...."
[These folks don't even have words for snowflakes!]
There were
no reports of bloodshed
during the snowstorm...
Data Theft
ibtimes.com/ ... 16:57:51
Airline travelers were exposed to identity theft by a U.S. government web site meant to help them remove their names from security a no-fly list, according to a new report... Large amounts of personal information submitted by 247 people could have been easily seen by hackers between October 2006 and February 2007...
Socialism in Action
suntimes.com/ ... 16:57:08
Metra officials on Friday said they still plan to raise fares 10 percent Feb. 1 -- despite a mass-transit funding bill that would avert Jan. 20 fare hikes and service cuts at the CTA and Pace if state legislators approve a last-minute change from the governor. Also Friday, Gov. Blagojevich signaled he wants even more people to ride mass transit for free...
Big Brother
washingtonpost.com/ ... 16:56:39
A new Bush administration plan to create national standards for driver's licenses drew heavy criticism yesterday from civil liberties groups, some Republican and Democratic lawmakers, governors, and the travel industry. The critics said the new licenses anticipated under the plan, which is aimed at screening out potential terrorists and uncovering illegal immigrants, could still be forged. They also complained that the program, known as Real ID, would be costly for states to implement, potentially restrict summer travel, and
allow private companies access to the personal data of most U.S. citizens...
states have until May 2011 before they need to begin issuing licenses that meet the department's new guidelines, and until December 2014 to begin replacing current licenses...
Big Nanny
reuters.com/ ... 16:59:25
The U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush have stymied efforts to tighten regulation of tobacco and discourage smoking and states have not spent nearly enough to battle cigarettes, the American Lung Association said on Thursday...
iht.com/ ... 16:43:27
The conceit in the 1960s show "The Outer Limits" was that outside forces had taken control of your television set. Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages...
Supernatural Consequences
azcentral.com/ ... 16:37:11
Book of Mormon... "After thousands of years all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are
among
the ancestors of the American Indians," the new introduction reads. In previous editions, the phrase was "are the ancestors..." What's the big deal? Church defenders say there is nothing important in the change. But skeptics view it differently. The issue is that church missionaries have long portrayed Book of Mormon stories as fact. To them, it looks like the new wording is a quiet concession that DNA research accurately contradicts the scriptural claim... "In a way, this is a mask for a more serious problem.... The Book of Mormon is entirely inconsistent with the archaeology, the DNA, actually with all the evidence we have from the ancient Americas..."
Love is Strange
foxnews.com/ ... 16:35:59
Buddy Holly's widow is trying to keep the woman whose name was made famous by the hit song "Peggy Sue" from selling a book about her friendship with the late rock 'n' roll star... 2008 is the 50th anniversary of the release of "Peggy Sue..."
Marriage Today
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 16:32:19
A pair of twins who were adopted by separate families as babies got married without knowing they were brother and sister... Details of the identities of the twins involved have been kept secret, but Lord Alton said the pair did not realise they were related until after their marriage...
Reasons for Repeal
breitbart.com/ ... 16:44:40
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands... A man claiming to be a Catholic priest was arrested Friday at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after he was caught carrying 7.7 pounds of cocaine under his robes... initially refused to undergo a routine body check "for religious reasons..."
msnbc.msn.com/ ... 16:27:09
PHOENIX - A woman leaving an eyeglass store is grabbed in the parking lot by four men who force her, kicking and screaming, into a pickup. The kidnappers demand a $900,000 ransom. But police soon realize her family is holding something back and isn't fully cooperating with them. Later, investigators find out that relatives have arranged the woman's release on their own. And they discover that members of the family are heavy into
marijuana trafficking. The case illustrates how a terrifyingly common crime in Latin America has moved across the border into the United States: Criminals and their family members are being kidnapped by fellow criminals and held for six-figure ransoms...
US Election 2008
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 16:43:47
Asked whether the American commanders on the scene were right in not attacking the Iranian boats, Mr Huckabee said he backed their decisions, before warning Iran:
"Be prepared, first, to put your sights on the American vessel. And then be prepared that the next thing you see will be the gates of Hell, because that is exactly what you will see after that..."
blogs.abcnews.com/ ... 16:42:11
The plane carrying Sen. Barack Obama struck another plane while taxiing at Midway Airport in Chicago early Saturday morning...
lvrj.com/ ... 16:24:28
"No woman is illegal,"
Clinton said, to cheers...
canada.com/ ... 16:23:09
Tiktaalik roseae -- a 375-million-year-old fossilized "fishapod" discovered on Ellesmere Island in 2004 -- has been hailed as an "evolutionary icon" because it represents the crucial transition from sea to land for some of the Earth's most primitive creatures. The discovery was announced amid global fanfare in 2006, and Tiktaalik is now the showcase species in a report released last week by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to promote the study of evolution and counter calls for U.S. schools to teach creationism... That issue has dogged Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee...
"With jaw bones that correspond to gill bones in fish and sharks, a body plan shared with headless worms, and with parts of a DNA recipe shared with relatives of jellyfish, Huckabee's ties to some of the most humble forms of life on our planet run deep indeed..."
World of Sexual Cultures
reuters.com/ ... 11:32:05
A "substantial minority" of 15-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, according [to] results of a survey of 33,943 adolescents from 24 European and North American countries.... The percentages of 15-year-olds who said they had sexual intercourse varied by country ranging from 14.1 percent in Croatia to 37.6 percent in England. Boys were more apt than girls to report having had sexual intercourse... In additions, 13.2 percent of the sexually active 15-year-olds surveyed reported that they used no form of contraception during their last intercourse episode... the vast majority (82 percent) is acting responsibly, "protecting themselves and their partner against pregnancy with age-appropriate contraception (condoms and/or pills)..."
Researching the Obvious
reuters.com/ ... 11:29:32
College parties that boast drinking games or sexualized themes or costumes may encourage students to drink to a particularly excessive degree... [Is the relationship genuinely causal or only culturally associative?]
Digital Threat
sfgate.com/ ... 16:32:38
Ninety-five percent of personal computers are vulnerable to attack by hackers due to unpatched flaws in their software applications...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:27:21
Security experts are warning about a stealthy Windows virus that steals login details for online bank accounts. In the last month, the malicious program has racked up about 5,000 victims - most of whom are in Europe... it buries itself deep inside Windows to avoid detection... rootkit... tries to overwrite part of a computer's hard drive called the Master Boot Record (MBR)... Although the password-stealing programs that Mebroot installs can be found by security software, few commercial anti-virus packages currently detect its presence... Computers running Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 that are not fully patched are all vulnerable to the virus...
Unclear on the Concept
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:24:24
Artists and sports bodies should share profits from tickets resold on internet auction sites, MPs have said. In a report on touting, they have stopped short of calling for a ban, but have told online touts to "clean up their act" because they exploit fans...
[Unclarity about capitalism, if not outright fear of entrepreneurship, has always affected those whose income is paid by taxes....! The presumption seems to be that you are exploited because you pay more for something you want.]
World Climate
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:19:32
The next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should deal with the "frightening" possibility that both Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets start melting at the same time... Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change... chairman Rajendra Pachauri... plans to visit Antarctica next week with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg...
[I'm sure their carbon footprint for this absurd jaunt will be offset somehow...?]
World Energy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:17:01
New research shows that prairie grasses grown using only moderate amounts of fertilizer on marginal land can produce significant amounts of ethanol...
Digital Future is Now
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:11:49
Sony's...
Rolly
is an MP3 player the size and shape of a turkey egg. It rolls and spins around on the floor and blasts music out of two built-in stereo speakers, while flapping two speaker lids like it's a cancan dancer with folding fans. Pulsing multicolored diodes complete the sensory experience...
stun gun models
in "Fashion Pink" and a leopard print scheme. The leopard one costs $379, while regular Tasers cost $349... [with] music player holster...
Robot Guitar
takes care of the boring part of being a guitarist: the tuning...
camera [in] a swimming mask...
a small stadium scoreboard, showing points, period and time remaining, on top of a MP3-playing boombox...
world's first motorized, rideable ice chest...
[apparently does not have a built-in mp3 player... yet....]
Culture in Transition
reuters.com/ ... 10:54:15
Telecommuting may boost morale, and cut stress, but it can have the opposite effect on those left behind in the office...
[megaduh!]
Language Culture
reuters.com/ ... 10:53:12
nominations for the Macquarie Dictionary Online... [Austalia's] biggest online dictionary....
"arse antlers..." a tattoo in that fashionable area above the buttocks....
"tanorexia..." obsession with a suntan...
"salad dodger..." an obese person...
"infomania..." those who constantly put aside the job at hand to concentrate on incoming email and text messages...
Digital Business
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:21:11
British fans of the Pandora net radio service will be cut off on 15 January. Pandora said it was being forced to stop streaming music to British users of the service thanks to an unresolved royalty row...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:08:21
A scrappy, aggressively priced two-pound notebook with a surprisingly broad set of features, Eee is a no-brainer purchase for tech-savvy travelers who want to downsize their luggage at low cost. It also makes a great gift, at least as practical as Apple Inc.'s iPhone and about the same price...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:07:08
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. will become Panasonic Corp., shedding the name of its charismatic founder in favor of its more internationally known brand...
reuters.com/ ... 10:53:33
After years of booming sales supported by videotapes, DVDs and the Internet, the adult film industry is being challenged by easy video-sharing Web sites offering explicit content for free. "We're dealing with rampant piracy, tons of free content..."
reuters.com/ ... 10:50:17
British rock band Radiohead scored its second No. 1 album on the U.S. pop charts on Wednesday with a release that was initially sold on the Internet under a revolutionary "name-your-own-price" system. "In Rainbows" also topped the charts in Britain, Canada, France, Japan and Ireland, a representative for the group said...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:49:40
A satellite due to launch in three years promises to expand high-speed Internet services to rural Americans who cannot get access through cable or phone companies...
Running the Internet
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:16:14
Internet law professor Michael Geist looks at what doubling the number of users will mean to the net...
Last month hundreds of people descended on Rio de Janiero, Brazil, for the second annual
Internet Governance Forum...
With more than a billion internet users worldwide, doubling that number, which should happen within the next decade, will obviously have a profound effect on the network, technology, the computer software industry, access to knowledge, and our environment...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:49:08
The Internet's key oversight agency is taking a preliminary step toward combating domain name tasting - the online equivalent of buying expensive clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a party... The practice ties up millions of domain names at any given time, making it more difficult for legitimate individuals and businesses to get a desirable name... Don't expect any immediate relief... The operators of the ".org" suffix already won approval to charge companies that make too many returns. The number of deletions dropped to 152,700 in June, compared with 2.4 million in May, after the new fee took effect. New recommendations would apply to other global suffixes, including the Internet's most popular, ".com..."
Broadcast is Dead
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:20:57
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed new taxes on internet access and mobile phone use...
would help fund France's two public television channels, which would be free of advertising...
[!!!!!! This is like taxing cars to fund blacksmiths!]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:47:19
Best Buy Inc.'s chief executive said Tuesday that he is "very nervous" about being able to supply customers with the millions of digital TV converter boxes needed ahead of the shutdown of most analog TV transmissions in 13 months. "I think it's one of the biggest risks our industry has..." Full-power television stations will turn off their analog signal on Feb. 17, 2009...
Raising Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:46:46
first "Sandbox Summit" at CES. The trick, participants said, is for parents to intelligently monitor their children's use of computers and communication devices...
[megaduh!]
Theory of Justice
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:31:39
A federal judge blocked the government Friday from conducting background checks of low-risk employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after an appeals court said the investigations threaten the constitutional rights of workers...
reuters.com/ ... 10:15:10
A U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday that four former Guantanamo prisoners, all British citizens, have no right to sue top Pentagon officials and military officers for torture, abuse and violations of their religious rights... The appeals court cited a lack of jurisdiction over the lawsuit, ruled the defendants enjoyed qualified immunity for acts taken within the scope of their government jobs and held the religious right law did not apply to the detainees... the attorney who argued the case for the detainees vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court...
Sportsmanship
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:13:58
American Olympian Marion Jones has been sentenced to six months in prison for lying about steroid use and involvement in a drugs fraud case...
[Banning her from sports, I could see. Making her go on the lecture circuit, great. But... PRISON??? WHAT TH...?]
FRI 2008-JAN-11
Transport Tragedy
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:31:31
At least three people have died in a 50-vehicle pile up on a busy motorway, blanketed by fog and smoke from bush fires in the US state of Florida. The incident occurred on Interstate 4 between Tampa and Orlando... smouldering remains of dozens of burned-out lorries and cars...
[perhaps caused in part by]
smoke from the brush fire that was lit as part of a controlled burn...
1960s - less with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:30:32
Philip Agee did not survive surgery for perforated ulcers... has died aged 72... former CIA operative... in 1969... exposed the agency's undercover operations in Latin America and later settled in Cuba... caused outrage by naming former colleagues in a book... 22-page list... The US government said he was a traitor and that some of the people he named were later murdered... settled in Cuba in the 1980s after being refused residency by several European states... Cuban Communist Party newspaper... called him "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world"...
Iran
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:31:59
An alleged threat to blow up US warships "may not have come" from Iranian speedboats involved in a recent stand-off, the BBC has learned. The voice on a Pentagon tape could instead have come from another ship in the area or a transmitter on land, senior US Navy sources told the BBC...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:19:57
Iran's Revolutionary Guards say the US navy fabricated evidence that a convoy of its ships was harassed by Iranian speedboats in Gulf waters on Sunday...
Nature can be Deadly
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:17:57
At least 28 people are reported to have died in Iran's heaviest snowfall in recent years. Eight people froze to death as severe blizzards left 40,000 people stranded in their cars... Tehran has declared two days of national holiday, urging people to stay at home to avoid the bitter cold. The temperature has been down as low as -24 degrees Celsius, and for the first time in living memory there has been snow in the country's southern deserts....
Pakistan
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:17:39
President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview published Friday that U.S. troops would be regarded as invaders if they crossed into Pakistan to hunt al-Qaida militants. He also said he would resign if opposition parties tried to impeach him after next month's elections...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 10:40:09
Raising pressure on Tehran, the United States on Wednesday slapped sanctions on a general from the country's elite Qods force and three Iraqis living in exile in Syria and Iran for fomenting violence in Iraq...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:55
The Sri Lanka government has dismissed a call by Tamil Tiger rebels for both sides to observe a 2002 ceasefire. The rebels said on Thursday they were "shocked and disappointed" that the government was ending the ceasefire. But the government accused the rebels of using the ceasefire as a cover to "unleash terror activities"...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:23:14
The Spanish government says two men arrested in the Basque Country are suspected of carrying out the deadly 2006 Madrid airport bombing. The blast in a car park killed two Ecuadoreans and wrecked peace talks with the Basque separatist group Eta...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:22:58
"It all happened so quickly I didn't have time to think about it.... As we were queuing up to shake hands with the president, I became aware of a man who was jostling in the crowd behind me.... He asked me to get out of the way just as I was shaking hands with the president. He produced a large knife which he was concealing under a Maldives flag and lunged towards the president shouting 'Allah is great'. Fortunately I was able to fend him off with my left hand and his attempt to stab the president in the stomach was foiled..." His left hand was badly cut in the incident...
Correspondents say that the incident has raised concerns over the possibility of Islamic militancy in the traditionally peaceful archipelago which is predominantly Muslim...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:16:37
Nine American soldiers were killed in the first two days of a new American drive to kill al-Qaida in Iraq fighters holed up in districts north of the capital...
Six soldiers were killed and four were wounded Wednesday in a booby-trapped house in Diyala province...
three U.S. soldiers were killed and two were wounded Tuesday in an attack in Salahuddin province...
WW2 - still with us
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:17:20
President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing... Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:15:57
The secret diary of a young Jewish woman recounting two years under the Nazi occupation portrays the slow shattering of her life, ending with her deportation on her 24th birthday and death in a concentration camp. Helene Berr's account of life under occupation was destined for her fiance... The diary - published for the first time this month - describes the small joys, the pervasive angst and the growing horror under the Nazis. But hate is a word that Berr, an advanced student of English at the Sorbonne, seemed not to know...
Under Tyranny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:24:14
Chinese
migrant workers will have to declare their political affiliations when registering for residency permits...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:23:56
A
French
court has ruled that press articles about alcohol should be subject to advertising regulations that provide for health warnings. The ruling came in a case brought by a state-sponsored association against a Paris daily that published an feature on "The triumph of champagne". The paper, Le Parisien, argued that it was a "strictly editorial" piece. But the court has ordered the paper's publisher to pay the association 5,000 euros (£3,727) in damages...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:16:50
Detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with a representative of
Myanmar's
ruling junta Friday for the first time in nearly two months, a government official said...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:15:14
The young women practice posture by balancing books on their heads while squeezing a sheet of paper between the knees. A perfect smile is honed by hours in front of a mirror with a chopstick clasped between the teeth. Training for potential Olympic medal ceremony hostesses seems plucked from a 1950s charm school, but that's part of
Beijing's
meticulous planning for the Summer Games that even includes breeding flowers that will bloom in the oppressive August heat...
reuters.com/ ... 10:12:55
China...
About 6,000 Web sites have been found carrying illegal, sexually suggestive adverts involving sex-related drugs or health supplements, said the People's Daily... Some 199 would be closed and 130 "rectified..." did not say what would happen to the rest...
World Zookeeping
kvue.com/ ... 13:04:16
While visiting the Houston Zoo recently, Ayala, a Houston attorney, recorded a short clip of video which is now posted on YouTube. It shows caretakers at the Houston Zoo taking a 20-pound chunk of raw meat tied onto a rope and tossing it into a lions pen. Guests then got to tug on the rope. It happened in December, two days after a tiger escaped and at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a teenage boy. Animal behaviorist Louis Dorfman says playing tug of war with a lion eating meat does nothing more than taunt the animal...
Because It's There
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:25
Tributes have been paid to
Sir Edmund Hillary,
who made the first ascent of the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, after he died aged 88... Sir Edmund died of a heart attack at Auckland Hospital... Nepali Sherpas lit butter lamps and offered special Buddhist prayers in monasteries for his reincarnation... first living New Zealander to appear on a banknote... New Zealand's prime minister described him as a "colossus"... "The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived... But most of all he was a quintessential Kiwi... He was ours - from his craggy appearance to laconic style to his directness and honesty. All New Zealanders will deeply mourn his passing..." He was 33 years old when he became the first man to climb the 8,850m (29,035ft) peak, with
Tenzing Norgay
, on 29 May 1953... Returning to Everest's South Col camp, he famously greeted another member of the British expedition group with the words: "Well, George, we've knocked the bastard off..."
In our genes
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:14:26
A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young... Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light... The fact that the pig's offspring also appeared to have the green genes would indicate that the genetic modification had successfully penetrated every cell...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 09:46:36
Army Sgt.
David J. Drakulich,
22, of Reno, Nev., died Jan. 9 in Chagali, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.
defenselink.mil/ ... 09:45:44
Army Sgt.
David J. Hart,
22, of Lake View Terrace, Calif., who died in Balad, Iraq
Army Pfc.
Ivan E. Merlo,
19, of San Marcos, Calif., who died in Samarra, Iraq
Army Pfc.
Phillip J. Pannier,
20, of Washburn, Ill., who died in Samarra, Iraq
Jan. 9 of wounds sustained during combat operations in Samarra, Iraq. The incident is under investigation. They were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
US Military
reuters.com/ ... 10:39:49
The U.S. Marine accused of leading his unit in killing 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 was arraigned on voluntary manslaughter charges on Wednesday and a military judge set his court-martial for February. During a brief hearing at the Camp Pendleton Marine base in Southern California, Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich was ordered to face court-martial on February 25, in keeping with a demand by his defense attorneys for a speedy trial...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:34
The only US army officer to be charged over the Iraq jail abuse scandal has been cleared of any wrongdoing by the US military authorities. Lt-Col Steven Jordan was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison's interrogation unit when pictures of US soldiers abusing prisoners were taken in 2003. He was cleared of mistreatment charges in August, but convicted of disobeying orders not to discuss the inquiry. That conviction has now been thrown out, angering human rights campaigners...
defenselink.mil/ ... 09:44:26
The Department of Defense announced today its recruiting and retention statistics for the active and reserve components for the month of December.... All services met or exceeded recruiting goals for the month of December... and have surpassed goals for fiscal 2008 to date... Five of the six reserve components met or exceeded their accession goals for December 2007; however, all six have made their goals for fiscal 2008 to date....
Tax Money Will Fix All
usatoday.com/ ... 13:03:38
Tens of thousands of people whose property was destroyed when Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans' protective levees have filed claims demanding the government pay astronomical sums that would be enough money to make multimillionaires of everyone in Louisiana... Army Corps of Engineers received 247 claims from residents, businesses and government agencies seeking $1 billion or more... Just the top filings add up to so much money that the entire annual output of the nation's economy $12 trillion couldn't pay them off...
Theory of Sex Education
reuters.com/ ... 10:39:13
KATHMANDU... Ignoring social taboos in this conservative nation, a Nepali radio program on safe sex is spreading awareness against HIV/AIDS and offers life-saving advice to young people who are vulnerable to the disease. Confined only to a few towns six years ago, "Chatting with my best friend", a youth-friendly program about serious day-to-day issues like sexual health and HIV/AIDS, has expanded to cover much of this mountainous nation. Many Nepalis are now glued to the weekly, hour-long program... "Now there is a change. Even parents and school teachers advise the young people to listen to the program about sexual health..."
Sportsmanship
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:32:58
Organised crime - including the Russian mafia - could be involved in fixing matches, the head of women's tennis has told BBC Sport. Larry Scott said some players claimed they had been asked to throw matches. Scott said: "One has to assume that people running organised crime would be involved in trying to gain an advantage by corrupting the competition. "We have to be prepared for the possibility [of Russian mafia involvement] but we have no proof..."
But is it Art?
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:19:37
Police in Brazil say they have recovered two paintings worth millions of dollars stolen last month from a museum in the centre of Sao Paulo...
Digital Business
reuters.com/ ... 10:14:51
British music fans will pay less for downloads from Apple's online iTunes store after Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs reached a deal with the European Commission. British consumers have been angry at paying nearly 10 percent more than others in Europe for iTunes content to play on Apple's hugely popular iPods...
Theory of Justice
reuters.com/ ... 10:11:10
A computer systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Tuesday for trying to sabotage his company's servers out of fear he was about to lose his job... longest ever federal prison term for a criminal attempt to damage a computer system... also ordered to pay $81,200 in restitution...
THU 2008-JAN-10
Theory of Sex Education
post-gazette.com/ ... 01:48:34
[26yo F] teacher in the Moon Area School District, has admitted to having sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old student... in her car... in a school parking lot after an activity... sent lewd text messages and nude photos of herself to the boy...
chron.com/ ... 01:46:56
assistant principal entered... [42yo F] Westfield High School teacher['s]... 10th-grade English classroom after school on Thursday and found her performing oral sex on a 16-year-old male student...
Sex can be... disturbing
msnbc.msn.com/ ... 01:45:16
A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment's employees...
Prison Sucks
sun-sentinel.com/ ... 01:45:02
Victoria Sando, a paralyzed gunshot victim, remained in the Broward County jail for the 13th day Wednesday despite a flurry of legal wrangling...
Transport Threat
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 01:39:01
Boeing has been ordered to ensure passengers on its new 787 Dreamliner jet cannot hack into the flight system and take control of the plane...
Disturbing Family Patterns
orlandosentinel.com/ ... 01:38:24
BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. - A day after reporting his four young children were missing, a [37yo] shrimp fisherman broke down and confessed that he threw them off an 80-foot-high bridge to their deaths... ranged in age from a few months to 3 years... had a drug habit and had argued with his wife... came to Alabama from Vietnam in 1984...
Under Tyranny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 01:36:56
local people attempted to stop a rubbish truck from dumping refuse at a site that they argued was too close to their village... Members of the Chinese municipal inspectors, known as the Chengguan, intervened... Wei Wenhua, the manager of a construction company in Tianmen City, was driving by and stopped to film the confrontation on his mobile phone. When Mr Wei refused the Chengguan's demands that he delete the footage, he was beaten to death on the spot... Thousands of people have been posting messages on Chinese websites calling for the government agency involved in the incident to be abolished... There have also been large demonstrations in the province of Hubei where the attack occurred...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
keyetv.com/ ... 01:35:27
Two Mexican federal agents were killed and three more were wounded in a gunfight late Wednesday with a group of suspects in the border city of Reynosa... shootout comes after the arrests of three U.S. residents and seven other suspects in a deadly Monday shootout just across the border from Texas. Mexican officials say the 10 are suspected members of the powerful Gulf drug cartel...
Iraq
newscientist.com/ ... 01:34:27
The death toll in Iraq may be far lower than previously claimed, according to a team working for the Iraqi Ministry of Health. The researchers estimate that the number of violent deaths in Iraq between the US-led invasion of March 2003 and the end of June 2006 to be between 104,000 and 223,000. This loss of life is described as "massive", but is well below the figure of 600,000 violent deaths claimed by a team of Iraqi and US scientists in autumn 2006...
US Military
defenselink.mil/ ... 01:51:33
National Guard... January 9, 2008... This week the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps announced an increase, while the Coast Guard number remained unchanged. The net collective result is
2,421 more reservists
mobilized than last week.... This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized to
92,673,
including both units and individual augmentees....
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 01:53:57
Army Maj.
Michael L. Green,
36, of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, assigned to Headquarters, V Corps, Heidelberg, died in Laghar Juy, Afghanistan
Army Sgt.
James K. Healy,
25, of Hesperia, Calif, assigned to the 703rd Explosive Ordnance Detachment, Fort Knox, Ky., died at Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan
Jan. 7 of wounds suffered when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device in Laghar Juy, Afghanistan
defenselink.mil/ ... 01:50:03
Army Pfc.
Timothy R. Hanson,
23, of Kenosha, Wis., died Jan. 7 in Salmon Pak, Iraq, of wounds suffered from small arms fire. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Ga. The incident is under investigation.
defenselink.mil/ ... 01:48:58
Army Spc.
James D. Gudridge,
20, of Carthage, N.Y., died Jan. 6 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
Animal Companions
koat.com/ ... 01:47:36
SANTA FE, N.M. -- A woman drowned when she apparently tried to retrieve a kitten from a 55-gallon rain barrel at her home southeast of Santa Fe... kitten is alive, and most likely climbed out over [her]...
Healing Ourselves
news.scotsman.com/ ... 01:32:39
TECHNIQUES for forecasting earthquakes could also be used to predict when epilepsy sufferers will have fits... notably that the longer the period since a previous fit or earthquake, the longer until the next one... The study also reveals a similarity between the small tremors that precede large earthquakes and the tiny spikes in the brain's electrical activity just before a seizure...
Theory of Education
cumberlink.com/ ... 01:44:28
Andrew Figueiredo thought he was just taking a vitamin and a dietary supplement, but South Middleton School District administrators say he was taking medication without authorization and suspended him... father:.. "Zero tolerance equals zero common sense..."
People are Trashy
usatoday.com/ ... 01:42:33
Declaring war on the "white pollution" choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free flimsy plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to cloth bags steps largely welcomed by merchants and shoppers on Wednesday. The measure, effective June 1, eliminates the flimsiest bags and forces stores to charge for more durable bags, making China the latest nation to target plastic bags in a bid to cut waste and conserve resources...
World Energy
seattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 01:42:00
A Swedish company plans to harness the body heat generated by thousands of commuters scrambling to catch their trains at Stockholm's main railway station and use it for heating a nearby office building... believes the system can provide about 15 percent of the heating needed for a 13-storey building... About 250,000 people pass through the station every day... "All that's needed is a few pumps and some pipes..."
Digital Business
seattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 01:41:02
The Asus Eee PC is about the size of a small hardback book, and weighs two pounds. Rather than storing data on a spinning hard drive, it uses the type of solid-state flash memory more common in portable music players. It comes with the Linux operating system preinstalled, and it sells for as little as $300... one in a series of low-cost, flash-based computers hitting the market. Such machines will be in the spotlight Wednesday at CES during a symposium on technology in developing nations... are also becoming more common in the U.S. and other developed countries... faster boot times... more energy efficiency... significantly smaller amounts of storage...
The trend is complicating matters for Microsoft Corp... wasn't originally designed to work on computers with such small amounts of storage...
US Election 2008
worldnetdaily.com/ ... 01:43:40
A teenager who invented a series of rings with interchangeable rocks is challenging the use by the Barack Obama presidential campaign of a "Change Rocks" slogan. That's because, according to U.S. trademark No. 3,266,236, that slogan belongs to Stefan Doyno, a Scarsdale, N.Y., resident who invented the jewelry products rings and pendants...
cnsnews.com/ ... 01:43:03
Rove: Obama's 'Smarmy, Prissy' Slap Helped Clinton...
apnews.myway.com/ ... 01:33:23
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson ended his campaign for the presidency Wednesday after twin fourth-place finishes...
TUE 2008-JAN-08
Theory of Sex Education
abclocal.go.com/ ... 16:39:09
SPRING, TX... 42-year-old Westfield High School teacher... arrested for allegedly having sex with a student in the classroom... third time in the last four months, a teacher for the district is accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a student...
Nudity can be disturbing
hosted.ap.org/ ... 16:02:08
ARLINGTON, Ore... Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist created a stir with her MySpace page, where at one time anyone could see photos of her on one of the town's fire engines, clad only in a black bra and panties... "This isn't the way we want our city to be portrayed..." "That's my personal life," she said. "It has nothing to do with my mayor's position..."
Love is Strange
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:56:39
A western Pennsylvania man who mailed a bloody cow's head to his wife's lover has been sentenced to probation and community service...
Nature vs Infrastructure
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:30:47
A cat... caused a power outage that blacked out more than 12,000 homes and businesses... entered an electrical substation, snuggled up to a warm transformer and contacted a live circuit... killed the cat...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 14:57:12
U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a series of operations on Tuesday targeting al Qaeda in Iraq after an upsurge in suicide bombings which U.S. commanders say are an attempt by the militant group to reignite sectarian violence...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:55:59
A Taleban commander in Afghanistan responsible for leading attacks on British troops says he has been freed from prison after paying a bribe. Mullah Sorkh Naqaibullah told the BBC he paid $15,000 (£7,500) to the Afghan authorities to win his freedom. It was the third time that the leader, known as the "Red Mullah", had been captured and released...
Criminally Stupid
1600kush.com/ ... 16:42:08
STILLWATER Okla... woman... released after admitting "I took
marijuana to my brother in the Cushing prison..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 14:54:50
...The man walked into a station to report that he had been held up at gunpoint by a gang who had stolen his mobile phone. But when the detective phoned the number of the phone reportedly stolen, it rang in the complainant's pocket. "The shock left him speechless for a few minutes...." the man, 25, was then arrested for perjury...
Violence
cnn.com/ ... 16:32:34
BLAIRSVILLE, Georgia... A young hiker whose body was found in northern Georgia died from blunt force trauma to the head and was decapitated... charges against the suspect in the case were upgraded to murder... led investigators to her body Monday...
siouxcityjournal.com/ ... 16:07:58
SIOUX CITY -- Two girls [10 & 8] found dead in a smoke-filled house Sunday were the victims of a ritual slaying... stepfather... charged with two counts of first-degree murder... told investigators he was casting a spell that "had gone bad" and the spell "could have had severe consequences..." appear to have died of strangulation and stab wounds...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:52:21
A quick-thinking Boy Scout foiled an assassination attempt on the president of the Maldives on Tuesday, grabbing an attacker's knife as the man leapt from a crowd and lunged at the leader...
Transport Tragedy
ap.google.com/ ... 01:12:41
MEXICAN HAT, Utah... A ninth person died Monday after a bus carrying skiers home from a Colorado resort plunged off a damp, twisting highway in southeastern Utah and landed 41 feet below with its tires ripped away and the roof destroyed. "The bus looked like a convertible..." 51 passengers were aboard...
Nature can be Deadly
4029tv.com/ ... 17:14:35
One person is dead after a tornado reportedly blew through the eastern part of Arkansas on Tuesday...
At least one person is dead from flooding in parts of northern Indiana...
foxnews.com/ ... 01:11:30
A rare January outbreak of tornadoes raked the Midwest on Monday, flattening houses in several states and killing at least two people in Missouri... At least six people were taken to hospitals by ambulance... Storms continued to pummel the nation's midsection as darkness fell on a day when record temperatures were reported across much of the country. Tornadoes were also reported or suspected in Arkansas and Oklahoma and along the Illinois-Wisconsin line. In Illinois, about 500 people fled their homes after a suspected tornado knocked over rail cars carrying hazardous materials...
Iran
iht.com/ ... 00:45:03
A rift is emerging between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggesting that the president no longer enjoys the full backing of Khamenei, as he did in the years after his election in 2005...
Yuck!
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:30:06
France's justice minister wants to know why someone sent her a severed finger in the mail... [no info on whether it was the middle digit....]
WW1 - still with us
reuters.com/ ... 00:22:02
Thousands of people have been following the fate of a British soldier fighting in the trenches of World War One on a Web site publishing his letters home exactly 90 years after they were written...
Humans can be Dangerous
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:57:31
FAIRBURN, S.D... Acting to protect her dog, 80-year-old Martha Smith killed a mountain lion at her home along French Creek near Fairburn. She missed with her first shot, went into the house to call 911, then went back outside with a .22-caliber rifle. "And he was a spittin' and a growlin'.... All I saw was flashing eyes and teeth. And I knew I was gonna have to kill him if I could..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:11:46
Tusker, a towering 50-year-old bull elephant who had become a favorite for safari camp visitors, was shot dead after New Year's party-goers provoked the animal into trampling several cars...
Staying Healthy
health.usnews.com/ ... 17:15:39
People with four healthy lifestyle behaviors -- not smoking, physical activity, moderate alcohol consumption, and eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day -- live an average of 14 years longer...
Virtual History is Now
hosted.ap.org/ ... 14:59:04
A museum on Tuesday unveiled a virtual reconstruction of one of the bustling arteries that led into ancient Rome, allowing visitors to wander through rebuilt monuments and interact with the city's political elite. Using a concept similar to that of online virtual worlds, the project creates characters, or avatars, that roam the ancient Via Flaminia, exploring funerary monuments that lined the road, bridges and arches. They can also roam through the villa belonging to Livia, wife of Rome's first emperor, Augustus...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 16:45:25
Army Spc.
James D. Gudridge,
20, of Carthage, N.Y., died Jan. 6 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
defenselink.mil/ ... 00:42:00
Navy Petty Officer Second Class
Menelek M. Brown,
24, of Roswell, N.M., was declared dead Jan. 4 after apparently going overboard from USS Hopper in the Arabian Sea Jan. 3. Navy aircraft and ships conducted an extensive search but did not locate him. USS Hopper is homeported in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
defenselink.mil/ ... 00:40:23
Army Pfc.
Jason F. Lemke,
30, of West Allis, Wis., died Jan. 5 in Ibrahim Al Adham, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash.
Feeding Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:39:46
BOSTON... A third man who consumed products from a central Massachusetts dairy that were tainted with bacteria has died... The number of people sickened by listeria bacteria also rose to five after health officials linked a 31-year-old woman's listeriosis, diagnosed in September, to products from the diary. The infection was detected while the woman was in the hospital to deliver a baby, and "both mother and child are doing well..."
History - still with us
apnews.myway.com/ ... 00:44:37
New Jersey became the first Northern state to apologize for slavery, as legislators approved a resolution Monday expressing "profound regret" for the state's role in the practice...
itvs.org/ ... 00:39:02
Andy never ran again. In 1934 with no job and the country caught in the throes of the Depression, Andy did a different kind of running. He ran for clerk of the Oklahoma State Supreme Court and won. He continued to be re-elected, leaving only for a two-year hitch in the army during World War II... Andy Payne died suddenly in 1977, leaving his family a small fortune and a large legend...
roadsideamerica.com/ ... 00:38:13
Transcontinental Footrace of 1928...
Back then, the idea of a
3,400 mile race
from Los Angeles to New York City was novel...
20-year old from Oklahoma, Cherokee Indian Andy Payne... wanted the $25,000 first prize to save his family's farm and marry his girlfriend...
besides, the guy loved to run... 573 hours, 4 minutes, 34 seconds... averaged 6 miles an hour... got his $25,000 dollars, returned to Oklahoma, and married his sweetheart...
Researching the Obvious
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:27:06
Study: Girls Who Feel Unpopular May Gain Weight...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:26:44
Study: Anxiety May Be Bad for Your Heart...
Animal Companions
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:20:39
PORTAGE, Ind... A black Labrador that bit a 13-year-old boy's foot repeatedly, waking him up, is being credited with saving the boy and two of his friends from a house fire... "I thought she had to go to the bathroom, but she never bites me..." "We came up the stairs and thought it was a dream, but it was cold when we opened the door - then we knew it wasn't a dream..."
Digital Business
businessweek.com/ ... 16:40:42
Wikia Search, the highly anticipated search engine conceived by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, arrived Jan. 7 without many of its promised "collaborative" features, prompting a chorus of harsh reviews around the blogosphere... new search engine doesn't even turn up Wikipedia's own entries...
Headline of the Day
hosted.ap.org/ ... 16:02:59
Man with knives in pants stabs himself...
Digital Threat
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:36:28
When cable companies began promoting high-speed internet services nearly a decade ago, many branded them "the internet on cable". Years later, those services are gradually morphing into "the internet as cable" as broadcasters and service providers steadily move toward the delivery of content online that bears a striking resemblance to the conventional cable model...
Big Nanny
hosted.ap.org/ ... 15:29:15
ST. CHARLES, Mo... is considering a bill that would ban swearing in bars, along with table-dancing, drinking contests and profane music... City officials contend the bill is needed to keep rowdy crowds under control because the historic downtown area gets a little too lively on some nights...
Music industry is dead
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 15:31:11
Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government. Millions of people already "rip" discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law. Intellectual property minister Lord Triesman said the law should be changed so it "keeps up with the times"...
reuters.com/ ... 14:58:27
A Dutch rights organization which compensates artists for the use of their copyrighted material on Tuesday lost its court bid to remove a government block on new levies on MP3 media players. The court in The Hague upheld a government freeze on moves to impose new levies...
Lost & Found
ap.google.com/ ... 01:13:13
CONEJOS, Colo... Six snowmobilers missing in the mountains for 2 1/2 days while a howling blizzard swirled around them were rescued Monday hungry and cold but unhurt after taking shelter in a cozy cabin and calling 911 on a cell phone when the storm eased up...
US Election 2008
apnews.myway.com/ ... 16:09:07
Weather was spring-like and participation brisk, although it remained to be seen whether New Hampshire would match the record-busting turnout of the Iowa caucuses...
washingtontimes.com/ ... 16:06:17
Mike Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to prevent children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens from automatically becoming American citizens, according to his top immigration surrogate a radical step no other major presidential candidate has embraced...
usatoday.com/ ... 01:09:47
SALEM, N.H... Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign stop was interrupted Monday when two men stood in the crowd and began screaming, "Iron my shirt!" during one of her final appearances before the New Hampshire primary...
nydailynews.com/ ... 00:57:01
The Clinton industry, encrusted with the beneficiaries and acolytes of the first and probably only Clinton presidency, has turned Hillary into a product whose sell-by date has passed. In a year of change, she has been positioned as the establishment candidate. The relentless appeal to "experience" reinforces that - and too often elides into a dubious attempt to take credit for some of Bill's accomplishments...
Language Culture
thefreedictionary.com/ ... 00:56:03
e·lide
tr.v. e·lid·ed, e·lid·ing, e·lides
1. a. To omit or slur over (a syllable, for example) in pronunciation.
b. To strike out (something written).
2. a. To eliminate or leave out of consideration.
b. To cut short; abridge.
Theory of Education
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:32:34
MEXICO CITY... A 10-year-old Mexican boy dreaded returning to school after Christmas break so much that he glued his hand to his bed...
What's In a Name?
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:31:57
AKRON, Ohio... The former Dan Miller, 24, has legally changed his name to "The" Dan Miller Experience. His first name is "The" Dan, with the quotation marks. His middle name is Miller and his last name is Experience... "My first reaction was that this guy was going to have some problems with Homeland Security," said Magistrate Larry Poulos, who approved the name change. "But (Experience) is in the entertainment business, and he seems like a nice kid..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:29:19
...state Bureau of Motor Vehicles says... Francisco Mendez, 65... had to change his name to Francisco Mendez Vale to match his birth certificate even though he follows the custom of his native Puerto Rico and does not use his mother's family name. In many Spanish speaking parts of the world, children are given both the father's and mother's family names, but generally use only the paternal name. "I've been Francisco Mendez for 65 years..."
Digital Future is Now
pcworld.com/ ... 01:14:46
Panasonic announces it is dabbling with
technology that makes walls interactive...
Users will be able to customize wall space on the fly... In a demonstration, facial recognition technology on the wall automatically recognized a human passing by and started a TV program on a flat-screen TV...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:23:09
The distinction between flash memory and hard disk drives are fading rapidly as the two storage mediums encroach one another's territory - including marked advances announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show Monday. Makers of flash memory - known for its ruggedness, compact size and power efficiency - are introducing new, higher-capacity "solid state drives" for computers this week. Meanwhile, makers of hard drives - known more for monster capacity than portability - are touting new models about the size of a CompactFlash memory card...
World Climate
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 00:21:38
Projects that add nutrients to the world's oceans in order to create algal blooms that will absorb more carbon from the atmosphere are scientifically unsound, argues Kristina Gjerde, high seas policy advisor to the World Conservation Union. In this week's Green Room, she calls on delegates at the UN climate conference to
halt schemes that could do more harm than good...
Reasons for Repeal
wdbj7.com/ ... 01:23:33
The old warehouse that caught fire in southeast Roanoke Thursday night may have served as a stash house for
marijuana, apart from the many legitimate businesses there...
norml.org/ ... 01:22:32
A 27-year-old quadriplegic man
sentenced to serve ten days
in a Washington, DC jail on charges that he possessed a minor amount of
marijuana
died while in custody last week due to inadequate health care
, including prison officials' failure to provide him with a ventilator...
news-leader.com/ ... 01:21:47
The Friday discovery of a downtown Springfield apartment full of
marijuana plants has led police to three other growing locations and two arrests... 160 pounds of marijuana worth about $175,000 were recovered during the four raids...
wlos.com/ ... 01:21:00
BIRMINGHAM, Ala... A Charlotte, N.C., woman is one of three people arrested after authorities in Alabama found more than 300 pounds of
marijuana in a load of tomatoes in a tractor trailer during a traffic stop. The bundles of marijuana were found on Sunday and weighed about 331 pounds...
thedenverchannel.com/ ... 01:20:15
Police in Colorado Springs seized about $403,000 worth of
marijuana from a home that police say was the site of a major marijuana cultivation operation...
seattlepi.nwsource.com/ ... 01:19:34
Seattle...
Pot arrests higher for blacks in city... All marijuana cases down after initiative...
online.wsj.com/ ... 01:18:23
The
marijuana harvest in British Columbia generated about 7 billion Canadian dollars (US$7 billion) last year, making it one of the most lucrative industries in the Canadian province. But after a string of high-profile arrests and slayings -- including the execution-style murders of six people in October -- the easygoing attitude that has long surrounded marijuana in Canada is under attack...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:31:08
An officer heading home early Saturday smelled
pot burning in the police station parking lot...
[It was easier to topple the gawdamt Soviet Union that it is to repeal the iniquity of Prohibitionism!]
hosted.ap.org/ ... 00:19:36
IOWA CITY, Iowa... man who complained to police that he was robbed of his gambling earnings was arrested for illegal betting...
MON 2008-JAN-07
Masses can be Asses
reuters.com/ ... 10:02:27
Organizers of Australia's biggest hot-rod car festival on Monday pledged to review security after a drunken mob of hundreds of men surrounded women and demanded they flash their breasts during an angry rampage... had been billed as a "family event." "Anybody that brought their family in here would have to be dysfunctional..."
Police Riot
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:43:03
An Egyptian court has jailed three police officers for beating a prisoner and forcing him to parade down a busy street wearing women's underclothes... Senior officer... sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of torture...
Industrial Tragedy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:42:34
SEOUL, South Korea... Fire tore through a refrigeration warehouse under construction in an industrial district south of the capital Monday, killing 40 people and sending toxic fumes into the air... workers were injecting urethane foam into basement walls when the fire started...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:46:43
Five Iranian speedboats harassed three US navy ships at the weekend, approaching them and radioing a threat to blow them up... as the US vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz... US sailors came close to opening fire...
[I'll just bet they did.]
Some officials identified the Iranian boats as belonging to Iran's Revolutionary Guards...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:43:49
A double bombing in Baghdad has killed at least 14 people, including the head of a US-backed armed group which fights al-Qaeda in Sunni Muslim areas... Riyadh Samarrai, leader of the Adhamiya Awakening group, also a Waqf employee, was killed along with his son. The attacker is believed to be from among the more hardline Sunni insurgents who do not want reconciliation in Iraq... Other bombs killed at least five people in Baghdad on Monday...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:41:10
A suicide bomber on a motorcycle attacked a border police patrol on Monday in southern Afghanistan, killing a policeman... Four other policemen were seriously wounded... as officials reported that clashes and a roadside bomb elsewhere left nine people dead, including four civilians... In neighboring Helmand province, police discovered and tried to defuse a remote-controlled roadside bomb Monday in Nad Ali district, but it exploded, killing two policemen and two civilians...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:40:28
Suspected Islamic militants fatally shot eight tribal leaders involved in efforts to broker a cease-fire between security forces and insurgents in Pakistan's volatile northwest... in separate attacks late Sunday and early Monday in South Waziristan...
a suicide attacker in a pickup truck detonated a bomb near a guest house where military officers were staying Monday, also in the country's northwest, wounding five people...
WW2 - still with us
orlandosentinel.com/ ... 00:21:23
Fla... A
munitions cleanup at Odyssey Middle School
during the holiday break unearthed more than
400 pounds of World War II-era bombs and rockets along with 2,000 pounds of debris
on the school grounds and under the running track... about 50 fragmentation bombs, several rockets, a rocket booster and a 37 mm cannon... " 'Wow,' I thought, 'that's an awful lot of materiel,'..." "Oh, my goodness... What upsets me the most is that they [Army Corps] kept saying over and over that there was nothing under the school. But look here. Gosh..." The Army used the former 12,483-acre range in the 1940s to train bombardiers for combat...
Supernatural Threats
timesonline.co.uk/ ... 00:19:33
Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray "in perpetuity" to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy...
Healing Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 09:53:44
Flu viruses must be able to pick a very specific type of lock before entering human respiratory cells... a flu virus must be able to attach itself to an umbrella-shaped receptor coating human respiratory cells before it can infect cells in the upper airways...
History - still with us
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:45:16
Thousands of Aborigines who were removed from their families as children will receive no compensation, the Australian government has said... money will instead be put into health and education schemes... Many Aboriginal children were handed to white families from 1915 to 1969. They were brought up by white people in an attempt by the government to assimilate the white and Aboriginal populations... The country's new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has promised to apologise formally to the victims of the assimilation policy...
Dinosaurs -- still with us
news.independent.co.uk/ ... 00:23:39
Biting insects might have brought down the mighty dinosaurs rather than a cataclysmic meteor impact... Disease spread by ancient mosquitoes, mites and ticks... insects could have also made it harder for dinosaurs to survive by changing the nature of plant life on Earth... helps explain why dinosaurs took so long to die off... During the later part of the dinosaurs' reign insect numbers and species exploded...
US Election 2008
drudgereport.com/ ... 10:05:27
"She can't take multiple double-digit losses in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada," laments one top campaign insider to the DRUDGE REPORT. "If she gets too badly embarrassed, it will really harm her. She doesn't want the Clinton brand to be damaged with back-to-back-to-back defeats..."
["Don't you think she looks tired?"]
People Gamble
reuters.com/ ... 10:03:24
Illegal betting syndicates in a northern Malaysian state have refused bets on the number of the hotel room where an ex-government minister was allegedly filmed having sex...
CD/DVD/etc is Dead
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:59:12
Toshiba Corp. executives had a tough moment Sunday, when they had to face reporters just two days after its HD DVD movie disc format was dealt a potentially fatal blow by the defection of Warner Bros. Entertainment to a rival technology. "It's difficult for me to read the comments of the pundits that HD is dead," said Jodi Sally, vice president of marketing for digital audio and video at Toshiba America Consumer Products... "We've been declared dead before..."
Digital Future is Now
reuters.com/ ... 09:59:56
Sony Ericsson... on Sunday unveiled a cell phone that can be silenced by a wave of hand... a consumer using the phone as an alarm clock can activate the snooze function by waving across the phone...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:52:54
The way people interact with computers is going to dramatically change in the next five years, Microsoft chief Bill Gates has told BBC News. He predicted that the keyboard and mouse would gradually give way to more intuitive and natural technologies. In particular, he said, touch, vision and speech interfaces would become increasingly important...
Digital Business
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:03:47
Internet law professor Michael Geist examines a legal row which could have grave implications for anyone and everyone serving an online audience...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 09:59:22
For many Google has solved the problem of searching the web. But not everyone is happy with the way it works and the results it gives. Here Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia encylopedia, talks to the BBC about his new venture - Wikia Search. Billed as an open source search engine Wikia Search launched on 7 January backed by Wikia, the commercial wiki hosting company started in 2004 by Mr Wales...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 09:54:03
Pioneer Corp., which is sticking to making plasma flat-panel TVs as other manufacturers are switching to LCD TVs, announced Sunday it will be demonstrating a prototype set that emits no light in black areas of the picture, improving contrast and image quality...
reuters.com/ ... 09:52:30
Napster Inc, one of the largest digital music retailers, said on Monday it would start selling downloads in the MP3 format from the second quarter of this year in the latest blow to copy protection for songs bought online...
reuters.com/ ... 09:47:51
Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's second largest music company, will this month become the last of the big four majors to drop copy protection software on music downloads, also known as digital rights management (DRM)...
[BWAHH HHAH HAA HAAAAH! Told ya it wouldn't work!]
Transport Pre-Automation
breitbart.com/ ... 00:49:49
Cars that drive themselveseven parking at their destinationcould be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say...
World of Cultures
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:00:50
Before its move, the Moondance, originally called the Holland Tunnel Diner, had become a place where celebrity revelers sometimes showed up for breakfast. It was used as a location for scenes in "Spider-Man," "Friends" and "Sex and the City..." Diner made it safely through a 2,100-mile trek west from New York City, but it was no match for a Wyoming winter...
dailymail.co.uk/ ... 00:49:29
The number of patients needing hospital treatment for eating disorders has soared, it has emerged. The findings are sure to renew concerns about the effect "size zero" models and celebrities are having on the body image of many youngsters...
en.wikipedia.org/ ... 00:33:40
"Cry for a Shadow" is an early Beatles instrumental... written by George Harrison with John Lennon as a parody of The Shadows style... the only Beatles track to be credited to Lennon and Harrison alone...
superheroflix.com/ ... 00:27:23
Zack Snyder has apparently impressed the folks at Warner Bros. enough that they've agreed to fund a special extra for the DVD release of Watchmen. A source at Moviehole.net tells us that Tales of the Black Freighter will be filmed as an extra for the DVD...
superheroflix.com/ ... 00:25:35
Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen has gotten praise from Dave Gibbons, the artistic half of the creative team which created the award-winning mini-series for DC Comics. But according to Wizard Entertainment, Alan Moore, who wrote the series, wants nothing to do with the film... Moore has previously had many disagreements with Warner Bros. regarding the treatment of stories he wrote for DC Comics. Moore and the studios have come to disagreements when the adaptations of V For Vendetta, From Hell, Constantine and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were filmed. Moore's stance has generally been that, so long as his name is removed from the works and he doesn't have to see the films, he no longer cares...
Defending Ourselves
foxnews.com/ ... 00:24:43
GILBERT, Ariz. Before she lets them shoot her little pink stun gun, Dana Shafman ushers her new friends to the living room sofa for a serious chat about the fears she believes they all share... It doesn't take long before the women are lined up in the hallway, whooping as they take turns blasting at a metallic target... She's an independent entrepreneur who's been selling Tasers the way her mother's generation sold plastic food storage containers...
Bright Idea?
worldnetdaily.com/ ... 00:18:02
the UK Environment Agency issued guidelines calling for
evacuation of any room where an energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulb is broken, releasing toxic mercury...
people with certain skin ailments will suffer from the new eco-friendly bulbs... bulbs have been linked to migraine headaches in some people...
break a bulb... vacate the room for at least 15 minutes...
should not be removed with a vacuum cleaner, which could put toxic dust into the air, but with rubber gloves. The broken glass and all residue is to be placed into a sealed plastic bag and taken to a local official recycling site for proper disposal...
It costs about $1,300 to properly dispose of one municipal recycling bin full of bulbs...
Industrial Trouble
stltoday.com/ ... 00:15:25
The nation's supply of helium... is dwindling... managers of the nation's lone helium reserve, in Texas, expect it to be depleted within 10 years... "...demand for helium has just ballooned in recent years..." Medicine, industry and science depend heavily on helium. It plays a significant role in nuclear magnetic resonance, welding, fiber optics and computer microchip production.
NASA uses large amounts annually
to pressurize space shuttle fuel tanks... The planet's helium supply has been built up over billions of years from the decay of uranium and thorium. Helium exists as a gas but can become a liquid at very low temperatures. Known for its unique stability, helium can be found in many of the world's natural gas fields including those in Kansas, Oklahoma, Algeria, Canada and Russia. In 1925, the U.S. government began buying helium and stockpiling it in an abandoned natural gas field in the Texas Panhandle, primarily to use in dirigibles... many industrial helium users are calling for its conservation to help stretch the national reserve beyond its anticipated depletion...
Oh! The Irony!
orlandosentinel.com/ ... 00:13:03
Walt Disney World
's swankiest restaurant bans kids... The Magic Kingdom's poshest restaurant says
children younger than 10 are not welcome....
SUN 2008-JAN-06
Criminally Stupid
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:35:27
A handkerchief-wearing thief had a videotaped message for his victim: pay a $3,000 ransom, and you can get your video games back. There was just one problem. The burglar forgot to include any instructions for dropping off the cash. "We're not dealing with brain surgeons here," police Lt. Joe Cawley said...
Industrial Tragedy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:18:35
Follow-up: A window washer who fell 47 stories from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family and expected to walk again... [37yo] plummeted almost 500 feet in a Dec. 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother... Both legs and his right arm and wrist were broken in several places. He had severe injuries to his chest, his abdomen and his spinal column. His brain was bleeding. Everything was bleeding, it seemed... Doctors say they have never seen anything like it... He has movement in all his limbs. He is breathing on his own. And on Christmas Day, he opened his mouth and spoke for the first time since the accident... The death rate from even a three-story fall is about 50 percent, Barie said. People who fall more than 10 stories almost never survive. "Forty-seven floors is virtually beyond belief..." Science may never be able to explain... [Wife:] "I told him,
'You're not going back to work there...'
"
Fun can be Dangerous
reuters.com/ ... 11:37:18
A roller coaster stalled at the top of a loop at China's biggest amusement park, leaving [eighteen] passengers stranded upside down, their legs pointed toward the sky... for half an hour... on New Year's Eve Monday in the eastern province of Anhui... Investigations revealed that
strong headwind had triggered a mechanical fault...
Nicotine is a Drag
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:11:32
PARIS... Some diehard smokers blamed health-obsessed Americans for starting the trend. But others were delighted by being able to sip or serve a strong espresso without finishing the day with clothes smelling of second-hand smoke...
Turkey's parliament on Wednesday was debating a proposal to ban smoking in all enclosed public areas, such as bars, restaurants and coffeehouses... Some called it the end of an era in a nation that long portrayed the cigarette as a sign of freedom, rebellion, individualism or even intellect, indeed, a certain idea of the country. "They're banning tobacco practically like it's cocaine..."
reuters.com/ ... 11:36:14
The head of the Portuguese agency responsible for enforcing a new ban on smoking in public was seen lighting up at a New Year party, breaking the law on the first day it came into effect...
Nature can be Dangerous
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:35:59
Winter storms that have brought heavy snow and rain to the western US have killed at least three people. Up to 5ft (1.5 meters) of snow has so far fallen on California's Sierra Nevada mountains, and more snowfalls are expected in the coming days...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:24:05
About 700 people were evacuated as a volcano erupted Wednesday in southern Chile, rocking the area with explosions and spewing lava and ash. But the Llaima volcano's eruptions were slowing by Wednesday afternoon, so a larger evacuation did not appear necessary...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:20:29
A powerful earthquake has hit Greece, shaking buildings and waking people from their sleep... 6.5... centred 120km (75 miles) south-west of Athens in the southern Peloponnese region... was very deep, 51km underground, and there were no early reports of casualties or damage... felt over much of
Greece... the most earthquake-prone country in Europe...
Disinformation Propaganda & Spin
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:11:09
Al-Qaida video messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri can now be downloaded to cell phones, the terror network announced as part of its attempts to extend its influence...
[Along with really bad at-home lip-synchers, jackass stunts, and young girls showing off their boobies....]
reuters.com/ ... 10:50:40
An American al Qaeda militant urged Islamist militants to welcome President George W. Bush with bombs when he visits the Middle East this week and tore up his U.S. passport on camera...
[OOoooo, did he use both hands? We're scared now!]
reuters.com/ ... 10:49:48
Iran accused the United States on Sunday of interfering in the Middle East after President George W. Bush said he would press allies to help keep Iran's "aggressive ambitions" in check during a regional trip this week... "The aim of these repeated trips is to compensate for the failed policies of America in the region..."
[Um.... right....]
Theory of Justice
reuters.com/ ... 10:51:07
The Supreme Court, in a case being watched around the world, on Monday hears arguments about whether to ban the lethal three-drug cocktail used in most U.S. executions because it inflicts excruciating pain. The hour-long session marks the first time in more than a century the court has examined a specific method of capital punishment...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:42:15
Jan 2... China, which executes more people each year than any other country, will expand the use of lethal injections instead of gunshots for death sentences... Lethal injection "is considered more humane and will eventually be used in all Intermediate People's Courts..."
it is believed to execute more people each year than the rest of the world combined...
Iraq
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:41:14
For decades, the Imams bridge spanning the Tigris river linked two ancient Baghdad neighborhoods - one Sunni, the other Shiite - and illustrated the city's tradition of sectarian tolerance, as residents from both sides harmoniously intermingled. But the Imams was sealed and barricaded after nearly 1,000 Shiites fleeing what they thought was a Sunni suicide bomber died in a stampede on the bridge in 2005. It has remained closed through the past two years of rampant sectarian violence across the capital. Iraqi authorities now want to reopen the four-lane, 900-foot bridge. For most residents, however, the wounds are too fresh and the fears too real to risk opening a passageway between the two communities. They are fighting the plan...
War is Hell
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:58
Police in Ivory Coast say seven children, aged between four and 15, have been killed after a hand grenade they were playing with exploded. Seven other children were injured, two of them seriously... at a school in Bondoukou in the north-east. A child apparently removed the pin from one of two grenades they found nearby...
Prison Sucks
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:02
A guard named in a note left by two inmates who bored holes in their cell walls to escape from a New Jersey prison has committed suicide... on the day he was due to be interviewed about the incident... Two inmates who escaped in December thanked the guard in a sarcastic note... for a thick piece of wire and a steel water shut-off wheel they had used to escape. "You're a real pal! Happy Holidays," the note said, alongside a drawing of a hand with a raised middle finger... The two had used pin-ups of girls in bikinis to hide the holes through which they broke out...
Nature vs Transport
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:35:39
3 Jan... At least four sailors have died after their Bulgarian cargo ship sank in a storm lashing the Kerch Strait, just north of the Black Sea. Rescuers from Ukraine and Russia are searching for the other crew from the Vanessa. There were 10 Bulgarians and a Ukrainian pilot on board... Heavy snow has severely disrupted transport in Bulgaria and Romania...
Animals can be Deadly
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:31
[36yo] South African man has been killed and eaten by lions at a game lodge where he worked 150km (90 miles) west of Johannesburg...
Violence
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:40:43
Police arrested 14 men Friday for allegedly harassing two women outside a five-star hotel in Mumbai during New Year's celebrations, a case that drew widespread criticism after police initially refused to pursue it...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:39:09
Police in India's financial capital, Mumbai (Bombay), are investigating the alleged assault of two young women early on New Year's day. Nearly 70 men were reportedly involved in the incident near a top hotel in the city's Juhu area, which was captured on camera by two newspaper photographers. The men are seen surrounding the women after they left the hotel. Police have yet to make any arrests in the case. The incident has fuelled fears about women's safety in the city... One of the women had her clothes torn in the incident which went on for about 20 minutes...
reuters.com/ ... 10:30:40
Jan 2... An inmate who said he had chest pains overpowered two guards at a Maryland hospital on Wednesday, shot a man outside the hospital and commandeered his vehicle as a getaway car... Kelvin Polk, who was convicted of kidnapping and carjacking... the man he shot was in good condition...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
reuters.com/ ... 11:07:37
A suicide bomber blew himself up among soldiers and civilians celebrating Iraq's national Army Day holiday in central Baghdad on Sunday, killing 11 people...
three people were killed in the northern district of Qahira when a car bomb blew up outside a restaurant...
One person was killed in three blasts in central Nahda...
Three bombs exploded outside two Christian churches and a nuns' convent in the city of Mosul in the northern province of Nineveh, where U.S. commanders say al Qaeda is regrouping. Police said four people were wounded in the blasts...
overall levels of violence in Iraq are down... suicide bomb attacks have increased slightly since reaching a low in October...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:40:28
Jan 4... Police were interrogating four people detained after a bomb attack targeting Turkish soldiers in a passing bus killed five civilians and wounded 68 other people... A bomb-laden car exploded in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir as a military service bus passed. The explosion set dozens of cars on fire and shattered the windows of buildings nearby, including one packed with students preparing for university entrance exams. Four of the dead were students... Turkish leadership immediately blamed separatist Kurdish rebels...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:39:42
DNA analysis indicates a 3-year-old boy living in a Bogota foster home is the child of a woman held captive by leftist rebels for nearly six years... suggest President Alvaro Uribe was right - and that the leftist rebels misled Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the world when they promised to release the boy along with his mother Clara Rojas and another hostage from their jungle camps...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:38:18
2 Jan... The Sri Lankan government has formally withdrawn from a ceasefire agreement with Tamil Tiger rebels...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:47
3 Jan... At least nine Palestinians have been killed amid Israeli operations in Gaza... Several of the deaths occurred during raids by Israeli troops east of Khan Younis in the early hours of Thursday... Israel says it is trying to stop rocket fire into Israel. A rocket launched on Thursday reached the city of Ashkelon, some 17km (10 miles) north of Gaza. No-one was hurt, but the Israeli army said it was the furthest a rocket launched from Gaza had reached...
reuters.com/ ... 10:29:21
A suicide bomber killed 10 people in Iraq on Wednesday... at a checkpoint in the provincial capital Baquba north of Baghdad... the bomber jumped onto the hood of a car driven by a member of a volunteer neighborhood patrol, killing the driver and three others... bomber was a woman...
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:46:54
Army Maj.
Andrew J. Olmsted,
37, of Colorado Springs, Colo.
Army Cpt.
Thomas J. Casey,
32, of Albuquerque, N.M.
died Jan. 3 in As Sadiyah, Iraq, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked their unit using small arms fire during combat operations. Both Soldiers were assigned to the Military Transition Team, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:44:25
Army Pfc.
Joshua R. Anderson,
24, of Jordan, Minn., died Jan 2 in Kamasia, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. He was assigned to the 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:43:51
Army Staff Sgt.
Ryan D. Maseth,
24, of Pittsburgh, Pa., died in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 2 of injuries suffered in a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Campbell, Ky. The incident is under investigation.
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:43:10
Army Sgt.
Shawn F. Hill,
37, of Wellford, S.C., died Jan. 2 in Khowst Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 178th Engineer Battalion, 218th Infantry Brigade, South Carolina Army National Guard, Rock Hill, S.C.
defenselink.mil/ ... 12:41:55
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing from World War II, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
Navy Seaman 1st Class
General P. Douglas,
U.S. Navy, of Newcomb, Tenn., will be buried Jan. 26 in Sneedville, Tenn. On July 6, 1943, the light cruiser "USS Helena" was struck by torpedoes fired by Japanese destroyers off the coast of Kolombangara Island, Solomon Islands, in what would become known as the Battle of the Kula Gulf. More than 700 servicemen were rescued, but Douglas was one of more than 150 servicemen who were missing as the ship sunk. In June 2006, a resident of Ranongga Island, Solomon Islands, notified U.S. officials that he exhumed human remains and Douglas' dog tag that he found eroding out of the ground near a trail by his village. The officials contacted the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) who subsequently traveled to Ranongga Island to examine the burial location where they verified that no additional remains were present....
Animal Companions
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:33:56
DALLAS... The holidays were sad enough for Kim Velevis and her husband after their lovable pug "Scooter" dug its way out of the backyard and disappeared on Christmas Eve. But the real blow came with the new year: A letter from an anonymous woman who had found the friendly dog and gave it to her daughter as a Christmas present. To compensate for Velevis' loss, a $20 bill was enclosed...
Epidemic Without Borders
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:19:36
Thousands of people in Britain have been sickened by the biggest outbreak of a winter vomiting virus in five years. Doctors estimate that hundreds of thousands of people may be affected by norovirus in the coming days. Dozens of hospital wards across the country have already been closed to try to stop the virus' spread...
Cosmology
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:55:00
Astronomers have discovered a newborn planet in a solar system that is still in the process of forming - the first example of this ever found... planet has nearly 10 times the mass of our Jupiter; and it circles TW Hydrae, a nearby young star which is only eight to 10 million years old. The planet orbits the star with a period of 3.56 days at a distance of about six million km (four million miles), inside the inner rim of the system's dusty disc... "This demonstrates that planets can form within 10 million years, before the disc has been dissipated by stellar winds and radiation..."
Now
That's
Funny!
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:53:44
The basis for laughter may have originated in an ancient primate ancestral to both humans and modern apes... orang-utans had a sense of empathy and mimicry which forms an essential part of laughter... Facial expressions, such as the open, gaping mouth resembling laughter, were picked up and copied by orang-utans. The speed with which they were mimicked suggests these expressions were involuntary... In other words, the "laughter" was contagious...
World Zookeeping
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:23:13
BRISBANE, Australia... A snake has been saved by surgery after mistaking four golf balls for a meal of chicken eggs...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:28:17
Seven rare albino alligators disappeared from a Brazilian university zoo and authorities suspect animal smugglers stole them...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:28:00
A northern Indian state said Thursday it planned to use unemployed youths to sterilize monkeys to try to combat aggressive primates who have been raiding farms. The idea drew immediate condemnation from conservationists, who said the plan was unscientific and would likely worsen the problem...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:27:41
A federal judge ordered the Navy on Thursday to adopt measures that would lessen the impact of sonar on whales and other marine life during exercises near Southern California... requires the Navy to create a 12-nautical-mile no-sonar zone along the coast and have trained lookouts watch for marine mammals before and during exercises. Sonar should be shut down when mammals are spotted within 2,200 yards... the Navy does not believe the ruling "struck the right balance between national security and environmental concerns..."
Animal Culture
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:28:39
Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females... suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:25:16
the Alcon blue butterfly... has managed to produce larvae with a chemical coating similar to that of the local Myrmica rubra ants... The butterflies deposit their larvae on marsh gentian plants where exploring ants find them, identify the chemical coating, and take the butterfly larvae back to the ant colony and feed them until they grow up and leave... elsewhere in Europe the Alcon butterfly uses a different ant species to raise its young...
Solar System
reuters.com/ ... 10:48:55
Saturn's chilly north pole boasts a hot spot of compressed air... Scientists already knew about a hot spot at Saturn's sunny south pole but data from the Cassini spacecraft now shows that the winter pole drenched in darkness also has a hot spot... essentially a small, narrow region hotter than the gas surrounding it... "We think it is due to air descending from higher in the atmosphere to lower in the atmosphere.... The mass of air heats up as it's compressed -- like air in a bicycle pump..."
Healing Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:19:13
The groundbreaking vaccine that prevents cervical cancer in girls is gaining a reputation as the most painful of childhood shots, health experts say...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:55:59
A single jab that could give lifelong protection against all types of flu has produced promising results in human trials. The vaccine, made by Acambis, should protect against all strains of influenza A - the cause of pandemics...
reuters.com/ ... 10:47:45
A glitch in the way cells clear damaged proteins could be the trigger for the symptoms of Parkinson's disease...
Feeding Ourselves
reuters.com/ ... 12:19:51
The price of fruits and vegetables is climbing faster than inflation, while junk food is actually becoming cheaper...
reuters.com/ ... 11:37:44
A Chicago tavern said on Thursday it will begin selling chicken wings coated in one of the world's hottest peppers -- a dish so hot that patrons first have to sign a waiver agreeing not to sue for injuries...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:34:59
3 Jan... The chief of the Bangladesh army says the country is facing a catastrophe over rice supplies... Many people have been hit hard by spiralling food prices, which in some cases have doubled over the last year. Rice is the staple diet of most Bangladeshis, but this year crops have been damaged by heavy monsoon rain...
Defending Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:30:40
Charlie Merrell, 51, was standing in a checkout lane at Bucks IGA Supermarket on Indianapolis' south side when a masked man jumped over a nearby counter and held a gun on a store employee.... While the suspect demanded cash from workers, Merrell pulled his own handgun, pointed it at the robber.... Police said the suspect's gun was not loaded. Merrell had a valid permit to carry his gun, which was loaded....
Business Culture
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:27:21
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho... Several older residents of this town are protesting plans to open a funeral home across the street from a senior center, saying it would be a little too close for comfort...
Just Random Chance
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:28:42
A Pittsburgh pharmacist has given his wife's in-laws a Christmas gift that keeps on giving: a Pennsylvania Lottery ticket worth $1 million... said he doesn't want the ticket back because he said that would be like giving someone a shirt for Christmas, and then asking to wear it on New Year's Eve...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:24:49
A lucky couple expecting to cash in their winning Michigan Lottery ticket became a bit peeved when a store clerk turned down their request... showed up Wednesday morning with what they thought was a $150 winning ticket they'd bought Friday. They complained when the clerk told them they would have to collect their winnings in Lansing, the state capital, 150 miles away. Kabban said he took the couple into his office and explained the ticket was actually worth $250,000...
CD/DVD/etc is Dead
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:03:48
Warner Bros. Entertainment said Friday it will release movie discs only in the Blu-ray format, becoming the latest studio to reject the rival HD DVD technology and further complicating the high-definition landscape for consumers... Warner Bros., owned by Time Warner Inc., was the only remaining studio releasing high-definition DVDs in both formats...
Bright Idea?
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:57:00
The switch to energy-saving light bulbs may put thousands at risk of painful skin reactions... Fluorescent bulbs can exacerbate skin rashes in people with photosensitive skin conditions, experts said...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:41:49
The Environment Agency has called for more information to be made available on the health and environmental risks posed by low-energy light bulbs. It says because the bulbs contain small amounts of mercury, more information about safe recycling is needed. It also wants health warnings printed on packaging and information on how to clear up smashed bulbs in the home. But a toxicologist has played down the risks, saying
several bulbs would have to be smashed at once to pose a danger....
[ummmm..... this is MERCURY we're talking about here. Are we being politically correct about mercury here, just to push screwy AlGore lightbulbs?]
Digital Threat
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:04:58
It is not just the average net user who is a fan of social network sites, so are hi-tech criminals...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:04:44
Already people are seeing the amount of bandwidth they can use limited by monthly caps and, in the US, operators have just won the right to charge more for bandwidth-hungry services. With next-generation networks likely to cost billions to roll out, the issue of how operators will make money from them becomes even more pertinent. Network operators in the US, and increasingly also in the UK, believe that rather than pass all of the costs on to the end user,
content providers should also put their hands in their pockets in order to guarantee the best delivery of their services...
reuters.com/ ... 11:47:08
A revolutionary plan that would effectively legitimize file-sharing here has been slammed as "a pipe dream" by Canadian labels. The Songwriters Assn. of Canada proposes to allow domestic consumers access to all recorded music available online in return for adding a
$5 Canadian ($4.96) monthly fee to every wireless and Internet account in the country...
[Regardless of whether you trade their files OR NOT. Another piggy using government to pay them for what they can't sell....]
Digital Future is Now
reuters.com/ ... 12:08:08
JVC on Sunday unveiled an LCD TV less than 3 inches thick, calling it the world's thinnest flat-screen television...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 12:07:01
The best gadgets of CES 2008... radio for the deaf... integrated wireless HDTV... networking standards that allow mobiles to remotely control domestic appliances from afar...
reuters.com/ ... 11:43:52
Worried about people accessing your private information whenever you use a public computer? There is a way to protect yourself: Devices as small as a keychain allow you to use any computer without leaving a trail of evidence. A new computer program known as MojoPac can turn most flash memory sticks, hard drives or iPods into "virtual" PCs that can run most programs that work on Windows XP. The devices draw on the host computer's resources -- including its electricity, Windows XP software and DVD drive. Yet they retain their independence as they move from machine to machine...
Under Digital Tyranny
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:04:05
Thai authorities have shut down a political Web site that spoke out against the monarchy...
reuters.com/ ... 11:48:04
The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists has urged Saudi Arabia to release a blogger who has been detained in the conservative Muslim kingdom for almost a month for his writings... Interior Ministry Spokesman... confirmed that Fouad al-Farhan was being detained but
declined to say under what charges
.... "Arbitrarily detaining a writer and holding him for weeks without saying why violates the most basic norms for free expression and serves as a chilling reminder to those seeking to express their opinions," CPJ said in the letter. "It also runs counter to official Saudi statements in support of reform and a more open press..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:43:13
China has moved to restrict videos online,
allowing only state-controlled sites to post any
- including those shared by users - and requiring Internet providers to delete and report a variety of content...
Digital Culture
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:02:07
For the 10th time, Bill Gates will inaugurate the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by touting new Microsoft Corp. products and describing his view of the future of computing. Before you rush to the edge of your seat Sunday, consider this: Gates is a mediocre prognosticator... 2004 pledge to the World Economic Forum that spam would be "solved" by 2006... At CES in 1995, Gates described a way to make "the computing experience better." Its name was Bob... Bob required twice as much memory as most home computers had back then, found few buyers, and became an infamous bomb...
reuters.com/ ... 11:44:57
Larry Hryb... Xbox 360 players know Hryb by his alter ego, "Major Nelson", the endlessly energetic and unusually frank voice of the Xbox Live online service that serves as a sort of social networking community for hard-core video game players... he runs a mini-empire of Xbox-related media: blogs, podcasts, text messaging and social networking sites that potentially reach some 8 million users in what could be called Xbox Nation. Hryb is their Walter Cronkite -- someone who gamers can turn to for the straight story on all things Xbox...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:42:00
Japan's prime minister has begun posting English-language messages on the video-sharing Internet site YouTube in an apparent bid to raise his country's international profile...
reuters.com/ ... 11:37:34
The names of three banks and the word "stocks" beat "sex" to become four of the most Googled words in China last year...
Digital Business
reuters.com/ ... 12:07:24
Red Hat's new chief executive said on Friday that the company will continue to pursue a business model under which it makes its software available at no cost and makes money selling services to businesses...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:03:00
The founder of the One Laptop Per Child project claimed Friday that Intel Corp. undermined his group's effort to sell $188 computers for schoolchildren in the developing world even after the chip company got a seat on the nonprofit's board... said Intel even tried to undo a deal One Laptop had already sealed in Peru by citing flaws in the One Laptop "XO" machine and telling government ministers "we ought to know, because we are on the board." Such hostile comments were prohibited, Negroponte claimed, under the July peace treaty that brought Intel into the One Laptop Per Child camp. "I want to say we tried, but it was never a partnership.... There's not one single thing in their contract or agreement that they lived up to..."
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:55:40
Citing disagreements with the organization, Intel Corp. said Thursday it has abandoned the One Laptop Per Child program, dealing a big blow to the ambitious project seeking to bring millions of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries... because the two reached a "philosophical impasse," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. Meanwhile, Intel will continue with its own inexpensive laptop design called the Classmate, which it is marketing in some of the same emerging markets OLPC has targeted...
reuters.com/ ... 11:45:32
Total album sales plunged 15 percent in 2007... Sales of physical and digital albums tumbled to 500.5 million units, as the music industry was pillaged by piracy and competition from
other forms of entertainment
like videogames...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:42:48
DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. will begin delivering movies and other programming directly to televisions later this year through a set-top box...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:42:31
Flat-panel TVs look lovely on a wall - the cords hanging from them, less so. After a few years of false starts, the industry finally seems close to tackling that problem. At least three dueling
wireless technologies for high-definition TVs
will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which starts Monday. Manufacturers promise that sets incorporating these technologies will be in stores before the next holiday season...
reuters.com/ ... 10:42:30
SanDisk Corp introduced a new flash storage drive on Wednesday that also automatically backs up data to the Internet...
Transport Pre-Automation
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:26:41
Alton, Ill... For the second time in less than a year, a vehicle has slammed into the bedroom of Courtaway's 7-year-old son on Wednesday...
reuters.com/ ... 11:40:02
TORONTO... A new law meant to help crack down on young Canadian street racers in their souped up cars has nabbed an octogenarian in his Oldsmobile... "It really doesn't matter the age of the person or whether they're trying to race another car," OPP Sgt. Cam Woolley said on Friday. "The consequences of the crashes and
the laws of physics are always in effect..."
reuters.com/ ... 11:39:03
London... Stephanie Cole, 58, of Fishponds, Bristol... "I didn't intend getting onto the motorway, but all of a sudden I found myself on it and I could not get off... I just panicked. I hate that particular stretch of road and I avoid it normally. It is my nemesis..." woman banned from driving for seven days after traveling at speeds of less than 10mph on the motorway...
Theory of Education
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:26:53
Scientific advisers to the government emphasize in a report the importance of teaching evolution in public schools... takes swipes at creationism and other anti-evolution views. "Despite the lack of scientific evidence for creationist positions, some advocates continue to demand that various forms of creationism be taught together with or in place of evolution in science classes..." Evolution is a continuing topic of debate in some states. Florida officials are considering revisions in state science standards that would add the word "evolution" to the standards. The state Board of Education plans to vote on the guidelines next month. In Texas, the state's director of science curriculum, Chris Comer, maintains she was forced to resign recently due to evolution politics...
Intelligent design holds that the universe's order and complexity are so great that evolution cannot explain it...
[You're always safe with an self-defined unprovable maxim!]
Reasons for Repeal
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:23:52
Two Baylor College of Medicine researchers in Houston are working on a cocaine vaccine they hope will become the first-ever medication to treat people hooked on the drug. "For people who have a desire to stop using, the vaccine should be very useful..."
[In a free country, that would be admirable attitude. Under PuriTalibaNazi tyranny, watch judges start prescribing for users who get caught, and other egregious Nannyisms....]
Headline of the Day
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:19:14
Purdue students sniff manure for science...
US Congress
reuters.com/ ... 10:46:12
[79yo] Rep. Tom Lantos, who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and is the only Holocaust survivor elected to the Congress, on Wednesday said he has been diagnosed with cancer and will not seek re-election in November... was born in Hungary and twice escaped Nazi labor camps...
World Energy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:24:22
The federal government will open up nearly 46,000 square miles off Alaska's northwest coast to petroleum leases next month, a decision condemned by enviromental groups that contend the industrial activity will harm northern marine mammals...
reuters.com/ ... 10:49:08
Oil retreated further from the $100 a barrel mark on Friday as gloomy U.S. jobs data heightened concern over the health of the U.S. economy...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:37:26
Oil has traded at $100 a barrel for the first time. Violence in Nigeria, Algeria and Pakistan, the weak US dollar and the threat of cold weather have all raised prices after the new year break. Light sweet crude rose $4.02 to $100 a barrel in New York, prompting a drop in shares and a surge in gold prices...
US Election 2008
hosted.ap.org/ ... 12:39:05
CHICAGO... 114-year-old woman... registered to vote on Thursday. It was also her birthday... had voted up until about 20 years ago, when she moved in with her grandson, and did not update her voter registration... grandson... said the family would discuss whether [she] will actually vote on Feb. 5, but he doubted it, since she doesn't know who any of the candidates are...
[And neither does anyone else....]
reuters.com/ ... 11:09:14
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's plan to eliminate all income taxes... and payroll taxes... and replace them with a flat consumption tax has the support of martial arts guru Chuck Norris but few economic analysts... "All our headaches and heartburn from tax stress will vanish. Instead we will have the FairTax, a simple tax based on wealth. When the FairTax becomes law, it will be like waving a magic wand releasing us from pain and unfairness..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:33:10
Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama have won the Iowa caucuses...
Big Nanny
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:31:29
4 Jan... A Dutch judge has ordered a leading Amsterdam brothel to close, as part of a campaign to cut links between the sex trade and organised crime. The judge upheld the city's complaint that the Yab Yum Club had been taken over by the Hells Angels biker gang. The brothel, which describes itself as up-market and exclusive, denies this... In September the city announced plans to buy about 50 shop fronts where prostitutes display themselves, and turn them into businesses or homes...
FRI 2008-JAN-04
Transport Threat
dailymail.co.uk/ ... 11:16:22
...even motorists who use handsfree devices are a nuisance - because they are slowing everyone else down, according to a study... Drivers talking on their phones go about 2mph slower on clogged roads than others, and fail to keep up with the traffic flow... adds 20 hours a year to the commuting time for drivers who have a half-hour drive to and from work each day...
Industrial Trouble
nbc5.com/ ... 11:14:37
NILES, Ill... two suburban Chicago women... stuck in an elevator... After two days, they felt dizzy from hunger. The 25-year-old said she began to think they might die...
Nuclear is Nasty
washingtonpost.com/ ... 11:07:08
...taken aback when he discovered last March that many of his fellow security guards at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania were taking regular naps in what they called "the ready room..." supervisors... told [him] to be a team player... regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regulators let the matter drop after the plant's owner, Exelon, said it found no evidence of guards asleep on the job. So [he] videotaped the sleeping guards... Last month, Exelon, the country's largest provider of nuclear power, fired Wackenhut, which had guarded each of its 10 nuclear plants. The NRC is reviewing its own oversight procedures...
Scary Times
usatoday.com/ ... 11:02:27
Tens of thousands of airline passengers will soon be flying on jets outfitted with anti-missile systems as part of a new government test aimed at thwarting terrorists armed with shoulder-fired projectiles. Three American Airlines Boeing 767-200s that fly daily round-trip routes between New York and California will receive the anti-missile laser jammers this spring...
Disturbing Family Patterns
thisislondon.co.uk/ ... 11:01:49
Britney Spears has reportedly been placed on lock down for a mental evaluation amid extraordinary scenes after holding her children hostage and refusing to hand them over to their father at a court-appointed time. The fallen popstar - who is thought to be on suicide watch- was stretchered bleary-eyed from her home under police guard and then taken to hospital by ambulance for tests when she was suspected to be "under the influence of an unknown substance"...
New Year 2008
news.yahoo.com/ ... 11:15:16
so many people tried to send text messages on New Year's Eve that networks got jam-packed and many of the missives arrived hours later or not at all...
Reasons for Repeal
detnews.com/ ... 11:13:37
Federal agents are targeting a turbo-charged form of Ecstasy that is gaining in popularity, fearing it will lead to fatal overdoses similar to ones experienced a few years ago caused by heroin mixed with fentanyl... Michigan and nine other states along Canada's border would see the first wave of any such overdoses, and officials are warning that the so-called "extreme Ecstasy," which is mixed with methamphetamines, is becoming a problem... Lax views toward drug use in Canada, coupled with
successes scored by U.S. agents against European Ecstasy producers and smugglers,
have fueled the problem... Federal agents seized about 5.4 million dosage units of Ecstasy in the 10 states near the Canadian border in 2006, up dramatically from the 568,000 units seized in 2003, according to statistics from Burns' office. About 55 percent of the units had methamphetamines in them...
[according to PuriTalibaNazi propagandists, so you don't know what is true....]
Big Nanny
wcbstv.com/ ... 11:05:20
PEQUANNOCK TOWNSHIP, N.J... one New Jersey school district... Getting checked for alcohol is now the rule at dances and other social events.
"I'm all for it because if your child isn't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide,"
parent Barbara Fede said...
[Where did this woman get her copy of the "we don't need no stinkin' rights" handbook of spineless sayings?]
apnews.myway.com/ ... 11:03:06
With a button-popping spread of cornbread, sausage and gravy, chicken fried steak and pecan pie designated as Oklahoma's official state meal, it's no surprise that Oklahoma City's mayor wants to put the city on a diet. Mick Cornett has challenged the city to shed 1 million pounds as its New Year's resolution...
US Election 2008
opinionjournal.com/ ... 11:11:44
As this is written, late on the night of the caucuses, the outlines of the decisions seem clear: Barack Obama won. Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, the avatar of the machine, lost. It's huge. Even though people have been talking about this possibility for six weeks now, it's still huge. She had the money, she had the organization, the party's stars, she had Elvis behind her, and the Clinton name in a base that loved Bill. And she lost. There are always a lot of reasons for a loss, but the Ur reason in this case, the thing it all comes down to? There's something about her that makes you look, watch, think, look again, weigh and say: No. She started out way ahead, met everyone, and lost...
Obama... won the five biggest counties in Iowa... carried the young in a tidal wave. outpolled Mrs. Clinton among women...
cnn.com/ ... 10:59:16
ABC and Fox News Channel are narrowing the field of presidential candidates invited to debates this weekend just before the New Hampshire primary, in Fox's case infuriating supporters of Republican Rep. Ron Paul... Jesse Benton, Paul's spokesman, said it was a "big mistake" not to include Paul, especially given Paul's recent success in fundraising. He said the campaign has been trying to reach Fox News to get an explanation for the decision, but its calls had not been returned. "There very well might be some bias.... Ron brings up some topics that aren't very popular with Fox News, as in fiscal responsibility and withdrawing from the war in Iraq ... that does leave us scratching our heads a little bit about whether it was deliberate. Based on metrics, I don't see how you can possibly exclude Dr. Paul..."
THU 2008-JAN-03
Violence
kfor.com/ ... 21:12:25
Ardmore, Oklahoma... An Oklahoma man was arrested after police say he
stabbed another man in the neck with a pork chop bone
during a food fight...
Transport Pre-Automation
thejournalnews.com/ ... 21:08:41
BEDFORD HILLS - A 32-year-old Californian whose rental car got smashed by a Metro-North train last night was issued a minor summons for causing the fiery crash that stranded railroad commuters for hours... said he was merely trusting his car's global positioning system when he steered onto the tracks... crews spent hours repairing more than 200 feet of the electrified "third" rail damaged by the crash...
Staying Healthy
reuters.com/ ... 21:12:59
Happiness may be good for your health... ...those who reported upbeat moods had lower levels of cortisol -- a "stress" hormone that, when chronically elevated, may contribute to high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and dampened immune function, among other problems...
Animal Culture
miamiherald.com/ ... 21:10:13
It was raining iguanas... underneath buttonwood trees...
Wednesday night's bitter cold came like a giant Sominex for the tree-dwelling iguanas of South Florida. When the temperature falls below a certain level, the large green lizards drop out of the trees and litter the ground. They aren't dead. At least a lot of them aren't. It is as if they are in suspended animation...
World Climate
en.rian.ru/ ... 21:11:40
Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!.. Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer...
WED 2008-JAN-02
Pakistan
chicagotribune.com/ ... 20:16:29
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan As calls for an international investigation into the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto increase, new details are emerging that suggest that the truth behind her death will be very difficult to uncover...
US Military
defenselink.mil/ ... 21:03:47
The Department of Defense announced today the inaugural $1.75 million Wearable Power Prize competition will be held at the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), Twentynine Palms, Calif., Sept.22 until Oct. 4, 2008.... The Wearable Power Prize competition gathers and tests wearable power-generating methods and techniques. The goal is to reduce the weight of power systems that warfighters carry to operate their radios, navigation, weapons, and other gear. Competitors will demonstrate wearable systems that can power military equipment for 96 hours, but that weigh less than half the current battery load. Finalists, whose entries must produce power on test stands continuously for 88 hours, will wear their power systems in field conditions, testing their ability to work when in motion and exposed to weather. The first-place team meeting the required energy requirements will win $1 million for building the lightest weight system that generates 20 watts average power for 96 hours (including the "wear-off"). The second-place team will win $500,000 and the third place team, $250,000....
defenselink.mil/ ... 21:02:52
National Guard... January 2, 2008... This week the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard announced a decrease, while the Marine Corps announced an increase. The net collective result is
4,235 fewer reservists
mobilized than two weeks ago.... This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized to 90,252, including both units and individual augmentees.....
US Military Casualties
defenselink.mil/ ... 21:04:15
Army Sgt.
Reno S. Lacerna,
44, of Waipahu, Hawaii, died Dec. 31, 2007 in Al Qayyarah, Iraq, of a non-combat related illness. He was assigned to the 87th Corps Support Battalion, 3rd Sustainment Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. The incident is under investigation.
defenselink.mil/ ... 21:04:01
Army Pfc.
Joseph R. Berlin Jr.,
21, of Chelsea, Ala., died Dec. 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered in a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to the Special Troops Battalion, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. The incident is under investigation.
defenselink.mil/ ... 21:01:56
Navy Petty Officer 1st Class
Victor W. Jeffries,
52, of Honolulu, Hawaii, died Dec. 31, 2007 as a result of injuries suffered Dec. 24 in a vehicular accident in Kuwait. He was permanently assigned to the Navy Expeditionary Logistics Support Group, Kuwait.
Digital Future is Now
chron.com/ ... 20:58:44
Author sees hard-wired sex in the future - and apparently it's all good - especially if you like robots...
It's Only Money
ft.com/ ... 20:58:29
gold, oil and platinum setting records during the first trading session of the new year... Gold led the initial advance, rising 3.3 per cent to $861.10 a troy ounce, surpassing the previous high of $850 reached in January 1980. The metal later eased back to $858.10 in late London trading...
US Election 2008
wnbc.com/ ... 21:01:10
A man with a knife was arrested inside a campaign headquarters of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in Decorah in northeast Iowa... pulled out the knife, but no direct threats were made...
washingtonpost.com/ ... 21:00:51
"What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like
Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out,
doesn't get in the way of my thought process..." --Ed Rollins, the onetime wunderkind of the Reagan White House and now, at 64, the national campaign chairman for upstart Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee...
thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/ ... 20:16:16
The assembled media found the display hilarious and at several points laughed out loud...
thehill.com/ ... 20:15:51
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) told reporters Monday that he was pulling a negative ad designed to target his chief rival in Iowa, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R). Then he showed the ad to a room packed wall to wall with reporters...
[to laughter...]
Defending Ourselves
post-gazette.com/ ... 20:15:13
Dec 25-- A convenience store clerk in Ingram turned the tables on a knife-carrying robber... shooting and seriously wounding the would-be thief... "He shot the robber several times. I'm not sure how many.... I believe the clerk was cut...."
Reasons for Repeal
rawstory.com/ ... 20:56:29
60 Minutes: California's medical
marijuana system in 'chaos'... California's pot shops have admittedly become an easy source of supply for people who just want to get high... Although the centers are supposedly collectives which buy marijuana grown by members and redistribute it, it is clear that large amounts of marijuana are also
entering the system from the black market, putting money into the pockets of organized crime and terrorists...
[REPEAL! REPEAL! REPEAL!]
action3news.com/ ... 20:54:54
Omaha, NE - Two parents are arrested after police bust what they say is a
marijuana-growing operation... four kids... from fifteen to three... conditions inside were filthy. The couple was using space heaters and the oven for heat...
princegeorgecitizen.com/ ... 20:13:43
"A sophisticated
marijuana grow operation was located in the home and just over 150 mature marijuana plants were seized, along with various other items related to their production," said Prince George RCMP Staff Sgt. Brad Anderson. "One male was arrested in the home and will be facing a charge of production of a controlled substance..."
TUE 2008-JAN-01
Criminally Stupid
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:19:40
took a pickup from a Chevrolet lot in Roseburg [Oregon] on Friday, but had to switch vehicles when a tire blew... then allegedly took a Subaru Legacy from a driveway... had that car for about 15 minutes before the engine overheated, causing it to catch fire... As [driver-by] rushed over with a fire extinguisher, the suspect stole his Dodge pickup... Spike strips placed by investigating officers punctured two tires, and the pickup slid into a ditch...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:18:14
SANTA FE, Texas... Police arrested a neighbor after a woman reported some of her undergarments had been stolen from her house... he had been doing drugs and was, quote: "stoned and stupid..." "I took her bra, but I didn't know nothing about her panties..."
Pakistan
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:56:29
Pakistan's election commission said Tuesday that unrest following the killing of Benazir Bhutto would almost certainly force the postponement of Jan. 8 elections, despite opposition threats of street protests if the poll is delayed...
Civilization vs Gangsterism
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:15:53
In a murderous quest aimed at "cleansing" their turf of snitches and rival gangsters, members of one of Los Angeles County's most vicious Latino gangs sometimes killed people just because of their race... There were even instances in which Florencia 13 leaders ordered killings of black gangsters and then, when the intended victim couldn't be located, said "Well, shoot any black you see..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:03:04
Thirty Kenyans including many children have been burned to death in a church, after seeking refuge from the mounting violence over last week's elections. A mob attacked and set fire to the church in the western town of Eldoret where hundreds of people were hiding... Dozens more are reported to have been taken to hospital with severe burns. It comes as EU election monitors said the presidential poll "fell short of international standards...."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:01:55
A suicide bomber in Iraq has killed 30 people in an attack in the capital Baghdad... Thirty-two others were injured...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:01:12
Malaysian Health Minister Chua Soi Lek has admitted that he is the man who features in two widely circulated DVDs of an unmarried couple having sex. He said he had apologised to the prime minister and other ruling party leaders but would not resign, and his own wife and children had accepted his apology... CCTV footage taken in a hotel... "I am the man in the tape.... The girl is a personal friend..."
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:59:00
The
Islamist group al-Shabab
has claimed responsibility for the killing of a senior Somali military official and his bodyguard in south Mogadishu...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:58:40
An American diplomat and his driver were shot to death Tuesday in the Sudanese capital... "too early to tell" if the attack was terror related...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:58:05
Gaza's ruling Hamas militant group launched a new crackdown on the rival Fatah movement early Tuesday, arresting dozens of activists and barring public gatherings after Fatah anniversary celebrations sparked deadly violence. The fighting stretched into a second day, leaving a total of eight dead and 60 wounded...
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:56:11
Two assailants with guns and grenades ambushed a police recruitment center in northern India early Tuesday in an attack that killed seven police officers and a civilian...
Missing
kcbd.com/ ... 10:50:31
An amber alert has been issued for two little girls allegedly abducted from the Dallas area. Ameryca Yzabella Martinez and Olevia Ashley Martinez were allegedly taken from their Mesquite home early Monday morning, by their father Gilberto Martinez...
Staying Healthy
reuters.com/ ... 11:16:54
Deep, restful sleep may be important for keeping type 2 diabetes at bay...
Healing Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:16:40
Think of germs as gangsters. One thug lurking on a corner you might outrun, but a dozen swaggering down the street? Yikes. Bacteria make their own gangs, clustering quietly in the body until there's a large enough group to begin an attack. This is the next frontier in fighting drug-resistant superbugs. The idea: Don't just try to kill bacteria. The bugs will always find a way to thwart the next antibiotic. The new goal is to disable bacteria's ability to sicken, so scientists can throw superbugs a one-two punch. And attempts to bust up germ gangs are leading the race to create these novel anti-infectives - using everything from compounds in Pinot Noir to some popular bone-building drugs...
Feeding Ourselves
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:11:41
The dire state of many fish stocks means calls to increase catch quotas are misguided, argues Callum Roberts. Restraint now, he says, could yield major benefits later... A quarter of the world's fish stocks have been exhausted... Britain's Fisheries Minister, Jonathan Shaw, goes to Brussels this week for the annual round of haggling over fish quotas...
US Military
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:59:20
The alleged leader of US troops who killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2005 in Haditha will not face murder charges, a US Marines spokesman said. Sgt Frank Wuterich, 27, will stand trial for voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, dereliction of duty and other charges...
Big Whoops Cascade
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:22:21
Two men trying to trace a loaded .357-caliber Magnum as a pattern for a tattoo accidentally shot themselves... not life-threatening...
Housing Ourselves
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:21:30
Frustrated by a nationwide housing slump, a western Maryland couple is selling raffle tickets for their $390,000 house and hoping they'll sell enough $100 tickets to get the farmhouse off their hands...
Just Random Chance
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:21:05
A Florida man was about halfway through a [$10] plate of steamed clams when he chomped down on something hard - a rare, iridescent purple pearl... could be worth thousands... "Few are round and few are a lovely color, so this is rare," said gemologist... "I think they have found something precious and lovely and valuable..."
Digital Future is Now
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:15:30
BBC News website gives its predictions for five technologies that could become big in 2008.
1. The web to go
2. Ultra mobile PCs
3. IPTV
4. Wimax
5. Mobile VoIP...
Digital Business
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 11:14:31
UK [but also elsewhere]... People living in rural parts of the country have much less choice of broadband providers, are likely to get slower speeds and pay a different price. And with super-fast broadband on the horizon, some commentators think things are set to get a lot worse...
World Energy
hosted.ap.org/ ... 11:14:01
If you've ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know that asphalt absorbs the sun's energy. A Dutch company is now siphoning heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices...
Peace 3000
reuters.com/ ... 11:13:46
The Archbishop of Canterbury has followed the Queen's lead in posting his annual message on YouTube, where his green theme for the New Year is "God doesn't do waste"...
reuters.com/ ... 11:06:49
Pope Benedict ushered in the third New Year of his pontificate on Tuesday with a call for the protection of the traditional family, which he said was vital for world peace...
Theory of Justice
reuters.com/ ... 11:06:26
Sara Jane Moore [77], one of two women who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a three-week span in 1975, was freed on parole on Monday after almost 32 years in prison... left the low-security women's prison in Dublin, California, where she had been serving a
life term
... Ford expressed opposition to any parole in a 2003 interview. "Just because the president is left standing may be a matter of luck ... the malice is the same, and the attempt to kill is the same..." later [Jan 2007] expressed remorse. "I am very glad I did not succeed.... I know now that I was wrong to try...." said she was motivated by a zeal for revolutionary politics and Ford's pardon of his predecessor, resigned president Richard Nixon... [Biographer] described Moore as "a very complex, very manipulative, sort of frightening American. Yet she is very bright and very charming..."
Marriage Today
reuters.com/ ... 10:57:31
Australian newlyweds kissing on the backseat of their hired car were unaware their chauffeur was street drag racing, until a police siren broke their romantic bliss and ended the race.... newlyweds... were escorted home in a police car...
New Year 2008
hosted.ap.org/ ... 10:55:50
It was something not seen in Baghdad since before the 2003 invasion - people publicly welcoming a new year with singing, dancing and general revelry. The ballrooms of two landmark hotels - the Palestine and the Sheraton - were full of people for the first New Year's Eve celebrations after four years of violence...
news.bbc.co.uk/ ... 10:50:07
Millions of people across the UK have celebrated the arrival of the New Year. An estimated 700,000 people gathered in London, with many lining up at the River Thames for the firework display at the London Eye. In Edinburgh, about 100,000 revellers enjoyed the street party, with about 15,000 in Glasgow's George Square. In Cardiff, some 30,000 people joined in the Calennig celebrations at Cardiff Castle, and 5,500 celebrated at an open air concern in Belfast...
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