`Iran, one of two remaining members of President Bush’s “axis of evil,” is gaining strength and confounding U.S. attempts to curb its growing influence, several experts on Iran say.
Higher oil prices and political progress by Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and Lebanon are empowering a country that is developing nuclear technology and supporting groups the United States regards as terrorist. As a result, Iran is better able to cause problems for the United States and its allies. [..]
U.S. actions since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have improved Iran’s strategic position, says Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism chief in the Bush and Clinton administrations.
He says Iran has achieved its goals from the 1980s: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran in 1980; political rights for Iraq’s Shiite majority and free access to Shiite holy sites in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala.’
`Three chimpanzees from a small-town zoo were shot and killed after they escaped from their enclosure and could not be captured, the zoo director said.
The primates at Zoo Nebraska were able to get out of the cage Saturday when a padlock was not completely closed after cleaning, said zoo director Ken Schlueter Jr. He killed the animals with a deputy’s service revolver after a tranquilizer gun didn’t show any effect.’
`A doctor at the McGill University Health Centre has become the first person to treat an infant with Botox because of excessive drooling. Dr. Sam Daniel decided to experiment with the drug when the baby started to drown in his saliva. [..]
Dr. Daniel said the infant suffers from a rare disorder called Charge Syndrome. The child’s parents were distraught because he was drowning in his own saliva and was being kept alive on a ventilator. [..]
“There’s a lot of people that won’t go near him because they’re afraid of the drool. They figure if he’s drooling I’m going to catch something,” Gardner said. After having had two Botox injections, Kevin “went from four bibs a day to one bib a day.”‘
`How can you tell someone you don’t remember a sexual encounter you had with them?
I had a good answer, but I forgot it. What do you need to discuss it for? Are you going to be sitting over tea and biscuits discussing a play by play of your sexual inadequacies? Hell, I hope that you didn’t “forget” to bring a condom or where the clitoris is.
What’s a sexual practice everyone should try once before they die?
Autoerotic asphyxiation. Who knows? It may be the sexual practice you try right before you die.
What’s one most everyone can go their whole lives without?
Scat.
I cheated on a well-liked boyfriend and we broke up. How can I socially recover with our mutual friends?
Sleep with them, and then no one will feel left out.’
`There’s no water for the “wash the girl of your choice” service and there aren’t any girls either, but Big Daddy’s strip club on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street is getting ready to bring back erotic spectacle to the devastated city.
[..] Big Daddy’s general manager, Saint Jones, and a band of helpers defied an evacuation order by arriving to clean up their premises in the historic French Quarter, which escaped largely unscathed from the floods.
[..] Jones, a corpulent man with a strawberry blond beard wearing a black t-shirt reading “I’m smiling because they haven’t found the bodies yet,” foresaw few problems getting strippers.
“It shouldn’t be too hard. Everyone’s going to come back in town and want to work. You know, if you’ve got 50 dancers in Houston and they’re not making money, they’re going to spread out,” he said.’
`September is the beginning of aurora season. Why? It has to do with the sun’s magnetic field near Earth–the so-called interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). When the IMF tips south, it opens a crack in Earth’s magnetic defenses against the solar wind, fueling geomagnetic storms. During the weeks around the autumnal equinox, the IMF tips further south, on average, than it does at any other time of the year–hence aurora season.’
`A bicyclist was charged with manslaughter after he ran through a stop sign and struck and killed a 71-year-old woman, police said Monday.
Jean Calder died at Good Samaritan Hospital after she was struck Friday night as she crossed a street at an unmarked crosswalk, Corvallis police Capt. Ron Noble said.
Christopher A. Lightning, 51, was charged with manslaughter and reckless driving.
“A car and a bicycle are both vehicles and if they are operated in a way that could be criminal, then charges are filed equally in both situations,” Noble said. “He was going right through a stop sign.”‘
`Police say they found Spencer Michael Killette, 21, of 132 S. Columbia St., urinating Friday night in the town parking deck at 150 E. Rosemary St. That was at 11:50 p.m.
Twenty-eight minutes later, Killette was at it again, according to arrest warrants.
“After being cited and released for urinating in public, Mr. Killette walked approximately 50 feet and urinated inside the town parking deck again,” according to the second arrest warrant.’
I dunno about stuff like this. It’s mildly amusing, but is it news? 🙂 Surely reporters have better things to write about. Unfortuntely, I have nothing better to blog about, so there you go. 🙂
`The Mind Molester is an instrument of creative electronic harassment. It is an electronic device that can drive your victims a little crazy trying to figure out what it is and where it’s located. Your friends/enemies will become obsessed, awaiting the next chirp trying to determine its location, completely disrupting their normal activities.
Just connect this device to a 9-volt battery and plant it in an appropriate location. It produces a one-second electronic chirp about once every 3 minutes. Due to the chirp’s duration, frequency, and sound characteristics, it’s a very difficult, time-consuming, frustrating and maddening task to locate the unit. And even if they find it, they’ll have no idea what it is.’
`A Manitoba jail has stopped serving tea because some inmates were using tea bags to make cigarettes. [..]
“The gum is boiled and there’s a nicotine residue that’s removed and dried and then sprinkled on the redried tea bag leaves, and then rolled,” jail superintendent Cathy Sandney said Monday.
Jail officials were surprised inmates would go through the painstaking process to get a smoke, Sandney said, because it can take up to two days to make one cigarette.
The jail stopped serving tea last week, but is looking at offering instant tea – which has no bags.’
`The children were all either adopted or foster children, he said.
Authorities said the kids were kept in wooden cages, less than 3 feet by 3 feet, without pillows or blankets. [..]
Police said no charges had been filed against the parents.
“Basically, the parents thought they were providing for the protection of the children from themselves and from each other,” said Sommers.
“They thought there was circumstances with these children that warranted the cages at night,” Sommers added, but he would not go into details of what those circumstances were.’
`Scientists at the University of Chicago have found that two human genes involved in brain size and development are still evolving — and, they suspect, mutating to make people smarter.
The team is so sure of its hunch that it has patented the genes with plans to develop tests to identify those who carry these potentially brain-boosting traits — which appear to be more prevalent in some populations than others.’
`The time has come to abandon Christianity.’
News presented the way it deserves to be. 🙂
For a change, this is actually SFW. 🙂
More of the hot French news anchor here. [thanks Zuid :)]
The joy in a place that is NSFW.
(3meg .wmv)
A pretty cool animated short about trusted computing.
(various Quicktimes)
`The time-consuming and methodical motion of searching for arrowheads on farmland and in riverbeds seems to appeal to methamphetamine addicts, a sheriff says.
White County Sheriff Pat Garrett said that after more than 100 search warrants, he has come to expect arrowheads, many thousands of years old, when he storms the home of suspected meth makers. [..]
“You get kind of wired on that stuff, and you need to have something to do,” said Mr. Young, who is in the White County jail awaiting trial on methamphetamine charges. [..]
“The strangest things you find out there is other dopeheads,” said Mr. Young, who added that drug dealers and users often trade the arrowheads among themselves.’
‘Ipecac is a fluid that makes you vomit uncontrollably almost right after your drink it. Watch this guy take the ipecac challenge for $200.’
(12meg Windows Media)
When I first saw this Family Guy clip I thought they were exaggerating, but I’ve been proven wrong by reality. 🙂
(5.7meg .mp4)
see it here »
`For the second straight year, a sheep has been stolen from the Natural Resources Trust of Easton, abused, and left inside of a dormitory at Stonehill College.
According to Robert Babineau, executive director of the trust, the sheep was taken Sept. 3, spray-painted in black, dressed in a bra, and placed inside a Stonehill dorm.
”This type of behavior is not consistent with the college’s values nor does it represent the overwhelming number of compassionate students who make up our community,” David DiNapoli, chief of campus police at Stonehill, said in a press release.’
It’s in Russian. But the pictures are in English.
🙂
`Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.’
`If utopia is supposed to be the ideal and perfect place, where everyone lives in harmony, then why do so many of them turn out to suck?’
`As Scott Welch, a partner in a Huntley, Ill., concrete business, shopped for a new vehicle in late August to haul his family on vacation, the price of gas was topping $3 a gallon.
Welch shrugged off the record gas prices and zeroed in on a Chevrolet Suburban, one of the biggest and thirstiest sport-utility vehicles.
Does he really want a Suburban in the face of higher gas prices?
‘‘You probably don’t, but if you’ve got the means, why not?’’ Welch said while shopping at Stasek Chevrolet in Wheeling, Ill.’
Maybe “Retards who don’t give a fuck defy common sense” would be a better title for the story.
`Ang Lee’s tale of the homosexual love between two cowboys set in the conservative West of the 1960s won the Venice Film Festival’s top award Saturday.’
`A new analysis of ‘cool’ spots in the cosmic microwave background may cast new doubts on a key piece of evidence supporting the big bang theory of how the universe was formed.
Two scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) looked for, but couldn’t find, evidence of gravitational “lensing” where you might expect to find it, in the most distant light source in the universe — the cosmic microwave background.’
`This almost missed item in the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire today is simply outrageous. Bush’s failure in Iraq has stretched the military so thin that recruiters are on the verge of taking advantage of the hurricane to basically draft the victims.
In case you don’t subscribe, here’s what the Journal wrote today:
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS: Ten U.S. Army recruiters are offering volunteer help for Katrina vicitms at Houston’s Astrodome. But the recruiters, struggling to keep enlistment up during Iraq war, are also available with options for the jobless. “Our intent is to approach the evacuees at the right time for them,” says Army spokesman Douglas Smith.’
If anyone can find a link to this on a site that doesn’t require registration, can you let me know? I’d like to have a look at the full thing.
`Let’s face it: being a dedicated gamer can be lonely. Sure, you have your Everquest clan or your Quake buddies, but communing with fellow gaming geeks doesn’t fulfill certain…needs. At the same time, it’s hard to tear yourself away from the computer long enough to chase tail and engage in archaic but obligatory mating rituals. Now you don’t have to leave your true love behind. In fact, you and your PC are about to get closer…much, much closer.
We created this case mod to give the truly hard-core gamer an appropriate outlet. Do you love your computer? Really, really love your computer? Now you can satisfy your passion for PCs and your passion for pussy at the same time. How’s that for added functionality?’
`A Pentagon planning document being updated to reflect the doctrine of pre-emption declared by President Bush in 2002 envisions the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies.
The “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,” which was last updated 10 years ago, makes clear that “the decision to employ nuclear weapons at any level requires explicit orders from the president.” [..]
“However, the continuing proliferation of WMD along with the means to deliver them increases the probability that someday a state/nonstate actor nation/terrorist may, through miscaluation or by deliberate choice, use those weapons. In such cases, deterrence, even based on the threat of massive destruction, may fail and the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary.”‘
