✸ Miami Man Thinks Uploading a Sex Tape of a 14-Year-Old to Facebook is a Good Idea, Promptly Gets Arrested

When trying to get revenge on someone, it’s best that your plan doesn’t end up getting you arrested for child pornography charges. Take Rashad Hannibal Jackson for example. He wanted to get back at an ex for “disrespecting” him, so he decided to upload a tape he had secretly made while the two were getting busy back in the summer of 2009 to Facebook. This is a flawed plan of revenge on pretty much every level, but most specifically because the video was recorded when the girl was only 14.

✸ Penis tattoo gives guy permanent erection

You’d think somebody repeatedly sticking a needle in your penis would be a little off-putting, but the 21-year-old Iranian apparently thought it would be a grand idea to have Persian script reading borow be salaamat (good luck on your journeys), and the first initial of his girlfriend’s last name (“M”) tattooed onto his little gentleman. He was left with a permanent semi-erection as a reminder of just how good the idea was.  His case raises a number of questions, not least whether the wish for good luck is directed to the penis or to the man, and if it’s to the penis, where, exactly, is it going? But, medically speaking, how could getting penis ink give make the organ go haywire?

✸ Bulldozers back at ‘sex den’ mosque

“Mosques are sacred places, but if they are left abandoned they just become like any other deserted building that is a good location for youngsters to have sex, drink alcohol and use drugs.

✸ How NASA kept astronauts from swearing on the Moon

In preparing for his mission, NASA had the astronaut hypnotized. Rather than curse, a psychiatrist put the idea in his head that he would rather hum when his mind wandered. The hypnotized astronaut is rarely named, but only one man can be heard humming as he skipps across the lunar surface. Transmissions from Commander Pete Conrad are punctuated with “dum de dum dum dum” and “dum do do do, do do” making him the likliest candidate.

✸ Microbes may power up space robots

Today’s robotic space missions take careful steps to avoid carrying tiny bacterial life from Earth that could contaminate the surface of Mars or other planets. That may all change if a NASA-funded effort can harness microbes as an almost endless power source for the next generation of robotic explorers. Such microbial fuel cells could power space robots almost indefinitely, as long as their bacteria have the tiny amounts of food needed to stay alive and create electricity through their chemical reactions. That would offer an alternative to space missions that rely upon either nuclear or solar power for their batteries — NASA’s Spirit Mars rover was officially declared dead last May after the Red Planet’s harsh winter deprived it of sunlight for its solar panels.

✸ Killing the Kodak moment … is the iPhone really to blame?

In the days of film cameras, personal photography was principally about holding on to personal memories, with photos usually ending up in a shoebox. Photography was once about saving personal memories. deflam But recent research by anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists suggests personal photography has moved from being mostly a tool for remembering, to one of emphasising communication and our individual identities. As with most change, researchers have noted this switch most prominently in teenagers and young adults. This shift has been supported by the changes in underlying technology and the advent of “frictionless” sharing of photos and video via social network platforms. In the context of photography, “frictionless sharing” means minimising the number of steps between taking a photo and sharing it via a social network platform.

✸ ‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today’s fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of “badges” to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain—intentionally so—to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom.

✸ US overthrew Iran’s democracy 1953-1979, armed Iraq to invade 1980-1988, now lies for more war

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, has reported since 2005 that government insiders have disclosed to him that the CIA is presently engaged in covert operations similar to 1953 to overthrow the Iranian government.[17] Hersh, claiming inside White House sources, reported one idea from Vice President Dick Cheney was for the US Navy to build four or five boats that looked like Iranian Naval PT boats, man and arm them with US Navy Seals, then have the Navy Seals attack a US Navy ship off Iran’s coast. The incident would be filmed and used as propaganda to enflame US public opinion for war with Iran.[18] Hersh is the reporter who insiders trusted to report the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up in the Vietnam War, and the Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal in the current Iraq war. Scott Ritter, US former weapons inspector and officer for US Marine Intelligence calls any covert planning and actions by their correct legal name: Acts of War.

✸ This Girl Snuck Into a Russian Military Rocket Factory

Her name is Lana Sator and she snuck into one of NPO Energomash factories outside of Moscow. Her photos are amazing, like sets straight out of Star Wars or Alien. Now the Russian government is harassing her. It was easy to get in. She just went there, jumped over the fence and got right into the heart of the complex through a series of tunnels and pipes, which was very surprising. After all, this is an active industrial installation that belongs to one of the top manufacturers of liquid-fuel rockets in the world. Their engines power the modern Soyuz, the Zenit 3SL, and the Angara and Baikal launch vehicles. Heck, their RD-180 engine powers the first stage of the Atlas V, an American rocket. More importantly, they have specially strong ties to the Russian military. And yet, she found nobody. No guards, no security. Nothing. Just a few CCTV cameras here and there in rooms packed with huge machinery.

✸ US scraps 8-decades-old FBI definition of rape, to count more people as victims, including men

The Obama administration on Friday expanded the FBI’s more than eight-decade-old definition of rape to count men as victims for the first time and to drop the requirement that victims must have physically resisted their attackers. The new definition will increase the number of people counted as rape victims in FBI statistics, but it will not change federal or state laws or alter charges or prosecutions. It’s an important shift because lawmakers and policymakers use crime statistics to allocate money and other resources for prevention and victim assistance. The White House said the change was not motivated by the recent Penn State child sex-abuse scandal. Indeed, the expanded definition has been long awaited as many states and research groups made similar changes in their definitions of rape over recent decades.

✸ Forty seven Muslim paedophile suspects to appear in court in Liverpool

Inside info that 47 Muslim groomers, alleged paedophiles mainly from Rochdale and Manchester appeared at Liverpool crown court this week under massive police security. All are males aged between 20 and 50. Newspapers have been told not to report on this. Why? Its good that the police are acting on this massive problem, but why the secrecy? They obviously are concerned about “community cohesion”. Even while dealing with it, they STILL want to keep the scale of the problem from the British public. All suspects are bailed to Liverpool Crown court on February 6th for trial.

✸ Weather Weapons and Earthquake Bombs: World Leaders Condemn Britain and America’s Secret Arsenal

Weather weapons and earthquake bombs are a fraction of America’s commitment to achieving Full Spectrum Dominance by 2020. We need to be responsible and realise that taxes have paid for decades of secret research into these fields which, in our time, are coming to fruition. We need to show the courage of Chavez and Ahmadenijad and speak out against this—particularly those journalists and academics who have access to public platforms and are keeping quiet. We also need to take seriously the likelihood that Mother Earth herself—specifically the ionosphere and troposphere (with daily chemtrail spraying)—has been turned into a weapon. Generally, those responsible are cowardly men hiding away in Command and Control centres, using modern science in order to fulfil their outdated genetic impulses for power and domination: impulses which should have been left in the Stone Age—and if we keep letting them damage the ionosphere, that is an era to which most of us may be returning.

✸ Nazi 3D films from 1936 discovered

James Cameron and his team of minions may have produced the high watermark for 3D technology in the 21st century, but it seems the Nazis got there first. The Australian film-maker Philippe Mora says he has discovered two 30-minute 3D films shot by propagandists for the Third Reich in 1936, a full 16 years before the format first became briefly popular in the US. The first of the films, titled So Real You Can Touch It, features shots of sizzling stereoscopic bratwursts on a barbecue while the second, named Six Girls Roll Into Weekend, features actors Mora believes were probably stars from Germany’s top wartime studio, Universum Film. “The quality of the films is fantastic,” Mora told Variety.com. “The Nazis were obsessed with recording everything and every single image was controlled – it was all part of how they gained control of the country and its people.”

✸ Meet the Generationally Biased

These naysayers among us demonstrate a kind of generational bias that can blunt a promising musician’s career. It can be summarized thus: “The only valid music is what I liked when I was in my teens.” They tend to be vocal about their disapproval and aren’t likely to exploit new methods of dissemination, such as downloading or using Spotify, to hear new sounds. When they come across new music, it’s usually pushed toward them by a critic or a friend, or they hear a snippet on television. Had they been around in 1955, or 1963, they might have dismissed Messrs. Berry and Dylan too. Often aggressive and belligerent, the generationally biased—let’s call them Gee-Bees—rarely attribute their affection for the music of their youth to tender memories. They present their argument as perceived wisdom: Popular music was better then. For you to disagree is to reveal a deficiency on your part. Cite examples of excellence among today’s musicians and you too are dismissed.

✸ New materials remove carbon dioxide from smokestacks, tailpipes and even the air

Their tests showed that these inexpensive materials achieved some of the highest carbon dioxide removal rates ever reported for humid air, under conditions that stymie other related materials. After capturing carbon dioxide, the materials give it up easily so that the CO2 can be used in making other substances, or permanently isolated from the environment. The capture material then can be recycled and reused many times over without losing efficiency. The researchers suggest the materials may be useful on submarines, in smokestacks or out in the open atmosphere, where they could clean up carbon dioxide pollution that comes from small point sources like cars or home heaters, representing about half of the total CO2 emissions related to human activity.

✸ Just In: Japanese Expert Says Fukushima II (not I) Nuke Plant’s Containment Vessel Has Been Damaged by the Quake

One Japanese expert, Hiromitsu Ino, said a Containment Vessel at Fukushima II (Daini) is broken, and they are trying to repair it. It was probably caused by the earthquake, not tsunami. The workshop is on-going at this link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iwj-osaka1#utm_campaign=t.co&utm;_source=8481429&utm;_medium=social Hiromitsu Ino is professor emeritus at Tokyo University. His area of specialty is metallic materials science. He is the head of the Group of Concerned Scientists and Engineers Calling for the Closure of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant. I still remember a tweet last summer (I think) saying an acquaintance fleeing from the area near Fukushima II Nuke Plant right after the earthquake saw a smoke coming out of one of the reactor buildings (there are 4). Fukushima II, unlike Fukushima I, has 4 Mark-II type boiling water reactors built by Toshiba and Hitachi.

✸ Have RIM, Nokia & Apple provided Indian Military with backdoor access to cellular comm?

In exchange for mobile presence in India, RIM, Nokia and Apple have allegedly provided backdoor access for the Indian intelligence to spy on communication. On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said: As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Militaty (sic) Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme (sic) source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme (sic) and CBI

✸ ICE’s Own Data Fails To Back Enforcement Claims

Although ICE is still withholding much of the information, the files that have been furnished so far reveal “vast discrepancies” in many areas, according to a case-by-case analysis conducted by TRAC. The initial probe reveals that official ICE statements claimed 34 times more detentions, 24 times more deportations and almost five times more apprehensions than its own data. This certainly indicates that ICE knowingly lied to lawmakers and the press to embellish its enforcement activities.   For instance, during a one-year period that ICE claimed it detained 233,417 individuals it really only detained 6,778, according to agency’s own records. That same year, ICE said it deported 166,075 people when it really only deported 6,906 and it only apprehended 21,339 compared to claims that it had apprehended 102,034.

✸ US elections: Funding unlimited?

Money has been at the centre of US politics for decades. Candidate Barack Obama raised $750mn to help him get elected as president. That went down as the most expensive federal election in history - but this year it is due to get even more expensive. Millions of dollars are being spent as the race for the US presidency gets underway, and this year corporations and unions are spending record amounts to influence the election. As a result of a US Supreme Court judgement, known as the “citizens united” ruling, outside groups such as corporations and unions can now raise and spend unlimited money as long as they do not coordinate with the candidate. The ruling is being challenged in a number of cities. Critics of it say it empowers corporations with their vast treasure chests over individual donors. The Supreme Court says money is a form of free speech, but critics argue that corporations are not people and therefore do not have the same right to free speech.

✸ Robert Wilson jailed for biting off girlfriend’s nose

Robert Wilson, 39, from Burnley, attacked Jane Ireland while she slept in her home in July 2010. He hid in woods overnight then tried to steal a car in Simonstone. Armed with a knife, he was arrested after a struggle with police in which he was Tasered. The judge described Wilson as “a plainly dangerous offender” and said he must serve a minimum of seven years. He pleaded guilty at earlier hearings to wounding with intent, carrying an offensive weapon, aggravated burglary and assault with intent to resist arrest. Burnley Crown Court heard Ms Ireland, who is still in a relationship with Wilson, awoke at her home in Hapton Road, Padiham, with the defendant’s fingers down her throat. She said that she felt an “excruciating pain” as Wilson bit off most of her nose. Thanks Jasmine

✸ Teacher told girl, 17, stripping would aid vocal range

Gausepohl allegedly told a Gig Harbor High School student he was conducting a study on how sexual arousal affects vocal ranges. The girl, 17 at the time, was attending the college as part of the Running Start program. She complied with some of his requests to strip naked or touch herself during private voice lessons at the college, court records show. Other students told investigators Gausepohl approached them about being part of the study, court records show. They declined.

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☆ Fake pill improved sex drive in women

“Faking it” has long been associated with bad sex for some women, but a new study provides a pleasant twist on that phrase. According to a paper released today in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, the placebo effect may increase sex drive for women suffering from sexual dysfunction.

☆ Government organised 12 Chinese Hacker Groups behind all Attacks

About 12 different Chinese groups largely directed by the government there, do the bulk of the China based cyber attacks stealing critical data from U.S. companies and government agencies, according to U.S. cyber security analysts and experts. US online security companies are suggesting that it should have the right to force them to stop “by any means possible”. Sketched out by analysts who have worked with U.S. companies and the government on computer intrusions, the details illuminate recent claims by American intelligence officials about the escalating cyber threat emanating from China. And the widening expanse of targets, coupled with the expensive and sensitive technologies they are losing, is putting increased pressure on the U.S. to take a much harder stand against the communist giant.

☆ Gynecologist faces charge for secret photos

A German prosecutor said on Monday that 700 women had agreed to press charges against a gynaecologist who is suspected of secretly taking thousands of pictures of patients during check-ups in his practice. As many as 3,000 female patients may have fallen victim to the doctor’s hidden camera during examinations at his office in the town of Schifferstadt in western Germany, local state prosecutor Lothar Liebing said. “He stands accused of secretly taking photos of female patients’ private body parts,” Liebing said. “We now need to make clear to what extent he has done this and, of course, why he did this.” The gynaecologist could face up to a year in prison if convicted for violating intimacy laws, according to Liebing, but the investigations could be protracted due to the number of photographs — more than 35,000 — found in the doctor’s office.

☆ Pat Vaillacourt to Tattoo 100,000 URLs

This unusual project wasn’t Pat’s first idea of making the world a better place. He first started a website asking people to donate $10 for the Haiti Relief Fund, but that didn’t work out very well. Still he kept thinking of ways to raise money, and when he woke up one day he got this unusual idea that would allow him to reach his goal and set a new world record at the same time. He plans to have the first layer of 50,000 web addresses tattooed in black ink, and the other half tattooed in fluorescent ink that should make him very noticeable in nightclubs. He’s currently nearing the 15,000 tattooed URLs mark, and claims over 16,000 companies have already reserved a spot on his body. His friend, a tattoo artist, takes between 1 hour – hour and a half to execute 100 URLs, so Vaillancourt says the project will be completed in 10,000 – 12,000 work hours. When it’s done, Pat will be covered in URLs from his neck to his ankles.

☆ N.J. man dies from penis enhancing injection, authorities say; woman charged with manslaughter

Authorities have filed homicide charges against a woman after she allegedly administered a silicone injection into the penis of a 22-year-old man, who suffered a fatal blood clot. The victim, who died in May, had been seeking a penis enhancement, authorities said today. Kasia Rivera, 34, of East Orange, was arrested today on manslaughter charges and unauthorized practice of medicine in the death of Justin Street, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office said.

☆ Exorcism Conference: February 5-8th

If you’re a priest looking for something to do the weekend of February 5th, look no further! Tulsa, Oklahoma is again hosting the second annual ‘Conference on the Rite of Exorcisms in the Latin Church’. Unfortunately the conference is not open to the general public, but only those priests who are currently, “…engaged in the church’s pastoral care of those afflicted by extraordinary demonic activity”. Those unlucky priests currently unengaged in “regular demonic activity” will have to wait to shell out their $175 fee once they’ve levelled-up. The official registration pamphlet states the conference is meant for: “understanding the development of the rite of exorcism in the Latin church with an in-depth analysis of the Latin text.” Sounds about as interesting as paint drying.

☆ Custom-Sized Condoms Are Better For Sex But Which Size Are You?

95 sizes. Ninety-five different combinations of length and girth, people. Ordering these new fitted condoms, now legally available in Europe, using their order printable scale chart is fun. Using a condom that isn’t suited for your penis’ size increases the possibilities of breakage and slippage, which in turn increases the possibility of sexually transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancies. Thankfully, someone invented custom size condoms. It took more than two years, but now they are legally available… sadly only in Europe.

☆ Bloodless erections for big birds, say researchers

The large birds were previously thought to have blood-based erection mechanisms similar to humans. But scientists from Yale University, US, have now confirmed that the birds actually enlarge their penises with lymph fluid. All other birds with a penis achieve erections in this way, leading scientists to believe the mechanism evolved in their ancient ancestors. The findings are reported in the Journal of Zoology. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote The lymphatic system is a low pressure system, so this means that erection cannot be maintained” Dr Patricia Brennan Yale University The majority of birds reproduce with a ‘cloacal kiss’ – touching together their cloaca for long enough for sperm to transfer from the males to the females. The cloaca is a single opening through which urine and faeces are excreted but certain species, including ducks, geese, swans and flamingos also possess a penis.

☆ Red alert: Fukushima nuclear reactor 4 possibly collapsing, say sources, mass evacuations may be necessary

According to our source, the entire reactor 4 structure has been deemed “highly unstable,” and the south wall of the reactor appears to be headed into an imminent structural failure. This situation, of course, is extremely dangerous and could have devastating consequences for Northern Japan as well as North America, which is why mass evacuations in Japan would be a likely outcome in the hours following such a collapse.

☆ International Space Station Astronauts’ Dirty Laundry problem

NASA wanted space washing machine for ISS …….. NASA have moved at last to tackle the problem of dirty astronauts by commissioning a microwave with air-jets to clean underwear in space. There are no washing machines on the International Space Station so grime-encrusted nauts will wear underwear for 3-4 days and other items of clothing for months, before disposing of the dirty laundry by hurling it into the atmosphere to burn up in old Progress cargo capsules, attempting to wash it in a plastic bag or even – yuck – using it to grow plants in. …… NASA have selected small disinfectant business UMPQUA to make a prototype of a low-water, low-power washing machine that could enable the laundry to be done 250 miles above the earth’s surface – or much further afield, on deep space craft or in bases on the Moon or Mars.

☆ FBI: Carrier IQ files used for “law enforcement purposes”

A recent FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ” was met with a telling denial. In it, the FBI stated it did have responsive documents – but they were exempt under a provision that covers materials that, if disclosed, might reasonably interfere with an ongoing investigation. Carrier IQ came under fire after a security researcher demonstrated that the previously little-known company had software installed on a variety of phones on a variety of networks that could track user locations, keystrokes, encrypted Internet traffic and more, some of which was or could be sent back to either the cell phone owner’s service provider or Carrier IQ’s own servers.

☆ Mexico drug gangs up ante with high-tech tunnels

When architect Felipe de Jesus Corona built Mexico’s most powerful drug lord a 200-foot-long tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border with a hydraulic lift entrance opened by a fake water tap, the kingpin was impressed. The architect “made me one f—ing cool tunnel” Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman said, according to court testimony that helped sentence Corona to 18 years in prison in 2006. Built below a pool table in his lawyer’s home, the tunnel was among the first of an increasingly sophisticated drug transport system used by Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. U.S. customs agents seized more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine which had allegedly been smuggled along the underground route. In the past five years, a crackdown on drug smugglers in Mexico and tighter U.S. border security above ground has led to a dramatic increase in the use, and the sophistication, of tunnels under the border.

☆ Amy Winehouse Death Hoax?

Ever since the release of Amy Winehouses’s first album in 2003, a phony persona of a drunk and drugged out Blues artist was carefully cultivated. One of her biggest hits was actually entitled “Rehab”. This clever facade garnered far more media publicity for Amy Winehouse than her average talent ever did. But notice how healthy and full her face always seems to appear. She is a healthy woman whose facial features are clearly not typical of drunks and drug addicts. . The story of the cause of her sudden death in July of 2011 keeps changing.

☆ The pirates of YouTube

Malamud’s 146-page report from FedFlix to the Archivist of the United States documents claims that companies such as NBC Universal, al-Jazeera, and Discovery Communications have used ContentID to claim title to FedFlix videos on YouTube. Some music royalty collecting societies have claimed infringements in “silent movies”. These companies’ claims – there are hundreds of them – have the potential to generate black marks on FedFlix’s YouTube account, and these black marks could lead to automated punishment from YouTube. Accounts that generate claims can be suspended or deleted, or lose the right to mark videos as being available as Creative Commons or public domain files.

☆ Life Possible On ‘Large Regions’ of Mars

Australian scientists who modeled conditions on Mars to examine how much of the Red Planet was habitable said that “large regions” could sustain life. Charley Lineweaver’s team, from the Australian National University, compared models of temperature and pressure conditions on Earth with those on Mars to estimate how much of the distant planet was livable for Earth-like organisms. While just one percent of Earth’s volume — from core to upper atmosphere — was occupied by life, Lineweaver said their world-first modeling showed three percent of Mars was habitable, though most of it was underground.

☆ Obama calls on Iran to give back downed US drone

The Obama administration said Monday it has delivered a formal request to Iran for the return of a U.S. surveillance drone captured by Iranian armed forces but is not hopeful that Iran will comply. President Barack Obama said the U.S. wants the top-secret aircraft back. “We have asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said during a White House news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday. He would not comment on what the Iranians might learn from studying the downed aircraft. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said it is difficult to know “just frankly how much they’re going to be able to get from having obtained those parts.”

☆ Iran to Respond to “Battlefield 3″ with “Attack on Tel Aviv” Computer Game

Iranian computer game programmers will soon release “Attack on Tel Aviv” in a retaliatory move against “Battlefield 3″ videogame which depicts a US assault on Tehran. Speaking to FNA on Saturday, Executive-Manager of Iran’s National Foundation of Computer Games Behrooz Minaei told FNA that the foundation will fund the project, and announced that many Iranian computer game programmers have voiced preparedness to contribute a role in the project. Minaei said that Battlefield 3 has many technical and video faults, adding that the location of the game in Tehran is “unacceptable”. He said that Iran has sent letters to the US videogame company, Electronic Arts (EA), and voiced its protest at the latest version of Battlefield, but the opposite side has not yet responded to the letter.

☆ 100-year-old bartender in Dunlap is still ready to mix you a drink

For this shift at least, Ray Nauroth didn’t have to sling drinks. Turn 100 and you get a break from mixing your signature grasshoppers, pink squirrels and golden Cadillacs. To be sure, Nauroth’s timecard still was tucked in the top slot in the employee rack hanging on the wall behind the bar at the Gold Slipper supper club. For more than 45 years, Nauroth, who turned 100 Friday, has been a fixture here and still works each Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night. He could be found behind the counter of other local cafes and pool halls prior to that. He’s likely the world’s oldest working bartender.

☆ Google chairman says online piracy bill would ‘criminalize’ the Internet

An online piracy bill in the House would “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. Schmidt said the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would punish Web firms, including search engines, that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. He said implementing the bill as written would effectively break the Internet. “By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet,” Schmidt said, calling it a form of censorship. The search giant has been at the forefront of a tech industry backlash against the legislation from House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas). “If Congress writes a bad law, we all suffer,” Schmidt said.

☆ Verizon says ‘civil emergency’ alert in N.J. was only a test; company apologizes for ‘inconvenience’

A mass text message warning New Jersey cell phone users of a “civil emergency” was sent out by Verizon Wireless earlier today as part of a “test emergency notification,” the telecommunications company said. In a response statement issued about two hours after the mass text was sent out, alarming some Garden State residents, Verizon Wireless apologized to its customers. “This test message was not clearly identified as a test,” company spokesman David Samberg said in an e-mailed statement to The Star-Ledger. “We apologize for any inconvenience or concern this message may have caused.” The emergency alert was sent out to New Jersey phone users in Monmouth, Ocean and Middlesex counties earlier this afternoon, citing a “civil emergency in this area until 1:24 p.m.” and telling residents to “take shelter now.”

☆ #OccupyWallStreet Officially Classified As Terrorist Group Along With Al-Qaeda

We now have our first confirmation that Occupy Wall Street is being labeled as a Domestic Terrorist Threat and protestors now being labeled as possible domestic terrorists. Don’t hesitate to think for a single second that agencies across the entire US agencies haven’t already done the same exact thing. Perhaps more alarming is the photo of the original police document that has secretly handed “trusted” anti-terrorism partners has been removed from twitter. Here is a copy.

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✪ Satanic Sex Encounter Leaves Man With Hundreds Of Wounds

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

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

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

✪ Doctors noting increase in ‘sleep texting’

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

✪ Dozen boat migrants die in voodoo ritual to calm sea

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

✪ Skeleton Santa Controversy at Loudoun County Courthouse

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

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

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

✪ Man Arrested After Craigslist Pot Post

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

✪ Teacher Accused Of Making Students Rub Her Feet

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

✪ Buyer of Minivan Finds Hidden $500K in Cocaine

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

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

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

✪ Excrement Tattoo

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

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

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

✪ Superman comic sells at auction for $2.16m

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

✪ Fake pregnant belly becomes hot seller on the Internet

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

✪ Tyree Callahan Paints with a Typewriter

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

✪ Woman’s face catches on fire during surgery

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

✪ NYC transit: Stranded subway riders were forgotten

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

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

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

✪ Who Wants To Be a Thousandaire?

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

✪ The Future of Attention: A Conversation with David Pescovitz

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

✪ Internal Affairs report released in Police Santeria hex spell plot

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

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

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

✪ Occupy Your Mind: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

✪ The Muppets Are Communist, Fox Business Network Says

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

✪ A Brief History of the Apocalypse

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

✪ First sighting of dolphin in Irish lake

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

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

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

✪ Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

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

✪ Defaced Monuments

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

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

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

✪ Cops Hose Down Crowd of Staten Island Youths

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

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

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

✪ iPhone touchscreens tarnish the legacy of Steve Jobs

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

✪ Man Claims Illuminati Stole $1 Trillion

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

✪ Report: NY State Voting Machines Really Suck

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

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

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

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

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

✪ Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive

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

✪ Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis

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

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✦ Oscar de la Hoya Did Cocaine Stevie Nicks Style

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

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

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

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

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

✦ Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon

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

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

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

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

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

✦ The Limits of Preservation

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

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

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

✦ Zippy The Chimp Goes To School (1954)

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

✦ Voynich Manuscript

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

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

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

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

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

✦ That Bank Bailout Was Way Bigger Than Anyone Thought

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

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

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

✦ Feds Seize 130+ Domain Names in Mass Crackdown

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

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

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

✦ Records show dubious spending from Wyclef Jean charity

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

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

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

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

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

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New Image Art is proud to announce the coming together of artist Neck Face and New York based “FUCK THIS LIFE”. This union is a recipe for disaster of the most curiously illuminating kind, collaboratively commentating on the harsh and the veiled, the outlawed and the unthinkable.

Neck Face recently exhibited alongside those considered most influential in American street art culture in MOCA’s Art in the Streets exhibition. The event reintroduced the performer in Neck Face, whose portrayal of a down and out alley dweller brought him the first mention in the New York Times review of the graffiti and street art retrospective. His Halloween show openings have become notable charades celebrating the lurid and the ghastly complete with a haunted house entrance staged along with his family. Neck Face’s aptitude for multi-media has also been seen in the production of metal masks, paper-maché sculptures and film. For this unique character and international figure of street culture, the true triumph lies in the pure harmony between his examination of the villain, the rogue and the nightmare and his unfaltering wit and fresh approach. This time in Amerika’s 2 Most Wanted, Neck Face’s unmistakable illustrative style is maintained in the expansion of his medium to charcoal drawings. Also exhibiting his brilliantly colored guache and ink paintings, these works begin their development with scrawls on napkins with a bar maid’s breast-pocket pen – parody’s of his own tailoring, drawn from cartoons to current events of all denominations.

FUCK THIS LIFE has participated in The New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 with his well-known street culture ‘zine.
Several published anthologies deep – FUCK THIS LIFE also has a haphazard initiation of his own process – collecting discarded remains of newspapers (and other less savory publications) off the ground and scouring them for applicable images. The ensuing collages reveal themes of fate, tragedy, brutality and the human condition. In spite of the staggering trauma, main-stream hypocrisy and sensationalism represented in FUCK THIS LIFE’s socially analytical work, there is a stillness and commanding refinement to its assembly. New Image Art is honored to exhibit these full color original images for the first time.

A coalescence of eerie irony and macabre humor underpin this duo’s social interpretation.

• ✪ How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours

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

  “Yes,” he says. “I can.”

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

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

  “A girl or a boy?” he asks.

  “A girl probably,” I say.

  “How old?”

  “Maybe 10 or 11.”

  “Not a problem.”

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

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

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

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

  “Why not?”

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

  I’m not exactly sure what that means.

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

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

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

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

  BANK BAILOUTS: Bipartisan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ✪ Secrets of Somali pirates revealed in new book

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

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

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

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

  Why stop at the seat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ✪ Men lock selves in paddy wagon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Except that they didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ✪ Korean Otaku Marries Anime Body Pillow

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ✪ Improving Mexican economy draws undocumented immigrants home from California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• ✮ And Vinyly – Press your ashes in a vinyl record
• ✮ Captain Midnight: ‘No regrets’ about jamming HBO back in ’86

  John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO’s decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.

  That move and price had offended MacDougall’s sense of fair play – and all but halted the sales being generated by his fledgling satellite dish business in Ocala, Fla. So at 12:32 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, he transformed himself into Captain Midnight by commandeering HBO’s satellite transmission signal – interrupting a showing of The Falcon and the Snowman – and putting in its place the above protest message that aired for four-and-a-half minutes.

• ✮ No limits to the law in NoLa

  On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

  The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using “unnecessary and unreasonable force”; that it is “largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers” and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. “NOPD’s mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations,” the report says, “was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects.”

• ✮ Fuelled ‘by Viagra’, Gaddafi’s troops use rape as a weapon of war with children as young as EIGHT among the victims

  In an interview with the Sunday Times, Dr Khalifa al-Sharkassi described how two sisters, aged 16 and 20, had been assaulted by African mercenaries after their brothers had joined the rebels.

  The girls’ mother was locked in another room while they were raped.

  ‘Four or five Africans took turns raping both girls,’ he said. ‘(Now) one of them just sits and cries and looks lost.’

  He said another victim had tried to clean herself with bleach after being attacked.

  One of his patients had given herself an injection of chlorine in the belief that this would stop herself becoming pregnant.

• ✮ Tricks of Short Change Artists
  ARE the con men, the shills and the short-change artists of the old time circus and carnival deserting the field for the more generous one of big business? The present-day short-change artist is entirely modernized with up-to-date methods. Methods have to be up-to-date to make it possible to short-change an experienced bank teller, and that is exactly what they are doing. As a side line to thus robbing banks, odd fives and tens are daily picked up in drug stores, filling stations, etc. Usually the storekeeper first finds it out when counting up at night; the short-change artist is clever!
• ✮ Video: Man Caught Peeing on Cough Drops in Drug Store
  Investigators say the man went to the aisle where the cough drops are kept, looked around, unzipped his pants, and urinated on about 110 packages of cough drops.
• ✮ The Graffiti of War
  From war, art. This is the basic premise of The Graffiti of War , a project from two combat veterans that features the unconventional military art that soldiers, seamen, marines, and airmen (and women) create during deployments. From tanks spray painted with “I love u baby” to memorials for the dead to enemy jets covered in graffiti, every art work tells a story. It’s the alternative, unauthorized history of war from those who fought it.
• ✮ ATLAS HOODS: BOTSWANA’S COWBOY METALHEADS
  Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find out about a small but passionate collection of guys who dressed like doomsday cowboys and listened to Motorhead in the predominantly black, central African country of Botswana.
• ✮ Brigitte Bardot – Harley Davidson
  One of the 3 Harleys built by Maurice Combalbert for the clip “Harley Davidson”. The last one still existing. Brigitte Bardot. 1968.
• ✮ Plan to bring exhibition glorifying graffiti vandalism to the Brooklyn Museum should be tagged NoWay

  Now showing at Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary museum: “the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art,” an exhibition that reverently displays “installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community.”

  Translation: They’re having wine and cheese parties surrounded by framed images of urban blight. They’re giving the destruction of other people’s property a hallowed place in high-art halls.

  Thanks Smart Crew

• ✮ The Growing Up In Arcades: 1979-1989 Pool
  Awesome collection of vintage video game arcade pictures.
• ✮ Nibiru And the Anunnaki

  In recent years, there have been many speculative writings about Planet X, which is also known as Planet Nibiru. Most of these writings are based somewhat on Zecharia Sitchin’s book, The Twelfth Planet. Sitchin, like Velikovsky and Darwin, used his respective theories to support his claims. A question arises: Is Nibiru real? The answer to that is a resounding “Yes”.

  There are those who believe that the Anunnaki of Nibiru are coming back to Earth soon. They believe that Planet X is going to pass by Earth, in May or June of 2003, on its 3,600 year orbit around our sun. Such believers are terrified of the consequences that a close pass by Nibiru might bring. They fear this will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, severe flooding, food shortages due to climatic conditions, diseases, meteor fire storms, volcanic eruptions and the like. They are afraid that it will result in a great catastrophic infliction of loss of life on Earth.

• ✮ Will Release Of Obama’s Purported Birth Certificate Give Rise To New “Certer” Movement?
  So here’s a few nutty points about the birth certificate sure to be seized upon by the nonbelievers
• ✮ Dark Power: Pigment seems to put radiation to good use

  Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City recalls learning several years ago that single-cell fungi had been found thriving inside the collapsed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine. He and his colleagues later saw reports that the cooling water in some working nuclear reactors turns black from colonies of melanin-rich fungi.

  Nuclear reactors are intense sources of gamma rays, which can zap through living organisms and leave behind trails of destruction. Many microorganisms can survive in extreme environments, but Casadevall thought that something more might be going on. Perhaps the fungi were growing thanks to the radiation, not in spite of it. “The thought was that biology never wastes any energy source,” he says.

• ✮ Jury Acquits Man of Stealing 99-Cent Hot Dog
  It took jurors about five minutes to reach their verdict in the February trial. Juror Patrick Reeves tells The Spokesman-Review someone would “have to be an idiot” not to realize Richardson simply forgot to pay.
• ✮ Demon core
  The Demon Core was the nickname given to a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium that accidentally went critical in two separate accidents at the Los Alamos laboratory in 1945 and 1946. Both incidents resulted in the acute radiation poisoning and subsequent death of a scientist. After these incidents, the sphere of plutonium was referred to as the Demon Core.

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• ☁ London 2012 Olympics: Jacques Rogge dismisses Iran logo demand
  The Iranian national Olympic committee claims the logo spells out the word ‘Zion’ and has complained to the IOC it is “racist”.
• ☁ Porn, Laptops on Laps Can Cause Impotence, Infertility and Worse

  There is a double dosage of bad news for men who like to watch a lot of porn on laptops resting on their groin area. You know who you are (and so do we).

  Fox News has reported that an Italian andrologist, Carlo Foresta of Padua University, has conducted a study that found that resting a laptop on one’s groin for just one hour can raise the temperature of one’s testicles by two degrees Celsius (about four degrees Fahrenheit), overheating the genitals to the point that the owner’s ability to produce sperm could be impaired. Studies have further shown that even a one degree rise can lead to infertility, and that resting a laptop on the groin for more than two hours can result in having a child that looks like Joy Behar.

• ☁ Former employee accused of writing virus to target Whac-a-Mole machines

  Whac-A-Mole seems like it could be endless fun.

  Moles pop out of five holes in the arcade game and a soft mallet is used to force them back into the holes to score points.

  Children and adults alike could whack the moles for hours at a time.

  Or at least they could until a worker programmed a virus into the machines to make them shut down after a pre-determined number of plays, Holly Hill police said.
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  Now they have arrested that man, Marvin Walter Wimberly Jr., 61, of Orlando, who faces a charge of offenses against intellectual property.

  It was all a scheme by Wimberly to insure job security, according to an arrest affidavit.

• ☁ GOP leader John Boehner vows to eliminate ‘net neutrality’

  Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) vowed Monday to eliminate net neutrality rules recently enacted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), referring to the regulations as a “government takeover of the Internet.”

  “Right now, freedom and free expression are under attack by a power structure in Washington populated with regulators who have never set foot inside a radio station or a television studio,” Rep. Boehner said during a speech at the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention.

• ☁ Financial terrorism suspected in 2008 economic crash

  Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

  The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”

  While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.

• ☁ From NZ rubble, haunting texts to Mom beg for help

  The first text message said: “Mommy, I got buried.” About 40 minutes later: “Mommy, I can’t move my right hand.” Then, a brief call from New Zealand’s earthquake rubble to parents in the Philippines pleading to send help.

  After another harrowing hour in a crumpled building, when she sent a half-dozen more texts about increasing pain, continued shaking and overwhelming smoke, came the final one: “Please make it quick.”

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• ☞ Bishops take battle with the devil to Baltimore

  With some parishes seeing an increase in claims of demonic possession in the United States, the Roman Catholic Church is training its clergy in how to respond to requests for the ancient rite. More than 100 bishops and priests attended a November workshop on the subject in Baltimore.

  Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki, who organized the two-day, closed-door event at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, says pastors need help discerning the difference between those who need an exorcist and those who only believe they do.

  The goal, he says, was to help the clergy counsel people who believe they are possessed by a demon by referring them to a physician, a therapist, or — in very rare cases, he stresses — an exorcist.

• ☞ Meteorite above U.S. dazzles in night sky over seven states

  Streaking across the night sky, a stunning ball of fire shot across the south eastern part of the United States last night – dazzling stargazers with a bright flash.

  Authorities say the mysterious flash of light – which could be seen from Oklahoma to the Florida panhandle – was most likely a meteorite.

  The object, which was est

• ☞ Experts Suspect Military Testing Behind Mass Bird and Fish Deaths

  Yet another weapons technology has been under development for some decades. Scalar technology—invented by the genius Nikola Tesla early in the 20th Century—has the potential to turn the environment itself into a weapon and tune its deadly properties into a merciless, near instantaneous killer.

  That advanced technology may have just been tested in Arkansas and Louisiana.

• ☞ US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed
  John Pike, director of the Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org, said that, based on the GAO’s figures, US forces had expended around six billion bullets between 2002 and 2005. “How many evil-doers have we sent to their maker using bullets rather than bombs? I don’t know,” he said.
• ☞ Former Bush speech writer: Blame marijuana for shootings, not gun laws

  “After horrific shootings, we hear calls for stricter regulation of guns,” he wrote. “The Tucson shooting should remind us why we regulate marijuana.

  “Jared Lee Loughner, the man held as the Tucson shooter, has been described by those who know as a ‘pot smoking loner.’ He had two encounters with the law, one for possession of drug paraphernalia.”

• ☞ Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery

  It appears the process was going well, because the scientists decided to have a little party. The party included sake, whisky, various wines, shochu, and beer. At a certain point, the researchers decided to try soaking the compound in the many, many liquors they had on hand and seeing how they compared to the more conventional soaking liquids.

  When they tested the resulting materials for superconductivity, they found that the ones soaked in commercial booze came out ahead. About 15 percent of the material became a superconductor for the water mixed with ethanol, and less for the pure water. By comparison, Shochu jacked up conductivity by 23 percent and red wine managed to supercharge over 62 percent of the material. The scientists were pleased, if bemused with their results.

• ☞ Meet The Felon With The Golden Voice
  Williams, 53, has been busted for theft, robbery, escape, forgery, and drug possession. He is pictured at right in mug shots taken as a result of those Ohio collars, which stretch back more than two decades.
• ☞ Good guy 1, Bad guy 0, CCW in action unedited

  Police said a desk clerk shot a man who was attempting to rob an east side motel on Saturday night.

  Officers said that shortly before 9:30 p.m., a man walked into the Super 8 Motel, located at 2055 Brice Rd., showed a gun and demanded money.

  Police said the desk clerk on duty then shot the alleged robber, Antoine Stephens.

  Stephens, 20, was transported to Grant Medical Center and was in serious condition on Sunday morning, NBC 4 reported.

  Police said he would be charged with aggravated robbery.
  3 shots fired, all 3 hit the bad guy, gun was a glock 23, 40cal with 165g Gold dots

  no charges filed agenst shooter, badguy went to prison.

• ☞ Police Probe Wild Melee Caught On Tape [With Video]
  Prompted by a viral video showing a wild, all-female brawl outside a Florida gas station, cops have launched a probe to identify and possibly arrest the combatants, some of whom had clothing ripped off during the melee.
• ☞ Active Camouflage System Uses E-Ink to Make Tanks Invisible on the Battlefield

  Tank camouflage has come a long way since the good old days of painting them green and slapping a white star on the side. British defense tech firm BAE Systems is developing an active “e-camouflage” system that will employ a form of electronic ink to project imagery of a vehicles surrounding terrain, rendering the vehicle somewhat invisible to potential attackers.

  Using a set of electronic sensors attached to the tank’s exterior, the system would process the vehicle’s surroundings and recreate the colors, lines, and shapes common in its environment on the tank’s hull, making it extremely difficult to see. Because the images on the tank’s exterior would change as the surroundings change, ostensibly such an active camouflage system could cloak the vehicle even as it moves across an environment.

• ☞ After Failing to Innovate, MySpace Struggles

  As Facebook was negotiating a half-billion-dollar investment from Goldman Sachs recently, MySpace, once the dominant Web site for social networking, was preparing to fire nearly half its staff.

  The layoffs, which cut nearly 500 employees from a payroll of close to 1,100, were announced Tuesday. The downsizing is the most draconian yet for the beleaguered company, and could be a precursor to a sale of the site by the News Corporation, which bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million after a bidding war with Viacom.

  On one level, the decline of MySpace again shows the fragility of social media where fickle consumers and changing tastes can make sensations out of services like Tribe and Friendster that quickly fade from public imagination. According to comScore, MySpace reported 54.4 million users at the end of November, a loss of more than nine million from the previous year.

• ☞ Angelina Jolie drugs video shows actress talking about sex and killing her pets | From heroin to heroine

  ANGELINA JOLIE hangs out at a drugs den – in a grainy video of the Hollywood babe before she spectacularly turned her life around.

  The Tomb Raider beauty is seen wide-eyed and babbling in the seedy amateur footage – as a woman next to her casually smokes heroin.

• ☞ Cocaine: Coca Negra : black coke
• ☞ Seattle’s ‘superhero’ has nose broken in confrontation
  One of Seattle’s self-proclaimed superheroes had his nose broken and was threatened at gunpoint Saturday, prompting police to again ask that he and others stop with the costumes and call 911.
• ☞ Ted Williams Entering Rehab, Says Dr. Phil

  “I did have an alcohol problem early …,” Williams has acknowledged in an interview on the Today show. “I was drinking like a fifth a day … my life went to pits.”

  The troubled voiceover actor also has a rap sheet that includes theft, robbery, forgery and drug possession.

• ☞ Family charged ‘death tax’ for baby who lived one hour
  Olivia Clark lived for only one hour. Doctors didn’t even expect her to survive birth. Now her family has a hard time understanding why the King County Medical Examiner has to review her death and charge $50.
• ☞ Kenny Scharf mural bombed again
• ☞ Wikileaks volunteer detained and searched (again) by US agents

  Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher, Tor developer, and volunteer with Wikileaks, reported today on his Twitter feed that he was detained, searched, and questioned by the US Customs and Border Patrol agents at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 10, upon re-entering the US after a vacation in Iceland.

  He experienced a similar incident last year at Newark airport.

  An archive of his tweeted account from today follows.

• ☞ The boat that mistook itself for Monaco
  Money can’t buy you taste. This universal law is amply confirmed by the news that a £700m “hyper yacht” called the Streets of Monaco is on the drawing board of Derby-based ship designers Yacht Island Design. Whether it will ever get off that drawing board and into the sea is yet to be decided.
• ☞ XWave iPhone Accessory Channels Your Brain Waves into iPhone
  Do your friends complain that you can’t pull your eyes away from your iPhone? Well, if you get the new XWave by PLX Devices, then you might have trouble pulling your brain away, too. The peripheral, released in November for $99, brings an EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI) to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users at an affordable price. Based on NeuroSky’s Mindset, XWave gives you the power to manipulate various apps with brain rhythms. While you can’t text or browse the web with it yet, the XWave represents an important step in bringing BCI to the masses. Also, with the falling cost and increasing spatial resolution of brain-imaging technology, it’s exciting to ponder what powerful BCI devices we’ll be able to get for $99 in the future.
• ☞ Lil’ Wayne Birthday Cake!
  Check out this totally crazy b-day cake featuring the face of rapper Lil’ Wayne!
  It was actually made for the 14 year-old daughter of actor Alec Baldwin (her name is Ireland), and has licorice dreadlocks with chocolate sunglasses.
• ☞ Glock Pistol Sales Surge in Aftermath of Arizona Shootings

  Greg Wolff, the owner of two Arizona gun shops, told his manager to get ready for a stampede of new customers after a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people at a Tucson shopping center on Jan. 8.

  Wolff was right. Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols — popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters — flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

  “We’re at double our volume over what we usually do,” Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition.

• ☞ Fox News: The No. 1 Name in Murder Fantasies
  The Fox News culture permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against deemed enemies.
• ☞ Spending Time With Posterchild
  “Posterchild is an awesome street artist who, amongst other things, takes out the ads in telephone booths and replaces them with his own quirky messages. Bonus: He doesn’t have a cell phone.”

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• ❑ Illegal Underground Party – Paris Metro Tunnel
  Paris /Somewhere underground, 2009
• ❑ Sex game gone awry cited in Oklahoma City homicide

  A probable cause arrest affidavit filed in Canadian County states Arthur Sedille told investigators he and his wife often engaged in sexual fantasy involving a gun.

  Arthur Sedille told police he took a handgun from a shelf beside the bed and “racked the slide back causing the gun to cock,” the affidavit states. He said he placed the gun to her head and the gun discharged. He said he did not realize the gun was loaded, according to the affidavit.

• ❑ Boy,11, savaged by dog his father rescued off the street days earlier

  His father Michael, 42, along with mother Carol, 38 and sister Lily, nine, had taken pity on the dog after seeing it shivering near their home in Wolverhampton.

  But as the family watched the Coronation Street Christmas special, the animal ‘launched itself through the air’ with no warning to attack Finn.

  Michael, 42, said: ‘No one had shouted or made any sudden movements to frighten the dog – it just launched itself through the air without any warning at all and clamped itself on to Finn’s face.

  ‘The dog just went berserk for no reason. I’ve never seen such ferocity from an animal.

  ‘I tried punching it to stop it but it kept snarling and biting, it was vicious. My wife just ran into the next room, she was terrified and there was a lot of blood.

• ❑ 80-year-old man charged with indecent exposure, bribery
  An 80-year-old man was arrested Dec. 27 after allegedly using a “glory hole” in a National Park Service restroom to display himself to a ranger using the stall next door, according to his arrest report.
• ❑ Heroin for ailing grandma, says Oklahoma man stopped at Detroit airport
  A 53-year-old Oklahoma man says $50,000 worth of heroin found during a customs inspection at Detroit Metropolitan Airport was intended as a pain reliever for his ailing grandmother.
• ❑ Neck massager strangles woman
  A Florida woman’s death apparently was caused when an electric neck massager became ensnared on her necklace and strangled her, sheriff’s investigators said Wednesday.
  Thanks Patrick Nybakken.
  The woman, 37-year-old medical doctor Michelle Ferrari-Gegerson, had been wrapping gifts on Christmas Eve and used the massager to relieve neck pain, Broward County Sheriff’s investigators said.
• ❑ sleepycity | photography urban exploration | Demolition of the Paris Metro
  The Paris Metro and the service it provides are deeply intertwined into the fabric of the city. As the 4.5 million passengers who ride it every day will probably attest it’s the quickest way around whether it’s for work, for play or both. The metro’s distinctive art-nouveau style is unmistakable and the plant like green wrought iron entrances topped with the orange orbs and Metropolitan signage designed by Hector Guimard which sprout up all over the city lead one down to the gleaming white tiled platforms to be whisked away all over the city. On my first trip to Paris I arrived into Gare du Nord and entered the dense maze that is the metro. Despite the crowds, the noise and the distinct odour of piss, I was in love. The kind of love which inspires one to risk life, limb and deportation to get up close and personal.
• ❑ Spanish woman fakes kidnapping to test husband: police

  Spanish police have detained a woman who faked her own kidnapping to test whether her husband would pay ranson, sending him a photograph of herself with bound hands and feet, police said Monday.

  The man received the photo on his mobile phone from someone claiming to be one of the kidnappers along with a text message demanding a ransom of 20,000 euros (26,000 dollars) for her release, they said in a statement.

  The ransom request was repeated in later text messages as well as warnings that the man not go to police, which he ignored.

• ❑ Teen buys his own songs 2000 times with stolen credit cards, reaps £500,000 royalties
  We’ve heard of iTunes scams before, but this one is pretty audacious. A group of men in the UK is accused of uploading music to iTunes and Amazon and then reaping sales royalties by using stolen credit card details to download the tracks thousands of times.
• ❑ Qur’an etched in Saddam Hussein’s blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders
  It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur’an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight – locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant’s legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.
• ❑ If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?
  He rattles off some dismaying numbers: Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. “I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.” If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc. Possibly owing to said shrinkage, it takes me a while to catch on. “Are you saying we’re getting dumber?” I ask.
• ❑ Berlin police pepper spray snowballers
  Two Berlin police officers were pelted by snowballs thrown by a group of about 40 youths but were able to fight them off with pepper spray, police said on Sunday.
• ❑ Soviet anti-rock and roll propaganda film
  If there was one thing Americans and the Soviets could agree on in the 1950s, it was that rock and roll was totally going to ruin the youth. Of course, there was some disagreement as to how , exactly, that ruination would come about. While American parents fretted about sex, drugs, and inter-racial dating, the Soviet authorities seem to have been largely concerned with rock music making kids lazy and unproductive.
• ❑ Facebook to See a Surge of Artificial Intelligence in the Near Future?
  “I think that in 10 years if you ask a question on a social network and you get an answer you will not know if a computer or a person has answered you.” It’ll work the other way around too, Millner thinks: “When you receive a question, you will not know if it has been asked by a person or an artificial intelligence. And by answering you help the computer create an algorithm.”
• ❑ ‘Cord Cutting’ Could Help Bring Down Cable Bill
  When a research firm reported that 119,000 customers dropped their cable or satellite subscriptions in the third quarter of this year, there were headlines about how cable companies were in trouble. The Internet has made it possible for consumers to get rid of their cable bills. David Katzmaier, a senior editor at Cnet.com, got rid of his cable and wrote a blog called Diary of a Cord Cutter. He talks to Linda Wertheimer about whether his decision to let cable go was a good one.
• ❑ AP IMPACT: Cartel arrests did not curb drug trade

  • Federal agents do not nab top cartel bosses. None of the bosses who control their syndicates have ever been arrested in the U.S. They are all believed to be living in Mexico, where they can more easily dodge law enforcement.

  • Many of the people they do arrest are not even middle management. They are low-level American street dealers and “mules” who help smuggle the drugs. But most have never heard of the Mexican organized crime gangs they’re supposed to represent, let alone have conducted business directly with the cartel. Such workers are easily replaced with only an inconvenience to the organization.

  • A third of those arrested are already out on the streets. Jurors acquitted them, or prosecutors decided there was not enough evidence to hold them. Others jumped bail or went undercover for the DEA.

  • Authorities often announce high arrest numbers, but some suspects are counted twice. An arrested street dealer may show up in the statistics of several Justice Department sweeps.

• ❑ Cost’s Showpaper Box Recovered Interview
• ❑ Wikileaks Rest in Peace

  The original Wikileaks initiative is dead, replaced by a bloated apparatus promising 260,000 cables at slower than a snail’s pace. At the rate of 20 cables a day it will take 13,000 days to finish — some 35 years.

  The original merits of Wikileaks have been lost in its transformation into a publicity and fund-raising vehicle for Julian Assange as indicated in the redesign website which billboards him.

  Its once invaluable, steady stream of documents, packaged in its own, no-frills format, is now a tiny dribble of documents apparently regulated by a compact with a few main stream media which amplify the material well beyond its significance. Days go by when nothing new is offered except outpouring of manufactured news about Assange and a slew of trivial news and bombastic commentaries for and against the initiative.

• ❑ Dog Rescued: Dog With Head Through a Wall is Rescued
  An 8-month old German shepherd puppy learned a hard lesson Monday about sticking his nose where it didn’t belong when he got his head stuck in a hole in a wall.
• ❑ Fire and Ice – Subway Spits Sparks [Video]
  Four hundred tons of train, 25 mph of snowstorm and 625 volts of electricity. Sparks fly as the subway passes between Parkside Avenue and Prospect Park stations during the blizzard of December 2010 in NYC.
• ❑ Patrick Swayze wax figure as Dalton from Road House
  Patrick Swayze as “Dalton” from Road House. (UA, 1989) Swayze, the toughest nice guy on the big screen, sports his famous flowing 1980s hair style, khaki pants, and short sleeve black polo shirt. Made by Logan Fleming, the figure has a wax head portrait painted in oil. Shoes are not included. Figure measures 6 ft. 2 in.
• ❑ The Best Fake Rumors of 2010
• ❑ Anorexic Model Isabelle Caro Dies at 28
  French model and actress Isabelle Caro who became an international symbol for her struggle with anorexia has died at the age of 28.
• ❑ Kenny Scharf Dissed – Martha Cooper
  I don’t know if the guys who dogged Kenny’s wall thought about any of this or just wanted to get up wherever. For my part, I wish they’d shown a little respect for a hard working artist with established street cred and had allowed the wall to stand for a few months. Much as I admire vandals, I feel these perps were mean-spirited and heartless.
• ❑ Why Corporate Capital and Finance Are Waging an All-Out Cyberwar Against Wikileaks
  When your Swiss banker throws you overboard, you know you’ve made some very powerful enemies.
  Long famed for hiding money for everyone from Nazis and drug lords to spies and dictators, the Swiss government’s banking arm has decided that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are just too hot even for it to handle.And so the PostFinance, which runs the country’s banks, declared in early December that it had “ended its business relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Paul Assange” after accusing Mr. Assange of – gasp! – providing false information about his place of residence.

• ❑ Controversial Snow penises rock small town [Video]
• ❑ Abusive Homeland Security ‘troll’ attacks anti-TSA website: report

  “F**k you, f**k all you c**ksuckers, you wont change anything,” read a comment that has now been deleted from the WeWontFly blog. “Ride the bus, TSA is here to stay there [sic] doing a great job keeping americia [sic] safe.”

  WeWontFly blogger George Donnelly says he has traced the comment to a dhs.gov server — a computer inside the Department of Homeland Security.

  “Some questions come to mind,” Donnelly wrote. “Is this an official statement? If not, is it an accurate representation of the DHS position? Was this person on the public dime when he or she posted this? Who posted this and what is their position with DHS?”

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