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The Star Wars Holiday Special is a 1978 American television special set in the Star Wars galaxy. It was one of the first official Star Wars spin-offs, and was directed by Steve Binder. The show was broadcast in its entirety only once, in the United States and Canada, November 17, 1978, on the U.S. television network CBS from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time (EST), and on the Canadian television network CTV from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time.

In the storyline that ties the special together, Chewbacca and Han Solo visit Kashyyyk, Chewbacca’s home world, to celebrate Life Day. Along the way they are pursued by agents of the Galactic Empire, who are searching for members of the Rebel Alliance on the planet. The special introduces three members of Chewbacca’s family: his father Itchy, his wife Malla, and his son Lumpy (Later retconned to Attichitcuk, Mallatobuck, and Lumpawarrump, respectively).

During the special, scenes also take place in outer space and in spacecraft including the Millennium Falcon and an Imperial Star Destroyer. The variety-show segments and cartoon introduce a few other locales, such as a cantina on the desert planet of Tatooine and a gooey, reddish ocean planet known as Panna.

The program also features many other Star Wars characters, including Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa (who sings the film’s “theme song”, set to the music of John Williams‘ Star Wars theme, near the end). The program includes stock footage from Star Wars,and also features a cartoon produced by Toronto-based Nelvana that officially introduces the bounty hunter Boba Fett.

The special is notorious for its negative reception.Anthony Daniels, in a documentary promoting the worldwide tour of Star Wars: In Concert, notes with a laugh that the Star Wars universe includes “The horrible Holiday Special that nobody talks about”. George Lucas did not have significant involvement with the film’s production, and was unhappy with the results. David Acomba, a classmate of Lucas’ at USC film school, had been selected to direct the special, but he chose to leave the project, a decision supported by Lucas.

The Star Wars Holiday Special has never been re-telecast or officially released on home video. It has therefore become something of a cultural legend, due to the “underground” quality of its existence. It has been viewed and distributed in off-air recordings made from its original telecast by fans, which were later adapted to content-sharing websites via the Internet.

George Lucas himself has rarely commented on the special, or even acknowledged its existence. He is said to have nothing but the utmost contempt for it. For instance, Tom Burman, one of the costume designers for the holiday special, has said that Lucas once told him that he was very disappointed with the final product.

At one Australian fan convention, he reportedly said “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.” In an online chat with fans, he reportedly said: “The Holiday Special does not represent my vision for Star Wars.” In an interview with Maxim in May 2002, Maxim asked the question, “Any plans for a Special Edition of the Holiday Special?” In response, Lucas said, “Right. That’s one of those things that happened, and I just have to live with it.”

Later, in a May 2005 interview with StaticMultimedia.com, Lucas was asked if the film had soured him on working in television. He replied: “The special from 1978 really didn’t have much to do with us, you know. I can’t remember what network it was on, but it was a thing that they did. We kind of let them do it. It was done by… I can’t even remember who the group was, but they were variety TV guys. We let them use the characters and stuff and that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but you learn from those experiences.”

The official Star Wars site states that the holiday special “delivered mixed results,” and states that the highlight of the special was the Boba Fett animated segment.[6] The official site also says, when referring to the fan interest in seeing the Wookiees on screen, “the 1978 Holiday Special didn’t cut it.”[7] When asked at a fan convention, “So, you don’t like it (the holiday special) either?”, Lucasfilm head of content and fan relations, Steve Sansweet replied “No. I mean, I like the ten minute introduction of Boba Fett, but that’s about it.” The official site also refers to the Boba Fett animated segment as “a cult classic”.

On February 8, 2006, Harrison Ford made an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and during the interview, Conan O’Brien brought up the special, and began asking various questions regarding it, such as inquiring whether he remembered making it. Ford said nothing, but looked away and shook his head nervously, then saying he had no memory of it whatsoever and it, therefore, “doesn’t exist.” The audience responded with laughter and applause. O’Brien then asked Ford what he would think if he played a clip of the special on the show, Ford jokingly grabbed him, then said that “[he'd] never seen it, maybe it’ll be nice.” Humorously acting anxious and distracted, Ford suffered through the clip (which featured a scene showing Ford as Han Solo telling Chewbacca and his wife that they are “like family” to him), and then muttered a gruff, sarcastic “thank you” to O’Brien, before continuing with the interview to promote his then newest film, Firewall.

On the 2010 television program Times Talk, New York Times columnist David Carr asked Carrie Fisher about the Holiday Special; she said that she made George Lucas give her a copy of the Special in exchange for recording DVD commentary for the Star Wars films. She added that she shows it at parties, “mainly at the end of the night when she wants people to leave.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSR6LcDvI3I

☛✸Electrik Slide Show✸☚

 

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• ✪ Court Says Sending Too Many Emails To Someone Is Computer Hacking

  The latest example, found via Michael Scott is that the Sixth Circuit appeals court has overturned a district court ruling, and is now saying that a labor union can be sued for violating the CFAA because it asked members to email and call an employer many times, in an effort to protest certain actions. Now some of the volume may have hurt the business, but does it reach the level of hacking? What’s really troubling is even just the focus on emails:The e-mails wreaked more havoc: they overloaded Pulte’s system, which limits the number of e-mails in an inbox; and this, in turn, stalled normal business operations because Pulte’s employees could not access business-related e-mails or send e-mails to customers and vendors

• ✪ Questions Arise Over Whether ‘Flash Mob’ Attacks in U.S. Cities Motivated by Race

  “It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people,” Roffers told Wisconsin’s Newsradio 620.But while some witness accounts suggest the attacks are race-based, law enforcement officials say they have no evidence to prove it.

  There was “no confession or anything else” to suggest the July 29 attacks in Philadelphia were “racially motivated,” Philadelphia Police Department First Deputy Commissioner Richard Ross told FoxNews.com.

  “You can’t just simply look at the race of the offender and the race of the victim and say it’s ethnic intimidation. It may be, but we’re not sure. Does it give us pause? Yes it does,” Ross said.

  Without a confession, a witness account or some epithet overheard by the victim, no charges will be filed related to ethnic intimidation or a hate crime, Ross said.

  “If we don’t know and can’t prove it, we can’t charge it,” he said. “It’s just a very difficult charge to prove … We’re in the business of what we can prove, not what we think.”

• ✪ Europe Takes Its Own Path on Internet Privacy

  “What you really have here is a trans-Atlantic clash,” said Franz Werro, who was born and raised in Switzerland and is now a law professor at Georgetown University. “The two cultures really aren’t going in the same direction when it comes to privacy rights. “For instance, in the United States, Mr. Werro said, courts have consistently found that the right to publish the truth about someone’s past supersedes any right to privacy. Europeans, he said, see things differently: “In Europe you don’t have the right to say anything about anybody, even if it is true.”

  Mr. Werro says Europe sees the need to balance freedom of speech and the right to know against a person’s right to privacy or dignity, concepts often enshrined in European laws. The European perspective was shaped by the way information was collected and used against individuals under dictators like Franco and Hitler and under Communism. Government agencies routinely compiled dossiers on citizens as a means of control.

• ✪ Judge: no constitutional right to matzoh and grape juice

  A federal judge has ruled that an inmate does not have a constitutionally protected right to matzoh and grape juice.Christopher Henry, who was convicted of first-degree sodomy, claimed “permanent trauma” and malnourishment and requested nearly $10 billion in damages for what he called a violation of his First Amendment right to religious freedom.

  Oddly enough, Henry didn’t request matzoh for Passover, the Jewish holiday during which it is traditionally eaten. Instead, Henry claimed he had a right to have the unleavened bread served daily and grape juice every Friday.

  But on August 2, U.S. Southern District Judge Shira Scheindlin held that the Rikers Island jail could deny Henry his request in the interests of maintaining order and keeping costs reasonable.

• ✪ Security Flaws in Feds’ Radios Make for Easy Eavesdropping

  While studying the technology, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania overheard conversations that included descriptions of undercover agents and confidential informants, plans for forthcoming arrests and information on the technology used in surveillance operations.“We monitored sensitive transmissions about operations by agents in every Federal law enforcement agency in the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security,” wrote the researchers, who were led by computer science professor Matt Blaze and plan to reveal their findings Wednesday in a paper at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Francisco.

  Their research also shows that the radios can be effectively jammed using a pink electronic child’s toy and that the standard used by the radios “provides a convenient means for an attacker” to continuously track the location of a radio’s user.

• ✪ “A Declaration of War on the Poor”: Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on the Debt Ceiling Agreement
  The veteran broadcaster Tavis Smiley and the author and Princeton University Professor Cornel West are in the midst of a 15-city, cross-country trek they have dubbed “The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience.” The tour comes on the heels of last week’s deficit agreement, which has been widely criticized for excluding a tax hike on the wealthy, as well as any measures to tackle high unemployment. “Any legislation that doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, doesn’t close a single corporate loophole, doesn’t raise one cent in terms of new revenue in terms of taxes on the rich or the lucky, allows corporate America to get away scot-free again—the banks, Wall Street getting away again—and all these cuts ostensibly on the backs of everyday people,” says Smiley.
• ✪ U.K. Ethnic Tensions Stoked by Riots

  “People are saying it’s a race issue now—blacks against Asians,” said Mykel Douglas, a black youth worker and resident of Winson Green, the working-class district northwest of Birmingham city center where the incident occurred. “It’s like the ethnic groups are at war with each other.”Outside the family home of one of the dead men, identified by local media as Haroon Jahan, a group of young Asians—mainly ethnic Pakistanis—vowed vengeance. “People are very angry,” said a bearded man in a shalwar kameez who declined to give his name. “There’s going to be retaliation. An eye for an eye.”

• ✪ Rochester Woman Arrested After Videotaping Police From Her Own Front Yard

  In May, the Rochester Police Department arrested a woman on a charge of obstructing governmental administration after she videotaped several officers’ search of a man’s car. The charge is a criminal misdemeanor.The only problem? Videotaping a police officer in public view is perfectly legal in New York state — and the woman was in her own front yard. The arrest report of the incident also contains an apparent discrepancy from what is seen in the woman’s own video.

• ✪ ‘We are the Enfield Army’: Video of locals chasing rioters in London
  Londoners took to the streets to protect their neighbourhoods on Tuesday night after Britain’s worst rioting in a generation. A group of anti-rioters marched through Enfield, in north London, aiming to deter looters. “We are the Enfield anti-rioting squad,” said one local resident. “You want to riot our place, we will riot you mate. This is our area not your area.” Another Enfield resident said his fellow vigilantes were the “people that are London, not the small minority that are going around smashing up stuff, that have got nothing to wake up for in the morning.”
• ✪ Redneck Olympics faces lawsuit over name

  By all accounts, the Redneck Olympics was a huge success.About 2,600 people attended the three-day event on Harold Brooks’ land last weekend. There were no arrests, and the one ambulance visit was for a bee sting, Brooks said.

  But the party ended Monday when Brooks received a call from the legal division of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Brooks said the USOC told him he had to change the name of his event or face a lawsuit.

  He was told the word “Olympics” is the property of the Olympic Committee. Brooks said it’s a case of a large group bullying a small businessman.

  “I said, ‘I’m not basing it on your Olympics; I’m basing it on the Olympics in Greece,’” Brooks said.

  “I understand we can’t use the word ‘Pepsi,’ but we can use the word ‘soda.’ The Olympics has been around for thousands of years.” He likened it to taking out a copyright on the word “fair” and trying to force the Fryeburg Fair to change its name.

• ✪ New drug could cure nearly any viral infection

  Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

• ✪ Editorial: An Argument for Surrealism in Games
  The problem I find most troubling with realism in games, is that video games are inherently unrealistic. By definition, even, video games must adhere to some sense of absurdity. In Uncharted, no matter how realistic and convincing the characters and environments may be, the fact is that Nathan Drake can take a hell of a lot of damage, and is a little too good with every gun known to man. In Call of Duty, if realism is such a coveted aspect of the series, why does your character only bleed out of his eyes, and why is damage rarely permanent? The “game” part of these games keeps them from being truly realistic, and in turn makes them even less believable. Characters like Link, or even Master Chief, are believable in even the most absurd situations, as the worlds that they belong to don’t try to conform to the world that we live in.
• ✪ RUSSIAN NAVY CAPTURES SOMALIAN PIRATES (Expeditious disposal!)
  The Euro Union navy who patrol these waters would not interfere because they feared there could be casualties (!)
  All explanations are in Russian with a single exception of when a wounded pirate says something in English and the Russian soldier says “This is not a fishing boat.” All conversations between the commandos are in Russian but the pictures speak for themselves.
  The soldiers freed their compatriots and the tanker. The Russian Navy Commandos moved the pirates back to the pirate vessel, searched it for weapons and explosives, then left and blew it up with all remaining pirates hand-cuffed to it.They used the anti-piracy laws of the 18th and 19th centuries where the captain of the rescuing ship has the right to decide what to do with the pirates. Usually, they were legally hanged with no lawyers or court proceedings required. Perhaps from now on, Russian ships will not be targets for Somalian pirates.Other nations might take note. “Без суда и следствия”. Смотрите, девочки.
• ✪ Petition Asks Bert And Ernie To Get Married On Sesame Street

  The pair of puppets has long been rumored to be a veiled representation of a gay couple, though the Children’s Television Workshop has denied that this is the case.The petition echoes the message of the “It Gets Better” project, founded in 2010 following the suicides of a number of young gay men, including Tyler Clementi, Billy Lucas and others.

  Reactions thus far have been mixed. An editorial in the New York Daily News, headlined “Folks who want a gay marriage for Bert and Ernie of ‘Sesame Street’ need to get over themselves,” went on to say:

  “Why stop there? Why not march Yogi Bear and Boo Boo down the aisle, too?… Some stages of life – for example, the years from 2 to 4 – must be walled off from the passions of adults.”

  Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress agrees, but for different reasons. If Bert and Ernie were gay, she would be all for a marriage, but Rosenberg has a problem with same-sex roommates being equated with gay couples.

• ✪ Protect IP Could Have Far-reaching Impact on Digital Freedom
  Protect IP has been criticized for its ambiguity as to what constitutes an infringing website. To illustrate this, websites such as The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks who have been accused of distributing copyrighted content in the past, could have all of their search results blocked on search engines, effectively making them invisible. This raises serious concerns about free speech when the blocked website also hosts legitimate and lawful content. Under the act, these blocks can be enforced without notifying the infringing site and therefore eradicates the presumption of innocence.
• ✪ Collective: Odd Future

  They piled onto the shuttle late, after finally getting corralled by their minder, who was nursing a head wound with an ice bag wrapped in a towel. They piled in, niggering everything in sight, motherfucking the driver, boasting into the air unbidden about getting their dicks sucked and calling everyone in the area a faggot. Then one of them lit a joint (or a pipe, I didn’t look) and told the driver to shut the fuck up nigger and smoked it anyway. A female passenger tried to engage one of them in conversation, but he just stared at her with a dead-to-me stare while his seatmate flipped double birds in her face.The whole trip they complained about not being at a McDonalds and repeatedly shouted for the motherfucker to pull over so they could get some fucking McDonalds nigger. Interspersed with the McDonalds requests were shouted boasts about how often they masturbated and fucked bitches nigger and got paid like a motherfucker fifty grand like a motherfucker

• ✪ THE LANGUAGE OF THE Homosexual (1965)

  America is a mixture of many types of speech reflecting the cultures and backgrounds of its teeming millions. One type that is widely used, though not given recognition, serves a very important function in the lives of many people. This is the language of the homosexual.There are 2 ways in which homosexual slang is used. The first is when it is employed by the outsider or “straight” individual to describe or refer to homosexuals ar.d their activities. In this way the slang mirrors society’s disapproval and permits a person to talk of homosexuals without incurring any guilt by association.

  The other, or “inside” language, is used by the homosexual and serves several purposes other than simple communication. It helps to transform the feeling of being a despised minority to that of a special in-group.

• ✪ Steve Albini Hates On Odd Future While Also Sort of Defending Them
  If you happen to know anything about Steve Albini, it’s almost certainly one or both of the following two things: (1) His reputation as a producer (Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey) and musician (Big Black, Shellac) is unassailable, and (2) He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, and he’s not at all shy about it. Albini’s most recent outburst came at the expense of Sonic Youth, whom he more or less blamed earlier this year for corrupting independent music. Well, “most recent outburst” until this weekend, actually, when Albini went at Odd Future.
• ✪ Super flood blamed on lasers, a cruel Pathan

  Last year’s floods, which affected around 20 million people across the country, weren’t a natural disaster – they were a mistake on the part of our government.The government, in its effort to produce water, melted glaciers in the north using lasers. The experiment went awry and things got out of control, bringing forth the worst floods in the history of Pakistan.

  You might dismiss the aforementioned as absurd, but this is precisely what most people ardently believe in flood-hit areas from Muzaffargarh to Rajanpur.

  Though a year has passed since the floods hit and rehabilitation work is under way, locals in stricken areas still believe in conspiracy theories.

  “Not just the common people but elected representatives of our areas have time and again said that lasers were used to melt glaciers and the water went out of control,” a local in Muzaffargarh, Malik Mureed, told The Express Tribune.

• ✪ NYPD forms new social media unit to mine Facebook and Twitter for mayhem

  The NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.Newly named Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, one of the department’s online and gang gurus, has been put in charge of the new juvenile justice unit. He and his staff will mine social media, looking for info about troublesome house parties, gang showdowns and other potential mayhem, sources said.

  The power of social media to empower both criminals and cops has been on full display in London this week, where riots and looting have been spreading dramatically.

• ✪ Leukemia Treatment Virtually Eradicates Cancer, Kills ‘Pounds’ Of Cancerous Cells (VIDEO)

  A new leukemia treatment is wowing even the researchers behind its creation, providing results beyond their wildest expectations.It’s virtually eradicated cancerous leukemia cells in the first three patients it’s been tested on.

  In two of the first three patients the process was tested on the treatment completely destroyed the most common type of leukemia, according to MSNBC. In the third patient, the treatment seems to have reduced the cancerous cells to 70 percent of what they once were.

  “Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected,” said senior author Carl June, MD told Penn Medicine.

• ✪ Self-assembling micro-robots created, Judgment Day looms

  In news that makes you wonder if anyone from the US Department of Energy has watched the Terminator films, physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory have successfully created self-assembling micro-robots that are just 0.5mm (500 micron) in diameter.Formed out of minuscule ferromagnetic particles that float freely in a sandwich of water and oil, these micro-robots (microbots? nanobots?) are controlled with magnets. With the application of an alternating magnetic field that’s perpendicular to the immiscible mixture, the micro-particles assemble into spiked circles called asters, after the aster flower. Then, with a magnetic field that is parallel to the surface, the movements of these microbots can be controlled.

• ✪ Working in an office is bad for your brain

  A study has found that the hustle and bustle of modern offices can lead to a 32% drop in workers well being and reduce their productivity by 15%.They have found that open plan offices create unwanted activity in the brains of workers that can get in the way of them doing the task at hand.

  Open plan offices were first introduced in the 1950s and quickly became a popular as a way of laying out offices.

  Having a clean and sterile desk can also leave employees with smaller brains, scientists claim.

• ✪ Facebook’s Privacy Issues Are Even Deeper Than We Knew

  These developments mean that we no longer have to worry just about what Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other social sites do with our data; we have to worry about what they enable others to do, too. And it now seems that others will be able to do a lot.As reported in various privacy and security outlets like Kashmir Hill’s Forbes blog and Paul Roberts at ThreatPost, and demonstrated at last week’s Black Hat conference, the CMU researchers relied on just Facebook’s public profile information and off-the-shelf facial recognition software. Yet the CMU researchers were able to match Facebook users with their pictures on otherwise anonymous Match.com accounts. The researchers also had significant success taking pictures of experimental subjects and matching them to their Facebook profiles.

• ✪ Police Nab Alleged Zit-Popper Grossing Out Fast-Food Customers

  A man accused of disgusting McDonald’s patrons by popping his pimples was under arrest after customer complaints led to a brief chase by officers.It started Monday when customers of the McDonald’s located at 2404 Santa Barbara Blvd. alerted authorities to a man standing outside the restaurant for about 10 minutes squeezing away at the acne on his back. Events that followed with police ended in a brief chase and the arrest of the man, who allegedly gave a false name when confronted about the complaints.

• ✪ Dolce & Gabbana in dock over ‘killer jeans’

  Three of Italy’s best-known fashion houses are being accused of refusing to stop selling “killer jeans” that threaten the lives of workers in the poor countries where they are produced.The Clean Clothes Campaign began pressing in February for leading fashion manufacturers and retailers to ban sandblasting, a technique for producing denim garments with an artificially worn look. The large amounts of silica dust produced can lead to silicosis, a potentially lethal pulmonary disease.

  The process was banned in Turkey in 2009 after evidence was produced to show that 46 former sandblasting operators had contracted silicosis

• ✪ A Nuclear Needle in a Haystack: The Cold War’s Missing Atom Bombs
  In a 1968 plane crash, the US military lost an atom bomb in Greenland’s Arctic ice. But this was no isolated case. Up to 50 nuclear warheads are believed to have gone missing during the Cold War, and not all of them are in unpopulated areas.
• ✪ Twitter refuses to close accounts of rioters to protect their ‘freedom of expression’

  Twitter has refused to close the accounts of London rioters who used the service to spread unrest and insisted that Tweets must ‘continue to flow’.The US-based company said that ‘freedom of expression’ was essential and that information would be ‘kept flowing’.

  Social networks have faced criticism for allowing rioters and looters to incite violence and public disorder across the country since riots began last Saturday in Tottenham.

• ✪ Hong Kong exchange trading disrupted as hackers target website

  The Hong Kong stock exchange was forced to suspend trading in stocks including HSBC Holdings after hackers broke into the exchange’s website on Wednesday, preventing investors from accessing company announcements made during the midday break.”Our current assessment that this is a result of a malicious attack by outside hacking,” the chief executive of Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing (HKEx) Charles Li told reporters after the company announced interim results.

• ✪ Penis injury from Gretna police dog attack was unjustified, man alleges in lawsuit
  A 25-year-old man sued the Gretna Police Department Tuesday, alleging his civil rights were violated by a police officer who sicced his canine on him without provocation, leading the dog to bite into his groin area and virtually sever his penis.
  cody_melancon.jpgView full sizeSusan Poag,The Times-PicayuneCody Melancon alleges his civil rights were violated by a police officer who sicced his canine on him without provocation.Cody Melancon, of Gretna, said Tuesday the attack left him sexually dysfunctional. A doctor has recommended sexual enhancement pills and he faces neurosurgery in hopes of restoring the use of his penis, which was almost completely severed by the police dog’s bites.“I don’t have any sensation down there,” Melancon said. “I can’t get an erection. I’m 25 years of age.”
• ✪ Teenage brides suffer pain and shame of fistula

  “Nobody wants a woman who passes stools all the time and smells,” whispered Farhiya Mohamed Farah, explaining why her husband divorced her when she was pregnant with their second child.Farah, developed a hole between her vagina and rectum, causing feces to leak from her body, after giving birth to her first child at age 18 while fleeing gunfire in Somalia.

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• ✪ After Attack, Reclusive Amazon Tribe Feared Missing

  An uncontacted Amazon tribe that made headlines earlier this year after being filmed from the air is feared missing after presumed drug traffickers overran the Brazilian guards posted to protect the tribe’s lands.According to tribal advocacy group Survival International, Brazilian officials can find no trace of the Indians in the area after heavily armed men ransacked the guard post in western Brazil about 32 miles (20 kilometers) from the Peruvian border. Like other uncontacted tribes, the Indians live a traditional life in the forest and does not have contact with the outside world.

  Workers from FUNAI, the government bureau of Indian affairs, found a broken arrow in one of the men’s backpacks, raising fears for the tribe’s safety.

  “We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee,” Carlos Travassos, the head of the government’s isolated Indians department, said in a statement. “Now we have good proof. We are more worried than ever.”

• ✪ Privacy Groups Protest Massive DHS Database of Secret Watchlists
  Homeland Security plans to operate a massive new database of names, photos, birthdays and biometrics called Watchlist Service, duplicated from the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database which has proven not to be accurate many times in the past. DHS wants to exempt the Watchlist Service from Privacy Act provisions, meaning you will never know if you are wrongfully listed. Privacy groups worried about inaccurate info and mission creep have filed a protest, arguing the Privacy Act says DHS must notify subject of government surveillance.
• ✪ By Helping a Girl Testify at a Rape Trial, a Dog Ignites a Legal Debate
  The new role for dogs as testimony enablers can, however, raise thorny legal questions. Defense lawyers argue that the dogs may unfairly sway jurors with their cuteness and the natural empathy they attract, whether a witness is telling the truth or not, and some prosecutors insist that the courtroom dogs can be a crucial comfort to those enduring the ordeal of testifying, especially children.
• ✪ Alien Outposts Discovered In Antarctica?

  A self-proclaimed UFO researcher has found what he believes to be alien outposts in Antarctica. Posting at a blog and YouTube channel under the moniker “americanbunker,” he has “analyzed” satellite photos of Antarctica via Google Earth, and says the photos show UFOs and other creatures.He strings together highlights of his Antarctic objects in a 12-minute video. However, the objects visible in the stream of pixellated photos look much more like ice floes, rocky outcroppings and shadows cast by bumps in the terrain than they do flying spacecraft or structures built by Martians. [See the video]

  Instead of an alien invasion or a cover-up by the U.S. Geological Survey (many of the photos were made public by the USGS), there’s probably a psychological phenomenon at play here: “Pareidolia” is the scientific term for the common human tendency to find patterns in random shapes. We’re especially susceptible to perceiving faces or figures where they aren’t.

• ✪ Shop worker in Stonehaven UK stung by scorpion in bananas

  An Aberdeenshire shop worker has been treated in hospital after being stung by a scorpion.William Clarke, 48, was unpacking a box of Colombian bananas at Farmfoods in Stonehaven on Monday afternoon when the incident happened.

• ✪ Cheap housing luring Canadian marijuana growers into U.S.

  The U.S. housing crash has lured some marijuana growers to move their operations south of the border, according to an internal RCMP report obtained by the Vancouver Sun.”Some VOC (Vietnamese Organized Crime) groups have moved their marijuana grow operations to the United States where the lower cost of real estate (in some regions) allows them to operate a more profitable enterprise and where they can also avoid police/customs detection at the border,” states the RCMP report.

• ✪ After 9/11, an Era of Tinker, Tailor, Jihadist, Spy

  Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.And in a classified tactic used multiple times across the Middle East, American military and intelligence officers have hacked the cellphones of terrorist leaders using computer code, to lure them into an ambush or spread the word that fellow cell members were embezzling money or plotting against their comrades. Distrust of secure communications disrupts and even deters action.

• ✪ Sex offender dressed as Cookie Monster arrested

  A registered sex offender wore a Cookie Monster costume as he handed out fliers to children at the Mississippi Valley Fair over the weekend, police said.James Lester Rogers, 25, of 611 Perry St., Apt. 1, Davenport, was in the Scott County Jail on Monday on an aggravated misdemeanor charge.

  Police said that on Saturday he wore a full Cookie Monster costume and handed out fliers for a company called Q.C. Characters. If children wanted their pictures taken with “Cookie Monster,” Rogers stood for the photographs.

• ✪ Building Blocks of DNA Found in Meteorites From Space

  The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.

  Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth.

• ✪ Right-wing extremists tricked by ‘Trojan’ T-shirts
  About 250 T-shirts were distributed at the rock concert
  Hundreds of free T-shirts handed out at a weekend right-wing rock festival in the eastern German state of Thuringia contained a secret surprise. Upon washing, the original graphic faded to reveal a clandestine message.
• ✪ Hacker Group Anonymous Vows To Destroy Facebook On November 5

  Hacktivist group Anonymous, which has been responsible for cyber-attacks on the Pentagon, News Corp, and others, has vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5th (which should ring a bell).Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Facebook account, Anonymous hopes to “kill Facebook,” the “medium of communication [we] all so dearly adore.”

• ✪ Face-recognition software: It’s coming, everyone will use it, and you can’t stop it.
  Don’t believe it. Soon, face recognition will be ubiquitous. While the police may promise to tread lightly, the technology is likely to become so good, so quickly that officers will find themselves reaching for their cameras in all kinds of situations. The police will still likely use traditional ID technologies like fingerprinting—or even iris scanning—as these are generally more accurate than face-scanning, but face-scanning has an obvious advantage over fingerprints: It works from far away. Bunch of guys loitering on the corner? Scantily clad woman hanging around that run-down motel? Two dudes who look like they’re smoking a funny-looking cigarette? Why not snap them all just to make sure they’re on the up-and-up?
• ✪ The Cop iPhone App That Knows Your Face and Can Send You to Jail
  Before we talk about the facial recognition technology thats being rolled out to police stations nationwide next month, here’s a question for you: Who would you rather have access to face recognition tech: cops or that weird heavy-breather on the subway? Do you want it? You know, to check out that weird heavy-breather on the subway: what’s his deal? Maybe you are the heavy-breather. In the beginning, that face recognition app might just send you to some photos on Picasa or Facebook—but that’s all it takes to get to the top of the hill in figuring out a whole lot of stuff about someone.
• ✪ Google Group Members to Use Facial Recognition to Identify London Rioters

  A new Google Group called “London Riots Facial Recognition” has appeared online, in the wake of the riots that rocked the U.K. capital over the weekend. The group’s goal is to use facial recognition technologies to identify the looters who appear in online photos.The group appears to be thoughtfully considering its actions, in threads titled “Ethical Issues,” and “Keeping Things Legal,” for example. They’ve also stated that “it’s important we only use legal sources for images.”

  However, there’s a major “creepy” factor to this undertaking, too. The idea that a group of people would team up online to use (misuse?) facial recognition technologies in this way, notably outside professional law enforcement channels, seems like a modern take on vigilante style justice, where the torches of the angry villagers have turned into APIs and algorithms.

• ✪ Stand Your Ground: Taking Photos In Public
  The London Street Photography Festival had six photographers attempt to take pictures in various locations on public streets in Britain’s capital. Despite being perfectly within their rights, all six were stopped by private security forces who made vague allusions to “terrorism” and “security” and tried to intimidate them. The Festival filmed the encounters and what happened when the photographers politely refused to back down:
• ✪ Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So

  Let’s make one thing crystal clear, no member of the US military contributes in any way whatsoever to protecting the freedoms of the American people. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to turn their weapons on you than they are to defend your Constitutional rights.The only people on this planet Earth who can affect your freedom are members of Congress, local legislators and the members of enforcement institutions who will blindly follow the rulers who sign their paychecks. And, while your beloved troops are murdering people around the globe, yes, I said murdering, your Congress and local legislators are eliminating your freedoms, en masse, without any intervention by our so-called protectors in the armed forces.

• ✪ Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts

  Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

  But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism.

• ✪ “A Perfect Product of the Religious Right”: Deconstructing Michele Bachmann’s GOP Presidential Bid
  The former tax lawyer identifies as a conservative Christian and is a fierce opponent of abortion and gay marriage. Bachmann also supports teaching intelligent design in public schools, and she’s claimed that global warming is a hoax. She has largely built her campaign around accusing Obama of favoring government intervention, pushing the U.S. toward socialism, and having “anti-American views,” and is a particularly fierce critic of Obama’s healthcare overhaul. While Bachmann is known for advocating a limited government, she has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in agricultural subsidies for her family farm in Wisconsin.
• ✪ Creepy In-Vitro fertilization Could Use Eggs From a Dead Teenager

  A desperate Israeli family won a court decision that lets them extract and freeze the eggs from their dead daughter. The teenage girl died unexpectedly after a recent car crash.The parents wanted her eggs to be fertilized before storage, but that request was denied by the court. If the parents prove their daughter expressed an interest in bearing children, her eggs could be fertilized and a grandchild could be created at their discretion.

  Though creepy, this isn’t the first time a baby was made post-mortem. Another Israeli couple used sperm from their deceased son to create a grandchild using a surrogate mother.

• ✪ US Government Monitoring Facebook For Federal Reserve Protests As Economy Continues To Collapse

  Danny Panzella, an activist and independent journalist, has revealed that the U.S. government and local police are monitoring Facebook for Federal Reserve protests.On June 22nd, 2011 , the night before the rally, Danny announced a spur of the moment End the Fed Rally/Flash Mob on Facebook. When he arrived in the morning close to 40 police officers were waiting for him.

  This is clear evidence that the government is actively monitoring Facebook for signs of activism directed against the private Federal Reserve.

  As our economy teeters on the verge of collapse, our government and local law enforcement are spending time and most likely tax power dollars to protect the private banking cartel that created the crisis in the first place!

  As the White House attempts to blame the Tea Party for the problems with the economy, the real culprits are being protected by police nationwide.

• ✪ Man who put semen in bottle must pay $27,000

  “The idea that I had Mr. Lallana’s semen in my mouth, without my knowing, against my will, for his sexual pleasure, sickens me,” the victim said during her victim-impact statement in February. “What I experienced was not rape, but I feel it was a form of rape. I ultimately experienced sexually inflicted harm without my consent.”Deputy District Attorney Brock Zimmon argued that Lallana twice set a trap for his co-worker at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network by discharging his semen into a water bottle she kept on her desk.

  The woman first became aware of something unusual in her water when she took a sip from her water bottle on Jan. 14, 2010, while she was working in Northwestern’s Newport Beach branch. She testified that she immediately noticed an odd taste and held the bottle away from her face and saw something in the water.

• ✪ Hairy Actress
  Hairiest bushes in mainstream movies
• ✪ London riot looter may regret this facebook post…
  Post a picture of yourself with looted booty on the internet, a real genius here
• ✪ Forced to strip naked in the street: Shocking scenes as rioters steal clothes and rifle through bags as people make their way home

  This is the shocking moment a young man is apparently forced to hand over all of his clothes after appearing to be stripped naked during lawless riots overnight.Internet rumours last night claimed that on top of the widespread destruction across London and Birmingham, people were having their clothes removed by looters as police attempted to contain the criminality.

• ✪ CDG Zetas, a war put the town of Allende, Nuevo Leon.
  The gunmen hanged men and shot them in 60 times with AK-47. Victor’s chest marked with the letters “CDG” spray. In commercial premises located near the pedestrian bridge also left a narcopinta, “THIS will happen to X to kill innocent people,” said the deed had been done by members of the Gulf Cartel. The bodies remained at the sight of many for over two hours.
• ✪ Hypnosis and Sex (Feb, 1964)

  Whenever hypnosis is discussed with a layman, one question inevitably comes up: “Can you make your subject do whatever you want?”In posing that question some people think of the crimes which evil characters in cheap thrillers force their victims to commit. Most of them, however, have sex in mind. Women want to know whether they could be taken advantage of. Young men usually mean: “Would a girl undress if I told her it’s bed-time?”

• ✪ Orange Goo Near Kivalina, Alaska Identified As Eggs
  Scientists have identified an orange-colored gunk that appeared along the shore of a remote Alaska village as millions of microscopic eggs filled with fatty droplets.

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• ✪ Mexican Town Goes Mad for Pointy Boots‬‏ [Video]
  Mutant pointy cowboy boots _ part Aladdin, part Las Vegas _ created a fashion craze that spread from one northeastern Mexican town.
• ✪ World’s Greatest Drunk Driving Mug Shot

  Does this man look drunk to you?I mean, could someone who spends a lot of time sober ever possibly consider a facial tattoo like that?

  This is 29-year-old Cory P. Smits, who was recently given his fifth operating while intoxicated conviction.

  He’s racking these things up like body art.

  Smits was arrested in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, back in February when police pulled him over for swerving and found a man with glassy and bloodshot eyes.

  I’m surprised they even noticed the eyes.

• ✪ Boater finds brick of likely cocaine, snorts some, dies

  A Merritt Island videographer died in a Miami hospital Thursday after he snorted an unknown substance — possibly cocaine — from a brick he found floating off the Middle Keys, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office says.Thomas Swindal, 53, and his brother Kenneth were trolling in about 200 feet of water on Wednesday when, Detective Mark Maison said, they found what they believed to be a kilo of cocaine and brought it aboard the boat, tossing it into the bait well.

  They kept on fishing and, Kenneth Swindal told detectives, he looked back a short time later and saw his brother open the package and ingest some of its contents.

  He said about an hour and a half later, Thomas Swindal began to run around the boat, throw things in the water and even gaffed the engine, which fell off the boat and sank.

  He continued acting strangely, running around with knives and pliers, so Kenneth Swindal threw all the sharp objects, as well as the package, off the boat.

• ✪ Police: Man Admits To Sex With Cat

  The 29-year-old man, identified as Gerardo Martinez, answered the door shirtless with his pants down, the police report said. Officers asked him to pull his pants up and asked him about the cat.Martinez, who admitted to using meth, first denied having a cat, police said. Later, he changed his story and told police his boyfriend threw the cat from the window three hours prior, police said.

  When police told Martinez that witnesses said the cat was thrown more recently, he said he attempted to have sex with the cat and then threw it out the window, along with a pornographic DVD, police said.

• ✪ Warren Jeffs trial: Heavy breathing ‘sex tape’ made with 3 wives including ‘bride’ of 12

  The recording was allegedly made at the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas, owned by the FLDS. It begins with Jeffs asking the girl how she feels.According to the transcript made and given to the court, the girl replies: ‘Feels good.’

  Soon after Jeffs can be heard saying: ‘Everyone else let go of me, back away a little. Please get on the other side of the bed.

  ‘You shall learn the powers of the spirit of God as a heavenly wife should,’ Jeffs tells the 12-year-old.

  ‘Let the heavenly comfort hear us.

  ‘We bless you, by the Lord, at this young age. To come to know God and his power, and feel his presence.’

  According to CNN, many jurors lowered their heads and closed their eyes during the recording.

  The voice is also heard saying: ‘You have to know how to be sexually excited and to help each other … and you have to be ready for the time I need your comfort.

  ‘This is your mission. This is how you abide the law.’

  At one point, he says: ‘Take your clothes off. Do it right now.’

• ✪ 13 Reasons Why The U.S. Is Now OFFICIALLY BANKRUPT
  ATTENTION IDIOTS IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA – Stop The Budget Lies – There Are NO Cuts – House Passes Bill To INCREASE Spending By $7 Trillion Over The Next 10 Years
• ✪ Mysterious Orange Goo Baffles Remote Alaska Village

  Leona Baldwin’s husband saw it first, and she got on the marine radio to alert others in the remote Alaska village of Kivalina that a strange orange goo was sitting on top of the town’s harbor.The news attracted all the townspeople, anxious to get a gander of the phenomenon that covered much of the harbor and then began washing ashore Wednesday.

  The next day it rained, and residents found the orange matter floating on top of the rain buckets they use to collect drinking water. It was also found on one roof, leading them to believe whatever it was, it was airborne, too.

  By Friday, the orange substance in the lagoon had dissipated or washed out to sea, and what was left on ground had dried to a powdery substance.

  Samples of the orange matter were collected in canning jars and sent to a lab in Anchorage for analysis.

  Until results are known, Kivalina’s 374 residents will likely continue to wonder just what exactly happened in their village.

• ✪ How Did Those Vermont Fish Get Radioactive?

  “Hey, don’t look at us” has been Entergy Corporation’s response to the discovery of Strontium-90 in fish from the Connecticut River.But the contamination, revealed this week by the Vermont Department of Health, promises to complicate the utility’s effort to extend the license of its aging Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant.

• ✪ Police: Teens Leave Church Picnic To Riot In East Liberty, Pittsburgh

  “They came in Target, they were throwing chairs, everybody went running,” said witness Shauny Bowe.“Everybody was just running everywhere,” said Bowe. “They went to McDonald’s, and they told people to get out, cussing and swearing. They were about to taze people. I was scared for my life.”

  As members of the church cleaned up the park, they said they are saddened that a day of fun and worship is now associated with disruption and vandalism.

• ✪ Tottenham riots: Double decker bus set ablaze as mob violence hits London
  Twenty-six police officers hurt in clashes, with eight being treated in hospital
  Scotland Yard still dealing with ‘isolated pockets of crime’ this morning
  Mob of 500 people protest about death of father-of-four Mark Duggan who was shot by officers
  100 riot police on the streets as Tottenham burns
  Fears that violence was fanned by Twitter as picture of burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times
  Shop looted and youths storm McDonald’s and start cooking their own food
  Mail on Sunday photographers beaten and mugged by masked thugs
• ✪ Shoplifters Drown While Fleeing the Scene
  Amid heavy downpours, a mother and daughter suspected of shoplifting at a Charlotte coat store ran into a swollen, fast-moving stream Friday night. Police found the mother’s body at the bottom of the creek Friday, and now it is being reported that search crews have found the body of her 16-year-old daughter Saturday.
• ✪ PHILIP K. DICK’S BIBLE with HIS HANDWRITTEN NOTATIONS – eBay
  $6500 Buy It Now
• ✪ Shops and Cars Burn in Antipolice Riot in London

  Clusters of young men hurled bricks and aimed fireworks at riot police officers before a backdrop of burning cars and buildings early Sunday in north London as a protest turned into an all-out riot.Demonstrators on Saturday evening marched to a police station in the Tottenham area of London to protest the death of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of four who was killed Thursday by officers from the Trident unit of the Metropolitan Police, which investigates gun crime, according to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, an external government body which regulates the police.

  By 10:20 p.m. local time, the protest had turned violent. Two empty police cars were burned and officers were “subject to bottles and other missiles being thrown at them by the crowd,” according to a statement released by the police.

• ✪ 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

  Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

  How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

• ✪ John’s Phone: Subversive Mobile Technology – media underground

  “Whatever happened to coming to the pub to engage in social interaction!?” I exclaimed.There was no response.

  I looked out of the window at the multitude of passers-by, all of whom seemed to be preoccupied with whatever was on their cell phones.

  “Another beer?” asked the barmaid as she punched in a few characters on her smartphone.

  “What exactly are you all fucking doing?” I asked somewhat irritably.

  “I’m on Twitter,” she said without even looking up.

  “And I’m on Facebook,” remarked the fat lawyer – his beady little jaundiced eyes looked up again briefly, as if attempting to burn holes in the back of my inner skull.

  “Yeah,” I remarked sarcastically, “cos, so much interesting shit is going down in here right now that all your friends need an update.”

  “Do you want a beer or not?” asked the barmaid impatiently – her podgy little pink thumbs sliding over the touch sensitive device.

  “No thanks,” I said getting to my feet, “I’ve got walls at home I can stare blankly at.”

• ✪ Computer scientist calls for Web search shake-up
  The main obstacle to progress “seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination,” Etzioni writes in the piece, which he acknowledges “is meant to be provocative.”
• Earth Had 2 Moons That Crashed to Form 1, Study Suggests
  A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests.
• ✪ Germany’s War on Facebook
  The latest development has to with Facebook’s facial recognition feature that helps users tag photos. After joining in the chorus of European nations that objected to the feature launch in June, German authorities are now the first to declare the feature illegal. Hamburg’s data protection official Johannes Caspar claims that the software violates both German and European Union data protection laws and that Facebook users don’t know how to delete the data that Facebook is gathering. “If the data were to get into the wrong hands, then someone with a picture taken on a mobile phone could use biometrics to compare the pictures and make an identification,” Caspar told the Hamburger Abendblatt. “The right to anonymity is in danger.”
• ✪ Lego Minifigs Soon Headed for Deep Space

  The figures, milled from aluminum, will accompany Juno on its five-year trip to Jupiter. When Juno arrives in 2016, the Lego likeness of the Roman god, Jupiter, his sister, Juno, and the Italian astronomer, Galileo, will be there to take in all the sights and bask in the immensity of the largest planet.This (until now) secret installation was initiated by NASA scientists, who love Lego as much as anyone and wanted to do something memorable for this mission. They approached Lego and the company loved the idea. It saw the project as a way to promote children’s education and STEM programs.

  The brick company even underwrote the project, at a cost of $5,000 for each of the minifigs, which will soon become the farthest flying toys ever. The manufacture of the figures was a deliberate process to ensure the figures would not interfere with NASA’s sensitive measurements.

• ✪ Domain Seizures Do Not Violate Free Speech, U.S. Court Rules
  A U.S. federal court has ruled that the domain seizure of sports streaming site Rojadirecta does not violate the First Amendment, and has refused to hand the domain back to its Spanish owner. The order stands in conflict with previous Supreme Court rulings and doesn’t deliver much hope to other website owners who operate under U.S. controlled domain names.
• ✪ Why Facebook and Google’s Concept of ‘Real Names’ Is Revolutionary

  pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one’s real identity.I can understand why Google and Facebook don’t want this to happen. It’s bad for their marketing teams. It generates social problems when people don’t act responsibly under the cloak of their assumed identity. It messes up the clarity and coherence of their data. And maybe those costs do outweigh the benefits pseudonymity brings to social networks.

  But then let’s have that conversation. Let’s not pretend that what Google and Facebook are doing has long-established precedents and therefore these companies are only doing what they’re doing to mimic real life. They are creating tighter links between people’s behavior and their identities than has previously existed in the modern world.

• ✪ Face recognition: Anonymous no more

  IF YOUR face and name are anywhere on the web, you may be recognised whenever you walk the streets—not just by cops but by any geek with a computer. That seems to be the conclusion from some new research on the limits of privacy.For suspected miscreants, and people chasing them, face-recognition technology is old hat. Brazil, preparing for the soccer World Cup in 2014, is already trying out pairs of glasses with mini-cameras attached; policemen wearing them could snap images of faces, easy to compare with databases of criminals. More authoritarian states love such methods: photos are taken at checkpoints, and images checked against recent participants in protests.

• ✪ Mossad’s murder machine claims another scientist’s life in Israeli bid to stop Iran building a nuclear bomb

  The two assassins arrived from nowhere as their victim was driving home with his wife. Trapped inside his car, he was hopelessly vulnerable as their motorcycles pulled alongside.He would just have had time to notice their blacked-out visors before they opened fire, emptying round after round into his chest.

  Nuclear scientist Darioush Rezaei died immediately. His wife was critically wounded and still in hospital days after the attack in north eastern Iran.

  The hitmen? They vanished into the traffic fumes of the night.

• ✪ One in seven Americans lives on food stamps

  Believe it or not, one in seven Americans – 15 percent of the country – now need government-provided food stamps simply to survive, according to latest government figures.Nearly 46 million Americans receive food stamps out of a population of some 311 million people, the US Department of Agriculture, which administers what’s officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme reported Thursday.

• ✪ Rupert Murdoch pie attacker Jonathan May-Bowles jailed for 6 weeks

  A comedian who threw a foam pie into the face of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was jailed for six weeks yesterday.Jonathan May-Bowles, 26, attacked the 80-year-old chief executive and chairman of News Corporation as he gave evidence to MPs about the hacking scandal that has engulfed his company, calling him a ‘naughty billionaire’.

  May-Bowles – also known as Jonnie Marbles – from Windsor, Berkshire, was ordered to pay £250 costs at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, and a £15 victim surcharge.

• ✪ Even Wall Street Hates the Debt Deal

  The Dow Jones Industrial Average has plummeted by 760 points since the terms of the debt ceiling deal were announced Monday. If austerity was supposed to encourage economic growth, someone forgot to tell Wall Street.On Thursday alone, the index dropped more than 500 points, the worst one-day drop since the lowest lows of the meltdown.

  Some budget-cutting enthusiasts promoted the “important economic advantages of linking the debt limit to spending reductions,” and we’re seeing the immediate aftermath.

  Before the deal was voted on, Paul Krugman warned, “The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending since that will depress the economy even further.”

  Investors seem to agree and, for the moment anyway, have decided to get out of Dodge.

• ✪ Google’s self-driving wreck: Really human error?

  When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they’re cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as the rest of us?Should you have, this morning, been unreasonably detained by aggressive machines, may I tell you that Google’s famed, futuristic, liberating, and ultimately superhuman machine, the self-driving Prius, was involved in a fender bender.

  What seems evident from shots of the scene is that Google’s robot machine ran into the back of another Prius. You might think that it was on robotic autopilot and this was some sort of mating ritual.

  You might also think that a Google representative rushing to the defense of our future controllers by issuing a statement to Business Insider that a human had been driving might smack of the convenience of being chauffeur-driven.

• ✪ Pentagon’s Lightning Gun Sold for Scraps on eBay

  There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Pentagon sank tens of millions of dollars into remote-controlled lightning guns that it hoped would fry insurgent bombs before they killed any more troops. Now, disassembled parts from the one-time wonder-weapons are being sold on eBay. At least one buyer snatched up the gear, hoping to use it in his latest art project for Burning Man.All of which would make for a funny little story, if that buyer didn’t discover that the multimillion dollar “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizers,” or JINs, were kluged together from third-rate commercial electronics, and controlled by open Wi-Fi signals. In other words, the Pentagon didn’t just overpay for a flawed weapon. On the off-chance the JIN ever worked, the insurgents could control it, too.

  “This is the hack of all hacks,” says Cody Oliver, a freelance technologist in San Francisco. “And this is what they were selling to the government? Holy shit.”

• ✪ Porn Doesn’t Sell Like It Used To

  It is hard to get a fix on how much porn contributes to cable and satellite companies’ bottom lines because the companies aren’t transparent about it. But adult content has been a consistent source of profit, because cable operators have leverage to command margins that can exceed 90% on rentals of generally interchangeable porn movies, analysts say. “It’s a relevant business simply because of its profitability,” said Craig Moffett, a cable and satellite analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.Adult movies are often more expensive, too. Many adult movies cost $9.98 to rent on Time Warner Cable in New York, while Hollywood films often cost $4.99 to rent.

  The porn-cable connection tumbled into public view when NBC’s “30 Rock” mocked the dependence of Kabletown—a fictionalized version of NBC’s then soon-to-be owner Comcast—on pay-per-view pornography, calling it “the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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• ◆ TSA readying new behavior detection plan for airport checkpoints

  The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday.

  TSA already has “behavior detection officers” at 161 airports nationwide looking for travelers exhibiting physiological or psychological signs that a traveler might be a terrorist. However, Pistole said TSA is preparing to move to an approach that employs more conversation with travelers—a method that has been employed with great success in Israel.

• ◆ Existence: Am I a hologram?

  TAKE a look around you. The walls, the chair you’re sitting in, your own body – they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see in the universe – including you and me – may be nothing more than a hologram.

  It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out.

  The idea has a long history, stemming from an apparent paradox posed by Stephen Hawking’s work in the 1970s. He discovered that black holes slowly radiate their mass away. This Hawking radiation appears to carry no information, however, raising the question of what happens to the information that described the original star once the black hole evaporates. It is a cornerstone of physics that information cannot be destroyed.

• ◆ Are cancers newly evolved species?

  A molecular biologists has long believed that cancer results from chromosome disruption rather than a handful of gene mutations, which is the dominant theory today. That idea has led him to propose that cancers have actually evolved new chromosomal karyotypes that qualify them as autonomous species, akin to parasites and much different from their human hosts.

  “Cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn’t depend on other cells for survival; it doesn’t follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it likes,” said Duesberg. “That’s what species are all about.”

• ◆ Photo Tampering throughout History
  Though photo manipulation has become more common in the age of digital cameras and image editing software, it actually dates back almost as far as the invention of photography. Gathered below is an overview of some of the more notable instances of photo manipulation in history. For recent years, an exhaustive inventory of every photo manipulation would be nearly impossible, so we focus here on the instances that have been most controversial or notorious, or ones that raise the most interesting ethical questions.
• ◆ Why Your Dad’s 30-Year-Old Stereo System Sounds Better than Your new One

  If you fashion yourself as an audiophile and just threw down a decent wad of cash on a new A/V receiver, you probably won’t like hearing that the receivers of yesteryear produce comparable sound. Why is that? Technological advancement, ironically.

  Cnet’s Steve Guttenberg sheds light on this interesting development that over the years, actual sound quality became a secondary selling point since most people started buying their equipment either online or from big box retailers. People started caring more about the number of connections and wireless interfaces and wattage of systems. As a result, there was less money in R&D budgets to spend on advancements in sound.

• ◆ You Can’t Keep Your Secrets From Twitter
  When you tweet–even if you tweet under a pseudonym–how much do you reveal about yourself? More than you realize, argues a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation. The paper, “Discriminating Gender on Twitter,” which is being presented this week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Scotland, demonstrates that machines can often figure out a person’s gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets. And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others.
• ◆ New Twitter Algorithm Could Out Dudes Pretending to Be Lesbians
  Anonymous tweeters may have just become a little less anonymous. Researchers have put together an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet. Of course, determining the gender of an Internet personality has its monetary benefits for Twitter. “Marketing is one of the major motivators here, adding that he had heard talk that Twitter was internally working on similar demographically identifying algorithms internally,” linguist Delip Rao told Fast Company’s David Zax. But it could also help identify phonies misrepresenting themselves. Like, say, older men pretending to be lesbian bloggers. Remember when the Gay Girl in Damascus revealed himself as a middle-aged man from Georgia?
• ◆ Belsen Was A Gas parka by Australian label Evil Twin causes furore

  An Australian designer has been forced to apologise for referencing the Holocaust in the name of one of its garments.

  The “Belsen Was a Gas” military parka designed by Australian label Evil Twin, caused a furore among shoppers on the online retail website Buy Definition this week.

  Shoppers condemned the label for “committing the sin of such hateful, shallow and selfish callousness”.

• ◆ Atheist group sues over cross at Sept. 11 museum
  The installation of a cross-shaped steel beam at the Sept. 11 memorial at ground zero is unconstitutional, a national atheist group argued in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, asking a judge to order it removed or request that other religions and nonreligious views be equally represented at the site.
• ◆ Woman allegedly pulls baby from stroller, slams him against truck – says she wants to eat baby’s arm

  A 36-year-old woman allegedly snatched an infant from his stroller and slammed him into the metal railing of a truck as his mother and aunt tried to fight her off, police said Wednesday.

  The woman, Natasha Hubbard, later told police she wanted to eat the baby’s arm. The baby suffered only minor injuries.

• ◆ Thief dresses like armored truck guard — and walks out of Queens check-cashing spot with $15K

  A clever crook, dressed as an armored truck guard, waltzed out of a Queens check-cashing joint last week with almost $15,000 in cash, cops said.

  After stepping into Lorenzo’s Enterprises on 31st St. in Astoria about 10:15 a.m. Friday, the disguised bandit said he was there for a pickup and was given the load of cash, police said.

  The employees never suspected the man, who was clad in a GARDA Armored Courier uniform, was a thief.

  It wasn’t until a few hours later, when an actual guard from the same armored truck company arrived for the cash, that the workers realized they had been had, cops said.

• ◆ Homeless man killed in Fullerton police brawl; witnesses sought

  Responding to reports of someone breaking into cars, officers had confronted Thomas, a transient well-known to merchants and officers in downtown Fullerton.

  The Orange County Register reported that Thomas, who suffered from schizophrenia, began to struggle as officers tried to search him and that Thomas sustained head and neck injuries.
  Thomas’ father, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy, has asserted that officers used excessive force to subdue his son, who was unarmed, slight and of medium height.

  After seeing his son’s injuries and talking with witnesses, Thomas told the Register his son “was brutally beaten to death.”

  “When I first walked into the hospital, I looked at what his mother described as my son … I didn’t recognize him,” Thomas said. “This is cold-blooded, aggravated murder.”

• ◆ Paul Krassner: My Lesson in Mindfulness
  A dozen police cars had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the angry shouts from a mob of five thousand understandably outraged gays. The police were running amuck in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming profanity-laden homophobic epithets.I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee and I fell to the ground. Another cop came charging at me and made a threatening gesture with his billy club. When I tried to protect my head, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my chest. Oh, God, the pain! It felt like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs.
• ◆ Know Your Rights!

  Your computer, your phone, and your other digital devices hold vast amounts of personal information about you and your family. This is sensitive data that’s worth protecting from prying eyes – including those of the government.

  The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects you from unreasonable government searches and seizures, and this protection extends to your computer and portable devices. But how does this work in the real world? What should you do if the police or other law enforcement officers show up at your door and want to search your computer?

  EFF has designed this guide to help you understand your rights if officers try to search the data stored on your computer or portable electronic device, or seize it for further examination somewhere else.

  Because anything you say can be used against you in a criminal or civil case, before speaking to any law enforcement official, you should consult with an attorney.

• ◆ T-Shirts to Offend Lesbians

  The rabidly politicized, mad-as-hell, accept-us-or-die quotient of gay Americans—at last count, somewhere between 97 to 99 percent of them—seem determined to prove that they can get just as offended as your average hillbilly breeder mountaineer, if not more so.

  It’s as if they’re taking it to the streets, up into the hills, and down into the hollers to spread a simple message—“You think you can get offended, you stupid, hateful, one-toothed, inbred, Christ-worshiping rednecks? You ain’t seen an uptight bunch of whiny wah-wah emotionally retarded walking fetuses until you’ve tangled with us!”

• ◆ Scientists clone beagle that glows fluorescent green
  Scientists in South Korea have used a cloning technique to created a “glowing” dog, which they hope to use to investigate certain human diseases. The “glowing” effect in the two year old beagle named Tegon can be turned on and off with a doxycycline antibiotic.
• ◆ WANTED IN GREENPOINT: “Hipstras”
  Fuck MTV
• ◆ Apple Now Has More Cash Than The U.S. Government

  According to the latest daily statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion at the end of the day yesterday.

  Apple’s last earnings report (PDF here) showed that the company had $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June.

  In other words, the world’s largest tech company has more cash than the world’s largest sovereign government.

• ◆ Damaged Nuclear Fuel Rod Stuck At Japanese Plant for 17 Years

  A damaged nuclear fuel rod was stuck inside a reactor at Japan’s ageing Hamaoka nuclear plant after an accident 17 years ago and is still there, the plant’s operator said Thursday.

  The operator, Chubu Electric Power Co., said experts were unable to remove the spent fuel rod from the plant, located 125 miles (200 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, Kyodo News reported.

  The rod was stored inside a special container in the spent fuel pool of a decommissioned reactor. The company sought help from domestic and foreign experts on how to safely extract it, but no solution was found so far.

• ◆ War Texting : Hackers Unlock Car Doors Via SMS
  Don Bailey and Mathew Solnik, Two hackers have found a way to unlock cars that use remote control and telemetry systems like BMW Assist, GM OnStar, Ford Sync, and Hyundai Blue Link. These systems communicate with the automaker’s remote servers via standard standard mobile networks like GSM and CDMA — and with a clever bit of reverse engineering, the hackers were able to pose as these servers and communicate directly with a car’s on-board computer via “war texting” — a riff on “war driving,” the act of finding open wireless networks.

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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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• ✩ High levels of radiation detected in Northwest rain

  “Our government said no health levels, no health levels were exceeded.When in fact the rain water in the Northwest is reaching levels 130 times the drinking water standards,” said Pollet.

  Elevated rain water samples were collected in Portland, Olympia and Boise, which had the highest.

  But EPA officials say the data was there for anyone to read on their website. A spokesman sent this statement, in part:

  “Since Iodine 131 has a very short half-life of approximately eight days, the levels seen in rainwater were expected to be relatively short in duration.”

• ✩ R. Kelly Facing Foreclosure On His South Suburban Chicago Mansion

  After failing to pay more than a year of mortgage payments, Grammy winner and “R&B king” R. Kelly now faces a $2.9-million foreclosure lawsuit on his 11,140-square-foot Olympia Fields mansion, Crain’s Chicago reported Tuesday.

  Kelly’s home, which sits on a 3.7-acre lot, was constructed in the far southern suburb 11 years ago and its value has plummeted in recent years — falling 26 percent in its most recent appraisal to $3.8 million, as compared to its $5.2 million 2009 value, according to Crain’s. Therefore, Kelly, who has not lived in the home for more than a year, faces debts on the property that likely exceed its current value.

  A person reportedly close to Kelly told Crain’s the singer had stopped making payments on the mortgage in order to force the bank to renegotiate the loan.

• ✩ US law enforcement agencies increasingly obtaining Facebook warrants
  US law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, DEA, and ICE, are increasingly obtaining warrants to search Facebook. Not only do they gain access to Facebook accounts, but it often occurs with the user’s knowledge. Personal data obtained can include messages, status updates, links to videos and photographs, calendars of future and past events, Wall postings, and even rejected friend requests.
• ✩ Project Tarmeggedon by Anonymous Hackers Operation Green Rights
  Free-thinking citizens of the world:
  Anonymous’ Operation Green Rights calls your attention to an urgent situation in North America perpetuated by the boundless greed of the usual suspects: Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., Imperial Oil, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and many others.
  This week, activists are gathering along U.S. Highway 12 in Montana to protest the transformation of a serene wilderness into an industrial shipping route, bringing “megaloads” of refinery equipment to the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada (see Tar Sands FAQ Sheet below).
  Anonymous now joins the struggle against “Big Oil” in the heartland of the US. We stand in solidarity with any citizen willing to protest corporate abuse. Anonymous will not stand by idly and let these environmental atrocities continue. This is not the clean energy of the future that we are being promised.
• ‪✩ Man Shot after Confronting Tagger [Video]‬‏
  Thanks Smart Crew
• ✩ The Secret Bookstore, Thessaly La Force
  Watch this beautiful video about Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore that’s been tucked away in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side ever since the rent for his original retail space in Brooklyn was quadrupled. (Jonathan Lethem used to work there.) “This would have not been my ideal,” he says. “I wouldn’t have thought I want to have a bookshop in a location no one knows about.” But Brazen says it’s a continuation of being the kind of bookseller he wants to be—not on the street, not at book fairs, but inside, the shelves lined with first editions, knickknacks, and, one hopes, a cat. “I don’t know if it’s my familiarity with failure,” he adds. “I find ways to survive without it making enough money to be what you would call a successful business. If it’s all about money, there’s just better things to sell.” And how do those of us who’ve never been find him? He’s in the phone book, he says with a smile. Hiding in plain sight.
• ✩ Another Brawl At Dennys [Video]
• ✩ 12,000 Drones, Lethal Cyborg Insects, See-Shoot Robots — How Machines Are Taking Over War
  In the same way, robot drones as assassination weapons will prove to be just another weapons system rather than a panacea for American warriors. None of these much-advertised wonder technologies ever turns out to perform as promised, but that fact never stops them, as with drones today, from embedding themselves in our world. From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the opposite — it came home and entered our everyday world in the form of sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment, and the like, now implanted from our borders to our cities.
• ✩ Owl leaves imprint on Kendal woman’s window

  A woman returned to her Cumbrian home to find a near perfect imprint of an owl on her window.

  The bird had apparently crashed into the window of Sally Arnold’s Kendal home, leaving the bizarre image – complete with eyes, beak and feathers.

  Experts said the silhouette was left by the bird’s “powder down” – a substance protecting growing feathers.

• ✩ Boy regrets selling his kidney to buy iPad

  A 17-year-old student in Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan only to buy an iPad 2. Now, with his health getting worse, the boy is feeling regret but it is too late, the Global Times reported today.

  “I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.”

• ✩ Out-of-body Experiences Linked to Neural Instability and Biases in Body Representation
  Although out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with migraine, epilepsy and psychopathology, they are quite common in healthy and psychologically normal individuals as well. However, they are poorly understood. A new study, published in the July 2011 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex, has linked these experiences to neural instabilities in the brain’s temporal lobes and to errors in the body’s sense of itself – even in non clinical populations.
• ✩ HOUSE PASSES DEFAZIO AMENDMENT TO AUDIT THE PENTAGON

  Yesterday, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) offered a bipartisan amendment to force the Pentagon to produce auditable financial statements providing a clearer picture of how it spends tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year. The House passed the amendment unanimously.

  Currently, federal law exempts the Pentagon from conducting an audit. DeFazio’s amendment would reverse this exemption.

  “The Pentagon has spent more than $10 trillion since 1990 and will spend over $4 trillion over the next four years without ever passing an audit,” said DeFazio. “As Congress debates substantial cuts to programs that help middle class families, we need a clear picture that allows us to target wasteful and duplicative spending. The Pentagon needs to be audited just like every other federal agency in order to achieve significant budget savings.”

• ✩ Obama and the Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Grifters

  Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on “public safety” over civil liberties and constitutional rights. Indeed, “hope and change” huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President “bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”

  Pity that others, including CIA “black site” prisoners tortured to death to “keep us safe” (some 100 at last count) aren’t extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.

  As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President “has no greater responsibility than ‘protecting the American people’ is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation.”

• ✩ News Corp Has Lost $7 Billion In 4 Days

  Want to get a sense of just how bad the News of the World phone hacking scandal has been for Rupert Murdoch? Look no further than News Corp market value.

  The company has lost $7 billion in market value over the last four trading days, reports Bloomberg.

  The company “tumbled 4.6 percent to A$15.19 in Sydney today. The stock lost $1.27, or 7.6 percent, to $15.48 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday, the biggest drop since April 2009. It was the fourth straight decline in the company’s closing price, cutting its market value by 15 percent to $41.2 billion. “

  At 538.com Nate Silver notes a big chunk of that is from yesterday alone [below].

  The question remains: How much money does News Corp have to lose before Rupert Murdoch chooses to lose top lieutenants instead?

• ✩ Pripyat – Voskhod Building View – Chernoybl Tour

  This is the Voskhod Building in Pripyat. It’s one of two identical apartment blocks, designed to house the superior engineers of Chernoybl. As such, it was visibly luxurious inside, especially considering standards at the time.

  I climbed to the top, took photos from every angle, and William Hall of Life in Megapixels very kindly stitched them together for me, and corrected some errors.

  The resulting stitch shows probably the most complete picture of Pripyat Town that you can get in a single place – if you look closely, you can even see the “Steel Yard” (Duga-3 array), and you can make out all the famous major buildings, including the fairground. This was shot on 29th May, 2011.

  Close this dialog, then use your mouse to look around. You can scroll-zoom for a little extra detail.

• ✩ Penis Attack: Wife Cuts off Husband’s Penis, Tosses it in Garbage Dispoal
  The woman, identified as Catherine Kieu Becker, 48, the victim’s wife, had put an unknown type of poison and/or drug into her husband’s food to make him sleepy, according to Nightengale. She then tied him to the bed. When he woke up, she cut off his penis with a knife, investigators said. She then tossed the penis in the garbage disposal and turned it on.
• ✩ CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA

  The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.

  As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

  The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

• ✩ The Twentieth Century’s Best-Kept Military Secrets – LSD Gas Bombs: January 1960
  “Secret U.S. tests, now revealed, show startling military uses for weird new chemical agents,” we reported in 1960. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psychochemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.
• ✩ Contaminated soil a concern at Los Alamos lab

  The Las Conchas wildfire, which scorched land in the canyons near Los Alamos before it was turned away from the lab earlier the month, has added urgency to the soil removal efforts because flash floods could rush unimpeded through canyon floors stripped of vegetation, officials said.

  That concern is heightened by the monsoons that have arrived on schedule in northern New Mexico. The National Weather Service on Monday put out a flash-flood watch for the fire area through at least Wednesday.

  The soil in the canyons above Los Alamos National Laboratory, the linchpin of American’s nuclear weapons industry, contains materials with trace amounts of radiation and hazardous chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that were dumped there decades ago, said Fred deSousa, spokesman for the lab’s environmental control division.

• ✩ Cost of Wars May Exceed $6 Trillion
  A new report from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates that the total direct and indirect costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed $6 trillion over time. That figure comes from combining congressional appropriations for the wars over the past decade ($1.3 trillion), additional spending by the Pentagon related to the wars ($326 – $652 billion), interest so far on Pentagon war appropriations, all of which was borrowed ($185 billion), immediate medical costs for veterans ($32 billion), war related foreign aid ($74 billion), homeland security spending ($401 billion), projected medical costs for veterans through 2051 ($589 – $934 billion), social costs to military families ($295 – $400 billion), projected Pentagon war spending and foreign aid as troops wind down in the two war zones ($453 billion); and interest payments on all this spending through 2020 ($1 trillion).
• ✩ New Book Claims Hitler Gave Sex Dolls to Nazi Soldiers

  A new book reveals that Adolf Hitler ordered the manufacture of Aryan blow up dolls to discourage his troops from sleeping with disease-ridden prostitutes.

  The so-called “Borghild Project” reportedly kicked off in 1940 when SS chief Heinrich Himmler wrote to Hitler alerting him of the health risks posed to his men by liaisons with French women. “The greatest danger in Paris is the widespread and uncontrolled presence of whores, picking up clients in bars, dance halls, and other places,” he wrote. “It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health just for the sake of a quick adventure.”

• ✩ Fish captain fighting to keep long-missing moon rock

  Onetime Seattle resident and businessman Coleman Anderson wants to keep his little piece of the moon.

  Whether he does will depend on the outcome of an unusual lawsuit playing out in an Alaska court.

  Anderson, perhaps best recognized as captain of the fishing vessel Western Viking during the first season of the hit Discovery Channel series “Deadliest Catch,” is asking a judge to let him keep a lunar rock presented to the state of Alaska in 1969 by President Nixon, but missing for nearly 37 years.

  Anderson, who claims he found the rock in debris following a fire at an Anchorage museum in 1973, said he’s had it as a keepsake ever since.

• ✩ DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

  The Colorado prosecution of a woman accused of a mortgage scam will test whether the government can punish you for refusing to disclose your encryption passphrase.

  The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to order the defendant, Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home.

  Because Fricosu has opposed the proposal, this could turn into a precedent-setting case. No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects Americans’ right to remain silent.

  In a brief filed last Friday, Fricosu’s Colorado Springs-based attorney, Philip Dubois, said defendants can’t be constitutionally obligated to help the government interpret their files. “If agents execute a search warrant and find, say, a diary handwritten in code, could the target be compelled to decode, i.e., decrypt, the diary?”

• ✩ Aging Serial Killer Demands Playstation in Prison
  Ivan Milat is apparently bored, since he is serving more than seven consecutive life sentences for his crimes, so he probably really does want that Playstation console. In fact, he’s downright stir-crazy and has not eaten in nine days, reports one source. Officials in the High Court in Australia aren’t surprised, because this isn’t the first time Milat has pulled a far-out and crazy stunt to get attention. He’s kind of an attention-whore like that. Back in January of 2009, Milate sawed off one of his own fingers with a plastic knife and attempted to mail it to the High Court in Australia. Doctors were not able to sew the digit back in place. He has also swallowed razor blades and other metallic objects to both harm himself and garner attention.
• ✩ Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools
  While exploring Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, professional diver Scott Gardner heard an odd cracking sound and swam over to investigate. What he found was a footlong blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii) holding a clam in its mouth and whacking it against a rock. Soon the shell gave way, and the fish gobbled up the bivalve, spat out the shell fragments, and swam off. Fortunately, Gardner had a camera handy and snapped what seem to be the first photographs of a wild fish using a tool.
• ✩ Space-Time Cloak Possible, Could Make Events Disappear?

  “The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.

  Unlike invisibility cloaks—some of which have been made to work at very small scales—the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object.

  Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.

  In theory, the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up.

  If the “before” and “after” visions are seamlessly stitched together, there should be no visible trace that anything untoward has happened. One second there’s a closed safe, and the next second the safe has been emptied.

• ✩ Obama ‘cannot guarantee’ Social Security checks in August

  President Barack Obama sat down with CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Scott Pelley for an interview that will air in full Tuesday night. In a preview released Tuesday afternoon, Pelley points out to Obama that $20 billion in Social Security checks are supposed to be mailed out August 3, the day after the looming date the government could default on its debt.

  “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3 if we have not resolved this issue, because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it,” Obama said.

• ✩ Space Invaders cabinet is very small, very cool

  If you’re big on nostalgia, but small on space, we might just have the solution for you. A clever gentleman has created a teeny-tiny 80s arcade cabinet that will fit happily on your desktop – and while it might look like a mere mock-up, this one actually works, playing Space Invaders on the miniature screen.

  The whole thing is just seven inches tall, and uses the electronics from a Game Boy Advance, a little MDF, some photoshopped artwork and perhaps the world’s most adorable joystick – take a look.

• ✩ Israel blocks airborne protest, questions dozens

  Aided by Facebook, Israel on Friday prevented scores of pro-Palestinian activists from boarding Tel Aviv-bound flights in Europe, questioned dozens more upon arrival at its main airport and denied entry to 69, disrupting their attempts to reach the West Bank on a solidarity mission with the Palestinians.

  Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites, compiled a blacklist of more than 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel. On Friday, 310 of the activists who managed to land in Tel Aviv were detained for questioning, said Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad. Of those, four were immediately put on return flights and 65 were being held until flights home could be arranged for them, she said. The rest were permitted entry, she said.

• ✩ The Land of 10,000 Plastic Marios
  It’s official: Brett Martin has a metric buttload of video game memorabilia. By Mr. Martin’s own estimation, his collection clocks in at about ten to fifteen thousand individual pieces. But not all of those trinkets of molded plastic, cast metal, and fluffed polyester are depictions of Nintendo’s famous Italian plumber. His gaming nicknack collection actually spans a diverse range of characters from different franchises, companies, and eras.
• ✩ Super Mario Bros. Crossover
  Super Mario Bros. Crossover is a fan game that recreates the original Super Mario Bros. and allows you to play it as characters from other games.

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• ✩ Rise and Fall of Underground Comix
  Listen to an excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Underground Comix in San Francisco and Beyond” read by author Jay Kinney
• ✩ In Twitter Town Hall, Obama Tweets His Way into 2012

  Yes, the event was “cool.” When was the last time you could tweet a president, with the (slim) potential for him to answer your questions?

  But there was a problem with the Twitter aspect of the town hall — it went in one direction, which goes against the point of Twitter. Not only did the President not type in his answers, they were much longer than the 140 characters Twitterers use to communicate.

• ✩ Doctors Struggle to Evaluate Whether a Patient’s Pain Is Real
  Dr. Saper estimates that 15% to 20% of them are faking—or at least, aren’t as incapacitated as they say. Some are dependent on painkillers or seeking to resell them, he says. Some want a doctor to certify that they’ll never be able to work again and deserve disability payments. Some, he thinks, don’t really want to get well because they subconsciously find power in their pain.
• ✩ US police smash camera for recording killing

  Police noticed the man filming the shooting and an officer jumped into his truck, and put a pistol to his head, Benoit said. The video shows officers crowding around Herisse’s vehicle before opening fire, followed by indistinguishable yelling at onlookers, including Benoit, to stop filming.

  The cop yelled: “Wanna be a [expletive] paparazzi?” Benoit recounted in a TV interview.

  “My phone was smashed, he stepped on it, handcuffed me,” the 35-year-old car stereo technician told CNN.
  Despite his phone being destroyed, Benoit was able to save the footage by taking the memory card out of the device and putting it in his mouth before handing it over to police, he said, adding that officers smashed several other cameras in the chaos which followed the shooting.

• ✩ Thief steals Picasso drawing from S.F. gallery

  The well-dressed man in dark glasses didn’t attract a second glance when he walked into a gallery near Union Square on Tuesday.

  And soon he was gone, after grabbing a drawing by Pablo Picasso that was being offered for more than $200,000, and vanishing in a waiting taxicab, San Francisco police said.

• ✩ Woman Showers On NYC Subway Train [VIDEO]

  In this week’s crazy NYC subway video series, a woman, nude from the waist down, sets up a wash station on the blue bench of a subway car and proceeds to take a camping-style shower.

  With water and suds pooling on the subway car floor, the woman deliberately cleans herself in a 3-part YouTube video uploaded by a straphanger. It’s anyone’s guess what happens in the second and third videos, as they have been removed from YouTube for violating the policy on nudity or sexual content. See Video Below (Warning NSFW):

• ✩ Cylinder, Disc and Tape Care in a Nutshell – Librarians & Archivists – (Preservation, Library of Congress)
• ✩ Geocaching treasure hunt leads to UK bomb scare

  An Internet-based treasure hunt, known as geocaching, caused a bomb scare in West Yorkshire after a local cafe owner reported a suspicious package.

  The hidden box was blown up in a controlled explosion after being placed near the cafe, which was forced to be shut down for two hours.

  Geocaching participants use GPS and other mobile devices to hide and locate caches around the world. The caches typically contain a logbook to sign or small item to trade.

• ✩ Self-Experimenters: Psychedelic Chemist Explores the Surreality of Inner Space, One Drug at a Time

  Alexander Shulgin is the world’s foremost “psychonaut.” The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., where he has shared many a chemical voyage with his wife of 26 years, Ann.

  “I take them myself because I am interested in their activity in the human mind. How would you test that in a rat or mouse?” says Shulgin, known to friends as Sasha.

  He has paid the price for his avocation. Some of his creations have induced uncontrollable vomiting, paralysis and the feeling that his bones were melting, among other terrors.

• ✩ An Oral History of May 3, 1987: The Day The Butthole Surfers Came to Trenton, New Jersey
  Story of a crazy show I was at that became a riot. Best show EVER!
• ✩ Gastric band “made my stomach explode”, says Coventry woman

  COVENTRY woman Samantha Haworth is lucky to be alive after a gastric band made her stomach “explode”.

  Samantha had the band fitted when her weight soared to 28 stone, putting her health at risk.

  Two years later, an incredibly rare complication meant the band ‘slipped’ inside her, leaving the 25- year-old from Walsgrave in agony.

  But she mistook her deadly symptoms for heartburn.

  Without Samantha knowing, her gastric band had moved and turned septic. When her stomach could not cope any more it burst.

• ✩ 15 Food Companies That Serve You ‘Wood’

  The recent class-action lawsuit brought against Taco Bell raised questions about the quality of food many Americans eat each day.

  Chief among those concerns is the use of cellulose (read: wood pulp), an extender whose use in a roster of food products, from crackers and ice creams to puddings and baked goods, is now being exposed. What you’re actually paying for — and consuming — may be surprising.

• ✩ Roadside Radiation Detectors To Blanket U.S. Soon

  DHS is gearing up with just about every terror gadget and detection system possible to protect us from a pretty much nonexistent threat in the United States.

  Now they are testing roadside radiation trackers and sporting event radiation trackers in the next phase to screen the populace.

• ✩ Anonymous & Lulzsec Personal Information leaked by TeaMp0isoN
  TeaMp0isoN claim to expose the personal details of Anonymous & Lulzsec via a tweet. They posted a pastie link which contains the details of various Lulzsec members and Anonymous.
• ✩ Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab: nuclear playset for kids from the 50′s
  Gilbert had high expectations of America’s youngsters, and with such he tried to help the future engineers, doctors and leaders by providing toys worthy of their imaginations. As the inventor of the Erector Set, and seeing its commercial appeal, the he and his company set a higher goal. They became the leading manufacturer of scientific toys (chemistry sets) and construction sets (Erector), all of which gained wide acclaim at the retail level. Interested in the joy of science more than remuneration, however, Gilbert created the Atomic Energy Lab U-238 – with the help of MIT’s able faculty. The toy was made to de-mystify the perils of nuclear energy and to encourage the understanding of chemistry, physics and nuclear science – ultimately helping kids (and adults) become more open to the possibilities these disciplines offer. This educational composite, which was marketed during 1950-51, sold for $49.50 – a very high price for a toy set, even by today’s standard.
• ✩ Motel reports $3,500 worth of damage in feces-covered room

  The mysterious odor coming from Room 131 of the Lincoln Motel 6 last week turned out to be more than rotten food or a clogged toilet.

  The entire room was covered with feces, Lincoln Police Capt. David Beggs said.

  Police are looking for the person responsible for the vandalism, which caused about $3,500 damage to the hotel room. Employees reported the incident Saturday.

  After guests complained of an odor, employees discovered the room, including the curtains, table and counter, was covered with feces. Surrounding rooms had to be vacated, Beggs said.

  The last occupant, who stayed in the room June 22-29, checked in with three cats. But those who saw the room said some of the feces appeared to be too big to be from a cat, Beggs said.

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