File under Blast From The Past, Culture, Fashion, Influences, Music, SeMeN SPeRmS Approved, SeMeN SPeRmS BLArRrG, SeMeN SPeRmS ViDeO CLuB
Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on March 6, 2012
200 Million + People Using Illicit Drugs Worldwide
- ✖ 200 Million People Use Illicit Drugs, Study Finds
- Roughly 200 million people worldwide use illicit drugs such as marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine and opioids each year, according to a new study. The figure represents about one in 20 people between the ages of 15 and 64. Using a review of published studies, Australian researchers estimated that as many as 203 million people use marijuana, 56 million people use amphetamines including meth, 21 million people use cocaine and 21 million people use opioids like heroin. The use of all four drug classes was highest in developed countries. …The 200 million number does not include people who use ecstasy, hallucinogenic drugs, inhalants, benzodiazepines or anabolic steroids — just one reason it’s likely a vast underestimate of illicit drug use, according to lead author Louisa Degenhardt of the Sydney-based National Drug and Alcohol Research Center.
- ✖ Vancouver running out of free crackpipes
- He said PHS, which runs InSite, has distributed monthly highs of 20,000 pipes through its own needle and pipe distribution program. The 3,000 pipes PHS received from VCH in December were exhausted in three days. “At the beginning of the study, we expressed our concerns that (the pipe supply) is a tiny number … but we were told the number’s staying the same,” Townsend said. “To meet the demand we would need around 1,000 per day.”
- ✖ Newt Gingrich To New Hampshire: Jefferson, Washington Would Have Cracked Down On Pot
- During a town hall-style appearance in Concord, the former House Speaker said he had no interest in exploring drug decriminalization, arguing that such efforts haven’t worked in Europe. Contra Gingrich, however, Portugal has had some success with decriminalization initiatives. Pushed a bit later on the incarceration rate related to petty drug crimes, Gingrich responded, “I think the best thing is to get young people not to do drugs and then you won’t be dealing with criminals that you just described.” A third resident of the “live free or die” state argued that the founding fathers had been far more lenient about marijuana than the current political class. “I think Jefferson or George Washington would have rather strongly discouraged you from growing marijuana and their techniques with dealing with it would have been rather more violent than our current government,” Gingrich replied.
- ✖ Chivas Scotch Heroin Bottles Bust At Newark Airport
- We hope he drank the scotch before adding the H! On New Year’s Eve customs officials stopped Miami man Wilfer Bohorquez Rojo, 53, as he allegedly tried to smuggle 25 pounds of heroin from Medillin, Colombia, to Newark Airport. At first authorities just thought he had smuggled the drugs in “packages of plastic flags and between glued photographs” but further inspection found he’d filled four Chivas Royal Salute scotch bottles with “packages of a substance that also tested positive for heroin, according to the agency.” After the discovery of the drugs—estimated by authorities to be worth at least $700,000—Rojo was turned over to authorities and now faces federal narcotics smuggling charges.
- ✖ Purdue: Block Disclosure Of OxyContin Documents
- A long-simmering court battle over a trove of OxyContin documents has finally won the attention of Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker is belatedly seeking to intervene in a 2008 lawsuit in a Massachusetts state court, where an attempt is being made to force the state attorney general to release documents that were used to prosecute Purdue and three current and former execs several years ago. At issue are countless documents that were compiled by the US Department of Justice, which charged Purdue and the execs with misbranding – they facilitated improper use of the drug and misled patients, regulators and doctors about addictive risks. All totaled, $634 million in fines were paid, and the execs were barred from doing business with federal healthcare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid
- ✖ Ron Paul: Drug War Could Be Bigger Failure Than Prohibition (VIDEO)
- “This war on drugs has been a detriment to personal liberty and it’s been a real abuse of liberty,” Paul said. “Our prisons are full with people who have used drugs who should be treated as patients — and they’re non-violent. Someday we’re gonna awake and find out that the prohibition we are following right now with drugs is no more successful, maybe a lot less successful, than the prohibition of alcohol was in the ’20s.”
- ✖ Man wants rehab over Diet Cola 42 litres a week addiction
- Darren Jones wants to check himself into rehab – to cure a bizarre addiction to Diet Cola. Darren, 38, knocks back 42 litres of the drink every week. Now the 35 stone father of two is vowing to get treatment for his £100 a week habit to get fit again and save his relationship with 33-year old mother of two Paula Mullen. Darren, of Stockport, Greater Manchester, said: “I believe what I have is an actual addiction and I start to worry if I’m getting near the end of the bottle. “If I can’t get in touch with Paula to get me some more I start to panic – it’s like a drug or alcohol addiction. “I called up Diet Coke to ask them if it’s addictive and what I should do and she recommended putting water in it to dilute it, but it would taste horrid and I don’t think it would help. “We joke that I should get one of those hats with bottles either side of my head and straws straight into my mouth so I can drink it all the time. It’s like gold, it’s my fuel.”
- ✖ Why Ron Paul Is Right And Barack Obama Is Wrong About Iran
- Obama also argues that he opposes Iran’s nukes because of proliferation in the region. At which point one must loudly cough “Ahem.” Only one country in the region has illegally, in defiance of internatinal law and the NPT and US policy, has nuclear weapons and it’s Israel, not any Arab state. More absurdly, the US government has a formal policy of never acknowledging this fact. At one point in the not-so-distant past, the US government was committed to the view that Iraq had nukes but Israel didn’t. When will the US evolve a sane policy in the Middle East? One that advances our interests, avoids a catastrophic global religious war, and bases it judgment on history and statecraft rather than religion and a US-Israel alliance that, since the end of the Cold War, has become increasingly unhealthy to both parties? Less Kennedy, more Eisenhower, please.
- ✖ Judge: Black church rightful owner of KKK store
- After a lengthy legal battle between a black South Carolina church and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a judge has ruled that the church owns a building where KKK robes and T-shirts are sold. A circuit judge ruled last month that New Beginnings Baptist Church is the rightful owner of the building that houses the Redneck Shop, which operates a so-called Klan museum and sells Klan robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. The judge ordered the shop’s proprietor to pay the church’s legal bills of more than $3,300.
- ✖ No easy way to dissolve mouse in Mountain Dew
- A man in the U.S. is suing Pepsi Co. over a mouse allegedly found in a can of Mountain Dew, a claim the company rejects by saying the acid in the beverage would disintegrate the animal’s body. However, that reasoning doesn’t hold water with Canadian food experts. “There would not be enough acid in the matrix of the can to actually start causing those physical changes to the mouse,” says Massimo Marcone, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph. “The mouse would start to spoil; there would not be enough acid to preserve the mouse. It would start to smell bad. But to say that the mouse would actually dissolve in about 300 millilitres of soft drink, it’s pretty hard.”
- ✖ Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories
- Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction writer to get honored in the prestigious Library of America series, a kind of pantheon of American literature. If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
- ✖ Time Cheers the Drone War
- The new issue of Time magazine promises on its cover “Essential Info for the Year Ahead.” One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome. The report–written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a “hot military trend” this way: Today’s generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases. And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.
- ✖ Alejandro Jodorowsky Needs Your Support To Create The Autobiographical DANZA DE LA REALIDAD
- Alejandro Jodorowsky – the legendary cult filmmaker behind Santa Sangre, El Topo and The Holy Mountain – needs your help. After years trying to raise funding for big new projects King Shot and Son Of El Topo, Jodorowsky is moving on to something more personal: Danza De La Realidad, an autobiographical picture based on his own childhood and teenaged years. Having had no luck with conventional film financing methods in recent years, Jodorowsky is taking this one to the streets and trying the crowd funding method. Put a hundred dollars into the film and you’ll receive a special cut of the finished movie on DVD.
- ✖ YOUR KID’S ON DRUGS [Video]
- ✖ Sea Shepherd Intercepts the Japanese Whaling Fleet with Drones
- The Sea Shepherd crew has intercepted the Japanese whaling fleet on Christmas Day, a thousand miles north of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The Sea Shepherd ship, Steve Irwin, deployed a drone to successfully locate and photograph the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru on December 24th. Once the pursuit began, three Japanese harpoon/security ships moved in on the Steve Irwin to shield the Nisshin Maru to allow it to escape. This time however the Japanese tactic of tailing the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker will not work because the drones, one on the Steve Irwin and the other on the Bob Barker, can track and follow the Nisshin Maru and can relay the positions back to the Sea Shepherd ships. “We can cover hundreds of miles with these drones and they have proven to be valuable assets for this campaign,” said Captain Paul Watson on board the Steve Irwin.
- ✖ ‘Supersoldier’ ants with gigantic jaws
- Nightmarish ‘supersoldier’ ants with huge heads and jaws have been created by activating ancient genes. Scientists believe the monster ants may be a genetic throwback to an ancestor that lived millions of years ago. Scientists say they can create the supersoldiers at will by dabbing normal ant larvae with a special hormone – the larvae then develop into supersoldiers rather than normal soldier or worker ants.
- ✖ ACLU sues library for blocking Wiccan websites
- The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Eastern Missouri sued a local public library on Tuesday for allegedly blocking websites related to Wicca, a modern pagan religion. Anaka Hunter of Salem, Mo., said she tried to access websites about Wicca, Native American religions and astrology for her own research, but the library’s filtering software blocked the sites. According to the ACLU, the software labeled the sites as “occult” and “criminal.”
- ✖ Psychedelic Heroin: Grey Lodge Archives
- I recently tracked down the pdf’s for nearly all of the issues of the now-deceased counterculture online zine Grey Lodge Occult Review. The site was taken down due to “legal threats and religious hackers”. To see the table of contents for the issues visit the Wayback Machine here. Along with the rabbit hole that is Deoxy, this was one of my formative sanctuaries for all things mindfuckery.
- ✖ Forget Stocks Or Bonds, Invest In A Lobbyist
- In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.
- ✖ Excavator on Rooftop of 12-Story Building in Taiyuan
- Shanxi province Taiyuan city Wanbailin district Yingze West Street, an excavator operates on the rooftop of the Shanxi Science and Technology Hotel, causing surrounding city residents both surprise and concern.
- ✖ US ‘space warplane’ may be spying on Chinese spacelab
- The US Air Force’s second mysterious mini-space shuttle, the X-37B, could be spying on China’s space laboratory and the first piece of its space station, Tiangong-1. Amateur space trackers told the British Interplanetary Society publication Spaceflight that the black-funded spaceplane seemed to be orbiting the Earth in tandem with Tiangong_1, or the Heavenly Palace, leading the magazine to speculate that its unknown mission is to spy on it. “Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China’s nascent space station,” Spaceflight editor Dr David Baker told the BBC.
- ✖ NOT SATIRE: L.A. Tells Arrested OWS Protesters They Can Pay for “Free Speech” Classes to Avoid Court
- Incredibly, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office is offering Occupy L.A. protesters arrested in recent weeks the opportunity to pay $355 for private free speech classes to avoid their court dates. As reported in the Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles Chief Deputy City Atty. William Carter said the city won’t press charges against protesters who complete the educational program offered by American Justice Associates. … Carter said the free-speech class will save the city money and teach protesters the nuances of the law. “The 1st Amendment is not absolute,” he said, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled government can regulate when, where and how free speech can be exercised. As a civil rights attorney working with some of the approximately 350 protesters who have been arrested in recent weeks noted, the offer is nothing short of “patronizing.”
- ✖ Toddlers and Tiaras mothers DOPING their daughters with drinks spiked with ‘pageant crack’?
- No brand names are mentioned on the show, but many have speculated that the drink is Mountain Dew, a caffeinated soft drink. Others believe it even contains alcohol. Mrs Holler is filmed instructing Alana to take ‘two big gulps’ from an unlabelled drinks bottle. Within seconds the change is apparent. ‘A lot of pageant moms and people know what the special juice is – everybody has their different concoctions. Special juice is to help energise her’ The young pageant contestant starts rapidly swinging her arms over her head and spinning around on the floor, exclaiming: ‘My go-go juice is kicking in right now!’ After her drink fix, Alana takes to the stage in a plaid shirt displaying inches of stomach to perform a routine, inspired by sex symbol Daisy Duke. Describing how the drink makes her feel, she says smiling: ‘Go-go juice makes me laughy, and play-ey, and makes me feel like I want to pull my mommy’s hair.’
- ✖ Polar challenge: How do you cycle to the South Pole?
- Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton is hoping to become the first person to use a bike to reach the South Pole. She is attempting to travel 500 miles (805km) across Antarctica and will cycle for large parts of it, as well as snowkiting and walking. She hopes to complete the trek for Sport Relief in 20 days. At this time of year, the average temperature in Antarctica is -25C, but can drop to -50C. Severe coastal winds come from cold air flowing down off the interior ice sheet. Wind speeds can reach up to 125mph (201km/h) and average about 80mph. In addition, she will be dragging 12.9st (82kg) of equipment and supplies behind her on a sledge. It’s no average ride and she is not using your average bike. The specially-built Hanebrink “ice bike” took designers in Los Angeles three months to finish. Dan Hanebrink and Kane Fortune have been building all-terrain hybrid bikes that can be used in all environments for many years.
- ✖ Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control
- Here is an actual Rick Santorum quote: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
- ✖ With all eyes on their ears, lobe stretchers snip
- Some plastic surgeons are reporting an increase in younger clients, specifically those who are ready to undo a generational fashion statement that has left a lot of self-conscious people with a lot of sagging earlobe. Dr. David Kahn, who performed Tidwell’s surgery, was blunt in his assessment of his client’s condition. “It was unsightly, a distortion that needed to be overcome.”
- ✖ Miracle ‘chimeric’ monkeys made from cells of six animals spark protests
- They may look like any other baby monkeys, but these two are scientific breakthroughs. Roku and Hex are the world’s first chimeric monkeys – created with genetic material from six ‘parents’. But their birth has caused an ethical storm, with critics accusing scientists of disregarding the welfare of the animals.
- ✖ SOPA-Supporting News Outlets Aren’t Covering SOPA [STUDY]
- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC have dedicated no time to covering the Stop Online Piracy Act in their evening newscasts since Oct. 1, according to a report by Ben Dimiero of Media Matters For America. CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so. Dimiero based his report on Lexis-Nexis searches which includes transcripts of nighttime newscasts. Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), Time Warner (CNN) and Disney (ABC) are all listed as supporters of the bill. ABC and CBS are also listed as separate supporters of the bill.
- ✖ Japan plans futuristic farm with robot workers in disaster zone
- Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami. Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes. Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said this week. The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around 4 billion yen over the next six years, a ministry official said. Land in Miyagi Prefecture, some 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, which was flooded by seawater on March 11, has been earmarked for the so-called “Dream Project.”
- ✖ Newt Gingrich: ‘African-American Community Should Demand Paychecks And Not Be Satisfied With Food Stamps’
- Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Thursday he is willing to go before the NAACP and urge blacks to demand paychecks, not food stamps. Gingrich told a town hall meeting at a senior center in Plymouth, N.H., that if the NAACP invites him to its annual convention this year, he’d go there and talk about “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” He also said he’d pitch a new Social Security program aimed at helping young people, particularly African-American males, who he said get the smallest return on Social Security.
- ✖ Pentagon-backed ‘time cloak’ stops the clock
- The researchers created what they call a time lens, which can manipulate and focus signals in time, analogous to the way a glass lens focuses light in space. They use a technique called four-wave mixing, in which two beams of light, a “signal” and a “pump,” are sent together through an optical fiber. The two beams interact and change the wavelength of the signal. To begin creating a time gap, the researchers first bump the wavelength of the signal up, then by flipping the wavelength of the pump beam, bump it down.
- ✖ Pro skater with a love of God and psychedelic drugs goes on rampage inside Midtown hotel
- A pro skateboarder with a passion for God and psychedelic drugs was arrested Thursday after he went on a drug-fueled rampage inside a Midtown hotel wearing only his birthday suit, cops said. Jereme Rogers, 26, was high on angel dust when he ran naked out of his room at the Afinia Shelburne hotel and started tearing down framed pictures lining an 11th floor hallway, sources said. “It was a rampage,” said a witness who declined to give her name. “He was screaming. We didn’t even know what he was doing. He was incoherent and belligerent.” Rogers, a heavily-tattooed Californian who has appeared in several X Games and says his skills come from God, was taken to Bellevue Hospital. He was charged with criminal mischief and unlawful possession of marijuana, cops said.
- ✖ DHS Training excercise startles locals
- With their blue and white SUVs circled around the Main Street office, at least one official was posted on the door with a semiautomatic rifle, randomly checking identifications. And other officers, some with K-9s, sifted through the building. “I thought someone was upset about not getting there check,” said Laura Kelly, who took a friend to the office on Tuesday. According to one Homeland official in the Washington, D.C. office, Operation Shield. is an effort that uses routine, unannounced visits by FPS inspectors to test the effectiveness of contract guards, or protective security officers — “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”
- ✖ Panda caught eating meat on camera [Video]
- A wild panda is caught on surveillance camera eating a dead gnu in south-west China. An analyst says the bamboo-loving animals were predators millions of years ago. Although classified as carnivores, giant pandas mainly live on bamboo, but eat other foods including honey, eggs, fish, oranges and bananas when they are available
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on January 7, 2012
A Monkey In Silk Is A Monkey No Less
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A talented chimpanzee called Panzee can recognise distorted and incomplete words spoken by a computer, scientists have discovered.
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In a more innocent age, Ronald McDonald was the most benign of media icons: a cheerful clown whose floppy red wig and striped clothes presented an image of family fun.
But in recent years, another view of the spokes-clown has emerged: To detractors, he’s a heartless corporate shill bent on promoting morbid obesity to young children at the expense of good health.
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Thirty years ago this month, Nintendo released Donkey Kong to arcades across the United States. The game’s American version went on to sell tens of thousands of units, saving the then-struggling US branch of the company and paving the way for Nintendo’s future success on Western shores.
Without Donkey Kong, we would have no Mario, and without Mario, it’s hard to imagine what Nintendo would look like today. That makes Donkey Kong, above all others, the most pivotally important video game Nintendo has ever released.
So it’s time to celebrate–which I did by rounding up a bunch of weird, odd, and interesting stuff about this beloved game.
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Many of the nation’s leading banks and card issuers, including Wells Fargo, Citi, USAA, Sovereign Bank and Discover, are selling information about consumers’ shopping habits — how much they spend, where they shop and what they buy — to retailers.
Retailers are using the data to offer targeted discounts via text, email and online bank statements. Each time a consumer cashes in on one of those deals, the retailer pays the bank a nice commission.
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According to the reports, the court heard Zhan picked his victim at random in an unprovoked attack because he believed Davis was a zombie who was going to attack him.
The court also heard that Zhan, who is of Chinese origin but lives with his parents in Canada, travelled to Glasgow after hearing voices saying he should go there.
He reportedly told a psychiatrist that he started seeing blood over the faces of people and was convinced they were zombies.
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For millions of Jews and Christians, it’s a tenet of their faith that God is the author of the core text of the Hebrew Bible – the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses. But since the advent of modern biblical scholarship, academic researchers have believed the text was written by a number of different authors whose work could be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles and the different names they used for God.
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The human navel should be designated as a bacterial nature reserve, it seems. The first round of DNA results from the Belly Button Biodiversity project are in, and the 95 samples that have so far been analysed have turned up a whopping total of more than 1400 bacterial strains. In 662 cases, the microbes could not even be classified to family, “which strongly suggests that they are new to science”, says team leader Jiri Hulcr of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
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Cornish company Concept Shed’s novelty wedding vending machine dispenses marriage ceremonies for £1
A Cornish company has received interest from around the world for its novelty wedding vending machine.
Autowed is an 8ft (2.4m) tall pink machine compared by the makers to “a parking meter mixed up with a Cadillac”.
But it has caught the imagination of people around the world after a video was posted on the internet.
Requests for machines have come from as away as Russia and Brazil, Falmouth-based inventor Concept Shed said.
For £1 it plays a specially composed intro version of the Wedding March and asks customers to select their type of union. Bride and groom have the option of pressing one on a keyboard for “I do” and two for “Escape”.
Purchasers get a wedding receipt and two plastic rings in an egg-shaped plastic capsule.
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A massive tree house in Crossville, Tennessee, which many have claimed to be the world’s largest, may soon receive an official title from Guinness Book of World Records. It is estimated to have used over a quarter million nails to complete thus far.
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Rodrick Dantzler, the suspect in the slaying of seven people in Grand Rapids Thursday afternoon, allegedly continued his violent rampage by shooting the driver of a pickup truck in the nose during a traffic jam near Godfrey and Grandville.
But the bullet ricocheted off the man’s nose.
Robert Poore’s cousin, Harold Taylor, was riding in the car at the time of the incident. Taylor told 24 Hour News 8 his cousin likely survived the bullet because of a titanium plate in his nose.
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Where do such moons come from?
Rayman suggests one source: “When another large body collides with an asteroid, the resulting debris is sprayed into orbit around the asteroid and can gradually collapse to form a moon.”
Another possibility is “gravitational pinball”: A moon formed elsewhere in the asteroid belt might, through complicated gravitational interactions with various bodies, end up captured by the gravity of one of them.
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NASA is tracking a piece of Soviet space debris that could collide with the International Space Station, the US space agency said after the shuttle Atlantis docked on its final mission.
The space junk is part of Cosmos 375, a satellite launched in 1970 by the former Soviet Union and which collided with another satellite and broke apart, but details about the size and exact trajectory of the object were unknown, NASA said.
NASA estimates that the debris could collide with the station at around 12 noon (1600 GMT) on Tuesday, the same day two US astronauts are scheduled to step out on a spacewalk.
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Booz Allen Hamilton is a massive American consulting firm that does a substantial amount of work for the Pentagon. This means they’ve got a lot of military business on their servers—which Anonymous hacked. Today they’ve leaked it.
The leak, dubbed ‘Military Meltdown Monday,’ includes 90,000 logins of military personnel—including personnel from US CENTCOM, SOCOM, the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and what looks like private sector contractors. Their correspondences could include exchanges with Booz Allen’s highly brassy staff of retired defense folk: current execs include three former Directors of National Intelligence and one former head of the CIA. Anon was also kind enough to gut 4 GB of source code from Booz Allen’s servers. Anon cites the firm’s alleged complicity in the SWIFT financial monitoring program as at least partial motive for the attack.
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The holy man’s estranged wife, Amora, a respected psychologist, got wind of the tawdry tricks while they were going through a bitter custody battle, she said.
She managed to have Rabinowich secretly filmed with a call girl and entered the photographic evidence into the record of the bitter custody case.
“Since when are prostitutes kosher?” Amora Rabinowich told The Post. “He was coming to court claiming he was this pious individual, but he was using the phone on the Sabbath to meet prostitutes.
“And what kind of rabbi is he? He didn’t even take these prostitutes to the mikvah [Jewish ritual cleansing bath] first.
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A legal battle over the fate of 10 double eagle gold coins from the Franklin Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s started with the government saying the coins, now worth an estimated $75 million, were wrongly taken from a U.S. mint.
Authorities say the coins were improperly removed more than 70 years ago from the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia, only blocks from the courthouse where U.S. District Court Judge Legrome D. Davis was presiding over the case.
“You are going to hear a remarkable and intriguing story about gold coins that were stolen from the U.S. Mint in 1933,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Romero told the jury in her opening statement.
None of the 445,500 coins, then worth $20 each, ever legally went into circulation, she said. President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order shortly after taking office in March 1933 that prohibited the payout of gold from banks.
Yet 10 coins — called double eagles because the $10 coin was called an eagle — somehow disappeared.
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MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell blasted the “once noble” Newsweek magazine on Monday night for allowing Sarah Palin to say, “I think I can win” in an interview without contest.
O’Donnell noted that nearly every 2012 presidential poll has shown Palin has little chance, adding that she is the most unpopular politician in Alaska.
“Newsweek does everything to make the madness of Sarah Palin seem reasonable,” he said.
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As news of the marriage spread, the state forest department officials stepped into action. Since monkeys are protected in India as government property, no one can pet them, train them or – as in this case – marry them, even to a fellow monkey.
“It’s illegal to marry a monkey. Anyone found doing that or attending the marriage ceremony will be arrested,” said forest range officer Bhavar Singh Kaviya.
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The authors suggest that when interventions eliminate people’s freedom to value diversity on their own terms, they may actually be creating hostility toward the targets of prejudice.
According to Dr. Legault, “Controlling prejudice reduction practices are tempting because they are quick and easy to implement. They tell people how they should think and behave and stress the negative consequences of failing to think and behave in desirable ways.” Legault continues, “But people need to feel that they are freely choosing to be nonprejudiced, rather than having it forced upon them.”
Legault stresses the need to focus less on the requirement to reduce prejudices and start focusing more on the reasons why diversity and equality are important and beneficial to both majority and minority group members.
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For several years, public health officials have been concerned that gonorrhea, one of the most prevalent STDs in the world, might become resistant to the last widely available antibiotics used to treat it, a class of drugs called cephalosporins.
Now, it has.
In the space of one week, infectious disease specialists have received a one-two punch of bad news that confirms those fears, including the discovery of a new, cephalosporin-resistant strain of the bacteria.
The percentage of U.S. gonorrhea cases that are resistant to the two cephalosporins used to treat it, cefixime, taken orally, and ceftriaxone, injected, is on the rise, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
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A stun gun made it onto a JetBlue flight in Boston, and wasn’t discovered until a cleaning crew in Newark, NJ raised the alarm while cleaning up the plane.
The plane was empty when the palm-sized device was found, and nobody was injured, but the question remains of how it made it through security and onto the plane in the first place.
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“Looks like Megan is just as talented with Photoshop as she is in entertainment,” said plastic surgeon and blogger Dr. Nicholas Vendemia of New York. “Those lines on her forehead are totally fake. … Muscles in the forehead and brow simply don’t create curved wrinkles like that. The wrinkles Megan is showing us don’t coincide with brow anatomy, nor do they match the facial expression she is making.”
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Rap star Dizzee Rascal was hauled off a plane at Heathrow yesterday for allegedly hurling abuse at a stewardess – and now he could face a life ban from British Airways.
The singer, whose single Bonkers was a No 1 hit, was escorted off the flight at Terminal 3 by police called in to attend the disturbance.
The East London-born singer is said to have hurled foul-mouthed insults at the stewardess as he sat in First Class.
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Contrails are known to have several effects on climate. On the one hand, they act as a blanket, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space. On the other, during the day they reflect incoming sunlight, cooling the Earth below more than it is warmed by the other effect. But overall, the consensus among climatologists is that they warm the planet.
In the 1940s – unlike today – there was hardly any civilian air traffic, so historical records offer an opportunity to test the daytime effects. “Pilots cared about contrails a lot,” says Rob MacKenzie, formerly of Lancaster University, and now at the University of Birmingham, UK. “Aircraft were tracked using contrails and shot down. So pilots would report them.”
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The crackdown in Belarus grew more indiscriminate this week. Among the 400 arrested: a one-armed man charged with taking part in the clapping protests and mute person accused of shouting antigovernment slogans.
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Russian blogosphere is buzzing about a video of a crazy car crash in central Moscow that went viral on the web. The incident took place last week in central Moscow when a speeding Nissan GT-R, worth some $160 thousand, rammed into cars parked along the street. The impact was powerful enough to literally throw a jeep into the air. There are no reports of injuries – or the identity of the driver. It’s not clear whether the driver was street-racing with another car. Some bloggers have already claimed they’ve seen the car the evening before driving at a speed of around 200 km/h.
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on July 12, 2011
Full Moon Fever
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I started the WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit on March 19th during a rally for Bradley Manning at the White House. My goal is to bring awareness to WikiLeaks, protest the detention of Bradley Manning, and make the government and corporations sweat when they look out the window and see me parked in front of their buildings.
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Hackers who stole the personal details of more than 200,000 Citigroup customers ‘broke in through the front door’ using an extremely simple technique.
It has been called ‘one of the most brazen bank hacking attacks’ in recent years.
And for the first time it has been revealed how the sophisticated cyber criminals made off with the staggering bounty of names, account numbers, email addresses and transaction histories.
They simply logged on to the part of the group’s site reserved for credit card customers – and substituted their account numbers which appeared in the browser’s address bar with other numbers.
It allowed them to leapfrog into the accounts of other customers – with an automatic computer programme letting them repeat the trick tens of thousands of times.
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Charlotte Fielder, who was born missing a hand, has been awarded an MBE for her work helping people who are “limb deficient” with the charity Reach.
After signing up to Facebook, she found her profile image had been copied and posted on a pornographic website.
Her image was subjected to obscene comments by men attracted to amputees.
The image used was one of Mrs Fielder fully-clothed.
She said many women amputees she knew had been contacted by so-called “devotees”.
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Black metal music, often associated with satanism and church-burning, is set to burst onto the highbrow stage of global diplomacy following a move by Norway to teach the genre to its future envoys.
Some 20 diplomats in training received a black metal crash course this year, the Norwegian diplomatic academy said Friday.
“The objective is to show Norwegian culture in all its diversity. In the musical field, it goes from (Romantic music composer) Edvard Grieg to black metal,” its deputy head Steinar Lindberg said, adding he hoped to repeat the experience.
“In Italy, Japan or France, young people are learning Norwegian to decrypt the lyrics. Black metal is an export product and it’s important that future diplomats are interested in it,” he added.
Norway has produced a wave of black metal bands that have gained notoriety abroad, such as Mayhem, Darkthrone, Satyricon, Emperor, Enslaved, Burzum, Dimmu Borgir and Gorgoroth.
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Nu-mark sent me this, it’s pretty cool just like he is. I really dug it hiphop is missing play fullness and irreverence this is both of those things
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The problem is so severe that hundreds are sickened every year and it is believed to have resulted in positive drug tests for five members of Mexico’s national soccer team.
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Italians voted to abandon nuclear power for the foreseeable future, turning out in droves to cast ballots in a packet of referenda whose outcome is a sign of growing popular discontent toward Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government.
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Lasers emit highly concentrated, amplified light. Usually it takes a complex array of crystals, gels or gases to amplify light particles, known as photons, as they bounce around between mirrors inside laser machines. But now scientists have found another way: using engineered living cells that can perform the feat.
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Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he’s sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size.
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Filmmaker Ladd Ehlinger Jr. earned a measure of notoriety in 2010 with his ads for Dale Peterson, the Alabama agriculture commissioner candidate, that showed Peterson waving his gun around and ranting about the “thugs and criminals” and “dummies” who were driving Alabama into the ground. Ehlinger also dressed up Nancy Pelosi as the Wicked Witch of the West in ads for her 2010 opponent John Dennis. But those spots look like PTA bake-sale ads compared to Ehlinger’s latest effort—the unreal spot below attacking Janice Hahn, a Democrat running for Congress in California. It’s called “Give us your cash, B–ch!” and that might be the least offensive thing about it. The racial and sexual insults just keep on coming, as Ehlinger hammers Hahn on her supposed support for “gangsters.” On the YouTube page, Ehlinger says his goal is “to expose stupid, corrupt politicians on all sides of the aisle with humorous but hard-hitting videos!” Where’s the joke?
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“On June 6, 2011, the Fort Calhoun pressurized water nuclear reactor 20 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska entered emergency status due to imminent flooding from the Missouri River. A day later, there was an electrical fire requiring plant evacuation.
Then, on June 8th, NRC event reports confirmed the fire resulted in the loss of cooling for the reactor’s spent fuel pool. The discussion includes specific details of the technical failures at Fort Calhoun, the risks of coolant loss at overcrowded “spent” fuel pools, and the national hazards of nuclear facilities along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and other water sites during the current period of floods and climate change.”
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According to a police affidavit, Hayes became upset and began yelling at the victim because “Y’all didn’t save my kids no damn ice cream and cake.”
Hayes then left the party and went to his apartment.
According to the affidavit, he returned with a small black handgun tucked into the back of his pants, approached the host, lifted up his shirt and said, “I ain’t scared to go to jail, just take care of my kids.”
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Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has long sold weed killer. Now, it’s hoping to help people grow killer weed.
In an unlikely move for the head of a major company, Scotts Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn said he is exploring targeting medical marijuana as well as other niches to help boost sales at his lawn and garden company.
“I want to target the pot market,” Mr. Hagedorn said in an interview. “There’s no good reason we haven’t.”
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Who knew Wonder Woman drove a Poncho? For its upcoming auction at St. John’s in Plymouth, Michigan, held in late July in conjunction with the Concours d’Elegance of America (formerly the Meadowbrook Concours), RM Auctions will offer a most unusual Pontiac – the transparent display car that GM built for the 1940s World’s Fair.
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Austria’s State TV is apologizing for broadcasting a 1930s Walt Disney cartoon that critics say reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes of the era.
“The Three Little Pigs” depicts the Big Bad Wolf disguised as a Jewish beggar, complete with a long nose, beard and caftan, as he tries to gain entry to one of the pigs’ homes. The Austria Press Agency says it was seen last week on one of the network’s children’s programs.
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Mmmkay
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Here’s an overview published by the rogue security prankster group of their attacks so far. One day, it’s PBS and porno sites and the FBI. The next, it’s the US Senate, and Bethesda Software. Earlier today, Eve Online, Escapist Magazine and Minecraft. The targets seem so diverse, so random—following their Twitter account is like watching a rabid elephant on PCP wearing a top hat rampage through a crowded market with explosive banana diarrhea.
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Ordinance #2740( An unfunded city-wide mandate) was passed with a resounding 6 to 1 vote, and it allows for the citizens of Cedar Falls to forcefully give the government keys to their comercial properties through universal ‘lock boxes’. The intent of the program is to provide increased safety and protection to personal, private property which include businesses, apartments and some rental houses– which by the way– comes at the expense of furthering wayward erosion of fundamental constitutional rights.
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Learn how to model your own 3D Balls & Scrotum w bonus pubes
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A Pennsylvania man faces attempted homicide charges for allegedly beating his fiancee’s 2-year-old daughter because he thought the girl’s upbringing had been too lenient.
Investigators say 24-year-old Brandon Bishop told officers the girl was a princess. The Morning Call of Allentown reports Bishop admitted punching, kicking and choking the girl and picking her up by her hair and dropping her.
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Russian police could hardly control their laughter when a drunk driver attempted to make phone calls with a pack of cigarettes
Thanks Smart Crew -
Lorain County Sheriffs deputies had received a call of a man acting angrily and becoming violent with campers and animals. When deputies arrived at the scene, according to the report, they found Stroup passed out in a trailer. Deputies say Stroup smelled of alcohol and when he was eventually were able to wake him up, he began growling at them.
Stroup was placed under arrest for underage consumption and told authorities that he had blacked out from drinking too much vodka that evening.
According to the report Stroup went on to say that ever since he was scratched by a wolf in Germany he blacks out when the moon comes out and goes on the attack.
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An Edmonton man apparently upset that someone had set up an account for him
on a gay dating website went a little too far in trying to get payback.Robert Gary Boyes, 39, was placed under house arrest Monday after admitting
he posted a bogus dating website profile identifying another man as someone
into incest and wanting people to have sex with him and his kids. -
Showing some skin and raising some eyebrows, more than 100 scantily clad protestors gathered in dowtown Dallas Saturday, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, we understand that no means no.”
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Facebook has rolled out its facial recognition technology to countries outside of the US, but has switched the feature on by default without telling its users first.
UK-based security expert Graham Cluely noted earlier today that Facebook had slotted the tech into the social network.
The Mark Zuckerberg-run company started using its facial recognition software in December last year for its Stateside users in a move to automatically provide tags for the photos uploaded by Facebook users.
The tech works by scanning newly uploaded pics and then identifies faces from previously tagged photos already stored in Zuckerberg’s internet silo.
When the software was introduced in the US late last year, Facebook pointed out that users could disable the function.
“If for any reason you don’t want your name to be suggested, you will be able to disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings,” the company wrote on its blog post last December.
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How ill are the Mexican drug wars getting? The drug cartels are building their own armored trucks.
Rival drug gangs are playing around with really serious military hardware, including .50 caliber machine guns and grenades. At least some of them figured out an armoring solution for the uptick in firepower: armoring. Chop shops add inch-thick steel plates to a standard truck chassis like that of a Ford F-150. At least 100 of the so-cold “El Monstruo” monster trucks have been discovered by Mexican security officials this spring, with the most recent two found this weekend.
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A sign posted along Eight Mile and I-75 reads, “Warning! This area is infested by crackheads. Secure your belongings and pray for your life. Your legislators won’t protect you.” It’s a shocking statement, but neighbors say that sign is far from extreme.
“Reality is reality,” Solomon told us.
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Investigators say the thief wears a wig, fake mustache and dark-colored suit similar to an outfit in the Beasties Boys’ “Sabotage” music video.
Thanks Patrick Nybakken -
Syd Mead’s Land Yacht was commissioned by Playboy Magazine as the ultimate go-anywhere, do-anyone ride in an alternate Blade Runner-meets-Ladies Man future. Despite the 70′s look, its predictions of modern driving technology are surprisingly accurate.
Mead’s Land Yacht debuted in the June 1975 issue of Playboy, serving as both a roving bachelor pad and a vision of future travel. It’s designed with a central computer system which manages vehicle systems as well as the duties of over the road driving, leaving you to lounge in the luxurious cabin and leather recliners.
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Cameras in the toilets; CCTV in the classroom; pupils’ fingerprints kept in a database . . . Can’t happen here? Think again, because the surveillance state is quietly invading our schools
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Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, “seedbombs” are becoming an increasingly popular means combating the many forgotten grey spaces we encounter everyday-from sidewalk cracks to vacant lots and parking medians. They can be thrown anonymously into these derelict urban sites to temporarily reclaim and transform them into places worth looking at and caring for. The Greenaid dispensary simply makes these guerilla gardening efforts more accessible to all by appropriating the existing distribution system of the quarter operated candy machine. Using just the loose coins in your pocket, you can make a small but meaningful contribution to the beautification of your city!
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Women’s fake screams of ecstasy in bed may have less to do with trying to protect the sensitive egos of their partners, and more to do with a gal’s own personal insecurities and fear of intimacy, new research suggests.
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A San Francisco restaurant owner had a hit on his hands until the health department stepped in and said he can no longer sell his special grasshopper tacos or any other insect-inspired entrees. But Harry Persaud and his loyal customers are hoping to change their minds.
At one Mission Street Mexican restaurant, grasshopper tacos are the most talked-about food on the menu. They have earned it write-ups in local newspapers and even earned La Oaxaqueña Bakery and Restaurant the title of “Best New Mexican Hole-In-The-Wall. But now, they are gone.
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This is sort of fascinating. Google has decided to withdraw its language translation tools from public use (though the Google Translate site itself will stay around), and the reason, as with so many things internet-related, is that it’s a victim of its own success. Google’s translation engine improves over time by comparing side-by-side samples of translated text that get scooped up by its search robots, but this continuing improvement depends on the translations themselves being high quality. So what happens when spammers and link farmers flood the internet with text translated by Google’s own tools?
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A 53-year-old man died of a suspected heart attack while in the act of raping a 77-year-old woman, police investigators in Tivoli, Texas said this week.
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on June 15, 2011
