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

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

✸ Penis tattoo gives guy permanent erection

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

✸ Bulldozers back at ‘sex den’ mosque

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

✸ How NASA kept astronauts from swearing on the Moon

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

✸ Microbes may power up space robots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

✸ This Girl Snuck Into a Russian Military Rocket Factory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

✸ Nazi 3D films from 1936 discovered

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

✸ Meet the Generationally Biased

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

✸ ICE’s Own Data Fails To Back Enforcement Claims

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

✸ US elections: Funding unlimited?

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

✸ Robert Wilson jailed for biting off girlfriend’s nose

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

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

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

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✸ Could the U.S. Government Start Reading Your Emails?

It’s likely Anderson is not alone in her concerns that the government may be monitoring what Americans say, write, and read. And now there may be even more to worry about: a newly revealed security research project called PRODIGAL — the Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning — which has been built to scan IMs, texts and emails . . . and can read approximately a quarter billion of them a day.

✸ Facebook Flaw Means Anyone Can See Private Photos

A surprising security hole in Facebook allows almost anyone to see pictures marked as private, an online forum revealed late Monday. Even pictures supposedly kept hidden from uninvited eyes by Facebook’s privacy controls aren’t safe, reported one user of a popular bodybuilding forum in a post entitled “I teach you how to view private Facebook photos.” Facebook appears to have acted quickly to eliminate the end-run around privacy controls, after word of the exploit spread across the Internet. It wasn’t long before one online miscreant uploaded private pictures of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself — evidence that the hack worked, he said.

✸ Kodak’s long fade to black

Kodak Brownie and Instamatic cameras were once staples of family vacations and holidays — remember the “open me first” Christmas ad campaigns? But it may not be long before a generation of Americans grows up without ever having laid hands on a Kodak product. That’s a huge comedown for a brand that was once as globally familiar as Coca-Cola. It’s hard to think of a company whose onetime dominance of a market has been so thoroughly obliterated by new technology. Family snapshots? They’re almost exclusively digital now, and only a tiny fraction ever get printed on paper. Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera in 1975; but now that you can point and click with a cheap cellphone, even the stand-alone digital camera is becoming an endangered species on the consumer electronics veld. The last spool of yellow-boxed Kodachrome rolled out the door of a Mexican factory in 2009.

✸ Greenpeace penetrates French nuclear plant

Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading “Coucou” and “Facile”, (meaning “Hey” and “Easy”) on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country. Police, whom the environmental activist group immediately told of the publicity stunt, took several hours to round up nine intruders who had broken into the power plant in Nogent-sur-Seine, about 95km southeast of Paris, on Monday. Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures, ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year, was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors.

✸ ‘Human Zoos’ go on show in Paris

“Exhibitions: the invention of the savage”, at the Quai Branly museum, shows how up until the mid-20th century, labelling indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania and America “savages” helped to justify the brutality of colonial rule. Former football star Lilian Thuram, who was born on the French Caribbean island Guadeloupe, is chief curator of the show. He told AFP he was stunned by a visit to Hamburg zoo in Germany. “At the entrance there are animal sculptures, but also ones of Indians and Africans — letting visitors know they are going to see not just animals but human beings as well,” he said. “They are still there today.” In 1931, the grandparents of another French footballer, Christian Karembeu, were put on display at the Jardin d’Acclimation in Paris, then in Germany, along with around 100 other New Caledonian Kanaks, cast as “cannibals”.

✸ Seattle welfare recipient lives in million-dollar home

A Seattle woman who is receiving welfare assistance from Washington state also happens to live in a waterfront house on Lake Washington worth more than a million dollars. Federal agents raided the home this weekend but have not released the woman or her husband’s name because they have not officially been charged with a crime. However, federal documents obtained by KING 5 News show the couple currently receives more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus state and government disability checks and food stamps. They have been receiving the benefits since 2003. The 2,500 square-foot home, which includes gardens and a boat dock, is valued at $1.2 million. And even though the couple has been receiving the benefits for nearly 10 years, records show that they accurately listed the address of their current home when applying for the state and federal benefits.

✸ Fury as Virgin Megastore recommends Hitler’s Mein Kampf

The music, entertainment and media retailer came under fire as pictures have been circling the internet of a ‘Virgin Recommends’ book shelf with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for sale and published in Arabic. Virgin recommended the book in its store in the Landmark Shopping Centre in Doha. It has since taken it off the shelves. Charlie Gandelman took the picture and then posted it on Twitter after he was alerted to it by his friend Anna Peregrini.

✸ Ex-Pro wrestler Andre Davis ‘Gangsta of Love’ convicted of 14 felonious assault counts in HIV case

A jury on Wednesday convicted a former professional wrestler of 14 felonious assault counts alleging he had sex with women without telling them he had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Hamilton County jurors deliberated over two days before returning the verdict against Andre Davis, of Cincinnati. Prosecutors said the 29-year-old Davis, who wrestled using stage names including Gangsta of Love, Sweet Sexy Sensation and Andre Heart, violated state law by not telling a dozen sex partners about his HIV status or lying to them. Davis’ attorney, Greg Cohen, told WLWT-TV he would appeal the verdict. He said the state law regarding HIV and felonious assault is poorly written because it doesn’t require proof that there has been “harm or an attempt to commit harm.”

✸ Architecture of Fear – a conversation with Trevor Paglen

For his Limit Telephotography series, Paglen used high powered telescopes to picture the “black” sites, a series of secret locations operated by the CIA. Often outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction, these locations do not officially exist, they range from American torture camps in Afghanistan to front companies running airlines whose purpose is to covertly move suspects around.

✸ Planet like Earth found in star’s habitable zone

Scientists and their Kepler spacecraft have discovered for the first time a planet in distant space that is much like Earth, circling a sun-like star and lying in a region neither too hot nor too cold for an atmosphere that could support some form of life. The temperature on that planet, the scientists say, probably is a comfortable 72 degrees, rain or shine. The planet, whose discovery was announced Monday at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, was first detected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft two years ago, shortly after it began surveying 155,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

✸ U.S. Drug Agents Launder Profits of Mexican Cartels

Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials. The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are. They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.

✸ Scientists trying to clone, resurrect extinct mammoth

A team of scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States hopes to clone a mammoth, a symbol of Earth’s ice age that ended 12,000 years ago, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun. The researchers say they hope to produce a baby mammoth within six years. The scientists say they will extract DNA from a mammoth carcass that has been preserved in a Russian laboratory and insert it into the egg cells of an African elephant in hopes of producing a mammoth embryo.

✸ How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid’s Lunch

An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.

✸ German neo-Nazi gang ‘developed Monoploy-style game with death camps’

Called “Pogromly” and intended for other far-right extremists the game has the names of four Nazi concentration camps instead of the railway stations found on the traditional Monopoly board. Players have the chance to buy Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck, with each camp costing 4,000 reichsmarks, the currency used in Hitler’s Germany. A number of sets of the game were discovered in a garage used by the gang the self-styled National Socialist Underground amongst bomb-making equipment and unused nail bombs last month. Players start on a square emblazoned with a swastika and also have the chance of landing on a numbers of squares marked with the SS emblem. The board also comes with pictures of Hitler and sinister looking Jews.

✸ Indian state trades gifts for sterilisation

India has 1.2 billion people and is fast catching up with China as the world’s most populous nation. In an attempt to slow down the baby boom the state of Rajasthan, home to 68 million people, is offering prizes in exchange for sterilisation. Now women can win anything from food processors to cars if they undergo the knife. This latest effort has raised controversy as the procedure is is still viewed with suspicion after the government introduced a forced sterilization program the 1970s.

✸ The digital future of narcotics

Technologists will become the next drug dealers, administering narcotics through brain stimulation, according to Rohit Talwar, the founder of Fast Future Research speaking at Intelligence Squared’s If conference. Talwar was charged by the government to investigate the drugs landscape over the next 20 years, exploring scenarios going beyond the traditional model of gangs producing and shipping drugs around the world. He described how the world of genomic sequencing and services such as 23 and Me open up possibilities for tailoring drugs to the individual, delivering effects based on your physiology — which could apply just as effectively to narcotics as it could medicines.

✸ Nude Suspect Viewing Child Porn Before Arrest

Acting on a tip, authorities went Thursday morning to the home of 63-year-old Thomas Davis in the 2000 block of Westwood Northern Boulevard. Deputies said Davis answered the door in the nude, and they escorted him inside to retrieve some clothing. Investigators said they saw obvious child pornography images scrolling on a computer monitor inside the apartment, and Davis was arrested.

✸ Selah School District settles termination agreement of Selah Jr. High teacher

On October 13, Selah Police began an investigation of McMillen after a student discovered a camera hidden under a desk in his classroom. Police told KIMA they believed the camera had been hidden with the intent to look up girls’ skirts.

✸ Public high school teacher starred in porno movies released last year

Kevin Hogan is an English teacher and crew coach at a top-rated Massachusetts public high school, but he brings some unusual experience to the job: until recently, he was starring in pornographic movies. Hogan has worked at the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden since September. In addition to his coaching and teaching duties, he also chairs the high school’s English department. But he can also be found on the Internet and in adult entertainment stores under his screen name: Hytch Cawke. His movie credits include “Fetish World” and “Just Gone Gay 8,” and FOX Undercover found his third movie, whose title is not fit to reveal in a family news outlet, in a local adult store. It features him answering an ad to have sex for money.

✸ Weta insect: Heaviest in the world weighs 3 times more than a mouse

A nature-lover has revealed how he spent two days tracking down a giant insect on a remote New Zealand island – and got it to eat a carrot out of his hand. Mark Moffett’s find is the world’s biggest insect in terms of weight, which at 71g is heavier than a sparrow and three times that of a mouse. The 53-year-old former park ranger discovered the giant weta up a tree and his real life Bug’s Bunny has now been declared the largest ever found.

✸ Druggiest Colleges in U.S.: Colorado, Denison, Dartmouth, Kenyon, More

From study enhancers to bong rips, American colleges remain a hotbed for illegal drug experimentation. The Daily Beast finds the 30 institutions of higher learning where students experiment the most. The college experience is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and trying new things. For some college students, that includes experimenting with drugs, from Adderall to acid to marijuana. It’s no wonder, then, that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy singled out university students as a group particularly prone to drug abuse in its latest strategy report. “Reducing substance use behaviors among college students requires prevention strategies at the college or university as well as in the surrounding off-campus community,” according to the White House report.

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• ✪ After Attack, Reclusive Amazon Tribe Feared Missing

  An uncontacted Amazon tribe that made headlines earlier this year after being filmed from the air is feared missing after presumed drug traffickers overran the Brazilian guards posted to protect the tribe’s lands.According to tribal advocacy group Survival International, Brazilian officials can find no trace of the Indians in the area after heavily armed men ransacked the guard post in western Brazil about 32 miles (20 kilometers) from the Peruvian border. Like other uncontacted tribes, the Indians live a traditional life in the forest and does not have contact with the outside world.

  Workers from FUNAI, the government bureau of Indian affairs, found a broken arrow in one of the men’s backpacks, raising fears for the tribe’s safety.

  “We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee,” Carlos Travassos, the head of the government’s isolated Indians department, said in a statement. “Now we have good proof. We are more worried than ever.”

• ✪ Privacy Groups Protest Massive DHS Database of Secret Watchlists
  Homeland Security plans to operate a massive new database of names, photos, birthdays and biometrics called Watchlist Service, duplicated from the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database which has proven not to be accurate many times in the past. DHS wants to exempt the Watchlist Service from Privacy Act provisions, meaning you will never know if you are wrongfully listed. Privacy groups worried about inaccurate info and mission creep have filed a protest, arguing the Privacy Act says DHS must notify subject of government surveillance.
• ✪ By Helping a Girl Testify at a Rape Trial, a Dog Ignites a Legal Debate
  The new role for dogs as testimony enablers can, however, raise thorny legal questions. Defense lawyers argue that the dogs may unfairly sway jurors with their cuteness and the natural empathy they attract, whether a witness is telling the truth or not, and some prosecutors insist that the courtroom dogs can be a crucial comfort to those enduring the ordeal of testifying, especially children.
• ✪ Alien Outposts Discovered In Antarctica?

  A self-proclaimed UFO researcher has found what he believes to be alien outposts in Antarctica. Posting at a blog and YouTube channel under the moniker “americanbunker,” he has “analyzed” satellite photos of Antarctica via Google Earth, and says the photos show UFOs and other creatures.He strings together highlights of his Antarctic objects in a 12-minute video. However, the objects visible in the stream of pixellated photos look much more like ice floes, rocky outcroppings and shadows cast by bumps in the terrain than they do flying spacecraft or structures built by Martians. [See the video]

  Instead of an alien invasion or a cover-up by the U.S. Geological Survey (many of the photos were made public by the USGS), there’s probably a psychological phenomenon at play here: “Pareidolia” is the scientific term for the common human tendency to find patterns in random shapes. We’re especially susceptible to perceiving faces or figures where they aren’t.

• ✪ Shop worker in Stonehaven UK stung by scorpion in bananas

  An Aberdeenshire shop worker has been treated in hospital after being stung by a scorpion.William Clarke, 48, was unpacking a box of Colombian bananas at Farmfoods in Stonehaven on Monday afternoon when the incident happened.

• ✪ Cheap housing luring Canadian marijuana growers into U.S.

  The U.S. housing crash has lured some marijuana growers to move their operations south of the border, according to an internal RCMP report obtained by the Vancouver Sun.”Some VOC (Vietnamese Organized Crime) groups have moved their marijuana grow operations to the United States where the lower cost of real estate (in some regions) allows them to operate a more profitable enterprise and where they can also avoid police/customs detection at the border,” states the RCMP report.

• ✪ After 9/11, an Era of Tinker, Tailor, Jihadist, Spy

  Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.And in a classified tactic used multiple times across the Middle East, American military and intelligence officers have hacked the cellphones of terrorist leaders using computer code, to lure them into an ambush or spread the word that fellow cell members were embezzling money or plotting against their comrades. Distrust of secure communications disrupts and even deters action.

• ✪ Sex offender dressed as Cookie Monster arrested

  A registered sex offender wore a Cookie Monster costume as he handed out fliers to children at the Mississippi Valley Fair over the weekend, police said.James Lester Rogers, 25, of 611 Perry St., Apt. 1, Davenport, was in the Scott County Jail on Monday on an aggravated misdemeanor charge.

  Police said that on Saturday he wore a full Cookie Monster costume and handed out fliers for a company called Q.C. Characters. If children wanted their pictures taken with “Cookie Monster,” Rogers stood for the photographs.

• ✪ Building Blocks of DNA Found in Meteorites From Space

  The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.

  Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth.

• ✪ Right-wing extremists tricked by ‘Trojan’ T-shirts
  About 250 T-shirts were distributed at the rock concert
  Hundreds of free T-shirts handed out at a weekend right-wing rock festival in the eastern German state of Thuringia contained a secret surprise. Upon washing, the original graphic faded to reveal a clandestine message.
• ✪ Hacker Group Anonymous Vows To Destroy Facebook On November 5

  Hacktivist group Anonymous, which has been responsible for cyber-attacks on the Pentagon, News Corp, and others, has vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5th (which should ring a bell).Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Facebook account, Anonymous hopes to “kill Facebook,” the “medium of communication [we] all so dearly adore.”

• ✪ Face-recognition software: It’s coming, everyone will use it, and you can’t stop it.
  Don’t believe it. Soon, face recognition will be ubiquitous. While the police may promise to tread lightly, the technology is likely to become so good, so quickly that officers will find themselves reaching for their cameras in all kinds of situations. The police will still likely use traditional ID technologies like fingerprinting—or even iris scanning—as these are generally more accurate than face-scanning, but face-scanning has an obvious advantage over fingerprints: It works from far away. Bunch of guys loitering on the corner? Scantily clad woman hanging around that run-down motel? Two dudes who look like they’re smoking a funny-looking cigarette? Why not snap them all just to make sure they’re on the up-and-up?
• ✪ The Cop iPhone App That Knows Your Face and Can Send You to Jail
  Before we talk about the facial recognition technology thats being rolled out to police stations nationwide next month, here’s a question for you: Who would you rather have access to face recognition tech: cops or that weird heavy-breather on the subway? Do you want it? You know, to check out that weird heavy-breather on the subway: what’s his deal? Maybe you are the heavy-breather. In the beginning, that face recognition app might just send you to some photos on Picasa or Facebook—but that’s all it takes to get to the top of the hill in figuring out a whole lot of stuff about someone.
• ✪ Google Group Members to Use Facial Recognition to Identify London Rioters

  A new Google Group called “London Riots Facial Recognition” has appeared online, in the wake of the riots that rocked the U.K. capital over the weekend. The group’s goal is to use facial recognition technologies to identify the looters who appear in online photos.The group appears to be thoughtfully considering its actions, in threads titled “Ethical Issues,” and “Keeping Things Legal,” for example. They’ve also stated that “it’s important we only use legal sources for images.”

  However, there’s a major “creepy” factor to this undertaking, too. The idea that a group of people would team up online to use (misuse?) facial recognition technologies in this way, notably outside professional law enforcement channels, seems like a modern take on vigilante style justice, where the torches of the angry villagers have turned into APIs and algorithms.

• ✪ Stand Your Ground: Taking Photos In Public
  The London Street Photography Festival had six photographers attempt to take pictures in various locations on public streets in Britain’s capital. Despite being perfectly within their rights, all six were stopped by private security forces who made vague allusions to “terrorism” and “security” and tried to intimidate them. The Festival filmed the encounters and what happened when the photographers politely refused to back down:
• ✪ Our Troops do NOT Protect Our Freedom and We Should Stop Thanking Them for Doing So

  Let’s make one thing crystal clear, no member of the US military contributes in any way whatsoever to protecting the freedoms of the American people. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to turn their weapons on you than they are to defend your Constitutional rights.The only people on this planet Earth who can affect your freedom are members of Congress, local legislators and the members of enforcement institutions who will blindly follow the rulers who sign their paychecks. And, while your beloved troops are murdering people around the globe, yes, I said murdering, your Congress and local legislators are eliminating your freedoms, en masse, without any intervention by our so-called protectors in the armed forces.

• ✪ Anger in Japan Over Withheld Radiation Forecasts

  Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

  But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism.

• ✪ “A Perfect Product of the Religious Right”: Deconstructing Michele Bachmann’s GOP Presidential Bid
  The former tax lawyer identifies as a conservative Christian and is a fierce opponent of abortion and gay marriage. Bachmann also supports teaching intelligent design in public schools, and she’s claimed that global warming is a hoax. She has largely built her campaign around accusing Obama of favoring government intervention, pushing the U.S. toward socialism, and having “anti-American views,” and is a particularly fierce critic of Obama’s healthcare overhaul. While Bachmann is known for advocating a limited government, she has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in agricultural subsidies for her family farm in Wisconsin.
• ✪ Creepy In-Vitro fertilization Could Use Eggs From a Dead Teenager

  A desperate Israeli family won a court decision that lets them extract and freeze the eggs from their dead daughter. The teenage girl died unexpectedly after a recent car crash.The parents wanted her eggs to be fertilized before storage, but that request was denied by the court. If the parents prove their daughter expressed an interest in bearing children, her eggs could be fertilized and a grandchild could be created at their discretion.

  Though creepy, this isn’t the first time a baby was made post-mortem. Another Israeli couple used sperm from their deceased son to create a grandchild using a surrogate mother.

• ✪ US Government Monitoring Facebook For Federal Reserve Protests As Economy Continues To Collapse

  Danny Panzella, an activist and independent journalist, has revealed that the U.S. government and local police are monitoring Facebook for Federal Reserve protests.On June 22nd, 2011 , the night before the rally, Danny announced a spur of the moment End the Fed Rally/Flash Mob on Facebook. When he arrived in the morning close to 40 police officers were waiting for him.

  This is clear evidence that the government is actively monitoring Facebook for signs of activism directed against the private Federal Reserve.

  As our economy teeters on the verge of collapse, our government and local law enforcement are spending time and most likely tax power dollars to protect the private banking cartel that created the crisis in the first place!

  As the White House attempts to blame the Tea Party for the problems with the economy, the real culprits are being protected by police nationwide.

• ✪ Man who put semen in bottle must pay $27,000

  “The idea that I had Mr. Lallana’s semen in my mouth, without my knowing, against my will, for his sexual pleasure, sickens me,” the victim said during her victim-impact statement in February. “What I experienced was not rape, but I feel it was a form of rape. I ultimately experienced sexually inflicted harm without my consent.”Deputy District Attorney Brock Zimmon argued that Lallana twice set a trap for his co-worker at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network by discharging his semen into a water bottle she kept on her desk.

  The woman first became aware of something unusual in her water when she took a sip from her water bottle on Jan. 14, 2010, while she was working in Northwestern’s Newport Beach branch. She testified that she immediately noticed an odd taste and held the bottle away from her face and saw something in the water.

• ✪ Hairy Actress
  Hairiest bushes in mainstream movies
• ✪ London riot looter may regret this facebook post…
  Post a picture of yourself with looted booty on the internet, a real genius here
• ✪ Forced to strip naked in the street: Shocking scenes as rioters steal clothes and rifle through bags as people make their way home

  This is the shocking moment a young man is apparently forced to hand over all of his clothes after appearing to be stripped naked during lawless riots overnight.Internet rumours last night claimed that on top of the widespread destruction across London and Birmingham, people were having their clothes removed by looters as police attempted to contain the criminality.

• ✪ CDG Zetas, a war put the town of Allende, Nuevo Leon.
  The gunmen hanged men and shot them in 60 times with AK-47. Victor’s chest marked with the letters “CDG” spray. In commercial premises located near the pedestrian bridge also left a narcopinta, “THIS will happen to X to kill innocent people,” said the deed had been done by members of the Gulf Cartel. The bodies remained at the sight of many for over two hours.
• ✪ Hypnosis and Sex (Feb, 1964)

  Whenever hypnosis is discussed with a layman, one question inevitably comes up: “Can you make your subject do whatever you want?”In posing that question some people think of the crimes which evil characters in cheap thrillers force their victims to commit. Most of them, however, have sex in mind. Women want to know whether they could be taken advantage of. Young men usually mean: “Would a girl undress if I told her it’s bed-time?”

• ✪ Orange Goo Near Kivalina, Alaska Identified As Eggs
  Scientists have identified an orange-colored gunk that appeared along the shore of a remote Alaska village as millions of microscopic eggs filled with fatty droplets.

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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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• ✰ Glass staircase not dress friendly

  For years, women across America have dealt with glass ceilings. But now, women in Ohio have a new problem – glass floors.

  A $105 million courthouse opened in Franklin County, Ohio, on Monday, but the builders seemed to have forgotten one thing – the bottom of the stairs, reports affiliate 10TV. The staircase is made of glass.

  Dress wearers need to avoid taking the stairs, according to Franklin County Judge Julie Lynch, who wears dresses under her robes almost every day.

  “I wear dresses because that’s my personal choice,” Lynch told 10TV. “When you stand under the stairwell, you can see right up through them.”

• ✰ Mr. Brainwash Loses Lawsuit for Copyright Infringement
  A judge just ruled against Mr. Brainwash in a lawsuit from photographer Glen E. Friedman claiming that MBW used his iconic photo of Run DMC without permission. Mr. Brainwash had argued that the photo had been altered sufficiently and could be used under the ‘fair use act’. But the judge disagreed, and, MBW’s haters will be excited to hear that the judge “ruled that Guetta can’t defend his work as transformative fair use.”
• ✰ Famous people hanging out with their vinyl
• ✰ HOAX: McDonald’s Official Statement Condemns Racist Sign [UPDATED]
  Making the Twitter rounds on a super-sized scale over the weekend (under the hashtag of #seriouslymcdonalds) was this obviously fake sign that’s allegedly in a McDonald’s restaurant. It claims that “African-American customers are now required to pay an additional fee of $1.50 per transaction.” The picture originated on twitpic and has gone viral from there.
• ✰ TAI DJIN – Kung Fu Werewolf

  Tai Djin was born in China in 1849. He was born unique, afflicted with hypertrichosis. Unlike Jo-Jo, who would be born a few decades later, Tai Djin was born into a highly superstitious family. As A result they saw his affliction as the work of demons and he was left in the forest to die.

  A Shaolin monk traveling through the forest discovered the child and took him back to the Fukien Shaolin Temple. There Tai Djin was raised by the monks.

  He was trained in martial arts and it quickly became apparent that he was exceptional in both appearance and ability. The boy must have been a sight practicing kung-fu with his face covered in fine fur. He quickly became a favorite of many of the Shaolin masters and, as a result, each master passed their knowledge on to Tai Djin.

• ✰ Sophisticated Cyberattack Is Reported by the I.M.F.

  The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a new leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.

  The fund, which manages financial crises around the world and is the repository of highly confidential information about the fiscal condition of many nations, told its staff and its board of directors about the attack on Wednesday. But it did not make a public announcement.

  Several senior officials with knowledge of the attack said it was both sophisticated and serious. “This was a very major breach,” said one official, who said that it had occurred over the last several months, even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who ran the fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a chamber maid in a New York hotel.

• ✰ New Tennessee law makes it illegal to display an image that causes ‘emotional distress’
  Last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law that criminalizes “transmitting or displaying” any image that under a “reasonable expectation” might “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress” to anyone who sees it. This includes not only images posted on the internet, but also television and any other “electronic communications service” currently in existence. Essentially, the law allows anyone with a well-thought out argument to get anyone they want — including journalists — thrown into jail for up to a year or fined up to $2,500 for sharing a picture or other image.
• ✰ Little Spinners pole dancing classes for children as young as THREE

  To the tiny students at this dance studio, the moves are totally innocent.

  In fact, they are being instructed in the sleazy art of pole dancing. And their age? As young as three.
  Child protection groups yesterday labelled these images from the classes ‘deeply disturbing’.

• ✰ U.S., Russia, China faulted for ‘serious deficiencies’ in rule of law
  An annual survey of the rule of law around the world released Monday sees weak protections for fundamental rights in China, “serious deficiencies” in Russia, and problems with discrimination in the United States.
• ✰ New Russian A.T.M.’s Are Built to Detect Lies
  Russia’s biggest retail bank is testing a machine that the old K.G.B. might have loved, an A.T.M. with a built-in lie detector intended to prevent consumer credit fraud.
  Enlarge This Image
  Oleg Nikishin for The New York TimesDmitri V. Dyrmovsky, director of the Speech Technology Center’s Moscow offices, which built voice analysis software meant to detect lying. 

  Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end.

  The machine scans a passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for facial recognition. And it uses voice-analysis software to help assess whether the person is truthfully answering questions that include “Are you employed?” and “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?”

• ✰ TSA Considering Banning Photography Of Checkpoints
  The Transportation Security Administration is considering changing its policy on photographing security checkpoints after several videos depicting questionable incidents between passengers and TSA screeners were posted on Youtube.
• ✰ Police: Mac technician installed spyware to photograph women

  He was hired to fix their computers, but police say that Trevor Harwell instead installed spyware software that took candid photos of his clients in various states of undress.

  Harwell had been a Macintosh specialist with a Los Angeles-area home computer repair company called Rezitech. That’s how he allegedly had the opportunity to install the spy software, called Camcapture, on computers.

  While working on repair assignments, the 20-year-old technician secretly set up a complex system that could notify him whenever it was ready to snap a shot using the computer’s webcam, according to Sergeant Andrew Goodrich, a spokesman with the Fullerton Police Department in California. “It would let his server know that the victim’s machine was on. The server would then notify his smartphone… and then the images were recorded on his home computer,” he said.

• ✰ 10 physical gestures that have been patented
  It sounds crazy, but tech companies have been patenting physical gestures for almost two decades now. In a world ruled by touchscreens, Kinect, and Guitar Hero, these businesses don’t want people making certain gestures without paying for it. Find out which gestures you’re making that may be infringing somebody’s patents.
• ✰ Bill Warren ‘launches underwater search for Osama Bin Laden’s body’

  Some may have thought we would never discover the Titanic, but this is an even more ambitious search.

  Treasure-hunter Bill Warren, of California, is reportedly launching an underwater search to find the body of former Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

• ✰ Homophobic Men Most Aroused by Gay Male Porn

  When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.

  Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

  Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

• ✰ Hacking Senate.gov: Boss lulz or famous last words?
  LulzSec — which has been making inroads into Anonymous’ griefer market share with aggressively promoted attacks on Sony, PBS, affiliates of the FBI, porn sites, and Bethesda Softworks and Brink (sites they like) – just posted data that looks like it was taken from an internally facing server belonging to the U.S. Senate.
• ✰ Hitler, bin Laden and Milat baby clothes on sale in Melbourne
  A MELBOURNE-based company is selling baby and children’s clothes featuring pictures of evil monsters such as Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Ivan Milat, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson.
• ✰ Young Girls Attack/Strip 11-Year-Old Boy
  The police report taken Tuesday described the incident twice as a “prank” and says “police incident closed.” While one girl filmed, a second girl held her knee on the little boy’s neck, while yet a third girl stripped him completely naked. He is heard screaming out for his mother. This all happened in broad daylight with many spectators. Then a video of the incident was posted to YouTube.
• ✰ Famed Street Artist — Major Secret Revealed
  Shepard Fairey is one of the most famous street artists in the world… and Shepard Fairey’s wife can’t keep a secret to save her life.
• ✰ Taylor Momsen lets it all hang out in slashed top
  Momsen rocks a Sonic Youth/Necros shirt with side tits.
  Thanks Ramon
• ✰ ‘Breastaurants’ Ring Up Big Profits
  Restaurants that woo men with attractive waitresses, big beer selections & giant TVs are winning loyal customers–and raking in revenues.
• ✰ Man tells police child porn kept him from killing wife, kids

  A Crest Hill man told police he used child pornography as well as some 1,700 photos of dismembered women to keep himself from killing his wife and two young daughters, a detective testified in court Wednesday.

  Joshua Price, 26, a Joliet Junior College student, was arrested in March after accidentally leaving a flash drive with child pornography on it in the college’s computer lab.

  Police searching computers seized from Price’s apartment later found more child pornography as well as the images of dismembered women.

  Price said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his military service in the Middle East and that child pornography was “the only thing that kept him from killing his wife and children,” Will County sheriff’s Detective Joseph Fazio testified.

• ✰ Krzysztof Grzegorz and Jouoastaw K, Polish Contortionists, Steal From Travelers’ Luggage
  Here’s a new one: A Polish contortionist and his accomplice were arrested in Spain on Friday for stealing valuable items from travelers’ checked luggage after gaining entry to the cargo of an airport transit bus by hiding himself in a small suitcase.
• ✰ The Mystery Hexagon on SATURN [Video]
  Saturn holds a secret, a mysterious HEXAGON over the north pole. Yet unexplainable.
• ✰ The N12 Bikini
  The N12 bikini is the world’s first ready-to-wear, completely 3D-printed article of clothing. All of the pieces, closures included, are made directly by 3D printing and snap together without any sewing. N12 represents the beginning of what is possible for the near future.
• ✰ Thieves ram beauty store with car, steal $10,000 in hair extensions
  The New York Times reported last week that thieves targeting extensions have recently stolen $150,000 in hair from a Houston salon, $90,000 in extensions from a beauty supply store in Chicago and $85,000 in hair from a store in Missouri City, Texas.
• ✰ Facebook lost U.S. users in May

  The United States lost nearly six million users in May, Inside Facebook said, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it.

  Canadian users fell 1.52 million to 16.6 million during the month and Britain, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000, Inside Facebook said.

• ✰ Moorpark House Explosion, Fire Leads to Hash Oil Lab Discovery
  An explosion and fire that ripped through an upscale Moorpark home Thursday, leaving two people injured, led to the discovery of a hash oil lab inside, officials said.
• ✰ Japan Admits 3 Nuclear Meltdowns, More Radiation Leaked into Sea; U.S. Nuclear Waste Poses Deadly Risks

  ROBERT ALVAREZ [former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy]: Yes. As you know, the Japanese government, in its report to the IAEA, said it had underestimated the amount of radioactivity released to the atmosphere during the first week and that it amounts to roughly 40 million curies of radioactivity. What they failed to mention is that they discharged an equally large amount into the ocean, about 20 million curies, and that the—what they’re counting here is the radioactive iodine and radioactive cesium. [...]

  [T]he Soviet Union and Russia basically have claimed that about 50 million curies of radioactivity were released to the environment

• ✰ Sharevari @ The Scene, Detroit [Video]
  First ever Detroit techno record, released in 1981
• ✰ Hot Particles From Japan to Seattle Virtually Undetectable when Inhaled or Swallowed
  Original estimates of xenon and krypton releases remain the same, but a TEPCO recalculation shows dramatic increases in the release of hot particles. This confirms the results of air filter monitoring by independent scientists. Fairewinds’ Arnie Gundersen explains how hot particles may react in mammals while escaping traditional detection. Reports of a metallic taste in the mouth, such as those now being reported in Japan and on the west coast, are a telltale sign of radiation exposure.

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• ✖ “Classic” Tab of Oxy Fetches $50

  “The manufacturer basically changed Oxy’s chemical compound (none of the actual drug was removed) by adding a substance that makes it really difficult for most people to abuse it. People were abusing the old drug by crushing the pills to snort them, dissolving them to inject, or chewing them to get a maximum high. So in many ways the new drug is good news, because it prevents stuff like that. The bad news is that in my opinion, whatever substance they added to it has dulled how well the medication works and how long it lasts.”

  “The new OxyContin OPs are supposedly in line with the old 80 mg pills. But since the new pills were introduced, the price of the older OC pills has jumped by a good solid 20%. People who have them might want to hold on to them if they can. They’re like antiques. You might make some good money off of them later!”

• ✖ What Defines a Meme?
  Our world is a place where information can behave like human genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve
• ✖ ADL Declares “Japanese Good Luck Symbol Offensive to Jews”
  In yet another example of the Anti-Defamation League’s bizarre
  obsession with the Swastika, Nintendo has agreed to withdraw a
  Pokemon Trading card that bears a clock wise swastika.
  The Jewish Lobby declared that the card shows “insensativity to
  the feeling of Jews”.
• ✖ RATFINK NAZI HELMET Commercial 1968
  Fake Nazi Helmet commercial from a rare film
• ✖ Counterfeit herbal sex pills contain prescription-only erectile dysfunction meds, FDA warns

  Federal drug safety officials are warning consumers about counterfeit sex-enhancement pills that are sold as supplements but contain the drugs used in Viagra and another medication.

  The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that the fake “ExtenZe” pills, marketed to improve male sexual performance, contain tadalafil and sildenafil, the active ingredients in Cialis and Viagra. Both drugs require a doctor’s prescription.

  The FDA says the counterfeit product looks like ExtenZe, which is an herbal supplement. It says the counterfeit products are marked with lot numbers 1110075 and F050899.

• ✖ 2011 finalists Best Illusion of the Year Contest
• ✖ Chinese Teen Forced Out of School by Teacher for Body Odor
• ✖ There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

  You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.

  Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

• ✖ American Express now prohibiting medical marijuana buys

  American Express cards may no longer be used to purchase medical marijuana. The company has given no reason for the prohibition. Other credit card companies so far continue to allow their cards to be used for the purchase of medical marijuana where legal.

  “I haven’t seen it (the prohibition) with other credit cards,” said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association.

  “I don’t understand why they would turn their back on a $2 billion industry. It’s perplexing.”

• ✖ Hasid Vs. Hasid Arson Attempt Seriously Burns Man For Switching Synagogues
  Here in NYC, when Hasidim attack, the violence is usually reduced to running goy cyclists off the road or fisticuffs over Satmar schisms. But up in Rockland County, it’s all HDP (Hasids Don’t Play). An orthodox Jewish father of four is currently hospitalized with third-degree burns over 50 percent of his body after another orthodox Jew allegedly tried to burn his house down—because he started taking his family to a different synagogue.
• ✖ Rapper Glorifying Police Murderer is Honored at the White House

  Lynn, aka Common, is known for a rap song titled “Song for Assata”, which essentially praises a black woman known as Assata Shakur, her real name is Joanne Chesimard, who is an escaped convicted murderer who was serving Life plus 26 to 30 years for the cold-blooded killing of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973.

  In his rap song, Lynn paints Chesimard as a victim of the police and the system and portrays her as a hero, much in the same manner that Wesley Cook, aka Mumia Abu-Jamal, is praised by radical blacks and their ‘artists’ despite the fact that he too was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder a police officer, Daniel Faulkner of Philadelphia.

• ✖ Doesn’t Obama know what year it is? President signs Westminster Abbey guestbook 2008!

  Everyone wishes they could turn back the clock sometimes, and it turns out Barack Obama is no different.

  He got the date wrong by three years when he signed the guestbook at Westminster Abbey today on his official visit to the UK – despite apparently asking the dean what day it was.

• ✖ Morgellons: A hidden epidemic or mass hysteria?
  Sufferers include folk singer Joni Mitchell, who has complained of “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space… Fibres in a variety of colours protrude out of my skin: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer – a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”
• ✖ A look at the “sovereign citizen” movement

  This is a story about a group of Americans you’ve likely never heard of: they’re called “sovereign citizens.” Many don’t pay taxes, carry a driver’s license or hold a Social Security card. They have little regard for the police or the courts, and some have become violent.

  The FBI lists them among the nation’s top domestic terror threats.

  By some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 sovereign citizens in the U.S. And with the sluggish economy and mortgage mess, their ranks are growing.

• ✖ Every Six Hours, the NSA Gathers as Much Data as Is Stored in the Entire Library of Congress

  The National Security Agency is, by nature, an extreme example of the e-hoarder. And as the governmental organization responsible for things like, say, gathering intelligence on such Persons of Interest as Osama bin Laden, that impulse makes sense–though once you hear the specifics, it still seems pretty incredible. In a story about the bin Laden mission, the NSA very casually dropped a number: Every six hours, the agency collects as much data as is stored in the entire Library of Congress.

  That data includes transcripts of phone calls and in-house discussions, video and audio surveillance, and a massive amount of photography. “The volume of data they’re pulling in is huge,” said John V. Parachini, director of the Intelligence Policy Center at RAND. “One criticism we might make of our [intelligence] community is that we’re collection-obsessed — we pull in everything — and we don’t spend enough time or money to try and understand what do we have and how can we act upon it.”

• ✖ Catholic Church: Report indicts ’60s counterculture in Catholic abuse cases
  Blame the flower children. That seems to be the chief conclusion of a new report about the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. The study, undertaken by John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the request of America’s Catholic bishops, links the spike in child abuse by priests in the 1960s and ’70s to “the importance given to young people and popular culture” — along with the emergence of the feminist movement, a “singles culture” and a growing acceptance of homosexuality. It also cites crime, drugs, an increase in premarital sexual behavior and divorce.
• ✖ The Sexual World Of Bankers

  Sex scandals have become a staple of media exploitation with personal morality plays trumping political morality confrontations every time.

  They are both great distractions and effective tools of character assassination which are often more effective than more violent ways to neutralize people considered dangerous.

  That’s why the FBI was so hot to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with leaks of so-called wiretapped sex tapes. In his case, this tactic failed but the other worked.

  In some cases both tactics are deployed as in the physical assassination of Bin Laden and then the character-killing aimed at his supporters through the release of porn allegedly found in his “lair.”

• ✖ Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says

  The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space – as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night”.

  The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.

  The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Amazon languages.

  The Amondawa were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, and now researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Amondawa language.

  “We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

• ✖ Re-Branding Revolution: 7 Icons Pimped for Profit and Empire
  Revolutionary: Bobby Seale
  Re-branded: Vanilla ice cream enthusiast. Seale, who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the late 1960s, became a pitch man for Ben & Jerry’s in the early 1990s. In the ad Seale sports the Panther’s signature black beret while holding up a clenched fist in one hand and a serving of vanilla ice cream in the other. 

• ✖ New York in Black and White – Vintage Photos
• ✖ Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language

  Ruth Schulz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology call their robots the Lingodroids. The robots consist of a mobile platform equipped with a camera, laser range finder, and sonar for mapping and obstacle avoidance. The robots also carry a microphone and speakers for audible communication between them.

  To understand the concept behind the project, consider a simplified case of how language might have developed. Let’s say that all of a sudden you wake up somewhere with your memory completely wiped, not knowing English, Klingon, or any other language. And then you meet some other person who’s in the exact same situation as you. What do you do?

• ✖ Crossing your arms ‘relieves hand pain’

  “In everyday life you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world.

  “This means that the areas of the brain that contain the map of the right body and the map of right external space are usually activated together, leading to highly effective processing of sensory stimuli.

  “When you cross your arms these maps are not activated together anymore, leading to less effective brain processing of sensory stimuli, including pain, being perceived as weaker.”

• ✖ Bag Soaked With Chihuahua Urine Draws Bomb Squad Outside Long Island Court

  A dog that wasn’t quite housebroken may have indirectly been responsible for a bomb scare at a New York courthouse.

  The trouble began Friday when 19-year-old Melvin Ruffin arrived at a court complex in Central Islip following a long bus ride from his home in Bellport.

  During the trip, another passenger’s Chihuahua urinated on his backpack.

  So, he stashed the wet bag in some bushes while he went inside to answer a disorderly conduct citation.

  But then a retired police officer saw the bag and alerted security.

  The bomb squad was ultimately called in. Officers used a robot to determine that the bag didn’t contain anything harmful.

• ✖ The search for Mona Lisa unearths tomb and staircase
  Archaeologists digging for the remains of a 16th-century woman believed to be the model for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa masterpiece have found a crypt and a stairway to a probably second tomb inside a former medieval convent in central Florence.
• ✖ Osama Bin Laden: The Nigerian Email Scam
  My name is Captain Dan Nardiello of the US Marine corps (special) stationed in Pakistan, I found some money after the death of OBL I need someone to help me move it to a safer place, please have it in mind that there is no danger involved. You may contact me on usmc.12@blumail.org so that I can provide you with details.
• ✖ Steven McCormack, ‘Human Balloon,’ Injured By Compressed Air

  Steven McCormack was standing on his truck’s foot plate Saturday when he slipped and fell, breaking a compressed air hose off an air reservoir that powered the truck’s brakes.

  He fell hard onto the brass fitting, which pierced his left buttock and started pumping air into his body.

  “I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like it was going to explode from my foot,” he told local media from his hospital bed in the town of Whakatane, on North Island’s east coast.

  “I was blowing up like a football,” he said. “I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon.”

• ✖ Police go brutal on a guy, crowd gets angry and beat the hell out of cops [Video]
• ✖ Mother Nature gave us pimples, and then she made us self-conscious about them.
  Humans are pimply. It’s part of what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. While it’s true that some form of acne vulgaris affects other species—it’s been found in some Mexican hairless dogs and induced experimentally in rhino mice—acne is largely an affliction of our accursed species alone. (Somewhere between 85 and 100 percent of adolescents exhibit acne—and a significant minority of adults, too.) Why is the human animal so peculiar in its tendency to form volcanic comedones, papules, pustules, nodular abscesses, and, in some severe cases, lasting scars? According to evolutionary theorists Stephen Kellett and Paul Gilbert, we probably owe these unsavory blemishes to our having lost our apish pelts too rapidly for our own good.
• ✖ The Rise and Fall of an Oakland Potrepreneur

  It is an industry that blossomed in the oversize metal warehouses of old-line Oakland businesses. Established trucking, plumbing and construction companies, scrambling for work in a down economy, opened their doors to Ebyam’s cannabis farms, thought to be the largest in the city. His workers, mostly the bud-trimmers who assure the highest-quality medical marijuana, were organized by the Teamsters.

  But the failure of the statewide marijuana legalization initiative last fall, and subsequent threats from federal prosecutors, derailed the ambitious plan of city leaders to license four giant farms and thus make Oakland the legal cannabis capital of the country. And with the collapse of Oakland’s vision of marijuana supremacy came disaster for Ebyam.

  Ebyam is now locked in litigation over the $1.25 million sale of one of his growing operations, and another installation has been decimated by a string of suspicious burglaries — a fitting symbol, perhaps, of an industry that could have been.

• ✖ To Harvest Natural Gas From the Ocean, Shell Is Building the World’s Largest Man-Made Floating Object

  Shell is making good on its promise to build the largest object ever to float on water, announcing Friday it would build the Prelude FLNG Project to harvest offshore natural gas fields. The gargantuan ship will suck up the equivalent of 110,000 barrels of oil per day.

  The floating liquified natural gas facility will dwarf the biggest warships, weighing in at 600,000 metric tons. By contrast, the U.S.’ next-generation Ford-class supercarrier will displace 101,000 metric tons of water. Shell says its ship will be able to withstand a category 5 typhoon.

  In some ways, it’s more of a mini-island than a ship, designed to be moored in the same spot off the northwest coast of Australia for 25 years. The facility will be one-third of a mile long — longer than five football fields laid end-to-end — and will contain 260,000 metric tons of steel, about five times the amount used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

• ✖ RIP: Jeffrey Catherine Jones

  Jeffrey Catherine Jones, the fantasy artist who helped introduce fine art and illustration influences to comics in the ’70s and beyond, has died of complications from emphysema and bronchitis, according to numerous reports. She was 67.

  In the early 70s, then known just as Jeffrey, Jones helped form The Studio, a group of cartoonists/illustrators that included Mike Kaluta, Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor-Smith. Jones was known for her lyrical linework and ethereal paintings, which prompted Frazetta himself to say that Jones was “the world’s greatest living painter.” Although she produced the comics strip Idyll for National Lampoon in the ’70s, Jones was best known for her book covers, prints, and painting, with only a brief dabbling in comics.

• ✖ Hidden camera found in Starbucks bathroom

  The camera was disguised as a plastic coat hook and was affixed to a wall directly across from a toilet, officials said. A Starbucks employee discovered the device and called police, they said.

  Shortly after, authorities arrested Velasco, who downloaded the device about every hour to his laptop computer while sitting in his car, police said.

  Detectives confiscated his laptop and say they found video of at least 45 female victims, including children, using the restroom. It did not appear that any of the videos were uploaded to the Internet or distributed, they said.

• ✖ Cindy Sherman Print Sells For $3.9 Million At Auction, The Highest Ever For A Photograph
  Christie’s had a bumper night, tallying more than $300 million in sales. While not the priciest item up for auction that day, Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96″ from 1981 passed all records for photography, and was sold for $3.89 million. According to ArtInfo.com, the buyer was New York dealer Philippe Segalot, and the underbidder was Per Skarstedt, also a New York dealer. Christie’s confirmed that this was a record for a photograph at auction, previously held by Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent II Diptychon,” which fetched $3.35 million in 2006. Sherman recently had another high profile sale, with her work “Untitled #153,” from 1985 reaching $2.7 million in late 2010.
• ✖ Photographers Respond to Lady Gaga’s New Copyright Demands
  Lady Gaga is now demanding that photographers surrender the copyright of photos taken at her concerts – and photographers are incensed.
• ✖ Exploding watermelons put spotlight on Chinese farming practices

  Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax farming practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals.

  It follows discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms, and the detergent borax in pork, added to make it resemble beef.

• ✖ Powerful Bi-Partisan Caucus Prepares to Fight TSA

  As we reported earlier today, the Department of Justice and the TSA used financial terrorism to nix HB 1937 in Texas, a bill that would have made it “A criminal act for security personnel to touch a person’s private areas without probable cause as a condition of travel or as a condition of entry into a public place,” shortly before the legislation looked to be on its way to passage in the Senate having passed the Texas House unanimously.

  The DOJ and Homeland Security intimidated lawmakers into dropping the bill after they threatened to shut down all the airports in Texas and prevent any commercial flights from operating out of or entering the state, a brazenly tyrannical tactic that proves the federal government is acting more like a mafia criminal enterprise than a body that is supposed to represent the interests of the American people.

• ✖ Guatemala: 27 massacred, decapitated in Petén by paramilitary drug gang Los Zetas
  Written in the blood from a victim’s severed leg, in Spanish: “What’s up, Otto Salguero, you bastard? We are going to find you and behead you, too. —Sincerely, Z200.”
• ✖ NUH UHHHHHHH!!!! LOOK AT THE NEW HAIRCUT THAT SOME TEENAGE BOYS ARE GETTING!!! (UTTER RATCHETNESS)
• ✖ 17 Lost Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images

  Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

  More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.

  Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids.

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Photos by The Arab Parrot n Tim Barber from Milk Made Tiny Vices