☛ Emo Style Makeover Game

Stupendous beauty game in which you’ll be able to put makeup on a normal, common girl with the latest emo style cosmetics. You’ll be able to combine them with the most daring hairstyles and with the most stylish accessories, such as earrings, piercings, etc.

☛ Steve Jobs Action Figure: Apple Threatens Chinese Toy Maker With Lawsuit

Apple has allegedly threatened to sue Chinese company In Icons over its eerily realistic 12-inch action figure of Steve Jobs, the company’s late founder. The 1:6 scale model, which was said to be distributed by DiD Corp. in late February, comes with the clothes and accessories popularized by Jobs, such as the black faux turtleneck, blue jeans and sneakers. The figurine, which is packaged in a box that looks like Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography cover, also comes with a chair, a “One More Thing…” backdrop, as well as two red apples, including one with a bite in it. To make it extra creepy, the doll’s realistic head sculpt features Jobs’ famous unblinking stare.

☛ 34 Shocking Facts About U.S. Debt That Should Set America On Fire With Anger

We have all been lied to. For decades, the leaders of both major political parties have promised us that they can fix our current system and that they can get our national debt under control. As the 2012 election approaches, they are making all kinds of wild promises once again. Well you know what? It is all a giant sham. The United States has gotten into so much debt that there will be no coming back from this. The current system is irretrievably broken. 30 years ago the U.S. debt was a horrific crisis that was completely and totally out of control. If we would have dealt with it back then maybe we could have done something about it. But now it is 15 times larger, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to the debt every single year.

☛ Vertu making ‘year of the dragon’ Signature phone…Only $20,733!

☛ Paul Supporter Likely Violated Military Conduct Code

Following a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul held a boisterous rally, featuring a speech from Army Corporal Jesse Thorsen. Thorsen, who was in uniform, voiced impassioned support for Paul’s non-interventionist views. “We don’t need to be picking fights overseas,” he said, and pledged to help “make sure this man is the next president of the United States.” It was an understandable sentiment from a soldier who said he had served in the military for 10 years, which included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the appearance likely violated the protocols for service members included in Defense Department Directive 1344.10, which states explicitly that they are not to participate in political rallies as anything more than spectators. And if they do attend a political function, they’re not supposed to do so in uniform.

☛ Arthur Lee Thompson steals police vehicle while high on crack [Video]

☛ Islam Critical Black Metal music nominated for Norwegian Grammy

Metal band Taake is nominated for the Norwegian Grammys in the category for best metal album for the album “Norway’s weapons,” which came out this fall. Besides the line of text devoted to “Moslems”, include “those who burn our flag,” called the swine in the song “Hurricane.” The text also says that hard to be against hard: “Now wake up soon Norway.”

☛ Swank sushi: Tuna fetches record $736K

A bluefin tuna caught off northeastern Japan fetched a record $736,000, Thursday in the first auction of the year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The price translates to $1,238 per pound — also a record, said Yutaka Hasegawa, a Tsukiji market official. Though the fish is undoubtedly high quality, the price has more to do with the celebratory atmosphere that surrounds the first auction of the year.

☛ How fracking might have led to an Ohio earthquake

The link between “fracking”-related activities and earthquakes was thrown into stark relief over the weekend when a magnitude 4.0 quake struck Youngstown, Ohio – typically not a hot bed of noticeable seismic activity. The quake triggered shaking reportedly felt as as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto. The temblor struck Dec. 31 and was the latest and strongest of 11 minor-to-light quakes that have hit the region since March. The epicenters are clustered around a wastewater injection well for a hydraulic fracturing operation.

☛ Denver woman accused of attacking $30 million painting

A 36-year-old Denver woman, apparently drunk, leaned against an iconic Clyfford Still painting worth more than $30 million last week, punched it, slid down it and urinated on herself, according to a criminal case filed against Carmen Lucette Tisch. “It doesn’t appear she urinated on the painting or that the urine damaged it, so she’s not being charged with that,” Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney’s office, said Wednesday. “You have to wonder where her friends were.” Tisch is being charged with criminal mischief in the incident that happened at the Clyf ford Still Museum at 3:30 p.m. on Dec. 29. Damage to the painting — “1957-J-No. 2.” — is estimated at $10,000. The painting, which is nearly 9 1/2 feet tall and 13 feet wide, is estimated to be worth between $30 million and $40 million by the museum. Tisch allegedly committed the offense with her pants pulled down, according to the police report, and struck the painting repeatedly with her fist.

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• ◆ Four-time Texas lottery winner may have beat the system

  A four-time Texas lottery winner’s timing is priceless.Joan Ginther, 63, has been dubbed “the luckiest woman on earth,” having scratched her way to four jackpots worth a total of $20.4 million.

  Ginther, a reclusive, Stanford-educated math genius, has had winning tickets in 1993, 2006, 2008 and 2010. Now, Harper’s magazine theorizes that the Lone Star legend skillfully charted when and where winning tickets might show up.

• ◆ Fukushima Unit 3 MOX likely melted through

  MOX fuel that was believed to have been kept cool at the bottom of one of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant after its core melted is believed to have breached the vessel after melting again, a study said Monday.The study by Fumiya Tanabe, an expert in nuclear safety, said most of reactor 3′s mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel may have dribbled into the containment vessel underneath, and if so, the current method being used to cool the reactor will have to be rethought. This could force Tokyo Electric Power Co. to revise its schedule for containing the five-month-old disaster.

• ◆ Study says nuclear fuel at Fukushima reactor possibly melted twice
  Fuel inside one of the reactors at the crippled nuclear complex in Fukushima Prefecture, which was believed to have been kept cool at the bottom of the pressure vessel after its core suffered a meltdown, has possibly breached the vessel after melting again at the bottom of the vessel, an expert’s study showed Monday.
• ◆ Big Pharma’s Crooked Crusade to Push Pills on Little Kids
  In the past decade, America’s pharmaceutical industry has knowingly marketed dozens of dangerous drugs to millions of children, a group that executives apparently view as a lucrative, untapped market for their products. Most kids have no one to look out for their interests except anxious parents who put their trust in doctors. As it turns out, that trust is often misplaced. Big Pharma spends massive amounts to entertain physicians, send them on luxury vacations and ply them with an endless supply of free products. As a result, hundreds of thousands of American kids—some as young as three years old—have become dependent on amphetamines like Adderall and a pharmacopeia of other drugs that allegedly treat depression, insomnia, aggression and other mental health disorders.
• ◆ Michael Moore to Obama: ‘Show some guts,’ arrest S&P head

  On his Twitter feed Monday, the Oscar-winning film director also blamed the 2008 economic collapse on Standard & Poor’s — apparently because it and other credit-ratings agencies did not downgrade mortgage-based bonds, which encouraged the housing bubble and let it spread throughout the economy.“Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Mr. Moore wrote.

  Standard & Poor’s, one of three key debt agencies, stripped the U.S. federal government of its AAA status Friday night and reduced it to AA+ for the first time in the nation’s history.

  Mr. Moore went on to note that the “owners of S&P are old Bush family friends,” continuing a theme he has developed through several films about capitalism as essentially a crony system for the rich and Wall Street, especially the Bush family.

• ◆ Massachussetts takes up anti-liberty torch
  The hypocrisy of police trying to stop citizens from videotaping their public actions should be obvious in this, the Patriot Act Age. From warrantless wiretapping to data mining to the proliferation of red-light cameras, the Surveillance State is clearly on the march. And yet, when citizens occasionally exercise their constitutional rights and turn the camera on the Surveillance State itself, they increasingly face the threat of police retribution.
• ◆ Will RIM help British police ID BlackBerry users who rioted, looted?

  Well, this could pretty much rule out a marketing campaign touting BlackBerry as the smartphone of choice for rioters. Which is too bad, because Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) could use a new demographic stronghold to reverse its dwindling market share.Media reports since the weekend’s rioting in sections of London following the shooting death of a local man by police have focused on the roles Twitter and BlackBerry’s IM service played in stoking the mayhem.

  Now RIM has officially responded. BlackBerry UK, the “official UK Twitter account” for Canada-based RIM, early Monday tweeted:

  We feel for those impacted by the riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.

  So how can RIM help the police identify riot and looting participants? According to The Register, “RIM can pass over decrypted versions of BBM chatter.”

• ◆ Kanye West Says People Look At Him ‘like Hitler’

  The 34-year-old rapper known for his outbursts was the headline act at the Big Chill music festival Saturday night, where he ranted in the middle of his set about being misunderstood and underappreciated. “I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m (expletive) insane, like I’m Hitler,” he said. “One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.”West received light boos from the crowd as a result.

• ◆ Digital Hit Men for Hire

  Cyber attacks designed to knock Web sites off line happen every day, yet shopping for a virtual hit man to launch one of these assaults has traditionally been a dicey affair. That’s starting to change: Hackers are openly competing to offer services that can take out a rival online business or to settle a score.An ad for a DDoS attack service.

  There are dozens of underground forums where members advertise their ability to execute debilitating “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks for a price. DDoS attack services tend to charge the same prices, and the average rate for taking a Web site offline is surprisingly affordable: about $5 to $10 per hour; $40 to $50 per day; $350-$400 a week; and upwards of $1,200 per month.

• ◆ California Mother Charged With Murder After Breastfeeding on Meth

  Charges against a California mother have been upgraded from manslaughter to second-degree murder this week after evidence at preliminary hearings suggested that she knowingly endangered her infant’s life by breast-feeding while using methamphetamine.Six-week-old Anthony Acosta III died last year after an allegedly lethal amount of the drug was passed to him when his mother, Maggie Jean Wortman, 26, continued to breast-feed despite her meth habit.

• ◆ Man dead after firing on police in fiery Poconos standoff
  Battling an addiction to bath salts, Kish took his mother and two others hostage in his mother’s Chestnuthill Township house Thursday afternoon. After he wounded a state trooper with birdshot and set fire to the house, police said, he ran outside with a gun and refused to put it down.
• ◆ How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock
  In the early days of Michael Moorcock’s 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric. In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenland called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, “Six Days to Save the World”, he says those early novels were written in about “three to ten days” each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing.
• ◆ Smugglers using creative ways to bring drugs into South Florida
  From subs to nuts, in wigs, sculpture, fruit and “wearable heroin,” drug smugglers are finding more creative ways to conceal their bootlegged goods.
• ◆ Chocoholic fish: Giant Gourami Gary: Kit Kats: Sea Life London Aquarium
  Aquarium staff have managed to wean a chocoholic giant fish onto a healthier diet after inheriting the gourami, raised entirely on Kit Kats by its owners.
• ◆ 4 men arrested in LA-to-NY cocaine smuggling ring

  The prosecutor said police seized $3 million worth of cocaine, $900,000 in cash, steroids, money counters and other paraphernalia from several locations. Also seized were eight vehicles, including a Mercedes-Benz and two Cadillac SUVs.Besides the secret compartments, the ring took extra precautions by placing the vehicles on car carriers ordinarily used by legitimate auto dealers. The car carrier companies weren’t aware that drugs were being shipped inside the vehicles, authorities said.

• ◆ Kings of Leon bandmates “urge Caleb Followill to enter rehab”
  Caleb admitted: “We would wake up at 3pm, soundcheck, have dinner and drink two bottles of wine. We would drink another before we went on stage, take a bunch of pills, drink another bottle on stage followed by a bowl of cocaine.”
• ◆ Riots: the underclass lashes out
  This is the most arcane of uprisings and the most modern. Its participants, marshalled by Twitter, are protagonists in a sinister flipside to the Arab Spring. The Tottenham summer, featuring children as young as seven, is an assault not on a regime of tyranny but on the established order of a benign democracy. One question now hangs over London’s battle-torn high streets. How could this ever happen?
• ◆ Did George Soros win 10/1 return on S&P’s US credit rating downgrade?

  A mystery investor or hedge fund reportedly made a bet of almost $1billion at odds of 10/1 last month that the U.S. would lose its AAA credit rating.Now questions are being asked of whether the trader had inside information before placing the $850million bet in the futures market.

  There were mounting rumours that investor George Soros, 80, famously known as ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’, could be involved.

• ◆ Twitter users could be arrested for ‘inciting’ London rioting and looting

  Twitter users in the United Kingdom who posted inflammatory messages encouraging others to engage in violence could be arrested, according to Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh.Kavanagh told The Telegraph that officers were investigating messages posted on Twitter and would “absolutely” consider arresting users who helped incite some of the worst rioting in the British capital in years.

• ◆ Honey-Soaked Naked Girls Were Filmed By Pastor

  Using a hidden video camera, a Texas man filmed four naked, honey-drenched teenage girls while they showered at a church where he worked as a youth pastor.But since the statute of limitations has already expired, prosecutors today were forced to dismiss felony charges lodged against Thomas Fortenberry, who allegedly did the surreptitious filming in November 2007 at the Greater Harvest Community Church in Pasadena.

• ◆ China’s New Lucrative Business: Dead Babies Turn into Stamina Booster Pills

  Chinese hospitals and abortion clinics that are connected to the business immediately notify pharmaceutical companies when a baby dies, mostly because of a still birth or an abortion.The companies purchase the baby corpses and store them in some family’s refrigerator to avoid suspicion. The next step in this highly secretive process is putting the corpses in a medical drying microwave and grinding them into pills. The ground baby powder is then put in a capsule, ready to be sold as a stamina enhancer, according to the SBS team.

• ◆ Translucent Ants Photographed Eating Colored Liquids
  Scientist Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India captured beautiful photos of these translucent ants eating a specially colored liquid sugar. Some of the ants would even move between the food resulting in new color combinations in their stomachs.
• ◆ 10 Beautiful Chinese Women Executed Over the Past 30 Years
• ◆ London burning: history just went sci-fi

  History always repeats itself, said Hegel. But he forgot to add, commented Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. What Marx meant in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that history does not repeat itself at all. It only appears to, because human imaginations cannot keep up with the speed of change, so they dress it in costumes borrowed from the past. It is not the 2011 rioters who are dressing in history’s robes – they appear to have modelled themselves more on recent zombie movies – but commentators, who are reaching for analogies of 1980s socialists to attribute these troubles to familiar causes.It is worth looking at images of London’s violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness. Sci-fi nightmares of urban catastrophe resonate with these pictures because this is a city made strange.

• ◆ Texas Town to Recycle Urine

  The drought in Texas has gotten so severe municipal water managers have turned to a once untenable idea: recycling sewage water.”When you talk about toilet-to-(water) tank it makes a lot of people nervous and grossed out,” says Terri Telchik, who works in the city manager’s office in Big Spring, Texas.

  Water for the town’s 27,000 residents comes through the Colorado River Municipal Water District, which has broken ground on a plant to capture treated wastewater for recycling.

  “We’re taking treated effluent (wastewater), normally discharged into a creek, and blending it with (traditionally supplied potable) water,” district manager John Grant told Discovery News.

• ◆ Jay-Z and Kanye West album deal irks indie retailers

  Watch The Throne will be released first on iTunes before the Best Buy chain’s exclusive deal to sell the album nearly two weeks ahead of other music retailers.The letter says the deal will do “great damage” to more than 1,700 record stores and calls for equal access.

  Jay-Z’s spokesman had no comment.

  Posted by the organisers of Record Store Day, the letter has been signed by shops across the US and calls the release plan a “short-sighted strategy”.

• ◆ Mexican Smugglers Nearly Interrupt California Surf Contest

  Three Mexican nationals attempted to illegally land their boat on California’s Huntington Beach Sunday — about a mile away from where crowds were forming to watch a professional surfing contest.Lifeguards spotted the small fishing boat at around 8:30 a.m., but when the men realized they had been spotted, they turned back to sea and were seen throwing a package overboard, The Orange County Register reported.

• ◆ Racy Cathay Pacific Cockpit Pictures Prompt Investigation (VIDEO)

  Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways is launching an investigation into pictures that appear to show a pilot receiving oral sex from a flight attendant while in a commercial airplane cockpit.Low quality photos of the act, featuring a woman in a red outfit not unlike those of Cathay Pacific’s flight attendants and a pilot, have circulated through Chinese media. According to some reports, the two are a couple.

• ◆ Government agents stole $9,000 in cash during Rawesome Foods raid, says witness

  A witness on the scene during the Rawesome Foods raid has publicly stated that an agent of the Specialized Surveillance & Enforcement Bureau of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health stole $9,000 in cash from James Stewart after placing him in handcuffs. The $9,000 in cash was about to be used to acquire food products (honey, watermelons, eggs and others) that are offered to club members of Rawesome Foods.During the raid on Rawesome Foods, $4,500 in cash was taken from the store and $9,000 confiscated from James Stewart, but only the $4,500 in cash was noted on the warrant. California law requires that all items seized at the raid are noted on the warrant, but the LA County Department of Public Health failed to note the $9,000, meaning there is no longer any paper trail for this cash that was taken from James.

• ‪◆ Metropolis II by Chris Burden (the movie)‬‏
  A short doc about a kinetic sculpture that took four years to build. We had the honor of spending three days in Chris Burden’s studio filming this sculpture before it was moved to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA) where it is being reinstalled.
  The installation opens fall 2011.
• ◆ Italian town’s kebab ban enrages migrant community

  “To ban kebabs in Cittadella is like forbidding pizza in Paris or New York,” said Abdallah Khezraji, a member of the Consulta Regionale Immigrazione for Italy’s Veneto region.On Friday, the town council of Cittadella passed a law stopping to stop the issue of licenses to vendors wishing to sell kebabs in the medieval walled city in Veneto.

  ‘Protecting tradition’

  “This food is certainly not part of our tradition and of our identity,” said Mayor Massimo Bitonci of the anti-immigration Northern League party, which shares power in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition.

  Bitonci said kebabs were “not suited to our historic center [because of] the way in which the foods are eaten, the smell they give off.”

  He also justified the ban on health grounds, saying the ordinance targeted “dishes cooked and then left in the open for a long time.”

• ◆ Twelve Triggers Driving Mankind Towards World Government

  What I am about to describe in this article are not “predictions” of any kind. Rather, they are forecasts based on available data and common sense projections of where the Global Power Elite are trying to take the world, why they are doing so, and what they hope to achieve. The more they keep the general public in the dark, the higher their chances of success.Doing this kind of forecast is rather like understanding the weather. If on a hot summer day you look out your window and see dark clouds and lightning on the horizon, and suddenly a strong, damp ozone-filled gust blows your way, it’s basic common sense to say that you shouldn’t be forecasting “sunny and calm today,” but rather “drenching rain, thunder, lightning and hail.”

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• ✭ Internet archivist seeks 1 of every book written

  Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

  “There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”

• ✭ America’s city of broken dreams: 50 jobless and destitute people set up forest community on New York’s doorstep

  In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression these are the ramshackle homes of the desperate and destitute U.S. families who have set up their own ‘Tent City’ only an hour from Manhattan.More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey’s forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.

  And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country’s £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

  Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

• ✭ Who’s Grabbing Africa’s Land? U.S. Speculators, Including Universities
  China and Arab countries have generally been scrutinized in the media for their land deals, but much of the cash flow comes through U.S. and European investors, according to Oakland Institute—through established pension funds, agribusiness behemoths and even educational institutions.
• ✭ Facebook – the destruction of the innocence of computing
  Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.
• ✭ Burning Man Sells Out – limits tickets, increasing scalpers

  And now it has come to this: For the first time ever, Burning Man has literally sold out.Organizers were forced to cap the number of attendees to the weeklong event, an art-focused, community-centric festival that starts Aug. 29. The event sold out last week, giving rise to a profitable black market that some past Burning Man participants say goes against the festival’s principles.

  The cap on ticket sales was necessary to limit attendance as required by the permit issued by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That permit allows for 50,000 people at any one time, organizers said, and more than 51,500 tickets were sold last year.

• ✭ Cremated Ashes Packed into Ammunition

  If you’d like to go out with a bang, Holy Smoke LLC offers to pack your cremated ashes (or those of your loved ones) into ammunition cartridges. You tell them the caliber or gauge, ship the remains to them, and they’ll load the cartridges:Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedant’s ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverant staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.[...]

• ✭ Amy Winehouse planned to adopt little girl

  Amy Winehouse was in the process of secretly adopting an adorable Caribbean child — hoping to save her from her impoverished life — just before the tragic singer died, the little girl’s family said.Bright-eyed Dannika Augustine, 10, of St. Lucia, had caught the eye of the 27-year-old “Rehab” crooner during one of the singer’s many jaunts to the island and was going to be formally adopted by Winehouse before the troubled star died in her London pad on July 23, London’s Mirror newspaper reported yesterday.

• ✭ Do trees communicate?
  Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent and architecture of this network through the use of new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree’s roots from another. He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees.Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker, a recent undergraduate student in Forestry, found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees.
• ✭ Ghostface Killah Sued By ‘Iron Man’ Composer for Copyright Infringement

  On his second album, “Supreme Clientele,” Killah allegedly “copied verbatim” the Urbont-written “Iron Man Theme” on two tracks.The album was released back in 2000 (way before the recent Jon Favreau-directed movies) and it’s unclear why it took Urbont so long to sue. But he may have grown tired of seeing Killah’s name attached to his music on the Internet.

  Much of the case is a typical copyright infringement claim, but Urbont throws in an unusual unfair competition allegation that caught our attention.

  According to the complaint: “Defendant Ghostface is also known for the nickname, ‘Tony Starks,’ which is a take-off of the name ‘Tony Stark,’ Iron Man’s real name and true identity. In this way, Defendants’ use of Urbont’s ‘Iron Man Theme’ gives them a substantial commercial advantage by linking Ghostface to Iron Man without paying for it.”

• ✭ Joe Biden likens tea partiers to terrorists
  Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.
• ✭ Nikon’s Racist Camera
  Did someone blink?
• ✭ How Facial Recognition Technology Can Be Used To Get Your Social Security Number

  Those freaked out by facial recognition technology have fresh fodder: a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which researchers were able to predict people’s social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam.At the head of the research team was Alessandro Acquisti, a CMU professor who pointed out in 2009 that the social security number system has a huge security flaw — social security numbers are predictable if you know a person’s hometown and date of birth. This study essentially adds a facial recognition component to that study. Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman ran three experiments. In the first, they data mined Facebook for photos of people with searchable profiles. They then used that database of faces and identities when applying off-the-shelf facial recognition technology (PittPatt) to “anonymous” singles on a popular dating site. Acquisti told me in an interview last month that they were able to reidentify 15% of the digital Cupids.

• ✭ Twitter admits editing offensive Trending Topics, plans more
  Today Twitter’s CEO said they may in the future “edit out any…clearly offensive [trending topics].” He also said “we edit out any [trending topics] with obscenities.”
• ✭ Stasi Chic: Exhibition Unmasks the Art of the East German Spy Disguise

  At first glance the photos look staged. They show stocky men stiffly clad in various outfits that include fur hats and thick coats with upturned collars — and, most importantly, sunglasses. But these photos aren’t stage props from a silly low-budget spy film, they are images snapped by members of the feared East German secret state police, or Stasi, for an internal course called the “art of disguising.”Berlin-based artist Simon Menner unearthed the images while sifting through the Stasi archives, which were opened to the public after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was allowed to reproduce the photos and they are now on display in an exhibition entitled: “Pictures from the Secret Stasi Archives.”

  Morgen Contemporary, the Berlin gallery hosting the exhibition, says in its description of the collection that “many of the snapshots seem absurd and they may even be amusing. And yet we ought not lose sight of the intention that led the Stasi agents to take them.”

• ✭ Mind Control: Car’s Brakes, Bicycle Gears Worked by Brain Signals

  It’s the future. You’re racing down the highway when, all of a sudden, the driver ahead of you slows down. You know you need to hit the brakes to avoid an accident, but your foot can’t move as fast as your brain. You’re about to rear-end the guy, except. …… except that your car has read your mind. It picks up your brain waves and automatically slows down. Accident averted.

• ✭ Twitter Avatar Portraits
• ✭ Hideouts or Sacred Spaces? Experts Baffled by Mysterious Underground Chambers
  At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles.
• ✭ Quadriplegic man dies in Mont. skydiving accident

  A quadriplegic man with five years of skydiving experience died in a weekend skydiving accident in northwestern Montana, Flathead County officials said Monday.Sheriff Chuck Curry said Zack Fogle, 27, of Kingston, Wash., died Saturday afternoon when his parachute did not open during a jump at the 44th annual Lost Prairie Boogie, a 10-day skydiving event near Marion that typically draws hundreds of participants.

• ✭ Republican Congressman Refers To President Obama As A ‘Tar Baby’
  Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO) has equated negotiating with President Obama to ‘touching a tar baby’.
• ✭ Downtown L.A.: A nightmare on Every Street

  “Look, Daddy, that man’s going to the bathroom!”No, not the words any daddy wants to hear from his 10-year-old daughter, especially during a stroll through their brand-new neighborhood.

• ‪✭ Pig Race Mosque [Video]
  Upset neighbor races his pigs during prayer in protest of new mosque
• ✭ U.S. Now an Electronic Concentration Camp

  We’re under constant scrutiny—our movements monitored by cameras, tracked by satellites and catalogued by a host of increasingly attentive government agencies. No longer does the idea of an omnipresent government seem all that farfetched. As technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the idea of a total surveillance society moves further from the realm of George Orwell’s science fiction fantasy into an accepted way of life.In fact, surveillance has become a huge moneymaking industry in itself, with many sectors having sprung up devoted to developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep targeted individuals under surveillance, with or without their cooperation. The science behind this technology is particularly brilliant.

• ✭ Soaring demand spotlights secret NY gold hoard

  If there’s one place a James Bond villain — or even some actual governments — would love raiding today, it’s the basement of a somber building in lower Manhattan: the world’s biggest gold vault.Gold prices hit a record $1,632.8 an ounce Friday, reflecting a nervous rush by private and national investors from stocks, dollars and euros to the safe-haven commodity.

  And the biggest single pile of the stuff on the planet lies deep beneath the New York branch of the US Federal Reserve Bank, a stone’s throw from the Stock Exchange.

  On a visit, a guide from the bank revealed the 7,000-ton hoard gleaming softly in a vault carved from Manhattan’s bed rock, five stories under the Big Apple’s teeming streets.

  Cast in bricks, stacked ceiling-high in blue-painted, caged boxes, the heap is worth a staggering $350 billion.

• ✭ Computer To Wed Couple In Texas

  You could call it “My Big Fat Computer Geek Wedding.”After a Houston couple couldn’t get a friend to serve as the minister at their wedding, they decided to create their own.

  When Miguel Hanson and his fiancee, Diana Wesley, get married on Saturday, a computer will conduct the ceremony. Well, technically, a computer program Hanson wrote will serve as the minister.

  During the wedding, to be held in the Houston home of Hanson’s parents, the couple will stand before a 30-inch monitor in the backyard. In a robotic voice, the computer will greet the guests, say how the couple met and go through the ceremony.

• ✭ Obama Says Becoming A Dictator Is Very Tempting As La Raza Crowd Cheers [Video]

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• ✪ Catholic church’s plea could rule out damages for priests’ abuse

  Victims of sexual abuse by priests will no longer be able to sue the Catholic church for damages if a landmark judgment rules that priests should not be considered as employees.

  In a little publicised case heard this month at the high court, the church claimed that it is not “vicariously liable” for priests’ actions. The church has employed the argument in the past but this was the first time it had been used in open court and a ruling in the church’s favour would set a legal precedent.

• ✪ Mystery prisoner has authorities stumped
  A mystery man arrested on minor charges more than three weeks ago remains behind bars in Utah while law enforcement officials try to determine his true identity, which he refuses to reveal.
  “This is really a strange case,” said Lt. Dennis Harris with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. “He just doesn’t want to be found.”The unidentified man, who has graying hair, a light beard and is believed to be in his 60′s, was arrested on July 1 for trespassing in a parking garage. 

  He was booked into jail on three misdemeanor charges and has thwarted any chance of release, with or without bail, by refusing to identify himself.

  “I’ve been trying to think from A to Z why he would want to stay here … why he wouldn’t give us any information,” Harris said.

  “He either has to be wanted by some other state or he could be on some other registry or database that has not shown up,” he added.

  Law enforcement officials say the man is “fairly well spoken and educated,” but very guarded about his identity.

• ✪ 6 Ways Food is Being Used as a Weapon
  Because of massive corporate consolidation of agriculture, centrally coordinated global regulations, a devalued commodity-dollar and unrestrained commodity speculation, chemical and genetic modification, and real or manipulated food shortages; there is indeed a war being waged — with food as the primary weapon. Understand, this is a not purely a war on food, but rather a war on the general population. Therefore, it is crucial to understand these tactics in order to defend against them.
• ✪ South African Man Wakes After 21 Hours in Morgue Fridge

  A South African health official says a man awoke to find himself in a morgue fridge — nearly a day after his family thought he had died.

  Health department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said Monday that the man awoke Sunday afternoon, 21 hours after his family called in an undertaker who sent him to the morgue after an asthma attack.

  Kupelo says the man started yelling, prompting morgue workers to run away in fear. They eventually returned and removed him from the fridge. He was then taken to a nearby hospital and later discharged by doctors who deemed him stable.

  The mortuary owner says his family is very happy to have him home.

• ✪ The extraordinary experiment of a chimp raised as a human child

  However, Terrace thought differently and had chosen Stephanie LaFarge, a former student and lover, to bring up Nim in the large Manhattan townhouse she shared with her self-confessed ‘rich hippy’ writer husband, Wer, and their seven children.

  But it was a disastrous decision — Stephanie never bothered trying to discipline Nim. She did not take any notes on the experiment and did not keep a log of Nim’s progress, but she did breastfeed him and give him alcohol and puffs on her cannabis joints.

  He was encouraged to lay waste to their expensive home and wind up his rival for her affections, Stephanie’s husband. Home movie footage shows the little creature, a blur of black and white in his romper suit, charging around as Stephanie recounts dreamily how she let him explore her naked body as he moved into puberty.

  ‘I never felt sexually engaged with him,’ she recalls, which is a blessing at least. Yes, it certainly was the Seventies.

• ✪ Beijing Couple Throw Around & Drown Kitten In Water Puddle
  Video explodes on internet showing a man and woman pair abusing a cat in a puddle, repeatedly pressing the cat under water
• ✪ Shark Bites No Match For Dolphins’ Powers Of Healing

  Q: OK, so imagine a human and a dolphin both being bitten by a shark. How would the healing process differ between the two?

  Well, the dolphin wouldn’t hemorrhage…or have any infection, which is miraculous. And despite having sustained massive tissue injury, within about month the animal will restore its normal body contour. There’ll be some surface markings, but a chunk of tissue maybe the size of a football will have been restored with essentially no deformity.

  And what is equally amazing is that handlers who know these animals will tell you that they observe absolutely no indications in the animal’s behavior that it’s in pain.

• ✪ Plugging Fukushima reactors no longer stated goal for Tepco

  To substantially reduce the amount of radioactive materials released from the plant, Tepco needs to get to the bottom of the problem: plugging holes or cracks in the reactors’ containment vessels that are allowing contaminated water to flood on-site facilities, including the reactor buildings and turbine buildings, experts said.

  The updated road map, however, includes no reference to this critical work in the second stage, even though it was mentioned in past plans. And without fixing this problem, it is difficult to say that the release of radioactive materials is under control.

  “In terms of managing the leakage of radioactive materials, I think plugging the holes will be the most important point,” said Tsuyoshi Misawa, a professor of reactor physics at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, adding he was perplexed it wasn’t included in the new plan.

• ✪ 17 All-Time Worst Bathroom FAILS (PHOTOS)

  We’ve all been there: sitting in a porta-potty where the door has a faulty latch, or waiting in line at a movie theater restroom that inexplicably has 12 sinks and two toilet stalls. Hey, they can’t all be awesome engineers.

  But these photos we’ve found go above and beyond the simple “oops” you’d experience with your average bathroom flub. Oh no, ladies and gentlemen. These fails are far worse — and far more difficult to forgive.

  So go ahead, try to imagine how you’d handle using these architectural wonders, and then be sure to vote for your favorites.

• ✪ A Graph that gives a little perspective on this whole deficit mess
  This graph, courtesy of the New York Times, has been making the rounds today, and it’s worth examining. Note that health care reform, much-maligned by the right as deficit-killer, cost less than even the most inexpensive of George W. Bush’s policies (that policy being Medicare Part D). Note also that the Bush tax cuts alone added more to the deficit than all of President Obama’s new policies combined — and that’s including projected spending over the course of a theoretical second term.
• ✪ U.S. trucking funds end up in Taliban hands

  Cash from part of a $2.16 billion U.S. transportation contract in Afghanistan has ended up in the hands of Taliban insurgents, the Pentagon said on Monday.

  The disclosure is another example of the persistent difficulty the U.S. military has in keeping its massive war funding from reaching the insurgents it is fighting in the unpopular, decade-old Afghan war.

  The United States is spending more than $6 billion a month in the conflict.

• ✪ Microsoft apologizes for promotional Winehouse tweet

  Microsoft became a target of online ire over the weekend after the same Twitter account posted an update inviting people to remember Winehouse by buying digital versions of her “Back to Black” album at social.zune.net.

  The Zune website is Microsoft’s shop on the Internet for downloading music, films and other entertainment content to computers, smartphones, and Xbox 360 videogame consoles.

  Replies on Twitter criticized the Microsoft message as “crass” and “vile.”

• ✪ Startling Revelations about Three Mile Island Disaster Raise Doubts Over Nuke Safety

  The company immediately hired Randall Thompson to serve as the health physics technician in charge of monitoring radioactive emissions, while Joy Thompson got a job monitoring radiation doses to TMI workers.

  “I had other health physicists from around the country calling me saying, ‘Don’t let it melt without me!” Randall Thompson recalls. “It was exciting. Our attitude was, ‘Sure I may get some cancer, but I can find out some cool stuff.’”

  What the Thompsons say they found out during their time inside TMI suggests radiation releases from the plant were hundreds if not thousands of times higher than the government and industry have acknowledged — high enough to cause the acute health effects documented in people living near the plant but that have been dismissed by the industry and the government as impossible given official radiation dose estimates.

• ✪ Bill Clinton: Government Should Regulate Internet Speech

  Bill Clinton wants the government to “correct” what you say on the Internet, folks. Should the government listen to the former panderer-in-chief, we’ll go from Big Brother to Big Bubba on the ol’ Internet tubes.

  Bubba is not happy with what he claims is the “misinformation” on the Internet and he wants the force of government to stop it all. Politico is reporting that Clinton makes the proposal in an upcoming CNBC interview saying, “It would be a legitimate thing to do.”

  No, Bubba, it would not.

  Clinton says that the idea of having a government agency that “corrects” the “misinformation” on the Internet would be “independent” of government so it isn’t a traditional government agency. This, he feels would make it all A-OK with those fearing Big Brother government ministries of propaganda.

  Again, Bubba, it would not.

• ✪ The Fleet – London’s Underground River
  If you listen carefully just above this unassuming grate you can hear the ripple and splash of flowing water. This is the sound of the River Fleet, London’s largest subterranean river. Forced underground by the city’s burgeoning populace the river still flows from its source to its mouth where it joins London’s main waterway, the Thames. Yet what lies beneath?
  Below the ground there is a remarkable network of tunnels and chambers, put in to place by Victorian engineers, the final step in a process which took centuries. For over a thousand years there had been a shipping dock at the mouth of the river – its name comes from the Anglo-Saxon fleot which means a tidal inlet. Yet it was not destined to persevere as a river in its own right.

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• ✖ Busted by Facebook: Some on probation learn the hard way that online posts can backfire

  If you don’t want to do the time, stay offline. Or at the very least, don’t “friend” your probation officer.

  Convicted of possessing methamphetamine and Ecstasy, Scott W. Roby learned that the hard way. The Louisville man had his probation revoked this month — and was sentenced to two years in prison — in part for violating conditions that required him to stay alcohol-free and out of bars and liquor stores.

  Roby had invited his probation officer to be his friend on Facebook, then Roby posted pictures of himself drinking — including one in which he was holding a beer while posed next to “Buddy Bat,” the mascot for the Louisville Bats, said prosecutor Dinah Koehler.

  In another Facebook post, according to court records, Roby asked: “Anyone wanna go get smashed tonight one last time before the end of the Earth?”

• ✖ Heroin in the Heartland | An Epidemic of Addiction
  The change in Oxycontin formulation had a second, deadlier effect. Oxycodone is a lipid (fat)-soluble molecule, so the drug crosses nasal membranes quickly—almost as quickly as when the drug is injected. Most users of oxycodone were content to snort the drug, as the benefit of injecting was not worth dissolving the crushed tablets and using needles. But heroin burns when it is ‘insufflated’ or snorted, and the molecule crossed lipid membranes more slowly— providing reasons to inject the drug. Many patients tell me that they never considered using needles when Oxycontin was around, but that the only way to get similar effects from heroin was by injecting the drug. In other words, the change in formulation of Oxycontin resulted in an increase in intravenous drug abuse.
• ✖ Dad Busted for Injecting Heroin Into Nine-Year-Old Son’s Neck
  According to New Mexico state police, the mother of Velasquez’s nine-year-old son noticed unusual track marks on the boy’s neck and took him to the hospital. There, the youngster told investigators about how his dad would inject him with heroin sometimes. The police then arrested Velasquez, who’s now facing charges of child abuse and contributing to a delinquency of a minor.
• ✖ Ecuador suspends liquor sales after homemade booze kills 21

  The Ecuadorian government imposed a 72-hour nationwide ban on sales and consumption of alcohol after 21 people died from drinking homemade aguardiente made with methanol.

  The announcement was made Sunday during a press conference at which a number officials took part including Health Minister David Chiriboga and Security Minister Homero Arellano, and at which a national health emergency was declared.

  A source at Arellano’s office told Efe that the ban on booze is in force for all types of liquors, but only homemade alcohol will be subject to summary confiscation.

  Authorities had already declared the health emergency and alcohol ban in Los Rios province, where the deaths took place and where some 9,000 liters (2,400 gallons) of homemade liquor were seized.

• ✖ A History of Government Management of UFO Perceptions through Film and Television
  UFOs and aliens beings have often been portrayed in mass media, whether it be movies or television shows. Most of these appearances were however heavily edited and calculated by the American government in order to communicate a specific attitude towards this mysterious phenomenon. What is the purpose of these efforts? This article looks at the fascinating history of government involvement in UFO-related movies and television shows.
• ✖ State Rep. Hurley admits carving initials into House floor desk

  Yes, she carved her initials in her desk on the floor of the state House, state Rep. Julia Hurley, R-Lenoir City, confirmed today.

  “It was like 1 in the morning on the last day of the session,” Hurley said of that late-night session in May. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  Hurley was responding to a recent report on a Nashville television station about the incident. The station reported several other desks also have marks on them, ranging from initials to a dollar sign.

• ✖ Britain ‘four meals away from anarchy’

  MODERN civilisation may not be quite as safe as we thought. Britain’s security services have been privately warning their staff that western societies are just 48 hours from anarchy.

  MI5’s maxim is that society is “four meals away from anarchy”. In other words, the security agency believes that Britain could be quickly reduced to large-scale disorder, including looting and rioting in the event of a catastrophe that stops the supply of food.

• ✖ Nonbelievers
  Never Forget 9/11
  Religion was the cause.
• ✖ Going viral with doggie doo

  Pollution in the Puget Sound is such a problem that a group trying to protect the ecosystem spent $27,000 in state money to make a catchy video, complete with dance steps, telling people how they can do something about it.

  Pick up dog poop.

• ✖ Polk sheriff won’t cover inmate undies

  He changed the menu at Polk County’s jail, directing cooks to dish up less-expensive food. He banned basketball, ordering inmates to uproot the jail’s hoops. And he changed the jail’s TV options to favor educational viewing rather than sports and violent programming.

  Now Polk Sheriff Grady Judd is taking on skivvies. His latest cost-saving measure: stop providing free underwear to male inmates.

  “There’s no state law; there’s no federal law that says we have to provide underwear in the county jail,” Judd said.

  The jail will sell white boxers for $4.48 a pair and white briefs for $2.54 a pair — to inmates who choose to wear underwear.

  Judd presented the idea to county commissioners Thursday, saying the plan would save $45,000 a year.

  “Why shouldn’t they pay like the rest of us pay?” the sheriff said. “We pay to maintain the county jail; to keep them there. Certainly they can pay their way as much as they can afford.”

  “This is the county jail; it’s not a welfare program,” he said.

• ‪✖ Colonizing Space – ’70s Style!‬‏
  A NASA video from a time of great optimism about space exploration. The Apollo missions were completed and the Space Shuttle program was underway. How soon before cheap and frequent flights to space would allow the construction of O’Neal colonies and mining camps on the Moon? This visionary approach calls for tiered greenhouses in space and unlimited solar power beamed back to Earth… all before the year 2000!
• ✖ Murdoch news sites defaced, brought down by hackers

  LulzSec, the group of hackers that said three weeks ago it was disbanding, claimed credit Monday for defacing Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper website, while an allied group, Anonymous, claimed credit for a denial-of-service attack that brought down the website of The Times, another Murdoch paper. The Sunday Times and News International sites also appeared to be down Monday.

  “Tango down,” Anonymous said on its Twitter page about The Times. Meanwhile, late Monday, those who went to the Sun’s website were redirected to a website that looked like The Sun with a fake story that said Murdoch’s body had been found in his garden. Then they were taken to LulzSec’s Twitter page, where the group proclaimed:

  “TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun!,” then followed with this: “”We have joy, we have fun, we have messed up Murdoch’s Sun.”

• ✖ Cities Report Surge in Graffiti

  And Los Angeles does not appear to be alone in grappling with a recent upsurge in graffiti, which is turning up in some unlikely places. A bumper crop of scrawls is blossoming in many modest-size communities across the country — in places like Florence, Ala.; Bernalillo County, N.M.; Taylors, S.C.; and in larger cities like Nashville and Portland, Ore. — even as major cities like Chicago, Denver, New York and Seattle say vigilant antigraffiti campaigns have spared them thus far.

  “It’s popped up all of a sudden in the last six months,” said Tim Sandrell, the owner of Safari Adventures in Hair in Florence. “I’ve been downtown for 10 years, and I’m really disappointed that we are seeing this kind of activity. We have a beautiful city and an historic city, and it’s really upsetting to me seeing this going on.”

• ✖ Pseudomamma on the foot: An unusual presentation of supernumerary breast tissue
  On physical examination, the breasts were symmetrical having no nodes or retractions. In the plantar region of the patient’s left foot, there was a well-formed nipple was surrounded by areola and hair on the surface, measuring 4.0 cm in diameter, with no palpable nodes (Figs. 1 and 2). The remaining physical examination was normal, including the mammary line. Results of the following laboratory tests were normal: complete blood count, fasting serum glucose level, urine exam, electrolytes, serum urea and creatinine. No alterations were found during ultrasound of the lesion and urinary tract.
• ✖ Your Brain on Androids

  Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum? Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been a visitor to what’s called the “uncanny valley.”

  The phenomenon has been described anecdotally for years, but how and why this happens is still a subject of debate in robotics, computer graphics and neuroscience. Now an international team of researchers, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California, San Diego, has taken a peek inside the brains of people viewing videos of an uncanny android (compared to videos of a human and a robot-looking robot).

• ✖ Salt or cocaine, a fix is a basic instinct

  PRIMORDIAL instincts that drive animals to seek out salt may be governed by the same mechanism that drives drug addicts to hunt down their fix.

  Researchers deprived mice and rats of salt, then offered them salty water to drink. After killing the animals they examined gene activity in the hypothalamus, the brain’s “reward” centre. They found that gratification genes had been activated – the same genes that are active in cocaine and heroin addicts when their craving has been satisfied.

• ✖ An Alarming New Stimulant, Sold Legally in Many States
  The cases are jarring and similar to those involving PCP in the 1970s. Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself “to pieces” over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.
• ✖ How the drugs of the 60s changed art

  In the ’60s, a lot of people were experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs including marijuana, LSD and everything in between. You had acid rock posters in San Francisco associated with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and groups like that.

  But my theory is that there were probably a lot of artists that didn’t necessarily want to do psychedelic-style art that were still influenced by the experience and created works that don’t necessarily look psychedelic in the stereotypical way, but may be conceptually psychedelic or have a kind of philosophical way of looking at the world.
  story.serra.maze.gi.jpg

  If you look at a lot of different styles in art of the past 50 years, you can see the influence of psychedelics, ranging from sculpture that looks very minimal like Richard Serra’s giant, spiral, mazelike structures, to something like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” there’s an interest in having art be experiential…

• ✖ Brothers grim: Jake or Dinos Chapman – in pictures

  Jake and Dinos Chapman’s new two-part show at London’s White Cube galleries are presided over by a troupe of ghoulish Nazis with smiley-face armbands and a horde of schoolgirls with animal faces. Just two distinctive touches in an exhibition that makes a virtue of bad taste

  Warning: contains images that some people may find offensive

• ✖ Colo. Woman Accused Of Groping TSA Agent In Ariz.

  Authorities say a Colorado woman who allegedly groped a female Transportation Security Administration agent at Phoenix’s international airport is facing a felony count of sexual abuse.

  Phoenix police say 61-year-old Yukari Mihamae is accused of grabbing the left breast of the unidentified TSA agent Thursday afternoon at an airport checkpoint.

  TSA staff say Mihamae refused to be go through passenger screening and became argumentative before she squeezed and twisted the agent’s breast with both hands.

• ✖ How to Damage Your Laptop in the Quickest Possible Time

  Your laptop, with all its sensitive data and/or ill-gotten gains, is about to be confiscated by the authorities, who are banging on the door. There’s no time to reformat it—you’ve got to destroy it, fast.

  This sticker will help you do just that, provided you’ve a drill by your side. (And which self-respecting cyber criminal wouldn’t?)

  Meant to be placed directly above your laptop’s hard disk, the sticker sports a crosshair with which you can accurately destroy any digital evidence the cops are after.

  Randy Sarafan, who created the stickers, advises to “research the build of your laptop and locate the position of your hard drive”.

• ✖ Austerity For Everyone, Except The Department Of Defense
  While Congress and the President fight it out over the debt ceiling and all of America quietly shudders over whether our economy will completely default on itself, at least one industry still hums along without a care in the world. Amidst a fiscal crisis of apparently apocalyptic proportions, where the GOP demands dollar for dollar spending cuts from the budget in order to raise our debt limit, the Pentagon asked Congress for $264 million to cover part of a $771 million overrun on the F-35 program. The Hill reports Republican Senator John McCain let the news slip via Twitter, saying “Congress notified that first F-35 jets have cost overruns of $771M. Outrageous! Pentagon asking for $264M down payment now. Disgraceful.”
• ✖ Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine

  On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

  This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.

• ✖ Photo Gallery: South African Prison Tattoos
  Cut into the flesh with nails and makeshift blades, rubbed into the wounds with a mixture of melted black rubber seals, ground red brick, trash bins, batteries, and saliva — these tattoos are forbidden in the South African prison system. Despite the severe penalties and permanent stigma, tattooing persists. For her photo study Life After, Cape Town photographer Araminta de Clermont sought out former inmates of “Numbers” prison gangs who were struggling for acceptance and survival since being released after years, sometimes decades of incarceration and shot their portraits in their current environment. Faces. Signs. A sailor’s grave. A note to a deceased mother, inked across the forehead. These full body and facial tattoos serve as narratives of crime history and life struggle. See the compelling images in our gallery.
• ✖ Online child porn bill raises privacy fears

  A bill that seeks to clamp down on online child pornography is raising some alarms in the tech and privacy communities because of a provision that would require Internet service providers to store users’ IP addresses for 18 months.

  The legislation, spearheaded by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), would require Internet providers and possibly other entities to retain that information to aid law enforcement investigations of child exploitation.

  The bill already has some notable support, namely from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  However, it also faces tough criticism from tech companies and public interest groups, which believe the section on data retention is too broad, threatens Web users’ privacy and may not accomplish its stated goal of cracking down on child pornography.

• ✖ MK ULTRA AND MIND CONTROL IN THE WHITE HOUSE
  Timothy McVeigh? The V-Tech Shooter? The Columbine Killers? John Hinkley Junior? Mark David Chapman? Sirhan Sirhan? Harvey Lee Oswald? These people have significantly impacted our lives, all MK Ultra victims.
• ✖ Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman: “So When Officials Tell You that We Must Rush to Settle with the Banks for the Sake of the Economy, Don’t Believe Them. We Should Do This Right, And Hold Bankers Accountable for Their Actions”

  Officials are pushing for a settlement with mortgage companies that, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, “would broadly absolve the firms of wrongdoing in exchange for penalties reaching $30 billion and assurances that the firms will adhere to better practices.”

  Why the rush to settle? As far as I can tell, there are two principal arguments being made for letting the banks off easy. The first is the claim that resolving the mortgage mess quickly is the key to getting the housing market back on its feet. The second, less explicitly stated, is the claim that getting tough with the banks would undermine broader prospects for recovery.

  Neither of these arguments makes much sense.

• ✖ News of the World phone-hacking whistleblower found dead

  Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

  Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

  Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: “At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

  “The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”

• ✖ 2 Arrested After Goats, Guinea Pigs, Ducks Found In Car of Bang Bus Stars

  Two men face animal cruelty charges after a call reporting crying coming from a car led officers to discover several animals inside.

  Miami police said officers were dispatched to Northwest 37th Avenue and Northwest Seventh Street on Monday after receiving a report that someone had heard what they thought was a baby crying in a car parked there.

  The officers found no child in the car, but they did find several animals, including goats, roosters, pigeons, guinea pigs and ducks.

  Police said one of the goats died later that day, but they did not elaborate on the animal’s cause of death.

• ✖ Tepco Works to Cover Fukushima as Storm Nears
  Tokyo Electric Power Co. is rushing to install a cover over a building at its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant to shield it from wind and rain as Typhoon Ma-on approaches Japan’s coast from the south.
• ✖ BP pipeline leaks oily mixture onto Alaskan tundra

  BP reported yet another pipeline leak at its Alaskan oilfields, frustrating the oil giant’s attempts to rebuild its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

  BP said on Monday that a pipeline at its 30,000 barrel per day Lisburne field, which is currently closed for maintenance, ruptured during testing and spilled a mixture of methanol and oily water onto the tundra.

  The London-based company has a long history of oil spills at its Alaskan pipelines – accidents which have hurt its public image in the U.S., where around 40 percent of its assets are based.

• ✖ 64 missile warheads stolen from train

  AUTHORITIES are investigating the theft of 64 missile warheads from a train transporting military equipment to Bulgaria.

  Interior ministry spokesman Marius Militaru said Sunday the components are not dangerous on their own – only when integrated into missile systems. Prosecutors said on nday they are investigating the theft.

  Officials did not respond to inquiries regarding if the warheads contained explosives.

  Railway workers on Saturday noticed the seals on a carriage door were broken, and it was not properly closed when the train reached Giurgiu, a Danube port that borders Bulgaria.

• ✖ Cheap Trick Stage Collapse VIDEO: Catastrophic Crash At Ottawa Bluesfest

  The main stage at the Ottawa Bluefest came crashing down Sunday right in the middle of a Cheap Trick set, injuring 4 people including one in serious condition.

  Winds apparently picked up around 8 p.m. EDT, causing the stage to seemingly fold in on itself and sending the band members quickly off their feet. All members of the band reportedly emerged unharmed.

• ✖ Police: Foreclosed Home Set Fire; Man Shot

  a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy went to a townhouse at 738 SW 107th Ave. to serve an eviction notice about 11 a.m.

  The real estate agent for the property confirmed the man inside the home was Allen Gauntlett, 52, who had lost the home to foreclosure after owing $10,000 in homeowners’ dues and fees.

  Police officers said Gauntlett would not come out of the home, and the deputy called for backup.

  “As we were sending a unit to that location, the BSO deputy then called again and said that the subject was setting the house on fire,” said Sgt. John Gazzano, of the Pembroke Pines Police Department.

  “They said he put gasoline in his whole house and set it on fire, and the windows are all burned out, and the door has burnout around it,” said neighbor Kara Burbano.

  Police said Gauntlett walked out of the burning house and got into a fight with officers, so the officers shot him.

• ✖ Police say city men kidnapped teen and glued his lips shut

  Holding the butcher knife, Bangs allegedly ordered the teen to take off his clothes and lie down. Bangs allegedly burned a rubber glove over the teen, letting it drip onto him and burning his abdomen, according to police.

  Bangs accused the teen of being “a snitch,” according to the police report.

  After dripping the burning rubber on the teen, Ismael then allegedly held a lighter close to the teen’s lips and told him not to blow it out or he would cut him. He also stuck paper up the teen’s nostrils and lit it, again telling him not to blow it out. The teen suffered burns on his lips, according to the report.

  Ismael then allegedly applied a large amount of glue to the teen’s lips, gluing them together. He also used a lighter to heat up the blade of a knife and applied it to the victim’s shoulder “numerous times,” causing several burn injuries.

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• ☛ FBI: Smugglers plant pot in crossers’ cars

  The smugglers selected their targets by placing lookouts at the port of entry who identified vehicles that daily used the SENTRI express lane, according to the affidavit. Once a vehicle and driver were selected, the smugglers would secretly obtain the car’s vehicle identification number. The VIN was then used to make spare keys for that car.

  The keys would be used at night by smugglers to unlock the car, put drugs in it and lock it. The next morning, the drivers would get in their cars and drive to El Paso — without ever knowing that drugs had been placed in the vehicles overnight.

• ☛ Surgeons carry out first synthetic windpipe transplant

  Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.

  Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

• ☛ New Smartphone App Automatically Tags Photos

  So much for tagging photographs with names, locations and activities yourself – a new cell phone application can take care of that for you.

  The system works by taking advantage of the multiple sensors on a mobile phone, as well as those of other mobile phones in the vicinity.

  Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina (USC) and unveiled at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.

  “When a TagSense-enabled phone takes a picture, it automatically detects the human subjects and the surrounding context by gathering sensor information from nearby phones,” said Xuan Bao, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Duke who received his master’s degree at Duke in electrical and computer engineering.

• ☛ DHS: Imported Consumer Tech Contains Hidden Hacker Attack Tools
  A top Department of Homeland Security official has admitted to Congress that imported software and hardware components are being purposely spiked with security-compromising attack tools by unknown foreign parties.
• ☛ Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results
  Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning.
• ☛ How to visualize behavior tracking cookies with a Firefox add-on
  Collusion is a very simple website that visualizes the interwoven mesh and mess of third-party tracking cookies. You install an add-on, and then just start browsing the web. If you have multiple monitors, you can drag the Collusion tab out and watch as your web of browsing history and cookies expands; otherwise, just surf the web for an hour or so, and then take a look at Collusion. What you will see is quite astonishing. Each and every one of the red dots is tracking your movement and behavior across the web. Some of the red dots are obvious, like Google’s DoubleClick ad network — but did you know that the ShareThis and AddThis widgets, which are found on almost every news or blog website, are tracking your clicking and reading habits?
• ☛ RIAA Accounting: How To Sell 1 Million Albums And Still Owe $500,000

  from the who’s-ripping-off-whom-again? dept

  Last year, we had a post on RIAA accounting, detailing how labels screw over many musicians, even some of the best selling ones, such that they never actually make a dime in royalties. Bas points us to an excellent 14 minute video from lawyer Martin Frascogna, entitled How To Sell 1 Million Albums and Owe $500,000

• ☛ Hipster fashion blogger
• ☛ Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: On 40th Anniversary of “War on Drugs,” Cops Release Report Showing its Failure
  In conjunction with this week’s 40th anniversary of President Nixon declaring “war on drugs,” a group of police, judges and jailers who support legalization released a report today showing how the Obama administration is ramping up a war it disingenuously claims that it ended two years ago.
• ☛ Alarming Rise in Celebrity Drug Busts: 40 Arrests in First Six Months of 2011
  Forty celebrities were arrested for drugs (mostly marijuana) during the first six months of 2011. This doubles the total from the first half of 2010. Last year, 43 celebrities were arrested for drugs. In 2011, that figure will likely double as well
• ☛ DEA Now Monitoring Krokodil, a Deadly Morphine Derivative
  To produce the potentially deadly drug, which has a comparable effect to heroin but is much cheaper to make, users mix codeine with gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorous. Codeine, a controlled substance in the United States used to treat mild to moderate pain, is widely available over the counter in Russia.
• ☛ Police database abuse ‘hugely intrusive’
  “Our investigation shows that not only have police employees been found to have run background records checks on friends and possible partners, but some have been convicted for passing sensitive information to criminal gangs and drug dealers,” said Daniel Hamilton, director of the Big Brother Watch.
• ☛ Can Predictive Policing Forecast Future Crimes?

  It’s great when cops catch criminals after they’ve done their dirty work. But what if police could stop a crime before it was even committed? Though that may sound like a fantasy straight from a Philip K. Dick novel, it’s a goal police departments from Los Angeles to Memphis are actively pursuing with help from the Department of Justice and a handful of cutting-edge academics.

  It’s called “predictive policing.” The idea: Although no one can foresee individual crimes, it is possible to forecast patterns of where and when homes are likely to be burgled or cars stolen by analyzing truckloads of past crime reports and other data with sophisticated computer algorithms.

• ☛ Penis length: Research find new way to measure penis length
  Penis length cannot be determined by how big his hands or feet are — those and other supposed indicators have been widely discredited for years. But now a team of Korean researchers has produced what may be a more reliable guide: the ratio of the length of his index finger to that of his ring finger. The lower that ratio, the longer the penis may be, the researchers wrote Monday in the Asian Journal of Andrology.
• ‪☛ Organic Spies Find Lies [Video]‬‏

  Why The Organic Trade Association and Corporate Organic Food Brands do NOT want Labeling of Genetically Engineered and Genetically Modified Foods

  This Video provides financial evidence that the President of the Board of Directors at the Organic Trade Association, Julia Sabin, individually profits off of Genetically engineered foods as a VP and General Manager at Smuckers.

• ☛ Woman Died From Sex With Dog After Allergic Reaction

  A man has been charged with breaking Ireland’s bestiality laws for forcing his dog to have sex with a woman who died from an allergic reaction brought on by the perverse act.

  Sean McDonnell, the 57-year-old charged in the case, apparently ordered his German Shepard to have sex with a 43-year-old mother of four that he met in an online fetish chatroom, according to the Journal.

  They met to perform the kinky act with the canine, but the woman died hours later from an attack similar to a reaction unleashed by a peanut allergy, according to the Irish Daily Star.

• ☛ True fact: A common ingredient in commercial breads is derived from human hair harvested in China

  If you read the ingredients label on a loaf of bread, you will usually find an ingredient listed there as L-cysteine. This is a non-essential amino acid added to many baked goods as a dough conditioner in order to speed industrial processing. It’s usually not added directly to flour intended for home use, but you’ll find it throughout commercial breads such as pizza dough, bread rolls and pastries.

  While some L-cysteine is directly synthesized in laboratories, most of it is extracted from a cheap and abundant natural protein source: human hair. The hair is dissolved in acid and L-cysteine is isolated through a chemical process, then packaged and shipped off to commercial bread producers. Besides human hair, other sources of L-cysteine include chicken feathers, duck feathers, cow horns and petroleum byproducts.

  Most of the hair used to make L-cysteine is gathered from the floors of barbershops and hair salons in China, by the way.

• ☛ Self-Experimenters: Self-Styled Cyborg Dreams of Outwitting Superintelligent Machines
  As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. “My body was effectively extended over the Internet,” Warwick says.
• ☛ Band Presses Vinyl Record on Chocolate

  This record can easily go from turntable to coffee table. Scottish band Found, looking for an inventive new way to release a new single, baked up a sugary idea: to press the 7” record on chocolate.

  The band enlisted the help of a friend, baker Ben Milne who, after several failed attempts, managed to successfully created the Willy Wonka-like treat; the entire record, including the paper label, is edible.

  While not audiophile quality by any stretch, the chocolate disc plays a decent version of the band’s “Anti-Climb Paint” single.

• ☛ WikiLeaks loses Icelandic financial lifeline

  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lost a financial lifeline.

  Since December bans by the world’s major credit card networks, it has been difficult for supporters of the controversial whistleblower to send him donations. But this week, WikiLeaks gained a brief respite with the unwitting help of an Icelandic bank.

  The window was quickly closed.

• ☛ Millions of jellyfish invade nuclear reactors in Japan and Israel (PHOTOS)

  A nuclear reactor in Japan was forced to shut down due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish near the power plant.

  A similar incident was also reported recently in Israel when millions of jellyfish clogged down the sea-water cooling system of the power plant.

  Such massive invasions of the species have raised speculations and scientists are trying to figure out the reason behind such unusual growing trends.

  “The several [power plant incidents] that happened recently aren’t enough to indicate a global pattern. They certainly could be coincidental,” LiveScience quoted Monty Graham, a jellyfish biologist and senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab off the Gulf Coast of Alabama stating.

  Recent studies have found out that jellyfish blooming occurs mostly during the summer and spring months.

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• ► Unmanned helicopter crash lands at nuke plant

  The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it lost control of an unmanned helicopter during a flight near the No. 2 reactor building, forcing the controller to make an emergency landing on a roof there.

  Tokyo Electric Power Company says the remote-controlled light helicopter took off from an observatory south of the Fukushima plant just past 6:30 AM on Friday. Its mission was to collect airborne radioactive substances around the No. 2 reactor building.

  The utility says its engine failed about 30 minutes later, making it impossible for the aircraft to ascend.

  The helicopter — 50 centimeters long and weighing 8 kilograms — was found lying on its side on the rooftop.

• ► Woman Says Doctor Was a Predator After Hours
  She claims that “during the course of these after-hours appointments, the plaintiff was placed under sedation by defendant Adams for the purposes, ostensibly, of defendant Adams conducting internal vaginal examinations and procedures including, but not limited to, internal ultrasounds of the plaintiff.”
  She says Adams prescribed large amounts of medication which was contraindicated in her conditions.
  “Over the course of the treatment regimen, defendant Adams insured that the plaintiff became dependent on the large volume of prescription drugs provided by defendant Adams to his patient … (H)e assured her that the prescription drugs being prescribed were necessary for her treatment and pain management,” the complaint states.
• ► Russia’s Krokodil Addiction: Deadly Designer Drug Spreads
  As typically happens in Russia, Pavlova began her drug use as a teenager shooting a substance called khanka, a tarlike opiate cooked from poppy bulbs, then graduated to heroin and finally, at the age of 27, switched to krokodil, because it has roughly the same effect as heroin but is at least three times cheaper and extremely easy to make. The active component is codeine, a widely sold over-the-counter painkiller that is not toxic on its own. But to produce krokodil, whose medical name is desomorphine, addicts mix it with ingredients including gasoline, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid, iodine and red phosphorous, which they scrape from the striking pads on matchboxes. In 2010, between a few hundred thousand and a million people, according to various official estimates, were injecting the resulting substance into their veins in Russia, so far the only country in the world to see the drug grow into an epidemic.
• ► Hitler model banned by eBay

  Philip Fursman has been buying plain models from a UK company, painting them and then selling them on the eBay website for a number of years for a small profit.

  But Mr Fursman from Card, Somerset, fell foul of the site’s policies when he tried to sell a model of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

  However, similar models of Osama bin Laden used in war games are allowed.

  The 37 year-old father-of-three said he was surprised by the policy because he had recently sold miniature figures of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban on eBay without any problem.

• ► It’s so Surreal… the artist who forged himself

  When art copies art

  The Flavour of Tears is established as a bona fide original, but René Magritte and his fellow Surrealists were no strangers to the dark arts of forgery. Magritte made a living during the Nazi occupation of Belgium by forging Picassos and Renoirs. Fellow artist Marcel Mariën would sell them on to private collectors.

  The Surrealist movement explores the tension of the real and the unreal, and Magritte may well have seen his forgeries as part that conflict. Playing a joke on the aficionados, he hung his forgery of Max Ernst’s The Forest in place of the original in 1943.

  Fellow Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, in his later years, produced what he called “self-forgeries” of his earlier, more popular style. He would backdate them to fool the critics; ironic revenge for their attacks on his later works.

• ► Could the Krokodil Drug Epidemic Poison America?

  The name krokodil comes from its trademark side effect: scaly green skin like a crocodile around the injection site. TIME calls it “the dirty cousin of morphine,” because it’s three times cheaper than heroin and very easy to make, being that its main ingredient is codeine, a behind-the-counter drug that has sent many of America’s famous rap community to prison.

  The medical name of krokodil is desomorphine. A quick search for that will bring up graphic images of people with swollen faces, exposed bones and muscles and skin rotting off on any given body part.

  The reason the drug is so anatomically destructive is due to its mix-ins. Users stir in ingredients “including gasoline, paint thiner, hydrochloric acid, iodine and red phosphorus which they scrape from the striking pads on matchboxes,” reports TIME.

• ► FCC increases penalties for caller ID ‘spoofing’

  The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules Thursday that increase the penalties for faking caller ID information in order to commit fraud or harm consumers.

  The practice, known as caller ID “spoofing,” can still be used for legal purposes such as safeguarding the privacy of individuals. But the commission argues spoofing is increasingly used for malicious purposes such as identity theft or placing false emergency calls to police.

  “Far too often, though, fake caller IDs are used by bad actors to get money from consumers, steal consumers’ identities, or stalk or harass,” said Joel Gurin and Sharon Gillett, the chiefs of the FCC’s Consumer and Wireline bureaus, respectively, in a statement.

• ► Feds to Launch Probe of Google
  Federal regulators are poised to hit Google Inc. with subpoenas, launching a broad, formal investigation into whether the Internet giant has abused its dominance in Web-search advertising, people familiar with the matter said.
• ► Exclusive: Top ISPs poised to adopt graduated response to piracy
  After years of negotiations, a group of bandwidth providers that includes AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are closer than ever to striking a deal with media and entertainment companies that would call for them to establish new and tougher punishments for customers who refuse to stop using their networks to pirate films, music and other intellectual property, multiple sources told CNET.
• ► LulzSec leaks Arizona law enforcement papers (Updated with excerpts)
  With more than 700 bulletins, email archives, images and other files, the 440MB package will keep readers busy for days. A few excerpts from the most obviously newsworthy documents follow.
• ► Libya: media blackouts, lies, and videotape

  The “limited kinetic action” in Libya has been one of the most misrepresented, selectively covered, and tragic imperialistic NATO adventures in recent history. We are presented a picture of a madman, frothing at the mouth, slaughtering civilians whenever possible. We are shown a Libya that is united against Qaddafi, with a population that wants NATO to save them and help depose the evil Qaddafi. But is this true?

  In fact, this is only a very small part of a large, complex picture. However, the Western media refuses to show their audience the entire reality while they are in fact there in Libya, able to fully appreciate the events. This just goes to show the strict gatekeeper aspect of Western mainstream media in which only certain things get covered and a very select few become major stories.

• ► 20 Classic Hip Hop Album Covers Recreated in LEGO
• ► Nuclear radiation in Teton Valley?
  With Boise rainfall samples measuring by far the highest concentrations of radioactive nuclides in the country, apocalyptic rumors of nuclear disaster run rampant. Higher cancer rates, lower SAT scores, genetic mutations, and birth defects are just a few of the things doomsayers expect to see in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima’s Daiichi plant. But if the nuclear scare has you dumping milk and fleeing from radioactive rain, you might want to put the dangers into perspective.
• ► Getting ready for the next big solar storm

  In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average1 solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren’t sure how to categorize it. The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii.

  This week, officials have gathered at the National Press Club in Washington DC to ask themselves a simple question: What if it happens again?

  “A similar storm today might knock us for a loop,” says Lika Guhathakurta, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters. “Modern society depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS, and satellite communications–all of which are vulnerable to solar storms.”

• ► Asteroid Apophis: Russia Says It Might Hit Earth, NASA Says It Won’t [Video]
• ► Taiwan Blogger jailed over critical restaurant review
  After visiting a Taichung beef noodle restaurant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches and that the owner was a “bully” because he let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.
• ► Missing Wharhol Found On Ryan O’Neal’s TV SHow
  Police believe they have tracked down a missing portrait of Farrah Fawcett.
• ► The Truth About Bottled Water [Video]
  Penn & Teller call BULLSHIT!
• ► Purified Bottled Water Is Not Tap Water, Industry Argues

  The International Bottled Water Association on Wednesday took on what it described as a “a myth repeated by some anti-bottled water activists that bottled water which comes from municipal water sources is just tap water in a bottle.”

  At least one group opposed to bottled water, however, shrugged at the public-relations gambit, suggesting that no matter how much processing is involved, bottled water is, on its face, an unnecessary product.

• ► Kind of Screwed

  Remember Kind of Bloop, the chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue that I produced? I went out of my way to make sure the entire project was above board, licensing all the cover songs from Miles Davis’s publisher and giving the total profits from the Kickstarter fundraiser to the five musicians that participated.

  But there was one thing I never thought would be an issue: the cover art.

• ► Regulating Chicken Fucking
  Roosters looking to get a little action in local henhouses must first produce a clean bill of health under a newly adopted law regulating romantic interactions among chickens in backyard farms.

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• ✖ “Classic” Tab of Oxy Fetches $50

  “The manufacturer basically changed Oxy’s chemical compound (none of the actual drug was removed) by adding a substance that makes it really difficult for most people to abuse it. People were abusing the old drug by crushing the pills to snort them, dissolving them to inject, or chewing them to get a maximum high. So in many ways the new drug is good news, because it prevents stuff like that. The bad news is that in my opinion, whatever substance they added to it has dulled how well the medication works and how long it lasts.”

  “The new OxyContin OPs are supposedly in line with the old 80 mg pills. But since the new pills were introduced, the price of the older OC pills has jumped by a good solid 20%. People who have them might want to hold on to them if they can. They’re like antiques. You might make some good money off of them later!”

• ✖ What Defines a Meme?
  Our world is a place where information can behave like human genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve
• ✖ ADL Declares “Japanese Good Luck Symbol Offensive to Jews”
  In yet another example of the Anti-Defamation League’s bizarre
  obsession with the Swastika, Nintendo has agreed to withdraw a
  Pokemon Trading card that bears a clock wise swastika.
  The Jewish Lobby declared that the card shows “insensativity to
  the feeling of Jews”.
• ✖ RATFINK NAZI HELMET Commercial 1968
  Fake Nazi Helmet commercial from a rare film
• ✖ Counterfeit herbal sex pills contain prescription-only erectile dysfunction meds, FDA warns

  Federal drug safety officials are warning consumers about counterfeit sex-enhancement pills that are sold as supplements but contain the drugs used in Viagra and another medication.

  The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that the fake “ExtenZe” pills, marketed to improve male sexual performance, contain tadalafil and sildenafil, the active ingredients in Cialis and Viagra. Both drugs require a doctor’s prescription.

  The FDA says the counterfeit product looks like ExtenZe, which is an herbal supplement. It says the counterfeit products are marked with lot numbers 1110075 and F050899.

• ✖ 2011 finalists Best Illusion of the Year Contest
• ✖ Chinese Teen Forced Out of School by Teacher for Body Odor
• ✖ There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

  You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.

  Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

• ✖ American Express now prohibiting medical marijuana buys

  American Express cards may no longer be used to purchase medical marijuana. The company has given no reason for the prohibition. Other credit card companies so far continue to allow their cards to be used for the purchase of medical marijuana where legal.

  “I haven’t seen it (the prohibition) with other credit cards,” said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association.

  “I don’t understand why they would turn their back on a $2 billion industry. It’s perplexing.”

• ✖ Hasid Vs. Hasid Arson Attempt Seriously Burns Man For Switching Synagogues
  Here in NYC, when Hasidim attack, the violence is usually reduced to running goy cyclists off the road or fisticuffs over Satmar schisms. But up in Rockland County, it’s all HDP (Hasids Don’t Play). An orthodox Jewish father of four is currently hospitalized with third-degree burns over 50 percent of his body after another orthodox Jew allegedly tried to burn his house down—because he started taking his family to a different synagogue.
• ✖ Rapper Glorifying Police Murderer is Honored at the White House

  Lynn, aka Common, is known for a rap song titled “Song for Assata”, which essentially praises a black woman known as Assata Shakur, her real name is Joanne Chesimard, who is an escaped convicted murderer who was serving Life plus 26 to 30 years for the cold-blooded killing of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973.

  In his rap song, Lynn paints Chesimard as a victim of the police and the system and portrays her as a hero, much in the same manner that Wesley Cook, aka Mumia Abu-Jamal, is praised by radical blacks and their ‘artists’ despite the fact that he too was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder a police officer, Daniel Faulkner of Philadelphia.

• ✖ Doesn’t Obama know what year it is? President signs Westminster Abbey guestbook 2008!

  Everyone wishes they could turn back the clock sometimes, and it turns out Barack Obama is no different.

  He got the date wrong by three years when he signed the guestbook at Westminster Abbey today on his official visit to the UK – despite apparently asking the dean what day it was.

• ✖ Morgellons: A hidden epidemic or mass hysteria?
  Sufferers include folk singer Joni Mitchell, who has complained of “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space… Fibres in a variety of colours protrude out of my skin: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer – a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”
• ✖ A look at the “sovereign citizen” movement

  This is a story about a group of Americans you’ve likely never heard of: they’re called “sovereign citizens.” Many don’t pay taxes, carry a driver’s license or hold a Social Security card. They have little regard for the police or the courts, and some have become violent.

  The FBI lists them among the nation’s top domestic terror threats.

  By some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 sovereign citizens in the U.S. And with the sluggish economy and mortgage mess, their ranks are growing.

• ✖ Every Six Hours, the NSA Gathers as Much Data as Is Stored in the Entire Library of Congress

  The National Security Agency is, by nature, an extreme example of the e-hoarder. And as the governmental organization responsible for things like, say, gathering intelligence on such Persons of Interest as Osama bin Laden, that impulse makes sense–though once you hear the specifics, it still seems pretty incredible. In a story about the bin Laden mission, the NSA very casually dropped a number: Every six hours, the agency collects as much data as is stored in the entire Library of Congress.

  That data includes transcripts of phone calls and in-house discussions, video and audio surveillance, and a massive amount of photography. “The volume of data they’re pulling in is huge,” said John V. Parachini, director of the Intelligence Policy Center at RAND. “One criticism we might make of our [intelligence] community is that we’re collection-obsessed — we pull in everything — and we don’t spend enough time or money to try and understand what do we have and how can we act upon it.”

• ✖ Catholic Church: Report indicts ’60s counterculture in Catholic abuse cases
  Blame the flower children. That seems to be the chief conclusion of a new report about the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. The study, undertaken by John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the request of America’s Catholic bishops, links the spike in child abuse by priests in the 1960s and ’70s to “the importance given to young people and popular culture” — along with the emergence of the feminist movement, a “singles culture” and a growing acceptance of homosexuality. It also cites crime, drugs, an increase in premarital sexual behavior and divorce.
• ✖ The Sexual World Of Bankers

  Sex scandals have become a staple of media exploitation with personal morality plays trumping political morality confrontations every time.

  They are both great distractions and effective tools of character assassination which are often more effective than more violent ways to neutralize people considered dangerous.

  That’s why the FBI was so hot to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with leaks of so-called wiretapped sex tapes. In his case, this tactic failed but the other worked.

  In some cases both tactics are deployed as in the physical assassination of Bin Laden and then the character-killing aimed at his supporters through the release of porn allegedly found in his “lair.”

• ✖ Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says

  The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space – as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night”.

  The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.

  The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Amazon languages.

  The Amondawa were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, and now researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Amondawa language.

  “We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

• ✖ Re-Branding Revolution: 7 Icons Pimped for Profit and Empire
  Revolutionary: Bobby Seale
  Re-branded: Vanilla ice cream enthusiast. Seale, who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the late 1960s, became a pitch man for Ben & Jerry’s in the early 1990s. In the ad Seale sports the Panther’s signature black beret while holding up a clenched fist in one hand and a serving of vanilla ice cream in the other. 

• ✖ New York in Black and White – Vintage Photos
• ✖ Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language

  Ruth Schulz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology call their robots the Lingodroids. The robots consist of a mobile platform equipped with a camera, laser range finder, and sonar for mapping and obstacle avoidance. The robots also carry a microphone and speakers for audible communication between them.

  To understand the concept behind the project, consider a simplified case of how language might have developed. Let’s say that all of a sudden you wake up somewhere with your memory completely wiped, not knowing English, Klingon, or any other language. And then you meet some other person who’s in the exact same situation as you. What do you do?

• ✖ Crossing your arms ‘relieves hand pain’

  “In everyday life you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world.

  “This means that the areas of the brain that contain the map of the right body and the map of right external space are usually activated together, leading to highly effective processing of sensory stimuli.

  “When you cross your arms these maps are not activated together anymore, leading to less effective brain processing of sensory stimuli, including pain, being perceived as weaker.”

• ✖ Bag Soaked With Chihuahua Urine Draws Bomb Squad Outside Long Island Court

  A dog that wasn’t quite housebroken may have indirectly been responsible for a bomb scare at a New York courthouse.

  The trouble began Friday when 19-year-old Melvin Ruffin arrived at a court complex in Central Islip following a long bus ride from his home in Bellport.

  During the trip, another passenger’s Chihuahua urinated on his backpack.

  So, he stashed the wet bag in some bushes while he went inside to answer a disorderly conduct citation.

  But then a retired police officer saw the bag and alerted security.

  The bomb squad was ultimately called in. Officers used a robot to determine that the bag didn’t contain anything harmful.

• ✖ The search for Mona Lisa unearths tomb and staircase
  Archaeologists digging for the remains of a 16th-century woman believed to be the model for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa masterpiece have found a crypt and a stairway to a probably second tomb inside a former medieval convent in central Florence.
• ✖ Osama Bin Laden: The Nigerian Email Scam
  My name is Captain Dan Nardiello of the US Marine corps (special) stationed in Pakistan, I found some money after the death of OBL I need someone to help me move it to a safer place, please have it in mind that there is no danger involved. You may contact me on usmc.12@blumail.org so that I can provide you with details.
• ✖ Steven McCormack, ‘Human Balloon,’ Injured By Compressed Air

  Steven McCormack was standing on his truck’s foot plate Saturday when he slipped and fell, breaking a compressed air hose off an air reservoir that powered the truck’s brakes.

  He fell hard onto the brass fitting, which pierced his left buttock and started pumping air into his body.

  “I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like it was going to explode from my foot,” he told local media from his hospital bed in the town of Whakatane, on North Island’s east coast.

  “I was blowing up like a football,” he said. “I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon.”

• ✖ Police go brutal on a guy, crowd gets angry and beat the hell out of cops [Video]
• ✖ Mother Nature gave us pimples, and then she made us self-conscious about them.
  Humans are pimply. It’s part of what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. While it’s true that some form of acne vulgaris affects other species—it’s been found in some Mexican hairless dogs and induced experimentally in rhino mice—acne is largely an affliction of our accursed species alone. (Somewhere between 85 and 100 percent of adolescents exhibit acne—and a significant minority of adults, too.) Why is the human animal so peculiar in its tendency to form volcanic comedones, papules, pustules, nodular abscesses, and, in some severe cases, lasting scars? According to evolutionary theorists Stephen Kellett and Paul Gilbert, we probably owe these unsavory blemishes to our having lost our apish pelts too rapidly for our own good.
• ✖ The Rise and Fall of an Oakland Potrepreneur

  It is an industry that blossomed in the oversize metal warehouses of old-line Oakland businesses. Established trucking, plumbing and construction companies, scrambling for work in a down economy, opened their doors to Ebyam’s cannabis farms, thought to be the largest in the city. His workers, mostly the bud-trimmers who assure the highest-quality medical marijuana, were organized by the Teamsters.

  But the failure of the statewide marijuana legalization initiative last fall, and subsequent threats from federal prosecutors, derailed the ambitious plan of city leaders to license four giant farms and thus make Oakland the legal cannabis capital of the country. And with the collapse of Oakland’s vision of marijuana supremacy came disaster for Ebyam.

  Ebyam is now locked in litigation over the $1.25 million sale of one of his growing operations, and another installation has been decimated by a string of suspicious burglaries — a fitting symbol, perhaps, of an industry that could have been.

• ✖ To Harvest Natural Gas From the Ocean, Shell Is Building the World’s Largest Man-Made Floating Object

  Shell is making good on its promise to build the largest object ever to float on water, announcing Friday it would build the Prelude FLNG Project to harvest offshore natural gas fields. The gargantuan ship will suck up the equivalent of 110,000 barrels of oil per day.

  The floating liquified natural gas facility will dwarf the biggest warships, weighing in at 600,000 metric tons. By contrast, the U.S.’ next-generation Ford-class supercarrier will displace 101,000 metric tons of water. Shell says its ship will be able to withstand a category 5 typhoon.

  In some ways, it’s more of a mini-island than a ship, designed to be moored in the same spot off the northwest coast of Australia for 25 years. The facility will be one-third of a mile long — longer than five football fields laid end-to-end — and will contain 260,000 metric tons of steel, about five times the amount used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

• ✖ RIP: Jeffrey Catherine Jones

  Jeffrey Catherine Jones, the fantasy artist who helped introduce fine art and illustration influences to comics in the ’70s and beyond, has died of complications from emphysema and bronchitis, according to numerous reports. She was 67.

  In the early 70s, then known just as Jeffrey, Jones helped form The Studio, a group of cartoonists/illustrators that included Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor-Smith. Jones was known for her lyrical linework and ethereal paintings, which prompted Frazetta himself to say that Jones was “the world’s greatest living painter.” Although she produced the comics strip Idyll for National Lampoon in the ’70s, Jones was best known for her book covers, prints, and painting, with only a brief dabbling in comics.

• ✖ Hidden camera found in Starbucks bathroom

  The camera was disguised as a plastic coat hook and was affixed to a wall directly across from a toilet, officials said. A Starbucks employee discovered the device and called police, they said.

  Shortly after, authorities arrested Velasco, who downloaded the device about every hour to his laptop computer while sitting in his car, police said.

  Detectives confiscated his laptop and say they found video of at least 45 female victims, including children, using the restroom. It did not appear that any of the videos were uploaded to the Internet or distributed, they said.

• ✖ Cindy Sherman Print Sells For $3.9 Million At Auction, The Highest Ever For A Photograph
  Christie’s had a bumper night, tallying more than $300 million in sales. While not the priciest item up for auction that day, Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96″ from 1981 passed all records for photography, and was sold for $3.89 million. According to ArtInfo.com, the buyer was New York dealer Philippe Segalot, and the underbidder was Per Skarstedt, also a New York dealer. Christie’s confirmed that this was a record for a photograph at auction, previously held by Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent II Diptychon,” which fetched $3.35 million in 2006. Sherman recently had another high profile sale, with her work “Untitled #153,” from 1985 reaching $2.7 million in late 2010.
• ✖ Photographers Respond to Lady Gaga’s New Copyright Demands
  Lady Gaga is now demanding that photographers surrender the copyright of photos taken at her concerts – and photographers are incensed.
• ✖ Exploding watermelons put spotlight on Chinese farming practices

  Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax farming practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals.

  It follows discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms, and the detergent borax in pork, added to make it resemble beef.

• ✖ Powerful Bi-Partisan Caucus Prepares to Fight TSA

  As we reported earlier today, the Department of Justice and the TSA used financial terrorism to nix HB 1937 in Texas, a bill that would have made it “A criminal act for security personnel to touch a person’s private areas without probable cause as a condition of travel or as a condition of entry into a public place,” shortly before the legislation looked to be on its way to passage in the Senate having passed the Texas House unanimously.

  The DOJ and Homeland Security intimidated lawmakers into dropping the bill after they threatened to shut down all the airports in Texas and prevent any commercial flights from operating out of or entering the state, a brazenly tyrannical tactic that proves the federal government is acting more like a mafia criminal enterprise than a body that is supposed to represent the interests of the American people.

• ✖ Guatemala: 27 massacred, decapitated in Petén by paramilitary drug gang Los Zetas
  Written in the blood from a victim’s severed leg, in Spanish: “What’s up, Otto Salguero, you bastard? We are going to find you and behead you, too. —Sincerely, Z200.”
• ✖ NUH UHHHHHHH!!!! LOOK AT THE NEW HAIRCUT THAT SOME TEENAGE BOYS ARE GETTING!!! (UTTER RATCHETNESS)
• ✖ 17 Lost Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images

  Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

  More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.

  Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.

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• ☆ Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators
  The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.
• ☆ America’s shocking secret: US experimented on disabled citizens and prison inmates

  Pictures have emerged providing the shocking proof that U.S. government doctors once experimented on disabled American citizens and prison inmates.

  Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

  Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission.

• ☆ Inside Gaddafi’s bunker [Video]
• ☆ RAPTOR RAPE REVERSAL
  The thought alone was glorious, and a toothy grin spread across Raaazerchakz’s evil face, his snakelike eyes narrowed as he charged at Bill, entering him bone dry. The intertwined lizard lovers smashed into a nearby kitchen worktop, and Raaazerchakz started to go to work on Bill, who screeched his disapproval and started thrashing his tail wildly. Pots and pans clanged loudly as they were hurled off the half destroyed kitchen unit by the bumming beasts, flying silver tributes to their wrong love. Frantically pumping, Raaazerchakz used his right claw to hook into the tail, preventing it from knocking him. With his other claw, Raaazerchakz started to lightly puncture Bill’s back in various places, giving him a brutal backscuttler. This was something he had heard about back when he was in his pen, separated from a jumping escape by two layers of razor wire mesh netting, inter and outer.

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