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RT.com
2013-01-02 17:22:00
A federal judge issued a 75-page ruling on Wednesday that declares that the US Justice Department does not have a legal obligation to explain the rationale behind killing Americans with targeted drone strikes. United States District Court Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in her finding this week that the Obama administration was largely in the right by rejecting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times for materials pertaining to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to execute three US citizens abroad in late 2011 [pdf]. Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both US nationals with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, were killed on September 30 of that year using drone aircraft; days later, al-Awlaki's teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was executed in the same manner. Although the Obama administration has remained largely quiet about the killings in the year since, a handful of statements made from senior White House officials, including Pres. Barack Obama himself, have provided some but little insight into the Executive Branch's insistence that the killings were all justified and constitutionally-sound. Attempts from the ACLU and the Times via FOIA requests to find out more have been unfruitful, though, which spawned a federal lawsuit that has only now been decided in court. Siding with the defendants in what can easily be considered as cloaked in skepticism, Judge McMahon writes that the Obama White House has been correct in refusing the FOIA requests filed by the plaintiffs. | |
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Natasha Lennard
Salon 2013-01-02 16:53:00
The intractable fusion of Wall Street and government interests was a major focus of many Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. There is some dark irony, then, that an FBI program specifically dedicated to the partnership between the FBI, DHS and the private sector monitored the protests, providing information and tips to corporate partners on interacting with and combating Occupy groups. According to FBI documents obtained through FOIA by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC) - "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" - produced a report specifically for the use of "the corporate security community" on the Occupy protests that aimed to shut down West Coast ports. DSAC also issued tips to corporate clients advising that they avoid "all large gatherings relating to civil issues." As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) put it, such documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America." The FOIA'ed FBI documents have garnered much attention from civil liberties advocates for highlighting the coordination between federal agencies, local police departments, fusion centers and hired corporate security firms in surveying, policing and ultimately cracking down on Occupy encampments and days of action. As a number of outlets have noted, PCJF's findings also show how the authorities had long framed Occupy as a potential terrorist or criminal threat. | |
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RT.com
2013-01-02 16:37:00
Only one month into the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last year, plans were formulated to identify key figures in the movement and execute them with a coordinated assault using sniper rifles, new documents reveal. The revelation - discussed in a heavily redacted FBI memo unearthed late last month through a Freedom of Information Act request - reveals that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of plans for a violent assault on the peaceful protest movement but stayed silent on rumors of an assassination attempt only until now. Information on the alleged plot to kill off protesters appears on page 61 of the trove of documents obtained recently by a FOIA request filed by the Partnership For Civil Justice Fund. On the page in question, marked "SECRET," the FBI acknowledges: Throughout the rest of the material obtained by the PFCJF, the FBI declines to mention any follow-up attempts at investigating or handling the rumored assassination plot.Page 61, where the plot is discussed, was redacted heavily before handed over to the PFCJF. As RT reported when the documents were first published just before Christmas, other material released through the FOIA request shows the FBI and other law enforcement agencies labeling Occupy activists as criminal and domestic terrorists right from the early days of their anti-capitalism and anti-corporate greed protests that began in September 2011. | |
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AP
2013-01-02 16:05:00
Myanmar's military has acknowledged carrying out airstrikes against ethnic Kachin rebels in the country's north, and says it has captured a hilltop post from where the insurgents launched attacks on government supply convoys. The statement broadcast on state television Wednesday contradicted government claims two days earlier that the military was not carrying out offensive air attacks on the Kachin, raising questions about how much control the elected government of reformist President Thein Sein has over the army. State television, quoting the Defense Ministry, said the military on Sunday occupied a Kachin Independence Army hilltop post during a mopping-up operation of the area where attacks had been launched against government supply convoys. The government has been seeking to supply a base at Lajayang which is very close to KIA headquarters at Laiza, the rebel group's last major outpost. The government delivered an ultimatum to the Kachin to clear a road by Christmas Day so it could supply its base. The Kachin rejected the ultimatum for fear of a government attack on their own outpost. KIA spokesman La Nan charged Monday that the supplies being sent to government troops included ammunition as well as rice. | |
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Al-Jazeera
Canada's Idle No More movement began as a small social media campaign - armed with little more than a hashtag and a cause.2013-01-02 13:59:00 But it has grown into a large indigenous movement, with protests and ceremonial gatherings held almost daily in many of the country's major cities. The movement is spearheaded by Theresa Spence, the leader of the Attawapiskat, a small native band in northern Ontario. Spence is now 22 days into a hunger strike on Ottawa's Victoria Island, just across from the Canadian parliament. Spence and other First Nations groups are demanding better living conditions for Canada's aboriginals, and they are angry at the country's government, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which they accuse of trying to erode their land and sovereignty rights. Canada's aboriginal communities have long been disproportionately affected by poverty. A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that, in 2006, the average income for aboriginal people was just under $19,000, which is 30 percent lower than the $27,097 average for other Canadians. Although that is a slightly narrower gap than 10 years previously, it would still take 63 years to achieve income parity. The same study also found the annual income gap between other Canadians and aboriginals is $7,083 higher in urban settings, and $4,492 higher in rural settings.
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Glenn Greenwald
Guardian 2013-01-02 13:43:00
Few ideas have done as much damage throughout history as empowering the government to criminalize opinions it dislikes. Writing in the Guardian today, Jason Farago praises France's women's rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, for demanding that Twitter help the French government criminalize ideas it dislikes. Decreeing that "hateful tweets are illegal", Farago excitingly explains how the French minister is going beyond mere prosecution for those who post such tweets and now "wants Twitter to take steps to help prosecute hate speech" by "reform[ing] the whole system by which Twitter operates", including her demand that the company "put in place alerts and security measures" to prevent tweets which French officials deem hateful. This, Farago argues, is fantastic, because - using the same argument employed by censors and tyrants of every age and every culture - new technology makes free speech far too dangerous to permit: | |
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I am shocked and saddened that your organization would label me as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew. It is utterly defamatory, and such allegations are entirely based on distortions of what I believe and what I have done. To confuse my criticisms of Israel with self-hatred of myself as a Jew or with hatred of Jews is a calumny. I have long been a critic of American foreign policy but that does not make me anti-American; it is freedom of conscience that is the core defining reality of a genuinely democratic society, and its exercise is crucial to the quality of political life in a particular country, especially here in the United States where its size and influence often has such a large impact on the lives and destiny of many peoples excluded from participating in its policy debates or elections. It is always difficult to negate irresponsible accusations of this kind. What follows is an attempt to clarify my honestly held positions in relation to a litany of charges that have been given currency by a campaign conducted by UN Watch ever since I was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to be Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2008. What follows are brief attempts at clarification in response to the main charges: | |
Comment: For further reading check out UN Article 19: Human Rights and Revisionism
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Peter Van Buren
TomDispatch 2013-01-02 13:01:00
On New Year's Eve 2003, Khaled el-Masri, an unemployed car salesman from Germany on vacation in Macedonia, was removed from a bus and kidnapped by the CIA due to a confusion of names. His evidently bore some similarity to an al-Qaeda suspect the Agency wanted to get its hands on. Five months later, after spending time under brutal conditions in an "Afghan" prison called "the Salt Pit" (run by the CIA), he was left at the side of a road in Albania. In between, his life was a catalogue of horrors, torture, and abuse. Last week, the European Court of Human Rights finally rendered a judgment in his favor, confirming the accuracy of the story he's told for years about his sufferings, fining the Macedonian government for its role in his case, and concluding for the first time in a court of law that "the CIA's rendition techniques amounted to torture." El-Masri's attempt to bring a case in the U.S. legal system against "George Tenet, the former director of the C.I.A., three private airline companies, and 20 individuals identified only as John Doe" for his mistreatment was long ago thrown out, thanks to the "state secrets privilege" -- such a trial, so the government claimed, could compromise U.S. national security. In this way, American courts, including the Supreme Court, typically avoided the subject of Bush administration and CIA torture tactics. El-Masri was one of more than 9,000 individuals who were then being held in a globe-spanning archipelago of injustice, a series of "black sites" and borrowed prisons (as well as borrowed torturers in many cases). Some of those prisoners were, like el-Masri, innocent of any crime whatsoever; some like him had been kidnapped by the CIA; most, whether reasonable suspects or not, were charged with nothing. The crown jewel of this system was, of course, the U.S. prison built in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which the present promised to close within a year of coming into office and which still couldn't be more open. | |
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Craig Whitlock
Washington Post 2013-01-02 11:43:00
The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators. U.S. agents accused the men - two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain - of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial. | |
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Glenn L. Carle
Zero Dark Thirty, Hollywood's version of how we killed Osama bin Laden essentially says that torture works. Torture is disturbing, but tough, and American heroes do it.Huffington Post 2013-01-02 10:42:00 Do not be misled. Pay attention: The men and women who hunted, found, and killed Osama bin Laden -- and heroes they are -- did not need to use torture. Torture is un-American. It is evil. We found bin Laden using painstaking intelligence work, not waterboards. Comment: Actually the entire narrative behind Zero Dark Thirty is based on a lie. Navy Seals did not hunt down and murder Osama bin Laden and then dump his body in the ocean. All of that is simply a story for the American public to accept as a just another chapter in the U.S. government's psy-op on the American people in the form of terrorism and "al-Qaida". The shocking opening scenes and the underlying premise of Zero Dark Thirty, the latest fillip of the torture hagiography to afflict and pervert American society insidiously propagates the view that torture is necessary; tough men and women must make tough decisions, right? It becomes clear how deeply America's moral frames of reference have deteriorated when we realize that it was Kathryn Bigelow, a Hollywood director and power, and not a known shill for the Neoconservatives, whose film presents torture as having been instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden, and that "enhanced interrogation" is Americans doing what Americans must do to protect home and hearth. Bigelow's views -- like those of so many millions of Americans -- seem to have been colored by the big lie about torture perpetrated by the Bush Administration, and now the Republican Party, for eight years and beyond: Americans must work on the "dark side, if you will" to protect ourselves. Torture is legal -- because, well, because a political hack in the Justice Department, at the behest of the vice president, says so. So, therefore, it is acceptable. A message not-so-subliminally enhanced by the zeitgeist-shaping avatars of pop culture like the execrable 24, which shows tough-guy Jack Bauer saving us all every week by torturing people, and doing what needs to be done, damn the law and all hand-wringers. Even left-wing Hollywood now weaves it into our national consciousness as part of our imagined reality. Even Hollywood filmmakers. |
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Peter Beaumont
Guardian 2013-01-02 10:36:00
Human rights commissioner reveals sharply increased estimate of death toll as reports say dozens killed in petrol queue air strike. At least 60,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, the UN human rights commissioner has said, citing an "exhaustive" study which has sharply increased the number of those believed killed. Before the new UN-commissioned survey it had been estimated that up to 45,000 people had perished during the conflict, so the new calculation increases the death toll by a third. The revised estimate came as it was reported that dozens had been killed on Wednesday after a government war plane bombed a petrol queue in a suburb of Damascus. According to the UN report, almost three-quarters of those listed as killed on both sides of the conflict were men. Estimating casualties is a notoriously difficult process in the midst of an ongoing war, but in this case the UN says it has established the name, place and date of death of each of those it says it has counted. The real death toll is likely to be greater because reports containing incomplete information were excluded and a significant number of killings may not have been documented at all. "There are many names not on the list for people who were quietly shot in in the woods," said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the human rights commissioner, Navi Pillay. | |
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David Rogers
Politico 2013-01-02 10:29:00
House Republicans abruptly pulled the plug Tuesday night on their promise to take up this week an emergency supplemental disaster aid bill for Northeast states damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The decision is a stunning reversal since just hours before New Jersey lawmakers were preparing for floor debate Wednesday as outlined under a strategy promoted by no less than Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). Indeed the Appropriations Committee had gone so far as to file a $27 billion bill Tuesday together with an amendment to be offered by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) seeking an additional $33 billion to match the Senate passed package of last week. Absent a change of heart, the upshot now is that the Senate bill will die with this Congress on Thursday at noon. And the whole affair is sure to bring back memories of the famous Daily News headline in 1975 - "Ford to City: Drop Dead." "I am stunned, stunned," Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) told POLITICO. "I assume there is as tactical consideration here, that the Republican leadership didn't want to be anywhere near a big spending bill after the fiasco of their handling the tax debate. I understand the tactics but there is a real human need here that is being ignored." | |
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RT.com
2013-01-02 09:55:00
The Iowa Department of Public Safety has secured $110,000 in federal funds that will be used to implement a state-wide face recognition program that will start with tracking convicted sex criminals. Terry Cowman, the special agent in charge of the Iowa sex offender registry program, tells the Globe Gazette newspaper that the DPS is around one-third of the way to having enough money to make science fiction a reality in the Midwestern state. His fingers are crossed that an additional grant will be awarded in 2013 that will provide another $180,000, at which point the agency can start digitizing around 10,000 images to be used in an expansive and expensive surveillance program based off of biometric analysis. When all of the images are scanned in and the state is done training its staff, the Gazette's says Cowman and his crew will be able to comb through security camera images and even Facebook photos in order to pick out people from a crowd and cross-reference them with a list of over 5,600 registered sex offenders using only their personally identifiable facial features, or biometrics. "Biometrics is really coming up to play a big part in law enforcement and investigations and things like that," Cowman adds to reporter Mike Wiser. "What's interesting about facial rec is it is kind of the future of where we're at." Iowa isn't the first location to look towards biometrics, but it will be a big step in the grand scheme of implementing intensive face recognition programs elsewhere if it indeed gets off the ground. The state isn't likely to see much opposition when it comes to cracking down on criminals that prey on innocent children, but investigators may soon find themselves on a slippery slope once anyone is under the government's microscope. | |
Comment: The fact is that once this technology, which is most likely already in use by intelligence agencies, gets into the hands of local law enforcement agencies there is no telling what they will use it for. They can talk all they want about not using it for civil priorities but once the pandora's box of facial recognition is open and widely available it's only a matter of time before it's being used for nefarious purposes. If history is any indication, it can be no other way.
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RT.com
2013-01-02 09:40:00
The four major Russian Navy fleets will hold a joint exercise in late January in the Mediterranean and Black seas. It will be the biggest such event in decades. Commands for the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific fleets have been preparing for the exercises since December of last year, the Russian Defense Ministry has announced. Warships detached for the event are currently sailing to those regions. "The primary goal of the exercise is to train issues regarding formation of a battle group consisting of troops of different branches outside of the Russian Federation, planning of its deployment and managing a coordinated action of a joint Navy group in accordance with a common plan," the ministry's information department explained. The exercise will include several scenarios, including the loading of amphibious troops from an unprepared coast in the Northern Caucasus onto transport vessels. The announcement comes days after the launch of the nuclear-powered submarine Vladimir Monomakh, the third Borei-class strategic submarine cruiser produced in Russia. The vessel, armed with Bulava ICBMs, will become part of the country's nuclear deterrence force after completing sea trials. The Russian Navy's five fleets each have their own headquarters. The strongest, the Northern fleet is based in Severomorsk in north-west of the country. The Baltic fleet is based in Kaliningrad, the western Russian enclave on the coast of the Baltic Sea. | |
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RT.com
2013-01-02 09:24:00
Dozens of Palestinians have been wounded in clashes with undercover Israeli troops disguised as vegetable vendors. The discovery of a small commando unit conducting arrests in the West Bank outraged locals forcing the regular army to use tear gas. Over 30 Palestinians have been wounded along with two IDF soldiers after unrest broke out in the West Bank village of Tamaun. Dozens more suffered from tear gas inhalation. Witnesses report that IDF troops were disguised as Arab vegetable vendors to apprehend a number of wanted militants. The mission, by the Mistaarvim ("Arabized") Unit, an elite counter-terrorism force, was then tactically changed from a covert operation to an overt one. Dozens of masked youths hid behind barricades hurling rocks and firebombs at the disguised soldiers. IDF regular units then scrambled to the scene firing rubber bullets and tear gas to quell the crowd. Reports that lethal ammunition was used were brushed aside by an Israeli military spokeswoman. The military said it arrested a "terrorist affiliated with the Islamic Jihad terror group." "A special forces squad went in on an arrest operation," military radio reported. "It seems that a family or local residents spotted the force and then a big disturbances started... some soldiers received superficial injuries from stone that were thrown," ynetnews quoted. | |
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Global Post
2013-01-02 16:57:00
A passenger died aboard an American Airlines flight to Texas. The passenger, a 25-year-old woman, showed no signs of trauma, the Associated Press reported. The flight was diverted to Houston after her death. American Airlines officials said the flight later continued to Dallas, its original destination,The Houston Chronicle reported. | |
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wafb.com
2013-01-02 16:46:00
A Brazilian teen is placing her virginity up for auction to the highest bidder. Rebecca Bernardo,18, made the decision out of desperation to care for her bed-ridden mother. "I made up my mind right after my 18th birthday," said Bernardo through a translator. "That's when my mother suffered a stroke." While Bernardo tried other forms of employment, the money she earned barely covered the costs of a caretaker. She was inspired by the virginity auction of another Brazilian woman, Catarina Migilorini. Migilorini offered to sell her virginity through an Australian website. She received widespread publicity and was offered modeling contracts. "There comes a time when you have to make decisions to get what you want," said Bernardo. "You have to be strong." | |
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Daily Mail
2013-01-02 16:15:00
An Indiana hospital has fired eight employees, many of them veteran nurses, because they refused to take the flu vaccine. IU Health Goshen is just the latest hospital to force its employees to receive the jab and fire or discipline the ones who object. At least four of the nurses who was terminated tried to appeal the vaccine on religious grounds with the help of a lawyer. The hospital rejected their arguments and fired them anyway. The Elkhart Truth reports that the hospital informed its staff in early September that vaccinations would be mandatory for all employees. The hospital said it was following guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association, which both recommend mandatory vaccinations for employees. 'As a hospital and health system, our top priority is and should be patient safety, and we know that hospitalized people with compromised immune systems are at a greater risk for illness and death from the flu,' hospital spokeswoman Melanie McDonald told the newspaper. 'The flu has the highest death rate of any vaccine preventable disease, and it would be irresponsible from our perspective for health care providers to ignore that.' | |
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Phillip Rawls
ABC News 2013-01-02 15:50:00
A teen pilot killed along with two friends in an Alabama plane crash had his own key to the aircraft and had flown it many times, his mother said Wednesday, denying authorities' assertion that the plane had been taken without permission. Sherrie Smith said her 17-year-old son Jordan Smith was the one flying the plane that went down in the Alabama woods Tuesday night, killing the him and two other male teens. The Federal Aviation Administration said the Piper PA 30 crashed less than a mile from the Walker County Airport in Jasper, which is northwest of Birmingham. Smith says the owner of the plane had let her son fly it many other times and had given her son his own key. "He had used the plane many times before," she said. She said her son was a high school junior who fell in love with flying at an early age and was one test short of earning his private pilot's license. | |
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Mathew Mulholland
I am in a remote village on the Pacific coast of Colombia. One road leads in and out, extending as far as the next village. It is a thoroughfare for cocaine transportation -- processed deep in the jungle, transported up the coast, en-route to Panama -- a ruthless commodity akin to conflict minerals or diamonds. Fuelling both addiction and war, affecting the lives of every person in this area.Huffington Post Canada 2013-01-02 15:31:00 There exists a palpable sense of death here. At the very least, a recognition of one's mortality -- it seeps through the air. Ten people have lost their lives in so many days. Eight trapped in their rooms on a passenger ship sunk off the coast, two murdered and four wounded in narco-trafficking conflicts and domestic disputes. Yet life goes on. Death is, for the residents, a practical outcome of the day to day -- dogs hang their heads in the street, gaunt, homeless, searching for scraps of food. Cows show ribs and chickens spotted with featherless patches roam aimlessly. The military casually occupies benches in the town centre equipped with all manner of assault rifles, sidearms and even rocket launchers. |
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3 News
2013-01-02 15:17:00
The leader of a breakaway Mormon sect has incorrectly prophesied the end of the world for the second time in as many months. Warren Jeffs, head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), issued his latest edict last week, saying the apocalypse would occur before the New Year. CNN reports on December 31 authorities in Colorado City, where the church is based, were preparing for the worst. "Jim Jones, Koresh, history has showed us that these things happen when religious zealots take charge of a group of people," said Sam Brower, a private investigator who has worked on cases for ex-FLDS members. | |
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Marc Lallanilla
LiveScience 2013-01-02 13:42:00
A number of new laws went into effect after the toll of midnight on Dec. 31, and from the wise to the wacky, they're now officially on the books in states across America. In Kentucky, for example, it's illegal to release a feral hog into the wild. The law makes sense, according to Politico, because wild hogs have been running amok in Kentucky's farmland, destroying crops and spreading disease. Though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been using gun-equipped helicopters to cull packs of wild hogs in the state, their populations continue to increase. The beasts are now found in 37 of Kentucky's counties, up from 19 counties in 2009, reports Politico. The state of Illinois has dealt a blow to necrophiliacs, specifically outlawing sex with a corpse for the first time. Previously, the only charge authorities could level was "criminal damage to property." "The death of a loved one is bad enough, but it should be much more than criminal damaged property," state Rep. Daniel Beiser told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "This is a completely inappropriate charge." | |
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Makini Brice
Medical Daily 2013-01-02 13:41:00
Diners in China received quite the uncomfortable surprise recently when they ordered eggplant dishes in a Beijing restaurant. The dishes had been laced with clonidine, a drug prescribed for a variety of conditions, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, menopause and LSD flashbacks. The event sent 80 diners to the hospital; 34 patrons needed to have their blood pumped in order to remove traces of the drug. According to the Annals of Internal Medicine, the perpetrators were connected to a neighboring restaurant, who wanted to gain a leg up on the competition by making its patrons sick. The pair hid the drug, a white powder without a scent, in the restaurant's starch, which the chefs used to thicken the braised eggplant. Clonidine was likely chosen because it takes only a small trace of the drug to make a person sick and would be tasteless. The diners fell ill almost immediately, becoming dizzy, tired, nauseous. Some diners also reportedly suffered from blurred vision and started vomiting. Doctors at an area hospital quickly discovered that the source of the diners' symptoms was potentially toxic levels of clonidine in their blood. The police traced the drug to the restaurant before linking the chemical with the nearby restaurant. The perpetrators were snagged and sentenced to one year in prison. | |
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Melanie Eversley
USA Today 2013-01-02 13:54:00
A western New York man was arrested in the alleged attempted murder of a 7-year-old girl, the Buffalo News and Niagara Gazette report. Lockport, N.Y., police arrested David Alfonso, 28, on Monday after responding to a 911 call and finding Alfonso at an intersection covered in blood, the News reports. Alfonso allegedly tried to kill the little girl, the child's mother, Cassandra Castro, 27, told police, according to the News. In her call to emergency responders, the mother allegedly said, "He is killing my baby," the Gazette reports. | |
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Christine Hsu
Medical Daily 2013-01-02 10:31:00
Most American teenagers can't wait to shed their "metal mouth" nickname and count down the days they can finally take their braces off. However, trendy teenagers in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand can't wait to get them on, even if they don't need it. Braces are the latest teenage fashion trend in Asia. According to the Vice UK, having a mouth of metal has become such a hit with Asian teens that there have been reports of many adolescents buying harmful, fake, black market braces. Braces are considered a sign of wealth in Southeast Asia. A real set of braces in Bangkok, for example, will cost around $1,200, which is a considerable amount for a country with a GDP of $345 billion, compared to the US which had a GDP of $15.06 trillion in 2011. Vice UK reports that the "best part" about the fashionable faux braces is that they don't need to be inserted by a medical professional. According to the website many Asian beauty salons are now offering to put in these fashion braces. There are even cheaper do-it-yourself kits that let people choose between "Hello Kitty", "Mickey Mouse" or other varieties for as little as $100. | |
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WDBJ7
2013-01-01 13:51:00
Giles County, Va., - On Wednesday, most students will head back to school but not those inGiles County. They were suppose to return to class but school was canceled after an online article raised concerns about safety. The article is entitled: The Next School Massacre Target?". It's posted on a website that caters to conspiracy theories and UFOs. "We have to take this as serious information," says Giles County Sheriff Morgan Millirons. The article connects the Colorado movie theater shooting to last month's shooting in Connecticut and then to Narrows. The author uses a scene in the latest Batman movie that shows a map of attack sites. One is called Sandy Hook, the other is Narrows. The author writes that it's plausible schools in Narrows, Virginia might be in danger. "We just want to emphasize that no threat has been made to any school system here in Giles County," says Sheriff Millirons. But police aren't taking any chances. On Tuesday, police issued a reverse 911 call to parents about the article. | |
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Kristen Drew
KOMO News 2013-12-29 19:12:00
Now he is now warning others to be on the lookout - and he's especially worried for pets and children in the area. Faron Scarberry says he moved to Kent about two weeks ago and he's already facing an unexpected danger in the neighborhood. "I love wildlife," he says, "I like looking out the deck, looking at them. But when they're starting to threaten the animals and people in the neighborhood, it's gone a little bit overboard." Scarberry says three coyotes attacked him Friday night while he was walking his dog in the backyard. "They come up toward my face, and I kind of blocked them and pushed them away, and that's when the one grabbed me by the leg," he says. | |
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Telegraph
2013-01-02 11:30:00
A coroner has described a man's death as 'bizarre' after he was found dead standing up in his kitchen. Andrew Evans was discovered by a friend, who visited him at his home in East Grinstead, West Sussex, on May 10 this year. Horsham Coroner's Court heard how the 35-year-old had injured his head earlier in the day, but is not believed to have realised how serious the injury was. The court heard how Mr Evans had consumed a lot of alcohol on the day and was four times over the drink drive limit. It is believed he died after blacking out as he reached into a cupboard in his kitchen, with his body falling against the kitchen fittings and remaining standing up. The court heard how a friend of Mr Evans, who was not named, arrived at this home on May 10 to see him "standing in the kitchen" with his right hand reaching into a cupboard. | |
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Kerry Mcdermott
Daily Mail 2013-01-02 10:59:00
A gun trade show in the U.S. has attracted huge crowds and posted record sales - just weeks after 20 children and six adults were shot dead in the Sandy Hook school massacre. Many vendors at the Nation's Gun Show, held over three days in Chantilly, Virginia, struggled to keep up with demand as customers rushed to snap up assault-type rifles, handguns, ammunition and magazines. As the debate over gun control continues to rage in the U.S. in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting on December 14, some commentators said boosted sales at the trade show were down to fears such weapons may not be on the market for much longer. | |
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Ben Brumfield and KJ Matthews
CNN 2013-01-02 09:36:00
Paparazzi have had nasty run-ins with pop star Justin Bieber, including a high-speed chase in July that prompted a city councilman to predict that such an encounter could end tragically. It happened Tuesday. A photographer, who thought he spied Bieber sitting in his parked white Ferrari, was struck and killed by oncoming traffic as he walked across a Los Angeles freeway to get back to his car after snapping photos. An opportune picture of the 18-year-old celebrity can rake in hard currency -- but Bieber was not in the car at the time of the New Year's Day incident. California Highway Patrol officers had pulled over Bieber's vehicle Tuesday evening at an off-ramp of Interstate 405. The photographer spotted the sports car, parked his own vehicle across the street, crossed to get closer to Bieber's car and took photos of its occupants, said Los Angeles Police spokesman James Stoughton. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Dan Nosowitz
PopSci 2013-01-02 15:00:00
Here's a pretty cool interactive map made by Brandon Martin-Anderson showing, according to census data, every single person in the United States and Canada. The map uses the 2010 US census and the 2011 Canadian census, for a total of 341,817,095. But interestingly, there are no other visual aids--no landmarks, no borders, no rivers or lakes. So if you want to find yourself, you'll have to go by population groups, which gets pretty difficult as you zoom further in. Unless you live in Nunavut or something. Source: BMander | |
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Jeff Hecht
New Scientist 2013-01-02 14:15:00
Who says NASA has lost interest in the moon? Along with rumours of a hovering lunar base, there are reports that the agency is considering a proposal to capture an asteroid and drag it into the moon's orbit. Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion - slightly more than NASA's Curiosity Mars rover - and could be completed by the 2020s. For now, NASA's only official plans for human spaceflight involve sending a crewed capsule, called Orion, around the moon. The Obama administration has said it also wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. One proposed target, chosen because of its scientific value and favourable launch windows for a rendezvous, is a space rock called1999 AO10. The mission would take about half a year, exposing astronauts to long-term radiation beyond Earth's protective magnetic field and taking them beyond the reach of any possible rescue. Robotically bringing an asteroid to the moon instead would be a more attractive first step, the Keck researchers conclude, because an object orbiting the moon would be in easier reach of robotic probes and maybe even humans. | |
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TechNewsDaily
2013-01-02 14:17:00
Help is on the way for parents who lie awake in bed worrying about their newborn babies sleeping in the nursery. New "smart" baby clothing could automatically track infants' breathing and alert parents in case of trouble. Parents won't have to directly attach sensors to their infants to achieve peace of mind. Researchers fitted a baby romper suit with a printed circuit board - made of stretchable polyurethane - and commercially available sensors to monitor the breathing in a baby's chest and stomach areas. Such work marks yet another step toward the future of "smart" or"intelligent" clothing that could monitor soldiers and babies alike. "The circuit board we have developed can be manufactured using routine industrial processes, meaning a high throughput and, consequently, good cost-efficiency," said Manuel Seckel, a scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin, Germany. Baby suits with the added technological twist could possibly help unravel the mystery of the 4,500 infants in the United States who die suddenly from no obvious cause each year. Health researchers have already set up a database to track cases of sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) to better figure out how to prevent such tragedy. (SUID refers to sudden, unexpected deaths of an infant in which the manner and cause of death are not immediately obvious before an investigation.) | |
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Brett Smith
RedOrbit 2013-01-02 14:12:00
In a sun-scorched region of Western Australia known as Pilbara, a team of American and Australian paleobiologists believe they have located the oldest known evidence of life on Earth. The ancient bacterial fossils have been dated as 3.49 billion years old, only about a billion years after scientists estimate the Earth was formed. "It's not just finding this stuff that's interesting," said Alan Decho, a geobiologist at the University of South Carolina. "It's showing that the life had some organization to it." According to the findings presented by the joint team at the most recent meeting of theGeological Society of America, the tiny ridges that lattice the rocks like a fishing net seem to indicate that primitive bacteria integrated themselves into expansive networks. This collective behavior, which mirrors that of modern bacteria, involved thousands of different bacteria species, each performing a unique task that contributed to the larger community. One of those communal functions was responsible for leaving behind traces of the bacteria for billions of years. Like some species of modern bacteria, thick mats of the microbes ensnare and fasten together sand particles. This adhesive layer of particles prevents erosion, resulting in rock fossils that outlast the living organisms that once lived there. The team's excitement over finding record-breaking ancient fossils, however, is tempered by the fact that scientists have been fooled by similar rock formations in the past. In 1980, comparable rippling layers were found in Australia's Strelley Pool, over 180 miles to the north. However, Oxford University scientists later showed that water flowing along a seafloor can create similar structures under the right conditions. | |
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Ricki Lewis, PhD
DNA Science Blog 2012-12-27 13:54:00
Growing up in the 1960s, I collected monster cards: The 60-foot-man and the 50-foot woman, duplicate bodies gestating in giant seed pods, unseen Martians that sucked children into sand pits and returned them devoid of emotion, with telltale marks on the back of the neck. One card featured a very young Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Forgive my lapse in political correctness, but I recalled those cards when I saw the word "hypertrichosis" in a recent paper in PLOS Genetics, because, unfortunately, the condition is also known historically as "werewolf syndrome." In the paper, geneticist Angela Christiano, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia University analyzed the genomes of a father and son with Ambras syndrome, a form of hypertrichosis - and found something intriguing about the causative mutation that has repercussions for genetic testing in general. A WEREWOLF PRIMER Before a genetic explanation for overactive hair follicles existed, werewolfism, aka lycanthropy, was thought to arise in eclectic ways: rubbing a magic salve into the skin, sleeping outdoors under a summer full moon, drinking from the pawprint of a wolf, or a devil's curse. Werewolves were once considered to be giant extinct lemurs from Madagascar. Armenian folklore describes a werewolf as a female criminal being punished by coming out at night and eating her children, and then her relatives' children, in order of relatedness. In 1963 a physician in London, where Warren Zevon tells us werewolves are prevalent, ascribed lycanthropy to the very rare blood disease congenital erythropoietic porphyria. With its attendant hairiness, reddish teeth, pink urine, and aversion to bright light, porphyria would later explain vampires too, although that idea has been discredited. Some physicians suggested that hypertrichosis causes lycanthropy, but others argued that the genetic condition was too rare to account for the many werewolves loose on the streets of Europe. | |
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Lee Rannals
RedOrbit 2013-01-02 12:26:00
Astronomers using CSIRO's 210-feet Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia have found monstrous outflows of charged particles coming from the center of our galaxy. The researchers said that the outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy, reaching about a million times the energy of an exploding star. Although the outflows are shooting out at over 600 miles per second, but they pose no danger to Earth or the solar system. "They are not coming in our direction, but go up and down from the galactic plane," saidCSIRO's Dr. Ettore Carretti. "We are 30,000 light-years away from the galactic center, in the plane. They are no danger to us." The outflows extend 50,000 light-years from top to bottom out of the galactic plane, which equals half the diameter of the Milky Way. Astronomers said the outflows stretch about two-thirds across the sky from horizon to horizon, and correspond to a "haze" of microwave emission previously spotted by the WMAP and Planck space telescopes. | |
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Ernesto Guido & Nick Howes
Cbet nr. 3367, issued on 2013, January 01, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude 15.2) by the E12 Siding Spring Survey on images obtained with the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt + CCD on December 30.6. The new comet has been designatedC/2012 Y3 (MCNAUGHT).Remanzacco Observatory 2013-01-02 11:37:00 We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 19 unfiltered exposures, 30-sec each,obtained remotely,from Q26 (iTelescope Observatory, Siding Spring) on 2013, Jan. 01.46, through a 0.32-m f/9.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD shows that this object is a comet: coma about 10" in diameter with a fan-shaped tail elongated in PA 85. Our confirmation image:
M.P.E.C. 2013-A03 assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to cometC/2012 Y3: T 2012 Aug. 26.59; e= 1.0; Peri. = 236.15; q = 1.78 AU; Incl.= 73.90. | |
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Andrew Hough
The Telegraph 2013-01-02 10:19:00
The morning skies are this week set to be filled with hundreds of shooting stars in the year's first meteor shower, the Quadrantids, according to Nasa scientists. Amateur British stargazers will be able to view nature's own "beautiful" firework display from space throughout much of the country depending on clear weather conditions. Astronomers said Quadrantids, a little-known, but spectacular meteor shower, is due to start in the early hours of the morning tomorrow before peaking just before dawn on Friday. Scientists say that during the annual shower, named after an extinct constellation, up to 200 shooting stars could be visible to the eye every hour. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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Rebecca Quilliam
The New Zealand Herald 2013-01-02 15:54:00
Gale force winds, torrential rain, thunderstorms and now unseasonable snow have pounded the South Island. Snow fell on the Lindis Pass in Otago overnight, forcing travellers to abandon their vehicles near the summit. Sergeant Mark Booth of southern police communications said Lindis Pass was closed and eight vehicles were stranded. "But I imagine at this time of year the snow's not going to last long." The centre of the island and the West Coast have "copped it" over the last few days, Mr Booth said. The West Coast road via Lewis Pass through Murchison had closed, forcing travellers to make a seven hour detour around Blenheim and Kaikoura to get to the east coast of the island. Last night severe thunderstorm warnings were issued for the Westport area as the last of the system moved through. Nearly 600mm of rain has fallen on the West Coast in the past 48 hours. A vital one-lane bridge on State Highway 6, just north of Harihari, was washed away yesterday. | |
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UPI
2013-01-02 14:27:00
St. Ives, England, -- Experts said a seal discovered 50 miles from the British coast likely made its way through flood waters to a landlocked lake. Graham Elliott, area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which also works to safeguard other forms of wildlife, said the seal was spotted at the Fen Drayton Lakes reserve, near St. Ives, England, about 50 miles from the coast, The Scotsmanreported Wednesday. "It would be the first time this has happened, to my knowledge, that one has made its way into the lake. The floods normally come from ground water rather than the river, and so it must have worked its way up in a ditch or something like that," Elliott said. "It would be extremely unusual and it would become an attraction to visitors" | |
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Anthony Watts
WattsUpWithThat.com 2013-01-02 14:05:00
(Via the Hockey Schtick) A new peer reviewed paper published in The Holocene finds a significant link between solar activity and climate over the past 1000 years. According to the authors: The authors also find "a link between the 11 yr solar cycle and summer precipitation variability since around 1960″ and that: | |
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Anthony Watts
Alaska is going rogue on climate change. Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again: While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation's icebox is getting even icier. That may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades, or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth.WattsUpWithThat.com 2013-01-02 14:01:00 Then again, it might. The 49th state has long been labeled one of the fastest-warming spots on the planet. But that's so 20th Century. In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit. But now comes cooling. Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska. Some contend the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is harming the state's king salmon runs, too.
Full story here | |
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CNN-IBN
Delhi witnessed its coldest day on Wednesday in the past 44 years, with the maximum temperature falling sharply to 9.7 degree Celsius. Residents woke up to a foggy morning, with the minimum temperature dipping to 4.8 degree Celsius.2013-01-02 12:47:00 Poor visibility affected schedules of nearly 30 flights and led to diversion of an international flight to Mumbai. In Uttar Pradesh, the death toll continued to mount, with 15 more people succumbing to the chill in various parts of the state. Officials said four people died in Muzaffarnagar which remained the coldest place with 0.6 degree Celsius, followed by three in Mathura, two each in Agra, Bulandshahr, Etah and one each in Barabanki and Mirzapur.
With this, the death toll in the state this winter has reached to 107. Night temperatures remained below normal in most parts of the state including Moradabad, Agra, Meerut, Gorakhpur, Lucknow, Bareilly and Kanpur divisions. | |
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Marc Lallanilla
LiveScience 2013-01-02 10:24:00
As the rest of the world contends with unusually warm temperatures and scorching drought, Alaska has been bucking the trend since 2000 by reporting some of the coldest winters on record. Like most of the planet, the state has been heating up steadily over the past century and is frequently cited as one of the fastest-warming areas on the planet, according to the Alaska Dispatch, an online newspaper. The Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks notes the state was warming at roughly twice the pace as the rest of the planet, particularly from the 1970s into the 1990s, reports the Dispatch. But since 2000, nearly all the National Weather Service monitoring stations sprinkled across the vast state have reported colder-than-average temperatures. The station at King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula, for example, experienced an average 4.5 degree Fahrenheit (2.9 degrees Celsius) drop in temperature over the course of the first decade of this century. | |
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An upper-air disturbance slated to move into the southwestern United States has the potential of bringing wintry weather to portions of extreme southern New Mexico and the Big Bend Country of Texas beginning on Thursday. While the best chance for snow will be across the Trans-Pecos, a general coating to perhaps an inch of snow will likely fall before it is all said and done. The upper-air disturbance will begin to enter the Southwest on Wednesday night and slowly ride along the United States and Mexico boarder. This disturbance will likely stick around through Friday before lifting northeastward into the southern Plains. As the system tracks into the Southwest, it will draw Pacific moisture from the south and Gulf of Mexico moisture from the east. | |
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A second sinkhole has opened along North 4th Street in Harrisburg, leading to possible evacuations for some residents. City officials said the second hole opened about 11 p.m. Monday night, resulting in the loss of water, gas and sewer service to the neighborhood. "Due to the prolonged loss of these utilities, the city's Department of Public Works is recommending the immediate evacuation of affected residents at addresses 2102 to 2163 N.4th Street," a city news release states. Twenty-nine homes are affected. The evacuation is not an order, just a recommendation by the city. | |
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Fidockave213
Strong earthquakes, multiple fireballs, record flooding, record snowfall, record cold temperatures, record tornado outbreaks, enormous sinkholes, super-typhoons, 'two suns' in the sky, volcanic eruptions, mass murder of innocents... all in just one month. What on (or off) Earth is going on?YouTube 2013-01-02 07:57:00 Source
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Matthew Kemeny
The Patriot-News 2013-01-01 10:08:00
Harrisburg -- North Fourth Street is closed between Woodbine and Maclay streets in uptown after a sinkhole opened up this morning, catching the back wheels of a city trash truck. Officials shut off water to that section of the street as they prepared to tow the truck from the gaping hole around 11 a.m. Officials did not have an idea when the road will reopen. | |
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| Fire in the Sky |
| No new articles. |
| Health & Wellness |
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David Evans
This study was published in the Annals of Surgery 2009 Sep;250(3):395-402Healthy Diets and Science 2012-12-31 00:00:00 Study title and authors: Parenteral fish oil improves outcomes in patients with parenteral nutrition-associated liver injury. Puder M, Valim C, Meisel JA, Le HD, de Meijer VE, Robinson EM, Zhou J, Duggan C, Gura KM. Department of Surgery, Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. mark.puder@childrens.harvard. This study can be accessed at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ This study compared the safety and efficacy between a fish oil-based intravenous lipid emulsion and a soybean oil-based intravenous lipid emulsion in the treatment of parenteral nutrition-associated liver disease. Parenteral feeding is the intravenous administration of nutrients to patients who cannot support their nutritional needs because of intestinal failure. Prolonged parenteral feeding may lead to health complications such as: Steatosis, steatohepatitis, cholestasis, fibrosis, micronodular cirrhosis, phospholipidosis, biliary sludge and cholelithiasis. |
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Stephen C. Webster
The Raw Story 2013-01-02 10:26:00
People who consume fructose instead of sugar derived from cane or other natural sources feel less satisfied by their food and tend to consume more, according to research published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Compared with individuals who consumed sugar-based glucose beverages, people who drank liquids containing fructose exhibited a weaker connection between the hypothalamus, thalamus and striatum, brain scans taken by researchers revealed. Stacked next to brain scans of individuals who consumed glucose, the results showed a clear divergence in areas of the brain regulating appetite and reward processing. | |
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Kiera Butler
Mother Jones 2013-01-02 11:34:00
It's a sweltering late February afternoon when I pull into the Esso gas station in the tiny town of Bukit Merah, Malaysia. My guide, a local butcher named Hew Yun Tat, warns me that the owner is known for his stinginess. "He's going to ask you to buy him tea," Hew says. "Even though he owns many businesses around here, he still can't resist pinching pennies." An older man emerges from the station office. His face and hands are mottled with white patches, his English broken. "I'll talk to you," the man says, "but only if you buy me tea." He grins. "You should be ashamed of yourself," says Hew, laughing. "A rich man like you." At a bustling open-air café nearby, we order tea and ais kacang, giant shaved-ice desserts laden with chopped-up jello and sweet, sticky red beans. I dig in, but the station owner - I'll call him Esso Man, since he doesn't want me to use his real name - is moodily stirring his into a slushy puddle. We're here to ask him about something he doesn't like to talk about: a job he did 30 years ago, when he owned a trucking company. He got a contract with a local industrial plant called Asian Rare Earth, co-owned by Mitsubishi Chemical, that supplied special minerals to the personal electronics industry. Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load - the quicker the trip, the more money they earned. "Sometimes they would tell us it was fertilizer, so we would take it to local farms," Esso Man says. "My uncle was a vegetable farmer, so I gave some to him." Other times, the refinery officials said the stuff was quicklime, so one driver painted his house with it. "He thought it was great, because it made all the mosquitoes and mice stay away." | |
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Marilynn Marchione and Mike Stobbe
Associated Press 2013-01-01 09:26:00
This is your brain on sugar - for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating. After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found. It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight. All sugars are not equal - even though they contain the same amount of calories - because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms. For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart. | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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LiveScience
2013-01-02 10:28:00
Just hours after they're born, babies seem to be able to tell the difference between sounds in their native tongue and a foreign one, according to a new study that suggests language learning begins in utero. "The mother has first dibs on influencing the child's brain," researcher Patricia Kuhl, of the University of Washington, said in the statement. "The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them." Researchers examined 40 babies (an even mix of girls and boys) in Tacoma, Wash., and Stockholm, Sweden. At about 30 hours old, the infants in the study listened to vowel sounds in their native language and in foreign languages. The babies' interest in the sounds was measured by how long they sucked on a pacifier wired to a computer. The study found that, in both countries, the infants listening to unfamiliar sounds sucked on the pacifier for longer than they did when exposed to their native tongue, suggesting they could differentiate between the two. Lead author of the study, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, said the results show that fetuses can learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother's language. | |
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| High Strangeness |
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ninemsn
2012-12-30 10:02:00
A new book has revealed rare historical gems buried in New Zealand's national archives, including a bizarre World War II plan to create a "tsunami bomb" and military files detailing supposed UFO sightings. Author Ray Waru said he wrote Secrets and Treasures to highlight the material publicly available at Archives New Zealand in Wellington where almost 100 kilometres of shelf space is crammed with historical artefacts. "It was totally overwhelming at the beginning," Waru told AFP. "I knew I wanted to get in the important things - the Treaty of Waitangi (New Zealand's founding document), the Declaration of Independence, the women's suffrage petition, and a few other things. "But once you start digging, one story leads onto another and I'd just follow my nose." The suffrage petition Waru refers to contains 36,000 signatures and was dramatically unfurled on the floor of the New Zealand parliament in 1893 by supporters of women's right to vote. | |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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Kevin Dolak
ABC News 2013-01-02 15:58:00
A young boy's lost bicycle has led to a unique piece of natural roadside art on Washington state's Vashon Island, over 50 years later. Traveling off of Vashon Highway, about 50 feet into the woods behind the local Sound Food Café, travelers will come across a peculiar site - an intact, 1950s-era bicycle embedded into a tree. In 1954 Helen Puz had been recently widowed when she received the bike as a gift from someone in the community, according to Discover Washington State. "People were very sympathetic and generous," Puz reportedly wrote in a document on display at the Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Museum. "We were given a girl's bike and my 8-year-old son Don seemed the natural one to ride it." | |
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Zeon Santos
Neatorama 2013-01-01 06:30:00
The next time you, or someone you know, is having trouble with a temperamental bird just be glad the little feathered bugger isn't screaming out a bunch of obscenities! A zoo in Hubei, China got a big surprise when their Myna bird started screaming obscenities, which it had picked up from one of the zoo's guests according to zookeeper Li Yun, and had to be removed from display until his vocabulary could be deemed appropriate for all ages. The bird may not be zoo friendly, but he has a great career ahead of him as an insult comic. Source |
