✦ Teen who butchered 9-year-old neighbor wrote that killing was amazing, enjoyable in her journal before she went to church

“I just f—— killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they’re dead. I don’t know how to feel atm. It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the “ohmygawd I can’t do this” feeling, it’s pretty enjoyable. I’m kinda nervous and shaky though right now. Kay, I gotta go to church now…lol.” Thanks Jasmine

✦ GREAT (?) MOMENTS IN COMICS HISTORY: “MAD’S PUNK ROCK GROUP OF THE YEAR” (1978)

But when it had one of its surges of brilliance, MAD was indeed a force to be reckoned with and if you were of the right age at the right time it was both eye opening and fucking hilarious, a good case in point being the hit-or-miss observations and social commentary found in the long-running “(FILL IN THE BLANK) OF THE YEAR” series. Two of those stand out in my memory as being absolutely vital in the forging of my sense of humor were “Mad’s Karate Movie Producer of the Year” (MAD #167, June 1974), a piss-your-pants moment of brilliance illustrated by Jack Davis during the height of the 1970′s martial arts movie boom, and issue #199′s (June 1978) poke at the British punk rock movement when it reared its Mohawked head over here in the States.

✦ Know your Rights!- right!?

Recently as I was doing some research I came across a designers site that had a rug for sale that had the exact style of my friend Keen One, I thought to myself how unlikely that he would do such a commercial project so I passed the link for confirmation. As it turned out it wasn’t an agreed upon collaboration but an artistic infringement by the designer. Since the work was painted on a wall in public they must have assumed the artist had no rights to said work since it may or may not have been legal and decided to use for their own commercial and financial gain.

✦ Play the Rings of a Tree Trunk Like a Record

What would the trunk of a tree sound like if a cross section of it were played like an LP? With his creation Years, Bartholomäus Traubeck attempts to answer that question by using a turntable, PlayStation Eye Camera, a stepper motor to control the arm, and computer running Ableton Live. As you’ll hear in the video above, the rings of the tree trunk, as interpreted by this piece, create an eerie and ominous piano track that sounds like it was taken from psychological horror film. Who knew trees were so emo?

✦ THE FAB 5 FREDDY DEBATE CONTINUES

Revok recently pulled Fab 5 Freddy’s card calling him a biter and a fraud (check Revok’s blog post HERE). This accusation has drew a line in the sand with people opposing and supporting Fred’s work. Today I received this harshly retarded email from Holland’s Shoe aka Niels Shoe Meulman…

✦ Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic

The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills. The group of students, part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, ventured to the jungles of Ecuador. The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.

✦ Stealing in virtual world is theft in real life, top Dutch court rules

The amulet and mask were a 13-year-old boy’s virtual possessions in an online fantasy game. In the real world, he was beaten and threaten with a knife to give them up. The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the theft conviction of a youth who stole another boy’s possessions in the popular online fantasy game RuneScape. Judges ordered the offender to perform 144 hours of community service. Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods” — and whether stealing them is real-world theft. The suspect’s lawyer had argued the amulet and mask “were neither tangible nor material and, unlike for example electricity, had no economic value.”

✦ New Theory of Life Claims to Unite Fields of Science

The Earth is alive, asserts a new scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects — for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA — are animate, that is, alive.

✦ First ‘Heartless’ Man: You Don’t Really Need A Heart, Or A Pulse

Two doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.

✦ Twitter news: US bars friends over Twitter joke

TWO pals were barred from entering the US after innocent tweets joking about “destroying America” were picked up by the country’s anti-terror cops. US special agents monitoring Twitter spotted Leigh Van Bryan’s messages weeks before he left for a holiday in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. Leigh, who also quipped about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” on Twitter, said they were treated like terrorists on arrival at a Los Angeles International Airport. The pair were held by armed guards and quizzed for five hours before being handcuffed, put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight.

✦ Key Internet operator VeriSign hit by hackers

VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world’s websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company. The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.

✦ A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors [Video]

Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Special thanks to Professor Daniel Lee for his support.

✦ 2,100 pounds of marijuana seized from fake AT&T; work truck

Two men are behind bars after authorities found more than a ton of marijuana inside a fake AT&T; work truck. It all happened off FM 490 just west of the Hidalgo County community of McCook. A Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) state trooper pulled over what appeared to be an AT&T; truck over for speeding 72 mph in a 60 mph zone. Driver Aaron Arrellano-Salgado fled on foot but was caught. Authorities found 189 bundles with 2,168 pounds of marijuana inside the cloned work truck. State troopers pulled over a second car driven by Wilfredo Garza-Salgado for running a stop sign nearby.

✦ Oriental riff

The Oriental riff, also known as the Asian riff or the Chinese riff, is a musical riff or phrase that has often been used as a trope or stereotype of orientalism in Western culture to represent the idea of the Orient, China, Japan or a generic East Asian theme by Western culture. The riff is sometimes accompanied by the sound of a gong.

✦ Police Raid 5-Story Bronx Marijuana Farm, 593 Plants Seized

Police raided a five-story Bronx building that they believe was being used as a marijuana farm with hundreds of plants in an elaborate growing system. A search warrant was executed at about 1 p.m. Tuesday at 610 Morris Park Ave., according to police. Investigators seized 593 plants, some as tall as seven feet, as well as 75 pounds of marijuana that had been cut, dried and packaged in plastic. Sources told NBC New York that each floor of the building was used for a different stage of growth for the plants. It had been outfitted with an intricate ventilation and hydration system. The seized plants and packages totaled about 1,550 pounds, police said. Investigators said about 50 to 60 pounds of marijuana were being produced each month for a value of about $250,000.

✦ Joan Rivers, 78, gets stoned in a carpark and is unable to drive home… and its all filmed for her reality show

Joan Rivers is not known as a shrinking violet. But the 78-year-old has taken things a step further by smoking a marijuana pipe in a carpark with her friend – and had it all filmed for her reality show. The comedian, known for her red carpet interviews at award shows, became so stoned, she was unable to drive home and later ended up fully clothed in a hot tub and drinking the water out of her shoe.

✦ Your cell phone is a government issued tracking device

Mobile phones have become a major part of our modern civilization. These hand-held computers have reached a level of sophistication that allows us to instantly communicate through text, voice and video. This same technology is also being used to amass a situational awareness and sensory system that will track you and the world around you. You and your cell phone are nodes in a grid of sensors that paints a virtual picture of the world.

✦ US ‘no-fly’ list of suspected terrorists doubles in 12 months

The size of the US government’s secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the country has more than doubled in the past year. The no-fly list jumped from about 10,000 known or suspected terrorists one year ago to about 21,000, according to government figures. About 500 are US nationals. The flood of new names began after the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner when the US government lowered the standard for putting people on the list and scoured its files for anyone who qualified. “We learned a lot about the watchlisting process and made strong improvements, which continue to this day,” said Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Centre, which produces the no-fly list.

✦Stacey Irvine, 17, collapses after eating only McDonald’s chicken nuggets since age 2

Ever since she was a toddler, Stacey Irvine has eaten little else but chicken nuggets and the occasional portion of chips. Now, at the age of 17, she has been warned by doctors to change her appalling diet or die. The factory worker – who says she has never tasted fresh fruit or vegetables – had to be taken to hospital earlier this week when she collapsed after struggling to breathe.

✦ Addicts’ cravings have different roots in men and women

When it comes to addiction, sex matters. A new brain imaging study by Yale School of Medicine researchers suggests stress robustly activates areas of the brain associated with craving in cocaine-dependent women, while drug cues activate similar brain regions in cocaine-dependent men. The study, expected to be published online Jan. 31 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests men and women with cocaine dependence might benefit more from different treatment options.

✦ Missing Iraq $100 Million: Pentagon Unable to Account for Missing Iraqi Millions

The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says. The missing records raise new questions about how the US government handled billions of dollars in Iraqi funds during the war. The new report, the latest in a multi-year investigation by the inspector general into missing money in Iraq, paints a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records

✦ Cocaine accidentally sent to UN headquarters

Bags containing 16 kilogram of cocaine that Mexican drug traffickers recently lost has turned up in an unlikely place – the United Nations in New York. Two fake UN bags containing the drugs – which experts said had a street value of about $US2 million ($1.9 million) – set off a security alert when they were delivered, apparently by accident, to the global body’s headquarters. The bags, which had the UN symbol printed on them, were shipped from Mexico through the DHL delivery company’s centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, deputy commissioner Paul Browne of the New York Police Department said. But the bags had no address on them, nor any return to sender details. “It is my understanding that because there was no addressee, the DHL just thought, well, that’s the UN symbol so we should ship it on to UN headquarters and let them figure out who it was supposed to go to,” deputy commissioner Browne said.

✦ The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers

With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

✦ Student receives free cocaine with Amazon textbook order

A US university student discovered a package of cocaine in a pre-owned textbook she bought from online retailer Amazon.com. Sophia Stockton, a junior at Mid-America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas, ordered a textbook called Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues through Amazon.com for a spring course on terrorism. After flipping through the pages of the just received textbook a bag of ‘white powder’ fell to the ground. Stockton initially thought that it was Anthrax and took the book and bag to the Gardner police station after classes and was surprised she had been shipped $400 worth of cocaine. She told WPTV: I told them white powder was in my terrorism textbook and so I put it on the table and they’re like, ‘oh, okay,’ And so he went back and tested it, He comes back and says, ‘you didn’t happen to order some cocaine with your textbook, did you?’ And I was like, no!

✦ New designer drug ‘Roflcoptr’ hits UK dance floors

The new ‘rave drug’ is called Roflcoptr, which is a street-speak acronym for “Roll On the Floor Laughing Crapping Our Pants Totally Ruined”. An alternative name is “mket” (which is a truncation of the full chemical name, as described below). Like other drugs linked to electronica and other forms of club / dance music, the physiological affect is to produce a state of euphoria and sometimes have hallucinogenic properties. The basis of the new substance is the chemical methoxetamine (and which has a very long chemical name: 2-(3-methoxyphenyl)-2-(ethylamino)cyclohexanone). The chemical takes the form of a white powder. The user snorts the powder.

✦ Drug war hypocrisy: drug trafficking’s big money benefits Big Brother and corrupt banksters

The hypocrisy of the war on drugs is outrageous when compared to the amount of drug trafficking that benefits the CIA and international banking system. The son of a convicted notorious mobster, John Gotti Jr, when asked in court if the family still dealt drugs cracked, “No, we can’t compete with the government.” Today in Afghanistan, American troops have been seen guarding poppy fields used to make heroin. Those fields were all but wiped out by 2001 when the Taliban destroyed them and forbade that agricultural pursuit. Now they’re flourishing again after the American occupation. This doesn’t make sense despite all the mainstream reports that American troops are protecting the poppy farmers from the bad guys. Internet sites such as Prison Planet, Info Wars, The Political Coffeehouse and others report otherwise. They connect the CIA and US military to restarting the poppy fields in Afghanistan in 2002, increasing poppy growth by over 650 percent. Who’s telling it like it is?

✦ Discipline recommended in Air Force whistle-blower case

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel said Tuesday it has recommended disciplinary action against three Air Force officials after concluding they retaliated against four civilian mortuary workers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for disclosing that remains of fallen troops had been mishandled.

✦ Peacemaker: Lauderdale police put trouble spots under surveillance with Big Brother truck

Tania Ouaknine is convinced the police are watching her. She’s not paranoid — it says as much on the red sign painted along the side on the hulking armored truck that’s been parked in front of her eight-room Parisian Motel for several days. “Warning: You are under video surveillance,” reads the bold message on the side of the truck. From the front bumper of the menacing vehicle, another sign taunts: “Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?” The truck is a new weapon for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in the fight against drugs and neighborhood nuisances, and it looks like a Winnebago on steroids. They call it “The Peacemaker,” and it may be a first in South Florida.

✦ Facebook IPO: What happens if Mark Zuckerberg were to die?

“In the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death, control may be transferred to a person or entity that he designates as his successor. As a board member and officer, Mr. Zuckerberg owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders.”

✦ Teacher abused students during class, detective says

Investigators recovered photos from the film processing store and Mark Berndt’s home that allegedly showed the students bound and blindfolded and some with large Madagascar cockroaches crawling on them inside the school setting, Scott said. Scott said girls were allegedly photographed with a blue spoon holding a white substance near their mouths. Investigators said they believe that substance was Berndt’s semen and that he had the girls consume it. Thanks Jasmine

✦ 9-Eyes

Collection of strange Google Street View screenshots

✦ Early 70′s LA Gang Graffiti

Howard Gribble: When these photographs of Chicano “placas” (wall writing) were made in the early 1970s gangs and their graffiti were a mysterious presence that few understood — if they were aware of them at all. In the thirty plus years since the popular media and entertainment industry have repeatedly spotlighted the subject to the point that the gangsta culture has become a pervasive part of our society. The original gangster graffiti of this period was of a purer form than that seen today, with much emphasis on artistic flourishes. These pieces could last for years in the days before municipilaties instituted aggresive graffiti removal programs that quickly remove them from view — often overnight. This is, of course, still vandalism but from an earlier and more innocent time.

✦ ALIEN or HUMAN born with PIGS BODY….you decide. [Video]

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✰ Educators worried by rise of students who snort crushed candy

A trend among some students to crush certain candy and snort or inhale it — dubbed “Smoking Smarties” — is causing concern among some drug educators. “It is not a narcotic of any sort. They are not getting high,” said Carol Williams, project coordinator of the Shelby County Drug Free Coalition Project Safe Place Programs of Family Connection, Inc. “They are literally just inhaling sugar into their body.” The students, often middle schoolers, crush candies such as Smarties or use already powdered candies such as Pixy Stix or powder drink packets such as KoolAid and snort them into their noses, Williams said. In some cases the students will crush a pack of candy and put the packet in their mouth and inhale and blow the fine granules out as if they were smoking. she said.

✰ Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield an alleged heroin hotbed

The accounts give a rare glimpse into how some NATO personnel and contractors seem to have gotten ensnared in Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar narco economy, which supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. Canada and other NATO powers have long been accused of turning a blind eye to a 15-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001 (according to UN figures) and cozying up to Afghan warlords and officials reputed to be involved with drugs. But these new accounts suggest NATO’s presence helps fuel the gigantic Afghan drug trade. The accounts are reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when U.S. forces befriended opium-dealing warlords in Southeast Asia and many U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin, with some smuggling it back home.

✰ Buffalo Body-Painting at Unique Traditional Festival

Traditionally, the bulls were painted by the Hani people of China in the belief that the practice would protect their village, mainly by preventing tigers from wandering into their homes. Of course, the threat of tigers and other man-eaters has reduced drastically in modern times, but the festival continues to be celebrated with much enthusiasm. The China-Laos-Vietnam Bull Painting Festival, as it is called, had 48 participating teams this year. The paraded bulls were hardly recognizable, covered in colors like bright blue, gold, yellow and red. But the paintings were far from abstract. The bulls served as a canvas for some real artistic talent, landscapes, portraits, and intricate patterns adorned their otherwise brown or white skin. Even the horns were covered with paint.

✰ Vets see more dogs snarfing humans’ medical pot

Some veterinarians in Durango have seen a spike in the number of dogs poisoned by marijuana since the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries made the drug more accessible. “We used to see maybe one case a year,” said Stacee Santi, a veterinarian at Riverview Animal Hospital. “Now we’re seeing a couple a month.” Dogs can be exposed to marijuana through smoke or eating cannabis-laced foodstuffs. Recently, a large-breed dog was brought to the hospital stumbling, dribbling urine and exhibiting the classic symptoms of dilated eyes and slow heart beat, Santi said. “We induced vomiting, and up came a 3-by-3-foot piece of cheesecloth,” Santi said. “The cheesecloth could have been used to strain marijuana butter.” The butter, once infused with cannabis, can be used to make baked goods such as brownies.

✰ Mum changes her name to Pink Sparkly And All Things Nice

Mr Knox-Hewson renamed himself Emperor Spiderman Gandalf Wolverine Skywalker Optimus Prime Goku Sonic Xavier Ryu Cloud Superman Heman Batman Thrash. Mr Borbidge now goes by Baron Venom Balrog Sabretooth Vader Megatron Vegeta Robotnik Magneto Bison Sephiroth Lex Luthor Skeletor Joker Grind. “We decided to change our names because we were bored of our day-to-day lives and wanted to do something that reflected our true personalities,” Emperor Thrash said. “We couldn’t believe how easy it was to do – we just had to fill in a few forms and we were granted superhero status.” Baron Grind said he was looking forward to seeing his new name on his bank card. “I wonder how they will fit it all on?” he said. Meet some more of the people who’ve given themselves crazy names – including Lianne Madonna Vogue On The Cover Of A Magazine McHale Dawson, her twin sister Emma Madonna Confessions On A Dance Floor McHale Dawson and their best friend Gemma True Blue Strike A Pose Carroll McHale Dawson Me

✰ Japan builds toilet encrusted with diamonds

In a nod to traditional belief, the sparkling lavatory was created to please the “god of lavatories,” said Kazuo Sumimiya, director of the showroom for the Lixil interior fixture company of which INAX is a part. “In Japan, we believe a deity exists in the lavatory. That’s why keeping lavatories clean and taking good care of it have been a Japanese custom since long ago,” he added. “If we were to sell it, it would probably be worth around 10 million yen ($130,000).”

✰ Behold! Christ’s grave in Japan

Christ first visited Japan between the ages of 21 and 33 (the Bible does in fact skip over large periods of Christ’s early life, and many theories exist about what he did in the intervals). The document claims he studied the native language and culture before returning to Jerusalem, where he was crucified. Only it wasn’t really him who was crucified. His younger brother, Isukiri (who makes no appearance in the Bible), nobly took his place on the cross, pretending to be the Son of God, while the real Christ fled to Siberia. A few years later, via Alaska, he arrived at the port of Hachinohe, just 40 km from Shingo. He made his way to the village, where he married, had three children, and lived to the age of 106.

✰ South Dakota bar owner charged with raping 3 underage girls

The shots of alcohol and mixed drinks began flowing in the early morning hours. Three friends — two 14-year-olds and a 12-year-old — were supposed to be babysitting over a Saturday night. Instead, police say, they met up with a bar owner, who drove them to his closed tavern and began pouring them drinks — vodka shots, orange juice and vodka, vodka and coke and energy drinks. Two of the girls say they got sick, and all three say they either passed out or fell asleep at the bar. That’s when, according to prosecutors, 34-year-old Werner Fajardo raped each of them. Fajardo, who owns and operates a bar in the South Dakota city of Huron, was charged with six counts of rape and three counts of giving alcohol to minors. He was released after posting a $10,000 cash bond.

✰ I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping…

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can’t depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.

✰ Gay nativity scene vandalized at Claremont church

An unusual nativity display at a Claremont church that portrayed gay couples was vandalized over the weekend in an incident authorities are investigating as a hate crime. Claremont United Methodist Church has a Christmas tradition of unusual nativity displays, intended to carry a social or political message. Despite some of the controversial topics, the scenes had never been vandalized or defaced, according to church officials and John Zachary, the artist who created the scenes. But this year, suspects vandalized a nativity scene that included wooden light boxes with three couples holding hands — a man and a woman, two women and two men — under a star of Bethlehem and a sign that said “Christ is Born.” Church officials came in before the Christmas morning service to find that someone had pushed over the two gay couples and left the heterosexual couple standing.

✰ Bugs may be resistant to genetically modified corn

One of the nation’s most widely planted crops — a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide — may be losing its effectiveness because a major pest appears to be developing resistance more quickly than scientists expected. The U.S. food supply is not in any immediate danger because the problem remains isolated. But scientists fear potentially risky farming practices could be blunting the hybrid’s sophisticated weaponry.

✰ How Doctors Die

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

✰ The New Full-Frontal: Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?

What’s happening to America’s vaginas? Is pubic hair going extinct? In a word, no. But it’s on the fast track to the endangered species list, and its chief predators include the porn industry, smaller bathing suits and lingerie bottoms, and the Kardashian sisters (case in point: Kim once famously proclaimed that women “shouldn’t have hair anywhere but their heads”). Pubic hair is, however, evolving. Once upon a time, all vulvas were coated in a protective layer of coarse, woolly tresses. Hard to believe, right? It’s kind of like the revelation that horses once had toes, or that the Ford Mustang once had tailfins. But like any evolving species, the vulva has morphed into something sleeker, starker, and altogether more modern. Today, it is smooth, baby-soft, and hairless.

✰ Why ‘Manscaping’ Isn’t Just for Porn Stars Anymore

The Atlantic reported this month that female pubic hair in America is on the road to extinction, but that’s a bit like noting the spotted owl is an endangered species. Grooming and waxing experts say the latest trend in pubic hair removal isn’t targeted at women—it’s for the guys. There’s evidence of this all around us (if you dare to look). The most startling aspect of seeing Anthony Weiner’s penis in a leaked iPhone sext earlier this year wasn’t its size, but that it looked like a plucked chicken. The same is true of other celebrities’ trimmed full-monty shots, from football player Brett Favre to Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz.

✰ Why We Should All Give Google+ The Finger

This blogger we all know got a pic of himself flipping off a camera removed from Google+ yesterday, and another blogger blogged about it, and then the original blogger blogged about that blogger. Here’s why the image removal was significant, via BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza. “But Google describes Plus as “sharing in real life”. It describes it as an “identity service”. The middle finger, pointed at no-one in particular, is hardly a scandalous gesture; here it triggers a vaguely-defined policy that’s being applied to a service marketed heavily as a public venue for free expression.”

✰ Diseased seals in Alaska tested for radiation

Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Scores of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding lesions on the hind flippers, irritated skin around the nose and eyes and patchy hair loss on the animals’ fur coats. Biologists at first thought the seals were suffering from a virus, but they have so far been unable to identify one, and tests are now underway to find out if radiation is a factor.

✰ How Your Privacy Will Be Invaded in 2012

In 2011, we watched as tech villains found creative new ways to violate our privacy. They misappropriated our social networking profiles, stalked us through our phones, and plucked secrets from our wifi networks. To help you better prepare for 2012′s inevitable privacy attacks, we enumerate below the most worrisome threats you should monitor in the coming year.

✰ Bethlehem Battle: Clergymen Clash At Birthplace Of Jesus

The annual cleaning of one of Christianity’s holiest churches deteriorated into a brawl between rival clergy Wednesday, as dozens of monks feuding over sacred space at the Church of the Nativity battled each other with brooms until police intervened. The ancient church, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, is shared by three Christian denominations – Roman Catholics, Armenians and Greek Orthodox. Wednesday’s fight erupted between Greek and Armenian clergy, with both sides accusing each other of encroaching on parts of the church to which they lay claim.

✰ Sexual assaults rise at US military academies

The number of sexual assaults reported at the country’s prestigious military academies rose sharply for the second year in a row, according to a Pentagon report issued Tuesday.

✰ Automakers, U.S. security officials worry about hacking of cars

As cars and trucks have become laden with brainy devices to control everything from air bags to crash-avoidance systems, the vehicles have become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to recent studies by university researchers and security companies. One found that a car’s computer controls could be remotely accessed through its Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or OnStar connections, potentially allowing terrorists to control the brakes of numerous cars simultaneously, corporate spies to eavesdrop on a motoring executive’s phone calls, or thieves to electronically locate, break into and start cars they’ve targeted to steal. Another showed how a car’s tire pressure warning system could be wirelessly tricked into sending false alerts to drivers, which could prompt them to stop and fall prey to robbers following them.

✰ Satellite Imagery Indicates Shell Spill May Be Worse Than Reported

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth. If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

✰ Inside the mind of the octopus

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus. For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

✰ Internet giants seriously considering ‘nuclear option’ to stop SOPA

Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act won an important, but temporary, victory this month when the House Judiciary Committee hit the pause button on the disastrous legislation. Despite this, as Nancy Scola details, the fight is far from over and SOPA is still favored to pass. One major tactic that might truly derail the bill would be if the biggest websites in the country were to temporarily shut down their services and instead inform visitors of the dangers of SOPA. Remarkably, it now appears as though a coalition made up of fifteen online titans is seriously considering doing exactly that

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✖ ‘Absolutely no progress being made’ at Fukushima nuke plant, undercover reporter says

Conditions at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are far worse than its operator or the government has admitted, according to freelance journalist Tomohiko Suzuki, who spent more than a month working undercover at the power station. “Absolutely no progress is being made” towards the final resolution of the crisis, Suzuki told reporters at a Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan news conference on Dec. 15. Suzuki, 55, worked for a Toshiba Corp. subsidiary as a general laborer there from July 13 to Aug. 22, documenting sloppy repair work, companies including plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) playing fast and loose with their workers’ radiation doses, and a marked concern for appearances over the safety of employees or the public.

✖ 9 Underground Economies – And Greece

The fortunes of the world’s legitimate economies may rise and fall, but the global black market is currently booming. From Somalia’s “pirate stock exchange” to the flourishing illegal organ trade in Egypt, there are some making money hand-over-fist, under the table. We took a look at nine “alternative economies” — and Greece — to find out how people make do on the margins.

✖ TEPCO says it ‘no longer owns’ Fukushima fallout

TEPCO’s lawyers used the arcane legal principle of res nullius to argue the emissions that escaped after the tsunami and earthquake triggered a meltdown were no longer its responsibility. “Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant belong to individual landowners, not TEPCO,” the utility told Tokyo District Court. The chief operating officer of the prestigious golf course, Tsutomo Yamane, told The Australian that he and his staff were stunned: “I couldn’t believe my ears. I told my employees, ‘TEPCO is saying the radiation doesn’t belong to them’, and they said ‘I beg your pardon’.”

✖ The Leading Cause of Breast Cancer?

Profiteers in the medical CT scan business took a big hit last week from a major new government report on the causes of breast cancer. Published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the exhaustive analysis found that medical radiation, particularly the large radiation dose delivered by CT scans, is the foremost identifiable cause of breast cancer

✖ Street Cams Can Now Tag, Track and Follow Individuals (video)

The dystopian nightmare described in George Orwell’s novel 1984 took place in London, UK. This very city is today one of the most heavily monitored places in the world, using a record number of cameras and the most advanced surveillance technology to keep track of its citizens. Reuters now reports that the CCTV system of London has now the ability to tag specific people, track them across the entire system and even run a “search” on them for previous footage. The report basically praises the software and quickly dismisses the privacy concerns it raises, stating that most citizens approve of being monitored (I’d like to see a scientific survey proving this). Of course, this summer’s London Riots were mentioned as an excuse to implement this technology, as anticipated in my article entitled The London Riots and How They Will be Used to the Elite’s Advantage.

✖ Man Jailed In Near-Shooting Over Facebook

A North Strabane Township man has been jailed on attempted homicide and other charges after police said he tried to shoot his wife because he believes she spends too much time on Facebook.

✖ The Pentagon and its Sock Puppets

The inspector general’s investigation grappled with the question of whether the outreach constituted an earnest effort to inform the public or an improper campaign of news media manipulation. The inquiry confirmed that Mr. Rumsfeld’s staff frequently provided military analysts with talking points before their network appearances. In some cases, the report said, military analysts “requested talking points on specific topics or issues.” One military analyst described the talking points as “bullet points given for a political purpose.” Another military analyst, the report said, told investigators that the outreach program’s intent “was to move everyone’s mouth on TV as a sock puppet.”

✖ Child sex: Woman arrested on sex charges involving 7-year-old girl

A woman who told deputies she had sex with a 7-year-old girl to prove her love for her married boyfriend is in the Orange County Jail, where she is being held on sexual-battery and other charges. Margaret Ann O’Neill, 26, of Kissimmee, admitted to sheriff’s investigators that she had sex with the child three times last year at a home in west Orange County, they said. O’Neill, known as Meg, told detectives that her lover, Christopher P. Smith, 32, manipulated her to perform the acts. He promised to leave his wife for her and said “she was led to believe that by giving herself to Smith’s sexual appetites proves her love for him,” a sheriff’s report states. Smith was arrested Dec. 5 and is being held without bail at the same jail. Another woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair turned him in Dec. 4 after he asked her to have sex with the child, now, 8, according to the report.

✖ Rock Hill woman struck in head with bowling ball

Deputies were called Sunday to Strikers Family Sports Center, 124 N. Anderson Road, Rock Hill, and found a 28-year-old woman on the floor next to the snack bar, bleeding from the forehead, according to a York County Sheriff’s Office report. Deputies could see her skull through the cut, and EMS treated her before taking her to Piedmont Medical Center. The woman told police she and a man had been arguing because she wouldn’t let him buy her drinks, the report states. When it was his turn to bowl, the man picked up a 12-pound ball and flung it at her head while she was sitting down. Witnesses told deputies they saw Stevenson pick up the ball and throw it at the woman before he left the bowling alley.

✖ Venezuela’s Chavez: Did U.S. give Latin American leaders cancer?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speculated on Wednesday that the United States might have developed a way to give Latin American leaders cancer, after Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez joined the list of presidents diagnosed with the disease. It was a typically controversial statement by Venezuela’s socialist leader, who underwent surgery in June to remove a tumor from his pelvis. But he stressed that he was not making any accusations, just thinking aloud. “It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now … I don’t know. I’m just reflecting,” he said in a televised speech to troops at a military base. “But this is very, very, very strange … it’s a bit difficult to explain this, to reason it, including using the law of probabilities.”

✖ Tessa Gay, 35, ‘had sex with her daughter’s underage friends on dozens of occasions’

A mother is facing up to 80 years in jail after being accused of having sex with two of her daughter’s male teenage friends. Tessa Gay, 35, is also alleged to have played sexually charged game of ping pong with another teen where the winner allowed to intimately touch the loser. Gray, a mother of one, is said to have admitted to the underage sex charges when interviewed by police.

✖ Ohio dad charged with drugging kids

An Ohio father has been charged with giving his children a potentially addictive pain medicine so he could submit their urine for his drug tests. Police said Lawrence E. Kirk Jr., 30, Conneaut, Ohio, had to submit to a urine test before his prescription for Oxycodone could be renewed in order to assure he was not using illegal drugs. They said he diluted the Oxycodone in water and then had his 6, 7, 9 and 10 year old children drink the solution. He would then collect their urine and present it to a doctor as his own.

✖ Police Search For “Backpage Killer” After Four Women Found Dead

Police have found the dead bodies of four women this month, and police say three of them had advertised escort services on Backpage.com, a Craigslist-type site that includes ads for escort, massage and stripper services. On December 19, the bodies of 23-year-old Renisha Landers (pictured), and her cousin, 24-year-old Demesha Hunt, were found in the trunk of Lander’s new Chrysler 300 parked in the driveway of a vacant home. Their bodies showed no outward sings of trauma and investigators are awaiting autopsy results to determine the cause of death. Then, on Christmas Day, two black females between the ages of  28 and 29 were found in the trunk of a car that had been set on fire. They were both burned beyond recognition. Police would later identify them and reveal both had advertised escort services on Backpage.com, as did either Landers or Hunt.

✖ Photographer arrested after falling asleep in Mcdonalds with child porn on laptop screen

According to a probable-cause affidavit, Harrison County Police Department Officer Nicholas Smith was walking through a McDonald’s restaurant Nov. 14 in Corydon when he observed Brockman asleep in an upright position behind a table. There was a laptop computer in front of him. When the officer walked behind Brockman, he observed multiple pictures of nude children who appeared to be between the ages of 5 and 10 on the computer screen. Brockman consented to a warantless search of his computer, which was taken into evidence. An investigation by the Indiana State Police revealed “hundreds of images of child erotica,” according to court records. There was at least one image that depicted sexual conduct by a child.

✖ Caught In Act, TSA Bomb Screener Declares Child Porn “Not Right In A Legal And Moral Sense”

After waiving his Miranda rights, Wilson–who has been suspended by the TSA–told investigators that he used his laptop to download illicit images of children, and that he “sometimes masturbates to the images of child pornography.” Wilson added that he “usually deletes the child pornography” after viewing movies and images “because he knows that it is not right in a legal and moral sense. Wilson stated that he knows that he has a problem.” A “forensic preview” of Wilson’s two computers (as well as various storage devices found in a locked safe) revealed a variety of videos and photos “depicting prepubescent females engaged in sexually explicit conduct with adults.

✖ Man Who Sexually Assaulted Teen Allegedly Posed As Police Officer

A Brooklyn neighborhood remains on edge as police continue their search for a man who allegedly pretended to be a police officer and sexually assaulted a teenage boy he met in a subway station last week. Investigators say the man, seen above in a police sketch, approached a 15-year-old boy at the 53rd Street and Fourth Avenue station in Sunset Park around 9:30 a.m. Friday, after the teen threw an empty bag of potato chips on the ground.

✖ Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation

One recent afternoon in the offices of the Midtown law firm run by David Boies and his powerful litigation partners, a large black clamshell box sat on a conference table. Inside were raucous, sometimes wildly funny collages of photographs and magazine pages handmade by the artist Richard Prince, works of art that have become the ur-texts of one of the most closely watched copyright cases ever to rattle the world of fine art. In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.)

✖ Embolism After Long Flight Killed Rapper Heavy D

A pulmonary embolism brought on by a long flight killed rapper Heavy D, according to a report from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office released Tuesday. Heavy D (real name: Dwight Arrington Myers) collapsed and died suddenly outside his Beverly Hills home on Nov. 8 at age 44. His cause of death was a blood clot in his lung, but he also suffered from deep vein thrombosis and heart disease. Craig Harvey, chief of the L.A. County Coroner’s Office, said the blood clot was “most likely formed during an extended airplane ride,” according to the L.A. Times. The rapper had recently returned to L.A. from a trip to London. Risk factors for deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, include long distance travel with little mobility, obesity, and immobility from an acute illness or surgery.

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☹ Shroud of Turin: Redux

The bottom line on the Shroud remains the same: the Shroud continues to fail several key practical tests, as discussed by skeptical investigator Joe Nickell in his classic work on the subject, Looking for a Miracle:2 Provenance: there is no sign that this object existed before the 14th century; Art history: the Shroud fits into art history as part of a genre of artistic depictions and recreations of burial cloths of Christ; Style: the image upon the shroud looks like a manufactured illustration consistent with 14th century religious iconography, not like a real human being; Circumstance: a 14th century Catholic bishop determined that the Shroud was a “cunningly painted” fraud—and discovered the artist who confessed to creating it; Chemistry: the Shroud contains red ochre and other paint pigments; Radiometric dating: carbon-14 dating tests showed in 1988 that the Shroud was likely created between 1260 and 1390 CE.

☹ New powerful painkiller has abuse experts worried

Drug companies are working to develop a pure, more powerful version of the nation’s second most-abused medicine, which has addiction experts worried that it could spur a new wave of abuse. The new pills contain the highly addictive painkiller hydrocodone, packing up to 10 times the amount of the drug as existing medications such as Vicodin. Four companies have begun patient testing, and one of them — Zogenix of San Diego — plans to apply early next year to begin marketing its product, Zohydro. If approved, it would mark the first time patients could legally buy pure hydrocodone. Existing products combine the drug with nonaddictive painkillers such as acetaminophen. Critics say they are especially worried about Zohydro, a timed-release drug meant for managing moderate to severe pain, because abusers could crush it to release an intense, immediate high. “I have a big concern that this could be the next OxyContin,”

☹ The NDAA Repeals More Rights

Little by little, in the name of fighting terrorism, our Bill of Rights is being repealed.  The 4th amendment has been rendered toothless by the PATRIOT Act.  No more can we truly feel secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects when now there is an exception that fits nearly any excuse for our government to search and seize our property.  Of course, the vast majority of Americans may say “I’m not a terrorist, so I have no reason to worry.” However, innocent people are wrongly accused all the time.  The Bill of Rights is there precisely because the founders wanted to set a very high bar for the government to overcome in order to deprive an individual of life or liberty.  To lower that bar is to endanger everyone.  When the bar is low enough to include political enemies, our descent into totalitarianism is virtually assured.

☹ Porn Condoms Initiative Approved by L.A. City Clerk Even as City Attorney Wants to Keep it From Voters

​The war over condoms in porn continues this week as the AIDS Healthcare Foundation announced Tuesday that the L.A. City Clerk has “officially certified” the signatures it submitted in order to get a mandatory condom measure before you, the voter, next year. The announcement comes in the wake of a strange, L.A. City Attorney’s lawsuit to keep the condom measure off the ballot — and a challenge by an L.A. city councilman to that challenge. Yeah, seems like everybody wants in on this porn thing (or maybe they don’t want to deal with, er, head-on): The AHF has been battling for a few years now to get condoms mandated at California porn sets. As part of its drive it collected 70,901 voter signatures in support of putting the idea before city voters. AHF’s initiative would ask the city to require condom use as a part of obtaining film permits.

☹ US Senators: Give Residence Visas to Foreigners Who Buy Homes

Two United States Senators have a new idea that would solve two problems at once: give visas to foreigners who make a significant investment in residential real estate in the United States. The move would help the poor housing market recover while at the same time tackling much-needed immigration reform. This is just one idea put forth by New York Democrat Charles Schumer and Utah Republican Mike Lee in a proposed package of immigration reforms. According to their plan, immigrants who spend more than $500,000 on a residential property in the United States would be granted residency. Much like the EB-5 investment visa, this new visa would welcome those from overseas who wish to help the U.S. economy while starting a new life on American soil.

☹ Fukushima: TEPCO uses Organized Crime forced labour

People who fall into debt to loan sharks are often forced by the Yakuza to work in nuclear power plants, said a Japanese journalist who has written a book on his experience working at the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant this summer. About ten percent of workers at the damaged Fukushima 1 plant were brought in by the Japanese mafia, said Tomohiko Suzuki. Though the Yakuza is deeply involved in the nuclear power industry, its members themselves don’t work at the plants, added Suzuki. Instead they have an established practice of sending debtors there as a way to pay off their debts to loan sharks.

☹ Mythbusters Banned From Talking About RFID By Visa and Mastercard TPTB [Video]

☹ President Obama Eats Traditional Christmas Baby

President Obama took part this weekend in one of the most ancient and eagerly-anticipated presidential traditions: the annual Christmas Baby Eating, a ritual that goes back to well before recorded history.

☹ What every state needs to do: Montanans launch recalls of Senators who voted for NDAA

In response to the traitorous actions of 86 senators who voted to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, commonly referred to as the NDAA, Montanans have announced a recall campaign against Senators Max Baucus and Jonathan Tester. As I have previously outlined, the fact that the NDAA allows for the indefinite detention without charge or trial of American citizens is simply irrefutable. Therefore, every single one of our so-called representatives who voted for this atrocious legislation is in direct violation of their oath to uphold the Constitution and thus are actively working against us – the American people. Thankfully, some people are already taking action, as we see in the cases of the Montana recall effort and Representative Jeff Landry who introduced an amendment (after voting for the NDAA with detention provisions intact) which would protect Americans’ right to due process.

☹ Mary Lisee Allegedly Called 9-1-1 to Report That She Ate Too Much

Again, the cops asked why she called. Police say she responded by saying she “ate too much.” Cops asked her to repeat why she called — yep, she ate too much. Police asked her if it was a medical emergency — she said it wasn’t — and they reminded her that 9-1-1 is for emergencies. For good measure, police asked her again why she called 9-1-1. “Because I ate too much food,” she said, according to the cops. Police say she then “began repeatedly yelling that she had not consumed cocaine in over a year.” The cops asked her if she wanted to make a written statement about why she called 9-1-1, and she started writing what police describe as a “mostly illegible statement.” At that point, the deputies asked her to read it to them, and she read, “My name is Mary Ellen Lisee. I have beaten, I believe in God, and He forgives me. I may joke, but I do not do crack. I will not for as long as I live.”

☹ Could Mars and Moon Harbor Alien Artifacts? Leading Astrophysicists Says “Yes”

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a low probability of success, but it would have a high impact if successful. Physicists Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University argue that it makes sense to widen the search to scour the Moon for possible alien artifacts. Meanwhile at Penn State, researchers propose the same search for Mars. To date, SETI has been dominated by the paradigm of seeking deliberately beamed radio messages. The ASU team argues that Alien civilizations may have sent probes to our region of the galaxy, and that any mission to the solar system would probably have occurred a very long time ago. The lunar environment could preserve artifacts for millions of years due to the absence of erosion and plate tectonics.

☹ In Japan, Radiation Fears Reshape Lives

But while the horror has receded, for many of us, particularly women with families, things will never be the same. There’s no getting past the fact that the nuclear accident dumped radioactive particles into the atmosphere, soil and sea. While Fukushima Prefecture in the northeast was hardest hit, radiation “hot spots” keep turning up in neighborhoods far from the accident. The latest was at a school, minutes from where I live in Tokyo. What’s more, figuring out what’s “safe” to consume has become all but impossible. At my local supermarket, the familiar ritual of shopping has changed drastically. Instead of just tapping fruit or checking for spots, now I scrutinize the place of origin. “Made in Japan” used to be the gold standard. But now domestic foods are suspect, as is anything on sale. I obsessively search for produce grown as far from Fukushima as possible.

☹ Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK. Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of “diddling the public”. Their demonstration had been hacked

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✦ Teen Girl Says Porn Addiction Led To Burglary

When questioned by investigators, Owens reportedly copped to entering Pake’s home on several occasions (via the doggy door) and stealing a jar of money and a camera, which she planned to pawn. The teenager, deputies noted, “stated she is addicted to pornography and purchased 20 to 30 DVD’s and owed money, that’s why she burglarized Mr. Pake’s home in attempt to get items to pawn for cash.”

✦ World Champion Masturbator, Masanobu Sato, Expands On His Favorite Hobby

In 2009, Sato broke his own record by masturbating for an impressive 9 hours and 58 minutes at the Masturbate-a-thon, the San Francisco Weekly reports. His previous record was 9 hours and 33 minutes. But self-gratification isn’t all fun and games. Apparently, there’s some actual training involved when preparing to go the distance. “I swam twice a week and gained about 5 kgs in muscle,” he told the San Francisco Weekly in an email. “That helped me a lot, too, in terms of stamina.” The Masturbate-a-thon is an annual affair sponsored by the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco, where events are held in a place appropriately titled the “masturbatorium.” If a man is taking part in a competition, he must stay aroused without ejaculating for as long as possible, a 2010 article in the San Fransisco Weekly explains. At times, the event attracts more males than females, which can be a turn off for some participants.

✦ The 12 Biggest Sex Scandals You’ve Never Heard Of Photo Gallery

What happens behind closed doors between two consenting adults should be their own business, right? Well, sometimes the nocturnal goings-on are too strange to keep silent. While today’s headlines scream about the sexual misconduct of a bevy of politicians and celebrities, the pages of history are also rife with strange sex scandals.

✦ Teen trio admits smearing feces on birthday cake in prank at Pa. high school

Three Pennsylvania teens must clean toilets, urinals and bed pans after admitting they iced a birthday cake with feces as a prank on a high school classmate. The Daily Local News of West Chester reports the girls were also ordered Monday to pick up dog droppings at a local park during their 200 hours of community service in return for guilty pleas stemming from the March incident at Avon Grove High School. Authorities say the trio and a juvenile student provided school officials with written confessions after a classmate and her family was sickened by the cake.

✦ Trent Arsenault, Sperm Donor, Caught In Online Pornography

Arsenault gained national attention when he was served with a cease order from the FDA for his private sperm donations for families who cannot reproduce. The Huffington Post reported about Arsenault’s project, commenting about his extremely healthy lifestyle and charitable goals. But Gawker reported Wednesday that Arsenault also moonlights as an online pornographer. On his extremely NSFW site, Arsenault — er, “TrentDog” — has posted more than 100 videos of himself masturbating, sometimes using unusual aids including a water polo ball and frozen packs of organic blueberries. Arsenault defended his site to Gawker, calling himself a “donorsexual.”

✦ Did sleepwalking kill an Oaklyn, NJ woman?

Sleepwalkers are known to cook, paint, and even drive without knowing it. But for a 55-year-old South Jersey woman, sleepwalking may have proved deadly. Charlene Ferrero walked away from her home at the Hill Manor Apartments in Oaklyn, N.J. early Sunday morning. The next evening, crews pulled her body from Newton Lake in Collingswood. The autopsy ruled it an accidental drowning but Ferrero’s friends believe she may have been sleepwalking because she had done it about a week and a half earlier. “I heard a knock on the door, and I go, ‘What are you doing up, honey?’ And she goes, ‘I’m so sorry. The people at Table 2 ordered the eggs,’” said Ferrero’s friend Teresa Cerini.

✦ Bridge in India Could Collapse Due to…Human Spit?

The Howrah Bridge is a cantilever suspension bridge that crosses the Hooghly River. Over the years, residents have been purchasing and chewing a mix of betel leaf, areca nut, and slaked lime, then spitting the mixture at the base of the bridge (among other places, I’m sure). The mixture, known as paan, is a mild stimulant and, if you take a look at the weakened steel hangars of the bridge, pretty darned corrosive. The hangars, which were once 6 millimeters thick, are now a mere 3 mm, prompting authorities to come up with news ways to prevent any future damage. One such way is to cover the bridge’s steel with a fiberglass casing. But given the corrosive spit, as well as past vehicular accidents and corrosive bid droppings, this incredibly busy bridge is in dire need of a makeover before anyone gets seriously injured.

✦ S.F. man charged with acting like cosmetic surgeon

A San Francisco man with no medical license performed liposuction on a woman while smoking a cigar, then flushed six pounds of fat he removed down the patient’s toilet, city prosecutors alleged. Carlos Guzmangarza, 49, was arrested Thursday for allegedly posing as a physician assistant to perform cosmetic surgery on the woman and treat her daughter for acne, said Stephanie Ong Stillman, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. Guzmangarza is accused of operating a bogus clinic on Mission Street called the Derma Clinic. He stole the identity of a physician assistant with a similar name, Stillman said, and operated under the premise that a doctor ran the clinic.

✦ Man shoots at mouse, hits roommate in the chest; another man arrested for child rape

“A roommate, after seeing a mouse or some type of varmint in the home, shot at that particular animal,” he said Wednesday. “The round went through the adjacent wall.” A 27-year-old man in the bathroom on the other side of the wall was hit in the chest, said Wyant. He was hospitalized in critical, but stable, condition on Wednesday. Four men lived in the home. Zach Baker, who lives in the basement, said he slept through the gunshot. “I got woken up by the cops,” he told FOX 13. “They came storming in my room, checking to make sure everybody was OK and nobody was shot or anything like that.” Baker said he was stunned to see police officers surrounding him and a 13-year-old girl. Wyant said the girl was discovered hiding in a closet in the basement. “I’d never seen the girl there before and I don’t know how long she’d been there,” he said. “They said she’d been hiding in a closet and that creeps me out.”

✦ After Scary Bigfoot Encounter Man Invents Fire Ball Gun

In the premier episode they are contacted by Jim Lebus who invented a fireball Gun, more specifically incendiary paintballs, to protect himself after an encounter he describes below. “Its a deterrent for a situation out in the woods. A couple of years ago I was in northern California… I was attacked by an animal and I was in my tent. I see this shadow go past the moon. So this tells me this thing is, like, 8 feet tall. And whatever it was, was pushing me into the ground…I’m assuming it was a Bigfoot. I had a .38 with me, but you can’t just start popping off rounds. If you gonna cap Bigfoot your just gonna piss it off”

✦ Blake Prize, Drag queen Christ sure to stir the passions

Christians are used to people rubbishing their faith, but they may find it hard to turn the other cheek after seeing Luke Roberts’s entry in this year’s Blake Prize for religious art. The provocative Brisbane artist has created three depictions of the crucifixion of Christ: in one, lesbian academic Jodie Taylor kneels at the feet of a Christ figure played by Tobin Saunders, better known as drag queen Vanessa Wagner. Another photo features Jandy Rainbow, an intersex woman, clad only in a pink G-string and nipple tassles adopting the crucifixion pose, while controversial indigenous artist Richard Bell, who judged this year’s Sulman Prize by tossing a coin, features in the third shot.

✦ Iranian Raelian leader granted asylum in U.S. after renouncing Islam

Negar Azizmoradi, leader of the Iranian branch of the International Raelian Movement (IRM), has been granted religious asylum in the United States after a long struggle that began when she publicly declared atheist/Raelian beliefs in her home country.

✦ Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer?

As we came by the checkpoint line, Schneier described one of these aspects: the ease with which people can pass through airport security with fake boarding passes. First, scan an old boarding pass, he said—more loudly than necessary, it seemed to me. Alter it with Photoshop, then print the result with a laser printer. In his hand was an example, complete with the little squiggle the T.S.A. agent had drawn on it to indicate that it had been checked. “Feeling safer?” he asked.

✦ Christopher Walken opts for comfort with a pair of Uggs

Even Los Angeles is prone to be chilly during the cold winter months. So that would explain why super cool actor Christopher Walken decided to don a pair of black Uggs as he arrived for a flight out of the city. The warm weather footwear is certainly not an outfit choice associated with the legendary Deer Hunter star, who is far more at home in suave suits and leather shows.

✦ Christmas Cigarettes – Classic Advertising

Light up a stoge with Santa

✦ Mein Kampf tagged as ‘perfect Christmas present’ by Waterstone’s

The UK’s biggest book chain, Waterstone’s, has apologised after one of its branches pushed Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf as the “perfect” Christmas present. Amid the glossy hordes of titles by Jeremy Clarkson, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver for sale this Christmas, the Huddersfield branch of Waterstone’s used a festive sticker to describe Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the antisemitic diatribe written by Hitler in prison before he rose to power in 1933, as the “perfect present”. A staff recommendation described it as “an essential read for anyone seeking to understand one of history’s most despicable figures. A shocking read and a vital warning for future generations.”

✦ The Arabic textbooks which show children how to chop off hands and feet under Sharia law

Barbaric textbooks handed out in Saudi Arabian schools teach children how to cut off a thief’s hands and feet under Sharia law, it has emerged. The shocking books, paid for and printed by the Saudi government, also tell teenagers that Jews need to be exterminated and homosexuals should be ‘put to death’. Recent editions were obtained by the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, D.C., which says they should raise fears in the West over the use of jihadist language.

✦ Race for New Air Jordan Sneakers Turns Ugly at a Metro Atlanta Mall

The quest for some limited edition sneakers took an ugly turn early Friday morning outside the Mall at Stonecrest in Lithonia. DeKalb police say several people have been arrested , including one woman who left two young children in her car, after the new Nike Air Jordan 11 Concords went on sale. Hundreds of people began lining up in the early hours at the Mall at Stonecrest to get their hands on a pair of Nike’s new Michael Jordan sneakers. Several stores inside the mall were offering the sneakers. Apparently, some people could not wait until the mall opened its doors at 8 a.m. Police were called to the scene. DeKalb police responded with as many as 20 squad cars after a large crowd apparently made an illegal entry into the mall, breaking down the door. Police escorted most of the people back outside. At least four people were arrested in that incident.

✦ Aliens in the manger

One Oregon nativity display is more of a close encounter of the third kind type. Portland artist Matt Henderson created the nativity scene using alien figurines. The display, which is inside a former church, also includes an androgynous Mary and Joseph and a shaman Santa Claus. Henderson says he does not mean to hurt anyone’s feelings with the display, instead he wants the public to use it to reflect on themselves. “You might be expecting to see an alien baby but you see a reflection of yourself. And that’s the symbolic message of nativity. Recognizing divinity and potential in yourself. And at the same time perhaps recognizing the terrestrial nature of Christ,” he explains.

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✰ Acoustic Levitation Of Stones

Tibetan Monks levitate stones by using an acoustic levitation technique with the aid of drams in this 1939 sketch by Swedish aircraft designer Henry Kjellson. A New Zealand scientist recently gave me an intriguing extract from an article published in a German magazine, relating to a demonstration of levitation in Tibet. After obtaining a translation by a German journalist, in English, I was amazed at the information contained in the story, and was surprised that the article had slipped through the suppression net which tends to keep such knowledge from leaking out to the public.

✰ Mysterious ‘Space Ball’ Crashes in Namibia

Ludik also described the object as being made of a “metal alloy known to man,” weighing in at six kilograms (13 pounds). “It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he added. Baffled, the Namibian police have appealed to NASA and the European Space Agency for an explanation. So what could it be? Assuming it does originate from space, is it a component from a top secret space weapon? Space hopper? Or could the explanation be a little more… alien? Sadly, we won’t be seeing the Men In Black flying to Windhoek any time soon. This hollow sphere will immediately strike a chord with any space expert. Exhibit A looks like a dusty “Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel” (or COPV for short) and although it did drop from orbit, it’s simply an exotic-looking chunk of space junk.

✰ Baby foreskins could cut animal testing

A research organization is growing human skin in the hope of using it to trial cosmetics and medicines, reducing the need for animal testing. The synthetic skin is made using cells from infant foreskins.

✰ Is This Humble Plant Capable of Alleviating Most Human Suffering?

One of the novel findings that emerged in the author’s comprehensive review of turmeric is that it expresses over 150 distinct beneficial actions, describable in terms of traditional pharmacological pathways, e.g. interleukin-6 down-regulator, apoptotic, cyclooxygenase inhibitor, etc. During the indexing process the image emerged of a many-armed Goddess, due to how diverse, intelligent and simultaneous are this spice’s healing gifts. In fact, from the perspective of monochemical-oriented pharmacology, a drug with more than 10 simultaneously therapeutic actions, and without the vast array of adverse, unintended side effects commonly associated with novel, patentable chemicals, turmeric would represent an impossible, miraculous entity, which if patentable, would generate more revenue than all the blockbuster drugs on the market put together.

✰ Facebook Photos Lead Police To Suspects In Burglary

Police say they stole thousands of dollars in cash and goods, and then posed with their loot and posted the photos to a popular social media site. Police say the three suspects, along with another teen, posted the photos on Facebook about an hour after they burglarized Elliott’s Town Market on Chartiers Avenue in the West End. “We received information the day after the burglary that these pictures were posted on Facebook, and if you look at the pictures, you can see that the individuals are holding a large amount of cash,” Sgt. Kevin Gasiorowski, of the Pittsburgh Police, said.

✰ All the Companies Supporting SOPA, the Awful Internet Censorship Law and How to Contact Them

Who’s officially on the record backing what could be the worst thing to ever happen to the internet? All of these companies listed below. Don’t take our word for itě°˝€”this list comes straight from Congress. Just FYI. If you want to get in touch, we’ve provided a contact list below. Maybe you want to let them know how you feel about SOPA.

✰ Congressman apologizes for criticizing Michelle Obama’s ‘large posterior’

According to Fishbowl DC, which first reported the lawmaker’s remarks, Sensenbrenner was recounting a recent conversation he’d had at church event in Wisconsin. Obama, Sensenbrenner said loudly, “lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Daniel Bice, Sensenbrenner made a similar remark at the Wisconsin church he was referencing in his phone call, telling attendees there that Obama has a “big butt.” The Wisconsin lawmaker, who, it must noted, is a bit rotund–sent a personal note to Obama apologizing for his remarks, his spokeswoman Amanda Infield tells Yahoo News. She declined to go into detail about what the note said. In a statement to reporters, the lawmaker reiterated his apology. “I regret my inappropriate comment, and I have sent a personal note to the First Lady apologizing,” he said. A spokesman for Obama did not respond to a request for comment.

✰ D’oh! Stunned couple unearth 800-year-old stone head in their garden… and it looks like HOMER SIMPSON

Whoever carved the statue would not have had TV’s favourite cartoon anti-hero in mind – but there is no doubting the resemblance of this stone head to Homer Simpson It was found by Rosalind and Donald McIntyre when they were clearing the bottom of their garden at their home in Fife, Scotland, earlier this year. The couple were working in their garden when Mrs McIntyre picked up the head. She took it to St Andrews Museum, and the discovery has been referred to the National Committee for Carved Stones of Scotland.

✰ Boehner’s office cuts off C-SPAN cameras as GOP takes verbal beating

A strange thing happened Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill. As Rep. Stenny Hoyer (D-MD) attempted to call for a vote to extend a payroll tax cut to middle class and working Americans, his Republican colleagues adjourned the House and walked out of the chamber. And if that weren’t odd enough, it got even stranger: As Hoyer railed against them for failing to help working Americans, footage from C-SPAN went silent, then cut away. Moments later, C-SPAN took to the Internet to explain that it wasn’t their doing, but someone working for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). The incident occurred mere moments after the House went into session. Hoyer made a motion for a vote on the Senate’s payroll tax cut extension, which would extend the lower rates for another two months, but the Republican presiding over the House did not acknowledge the motion. He instead adjourned the House, then got up and walked out.

✰ The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos: Two bombshell documents that Citigroup’s lawyers try to suppress, describing in detail the rule of the first 1%

So what are we talking about? In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to invest, and who want to invest wisely. So Citigroup did their duty and published two explosive memos, which should have become mainstream news, but eventually did not. The first memo is dated October 16, 2005 (35 pages) and is titled: “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.”

✰ FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act. This new information comes as the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) as unconstitutional because its vague wording has had a chilling effect on political activism. This document adds to the evidence demonstrating that the AETA goes far beyond property destruction, as its supporters claim.

✰ It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a UFO?

Sitting inside Lindly’s Appliance Store, Kammi Root is used to seeing large machinery towed down US 77. But what she saw Monday afternoon is something she won’t soon forget. “There was this funny sphere that went through on this big trailer and my first thought was, ‘That looks like a UFO,’” said Root.

✰ Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1%

Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

✰ Rihanna barfs, yawns on stage during European concerts

It’s been a rough week for Rihanna. She became the target of racist vitriol not once but twice. First when a hotel guest in Portugal allegedly went on a racist tirade that prompted the pop singer to go on her own rant on Twitter in response. Then, a Dutch magazine printed a fashion feature that referred to her as a “n***abitch” (the editor later resigned over the story). Now, “The Sun” reports that the singer is being criticized for apparently yawning as she held the mic up for a crowd sing-a-long during a performance at London’s O2 arena on Wednesday night — mere days after she apparently vomited off-stage in Portugal while singing “What’s My Name.”

✰ Mystery buyer acquires vatican.xxx web address

The Vatican said on Wednesday an unknown buyer had snapped up the internet address vatican.xxx, a domain combining its name with an extension reserved for pornographic content. “This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said on Vatican radio. It was not clear from his statement if the Vatican had tried to acquire the domain in order to prevent future misuse and had been beaten to the punch by the unknown buyer.

✰ For Christmas, Your Government Will Explain Why It’s Legal to Kill You

Summary: The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen, who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda, which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment; it did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of), based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won’t show anyone, and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won’t show anyone, and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny; although don’t worry, because the C.I.A. would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first; and this is the “most transparent administration ever”; currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

✰ Frito-Lay sued for labeling its GMO-filled snacks as ‘All Natural’?

Less than a year after Frito-Lay announced plans to make half their products without “any artificial or synthetic ingredients,” the $13 billion company was sued last week in federal court for fraudulently marketing the snacks that contain genetically modified ingredients. Somehow, “artificial” and “synthetic” doesn’t include “genetically modified” in Frito’s mind.

✰ Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear

Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The federal grant spending, awarded with little oversight from Washington, has fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations in Fargo and in departments across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found. No one can say exactly what has been purchased in total across the country or how it’s being used, because the federal government doesn’t keep close track. State and local governments don’t maintain uniform records.

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❒ Nine-in-ten baby changing units in public toilets found to have traces of cocaine

In a list of places where people do drugs, it’s probably one of the last you would expect to find a class A substance. However, incredibly, traces of cocaine have been found in more than nine out of 10 baby-changing units in the north west, research has found. An examination of more than 100 units – including facilities in public toilets, shopping centres, police stations, courts and churches – found that 92 per cent of them carried traces of the class A drug.

❒ China’s ‘River of Blood:’ Jian Turns Red After Chemical Dump [PHOTOS]

Visitors to the Jian River in Luoyang, China were shocked earlier this week when they saw the water had become a “river of blood,” dyed bright red after an illegal dye dump by nearby chemical plant, an incident that has since launched an official investigation by the Luoyang Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. The Jian (or Jianhe) River runs through Luoyang in the Henan province. Locals were subject to the water’s eerie, blood-like color for several days before government officials tracked the source of the color not to a Moses-like End Times but to two small chemical plants dumping red dye into the city’s storm water pipe.

❒ Rats Hit the Post Office Gift Pile

Maureen Marion, a postal spokeswoman for the Northeast, agreed that the post office is a veritable smorgasbord this time of year. “The little animals can smell the chocolate and goodies,” she said. “At Midtown they’ve been very good at putting things in cabinets to keep them away from nibbles, but this time of year they just have more packages than they do have space to accommodate them.” (Similar problems have been documented at the 10003 post office in the East Village.)

❒ This Is What The Government Told Gizmodo About Osama Bin Laden’s Body

Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden’s sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No— a complete denial that any records exist. Read it. The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen’s email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden’s remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they’re in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they’ll be safe for the rest of time.

❒ Thai ‘ladyboy’ flight attendants take flight on PC Air

Fasten your seatbelts! A Thai airline that hired transsexuals as flight attendants to set itself apart from competitors has taken to the skies. PC Air, a new charter airline that plans to fly routes across Asia, originally set out to hire only male and female flight attendants. But it changed its mind after receiving more than 100 job applications from transvestites and transsexuals.

❒ Man kills 3-year-old to cook and eat her heart

A Moroccan man kidnapped a three-year-old girl, murdered her, wrested her heart out of her chest and cut the body into pieces before he started cooking the parts. Her parents who entered the killer’s house stood in horror watching him preparing their own daughter as his meal. The girl went missing in the northern town of Tangier on Sunday, triggering a massive police manhunt. Her parents were told by a local resident that he had seen a man taking the child into his apartment. “The parents rushed to that flat in the hope they will find their daughter… when they were in, they were stunned… their daughter lay before their eyes cut into many pieces while the killer had already taken her heart out of her chest and placed it in a container to cook it,” the Moroccan daily Hespress said. “They then saw him cutting onion and adding spice to the remaining parts of her body…he has already started cooking the girl’s hands and legs… it was an unprecedented savagery that also stunned the police

❒ NYU professor claims school fired him for giving James Franco a “D”

James Franco’s tired James Dean act got an NYU professor booted from the school last year — after the teacher dared to give the overhyped Hollywood hunk a “D” for blowing off class, a lawsuit charges. José Angel Santana said he slapped the “127 Hours’’ star with the bad grade because he missed 12 of his 14 “Directing the Actor II” classes while pursuing a master’s in fine arts. Santana said he then suffered all kinds of drama — first from Franco, who publicly ridiculed him, then from his department, which axed him over the “D.” “The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana, 58, told The Post. “The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.”

❒ Man dies after brother asks him to eat drugs

Police showed a video Monday of the brothers in the back of the cruiser. Investigators say Mitchell tells his 20-year-old brother he will get life in prison for another drug conviction, encouraging his younger brother to eat the evidence, but warning him that he could die. The brother had a seizure and was dead within an hour. The cause of death was listed as acute cocaine toxicity.

❒ Man Celebrated 45th Birthday With $283 Worth Of Food Stuffed In Pants

Shrimp, rib-eye steak, baby back ribs and smoked turkey. One Salisbury man celebrated his 45th birthday by trying to stuff all of it — almost $300 worth of food — down his pants. Ronald Broadway, 45, was arrested Thursday night in the parking lot of his local Food Lion supermarket, packed with enough meats and fish intended for a birthday and holiday celebration, police said.

❒ Sperm donor in Fremont feeling heat from feds

Arsenault’s been a sperm donor for five years, offering his semen to women he meets on the Internet for free. But his baby-making days may be numbered. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has told him to stop giving away his sperm – or face a $100,000 fine or up to a year in prison – on the grounds that he’s ignoring federal regulations that require blood tests every time a person donates any kind of body tissue or fluid. He’s allowed to keep providing sperm while his case is pending.

❒ TV presenters push the boundaries of taste as they are filmed eating EACH OTHER

Two Dutch TV presenters are set to make history with a macabre broadcast stunt. Each presenter has eaten the flesh of the other – and the disgusting meal will be broadcast on their show. Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno both underwent surgery to have a small piece of muscle removed. They then fried each other’s meat and ate it in front of a studio audience. Thanks Cat

❒ HOLLYWOOD BODYGUARD CONFIDENTIAL

Despite that drama, Weaver insists his worst client was Lindsay Lohan, whom he protected during most of 2007. “When she was sober, she was charming,” Weaver writes. “But when she’d done drugs or had been drinking, she was a demon!” She once told Weaver: “I can dress like a princess and still fight like a whore.” And one night she almost got them both killed. Weaver says she called him at 4 a.m. and asked him to take her to Beverly Hills to “pick up a script.” But when they got to the location, Lindsay approached a man waiting in the front yard and screamed: “You ripped me off, you bastard!” With no warning, Lindsay “slapped him so hard that I almost felt it.” She then slapped him again, Weaver writes, and “before I could stop him, he held a gun to Lindsay’s face.” Weaver moved in to save hisclient, and found himself looking down the barrel of the gun. When a noise distracted the gunman, Weaver says he “punched that man as hard as I could in the side of his neck.”

❒ Chicago Bears’ Sam Hurd arrested on drug charges

At that meeting, Hurd told the informant that he wanted to buy “five to 10 kilograms of cocaine and 1,000 pounds of marijuana per week for distribution in the Chicago area,” according to the complaint. Hurd allegedly negotiated to pay $25,000 per kilogram for the cocaine and $450 per pound for the marijuana. The complaint says that Hurd “further stated that he and another co-conspirator currently distribute four kilograms of cocaine per week in the Chicago area, but that the supplier could not supply him with enough quantity.” After they agreed on a price, the undercover agent gave Hurd a kilogram of cocaine, according to the complaint. Hurd told the agent that he plays for the Bears and would get out of practice at 5:30 p.m., at which time he would make arrangements to pay for the drugs. According to the complaint, Hurd then took the drugs and got in his car. He was promptly arrested.

❒ MPAA Head Chris Dodd on Online Censorship Bill: China’s the Model

If you’re wondering why lawyers and Hollywood folks would get behind legislation to censor the Internet, you only need to listen to former Senator Chris Dodd, now the head of the MPAA, who last week explained to Variety that the lobby is only asking for the same kind of power to censor the Internet as the government has in the People’s Republic of China

❒ Toddlers singing Twinkle Twinkle banned from making gestures ‘in case it offends deaf people’

Generations of children have grown up singing along and performing actions to the nursery rhyme favourite Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. But one toddler group has been told not to make the twinkling ‘star’ sign with their hands for fear it could offend the deaf. Parents were told that the sign – which resembles a diamond shape when made with forefingers and thumbs – is used in official sign language to represent female genitalia.

❒ What’s the Most Disgusting Thing? | What’s the Grossest Thing? | What Disgusts People the Most?

Seeing a stranger’s tissue dripping with yellow snot might make you squirm, but this image doesn’t even crack the top three on the gross scale. People universally find other images much more disgusting. To determine just what is the grossest sight, Valerie Curtis, the Director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & and Tropical Medicine devised a truly gruesome experiment. Curtis and a team of researchers presented 20 images of things perceived as repulsive to more than 80,000 individuals from 172 countries in a Web-based survey [take the disgust questionnaire for yourself here]. The images included photos of skin abrasions, bugs such as wasps, lice and worms, and a soup bowl full of what looked like a bodily fluid.

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✪ Satanic Sex Encounter Leaves Man With Hundreds Of Wounds

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

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

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

✪ Doctors noting increase in ‘sleep texting’

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

✪ Dozen boat migrants die in voodoo ritual to calm sea

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

✪ Skeleton Santa Controversy at Loudoun County Courthouse

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

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

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

✪ Man Arrested After Craigslist Pot Post

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

✪ Teacher Accused Of Making Students Rub Her Feet

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

✪ Buyer of Minivan Finds Hidden $500K in Cocaine

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

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

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

✪ Excrement Tattoo

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

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

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

✪ Superman comic sells at auction for $2.16m

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

✪ Fake pregnant belly becomes hot seller on the Internet

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

✪ Tyree Callahan Paints with a Typewriter

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

✪ Woman’s face catches on fire during surgery

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

✪ NYC transit: Stranded subway riders were forgotten

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

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

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

✪ Who Wants To Be a Thousandaire?

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

✪ The Future of Attention: A Conversation with David Pescovitz

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

✪ Internal Affairs report released in Police Santeria hex spell plot

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

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

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

✪ Occupy Your Mind: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

✪ The Muppets Are Communist, Fox Business Network Says

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

✪ A Brief History of the Apocalypse

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

✪ First sighting of dolphin in Irish lake

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

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

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

✪ Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

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

✪ Defaced Monuments

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

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

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

✪ Cops Hose Down Crowd of Staten Island Youths

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

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

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

✪ iPhone touchscreens tarnish the legacy of Steve Jobs

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

✪ Man Claims Illuminati Stole $1 Trillion

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

✪ Report: NY State Voting Machines Really Suck

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

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

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

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

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

✪ Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive

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

✪ Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis

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

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✖ Pepper Spray Developer: It Has Become Fashionable to Use Chemicals on People with Opinions

In what appears to be his first television interview on the subject, Kamran Loghman, the developer of weapons-grade pepper spray and the policy for its use by US police departments, appeared on Democracy Now! to condemn how police forces have been using pepper spray on peaceful protesters in the country. He said he was “shocked” and bewildered to see UC Davis police pepper spraying students and the first thing that came to his mind was how the students could be his children “sitting down having an opinion” and being shut down forcibly by chemical agents.

✖ The Apologies of Zuckerberg: A Retrospective

Here’s a trip down memory lane, looking back at Zuckerberg’s apologies for upsetting users — usually about privacy. There are some common themes. Zuckerberg almost always tells users that change is hard, often referring back to the early days of Facebook when it had barely any of the features people know and love today. He says sharing and a more open and connected world are good, and often he says he appreciates all the feedback. Most of all, Zuckerberg seems to take pride in offering an explicit, earnest apology, but doesn’t actually admit he was wrong, just that he’s sorry for how things were rolled out or perceived.

✖ Sex, drugs and … more sex and drugs

Forget about rock ‘n’ roll: When rats are administered the highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine and allowed to engage in sexual behavior while high, all they want is more of both. That’s the raw finding of a study published Tuesday by the Journal of Neuroscience. It’s important because many who use methamphetamine report that it enhances their sexual experience. But because it also reduces their inhibitions, those abusers are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, including unprotected sex and anal intercourse. The result: HIV transmission appears to be far more likely among methamphetamine users than it is among those who do not take the drug.

✖ Jeno Paulucci, food visionary behind the pizza roll, dies at 93

Using a machine he invented to prepare Chun King egg rolls, Mr. Paulucci replaced the innards of the Chinese hors d’oeuvre with traditional pizza toppings. He sold Jeno’s to Pillsbury in the late 1980s for more than $140 million, and his bite-size pizza snacks are now sold as Totino’s Pizza Rolls.

✖ Designer cocaine ‘glass cleaner’ sold legally, potentially lethal

A designer drug that simulates cocaine that is marketed as “glass cleaner” has replaced “bath salts” in many smoke shops across the Tempe area, rendering all but useless an emergency federal ban enacted last month to stem the sale and use of the potentially lethal bath salts, officials say. The legal sale of the white powder that is altered slightly from “bath salts” for less than $20 in smoke shops, on websites and in some liquor and convenience stores is sending a rapidly rising number of patients to emergency rooms, treatment facilities and poison centers, officials say. Thanks Cat

✖ Former Sheriff of the Year Patrick Sullivan accused of dealing meth, trying to trade it for sex

Former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick Sullivan was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of trying to trade drugs to a man for sex, as investigators monitored the deal. Drug task-force officers were “visually monitoring” the deal when the 68-year-old former national Sheriff of the Year delivered methamphetamine to an Aurora home and sought sex in return, said current Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. “This shows that no one is above the law, particularly a current or a former peace officer,” Robinson said. Robinson said Sullivan had an ongoing relationship with the man as well as other men he had a history of bonding out of jails in the metro region.

✖ ‘The Pirate Bay Dancing’ Add-On Killls DNS and IP Blockades

Efforts to censor the Internet are increasing in the Western world. In the US lawmakers are currently discussing legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that could take out The Pirate Bay, or disable access to it. In several other countries such as Italy, Finland and Belgium, courts have already ordered Internet Providers to block their users’ access to the site. Demonstrating the futility of these efforts, a small group of developers today releases a browser add-on called “The Pirate Bay Dancing.”

✖ The Sex Addiction Epidemic

Valerie realized that sex was wrecking her life right around the time her second marriage disintegrated. At 30, and employed as a human-resources administrator in Phoenix, she had serially cheated on both her husbands—often with their subordinates and co-workers—logging anonymous hookups in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, affairs with married men, and one-night stands too numerous to count. But Valerie couldn’t stop. Not even after one man’s wife aimed a shotgun at her head while catching them in flagrante delicto. Valerie called phone-sex chat lines and pored over online pornography, masturbating so compulsively that it wasn’t uncommon for her to choose her vibrator over going to work. She craved public exhibitionism, too, particularly at strip clubs, and even accepted money in exchange for sex—not out of financial necessity but for the illicit rush such acts gave her.

✖ Wi-Fi Near Testes Could Decrease Male Fertility: Study

Authors of a new scientific study speculated that “a laptop connected wirelessly to the Internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility.” The study appeared in the September issue of the medical journal Fertility and Sterility. A team of Argentine scientists placed healthy sperm under a laptop running a Wi-Fi connection. After four hours, the Wi-Fi-exposed sperm showed signs of damage including slowed motility and increased DNA fragmentation, the researchers found. Healthy sperm stored for the same time and temperature away from the computer didn’t show the damage. That is, the sperm exposed to Wi-Fi were less capable of moving toward an egg to fertilize it and less capable of passing on the male’s DNA if it does fertilize an egg. A separate test also showed that merely placing sperm near a computer (without Wi-Fi) does not cause nearly the same damage, the report showed.

✖ Study reveals racial segregation in online dating

When it comes to online dating, segregation appears to be alive and well. After analyzing more than one million profiles on a mainstream dating website, researchers at the University of California Berkeley, concluded that whites are highly unlikely to initiate contact with black people. Even when their profiles indicate that they are indifferent about the race or ethnicity of a potential romantic interest. The researchers expected to find homophily, a social science term which means love of the same, in their analysis but they were surprised that the internet did not play a role in eroding reluctance to date outside ones own race. “When the constraints of segregation are lifted by technology, what do people do? They don’t act all that differently,” said Gerald Mendelsohn, PhD, one of the professors who worked on the study. “Segregation remains a state of mind as much as it is a physical reality.”

✖ Life began with a planetary mega-organism

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today. This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor – not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others. The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.

✖ Scientists finding new uses for hallucinogens and street drugs

What a long, strange trip it’s been. In the 1960s and ’70s, a rebellious generation embraced hallucinogens and a wide array of street drugs to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Almost half a century later, magic mushrooms, LSD, Ecstasy and ketamine are being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses. Scientists believe these agents have the potential to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, drug or alcohol addiction, unremitting pain or depression and the existential anxiety of terminal illness.

✖ Permafrost Thaw May Emit More Than Deforestation, Study Says

“We calculate that permafrost thaw will release the same order of magnitude of carbon as deforestation if current rates of deforestation continue,” the researchers said. “Because these emissions include significant quantities of methane, the overall effect on climate could be 2.5 times larger.”

✖ Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews

The Netanyahu government’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption is sponsoring advertisements in at least five American communities that warn Israeli expatriates that they will lose their identities if they don’t return home. The Ministry is also featuring on its website a series of short videos that, in an almost comically heavy-handed way, caution Israelis against raising their children in America — one scare-ad shows a pair of Israeli grandparents seated before a menorah and Skypeing with their granddaughter, who lives in America. When they ask the child to name the holiday they’re celebrating, she says “Christmas.” In another ad, an actor playing a slightly-adenoidal, goateed young man (who, to my expert Semitic eye, is meant to represent a typical young American Jew) is shown to be oblivious to the fact that his Israeli girlfriend is in mourning on Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s memorial day.

✖ Man sues former hostages, says they broke promise

A man who held a Kansas couple hostage in their home while fleeing from authorities is suing them, claiming that they broke an oral contract made when he promised them money in exchange for hiding him from police. The couple has asked a judge to dismiss the suit.

✖ Who Smashed the Laptops from Occupy Wall Street? Inside the NYPD’s Lost and Found

Worse, it was as if someone along the way purposefully destroyed all confiscated electronics, a strategic smashing of at least part of the digital record logged by full-on occupiers. “Dude, all the laptops are in a row,” he tells us, baffled and raking his shock of brown hair. “They’ve all been smashed with bats.” When asked about the mangled property, LiPani admits that, inevitably, certain items could’ve been damaged in the shuffle: “I’m not surprised,” he says, to hear of damaged laptops. He adds that the DSNY is providing clearance forms to those occupiers concerned their property may’ve been mishandled or misplaced.

✖ Carrier IQ Video Shows Alarming Capabilities Of Mobile Tracking Software

You may be aware of the growing controversy surrounding Carrier IQ, a piece of software found pre-installed on Sprint phones that, according to developers who have investigated, is capable of detecting, recording, and transmitting various user actions and inputs. Among the data CIQ potentially has access to are location, SMS, apps, and key presses. News of the software has been percolating for months on development forums, but when Trevor Eckhart recently summarized his findings, he found himself facing a cease and desist while Sprint vigorously denied the charges, saying “We do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool.” The C&D; was quickly retracted, but Eckhart has now released a video that seems to give the lie to both Sprint and Carrier IQ’s assurances.

✖ Millions of printers open to devastating hack attack, researchers say

Could a hacker from half-way around the planet control your printer and give it instructions so frantic that it could eventually catch fire? Or use a hijacked printer as a copy machine for criminals, making it easy to commit identity theft or even take control of entire networks that would otherwise be secure? It’s not only possible, but likely, say researchers at Columbia University, who claim they’ve discovered a new class of computer security flaws that could impact millions of businesses, consumers, and even government agencies.

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