▲ Ferret Legging – A Truly Unusual Sport

Also known as ferret-down-trousers and put ‘em down, the rules of the sport are pretty tight. Competitors have two ferrets placed inside their trousers, which are tied firmly at the ankles and belted up at the waist, thereby eliminating any point of escape for the furry creatures. The competitor then stands before judges, enduring the misery of the razor-sharp claws and teeth of the ferrets. Other rules state that competitors cannot be drunk and the ferrets must not be sedated. Also, the ferrets must have a full set of teeth that have not been blunted or filed. The man who stands the longest, wins. Sounds gruesome, doesn’t it? Well, get this – they aren’t even allowed to put on underwear, so as to allow free access to the ferrets from one leg to the other.

▲ Shoplifting Around the World [Infographic]

▲ Mountain Dew Will Dissolve Rats On Contact

According to McGill, if a mouse is submerged in Mountain Dew between four and seven days, the rodent “will have no calcium in its bones and bony structures.” During those days of soft drink immersion, “the mouse’s abdominal structure will rupture.” Additionally, “its cranial cavity (head) is also likely to rupture within that time period,” McGill noted. After 30 days exposure to Mountain Dew, “all of the mouse’s structures” would have disintegrated to the point that it would not be recognizable. In fact, “the mouse will have been transformed into a ‘jelly-like’ substance.” The only part of the rodent that could possibly survive, added McGill, was “a portion of the tail.”

▲ Lab-grown glands, eyes and brain parts

Growing a complete, functioning brain is unfeasible, but there is real potential in growing functional neural tissue containing specific types of cells, for transplantation into the human brain. This is one avenue of research that the team are investigating. Last year, they showed that ES cells can be coaxed to differentiate into functional cerebellar Purkinje cells, which integrate themselves into the brain when transplanted into mouse foetuses. “We are now attempting to generate Purkinje cells from human ES and induced pluripotent stem cells,” says Sasai. This would be useful in establishing animal models for the spino-cerebellar ataxias, to investigate their pathogenesis and to explore the possibility of gene therapy for these diseases.” The 3D culture technique could also be used to grow midbrain tissue containing neurons that synthesize the neurotransmitter dopamine, which could eventually prove to be very useful in the development of therapies for Parkinson’s Disease.

▲ No Fear: Memory Adjustment Pills Get Pentagon Push

The Pentagon hasn’t come close to solving the PTSD crisis plaguing the current generation of troops. But a cutting-edge realm of treatment might change that — by wiping away the fear that military personnel associate with traumatic memories. The Pentagon this week announced an $11 million grant for three research institutions, all of them long-time hubs for the military’s ongoing PTSD investigations. Experts at Emory University, the University of Southern California and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center will study the effectiveness of D-Cycloserine (DCS). DCS is a pharmaceutical thought to help extinguish fearful memories. It’s usually taken right before exposure therapy, a process that involves recalling traumatic experiences in an effort to nullify the menacing associations that accompany them.

▲ Saudi son sale: $20 million price tag for a child

A failed Saudi businessman has put up his own son up for sale on Facebook. He claims that with all doors closed to him, he couldn’t see any other way to provide for his wife and daughter. ­Saud bin Nasser Al Shahry wants more than 73 million UAE Dirhams for the boy, a sum equivalent to almost $20 million, reports Qatar’s Al Sharq newspaper. A deal on the boy would offer “a decent life to his mother and sister rather than living in poverty.” The resourceful businessman said his debt-collecting firm had been ruled illegal by a local court and had to be shut down. When Al Shahry approached the Labor Office for financial assistance, the authorities allegedly refused him aid as the ministry does not provide help to individuals over 35 years old.

▲ 7 year old Poppy Burge gets liposuction voucher from ‘Human Barbie’ mum Sarah for Christmas

A seven-year-old who received a voucher for a boob job on her last birthday has received yet another inappropriate gift from her surgery-obsessed mother: A £7,000 voucher for liposuction. Little Poppy Burge received the gift in her Christmas stocking after her mother, a 51-year-old plastic surgery addict known as The Human Barbie, decided it would ‘come in handy’. ‘I put the voucher in her stocking – there’s nothing wrong with that,’ she said. ‘She asks for surgery all the time. She wants to look good and lipo is one of those procedures that will always come in handy.

▲ Police Shoot and Kill Armed 8th Grader in Texas

Police shot and killed an eighth grader brandishing a handgun in a Texas middle school hallway Wednesday. Police received a call around 8 a.m. saying there was someone with a weapon at Cummings High School in Brownsville, Texas, the Associated Press reported. Officers found the student with a handgun in a hallway and shot him after he “engaged” police, a district spokeswoman said in a statement. He was taken to a nearby medical center where he later died, the Brownsville Herald reported. His name has not been released. Local ABC affiliate KXXV-TV reported that police told the student to put his weapon down and fired three times after he refused to comply.

▲ Stephen Hawking admits he finds women ‘a complete mystery’

His career has shed light on the secrets of the universe, from the nature of space-time to the workings of black holes, but there is one conundrum that still baffles the world’s most famous scientist. In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women. “They are,” he said “a complete mystery.”

▲ Avoiding Facial Recognition of the Future

The main focus of the camouflage is to use makeup and hair to create a look that is a mix between organic and machine. This makes it very hard to program software that can detect facial features if the traditional lines of a person’s visage are broken up in non-organic fashion. For those wanting to take a stab at protecting their identity, there are a few basic tips offered: 1. Avoid enhancers: They amplify key facial features. 2. Partially obscure the nose-bridge: The region where the nose, eyes, and forehead intersect is a key facial feature. 3. Partially obscure the ocular region: The position and darkness of eyes is a key facial feature. 4. Remain inconspicuous: For camouflage to function, it must not be perceived as a mask or disguise.

▲ PayPal Tells Buyer To Destroy Purchased Violin Instead Of Return For Refund

a seller claims that she’s out $2,500 and an antique violin after the company told the buyer to destroy the instrument. According to the seller, who shared her tale with the aforementioned Regretsy, she had sold the old violin to a buyer in Canada, who subsequently disputed the instrument’s bona fides. It is certainly not uncommon for people in the antique musical instrument field to argue over whether or not a particular item is the real deal, and it makes sense to notify PayPal that you are disputing the purchase. But the decision as to whether or not the violin is the real deal or an impersonator is not usually left up to the company that promises the payment. Alas, someone at PayPal apparently is an expert in old violins, because the company determined the instrument was “counterfeit” and told the buyer he needed to destroy it in order to get his refund. The buyer not only smashed the violin to bits; he also snapped some pics that he sent to the seller.

▲ La Redoute Naked Man Kids PHOTO

Stylist UK reports that the image has stirred up its fair share of controversy in France — and with good reason. The photo, found on La Redoute’s e-commerce site, features four annoyingly happy looking children frolicking on the beach wearing fun (if grammatically incorrect) T-shirts. But way off in the distance behind them is a man wearing absolutely nothing. This is creepy on a number of levels — in the photo, this naked man’s presence invalidates all that childlike joy the children are experiencing. But then you have to step back a level. How did this man get here in the first place? Did La Redoute really do a children’s photoshooot on a beach where people are allowed to roam around naked? Odds are, if there was one naked guy on that beach, there were probably more.

▲ Chinese Girls Before and After Makeup

Before and after makeup comparisons, even more shocking than plastic surgery

▲ Deadly parasite turns Bay Area honeybees into zombie slaves

Infected bees go mad, abandoning their hive in a suicidal rush toward bright lights, according to a new study by San Francisco State researchers. “It’s the flight of the living dead,” said lead investigator and biology professor John Hafernik, also president of the California Academy of Sciences. The parasite, a tiny fly, has been found in bees from three-quarters of the 31 surveyed hives in the Bay Area — essentially, everywhere except Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. In a plotline similar to a George Romero horror film, the fly deposits its eggs into the bee’s abdomen, then takes over. The hapless bees walk around in circles, with no apparent sense of direction. Some are unable to even stand on their legs. “They kept stretching them out and then falling over,” Hafernik said. “It really painted a picture of something like a zombie.”

▲ India girl killed in ritual sacrifice to ensure better harvest

Police arrested two men, both poor farmers, last week and they told police they killed the girl to appease their gods and get a better harvest, Das said. Tati was walking home after watching television at a neighbor’s house when she was kidnapped, Das said. The two men confessed to cutting her open and removing her liver as an offering. Das said the police had gathered enough evidence, apart from the confessions, to charge the two with murder. They would face life in prison or even the death sentence if convicted. The men were described as “tribals,” a term referring to the region’s indigenous people, most of whom remain mired in poverty and illiteracy.

▲ ‘Lost World’ Of Sea Creatures Discovered Near Antarctica

A “lost world” of sea creatures was discovered near Antarctica, British scientists announced Wednesday. Scientists doing their first exploring of deep-sea vents in the Antarctic said it was unlike anything found around other hydrothermal vents — a world populated by new species of anemones, predatory sea stars, and piles of hairy-chested yeti crabs. It was “almost like a sight from another planet,” said expedition leader Alex Rogers, a professor of zoology at Oxford University. Even in the eye-popping world of deep-sea vents, the Antarctic discoveries stand out, with the unfamiliar species of crabs found crowded in piles around the warm waters emanating from the seafloor. Many of the animals found at the vents have never been found at hydrothermal vents in other oceans, Rogers said. “To see these animals in such huge densities was just amazing,” Rogers told LiveScience.

▲ Naked man interrupts ‘Chipmunks’ at North Riverside Mall theater

Kids and parents who paid admission to see a movie about three shipwrecked chipmunks on Dec. 29 at the North Riverside Park Mall’s Classic Cinemas theater, 7501 Cermak Rd., got a bonus show that afternoon – one that landed a 34-year-old Chicago man in Cook County Jail. About a half hour into the 4 p.m. showing of the kiddie feature Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, police say an entirely naked Edward L. Brown stood up from his seat in the front row, faced the crowd of 86 theater-goers, stretched out his hands and displayed his genitalia for all to see before sitting back down to enjoy the movie. …According to the police report, Brown told officers that he had been let inside the movie theater for free by an unknown female who allegedly told him to have a seat in the front row of the theater, take off his clothes and wait for her, so they could have sex, smoke crack and do heroin.

▲ Charlton Library Sends Police To Collect Overdue Books From 5-Year-Old

A Charlton mom says her local library crossed the line when they sent police to collect her daughter’s overdue library books. Her mom says the 5-year-old girl was so afraid that she burst into tears. Charlton Police Sergeant Dan Dowd stopped by the home of Shannon Benoit to let her know that her daughter had two books several months overdue which needed to be returned or paid for.

▲ Bonobo ape lights campfire, cooks hamburgers

Kanzi, a 31-year-old Bonobos, also known as the pygmy chimpanzee, reportedly became obsessed with the film “Quest for Fire” at an early age. “Kanzi makes fire because he wants to,” Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, his main handler at the Great Ape Trust, told the Telegraph. “The movie was released about a year after Kanzi was born and was about early man struggling to control fire. Kanzi watched this spellbound over and over hundreds of times.”

▲ Children becoming ‘addicted’ to computers

Children’s access to smartphones and computers should be limited to stop them becoming “addicted” to electronic gadgets, according to a schools’ leader.

▲ Password case reframes Fifth Amendment rights in context of digital world

Beyond the log-in screen of Ramona Fricosu’s laptop computer lies what federal prosecutors say could be the key evidence in the bank-fraud case against her. There’s only one problem: Prosecutors don’t know her password. Thus, in an extraordinarily rare move, prosecutors in Denver are seeking a court order forcing Fricosu to unlock the computer so that they can obtain files they would use to try to convict her and her ex-husband. Civil-liberties groups nationwide have taken notice, saying the case tests the strength of rights against self-incrimination in a digital world. Prosecutors, meanwhile, say that allowing criminal defendants to beat search warrants simply by encrypting their computers would make it impossible to obtain evidence in an age when clues are more likely held within a hard drive than a file cabinet.

▲ White powder sent to Fla. gov’t office sickens 4

According to the Palm Beach Post, initial testing of the white powder was “inconclusive.” WPEC mentioned that there can be psychological and physical effects or psychosomatic symptoms even if the substance is not hazardous due to the panic caused by the situation, but Emergency Manager for the City of West Palm Beach Allan Ortman told the Palm Beach Post that when tested the powder didn’t change colors, which is raising some concern. The powder has been sent to a FBI lab for further testing, and results are expected within 24 hours.

▲ Police State 2012: No Need to Wait, It’s Already Here

One of the greatest problems in talking about the police state is that all such discussion of the subject is hampered by the lack of a clear-cut definition. Given the public’s own ignorance of the true nature and function of a police state, story after story after story of intolerable levels of official oppression, secret illegal surveillance, and increasingly sophisticated technology for tracking, apprehending, incapacitating and even killing dissenters can be dismissed because these stories are reported one at a time, in a contextless and therefore meaningless way that invites the interpretation that these stories are only warnings of what is to come instead of sign posts of a reality that is already here.

▲ John Lydon’s top of the pops roots Reggae picks

Don Letts: The Rastas loved John! To them he was “THE punk rock Don from London” they were aware of all the trouble he had stirred up in London, and yeah, they were into what he stood for and his stance, and they dug it… We smoked a chalice together with U Roy for breakfast, and then went out to one of his dances, miles out in the countryside, quite a long journey by car. I remember the dreads stringing up this sound, and kicking off with some earthquake dubs. Now let me tell you this sound system was LOUD, and me and John both of us, literally passed out! I remember hours later some dreads shaking us awake, it was like, “Wake up man, dance done, dance finish now man!” Yeah, it was pretty wild for me and John out in Jamaica. We loved it. John just had a vibe you know, people were drawn to him. It was the same in London; it was the same in Kingston. John is Irish, and there is a definite affinity between Jamaicans and Irish!

▲ Pot Culture: White Punks on Dope

In fact, despite protestations to the contrary, the punks always smoked pot when no one was looking. In John Lydon’s autobiography, Don Letts explains how he became DJ at the seminal punk hang out, The Roxy: “I took the job at first for the money. I thought the punks were just a bunch of crazy white people. I didn’t really tune into it. When I became the deejay and started meeting them, I picked up on what they were doing. I got the job first, and then got all my black mates to work there. Everybody who worked there, besides Andy (Czezowski), was black. We used to make joints before we went to work to sell to the punks over the counter. The people would come up and say, ‘Give me two beers and a spliff. No, make that two spliffs and a beer.’ They couldn’t roll Jamaican cones.”

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✰ Educators worried by rise of students who snort crushed candy

A trend among some students to crush certain candy and snort or inhale it — dubbed “Smoking Smarties” — is causing concern among some drug educators. “It is not a narcotic of any sort. They are not getting high,” said Carol Williams, project coordinator of the Shelby County Drug Free Coalition Project Safe Place Programs of Family Connection, Inc. “They are literally just inhaling sugar into their body.” The students, often middle schoolers, crush candies such as Smarties or use already powdered candies such as Pixy Stix or powder drink packets such as KoolAid and snort them into their noses, Williams said. In some cases the students will crush a pack of candy and put the packet in their mouth and inhale and blow the fine granules out as if they were smoking. she said.

✰ Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield an alleged heroin hotbed

The accounts give a rare glimpse into how some NATO personnel and contractors seem to have gotten ensnared in Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar narco economy, which supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. Canada and other NATO powers have long been accused of turning a blind eye to a 15-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001 (according to UN figures) and cozying up to Afghan warlords and officials reputed to be involved with drugs. But these new accounts suggest NATO’s presence helps fuel the gigantic Afghan drug trade. The accounts are reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when U.S. forces befriended opium-dealing warlords in Southeast Asia and many U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin, with some smuggling it back home.

✰ Buffalo Body-Painting at Unique Traditional Festival

Traditionally, the bulls were painted by the Hani people of China in the belief that the practice would protect their village, mainly by preventing tigers from wandering into their homes. Of course, the threat of tigers and other man-eaters has reduced drastically in modern times, but the festival continues to be celebrated with much enthusiasm. The China-Laos-Vietnam Bull Painting Festival, as it is called, had 48 participating teams this year. The paraded bulls were hardly recognizable, covered in colors like bright blue, gold, yellow and red. But the paintings were far from abstract. The bulls served as a canvas for some real artistic talent, landscapes, portraits, and intricate patterns adorned their otherwise brown or white skin. Even the horns were covered with paint.

✰ Vets see more dogs snarfing humans’ medical pot

Some veterinarians in Durango have seen a spike in the number of dogs poisoned by marijuana since the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries made the drug more accessible. “We used to see maybe one case a year,” said Stacee Santi, a veterinarian at Riverview Animal Hospital. “Now we’re seeing a couple a month.” Dogs can be exposed to marijuana through smoke or eating cannabis-laced foodstuffs. Recently, a large-breed dog was brought to the hospital stumbling, dribbling urine and exhibiting the classic symptoms of dilated eyes and slow heart beat, Santi said. “We induced vomiting, and up came a 3-by-3-foot piece of cheesecloth,” Santi said. “The cheesecloth could have been used to strain marijuana butter.” The butter, once infused with cannabis, can be used to make baked goods such as brownies.

✰ Mum changes her name to Pink Sparkly And All Things Nice

Mr Knox-Hewson renamed himself Emperor Spiderman Gandalf Wolverine Skywalker Optimus Prime Goku Sonic Xavier Ryu Cloud Superman Heman Batman Thrash. Mr Borbidge now goes by Baron Venom Balrog Sabretooth Vader Megatron Vegeta Robotnik Magneto Bison Sephiroth Lex Luthor Skeletor Joker Grind. “We decided to change our names because we were bored of our day-to-day lives and wanted to do something that reflected our true personalities,” Emperor Thrash said. “We couldn’t believe how easy it was to do – we just had to fill in a few forms and we were granted superhero status.” Baron Grind said he was looking forward to seeing his new name on his bank card. “I wonder how they will fit it all on?” he said. Meet some more of the people who’ve given themselves crazy names – including Lianne Madonna Vogue On The Cover Of A Magazine McHale Dawson, her twin sister Emma Madonna Confessions On A Dance Floor McHale Dawson and their best friend Gemma True Blue Strike A Pose Carroll McHale Dawson Me

✰ Japan builds toilet encrusted with diamonds

In a nod to traditional belief, the sparkling lavatory was created to please the “god of lavatories,” said Kazuo Sumimiya, director of the showroom for the Lixil interior fixture company of which INAX is a part. “In Japan, we believe a deity exists in the lavatory. That’s why keeping lavatories clean and taking good care of it have been a Japanese custom since long ago,” he added. “If we were to sell it, it would probably be worth around 10 million yen ($130,000).”

✰ Behold! Christ’s grave in Japan

Christ first visited Japan between the ages of 21 and 33 (the Bible does in fact skip over large periods of Christ’s early life, and many theories exist about what he did in the intervals). The document claims he studied the native language and culture before returning to Jerusalem, where he was crucified. Only it wasn’t really him who was crucified. His younger brother, Isukiri (who makes no appearance in the Bible), nobly took his place on the cross, pretending to be the Son of God, while the real Christ fled to Siberia. A few years later, via Alaska, he arrived at the port of Hachinohe, just 40 km from Shingo. He made his way to the village, where he married, had three children, and lived to the age of 106.

✰ South Dakota bar owner charged with raping 3 underage girls

The shots of alcohol and mixed drinks began flowing in the early morning hours. Three friends — two 14-year-olds and a 12-year-old — were supposed to be babysitting over a Saturday night. Instead, police say, they met up with a bar owner, who drove them to his closed tavern and began pouring them drinks — vodka shots, orange juice and vodka, vodka and coke and energy drinks. Two of the girls say they got sick, and all three say they either passed out or fell asleep at the bar. That’s when, according to prosecutors, 34-year-old Werner Fajardo raped each of them. Fajardo, who owns and operates a bar in the South Dakota city of Huron, was charged with six counts of rape and three counts of giving alcohol to minors. He was released after posting a $10,000 cash bond.

✰ I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping…

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can’t depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.

✰ Gay nativity scene vandalized at Claremont church

An unusual nativity display at a Claremont church that portrayed gay couples was vandalized over the weekend in an incident authorities are investigating as a hate crime. Claremont United Methodist Church has a Christmas tradition of unusual nativity displays, intended to carry a social or political message. Despite some of the controversial topics, the scenes had never been vandalized or defaced, according to church officials and John Zachary, the artist who created the scenes. But this year, suspects vandalized a nativity scene that included wooden light boxes with three couples holding hands — a man and a woman, two women and two men — under a star of Bethlehem and a sign that said “Christ is Born.” Church officials came in before the Christmas morning service to find that someone had pushed over the two gay couples and left the heterosexual couple standing.

✰ Bugs may be resistant to genetically modified corn

One of the nation’s most widely planted crops — a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide — may be losing its effectiveness because a major pest appears to be developing resistance more quickly than scientists expected. The U.S. food supply is not in any immediate danger because the problem remains isolated. But scientists fear potentially risky farming practices could be blunting the hybrid’s sophisticated weaponry.

✰ How Doctors Die

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

✰ The New Full-Frontal: Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?

What’s happening to America’s vaginas? Is pubic hair going extinct? In a word, no. But it’s on the fast track to the endangered species list, and its chief predators include the porn industry, smaller bathing suits and lingerie bottoms, and the Kardashian sisters (case in point: Kim once famously proclaimed that women “shouldn’t have hair anywhere but their heads”). Pubic hair is, however, evolving. Once upon a time, all vulvas were coated in a protective layer of coarse, woolly tresses. Hard to believe, right? It’s kind of like the revelation that horses once had toes, or that the Ford Mustang once had tailfins. But like any evolving species, the vulva has morphed into something sleeker, starker, and altogether more modern. Today, it is smooth, baby-soft, and hairless.

✰ Why ‘Manscaping’ Isn’t Just for Porn Stars Anymore

The Atlantic reported this month that female pubic hair in America is on the road to extinction, but that’s a bit like noting the spotted owl is an endangered species. Grooming and waxing experts say the latest trend in pubic hair removal isn’t targeted at women—it’s for the guys. There’s evidence of this all around us (if you dare to look). The most startling aspect of seeing Anthony Weiner’s penis in a leaked iPhone sext earlier this year wasn’t its size, but that it looked like a plucked chicken. The same is true of other celebrities’ trimmed full-monty shots, from football player Brett Favre to Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz.

✰ Why We Should All Give Google+ The Finger

This blogger we all know got a pic of himself flipping off a camera removed from Google+ yesterday, and another blogger blogged about it, and then the original blogger blogged about that blogger. Here’s why the image removal was significant, via BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza. “But Google describes Plus as “sharing in real life”. It describes it as an “identity service”. The middle finger, pointed at no-one in particular, is hardly a scandalous gesture; here it triggers a vaguely-defined policy that’s being applied to a service marketed heavily as a public venue for free expression.”

✰ Diseased seals in Alaska tested for radiation

Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Scores of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding lesions on the hind flippers, irritated skin around the nose and eyes and patchy hair loss on the animals’ fur coats. Biologists at first thought the seals were suffering from a virus, but they have so far been unable to identify one, and tests are now underway to find out if radiation is a factor.

✰ How Your Privacy Will Be Invaded in 2012

In 2011, we watched as tech villains found creative new ways to violate our privacy. They misappropriated our social networking profiles, stalked us through our phones, and plucked secrets from our wifi networks. To help you better prepare for 2012′s inevitable privacy attacks, we enumerate below the most worrisome threats you should monitor in the coming year.

✰ Bethlehem Battle: Clergymen Clash At Birthplace Of Jesus

The annual cleaning of one of Christianity’s holiest churches deteriorated into a brawl between rival clergy Wednesday, as dozens of monks feuding over sacred space at the Church of the Nativity battled each other with brooms until police intervened. The ancient church, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, is shared by three Christian denominations – Roman Catholics, Armenians and Greek Orthodox. Wednesday’s fight erupted between Greek and Armenian clergy, with both sides accusing each other of encroaching on parts of the church to which they lay claim.

✰ Sexual assaults rise at US military academies

The number of sexual assaults reported at the country’s prestigious military academies rose sharply for the second year in a row, according to a Pentagon report issued Tuesday.

✰ Automakers, U.S. security officials worry about hacking of cars

As cars and trucks have become laden with brainy devices to control everything from air bags to crash-avoidance systems, the vehicles have become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to recent studies by university researchers and security companies. One found that a car’s computer controls could be remotely accessed through its Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or OnStar connections, potentially allowing terrorists to control the brakes of numerous cars simultaneously, corporate spies to eavesdrop on a motoring executive’s phone calls, or thieves to electronically locate, break into and start cars they’ve targeted to steal. Another showed how a car’s tire pressure warning system could be wirelessly tricked into sending false alerts to drivers, which could prompt them to stop and fall prey to robbers following them.

✰ Satellite Imagery Indicates Shell Spill May Be Worse Than Reported

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth. If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

✰ Inside the mind of the octopus

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus. For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

✰ Internet giants seriously considering ‘nuclear option’ to stop SOPA

Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act won an important, but temporary, victory this month when the House Judiciary Committee hit the pause button on the disastrous legislation. Despite this, as Nancy Scola details, the fight is far from over and SOPA is still favored to pass. One major tactic that might truly derail the bill would be if the biggest websites in the country were to temporarily shut down their services and instead inform visitors of the dangers of SOPA. Remarkably, it now appears as though a coalition made up of fifteen online titans is seriously considering doing exactly that

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✪ Satanic Sex Encounter Leaves Man With Hundreds Of Wounds

According to a search warrant obtained by 12 News, an 18-year-old man came to Milwaukee from Arizona to meet with a woman he met online. It’s unclear what he hoped would happen, but he told police after arriving by bus he spent two days in the apartment tied up, and getting cut, slashed and stabbed. By the time he escaped, doctors said he had more than 300 wounds covering his body. Rebecca Chandler, 21, was arrested at the scene. According to court documents, she told detectives she was having sex with the victim and that the cutting was consensual but that it got out of hand. Chandler told police her roommate of a few months, “Scarlett” did the majority of the cutting. Chandler said she doesn’t know “Scarlett’s” real name but she thinks “Scarlett” is involved in the occult.

✪ Santa poses with AK-47s for gun club photos

Everyone is familiar with the idea of having you photo taken with Santa — but Santa and high-powered weaponry, that’s a new one on us. A gun club in Arizona is offering members to opportunity to have family photograph taken with Father Christmas and a selection of guns. Posing amid piles of wrapped presents families are encouraged to pick up AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers as they surround an unarmed Santa.

✪ Doctors noting increase in ‘sleep texting’

Doctors are seeing more cases of sleep deprived patients who are sleep texting. Sleep expert Dr. Marcus Schmidt tells WTHR-TV that sleep deprivation can trigger common motor behaviors during sleep, including reaching for the phone when it goes off. Schmidt suggests keeping your cell phone away from the bed while you are sleeping, maybe even in another room.

✪ Dozen boat migrants die in voodoo ritual to calm sea

Witnesses claimed victims were thrown in after a macabre “magic dance” by several Nigerian women. Prosecutor Ignazio Fonzo, based in Agrigento, said: “Survivors told us the captain of the boat, a Nigerian, was the leader of the rituals that began after the engine failed. “One man was selected, taken into the hold and beaten, led back up on deck then thrown into the sea. As this happened prayers, chanting and dancing took place. It was said he was sacrificed to cast out demons and calm the seas. We believe at least a dozen people were thrown alive into the sea.” One survivor, Mohamed Yacoub Ibrahim, said: “I saw a group of Nigerian women carrying out a strange magic ritual and afterwards they pointed at various people. The first was grabbed, had his hands and feet tied and he was then thrown in alive.”

✪ Skeleton Santa Controversy at Loudoun County Courthouse

Holiday music, holiday lights and holiday sales are unavoidable the first week of December, but tisn’t really the season without a holiday display controversy in Leesburg, Va. A skeleton dressed in a Santa suit and nailed to a cross was set up on the Loudoun County courthouse lawn in Leesburg on Monday. The macabre Kris Kringle was one of the nine approved displays for this Christmas season, but it was not standing for long. Someone tore the skeleton down, sparking a debate about free speech.

✪ Brain infection from water amoeba kills 3; victim used ‘neti pot’

Two children and a young man have died this summer from a brain-eating amoeba that lives in water, health officials say. The death of the young man, who was from Louisiana, was traced to water used in a neti pot.

✪ Man Arrested After Craigslist Pot Post

Police didn’t have to look far to find a man hoping to buy marijuana Thursday. Michael Krebes, 31, of Vernon, put an ad on Craigslist looking to buy pot, police said. Members of the East Central Narcotics Task Force answered the ad, and set up a location to meet Krebes. Officers set up surveillance and waited for Krebes to arrive. Sure enough, he showed up at the McDonald’s on Main Street in Glastonbury Thursday, where police took him into custody. Krebes was charged with Criminal Attempt/Possession of less than 4 ounces of Marijuana.

✪ Teacher Accused Of Making Students Rub Her Feet

Lexington County School District Three is investigating after a first-grader complained about having to rub her teacher’s feet. A district representative said the district has launched a full investigation, appropriate action has been taken and the situation has been rectified. But that’s not nearly enough for some parents. “She admitted to the children rubbing her feet,” said Brenda Norris. “Just the thought of it… They immediately sent her home, but she’s back there today.” Norris is far from satisfied after her 6-year-old granddaughter, who is in first grade, came home from Batesburg-Leesville Primary School last Wednesday to said she was “tired of rubbing her teacher’s feet.” “‘Do she take off her socks and shoes?’” Norris recounted asking. “‘Grandma, she wears flip flops.’”

✪ Buyer of Minivan Finds Hidden $500K in Cocaine

A California man was stunned to see what a previous owner of his minivan apparently left behind: $500,000 worth of cocaine jammed in the door panels. San Jose psychologist Charles Preston says the cellophane-wrapped cocaine was found when he took the van to a mechanic. Police were immediately notified. Preston says he noticed the driver’s side window wouldn’t go down all the way, but he figured he would live with it because the Town and Country van had a good air conditioning system.

✪ Principal forced to retire amid 9-year-old boy’s suspension for calling teacher ‘cute’

A Gastonia principal who accused a 9-year-old of sexual harassment retired abruptly Tuesday night. Principal Jerry Bostic told Eyewitness News he retired as of 5 p.m. He told the Gaston Gazette the Gaston County School District gave him one hour to decide whether to quit or be fired. “One mistake in 44 years, and I’m not given the benefit of the doubt. I really don’t believe I was treated fairly,” Bostic told Eyewitness News. Chiquita Lockett said her son, Emanyea, was suspended from Brookside Elementary last week for calling a teacher “cute.” The school initially claimed it sexual harassment, adding Emanyea used the word “fine” in a suggestive tone. School officials said in addition to the comment about the teacher, Emanyea had been warned about calling students bad words.

✪ Excrement Tattoo

Claim: A woman sued her ex-boyfriend for surreptitiously tattooing a pile of excrement on her back. FALSE

✪ Drunk Florida Man Tries to Use Taco as I.D.

Ground beef is not a valid form of identification. Not in Martin County, not in Los Angeles, not anywhere. A Florida man learned this the hard way, when he handed a taco to police officers who asked for his I.D. This was after he had passed out in his car. While sitting in the drive-through lane of a Taco Bell. And his engine caught fire.

✪ Superman comic sells at auction for $2.16m

A rare comic which features the first appearance of Superman and was stolen and disappeared for 11 years, had sold at auction for a whopping $2.16m. The pristine copy of Action Comics #1 became the world’s most expensive comic in the process — despite initially costing 10 cents in 1938. While the comic was stolen from a collector in 2000, it reappeared earlier this year and (after being returned to its rightful owner) was listed on ComicConnect.com.

✪ Fake pregnant belly becomes hot seller on the Internet

Artificial replicas of pregnant women’s abdomens, made of silica gel, have become hot sellers on the online shopping market, the China News.com reported on Monday. Looking like the belly of a genuine pregnant woman, the imitations have variously been described as having “flesh color” and “human skin texture,” and as “highly comfortable,” by online shop owners. There are currently three types of fake bellies being sold, each of which approximates a different period of pregnancy, corresponding to the second and latter trimesters and the final month.

✪ Tyree Callahan Paints with a Typewriter

It might look like just an old typewriter, but Washington-based artist Tyree Callahan has actually converted this antique 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter into an art instrument that makes beautiful paintings. Callahan replaced the ink pads of the typewriter with colored paint pads and the letters with color markers, to create a painting machine he calls a Chromatic Typewriter. So instead of creating paintings with brushes, he types them with his unique typewriter. While it would take a while getting used to, and although it will probably never yield the detailed results of a brush, I have no doubt this thing could produce some pretty awesome artworks. After all, artists like Keira Rathbone use conventional typewriters to create exceptional works of art using just letters and symbols. I know it sounds strange, but lets face it, artists have used stranger things to unleash their painting talent (vomit, remote-controlled cars or their lips, just to name a few).

✪ Woman’s face catches on fire during surgery

It was supposed to be a routine outpatient surgery to remove some growths from Kim Grice’s head. But something went horribly wrong during the Tuesday morning procedure and a flash fire seared Grice’s face and neck.

✪ NYC transit: Stranded subway riders were forgotten

A transit official has admitted that subway passengers left stranded on a train for hours during last year’s blizzard had been forgotten. New York City Transit President Thomas F. Prendergast testified Tuesday at a City Council hearing on winter preparedness. Among other things, he discussed an A train that was infamously stranded last December on an open-air station platform in Queens, near Kennedy Airport.

✪ Monopoly Metallica Edition – Can They Get Any Lamer?!

“The fast-dealing property trading game” just got faster! MONOPOLY METALLICA Collectors Edition takes the popular board game to a whole new level. Every aspect of the game designed for the true Metallica fan in mind. You’ll “pass go” through historic Metallica events and locations around the board such as club shows, festivals, studios, childhood homes and other metal landmarks! Game pieces include the Kill ‘Em All hammer, Justice scales, St. Anger fist, Black Album snake, ninja star, and the “Jump in the Fire” demon (addition board game pieces sold separately). Land on one of the “Binge and Purge” or “Jump in the Fire” spaces and be rewarded or fined in true Metallica form. “You won’t believe the price, you’ll pay!”

✪ Who Wants To Be a Thousandaire?

Michael Larson held the record for the most game-show winnings in a single day until 2006, when it was broken by Vickyann Chrobak-Sadowski on The Price is Right. Larson’s handiwork on Press Your Luck was sufficiently extraordinary that he has become a strange kind of folk hero to some. Others regard him as a cheap huckster or a likable-but-occasionally-creepy crackpot. The real Michael Larson was arguably an amalgam of these qualities. His shenanigans on Press Your Luck are oft described as a “scam,” “scandal,” or a “cheat,” but even the CBS executives ultimately admitted that he had broken nary a rule. In the end, his impressive performance on Press Your Luck may be one of the only honest day’s work that Michael Larson ever did.

✪ The Future of Attention: A Conversation with David Pescovitz

We’re living in a world where it’s not just that everyone is connected via their iPhone or WiFi, but we’re seeing the proliferation of tiny sensors that go far beyond RFID tags. These are very small devices, eventually, perhaps, to be the size of a grain of sand in the next decade or two, probably. And they can keep a constant vigil on the world around us in a very high resolution. They can monitor the structural stability of buildings, because you can paint them on inside the walls, or sprinkle them on a farmer’s field and they can give a very precise picture of the water situation in the crops, or, throughout a city, to give you a sense of how people are moving and crowd dynamics. We’re moving into a world where objects and inanimate things can blog, basically. They can Tweet. There are already devices that you can put in your houseplants and they send you a text message when they’re thirsty. So, we’re giving non-living things voices.

✪ Internal Affairs report released in Police Santeria hex spell plot

City officials are now providing details as to why two North Miami Beach city employees tried to cast a spell on a city manager. According to a North Miami Beach Police Department internal affairs report, in late August, North Miami Beach police officer Elizabeth Torres and Police Chief Larry Gomer’s secretary Yvonne Rodriguez plotted together to put a hex on City Manager Lyndon Bonner. The report, which was released on Wednesday, said that the pair approached a maintenance worker at North Miami Beach City Hall and asked the worker if she had access to Bonner’s office at night. Then, the duo allegedly asked the maintenance worker if she could spread bird seed around Bonner’s office. The bird seed would make the city manager want to leave the city, the report said.

✪ Awesome New UFO Theory: Approaching Comet is Really a Borg Cube From Jesus

Conspiracy theorists believe that Comet Elenin is rapidly approaching Earth, and that it’s a perfect cube. A cube piloted by cyborgs who seek to assimiliate the human race into their collective. A Borg Cube, in other words. Yes, the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation “were being prophetic” when they created the Borg, writes extraterrestrial expert Alex Collier over at the Canadian National Newspaper. (For what it’s worth, NASA says Comet Elenin was destroyed in October, and it was never going to be an issue in any case. But that’s just what you’d expect them to say.) So Comet Elenin wasn’t actually destroyed, and it’s a perfect cube, and this proves the Borg are real. Okay. But it doesn’t stop there — apparently this Borg cube is known as the Galactic Obliteration Device, or G.O.D. for short. And there’s tons of evidence that Christianity and the Bible are really about how Jesus is a Borg and he’s coming to assimilate us.

✪ Occupy Your Mind: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky

The great Chilean-born director, artist, writer, shaman and “criminal madman, ” Alejandro Jodorowsky interviewed via Skype from a hotel room in NYC on October 30th. Topics include Occupy Wall Street, why revolutions fail but mutation succeeds, the magical side of reality, the search for gurus and wisdom and why Twitter is the haiku of this century! Jodorowsky’s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain are available on Blu-ray from ABKCO.

✪ Cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky holds ‘march of skulls’ for Mexico’s drug war dead

It was billed as “the first act of collective psycho-magic in Mexico.” The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to “heal” the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls. On Sunday, on a wet and frigid morning in this mountain capital, hundreds of Jodorowsky fans answered the open convocation (video link in Spanish). They donned black top hats and black shawls, and carried canes and Mexican flags colored in black. They wore calavera face paint or masks to give themselves the look of stylish skeletons gathered in this often-surreal city in the name of Mexico’s tens of thousands of sometimes nameless drug war dead. “Long live the dead!” they shouted.

✪ Turbo Snort Nasal Spray Gives Caffeine Heads a New Way To Wake Up

TS Enterprises has released the world’s first caffeinated nasal spray under the brand name, Turbo Snort. This new energy nasal spray is the latest answer to consumer demand for new personal energy alternatives in this already booming category. While there are dozens of caffeinated energy shots, drinks, gums, mints, pills and mouth sprays, Turbo Snort could change the way consumers get their morning jolt of caffeine – by way of the nose.

✪ Abortion is Legal: So Why is Self-Abortion Care a Crime?

Last week, a 20-year-old woman in New York City was arrested on charges of “self-induced abortion” and faces first-degree misdemeanor charges. Initial news reports indicate that she intentionally caused the miscarriage/abortion of her 24-week fetus. The woman disposed of the fetus in what was probably the only way she could think of: wrapped in plastic bags and placed in the trash receptacle of her apartment building. The prosecution of this woman echoes similar cases in Idaho, Massachusetts and South Carolina. In spite of ever-increasing restrictions, abortion is legal through the second-trimester throughout the United States, although it is inaccessible to many women. Yet if women safely end their pregnancies without medical supervision, they face criminal penalties.

✪ Psychic healer and Lewisham mayoral candidate, Graham Dare, faces jail over sex assault

Blackfriars Crown Court heard Dare preyed on a trusting 31-year-old Japanese student last September when she came for help with migraines. He groomed her by treating her naked or partially-clothed for three of their six sessions. Dare, waiving his fee for most of the appointments, fondled her breasts and groin before stripping off and luring her into massaging him. Blackfriars Crown Court heard the woman was suspicious about his “strange” methods but did not object because she feared causing offence. Heather Stangoe, prosecuting, said: ‘It’s not a crime to trust someone. What is a crime is to take advantage of someone’s trust and naivety and to abuse it for your sexual pleasure.’ The victim described how, on one occasion he “concentrated between my legs and he held my nipple”. Dare told her: “This is the way to correct the energy flow.”

✪ The Muppets Are Communist, Fox Business Network Says

It ain’t easy being green, but according to Fox Business, Kermit the Frog and his Muppet friends are reds. Last week, on the network’s “Follow the Money” program, host Eric Bolling went McCarthy on the new, Disney-released film, “The Muppets,” insisting that its storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood’s so-called liberal agenda.

✪ A Brief History of the Apocalypse

According to Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts (1979), an Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC was unearthed bearing the words “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.” This is one of the earliest examples of the perception of moral decay in society being interpreted as a sign of the imminent end.

✪ First sighting of dolphin in Irish lake

THE IRISH Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) has confirmed the first sighting of a dolphin in an Irish lake, in Lough Hyne near Baltimore, Co Cork. This is the first time a cetacean has been found in such an environment.

✪ Therapist ‘Brainwashed’ Woman Into Believing She Was In Satanic Cult, Attorney Says

The complaint alleges Nasseff’s therapist, Mark Schwartz, “carelessly and negligently hypnotized [Nasseff]” while she was under the influence of “various psychotropic medications” to treat depression and anxiety. The hypnosis allegedly created false memories, including the belief that she was “a member of a satanic cult and that she was involved in or perpetrated various criminal and horrific acts of abuse.” One of those acts included “sacrificing her sister’s baby on the altar of Satan,” according to Vuylsteke. Nasseff “was in a highly vulnerable physical and mental state due to her pre-existing eating disorder,” according to the complaint. The lawsuit also alleges Schwartz “persuaded and convinced [Nasseff] to become increasingly isolated from her family and friends by leading her to believe said persons were involved in a satanic cult and that they had been and would continue to sexually abuse her and force her to engage in criminal acts and horrific abuse of others.”

✪ Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

✪ Defaced Monuments

An ongoing collection of statues, sculptures, memorials, markers and monuments that have been intentionally or unintentionally altered, damaged or destroyed as a political statement or during a political protest.

✪ US Army’s hi-tech, two-year-old sandwich served fresh

A sandwich which stays fresh for up to two years has been developed for the US army as Dr George McGavin found out as part of his investigation into what happens when food rots.

✪ Cops Hose Down Crowd of Staten Island Youths

Two police officers were hurt while attempting to control a large group of youths in Mariners Harbor this afternoon, prompting emergency officials to spray the youths with a fire hose to get them away from the cops, multiple witnesses to the incident told the Advance.

✪ Indiana University Buys Up Possible Reputation Damaging .XXX Internet Addresses

Indiana University is buying up 11 Internet domain names using a new suffix meant for pornography sites in order to protect the school’s reputation and trademarks. University officials say they’re spending about $2,200 to secure for 10 years the site names using the “.xxx” suffix that was approved in March by the organization overseeing the Internet address system. “If someone were interested in using our name or our trademarks for one of these .xxx sites, it would cost us several thousand dollars to fight it legally,” Valerie Gill, the university’s director of licensing and trademarks, told The Herald-Times. The domain names the university is securing include Indianauniversity.xxx, Hoosiers.xxx, IUPUI.xxx and others based on the initials of IU’s regional campuses.

✪ iPhone touchscreens tarnish the legacy of Steve Jobs

What touchscreens lack is something called affordance. It’s a lofty term for an object’s built-in ability to tell you how it works. A doorknob affords turning. The button on a car stereo affords pushing. A touchscreen affords nothing. It relies on software for any affordance, which in turn relies on total immersion for the user. Immersion is a fantastic quality while flicking virtual birds at digital pigs in your smartphone. Immersion at 80 mph is less desirable.

✪ Man Claims Illuminati Stole $1 Trillion

An American expatriate in Bulgaria claims the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the Office of International Treasury Control and the Italian government conspired with a host of others to steal more than $1.1 trillion in financial instruments intended to support humanitarian purposes. The 111-page federal complaint involves a range of entities common to conspiracy theorists, including the Vatican Illuminati, the Masons, the “Trilateral Trillenium Tripartite Gold Commission,” and the U.S. Federal Reserve. Plaintiff Neil Keenan claims he was entrusted in 2009 with the financial instruments – which included U.S. Federal Reserve notes worth $124.5 billion, two Japanese government bonds with a combined face value of $19 billion, and one U.S. “Kennedy” bond with a face value of $1 billion – by an entity called the Dragon Family, which is a group of several wealthy and secretive Asian families.

✪ Report: NY State Voting Machines Really Suck

All is not well with the state of New York’s voting machines, according to a recent study by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice: As many as 60,000 of the votes cast in New York State elections last year were voided because people unintentionally cast their ballots for more than one candidate…The excess-voting was highest in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, including two Bronx election districts where 40 percent of the votes for governor were disqualified. The study…blamed software used with new electronic optical-scan voting machines as well as ambiguous instructions for disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. The old mechanical lever-operated machines did not allow votes for more than one candidate for the same office… [T]he authors estimate that more than 100,000 votes could be disqualified in next year’s presidential balloting, since more people will vote in the national election.

✪ BP says Halliburton ‘intentionally destroyed evidence’ after Gulf oil spill

BP is accusing Halliburton of having “intentionally destroyed evidence” related to the explosion aboard an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. The accusation comes in court papers filed by BP Monday in federal court in New Orleans as part of a lawsuit aimed at having sanctions imposed on Halliburton Energy Services Inc., which was a contractor for BP on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. An explosion on the rig on April 20, 2010, killed 11 people working on the rig and injured 16 others. The explosion led to more than 200 million gallons of oil being released into the Gulf. BP alleges in its filing that Halliburton destroyed evidence on cement testing and violated court orders by not bringing forth “inexplicably missing” computer modeling results.

✪ 18 Crazy Facts Which Show That No Nation On Earth Is More Doped Up On Prescription Drugs Than America Is

Anyone that comes to visit America may notice that most of us walk around like a bunch of zombies. Well, the truth is that this is because about half of us are completely doped up on prescription drugs. In America, we don’t just take pills if we are sick. In this day and age, the pharmaceutical companies have come up with a pill for just about everything. If we are feeling a little sad, we are told to just pop a pill. If we are feeling a little bit of pain, we are told to just pop a pill. If our children like to run around and play, we are told that giving them the right pills will settle them down. Every single year, prescription drug use in America increases, and there are dozens of different pharmaceutical companies that are making billions of dollars off of our “legal” addiction to drugs. The funny thing is that many of these “legal” drugs are only just the slightest bit different from many of the “illegal” drugs that are being sold out on the streets.

✪ Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive

The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library’s repository of historical documents. “We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,” said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library’s national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. The archives don’t contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there.

✪ Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis

Yafimau is one of the faceless and neglected victims in a sprawling global black market in organs — where brokers use deception, violence and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations. The middlemen form alliances with doctors in leading hospitals who do these transplants for a fee, no questions asked. Organ trafficking is on the rise, as desperate people seek transplants in a world that doesn’t have enough donors. About 5,000 people sell organs on the black market each year, according to Francis Delmonico, an adviser on transplants to the World Health Organization.

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➪ 30 Signs That The United States Of America Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison

If you live in the United States of America, you live in a giant prison where liberty and freedom are slowly being strangled to death. In this country, the control freaks that run things are obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do. Nothing is private anymore. Everything that you do on the Internet is being monitored. All of your phone calls are being monitored. In fact, if law enforcement authorities suspect that you have done something wrong, they will use your cell phone microphone to listen to you even when you think your cell phone is turned off. In many areas of the country, when you get into your car automated license plate readers track you wherever you go, and in many major cities when you are walking on the streets a vast network of security cameras and “smart street lights” are constantly watching you and listening to whatever you say.

➪ Carrier George H.W. Bush suffers widespread toilet outages

The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier has a messy problem. Since deploying in May, the Norfolk, Va.-based carrier George H.W. Bush has grappled with widespread toilet outages, at times rendering the entire ship without a single working head. But it’s no laughing matter. Sailors tell of combing the ship for up to an hour to find a place to do their business, if they can find one at all. Others have resorted to urinating in showers or into the industrial sinks in their work stations. Some men are using bottles and emptying the contents over the giant ship’s side, while some women are holding it in for so long that they are developing health problems, according to sources on the ship.

➪ Cheeky monkey makes a boob-boon out of model

Charmian Chen – who is also a model – has become a global internet star after playfully feeding long-tailed macaques. But she was left red-faced when one decided to retrieve a piece of corn that had fallen down the 22-year-old’s top. As she struggled with the monkey, her dress was forced a little too far down – leaving Charmian struggling to maintain her modesty. Thanks Cat

➪ Bartender, a Dirty Martini With a Tampon!

Yet reportedly vodka-in-a-tampon is the new rage among under-age drinkers. Just Google it — everybody agrees the trend is huge. Here’s our own HuffPost suggesting the practice is a full-blown trend amongst teenagers. Boys can apparently achieve the same effect by something called “butt chugging.” Soaking a tampon in vodka and then… re-inserting it somehow… is supposed to produce the “ultimate body shot” — a fast, intense buzz (the alcohol is allegedly absorbed more quickly than by mouth), with no tell-tale alcohol breath for mom or the police to detect.

➪ ‘Bubble Man’ Chandra Wisnu emerges in bid to save children from same fate

Chandra Wisnu, 57, suffers from a rare disease that has left him covered in tumours resembling pink bubble wrap. The father of four – known as “The Bubble Man” in his home village in Indonesia – rarely leaves his house. When he does, he wears three jackets, a balaclava and sunglasses so he doesn’t frighten children. “People are afraid, they are frightened of my horrible face and worried they might catch the disease,” he said. “So instead I avoid people, I rarely go out except to pick up my daughter from school. “And when I do I cover my head and my face because I don’t want my daughter’s friends to bully her for having ‘the dad with the horrible face’.”

➪ Schaumburg Christian School Teacher Accused of Masturbating During Class

A northwest suburban math teacher charged with masturbating in his classroom allegedly told police he’d pleasured himself at the school for last 10 years while fantasizing about female students. Paul A. LaDuke, 75, of Schererville made the handwritten admission after he was arrested for a Veteran’s Day incident witnessed by two students at the Schaumburg Christian School, according to Tandra Simonton, spokeswoman for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. While his students were working on an assignment during a 10 a.m. algebra class Friday, LaDuke placed an apron around his waist, unbuckled his pants below his hips and began masturbating behind a podium, prosecutors allege

➪ Man Finds A Dead Bird in His Supermarket Salad!

A man in Somerset, England was horrified to find a dead bird in his pre-packaged supermarket salad bag after laying the contents out on the dinner table for his family to eat. A shriek from his girlfriend alerted him to the sight of a skeletal, decomposing, dead bird hidden among the green, leafy vegetables, almost obscured from sight. But the picture below tells the tale.

➪ World has five years to avoid severe warming: IEA

The world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous climate change and extreme weather events, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Wednesday. On current trends, “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change,” the IEA concluded in its annual World Energy Outlook report. “The door to 2.0 C is closing,” it said, referring to the 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) cap on global warming widely accepted by scientists and governments as the ceiling for averting unmanageable climate damage. Without further action, by 2017 the total CO2 emissions compatible with the 2.0 C goal will be “locked in” by power plants, factories and other carbon-emitting sources either built or planned, the IEA said.

➪ Bands banned for term

Queen’s Bands was suspended yesterday after controversial material was brought to university administrators. After the announcement, the Journal received three years of pamphlets entitled ‘The Banner’ which were distributed to band members. The pamphlets contained phrases like “I will rape you with a lamp” and photos of band members as “people with dicks in their mouths.” Front page titles over the past three years included: “Mouth raping your little sister since 1905,” “Sucking the nipple and biting the tit since 1905” and “Perpetuating racial stereotypes since 1905.”

➪ Video: Surfer rides ‘biggest wave of all time’

Hawaii’s Garrett McNamara sets a world record by surfing a 90-foot wave off the coast of Praia do Norte in Portugal.

➪ Toy doll may swear – you decide – ‘You Crazy Bitch’

We’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about a talking baby doll sold at Toys “R” Us. Some buyers say that instead of babbling, the baby is clearly cursing. So we went to the store, bought one for ourselves and checked it out. FOX23 News played the toy for two walkers at The Crossings in Colonie. “I heard that! Loud and clear. No mistaking it,” they said. “I think it did say b****,” said Vince Prendergast of Troy. “I did hear that. I wouldn’t want that for my child, definitely not,” said parent Denise Altschule.

➪ Mouse-Stomping High-Heeled German Women Convicted For Perverse Video

Two German women paid to record a fetish film of themselves stomping on mice while dressed in high-heels have been charged with animal cruelty. The women, ages 29 and 25, were promised a “considerable amount of money” by a man to perform the despicable act, according to Fox News. A video played for the court as evidence also showed the women using a car to crush 12 mice, burning rodents with lit cigarettes, and stomping on two lizards and three geckos, according to The Global Post. A court prosecutor explained the disturbing fetish, known as “animal crushing.” “Customers who watch films with such content satisfy themselves, according to our information, by watching beautiful women slowly and painfully trample on the animals while wearing socks, high heels or while barefoot,” the prosecutor explained, according to The Local.

➪ Female orgasm captured in series of brain scans

Scientists have used brain scan images to create the world’s first movie of the female brain as it approaches, experiences and recovers from an orgasm. The animation reveals the steady buildup of activity in the brain as disparate regions flicker into life and then come together in a crescendo of activity before gently settling back down again.

➪ Entertainer forces poisonous snakes through his nose and out of his mouth

Fei, from east China’s Jiangxi Province, has been performing the death-defying act for the past 30 years – what a charmer. Sometimes, when he feels like it, the 53-year-old will even use two 3ft snakes instead of one. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the snake swallower though – Fei has had several close calls with his wriggly friends, the most serious being when he swallowed one accidentally. Luckily for him, the serpent died in his stomach before it could cause any damage. He does live a charmed life it seems.

➪ NASA – Astronaut Selection

If you have dreamed of joining the Astronaut Corps, now is the time to apply. NASA is continuing space exploration programs that will include missions beyond low Earth orbit

➪ Why Does Evolution Allow Some People to Taste Words?

A neural condition that tangles the senses so that people hear colors and taste words could yield important clues to understanding how the brain is organized, according to a new review study. This sensory merger, called synesthesia, was first scientifically documented in 1812 but was widely misunderstood for much of its history, with many experts thinking the condition was a form of mild insanity. “It’s not just that the number two is blue, but two is also a male number that wears a hat and is in love with the number seven,” said study co-author David Brang, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

➪ The Sour Toe Cocktail – A Shot With A Mummified Big Toe In It [Video]

➪ Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns

The EU treaties that created the euro and set its membership rules contain no provision for members to leave, meaning any break-up would be disorderly and potentially chaotic. If eurozone governments defaulted on their debts, the European banks that hold many of their bonds would risk collapse. Some analysts say the shock waves of such an event would risk the collapse of the entire financial system, leaving banks unable to return money to retail depositors and destroying companies dependent on bank credit. The Financial Services Authority this week issued a public warning to British banks to bolster their contingency plans for the break-up of the single currency. Some economists believe that at worst, the outright collapse of the euro could reduce GDP in its member-states by up to half and trigger mass unemployment.

➪ Spiderman, Batman & Ironman Get Loose At A Kids Party! [Video]

➪ Armed robbery suspect shot with his own gun

About 8:15 p.m., a 33-year-old pizza-delivery driver was delivering an order when he realized the house he was supposed to make the delivery to was abandoned. A man held the driver up at gunpoint and demanded his money and his wallet, Small said. The driver handed over his wallet, which contained $100, and began fighting with the suspect. During the struggle, the delivery driver wrestled the gun out of the suspect’s grasp. The driver shot the man once in his neck and once in his buttocks. Police found two boxes of pizza, a bag of food and the suspect’s blood on the scene. The suspect, who police identified Monday night only as a 26-year-old man, was taken to Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition as of 10 p.m.

➪ Drugged drinks send many to ER

In 2009, nearly 15,000 American women and men ended up in an emergency room after being unwittingly, but intentionally, drugged by someone else, a new federal report reveals. In 2009, nearly 15,000 American women and men ended up in an emergency room after being unwittingly, but intentionally, drugged by someone else, a new federal report reveals. According to the data, about 60 percent of these cases occurred after someone surreptitiously slipped a drug into the victim’s drink. Details outlined in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) report — touted as the first of its kind — suggest that the problem extends to a broad section of society. For example, nearly three-quarters of intentional poisonings involved individuals over the age of 21. And though the majority of cases involved females, nearly four out of every 10 victims was male.

➪ Florida woman: Fix-A-Flat butt injection ‘doc’ ruined my face

More victims are coming forward in the Miami Fix-A-Flat plastic surgery case – and the evidence isn’t pretty. Rajee Narinesingh told CBS Miami that accused transgender cosmetic quack Oneal Ron Morris pumped her face full of a toxic brew investigators say was a mix of tire mender, mineral oil and cement, leaving her disfigured for life.

➪ File reveals police view of drug squad raid on Keith Richards

When the Chelsea drug squad raided his home in Cheyne Walk, London – just a few doors down from Mick Jagger’s house – one bright Tuesday morning in June 1973 they found not only the expected collection of grass, cannabis resin, “Chinese” heroin, mandrax tablets, burnt spoons, syringes and pipes but also a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver, a shotgun and 110 rounds of ammunition. It would have seemed an open and shut case that should have attracted a hefty sentence, given Richards’s famous record.

➪ Robotic prison wardens to patrol South Korean prison

The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

➪ About Pepper Spray

But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious. Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup – it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

➪ Toddler Shot in Head During Rap Video Shoot

A 1-year-old boy is in critical condition after being shot in the head last night, possibly during the taping of a rap music video in Oakland. Six others also were shot, including a 24-year-old woman also in critical condition, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Police say Oakland rapper Kafani was at the scene, but Kafani denies it and says reports that he was shooting a music video at the time are untrue, according to AllHipHop.

➪ Miami Beach artist charged with wildlife smuggling

Miami Beach sculptor Enrique Gomez De Molina fashions bird beaks, antelope hooves and other wildlife parts into fanciful animals and calls it art. Federal prosecutors call it a felony. De Molina has been charged with wildlife smuggling for allegedly importing a vast range of protected animal parts from China, Indonesia, Bali, Thailand and the Philippines into the United States for a highly profitable art business. Among his purchases: An orangutan skull, king cobra, a slow loris, a woolly stork, skulls of heavy-beaked birds called hornbills, a rare bird called the Himalayan Monal and many other protected species, according to court papers filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

➪ Passenger sentenced to 21 months for dealing drugs on gay cruise

A judge in the U.S. Virgin Islands yesterday sentenced a California man to 21 months in prison for dealing drugs to fellow passengers on the 5,400-passenger Allure of the Seas. Steven Barry Krumholz pleaded guilty to the charges in July. The West Hollywood man had been arrested in February when the ship docked in St. Thomas. The Allure of the Seas was at the time chartered by Atlantis Events, the sailing on the world’s largest ship billed as the world’s largest gay cruise. U.S. District Court Judge Curtis Gomez said Krumholz used his cabin on the cruise ship “as if it was an apothecary for controlled substances,” the Associated Press reports. Police at the time of his arrest said they found more than 142 ecstasy pills, methamphetamine, a small amount of ketamine, and about $51,000 in cash in Krumholz’s cabin.

➪ Dealers give teens free heroin samples

St. Louis County Police Chief, Tim Fitch, says dealers are giving teens free samples of heroin. Sometimes teens are not told that its heroin. Once they get addicted to it, the teens start buying it from drug dealers. This year, 69 people have died from heroin in St. Louis County. That’s up from last year. And statistics show the people dying from heroin overdoses are younger than in the past. The police chief says the heroin is coming mainly from Mexico via drug dealers in Chicago. He says Fenton is Ground Zero for heroin. “I always ask them, how did you use this the first time?” says Fitch. “And they will almost always tell you it was in some party situation. They were already impaired by alcohol, or impaired by marijuana, or impaired by painkillers and they just took the next step.”

➪ ‘Weed Wars’: Reality TV puts Oakland dispensary in spotlight

Cable television in recent years has introduced millions to offbeat professions, from crab fishermen and ice road truckers, to pawnshop operators and bounty hunters. But are Americans ready to invite licensed pot peddlers into their living rooms? Programmers at Discovery Channel hope so. They’re taking a risk with “Weed Wars,” a show that could have a polarizing effect on viewers. When an Entertainment Weekly online reporter broke news of the series in July, it was met with a deluge of comments, many of them negative. Cable news is also jumping into the fray, as DeAngelo and his brother, Andrew, general manager of Harborside, were grilled by Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show Monday and were part of a Current TV news special about the California medical marijuana industry.

➪ Researchers block morphine’s itchy side effect

Itching is one of the most prevalent side effects of powerful, pain-killing drugs like morphine, oxycodone and other opioids. The opiate-associated itch is so common that even women who get epidurals for labor pain often complain of itching. For many years, scientists have scratched their own heads about why drugs that so effectively suppress pain also induce itch. Now in mice, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown they can control opioid-induced itching without interfering with a drug’s ability to relieve pain. The discovery raises tantalizing possibilities for new treatments to eliminate itch in cancer and surgery patients as well as others who rely on opioids to relieve chronic and severe pain.

➪ Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched

In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.” Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said. Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

➪ Legalizing medical marijuana does not increase use among youth, study suggests

Based on their analysis of 32,570 students, they found that while marijuana use was common throughout the study period, there were no statistically significant differences in marijuana use between states in any year. Choo says, “Our study did not find increases in adolescent marijuana use related to Rhode Island’s 2006 legalization of medical marijuana; however, additional research may follow future trends as medical marijuana in Rhode Island and other states becomes more widely used.”

➪ Broadway Drama Turned Samuel L. Jackson Onto Crack Cocaine

The Pulp Fiction star admits it was soul destroying to work so hard to play Boy Willie in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, and then never get to to appear onstage. He explains, “I originated the role at Yale (Repertory Theater) and then I had to understudy him (Dutton) because the role was written for him when he was doing Crocodile Dundee 2, so when Crocodile Dundee 2 was over he came back and he started to do the play. It was pretty much the play that put me in rehab. “You have to show up every day and sign in and if that person’s not there by half hour (before the show) you start getting ready to go on. But he was always there… I had to sit backstage until at least the first act was over and listen to the play onstage, which was kinda running me crazy, so I used to sit on the back steps and smoke crack.” His casual drug habit became a full-blown addiction as Jackson continued to “chase the wind” to get high – and he admits he could have died a little-known actor.

➪ Internet addiction in Kenya worse than substance abuse

According to the chairperson of the Kenya Counselling Association, Catherine Gachutha, Internet addiction is rapidly increasing in Kenya. The problem, she says, is most prominent in young people aged between 18 and 28. “Incidentally, the number of youths addicted to various internet sites surpasses that of those addicted to drugs and alcohol,” Gachutha said. “This is because most of them are idle and the cost of accessing the internet is much lower than drugs and beer.”

➪ Goldie Hawn’s ex-husband Bill Hudson paints depraved portrait

During their second date at a Rolling Stones concert, Hudson recalls, “a large plate of cocaine came by and she took a huge snort.” Afterward, he had sex with the still-married Hawn from 1 a.m. to 1 p.m. and they exchanged “I love yous,” Hudson writes. But there were early signs of discord, he remembers, especially when he brought up her affairs with European men. “She was also starting to develop the none-too-pleasant habit of referring to herself in the third person. ‘Goldie will do whatever she wants, when she wants,’ she yelled,” Hudson writes.

➪ Dolphins ‘fed drugs by ravers’ died after 2-day techno party at Connyland marine park

A pair of dolphins may have died after being fed drugs by ravers after a second animal died. Police looking into the deaths in Connyland, Lipperswil, Switzerland, initially thought the deafening music from the rave may have killed dolphins Shadow and Chelmers. But zoo vets are awaiting toxicology test results to see if they were poisoned by narcotics thrown into their enclosure during the rave.

➪ Drunk man attacked by monkeys at zoo [Video]

A drunk man at a Brazil zoo swims over to play with monkeys and is attacked.

➪ Teens Using Vodka Soaked Tampons To Get Drunk [Video]

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✦ Oscar de la Hoya Did Cocaine Stevie Nicks Style

Oscar de la Hoya encouraged model Angelica Marie Cecora to help him do cocaine using a body part other than his nose during an alleged, kinky romp at Manhattan’s Ritz Carlton hotel last March, she told Page Six. Cecora also claimed to us that the ex-boxing champ revealed to her he was molested by a female staffer in high school.

✦ 400 Yard Drug Tunnel Found in California, Another Found in Arizona

The discovery of a secret drug smuggling passage that stretched about 400 yards and linked warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana has lead to the seizure of an estimated 17 tons of marijuana, in what authorities say is one of the most significant narco-tunnels ever found. U.S. authorities seized about nine tons of marijuana inside a truck and at the warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa area, said Derek Benner, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. Mexican authorities recovered about eight tons south of the border.Authorities spoke at a news conference near packages of seized dope festooned with labels of Captain America, Sprite and Bud Light. The markings are codes to identify the owners.

✦ A widespread shortage of the popular ADD pill is distracting a nation of Adderall users. Naturally, it’s all about Big Pharma profits.

If addiction is the kind of thing you think about a lot, it’s easy to overlook its significance in the cold, objective Realpolitik scheme of things, which is this: it’s a great fucking business model. From the British East India Company to the Bronfman clan to Duke University, history is redolent of abject mediocrities who owe their billions to Big Addiction.

✦ Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon

A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community

✦ Kansas gov. says staff overreacted to teen’s tweet

When a high school senior tweeted that Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback “sucked,” among other invectives, reaction at the state Capitol led her principal to demand an apology. Instead, it was the Republican governor offering a mea culpa Monday, forced to admit to a self-described overreaction by his staff that subjected him to ridicule for efforts to police a teenager’s Internet musings. Emma Sullivan’s tweet from the back of a crowd listening to Brownback speak last week, and her subsequent refusal to write an apology letter, spurred several thousand supporters to rush to her online defense – boosting her Twitter following from 61 friends to more than 12,000 people in less than a week.

✦ Solid Proof That Weather Modification Projects Are Being Conducted All Over The United States

Most Americans still believe that our weather patterns are 100% natural and that our government has absolutely no control over the weather. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. What you are about to read is evidence that weather modification is happening right now all over the United States. This is never acknowledged by our politicians and it is never talked about by the mainstream media. But it is very, very real. Weather modification programs in some parts of the country have been going on for many years and evidence of these programs is hidden in plain view. So does this mean that if we don’t like the weather we can just blame the government? Well, yes it does, but it also means that the government has been seriously messing around with our environment and there could be “unintended consequences” that are far more dramatic than any of us ever dared to imagine.

✦ The Limits of Preservation

The Minescape project by Los Angeles-based photographer Brett Van Ort looks at the ironic effects of landmines on the preservation of natural landscapes, placing woods, meadows, and even remote country roads off-limits, fatally tainted terrains given back to animals and vegetation.

✦ The future of airport security: Thermal lie-detectors and cloned sniffer dogs

After the EU’s announcement that it will ban “backscatter” x-ray body scanners, airports may have to look harder at alternative security measures. From Bluetooth tracking to thermal lie-detector cameras, we take a glimpse into the weird and wonderful future of airport security.

✦ Zippy The Chimp Goes To School (1954)

The heartwarming tale is about Zippy trying to make his way in primary school, navigating the cliques and clacks, trends and fashions, loves and hates that plague many students today. And he had his difficulties; the kind that would trigger medication for children in our overly medicated society. But Zippy had a dream – and atavistic ambition.

✦ Voynich Manuscript

Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.

✦ New Jersey DMV workers accused of selling identities for $200 a pop

Prosecutors have charged two New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission employees with selling names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers of “unsuspecting residents” for as little as $200 per identity. The same investigation conducted by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Economic Crime Unit in Trenton led to charges against two non-government workers who allegedly used their jobs in a tax office and realty company to sell identities as part of a similar scheme.

✦ Every crazy CIA plot you’ve heard of originated with one man

There are stories that have come to light, over the years, that make the Central Intelligence Agency look like a collection of Looney Tunes shorts. The violence, the slapstick, and the over-the-top ridiculousness of the experiments that have been conducted over the years boggle the mind. They came from the (slightly-boggled) mind of one man: Sidney Gottlieb.

✦ That Bank Bailout Was Way Bigger Than Anyone Thought

Remember the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program with which the federal government came to the rescue of faltering banks in 2008? Well, according to a Bloomberg report, that was just a fraction of the financial help the Federal Reserve Bank wound up doling out to troubled lenders. The real total was reportedly closer to $8 trillion, after you add up benefits outside TARP, including emergency loans given at below-market rates

✦ Brooklyn DA claims record number of child sex-abuse charges vs. haredim

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office says it has charged 89 men in the borough’s haredi Orthodox communities with child sex abuse — a threefold increase over a two-year span. However, the Forward reported that Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes declined to provide any details about the cases, making the number of arrests impossible to verify. His spokesman, Jerry Schmetterer, gave the figures to the newspaper in mid-November. The numbers reflect the number of haredi Orthodox men charged with sexual abuse since October 2009.

✦ Feds Seize 130+ Domain Names in Mass Crackdown

US authorities have initiated the largest round of domain name seizures yet as part of their continued crackdown on counterfeit and piracy-related websites. With just a few days to go until “Cyber Monday” more than 100 domain names have been taken over by the feds to protect the commercial interests of US companies. The seizures are disputable, as the SOPA bill which aims to specifically legitimize such actions is still pending in Congress.

✦ Paying for sex and ‘playing dead’ – the deceitful gift-giving spider

Male nursery web spiders (Pisaura mirabilis) prepare silk-wrapped gifts to give to potential mates. Most gifts contain insects, but some gifts are inedible plant seeds or empty exoskeletons left after the prey has already been eaten (presumably by the male himself!). Males will also ‘play dead’ if a female moves away and then attempt to re-establish mating. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology examines the reproductive success of deceitful males and shows that females are not impressed by worthless gifts.

✦ Records show dubious spending from Wyclef Jean charity

In the months following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, a charity run by hip-hop star Wyclef Jean spent a pittance of the money it took in on disaster relief and doled out millions in questionable contracts. Yele Haiti’s coffers swelled to $16 million in 2010, the most the charity had ever received. But less than a third of that went to emergency efforts, and $1 million was paid to a Florida firm that doesn’t seem to exist, The Post has learned.

✦ TERRORIST USA ARMY KILLED A SHEEP WITH A BASEBALL BAT [Video]

The target of the USA cruelty is not limited with humans. In the latest leaked footage, it is seen how the terrorist USA soldiers had great satisfaction by beating and killing a captured innocent sheep with a baseball bat. And the other USA soldiers there had fun by laughing with disgusting laughters and yellings. According to news agencies and the source data, this footage was recorded in Afghanistan on the first day of Eid al-Adha (06 Nov 2011).

✦ Girl sues ex-boyfriend for tattooing a pile of shit on her back

Tattoo artist Ryan Fitzgerald from Dayton, OH was hit with a $100,000 lawsuit last week by his ex-girlfriend Rossie Brovent. She claims that her boyfriend was supposed to tattoo a scene from Narnia on her back but instead tattooed an image of a pile of excrement with flies buzzing around it.

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• ▲ John McCain’s ‘outrageous’ Arizona fires explanation

  The GOP senator claims illegal immigrants may have started Arizona’s massive blaze, but his lack of evidence is drawing howls of protest and mockeryAs the Wallow wildfire charbroils more than 500,000 acres of Arizona, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is blaming illegal immigrants. “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said Saturday, while declining to offer any such evidence.

• ▲ Dieting forces brain to eat itself, scientists claim

  Like other parts of the body, brain cells begin to eat themselves as a last-ditch source of energy to ward off starvation, a study found.The body responds by producing fatty acids, which turn up the hunger signal in the brain and increase our impulse to eat.

  Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York said the findings could lead to new scientifically proven weight loss treatments.

  Tests on mice found that stopping the brain cells from eating themselves – a process known as autophagy – prevented levels of hunger from rising in response to starvation.

  The chemical change in their brains caused the mice to become lighter and slimmer after a period of fasting, the researchers reported in the journal Cell Metabolism.

• ▲ New Pizza Hut Meat Lovers Bloody Band-Aid Pizza

  Ken Wieczerza usually loves a slice of leftover pizza from the refrigerator.But when he bit into this particular piece of cold Pizza Hut pie, he recoiled when his teeth encountered an unexpected ingredient: a blue bandage with what appeared to be remnants of dried blood.

  “It felt kind of like biting into a folded-up piece of plastic,” he recalled. “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than chewing on a bandage, other than a body part. Fortunately, I didn’t swallow it.”

  The bandage was baked into the bottom crust with a slight indentation, he said. The approximately 1-by-3-inch adhesive strip in a bright blue hue was dotted with what looked like blood droplets.

• ▲ Mystery surrounds loss of records, art of 9/11

  Letters written by Helen Keller. Forty-thousand photographic negatives of John F. Kennedy taken by the president’s personal cameraman. Sculptures by Alexander Calder and Auguste Rodin. The 1921 agreement that created the agency that built the World Trade Center.Besides ending nearly 3,000 lives, destroying planes and reducing buildings to tons of rubble and ash, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks destroyed tens of thousands of records, irreplaceable historical documents and art.

  In some cases, the inventories were destroyed along with the records. And the loss of human life at the time overshadowed the search for lost paper. A decade later, dozens of agencies and archivists say they’re still not completely sure what they lost or found, leaving them without much of a guide to piece together missing history.

• ▲ Patrick Bateman’s New York: What Happened To The World of American Psycho

  No matter how rich, famous, and powerful you become, it simply won’t happen, for one simple reason: they’re all fictional, dreamed up by author Bret Easton Ellis.But American Psycho, set in the soulless, superficial, status-seeking world of 1980′s New York finance, name-drops dozens of restaurants and clubs that actually did exist during that era, the elite NYC hot spots where you and I would have absolutely no shot of ever getting in (admit it!).

  What still remains from the world of American Psycho? Are Patrick Bateman’s old haunts still around, turning away all but those graced with a much sought after reservation? Or have the Dorsia’s of the world been replaced by Shake Shacks and Duane Reades?

  Let’s have a look! The locations below are presented in the order they appear in the film. If you ever dined/partied at any, please leave your memories in the comments!

• ▲ Killer rat daubs fur with poison-arrow plant toxins
  The deadly secret of a rat that kills lions and jackals has at last been revealed. Unlike some mammals that produce their own toxins, the African crested rat is the first known to protect itself by daubing its fur with poisons from plants. The same lethal toxins are used by African tribal hunters to coat their arrow-tips.
• ▲ N.J. Dunkin Donuts worker caught in ‘extra sugar’ sex sting

  An undercover operation was developed wth the assistance of Officer Robert Koehler and Officer Scott Haigh acting as the undercover “John.”"He went in plain clothes through the drive-thru window,” Schwarzmann said. “He spoke to her and she said if he wanted a good time to call her and she gave him her phone number.”

  Haigh parked in the parking lot and Redmond allegedly came out, approached him and gave him a specifc price list for her services.

  Haigh returned on another occasion and inquired about her services, was offered a new, and lower, price so he said he needed to go to a bank machine but would return with the money.

• ▲ High-end items for Detroit office bought with money for poor people

  More than $210,000 intended for poor people but instead used to furnish a City of Detroit office paid for numerous leather chairs, a $3,000 mahogany-finish conference table and at least three stainless steel trash cans with motion sensor lids and a price tag of $315 each, records show.A 56-page receipt, obtained by the Free Press under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act, lists dozens of high-end items destined last year for the Human Services Department’s east-side building, including more than $30,000 spent to furnish the office and conference room of the director.

• ▲ Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks memoir: Australia opens case to seize cash

  Australia’s government has launched a court action against former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks in a bid to seize profits from his autobiography.The case is being brought under a law banning profits from crime.

  Hicks’s legal team says the law does not apply because his conviction by a US military commission at Guantanamo Bay was invalid.

  Hicks spent five years at the facility before pleading guilty to providing material support for terrorism.

  His book Guantanamo, My Journey, tells the story of his incarceration at the controversial detention centre in Cuba. It has sold about 30,000 copies.

  The Australian government wants to retrieve any profits that Hicks has made from the book, claiming he has benefited financially from a crime.

• ▲ Homeless man jumps fence at White House

  man has been detained by the Secret Service after jumping a fence at the White House Tuesday.James Dirk Crudup, 41, scaled the fence on the north side of the White House between 7:30 and 8 p.m.

  Crudup was quickly taken into custody after scaling the fence. A backpack Crudup was carrying was confiscated by Secret Service.

  The contents of the backpack were investigated by Secret Service and D.C. Fire & EMS. Nothing hazardous was found.

  According to the Secret Service, Crudup is homeless.

• ▲ Biden collects rent from Secret Service

  Taxpayer watchdogs say the Secret Service should do everything it can to protect Mr. Biden, but they wonder whether he should be collecting rent from the agency while it’s doing its job.“He should be afforded every single protection available to him and his family, as should every vice president and president,” said Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste.

  “But this arrangement seems bizarre to me,” she added. “You’d think the vice president, who shepherded the deficit committee, would think twice about charging the Secret Service rent. Why would he need the money? I don’t get it.”

• ▲ Mayor Crushes Car Parked In Bike Lane With Armored Vehicle [Video]
  ‪Vilnius Mayor A.Zuokas Fights Illegally Parked Cars with Tank‬‏
• ▲ Coffee shop worker adds mucus to cops’ coffee

  Two police officers went to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Peterborough Street June 19 and ordered two cups of coffee from Hildreth, according to authorities. They said Hildreth took two coffee cups and then went to the back room to make the coffee.According to the affidavit, the officers found his behavior odd because they had ordered coffee from Hildreth before and never saw him go out back to make coffee.

  And what the officers saw Hildreth do next will disturb you.

  Watching from a store-front video monitor which shows a view of the back room, police say they saw Hildreth put nasal mucus into the cups.

• ▲ Leaked contract reveals BP’s control of Iraqi oil

  A leaked contract between BP and the Iraqi government has revealed the extent to which the company has gained control over Iraq’s oil. The 20-year contract for the Rumaila field near Basra published today by oil industry watchdog PLATFORM, commits future Iraqi governments to paying BP whether or not it extracts oil, irrespective of OPEC quotas and of the state of Iraqi pipeline and export infrastructure.BP was awarded the deal at an auction in June 2009, but suspicions were raised when the company did not sign the contract until four months later. The Iraqi government said nothing had changed in the interim, only “clarifications” – claims that the leaked contract show not to be true.

• ▲ White supremacists attack teacher online by hacking Facebook profile

  The account’s creators befriended at least 32 people, almost all of them children.Several have since unfriended the fake Facebook profile but exchanges visible on the wall show some believed it was the teacher and innocently added the frauds as a friend.

  The fake account uses his name as well as the name of the school where he teaches in Sydney’s west.

  It features a profile picture of two naked men blowing kisses at the camera.

  In the information section it states: “I’m a teacher at (name deleted) school and I adore my students. Especially the boy’s (sic) I could eat them up with a spoon.”

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  It features inappropriate pictures with captions such as “This is me being a gay god”.

  The profile lists his favourite pop stars as Michael Jackson, Elton John, the Pet Shop Boys and Lady Gaga.

• ▲ Martial Law in North America Represents The Total Destruction of Freedom

  Martial is coming to America and Canada in slow motion. The train left the station a long time ago. And the cunning conductors are not going to lose their nerve as their train of evil approaches the final destination: mass detention of activists, violent government crackdowns on protests, and slavery for the people.Corporate fascism, government oppression and private banking tyranny didn’t suddenly creep up on America and other Western countries. The crisis of freedom in America and Western civilization was foreseen years ago both by people within government (John F. Kennedy) and by people outside of government.

  What blind and arrogant people don’t want to admit is that “conspiracy theorists” like Alex Jones, Ron Paul, Jesse Ventura and countless other truth-tellers are the Paul Reveres of this generation.

• ▲ Southern U.S. distillery to legally sell moonshine

  News accounts in the 1920s called the Dark Corner “a little Chicago” because of federal agents’ raids on stills, killings, and gun and knife fights that broke out after church, he said.Illegal moonshine is still being made there, Campbell said. In June, sheriff’s deputies busted a still in Landrum, South Carolina, and confiscated 2,000 gallons of illegal white liquor along with $150,000 in cash.

  State lawmakers in 2009 altered existing liquor laws in a way that lessened the financial burden on small distilleries, paving the way for the Dark Corner Distillery to set up shop.

  Despite the drink’s reputation, legal moonshine makers also have popped up in other states, including Oregon, Wisconsin, Montana, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, New York and North Carolina.

• ▲ Missouri Outlaws Student-Teacher Facebook Friendship
  Missouri Senate Bill 54 is deigned to prevent children and adults from having sexual relationships. It will no doubt drive an even firmer wedge than already exists in the U.S. between children and their tutors, preventing other socially healthy and perfectly natural affectionate bonds between them, which can be crucial to a child’s development. It’s also likely to discourage American educators, increasing their stress and anxiety by treating them as potential predators. —ARK
• ▲ Swede held for building nuclear reactor in his kitchen
  Swedish police have detained a 31-year-old man in Ängelholm in western Sweden who was discovered after he sought advice from authorities on the legality of building a nuclear reactor in a domestic kitchen.
• ▲ rep.licants.org

  rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.The bot does not born with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prothesis added to an user’s account. With the aim to help him to forge a digital identity of what he would really like to be and by trying to build a greater social reputation for the user. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.

• ▲ Lottery restricts high-level players

  Several groups – two of them led by highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern University – formed gambling companies and began pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Cash WinFall, a phenomenon lottery officials first noticed in 2005.The top five groups and individuals playing Cash WinFall collectively win back the cost of their tickets plus $1 million to $6 million in profits each year during rolldowns, without ever winning the jackpot, according to Mohan Srivastava, a Canadian statistician who found a flaw in a Canadian instant game that allowed him to detect winning tickets without scratching them.

• ▲ Five Tasers, Two Seconds: That’s Gonna Hurt, Bro

  If you’re in a position to be tased, you’ve typically got one (not very impressive) advantage: the police officer or rent-a-cop trying to send 20,000 volts through your body has to be pretty close to you. But your advantage is about to disappear in a hail of electric shock cartridges.Taser International is teaming up with crazy-ass Australian electric gun company Metal Storm to produce a bowel-liquifying stun shotgun called — seriously — MAUL. Picture, if you will, a 12-gauge shotgun that stacks stun cartridges on top of one another and uses electricity to fire them out, railgun-style. Five of Taser’s XREP cartridges come flying at you from 30 yards away — “semi-automatic fire as fast as the operator can squeeze the trigger,” the company boasted on Thursday.

• ▲ Japan denies censorship over nuclear crisis

  The controversy was triggered when METI’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy earlier this month opened a call for bids for its so-called Nuclear Power Safety Regulation Publicity Project.The bid said the agency needed a contractor “to monitor blogs on nuclear power and radiation issues as well as Twitter accounts around the clock”.

  The contractor would be asked to “conduct research and analysis on incorrect and inappropriate information that would lead to false rumours and to report such Internet accounts to the agency”, it said.

  The contractor would then “publish correct information in question-and-answer format on the agency’s website and Twitter account, after consulting with experts and engineers if necessary”, said the call for tenders.

  Asatsu DK, a major Japanese advertising company, won the contract for 70 million yen ($897,000) which expires at the end of March 2012.

• ▲ Fukushima Teacher Muzzled on Radiation Risks for School Children

  Radiation can damage human cells and DNA, with prolonged exposure causing leukemia and other forms of cancer, according to the World Nuclear Association. Children are more susceptible as their cells grow at a faster rate.“It’s all invisible. The trees are still trees, people are shopping, the birds are singing and dogs are walking in the street,” said Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster’s school of biomedical sciences, who visited Fukushima prefecture last week to provide information on health risks. “When you bring out the (Geiger) machines, you can see everything is sparkling and everyone is being bitten by invisible snakes that will eventually kill them.”

• ▲ Fatal Radiation Level Found at Fukushima Daiichi Plant

  The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant said Monday that it measured the highest radiation levels within the plant since it was crippled by a devastating earthquake. However, it said the discovery would not slow continuing efforts to bring the plant’s damaged reactors under control.The operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said that workers on Monday afternoon had found an area near Reactors No. 1 and 2, where radiation levels exceeded their measuring device’s maximum reading of 10 sieverts per hour — a fatal dose for humans.

• ▲ Record-high radiation detected at Fukushima

  “The levels reported of 10 sieverts per hour are very high levels and it’s going to be very difficult to manage workers going into those areas and doing operations,” he said.”To put the 10 sieverts into context, that 10 sieverts is actually a lethal dose of radiation. So you can’t afford to be exposed for more than a few minutes at those levels.

  “It means you’re directly exposed to fuel rods in the reactors or the spent fuel ponds very closely and while it’s possible to get to those levels it means there is very little shielding going on there.”

• ▲ Only 52% of Americans Approve of God’s Job Performance
  Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning polling organization out of North Carolina that likes to make news with flashy headlines, released the results of a survey today that included a question not too often asked by pollsters: “If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of its performance?” Fifty-two percent of the 928 respondents approve of the job the Almighty’s done while 9 percent disapprove.So about half the public isn’t too thrilled with the way God is handling, well, everything. These people realize that, if God exists, He knows how they answered, right? Looks like we’ve got a new flood to get ready for.
• ▲ Is This a UFO On the Bottom of the Ocean?

  Swedish sea treasure hunters have found something extraordinary: A 60-foot disc sunk in the bottom of the ocean, with what appears to be 985-foot-long impact tracks leading to it. The team leader never found anything like it:You see a lot of weird stuff in this job but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round… a circle.

  Those are the words of Peter Lindberg, commander of the Ocean Explorer. He and his team found the strange disc on June 19 2011, at 285 feet below the surface of the Botnia Gulf, which is located somewhere between Finland and Sweden in the Baltic.

  The Ocean Explorer is not a team of crazy UFO hunters, but a company that finds sunken ships and retrieve their contents for profit. In 1997 they found the ship Jönköping, which was loaded by 2.500 bottles of an amazing champagne: Heidsieck&Co Monopole 1907 “Gout Americain” dedicated to the Russian Imperial Fleet. They sold those bottles for $13,000 a pop.

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• ✪ How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours

  “If I would like to get a child to live with me and take care of me,” I ask. “Could you do that?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I can.”

  He’s speaking in Creole, the most prevalent Haitian language. The man doing the translation, who has set up the meeting, works for us (unbeknownst to the slave trafficker).

  The trafficker assures me he’s done this sort of transaction many times before.

  “A girl or a boy?” he asks.

  “A girl probably,” I say.

  “How old?”

  “Maybe 10 or 11.”

  “Not a problem.”

  He says he can get me an 11-year-old girl, although he suggests that a 15-year-old might be better, because she’d be more “developed.”

  I’m thinking: I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.

  “And this is OK?” I ask. “I won’t have any trouble from their parents or anything like that?”

  “No, you won’t have any problems with their parents.”

  “Why not?”

  “When I give you the child, I will train it for you.”

  I’m not exactly sure what that means.

• ✪ Mainstream Reporters: Too Close to the Field and Teams to Get the Debt Story

  The big items that added trillions to the debt are not even on the field of debate. Because the two teams are not contesting them.

  WARS: When Obama expanded the Afghan war and asked for the largest military budget in world history, the GOP largely applauded. It was bipartisan.

  BUSH TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY: Obama extended them in December

  BANK BAILOUTS: Bipartisan.

  DECLINING TAX REVENUE: Resulted from recession and financial meltdown caused by years of bipartisan (Reagan/Clinton) deregulation of Wall Street. And by big companies like General Electric (whose CEO is Obama’s jobs chairman) dodging their taxes.

  That’s the broad view – a perspective that sees our country over the edge in debt because the leaders of the two teams collaborated in putting it there.

• ✪ Poachers, prostitutes and profit
  A statement to police that led to the arrest of the leader of an alleged Thai rhino poaching syndicate exposes the sleaze in the officially sanctioned shooting of this endangered species, with prostitutes used in “canned hunts”.
• ✪ Inside the Lives of Somali Pirates [Video]
• ✪ World sea attacks rise as pirates become bolder

  A global maritime watchdog says sea piracy worldwide surged 36 percent to 266 attacks in the first half this year as Somali pirates took higher risks and raided more vessels.

  The International Maritime Bureau says 61 percent, or 163 of the global attacks, were by Somali pirates largely in the Arabian Sea area. It says pirates fired on ships in rough seas in the Indian Ocean last month, attacking for the first time during the monsoon season.

• ✪ 21 Google Plus Circles You Can Actually Use
• ✪ Miniature Hong Kong Exhibition July 2011
  Super cool mini models of old Hong Kong.
• ✪ The economics of penis size

  A paper authored by Tatu Westling of Helsinki University explores the relationship between the GDP growth of countries and the penile length of their residents.

  The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres.

  That “U-shaped” curve…it looks like something flaccid-ish, innit?

• ✪ Check Out The Skinniest House In The World
  There are skinny houses. And then there is Jakub Szczęsny’s Keret House, which could make Calista Flockhart look like a fatty. At its most generous, the proposed place, in Warsaw, Poland, will clock in at 4 feet wide. At its narrowest, it’ll be just 28 inches wide — thinner than the average doorway. And we complain about our sardine can in New York…
• ✪ Breast ironing tradition targeted in Cameroon

  Every morning before school, nine-year-old Terisia Techu would undergo a painful procedure. Her mother would take a burning hot pestle straight out of a fire and use it to press her breasts.

  With tears in her eyes as she recalls what it was like, Terisia tells CNN that one day the pestle was so hot, it burned her, leaving a mark. Now 18, she is still traumatized.

  Her mother, Grace, denies the incident. But she proudly demonstrates the method she used on her daughter for several weeks, saying the goal was to make her less desirable to boys — and stave off pregnancy.

• ✪ Secrets of Somali pirates revealed in new book

  In a trip to the pirate stronghold of Eyl, Bahadur discovers pirates who are afraid of phantom U.S. navy divers and believe in psychic powers. He even describes an incident of panty-thieving on the high seas.

  He also finds that many widely held beliefs about pirates are wrong, including allegations that they are controlled by international criminal cartels, have alliances with Islamist rebels or use sophisticated intelligence networks. Such assumptions help shape the multibillion dollar fight against piracy.

  “You have a lot of people with agendas making claims that aren’t backed up by anything,” said Bahadur. “I don’t really have an agenda. I just tried to use common sense. … I actually met these people and spoke to them. Most of them had no idea of the outside world.”

• ‪✪ Crazy Dude In SF Bites Head Off Pigeon! [Video]
• ✪ All Leather Harley-Davidson Motorcycle

  Why stop at the seat?

  That’s what a Japanese company thought when it began making an all-leather Harley-Davidson motorcycle (above and below), now on display in Milwaukee’s Harley-Davidson Museum.

  “The chopper… took 20 craftspeople from a Japanese company specializing in leather products more than two years to complete.”

  Wrote Mary-Liz Shaw in a June 9, 2011 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article, “The bike is a ¾-scale replica made entirely of leather, including wheels, frame, headlight, spark plug boots, chain, fuel valve, even the tools in the tool bag.”

• ✪ ‘Surrender Dorothy’ painted on a Beltway overpass — what’s the story?
  As I traveled on the Beltway in the early ’70s near the Mormon Temple in Kensington, I was always amused by one re-occurring sight. On an overpass just as the temple comes into view, someone would always spray paints in big letters “Surrender Dorothy.” The line was from “The Wizard of Oz,” and I’m fairly sure it reflected the graffiti artist’s impression that the temple was reminiscent of the spires that Dorothy and company saw as they approached the Emerald City and their subsequent fear when the witch wrote the phrase in the sky. While I recognize that it was illegal to do that, I marveled at the writer’s ability to write it so boldly as to be seen from the highway. I’ve often wondered if anyone knew the story behind it or knew who the person was.
• ✪ Newborn baby falls through train toilet onto tracks

  She went into the lavatory hoping to relieve the pain, but instead suddenly gave birth. The baby fell into the lavatory bowl and through the flap onto the tracks under the speeding train, and her mother quickly ran out of the lavatory and jumped from the carriage to find the child.

  Her husband, who pulled the emergency cord, and other passengers who saw her jump, said she injured herself in her leap, but managed to get up and start running back to where the child tumbled onto the track.

• ✪ Men lock selves in paddy wagon

  Two pranksters from Evesham were arrested after accidentally locking themselves in a Pennsylvania constable’s van in Delaware County early Saturday, police in Radnor, Pa., said.

  Ryan Letchford, 21, and Jeffrey Olson, 22, left a party at a condominium complex with a friend and somehow got into a constable’s vehicle on East Lancaster Avenue to take phony “arrest” photographs of themselves, police said.

  The joke was over when the men could not undo the childproof locks that had snapped into place, forcing the friend to call 911 at 3:57 a.m., police said.

  The interior of the van was damaged as the men frantically attempted to free themselves, according to Michael Connor, constable for the township.

• ✪ Swaziland: HIV patients ‘eat dung to make drugs work’
  Some HIV-positive patients in Swaziland are so poor they have resorted to eating cow dung before taking anti-retroviral drugs, Aids activists say.
• ✪ Sloan-Kettering Employee Pleads Guilty to $1.5M Ink Toner Scam

  A former employee of Memorial Sloan-Kettering pleaded guilty Tuesday to ripping off $1.5 million worth of toner cartridges from the cancer center to buy diamond jewelry and an expensive car, among other high-priced amenities.

  Marque Gumbs, 33, who earned $37,800 a year as a receiving clerk at the Upper East Side center, used the ill-gotten funds from his supply scam to buy a diamond Rolex, Louis Vuitton bags and watches, and a $50,500 BMW X6, which he paid for in cash. He also took lavish trips to Las Vegas, Cancun and Florida, prosecutors said.

  Gumbs scammed the hospital by ordering $1.5 million in toner shipments from Office Max between September 2007 and August 2010 for printer models that were not even in use at the hospital. The hospital was charged for the toner cartridges, but Gumbs intercepted them at the hospital’s loading dock and sold them for profit.

• ✪ $50,000 Prop Money
  A bundle of cash is a powerful emotional trigger. In fact, human brain scans have shown that the idea of money stimulates the same primal pleasure centers as food, sex and cocaine. So what does this tell you? That if you’re going to use prop money in your film or photograph, you must make it look as real as possible for maximum impact. Here is an abridged how-to guide to making a top-notch bundle of prop money
• ✪ Man unmasked as fake military hero in Springs reappears as “lawyer” in the Highlands

  Last October, a man named Rick Gold, a 30-something lawyer who said he lived in Denver’s trendy Highlands neighborhood, appeared on the social scene and slipped comfortably into a welcoming circle of young Jewish professionals.

  He attended Passover meals and Sabbath dinners, knew enough Hebrew to participate in the prayers and joined several faith-based organizations as he told friends of his Israeli heritage and sought to reconnect with his religious roots.

  Through parallel social networks, online and in person, a lot of people got to know Rick Gold.

  Except that they didn’t.

• ✪ Flying Drone Can Crack Wi-Fi Networks, Snoop On Cell Phones
  At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year’s worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillace Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae.
• ✪ House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill

  Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

  The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

  A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

• ‪✪ Gangs Of Black Thugs Attack French people at a festival [Video]
• ✪ How long can you live after your head is chopped off?

  Imagine yourself with your head in the business end of a guillotine. I know, it’s not the most pleasant of thoughts, but the guillotine was once considered a humane way to kill someone: Just a quick slice and you’re flat-out dead.

  But researchers are finding that neurons, the cells that make up the brain, are active even after their blood supply is suddenly cut off. And they may show activity for longer than a minute, according to a Science News report.

  So, imagine yourself in the guillotine again. Once that big blade comes swooshing down and your head rolls away, are you still aware? Could you see the world around you? Might you actually experience the horrific reality that is your head removed from your body – for a minute or more?

• ✪ Ex-DEA investigator gets 25 years for child porn
  Whitcomb confessed that between the years of 2007 and 2010, he produced videos containing three boys, all which were under the age of 16. According to prosecutors, Whitcomb first gained the trust of his victims and their families by inviting them over to play video games. Ultimately the video games turned into video recordings of sexual activities. According to the victims, Whitcomb would resort to violence if they would not comply with his wishes.
• ✪ Stuff on my cock
  (PAUSE!)
• ✪ stuff in my vagina: Archive
• ✪ Hitler cat ‘overlooked for adoption because of markings’

  The six-week-old cat – which was abandoned at the roadside – earned the moniker because of her distinctive black moustache.

  Staff at Wood Green animal shelter in Godmanchester, Cambs., say they are struggling to find her a loving home because of her unusual markings.

  Spokeswoman Tara Dundon said: ”Kitler is an adorable little girl who will make a wonderful addition to the right family. She is really playful and a typical sweet kitten.
  Thanks PrinceTerrence

• ✪ Korean Otaku Marries Anime Body Pillow

  A Korean anime fan has proudly tied the knot with a pillowcase featuring the image of his favorite magical girl heroine.

  Heavy Rain asked the player, “how far would you go for love?” Would you go so far as to travel to another country? Would you kill a man? Or would you just decide that your soulmate was a fictional character and marry her image printed on a cotton pillowcase?

  A Korean otaku opted to go with the last option, wedding a dakimakura body pillow featuring the image of Fate Testarossa, one of the popular heroines of magical girl show Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. Not only has this particularly dedicated fan married his favorite pillowcase, he also takes her out on dates to restaurants and to amusement parts, as chronicled on media sites.

• ✪ History of the Guillotine
  Primitive ancestors of the guillotine were used in Ireland, England and Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Several known decapitation devices such as the Italian Mannaia, the Scottish Maiden, and the Halifax Gibbet are well documented and may pre-date the use of the French guillotine by as much as 500 years. The following deals mostly with the modern guillotine from the late 18th Century until today. It is not meant to be a complete history or even a complete overview of the history as this would take hundreds of pages. Instead consider it a brief introduction to the subject highlighted by a few good pictures.
• ✪ CIA and FBI Tried to Get U.S. Lawyer to Betray Arab Clients

  Federal agents from the FBI and CIA/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force tried to get a distinguished international lawyer to inform on his Arab and Muslim clients in violation of their Constitutional rights to attorney-client privilege, this reporter has learned. When the lawyer refused, he said the FBI placed him on a “terrorist watch list.”

  Law professor Francis Boyle gave a chilling account of how, in the summer of 2004, two agents showed up at his office (at the University of Illinois, Champaign,) “unannounced, misrepresented who they were and what they were about to my secretary, gained access to my office, interrogated me for about one hour, and repeatedly tried to get me to become their informant on my Arab and Muslim clients.”

• ✪ Improving Mexican economy draws undocumented immigrants home from California

  There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.

  “It’s now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico,” Sacramento’s Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. “We have become a middle-class country.”

  Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.

• ✪ Tylenol, Extra Strength, Is the Number One Cause of Liver Failure

  Besides Tylenol, acetaminophen is the active ingredient in the prescription painkillers Percocet and Vicodin and in some nonprescription pain relievers, including NyQuil and some Sudafed products. It’s found in thousands of medicines taken for headaches, fever, sore throats and chronic pain.

  But people taking multiple medicines at once don’t always realize how much acetaminophen they are ingesting, partly because prescription drug labels often list it under the abbreviation “APAP.”

• ✪ Here’s How U.S. Spies Will Find You Through Your Pics

  Iarpa, the intelligence community’s way-out research shop, wants to know where you took that vacation picture over the Fourth of July. It wants to know where you took that snapshot with your friends when you were at that New Year’s Eve party. Oh yeah, and if you happen to be a terrorist and you took a photo with some of your buddies while prepping for a raid, the agency definitely wants to know where you took that picture — and it’s looking for ideas to help figure it out.

  In an announcement for its new “Finder” program, the agency says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for “locate” that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken.

• ✪ Ron de Jeremy – THE adult RUM
  Wash down yer Extenze with some Ron Jeremy rum
• ✪ Hot-Dog Infused Vodka – Weeniecello

  Over the years, I’ve tried various sorts of infusions, with vodka and other liquors. Fruit and herb-infused are the best known, and are often wonderful. But what I like is meat. Where’s the infusion for people like me? I felt disenfranchised, and alone, especially after some research on the interwebs revealed a real lack of meat-based liqueurs. It would be up to me to blaze the trail.

  I decided that a hot dog based infusion would work best. Not as assertive as chorizo, but bolder than pork chops or steak; in addition, the preservatives in the dogs would lend themselves to prolonged infusion. With that in mind, I began with fine all-beef franks:

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