☛ 2011′s Most Insane Facebook Stories (30 pics)

Facebook has been a blessing and nuisance to many, but for certain people it has caused nothing but trouble. See the wildest, stupidest and craziest stories of 2011 from the huge social website.

☛ Jimmy Lee Massey forced woman to watch him torture and dismember Carina Saunders

A teenager was tortured and cut up in front of another woman so she would be frightened into cooperating with a human trafficking ring, police said. Jimmy Lee Massey, 33, was arrested over the first-degree murder of Carina Saunders, 19, whose dismembered body was found stuffed in a duffel bag. The young woman had been beheaded and dumped on October 13 behind a grocery store. A 20-year-old woman came forward as a witness to say she had been kidnapped by Massey and forced to watch Miss Saunders painful death in Bethany, Oklahoma. Her identity has not been released because of concerns for her safety.

☛ Busy Signal Service Targets Cyberheist Victims

A new service on the cyber criminal underground can be hired to tie up the phone lines of any targeted mobile or land line around the world. The service is marketed as a diversionary tactic to assist e-thieves in robbing commercial customers of banks that routinely call customers to verify large financial transfers. For just $5 an hour, or $40 per day, you can keep anyoneě°Ë?€™s phone so tied up with incoming junk calls that the number is unable to receive legitimate calls.

☛ The Homeland Security Snow-Cone Machine

There have been plenty of examples already showing that large amounts of your tax money supposedly earmarked for the “War on Terror” end up getting used for purposes that are, shall we say, less than mission-critical. Back in 2006, we learned that $25 million in homeland-security money had been handed out in just one grant program with no controls at all, which resulted in $77,000 going to local fire departments to fund “puppet and clown shows,” and another $22,000 for an “educational robot.” An Indiana county got in trouble for using its $300,000 Electronic Emergency Message Boards, intended to notify the public about things like evacuation routes, to advertise the volunteer fire department’s charity fish fry. This is just the local stuff, not counting the umpteen billions spent on naked scanners that don’t do any good. Also, the war in Iraq. Still, it is something special when a homeland-security grant is used to buy a snow-cone machine.

☛ How to Open a Padlock with a Coke Can

If you’re like millions of Americans, you put a lot of trust in simple padlocks to secure your valuables. Today we’re going to continue to break down the veil of security by showing you how easy it is to shim open a padlock with a coke can. Again, as with all our lock picking and security articles, we’re not advocating anything illegal and this information is for educational purposes and Locksport only.

☛ Next Step: Identifying Customers of Surveillance Technology Companies and Turning Up the Heat

In the past monthě°˝€”thanks to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, as well as WikiLeaks and its media partnersě°˝€”a little sunlight has finally exposed a large but shadowy industry: Western technology companies selling mass spying software to governments. The amazing and dangerous capabilities of these tools are described in hundreds of marketing documents that were recently leaked to the media organizations.

☛ Cast Your Ballot for the Worst Prison Innovation of 2011: With Solutions Like These, Who Needs Problems?

So which is the worst prison idea of 2011 ě°˝€“ no lunch, gouging families, or robo-guards?

☛ Tomas Bautista Gets a Year in Jail for Fingering a Chihuahua

It was February 17 when Bautista’s roommate arrived at their Oakland Park home and found Bautista drunk, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Instead, Bautista told another roommate he was going outside — where the small Chihuahua mix named Mimi followed him. A little while later, one of the roommates heard the dog yelp, so he grabbed a flashlight and ran outside. There, the roommate found the dog running away from Bautista, and Bautista passed out with his pants down. The dog was bleeding, so the roommate called the cops and took Mimi to an animal hospital. Bautista told BSO detectives that “he used his finger to penetrate the dog,” and he was taken to jail for “sexually assaulting” Mimi.

☛ Moms Turn to Phone Sex Business for Income

Aubrey, 22, and the mother of a 3-year-old son, says working as a phone sex operator is difficult, and often disturbing. “There was a lot of having to get used to just, you know, the weirdoes out there,” she said. “There is basically anything you could think of. There’s married men with children. There’s divorced men. Sometimes, every once in a while, there’s a couple that’ll call,” she said. “More recently, there’s actually been a few women calling.” Aubrey said she at times feels disgusted speaking intimately with strangers while her son sleeps down the hall. “This is nothing I’d ever thought I’d be doing, ever,” she said. Working as a phone actress is as far as the 22-year-old says she is willing to go in adult entertainment. “I’d never want to take off my clothes for anyone, or actually, you know, fulfill these fantasies for anyone,” she said.

☛ Troubled Pakistanis turn to exorcism for help

A girl in a long black shirt screams incoherently, banging her head against a wall at a Sufi shrine in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Sania Haneef’s family says she is possessed by a demon. Doctors could not help, so they brought the college student, kicking and screaming, to be exorcised by the spirit of a saint.

☛ A Movie Insider’s Look At This Huge Weapons Cache In The Heart Of New York City

The weapons used in movies and television shows have to come from somewhere, and if the scene is shot outside Hollywood, it’s likely they came from The Specialists Ltd. in NYC. Owned by actor Rick Washburn, the studio is tucked into the lofts of SoHo where Washburn says he runs it like a speakeasy, “We don’t want people to know where we are.” The Specialists is home to thousands of weapons that come in fully functional and are re-fitted by Washburn’s team to fire only blanks. Directors send in their prop guys to select weapons appropriate to the production, and if they can’t find something they like, Washburn’s team will make it. They also offer training for actors.

☛ Ninja Daggers Hidden in Hollowed Book Found at Reagan National

Two throwing daggers were discovered in a passenger’s carry-on bag at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport Monday, according to the TSA. The weapons, each measuring just over a half-foot long, were found inside a hollowed-out book when the passenger went through a TSA checkpoint. The passenger voluntarily surrendered the knives and the hollow book in which they were kept. The TSA has the authority to charge a civil penalty to passengers who bring dangerous and deadly weapons into the airport checkpoint.

☛ Man Post Pics of His Daughter Bound with Tape on Facebook

A Chicago dad found himself in big trouble with the public an well as the law, when he allegedly posted pics of his daughter on facebook bound with tape. He says his actions were prompted by her hitting him and the binding was her punishment. The picture had the following caption: “This is wut happens wen my baby hits me back; )”

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SeMeNSPeRmS@SeMeNSPeRmS.com

✪ 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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✰ London Dungeon skeleton found to be real

London Dungeon operations manager Catherine Pritchard said: “We have no idea where they originally came from, but suspected they might date back to… when bodies were regularly smuggled in from the Far East for dissection.” Both skeletons were due to move to the Dungeon’s annual “Satan’s Grotto” feature in mid-December, but will now have to be replaced by other props. Dungeon bosses now have to decide whether to pay more than £2,000 a year for a licence from by the Tissues Authority to keep the skeletons on display or have them removed altogether.

✰ Weather Control as a Cold War Weapon

In August of 1953 the United States formed the President’s Advisory Committee on Weather Control. Its stated purpose was to determine the effectiveness of weather modification procedures and the extent to which the government should engage in such activities. Methods that were envisioned by both American and Soviet scientists—and openly discussed in the media during the mid-1950s— included using colored pigments on the polar ice caps to melt them and unleash devastating floods, releasing large quantities of dust into the stratosphere creating precipitation on demand, and even building a dam fitted with thousands of nuclear powered pumps across the Bering Straits. This dam, envisioned by a Russian engineer named Arkady Borisovich Markin would redirect the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which would theoretically raise temperatures in cities like New York and London.

✰ Why the ‘Native’ Fashion Trend Is Pissing Off Real Native Americans

But many Native Americans are less than thrilled that this so-called “native look” is trendy right now. The company that’s stirred up the most controversy so far is Urban Outfitters, which offered a “Navajo” line this fall (items included the “Navajo Hipster Panty” and “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask”) before the Navajo Nation sent the company a cease and desist order that forced it to rename its products. Forever 21 and designer Isabel Marant also missed the memo that the tribe has a trademark on its name; thanks to the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990, it’s illegal to claim a product is made by a Native American when it is not.

✰ How to kill political robocalls

Are you ticked off by automated phone calls from political candidates? Now you can do something about it. Visit Reverse Robocall, and for less than the cost of a latte you can make your own automated calls to politicians about things that really bug you (like robocalls). It’s pretty simple. Choose the issue, party, political entity, or representative you want to call. Plug your phone number into the site. Reverse Robocall will call your phone and let you record a message. Hang up and pay online to have that message sent and get an email report on whether the calls were answered. Better yet, you can post recordings of those calls online, if you choose, so others can listen in and rate your call (witty, angry, dull, etc).

✰ It’s official: French docs reveal ‘normal’ penis size

The Paris-based National Academy of Surgery (l’Academie nationale de chirurgie) was created in 1731 by Louis XV. Its headquarters are in the appropriately-named rue de l’Ecole de Medecine and it has more than 500 members specializing in different branches of surgery. In its latest declaration, the academy has published the average measurements of a man’s tackle in an effort to discourage men from going through potentially dangerous penis enlargement procedures. A “normal” penis should be between 9 and 9.5 centimetres (3.5 to 3.7 inches) when flaccid and between 12.8 and 14.5 centimetres (5 to 5.7 inches) when erect. When it comes to girth, the average circumference is between 8.5 and 9 centimetres (3.3 to 3.5 inches) “at rest” and between 10 and 10.5 centimetres (3.9 to 4.1 inches) when “standing to attention.”

✰ ‘Drop a bomb and wipe them out’: NYPD officers call West Indian Day parade goers ‘savages’ and ‘animals’ in racially-charged Facebook rants

The worst examples ‘I say have the parade one more year, and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out.’ ‘Why is everyone calling this a parade? It’s a scheduled riot.’ ‘Welcome to the Liberal NYC Gale, where if the cops sneeze too loud they get investigated for excessive force but the “civilians” can run around like savages and there are no repercussions.’ ‘They can keep the forced overtime…’ the safety of police officers should come ‘before the animals.’

✰ Recent Charges Of Sexual Abuse Of Children In Hollywood Just Tip Of Iceberg, Experts Say

“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurs former “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ‘80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.” Arngrim, 49, was referring to Feldman and his co-star in “The Lost Boys,” Corey Haim, who died in March 2010 after years of drug abuse. “I literally heard that they were ‘passed around,’” Arngrim said. “The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful – these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet. There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”

✰ My Three-Month Facebook Dialogue With A Scammer From Malaysia Pretending To Be A Beautiful Woman

During Hurricane Irene weekend, while holed up in a friend’s apartment and looking for some stimulation, I got friend-requested and emailed by an obvious scammer on Facebook. The con artist, under the name “Claire Anrie,” used a few professional photos of an attractive young woman (whom I later reverse-image-searched and discovered was a personal trainer in New York) and a typo- and contradiction-filled profile. “Claire” quickly asked me to send her money by Western Union so she could come back to the U.S. and be with me, her “husband.” Over the next three months, I kept up an ongoing dialogue via Facebook messages and chat in which I continually found ways to irk her by screwing up the Western Union payment, demanding she send me more photos and de-friend the other men on Facebook she’d added in hopes of scamming them, claiming I’d lost all my money during Irene, and repeatedly confiding in her that I had chronic diarrhea and hoped she would still love me.

✰ Study: Vaccines & Hand-Washing Can Reduce Prejudice Against Immigrants, the Obese & Crack Addicts

The war between people and disease-causing pathogens is old as humanity itself. This has helped shaped our so-called behavioral immunity, which can lead us, for example, to automatically avoid people who are visibly sick. But it can also misfire; previous studies have shown that people with compromised immune systems (due to a recent illness), and even people who describe themselves as afraid of germs or susceptible to disease, are more likely to avoid and feel prejudiced toward otherwise healthy people who merely look different than them, like foreigners or immigrants.

✰ Chasing the Dragon in Jail

Being locked up is an inconvenience when you and your mates crave heroin. One London prisoner and ex-user recalls that getting the drugs is the easy part.

✰ 6 Terrifying Things Nobody Tells You About Donating Sperm

To a young guy with not much money, sperm donation seems too good to be true. It pays well (as we’ve pointed out before) and requires you to do nothing more than what you’d be doing anyway. And if you happen to help a childless couple along the way, that’s just icing on the cake. Having actually been a sperm donor, I can say that you had better be prepared for a long haul. There are a lot of (horrifying) hoops to jump through, and then sperm banks expect you to masturbate like … well, like it’s your job.

✰ Domino’s Pizza Dough Bong

On the job training at Domino’s is serious business.

✰ Congress temporarily thwarted in its effort to launch biological drug war

Remember Mark Souder? Well, back in 2006, he and Senator Hatch and Senator Biden were desperately trying to introduce some major biological warfare into the drug war – namely, the use of mycoherbicides for drug crop eradication. At that time, we were able to stop them from implementing active field studies of mycoherbicides in Colombia and Afghanistan. But they still managed to push a pro-mycoherbicide provision… into the ONDCP reauthorization.

✰ D’oh! Homer Simpson Decorated Pot Seized from Cartel

Some packages depicted a dog, another a smiley face. One even had a scornful looking Homer Simpson with the inscription “Voy de mojarra y que wey!” which roughly translates as “I’m going to get high, dude!”

✰ Former Narcotics Detective Admits Drug Planting Common

Stephen Anderson, a former New York Police Department (NYPD) narcotics detective, recently testified that he regularly saw police plant drugs on innocent people as a way for officers to meet arrest quotas. While the news may shock many civilians, the custom is so well known among officers that it has a name: “flaking.”

✰ Boy, 13, arrested for selling meth in Lincoln

A 13-year-old boy, not even 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds, was arrested Wednesday night for selling methamphetamine. Lincoln police say the boy is the youngest person to sell meth they can remember. The Lincoln/Lancaster Narcotics Task Force began investigating the case after multiple sources reported the boy was selling, said Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood. According to court records, the boy sold two grams of meth to an undercover officer for $200 in a parking lot near First Street and Cornhusker Highway about 7 p.m. Wednesday. Minutes later, an SUV pulled up and the boy allegedly bought more meth from 19-year-old Tasha Ryan, a transient who, police say, had 3.3 grams of meth and 12 grams of marijuana with her.

✰ 11 Year Old Boy photos parents’ pot stash; cops pounce

An 11-year-old Minnesota boy who says he was fed up with his mom and stepfather filling their home with marijuana smoke took photos of the drugs, which were then sent to police. Drug agents served a search warrant on their home in Ravenna Township near Hastings last month and arrested Heidi Siebenaler, a Dakota County probation supervisor, and her husband, Mark Siebenaler. Both face charges in the case after eight pounds of marijuana were found in two Wal-Mart shopping bags in the master bedroom, according to KMSP-TV.

✰ High IQ linked to drug use

The “Just Say No” generation was often told by parents and teachers that intelligent people didn’t use drugs. Turns out, the adults may have been wrong. A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. The data come from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which has been following thousands of people over decades. The kids’ IQs were tested at the ages of 5, 10 and 16. The study also asked about drug use and looked at education and other socioeconomic factors. Then when participants turned 30, they were asked whether they had used drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin in the past year.

✰ Cop Says Marijuana Legalization Could Cause Window Washers to Fall From Large Buildings and Land on People

Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department’s Robert McMahon is charged with enforcing the law on marijuana use. But he is very concerned about the many hidden ramifications of decriminalizing cannabis, making it legal for anyone to grow and smoke hemp. He’s afraid of what the second largest city and most populous state in the country would look like in 20 years if weed is made legal. “I think that anytime that an intoxicant is made legal there are social costs associated with it. And I point directly to cigarettes and alcohol as examples,” he says. “We’re talking about loss of work and collisions, work-related industrial injuries. Somebody comes to work stoned, and they are working some heavy equipment or up on a high-rise — a window washer that’s stoned — not only could he [or she] injure himself, but some of his or her negligence could cause someone else to be injured.”

✰ San Francisco drug lab technician indicted on federal charges she skimmed cocaine from lab

A former technician at the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab has been charged in federal court with skimming cocaine from the lab, an allegation that forced its closure and the dismissal of hundreds of drug cases. A federal grand jury indicted 61-year-old Deborah Madden Thursday on a felony count of acquiring a controlled substance by subterfuge. Authorities say Madden took cocaine evidence from the lab while working there in late 2009.

✰ Bronx drug mill on residential street shut down, $400,000 of “Blackberry” heroin off the streets

Two NYPD “Operation Clean Halls” signs are posted in the lobby of a well-kept Cruger Ave. building where an apartment was used to package “Blackberry” heroin in glassine envelopes stamped with a likeness of the popular smartphone . Nearly $400,000 worth of heroin was seized and six pushers arrested this week after a two-month investigation brought down two drug mills in the tree-lined Pelham Parkway section, leaving residents shocked and scared.

✰ Smoking can make your nipples fall off

The nicotine in cigarettes and the carbon monoxide contained in cigarette smoke can diminish blood flow to various parts of the body. These toxins act as a virtual tourniquet. If the blood flow to a particular body part becomes greatly reduced or halted, that body part dies. In my memoir “In Stitches,” I told the story of a smoker whose nipples turned purple while undergoing a breast lift surgery. Purple is the precursor to black. Black is the precursor to falling off. To save the patient—and her nipples – we turned to the only treatment available. We went medieval. We used leeches.

✰ College Math Professor, 74, Accused Of Running Meth Lab

A 74-year-old math professor at two Boston universities is facing charges that she ran a methamphetamine lab with her son out of their home. Irina Kristy, 74, teaches math at Boston University and Suffolk University, the Boston Globe reported Sunday. Suffolk University placed her on administrative leave last week after learning of the charges against her.

✰ Third Grade Teacher Put Students In Lingerie

An Oklahoma teacher was arrested after concerned parents tipped off law enforcement that the woman made their children pose in Christmas lingerie during a pizza and Christmas tree decorating party at her house. That tip led police to discover child porn on her phone. Kimberly Crain, 47, hosted the gathering on Nov. 11 at her Shawnee, Okla., home for a handful of her students from McLoud Elementary School. When one third grader’s parents asked her how the party was, she told them “they dressed up in bras and panties and decorated the tree and ate pizza,” according to the police report. Thanks Jasmine.

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☛ Archie Comics Gay Military Inter-Racial Wedding Cover

This is the new cover to the upcoming Life With Archie #16, the comic which envisions possible futures for Archie characters. And this upcoming issue features the gay inter racial wedding of soldier Kevin Keller and his intended. On the cover. Of an Archie comic. All you folks who have been waiting for the future to happen? This is where it starts. Personal jetpacks are up next.

☛ Smart Meters Interfering With Home Electronics

About 200 customers of the Central Maine Power Company recently noticed something odd after the utility installed smart meters in their homes: in some cases other wireless devices stopped working, or behaved erratically. The 425,000 installed smart meters all broadcast in the 2.4GHz frequency range. Unfortunately, so do many of the consumer gadgets we take for granted these days including routers, electric garage doors, fire alarms, clocks, electric pet fences, answering machines, and baby monitors.

☛ Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself. The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.

☛ Experts Admit Fukushima is Causing Hidden Cancer Deaths

Health and radiation experts are now admitting that the Fukushima disaster is contributing to an unknown number of deaths as a result of increasing cancer rates around the globe. They are also stating that these deaths will be ‘hidden’ from the public eye due to a lack of accurate identification when it comes to targeting Fukushima-related cancer deaths. Of course the scientific experts are focusing primarily on the evacuation zone radiation and surrounding areas, despite the fact that Fukushima radiation is now so far reaching that it is adversely affecting the health of United States citizens.

☛ The FBI Announces Gangs Have Infiltrated Every Branch Of The Military

The FBI has released a new gang assessment announcing that there are 1.4 million gang members in the US, a 40 percent increase since 2009, and that many of these members are getting inside the military

☛ Controversial “anti-Semitic” vodka billboard taken down in NYC

A billboard for Wodka vodka in NYC has been taken down and destroyed after complaints that the advertisement’s message is anti-Semitic. The New York Times reported that the billboard featured a long-haired dog wearing a yarmulke and another dog wearing a Santa hat with the words, “Christmas quality, Hanukkah pricing,” alongside the photo.

☛ Hitler’s bedsheets up for auction in Bristol – for £3,000

BED linen which once belonged to Adolf Hitler is expected to fetch more than £3,000 when it goes under the hammer in Bristol next week. A personalised single bed sheet and pillowcase slip, decorated with the dictator’s initials and the Nazi eagle and swastika, are to be sold by auctioneers Dreweatts on Tuesday.

☛ Man-made super-flu could kill half humanity

A virus with the potential to kill up to half the world’s population has been made in a lab. Now academics and bioterrorism experts are arguing over whether to publish the recipe, and whether the research should have been done in the first place. ­The virus is an H5N1 bird flu strain which was genetically altered to become much more contagious. It was created by Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who first presented his work to the public at an influenza conference in Malta in September.

☛ Justice Department Seeks Ebonics Experts

Ebonics has widely been described as a nonstandard variant of English spoken largely by African Americans. John R. Rickford, a Stanford University professor of linguistics, has described it as “Black English” and noted that “Ebonics pronunciation includes features like the omission of the final consonant in words like ‘past’ (pas’ ) and ‘hand’ (han’), the pronunciation of the th in ‘bath’ as t (bat) or f (baf), and the pronunciation of the vowel in words like ‘my’ and ‘ride’ as a long ah (mah, rahd).” Detractors reject the notion that Ebonics is a dialect, instead considering it a bastardization of the English language.

☛ Colorado Kids N Teen store sells crotchless thong panties for CHILDREN

A grainy video that she filmed in the store on her cell phone shows pink and leopard-print thong panties with no crotches. ‘They’re sized to fit a seven-year-old – that’s just totally inappropriate,’ the mother-of-two said.

☛ Senator Lieberman asks Google to add ‘terrorist’ label to Blogger posts

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wants Google to add a “terrorist” flag so readers can label terrorist content. Lieberman sent a letter (yes, on paper, but that’s the best way to show the United States Senate letterhead) to Google CEO Larry Page taking him to task because “Blogger’s Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content,” and some other details. Lieberman goes on to point out that YouTube, also owned by Google, does ban terrorist content. He adds, quote, “Google’s inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online.” So Blogger could hold back terrorists if it wanted to? Unfortunately, Lieberman doesn’t define what he considers “terrorist content” or whether deleting posts with such content is within the purview of Blogger or the First Amendment. Google, not surprisingly, has yet to comment. Wonder if Larry Page still wished he had Eric Schmidt to handle such political fun and games.

☛ Broward fair ride shares name with Holocaust poison gas

A carnival ride at this year’s Broward County Fair shares a name with the poisonous gas used to kill millions in the Holocaust. The ride is “The Zyklon.” Zyklon B was the name of the lethal cyanide gas used at Nazi death camps. But, the ride’s owner said, that’s definitely not what it’s named for. Zyklon is German for cyclone. Still, it’s offending some in South Florida, home to the most Holocaust survivors in the nation, after New York City.

☛ Yale University offers a class in how to party in New York City

Moore’s “Dance Music and Nightlife Culture in New York City” seminar at the 310-year-old institution of higher learning also features texts by venerable scholars of the open bar Michael Musto (whose recent piece, “‘Why I Hate Nightlife,” is a tortured love letter to the scene) and Anthony Haden-Guest, who won top prize in Spy magazine’s 1988 Ironman Nightlife Decathlon. Speakers include Madame Wong’s and Red Egg pop-up club mastermind Simonez Wolf, Santos Party House’s Andrew W.K . and Vibe magazine co-founder Scott Poulson-Bryant. Wolf will even create a one-off party at Yale to show the preppies how it’s done. But students shouldn’t stay out late. Moore’s class allows just “one excused absence,” otherwise, they’ll need a note from the dean.

☛ Why I Hate Nightlife! 35 Bitter Reasons!

You’re the arbiter of culture for the entire Eastern Seaboard, but you’re pushed out of your table to make way for some sweaty businessman with his collar up who wants to pay $400 for a bottle of booze and some cranberry juice.

☛ Cannibals ate girl with potatoes

The case was postponed after the juror had to be excused while examining photographs of student Karina Barduchian after her death. Maxim Golovatskikh and his friend florist Yury Mozhnov, both 20, are accused of drowning Karina Barduchian, in a bath, then carving up her body and serving her meat with potatoes to a lodger. Before the case was halted, the lodger, Ekaterina Zinovyeva, told the court in St Petersburg they had a party with their Goth friends on the night of the murder in January, 2009.

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

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

• ▲ Dieting forces brain to eat itself, scientists claim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ▲ Homeless man jumps fence at White House

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

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

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

  According to the Secret Service, Crudup is homeless.

• ▲ Biden collects rent from Secret Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ▲ White supremacists attack teacher online by hacking Facebook profile

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

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

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

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

  Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.

  End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ▲ Lottery restricts high-level players

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

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

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

• ▲ Japan denies censorship over nuclear crisis

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

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

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

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

• ▲ Fukushima Teacher Muzzled on Radiation Risks for School Children

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

• ▲ Fatal Radiation Level Found at Fukushima Daiichi Plant

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

• ▲ Record-high radiation detected at Fukushima

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• ★ Lady Gaga website stays strangely silent over database hack
  A gang of hackers known as SwagSec announced at the tail end of last week that they had hacked into Lady Gaga’s UK website and made off with a database of names and email addresses of fans. To prove their point, they published the stolen data online.
• ★ Vaudeville Ventriloquist Dummy Portraits
  Ventriloquism creeps me out as it is, but these vaudeville era portraits of ventriloquists with their creepy dummies are, well, creepy. This first one is quite possibly the most unsettling thing I have ever seen. Enjoy the rest, including the random police booking photo of “The Great Lester”.
• ★ Monsanto-Resistant Weeds Take Root, Raising Food Prices

  For decades, farmers had it relatively easy when it came to weeds infesting their soil: apply herbicides, wait for the weeds to die and grow more crops. Those salad days, alas, are coming to an end.

  A new series of studies released by Weed Science this month finds at least 21 weed species have become resistant to the popular herbicide glyphosate (sold as Monsanto’s Roundup), and a growing number survive multiple herbicides, so-called “super-weeds.” The same selection pressure creating bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics is leading to the rapid evolution of plants that survive modern herbicides. If the trend continues, yields could drop and food costs climb as weeds grow more difficult to uproot.

• ★ A devil of a name put on NZ banned list

  NAMING your new bundle of joy Lucifer has been effectively banned by New Zealand’s names registrar after three parents had the odd request knocked back.

  The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages has been cracking down on mothers and fathers getting too creative with their children’s names, ruling out punctuation marks such as . (Full Stop), * (Asterisk) and / (presumably ”Slash”).

  The list of 102 names rejected in the past two years includes Baron, Bishop, Duke, General, Judge, Justice, King, Knight and Mr, all deemed too similar to titles.
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  Messiah was also turned down, as was 89, and the single letters, C, D, I and T, although Q and J were accepted after being queried.

• ★ Rocker Daltrey’s migrant fury

  RAGING pop star Roger Daltrey claims PM David Cameron does not have “the balls” to tackle mass immigration.

  The Who’s working class hero Roger Daltrey sparked a storm a fortnight ago when he blasted Labour for “screwing” Brits by opening the floodgates to foreigners.

  Yesterday he turned on the Tories, saying Mr Cameron and his team lacked the guts to deal with the issue.

  He also took a pop at leftie rocker Bono for claiming he is a socialist while dodging taxes in his homeland.

• ★ Brilliant Camera Angle
  After getting a pie in the face, Rupert Murdoch inadvertently gets a pair of devil horns.
• ★ YouTube DMCA Takedown Grabs Track For Eminem

  After “Dare to Dream” was put up on YouTube one of its early listeners was Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope records. Recognizing quality, Iovine had plans in his mind for Skepta’s track so, with help from parent company Universal, they had YouTube remove the song on copyright grounds.

  Armed with cash Interscope approached Boy Better Known, a group and record label founded in 2005 by Skepta and the team behind Dare to Dream.

  “Being in an industry where money talks, everybody involved in the ‘Dare To Dream’ project came to a conclusion to sign it to Interscope,” says Skepta.

  So who is the lucky recipient of the track? None other than Interscope giant Eminem.

• ★ Is Your Voicemail Wide Open?
  For years, it has been a poorly-kept secret that some of the world’s largest wireless providers rely on caller ID information to verify that a call to check voicemail is made from the account holder’s mobile phone. Unfortunately, this means that if you haven’t set up your voicemail account to require a PIN for access, your messages may be vulnerable to snooping by anyone who has access to caller ID “spoofing” technology. Several companies offer caller ID spoofing services, and the tools needed to start your own spoofing operation are freely available online.
• ★ Civilian Deaths from CIA Drone Strikes: Zero or Dozens?

  Last month, however, John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism advisor broke this silence, telling reporters that “in the last year ‘there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.’”

  Zero civilian casualties — during a period when there were more than 100 CIA drone strikes — sounded almost too good to be true. As it turns out, it was. According to a new report from the UK’s award-winning Bureau of Investigative Journalism, released last night, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes since August 2010. Among these, the Bureau reports that it has identified, by name, six children killed in drone strikes. More civilians are likely to have been killed in an additional 15 strikes for which precise information is not available.

• ★ FBI releases files on controversial booksellers Paladin and Loompanics
  The FBI has released its files on two famously controversial publishers, Paladin Press and Loompanics Unlimited, following a FOIA request filed by Government Attic. The files suggest that the booksellers’ huge libraries of books on drugs, guns and other ultra-libertarian issues only rarely drew the FBI’s attention.
• ★ Summer’s Eve ‘racist’ for using different coloured hands in ads

  A series of adverts for a range of women’s hygiene products by Summer’s Eve have sparked a massive backlash from viewers.

  The use of ‘talking’ hands of black, white and Latina women to represent female genitalia was always meant to be provocative, but have been branded racist by some.

  Hundreds of negative comments have been posted online, with some arguing that the distinctive voice-overs adhere to racial stereotypes.

  The commercials were made with the intention of promoting cleanliness, but for many women it’s the image of Summer’s Eve that needs a good scrub.

• ★ Prostitution ring for Wall Street clients busted

  Seventeen people were indicted on Wednesday on charges of running a high-end prostitution ring that catered to Wall Street clients who often spent more than $10,000 in a night, authorities said.

  The ring pulled in more than $7 million over three years, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said at a news conference.

  “The business of high-end prostitution is enormously profitable,” Hynes said.

  The prostitution service, named High Class NY, was run 24 hours a day out of an office in Brooklyn and charged from $400 to $3,600 an hour for its services, according to the 144-count indictment. It also provided customers with cocaine and other narcotics, the indictment said.

  Hynes said clients often spent in excess of $10,000 in a single night.

  They were “all high-end customers coming from the financial markets. People with nothing but money,” he said.

• ★ Supporters worry about muting of pro-Israel media voice
  Backers of Israel worried that a diminished Rupert Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.
• ★ Bringing light to the poor, one liter at a time
  A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time.
• ★ Police arrest goat accused of armed robbery

  Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.

  Vigilantes seized the black and white goat, saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into an animal to escape after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

  ‘The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them.

• ★ Chihuahua thwarts robbery at Altadena smoke shop

  The store owner quickly begins placing money in a robber’s backpack. As he does, his Chihuahua erupts into ferocious barking at the two men, who beat a hasty retreat, running out of the store with the backpack but taking less money than they could’ve gotten.

  At one point, one of the robbers even points his rifle at the diminutive but undaunted pooch, who chases the pair out of the store and down the street.

• ★ Dutch abortion ship is forced to flee Polish storm of protest

  Pro-abortion activists from Holland who took a seaborne clinic to staunchly Catholic Poland have been forced to pull out after a fortnight of furious protests and official pressure.

  Women on Waves, a group of radical campaigners seeking to spread their doctrine of “free abortions” throughout Europe, had hoped to bypass Poland’s tough anti-abortion laws by ferrying women to international waters aboard a converted tug, the Langenort, to undergo abortions.

  Last week, however, they abandoned their efforts and left Polish waters after providing “counselling” to only 20 women. Rebecca Gomperts, a former Greenpeace activist who heads Women on Waves, refused to say whether they had performed any abortions.

  The arrival of the Langenort in the northern Polish port of Wladyslawowo provoked outrage from the Roman Catholic Church, and the vessel was met by furious demonstrators when it docked.

• ★ 22 NFL Players Arrested During The Lockout So Far [Slideshow]
• ★ High levels of radioactivity found extensively

  Japan’s science ministry says air above the ground about 150 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is as radioactive as areas 50 kilometers from the source of radioactivity.

  The ministry on Wednesday released a map showing radiation levels at locations one meter above the ground in Miyagi Prefecture, north of Fukushima, based on the results of an aerial survey from June 22nd through 30th.

• ★ Bootleg Chinese ‘Apple Stoer’
  They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.
• ★ Diamonds Lose Mass in Sunlight
  It might be among the hardest materials known, but place a diamond in a patch of sunlight and it will start to lose atoms, say a team of physicists in Australia. The rate of loss won’t significantly trouble tiara wearers or damage diamond rings, but the discovery could prove a boon for researchers working to tap diamond’s exceptional optical and electronic properties.
• ★ Stick insects survive one million years without sex

  Certain species of Timema stick insects were known to reproduce asexually, with females producing young in “virgin births” without the need for egg fertilisation by males.

  The insects instead produce genetic clones of themselves.

• ★ Coming Soon: The Breast Milk Baby Doll

  A new doll, called the “Breast Milk Baby,” is slated to make a debut sometime this year in US toy stores. A sensation in Europe, the doll has already polarized many groups at odds over issues like breastfeeding in public and those who feel young girls are already growing up too fast.

  The doll comes with a halter which is worn by a young girl as she holds the baby up to a pair of rose petal “nipples” on the front. When the doll is placed near the petals, it begins to make suckling sounds.

  Naturally, when asked what they thought about a breast milk baby doll, some shoppers in NYC were astounded, even offended. But the company who makes it remains philosophical.

  “I think that it’s totally bizarre to teach a prepubescent child how to breastfeed,” said one Manhattanite woman. “Quite strange.”

• ★ Big Brother Creep Out: 7 Ways US Govt. Invades Brains
  With increasing frequency it seems agencies of the government are looking to tap into the public consciousness to gather information on everything from how you surf the Web to how they can use information generated by you to predict the future. It’s all a little creepy, really. Here we take a look at seven programs announced this year that in some cases really want to crawl into your brain to see what’s happening in the world.
• ★ Just what is Manhattanhenge?
  New Yorkers have witnessed an urban solar phenomenon, with the Sun setting in alignment with the city’s skyscrapers and giving an effect fans say is reminiscent of Wiltshire’s Stonehenge. Welcome to Manhattanhenge.
• ★ It’s Not Just a Scandal, It’s a Syndrome

  A good journalist brings that depth of commitment to a story, along with the appropriate contextual information, public memory, and reportorial skill. When a reporter from the German magazine Der Spiegel told me in 2003 that Fox News reporters in Baghdad had borrowed sandbags from American soldiers and piled them on the roof of their hotel to stage an on-camera impression that they were reporting from a battle elsewhere, I was reminded that Murdoch’s News Corporation isn’t so interested in serious journalism.

  No large news organization in the world, in fact—at least none that’s as large as or larger than those influenced by Vladimir Putin in Russia or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or the Communist Party in China—tries as brazenly as Murdoch’s globe-straddling News Corporation to generate and even fabricate news or to subvert good reporting of news so cynically and powerfully—and hurtfully, to both its subjects and its audiences.

• ★ Man’s call for Obama assassination is free speech, not crime, court rules

  Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against a major presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama’s impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time.

  A divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that conviction Tuesday, saying Bagdasarian’s comments were “particularly repugnant” because they endorsed violence but that a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken them as a genuine threat.

  The observation that Obama “will have a 50 cal in the head soon” and a call to “shoot the [racist slur]” weren’t violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn’t criminalize “predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president,” said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ✩ Woman Showers On NYC Subway Train [VIDEO]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But she mistook her deadly symptoms for heartburn.

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

• ✩ 15 Food Companies That Serve You ‘Wood’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• ✪ Hand-hacking lets you pluck strings like a musical pro

  WANT to learn a musical instrument, but can’t find the time to practise? A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune. No spirits of dead musicians are involved.

  PossessedHand, being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, also in Tokyo, electrically stimulates the muscles in the forearm that move your fingers. A belt worn around that part of the subject’s arm contains 28 electrode pads, which flex the joints between the three bones of each finger and the two bones of the thumb, and provide two wrist movements. Users were able to sense the movement of their hands that this produced, even with their eyes closed. “The user’s fingers are controlled without the user’s mind,” explains Emi Tamaki of the University of Tokyo, who led the research.

• ✪ Billy The Kid photo sells for $2.3 million

  130 years ago, legendary outlaw Billy the Kid had his “picture made” in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, posing for what is now considered the most recognizable photo of the American West. A single, original tintype is the only authenticated photo of the Kid in existence today…

  Nearly as legendary as the kid himself, the photo has been studied, copied, scrutinized, portrayed in films, re-imagined, and immortalized. Once thought to prove Billy was “The Left Handed Gun,” it later proved he was not.

• ✪ U Pay Your Tax 2?
  As U2 took to the stage a balloon decorated with the message “U Pay Your Tax 2″ was removed from the Glastonbury crowd
• ✪ Jamaicans react to Buju Banton 10 year sentence [Video]
• ✪ Suspected flash mob rips off Upper Darby Sears (With Video)
  “Imagine the guts of this gang of young hoodlums. One was 11 years old. The others arrested ranged from 12 to 16 years old. They planned this out earlier in the day on a social networking site. It was pre-planned. They got on the El, got off at 69th Street Terminal and walked up the hill to Sears.”
• ✪ HIV drug scam: NYC doctor busted for doling out meds patients didn’t need, prosecutors say
  A Washington Heights doctor was busted in a $700,000 Medicaid scam for prescribing HIV drugs to a stunning 150 patients who did not have the virus – and billing the public health system for their care, prosecutors said.
• ✪ Global warming reintroduces gray whale, algae species to Northern Atlantic

  Just decades ago, the gray whale hasn’t strayed to the Northern Atlantic since the 18th century. The Neodenticula seminae, a species of algae, hasn’t been there in 800,000 years. Now, members of both species have been spotted in the Northern Atlantic.

  Scientists believe the accelerated melting of the earth’s polar caps due to global warming over the last few decades is responsible for the reintroductions.

• ✪ Battle-weary teachers agree out-of-control middle school should close

  Kids hoot and yammer so loudly that their ruckus drowns out the teacher. A trash can is overturned in class and dumped. Grimy floors are littered with sunflower-seed shells, spit out by the hundreds.

  Books and supplies fly out the windows. Mouse droppings are everywhere, even on the computers.

  MS 344, the Academy of Collaborative Education in Harlem, is a hellhole where teachers should get combat pay — they are cursed, assaulted and sometimes groped.

  “It was literally war,” said a teacher who once found a sticky used condom in her purse. “I was pushed, shoved, scratched, thrown against the wall, spit on and pickpocketed. I just wanted peace.”

• ✪ A Crime of Shadows
  After months of prowling Internet chat rooms, posing as the mother of two young daughters, Detective Michele Deery thought she had a live one: “parafling,” a married, middle-aged man who claimed he wanted to have sex with her kids. But was he just playing a twisted game of seduction? Both the policewoman and her target give the author their versions of the truth, in a case that challenges the conventional wisdom about online sexual predators, and blurs the lines among crime, “intent,” and enticement.
• ✪ D.C. Caribbean Fest 2011 Brawl @ Howard University Pt. 1 [Video]
  Top Flight Crew Vs. Hampshire Towers Crew Fight @ D.C. Caribbean Fest 2011. Kids in D.C. Going HAM-BURGER @ tha Caribbean fest in D.C. on Georgia Ave. !!!!!!!!!
• ✪ Murder in the Amazon
  The Brazilian House of Representatives has just approved the abandonment of the Brazilian Forestry Code. If we do not mobilize now, huge expanses of our forests may be vulnerable to a devastating deforestation. The bill has generated widespread outrage and protests across the country. And the tension is rising: in recent weeks several respected environmental activists were murdered, allegedly by assassins hired by illegal loggers. It is essential to act now. They are trying to silence any criticism as the law is being debated in the Senate. But President Dilma has the power to veto the changes if we can persuade her to overcome the political pressure and take the role of a true leader on environmental issues.
• ✪ The History Of The (Fake) ‘Free Public WiFi’ You Always See At Airports

  If you travel a fair bit, as I do, you’ve noticed at almost every airport that there’s an “ad hoc” (i.e., computer-to-computer rather than computer-to-WiFi) option called “Free Public WiFi.” It seems to be everywhere. I’ve never connected to it, because I know enough not to connect to an ad hoc offering, but I was always amazed at the fact that I see it in pretty much every airport I’ve been to. I had wondered if it was a honeypot scam for a while, but I couldn’t believe that scammers would be able to set up such honeypots in so many airports worldwide and no one would catch them and take it down. So how could there be such “Free Public WiFi” (which obviously was not what it claimed to be) in so many places?

  The answer? Well, it’s all Microsoft’s fault.

• ✪ Impact: Earth!
  Calculate the destruction a object hitting the earth from outer space would cause
• ✪ Fukushima residents’ urine now radioactive

  More than 3 millisieverts of radiation has been measured in the urine of 15 Fukushima residents of the village of Iitate and the town of Kawamata, confirming internal radiation exposure, it was learned Sunday.

  Both are about 30 to 40 km from the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, which has been releasing radioactive material into the environment since the week of March 11, when the quake and tsunami caused core meltdowns.

  “This won’t be a problem if they don’t eat vegetables or other products that are contaminated,” said Nanao Kamada, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Hiroshima University. “But it will be difficult for people to continue living in these areas.”

• ✪ Aliens found in Russia after a UFO crashed in 1969
  Back in 1969, the Russian KGB rescued a UFO shot down probably by their fighters. In this small ship several small humanoids were found.
• ✪ Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ jacket fetches $1.8M
  The jacket is one of two Jackson wore during the filming of the 1983 Thriller video. Jackson wears the jacket in a scene with a troupe of zombies who rise from their graves and break into a dance routine.
• ✪ Guru Kailash Singh Quit Bathing 37 Years Ago

  Some say cleanliness is next to godliness, but not Guru Kailash Singh who quit bathing 37 years ago, because he believe he’d be rewarded for his sacrifice.

  Kailash, 65, a farmer from India, stopped using soap and water in 1974, after his wedding. He also hasn’t cut his dreadlocks, according to the news agency Barcroft.

  It wasn’t because he no longer needed to attract the ladies that he let himself go. Kailash reportedly abandoned washing because a priest told him it would help him produce a son.

  With seven daughters born since then, he’s still waiting for a male heir.

  Each evening, Kailash winds down the day with a “fire bath” ritual of smoking marijuana, praying to the Hindu god Shiva and dancing around a campfire.

  There was one failed attempt by his family to force him into a stream.

• ✪ City living affects your brain, researchers find

  The brains of people living in cities operate differently from those in rural areas, according to a brain-scanning study. Scientists found that two regions, involved in the regulation of emotion and anxiety, become overactive in city-dwellers when they are stressed and argue that the differences could account for the increased rates of mental health problems seen in urban areas.

  Previous research has shown that people living in cities have a 21% increased risk of anxiety disorders and a 39% increased risk of mood disorders. In addition, the incidence of schizophrenia is twice as high in those born and brought up in cities.

• ✪ Did Shakespeare Smoke Weed? Let’s Dig Him Up and Find Out

  The team also looks to address a controversial suggestion Thackeray made a decade ago, when he examined a collection of two dozen pipes found in the playwright’s garden and determined that Shakespeare was an avid marijuana smoker.

  Thackeray claimed the devices were used to smoke cannabis, a plant actively cultivated in Britain at the time. The allegation has provoked disbelief and anger among some fans of the bard.

  Prof. Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, told the Daily Mail, “I would be happy if they did open it up because it could put an end to a lot of fruitless speculation.”

  “If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, citing similar evidence found in Virginia.

• ✪ Mahatma Gandhi’s face seen on Mars!

  An Italian space enthusiast, while going through pictures of Mars, claims to have found a structure on the face of the planet that resembles Mahatma Gandhi.

  Matteo Lanneo was scanning through the latest images sent by the Mars Express probe when he came across the uncanny resemblance to India’s father of the nation, the Daily Mail reported.

  The head appears to have a moustache and shaven, and has prominent eyebrows.

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