Shoes were formed in Zion, Illinois, in 1975 by Jeff Murphy, John Murphy, Gary Klebe, and Skip Meyer, with the Murphys and Klebe all sharing songwriting duties. After one self-made and extremely limited album (only 300 were pressed), 1975′s Un Dans Versailles, and the unreleased Bazooka (1976), they recorded their true debut for national consumption, Black Vinyl Shoes, in Jeff Murphy’s living room and released it on their own label, Black Vinyl Records. Though it was barely distributed, enough critics and key people heard the record to start a word-of-mouth buzz. Eventually, Greg Shaw, the head of Bomp! Records, heard the record and arranged for the band to release one single, the brilliant “Tomorrow Night”/”Okay,” on his label. A contract with Elektra Records soon followed, and the label released the group’s next three textbook power pop albums: Present Tense (1979), Tongue Twister (1981), and Boomerang (1982). Despite the instantly accessible, catchy quality of the songs, the band was unable to achieve mainstream success — among specialists, however, these albums, along with the debut, stand as the high points of the era. -Allmusic
When he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and other charges in 2005, Stephen Slevin had no way of knowing that an opinion about his mental state would put him on a path to spend more than 22 months of solitary confinement in a New Mexico county jail, despite never having his day in court. This week, he reached a $15.5 million settlement with Dona Ana County.
If you reach back into the dark crevices of your memory to last September, you may recall that a man was mauled by a tiger after he jumped out of the Bronx Zoo’s Wild Asia Monorail and into a tiger den. David Villalobos, 25, told police at the time that he jumped because he wanted “to be one with the tiger,” not because of any suicidal impulses. But his mother begs to differ: she claims her son’s mind was warped because of Adderall addiction. And she thinks the tiger incident may have saved his life: “He was always interested in animals, and we brought him up as a Christian, but Adderall changed his way of thinking,” his mom, Fernanda, told Lawyers and Settlements.
Police arrested a young mother from Centralia, Washington, last week after footage surfaced on YouTube showing her allowing her 22-month-old son to inhale marijuana smoke from a bong. 24-year-old Rachelle Braaten was charged with delivery of a controlled substance to a minor as well as manufacture of marijuana after officers found as many as 40 marijuana plants inside her home. Several weapons were also found.
Three 6 Mafia rapper DJ Paul — famous for his song “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” — has some words of advice for Justin Bieber … stay away from sizzurp, or you could die. Paul was out in Vegas this week when we asked him about the photos circulating of Justin Bieber — showing the singer surrounded by double cups and codeine — and the rapper tells us, Bieber’s playing with fire. Paul says, “I can’t say don’t do [sizzurp] because I did my rounds with it. But I stay away from it these days because I had a lot of friends that passed away from it. It’s dangerous if you do too much of it.”
A Roane County woman who died after taking two doses of LSD could be the first reported acid-related fatality in the state and one of the few documented globally. Prosecutors are still awaiting toxicology results to make that distinction. An autopsy hasn’t been completed on Renee Honaker, 30, of Left Hand, who died last week. Lab results for the acid strips she allegedly took aren’t back yet either, Roane County Prosecuting Attorney Josh Downey said on Saturday. Police charged Renee’s husband, Todd Anthony Honaker, 34, with first-degree murder after the couple apparently each took two hits of LSD on March 1. Renee later fell to the floor, began convulsing and died. Police also charged Chad M. Renzelman, 32, of Kennewick, Wash., the chemist they said manufactured the drug, with first-degree murder. He is being held in jail awaiting extradition to West Virginia.
Diane Shattuck filled a prescription in December for a generic antibiotic called doxycycline. With insurance, she paid $4.30 for 60 pills at a CVS store in Orange. She returned at the end of February to refill her prescription. This time, she was told her cost for the drug would be about $165. “It was bizarre,” Shattuck, 73, told me. “And no one at CVS could explain why the price was so high.” Unfortunately, I won’t be able to offer a clear-cut answer, either. But my effort to untangle Shattuck’s situation cast a harsh light on the shadowy world of drug pricing. It revealed that different manufacturers can charge wildly different prices for what is essentially the same generic medicine, and that drugstores can rake in unconscionable profits by passing along marked-up meds to customers without the slightest explanation. “It’s a very murky world,” said Jeffrey McCombs, a professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at USC.
A 21-year-old man who told officers he loved cocaine and needed more cocaine was arrested after he was caught running naked through an apartment complex. On Feb. 24 the Crestview Police Department received numerous reports from Bel-Aire Apartments about a man running naked and yelling through the complex. At one point he tried to get into a car of a woman and her young child. When lawmen arrived the man, now wearing pajama pants, leaped onto the hood of the patrol car and wouldn’t get down until ordered. He lay down on the grass nearby, where he made several comments about loving cocaine and needing more cocaine.
At 21 Andrew got a job at Butlins in Minehead, Somerset, and during that time he experimented with drugs such as ecstasy and LSD as a way of dealing with the psychological effects of being born without his manhood. He said: “By taking drugs I gave myself the perfect cover. “I’d bed girls but said things could only go so far because the drugs meant I couldn’t rise to the occasion. “I’ve been to bed with over 100 women. Some were one-night stands, some long-term relationships. I’ve told 20 per cent of them the truth. “The fact I didn’t just want to get my leg over made me more attractive to women. I had charm and patter because it wasn’t all about sex.”
Heroin addicts in Denmark, who are given state-sponsored fixes, say they are bored now that they don’t have to chase drugs, a non-profit group says. Once drug addicts end up admitted into a heroin clinic they receive twice-daily prescription doses of state-funded heroin, the Fyens Stiftstidende reported. Mette Guul, head of Reden Odense, a YWCA center for abused women and prostitutes in Aarhus, said many don’t know how to handle their newly found free time, the Fyens Stiftstidende said. “The women say they are lonely, bored and do not know what to do now that they do not have to chase the drugs anymore,” Guul told the newspaper.
The producers of History Channel’s “The Bible” miniseries say Internet chatter that their Satan character resembles President Barack Obama is “utter nonsense.”
A teenage boy opened a can of Bud Lite then drank it off a girl’s breasts. When the story was later recounted to another partygoer who was wearing a cap with the word ‘t*****s’ on it, he said: ‘Awesome!’ During an aborted attempt to drink out of a beer bong, a girl ended up covered in Budweiser. He male friend said, pointing to her t-shirt: ‘You got it wet, take it off!’ He added, pointing to his large bottle of Miller Lite: ‘Whatever he says is the rules.’ Soon after the casualties began to appear. A portly woman who could no longer stand was hauled out of the crowd by two male companions where she became abusive towards them. A teenage girl collapsed behind the toilets with saucer like eyes and vacant look to her face.
Thought of as a soft drink. Strong enough to kill. Yes. One 12 oz oca Cola is all it takes to end a human life. Many women when late try to end their pregnancy, in poor countries, and over a period of time, they’ve worked out the best way to do it. All they need is a 12 oz bottle of Coca Cola. This they boil for fifteen minutes. Then they leave it out in the midday sun from morning til afternoon. This must do something to alter the chemical composition, because that alone, when drunk, can be fully effective to cause an abortion. They only add headache pills to beef up the solution, and whack, the pregnancy’s over. It works in about half of cases, my partner assures me. Her friends have used it successfully.
“The guards sounded the sirens from the prison towers and rushed in with tear gas guns and other firepower. At first, O.J. was watching all this from a distance and didn’t even notice that two inmates were approaching him. “Then, one of ‘The Girls’ spotted a flash of metal. It was sunlight reflecting from the blade of a knife wielded by a skinhead rushing at O.J. At the same time, another one of ‘The Girls’ saw an attacker coming from the other side. “The two skinheads charged toward O.J. They lunged at him and slashed at his face, coming close to cutting him. Luckily, they were blocked by his girly-man buddies. They may act like chicks but, believe me, they’re darn tough.”
Terrell Garrett faces two counts of aggravated driving under the influence and two counts of reckless homicide, according to Sally Daly, spokeswoman at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. Charges were filed on Saturday afternoon. Garrett allegedly drove the wrong way on Lake Shore Drive, striking two cars head on in the southbound lane near LaSalle around 4 a.m. Friday morning. Two people — Fabian Torres, 27, and Joaquin Garcia, 25– were killed. A third person was treated at the hospital and released.
“So what exactly is this magic ingredient that will be appearing in a new version of Pepsi, and how is it made? Unfortunately, those questions are hard to answer. Senomyx… refers to them only as ‘enhancers’ or ‘ingredients’… The products work by triggering receptors on the tongue and tricking your taste buds into sensing sweetness — or saltiness or coolness, in the case of the company’s other programs… So are Senomyx’s covert ingredients safe? That, too, is anyone’s guess… many of its enhancers have ‘been granted’ GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status, but all that means is that the company did its own assessment and then concluded everything was fine. We don’t know whether Senomyx did any testing since the company isn’t required to submit anything to the FDA.14 There’s no reason to think that Senomyx’s products will cause harm, but until or unless Pepsi decides to share details about how exactly it’s achieving a 60 percent reduction in sugar while keeping the taste …
Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason. Allegations from Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner that Facebook was creating “shadow profiles” of non-users were initially refuted by Facebook’s spokesman Andrew Noyes, who said categorically that “The allegations are false.” But Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, engineering director Arturo Bejar, engineering manager Gregg Stefancik, corporate spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin, and Noyes have now revealed the extent of the company’s tracking. As previously thought, Facebook are using cookies to track anyone who visits a Facebook.com page.
We, the undersigned, would like the Obama administration to recognize the need for a new national anthem, one that even a decade after its creation, is still hot and fresh out the kitchen. America has changed since Francis Scott Key penned our current anthem in 1814. Since then, we have realized that after the show, it’s the afterparty, and that after the party, it’s the hotel lobby, and–perhaps most importantly–that ’round about four, you’ve got to clear the lobby, at which point it’s strongly recommended that you take it to the room and freak somebody. President Obama: we ask you to recognize the evolution of this beautiful country and give us an anthem that better suits the glorious nation we have become.
In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely, sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said something: we’re done, go away. My father took great pride in hanging up our model 554 phone violently when something went awry. An inbound wrong number dialed twice in a row, or an unwelcome solicitor. Clang! The handset’s solid mass crashed down on the hook, the bell assembly whimpering from the impact. The mechanical nature of telephones made hangups a material affair as much as a social one. A hangup is something your interlocutor could feel physically as much as emotionally, and something you couldn’t downplay either. Like slamming a door or yelling at a child, hanging up a phone couldn’t be subdued or hidden.
Checkpoints (some would say illegal checkpoints) have been popping up quite frequently in the USA. As you see in this video, you DO NOT have to comply with their question’s or demands. Don’t forget, you have rights.
There are four general types of checkpoints you might encounter: DUI checkpoints, US border checkpoints, drug checkpoints, and TSA checkpoints. In a legal sense, they are not all created equal. So depending on which one you encounter, you’ll want to be prepared to flex your rights appropriately.
Google has the marketing power to make acting like ‘Creepy Cameraman’ socially acceptable. Would you have even considered wearing a hidden spy camera or recording conversations a few years ago? Well soon everyone will be doing it and finding you odd for objecting. There is no way to know if you are being recorded by someone wearing Google Glass or a similar device. This is in contrast to a smart phone where the user must visibly hold the camera up to take a picture or record video. We must therefore assume that we are being recorded at all times(and possibly publicly broadcast) from a low angle where ones face is clearly visible. Even if the user is not recording video, audio for their own use it may still be being collected and processed in the cloud in order to display contextual information using image, object, face, voice identification and speech recognition. (so called augmented reality) for example. Display the G+ or Facebook profile of the person you are looking at.
The opposition will congregate in dark corners. They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles. The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass? It won’t be easy. Once you’ve been cybernated, there’s no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web. One site is called “Stop The Cyborgs.” It claims to be “fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time.” A sticker being offered on the “Stop The Cyborgs” Web site. It’s going to take a lot of bitty fighting, but the people behind this site — they’re naturally anonymous, in an attempt to stop Google spying on them — say they’re fighting Google Glass in particular. They say that it will herald a world in which “privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”
So, we’re done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites. And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant. Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.
The Herald Sun understands remote access to the venue’s security system was given to an unauthorised person. Images relayed from cameras were then used to spy on a top-level gaming area where the high roller was playing. Signals were given to him on how he should bet based on the advice of someone viewing the camera feeds. Sources said the total stolen was $32 million. The cameras at Crown are state-of-the-art, high-resolution technology. They are capable of transmitting the most intricate detail of goings-on inside the building.
An alleged auto thief tried to escape capture by car, foot and boat Wednesday but was caught in Oakland with the help of several law-enforcement agencies that surrounded him by air, land and sea, authorities said. Terry Rizzo was caught after he ditched a stolen car, fled on foot and dove into the Oakland Estuary before trying to escape in a sailboat, said Alameda County sheriff’s Sgt. J.D. Nelson. Rizzo, surrounded by officers on the ground and others in a helicopter and a boat, eventually gave up and was booked into a downtown Oakland jail on warrants for theft and auto theft. “I’ve seen a lot of people try to avoid being arrested, but they don’t usually go through a criminal triathlon to get away,” said Nelson, who added that Rizzo had a small amount of methamphetamine in his possession when arrested.
When Bruce Tomb realized that flying cars weren’t on the imminent horizon, he decided to make his own. The outcome might not be what you’d expect. With the help of some friends, Tomb created “Maria del Camino.” She’s an excavator topped with a 1959 El Camino, mounted on a hydraulic array that lifts it high off the ground. Her body is adorned with thousands of drilled-out holes, and her hood sports a portrait of the robot woman from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which shines when the light hits it. In simple terms, it’s nothing but sheer magnificence. Maria is currently being worked on at the DIY space Nimby in Oakland California. We stopped by to ask Tomb how — and why — he built his “flying” car, and he took us for a beer run, stopping traffic along the way. As for future modifications, Tomb has a big one in mind. “Been working on removing the manual controls,” he says. “I’ve heard driverless cars are all the rage!”
Following Rubio’s “Watergate” incident, Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and author of the book Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, took to Twitter to ask Nestlé, owner of the brand, just how much Poland Spring bottled water is actually from the iconic source in Maine. He’d been trying, he says, for years to get an answer to that question. This time, he got one: about a third.
“Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use,” the paper continued. The way to stop this is to “stop treating population growth as a ‘given’ and consider the nutritional, health and social benefits of humanely ending growth well below nine billion and starting a slow decline. This would be a monumental task, considering the momentum of population growth. Monumental, but not impossible if the political will could be generated globally to give full rights, education and opportunities to women, and provide all sexually active human beings with modern contraception and backup abortion.”
The proceedings were closely watched, as this was the first high-profile case against child sexual abuse that the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, had brought against a member of the politically powerful Satmar ultra-Orthodox community during his more than two decades in office. This sentence is the longest a Brooklyn court has imposed on a member of the ultra-Orthodox community for sexual abuse of a child. As Mr. Weberman was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he turned to his wife and gave her a nod and a small smile. On Dec. 9, Mr. Weberman was found guilty of 59 counts of sexual abuse, charges that carried a maximum combined sentence of 117 years. He was found guilty of engaging in various sexual acts, including oral sex, groping and acting out pornographic videos, during therapy sessions that were meant to help the girl become more religious. The abuse lasted three years.
Since the revelations of Jimmy Savile’s prolific sex offending came to light last year there has been a palpable effort on the part of the government and much of the media (most notably the BBC, where Savile worked – and abused children – for decades) to brush the issue under the carpet. The disturbing implications as to how Savile was able to operate unimpeded and his connections to rich and powerful people, have been put aside in favour of focusing media attention on other minor celebrities and has-beens and the occasional dead politician. While there have been hints pointing to paedophile rings linked to members of the government – notably after Tom Watson MP raised the issue in Parliament – few mainstream journalists have conducted a thorough investigation, and the idea of organized networks of child abusers reaching into the upper echelons of society is rarely considered a possibility.
In a stunning revelation from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), it appears that COINTELPRO is alive and well. Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, PCJF was able to obtain documents showing how the FBI was treating the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, from its inception, as a potential criminal and domestic terrorist threat. This despite the FBI’s own acknowledgement that the OWS organizers themselves planned on engaging in peaceful and popular protest and did not “condone the use of violence.”
A woman allegedly caught stealing hair weave from a West Side Chicago store was almost stripped naked by the owners. There are few details available, but based on the footage, several people tried to detain two black female shoplifters. One alleged female offender, wearing a dark-colored tank top and shorts, put up a violent struggle… knocking an older Asian woman to the floor, pulling her hair, and toppling merchandise. During the melee, the female suspect’s shorts were nearly ripped off her as the shopkeepers struggled to hold her for the police. Another black female allegedly involved in the incident had her shirt torn and her breasts were exposed.
Harvard geneticist George Church recently told Der Spiegel he’s close to developing the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal, at which point all he’d need is an “adventurous human woman” — einen abenteuerlustigen weiblichen Menschen — to act as a surrogate mother. It’s not out of the question at all. As MIT Technology Review’s Susan Young points out, scientists cloned an extinct subspecies of ibex in 2009. It died immediately, sure. But they still cloned it. What would that entail? According to a 2008 study of a Neanderthal infant skeleton (from which the above image is taken), “the head of the Neanderthal newborn was somewhat longer than that of a human newborn because of its relatively robust face,” and Neanderthal women generally had a wider birth canal than human women.
On Thursday, two local women, who we’ll call Samantha and Sarah, expressed concern with the statue and called its presence “disrespectful” to the departed whose final resting places are located in the vicinity of where the porcelain folk figure – or Santa Muerte as it’s more commonly referred to in the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere – was placed. The statue depicts Death atop a crushed pile of skulls, cloaked in black and wielding a bronze globe in its left hand and a scythe in its right. Two incense sticks were found inside the sculpture, one within the globe that was visible through a gaping hole and another inside the base, which appeared to have been broken to gain access. It’s also accompanied by a bronze owl perched near the base and a tag tied to the scythe that displays a crowned Winged Death dangling a heart from a string.
Have you ever wanted to show a list of the entire download history of a Mac? Maybe you know you downloaded a file but you can’t quite pinpoint where you got it from and the “Get Info” trick didn’t work. Or maybe you are trying to track down a file that has been placed on a system that led to problems. Whether it’s for troubleshooting, personal interest, or forensics, the following command will show you everything that you’ve downloaded to a Mac regardless of the application that it came from
Brain scans could soon be used to detect whether or not people are racist, scientists say. Researchers found that brain scans were able to pick up on differences in the way that people with implicit negative racial attitudes viewed black and white faces. Racial stereotypes have previously been shown to have subtle and unintended consequences on how we treat members of different race groups.
On Friday, police found Michele’s corpse with four other bodies dumped outside a kindergarten school. Fighting back tears, Deborah Ngoh Tonye described what was left of her sister’s gruesome corpse. Someone had removed Michele’s genitals, tongue, eyes, hair, and breasts. Michele’s bizarre murder is believed to be part of a wave of killings linked to occult rituals that has triggered panic in Yaounde, the capital city of more than 2 million people in the West African nation of Cameroon. In the past two weeks police have found 18 bodies dumped along the streets. Authorities said all of the bodies had been mutilated. Officials have not said if the female victims among the 18 bodies had been raped.
Check out the band of snow being generated by the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant near Shippingport. Up to an inch of snow has fallen as a result of the steam billowing from the stacks.
Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say. The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks. Aylin Caliskan Islam (left); Sadia Afroz (right) Aylin Caliskan Islam (left); Sadia Afroz (right) “If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them,” researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany. “Function words are very specific to the writer. Even if you are writing a thesis, you’ll probably use the same function words in chat messages. “Even if your text is not clean, your writing style can give you away.” The analysis techniques could also reveal botnet owners, malware tool authors and provide insight into the size and scope of underground markets, making the research appealing to law enforcement.
Bas Lansdorp, the 35-year-old founder of Mars One, told FoxNews.com his company is serious about a one-way mission. The company will hold a worldwide lottery next year to select 40 people for a training team. They will then set up a mock colony in the desert, possibly somewhere in the U.S., for three months. This initial team will be reduced to ten crew members. They will then be sent to Mars, never again to return.
Using the mouth, lips, tongue and voice to generate sounds that one might never expect to come from the human body is the specialty of the artists known as beatboxers. Now scientists have used scanners to peer into a beatboxer as he performed his craft to reveal the secrets of this mysterious art.
A farmer who was arrested last month expressed his displeasure Thursday afternoon in Newport by driving a heavy tractor over seven police vehicles owned by the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department, authorities said. State police estimated the damage at about $250,000. No one was hurt.
Marsh then had Carter “exit the patrol unit, placed him into handcuffs, searched him a second time then placed him into the back seat of the patrol unit.” Jonesboro Police Sergeant Lyle Waterworth told WREG that Carter had been “handcuffed behind his back and double locked, and searched.” At that point, Officer Keith Baggett believed a passing car ran over a piece of metal in the road because he heard “a loud thump with a metallic sound.” Baggett said he then heard “several thumps” after Marsh released the two other suspects. Marsh motioned Baggett over to the patrol car and said the 21-year-old had shot himself. When the officers opened the patrol car door, they found Carter in a “sitting position slumped forward with his head in his lap.” The report indicated that Carter was still handcuffed and a small caliber handgun was sitting beside him.
Iran on Wednesday denied reports that its nuclear program’s systems had been hit with a new cyber virus which shut down computer functions at two facilities – and played music by AC/DC at loud volume. “Who seriously believes such a story? It is baseless and there has never been such a thing,” Chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), Fereydoun Abbasi, told ISNA news agency.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he did not favour a tough punishment in the trial of an all-girl punk band which performed a song against his rule in Moscow’s biggest church. “There is nothing good in what they did,” news agencies quoted Putin as saying about the three Pussy Riot members. “Nevertheless, I do not think that they should be judged too severely for this.” Putin’s first comments on a case that has split Russian opinion and drawn concern from both global music stars and Western states suggests a lenient ruling in the ongoing trial of the three 20-something part-time musicians. The band — its members dressed in tight neon dresses and knitted balaclavas — in February performed a “punk prayer” in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral that included lyrics condemning the Church’s open support for the state.
Facebook has more than 83 million fake profiles, including millions created for users’ pets and a large number of accounts the company deems “undesirable”, it has admitted. The figure emerged in Facebook’s first quarterly report to US financial regulators since the world’s biggest social network made its much-criticised stock market debut in May. In a return published this week, the company said 8.7% of its 955 million global users are not real.
Fifty police officers across the UK have been arrested as part of a crackdown on suspected paedophiles who pay to access child pornography websites, detectives revealed today. The officers were among 1,300 people arrested on suspicion of accessing or downloading indecent images of children – some as young as five – from US-based Internet sites.
THE kids these days play their music too loud and it all sounds the same. Old fogies familiar with such sentiments will be happy to hear that maths bears them out. An analysis published in Scientific Reports by Joan Serrà of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona and his colleagues has found that music has indeed become both more homogeneous and louder over the decades.
As examples they use Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik, who used myspace instead of facebook (or as they put it, “largely invisible on the web”, haha @ myspace), and the newer Aurora shooter who used adultfriendfinder instead of facebook. So being social on any other website isn’t good enough, it has to be specifically facebook that people are using. While it is already established that sites like facebook and google+ are no good for political activists, abuse survivors, and people in the witness protection program; abuse survivors will have to take a back seat while more and more insane articles like this come out. There seems to be an insanity bubble around older people which has arrived after the initial facebook boom that brought in the youth, where they see facebook as a necessary utility; instead of a trendy website that will have passed in a few years.
Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentally threatening our freedom on the open road. You may have seen the recent New York Times op-ed that admonished us to start referring to our mobile devices as “trackers” instead of “phones.” Perhaps as ALPR technology spreads we should start saying “tracker” in place of “car,” too. We need statutory protections to limit the collection, retention, and sharing of our travel information. And we need to find out more about this technology.
A start-up company said it’s leaving Facebook because 80% of its ad clicks are coming from bots. Musician site Limited Run said Facebook also won’t let it change its Pages name unless it commits to buy $2,000 in advertsing on the social network per month. Limited Run said it plans to delete its Facebook page because only 20% of the ad clicks it gets come from Facebook users. The rest come from bots, or web robots, which are software programs that run automated tasks quickly. The company, which goes by its Limited Pressing on Facebook, said it used six analytic services and its own analysis to find out discovered that bots make most of the ad clicks. “Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things,” the company said in a note. “Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site.”
Eyewitness News learned, tips from the public helped investigators identify the suspect Tuesday night. Then on Wednesday morning, detectives tracked down and arrested the suspect at a deli at the corner of Farragut and Chestnut Streets. Sources say the suspect is a black male who turned 13-years-old just two months ago. We are told he has been arrested twice before for robbery-related offenses. On Tuesday, police told Eyewitness News the gun-toting suspect had victimized five people in less than 24 hours. But that was not the most shocking part of this crime spree. What had everyone talking is how young the suspect looked. “About 12 years old? Quite young. Very young.”
Her face etched with pain, a child trains for Olympic glory while her gymnastics trainer stands on her legs. The cartoon space rockets and animal astronauts on her tiny red leotard are a stark and powerful reminder of this little girl’s tender age as she trains as hard as any adult athlete in the Western world. Nanning Gymnasium in Nanning, China, is one of many ruthless training camps across the country to which parents send their children to learn how to be champions.
Brown, 57, lived alone in the Whispering Pines mobile home park in Largo, a professional puppeteer with a soft, Southern-accented voice and thick eyeglasses. He often served pizza to kids in the neighborhood, then drove them to services at Gulf Coast Church, where he was an active congregant. But there was another side to Brown, according to a 29-page criminal complaint filed July 20 in federal court in Tampa: The man who, as he was feeding pizza to teenagers, nursed fantasies of murdering and eating them. The one who acted out Bible stories with puppets at his church, while musing online about carving and cooking the body parts of a young parishioner for Easter. “I imagine him wiggling and then going still,” Brown told an associate in an Internet chat session, describing his plot to kill and cannibalize a boy at Gulf Coast Church, according to the criminal complaint.
Most people have heard some variation of the saying “never bring a knife to a gunfight.” But the Chinese government seems to have taken that to a heated extreme. This video shows three soldiers using a powerful flamethrower to douse a tree reportedly filled with wasps:
The woman told police she was standing next to the bar at Shooters Grill and Bar, 1801 13th St., about 11:45 p.m. Saturday when a man — later identified as Timothy Paez, 22 — came up behind her and put his arm around her. The woman turned around and said, “Um, really?,” and Paez took his arm off her, according to the report.. According to police, a few seconds later, the woman said she felt some sort of liquid hitting her leg. She initially thought Paez was spilling his beer on her, but when she turned around she told police she saw Paez with his penis exposed urinating on her leg and the front of the bar. Thanks Jasmine
Sunday police arrested 15-year-old Trevon Isaac after his 59-year-old grandmother called 911 and said Isaac had raped her in her sleep. Court documents state the boy’s grandmother said when she woke up Thursday morning “her privates were hurting and she noticed her panties were missing.” She later found them “under her bed and they had been cut.” The woman told police she ”takes medications at night for medical reason and the medications put her to sleep.” The next night she told police she slept on the couch and the woke up to “Isaac thrusting against her” and that he ran into the bathroom yelling “I just touched you.” The woman later called 911 and her son. Her son picked up Isaac and also called police. The victim’s son said Isaac told him, “I cut her panties off while she was in bed” and “I had sex with grandma.” Court records state he also said that he “had sex with grandma on the couch.”
Jonah Falcon was stopped and frisked by the TSA at the San Francisco International Airport on July 9 because of a bulging package hidden in his pants. But the 41-year-old New Yorker wasn’t packing a dirty bomb, drugs or a Costco-sized tube of toothpaste. The New Yorker has the world’s largest recorded penis. In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post, Falcon described his hard times with security guards after his extra carry-on became suspect. “I had my ‘stuff’ strapped to the left. I wasn’t erect at the time,” said Falcon, whose penis is 9 inches flaccid, 13.5 inches erect. “One of the guards asked if my pockets were empty and I said, ‘Yes.’” Falcon said he knew that his interview was about to get a lot more personal when he was led through one of the X-ray body scanners and passed a metal detector. “Another guard stopped me and asked me if I had some sort of growth,” Falcon said, laughing. Indeed he did have a growth.
The Burger King employee involved in the disturbing picture showing someone standing with shoes on a container of shredded lettuce was fired by the owner of the local franchise, the company said in a statement to Fox8.com. Many details of the picture that was posted on 4chan.org, a social networking website, remain unclear, but the anonymous user reportedly posted the picture along with a comment that said, “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.” According to a HyperVocal.com report, an aggravated 4chan user tracked the image’s geo-tagging to locate the employee. The photo was tagged back to Ohio. A Burger King spokeswoman would not confirm the precise location the picture was taken.
A Brooklyn woman pleaded guilty to her role in a fraud ring that embezzled $57 million from a group that helps compensate victims of Nazi persecution. Zlata Blavatnik, a former clerk for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, faces up to 40 years in prison after admitting to her role in the conspiracy that approved nearly 5,000 fraudulent applications in exchange for kickbacks. The 64-year-old pleaded guilty Tuesday.
Shying away from certain questions, Calitz, who claimed she was raped by her captors, said more would be revealed in a book they were planning to write about their ordeal. In their almost two years in Mogadishu, Somalia’s largest city, the couple said they were moved – blindfolded – about 17 times. Calitz said she bore no grudges: “They were young enough to be my children, I can’t hate them. They don’t know any different.” Pelizzari said some pirates appeared to be friendly, but they had a rule not to speak to the hostages for more than a minute at a time. “Some were ruthless, but others would sneak us a banana or something now and again,” he said. “I don’t know if it was part of their plan.” The couple said their only link to the world – and a source of entertainment – was the oil-drenched newspaper wrapping their meals. “We’d read whatever news we could find and do the cryptic crosswords in our heads,” he said.
The fast food chain Chick-fil-A has long been suspected of having an anti-gay agenda, and this week, the company’s COO has decidedly come out on the side of the ‘biblical definition of the family unit.’ Dan Cathy, the president of the multimillion-dollar empire said in an interview with the conservative paper Baptist Press that his company is ‘very much supportive of the family,’ but only when it involves heterosexual couples. ‘Well, guilty as charged,’ Cathy responded when asked about Chick-fil-A’s backing of ‘traditional’ families with a husband and wife.
Eight months ago, Robert Downs, 51, set up a small structure in the woods near the Tujunga Ponds Wildlife Sanctuary in Sunland, Calif. To hide his home from police, Downs, who was previously homeless, sprayed it with camouflage paint and cut down nearby trees, said Johnie Jones, a deputy in the Parks Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The structure, which Downs built with materials he bought at Home Depot, contained four bunk beds built into the walls, tables, shelves and fire extinguishers. Outside were a rock patio, a barbecue grill and more tables. An American flag was draped over Downs’ bed. Downs stood a chance of evading major legal trouble for his hidden house, but sheriff’s deputies also discovered that he cultivated eight marijuana plants outside the structure, a felony because he did not have a permit to do so, Jones said.
It first became apparent to my parents that something was wrong when I was four or five months old. I began chewing on my tongue while teething. They took me to a paediatrician where I underwent a series of tests. At first they put a cigarette lighter underneath my foot and waited for my skin to blister. Once they saw that I had no response to that then they began running needles up and down my spine. And since I had no response to either of those tests they came to the conclusion that I had what I have – congenital analgesia. By which point, I had chewed off about a quarter of my tongue through teething.
The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.
Shares in Facebook continued to slide on Tuesday, after an analyst claimed the dominant social network had seen a modest drop in its userbase. Capstone Investment’s Rory Maher said Mark Zuckerberg’s company suffered a 1.1 per cent fall in US users over the last six months. The number of European Facebookers had also declined, he added. Meanwhile, Facebook’s stock hit a month-long low yesterday finishing the day at $28.09 on Nasdaq, after falling some 8 per cent at the start of the week.
Modern social scientists, who are little more than unscientific socialists, variously view racism as a cancer, a sin, an aberration, and a mental illness rather than a natural and ubiquitous phenomenon. Ignoring the fact that every culture throughout human history has been ethnocentric, they frame racism as an exclusive product of white supremacy, European colonialism, and predatory palefaced capitalism. They also shellac it with a thick gloppy glaze of moralistic condemnation, depicting it as the worst and most destructive of all possible human instincts. The psychological establishment is well on its way to depicting “sociobiological” as personality disorders rather than natural drives toward self-preservation, which in a bygone era were seen as the epitome of mental health.
However, the error message sounded as if Facebook was analyzing the contents of the message and deciding what was relevant or not, which would go beyond traditional anti-spam measures and veer into censorship territory. “Wow, does Facebook do sentiment analysis on comments and keeps you from posting negative comments?” Scoble asked on his Facebook page. Facebook’s Error Message Scoble’s “This Comment Can’t Be Posted” pop-up message stated the following: “This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.” There was an “Okay” button to close the error message.
At the time of this report, Facebook “likes” such as “incest” and PTHC (preteen hardcore pornography) were still available in the website’s search engine. One open group with 145 members, “Incest,” offered the following description of the crowd: “all mom dad sister bro aunt f–kers.” A Facebook user by the name “Bizzy Bones” declared: “I masturbated with my cousin once. She was 15. I was 14.” Several visitors to the page liked the listing and one eagerly asked, “How was ur experience?” Another page under the title “Incest” had 1,527 likes. A fourth had 12,311 likes. A fifth had 2,376 likes. Two more had 403 likes. Meanwhile, WND recently reported 34 more links to the FBI depicting images and videos of child sex abuse in a period of only a few days. As part of a two-month undercover news investigation, WND used alias Facebook profiles and located dozens of child-porn images after “friending” many likely pedophiles and predators who trade thousands of pornographic photos
With that being said, there is a part of me that believes that Lady Gaga isn’t sincere with her antics and is just doing so because she needs a gimmick to separate herself from the rest of the group. With Prince and Madonna, they weren’t acting crazy because they were trying to be different, they were just extravagant figures who have very unique views on many things so they expressed it in their attire and music. I am pretty sure that they probably look back at it now and figure how crazy they were back then, but at least that is who they were. With Lady Gaga I do not get that same type of vibe as I believe she is just putting on a show rather than really expressing herself. She knows that her antics is what sales records and draws in more twitter followers so she does whatever it takes. That does not make her unique, which just makes her a figure seeking attention. In other words, she comes across as fake to me which really takes away from her appeal.
Human skin takes on the colour of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about 5500 square centimetres. After being mashed up to remove moisture, some is destined to protect burn victims from life-threatening bacterial infections or, once further refined, for breast reconstructions after cancer. The use of human tissue “has really revolutionised what we can do in breast reconstruction surgery”, explains Dr Ron Israeli, a New York plastic surgeon. “Since we started using it in about 2005, it’s really become a standard technique.” A significant number of recovered tissues are transformed into products whose shelf names give little clue to their actual origin. They are used in the dental and beauty industries, for everything from plumping up lips to smoothing out wrinkles.
The security of high-end handcuffs depends on a detainee not having access to certain small, precisely-shaped objects. In the age of easy 3D printing and other DIY innovations, that assumption may no longer apply. In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.
The mysterious disc-shaped object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea could be a relic from a giant World War II device placed there by the Nazis to disrupt Soviet submarine navigation. The object may be the concrete anchor of the device, which also had to be fitted with stainless steel mesh, Swedish naval officer and warfare history expert Anders Autellus told Swedish newspaper Expressen. It would interfere with submarine radar signals and make them crash. The mesh itself may well have eroded away over the decades, but the images of the object made by the Ocean X team exploring it show what appear to be holes, where it was attached to the foundation, he added.
In the foreclosure-battered inland stretches of California, local government officials desperate for change are weighing a controversial but inventive way to fix troubled mortgages: Condemn them. Officials from San Bernardino County and two of its cities have formed a local agency to consider the plan. But investors who stand to lose money on their mortgage investments have been quick to register their displeasure.
It’s relevant to understand that these children have inherited extra genes—that of TWO women and one man—and will be able to pass this extra set of genetic traits to their own offspring. One of the most shocking considerations here is that this was done—repeatedly—even though no one knows what the ramifications of having the genetic traits of three parents might be for the individual, or for their subsequent offspring. Based on what I’ve learned about the genetic engineering of plants, I’m inclined to say the ramifications could potentially be vast, dire, and completely unexpected. As a general, broad-strokes rule, it seems few scientists fond of gene-tinkering have a well-rounded or holistic view of living organisms, opting instead to view the human body as a machine. And as demonstrated with the multi-varied problems that have arisen from genetically engineered foods—from the development of superweeds and superpests, to the creation of a never-before-seen organism
A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday. In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.
On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5″ on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them. As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead. They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.
NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake is backing the EFF’s lawsuit over the government’s massive spying program. Drake also had a lot to say about the establishment of a ‘surveillance society’ in America. In a video interview, he said it was ‘soft tyranny. It raises the specter of you’re automatically suspicious until we prove that you’re not. It raises the specter of a universal wiretap, a persistent universal wiretap on every single person, or if not, they can create one.’
Currently, large doses of chemotherapy are required when treating certain forms of cancer, resulting in toxic side effects. The chemicals enter the body and work to destroy or shrink the tumor, but also harm vital organs and drastically affect bodily functions. Now, University of Missouri scientists have found a more efficient way of targeting prostate tumors by using gold nanoparticles and a compound found in tea leaves. This new treatment would require doses that are thousands of times smaller than chemotherapy and do not travel through the body inflicting damage to healthy areas. The study is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lake County, Florida sheriff’s deputies who failed to identify themselves when knocking on a man’s door at 1:30AM at night immediately shot and killed the homeowner after he allegedly opened his door with a gun in hand. The man who was murdered, 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott, was described by neighbors as a good person and “very nice guy.” The deputies realized later they got the wrong house, but for good measure they searched the man’s apartment and found drugs, which apparently justifies their murdering him randomly. The police are entirely unapologetic. Lt. John Herrell said of the incident, “The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police office, you’re going to get shot.” For police who refuse to identify themselves to point their guns at you is A-OK, yet for you to do the same in self-defense is grounds for summary execution.
What makes this new legislation shocking is that we have seen the US government repeatedly use the “State Secrets” and the “National InSecurity card to suspend the Constitution at will to commit a wide variety of heinous activities from torture and indefinite detention without trial to outright forced drugging of prisoners and even repeated assassination by the government, of people including US citizens, which is now being done on the direction of the United States’ first even assassination czar. Keeping that in mind the fact that lawmakers are now trying to go after reporters that “publish government secrets” unequivocally amounts to an outright ban of any and all reporting on government corruption PERIOD because at the end of the day the corrupt and illegal activities conducted by government officials are done in secret in the first place.
Five years ago a composer created music for use in a one-off anti-piracy video. However, without his permission it was used time and again on dozens of commercial DVDs such as Harry Potter. Even in the wake of a huge controversy over “corrupt” and “mafia-like” practices, the local music rights group that got involved in the case failed to pay him the money he was owed. The case went to court and this week the music rights group lost.
Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls. The study, published online July 6 in the journal Sex Roles, also identified factors that protect girls from objectifying themselves.
Two Harvard engineers are planning to spray thousands of tonnes of sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth. David Keith, one of the investigators, has argued that solar geoengineering could be an inexpensive method to slow down global warming, but other scientists warn that it could have unpredictable, disastrous consequences for the Earth’s weather systems and food supplies. Environmental groups fear that the push to make geoengineering a “plan B” for climate change will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
Ian: It’s getting fairly high right now. Cameraman: What is it now? Ian: It’s 5! Man: It’s 60… 80… This is impossible! It’s 100!! It’s 300! Hiroshi: It just hit 500! Ian: Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Man: This is not good. (Camera cuts to black; Unidentified screams) Man: Oh my god. Cameraman: I think we’re in trouble. That was bizarre. I felt it as well.
“What really frightens me is not just the disastrous nature of Citizens United, but the whole trend that we are seeing lately, economically, of moving this country toward an oligarchic form of government,” he said. “What you have right now is incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income… the Walton family of Walmart itself owns more wealth — one family — than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.” “You’ve got that reality out there, and then what’s happening now — what Citizens United is about — is these guys are not content to own the economy, to own the wealth of America, they now want to own lock, stock and barrel the political process as well.” The DISCLOSE Act would have required outside campaign groups to disclose those who contribute $10,000 or more. But it failed to move forward on Tuesday after Senate Republicans unanimously voted against it.
More than 40 poles have been bent, buckled or broken in the past 18 months in one area of south Auckland, New Zealand, it is claimed. The signs, bearing legally required notices such as parking restrictions, are thought to have cost ratepayers thousands of dollars to replace. “Prostitutes use these street sign poles as dancing poles,” said Donna Lee, an elected member of the city council’s Otara-Papatoetoe Local Board. “The poles are part of their soliciting equipment and they often snap them. “Some of the prostitutes are big, strong people.”
People left the “massive house party” and went about two miles to the Walmart, where more shots were fired about 11:20 p.m., according to a second police report. Men and women, most appearing to be teens on the YouTube video, threw produce around as they crowded into the store. The three-minute video shows people riding shopping carts and mugging for the camera in what apparently lasted several minutes. Gee said snacks and sodas were stolen, but no one was hurt and damage was minimal. A store security scanner also was damaged as everybody fled, the police report said. No identifiable Walmart employees are seen during the video. The gunshots were fired into the air outside the store, but no cars or people were hit, the report said. Flash mobs are usually a group of people who dance or sing together in a public place, captured on social media. But so-called “flash robs” like this one are a recent phenomena.
A horrifying video of a woman being pounced upon by roughly twenty men after she left a bar in India has caused international outrage. In it, the woman is seemingly stripped, molested, and even burned with cigarettes as she screams for help for roughly thirty minutes, to no avail. Thanks Jasmine
Police in remote Papua New Guinea have arrested members of an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises, a report said Friday. The 29 people were part of a 1,000-strong group formed to combat errant sorcerers who The National newspaper said had begun charging exorbitant fees. The cost of a witch doctor revealing a cause of death or casting out an evil spirit was usually 1000 kina ($472) cash, plus a pig and a bag of rice, but some were also demanding sex as payment. “It’s against our traditional ethics and morals for a sorcerer to have intercourse with a man’s wife or teenage daughter,” said one local cult leader in the Tangi area, inland from Madang province on PNG’s northeast coast.
“I make a point of staying right at the edge of poverty. I don’t have a pair of pants without a hole in them, and the only pair of boots I have are on my feet. I don’t mess around with unnecessary stuff, so I don’t need much money. I believe it’s meant to be that way. There’s a ‘struggle’ you have to go through, and if you make a lot of money it doesn’t make the ‘struggle’ go away. It just makes it more complicated. If you keep poor, the struggle is simple. “ ~Von Dutch
They are surely the most horrifying offshoot of modern technology – nuclear warheads which can smite hundreds of thousands of people dead within seconds, and leave lasting scars on a landscape for generations. And while most of us will have seen archive footage of nuclear explosions before, one thing we are unlikely to have heard is their sound. For, according to one expert, most films we see of a nuclear blast use stock ‘explosion’ sound effects for the bang – and audio footage is few and far between. But Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, has shared a unigue video of a blast during America’s testing of nukes in the Yucca Mountain area of Nevada during the 1950s.
No longer is it enough for Washington to simply use, cooperate with, or listen to private communications. Now the president claims the authority to order all of it seized– as in nationalized under federal control. In a sense, however, this sweeping new order is only somewhat unprecedented, at least in the Bush-Obama era of executive power. Potential seizure of communications infrastructure simply folds into a laundry list of resources that Obama declared authority to seize and manage in another recent Executive Order:
Police in Papua New Guinea have unearthed a ‘cannibal cult’ in the jungle thought to be responsible for the murders of seven suspected witch doctors. The 29 cult members allegedly ate their victims’ brains raw and made soup from their penises, according to police officials. Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie said: “They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong; they admit what they’ve done openly.” Wagambie said the suspected killers believed their victims practiced “sanguma”, or sorcery, and had allegedly been extorting money and demanding sex from poverty-stricken villagers for supernatural services. The cult members are thought to have eaten the witch doctors’ organs in the belief that they would attain supernatural powers and become ‘bulletproof’.
Dr. Twana Sparks, an ENT (Ears, Nose and Throat) surgeon, had just finished doing a tympanoplasty with mastoidectomy, a surgical procedure to correct a middle ear problem. The patient was a middle-thirties Hispanic man who lay stretched out before her on the operating table, still under anesthesia. After applying a dressing to the surgical site, Dr. Sparks, who was also the hospital chief of staff, reached inside the patient’s boxer shorts without wearing gloves, fished out his penis and pointed it at the ceiling. She observed fluid filled vesicles on the side of the shaft, indicating a sexually transmitted disease, and shouted “Oh Gross!” She then slapped the head of his penis three times, saying “Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy!” with each strike, as her all female operating team erupted in laughter.
In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated widespread incidents of power thefts in Puerto Rico believed to be related to smart meter deployment. The FBI believed that former employees of the meter manufacturer and employees of the utility company were tampering with the meters charging between $300 to $1,000 to reprogram residential meters and $3,000 to reprogram commercial meters. The perpetrators were said to have hacked into the smart meters using an optical converter device connected to a laptop, allowing smart meters to connect with the computer. The hackers were able to change the settings for recording power consumptions using software available on the internet after making a connection. This method does not require the removal, alteration or disassembly of the meter.
No music fan in his or her right mind would pull the plug on the legendary Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney, but that’s exactly what London police did late Saturday night. Springsteen was at the tail end of a three-hour long performance in London’s Hyde Park when he brought the ex-Beatle onto the stage to do a couple of songs together. The pair went beyond the park’s 10:30 p.m. curfew by about half an hour, prompting police to cut off the juice.
Jacqueline established The Snuggery because she believes in the healing power of touch. The Snuggery is a place to take a break from the hustle and bustle of life and focus on the simple restorative pleasure of touch. Though science has unquestionably supported the psychological and physical benefits of non-sexual touch, Americans distinctly lack it. It’s time for change. At The Snuggery, Jacqueline provides individuals with private snuggling sessions. She aims to make the world a gentler place, one snuggle at a time.
16 escape stories with only one that makes sense The blind Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng has finally “escaped” the “brutal” treatment of the Chinese “regime” and landed in the “free” world. The world – in particular the American media – called this a human rights win for America.
Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.
Let’s face it, you need a new way to stash your goods. Allow me to introduce you to your favorite new toy… your brand new, never-before-seen, concert-going, downtown-clubbing, music-festival-loving, wallet-replacing iStash.
Beaver and two other friends buy shirts with monsters on the front, each more gruesome than the next. Beaver is the only one who tricks his parents and wears his new sweatshirt to school. However, the principal doesn’t like it and an angry Ward comes to pick up Beaver.
Shuffling along the road, holding tightly onto her grandmother’s hand, every step three-year-old Yu Yu takes is painful. The toddler suffers from an undiagnosed condition which causes her feet to grow at an alarmingly rapid rate. The youngster is forced to walk barefoot as her poverty-stricken family are unable to afford shoes big enough for her. Yu Yu’s feet are constantly swollen and heavy, making moving around extremely difficult.
The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.
B.C.’s top health official says taking pure ecstasy can be “safe” when consumed responsibly by adults, but he says he is not advocating legalized recreational use of the drug. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall says while the pure form of the drug has been proven safe in controlled clinical trials by psychiatrists, the type of ecstasy sold on the street is laced with potentially dangerous impurities.
Next week, the U.S. Senate will begin floor debate on the 2012 Farm Bill, which lays the groundwork for nearly $1 trillion in U.S. government spending over the next decade. Most of that spending goes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP — still sometimes referred to as food stamps), and to subsidies and incentives for farmers. Efforts to restrict SNAP spending to healthier foods have been fought bitterly, and successfully, by the junk food lobbies. Meanwhile, the current Senate proposal would give tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to Big Agribusiness, but would give next to nothing to programs benefiting the environment, organic food, nutrition, or small farmers. The food blog Civil Eats calls the proposal an “all-you-can-eat-buffet for the subsidy lobby.”
A man and woman who were critically burned in an explosion in Livermore were arrested Thursday on suspicion of murdering a third person who died in the blast, after authorities determined the three had been making hashish oil in an apartment. The explosion occurred on May 21, 2011 at 3624 Silver Oaks Way. It killed Paul Lom, 35, of San Jose, while critically injuring Lexie Miriyah Hutson, 23, who lived in the unventilated apartment, and her boyfriend, Evan Aviles, 22. An investigation determined that all three had been making hashish oil, a controlled substance, said police Sgt. John Hurd. The group had been using liquid butane, which is highly flammable, to extract the oil, Hurd said, and allowed an unknown amount of butane to pool on the floor. Hutson and Aviles were each booked Thursday on suspicion of murder and manufacturing a controlled substance. Both lost parts of their fingers and were severely burned as a result of the explosion, which left the structure uninhabitable.
SELLERSVILLE, Pa. – The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office is now investigating Saturday’s shooting of a 26-year-old man during a confrontation with Perkasie police. Michael Marino was shot to death by an officer after he started acting strangely, cursing out neighbors and struggling violently with police. Friends and family claim Marino was unarmed and handcuffed at the time. The district attorney won’t comment further. Neighbors who saw Marino say they knew something was wrong. The three officers involved in the arrest are on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.
Several weeks back, Israel was rocked by a night of right-wing race-riots targeting African refugees in Tel Aviv. The thuggery was frightening – refugees were attacked, African-owned businesses and stores were vandalized and a community was forced to hunker down behind closed doors in fear for their lives. Perhaps more disturbing still was that the riots, which began with an anti-immigrant demonstration, were incited by Israeli politicians representing the increasingly influential hard-right. They fired up the crowd, calling the refugees “infiltrators,” and a “cancer,” and accusing them of violence and rape. It was a classic example of “othering” – eliminationist rhetoric that led directly to action by the xenophobic crowd.
The complaint states that West berated and harassed the 8-year-old, third-grade younger brothers on Nov. 15. The parents claim West told the child he “smelled badly, was dirty and that he had bad hygiene,” and took him to see Van Rite. They both told the child to disrobe and take a shower in their presence and while another student was in the nurse’s office, the parents say. “While P.T. objecting to completely disrobing and taking a shower, defendants West and Van Rite forced P.T. to remove his clothing and began violently washing his body with a washcloth, scrubbing him over a large portion of his body, stuck cotton balls in his ears, all while ridiculing and harassing him about being ‘dirty,’” the complaint states. “P.T. was then forced to apply deodorant at the insistence of defendant West and Van Rite, who then told P.T. ‘if you ever come to school dirty again[,] we will strip you buck naked and throw you in the shower and scrub you down.’”
As a dad (and blogger) I’m concerned with the integrity of the news and entertainment my family and I consume every day. Who really produces, owns and airs the shows my kids are glued to every evening and which companies select the stories I read with such loyalty each morning? I’ve always advocated for critical consumption, and what could be more important than an awareness of the sources of our families’ daily info and entertainment diets? And today, most of our media is controlled by one of six companies.
Known as a socialist and feminist organization, the party claims that seated urination is more hygienic for men — the practice decreases the likelihood of puddles and other unwanted residue forming in the stall — in addition to being better for a man’s health by more effectively emptying one’s bladder, The Local reported. But not everyone agrees. “Men scatter urine not so much during the actual urination as during the ‘shaking off’ that follows,” John Gamel, a professor at the University of Louisville, wrote while addressing the issue in 2009. “As a result, forcing men to sit while emptying their bladders will serve little purpose, since no man wants to shake himself off while remaining seated on the toilet.”
Following his May 23 arrest, Godek waived his Miranda rights and told agents that he had been “collecting pictures of teen boys for a very long time” and preferred “boys aged 14 and older,” according to Messineo’s affidavit. Godek admitted that he masturbated to these images, and “sent such pictures” to others via e-mail. With Godek’s consent, agents searched his vehicle (in which he had been living) and located the NAMBLA membership list and “articles about the arrests of NAMBLA members.” Investigators also seized “printed child pornography images,” a digital camera containing illicit images, and an “article about methods of enticing boys into sexual activity.” The FBI affidavit does not detail why Godek was in possession of the membership list, or what, if any, role he has with the secretive organization. NAMBLA claims it is a civil rights group dedicated to ending “the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships.”
Want to see how people will change to fit in? In 1962, groundbreaking social psychologist Solomon Asch teamed up with the television show Candid Camera to demonstrate how quickly a basic social norm (how people stand in an elevator) could be reversed using group conformity. Just imagine all the behaviors and beliefs you could get tricked into following, via the power of social pressure. (The elevator experiment was still effective when replicated in the present day on the University of South Florida campus.)
Exhausted and dangerously dehydrated, Moss was losing control of her body with every step. But she trudged on, pushing herself toward victory. The legs went first. A quarter mile after passing the Sizzler, Moss wobbled, then her knees buckled inward and she telescoped to the ground like a dynamited building. The moment she hit the pavement, her bowels cut loose, emptying against her will. The torrent breached her dainty, light-blue running shorts and moved down her legs, where the hot, acidic fecal matter stung her skin and the putrid stench tattooed the inside of her nostrils.
A USA TODAY investigation, based on court records and interviews with government officials and attorneys, found more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun. Many of them don’t even know they’re innocent. The legal issues underlying their situation are complicated, and are unique to North Carolina. But the bottom line is that each of them went to prison for breaking a law that makes it a federal crime for convicted felons to possess a gun. The problem is that none of them had criminal records serious enough to make them felons under federal law. Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.
You’re giving away what’s valuable about you Right now, users give away valuable information about themselves. Sometimes they get something of real value in return, but most online businesses give away worthless “value” dressed up using gamification techniques. Klout, I’m looking at you. As we see more data breaches and grosser levels of disrespect for user privacy, I suspect the public will start to realize they’re being had. And as they’ve learned they can do in other venues, they’ll take charge. The pieces are out there to create a data brokerage that pays you I fully expect to see services pop up that act as personal-data brokers, giving users a cut of the money made from their personal information — the data users explicitly choose to share, not what is gathered about them sneakily. Again, this business model has long existed, but not in a way that allows individuals to participate in the proceeds.
A jury has awarded a Georgia woman $3 million over her husband’s heart attack, finding that his doctor should have warned the Atlanta cop against strenuous activity like the three-way sex he was having at the time he died, WXIA-TV reports. William Martinez, a 31-year-old Atlanta police officer, collapsed and died while he and a male friend were having sex with a woman who was not his wife at an Atlanta airport motel in 2009.
For the fourth time in the past two years, a Cincinnati man has been arrested for masturbating in public with the aid of a teddy bear, records show. Charles Marshall, 28, was arrested Wednesday evening after employees at a health clinic spotted him pleasuring himself in an alley. Marshall, pictured in the adjacent mug shot, was cited for disorderly conduct. Municipal Court records show that Marshall has already been convicted three times of engaging in public indecency/disorderly conduct with a teddy bear. The misdemeanor counts resulted in short jail sentences and small fines for Marshall. Marshall was first busted in February 2010 when witnesses spotted him engaged “with a teddy bear in mens bathroom” at a public library (which prompted a judge to order him to “stay away all Hamilton Co. public libraries”). He was again arrested in November 2010 and August 2011 for “masturbating w/a stuffed animal (teddy bear)” and “masturbating using a teddy bear in a public place where minors
Babies born by Caesarean section, Dr. Proctor added, start out with different microbiomes, but it is not yet known whether their microbiomes remain different after they mature. In adults, the body carries two to five pounds of bacteria, even though these cells are minuscule — one-tenth to one-hundredth the size of a human cell. The gut, in particular, is stuffed with them. “The gut is not jam-packed with food; it is jam-packed with microbes,” Dr. Proctor said. “Half of your stool is not leftover food. It is microbial biomass.” But bacteria multiply so quickly that they replenish their numbers as fast as they are excreted. The bacteria also help the immune system, Dr. Huttenhower said. The best example is in the vagina, where they secrete chemicals that can kill other bacteria and make the environment slightly acidic, which is unappealing to other microbes.
A hitchhiker, who says he is writing a memoir called Kindness in America and claimed he was victim of a drive-by shooting in Montana, admits he shot himself, according to Montana authorities.
A suburban Chicago couple is behind bars and their five children are in protective custody after two of them were discovered blindfolded and with their limbs bound in the parking lot of a Walmart, police said. Adolfo Gomez, 52, and Deborah Gomez, 43, of Northlake, Illinois, were arrested after police visited the store in Lawrence, Kansas on Wednesday and spotted a 5-year-old boy sitting on the ground beside a large SUV with his hands tied behind his back, his legs bound and a blindfold covering his eyes. A 7-year-old girl was found inside the vehicle, also bound and blindfolded, along with three other children, ages 12, 13 and 15, who were not restrained. Thanks Jasmine
Female customers who shopped at a Sears store in North Hollywood, Calif., over the past three years may have been videotaped in the dressing rooms and restrooms, according to an attorney representing 25 women suing the retail chain. The group is suing Sears and a former maintenance worker who allegedly videotaped them from 2009 to April 2012. Michael Alder, the attorney for the plaintiffs, said an unknown number of female customers were also likely videotaped in the store during that period. “There’s a lot of people who were patrons and don’t have any idea that they’ve been videotaped,” Alder said.
6-year-old Lili of Liuchang village of Qingzhen county city in Guizhou province, the left side of her face covered with black fur, with large and small black spots all over her body. When she was 2 years old, her mother left the family never to return, her father took her to a childcare nursery and disappeared without a trace, and it was kind-hearted distant relative Liu Mingying who brought her back from Guiyang to the village. She has now reached school age and though the school is right in front of her home, attending school is still something unattainable for Lili. Qianzhong Morning News/CFP Lili was born with these black spots, and when she was two years old, her mother could no longer stand this “fur child”, and in her frustration abandoned Lili, never to return. Her father, who had been working long-term in Guiyang brought her to a children’s nursery, and never reappeared.
But where can a digital citizen turn for protection against the powerful? This question lay at the heart of the fight to stop SOPA and PIPA and keep the web open. While I do not have all the answers, the remarkable cooperation we witnessed in defense of an open Internet showed me three things. First, government is flying blind, interfering and regulating without understanding even the basics. Second, we have a rare opportunity to give government marching orders on how to treat the Internet, those who use it and the innovation it supports. And third, we must get to work immediately because our opponents are not giving up.
A Swedish mom has a face that is 50 shades of red ever since police came across a secret sex chamber she set up at an abandoned military bunker near the town of Nordmaling. Last Friday, two fisherman came across the old bunker and discovered what appeared to be either a garden of earthly delights complete with a silk-sheet laden bed, ropes, dildos and leather items — or a crime scene. The fishermen assumed it was a crime scene, according to Sweden’s The Local, especially since a similarly equipped dungeon was discovered in March 2011 in an abandoned farmhouse.
When examined, the doctors found ‘baby cephalopods’ attached to her mouth. These are small pods, covered in a cement-like material to make them stick. Inside the pods is an ‘ejaculatory apparatus’ and sperm – with the apparatus expelling the sperm quite forcefully. After the victim of the ‘attack’ was hospitalised, doctors removed the baby cephalopods from her gums, tongue and cheek. It was only then that the pods were formally identified as ‘squid spermatophores.’ The Center’s paper says: ‘She did not swallow the portion, but spat it out immediately. She complained of a pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity. ‘Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva [gums] were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa. ‘On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.’
Now you see it, now you don’t. A Queens truck driver took a move from the magician’s playbook, making his license plate seemingly disappear as he drove through a toll plaza without paying the $40 fee, the Port Authority said Wednesday. Orlando Payano’s tractor-trailer had a cable running from the license plate to the dashboard cigarette lighter when PA police stopped it recently on the Staten Island side of the Goethals Bridge, authority spokesman Steve Coleman said
Conspiracy of Silence is a powerful, disturbing documentary revealing a U.S. child sex abuse and pedophilia ring that leads to the highest levels of government. Featuring intrepid investigator John DeCamp, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and 16-year Nebraska state senator, Conspiracy of Silence reveals how rogue elements at all levels of government have been involved in systematic child sex abuse and pedophilia to feed the base desires of key politicians. Based on DeCamp’s riveting book, The Franklin Cover-up, Conspiracy of Silence begins with the shut-down of Nebraska’s Franklin Community Federal Credit Union after a raid by federal agencies in 1988 revealed that $40 million was missing. When the Nebraska legislature launched a probe into the affair, what initially looked like a financial swindle soon exploded into a startling tale of drugs, money laundering, and a nationwide child sex abuse ring. Nineteen months later, the legislative committee’s chief investigator died suddenly
US President Barack Obama has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Israeli President Shimon Peres, the man who has overseen the killing of Palestinian women and children by Israeli forces in the occupied territories for decades.
“When you vote, you’re essentially choosing gang members — do you want the Crips to lead or the Bloods?” Ventura says, noting that the Bloods’ colors are red, like the Republicans, and the Crips’ color is blue, like the Democrats.
Every year, thousands of inmates escape from prisons around the world. Of these, most just walk away from minimum-security corrections facilities, but other inmates implement complex, ingenious, and often violent schemes in order to make their getaway. Whether the work of notorious outlaws, WWII G.I.s, or 18th century writers, the following are the top 10 most incredible prison escapes.
The story of the so-called Forest Boy — a riddle that has perplexed people in Germany and elsewhere for months — is a lie, police in Germany said Friday. The 20-year-old hoaxer, who claimed he was 17 and lived in the German woods for five years, is actually from Hengelo, in the Netherlands. He never lived in the forest and made his way to Berlin some time last year, police said. He had been declared missing in September when he was 19. But because he was an adult and could determine where he wanted to live, there was no further investigation by Dutch authorities, police in Germany said. Police say the man has admitted his story is a lie and confirmed his identity. He will have to leave a Berlin city youth home since he is not under age.
The science is real. The story is more than 5,000 years old. The legend says that at a certain place above the Arctic Circle, there exists an oceanic depression or an entrance into the Earth. It’s a place where the maritime legend claims sea level isn’t level anymore. The discovery that the earth is hollow would forever shatter our long-held beliefs about how planets are formed. More importantly, however, discovering life beneath the earth’s crust could potentially provide us with new tools that would allow life on the surface to regain environmental balance, harmony, and possibly even peace. These prospects make the North Pole Inner Earth Expedition the greatest expedition in the history of the world.
The cadavers in question had been kept at 39 degrees F (4 degrees C) to keep from rotting. The stem cells the researchers isolated give rise to skeletal muscle, the kind connected to the bones, as opposed to the kind in the heart or other internal organs. [The Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt & Beyond] Apparently the stem cells were able survive in the total absence of oxygen. “These cells are so resistant to extreme and deleterious conditions that they stay alive up to 17 days after death,” Chrétien said. The researchers also recovered viable stem cellsfrom mice 14 days after death. These cells appeared to function properly after they were transplanted into living mice, helping regenerate damaged tissues.
L.A. NOW Southern California — this just in Los Angeles County officials are investigating what appeared to be a pair of lungs found on a sidewalk in unincorporated South Los Angeles. A citizen called to report what she thought were the organs about 8:30 p.m. Sunday in the 13100 block of Avalon Boulevard, said Sgt. Robert Dean of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies responded and called the coroner’s office to the scene. Additional testing will be done to determine if the remains are in fact lungs and whether they are human, Dean said. “We don’t know what they are,” Dean said. “It’s really weird.”
Three men in Tennessee have notched up a staggering 78 children by 46 different women between them – and are doing their best to squirm out of paying for a single one. Terry Turnage has 23 children with 17 different women, while Richard M. Colbert has 25 children with 18 women. But Desmond Hatchett takes the record with 30 children with 11 women. On rare occasions, they pay a few dollars to the long-suffering mothers but mostly leave the state to pick up the slack – while one eludes his responsibilities altogether thanks to a stint in prison. The latest deadbeat dad to emerge from the state is Turnage, who was summoned before a judge over child support payments for his 23 kids by 17 different women – but didn’t show up to court.
Police in Shelby say they arrested a woman over the weekend after she squeezed a man’s testicles out of his scrotum. Joyce Maxine Gregory, 35, is charged with malicious castration and assault inflicting serious bodily injury, according to Shelby Police Chief Jeff Ledford. Police say Gregory got into an argument with an older man Saturday morning. When he went outside to call 911 she followed him and grabbed his scrotum.
“James Dean is no longer the epitome of cool,” Dar-Nimrod said. “The much darker version of what coolness is still there, but it is not the main focus. The main thing is: Do I like this person? Is this person nice to people, attractive, confident and successful? That’s cool today, at least among young mainstream individuals.”
