Graff

Here Comes the Neighborhood Episode 6 : IRAK

In this episode of Here Comes the Neighborhood, Kunle Martins aka EARSNOT, founder of the IRAK CREW, along with Jesse Geller aka NEMEL break down the importance of good penmanship, the difference between murals and graffiti, and the concept behind their “tagging mosaic” in Wynwood. Stealing, masturbation and other compulsive behaviors are also addressed.

For more information on Kunle Martins follow him at twitter.com/KunleIRAK

Jesse Geller, his dog and his girlfriend can be found at coastttocoast.tumblr.com/

File under Graffiti, IRAK Crew, SeMeN SPeRmS Approved, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS ViDeO CLuB

U$$A

  • A movie script that had been rejected provoked a bomb scare in Beverly Hills Thursday afternoon.Authorities responded after a briefcase was found in an alley at Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard just before 10:30 a.m.

    Parts of Beverly Hills were shut down for two hours and some businesses were evacuated as the bomb squad pulled a suspicious device from a literary agent’s office.

    Turns out it wasn’t a real bomb, but a briefcase with a computer inside and a screenplay a man wanted the agent to read.

    Beverly Hills police say the screenwriter won’t be charged with a crime. They wouldn’t reveal his name, but they say he’s been asking this agent for some time to read his work and left the briefcase when the agent refused to read it.

  • Fukushima nuclear power plant radiation recordings of external gamma radiation have been so high this week, they went off scale said veteran nuclear expert Arnie Gunderson on Thursday after the famous physicist, Dr. Chris Busby told the Japanese people this week that radioactive air contamination there is now 300 times that of Chernobyl and 1000 times the atomic bomb peak in 1963, inferring that hundreds of millions of people are now dying from Fukushima radiation, including people in the United States.
  • Egypt’s General Authority for Export and Import Control recently discovered radioactive cargo in two containers shipped from Japan to Ain Sokhna port, the Red Sea Ports Authority said.This is the third radioactive shipment Egypt has discovered over the past month.

    The radioactive material was found aboard ships carrying electric and mechanical instruments. A letter from Egypt’s atomic energy authorities confirmed the cargo had above-regulation radiation levels.

    An official at the seaport said the Ministry of Environment and DP Worlds, which runs the Ain Sokhna port, transferred the ships to a sandy area in order to prevent the radiation from spreading to other shipments and vessels.

    The authority said it would review communications between Japan and the companies that imported the shipments. It had said in late July it would immediately withdraw the shipping licenses of any companies responsible for importing radioactive cargo.

  • Inmates typically do not choose to return to prison once they are released, but Thursday morning officers at Folsom Prison were dealing with a former prisoner who snuck back on campus.Correctional officers arrested 48-year-old Marvin Lane Ussery for being on prison grounds. Ussery was paroled in 2009 after serving time for a robbery charge, he was held at California State Prison, Sacramento, also called New Folsom Prison.

    Officers say Ussery snuck onto the prison grounds overnight, and was spotted on thermal imaging equipment around 1:30 a.m.

  • If you’re on a longboard, you failed already. Thanks Baller

  • More face transplant recipients and donor families are going public. They are boosting acceptance of an operation that six years ago was just daredevil theory.On Thursday, a Boston hospital released a photo of Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman mauled by a chimpanzee. She had a face transplant in May. Other people who have had face transplants are now able to walk the streets without people knowing they have someone else’s face.

    Eighteen such transplants have been done worldwide. The first was in November 2005 on a French woman mauled by her dog. The first in the U.S. was in December 2008 in Cleveland. A Pittsburgh hospital hopes to offer them soon. The U.S. Department of Defense is funding more in hopes of helping disfigured soldiers.

  • FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a five-step plan on Wednesday to update the technology that powers the 911 emergency response system.The plan will enable the transmission of text messages, voice calls, videos and photos, as well as automatic location information. The FCC hopes that such a plan will enable emergency responders to respond faster while also giving individuals more options for contacting 911, depending on the emergency situation.

  • You’d think graffiti would be a young man’s game. Especially the kind of down-and-dirty, illegal type that requires taggers to covertly leave their mark while being prepared to run like hell if anyone catches them. Well, there’s always an exception to the rule.Meet 71-year-old Charles Ignatius Wesley. He was finally arrested after leaving his tag on hundreds of telephone poles in Pinellas County over the past five years.

    The initials SLA had been popping up on phone poles in the area since at least 2006. According to the St. Petersburg Times, sheriff’s deputies originally thought the tag could be connected to the Symbionese Liberation Army, the left-wing radical group that made waves in the ’70s by kidnapping heiress Patty Hearst.

  • Another milestone for custom-crafted transplants: the world’s first lab-built sphincters. The breakthrough offers hope to countless people who have become incontinent through damage to their own anal sphincters.The spare-part sphincters were made with some human cells, but have been implanted only in mice so far. Researchers made them by growing donated smooth muscle cells from human sphincters alongside gut nerve cells from mice in circular moulds.

  • “Yeah, there’s a group of African Americans that are walking down 75th Street, going north, that thought it was okay to have a law abiding citizen walking by… and they just jump me, what?”"Do you need an ambulance, sir?”

    “No I don’t need an ambulance. I’m bleeding but I don’t give a shit.”

    “Do you want an ambulance?”

    “No I don’t want a fucking ambulance. Send some squads, arrest these people.”

    “We have squads all over the area you’re going to have to walk up to an officer and find one.”

    “Walk up to an officer? I don’t see an officer anywhere what are you talking about?”

    “We have about 20 squads all around the general area.”

    “I mean this is what I gotta go through, I pay taxes and I’m walking down the fucking street — really? — and this is what the fuck happens, some stupid fucking black motherfuckers, they think they can just punch people, really?”

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File under Graffiti, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death

Surrender Dorothy

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

    “Yes,” he says. “I can.”

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

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

    “A girl or a boy?” he asks.

    “A girl probably,” I say.

    “How old?”

    “Maybe 10 or 11.”

    “Not a problem.”

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

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

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

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

    “Why not?”

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

    I’m not exactly sure what that means.

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

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

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

    BANK BAILOUTS: Bipartisan.

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

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

  • A statement to police that led to the arrest of the leader of an alleged Thai rhino poaching syndicate exposes the sleaze in the officially sanctioned shooting of this endangered species, with prostitutes used in “canned hunts”.
  • A global maritime watchdog says sea piracy worldwide surged 36 percent to 266 attacks in the first half this year as Somali pirates took higher risks and raided more vessels.

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

  • Super cool mini models of old Hong Kong.
  • A paper authored by Tatu Westling of Helsinki University explores the relationship between the GDP growth of countries and the penile length of their residents.

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

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

  • There are skinny houses. And then there is Jakub Szczęsny’s Keret House, which could make Calista Flockhart look like a fatty. At its most generous, the proposed place, in Warsaw, Poland, will clock in at 4 feet wide. At its narrowest, it’ll be just 28 inches wide — thinner than the average doorway. And we complain about our sardine can in New York…
  • Every morning before school, nine-year-old Terisia Techu would undergo a painful procedure. Her mother would take a burning hot pestle straight out of a fire and use it to press her breasts.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Why stop at the seat?

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

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

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

  • As I traveled on the Beltway in the early ’70s near the Mormon Temple in Kensington, I was always amused by one re-occurring sight. On an overpass just as the temple comes into view, someone would always spray paints in big letters “Surrender Dorothy.” The line was from “The Wizard of Oz,” and I’m fairly sure it reflected the graffiti artist’s impression that the temple was reminiscent of the spires that Dorothy and company saw as they approached the Emerald City and their subsequent fear when the witch wrote the phrase in the sky. While I recognize that it was illegal to do that, I marveled at the writer’s ability to write it so boldly as to be seen from the highway. I’ve often wondered if anyone knew the story behind it or knew who the person was.
  • She went into the lavatory hoping to relieve the pain, but instead suddenly gave birth. The baby fell into the lavatory bowl and through the flap onto the tracks under the speeding train, and her mother quickly ran out of the lavatory and jumped from the carriage to find the child.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Some HIV-positive patients in Swaziland are so poor they have resorted to eating cow dung before taking anti-retroviral drugs, Aids activists say.
  • A former employee of Memorial Sloan-Kettering pleaded guilty Tuesday to ripping off $1.5 million worth of toner cartridges from the cancer center to buy diamond jewelry and an expensive car, among other high-priced amenities.

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

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

  • A bundle of cash is a powerful emotional trigger. In fact, human brain scans have shown that the idea of money stimulates the same primal pleasure centers as food, sex and cocaine. So what does this tell you? That if you’re going to use prop money in your film or photograph, you must make it look as real as possible for maximum impact. Here is an abridged how-to guide to making a top-notch bundle of prop money
  • Last October, a man named Rick Gold, a 30-something lawyer who said he lived in Denver’s trendy Highlands neighborhood, appeared on the social scene and slipped comfortably into a welcoming circle of young Jewish professionals.

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

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

    Except that they didn’t.

  • At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year’s worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillace Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae.
  • Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Whitcomb confessed that between the years of 2007 and 2010, he produced videos containing three boys, all which were under the age of 16. According to prosecutors, Whitcomb first gained the trust of his victims and their families by inviting them over to play video games. Ultimately the video games turned into video recordings of sexual activities. According to the victims, Whitcomb would resort to violence if they would not comply with his wishes.
  • (PAUSE!)
  • The six-week-old cat – which was abandoned at the roadside – earned the moniker because of her distinctive black moustache.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Primitive ancestors of the guillotine were used in Ireland, England and Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Several known decapitation devices such as the Italian Mannaia, the Scottish Maiden, and the Halifax Gibbet are well documented and may pre-date the use of the French guillotine by as much as 500 years. The following deals mostly with the modern guillotine from the late 18th Century until today. It is not meant to be a complete history or even a complete overview of the history as this would take hundreds of pages. Instead consider it a brief introduction to the subject highlighted by a few good pictures.
  • Federal agents from the FBI and CIA/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force tried to get a distinguished international lawyer to inform on his Arab and Muslim clients in violation of their Constitutional rights to attorney-client privilege, this reporter has learned. When the lawyer refused, he said the FBI placed him on a “terrorist watch list.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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File under Graffiti, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS Links 'o Death, Sex

Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on July 30, 2011

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PHEW..!

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

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

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

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

  • The change in Oxycontin formulation had a second, deadlier effect. Oxycodone is a lipid (fat)-soluble molecule, so the drug crosses nasal membranes quickly—almost as quickly as when the drug is injected. Most users of oxycodone were content to snort the drug, as the benefit of injecting was not worth dissolving the crushed tablets and using needles. But heroin burns when it is ‘insufflated’ or snorted, and the molecule crossed lipid membranes more slowly— providing reasons to inject the drug. Many patients tell me that they never considered using needles when Oxycontin was around, but that the only way to get similar effects from heroin was by injecting the drug. In other words, the change in formulation of Oxycontin resulted in an increase in intravenous drug abuse.
  • According to New Mexico state police, the mother of Velasquez’s nine-year-old son noticed unusual track marks on the boy’s neck and took him to the hospital. There, the youngster told investigators about how his dad would inject him with heroin sometimes. The police then arrested Velasquez, who’s now facing charges of child abuse and contributing to a delinquency of a minor.
  • The Ecuadorian government imposed a 72-hour nationwide ban on sales and consumption of alcohol after 21 people died from drinking homemade aguardiente made with methanol.

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

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

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

  • UFOs and aliens beings have often been portrayed in mass media, whether it be movies or television shows. Most of these appearances were however heavily edited and calculated by the American government in order to communicate a specific attitude towards this mysterious phenomenon. What is the purpose of these efforts? This article looks at the fascinating history of government involvement in UFO-related movies and television shows.
  • Yes, she carved her initials in her desk on the floor of the state House, state Rep. Julia Hurley, R-Lenoir City, confirmed today.

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

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

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

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

  • Never Forget 9/11
    Religion was the cause.
  • Pollution in the Puget Sound is such a problem that a group trying to protect the ecosystem spent $27,000 in state money to make a catchy video, complete with dance steps, telling people how they can do something about it.

    Pick up dog poop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • A NASA video from a time of great optimism about space exploration. The Apollo missions were completed and the Space Shuttle program was underway. How soon before cheap and frequent flights to space would allow the construction of O’Neal colonies and mining camps on the Moon? This visionary approach calls for tiered greenhouses in space and unlimited solar power beamed back to Earth… all before the year 2000!
  • LulzSec, the group of hackers that said three weeks ago it was disbanding, claimed credit Monday for defacing Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper website, while an allied group, Anonymous, claimed credit for a denial-of-service attack that brought down the website of The Times, another Murdoch paper. The Sunday Times and News International sites also appeared to be down Monday.

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

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

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

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

  • On physical examination, the breasts were symmetrical having no nodes or retractions. In the plantar region of the patient’s left foot, there was a well-formed nipple was surrounded by areola and hair on the surface, measuring 4.0 cm in diameter, with no palpable nodes (Figs. 1 and 2). The remaining physical examination was normal, including the mammary line. Results of the following laboratory tests were normal: complete blood count, fasting serum glucose level, urine exam, electrolytes, serum urea and creatinine. No alterations were found during ultrasound of the lesion and urinary tract.
  • Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum? Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been a visitor to what’s called the “uncanny valley.”

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

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

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

  • The cases are jarring and similar to those involving PCP in the 1970s. Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself “to pieces” over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.
  • In the ’60s, a lot of people were experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs including marijuana, LSD and everything in between. You had acid rock posters in San Francisco associated with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and groups like that.

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

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

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

    Warning: contains images that some people may find offensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • While Congress and the President fight it out over the debt ceiling and all of America quietly shudders over whether our economy will completely default on itself, at least one industry still hums along without a care in the world. Amidst a fiscal crisis of apparently apocalyptic proportions, where the GOP demands dollar for dollar spending cuts from the budget in order to raise our debt limit, the Pentagon asked Congress for $264 million to cover part of a $771 million overrun on the F-35 program. The Hill reports Republican Senator John McCain let the news slip via Twitter, saying “Congress notified that first F-35 jets have cost overruns of $771M. Outrageous! Pentagon asking for $264M down payment now. Disgraceful.”
  • On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

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

  • Cut into the flesh with nails and makeshift blades, rubbed into the wounds with a mixture of melted black rubber seals, ground red brick, trash bins, batteries, and saliva — these tattoos are forbidden in the South African prison system. Despite the severe penalties and permanent stigma, tattooing persists. For her photo study Life After, Cape Town photographer Araminta de Clermont sought out former inmates of “Numbers” prison gangs who were struggling for acceptance and survival since being released after years, sometimes decades of incarceration and shot their portraits in their current environment. Faces. Signs. A sailor’s grave. A note to a deceased mother, inked across the forehead. These full body and facial tattoos serve as narratives of crime history and life struggle. See the compelling images in our gallery.
  • A bill that seeks to clamp down on online child pornography is raising some alarms in the tech and privacy communities because of a provision that would require Internet service providers to store users’ IP addresses for 18 months.

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

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

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

  • Timothy McVeigh? The V-Tech Shooter? The Columbine Killers? John Hinkley Junior? Mark David Chapman? Sirhan Sirhan? Harvey Lee Oswald? These people have significantly impacted our lives, all MK Ultra victims.
  • Officials are pushing for a settlement with mortgage companies that, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, “would broadly absolve the firms of wrongdoing in exchange for penalties reaching $30 billion and assurances that the firms will adhere to better practices.”

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

    Neither of these arguments makes much sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Tokyo Electric Power Co. is rushing to install a cover over a building at its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant to shield it from wind and rain as Typhoon Ma-on approaches Japan’s coast from the south.
  • BP reported yet another pipeline leak at its Alaskan oilfields, frustrating the oil giant’s attempts to rebuild its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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