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. . Fake Walnuts Filled with Concrete in China: There’s a set of photos making the rounds on the Internet these days, but even though they recently went viral, they were actually released a year ago. They show a bunch of normal-looking walnuts that when cracked open reveal a very hard filling – concrete pebbles. According to Ministry of Tofu, these fake walnuts were bought by a certain Mr. Li, last February, from a street vendor in Zhengzou, Henan province. When he got home and started cracking them, he noticed that instead of a meaty seed, many were actually filled with concrete pebbles wrapped in tissue. But Li’s case is not an isolated one. Apparently, many Chinese walnut vendors try to maximize their profits by carefully cracking open the hard shell, taking out the nutmeat, replacing it with concrete and tissue so it doesn’t make a strange noise, and gluing it shut. This way they can sell the nuts and the seeds separately.; .; .
Here’s How You Buy Your Way Onto The New York Times Bestsellers List – Forbes: So it would’ve cost more than $211,000, and that’s before ResultSource’s fee, which is typically more than $20,000. Kaplan settled for making the Journal’s list, reaching the pre-sale figure of 3,000 by securing commitments from corporate clients, who agreed to buy copies as part of his speaking fees, and by buying copies for himself to resell at public appearances. Kaplan expresses significant reservations about taking part in what is essentially a laundering operation aimed at deceiving the book-buying public into believing a title is more in-demand than it is. “It’s no wonder few people in the industry want to talk about bestseller campaigns,” he writes “Put bluntly, they allow people with enough money, contacts, and know-how to buy their way onto bestseller lists.”
. . Napster: the day the music was set free: I was 17, and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC’s How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster’s vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive. “It’s difficult to describe to people… how much material was suddenly available,” the technology guru John Perry Barlow tells Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, in his new documentary. Speaking to me on the phone from the US, Winter added: “There was no ramp up. There was no transition. It was like that famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the prehistoric monkey throws a b…
. . Emoticon-based “Moby Dick” gets its day in the sun: In the US Library of Congress: The US Library of Congress welcomed Moby Dick onto its vaunted shelves this week but it wasn’t the famous Herman Melville-penned whale tale version oh no, it was the version told exclusively in emoticon – you know those little signs like J, . Emoji are the emoticons typically used in Japanese texting though they obviously are used world-wide to annoy or entertain everyone depending on your opinion of them. Called “Emoji Dick,” the emoticon book project was undertaken back in 2009 by data engineer Fred Benenson. According to the Library of Congress’ blog, in 2009 Benenson started a campaign to fund the “Emoji Dick” project and within a month raised enough money to put it together – $3,500.
. . NASCAR Crash Daytona 500 2013 [Video]: Fans sprayed with debris. Someone got mashed by a tire. NASCAR tried to take this down.
. . Kurt Cobain had the worst jeans.
. . Kara Vandereyk – Jailed After Having Sex With Pit Bull In Front Yard: According to Las Vegas Metro Police, an officer was patrolling the 300 block of N. 16th st. Tuesday when he came across a naked woman who appeared to be engaged in sexual relations with a dog. Officers arrived on the scene to find the woman, who was still undressed, laying on the ground. When the woman saw officers approaching, she said “Hi” to them and then began fondling the dog in a sexual manner.
. . Drivers stoned on marijuana test their driving skills: CNN may have just posted their best piece of investigative journalism in years. In the following video, three drivers of varying ages got incredibly high on marijuana and test-drove cars around a course. A driving-ed instructor accompanied them to avert any chance of an accident, and police watched from the sidelines to spot any visible ‘signs’ of inebriation in their movements.
. . An ‘alternative universe’ will eventually destroy ours, says Higgs researcher: Remember that Higgs-like particle that scientists finally managed to pin down last year at the Large Hadron Collider? Well, it’s proving to be a harbinger of bad news. According to Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the mass of the Higgs boson indicates that “the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out.”
. . Gallon Smashing: The Video Sensation Out To Destroy Harlem Shake: I love this. I know that the comments are going to be filled with people decrying the destructive aspects of ‘Gallon Smashing,’ and they’re not wrong, but there’s so much that’s great about this concept. There’s a level of straight up slapstick comedy that is incredible. This kid (is it the same kid every time? I think it might be) has the moves of a silent comedy star. I like that the prank isn’t necessarily about getting other people wet or anything (although that happens, as is the unpredictable nature of smashing gallons of milk). And I like that this guy seems to be in his teens – exactly the right age to be doing stupid, destructive, anti-social prank behavior. When frat boys start doing this it won’t be funny.
. . College women told to urinate or vomit to deter a rapist: The list of 10 tips by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs was billed as “last resort” options to deter a sexual assault. “Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating,” read one tip. “Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone,” read another.; Thanks Jasmine
. . Scorecard: How Many Rights Have Americans REALLY Lost?: For example, the following actions may get an American citizen living on U.S. soil labeled as a “suspected terrorist” today: Being young (if you live near a battle zone, you are fair game; and see this) Using social media Reporting or doing journalism Speaking out against government policies Protesting anything (such as participating in the “Occupy” movement) Questioning war (even though war reduces our national security; and see this) Criticizing the government’s targeting of innocent civilians with drones (although killing innocent civilians with drones is one of the main things which increases terrorism. And see this) Asking questions about pollution (even at a public Congressional hearing?) Paying cash at an Internet cafe Asking questions about Wall Street shenanigans Holding gold Creating alternative currencies Stocking up on more than 7 days of food (even though all Mormons are taught to stockpile food, and most …
. . How a “revenge porn” site got built: Fake identities to trade photos: Earlier this month, “revenge porn” entrepreneur Craig Brittain sat for an on-camera interview with CBS4-Denver, where he explained how his website IsAnybodyDown is nothing more than “entertainment.” Brittain’s site shows nude pictures of people, mostly women, without their consent, along with their personal contact info. The website advertises links to a service called “Takedown Hammer” which promises to get victims off the site if they pay $250. Many assume the “Hammer” is Brittain, since its e-mails come from the same IP address; Brittain denies it. In any case, to many of the victims, Brittain’s site looks like a simple extortion scheme.
. . USA vs China: Who Is Hacking Who? Part 2 – Eastern Europe: Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times. The United States of America. All seemingly hacked by the Chinese. China. Seemingly hacked by the US. Big time. But is there another option? “At least 40 companies including Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were targeted in malware attacks linked to an Eastern European gang of hackers that is trying steal company secrets, two people familiar with the matter said.” Bloomberg Chinese-hackers According to Tom Kellerman of Trend Micro there could well be – “We’ve all been watching China, but they’re not the most advanced cybercriminals. The most advanced are from the Eastern Bloc and Russia.” Tom Kellerman via CNN
. . Dairy farmers spray milk at the European Parliament in Brussels: A protest staged by dairy farmers in Brussels has entered its second day. Farmers sprayed thousands of litres of fresh milk at the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday in protest at what they say are excessive milk quotas and prices below the cost of production.
. . Airport diamond heist: It is shockingly easy to breach perimeter security at most airports.: The testimony at the hearing made it very clear that airport security is only as strong as its weakest link. This seems self-evident. Yet, despite all the money and manpower wasted on airport security theater in this country and around the world, perimeter security remains so lax that a guy with a costume and some bolt cutters can make a hole large enough to drive a van through. This is great news for heist fans, to be sure. But it’s pretty alarming for everyone else.
. . Power and the Internet: All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that’s only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and the role of information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general.
. . ‘I’ve been cleared to have sex!’ Porn legend Ron Jeremy gets back to business after near-fatal aneurysm: Porn legend Ron Jeremy, 59, has been released from hospital after a near-death experience and he’s already planning on getting back to business. Doctors have told the prolific star that he’s cleared to have sex after he left Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles around week ago.
. . Large Labia Project Tumblr
. . Earlie Johnson’s vintage porn collection stolen: “I had a sinking felling because my porn collection is valuable, man,” Johnson told WZZM 13. Johnson collects rare performances by black adult film stars that were difficult for him to find and impossible to replace. He says the stolen pornography collection is worth $7,500, much more than the televisions that were taken. “I had a collection that had every African American that’s ever been in porn, from the 70s up until now,” explained Johnson. “My collection was the best in Michigan– a guy in Connecticut told me that,” said Johnson. He believes the thieves realized the value when they stumbled on the porn. “They came upon it and looked at the titles and realized what they had ran across… and realized people will pay cash money for them DVDs.” Johnson says his rare footage can’t be found on the internet. “I trade and I collect and I look at them too. I ain’t got no problem with that,” said Johnson.
. . Chinese Eugenics: The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
. . New anti-piracy system will hit U.S. Internet users next week: Starting next week, most U.S. Internet users will be subject to a new copyright enforcement system that could slow the Internet to a crawl and force violators to take educational courses. A source with direct knowledge of the Copyright Alert System (CAS), who asked not to be named, has told the Daily Dot that the five participating Internet service providers (ISPs) will start the controversial program Monday. The ISPs—industry giants AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon—will launch their versions of the CAS on different days throughout the week. Comcast is expected to be the first, on Monday.
. . Boy meets girl. Girl strips on webcam. Tells boy to do the same. Girl blackmails boy: Now, people are being warned about another risk of finding love in the online world – webcam extortion. Webcam extortion. Image from ShutterstockBut it’s not the familiar headline of perverted hackers blackmailing young women into stripping in front of the camera. This time the tables have turned, and it’s *men* who are being victimised by *women*, in a peculiar twist on traditional webcam extortion. Singapore’s Police Force has warned of femme fatales befriending potential victims on sites such as Facebook and Tagged.com. The women enter steamy webcam conversations with their prey, where they strip and encourage their male victim to do the same. What the man doesn’t realise, as he feverishly rips his clothes off and agrees to engage in various sexual acts in front of the camera, is that his female love interest is secretly recording everything that’s going on. The male victim is then blackmailed for money by the woman who threatens to circulate the compromising photographs
. . As Secretive “Stingray” Surveillance Tool Becomes More Pervasive, Questions Over Its Illegality Increase: Of course, we’ve seen this pattern over and over and over. The government uses “terrorism” as a catalyst to gain some powerful new surveillance tool or ability, and then turns around and uses it on ordinary citizens, severely infringing on their civil liberties in the process. Stingrays are particularly odious given they give police dangerous “general warrant” powers, which the founding fathers specifically drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. In pre-revolutionary America, British soldiers used “general warrants” as authority to go house-to-house in a particular neighborhood, looking for whatever they please, without specifying an individual or place to be searched. The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier. It allows police to point a cell phone signal into all the houses in a particular neighborhood, searching for one target while sucking up everyone else’s location along with it. With one search the police could potentially invade count…
. . Banksy Work, Taken From London Wall, Turns Up in Miami, for Auction: “Slave Labor (Bunting Boy),” a 2012 work by the mysterious British graffiti artist Banksy, has vanished from a wall outside a discount store in London, and turned up at an auction house in Miami. And the town council in Haringey, the north London borough where the Banksy work appeared last May and disappeared last week, say that they want the piece returned. The stenciled piece, which shows a young boy at an old fashioned sewing machine creating a string of Union Jacks – the flags are in bright red, white and blue; the rest of the picture is in black, white, grey and sepia – appeared last year during the celebrations commemorating Queen Elizabeth’s 60 years on the throne. It was taken as an acerbic social comment, as most of Banksy’s works are, and has been regarded as a cultural attraction in the Turnpike Lane neighborhood where it stood.
. . More on Chinese Cyberattacks: Wow, is this a crazy media frenzy. We should know better. These attacks happen all the time, and just because the media is reporting about them with greater frequency doesn’t mean that they’re happening with greater frequency. Hype aside, the Mandiant report on the hackers is very good, especially the part where the Chinese hackers outted themselves through poor opsec: they logged into Facebook from their work computers. But this is not cyberwar. This is not war of any kind. This is espionage, and the difference is important. Calling it war just feeds our fears and fuels the cyberwar arms race.
. . JStylo-Anonymouth – Writing Style Anonymization: JSAN is a writing style anonymization framework. It consists of two parts: JStylo and Anonymouth. JStylo is a standalone platform for authorship attribution. It is used as an underlying feature extraction and authorship attribution engine. Anonymouth is the writing style anonymization platform. It uses the extracted stylometric features and classification results obtained through JStylo and suggests users changes to anonymize their writing style.
. . Science of Stylometry a Weapon Against Hackers, Trolls, Malware: It’s been used to question or confirm the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey and St Paul’s letters for hundreds of years. Now the science of stylometry could be used in the fight against hackers, trolls and malware writers that wreak havoc on the web. At the same time, stylometry – the analysis of a person’s unique writing style – could also be used by employers to identify whistleblowers or whingers among their staff. What you say online could be traced back to you using stylometry. “Your writing style can give you away and on the internet anonymity is difficult to achieve,” say the US researchers who have developed online tools to analyse writing. Advertisement The researchers, from Drexel University in Philadelphia, studied the leaked conversations and contributions of hundreds of anonymous users in underground online forums. They were able to identify 80 per cent of users using stylometric analysis to match writing styles to authors.
. . Barnacle sex, superlong penises and spermcasting: Barnacles are known for having very long penises. National Geographic reported in 2008: To cope with changing tides and a sedentary lifestyle, the gnarly crustaceans have evolved penises that are eight times the length of their bodies—the longest relative to body size of any animal. My sedentary lifestyle has had no such effect. I feel cheated. That article also noted that barnacles have the ability to change the size and shape of their penises to suit their living conditions. Barnacles living in gentle waters have long, thin penises best equipped for maximum reach, the study found. But those animals living in rough waters have shorter, stouter penises that are better able to withstand strong waves. [...] The researchers also transplanted barnacles living in gentle waters to rough waters and vice versa, to make sure the penis variations they observed were a result of the environment and not due to genetic differences. The results showed that barnacles coul…
. . Facebook Hacked! Facebook OAuth flaw allows gaining full control over any Facebook account – Hacking News: Facebook OAuth is used to communicate between Applications & Facebook users, to grant additional permissions to your favorite apps. To make this possible, users have to ‘allow or accept’ the application request so that app can access your account information with required permissions. As a normal Facebook user we always think that it is better than entering your Facebook credentials, we can just allow specific permissions to an app in order to make it work with your account.
. . Circumcision: The History of Metzitzah BʼPeh Disease Transmission: More than 200 years of disease and death transmitted through metzitzah b’peh, the direct mouth-to-genital suction done by mohels to the bleeding just-circumcised-penises of baby boys.
. . Revealed: al-Qaeda’s 22 tips for dodging drones: The document includes advice such as “hide under thick trees” (believed to be bin Laden’s contribution), and instructions for setting up a “fake gathering” using dolls to “mislead the enemy”. Found by the Associated Press in a building in Timbuktu, the ancient city occupied by Islamists last year, the document is believed to have been abandoned as extremists fled a French military intervention last month. It is a Xeroxed copy of a tipsheet authored by a Yemeni extremist that has been published on some jihadi forums, but that has made little appearance in English. The list reflects how al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghbreb anticipated a military intervention that would make use of drones, as the war on terror shifts from the ground to the air.

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Super Zeros


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1970s NY Graffiti Artists Still Have Urge to Tag: Witten and a generation of urban latchkey kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s and landed in the city’s street art scene are coming of age — middle age, that is.; .; .
1% Rappers: #20 Rick Ross – Net Worth $25 Million #19 Tie between T-Pain and T.I – Net Worth $30 Million #18 Nelly – Net Worth $55 Million #17 Busta Rhymes – Net Worth $60 Million #16 Ludacris – Net Worth $65 Million #15 Beastie Boys – Net Worth $75 Million Each #14 Timbaland – Net Worth $75 Million #13 Pharrell Williams – Net Worth $77.5 Million #12 Tie between LL Cool J and Akon – Net Worth $80 Million #11 Kanye West – Net Worth $90 Million #10 Lil Wayne – Net Worth $95 Million #9 Ice Cube – Net Worth $100 Million #8 Snoop Dogg – Net Worth $110 Million #7 Birdman – Net Worth $115 Million #6 Eminem – Net Worth $120 Million #5 50 Cent – Net Worth $250 Million #4 Dr. Dre – Net Worth $260 Million #3 Master P – Net Worth $350 Million #2 Jay-Z – Net Worth $475 Million #1 Diddy – Net Worth $500 Million; .; .
It’s raining heroin on Indo-Pak border: On an average, more than a kilogram of heroin was seized every day on the Indo-Pak border adjoining Punjab for the first six months of this year. Records with the Border Security Force (BSF) show that in the first half of 2012, the force has seized a record 197 kilograms of heroin worth nearly Rs 1,000 crore. This is nearly three times more than 68 kgs seized last year. It is also the highest amount of the drug seized in the past five years.; .; .
The Shining finally gets a second movie: Warner Bros have confirmed that they are working on a prequel to the Jack Nicholson thriller – which contained the famous line, “Heeere’s Johnny.”; .; .
Heroin drug targets middle school students: Cheese is the slang name for a mixture of black tar heroin and Tylenol PM. The substances are combined and come out looking much like parmesan cheese. The resulting product is sold for as little as $2 per hit. Kids in the Dallas-area are buying “cheese” with their lunch money, according to media reports. They’re snorting the stuff up their noses – often at school – and dying in alarming numbers, according to the Dallas County medical office. A recent study by the Dallas Independent School district determined that more than 5,000 kids have tried cheese. More than two dozen have died of overdoses. Most, like Mariela, first take the drug in middle school. That’s shocking. Middle school students are being targeted by drug dealers and turned into heroin addicts before they reach high school.; .; .
TSA Checkpoints Exposed: Journalist Tracked, Targeted and Harassed for Filming: Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange breaks down WRC Correspondent Julio Rausseo’s experience at the Chicago Union Station, 1 week after releasing a video exposing TSA checkpoints being setup there.; .; .
The Aleppo Codex Mystery: One day this spring, on the condition that I not reveal any details of its location nor the stringent security measures in place to protect its contents, I entered a hidden vault at the Israel Museum and gazed upon the Aleppo Codex — the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible. The story of how it arrived here, in Jerusalem, is a tale of ancient fears and modern prejudices, one that touches on one of the rawest nerves in Israeli society: the clash of cultures between Jews from Arab countries and the European Jews, or Ashkenazim, who controlled the country during its formative years. And the story of how some 200 pages of the codex went missing — and to this day remain the object of searches carried out around the globe by biblical scholars, private investigators, shadowy businessmen and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency — is one of the great mysteries in Jewish history.; .; .
Just a face in a crowd? Scans pick up ID, personal data: As you scan the face on that giant billboard, it may just be scanning your face right back. Increasingly sophisticated digital facial-recognition technology is opening new possibilities in business, marketing, advertising and law enforcement while exacerbating fears about the loss of privacy and the violation of civil liberties. Businesses foresee a day when signs and billboards with face-recognition technology can instantly scan your face and track what other ads you’ve seen recently, adjust their message to your tastes and buying history and even track your birthday or recent home purchase. The FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies already are exploring facial-recognition tools to track suspects, quickly single out dangerous people in a crowd or match a grainy security-camera image against a vast database to look for matches.; .; .
Palestinians Rip Romney’s ‘Racist’ Praise for Israel – Candidate again steps in it, says Israel has better ‘culture’ for business: Mitt Romney offended Palestinians again today, saying that Israel was more prosperous than Palestine because of its superior culture and the will of God. “You notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israel and Palestine, Romney said at a fundraiser in Jerusalem today, citing each nation’s per-capita GDP, the AP reports. He went on to say that in considering Israel’s accomplishments “I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things” including the “hand of providence.”; .; .
30 Global News Events The Batman Massacre Allows The American Media To Ignore: The essence of the information war is the timely interjection, distortion or omission of news events. Reports can minimize, omit or basically bury key news stories that require analysis while magnifying others which are of lesser importance to the keen, analytical mind. While the Batman massacre is tragic, the buzz in the so called alternative media circle is centered around the litany of ongoing stories that will be stifled in the week to come by the mainstream media’s focus on the Aurora, CO shooting. Beyond that, the analysis you read here is not all presented as 100% fact, some conclusions are presented in light of other evidence, and where noted, some are speculative based on educated theory. In this era of total media bombardment, to the point of overload, some events have to be considered beyond just what is confirmed in print or on video and must be evaluated in the full context of possible human behavior.; .; .
Feds Sue Telecom for Fighting Warrantless Search: The Justice Department is suing a telecommunications company for challenging a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for customer information — despite the fact that the law authorizing the request explicitly permits such challenges. According to documents provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is representing the telecom, the company (whose name is one of the many redacted details in the documents) received a national security letter (NSL) in 2011. An NSL is essentially a self-issued search warrant whereby the FBI bypasses the Fourth Amendment and demands information about an individual without bothering to obtain a judge’s consent — and forces the recipient of the letter to keep mum about it because disclosure would allegedly harm national security. NSLs were employed somewhat sparingly prior to 2001 but became widely used — and abused, as the Justice Department’s inspector general reported in 2007 — after the misnamed Patriot Act loosened the require; .; .
Feeling bad about your life? Well, at least you’re not this guy!
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American fast food diet unleashes disease epidemic sweeping across Asia: Though increasingly looked down upon here in the U.S. as a sign of slothfulness and low socioeconomic status, routine fast food consumption in some parts of the world is actually considered to be culturally desirable. But as foreigners progressively adopt the American fast-food lifestyle in place of their own native foods, rates of chronic disease are skyrocketing, including in East and Southeast Asia where diabetes and heart disease rates are off the charts. According to a recent study published in the journal Circulation, globalization continues to usher U.S.-style fast food into East Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia, where natives, especially those from the younger generations, are quickly adopting things like hamburgers and fries in place of their traditional fare. And based on the data, this Western fast food craze is responsible for a significant uptick in cases of diabetes and heart disease.; .; .
Scientists Read Monkeys’ Minds, See What They’re Planning to Do Before They Do it: Neurologists working with monkeys at Washington University in St. Louis to decode brain activity have stumbled upon a rather surprising result. While working to demonstrate that multiple parameters can be seen in the firing rate of a single neuron (and that certain parameters are embedded in neurons only if they are needed to solve the immediate task), they also found that they could read their monkeys’ minds. This isn’t exactly ESP, but it is really interesting. The researchers came to find out that by analyzing the activity of large populations of neurons, they could discover what actions the monkeys were planning before they made a single motor movement. By monitoring neural activity, the researchers could essentially see what the monkey was thinking about doing next.; .; .
CIA “Manages” Drug Trade, Mexican Official Says: In a recent interview, Chihuahua state spokesman Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva told Al Jazeera that the CIA and other international “security” outfits “don’t fight drug traffickers.” Instead, Villanueva argued, they try to control and manage the illegal drug market for their own benefit. “It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Villanueva told the Qatar-based media outlet last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.” Another Mexican official, apparently a mid-level officer with Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of “Homeland Security,” echoed those remarks, saying he knew that the allegations against the CIA were correct based on talks with American agents in Mexico. “It’s true, they want to control it,” the official told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.; .; .
Is There Too Much Pressure to Engage in Crazy, Kinky Sex?: What those trying to aggressively market an ever more “exotic sex life” fail to realize is that sexual preferences aren’t shaped by artifice. Buying a leather slapper won’t suddenly give you a penchant for spanking—and let’s face it, if you were really into the idea in the first place, you probably would have gone DIY and just picked up a hairbrush long before now. Making people feel shitty about their vanilla-ness is mainly a capitalist calculation. As any marketing exec knows, the moment people become satisfied is the moment they stop buying stuff.; .; .
Black Hat presentation shows iris-scanning breach: A research team from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and West Virginia University have troubling findings for those who think iris scanning is one of the safest methods of biometric security. Their reverse-engineered, “replicated eye” image was able to bypass iris scanning, fooled into thinking the synthetic image was real and correct. Javier Galbally and his team printed out synthetic images of irises taken from codes of real irises stored in security databases to test iris-scanning vulnerabilities. An iris code is the data stored by recognition systems when they scan a person’s eye. This is information that the researchers could replicate in their synthetic images. A commercial iris system only looks for the iris code and not an actual eye, Galbally noted. He and his team tested their fake irises against a leading commercial-recognition system. In 80 percent of attempts, the scanner believed that the attempt was a real eye.; .; .
Was the “Batman Shooting” a Ritualistic Murder Carried Out by Mind Controlled Patsy?: Shooter James Holmes even went as far as to take Vicodin, a drug found in Heath Ledger at the time of his death. Vicodin is a powerful pain-killer with morphine-like effects that is used in mind control to “dull out” victims. Is there some kind of ritualistic connection between The Dark Knight, the sacrificial death of Heath Ledger and this new installment of a Batman movie that was “launched” with a mass murder? Is there a reason why this mass-murder, which occurred during the midnight screening of a movie called Dark Knight RISING took place in a city called Aurora, the name Roman goddess of dawn (dawn being the time where the sun begins to rise)? Another interesting fact: Aurora is considered to be the mother of the morning star, also know as the Light Bringer, or Lucifer.; .; .
Social Scientists Might Gain Access to Facebook’s Data on User Behavior: Social scientists hungry for Facebook’s data may be about to get a taste of it. Nature has learned that the social-networking website is considering giving researchers limited access to the petabytes of data that it has amassed on the preferences and behaviour of its almost one billion users. Outsiders will not get a free run of the data, but the move could quell criticism from social scientists who have complained that the company’s own research on its users cannot be verified. Facebook’s in-house scientists have been involved in publishing more than 30 papers since 2009, covering topics from what drives the spread of information and ideas to the relationship between social-networking activity and loneliness. However, because the company fears breaching its users’ privacy, it does not release the underlying raw data.; .; .
With A Chemical Injection, Blind Mice Can See: Two of the most common causes of blindness are retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease, and macular degeneration, an age-related disorder. Both are characterized by damage to the rod and cone cells in the retina, which robs the eye of its photoreceptors. Treatments for these forms of blindness focuses on restoring the retina’s abilities, and we’ve seen a few examples — stem cell injections, implantations of light-sensitive compounds using viruses, and a whole host of electronic devices and artificial retinas. A chemical called AAQ can also make these damaged cells sensitive to light again, and it wouldn’t require any foreign substances or stem cells.; .; .
How Much Is Your Gmail Account Worth?: The cloud backup guys over at Backupify put together a calculator to help folks estimate the value of their cloud-based Google Gmail web mail accounts. So what’s the average account’s worth? $3,588.85, Backupify’s Jay Garmon writes in a blog post. That’s the value of the time invested in the average Gmail account, given how many emails the average Gmail user has written (5,768), how long it takes to write the average email (one minute, 43 seconds), and the most recent U.S. Depart of Labor statistics on average annual salary ($45,230). In other words, if the average Gmail user were paid to recreate all the Gmail messages he or she’s ever written, it would cost $3,588.85.; .; .
Honey buns sweeten life for Florida prisoners: They are a lowly, sturdy food designed for desperate cravings and vending machine convenience. They can endure weeks of neglect and even a mild mashing in a coat pocket or backpack. They are, it should come as no surprise, especially beloved by a similarly hardy but disrespected population: Florida’s prison inmates. Inmates in the Florida prison system buy 270,000 honey buns a month. Across the state, they sell more than tobacco, envelopes and cans of Coke. And they’re just as popular among Tampa Bay’s county jails. In Pasco’s Land O’Lakes Detention Center, they’re outsold only by freeze-dried coffee and ramen noodles. Not only that, these honey buns — so puffy! — have taken on lives of their own among the criminal class: as currency for trades, as bribes for favors, as relievers for stress and substitutes for addiction. They’ve become birthday cakes, hooch wines, last meals — even ingredients in a massive tax fraud. Thanks Jasmine; .; .
Texas woman jailed for stabbing husband: Was it Facebook or PCP use?: Rhonda Roshell Washington, 33, told police her husband was high on PCP when they got into an argument about his drug use at their home in Bryan early Thursday, the Bryan-College Station paper reports. The fight turned physical, she said, and she jabbed him in the hand with her keys. Her husband, however, claimed she became upset about something on his Facebook page and chased him with a knife, stabbing him in the hand.; .; .
UK’s largest skateboard unveiled ahead of Olympics: This isn’t a story about a skateboarding giant, the UK’s largest skateboard has been created to mark the fact two thirds of children think the Olympics will only be worth watching when more extreme sports like skateboarding are included, obviously. Measuring a staggering seven metres in length, two and half metres in width and at a metre high, the oversized board weighs as much as a baby African elephant – so any ‘ollies’ or ‘kick flips’ are probably out of the question.; .; .
The Joke’s on You: Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.; .; .
Google: we failed to delete all Streetview data: Despite repeated assurances in public and to the Information Commissioner, Google has admitted that it did not in fact delete all the data, which could include passwords and emails, collected over open WiFi networks by its Streetview mapping cars in 2010 in a number of countries around the world. The news means that Britain’s recently reopened investigation into the so-called WiFi snooping could be bolstered by an opportunity to re-examine evidence that the ICO had asked to be destroyed. The ICO has demanded to examine the data “immediately” to look for evidence that it is in fact more extensive than Google had originally claimed, as authorities in America had discovered for data collected there.; .; .
Tim Geithner Admits Banks Bailed Out With Rigged Libor, Costing Taxpayers Huge Amount: But he also said that, months later, when it came time to set bailout terms for the Too Big To Fail Set, the government just had no other choice but to use Libor. Sure, that’s one way to look at it. Another, less charitable way to look at it is that the Fed was fully aware that Libor was being manipulated lower, and was fine charging an artificially low rate to lend money to banks and to AIG, in what amounted to yet another kind of bailout. Why make life harder for them, right? They had enough problems dealing with the crisis they had created. Raising red flags about Libor might have only made the crisis worse, making it harder for banks to borrow money. But in the process, the government left untold mountains of cash on the table for U.S. taxpayers. Even if Libor was only manipulated a tiny bit lower, these small breaks add up.; .; .
Woman Claims Watching 3D Film Made Her Pregnant
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What Terrorizes Americans Most: Guns or Sexual Freedom?: America treats sex, not violence, as the biggest threat to families and the nation, starting with Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings bestowing action flicks that brutalize half-naked nymphets a PG-13, but anything suggesting female pleasure the deathly NC-17, as happened with the marital cunnilingus scene between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. A common argument against gay marriage or condom commercials is, “What would I say to my kids,” as if sex talk destroys childhood innocence.; .; .
19 Examples Of How Control Freaks Are Killing America With Their Completely Ridiculous Regulations: The control freaks are winning, and they are absolutely killing America. Our founding fathers intended to establish a nation where Americans would be free to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in an environment where freedom was maximized and government interference was minimized. Unfortunately, our nation has turned away from those principles and is now running 180 degrees in the other direction. For some reason, our political system tends to attract psychotic control freaks that want to micromanage our lives and make most of our decisions for us. These control freaks are actually convinced that freedom and liberty are “dangerous” and that there should be a rule or a regulation for just about everything. This is not just happening on the federal level either. The truth is that the control freaks are often the worst on the local level. When you add up the red tape on all levels of government, we literally have millions of laws, rules and regulations in America; .; .
Iran nuclear energy facility hit with malware that plays AC/DC at full volume: An email to F-Secure — allegedly sent from an AEOI scientist — detailed the attack, noting that the malware has shut down some of the facility’s automated processes. The rather vague wording of the email leaves a few unanswered questions as to just what parts of the AEOI are in danger, but one piece of information was very clear: The insidious software prompted several of the group’s computers to begin playing the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC in the middle of the night, and at full volume.; .; .
600-year-old linen bras found in Austrian castle: A revolutionary discovery is rewriting the history of underwear: Some 600 years ago, women wore bras. The University of Innsbruck said Wednesday that archeologists found four linen bras dating from the Middle Ages in an Austrian castle. Fashion experts describe the find as surprising because the bra had commonly been thought to be only little more than 100 years old as women abandoned the tight corset.; .; .
Skydiver Fearless Felix jumps from 18 miles up: On Wednesday, Baumgartner took another stratospheric leap, this time from an altitude of more than 18 miles — an estimated 96,640 feet, nearly three times higher than cruising jetliners. He landed safely near Roswell, N.M. His top speed was an estimated 536 mph, said Brian Utley, an official observer on site. It’s the second test jump for Baumgartner from such extreme heights and a personal best. He’s aiming for a record-breaking jump from 125,000 feet, or 23 miles, in another month. He hopes to go supersonic then, breaking the speed of sound with just his body.; .; .
62,000 pennies used to pay off mortgage: What started out as a joke 35 years ago ended with a Massachusetts man paying off his mortgage using 62,000 pennies. “I’ve never saved anything other than pennies. And it started out as a whim. You know, a penny for the mortgage,” Thomas Daigle told NBC affiliate WHDH-TV of Boston. Daigle, from Milford, Mass., recalled how, after signing the mortgage papers 35 years ago, he found a penny on the ground. He and his wife then joked about collecting pennies to pay off the loan — and the rest is history. Over the next 35 years, Daigle would roll pennies, 50 cents at a time. His bank found out the hard way just how much work that was — it reportedly took tellers two days to unroll the penny cases.; .; .
More odd-colored lobsters turning up in the catch – but why?: Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown. But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters – one color on one side, another on the other – have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.; .; .
Did the NYPD Break International Law in Suppressing Protest?: A report by a group of civil and human rights attorneys released Wednesday morning paints the clearest picture yet of the New York City police department’s aggressive tactics and over-policing, all of which resulted in the systemic suppression of the basic rights of Occupy protesters. The report, which chronicles events from late September 2011 up to July of 2012, extensively documents numerous ways in which the NYPD acted with excessive force, attempted to intimidate and harass members of the press, expelled activists from public space due to the content of their speech, and ultimately concludes that authorities broke international law in their handling of Occupy Wall Street.; .; .
Mayor Bloomberg Says Cops Should Go On Strike Until Americans Give Up Their Guns: In 2008, ten times more civilians regular people were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps. In 2011, 72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year–22 percent of those people were unarmed. As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, “Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” And as Choire Sicha wrote earlier this year, “2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year.”; .; .
Batman Shooter James Holmes on Hardcore Pharmaceutical Drugs: Like virtually all massacre shooters before him, the notorious Batman shooter James Holmes is now reported to have been taking hardcore pharmaceutical drugs. In Holmes’ case, they happen to be the very same drugs that ultimately led to the early death of actor Heath Ledger. With a fix for ‘altering his state of mind’, the ‘Batman shooter’ was heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. Holmes even reportedly dosed up on a pharmaceutical cocktail just before the shooting. Side effects of Vicodin use, even at ‘recommended’ levels which Holmes likely far exceeded, include ‘altered mental states’ and ‘unusual thoughts or behavior’.; .; .
The New Domain Awareness System Will Be Used To Track Potential Criminals And Terrorists: The New York Police Department will soon launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” that combines several streams of information to track both criminals and potential terrorists. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the city developed the software with Microsoft. Kelly says the program combines city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases. He says it will be officially unveiled by New York’s mayor as soon as next week.; .; .
Two Texas Pre-Teens Create a Fake Facebook Account, Texas Cops Charge Them With Felonies and Lock Them Up: According to the Student Press Law Center, which investigated the girls’ arrest, officials in Hood County, Texas, are refusing to say whether the girls (who were arrested July 16) are still being detained. The center’s reporting suggests that the girls have been behind bars for more than a week for the crime of pranking a fellow student on Facebook; .; .

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War On Synthetic Drugs Whac-A-Mole

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☛ New Federal Ban on Synthetic Drugs Already Obsolete: A federal ban on synthetic drugs, signed into law by President Obama on July 9, was obsolete before the ink of his signature dried. Drug formulations not covered by the law’s language, and almost certainly synthesized in direct response to legal pressure, are already on sale. If synthetics are supposed to be part of the War on Drugs, then this battle may already be lost. “There are several compounds out there now, in mixtures that I’ve tested myself, that would not fall under this ban,” said Kevin Shanks, a forensic toxicologist at AIT Laboratories, an Indiana-based chemical testing company. “The law just can’t seem to keep up.” The new law, officially known as the Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act of 2012, comes in response to the growing popularity of compounds designed by chemists to mimic the effects of various illegal substances, particularly marijuana and amphetamines.
☛ San Antonio Wendy’s Drive-Thru Worker Gets Prison For Child Porn: A drive-thru restaurant worker in South Texas has been sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison for selling child porn to patrons. A federal judge in San Antonio on Wednesday sentenced 36-year-old Juan Antonio Rosa. Rosa in March pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography. He allegedly met the porn customers online. Prosecutors say buyers used the code word “Scooby Doo” to get the memory cards along with food at a Wendy’s Co. restaurant in San Antonio. Officials say the restaurant operators were not aware of the illegal deals.
☛ Organic Food Purists Worry About Big Companies’ Influence: The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store. The industry’s image — contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms — is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic. Bear Naked, Wholesome & Hearty, Kashi: all three and more actually belong to the cereals giant Kellogg. Naked Juice? That would be PepsiCo of Pepsi and Fritos fame. And behind the pastoral-sounding Walnut Acres, Health Valley and Spectrum Organics is none other than Hain Celestial, once affiliated with Heinz, the grand old name in ketchup. Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others — Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M; Mars among them — have gobbled up most of the nation’s organic food industry.
☛ Ouija board helps psychologists probe the subconscious: Gauchou’s approach is to turn to the Ouija board. To keep things simple her team has just one person with their finger on the planchette at a time. But the ideomotor effect is maximised if you believe you are not responsible for any movements – that’s why Ouija board sessions are most successful when used by a group. So the subject is told they will be using the board with a partner. The subject is blindfolded and what they don’t know is that their so-called partner removes their hands from the planchette when the experiment begins. The technique worked, at least with 21 out of 27 volunteers tested, reports Gauchou. “The planchette does not move randomly around the board; it moves to yes or no. It seems to move almost magically. None of them felt responsible for the movement.” In fact some subjects suspected that their partner was really an actor – but they thought the actor was deliberately moving the planchette, never suspecting they themselves were the only ones touching it.
☛ The Girl Who Wrote About Drugs: Cat Marnell on Vice, Addiction & More: Cat Marnell became Internet-famous last month for quitting her job to do drugs. She’d been the beauty and health director of the women’s website xoJane.com since it launched last year but couldn’t bear to spend another summer meeting deadlines in an office when she could be on the roof of a New York City club “looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust.” It wasn’t long after her much blogged-about resignation that the diminutive, amphetamine-addicted, and uncomfortably honest former beauty writer landed a weekly column at Vice.com. Marnell is arguably the Internet’s most divisive writer, not just because she’s always on drugs, as she often makes sure to note, but because she allows her longtime yet ever evolving addiction play out online like a reality TV show. The fragile-looking 29-year-old, with her white-blond hair and seemingly permanent black eyeliner, drops names, brands, clubs, drugs, and emotions freely as she details her drug-fueled dalliances around her New York City
☛ The Montauk Project: You’ve got to love a story that is stranger than any fiction but claims to be the God’s honest truth. What could be more fabulously outrageous than the idea that your tax dollars have subsidized the demented experiments of an evil cabal of Navy brass, CIA shrinks, fugitive Nazis and Reptoid ETs? What could be more fantastic than the vision of them pow wowing together for a little high-tech, tantric voodoo? How very spicy, that this panoply of government geeks and their alien pals fired up interdimensional vortexes by means of a buff, naked dude who was jacked into a psychotronic chair — while sporting a raging boner!
☛ America the Beautiful: A Fire Sale for Foreign Corporations: If you thought that with Citizens United we had hit rock bottom in surrendering our democracy to the power of money, this TPP “trade agreement” would throw our democracy into free fall. Foreign corporations will be allowed to feast like termites upon America’s natural resources, trash our environment and public health, violate our rights as American citizens and make us pay them if we try to protect ourselves.
☛ Hidden Government Scanners Will Instantly Know Everything About You From 164 Feet Away: Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body—agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you. And without you knowing it.
☛ 17 previously unknown legal highs found by researchers: The drugs found in Britain by researchers for the first time between January 2011 and March 2012 1. DMMA 2. MDAI (Sparkle) 3. Etizolam 4. JWH-250 5. JWH-200 6. AM-694 7. 4-Me0-PcP 8. 5-Me0-DALT 9. 2-AI 10. n-ethylbuphedrone 11. 2-C-C-NBoMe 12. AM-2201 13. Ipracetin 14. Ethacetin 15. 4-HO-MiPT 16. 2-C-P 17. 25D-NBOMe
☛ Bad dog! Anger at police pooch named Bono that ALWAYS says there are drugs in a car: A dog with a sharp nose for drugs can be a great asset to any police department, but in the case of a German shepherd named Bono, accuracy is not his strongest suit. The four-legged crime fighter working for the Virginia State Police has been on a hot streak, detecting drugs nearly every time he’s on the job. In reality, however, illegal narcotics were found just 22 times of the 85 ‘alerts’ by the dog.
☛ The Real Class Warfare is Baby Boomers Vs. Younger Americans: Hey kids, wake up! Stop playing your X-Box while listening to your Facebooks on the iPod and wearing your iPad with the cap turned backwards with the droopy pants and the bikini underwear listening to Snoopy Poopy Poop Dogg and the Enema Man and all that! Take a break from getting yet another tattoo on your ass bone or your nipples pierced already! And STFU about the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent! You’re not getting screwed by billionaires and plutocrats. You’re getting screwed by Mom and Dad. Systematically and in all sorts of ways. Old people are doing everything possible to rob you of your money, your future, your dignity, and your freedom. Here’s the irony, too (in a sort of Alanis Morissette sense): You’re getting hosed by the very same group that 45 years ago was bitching and moaning about “the generation gap” and how their parents just didn’t understand what really mattered in life.
☛ Egypt’s Government Planning to Destroy the Great Pyramids?: An online magazine has offered translations to Arabic news sources that purportedly indicate that Egypt’s Salafi party has come forth with plans to demolish Egypt’s Great Pyramids in an effort to bring down what it calls “symbols of paganism.”
☛ CCSU Police Say Student Faked Anti-Gay Notes: The day Alexandra Pennell addressed an anti-hate rally at Central Connecticut State University about the anti-gay messages scrawled on her door, police had begun to question her claims. Twice the video surveillance system placed in Pennell’s room to help police identify the person responsible for scrawling the notes had been disabled, in one case just before a note was slid under Pennell’s dorm room door. Police say only after they set up a second camera in a hall closet — a camera that Pennell did not know about — did they learn the truth: Pennell had been writing the notes herself.
☛ How to spot a meth lab, drug dealer in your neighborhood: The Smell Meth production creates an odor. It can be flammable and highly dangerous, depending on the recipe, and police say there are many different kinds. Ingredients can include muriatic acid, a chemical used for cleaning concrete; camp fuel and automotive starting fluid, all which have strong odors on their own. According to one website offering meth recipes, the smell of cooking meth with these ingredients can range from a rotten egg and chemical aroma to ammonia or cat urine smell, depending on the ingredients. “People experience different smells,” Madison County Sheriff Allen Riley said, but there is always a strong chemical smell. The smell can dissipate soon after the cooking is done. If cooked indoors, there is generally an exhaust or fan system rigged up to ventilate the cooking area, since the fumes generated can make the cook sick. Burgess said that while there are multiple ways to make meth, the “Shake and Bake” or “one-pan” method is the recipe most-used now
☛ Homemade drugs frustrating police: When Andrew Spofford was arrested by Grand Forks police last month, he told them he is a “hobby chemist.” Police say the end result of his chemistry was a synthetic drug that appears to have killed two teens in the area and sent several others to the hospital with overdoses. It’s a growing problem for law enforcement as investigators struggle to identify a myriad of new synthetic drugs. Knowledge of basic chemistry has allowed drug “cooks” to make small molecular changes to existing drugs, creating new substances and keeping the cooks a step ahead of investigators. “We are seeing a continued influx of changing of chemical compounds that make up various drugs or substances being ingested throughout the state,” said Drew Evans, senior special agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. “They are changing at the molecular level into something it wasn’t before, but may have similar effects or different effects.”
☛ Methadone to blame for one-third of U.S. prescription painkiller deaths, CDC says: Methadone accounts for only 2 percent of painkiller prescriptions in the United States – but the drug is behind more than 30 percent of prescription painkiller overdose deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. Methadone is commonly known for treating withdrawal symptoms from heroin addiction, but the drug is also prescribed for pain. Health officials say most of the overdose deaths are people who take it for pain – not heroin or drug addicts. According to the CDC, methadone carries more risks than other painkillers because levels build up in the body and may interfere with a person’s normal heart rhythm or breathing.
☛ The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn’t a Crook—He’s an Artist: The majority of counterfeiters, as one federal investigator told me, are meth heads who, after three nights without sleep, suddenly get the bright idea to scan a $20 bill, bleach a bunch of $5 bills, and print the image of the $20 on that same paper. Even the most senile merchant can usually spot these shams. But with his scrupulous craftsmanship, Kuhl placed himself among a rarefied class of counterfeiters who can produce truly high-quality fakes. They possess sophisticated knowledge about paper and dyes, and they have expertise in printing machinery and banknote security features such as watermarks and color-shifting ink. With a cigarette in one hand and a money- marking pen in the other, Kuhl began his quest to conquer the dollar by thumbing through thick binders of paper samples. Money-marking pens draw a black line on paper made with starch but not on stock that lacks starch, such as the ultrafine cotton-linen sheets manufactured by Crane & Co. of Dalton, Massachusetts
☛ The NSA’s warrantless wiretapping is a crime, not a state secret: And in Congress, two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been asking the NSA for a year simply for a ballpark figure of how many Americans have had their communications surveilled by the spy agency. The NSA finally responded two weeks ago, claiming it did not have the capacity to find such number. Apparently unaware of the irony, the NSA argued that releasing an estimate of how many people’s emails they read would violate Americans’ privacy.
☛ The Socialist Way: The Art of Shoplifting: Shoplifting is a topic that is practically relevant to many and it should therefore not become an exclusive craft confined to a small shoplifting elite. On the contrary, shoplifting is an art that deserves the widest possible dissemination. For your convenience we have printed below a step by step guide to shoplifting. Good luck.
☛ DHS taps database of license plate snapshots to hunt fugitives: More than 685 million continually updated images of license plates gathered in a commercial database soon will be available to federal authorities for pinpointing the hideouts of escaped illegal immigrants, according to a contract slated to be finalized Tuesday. The National Vehicle Location Service program, commonly used in law enforcement, is intended to augment manual field surveillance of fugitives, Homeland Security Department officials said. Fugitive aliens are non-U.S. citizens who have not complied with deportation orders. The geo-tracking data largely will come from commercial camera operators who capture license plate information on behalf of lenders trying to recover collateral from borrowers, according to the vendor, Vigilant Video. Also, law enforcement agencies themselves increasingly are deploying license plate readers to share photographs through the service.
☛ Dinosaur Sex Experts Concur That Animals Mated Front To Back: Ever think about dinosaur sex? Paleontologists do. And they’ve come up with some surprisingly specific ideas about how the prehistoric beasts were able to mate despite their enormous size and weight–and despite the horns and other bony appendages that might have proven bothersome when the creatures got hot and bothered. The males and females of modern-day birds and reptiles have a single body opening for urination, defecation, and reproduction–something called a cloaca (Latin for sewer). Paleontologists believe that dinosaurs had the same basic equipment, and that they coupled by pressing their cloacas together. No penis is needed to perform a “cloacal kiss.” But some birds have penises and crocodiles sport penis-like “intromittent organs,” and male dinosaurs might have had something similar. As you might imagine, a dinosaur penis might have been pretty big–perhaps up to 12 feet in length for T. Rexes.
☛ Pentagon’s Mega Stun Gun Could Blast You Unconscious: Imagine a stun gun that doesn’t just drop you to the floor, but renders you unconscious for several minutes. This tech is called a “nano-second electrical pulse,” and the Pentagon believes it could be used in a gun that would hit targets with high voltages of electricity for an amazingly short amount of time – we’re talking billionths of seconds here. That would make the enemy an easy capture. But today’s stun guns are already linked to dozens, if not hundreds, of abusive incidents. What happens if they become even more powerful?
☛ Provocative Palestine-Israel ads at New York train stations rile critics: Advertisements at train stations in suburban New York depicting shrinking Palestinian territory in Israel are riling some critics who say they are “deliberately misleading and inaccurate,” FoxNews.com has learned. The ads, which were purchased by The Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine, show the “Palestinian Loss of Land” from 1946 to 2010. An accompanying headline reads: “4.7 million Palestinians are classified by the U.N. as Refugees.”
☛ Biker Activities – First Date Ideas – BikerKiss.com
☛ Boyfriend assaults girlfriend with steak sauce over ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’: The sauciness of “Fifty Shades of Grey”–the titillating trilogy that millions of women around the world are reading this summer–turned literal late last month, when a 31-year-old British man, apparently upset that his girlfriend was one of them, assaulted her with a bottle of steak sauce. According to authorities in Carlisle, U.K., Raymond Hodgson was so bothered that his girlfriend, Emma McCormick, was reading E.L. James’ “pornographic” and “distasteful” book, he drove to her house and squirted her in the face. Thanks Jasmine
☛ Couple arrested for dancing on subway platform: lawsuit: “We were doing the Charleston,” Stern said. That’s when two police officers approached and pulled a “Footloose.” “They said, ‘What are you doing?’ and we said, ‘We’re dancing,’ ” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You can’t do that on the platform.’ ” The cops asked for ID, but when Stern could only produce a credit card, the officers ordered the couple to go with them — even though the credit card had the dentist’s picture and signature. When Hess began trying to film the encounter, things got ugly, Stern said. “We brought out the camera, and that’s when they called backup,” she said. “That’s when eight ninja cops came from out of nowhere.” Hess was allegedly tackled to the platform floor, and cuffs were slapped on both of them. The initial charge, according to Stern, was disorderly conduct for “impeding the flow of traffic.” “There was nobody on the platform. There were, like, three people,” she said.
☛ Man Gives Cops The Finger, Gets Arrested, Sues City: He was taken to the local precinct, where he cooled his heels for a couple of hours while being booked for disorderly conduct. While in the holding cell, the lawsuit alleges that “several officer-defendants made derogatory comments and taunts regarding their perception of Bell’s sexual orientation.” He was ultimately released without having to spend the night at the Tombs going through Central Booking, and after consulting with the NYCLU, Bell pleaded not guilty. And because Officer Play didn’t appear at the court date, the charges were dropped. But now Bell’s making a stand on behalf of all Americans who salute with one finger. His lawyer, Robert Quackenbush, assures us that flipping the middle finger is protected by the First Amendment, “particularly where the officers who were the target of the gesture never even saw it, and especially because the Supreme Court has said that police officers are expected to exercise restraint in response to criticism.”
☛ 14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies That Big Brother Will Soon Be Using To Spy On You: Most of us don’t think much about it, but the truth is that people are being watched, tracked and monitored more today than at any other time in human history. The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, spy agencies and big corporations monitoring tools that the despots and dictators of the past could only dream of. Previous generations never had to deal with “pre-crime” surveillance cameras that use body language to spot criminals or unmanned drones watching them from far above. Previous generations would have never even dreamed that street lights and refrigerators might be spying on them. Many of the incredibly creepy surveillance technologies that you are about to read about are likely to absolutely astound you. We are rapidly heading toward a world where there will be no such thing as privacy anymore. Big Brother is becoming all-pervasive, and thousands of new technologies are currently being developed that will make it even easier to spy on you
☛ How Many Checkpoints in One Morning?! Welcome to the Police State! [Video]: ‘No thank you!’
☛ Man made movies of drunken rape: A Webster man is in jail on no bond, accused of raping a 17-year-old female after getting her drunk nearly two years ago. Elric Shawn Millner, 24, is charged with sexual assault of an adult. According to court records, the woman told Webster police she was at Millner’s apartment on Aug. 3, 2010, when he gave her so much alcohol to drink that she has no memory of the night. She said she woke up between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. the next day, and Millner showed her videos he had taken the night before in which he forced her to perform sexual acts, records state. The woman saw herself in one video vomiting violently and urinating on herself because she was so intoxicated while the defendant laughed at her, according to the complaint filed against Millner by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. Thanks Jasmine

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For The Older People And The Kids

✰ Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’: The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.
✰ Pure ecstasy can be ‘safe’ for adults, health official says: B.C.’s top health official says taking pure ecstasy can be “safe” when consumed responsibly by adults, but he says he is not advocating legalized recreational use of the drug. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall says while the pure form of the drug has been proven safe in controlled clinical trials by psychiatrists, the type of ecstasy sold on the street is laced with potentially dangerous impurities.
✰ Why Are Twinkies Cheaper Than Carrots?: Next week, the U.S. Senate will begin floor debate on the 2012 Farm Bill, which lays the groundwork for nearly $1 trillion in U.S. government spending over the next decade. Most of that spending goes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP — still sometimes referred to as food stamps), and to subsidies and incentives for farmers. Efforts to restrict SNAP spending to healthier foods have been fought bitterly, and successfully, by the junk food lobbies. Meanwhile, the current Senate proposal would give tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to Big Agribusiness, but would give next to nothing to programs benefiting the environment, organic food, nutrition, or small farmers. The food blog Civil Eats calls the proposal an “all-you-can-eat-buffet for the subsidy lobby.”
✰ Murder alleged after drug lab blast in Livermore: A man and woman who were critically burned in an explosion in Livermore were arrested Thursday on suspicion of murdering a third person who died in the blast, after authorities determined the three had been making hashish oil in an apartment. The explosion occurred on May 21, 2011 at 3624 Silver Oaks Way. It killed Paul Lom, 35, of San Jose, while critically injuring Lexie Miriyah Hutson, 23, who lived in the unventilated apartment, and her boyfriend, Evan Aviles, 22. An investigation determined that all three had been making hashish oil, a controlled substance, said police Sgt. John Hurd. The group had been using liquid butane, which is highly flammable, to extract the oil, Hurd said, and allowed an unknown amount of butane to pool on the floor. Hutson and Aviles were each booked Thursday on suspicion of murder and manufacturing a controlled substance. Both lost parts of their fingers and were severely burned as a result of the explosion, which left the structure uninhabitable.
✰ Family Claims Man Shot By Police Was Handcuffed: SELLERSVILLE, Pa. – The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office is now investigating Saturday’s shooting of a 26-year-old man during a confrontation with Perkasie police. Michael Marino was shot to death by an officer after he started acting strangely, cursing out neighbors and struggling violently with police. Friends and family claim Marino was unarmed and handcuffed at the time. The district attorney won’t comment further. Neighbors who saw Marino say they knew something was wrong. The three officers involved in the arrest are on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.
✰ Why the U.S. Media Barely Covered Brutal Right-Wing Race Riots in Tel Aviv: Several weeks back, Israel was rocked by a night of right-wing race-riots targeting African refugees in Tel Aviv. The thuggery was frightening – refugees were attacked, African-owned businesses and stores were vandalized and a community was forced to hunker down behind closed doors in fear for their lives. Perhaps more disturbing still was that the riots, which began with an anti-immigrant demonstration, were incited by Israeli politicians representing the increasingly influential hard-right. They fired up the crowd, calling the refugees “infiltrators,” and a “cancer,” and accusing them of violence and rape. It was a classic example of “othering” – eliminationist rhetoric that led directly to action by the xenophobic crowd.
✰ Parents Sue School Over Forced Shower: The complaint states that West berated and harassed the 8-year-old, third-grade younger brothers on Nov. 15. The parents claim West told the child he “smelled badly, was dirty and that he had bad hygiene,” and took him to see Van Rite. They both told the child to disrobe and take a shower in their presence and while another student was in the nurse’s office, the parents say. “While P.T. objecting to completely disrobing and taking a shower, defendants West and Van Rite forced P.T. to remove his clothing and began violently washing his body with a washcloth, scrubbing him over a large portion of his body, stuck cotton balls in his ears, all while ridiculing and harassing him about being ‘dirty,’” the complaint states. “P.T. was then forced to apply deodorant at the insistence of defendant West and Van Rite, who then told P.T. ‘if you ever come to school dirty again[,] we will strip you buck naked and throw you in the shower and scrub you down.’”
✰ Media Consolidation: The Illusion of Choice (Infographic) These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America: As a dad (and blogger) I’m concerned with the integrity of the news and entertainment my family and I consume every day. Who really produces, owns and airs the shows my kids are glued to every evening and which companies select the stories I read with such loyalty each morning? I’ve always advocated for critical consumption, and what could be more important than an awareness of the sources of our families’ daily info and entertainment diets? And today, most of our media is controlled by one of six companies.
✰ Swedish Left Party Chapter Wants To Make Urinating While Standing Illegal For Men: Known as a socialist and feminist organization, the party claims that seated urination is more hygienic for men — the practice decreases the likelihood of puddles and other unwanted residue forming in the stall — in addition to being better for a man’s health by more effectively emptying one’s bladder, The Local reported. But not everyone agrees. “Men scatter urine not so much during the actual urination as during the ‘shaking off’ that follows,” John Gamel, a professor at the University of Louisville, wrote while addressing the issue in 2009. “As a result, forcing men to sit while emptying their bladders will serve little purpose, since no man wants to shake himself off while remaining seated on the toilet.”
✰ FBI Seizes NAMBLA List During Search: Following his May 23 arrest, Godek waived his Miranda rights and told agents that he had been “collecting pictures of teen boys for a very long time” and preferred “boys aged 14 and older,” according to Messineo’s affidavit. Godek admitted that he masturbated to these images, and “sent such pictures” to others via e-mail. With Godek’s consent, agents searched his vehicle (in which he had been living) and located the NAMBLA membership list and “articles about the arrests of NAMBLA members.” Investigators also seized “printed child pornography images,” a digital camera containing illicit images, and an “article about methods of enticing boys into sexual activity.” The FBI affidavit does not detail why Godek was in possession of the membership list, or what, if any, role he has with the secretive organization. NAMBLA claims it is a civil rights group dedicated to ending “the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships.”
✰ Groupthink And The Elevator Experiment: Want to see how people will change to fit in? In 1962, groundbreaking social psychologist Solomon Asch teamed up with the television show Candid Camera to demonstrate how quickly a basic social norm (how people stand in an elevator) could be reversed using group conformity. Just imagine all the behaviors and beliefs you could get tricked into following, via the power of social pressure. (The elevator experiment was still effective when replicated in the present day on the University of South Florida campus.)
✰ It happens – athletes poop their pants: Exhausted and dangerously dehydrated, Moss was losing control of her body with every step. But she trudged on, pushing herself toward victory. The legs went first. A quarter mile after passing the Sizzler, Moss wobbled, then her knees buckled inward and she telescoped to the ground like a dynamited building. The moment she hit the pavement, her bowels cut loose, emptying against her will. The torrent breached her dainty, light-blue running shorts and moved down her legs, where the hot, acidic fecal matter stung her skin and the putrid stench tattooed the inside of her nostrils.
✰ Scores of N.C. inmates ‘innocent’ of gun charges, yet still imprisoned: A USA TODAY investigation, based on court records and interviews with government officials and attorneys, found more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun. Many of them don’t even know they’re innocent. The legal issues underlying their situation are complicated, and are unique to North Carolina. But the bottom line is that each of them went to prison for breaking a law that makes it a federal crime for convicted felons to possess a gun. The problem is that none of them had criminal records serious enough to make them felons under federal law. Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.
✰ Marx 1975 Toy Catalog: Featuring Jack Davis illustrations.
✰ The next consumerization revolution: Your personal data: You’re giving away what’s valuable about you Right now, users give away valuable information about themselves. Sometimes they get something of real value in return, but most online businesses give away worthless “value” dressed up using gamification techniques. Klout, I’m looking at you. As we see more data breaches and grosser levels of disrespect for user privacy, I suspect the public will start to realize they’re being had. And as they’ve learned they can do in other venues, they’ll take charge. The pieces are out there to create a data brokerage that pays you I fully expect to see services pop up that act as personal-data brokers, giving users a cut of the money made from their personal information — the data users explicitly choose to share, not what is gathered about them sneakily. Again, this business model has long existed, but not in a way that allows individuals to participate in the proceeds.
✰ Cop dies during 3-way sex; widow wins $3M lawsuit: A jury has awarded a Georgia woman $3 million over her husband’s heart attack, finding that his doctor should have warned the Atlanta cop against strenuous activity like the three-way sex he was having at the time he died, WXIA-TV reports. William Martinez, a 31-year-old Atlanta police officer, collapsed and died while he and a male friend were having sex with a woman who was not his wife at an Atlanta airport motel in 2009.
✰ Pervy Perp Again Busted For Sex With Teddy Bear: For the fourth time in the past two years, a Cincinnati man has been arrested for masturbating in public with the aid of a teddy bear, records show. Charles Marshall, 28, was arrested Wednesday evening after employees at a health clinic spotted him pleasuring himself in an alley. Marshall, pictured in the adjacent mug shot, was cited for disorderly conduct. Municipal Court records show that Marshall has already been convicted three times of engaging in public indecency/disorderly conduct with a teddy bear. The misdemeanor counts resulted in short jail sentences and small fines for Marshall. Marshall was first busted in February 2010 when witnesses spotted him engaged “with a teddy bear in mens bathroom” at a public library (which prompted a judge to order him to “stay away all Hamilton Co. public libraries”). He was again arrested in November 2010 and August 2011 for “masturbating w/a stuffed animal (teddy bear)” and “masturbating using a teddy bear in a public place where minors
✰ Human Microbiome Project Explores Our 100 Trillion Good Bacteria: Babies born by Caesarean section, Dr. Proctor added, start out with different microbiomes, but it is not yet known whether their microbiomes remain different after they mature. In adults, the body carries two to five pounds of bacteria, even though these cells are minuscule — one-tenth to one-hundredth the size of a human cell. The gut, in particular, is stuffed with them. “The gut is not jam-packed with food; it is jam-packed with microbes,” Dr. Proctor said. “Half of your stool is not leftover food. It is microbial biomass.” But bacteria multiply so quickly that they replenish their numbers as fast as they are excreted. The bacteria also help the immune system, Dr. Huttenhower said. The best example is in the vagina, where they secrete chemicals that can kill other bacteria and make the environment slightly acidic, which is unappealing to other microbes.
✰ Hitchhiker retracts claim he was victim of drive-by shooting: A hitchhiker, who says he is writing a memoir called Kindness in America and claimed he was victim of a drive-by shooting in Montana, admits he shot himself, according to Montana authorities.
✰ Parents arrested after police find children blindfolded and bound outside Walmart (video): A suburban Chicago couple is behind bars and their five children are in protective custody after two of them were discovered blindfolded and with their limbs bound in the parking lot of a Walmart, police said. Adolfo Gomez, 52, and Deborah Gomez, 43, of Northlake, Illinois, were arrested after police visited the store in Lawrence, Kansas on Wednesday and spotted a 5-year-old boy sitting on the ground beside a large SUV with his hands tied behind his back, his legs bound and a blindfold covering his eyes. A 7-year-old girl was found inside the vehicle, also bound and blindfolded, along with three other children, ages 12, 13 and 15, who were not restrained. Thanks Jasmine
✰ More Women Were Likely Videotaped in Sears Dressing Room, Says Lawyer: Female customers who shopped at a Sears store in North Hollywood, Calif., over the past three years may have been videotaped in the dressing rooms and restrooms, according to an attorney representing 25 women suing the retail chain. The group is suing Sears and a former maintenance worker who allegedly videotaped them from 2009 to April 2012. Michael Alder, the attorney for the plaintiffs, said an unknown number of female customers were also likely videotaped in the store during that period. “There’s a lot of people who were patrons and don’t have any idea that they’ve been videotaped,” Alder said.
✰ Furry Child: Chinese Girl’s Body Covered by Black Spots & Fur: 6-year-old Lili of Liuchang village of Qingzhen county city in Guizhou province, the left side of her face covered with black fur, with large and small black spots all over her body. When she was 2 years old, her mother left the family never to return, her father took her to a childcare nursery and disappeared without a trace, and it was kind-hearted distant relative Liu Mingying who brought her back from Guiyang to the village. She has now reached school age and though the school is right in front of her home, attending school is still something unattainable for Lili. Qianzhong Morning News/CFP Lili was born with these black spots, and when she was two years old, her mother could no longer stand this “fur child”, and in her frustration abandoned Lili, never to return. Her father, who had been working long-term in Guiyang brought her to a children’s nursery, and never reappeared.
✰ KeepTheWebOpen.com: But where can a digital citizen turn for protection against the powerful? This question lay at the heart of the fight to stop SOPA and PIPA and keep the web open. While I do not have all the answers, the remarkable cooperation we witnessed in defense of an open Internet showed me three things. First, government is flying blind, interfering and regulating without understanding even the basics. Second, we have a rare opportunity to give government marching orders on how to treat the Internet, those who use it and the innovation it supports. And third, we must get to work immediately because our opponents are not giving up.
✰ Bondage-Loving Swedish Mom Admits Building Sex Chamber In Abandoned Military Bunker: A Swedish mom has a face that is 50 shades of red ever since police came across a secret sex chamber she set up at an abandoned military bunker near the town of Nordmaling. Last Friday, two fisherman came across the old bunker and discovered what appeared to be either a garden of earthly delights complete with a silk-sheet laden bed, ropes, dildos and leather items — or a crime scene. The fishermen assumed it was a crime scene, according to Sweden’s The Local, especially since a similarly equipped dungeon was discovered in March 2011 in an abandoned farmhouse.
✰ Woman’s mouth ‘falls pregnant’ to twelve squid after biting into sea creature, scientists claim: When examined, the doctors found ‘baby cephalopods’ attached to her mouth. These are small pods, covered in a cement-like material to make them stick. Inside the pods is an ‘ejaculatory apparatus’ and sperm – with the apparatus expelling the sperm quite forcefully. After the victim of the ‘attack’ was hospitalised, doctors removed the baby cephalopods from her gums, tongue and cheek. It was only then that the pods were formally identified as ‘squid spermatophores.’ The Center’s paper says: ‘She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity. ‘Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva [gums] were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa. ‘On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.’
✰ He rigged his rig to beat toll: Now you see it, now you don’t. A Queens truck driver took a move from the magician’s playbook, making his license plate seemingly disappear as he drove through a toll plaza without paying the $40 fee, the Port Authority said Wednesday. Orlando Payano’s tractor-trailer had a cable running from the license plate to the dashboard cigarette lighter when PA police stopped it recently on the Staten Island side of the Goethals Bridge, authority spokesman Steve Coleman said
✰ Conspiracy Of Silence [Video]: Conspiracy of Silence is a powerful, disturbing documentary revealing a U.S. child sex abuse and pedophilia ring that leads to the highest levels of government. Featuring intrepid investigator John DeCamp, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and 16-year Nebraska state senator, Conspiracy of Silence reveals how rogue elements at all levels of government have been involved in systematic child sex abuse and pedophilia to feed the base desires of key politicians. Based on DeCamp’s riveting book, The Franklin Cover-up, Conspiracy of Silence begins with the shut-down of Nebraska’s Franklin Community Federal Credit Union after a raid by federal agencies in 1988 revealed that $40 million was missing. When the Nebraska legislature launched a probe into the affair, what initially looked like a financial swindle soon exploded into a startling tale of drugs, money laundering, and a nationwide child sex abuse ring. Nineteen months later, the legislative committee’s chief investigator died suddenly
✰ You know it’s an election year when… Barack Obama honors Israeli president with Medal of Freedom: US President Barack Obama has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Israeli President Shimon Peres, the man who has overseen the killing of Palestinian women and children by Israeli forces in the occupied territories for decades.
✰ Jesse Ventura Explains Why Governments Are Like Gangs: “When you vote, you’re essentially choosing gang members — do you want the Crips to lead or the Bloods?” Ventura says, noting that the Bloods’ colors are red, like the Republicans, and the Crips’ color is blue, like the Democrats.
✰ Top 10 Most Incredible Prison Escapes: Every year, thousands of inmates escape from prisons around the world. Of these, most just walk away from minimum-security corrections facilities, but other inmates implement complex, ingenious, and often violent schemes in order to make their getaway. Whether the work of notorious outlaws, WWII G.I.s, or 18th century writers, the following are the top 10 most incredible prison escapes.
✰ Police: ‘Forest Boy’ story is a hoax: The story of the so-called Forest Boy — a riddle that has perplexed people in Germany and elsewhere for months — is a lie, police in Germany said Friday. The 20-year-old hoaxer, who claimed he was 17 and lived in the German woods for five years, is actually from Hengelo, in the Netherlands. He never lived in the forest and made his way to Berlin some time last year, police said. He had been declared missing in September when he was 19. But because he was an adult and could determine where he wanted to live, there was no further investigation by Dutch authorities, police in Germany said. Police say the man has admitted his story is a lie and confirmed his identity. He will have to leave a Berlin city youth home since he is not under age.
✰ NPIEE: The North Pole Inner Earth Expedition: The science is real. The story is more than 5,000 years old. The legend says that at a certain place above the Arctic Circle, there exists an oceanic depression or an entrance into the Earth. It’s a place where the maritime legend claims sea level isn’t level anymore. The discovery that the earth is hollow would forever shatter our long-held beliefs about how planets are formed. More importantly, however, discovering life beneath the earth’s crust could potentially provide us with new tools that would allow life on the surface to regain environmental balance, harmony, and possibly even peace. These prospects make the North Pole Inner Earth Expedition the greatest expedition in the history of the world.
✰ Living Stem Cells Discovered in 17-Day-Old Human Corpses: The cadavers in question had been kept at 39 degrees F (4 degrees C) to keep from rotting. The stem cells the researchers isolated give rise to skeletal muscle, the kind connected to the bones, as opposed to the kind in the heart or other internal organs. [The Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt & Beyond] Apparently the stem cells were able survive in the total absence of oxygen. “These cells are so resistant to extreme and deleterious conditions that they stay alive up to 17 days after death,” Chrétien said. The researchers also recovered viable stem cellsfrom mice 14 days after death. These cells appeared to function properly after they were transplanted into living mice, helping regenerate damaged tissues.
✰ Officials investigating possible lungs found on South L.A. sidewalk: L.A. NOW Southern California — this just in Los Angeles County officials are investigating what appeared to be a pair of lungs found on a sidewalk in unincorporated South Los Angeles. A citizen called to report what she thought were the organs about 8:30 p.m. Sunday in the 13100 block of Avalon Boulevard, said Sgt. Robert Dean of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies responded and called the coroner’s office to the scene. Additional testing will be done to determine if the remains are in fact lungs and whether they are human, Dean said. “We don’t know what they are,” Dean said. “It’s really weird.”
✰ Tennessee’s deadbeat dads: The three men who have 81 children by 46 different women… and they’re not paying child support to any of them: Three men in Tennessee have notched up a staggering 78 children by 46 different women between them – and are doing their best to squirm out of paying for a single one. Terry Turnage has 23 children with 17 different women, while Richard M. Colbert has 25 children with 18 women. But Desmond Hatchett takes the record with 30 children with 11 women. On rare occasions, they pay a few dollars to the long-suffering mothers but mostly leave the state to pick up the slack – while one eludes his responsibilities altogether thanks to a stint in prison. The latest deadbeat dad to emerge from the state is Turnage, who was summoned before a judge over child support payments for his 23 kids by 17 different women – but didn’t show up to court.
✰ Woman accused of castrating man with bare hands: Police in Shelby say they arrested a woman over the weekend after she squeezed a man’s testicles out of his scrotum. Joyce Maxine Gregory, 35, is charged with malicious castration and assault inflicting serious bodily injury, according to Shelby Police Chief Jeff Ledford. Police say Gregory got into an argument with an older man Saturday morning. When he went outside to call 911 she followed him and grabbed his scrotum.
✰ What Does It Mean To Be Cool? It May Not Be What You Think: “James Dean is no longer the epitome of cool,” Dar-Nimrod said. “The much darker version of what coolness is still there, but it is not the main focus. The main thing is: Do I like this person? Is this person nice to people, attractive, confident and successful? That’s cool today, at least among young mainstream individuals.”