moonbuggy

Fun.

Also, Hapland 1 and 2.

`Last week, Federal Parliament passed a law that allows the Government to read private emails, text messages and other stored communications without our knowledge. The power extends to innocent people, called B-parties, if they have been unlucky enough to communicate with someone suspected of a crime or of being a threat to national security.

The Government should sometimes be able to monitor the communications of innocent people. This may be necessary to protect the wider community where a suspect can only be tracked through another person. However, the law goes beyond what can be justified and undermines our privacy more than is needed.

Under the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Act, the Government will be able to access communications not only between the B-party and the suspect, but also between the B-party and anyone else. If you have unwittingly communicated with a suspect (and thereby become a B-party), the Government may be able to monitor all your conversations with family members, friends, work colleagues, your lawyer and your doctor.’

`A youth minister was charged with assault for allegedly knocking a 16-year-old boy down and kicking him in the groin after taking a head shot from the teen in a dodgeball game.

David M. Boudreaux, 27, was charged Wednesday with one count of third-degree assault. According to court documents, the incident happened in February at Crescent Lake Christian Academy.

Authorities said the teen missed Boudreaux with one throw but then knocked the youth minister’s glasses off with the next.

The boy apologized, authorities said, but Boudreaux pushed him backward, and when the teen got up again, Boudreaux kicked him in the groin and left.’

`A hooker who bit her client’s penis reportedly so hard that he required an operation has denied grievous bodily harm with intent, according to a report from the UK.

Prosecutor Matthew McNiff told the jury Louise Jowett carried out the attack because Brett O’Leary told her he had no additional money to dispense after already paying her for sex, reports the Cambridge News.

It was alleged that afterwards she asked O’Leary for more cash, becoming more aggressive as her requests continued. While performing a sex act on O’Leary he told her he did not have any more cash.

McNiff said she grabbed his penis and took it in her mouth and gripped it between her teeth. He said: “She bit hard. She bit very hard. This caused what Mr O’Leary described as indescribable pain.”‘

`At least six men came to western North Carolina, some from as far away as South America, to have their genitals mutilated in what police described Friday as a sadomasochistic “dungeon.”

Three men have been charged with illegal castration in the case, Haywood County Sheriff Tom Alexander and District Attorney Michael Bonfoey said. The sheriff and prosecutor said the victims were willing participants in the procedures. [..]

Michael Mendez, 60, Richard Peter Sciara, 61, and Danny Carroll Reeves, 49, each are charged with castration without malice, maiming without malice and practicing medicine without a license.’

`A rash of oven-door thefts may be linked to a recent case in which a woman bought what she thought was a flat-screen television, only to discover that the package held an old oven door, police said.

South Bend detective Sgt. Jim Walsh said police arrested a suspect Thursday they believe sold the appliance door to the woman. According to police reports, officers found an oven door and packaging materials inside the trunk of the man’s car.

Oven doors are an increasingly hot item in burglaries targeting vacant properties. Walsh said police have investigated five recent burglaries where oven doors were among the items stolen.

Police have had two reports of the doors being sold as flat-screen televisions, and it’s likely that others went unreported by the embarrassed dupes, Walsh said. Officers continue to investigate at least two other suspects who may be disguising oven doors and selling them.’

`Australia and China have signed a nuclear deal allowing Beijing to import Australian uranium for power stations.

The agreement was signed under the gaze of both countries’ prime ministers.

Australia, which has 40% of the world’s known uranium deposits, sells uranium only to members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. [..]

Australia insists that potential uranium buyers must agree to a separate bilateral deal stipulating that they will not divert nuclear fuel into weapons programmes.’

`As if shopping for new flat-panel, high-definition television is not hard enough, Mitsubishi is scheduled to announce this week that it has developed commercial television that uses colored lasers to display bright, deep images on large, thin, lightweight screens — surpassing images seen on film. The television sets, which Mitsubishi is calling the first of their kind, are expected to reach stores sometime late next year.

At the heart of the first generation of this new television is an existing rear-projection technology called digital light processing. In the past, this technology, developed by Texas Instruments, used white-light mercury lamps as the television’s light source. With laser television, separate red, green and blue lasers are used in conjunction with an HDTV chip, said Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi.’

`Jeffrey Doles wants his bongs back.

He owns a store in Gillette, Wyo., called Hip Hop Hippie. Doles has been acquitted of drug paraphernalia charges.

Now, he wants authorities to return about 130 brightly colored pipes and bongs that were confiscated when he was arrested last summer.

But prosecutors said they’ll file a civil lawsuit seeking permission to destroy the items. Doles charges prosecutors are just mad because they didn’t win the criminal case against him.’

`How easy is it for the average internet user to make a phone call secure enough to frustrate the NSA’s extrajudicial surveillance program?

Wired News took Phil Zimmermann’s newest encryption software, Zfone, for a test drive and found it’s actually quite easy, even if the program is still in beta.

Zimmermann, the man who released the PGP e-mail encryption program to the world in 1991 — only to face an abortive criminal prosecution from the government — has been trying for 10 years to give the world easy-to-use software to cloak internet phone calls.’

`To James Valverde , a risk management expert at the Insurance Information Institute in New York City , the religious xenophobia of Islamic terrorists is reason to worry.

“Given the religious fervor and underlying ideology in which this jihad is being pursued, it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility to assume that Christian churches would be on the receiving end of terrorist attacks,” he said. “It hasn’t occurred yet, but that’s not to say it couldn’t happen.”

However, that is not why insurance companies are offering churches terrorism insurance.

Reacting to Sept. 11, Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Extension Act in 2002. It required all property and casualty insurance companies to offer terrorism insurance to all clients. Clients are not obligated to buy the coverage.’

`A woman whose 457-pound body sat in a morgue for more than a month during a dispute over the cost of her cremation will be cremated within the next few days, officials said Thursday.

Charlotte Ann Blue died Feb. 6, but she wasn’t immediately cremated because Dallas County and the crematorium it contracts with disagreed over the extra dollar per pound charged for bodies weighing more than 300 pounds.

Blue’s son, Sam Roberts, said he believed his mother had been cremated under a county indigent plan until he called to get a death certificate.

“That’s when I was informed that for the last two months she’s been sitting in the deep freeze at the medical examiner’s office because the crematorium that does business for the county says, ‘Oh well, she’s too big (and) too fat,” he told WFAA-TV on Wednesday.’

`An international collaboration of scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (March 30, 2006) the first results of a new neutrino experiment. Sending a high-intensity beam of muon neutrinos from the lab’s site in Batavia, Illinois, to a particle detector in Soudan, Minnesota, scientists observed the disappearance of a significant fraction of these neutrinos. The observation is consistent with an effect known as neutrino oscillation, in which neutrinos change from one kind to another. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment found a value of delta m2 = 0.0031 eV2, a quantity that plays a crucial role in neutrino oscillations and hence the role of neutrinos in the evolution of the universe.’

`A woman attending anger management classes became irate during a Wednesday morning class, threatened to kill a classmate, then went out to the lobby and broke a display case, Valparaiso police said. [..]

The specialist in the meeting room told police a 26-year-old man walked in and asked Prenderville if the seat next to her was taken. The specialist told police Prenderville immediately started yelling to the man, “I’m going to put a cap in you and send you to heaven.”

Prenderville is accused of repeating the threat several times — causing the man to become visibly shaken and start crying. She is also accused of threatening another client before storming out of the room.’

`A Sentinel High School teacher, charged with misdemeanor assault for allegedly giving a student a hickey, has resigned.

Missoula County Public Schools said Dan Kucera, a business teacher, resigned several weeks ago.

Kucera was suspended in January. Police said Kucera put a 17-year-old male student in a head lock and sucked on his neck, causing it to bruise.’

`Dozens of high school students protested a temporary school policy forbidding students from displaying the U.S. flag — as well as flags from other countries — amid racial tensions following immigration rallies.

Skyline High School Principal Tom Stumpf said American flags were brazenly waved in the faces of Hispanic students and in one case a Mexican flag was thrown into the face of another student.

“When it involves the American flag and its abuse in vilifying other people, we simply will not tolerate it,” Stumpf said. “They were using the symbol derisively as misguided patriotism.”‘

`So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, that the last four digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New York’s Times Square move in seemingly random increments as they struggle to keep pace.

The national debt clock, as it is known, is a big clock. A spot-check last week showed a readout of 8.3 trillion — or more precisely 8,310,200,545,702 — dollars … and counting.

But it’s not big enough.

Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and, lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.’

`A judge has ordered Son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz and his former lawyer to prepare for a trial to resolve their dispute over ownership of several items that Berkowitz says are his. [..]

Berkowitz is serving six sentences of 25 years to life for killing six people and wounding seven in 1976-77 in the New York City area. He is imprisoned at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y.

He said he gave the materials to Harmatz for safekeeping and as props in a youthful offender program the lawyer said he was developing. He sued Harmatz in June 2005 after learning the lawyer planned to use them to document a book he was writing.’

`Of Pensacola’s many rules, those dealing with male-female relationships are the most talked about. There are restrictions on when and where men and women may speak to each other. Some elevators and stairwells may be used only by women; others may be used only by men. Socializing on particular benches is forbidden. If a man and a woman are walking to class, they may chat; if they stop en route, though, they may be in trouble. Generally men and women caught interacting in any “unchaperoned area” — which is most of the campus — could be subject to severe penalties.

Those rules extend beyond the campus. A man and a woman cannot go to an off-campus restaurant together without a chaperon (usually a faculty member). Even running into members of the opposite sex off campus can lead to punishment. One student told of how a group of men and a group of women from the college happened to meet at a McDonald’s last spring. Both groups were returning from the beach (they had gone to separate beaches; men and women are not allowed to be at the beach together). The administration found out, and all 15 students were expelled.

Even couples who are not talking or touching can be reprimanded. Sabrina Poirier, a student at Pensacola who withdrew in 1997, was disciplined for what is known on the campus as “optical intercourse” — staring too intently into the eyes of a member of the opposite sex. This is also referred to as “making eye babies.” While the rule does not appear in written form, most students interviewed for this article were familiar with the concept.’

“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.”
Charles Darwin, in the foreword to his book, The Origin of Species, 1869.

“And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam”
Newsweek, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s.

“This antitrust thing will blow over.”
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.

“I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here… We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.”
Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator, on the Smithsonian Institute, 1901.

.. that last one might not be too bad a prediction afterall.

`The parents of a man who hanged himself took their own lives after hearing of his death an inquest has heard.

Neil Powell, 27, from Bridgend, was found hanging from a tree in a field in July 2005.

Hours after being told by police, his father Robert, 56, hanged himself at home in Llandeilo and his mother Mary, 56, drowned herself at a reservoir.

The coroner said it was one of the most tragic family cases he had come across in 30 years.’

`Going to the hospital is rarely fun. If you weigh over 300 pounds like Beth Henk, it can be embarrassing.

“I’ve flipped an exam table — I sat on the end of it and it just flipped up,” said Henk, whose weight peaked at 745. When her son was born three years ago, “I had to sit in the hospital bed the whole time — the hospital’s rocker wouldn’t fit my butt.”

Today Henk helps Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis find better ways to deal with the growing number of very obese patients, an issue for many U.S. hospitals. Barnes-Jewish is replacing beds and wheelchairs with bigger models, widening doorways, buying larger CT scan machines, even replacing slippers and gowns.’

`The new iGoatse is the definitive skin for your iPod.
There are no words to describe it.
And you know why.’

`At the warehouse, agents found bricks of cocaine packed inside tombstones, some decorated with figures of the Virgin Mary, the DEA said.

“Like grave robbers who have no respect for the dead, this drug organization used revered tombstones to smuggle millions of dollars worth of cocaine into New York City,” said John Gilbride, the special agent in charge of the New York DEA office.

At the Brooklyn warehouse, agents found eight tombstones, five of which were packed with 20 to 25 kilograms each of cocaine. They also found remnants of smashed tombstones.’

`Buzzaire is, quite simply, a caffeine inhaler. One squeeze, one inhale, and you’ve just rushed 150mg of caffeine into your blood stream. Mints or drinks have to go through your digestive tract first before partying in your blood (or through your skin, in the case of caffeinated soap). But the lung/blood barrier is the fastest way (other than injection or IV) to get caffeine into your system. Not only will you get one heck of a rush, but you’ll also freshen your breath! A hint of peppermint oil in each puff will give you a little extra perk with its peppy zing. Buzzaire can beat up your air!’

`Just when you think George W. Bush has plumbed the depths of goofiness, he bests himself. In a speech today (reported on CNN), Bush said that:

Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government.

When in doubt, blame the guy in jail. So, at what point did George discover that Saddam’s previous grotesque behavior spawned sectarian strife? Is there any chance he heard about this before launching the invasion in 2003 or was he still reading from the script that promised Iraqis, regardless of their sectarian beliefs, would be dancing in the streets?

It would be nice to get an answer on this point. Why?’

`Does this story line sound familiar? The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops. The intelligence agencies say the nuclear threat from this nation is 10 years away, but the director of intelligence paints a more ominous picture. A new U.S. national security strategy trumpets preemptive attacks and highlights the country as a major threat. And neoconservatives beat the war drums, as the cable media banner their stories with words like “countdown” and “showdown.”

The nation making headlines today, of course, is Iran, not Iraq. But the parallels are striking. Three years after senior administration officials systematically misled the nation into a disastrous war, they could well be trying to do it again.’

`A 25-year-old man charged with first-degree sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl appeared in court Tuesday with an unexpected advocate: the alleged victim’s mother. [..]

“I feel Marvin’s in this situation because my daughter manipulated him. She lied to him about her age,” said Estela Torres, the victim’s mother. “In my heart I think if I wasn’t here, I wouldn’t be doing the right thing. I love her. She’s my daughter. I stand behind her. But I also have to support this young man because what’s happened to him is not fair.”‘

A list of the days events at Wikipedia.

`An incinerator, where one of Africa’s biggest hauls of narcotics is being burnt in Kenya, has exploded, delaying the process, police say.

No-one was hurt in the blast but it will now take 11 hours – three more than initially expected – as only one incinerator is working.

Police seized the 1.1 metric tons of cocaine worth $88m in December 2004.’