`The press, flown in from Baghdad to this agricultural gridiron northeast of Samarra, huddled around the Iraqi officials and U.S. Army commanders who explained that the “largest air assault since 2003” in Iraq using over 50 helicopters to put 1500 Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground had netted 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released. The area, explained the officials, has long been suspected of being used as a base for insurgents operating in and around Samarra, the city north of Baghdad where the bombing of a sacred shrine recently sparked a wave of sectarian violence.
But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. (“Air Assault” is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What’s more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.’
`We invite you to take a virtual tour of our shop. Below, You’ll have a chance to take a peek at what happens behind the scenes. Our state-of-the-art facility is well equiped to bring just about any idea into reality. We pride ourselves in bringing to reality the difficult challenges brought to us by our clients.’
I’ve been watching a lot of Mythbusters lately. It’s good. 🙂
`Police allowed 7kg of cocaine, worth more than $1 million, to be sold on Sydney streets in an undercover operation, but failed to recover nearly all of it.
The Sunday Telegraph says it was revealed in evidence to a Sydney court earlier this month that police had given the cocaine to a dealer to sell, but 6kg of the drug was never recovered.
It says undercover officers watched as the dealer sold the drug to contacts, but it was not until some time later that they made a number of arrests.’
`Researchers at Oregon State University have created the world’s first completely transparent integrated circuit from inorganic compounds, another major step forward for the rapidly evolving field of transparent electronics.
The circuit is a five-stage “ring oscillator,” commonly used in electronics for testing and new technology demonstration. It marks a significant milestone on the path toward functioning transparent electronics applications, which many believe could be a large future industry.’
`Turkeys are going wild on Chestnut Hill residents, forcing walkers to arm themselves with sticks and parents to guard their children at bus stops.
The turkeys have lived in the area behind the Cleveland Circle Cinema and near a Brookline school for years, but recently they have become unmanageable.
“As I was walking faster, they’d walk faster. I heard a sound behind me and then I felt the turkey’s claw on my back. I was lucky that there was a branch right there and I swung it at the turkey,” said neighborhood resident Marianne Lee.’
`The government of Dubai thought it would be a good idea to put a speed bump on a street where locals tended to speed. Problem is they didn’t tell anybody. This Gallardo hit it at over 60 MPH.
There’s actually a video of the accident. The back end of the Gallardo goes about 5 feet off the ground.’
`A runaway train killed seven people and injured at least 11, severing some of their limbs, during the filming of a TV show in Uruguay, police said. [..]
Participants in the programme, called A Challenge to the Heart, raise funds for local charities by completing difficult tasks set by the network – in this case manoeuvring a train a certain distance down railway tracks.
The Associated Press news agency quoted Ana Portela as telling local radio station El Espectador that the train was moving when “somebody slipped and fell under the locomotive, and others were falling alongside it.
“There were shouts and somebody said ‘my arm!'” Ms Portela said.’
`A former employee of Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine told The Epoch Times during a recent interview that the Sujiatun Concentration Camp in China was actually a part of a hospital. The concentration camp has engaged in taking organs from Falun Gong practitioners when they were still alive and selling the organs. Since 2001, the concentration camp has secretly detained approximately 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners, none of whom have been able to leave the camp alive. The hospital removed many kidneys, livers, and corneas from the practitioners. After the organ removal, the practitioners were thrown into an incinerator, which was converted from a boiler. Their ashes were dumped together with burned charcoal.’
`A German hotel has started calculating fees according to the weight of the guest.
The three-star Ostfriesland hotel in the north German town of Norden charges the equivalent of 34p per kilogram.
So a thin man weighing 60 kilos pays just over £20 a night, but a man weighing 100 kilos would be forced to shell out nearly £35.
Owner Juergen Heckroth said: “Slim guests live longer and can therefore come more often and that is why we reward them.”‘
`Hollywood bully Tom Cruise got Comedy Central to cancel Wednesday night’s cablecast of a controversial “South Park” episode about Scientology by warning that he’d refuse to promote “Mission Impossible 3,” insiders say.
Since Paramount is banking on “MI3” to rake in blockbuster profits this summer, and Paramount is owned by Viacom, which also owns Comedy Central, the tactic worked.
The “South Park” episode, “Trapped in the Closet,” pokes fun at Scientology and shows Cruise, John Travolta and R. Kelly (who is not a Scientologist, but has a song called “Trapped in the Closet”) literally in a closet.
The episode, which first aired last November, was set to rerun Wednesday night, but was mysteriously pulled at the last minute.’
‘If you’re going to start out a fight with a flying jump kick, it’s best not to immediately hit the ground and get kicked in the head. Weak karate for the loss!’
(1meg Flash video)
see it here »
`Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.
The discovery — which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation — is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.
It also helps explain how matter eventually clumped together into planets, stars and galaxies in a universe that began as a remarkably smooth, super-hot soup.’
`Bali police have burned the stash of marijuana that sent Schapelle Corby to an Indonesian jail for 20 years.
The drugs were piled up on top of a metal drum in a backyard beside the Denpasar District Court where a distraught Corby was convicted on May 17 last year.
There was little fuss apart from some dizziness among some of the spectators after chief prosecutor I Ketut Arthana, who led the case against the Gold Coast woman, poured petrol on the pile and set it alight.
Watching on were Denpasar Mayor Anak Agung Puspa Yoga and local police chief Hari Dono Sukmanto, as well as a small crowd of journalists, who said they became giddy as pungent smoke wafted over the yard.’
`Medical experts have been baffled by what causes asthma. Most of them favor the idea that it stems from “helper” cells that have gone awry. But researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) have come up with convincing evidence that the answer lies in a special type of natural “killer” cell.
“We were very, very surprised,” admits Dale Umetsu, a professor of pediatrics at the Medical School and at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital in Boston. “People have been confused about which cells in the lungs are responsible for all these years. Now, we have to rethink the results of so many studies. Our new findings were totally unexpected.”‘
A young girl terrified by her own shadow. She’s gonna have to get over it, or live the rest of her life in a dark room. 🙂
see it here »
`Last week, the press reported that Merrill Keiser, a Democratic candidate United States Senate from Ohio, believes that homosexuality should be punishable by death. Kaiser’s opposition for the Democratic nomination is US Rep. Sherrod Brown.
PageOneQ has obtained a portion of an audio interview in which Keiser says that singer/performer Elton John should be put to death and insinuates that the same should happen to Mary Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Richard B. Cheney.’
`Stretching out to the corners of the gymnasium, the indoor roller coaster at Royal Oak Intermediate School appears gargantuan compared to its creators.
Twenty-four feet tall at its highest point and occupying 10,000 square feet, the fully-functional ride towers over the 135 eighth-graders who are its designers, builders and decorators. Students and four teachers have spent thousands of hours measuring, sawing, constructing, painting and decorating the wooden structure over the last three weeks.
They will launch a small, unmanned car on the track at 7 p.m. today.’
`Before cops threw the book at him, Jakub Fik threw something unusual at them — his penis.
Fik, 33, cut off his own penis during a Northwest Side rampage Wednesday morning. When confronted by police, Fik hurled several knives and his severed organ at the officers, police said. Officers stunned him with a Taser and took him into custody.
“We took him out without any serious injury, with the exception of his own,” said Chicago Police Sgt. Edward Dolan of the 16th District.’
`”The physiological effects of tiredness are well-known. You can turn a smart person into an idiot just by overworking him,” notes Peter Capelli, a professor of management at Wharton.
Still, putting in more than 50 hours a week at the office has become routine — and that doesn’t count time spent doing paperwork at home, answering e-mail at the airport, or talking on the phone in the car.
Sooner or later, companies’ performance has to reflect that, Capelli says. “On the organizational level, what you get is, everyone is so focused on running flat-out to meet current goals that the whole company is unable to step back and think.”‘
Accurately titled, if not accurately spelt. Safe for work? Have a guess..
(570kB Windows media)
`Test your pop culture literacy by trying to guess which are the hoax photos (i.e. those that have been manipulated in some way) and which are real.
For each image, click either HOAX or REAL to begin scoring the test. When you’re done, click the box at the bottom of the page to see your score.’
I got 10 out of 10 for the first test, didn’t do the others because I’m lazy. Can’t fool me. 🙂
`We know there are plenty of “secure” flash drives out there, but face it: if someone is really determined to get at your data, they’ll probably figure out a way. That’s where Kingston’s Data Traveler Elite Privacy Edition comes in. The 4GB flash drive encrypts all data with 128-bit AES, and then adds an extra layer of security: a self destruct feature. If anyone tries to use a brute-force attack to guess your password, the drive will automatically erase itself after 25 wrong guesses.’
`It’s almost two in the morning and I’m standing in the middle of Austin’s Sixth Street, hoping that I’m not going to get hit by a car.
On the other hand, I am hoping–as are 15 or so other people standing nearby–that one of the cars that keep rushing by will crush the tricked-out Roomba robot vacuum cleaner that Make Magazine associate editor Phillip Torrone and Eyebeam R&D fellow Limor Fried are sending back and forth across the street and through traffic.
This is Roomba Frogger, a modern, geek version of the famous 1981 video game “Frogger,” in which players had to get a frog across a street without it getting crushed by a car or truck.’
`Want to buy a head? On the American body-part market, the going price is between $500 and $900, plus another $50 if you’d like the brain, too. A torso will set you back as much as $3,000, while a single foot could cost $650.
At these prices, there’s plenty of temptation for people to take advantage of the dead. But as a disturbing new book reveals, the burgeoning trade in human remains is largely unmonitored. Universities, mortuaries and medical companies routinely buy and sell arms, legs and elbows with virtually no oversight.
The inevitable result? Crooked deals, stolen corpses and lots of looking the other way.’
`The human rights scandal now known as “Abu Ghraib” began its journey toward exposure on Jan. 13, 2004, when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories that introduced the world to devastating scenes of torture and suffering inside the decrepit prison in Iraq.
Today Salon presents an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first gathered by the CID, along with information drawn from the CID’s own timeline of the events depicted. As we reported Feb. 16, Salon’s Mark Benjamin recently acquired extensive documentation of the CID investigation — including this photo archive and timeline — from a military source who spent time at Abu Ghraib and who is familiar with the Army probe.’
`Three computer science researchers are warning that viruses embedded in radio tags used to identify and track goods are right around the corner, a danger that so far has been overlooked by the industry’s high interest in the technology.
No viruses targeting radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have been released live yet, according to the researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. But RFID tags have several characteristics that could be engineered to exploit vulnerabilities in middleware and back-end databases, they wrote in a paper presented today at a conference in Pisa, Italy.
“RFID malware is a Pandora’s box that has been gathering dust in the corner of our ‘smart’ warehouses and home,” the paper stated.’
`A 20-year-old man who awoke after a party to find himself covered in syrup and dry oatmeal is facing a criminal charge after authorities say he turned a gun on the man who pulled the prank.
Witnesses told police they were just trying to ”get even” with Travis Maassen of La Crosse for pranks he had pulled in the past few days, according to a criminal complaint.
But Maassen ”freaked out,” emerging from a bedroom Friday with a .22 caliber bolt-action rifle, the complaint said. One man tackled Maassen after having the gun pointed at his head, the complaint said.’
`When a dump truck backed into Curtis Gokey’s car, he decided to sue the city for damages. Only thing is, he was the one driving the dump truck.
But that minor detail didn’t stop Gokey, a Lodi city employee, from filing a $3,600 claim for the December accident, even after admitting the crash was his fault.
After the city denied that claim because Gokey was, in essence, suing himself, he and his wife, Rhonda, decided to file a new claim under her name.’
`Detective Danny Johnson was on patrol outside Tampa, Florida, when a report came through of a possible shooting in a junkyard three blocks away. Arriving on the scene, he found an elderly man sitting on a tractor, with a large hole in his leg that was bleeding profusely.
Realising it would be some time before the ambulance arrived, Johnson opened a packet of sand-like material and poured it into the wound. Within seconds the bleeding had practically stopped, and the man survived. “The medic told me that had I not put the substance in there, the guy would probably have bled out and died,” he says.
The material, called QuikClot, which is issued routinely to police officers in Hillsborough county, Florida, was developed for the US military to cut down the number of soldiers who bleed to death on the battlefield. [..]’
`A Scotrun man, who police say was masturbating in the nude on a sidewalk before leading officers on a high-speed chase Nov. 29 in Pocono and Stroud townships, will head to Monroe County Court.
Eric Wayne, 57, said he “tends to get a little weird” when he and his partner haven’t been intimate, according to an affidavit signed by Pocono Township Police Officer Robert Furino.’
