R. Kelly

Marinated Morsels

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✖ Beauty writer Cat Marnell leaves xoJane.com to write book, smoke angel dust: Cat Marnell, the drug-addicted beauty columnist for Jane Pratt’s Web site xoJane.com, has parted ways from the site after refusing to get clean. Marnell chronicled her drug use on xoJane.com, and was profiled by New York magazine in April, the day before she entered rehab, as ordered by xoJane.com publisher Say Media. But sources say Marnell never stayed clean, with one suspecting she even worked high. “I’m always on drugs,” she wrote to us in an unapologetic e-mail. “Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.” Marnell, formerly a beauty editor at Lucky, admitted she’s not fit for the 9-to-5. “Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers,” she wrote us.
✖ Singer R. Kelly ‘owes $4.8m in back taxes to U.S. government’: R. Kelly reportedly owes $4.8 million in back taxes after ‘not paying anything’ on his superstar earnings for almost seven years. The ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ singer stopped paying taxes in 2005, according to documents filed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Despite the huge bill, the twice Grammy nominated singer is ‘confident’ the matter can be resolved.
✖ Operation: Entrapment – Cleveland bomb “plot” masterminded by FBI agents: Taking a closer look at the federal complaint against the five men reveals that although the suspects are believed to have expressed anti-government sentiments and disdain for major financial corporations, the impetus in the would-be bombing was the urging of undercover agents that had infiltrated a group of friends and encouraged them to consider acts of terrorism. Although the incident is still developing, federal authorities have submitted statements and recordings stemming from conversations their contacts had with the alleged terrorists, and unsurprisingly the mainstream media is largely ignoring one key problem with the federal probe: the FBI provoked members of an Occupy Wall Street off-shoot to embrace terrorist-like crimes despite voicing from the start that they were opposed to such.
✖ Miami Face-Chewing Victim: victim in the Miami “zombie” attack may have been shot by police: All that “zombie” watercooler talk may have subsided, but doctors working with the Miami face-chewing victim revealed another bizarre twist in the case Tuesday: The man, now awake and alert, may have been shot twice by the police during the attack.
✖ White House softball team smoked by pot lobby’s bats: Anyone notice a cloud hanging over the Mall last week? That might have been the White House softball team getting absolutely smoked by the team fielded by the marijuana lobby. The One Hitters, the team of pro-pot activists, beat STOTUS (the Softball Team of the U.S.) 25-3. Marijuana doesn’t seem to dampen athletic prowess (which we already knew — hello, Michael Phelps!). Still, the victors were gracious about the rout. “The One Hitters enjoyed slugging it out with the White House,” said Aaron Houston, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the group that sponsors the team. “Hopefully we can play them again when they aren’t totally absorbed in work.”
✖ 9-year-old girl stuck with bloody syringe buried in hotel bed: A 9-year-old girl faces months of tests to determine if she contracted any disease from a blood-caked syringe that pricked her heel inside a Washington hotel room. The dirty needle was left beneath the mattress cover of her bunk bed at the Guest House Inn and Suites in Aberdeen, where the girl and her family were attending a softball tournament, authorities said. Angie Smith, the mother of shortstop Emily, said the family was appalled to find the paraphernalia. “There were syringes, plastic bags, bloody bandages all underneath the mattress cover,” Smith told KOMO-TV. “We were really shocked and freaking out. It scare us to death.”
✖ Mom, Daughter Arrested After Girl Fight In Antelope Park: “She brought her daughter fully in Vaseline up on her face and arms,” Julian said, “to get her and to beat her and to rip her clothes off, which she did. She managed to tear the shirt to where my daughter’s breast came out during the fight at the park.”
✖ Vanity Wonder ‘Shot Girls’: Mother-of-two, who spent $15k on butt injections, writes book: She admits that her own first experience with butt shots could have been just as dangerous, as she had no idea what she was injected with – and still doubts the answer she was given. ‘The first two times, I was injected by a lady… when we finally asked her [what we were being injected with], she said soybean oil. So my first two times I had no idea what I was being injected with. ‘All the rest were done by [a different] lady, and it was medical grade silicone.’ She says the difference in the two substances was huge. The silicone, she says, is ‘a lot more moveable and jello-like. The ‘soybean oil’ made the treated areas ‘stiff and hard’. Describing her butt now, Vanity said: ‘Because that original work has been covered so many times, it’s all jiggly and very moveable. A lot of people are amazed.’
✖ Are Corporations and Big Banks Making a Windfall From Food Stamps?: How much more food stamp money is Walmart getting across the country? We don’t know, because USDA and state agencies refuse to release this information. We also have no clue how much money the likes of Coca-Cola, Kraft, and General Mills make from SNAP. The feds don’t even bother to collect that data, despite a national epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases fueled in part by your tax dollars. Then add healthcare on top of that. But one area of profit from food stamps is quite transparent: food corporations and industry groups have been lobbying intensely to make sure that junk food such as candy and soda can be purchased using SNAP. As New York City and nine states have pushed for health-based reforms to limit such purchases, these industry lobbies have pushed back hard to protect their pot of gold. Powerful food industry lobbying groups such as the American Beverage Association and the Snack Food Association teamed up to oppose health-oriented improvements to SNAP
✖ Computer files link TV dirty tricks to favourite for Mexico presidency: Mexico’s biggest television network sold prominent politicians favourable coverage in its flagship news and entertainment shows and used the same programmes to smear a popular leftwing leader, documents seen by the Guardian appear to show. The documents – which consist of dozens of computer files – emerge just weeks ahead of presidential elections on 1 July, and coincide with the appearance of an energetic protest movement accusing the Televisa network of manipulating its coverage to favour the leading candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto.
✖ 24 year old gets three life sentences for witnessing a drug deal: It’s been nearly 20 years since Clarence Aaron was put in jail for conspiring to distribute crack cocaine, and unless President Obama steps in, the 19-year veteran of the American prison system is expected to stay there for a while. A long while. Aaron wasn’t buying, selling or even touching coke when cops busted the then 23-year-old college student in 1993. Instead Aaron was simply a witness of a plotted crack transaction and associate of the buyer and seller, who, unlike him, pled guilty and gave law enforcement their full cooperation. But despite lacking any criminal record at all, however, Aaron was sentenced to serve three life sentences behind bars for his role in a would-be drug deal. Neither President Clinton nor George W. Bush offered a commutation to kill the lengthy sentence during their combined 16 years in office, and new evidence reveals that there may have been a reason for that.
✖ Israel rounds up African migrants for deportation: Israel said on Monday it had started rounding up African migrants in the first stage of a controversial “emergency plan” to intern and deport thousands deemed a threat to the Jewish character of the state. Israel Radio reported that dozens of Africans, mainly from South Sudan, had already been detained in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, including mothers and children. “This is only a small group of the infiltrators,” Interior Minister Eli Yishai said. “I’m not acting out of hatred of strangers but love of my people and to rescue the homeland.”
✖ Federal agents ‘have sex at Cirque Du Soleil’: A California performance of Cirque Du Soleil turned into “Sex Du Soleil” recently when two U.S. border agents allegedly had sex in front of other audience members before attacking them. Broadcast reports indicate Kallie Helwig was performing oral sex on Gerald Torello Jr. in plain view of others including children during the May 27 event at the Del Mar Fairgrounds near San Diego. “She had her head in his lap. It looked like her head and her hand were moving up and down and it looked like she was giving him oral sex in public,” an unidentified female witness told KFMB-TV. The witness also claims Torello, the male agent, gave a 5-year-old boy a high-five during the incident, and there were other children present at the time.
✖ Teens ‘huffing’ Freon from air conditioning units, experts say: Morris took that to mean someone tapped into the air conditioning units to steal the Freon, which can be inhaled, or “huffed,” to get high. Inhaling Freon produces a high that is similar to what is felt from drinking alcohol, and doing so can freeze the lungs or cause brain damage. It can also prove fatal, Morris warned, citing several recent examples, including a teenager in Oklahoma who died in November. “He was still in the yard next to the unit,” Morris said of that death. “So it is a one-time thing. You do it and it could kill you.” Californian Jacob Henry, 18, died in September after huffing Freon. “Huffing is a game of Russian roulette,” his mother Gail told Los Angeles’ KABC last fall. “Don’t ever consider doing it because that five seconds of high that you get when you do it, it isn’t worth dying over.”
✖ Ex-cop found guilty of rape; he blamed Zoloft for his actions: It found the defendant, Anthony Nicholas Orban, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War, guilty of two counts of rape, two counts of forced oral copulation, two of sexual penetration with a foreign object, one count of making a criminal threat, and a sentence enhancement of using a firearm in commission of a kidnapping. Orban faces a sanity hearing before sentencing. Defense attorney James Blatt had argued that Orban was rendered “unconscious” by use of the antidepressant, and therefore was not responsible for his actions in the brutal 2010 attack in Fontana. A defense psychiatrist testified that Orban had stopped taking the prescribed antidepressant, then resumed it at full dose, provoking a psychotic break during which he was not fully aware of his actions. But prosecutors said such a defense was “baloney” that ran counter to medical consensus on the drug’s effects. Orban had been out drinking and seeking sexual encounters before he kidnapped the victim at gunpoint and made her drive to
✖ Elevator Child Rapist Sought! Little Girl Beats His Ass [Video]
✖ TSA Sexually Assaults My Mother [Video]: 5-28-11 at Sky Harbor International in Phoenix, AZ my mother was sexually assaulted which brought her to tears. Multiple TSA agents claimed to know my whole family (WELCOME TO 1984) TSA then threatened to steal my luggage because I left it unattended… rather because I was 10 feet from it. I was then threatened to have my ability to fly revoked by Southwest Airlines, NOT TSA. Southwest Airlines then threatened to have me arrested for filming the event, even though TSA, Southwest, and Phoenix Police couldn’t provide me with the statute or law that claims I cannot film in a public area. Here is that event. Police- Protecting and Serving??? Why is TSA asking for my father’s phone number and address at the end of this ordeal, to add us to a no-fly list or spy on us?
✖ Eating farts could reduce blood pressure: Chinese study: The hydrogen sulfide contained in flatus has the ability to help reduce blood pressure, according to a recent medical study, yet researchers at Zhongda Hospital at Southeast University in Nanjing are still unsure of the amount needed to be beneficial and whether patients are willing to accept “eating farts” as a form of treatment, reports our Chinese-language sister newspaper Want Daily. The smell of flatus comes from hydrogen sulfide, a substance that has been proven effective in controlling blood pressure in mice in an experiment at John Hopkins University. The study has been published in the journal Science. Thanks Jasmine
✖ Town Considers Fines for Cursing: “The cursing has gotten very, very bad. I find it appalling and I won’t tolerate it,” said Ms. Duphily, a civic leader in the otherwise quiet New England community, which calls itself the Cranberry Capital of the World. “No person should be allowed to talk in that manner.” Soon, Middleborough residents who do could risk a $20 fine. Ms. Duphily, 63 years old, tried scolding the cursers—whom she describes as young people shouting the “F word” back and forth—with a stern, “Hey kids, that’s enough!” Then she conferred with the Beautification and Activities Group, which informed the Middleborough Business Coalition, which then called a summit with Middleborough Police Chief Bruce Gates, who now, in his sworn role, is trying to stomp out swears.
✖ Woman Posed As Boy, Tricked Girl Into Sex: A 24-year-old Massachusetts woman who allegedly masqueraded as a teenage boy is facing federal charges for engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a 15-year-old girl who was unaware that the boyfriend she met online was actually a female
✖ Israel’s Richest Rabbis Make Hollywood Stars Look Poor: Many of these rabbis have their wealth in nonprofit organizations. But each has absolute control over their nonprofits and each uses them for any purpose they choose, often as their personal checkbooks. For example, Pinto allegedly buys custom made suits for his teenage son and high end collectible watches by the fistful using money donated to help the poor. Many of these rabbis have extensive private real estate holdings and business investments, as well and some have paid millions of dollars in settlements to Israel’s Tax Authority, its version of the IRS, to settle tax fraud charges. But the Israeli government is reluctant to press criminal charges against most of these rabbis because they control large voting blocs and, in the case of the Gerrer Rebbe, control a political party that has often had the ability to make or break government coalitions.
✖ Surveillance Video: Woman Set On Fire (WARNING: Very Disturbing): Surveillance video from a Boynton Beach 7-Eleven store shows an attack during which a woman was set on fire Monday morning.
✖ Ultra Violet SUPERPOWER (!) after Cataract Surgery with Crystalens – color glow: I’ve been very happy so far with the Crystals implant for Cataract Surgery – after a lifetime of glasses, it’s life-changing to be able see good! I expected some color shifts since my natural cloudy/yellow lens was replaced and it’s wonderful seeing a “brighter more vivid” world. But one unexpected/interesting aspect is I see a violet glow that others do not – perhaps I’m more sensitive to the low end of the visible light spectrum. While I don’t have a “Sixth Sense” that allows me to say “I see dead people” (!), I suspect I’m actually seeing Ultraviolet light!
✖ How Urban Outfitters Peddles Ironic Conservatism, Hipster Racism and Other Terrible Values: Anti-Semitic apparel: The Anti-Defamation League once went after Urban Outfitters for selling shirts with the slogan “Everyone Loves a Jewish Girl” and pictures of dollar bills and shopping bags. The company also once sold yellow shirts with a Star of David on the pocket, which of course has horrible connotations. “Pro-ana” apparel: Who in their right mind would sell a shirt to young women with the slogan “Eat Less?” Urban Outfitters, that’s who. “Ghettopoly”: It’s like Monopoly, but shockingly racist! The game, which drew the ire of the NAACP among other groups, featured liquor stores, “Ghetto Stash” cards, and crack, basketball and pimp playing pieces. “You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50 from each playa,” read one space on the game board. The color “Obama black”: A few years ago, Urban Outfitters put a henley T-shirt in its online shop that came in the colors “White/Charcoal” and “Obama/Black.” Nothing to add.
✖ Billboard Swing – Created by Didier Faustino: Didier Fiuza Faustino created this awesome billboard swing for an installation entitled Double Happiness. This “urban reanimation device” was created for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture in 2009. “Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.”
✖ George Zimmerman old phone: Orlando man with Zimmerman’s old phone number slammed by threatening calls: At age 49, Junior Alexander Guy got his first cell phone last month. The calls started immediately. Strangers called at all hours. Some were insulting. Others angry. Sometimes, they threatened him. “You murderer!” “You deserve to die!” By Day 2 he figured out what was going on: T-Mobile had given him the phone number formerly used by George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin in February. The number —407-435-2400 — was the one Zimmerman spelled out to a police dispatcher in a recorded call the night of the shooting that has since been widely circulated by news organizations and is available on the Internet. Guy, who works at an Orlando wastewater plant, said his phone rang around the clock. “At 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock in the morning I kept getting these,” he said. He estimates he received 70 threatening calls. He has moved out of his home and relocated his mother, who had lived with him, to a different location, he said.
✖ Sales of sex accessories and kinky rope skyrockets among NYC women who read “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Nathaniel Garber Schoen, co-owner of Garber Hardware in the West Village, says customers eager to get tied up rather than secure lumber have a telltale sign: They request softer nylon material. In which case Schoen recommends the 12-gauge, non-braided nylon — “Anything skinnier is too small. You might hurt yourself,” he says of the rope, $18 for a 50-foot spool. “For those purposes, 12-gauge is a reasonable choice and the most popular.”
✖ The Real Reason Apple Can’t Make Your iPhone in America: China competes with us as a country. But our businesses see themselves as GLOBALIZED, not as part of a country. So since we – at least our businesses – no longer see themselves as part of a country we are not responding to this competition. We are not mobilizing to fight back. In fact, China has essentially recruited our own business leaders to fight against our own government. Look at the effects on our country since we entered into this deal with China. They are luring our businesses to move our jobs, factories, industries and technologies there for the private gain of a few, at the expense of us as a country, and we let that happen. The trade imbalance is bankrupting us as a country. It has already drained trillions from our economy, weakening us and strengthening them. They are smart, they do this as a NATIONAL strategy, as a country competing with us as a country, and the result is that in a competition between countries we may have already lost.
✖ Wayne Roberts, ‘Stay High 149’ in Graffiti Circles, Is Dead at 61: Wayne Roberts was a pioneering 1970s graffiti writer known as “Stay High 149” who borrowed the haloed stick figure from the title sequence of the 1960s television series “The Saint,” put a joint in its mouth and turned it around. His “Smoker” tag, or signature, turned the heads of legions of imitators and admirers, including the anonymous teenagers who slipped into train yards at night to paint whole cars, as well as Norman Mailer, who featured him in his book “The Faith of Graffiti.” Mr. Roberts, who disappeared from the scene for some 25 years until he was rediscovered by a new generation of fans and artists in 2000, died on Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 61.
✖ Does biker machismo fall under 1st Amendment freedoms?: The biker bar claims in the lawsuit that burnouts are among several activities patrons participate in while “expressing their manliness and macho, as all males are prone and inclined to do to a greater or lesser degree.” The bar says a burnout is an expressive motorcycle act that is protected by the First Amendment.

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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on June 14, 2012

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O RLY?

✩ High levels of radiation detected in Northwest rain

“Our government said no health levels, no health levels were exceeded.When in fact the rain water in the Northwest is reaching levels 130 times the drinking water standards,” said Pollet.

Elevated rain water samples were collected in Portland, Olympia and Boise, which had the highest.

But EPA officials say the data was there for anyone to read on their website. A spokesman sent this statement, in part:

“Since Iodine 131 has a very short half-life of approximately eight days, the levels seen in rainwater were expected to be relatively short in duration.”
✩ R. Kelly Facing Foreclosure On His South Suburban Chicago Mansion

After failing to pay more than a year of mortgage payments, Grammy winner and “R&B king” R. Kelly now faces a $2.9-million foreclosure lawsuit on his 11,140-square-foot Olympia Fields mansion, Crain’s Chicago reported Tuesday.

Kelly’s home, which sits on a 3.7-acre lot, was constructed in the far southern suburb 11 years ago and its value has plummeted in recent years — falling 26 percent in its most recent appraisal to $3.8 million, as compared to its $5.2 million 2009 value, according to Crain’s. Therefore, Kelly, who has not lived in the home for more than a year, faces debts on the property that likely exceed its current value.

A person reportedly close to Kelly told Crain’s the singer had stopped making payments on the mortgage in order to force the bank to renegotiate the loan.
✩ US law enforcement agencies increasingly obtaining Facebook warrants

US law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, DEA, and ICE, are increasingly obtaining warrants to search Facebook. Not only do they gain access to Facebook accounts, but it often occurs with the user’s knowledge. Personal data obtained can include messages, status updates, links to videos and photographs, calendars of future and past events, Wall postings, and even rejected friend requests.
✩ Project Tarmeggedon by Anonymous Hackers Operation Green Rights

Free-thinking citizens of the world:
Anonymous’ Operation Green Rights calls your attention to an urgent situation in North America perpetuated by the boundless greed of the usual suspects: Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., Imperial Oil, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and many others.
This week, activists are gathering along U.S. Highway 12 in Montana to protest the transformation of a serene wilderness into an industrial shipping route, bringing “megaloads” of refinery equipment to the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada (see Tar Sands FAQ Sheet below).
Anonymous now joins the struggle against “Big Oil” in the heartland of the US. We stand in solidarity with any citizen willing to protest corporate abuse. Anonymous will not stand by idly and let these environmental atrocities continue. This is not the clean energy of the future that we are being promised.
‪✩ Man Shot after Confronting Tagger [Video]‬‏

Thanks Smart Crew
✩ The Secret Bookstore, Thessaly La Force

Watch this beautiful video about Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore that’s been tucked away in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side ever since the rent for his original retail space in Brooklyn was quadrupled. (Jonathan Lethem used to work there.) “This would have not been my ideal,” he says. “I wouldn’t have thought I want to have a bookshop in a location no one knows about.” But Brazen says it’s a continuation of being the kind of bookseller he wants to be—not on the street, not at book fairs, but inside, the shelves lined with first editions, knickknacks, and, one hopes, a cat. “I don’t know if it’s my familiarity with failure,” he adds. “I find ways to survive without it making enough money to be what you would call a successful business. If it’s all about money, there’s just better things to sell.” And how do those of us who’ve never been find him? He’s in the phone book, he says with a smile. Hiding in plain sight.
✩ Another Brawl At Dennys [Video]
✩ 12,000 Drones, Lethal Cyborg Insects, See-Shoot Robots — How Machines Are Taking Over War

In the same way, robot drones as assassination weapons will prove to be just another weapons system rather than a panacea for American warriors. None of these much-advertised wonder technologies ever turns out to perform as promised, but that fact never stops them, as with drones today, from embedding themselves in our world. From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the opposite — it came home and entered our everyday world in the form of sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment, and the like, now implanted from our borders to our cities.
✩ Owl leaves imprint on Kendal woman’s window

A woman returned to her Cumbrian home to find a near perfect imprint of an owl on her window.

The bird had apparently crashed into the window of Sally Arnold’s Kendal home, leaving the bizarre image – complete with eyes, beak and feathers.

Experts said the silhouette was left by the bird’s “powder down” – a substance protecting growing feathers.
✩ Boy regrets selling his kidney to buy iPad

A 17-year-old student in Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan only to buy an iPad 2. Now, with his health getting worse, the boy is feeling regret but it is too late, the Global Times reported today.

“I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.”
✩ Out-of-body Experiences Linked to Neural Instability and Biases in Body Representation

Although out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with migraine, epilepsy and psychopathology, they are quite common in healthy and psychologically normal individuals as well. However, they are poorly understood. A new study, published in the July 2011 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex, has linked these experiences to neural instabilities in the brain’s temporal lobes and to errors in the body’s sense of itself – even in non clinical populations.
✩ HOUSE PASSES DEFAZIO AMENDMENT TO AUDIT THE PENTAGON

Yesterday, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) offered a bipartisan amendment to force the Pentagon to produce auditable financial statements providing a clearer picture of how it spends tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year. The House passed the amendment unanimously.

Currently, federal law exempts the Pentagon from conducting an audit. DeFazio’s amendment would reverse this exemption.

“The Pentagon has spent more than $10 trillion since 1990 and will spend over $4 trillion over the next four years without ever passing an audit,” said DeFazio. “As Congress debates substantial cuts to programs that help middle class families, we need a clear picture that allows us to target wasteful and duplicative spending. The Pentagon needs to be audited just like every other federal agency in order to achieve significant budget savings.”
✩ Obama and the Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Grifters

Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on “public safety” over civil liberties and constitutional rights. Indeed, “hope and change” huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President “bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”

Pity that others, including CIA “black site” prisoners tortured to death to “keep us safe” (some 100 at last count) aren’t extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.

As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President “has no greater responsibility than ‘protecting the American people’ is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation.”
✩ News Corp Has Lost $7 Billion In 4 Days

Want to get a sense of just how bad the News of the World phone hacking scandal has been for Rupert Murdoch? Look no further than News Corp market value.

The company has lost $7 billion in market value over the last four trading days, reports Bloomberg.

The company “tumbled 4.6 percent to A$15.19 in Sydney today. The stock lost $1.27, or 7.6 percent, to $15.48 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday, the biggest drop since April 2009. It was the fourth straight decline in the company’s closing price, cutting its market value by 15 percent to $41.2 billion. “

At 538.com Nate Silver notes a big chunk of that is from yesterday alone [below].

The question remains: How much money does News Corp have to lose before Rupert Murdoch chooses to lose top lieutenants instead?
✩ Pripyat – Voskhod Building View – Chernoybl Tour

This is the Voskhod Building in Pripyat. It’s one of two identical apartment blocks, designed to house the superior engineers of Chernoybl. As such, it was visibly luxurious inside, especially considering standards at the time.

I climbed to the top, took photos from every angle, and William Hall of Life in Megapixels very kindly stitched them together for me, and corrected some errors.

The resulting stitch shows probably the most complete picture of Pripyat Town that you can get in a single place – if you look closely, you can even see the “Steel Yard” (Duga-3 array), and you can make out all the famous major buildings, including the fairground. This was shot on 29th May, 2011.

Close this dialog, then use your mouse to look around. You can scroll-zoom for a little extra detail.
✩ Penis Attack: Wife Cuts off Husband’s Penis, Tosses it in Garbage Dispoal

The woman, identified as Catherine Kieu Becker, 48, the victim’s wife, had put an unknown type of poison and/or drug into her husband’s food to make him sleepy, according to Nightengale. She then tied him to the bed. When he woke up, she cut off his penis with a knife, investigators said. She then tossed the penis in the garbage disposal and turned it on.
✩ CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA

The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.
✩ The Twentieth Century’s Best-Kept Military Secrets – LSD Gas Bombs: January 1960

“Secret U.S. tests, now revealed, show startling military uses for weird new chemical agents,” we reported in 1960. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psychochemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.
✩ Contaminated soil a concern at Los Alamos lab

The Las Conchas wildfire, which scorched land in the canyons near Los Alamos before it was turned away from the lab earlier the month, has added urgency to the soil removal efforts because flash floods could rush unimpeded through canyon floors stripped of vegetation, officials said.

That concern is heightened by the monsoons that have arrived on schedule in northern New Mexico. The National Weather Service on Monday put out a flash-flood watch for the fire area through at least Wednesday.

The soil in the canyons above Los Alamos National Laboratory, the linchpin of American’s nuclear weapons industry, contains materials with trace amounts of radiation and hazardous chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that were dumped there decades ago, said Fred deSousa, spokesman for the lab’s environmental control division.
✩ Cost of Wars May Exceed $6 Trillion

A new report from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates that the total direct and indirect costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed $6 trillion over time. That figure comes from combining congressional appropriations for the wars over the past decade ($1.3 trillion), additional spending by the Pentagon related to the wars ($326 – $652 billion), interest so far on Pentagon war appropriations, all of which was borrowed ($185 billion), immediate medical costs for veterans ($32 billion), war related foreign aid ($74 billion), homeland security spending ($401 billion), projected medical costs for veterans through 2051 ($589 – $934 billion), social costs to military families ($295 – $400 billion), projected Pentagon war spending and foreign aid as troops wind down in the two war zones ($453 billion); and interest payments on all this spending through 2020 ($1 trillion).
✩ New Book Claims Hitler Gave Sex Dolls to Nazi Soldiers

A new book reveals that Adolf Hitler ordered the manufacture of Aryan blow up dolls to discourage his troops from sleeping with disease-ridden prostitutes.

The so-called “Borghild Project” reportedly kicked off in 1940 when SS chief Heinrich Himmler wrote to Hitler alerting him of the health risks posed to his men by liaisons with French women. “The greatest danger in Paris is the widespread and uncontrolled presence of whores, picking up clients in bars, dance halls, and other places,” he wrote. “It is our duty to prevent soldiers from risking their health just for the sake of a quick adventure.”
✩ Fish captain fighting to keep long-missing moon rock

Onetime Seattle resident and businessman Coleman Anderson wants to keep his little piece of the moon.

Whether he does will depend on the outcome of an unusual lawsuit playing out in an Alaska court.

Anderson, perhaps best recognized as captain of the fishing vessel Western Viking during the first season of the hit Discovery Channel series “Deadliest Catch,” is asking a judge to let him keep a lunar rock presented to the state of Alaska in 1969 by President Nixon, but missing for nearly 37 years.

Anderson, who claims he found the rock in debris following a fire at an Anchorage museum in 1973, said he’s had it as a keepsake ever since.
✩ DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop

The Colorado prosecution of a woman accused of a mortgage scam will test whether the government can punish you for refusing to disclose your encryption passphrase.

The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to order the defendant, Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home.

Because Fricosu has opposed the proposal, this could turn into a precedent-setting case. No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects Americans’ right to remain silent.

In a brief filed last Friday, Fricosu’s Colorado Springs-based attorney, Philip Dubois, said defendants can’t be constitutionally obligated to help the government interpret their files. “If agents execute a search warrant and find, say, a diary handwritten in code, could the target be compelled to decode, i.e., decrypt, the diary?”
✩ Aging Serial Killer Demands Playstation in Prison

Ivan Milat is apparently bored, since he is serving more than seven consecutive life sentences for his crimes, so he probably really does want that Playstation console. In fact, he’s downright stir-crazy and has not eaten in nine days, reports one source. Officials in the High Court in Australia aren’t surprised, because this isn’t the first time Milat has pulled a far-out and crazy stunt to get attention. He’s kind of an attention-whore like that. Back in January of 2009, Milate sawed off one of his own fingers with a plastic knife and attempted to mail it to the High Court in Australia. Doctors were not able to sew the digit back in place. He has also swallowed razor blades and other metallic objects to both harm himself and garner attention.
✩ Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools

While exploring Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, professional diver Scott Gardner heard an odd cracking sound and swam over to investigate. What he found was a footlong blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii) holding a clam in its mouth and whacking it against a rock. Soon the shell gave way, and the fish gobbled up the bivalve, spat out the shell fragments, and swam off. Fortunately, Gardner had a camera handy and snapped what seem to be the first photographs of a wild fish using a tool.
✩ Space-Time Cloak Possible, Could Make Events Disappear?

“The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.

Unlike invisibility cloaks—some of which have been made to work at very small scales—the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object.

Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.

In theory, the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up.

If the “before” and “after” visions are seamlessly stitched together, there should be no visible trace that anything untoward has happened. One second there’s a closed safe, and the next second the safe has been emptied.
✩ Obama ‘cannot guarantee’ Social Security checks in August

President Barack Obama sat down with CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Scott Pelley for an interview that will air in full Tuesday night. In a preview released Tuesday afternoon, Pelley points out to Obama that $20 billion in Social Security checks are supposed to be mailed out August 3, the day after the looming date the government could default on its debt.

“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3 if we have not resolved this issue, because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it,” Obama said.
✩ Space Invaders cabinet is very small, very cool

If you’re big on nostalgia, but small on space, we might just have the solution for you. A clever gentleman has created a teeny-tiny 80s arcade cabinet that will fit happily on your desktop – and while it might look like a mere mock-up, this one actually works, playing Space Invaders on the miniature screen.

The whole thing is just seven inches tall, and uses the electronics from a Game Boy Advance, a little MDF, some photoshopped artwork and perhaps the world’s most adorable joystick – take a look.
✩ Israel blocks airborne protest, questions dozens

Aided by Facebook, Israel on Friday prevented scores of pro-Palestinian activists from boarding Tel Aviv-bound flights in Europe, questioned dozens more upon arrival at its main airport and denied entry to 69, disrupting their attempts to reach the West Bank on a solidarity mission with the Palestinians.

Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites, compiled a blacklist of more than 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel. On Friday, 310 of the activists who managed to land in Tel Aviv were detained for questioning, said Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad. Of those, four were immediately put on return flights and 65 were being held until flights home could be arranged for them, she said. The rest were permitted entry, she said.
✩ The Land of 10,000 Plastic Marios

It’s official: Brett Martin has a metric buttload of video game memorabilia. By Mr. Martin’s own estimation, his collection clocks in at about ten to fifteen thousand individual pieces. But not all of those trinkets of molded plastic, cast metal, and fluffed polyester are depictions of Nintendo’s famous Italian plumber. His gaming nicknack collection actually spans a diverse range of characters from different franchises, companies, and eras.
✩ Super Mario Bros. Crossover

Super Mario Bros. Crossover is a fan game that recreates the original Super Mario Bros. and allows you to play it as characters from other games.